001okay good evening everybody we'll call the meeting of the cromwell board of education to order at 5 33 alessandra could you do roll call please not here catherine will not be here today okay uh next item approval of agenda editions and deletions and chairs review of agenda highlights up miss cantwell's here so nothing to change on the agenda in terms of highlights the largest topic on the agenda will be our training session with our board council and we will have an executive session at the end so if there are no questions is there a motion to approve the agenda motion by john second by dipty any comments or questions hearing none all in favor aye opposed abstentions the motion carries unanimously okay next item correspondence are there any correspondence doctor okay so no correspondence next
002item public comments before i read the rules for public comment is there anybody from the public that would like to comment okay so i will read the rules and then you could just go to the mic next to mr flanders and give your name and also just make sure the the red button is on the mic it says push okay uh we welcome an encourage public comments at our board of education meetings to make sure that our meetings are conducted respectfully while encouraging public participation following all the rules for public comment the public comment portions of the meetings thank you for your cooperation and participation individuals are welcome to address the board of education for up to three minutes each during the public comment portions of the meeting but board members will not generally engage
003in dialogue the board of education chair may at his her discretion extend the time for public comments speakers must come to the podium and share your name to facilitate efficient sharing of your comments we encourage you to share any comments you may have about instruction discipline or learning materials first with your student's teacher then principal and followed by the superintendent before bringing the comments to the board of education however if you do not believe your comments have been addressed appropriately or if you believe they should be shared with the board of education for any other reason please feel free to do so all comments must not include personal attacks and comments cannot be discourteous threatening vulgar or otherwise inappropriate the board chairperson may at his or her discretion curtail any public comments or terminate any
004such individual's privilege of address at any time if they violate any of these rules violate reasonable standards of decorum a boisterous or a repetitious the board of education reserves the right to limit public comments to particular topics so that being said thank you good evening my name is dr angela ryan and i wish to speak on the topic of unmasking our children and i'm sorry i have this to three minutes but now that i'm doing it through a mask i'm having a hard time inhaling so could you bear with me to um it might take a little longer than three minutes because of the breathing issue i am a 20-year resident of cromwell and my two adult children attended cromwell public schools at all levels i'm also a licensed pharmacist with a 23-year career as
005a drug information specialist in skilled nursing facilities i've been intensively studying all aspects of colvin 19 and the pandemic since the beginning i review a vast amount of the new information that becomes available every day on the sars kovi ii virus the shots as well as the interventional measures being pushed as proposed infection control procedures i am speaking today to offer you the first hard data that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal the journal of the american medical association also known as jama specifically regarding mask wearing in children i provided the full text of this study to the board this study demonstrates quantitatively the carbon dioxide content of the air being breathed by children who were wearing two different types of masks these children were breathing co2 in measurements as high as 25 000
006parts per minute [Music] you will see that masks put the children as much as five times above the five thousand parts per standard as shown in this jama study osha typically imposes fines or penalties if these standards are being violated i ask why would the violation of these safety standards ever be tolerated for our vulnerable growing children i know that the current plan for this school district is to mandate mask wearing for our students inside the school buildings this fall even if the governor's guidance modifies this order to exempt say students who got the coveted shots from wearing masks it's still critical to become aware of the scientific data which shows repeatedly that cloth or paper masks do not stop the transmission of viruses to any proven extent additionally i maintain that the wearing of
007face coverings in fact causes harm to our children and this article in jama that i provided you shows this in its measurements of carbon dioxide that they are breathing all day long it's time to withdraw the mandate for wearing masks for everyone in the cromwell public schools it's also time for the elected board of education representatives to take back from the state government their right to make decisions locally for our kids if you say to me the mask mandate can't be removed without losing federal funds or state funds for our schools i ask you to search your consciences for the answer to this question what is more important than the health and well-being of our precious children perhaps as a preliminary step you could conduct a formal survey of parents and students in cromwell to
008see what they think and feel about the mask mandate in schools and share this jama article with everyone i have provided the board with six documents to accompany this statement i implore you to read all the scientific published research information in full so that you can take a well-informed approach to removing the mask mandate in the best interest of our children thank you for your attention you dr ryan i did receive uh another uh submission to be read for public comment from a parent who could not be here today so i will read that to you the comment is from jessica tomzack so she writes to whom it may concern i'm a mother of two children in cromwell schools the last year and a half has been a roller coaster for all of us but
