Board of Education 10-15-20

001you good evening everyone i'd like to call tonight's board of education business meeting october 15th 2020. uh call to order mr zenski you have a rule for forum please mr grimbo here ms hallett here miss ham here ms harrigan here kelly here here mr white mr chairman thank you ashley we stand for the pledge of allegiance well good evening fellow board members jeff carroll marlene vincent it's good to see you all again here but everyone seems healthy and well knocked on wood uh to our folks that might be watching this evening welcome uh we are meeting town council chambers uh we do a presentation coming up with more esposito from jessica although moore's not here yet um we could move on to audience and standard reports of committees and potentially circle back tomorrow when she

002shows up sure this is an objection to that so that being said do we still have some audience questions jeff sure and just for the record if folks are wondering you probably have this memorized by now uh but any questions public comments concerns please email them to cpscovit19 at cheshirek12.ct.us and we'll be checking in those emails throughout the meeting so let me just jump into the report to stay in the committee starting with finance mr grippo i hear a step genie yeah oh i'll uh send the report over to mr matiana thank you good evening ladies and gentlemen we did include the finance report as of september 30th in the board's package i will provide a brief summary so september represents the third month of the fiscal year as you see on the report we

003have completed the largest section of encumbrances which is for the payroll accounts so as of right now our expended and encumbered percentage of budget is about 71.6 percent pretty typical for this time of the year the the only area that we didn't complete encumbrances which we will for next month is the transportation encumbrances which total about four percent of the budget about three and a half million dollars other than the expenses associated with the pandemic which include everything from cleaning uh to buying products to ppe there are no major budget variances that i'm concerned about which is good news and that includes our special ed accounts those seem to be running pretty much in line where we would expect them to be right now you know as far as the covet expenditures this is just

004you know to provide a further update from last month's report if you do look at page two of the finance report what we were able to do as of october 1st is submit our application to the state for the um the corona coronavirus relief funds if you remember in august we submitted a survey based on that survey the state approved about 700 6 000 in reimbursement grants for the expenditures related to coronavirus and so on october 1st we were able to complete the actual formal grant application and so you know i've outlined uh on on this grid basically those categories where we did apply for the grant the way the grant application worked was that we could only apply for the dollars based on what they approved previously in the same categories in other words

005the state's not permitting yet moving grants from one category to another so those categories on the personnel section are cleaning ppe health and safety where we were approved for eleven thousand twelve dollars we applied for eleven thousand twelve dollars and we will um we will certainly expend those funds you know primarily for isolation room monitors uh the second category is personnel transportation where the state approved about seventy five thousand dollars i'm not sure we'll be able to expend all those funds because we determined that we don't need as many bus aides as we originally had submitted when we completed the survey and then the other categories were contracted services for cleaning health and safety 457 000 approximately supplies for sanitizing disinfecting as well as some additional furniture and equipment we had to buy for the

006schools about a hundred thousand ppe for our staff forty one thousand and cleaning supplies were twenty 000 specific to transportation so the good news is we've applied for the grant we're still waiting for some additional details including whether or not the state will allow us to you know if we don't expend funds in one category can we expend them in another but assuming that we uh we received the 706 000 looking at our current expense run rate for these categories and we do need the reimbursement but it will make us close to hole for the expenditures based on what we know today you know based on the current way that we're operating our schools obviously it's only september you know we've got you know nine months remaining in the fiscal year several months remaining in

007the school year and you know we hope things continue to go you know kind of along the same lines that they're going now things are going pretty well we've only had one day where we had to put one of our schools highland into remote learning so if that continues i think from a budgetary point of view um we'll be okay um i know i promised that at the end of this month we would do a deeper dive into the budget to see are there categories that [Music] we may have to reproject you know and i will do that as as we get closer to the end of the month where i could see all the expenditures for october running out and have the transportation encumbrances done so um long and short of it with the

008state reimbursement of 706 000 i think we're running just fine budget-wise to this point in the year that is the budget update now if there are any questions i'll be glad to take them um van i just had a quick question on on your um i don't call it cost overruns but uh i guess account uh transfers uh mostly in the uh the maintenance and supply area in the last section yeah because you just explained um what the transfer was about there well you're looking at the maintenance supply 158 000 um against the maintenance repairs of 138 000 i just want to make sure yes okay so just to be clear those aren't transfers those are just where we would expect to be over budget maintenance supply and we would make up the shortfall in

009our repair line for our buildings and our equipment repair lines of 20 000. so those were projecting to net out the 158 000 are expenditures related to covet um so most of it is the cleaning supplies and the ppe we're just putting it into one you know category so we could track it more accurately we would be that's probably would be primarily offset by this reimbursement grant from the state that i was referring to but for now because we don't have the reimbursement we are over in that budget category so i'll have to make sure that we don't overspend that budget line as we get through the rest of the year if we don't get reimbursed okay thank you you're welcome um are there any other questions uh if you'd like to continue on to

010the um medical benefit trust yes thank you we just received late today the updated medical benefits claims from cigna so we were able to produce and and put late in the day today the updated medical benefits report unfortunately september we had a very high claim month of 1.2 million dollars against an expected claim month of about eight hundred thousand dollars so if you um take a look at the report you'll see that our medical trust fund balance decreased by 459 048 this month and the trust fund balance therefore as of september 30th there's 1 million 916 267. that gives us about 2.4 months in reserve you know this is certainly a concerning trend that we're seeing so far this year where the trust fund balance we we've run through about a million 53 000 of

011it most of what we're seeing are relatively high claims not hitting the 175 000 stop loss layer yet but trending that way we we know that we've had quite a few employees you know that have severe ailments again not covid um quite a few surgeries that employees are have been out for including as as we've gone through the first couple of months of the school year so you know i'm certainly hoping the trend subsides we know that come january we start a new hsa claim year and employees will have to meet their deductibles you know before hitting our claims pool but it is a concern i you know i think that we'll have to keep watching it over the next couple of months if the if the size of the claim subsides you know we'll

012certainly be okay to get through this year but i think what i would say is an early indicator is that as we prepare the 21 22 budget you know we will need to increase the medical benefits fund contributions so that you know we'll we'll start to have a more adequate reserve as we go forward so we'll cross our fingers and and hope for the best as we go forward but this was uh this is probably the worst budget news we we've had so far this year so at least we have a reserve to cover us any questions just a comment just can't seem to catch a break uh because in the operating budget so far you know based on the opening school year where we are with the state reimbursement with cobit costs we're looking

013okay not spending you know we put caps on so kind of you know knock on wood okay for now but on the flip side the benefits trend is not changing so go figure but we'll keep a close eye on that i don't know hopefully 21 is a better year on all counts um are there any other questions or comments um before i uh turn it back over um uh ben i just wanted to uh commend you and your team i know last month you were uh reporting that um that the state was making it difficult to be able to categorize our expenses for reimbursement for this grant and it looks like that uh your you and your team have solved the problem so congratulations on that we've really really been able to qualify a lot

014of the expenses for for reimbursement so that's that's great news um thank you yeah i think that's all so thank you so turn it back over yeah and uh tim joined us welcome to them i just uh we were just giving more some time to get here maura welcome i am as always thank you now don't be we've got plenty to talk about um for better for worse so we went to stan report communities reports so i had to get back to number two the presentation i thought that morris here uh we're gonna keep it here the rest of the next three hours or shorter hopefully we get this i'm gonna some more whenever you're ready yeah we're happy to hear you and then we'll get into audience i told jeff today unfortunately i haven't

015had a lot of time to prepare a lot of stuff i'm sorry it's been just really crazy um but i did send over some information um especially i wanted to indicate to you the update as to where our covet cases are in the age groups we are up to 228 cases um in the community so i created just some bullet points i figured you'd probably have more questions uh to ask me um because there's just we've been moving so fast um chespercott has been contact tracing since march 26th we've interviewed over 496 cases 228 of those were in cheshire our last residential um fatality was may 27th so that i'm very happy to report that we are not having the fatalities that we had at the beginning of this crisis we have worked very hard

016with our two nursing homes um this we also work with our group homes we have an outbreak last week we've been seeing the trends again in the beginning of the pandemic we saw those trends being in the older i get scared when i use that word older because i don't know how to i don't want to offend anybody um but now we're seeing about 20 to 40 year olds that's the age group the past two weeks we've conducted contact tracing for close contacts that exceed 275 people so that means we have a positive person and who have they come in contact with um we've assessed all walks of life businesses restaurant salons i don't want sports camps you name it we've been in working with them we've trained and worked very closely with all the

017schools private and public your nurses have been tremendous through this it has been a rocky road for sure but i'm getting less phone calls daily so i know they're getting it um you know but we expected that at the beginning it was going to be a little rough but now they're they're understanding um what is required of them um we have been experiencing the positive cases infiltrating into the school systems it's in all i do three school districts three school systems i have region 16 which is prospect and beacon falls cheshire public schools and i also have wolcott public schools you are not alone what you are happening here is happening in my other two so um and i can tell you also talking to my peers it is also happening there um you will

018also see the governor release tonight his new map and of cases and cheshire is on uh the high rate not the highest but what i can tell you is that i am seeing probably about three weeks ago there were some very high um publicized positive cases in waterbury um from high elected officials and unfortunately that resulted in a lot of their co-workers and they all many of them reside in our community and that was where a lot of these cases are coming from right now um again as i say my staff is really small there's only seven of us plus our two admins um but we have and none of us have taken any vacation or any time off but we continue to be dedicated to this pandemic um for both our community and everyone

019else um i did want to kind of go over what has happened in the cheshire public schools i don't know if jeff did i take your limelight away not at all okay um we did have a positive student in highland elementary school it was a very swift clean principal um jeffrey was really great to work with and working with the nurses we quarantine 20 students 20 from the class and eight from the bus and one teacher it's very very and as we keep getting more and more cases we're getting better at this um the dodd middle school we had a one positive student we quarantined eight students from the class and the case did not ride the bus and i do know that you may hear you know why didn't i do the whole classroom

020every case is is very specific and we need to look at many different parameters of what situation happened and so in that case the child had kind of come into the school was it didn't bring the proper notes the nurse acted as she should have and quickly removed the child so therefore the child was not in that room for a very long period of time and so i did not feel it was necessary to do everybody but only those things those kids that were close in proximity um but i wanted to give you a real life example because it really is kind of um sorry interesting when you start being able to connect all the spider webs to find out who is the spider um so i had one positive adult this one positive adult

021resulted in two positive kids his two children it resulted in 20 classroom students being quarantined seven teachers quarantined 11 from the bus 10 soccer kids 8 football and 12 basketball lo and behold one of the football also got ill from this child which resulted in another 70 quarantine and two teachers that was really challenging so um but it is real so a total of 140 people have been quarantined in region 16. um that is why you saw if you've watched the news region 16 actually shut down their middle school for two weeks that is not my goal at all to do that um but it is reality but i do have to say that i think that cheshire public schools have a lot more when i talk to when i need to talk to the

022principals they know exactly what i need and they get it to me they got it to me within minutes the other school districts were not as prepared as yours so i commend jeff and your staff and everybody for all the hard work that you've done i commend your nurses your nurses are completely on board they know what's going on who's doing what who's on first who's on second um so it's been a challenging tonight i've been working with another situation at wilcott high school and a girls softball team um the governor and the commissioner of health absolutely know that this is impacting the schools um the whole goal we all know in this room was to keep those kids at school and that was always my fight about sports um because we knew what would

023happen and so ultimately that is what we are seeing um my goal is trying to analyze each situation but i will tell you it's getting very tiresome um my staff is very tired we i worked three days all day all week all all weekend um but we're committed to keep doing it um so if you have any questions what no i was going to ask if any questions i'm sure tim's good tim the man then faith man thanks tony um thank you more for being here tonight and for everything that you do for this i'm gonna start sleeping in a minute public health is incredibly important and i know i would not want to be in your shoes um what uh do you have any suggestions for what we should do could do well the

024big okay so so we've looked at and i've looked at like what is the scenario of what's going on what we are finding right now is we're opening things up the government is opening up we're going out we're seeing people we're going to our families that is the culprit in our eyes um i'm not seeing like these big reported you know events i it's these little itty-bitty things i do have one or two that you know it was a bigger event but it was a bigger family event um i cannot say how much we are trying really to emphasize to the kids um younger kids that the importance of are the only tools that we have in our toolbox at this moment wearing your mask staying six feet apart washing your hands we we receive

025a lot of complaints about the kids walking up and down west main street we must have gotten three of them in the past day i will tell you that the governor is pushing us um we have uh all been asked to uh participate in the meeting tomorrow because as you know they had issued that we could issue tickets which in public health we don't issue tickets so you know but they're going to train us on how to issue tickets and yeah i i i have a lot of work to do um but i think the big thing is really emphasizing the fact that these people that went to the gatherings who were the sick person they didn't know they're asymptomatic at that moment but it's it's that infectious period two days before either you're showing

026a symptom or you're testing positive right now the most common symptoms that we are seeing congestion runny nose headache and complaining about a allergies that is what we're seeing we're not seeing the fever and the cough and things like that that seems to happen with the cases that are really bad but for the general public it's these very mild things symptoms and it's very challenging because they mimic almost everything else including the flu and we've already had positive flu in the community so again it's i know it's really hard but really limit your time exposure that's all i can suggest um we can't make anybody just be smart to try to limit and keep that curve because the curve is definitely going up the good thing about it is that we don't have the fatalities

027um so and you know can there be a good point for this but that's all i can say right now is just really getting the words and you're seeing a lot of those messages on tv um it's just repeat repeat repeat and hope that we get through this very fast um they have been pushing us we're meeting twice a week um in preparation of vaccinations which teachers are on that um we have gathered all our town numbers um chesapeake will be doing those vaccinations so we have we have like a lot of people too once we get one as we know the reports in the news about the vaccines haven't been too promising um but i'm hopeful that somewhere down the line something's going to happen because i really think that's only the only thing

028that's going to happen especially as we're getting colder and getting back inside and we know you know just like a flu you know we're inside we're spreading germs [Music] sorry that was a long winded i don't know no i appreciate it i was just going to add real quick this i will say our kids in school i have to commend them have been incredible about wearing masks everywhere you go they're always wearing the mask and most of our kids aren't calling around to organize family gatherings so that's a reminder for adults too to be smart i visited the high school sorry a couple weeks ago and i i didn't know what was happening outside but i was like what is going on and they were all doing a mask break and i was so impressed

029by all of them uh because they were all separated they were all following the rules um i i really thought you know that that's hard and they were dealing with it so adam oh thank you um so you know before i walked into the well before i heard your report this evening like i had a couple of questions written down and one was you know what would it take for us to maybe add a third in-person day to the high school but now it seems like you're painting a picture as if um we're at the top of the mountain about to jump off the cliff is that kind of what your impression is here where things are as good as they're gonna get until they don't um i don't say that we're at the top

030and we're about to jump off the cliff we're still climbing up the mountain um and i do know that you know it was very hard um with long river middle school because they had just opened up and went back um they increased um their kids coming back and the next day boom they shut down for two weeks um we don't know that's that's the problem with this um i will say it's just everywhere um we just don't know um we have cheshire has a significant amount we had 27 we had 14 cases last week plus three in the group home so we had 17 cases um we haven't seen that kind of activity since april um but i think that a lot of that also is associated with the fact that we can get tested

031now you know back in april we couldn't get tested um and i want to say that most of the mothers or the parents that i speak to because i get a lot of phone calls all day long the school nurse said i can't come back until i get a you know a note or i'm in quarantine what would you suggest and we always suggest that you know what for a peace of mind go get a test but just realize you're still quarantined for those 14 days um and so we have a lot more people getting tested so when we test we're gonna find well before in april we just didn't have the resources we didn't have the testing we didn't have the the equipment we didn't have a lot but now we're in a much

032better place so the so the your recommendation i'm guessing the recommendation of pph as well is to hold steady and not that we should resist the temptation to open further and that we should stay where we are there's a lot of supporting stuff that my numbers are going up um i'm getting a lot more younger um but i think that you know that's a hard decision for me to tell the whole board i mean i'm i would be very cautious i do not think it's going to get better i think it's only going to be getting worse in the next couple of weeks um and so my my second question is um is actually it's about cheshire academy sure um are they fully open yes and do their numbers count towards our numbers if we

033are to have to shut down at that percentage no actually believe it or not i work very closely with the cheshire academy they um they have to randomly test their students um so i'm i and they report actually their illnesses to me so i know exactly what's going on over there um i will tell you that um they're most most of their right i guess residential people their students residential students have been fine we've had a few instances where we've had day students that have tested positive we had um at the beginning of the school year we had a day student who had tested positive and we put several of those students out on quarantine and i believe we just had another person um just get ill but they're keeping a really big eye on

034their their students um and they do not count towards yours private schools i believe are separate like universities their own little category thank you yeah okay you're an excellent yeah um thank you more for your work um i do have some questions i'm hoping um as i understand it the state's statewide infection rate through october 7th is amongst k-12 populations 0.008 okay you would know that more than me i'll be honest with you i don't know those details um what do you know what our house cheshire's hospitalization rate is no i don't do can you describe the severity of the cases of the kids um who are testing positive like i said we have a few of them let me i brought the actual cases because i figured you'd be asking [Music] um so a

035lot of these that are positive um again we're mild okay um when you say a lot do you have a number um no i don't sorry i'm just i have to reference the ages if it's a cheshire public school students you're looking for faith that number is three yeah is that what you're looking for is that are those cases um now this is actually in cheshire generally are you seeing severe cases uh you know and i guess it's like a civilization question right so that's what you're what i said is what we're seeing right now is i've got a runny nose i've got i've got congestion i've got i think i have allergies and the parents are taking them to get tested because they've either dad got sick or they're being tested for other reasons

036um honestly we've the nurses and i don't know the numbers um i'm sure the head nurses would know but i know they have made a lot of people test um because that is the policy right now before they can come back to school if they're out due to covered symptoms they can only come back if they produce a negative covid pcr or they provide a note from their doctors diagnosing giving an alternate diagnosis so we have had a lot of kids tested i don't know what the number is but of those we have not had any positives could you say that i'm sorry could you say that again no one got positive based upon actually one one i think one of those three cases so we have a lot of kids that are out due

037to they're showing signs of runny nose and normal symptoms mom is having them parents are having them tested so that they can come back to school and those results are resulting in in negative okay so i just want to make sure if they come back with a negative pcr test they are allowed back into school as long as they're not being quarantined as a close contact okay so we go by addendum 5. so if your mom or your dad have been diagnosed and you are a close contact the student may be home but he's not coming home until he's finished his 14 days these are students that have got shown symptoms of covid okay a runny nose a little fever or something like that they go out they can if they have not had a

038close contact they can either get a test if they get their pcr says it's negative then they can come back to the school or if their doctor says you know what it's a strep they've given an alternate diagnosis they've got an ear infection and they've diagnosed it then they can come back to school okay just a couple more um okay so um do we have a number a percentage anything that a particular school would have to hit to justify shutting it down putting the whole school in court um there are some guidelines that the state health department has given the superintendents um that talks about like if you have like more than two cohorts so um the way that mr yemen and 16 viewed it is that i have a cohort here that was going

039out and i have a cohort here and they decided that that was what was their trigger okay and what is going to get us it seems like we're all living as if we are about one case away from a total shutdown what will get us to the point where we get back to normally are you saying it's a vaccine back to normal yeah i mean where yeah i guess to a degree of normalcy yeah or at least be able to add some days to the school year especially unfortunately i think that there's quite a few things that we're looking at and one of them is yes the governor has given us certain numbers are we in yellow orange red i mean those are very clear triggers for all of us my position is to inform

040and give that information to jeff i give them to them weekly okay our numbers are going up i provide the the the graphs and stuff like that but i'm in constant contact like if i start saying hey i've got you know five going on and they're affecting everything we're gonna talk we're gonna have that conversation what is the exact trigger i don't know what that exact trigger is i would have to really look to to mr solomon but are we waiting for a vaccine to get to some degree of normalcy in the world of public health yes okay so in other words this is going to go on it all depends on how well we all follow the rules and i think that you know if we are all doing what we're supposed to be

041doing keeping this six feet that is going to lower our risk there's no perfect but the lower the risk the better it is the problem is is that our people are not following those rules and so it has increased the risk by showing us more cases i i i guess i'm um oh well um don't take aid no no it's okay but i'm just thinking um you know we want more people tested and we're seeing mild cases and i'm not asking for a full blown let's get back to where we were in january but i look at the fallout of living behind mass for kids and i for one just feel um i'm gonna say perhaps we are going we are still living in a um spring situation yes when we're finding yes that really

042um it's a serious illness i i will never take away from that but there are other serious illnesses that do not require us to live on tender hooks all the time and to hear that i i know the family is the culprit uh family gatherings you know i have some reservations i'm just yeah i have no i i we understand that i mean when we talk about the spring our cases were up and our deaths were up our fatalities were going there right now we're just seeing cases we're not seeing the fatalities so i completely understand you but i also know that we are in a very uncharted territory where we don't know what these long-term effects can be i mean it seems like every day i turn on the news and i'm hearing it's

043now this study associates it maybe with with the youth with cardiac issues like like scarlet fever did we just don't know that i don't know that the scientists are working on that right now now and so i take my direction from the commissioner of health who takes it from the cdc um so i don't make the rules i just follow the rules um i understand the whole public health perspective behind it um but i do understand where you're coming from because it is hard i do i see it i see it in the faces but i we just don't know enough yet so to answer part of that question and you were asking about the numbers so the state guidance indicates the leading indicator about making decisions about reopening for schools is that low favors

044more in-person learning that means less than 10 new cases per 100 000 population um the map that's going to be released today has us at five to nine that's obviously an increase moderate um is that's moving toward hybrid learning that's 10 to less than 25 cases so that's kind of like we're moving in that direction over the last couple of weeks toward that moderate stage high being 25 plus new cases per hundred thousand i think when we opened school we looked at the mitigation strategies and realized that the high school level we we really just couldn't spread out 1400 kids and we didn't know what coming back to school would look like now that we're several weeks in i think if the numbers were what they were two to three weeks ago it'd really be

045pushing for moving to more full unfortunately they're swinging up to the point where the state guidance says you should be going hybrid um i think we really need to watch the numbers over the next couple weeks to see where they go i know like one of the emails we got tonight was a real concern about thanksgiving and should we shut down for two weeks after thanksgiving or something like that that's not something that i would suggest that at this point but you know that's what that's where some people's head is other people are you know we need to go back every day and i i wish we were back every day no doubt about it but um the numbers you know we don't want to go from trying to push back every day with the

046numbers crawling up and then have to pull what a neighboring district did and go back now full remote for weeks um so it's like walking that tightrope it's uh it kind of stinks it's very challenging especially when when you close down for two weeks you still have the sports going on and so the kids are still out there being exposed to each other it's very challenging it's but we spend a lot of time talking to these people and only seven people from staff yeah right well that was a learning lesson and let me tell you you know reason why you're up in the front and you're away from people is to keep you up there and hopefully a safe place um but in these instances the teachers were going up and down the aisles so

047again it's just reminding reminding reminding um we set those classrooms up to keep those teachers safe and hopefully to keep them in class thank you and you had some questions yeah uh i have a quick question but i would like to start by saying thank you thank you maura and your staff because you know we've been on overdrive for a long time as many of us have and um my only question is how safe is it because i've been thinking about this how safe is it to be having meetings in our schools um you know it all depends on what your space looks like you know if you have spaces like this you're fine um and it depends on a multitude of like are you projecting your voice out you know there's many factors that

048go into it um i don't hold i had a small conference room we don't have conferences in there anymore um we all go out into the open space um as best as we can and i've actually encouraged my staff let's you know what let's go for a walking meeting and let's talk about work as we're outside walking i mean we know the best safest place you can be right now is outside um so again it would be again just making sure that you're staying six feet apart keeping your mask on is the most important thing because it's protecting you and is protecting them but again it doesn't i take masks out of the equation when i figure out who is a close contact if you have been less than six feet in a cumulative more