009none have suffered more than our innocent children whom are at minimal risk for being affected by this virus prior to last march my children could be found playing with the neighborhood kids going to school and being carefree as a child should be today they are limited to what they can do where they can go freely in as many places still require masks for all my children will not set foot into any building place where they must wear a mask for a year and a half the only place that we have gotten them to go to with one on was school and that was very begrudgingly imagine disliking something so much that you do not want to go play mini golf visit a museum aquarium or your favorite ice cream place how would that feel we
010lost out on so much but the biggest thing is the memories that were lost yes we could have still gone to many of the places i listed with them but at what cost why would we go knowing that they would be miserable wearing a mask then there are the facts of the covid 19 quote pandemic i say pandemic loosely did you know the definition of a pandemic was changed in recent years but that this wouldn't have been a pandemic according to the old definition because of the pandemic we are in a state of emergency which provides the state federal funding which leads me to ask why is funding being held hostage for our schools for our children being held hostage how has this funding been used to improve ventilation in facilities like our schools for
011the cdc children can be infected but most children have mild to no symptoms at all there have been studies indicating that their risk is extremely low here is an example of one of them and there's a link to an article at this point adults who wish to have had the opportunity with about 70 percent of the state's population having received the coveted shot and more still having antibodies why would we then say we need them to mitigate risks haven't we already protected our most vulnerable through april 2020 the official recommendation by the journal of the american medical association was unambiguous face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people
012from becoming ill close quote part of that lack of evidence and facts showed that cloth face masks actually increase influenza-like illness and contravention to establish science states municipalities and businesses have violated the legal requirements for the promulgation of medical countermeasures during a public health emergency stating a belief that face masks live at the spread of sars kovi ii cdc guidance was released recommending that the continued use of masks and school-aged children over the age of two what data has been used to determine the efficacy for the use of masks prior to acquiring them in schools initially there was not much information but now that there is more what are using to determine if mass will continue to be required has the increased presence of carbon dioxide been taking into consideration what will the effects of
013this presence be here is a link to a study on carbon dioxide presence when masks are used used mask packages themselves have a disclaimer that they do not prevent the spread of virus so why are we continuing to use them it is known that the particulates from the virus would require a poorly fitted properly fitted sorry n95 mask to prevent the spread of virus of the virus further masks are considered a medical device only medical professionals should be prescribing their use in fact the mass requirement could be considered part of a legal clinical trial 21 code of federal regulation section 50.24 illegal clinical trial all parties mandating the use of face masks are not only willfully ignoring established science but are engaging in what amounts to a whole population clinical trial this conclusion is reached
014by the fact that face mask use and coven 19 incidents are being reported in scientific opinion pieces promoted by the united states centers for disease control and prevention and others close quote would like not asked to slow the spread available 14 days that's all we needed to do so we are all joined we all joined together to mitigate the spread as requested and yet this carrot keeps getting pulled further and further away i'm asking that regardless of what you believe that you allow the wearing of masks to be a choice please follow the science and regardless of the threat of funding uphold your duty to our children thank you jessica and then there was another note from a student i won't name the student's name but it says hi i'm 11 years old going to
015sixth grade and i don't like masks masks no paraphrase i don't like masks because i cannot breathe in them well and they make me sweaty and uncomfortable i can't see my friends faces my teacher can't always hear me and sometimes i can't hear her please don't make me wear a mask again this year thank you so just wanted to read those into the record as requested okay next item reports of liaisons from the town council and board of finance focus on issues of interest to the school community so i saw steve steve from the town council good evening good evening everyone it's uh let me just say it's great that uh to have everybody back together and actually see everybody's faces whether you're happy to see me or not so so just a quick uh
016just a quick comment um so the diversity equity and inclusion committee is going to be putting on a wheelchair basketball game kind of training so they received a 500 grant in support of the event the co-chair elsie newcomb was able to get some support from the ryan martin's foundation to get some additional volunteers to run the clinic and also provide equipment for volunteers so they're shooting they're trying to shoot for august 7th which is a saturday they're they're hopeful uh dr macri that they may be able to use uh one of the gyms maybe whis or uh the middle school actually i think they said the high school but i don't know with all the construction so but one of the other would be great to do because they're suggesting outside might be more of
017a challenge uh with the equipment so i know she uh uh caitlyn pearl had reached out to lynn i can't think of her lynne mckenny but i think she's on vacation this week that's what i'm being told so um but hopefully she gets back to her um the committee would love to take volunteers she's maybe hoping some of the high school basketball team the girls or boys teams might want to participate uh an assist i think the i think they're attempting to get people into chairs and to show what uh someone in a wheelchair may experience in trying to play that game so you might even see me there so i appreciate it thank you thank you steve any questions for mr pornbach no okay thank you and i don't see mr nitto or mr