049than 15 minutes so if you're going out and about and you're walking near them and you've been around them for more than 15 minutes for that day um you're going to be considered a close contact thank you so an evening meeting that is set up in the in the gym like this very spaced out wearing masks that seems to be okay because it's after school hours yes i mean i can not say for me that i have any positive cases that can identify that they got it in a meeting set up like this it is i'm sitting i'm eating where you take your masks off and i'm with you know you're close with your family members they're not staying six feet apart and they didn't know i mean it was a you know they didn't

050know that this person was contagious so again it's and we look at that when we start talking about the kids and where they are um who are they sitting with at lunch i mean we look at those moments you know how do they eat lunch do they you know we know they're taking their mask off but are they four feet are they looking at each other because that of course is increasing your risk are they sitting at a table where they're both facing out those are all the questions we ask because we know that certain things will keep a lower risk versus an increased risk and i would add for then that diana burns at uh chapman school principal at chapman school loves her tent her big tent out um so hopefully that that hangs

051out there for a while longer well the tents you know we had scheduled through november 6th we actually talked about about this today you know the obvious issue with the tents is cold you know when it gets into the 40s you know i mean it's going to be way too cold to eat lunch out there so the plan was to take them down november 6th we can look at the forecast which we'll do extend it but maybe thanksgiving if we're lucky that's all we're going to get and so we're going to wind up you know losing about 30 000 square feet of outdoor space and bringing it in and so that is plans are starting to be made for how do we spread out within the footprint of the building chapman you know as an

052example because the cafeteria is on the lower level to try to keep the students on the lower level we do have the back of the library has an area now used to be a computer lab area that's available we have a band room that we could make available but it's definitely going to present a whole different challenge one of those tenses plus those tents right now if you put any sightings on them which a lot of people aren't you can't it's considered then it's considered an indoor space so that that's the other challenge with those tents but i do have to say i drive by and those chapman kids they are sitting opposite i'm always impressed by it well i think that i think they're using those tent spaces those outdoor spaces for more than

053just meal times i mean last breaks they're doing some lecture classroom settings out there and it's it's obviously not just chapman it's six of the school buildings yeah yeah have tents including dodd which that's a gigantic tent so we'll continue to do everything that we possibly can we you know again that that's a big consideration when those when we have to take those tents down and yeah fire marshall and the building official were very specific about can't have any sides on the tent you cannot heat the tent because then it becomes essentially an indoor space if you start adding sides thank you that's all i have andrew so i don't have a specific question for you more but i just wanted to make a point where when you spoke with us over the summer about

054the work that you were doing to keep the ymca camps open holiday hill open and the plan you were doing for the district i just want to say thank you because it gonna be a lot easier for you and your staff of seven in the region it's about sixty thousand people between the three towns you just kind of draw a line in the sand these are the numbers these are the hospitalizations this is the way it's going we're closing everything we're keeping the kids home and you know as a dad and she was able to go back to her some of her summer activities go to summer camp so i just want to say thank you for all the work that you and your team have done we work very hard we take i wish

055we kept track of how many calls we get um because i think everybody now knows my phone my cell phone number in town um i feel like i try to make myself available as much as possible um and all of my staff does that and you know it is about holding a hand it was like holding hands when we were going to open holding the nurse's hands we're going to all get through this it's just been that way and right now we're just at a different challenge we're going into closed areas it's going to be another different challenge so i am really looking forward to vaccinating thank you tony um yeah so i'm just wondering if you could speak to two general topics both related to sports winter sports jeffrey when would winter sports start

056high school say not necessarily adult rentals or anything in these schools but yeah it would typically start in december but the state just released today um and i was going to talk a little bit about this in my my report but the state released a schedule for winter sports ciac did however they also said that no winter sport has yet been approved so you know i feel a little bad i'm sure it's disappointed kids to to hear that but it said they can begin practice on november 21st with contests beginning on december 7th um boys and girls basketball ice hockey you'll be allowed to play for a maximum of 16 regular season games no more than two contests per week boys swimming and wrestling 14 regular season meets about two per week indoor track 12

057meets um and then the state tournaments run from february 8th to the 21st the um but they do also say in here that it doesn't mean the board has approved any specific sport to play this winner but they released that schedule so for in in practical terms do they actually start practicing on november 21st if indeed the ciac sure approves those sports but they haven't said that yet yeah we learned today the ciac hasn't spoken um hasn't met with the commissioner of health yet regarding winter sports apparently that was supposed to start this week okay that's all we were told and then the um the second part i was wondering about for just if you can speak to it is not just winter sports but slightly outside our purview but they all come to our

058elementary school youth sports again like what could what could we do is there anything that we could to minimize the risk going forward it's very challenging especially on these youth leagues they're run by volunteers um i've had a few challenging situations my 140 kids eventually was a coach a positive coach um so i've had several positive coaches i've had positive six-year-olds um it ranges all over um have they been like you know everybody gets sick no i mean it just seems like um one or two but you know we're not testing every single person on that team so we're just putting them into quarantine i don't see the negative results so i don't know if the whole team got tested um but they don't have to test they just have to do the 14 days

059and after 14 days they can then go back to school they don't have to test out um i've been very challenged with you know i've had a little t-ball in cheshire i've had football i've had pop warner i've had we just did a we'll get cross-country team which is a low low risk um we had to put six people on quarantine there um the hot the risks it just seems like the sports because of the nature of sports they're getting closer um there's no sports that's called a no risk that's called sitting home reading a book um you know they're low moderate or high there's a risk and i think that parents need to understand that when they're sending their child children to play a sport there is a risk of disease on transmission if

060there's an infected person and that's what we're seeing um is it high no but is it happening absolutely um i had the woodland high school football team we've had um like i said there's so many i can't even remember all them um soccer t-ball um also don't forget we're also getting the college kids uh that we're getting positive and a lot of them uh were actually coming back to cheshire to do their quarantine out that was quite common what we found because the isolation places that at the college were less than adequate so the kids were coming home and then quarantined in cheshire so but sports is a very i've spent a lot of time on sports and i've spent a lot of time pushing it off um because in my world i know that

061you're gonna there's just no way you cannot not if there's an infected person you're most likely gonna be passing it to someone so i'm not a big sports proponent i believe in sports my son played four years of varsity on on you know for cheshire on the soccer team i i think sports are absolutely great i think they're mentally great um there's just a real risk associated with them maura to to first of all i need to get a chance to thank you and your staff as always i very much aware of work you're doing i think our town in particular because you're this is home base for you and your team knows what you're doing the businesses know so they do express a lot of gratitude at least what i'm told and i you

062know and um hear from jeff almost every day if not multiple times a day i know he's constant contact with you you gotta help with that too so thank you for that oh yeah i'm joking but you know on the sports side of things correct from wrong and i can be honest i it's been such a debacle between the ciac the department of health [Music] the health commissioner in some cases the government and task force was all over the place last couple months as you know but a couple weeks ago i know we got a few emails from the board from some parents because they caught a a few key words from uh governor lamont's press conference at the time almost as if to say the decision restaurant local health district the board of ed

063but to this day the department of health has not approved basically any plan of attack from the cic for fall sports as far as i understood i don't always talk about seven and seven footballers talk about other things but csc finally gave in and said that there's gonna be no way to meet those guidelines and last i heard there's possibly spring if the schedule allowed has any of that changed has department of health greenlighted anything so i'll just enlighten you public health people were not um not as knowledgeable about sports as others like ciac is i mean that's what they do so i can just give you some insight because i will tell you i think every health director maybe one or two that doesn't agree but i would say that we're all in the

064same wavelength and same thing with the state department of public health they really were like we are not the experts in sports okay we are experts in disease and how disease transmission happens and our job is to stop disease prevent disease that's what our toolbox is so what happened is the state department of health went to ciac and said look you have medical advisors who can actually talk to us and you know let's have the conversation and and that's where it got muddy and that's where dph kept pushing you know that you know you need to tell us that those strategies are going to work because we in public health have we like to go by science what has been proven by science and there were no scientific data on face masks and football under

065a mask and so those are how public health makes decisions we look at the data we rate it we analyze it we assess it and um a lot of the times we were just told well this is what we want to do and didn't want to take that hey you need to get us some facts behind that and that was where it it ended yeah because the facts couldn't get brought to us and i thought it was a great idea that um you know the medical directors you know were you know obviously going to the table trying so i think it was early september or middle september they just could not really comply anything to say again to your point that a lot of things weren't proven yet and i bring this up is because

066you know i've read news articles uh you know other towns that forget we're playing football uh i think one towning meridian at least at least allowing uh teams to use their equipment and their facilities and i understand it's for safety because if you're using the equipment you know it's safe but i feel like something like that is almost being uh aiming and abetting an activity that shouldn't be happening because whether the cic can't pull it off yeah directors i don't know how these leagues that i'm hearing or other intramural things are going to get around that you still well yeah and you know if i you know i struggle because you know we know what is impacted by this covet i know our student athletes especially in the sports arena and competition the the social

067emotional when i asked about that the leadership the coaching and team skills it's a huge huge right uh positive um positive for them so i i get it and i we want to see him there just like we want to see our kids more days of school what i'm not concerned about is we're bumping them against that low to moderate risk category hitting that you know ninth threshold and we fully hybrid learning i you know it's again i just have a hard time explaining to the the folks and most parents get it you know i think there's parents in town and student athletes that are willing to take the risk and they can opt into it yeah or opt out to it if it was happening but it hasn't officially been blessed at any level

068and uh i don't know how it's going to get there if our numbers are rising to the point where now the entire school system might be impacted if this trend continues correct last couple weeks uh you know like yourself we're trying to find that fine balance to please everyone but the data doesn't seem to be there too yeah i mean our big thing was trying to be beat the horse of we need to prevent this we need to prevent this we need to prevent this and with all those efforts it just keeps going this way and um it's hard to say you know if it's going this way it's hard for me to say justify i can't justify um you know when i saw the map appear tonight from the governor i was very disheartened

069by it i i you know i take pride in my health district and i don't want to be on the map that says we're all going getting sick that means i'm not doing my job and so you know i i know what has caused all of this and you know our town like i said we ring waterbury waterbury is the hot zone um and we have a lot of people that come and infiltrate and we reside we're you know they work out there and they come here um and so we have a lot of that um we also have on on our data i've got a one-year-old and a four-year-old an 11 year old and a 12 year old all in one family because once this disease gets virus gets into a family it really

070takes over so that is why i cannot stress the importance of when people get put into quarantine what truly quarantine means it doesn't mean you're sitting home you got a free ticket out um it means isolating yourself in a separate room hunkering down having very little activity or exposure uh to you you know your parents it means mom you're going to leave the the meal at the door you're going to back away and she's going to take it in the room and this goes for 14 days um you know and and this week with psats i had a lot of kids out on quarantine and it was ps i don't know if it's all the same day i can't remember and it was affecting that so there was a lot of things being impacted a

071lot of not very happy parents no i and listen i don't think anybody is happy yeah i wish we were happier i know about getting back to normal anytime soon but that being somewhere i just want to wrap up my takeaways uh hearing update more is um still very much into what you talked about when you're here the first time which is all about risk mitigation and you know i know there's folks out there that still you know thinks mass work mass don't work but at the end of the day it's really up to us as adults right to social distance i guess we're in control of the risk right we're found yeah i think you know as a town and you know i know we're doing some schools we try to resonate that message

072because we can but um we're doing that i am a little you know just certain to hear that you know we're trending upwards uh i didn't see the new map tonight but you know the fact that we're on that cusp of you know now lurching into the moderate uh category of risk could have some other ramifications so it's and then i'll be honest with everyone i i thought it'd be worse than it is right now just the nature of the virus um very happy to hear it's only been a couple actually one case positive in school system um which you know we don't want anybody to get sick but i'd rather have one than versus one hundred or two so we have three all right martin was another one okay also the three that we

073talked about we had three positive cases so three positive cases dodd highland and norton still if three's better yeah definitely we're doing better than most yeah i thought it'd be worse especially now we're hanging the floor no doubt it could be so again i is a little sobering um yeah i am very happy that when we have these positive cases you know the mitigation strategies have already been taken so i don't have to sit there and put out a whole team because really that's what we were all thinking we're able to look at the actual diagram of the room how the seats are arranged how is that how are they behaving what are their actions and that's how we're making it takes a lot of time but those are i'd rather have that and not

074put everybody out because i do understand the importance of being in school thank you more i don't agree with anything else uh anna yeah i just have one more question it's sort of related back to the uh the chart that jeff had spoke to about the uh the yellow red levels um so let's say we uh we move into that 10 to 25 area where the people who have tested positive have a low likelihood of being related to the school population can we uh enact mitigation policy as long as possible or would we be forced to go full hybrid because right now you know we're fortunate to have two thirds of our school at full open right now yeah um so would we are we in a position where we can um use those mitigated

075mitigating strategies that we're using right now longer or are is there a trigger at that level where we hit that that certain threshold and we have to go hybrid no matter what because the governor says we have to no yeah i can answer that question we're not we're not forced per se to follow that guidance so that that first what i just shared with you was the primary the leading indicator then they have a secondary indicator about you know the 70 rolling average of tests then you know whether there's a change in direction is the is the curve going up or down how you know how quickly is it going up or down then you know there are other items to consider such as design and physical space or whatever if we you know next

076week the numbers came out and we were 12 but we only had six total cases by next week as opposed to the three we have now i wouldn't suggest we go full hybrid or anything like that it you know a couple of meetings ago we talked about vuca you know volatile unique um complex and ambiguous like th this is not there's just not a strict litmus test for this you have to consider so many different variables we wouldn't just go automatically hybrid because that one indicator said so it is a significant number that we're monitoring the steep ascent of the the curve over the last week is something else because i'll tell you it's not just a cheshire problem you know my son's on quarantine right now in wallingford my oldest and there i get

077a like seemingly a couple emails a day about new positive cases there you know moore's talking about waterbury and wilkin prospect so those are variables we're monitoring and you know we won't just flip the switch based on that one data point but we're looking at a lot of stuff so it begins a process yeah i think i think you when that leading indicator if we go over 10 cases per 100 000 you want to certainly pay even more attention okay and this was a denim five right from the state department i'm sorry dendum was this detailed in yeah this is a denim four four okay yeah we did receive that from the cave a little while back read that update the big thing too is you're seeing like i said it runs in the family

078once it gets into the house they're all ill so you know you could have four of those kids from you know one family so you literally could have two families so you know not eight separate families is different you know you have eight kids but if they're from two families versus eight families it's a different scenario it's a deeper dive into looking at how and why thanks tony yeah i'm just curious to understand this 10 for 100 000. i mean we're 30 000 people in cheshire or less than that so if we have three cases i'm hearing then there's real problems but i'm i'm not hearing that really right now like um there is i don't know about the third what is the 10 what is the 10 out of 100 000 um i think

079what he's referring to is the governor's um rate is that correct yeah yeah the guidance on um addendum 4 meaning that uh i'll get you the exact language you need to be an attorney too so it's a seven day rolling um average of new cases per 100 000 population per day so it's it's basically a fractional rolling average like obviously we don't have a hundred thousand yep so ours would be you know a third of that seven uh on a rolling day seven average uh rolling okay so if we had three cases per day for seven days if you say we have thirty two yeah that would be really bad yeah it would be 2.1 cases every seven days would be the equivalent of seven per hundred thousand each each day for seven days increasing

080it's a rolling average of new cases yeah so 2.1 cases per day on a seven day rolling average so get you to get you to that number so we haven't gotten to 14 cases in a week yet we're darn close we have 14 cases in the community we don't have 14 cases in the schools yeah so 14 cases in the community if it's 2.1 uh actually it's like 2.2 a day you that's why we're five tonight we're just short of hitting that okay yes metric if we have two more cases if tomorrow the the number is three or four cases tomorrow we're probably going to cross that threshold on a seven-day rolling average okay yeah we've been having high cases like i said we haven't seen this kind of numbers of cases since april but

081you you jeff you're saying you're allowed to segregate those numbers and say if it was unfortunate elam park had 20 cases in one day yes that does not necessarily affect your decisions right yeah that's why maura and i you know have frequent talker miles you know like all the time about what's going on in our school community and then we okay we have to i would ultimately make a recommendation to you if it started to spike i'd i mean it's not necessarily a recommendation i would have to make the decision to close the school or whatever go hybrid and communicate to you and the public why i did that but right now i'm not close to that okay i mean i'm closer to try and put more people in than take more people out yeah

082but we're certainly you know right now it's a whole pat because of this you know the recent spike over the last week okay thank you yeah so this would be uh constant morris time listening board members have questions the audience arnold just received any questions that maybe moore can answer if i i think we addressed it yeah you know we had we've had 12 covet emails um and there were a handful that we're talking about you know can we get back full time and i think we've talked about that um which is the other day not right now right not right now i mean we want to get back right now but it seems like if we do so right now while the cases are accelerating we could be accelerating our way into a remote

083learning environment so that that seems to be one of the bigger questions tonight on behalf of all of us and community again thank you thank you you're welcome coming this evening i know you have a long day um i appreciate you being here um it's a pleasure to come out you know part of my job also is to educate you and to work with you all leaders um to help you guide you i mean that's really what my job is um and working really close with the schools to guide them as we're the public health experts um you know so it's really challenging um but that's what we're all in this together so great thank you so much thank you thank you thank you everybody uh moving on and item three i'm not sure any

084more audience questions at this point there might be someone during your update yeah i mean we could we could hold off to the up it's been a long night for people too i think you know it's it's quarter to nine i know some people have been waiting around yeah what i would say is that you know oh i said we had the 12 questions probably about four of them were when can we get back full time a number of them were about particularly with freshmen in the hybrid schedule at chs i would say quickly speaking to that um you know there it's it's a challenging situation because what we're hearing you know tonight we we have half basically half the students going every other day blending in remote learning we have been shifting to more

085synchronous instruction meaning students that are home are watching live but i will say to people we're going to devote a lot of time to this topic at monday curriculum committee monday's curriculum committee meeting so you know we are in the process of going more synchronous i'll say we have added more students that are attending every day based on need we will be surveying parents and students about their experience dr gad will be hosting some calls like we did over the summer marlene and i held a bunch of them in early summer she'll be holding some calls to take more feedback is a quick i would say thank you to the parents who did email you know they for the most part were uh very appreciative of the work being done and provided some very good

086uh constructive feedback for us to consider as we you know look at people's experience so that's that's helpful and i know marlene spent a lot of time with mary uh the last couple of days looking at this and again we'll have more on monday and for those those watching jeff just want to quickly touch upon some of the questions you sent in i i know i'm sure marlene and jeff will dig in a little deeper during the superintendent's update a little while later yep four items which i think we can get through fairly reasonably quickly so if folks are hanging around at a half hour uh pretty sure you more in-depth discussion about um the hybrid model and some of the remote learning days and things that have been changing so hang in there if

087not you can always watch this recording on youtube that being said i'll move back to report standing committees we uh completed finance earlier we're going to move on to personnel committee which is item b so tim i just want to give an update yeah thank you tommy appreciate it if you're ready um yeah so the personnel committee met last night we had three topics on the agenda which was the superintendent's annual goals and objectives as well as two union contracts the teachers union contract and the administrators union contract uh with regard to the with regard to the uh superintendent's goals uh he provided us with uh with his uh suggestion it included jeff uh it included let me see uh uh social emotional learning was number one the single largest piece of that you were

088talking about creating a plan for diversity equity and inclusion right the work that we're doing with um circ the state education resource center the second item was uh communications around our website that we've been in the process of rebuilding before covid hit and all of our tech resources were devoted to that uh we're adding surveying around social emotional learning and um well-being and the remote academic experience to that and then the third item was around our goal setting in our vision setting that we were doing every 10 years but that requires a lot of in-person time and we didn't want to sacrifice in-person time for the sake of getting it done uh community input's much more important so we're we're kind of pushing that off a little bit until we can get together in person

089thank you yeah so with regard to that i mean i i said the shared my thoughts that i brought to the board a year ago which is to have these crafted more as smart goals uh smart as an acronym specific measurable achievable relevant and time-bound and you know in our discussion last night i think that i think the superintendent was uh i think you were basically agreeing with someone as an example talking about better communication but what does that mean well do we have a goal for you know if you want to if you want to amplify your voice or the school's voice get the message out to parents and stuff could you increase the um you know you use social media and you increase that usage by 100 you don't really even have the

090analytics right now you don't have the data right tony i mean well that's your that's what you do yeah i think we're trying and you know for bombers that didn't hear last night so i think one of the things that jeff brought up about the new website i know this sounds like 15 years ago when i say this but the the current website really doesn't give any any analytics to give the administration idea of a is the right data being found what's being searched for are people getting the answers looking for which you know today that's built into a lot of web-based products so the idea is as tim and ann we're talking last night as well how we measure if the new site's actually helping with uh more reliable and quality communication well you

091would hope that with the stream online website and updated information if that's more timely and available if uh parents or students or communities are going to search and look for something they're finding it and they're actually reading it and there's there's ways to measure that that we can't do today so we just bat around some ideas not to get into a micro management but there's there's a feedback that will happen with the communication websites and you know jeff's indicating that you know that the software that we're using for what it is um should automatically adjust and capture the fact that people are not finding the answer they're getting alert versus you know we're fighting about it months later from someone that couldn't find something i was going to clip and say i know one way

092to measure the communication going out is you know and i'm it's a funny post i'm not gonna read the whole thing but we could probably reduce number of run-on sentences that get sent in the letters but the point is the point there is so much information that's you know do you go do you go which where do you go you go social media do you go to the website website doesn't so i think it's going to help with a lot of that so just bear with us i'm glad it's back on for this year and i think that's going to help tremendously for our community just stay updated a little bit more quickly sorry tim no no thank you johnny and the the one other goal that um it kind of had been in the

093back of my it's something the issue had been in the back of my mind since school had started but it's really um parents are concerned about how uh particularly the hybrid model at the high school parents are concerned that their students their kids uh could fall behind for a variety of reasons um but the what i would really like to see is not just the surveys to see where parents are or how parents feel because i personally believe that as a parent myself last spring i was in the dark so i could answer a survey but i didn't answer it knowledgeably and i'm concerned that there are high school parents who could be in that same situation right now um and so i'm one goal i would like to have is some sort of guide

094that could give parents an idea of where their kids are supposed to be in their various classes throughout the year um you mentioned last night jeff you mentioned the psat i think that's a great indicator but it's and it's helpful but it's we can't wait a year to for the concern of these parents is we can't wait a year to find out if their kids have fallen behind and i think this is a topic that's going to be addressed in curriculum on monday so i appreciate that you had mentioned a second ago jeff and i think you're thinking about it something along these lines so anyway that's that's it for the personnel committee right now uh so item two under personnel is uh discussion possible approval of the contract between the cheshire board education and

095the cheshire administrative personnel jeffy vincent you guys want to walk us through yeah the board members do have a memorandum on this i don't want to give an update yeah i think how we got here and what's transpired yeah absolutely thank you uh first of all you know this um fall we were navigating two contracts negotiations um both up for renewal is our administrative team and our teachers uh in either case in both cases they're they're uh guided by state statute timelines we have to enter negotiation meetings with the group if we don't come to a successful resolution on a contract then we have to go to mediation with the group and if that's not successful you have to go to arbitration uh the processes can be you know pretty uh involved uh it can

096be fairly expensive and at the end of the day when you go to arbitration they're looking at what's the town's ability to pay what is the uh bargaining unit contract what does that look like relative to other communities so specific to our administrators group uh you can look at a couple of different variables there salary is not necessarily as competitive with other like communities but their insurance is favorable to other communities so we went through a pretty lengthy process with them um and i you know the the effort of all of our staff this year has been extraordinary but they also i think are our unions both appreciate the fiscal circumstances of the world right now um and so you know while there were contentious items uh it was civil throughout and that's very much