018ireland from the board of finance so no board of finance update tonight okay next item presentations and reports of administration budget update 2020 2021 school year um just very little we do have um two we have finalists for the ap position for the high school and i will be interviewing um finalists oh i'm sorry did i miss something oh i'm sorry did i i skipped i'm sorry when i went here i'm sorry i didn't i skipped an item uh no i didn't i'm sorry sorry superintendent's updates and responses to boe comments so sorry it's okay sorry about that that's just very quickly just to let you know we're almost there um and excellent excellent pool of candidates which was very um which was wonderful and unfortunately i might be asked bothering you all to have
019a special meeting so that we can hopefully get the person started as quickly as possible and then just the other um the culinary arts kitchen which we are getting built um the asbestos removal is beginning shortly and hopefully we we don't believe it will be completely finished but it'll be safe for students to be in the building we hope it'll be finished by november but then we all know that everything in construction is slowing down and it's taking materials a long time but at least it's getting done and our students are elated and more kids are going to get to participate um and then i just wanted to let you know and i i can do this under actually um reopening plan update okay okay now on to presentations and reports oh sorry john please
020go ahead uh we had to wait a month or so before he was able to start prepared contract are we still going to be i mean even if we were to act in august we would not have somebody on board as far as the it's okay i know it's i know you mean as far as the well i think when mr cuckles most most of the most so even if we act in august we're not seeing anybody no that was why um the final on interviews with me will be on thursday so like i said i might be bugging you maybe to come in a little early so that we can get um someone on board so that they can give their 30 days if needed okay okay that was that's even better yeah that's
021why i said i might bother you i i know everyone's busy but it'll just help us get going great thanks john any other questions okay next presentations and reports of administration now budget just quickly miss burke is on vacation she did submit two pages to you we are predicting that we will we still are obviously paying invoices and receiving um items at this time we anticipate a small surplus of approximately three to five thousand dollars if this should exist we will go to the board of finance and they have always approved a transfer of the surplus of funds to our capital non-recurring account um considering the type of year we had where we didn't know what if we were coming or going and the ebbs and flows and the grants that we received and then
022we weren't sure we were going to receive i'm incredibly proud of the business department and i cannot say enough about miss burke we talked every single solitary day two to three times a day about where we were so luckily i'm very happy we of course we went without we had to but we were fiscally responsible and stayed within our means excellent okay i echo those words so congratulations and thank you for all the hard work um just a question or comment going forward as we get american relief fund funds can we add a similar chart like we did this past year to show how those are being allocated or will be allocated perfect any other questions selena just a quick one at the bottom it does say crf grant reimbursement so that i assume that's
023part of the grant that we received and that is put into this yeah that's how we made it okay um that for last year's budget we received what was it four hundred and four ninety three nine nine four yeah we received that money it was an interesting situation the state asked us to do a survey we didn't know no one knew that the state was actually going to take that survey and use it as uh and actually it wasn't truly a survey it was how much money do you need um cromwell didn't qualify we were too we're too wealthy of a town to qualify for um there were three different areas one of them being staffing so we had to pay for the extra staffing which was close to six hundred thousand dollars for the
024year but we did receive 493 dollars in maintenance extra support ot and to help us with um to improve our air quality you know how we did all of our buildings air conditioning our merv is like an outpatient center in all the buildings and um for ppe so we put that we were able to put well we had to put it towards making sure that you know it had we not gotten that money we would have been in the red and not to go to the town thank you sure any other questions okay so i assume we'll get a final update maybe next month on the final close of the books yes okay okay all right on to new business item a reopening plan update dr macri so it's very unfortunately uh quick and short
025we were meeting i was meeting two to three times a week with either dph and csde the connecticut state department of education department of public health anywhere between one and three times a week for the entire school year they stopped having the meetings the second or third week of june they said we were going to reconvene this morning i was exceptionally excited and they canceled the meeting so we do not have any um guidelines or anything as of now the guidelines are what they were when we ended the school year so just to let you know the reopening plan was slightly updated but it's still we're still following all of the rules that were in progress when we left the school year and we it had to be posted online and submitted in order for
026us to apply for the america american rescue plant grant so will it change is it a fluid document i absolutely will it change i have um absolutely no idea is it going to be a local decision is it going to be governor lama who makes the decision as far as mitigation strategies is it going to be local um to be quite frank with you i have absolutely no idea a lot of people have speculated but there is nothing that has come i hope next meeting which is july 20th my hope is that that doesn't get cancelled because superintendents are very eager to learn about what they need to do in their school districts and and put a plan in place but as of today nothing has changed or been updated even though the cdc has