097appreciated um vin and i met with our admin team at least five times formally and then several other informal conversations at the end of the day uh we're recommending minor language adjustments to address various issues that are really grounded in legal updates so like our non-discrimination clause for example at the end of our proposal for salary and benefits there are two numbers that really create a overall budget impact and certainly vin could further elaborate on these if need be but uh in each the teacher and the administrator contract there are steps i believe there are five steps in the uh administrator contract and when people matriculate up those steps year over year there's a cost associated with that and then there's a general wage increase that gets applied pretty much to the people that are

098at top step uh and when we look at that the general wage increase over the next three years uh starting in 21 22 july 1 of 21 it would be 1.3 percent gwi 2.2 and 2.58 raises for the folks at top step most of our administrators are on top step um but the when you factor in the step increases the total all-in number is 1.75 percent in year one 2.5 and 2.65 the insurance the insurance co-shares represent when you have a plan that you take from us an insurance plan the there is a cost that's associated with that plan the example i gave last night was like just call it ten thousand dollars the insurance percentage on that is what the employee pays so this year it's a 10 percent so they would pay a

099thousand dollars we pay 9 000 of that now next year the cost that insurance is likely to go up i mean most people's insurance go up year over year and so that number will go up the insurance co-share next year goes to 11 then 12 and a half and then 14 percent in the final year the district currently provides hmo and ppo plans uh the cap members right now have to buy up if they want that plan that plan is more expensive than the hsa plan so there's not really a cost impact on that for us but there is an administrative burden uh to to offer that plan to only three or four individuals so after next year the unions agreed to drop that plan um the it's it's uh very common for an administrative

100bargaining group to have a 403 b retirement contribution uh the contribution um will be an additional 1 000 toward their retirement plan and at the bottom what you see here on this memo that i i provided to you last night tim had asked me for what the um costs are for individual two person and family so you can see the the different plans we offer ppo hmo and hsa the this year the individual hsa plan cost seventy seven hundred and sixty eight dollars the family plan cost about 19 five the times 12 that you see there that's the what they pay per month is to the left of that um so the highlighted 10 percent in the in that column is what the employee pays toward their insurance that's what's going to be going up

101to 11 12 and a half and 14. vin did i do justice to that did that make sense anything you want to add he's speechless yeah yeah if a good thing i didn't ask him about ppe you covered it all the only thing that i would add um just round numbers so the board understands is the total salary cost for the administrators as a group they're 17 is 2 million 500 000 per year so the total cost impact of year one is an increase of 62 000 all in and that's before we reduce the increase medical which is yeah so that's 2 000 reduction yeah so the net is you know under 60 grand on that that first year so you can kind of get a sense of for the 17 of them um where

102that lies thanks tony yeah just for clarity on the the um the 403b the 401k equivalent it's a thousand dollars in year one and it'd be a thousand dollars in a year too or is it ramped up a thousand dollars no it's a thousand dollars in each of the years it's not it doesn't go one thousand two thousand right no no no it's not escalating it's flat okay correct so from a budgeting perspective there's no it's flat yeah yeah yeah all right thank you and that's not included in the percentage increases or anything that's not in there either so you don't get an additional percentage on that one thousand dollars every year it's flat yeah the percentage is just on their salary yes just on salary yeah yes faith um i may have misheard or

103um you said with that thousand dollars so it's an additional contribution of 1 000 what are they it's 1 000 on top of something we're already giving them right right now what are we giving them 5 000 right now okay so it's gonna be now six thousand what's the irs max on that bin do you know well yeah it's eighteen five or nineteen thousand but that includes employer employee contribution so employees can add to this on their own i think it's up to twenty percent there's more than twenty percent of it yeah it's a cap at a certain point it's well short of what the irs cap would be can we increase their contribution by 20 our contribution our contribution to their yes and they're in they're in the teachers pension at the state level

104right correct okay they're not relying on six thousand dollars a year no okay well just because we don't fund any of the teacher retirement plan that's right yeah it's funny yeah but that's right i don't think anybody else funds it either so it was a joke yeah okay yeah um yeah just uh to go back to that thousand is that is that sort of considered like in the corporate world like a company match on a 401k is that sort of no because the employee is not required to match that most of ours do you know but that's that's works out that they're not required but it's similar yeah absolutely like it's like the it's a it's a um public sector 401k basically so just look the 403 b maximum contribution is 19 500 this year

105and the irs does allow an additional 6 500 for the people who are close over 50 so it's 26 000. over 50 yes yes i didn't catch up contributions that's pretty young tradition right yeah fifty's not done all that young 50 is pretty young people in the room would agree yeah 50 is young question i i don't recall um that was came up during the discussions what as far as the all-in increase how's that compared to settlements in the state do we know is it um when we talked to floyd he considered this a favorable settlement for us the uh administrative group has met on this and has ratified this so the way it would work is um pending your approval it would go before the town council who could either take no action and

106then it's adopted i think after 30 days or they could vote on it their choice i was going to say unless there's another questions and we can talk about more during motion is there a motion yeah and did you want to make those yeah i would like to move that the cheshire board of education approves the collective bargaining agreement with the cheshire administrative personnel for the period of july 1st 2021 through june 30th 2024. it's their second adam seconds any discussion i was i would say is been not directly involved in this negotiation it wasn't a teacher's uh negotiation however uh jeff and vincent gave me daily updates on this uh throughout the course of it i think overall it's very fair considering what's going on the economy i i asked about the settlements because

107i i know that there are some higher settlements um in our districts however it's kind of apple's oranges comparison i think jeff alluded to earlier our our salary schedule is is good you know it's not as competitive per se as other school districts i know that always comes up as a factor down the road so the fact that they're able to work with us but we also were able to get a lot of help on the cost share the insurance because it i think the i think this the current contract the first year was nine percent or so yeah it's in ten now yeah yeah yeah yeah it's but the fact that we're able to add on uh three percent three percent yeah it's going to help us quite a bit so i you know

108again it as with any negotiation i think when both parties walk away from the table feeling like they didn't get what they wanted it's probably a good deal um i think this is very fair uh especially in the so i will definitely be one in favor of it so uh i do want to thank the administration team uh for helping appreciate this any other comments questions seeing as there are none uh the motion on the table is move the cheshire boy education approves a collective bargaining agreement with the cheshire administrative personnel for the period of july 1st 2021 through june 30th 2024. all those a favor it is unanimous thank you thank you [Music] i think i want to thank the cap yeah and i know that obviously they can't be here tonight but you

109know mike woods maureen reed um robin ann carey uh diana burns on their negotiating team and i really have to thank all of our administrators i mean this all of us are you know working way outside the norm these days and they've done a tremendous job for us i know they'd be appreciative of your show of support tonight so i i'm certainly more than comfortable passing that on on their behalf thank you up nexus planning committee uh andrew sure um well all of us were there it was the planning committee meeting of the whole it was held back on september 23rd 2020. um the bulk of the meeting revolved around hummus in school and the board of education sorry and how the building would be used in the future um school modernization committee has been

110looking at all the schools and um humberson has been one of those ones that's been looked at kind of independently um the meeting basically revolved around mr maciana presented the annual maintenance cost for the school for the operation of the building which is about 85 000 per year with 48 000 occurring at thirty seven thousand dollars non-recurring expenses um without getting into all the details of the meeting because we were all there um basically what the board decided was is that hummison is seen as an important school building for both the alternative high school as well as the board of education offices today as we move forward with school modernization it's going to be looked at since it is a school building as part of the overall plan for the school modernization costs you know

111are not completely out of line with other operations for a building of that age and of that size there are significant renovations that would have to be done to bring it up to full code compliance so that's why it's gonna be looked at holistically with the overall redevelopment plan for the schools also at the meeting we talked about the district solar energy project uh we had met with ecg back in march of last year we have a per hour we have a 90 an hour contract with them to look at all the schools and different locations for the solar installations um we have not met with them since march and it's going to be i think at the next planning committee we're going to have ecg come in and represent representative david newman come in

112and give us a update as to where they are but today we haven't received any invoices from them so they're in a holding pattern and once we have more information on that we'll report back to the full board sounds good i actually heard you andrew that was good as a quick update i actually heard you i was going to say for board members just a reminder i know i think some uh when we had our first meeting here some of you coming home just asked us to talk closer to mike was like here's i think you're fine andrew but um we're on the huntston building so i know there's an update from essentially later but at the end of the day there is no emergency situation that requires the board to move out of that

113building anytime soon doing so would certainly add a lot more cost than we're paying today because of finding their space long story short it does have to be considered as part of overall planning where board of ed office and hummus to ultimately be i know the smc is is working on that so i'm glad to hear at least we got some details in that so thanks to the committee and vincent team for getting that information together much appreciated tim yeah uh just on the solar yeah on the solar project andrew i'm not sure if if you know this at this point but for the viewing public there is some time sensitivity to this from a funding perspective funding ramps down over the next 15 months or so and it would be a construction project which

114obviously would take you know some time it's not a one-day project do you have an idea of when we might the planning committee might meet again yeah i actually brought a calendar so i was hoping that we could get together for well not before we adjourn but before we leave just to pick a couple of dates that would work okay for everybody so probably this week or next week okay awesome yeah thank you great thanks for that moving on policy committee mr purple thank you mr chairman um so uh we had a policy meeting uh virtually on october 6th uh we discussed um three let's say one two sorry four policies uh one of which was uh we discussed uh to have a uh a policy rescinded which is the bring your own device uh

115policy that we currently have um forget the reasoning why if it's due to executive order or just our current state of affairs the policy being rescinded yes that was because we have everybody is a one-to-one now this was the um the one-to-one bring your own technology nobody brings their own technology anymore and that's due to uh we can better control security and absolutely yeah network security is much greater it's much easier for us to repair devices when it's all one device and things like that but yeah that or at least limited number of style of devices and things like that but huge network security issue right yeah and uh so the policy committee voted to rescind that policy and to bring it to the full board which we'll discuss a little later on um the

116other three policies are not policies in effect but just new policies that we were discussing the first one was about the termination of of employment and uh mr white wanted to bring that for discussion and that was about the termination of employees of cheshire public schools we had a an extensive conversation which can be referred to in our minutes here where we all came to the conclusion that we do not have enough information yet about a foia law about uh union uh hearing regulation and uh what is uh permissible to be be reported publicly uh we're gonna be referring to our attorney a board attorney for that and then when we have more information we plan to discuss this again in our november meeting once we have better information to better construct the policy if

117it's necessary um the second and third policies that we discussed uh were about uh bylaw time place a bylaw for uh time place notification uh and type of meetings uh for the electronic for for the board of education electronic boards electronic meetings for the board of education uh and also attendance at meetings via electronic communication um so uh most of these uh we discussed about you know how we're currently having virtual meetings for at least our our uh subcommittees and uh what what is the what does the law say about even having uh you know virtual meetings for for us going into the future uh it was determined that um any virtual meeting that we hold at this point is um only by decree by the governor's executive order when the executive orders if if

118the executive orders uh expire in february then we would no longer to note we would be in violation of foia and that we would have to uh continue to hold all meetings in person um as the law would state because so so for right now it's executive order only um but as you can see um in practice we are uh instituting some of that as you can see catherine uh hallan is is uh could not attend in person uh due to uh it was a work conflict i think you could bug out at any time i believe um for uh work commitment uh so she was able to attend virtually today um so that's something that we're allowed to do uh by um again governor decree um and uh so that we will continue to

119do so until we're not allowed to if a board member cannot attend in person um another one that we're looking into was uh not only attendance but voting virtually if one of us one of us could not be here um in person to vote would uh would could their vote be counted if they called in or attended like catherine is this evening um there is uh we do not have clarification on that yet if that's something that's legal or not but it's just something that we're looking into it's uh it's not clear for if we have a desire to even have that sort of uh situation right now um and so that's what we discussed and we adjourned at 725 which is a pretty quick for us that was only about an hour so uh