027made a recommendation nothing from connecticut thank you any questions okay thank you uh next action approval of the minutes and motions from the special meeting on june 8th how does reference be in your packet is there a motion to approve motion by uh lori is our second second by jen any comments or questions hearing none on favor i opposed abstentions the motion carries unanimously okay next the action approval of the minutes and motions from the regular meeting on june 8 2021 reference c is there a motion to approve motion by dipd second by john comments or questions hearing none all in favor aye opposed abstentions the motion carries unanimously uh okay next item d action approval of the minutes of motions of the special meeting on june 15 2021 reference d is there a motion
028to approve motion by worries their second second by gen comments or questions hearing none all in favor aye opposed abstentions selena and lindsay otherwise the motion carries unanimously okay uh informational principle reports attached as references e f and g and i believe there was one that was sent by email later after the fact yes um the um secretary of school secretaries were on vacation so it got submitted just a little bit later and you all received it by email and i do have it if you want me to pass it around okay any comments questions okay uh okay next review uh review roles and responsibilities of board members attorney raider shipment and goodwin so by way of introduction we'll have a training session today uh we haven't had one in some time and part of
029that was because the past couple years have been crazy uh so we'd like to invite jessica ritter our outside counsel to do a training focusing on if we have power [Laughter] did you step on something steve it's very fortuitous uh the laptop is on but oh here we go we're back up and running nothing surprises me anymore so are we still live rob we're still going okay so for those in watching remotely we just had a power outage but something seemed to be on so um so again uh training that's probably long overdue um but i invite jessica ritter up to give us a training seminar on trips tips to become a more informed board member so this is a fairly open session feel free to ask questions at any point in time this isn't
030commentary just so i can see john i fully expect to be heckled by you it's okay uh and just do you want to grab a seat with the microphone or your test you can't have a problem i was gonna use the i need to use the slide advancer yeah this just go over the podium if that works for you let's try to have uh yeah the podium works fine because there's a microphone there so that's that's good okay you can have this for you just tell me so i don't know if everyone's met jess before because it's been some time since we've been in person so jessica ritter i have to tell you that not giving me the materials is a good start i'm sorry you know john you moved you threw me off i'm
031gonna heck with you back john so everyone over here just left does that mean i missed the part where we get to make sorry yes sorry about that yeah sorry that was uh the beginning of the meeting sorry oh that's right um if you would like to submit something in writing to dr macri she can just distribute it to the board if you would like i'll come back okay what was it july that's not our meeting our meeting is august 10th i believe the second tuesday in august if everyone's okay with it okay that's fine that's fine okay uh did you hear me do the rules for public comment okay if i could just read the rules public comment one more time sorry to if you would indulge me okay we welcome and encourage public
032comments at our board of education meetings to make sure that our meetings are conducted respectfully while encouraging public participation following all the rules for the public comment portion of our meetings thank you for your cooperation and participation individuals are welcome to address the board of education for up to three minutes each during the public comment portions of the meeting but board members will not generally engage in dialogue the board of education chair may his her discretion extend the time for public comments speakers must come to the podium and share your name right next to mr flanders seat there to facilitate efficient sharing of your comments we encourage you to share any comments you may have about instruction discipline or learning materials first with your student's teacher then principal and followed by the superintendent before bringing
033the comments to the board of education however if you do not believe your comments have been addressed appropriately or if you believe they should be shared with the board of education for any other reason please feel free to do so all comments must not include personal attacks and comments cannot be discourteous threatening vulgar or otherwise inappropriate the board chairperson may his or her discretion curtail any public comments to terminate any such individual's privilege of address at any time if they violate any of these rules violate reasonable standards of decorum a boisterous or a repetitious the board of education reserves the right to limit public comments to particular topics so with that being said if you wouldn't mind coming to the podium and just give your name sorry about that just make sure the uh the
034red light on the mic is on right well i've never been to a border bed meeting yeah my son is a sophomore sorry could you just point the mic to your and make sure the light is on just because uh we're live okay perfect start with your name that would be great uh jillian wiley so my son is a sophomore here that's a high school and i just came out of concerns of the mask mandate so i know you know we just um heard superintendent am i right okay uh say that basically it's out of your hands at this point so i you know i still would like to just make my opinion and that of many people that i've spoke with is that we don't feel it's necessary given how many people have been
035vaccinated and have gotten natural immunity from getting covet so there's so many different opinions and i wish we could all just agree on the science unfortunately somehow this has turned into a big argument and no matter which side you're on it seems like you could find evidence to back that up so um with that being said i think you know if we all just could kind of agree that we could as parents do what we think is best for our children so i'm a nurse i'm a registered nurse here in connecticut i've taken care of covered patients i've seen firsthand how bad it can be i also don't think my son needs to wear a mask i don't think any of the kids need to wear a mask i think if you want your child
036to wear a mask or if you want to wear a mask i absolutely think that that's fine for you i do know that there are plenty of scientific studies again i'm not going to sit here and read them to you and i have them they're they're and they're not you know fox news studies this is this is which by the way i do watch but it's it's nih it's the cdc it's it's who it you know it's it's the department of public health which i get information from all the time so um there's risk for hypercapnia there's risk for hypoxia which basically just means you're rebreathing um the carbon dioxide and not getting enough oxygen um which kind i know everything i feel like everybody might know what copd is and a lot of people
037suffer from that i take care of a lot of people with copd and part of that it kind of is like we're inducing that in our kids so they get brain fog they get very tired they get headaches and um although not everyone might experience this all the time it does happen and we don't know long-term effects of these things on our kids versus again let's not go into the numbers but the risk of kovid is so minor to kids it really is and even with the new variant it's still very minor so um i believe i hope most teachers have been vaccinated and i just don't think it's necessary and i just really want that on the record because i feel very strongly about it i think that we're risking too much it's even
038just the facial expressions it's nice to see people here and their smiles and you know we're losing a lot without having that so i i think that's about it i mean you know again if you want your kid to wear a mask you know wear them i didn't go into how you know they're really not effective as far as aerosolized and surgical mass versus n95s to go and i went into you know people who had coveted i have to be fit tested for an n95 so what happens with the fit testing is you put the n95 mask on i try a bunch of different ones they put you in this weird thing it looks like a little nasa guy and they spray this stuff with it and you have to see if you taste it
039smell it and if you do it means the n95 doesn't work if you had a surgical mask on you would instantly taste and smell those things and that's how we test for airborne illnesses and this particulate for the covet is very small so um meaning that it's like micrometers and it's it's less than the standard droplet precautions which gets into stuff that i'm super aware of being a nurse but you might not be but you know i'm kind of i'm pretty trustworthy so i'd say maybe it'll help maybe it won't but bottom line is i don't think they should wear i think there's more harm than good so that's that that's about it and no i don't want to vaccinate don't get me started on that one i've been vaccinated but i don't want to
040vaccinate my child i also think that that's unnecessary so i just think that they should be able to be kids and let the grown-ups take the risks on unauthorized vaccines and the risk for him getting these things that are popping up getting the vaccine is far less again with risk versus benefit it's far less than it would be if he got coveted if you get coveted he'd be fine i really think he'd be fine i every patient i have had that had covered that that was of normal age my age your age was fine people i work with fine i have had patients die from it they also were in their 90s and had copd diabetes congestive heart failure etc i've also seen a lot of patients that had all of those things survive perfectly
041fine so um yeah so i want to send him to school and let him learn and let him see you know it's high school he's got to see the pretty girl's smiles right and have him have a good high school experience freshman year was crazy and i want to be able to come into school and just live a normal life i think this has gone too far let the grown-ups deal we'll get vaccinated we'll wear masks we'll do whatever we have to do to make our kids be just again just normal everyday stuff okay so that's my opinion sticking to it thank you and thank you for jillian wiley over and out thank you great thank you and feel free to stay in no problem thank you okay jess over to you want me to
042use the microphone if you don't mind just so people streaming can hear is the red light on yes is that good yes perfect thank you okay can i move this so i can yes absolutely all right thank you okay hi everyone how are you i think that i have actually worked even with all the new board members in here i have worked on you even though it's been remotely but it is nice to see you in person um so i'm here today to talk about practical tips on how to become a more informed board member about four or five slides in uh john who will be heckling me the whole time i know that um did it catch a grammatical error which i do apologize for when we get there i'll point it out um
043but my sincere apologies because it's it's it's an embarrassing error so i'm sorry about that but we'll get there um what you have in front of you are the responders for those of you who i think maybe a few years ago were here for a similar type presentation i like to keep this interactive have it be a dialogue feel free to stop me and ask any questions because really this is your training so i mean i can talk up here for hours about all of this stuff but i want to know specifically what your concerns are in cromwell and what the interplay is between our board of education and our superintendent of schools so feel free to stop me at any time you'll see that i've built in a number of scenarios into the presentation