120sometimes we could go you know two three hours depending so just on clarifying them in the last part we're talking about voting uh remotely it's legal under the current executive order because we're going to flexibility do so but after it expires um it may not be i i know there is a board in this state that's had remote meetings even before covet i'll find out who they might have some information on how they're able to communicate before it's worth it if the board decides then in february that maybe it's a good thing to have more um remote meetings although my guess is the executive order probably extended a few more months back then so anyway any questions for adam on policy tim and faith thanks tony yeah i just wanted to add that on the

121topic on the policy topic of terminations after we had the discussion my view is that with regard to separation agreements and suspensions when people are actually leaving the school system for some time my preference would be to have that publicly noticed in some way whatever is foiable not anything that's private but if it is foiable it just should be the public should be aware of it or have relatively easy access to be aware of it for uh for what it's worth uh waterbury does that the board of ed they have their reasons and every school is a little different i'm not sure um why they do it but uh believe it or not michael gagne actually asked me about this very thing a few months ago i was wondering why we don't publish a list

122of who's leaving the school system like well that's really not something we i've seen anybody do but if there's any value i'm glad the policies can be taken out but there are absolutely union related issues related to that i i'm not quite certain um why watery did it but that might be a reference on this right and we had a lot of legal question marks about it so we uh you know we sent it back for some research and hopefully we'll have some answers in november to continue on um are there any other questions i'll go ahead and come back to the um bring your own device rescission i i guess i guess um we had the allow we allowed people to bring their own devices back in those halcyon days when you know protector

123was relatively new and the breaches were rare and now we're in um a whole new era but also because it would have been cheaper for the district i assume to have some kids bring theirs and is it and i'm not i'm i'm not asking about expenses or anything that's okay um practically speaking even before copenhagen how many was anyone still bringing their own device pretty limited yeah it was pretty limited the other thing is like is chromebooks became more readily available and we we built out a google platform the cost is really not it's negligible a chromebook even what's a because we buy in bulk obviously it's 75 and we do buy durable chromebooks so that they the breakage is minimized and we you know just then we repair them in-house so we typically buy

124parts by selling some of the old chromebooks off my parts put them in inventory and our own technology set prepares them so okay we should do it at a pretty modest price than only but to keep them running thanks um are there any other questions um seeing none mr chairman i'd like to make a motion please do so um moved at the cheshire board of education we send policy number 6141.328 bring your own device oh that's it and sick yeah yeah is there any discussion i wasn't sure if i got to kick it back to your life no okay is there any discussion on the motion seeing none call for a vote all in favor passes unanimously thank you mr gripper thank you and thank you to the policy committee for helping me at that

125point up next is a school monetization committee update sure thank you so we had our first school martial asia committee meeting in person at highland school on the 5th of october at 7 00 with our new chair jen bates and our co-chair chuck net coliers gave a presentation they have been looking at all of the district-wide school buildings and looking at different studies and reports and physical physical structures in person at the time of the meeting my loan and mcbroom's enrollment study had not been received yet that actually was delivered to us last night um i haven't had a chance to look at it but that will definitely be part of my next report and also the main focus of our next school modernization meeting which is going to be wednesday october 21st again at

126highland school at seven o'clock um enrollment study is a key component and it's going to definitely drive where we're going to be going with the different redevelopment scenarios a lot of the meeting revolved around renovation of existing buildings versus new construction cheshire's current renovation reimbursement rate by the state of connecticut is at 46 percent versus 36 for new construction the month of november is going to be really busy um a lot of the data that's going to be in the mylonamic room study is going to be looked at and it's going to help formulate a lot of the scenarios project schedules kind of still a little bit in flux we talked a lot about the different deliverables when we're going to be submitting to the town council of the different scenarios and when like public

127outreach is going to be done um but bottom line is is that we have to we have a drop dead date of submitting to the state of connecticut for with a project by june 30th of 2021 um which would mean that we'd have to get to the town council at some time in march in order for it to be forwarded to referendum or them to approve it to be forwarded to referendum depending on what the studies come back with um there's a lot of discussion that took place i'll try to keep this brief um one of the great things that's coming out of this is there's a community outreach and communication plan subcommittee that's being formed as can be chaired by mr rich gutzenberg i'm co-chaired by miss o'donnell and mr pangaro the purpose of

128this is to reach out with the different scenarios to the public to go visit different community groups and set up a website and really start pushing for whatever the first school construction initiative is going to be um they have asked school modernization committee has asked if the board of education as a whole could come to our next meeting which is going to be a highland school on october 21st at 7 pm in the cafeteria um so i don't know how that's handled but we would need to publicly notice that i would assume as a yeah absolutely thanks uh anderson i did uh cc carol and jeff on that you know if we have a quorum of the board members in the public we should notice that it won't be an official board meeting but just

129to you know make sure you don't violate it for you so yeah so um the democratization committee since it started certainly has the the long-term facility master study plan was done in 2016-17 and if you're only remembers that one called for starting a new middle school and there's a specific education specifications around that uh where the program would be in that school and i think the committee's still talking about you know buildings in general but it would be helpful not just from the board but from jeff and marlene and vincent as well as you know what we see the vision for what could be improved on schools now i believe a lot of our feedback will mimic what's already been heard by the committee in their walkthroughs enough space uh ventilation et cetera et cetera

130configurable desks and all that but i would just remind the board members look at the education spec for new middle school that was proposed because in there it listed out things like world language labs lab spaces common areas i think a lot of things that will build well in any school um so i think us giving them some feedback and i'll see our superintendent assist superintendents getting some feedback on the types of programming that we envision doing i think is going to help the committee narrow down you know a mountain of where do we start and with your own data so i just study that and again just bring your ideas to the table concerns and your opinions we told repeatedly that regardless of the last plan um you know all objects should be on

131the table the data that's being collected the study is being done my colleague has been alone should help drive a bunch of solutions but i think they're going to be uh served with um you know basically cps saying hey this is the kind of program we're trying to do we can't do today make it fit so um the only thing i would caution on is having everybody in highland you know seven board members let's just say 10 with administration plus they might want to try to do some kind of hybrid thing with i could talk to jen about that but yeah anna um will we be able to engage in a dialogue with the modernization committee yeah that's the whole point yeah okay that's yeah all right because yeah so i know in the past

132i've attended a meeting where it's like well you're on the board so you can't really say anything no they're inviting to come to get feedback from the board yeah um i think it's also important for all of us to attend because my lunatic room is going to be there presenting the demographic study for the first time so you could have back and forth questions with them as well would it be possible and i i guess i can ask john i'm not making you do my work but no the the study came out from malone last night you know smc has it be great to forward to the board before the meeting just so they have some questions like i'll ask jen and arnett about that it's okay it should be but i'll find out get

133give it to everybody ahead of time what does that mean next wednesday 21st i'm i'm sure we'll have more opportunities to talk with the members but so long as we i'm pretty sure as long as we notice that we're going to be there this is not a meeting of the whole anything like that but the fact that we're there we can actually have questions to answer without violating any issues with our foil laws so and it seems that you know things have taken a little bit of time to get to this point but now that a lot of this work has been done behind the scenes we kind of a slow summer unfortunately but now we're to the point where things are gonna start moving fast and getting to the town council and getting them

134to buy in to even put something up for referendum next november you know we're only talking a year from now where we're gonna actually have a project to vote on so i think we need to oh i'll be all hands on deck yeah is there anything you want to add or you guys think i would only add that i find your reports delightfully concise awesome thank you anne you usually have one thing to add so i guess i did my job this time so andrew that's at seven right yes thank you high on school cafeteria uh i'll ask i don't have to forward the meeting invite to all of us or wherever uh we do not have any understanding committees uh for those that might still be watching thank you we're on item f we're

135almost almost there item 5's approval of minutes in our board packets we have meeting minutes from the board of education meeting held september 17th are there any changes or addendums to those minutes i do not have any seeing as there is none i'll i have a motion to make move that the board of education approve the minutes from the meeting held september 17th 2020. is there a second adam sergeant meet you see there's no discussion all those in favor it is unanimous thank you everyone all right item number six correspondence anything good i think that secretary madam secretary do we have any correspondence that means we have no correspondence thank you i missed doing that by the way subject to the covet emails thank you kev us finally super 10's report all right thank you

136very much mr paragini uh just before i hit on the um you know briefly on the the covid19 emails i want to highlight some events uh from this past week on october 9th this was you know bar none kind of the highlight of the last couple of weeks uh chs senior haley falk through her because of the brave foundation held a very special 100th birthday parade for not one but three world war ii veterans from cheshire uh ralph roland irv dauber and florence bryant uh after hearing from keynote speaker colonel kevin brown us army retired and others there was an escorted parade around all of our schools and students came out and waved u.s flags as the three well as the parade went by but really certainly acknowledging the 100th birthday for these very special

137individuals i just wanted to give them and of course haley a shout out for that tremendous work it was really cool and the embodiment of a community contributor one of our performance standards quick update on pps director as i've mentioned [Music] tracy hussey unfortunately leaving us on november 1st we wish her well we are in the process of uh interviewing now for that position and we hope to have an update for you soon i want to congratulate highland elementary school they have been identified as a special olympics unified champion school my understanding is they're the first elementary school in connecticut to be so named they're featured on the espn website and it's really pretty awesome stuff uh and great accomplishment for them on the heels of norton just being named a national blue ribbon school

138it's been a great couple of weeks for our schools and then a special shout out for our girls swim team the ciac had a special online competition to name the greatest connecticut sports dynasty of all time and um there were eight dynasties i'm sure some of you are familiar with like ansonia football and a special sweetening of the award we knocked off southington softball on our route to being named the top dynasty of all time beating danbury wrestling and immaculate girls soccer along the way to name that that title so nothing new girls swimming wins another title the last item i want to hit up upon is i shared with parents this week that we made a revision to our calendar by adding some early release time now you know some other districts have that

139readily embedded throughout the whole year and to be frank with you when this school year started it was venturing into the great unknown you know we were optimistic but there were certainly many people betting on us not making it two weeks three weeks you know here we are um closing in on 10 weeks now and things have been going pretty well in terms of our attendance that you heard maura we had three positive cases thus far that's that's better than most and it's allowed us to continue along the path that being said when we're teaching students that are in front of you and at home at the same time that takes a lot of unique collaboration that we've never had to do before and i think we were very well prepped out for the first

140like eight eight weeks of being able to do that but to sustain this um we need to provide some additional planning time if it's gonna continue to to be of good quality and that's really challenging uh i know as a parent thankfully my kids are old enough now that i don't have to worry about them being home alone um but i understand like it it does add a little bit of a scramble so we don't take this lightly we did do it on wednesday knowing that you know if you have an older sibling attending the high school maybe they could watch your child but we did add a day in november a day in december two in january one in february one in march one in april and two in may now that being said

141if things go really well and we are a hundred percent back in school then we will do away with these days we won't we won't have them we'll drop them from the schedule we'll be full in if things go terribly wrong uh fingers crossed but if we were full remote we would not have early release days built into that schedule so this would only be the case if we're on the like the current system where our staff are trying to teach kids at home and in front of them at the same time so i just wanted to make that clear for people and i think because i think there was a little bit of confusion when we initially sent it out and so i don't know if carroll sent it out today but to you

142know today or tomorrow we'll send out a clarification around that to make that clearer for people um in terms of the emails i you know mentioned we have a total of 12 now the the biggest concern i think that people are raising it's it's really only the high school and it's the hybrid schedule and it's particularly around freshmen so you know in some cases we'll hear with freshmen you know don't load it up too much on that day between it's overwhelming um others are like they need more work we uh realize that you know again this is extending out we're almost 10 weeks now and we've learned some things there's some good constructive feedback marlene will go through that with mary and faith in the team on monday about what is it we're doing and