044which is why you have the responders it does collect data but it is anonymous data but i hope that that everyone will will share their thoughts on the scenarios uh jeff tell me about timing because i can work around your timing you want to go for an hour i think between an hour hour and a half anywhere in there leave a time for questions okay you know our summer meeting is usually our shorter meeting so absolutely so i'll i'll plan for an hour and i'll cover what i think is probably the most important okay and again that's why i provide you with the materials because there's a lot of things in there that will still be helpful to you even if we don't get it and if anybody has questions or wants to go longer
045then we can certainly do that too okay so here's our agenda we're going to talk about your roles and responsibilities which i understand is really what we might be emphasizing this evening there's also board meeting essentials we'll talk about board member conduct the executive session the privilege of executive session which is probably as as attorney flanders probably knows the most violated provision of the freedom of information law is the executive session we'll talk about electronic communications if we get there and what you as board of education members need to be mindful of when you are communicating via email via text anything that is electronic how to conduct a meeting public comment and then just some best practices again we won't get to all of this but this is what's built into the presentation okay so
046here is the i just want to point out the third bullet i very much apologize enza that should say who serves as the chief executive officer i am going to blame my marketing team because they're the ones who put this together after i am the brain behind it they have to execute the marketing i love you i know so i am very sorry for that my family is watching and my friends they're loving this yes so that should be who so i very much apologize for that right i know i know so again my sincere apologies for that okay so you are a board of education what i just passed out to you are two relevant bylaws that i think is very important for you to understand right so we have your limits of authority
047and we have your board related responsibilities so if i'm looking at uh board bylaw 9040 you can see that these are now these are your bylaws that you the cromwell board of education have adopted you can see what your responsibilities are and that right now it's limited to six provisions so one is to employ an able and qualified superintendent of schools that's probably your most important responsibility so as you know the superintendent of schools through 10-157 serves as your ceo so she is responsible for the day-to-day the operational she's responsible for implementing policy that the board of education determines is either legally necessary or necessary to meet the needs of cromwell in its community and its students she then takes those overarching broad policies and implements the administrative regulations because you as board of education
048members are not here every day and you should not be getting down into the weeds of the everyday implementation of your policy we need to trust in our ceo and give her that discretion she is also the only employee that you have so let's say you have concerns with an administrator that's really not for you to opine on that is for your superintendent of schools to deal with let's say you don't like the way your superintendent of schools dealt with a certain issue with an administrator or a few administrators that's something you take up with your superintendent through her evaluation process but that doesn't mean that you as board of education members get involved or into the weeds on an employment situation with any administrators or anyone below the ranking of the superintendent of schools
049now as you know you have a legal obligation to evaluate the superintendent of schools once annually now is that something that has been done diligently okay so as you know now do you normally do it as written feedback or verbal feedback uh we usually do both we we provide written we do a written evaluation which the board votes on and it gets presented to the superintendent and in the context of that delivery there's verbal feedback discussion of the written great evaluation and that's also a statutory obligation there's a statutory obligation that you as a board of education annually evaluate your superintendent of schools the other thing that you have so if you're looking at 90 40 you adopt policies that govern the operations of the school system you are absolutely the policy maker for the
050school district but again there's a difference between making policy and implementing those policies and the administrative regulations associated with those policies on a day-to-day basis now do you have a policy committee here i'm assuming and what's your standard process for anyone who's on the policy committee what's your standard process with respect to policies in terms of adopting them in terms of adopting them revising them uh revoking them so we usually have a two-step process where the policy comes to the committee as draft for a first review uh solicit feedback comments incorporate them and it comes back to the policy committee for a second read and then assuming it's approved by the committee at that meeting the second review then it goes to the full board for review okay and then are you using cabes policies
051currently ish okay because we go back and forth because part of the policy issue too is now i know that you have several lawyers and you're all very sophisticated board members but part of the issue too is with policies is there are several that will be identified as you absolutely legally have to have this policy in place so like our dcf child abuse and neglect reporting procedures there's not much wiggle room for you as board of education members to ver you know to have any variations off of that policy because that's going to be strictly legal you are essentially regurgitating the statute in a policy like that so that would be going above and beyond your authority if you said well i want to revise this accordingly because we want to make very sure to
052protect the district and to protect our administrators that that policy is up to date every year and that all of our administrators and all of our staff understand what the protocols and procedures are now you might have a valedictorian or a grading policy where you do have more discretion as board of education members to decide what you want that to look like and so you just have to keep in mind that even though you are policy makers there are some policies in which you really don't have much choice or much jurisdiction over the other thing it talks about is communicate the educational program to the people of the community and serve as a communication link between the community and the school so that's certainly true right i'm sure that you all got involved because you