143what is it we're shifting but in short as i said earlier we are moving to a more synchronous learning we have begun including more students who have more need based on their performance that we've identified we know we can't go to 100 in but we can go more than what we have now and so we're trying to be more inclusive we'll also be surveying students and parents to get uh better feedback about what we can do to improve the learning experience for that for all of our students so that's kind of where we are there was one specific question though to chs and vin touched on it a little bit but it was about tense at cheshire high um the weather has been incredibly cooperative we have people outside like marlene and i were talking

144about this earlier today i cannot ever remember a better fall like we didn't have scorching hot temps where you know we had to do it you know hopefully that's the one thing in 2020 that hasn't now it's good probably on a meteor tomorrow but the next week it's high 60s and sunny every day right now to try and put up a tent when we're gonna have to take it down because of the cold in a couple of weeks just doesn't make sense what we're what we have been doing at cheshire high school is during lunch we push people outside to eat as much as we can um and that's been pretty effective i don't anticipate us you know getting a tent for a two-week window at this point because we would have to take it

145down around early november uh so that's kind of where we are on the covid19 emails and as i said you know stay tuned for monday night much more information on thank you guys yeah inviting wrestle monday night there is a curtain committee meeting at 7 00 p.m uh it will be broadcast on youtube live uh and you know faith and team added the committee added these topics so i'm going to go more deep dive and clarify what's going on the schedule but i just want to add i got an email um this morning i didn't i didn't read the whole thing but so parents sent me an example and this might be i don't have all the details maybe on this extreme side but i think this the concern with earlier dismissal is less time

146in school and you talked about freshmen potentially there might be those that have need for more uh more work and those that have a good balance i think this might be the one that's on the need for more um sorry says for example my freshman got up at 9am because they had study hall first then london is for a second period for 10 minutes then was released he then logged into second class for today at 10 and was that go at 10 33 and he's done for today i don't have all the details in that situation who was that's obviously multiple teachers where can i direct this parent yeah there's four class meetings and two of them are study halls that's you know that's kind of atypical in our schedule uh for a student so

147that would be a little unique on that day that's that's definitely a a slow day so who can i point this person as a married as someone else yeah they're gonna be a discussion on multiple teachers first place to start is probably the child school counselor uh so if if and this is really helpful for us to know anyway if your child is struggling in a class the best person to reach out to is that teacher because they would want that feedback if if things aren't if you're concerned that there's not enough work or too much work or your child's not getting the work i would reach out to that teacher if as tony mentioned multiple classes i would reach out to the school counselor who can really help facilitate that much easier um they're

148there every day and can work with your teachers to to do that yeah i'll encourage that if i get more detail yeah i'll certainly share you know yeah thank you i'm sorry uh can i just clarify what jeff just said so it's just it's the school counselors who have more to do with the schedule not necessarily i wouldn't say necessarily just the schedule certainly they they work with the schedule but if there's a question or concern the school counselor is there to support any sort of academic questions or concerns that you may have you know how is this going to impact college um i'll tell you right now every durgby high school um with the exception of one that i know of is on a hybrid schedule the same sort of way we are um

149so that's it's pretty commonplace um and then definitely all the der gays were last i knew the last i checked so you know they can answer those but they can answer questions about if your child's having difficulty with the social emotional stuff or um if there's other concerns like uh eating or hygiene or just developmental things um the school counselor is a great place to turn for anything great thank you sure adam and andrew and then tim thank you um uh just you had mentioned synchronous learning uh because i know that um after a discussion of mora it seems like you know adding you know more in person right now is would not be advisable so for synchronous learning does that mean you will be uh you know i'll be watching on monday but i

150won't be able to ask a question i guess unless i email it and i suppose so i'll ask now um for synchronous learning does that mean you're going to be uh transitioning from that like uh uh let's say uh day a right or subject a is being taught in person and then the that class is home and then they right now if i'm understanding what's happening is that there's the people who are there in person are then home and then they could watch online for the people who were there on day two in person so that they can watch the same class over again it's almost like they're only learning the half half material so if it's synchronous that means that the people who are home can observe day a and then when they switch

151on on day day two that they could both then learn day b yeah together yeah and i did follow that yeah i did yeah so like basically the second day would be new material right new material and um you know i think it goes back to first of all you know we weren't teaching new material every day before covet you know we just you just don't teach new material every single day uh you know it could be reinforcing material things like uh you know group work it would typically happen you may introduce an idea or a concept day one and manipulate that sort of information day two and how do you make sense of it or you're doing something else the and i think one of the challenges here is not uniform so in it

152and that it shouldn't be necessarily so if i'm taking ap chem day one maybe uh new material day two maybe an extension of that day three may be an extension of that in my um art class day one could be replicated again on day two um and i think not having that you know everything is always the same for every class does make it a little bit more challenging for parents i think in some ways it's kind of what tim is talking about in terms of expectations but what we're transitioning to more of is day one you're teaching to this group live day two that half the class is home and the new class is in but on day one that class that was home was kind of was watching and we are like teaching

153synchronous synchronous meaning whether you're home or you're um at school everybody's participating at the same time half the class is virtually participating the other half is in person and every day it works that way that's got a lot of unique challenges to it um and so that's where you know we're talking about adding more days uh some some early release time to prep for that level of challenge uh it's it's much different than what our anybody any teacher is used to doing half and half right now but i think that for me that's sounds like that that's what we should be doing and that's what we're evolving toward yeah we didn't start that way um you know it was it was kind of all over the place based on what the content was with the

154class but it's evolving toward synchronous every day everybody's on logged on now keep in mind we're running block schedules so we're also a little you know you're concerned about like all right now my student is online they had three back-to-back classes that's 240 minutes of online classes you know that you know careful what you ask for right so like we need to understand like how do we build breaks in to that you it's really hard to sustain attention for 80 minutes watching something online you know so we're trying to that's why we're you know pushing a little bit more planning to make sure that that's meaningful time but yeah moving towards synchronous fantastic and now my second question is i thought i heard you say that there are study halls yeah we have study hope

155why are there study halls when we're trying to maximize what happens when the kids are in school right because we built the schedule with study halls in it and they're only like we only have enough staff to teach so many periods a day um in the the way when the schedule was built back in january we would have to add a slew of teachers to fill all those study hall periods to add more classes which you know logistically even if we wanted to right like even if you said here's uh four hundred thousand dollars go fill all those study halls with i couldn't hire the teachers just aren't out there um there's a real shortage right now because of cobit like people don't want to teach like people were tired out so when you constructed

156the the in-person time it was more more of a traditional it's the typical you know additional extension time period and those kids can get support a lot of times during that study hall period support is available to them we want more kids to access that support they don't always do so um and we're trying to push that more um and frankly trying to look at how do we bring the support to them you know they'll bring them out into muhammad routine okay thank you so there's a lot of unhappy parents in town um that i've spoken to several either you know at family functions or at the coffee shop and i was approached by a mom who came up to me and she said to me that her child is at cheshire high school they

157have 10 hours of in classroom instruction in the entire week is that possible like there's only 10 hours like this student goes to school only gets 10 hours of in classroom instruction for our entire week yeah it depends on the week and this is again this is the same situation that every school you know almost every high school in connecticut the larger high schools are in because when you have half the kids only attending um for the week so the the other option is to go um i mean i could tell you my my own son high school student attends half day twice or three times a week so he you know i would consider that situation worse um so it is a real conundrum what we're trying to provide through moving to more synchronous

158instruction is if covid is preventing me from adding you into the room physically then how do we make sure that the instruction is synchronous to be able to provide at least remote instruction to ramp up that 10 hours of engagement to the full engagement you know the 30 hours that you would typically when is that gonna start we've already started that in a lot of places in a lot of cases a lot of classes i don't have a list of of every class that is doing that but i know that you know marlene and mary have been looking at that too i know you want you know in the perfect world oh yeah of course absolutely our teachers desperately want that we want that our parents our kids want it our kid i coach a

159hockey team like 12 cheshire kids our kids going to school and they're getting 10 hours of instruction a week that's not cool no yeah i wouldn't say it's room instruction in classroom then they have wednesday that's not going to school you know that's right well you know again that's what everybody else in connecticut is living with right now too um it it's it's not a good thing um and so what we've tried to do is you know tim and i were talking last night with the personnel committee meeting you know it's like a college experience when you go to school monday wednesday friday the idea isn't that you don't do anything between monday and wednesday's class the professor has that expectation you've read chapter three you're coming back wednesday ready to discuss it the same

160sort of expectations are being set out here you know developmentally our kids are in different places some handle that well others don't so we try you know we're looking at those that aren't handling that well and how do we get them in every day for we are in the process of ramping numbers up we have pulled kids back to it every day um but yeah i mean this is a really bad situation but i'll go back to the fact that our kids went into this ahead of the game ahead of their peers and across the state and all of their peers are experiencing the same thing the numbers of high schoolers that are receiving more instructional minutes than we are is minuscule it may be a xavier where it's a private school and they they

161go every day you know but there are very limited situations where that's the case and i gotta imagine because connecticut is moving up it's it may be worse before it gets better and that's it's a hard pill to swallow is an educator as a parent it's a hard pill for me to swallow tim yes thanks tony so thank you for your thought sharing your thoughts there regardless of whether we move to synchronous get there a hundred percent learn hybrid remote in person i i think i like the idea of having some sort of guide for parents just an idea of where their kids should be this is take covet out of it i think that would be a useful tool is that something that you could do to give parents throughout the year you know

162like and and if that's not an if it's something you could do and it's not an easy lift you know what what's the hurdles to it because this is something i feel strongly about like i would love to see parents get something in hand where should their kids be in week seven in the high school freshman year geometry yeah next week like and i'm not saying that you could do it but but what are the hurdles to doing it yeah i i would say that's really challenging um as things are are so volatile um but i'll let you know i know marlene wants to jump in on this but i think we are in some respects building the plane as we fly it sure and we're trying to nail down all right well in the

163summer we're marking out quarter one what are the key uh instructional elements that we need to cover the the key standards to keep us moving ahead now we're jumping ahead to quarter two and i appreciate you suggesting that we you know even could potentially chunk it because i'll tell you right now for the full year we i i wouldn't want to devote the time it would take to do that because it would take away from planning for instruction in the here and now but marlene if you want to add on to that no sure i guess what i think of when i think of giving parents some information about where their kids are i think about parent conferences so we had an eight percent increase in attendance at parent conferences at the high school this

164year over previous years i think about progress reports i think about report cards i think about power school and how parents can go into power school and they could see are there students missing any assignments how did they do on quizzes how did they do on tests so i think about all those things and i think about the fact that any of our teachers are available if you wanted to have a parent conference and it wasn't the month that we do parent conferences our teachers all have internal pacing guides that we plan and we write as we write our curriculum now those obviously due to our new strategies during covid and addressing instruction are changing and so they're constantly tweaking those but those are extreme to the detail level of all of the content that

165needs to be reached and really i don't think would do the job for the parent who who you know was looking at that but just all of those other tools i think are really helpful to parents to know is my kid on is my kid on track or even an email to my to the kids teacher to say is my kid on track yeah it's i guess the thing is too is it's not just about saying is my kid on track but you know relative to last year because yeah so you know uh i'm trying to think of what it what a good example would be but it's we already missed out frankly on a couple months last year um so there were eighth graders who took algebra one and what's going to happen to

166them next year now that's next year it's down the road but how do they start algebra 2 right not geometry and and and parents i think want to have some have a little bit more understanding of of how this works and that internal pacing guide it probably isn't way too much detail for any parents but just you know going back to geometry or italian freshman year classes when we you know where would we normally be in week six where are we now yeah and and so i would and and i'll say this what you just said i recognized all those words that you use the power school and everything else but it's uh there's a lot of different things out there different ways to try to tackle that um and i think we use you

167know all of those and those are all communication tools to make sure parents know where their children are and what you referred to about learning loss is what i've been talking about this year and what we provided professional development on and what we utilized for learning and research over the summer was what i what i spoke about being acceleration as a strategy to mitigate learning loss and how that's something that all of our teachers are are utilizing and working with and and providing to students because yeah they took algebra 1 last year and they have to be ready for geometry this year so how do we do that how do we make sure that the kids are ready well one of those tools is this this strategy of acceleration so you know we have those