053either have students in the school district or you're very passionate about educational issues and so certainly you have constituents that you have to report to so that certainly means that you can have communications you can have dialogues with constituents but we have to be very careful about what we are discussing with them because there are certain things that are absolutely even though you are a board of education member not within your purview and it's not appropriate for us to be having those discussions with people in the community so for instance someone came up to you and said i don't like teacher x y and z it doesn't mean that you can't forward that concern to the superintendent of schools but you cannot opine or issue an opinion on how you also feel about that teacher
054you have to be really careful now i know some of you might say well i as a parent i might have had that teacher and have very similar feelings you have to be mindful about your role it doesn't mean that you sacrifice your rights as a parent but you just have to be mindful about not blurring those issues you also have to be mindful that anything related to a teaching issue might come before you after our ceo and our administration has properly dealt with it and you might have to serve as judge and jury and we'll talk a little bit about that if you've already been involved or you've tried to micromanage something like that that's going to be extremely problematic and potentially expose the district to liability down the road so we have to
055be very careful about how involved we're getting in things that are strictly administrative issues number four keep abreast of future educational needs of the town as well as the present which you all do right you're all very well informed the superintendent keeps you well informed um about what's going on in the community you adopt an annual budget so that's probably other than the policy maker the most important thing you do and as you know you're a separate statutory entity from the town your greatest autonomy is your ability to spend your appropriation in the way that you determined to be appropriate so i would say the policy making issues and the budget where you after listening to your community after you know knowing what the pulse is in this community you earmark and determine where you
056should be spending things of course you do that in collaboration with your superintendent of schools because again she's there for the day to day right she is the expert of what's going on in cromwell she's going to make a recommendation to you about what you should be spending your appropriation on but then ultimately it's up to you to approve that budget lastly it says take such specific actions as are required by law so that's pretty open-ended but i think what you can the take away from here is your responsibilities are somewhat limited right and so i think we just want to understand that you are a board of education member you are an important part of the community but you don't have other than here in a board meeting you really don't have any greater
057access or greater privilege to information than the average citizen off the street and so those are some other things that we're going to talk about and so we need to be mindful about those things okay um so for instance you do have an obligation to preserve confidentiality now let's say that there is a pending student issue that has to do with a parent in the community you don't have a right to know what's going on with that student and that family unless they give explicit consent for the board of education to know or unless it has come before you through a disciplinary proceeding or transportation proceeding or maybe there's a pending litigation where it's appropriate for you to have an executive session so that you can authorize the superintendent of schools to settle a very
058expensive legal action other than that you don't have the right to that information so i actually went to the freedom of information commission with a board member from a another district you know five or six years ago where he demanded to know everything about a student situation because it impacted his brother and he demanded to know everything and took us all the way to the commission when we denied it because he said i'm the board chair i should have this information i should know all about it and we took the position that this was not within your purview this was an incident that was not being brought before the board of education it was not a disciplinary proceeding it was not a transportation proceeding it was not a pending litigation and under ferpa you don't
059have any greater right to those records unless we have explicit consent or it falls under one of the exceptions that i talked about when you do actually have access to that information like i said and it may be appropriate in a due process or not due process an expulsion proceeding you cannot share the information that you acquire in your role with anyone outside of that room so that's very important right because anything that you're receiving in a disciplinary proceeding or transportation proceeding you have an obligation to preserve that confidentiality and if you don't there is exposure for the district so the family could file a ferpa claim you could have fepco the federal agency who enforces ferpa come in and do a full-blown investigation and you're gonna incur costs okay so we talked a little
060bit about that so he's here are now let me just talk about the the teacher tenure hearings too so we talked about expulsion school accommodation transportation hearings that would mean that you as board members would have a legitimate need to know that information about the students because in order for you to do your job sit as judge and during expulsion hearing you would need that information but that's that's a limitation under ferpa a teacher tenure hearing so let's go back to the teacher that i was talking about you're stopped in the grocery store lori and someone says i don't like teacher x y and z i think teacher x y and z should be fired well the superintendent of schools for all you know might be working on a case in which she is going