168things covered and then on the back side we have those pacing guides covered and we have what jeff was talking about um you know identifying those priority standards and making sure the kids are getting exactly what they need as we move through and i think you'll see at the curriculum committee meeting also and this might put some fears to rest some of the preliminary data that we have on at least our elementary students reading is commensurate with what we had last year and we started school much later this year than we did last year so it's it's a struggle that's fake thank you you're welcome i just wanted to say that i think one of the concerns there are a couple points um one of the concerns that parents have is just a sense of

169inconsistency how is it that a teacher one teacher can use the full lady minutes with their students and yet another one dismisses them after three minutes you know there's just where's the accountability and where's the the consistency and um and i've been hearing that quite a bit from parents you know there's just some seem to relish the whole period and use it to their best advantage and others just like okay you're done go um and that's to hear that is kind of disconcerting um so you know i think it's something that you might want to explore um you mentioned the study hall you know what do parents fully understand how that study hall is to be used i don't you know is there room for more communication than that uh with the parents i don't

170again i don't i don't have a senior i don't have a high schooler um so i don't know what communication is going back between between you and parents but um there seems to be confusion there um and you know i've heard okay the college experience that's great if you're a senior and they're in kids taking seniors taking college courses you know i know when i was in high school i did and and so you know you're learning but for a freshman who a year ago was in dog you know that's that's a lot to put on a 14 or 15 year old so just some comments and then the other thing i heard is okay connecticut schools may be in this position but there are a lot of states that are open and there are

171kids who are going to be going to out of state schools and so the comp the field competition is much broader than just connecticut and they're looking at that saying you know how is how's my kid going to rate compared to um you know i don't know where are they i know there are but i can't do one off the top um so you know those are just i throw this out because that's what i have heard and um just for you i'm sure you have as well but sure adam uh just one more comment um another thing that maura impressed upon me was that it appears that we're going to be in this situation until we have a vaccine all reports currently say that we realistically we may not have a vaccine until this

172school year is over which means that i would at least for monday i would like to hear at least what the plan is at least going through january if not longer and i guess maybe the real question is have we really just been planning to go full remote because it seems like sync because synchronous is is is is a lot more difficult than perhaps going fully remote um because at least everyone's all in the same place i guess yeah and so i'm just easier full in person is easier right hybrid is the hardest right to to do um and so yeah we are doing that and and i think that we we have been already planning for a more extended stay in the place that we're currently in you know nobody in august you can't

173tell me people had a clue about what october would look like oh sure so you know it is very much all of us are still flying by the seat of our pants um and trying to just kind of go one day at a time we are planning out you know as i mentioned uh before how do we evolve to better meet our our students needs you know to hear 10 hours in a week i mean that that would only happen if on an oddball week like this week where you had monday was a holiday and one day was psat you know at the very least a student's going to be in school two days 12 hours or three days 18 hours um and then one of those day wednesday would be full um for remote

174so i mean actually 12 would be the minimum every week um so you know we do need to continue to evolve we do need to improve that's why you don't hear boo from k-8 because we're all in i mean we do have 15 remote learners but we have a lot of practice in making that work now well yeah and and that's that leads me to my next point as the cases increase right and we may have to go hybrid at all levels right what does that look like are we going to need because right now it is just a high school if middle school and elementary school have to go hybrid so that we could maintain that for a while are we going to need more resources to achieve that are we ready for that

175for the entire system to go hybrid yeah we are and i i think what we have been doing in k through 8 you have that 15 remote um and so we are kind of teaching a little bit of a hybrid model there now we just have more kids in the room we're doing it's a little easier because you have more but the training wheels are already there at the high school it's not so much the case because you have 50 out it's a little bit tougher well it is in my impression that if you're a remote learner like at the elementary level that's five days a week you're remote yeah right right that's not a day there's no days off right and like no days in there's no it's not like you're mixing things up

176as much as you are at the high school it is it's definitely harder right you know from a teaching perspective it's a totally unique animal and but the there there are foundations of that that have been established k-8 that we could translate easier when we do make that transition um where now we've only done this at the high school it's a little bit different right so so could i get something to what jeff is talking about because i wanted to visit chapman school the first week of full classes and they are doing that they're doing they have remote students in the same classroom synchronously with students in the classroom not every classroom is being taught that way but diana really impressed upon me that the the one the teachers that are doing that are now

177developing a mentoring plan to um pass that excuse me information along to the teachers who aren't doing it who have just in um class students because it just gives us more flexibility but along with that also comes the technology has to be in the classrooms to be able to do that as well and that's been the plan since the summer when we started um implementing that technology in the classes but it's not every it's not in every class no what a 300 classes 36 i think you yeah we had um 60 rooms basically from the get-go and we're in the process of adding some more not trying to be the dead horse but uh just got an email in front of parents saying that scenario i bought earlier with the study halls uh no the

178um ten minutes class a day is um they believe is happening broadly throughout multiple grades however both of this person's kids have two study halls out of four classes in a day so i mean that's a rare bird to have two study halls you know four period windows i know but it's it's apparently it happens so yeah you know the challenge i have is i understand it's rare yeah parents of tolemance happening um we gotta fix it and so i'm going to advise and talk to the guidance counselor yeah we'll bring up monday night my guess is they're probably not going to get you or the guidance counselor so what is the step after that if they can't make progress with this you talk to the principal now if you know we're probably not going

179to change your schedule to not have two study halls in a day right now it would probably because you were a quarter of the way through it would most likely change if there's going to got to be a change made half here but usually study halls are opposite labs like science labs yeah all the details yeah but you know it's i'm hopeful i think whatever marlene's gonna present mine that we're gonna record and just kind of play back loop live on youtube like yeah 24 7. just to educate parents would it help if i just did a brief overview of what each day looks like for this group uh you know or do you might not want to go i would say we're starting around a little late okay i i know it's gonna be

180covered monday i'll be watching we'll be watching but thank you marlene and tim i know you had something yeah i just i just wanted to highlight it sounded to me a few minutes ago like we were talking about the elementary hybrid being maybe a learning model or teaching model for the high school hybrid or they're similar and i'm thinking these two hybrids are totally different hybrids they are yeah i mean elementary is linear throughout the week five lessons that move forward yeah and the concern i think a lot of parents have is that it's not that way with the high school hybrid it's lesson a on day one and on day two and then you move forward to lesson b yeah and that's why we've been moving more toward a synchronous yeah a b c

181d instead of a a b b c okay thank you so yeah monday and let me just clarify that wednesday is is a full remote day and there are all six classes on wednesday 30 minutes of pizza all six i'll just i'll say that and i'll save the rest for a moment your teaser for monday that's easier thank you marlene um up next is uh without any old business news business very quickly i i did send the board uh my notes i about three weeks ago three and a half yeah three and a half weeks ago um i had a zoom call with siparja aru and marisa from the cheshire coalition on equity and diversity remember we received their emails over the summer looking for systematic changes et cetera so i i reached out to

182them just you know as with all electronic communications whether it's social media or emails it's it's hard to gauge you know i have more questions i want to ask and you know rather than waiting for us to schedule a meeting uh so i reached out to him and and i'll tell you three were great um if i think i think marissa if not mistaken is getting her master's in education so she was very very well-versed um state-of-the-art education and trends and things and so i walked them through basically what the board does what the committees do some of the things that we're up against with curriculum and you know so it was a lot of great information they're learning about the process but for me uh you know it was a great dialogue like what

183i walked away with was we're not really far apart at all on where we are what we're trying to do in our future plan as it relates to diversity and equity and anti-racism and i think the more we taught the more we learned about some things we didn't know about uh i think the most recent graduate was from 2015 and i know a lot's changed and there's always areas for improvement on these topics but long story short it was great because i asked them you know given this mountain you're moving you know what are the top three things you want us to get done and they were able to actually able to condense that in three goals which we all have uh i know marlene's you know not on her head you know again so

184so what i advised him was you know boards are eager to hear more ideas from them they're eager to get in front of the board and just you know share some some information but they're very much interested in hearing about the circ presentation so definitely invite them to at least watch that because that's going to help us tailor a number of things but particularly we tackle some of these opportunities and then yeah i told them that you know get a week or two after digest information maybe we can have some kind of form with the group with the board of ed because i know a lot of us have questions for them and uh so we'll try to schedule it out you know soon the the challenge has been as you all know covid opening

185of schools um they're very understanding of that but yeah again i again i thought they were great the three of them very professional in fact i was telling marissa you know she should apply for a job in the school district i mean she seemed very passionate very you know uh versed especially in education in a room and surprise you were um you know to the point it was it was great i think we'll have a great conversation with the group um but it was very positive uplifting for me you know their intentions what they're trying to do it's it's great to see our alumni be proactive so um that's what that that was it i don't spend so much time with that so we are working towards um some of those things uh beyond that

186uh i don't think we've thought about the negotiations uh because we had mediation after last meeting yeah that you know we can discuss so executive session i am going to have a uh a motion to go to executive session with no action to follow but just a few updates on upcoming meetings uh monday october 19th at 7 pm is current committee meeting uh it will be via youtube live uh tuesday november 3rd at 6 30 pm is policy committee uh we do have an elementary school showcase on the books for thursday november 5th 7 30 that will be determined uh then we have curriculum committee november 9th at 7 pm and a boardwalk business meeting on november 19th at 7 30 p.m um it wasn't on the agenda but i know tim's raised and a

187few others considering for the next board meeting have it via google google me virtual uh just to break the rhythm a little bit i think it hey number one i gotta tell you i keep pulling on my massive talk because i feel like i'm no one's hearing me and i think it's hard people tell me that i i uh i bray a lot i i'm sure i have my video sequences when i'm in front of the mic but having this time doesn't help and they have i guess some folks have a hard time hearing us and the question is well if you're gonna get a room of mass what's the point okay let's do a virtual one next time we'll pull the board members you know we'll do whatever makes sense for the group but

188uh i think it'd be break it up a little bit i think our administrators here and carol obviously spent a lot of time at the schools as it is they have a little flexibility that i mean to be at home when this is happening we have our next scheduled meeting is our elementary showcase meeting so we'll send out some information on that and you know we can decide if we want to do that one remote or in person or the next one yeah i think the border by business meeting yeah the one thing november the remainder of both based on what we're planning yeah our plan was to show the um the synchronous rooms that we're using one of the high schools well so that's different there's action we're actually walking around and yeah you

189know i guess people are tired of seeing us yeah yeah but nonetheless the point is we're flexible so yep um that being said i do have a motion that the board of ed tony before you do that can you ask one question no yes um in regards to meeting uh with the uh with the i forget the name of the group no not special coalition cheshire coalition um i know that we're under restriction for uh 25 people uh and i know that they've sort of paired their their representation group to us to three people uh if they wanted to meet with us if we wanted to have a special meeting or something like that could we just invite them in person so that we could have a dialogue like that or none of them live

190here okay yeah so so remember these are you know they're not cheshire residents uh well they weren't anything there's three that i taught to know there's actually one is not in connecticut two are around so it more likely be virtual i i don't i but this group they're are they cheshire residents or not yeah not all of them okay yeah just one they came through our school system but now we're not they used to be but not anymore right right okay well out of the 750 that signed a petition i couldn't tell you how many cheshire residents but the folks i talked to are alumni of cheshire schools so they even said hey you know we'll do our best to attend i'm pretty sure it'll be these three it might be a couple others that

191might jump in to represent the group because it's a large group uh but we could work that out i mean i preferably like to have a personal you got that dialogue but we should do that via google me too as well you know but that's a good point we're gonna work out those details our next few weeks i do have a motion that the board adjourns in the possible executive sessions session to discuss unit negotiation with no action to follow and is to include vincent manciana marlene and jeff sullen faith seconds all in favor aye we are joining executive session uh we will not be coming back there will be no follow-up meeting ontario and watching this evening thank you uh thank you for your patience i know there's a lot of information as always

192uh if you couldn't follow everything please watch the video and as always send us questions and we'll get back to you as soon as we can that being said we are now going to executive session mike let us know and we can start that you