061to come to the board of education to recommend termination your superintendent even though she's the ceo does not have the legal authority to fire a teacher the only person who can terminate a teacher or administrator or anyone operating with a teaching certificate is the board of education which is why it's so important that we don't get involved in the details until it appropriately comes before you so enzy's going to make those decisions we trust in enza that she's going to do the right thing she's going to make a recommendation that the teacher be terminated in accordance with 10-151 that teacher gets to challenge that recommendation before an arbitrator an arbitrator makes a findings of fact and conclusions of law which is not binding on the board of education that arbitration opinion comes to the board
062of education you can decide even if the arbitrator said there's grounds to terminate this teacher you can decide that there isn't as long as your decision is based on that opinion and not arbitrary and capricious so you actually do have the final say on that even more important why we don't get into the weeds before that process plays itself out and that's the case even though as you said earlier the only employee the board has is the superintendent so we have that authority even though technically that employee the teacher is not an employee of the board correct so it's all based in statute but only enza has the right to make the recommendation for termination so you board of education members don't have the right to say i'm very upset with this teacher i don't
063like how she's been treating these students i want her fired or i'm gonna get her fired it first has to be a recommendation from our superintendent and then go through that entire arbitration process before we even get there now i've seen cases where board of education members have gotten overly involved in those types of situations and then the teacher has grounds to say well i can't really get a fair hearing or i can't really get a fair assessment of my case because i know three or four of the board members have been very involved have been promoting this action and guess what i just foied all of their correspondences over the last year and all their electronic communications make it clear that they've had it out for me even though they're not supposed to be
064involved and i've had that happen too so i'm just saying these are things where again we have to trust in our administration we have to understand our role and we have to respect the dynamics between the board and the superintendent um so we talked about that okay so let's do a scenario and when we get to the next slide we can use our clickers so yesterday the local newspaper publish excuse me published a front page story about a teacher employed by the district who was arrested for running a meth lab the article identifies the teacher by name and school parents from that school come to the next board meeting and during public comment several of them address the board to express concern that this teacher must be fired immediately a fourth parent who comes up
065to speak attacks the board for sitting there silently like bumps on a log and asks the board members what they're gonna do about this bad teacher okay so hopefully okay so the question is can a board member reassure the public that the board will fire this teacher if he is guilty as charged is there a poll thing that's showing up on that in the right-hand corner okay perfect so if everyone so yes or no if you use your clickers if you try to point it at the computer try to point it at the computer and then once you guys know that let me know if you voted okay go ahead laurie voted three times so you're skewing the data john all right let's see okay all right so 86 went with no oh i i
066closed the poll lori gloria close the poll but you can what's your answer lori so you think that we can reassure the public well we're gonna go no okay all right what does everyone else think no right what is an appropriate thing to say should we say anything at all do we engage during public comments you can't really say that because you actually don't have the right to notify everyone of that information so if particularly let's say teacher's evaluation any kind of evaluation materials are specifically excluded from disclosure under state law unless we have specific consent from the teacher now this is disciplinary nature but again the board of education if you're making comments at a public meeting that i'm going to get back to on that that's potentially problematic given the whole process the
067statutory process that i just laid out not to mention a lot of these things get resolved before they even come to you so you have to trust in your administration that she's going to resolve this negotiate some type of separation agreement with this teacher because the problem is the law is stacked against you and that if you move to termination you have to pay the employee during dependency of all the proceedings and keep them whole and the proceedings can take six months so sometimes you're better off from a cost-benefit standpoint to negotiate some type of settlement agreement to get them to leave sooner not incur all the costs the legal costs and everything like that associated with it at that point i would still not want the board of education to ever comment on that
068though the actual settlement agreement would be a public document if it were foi'd in this situation so let's say this happens again your one you would have the right after the fact to through an attorney-client communication which would probably be the only appropriate way to do it to have enza fill you in on some of the details not all of them but just so that you can be reassured that it was handled that the teacher is no longer there and you don't have to worry about that but the comment at a board meeting that we've resolved this issue with the teacher should never be happening here if anything enza's going to negotiate what that teacher's resignation letter looks like or she's just going to send you know a communication to the parents who may be
069impacted to say so and so no longer works here and we welcome so and so to fill in for that individual unbelievably in my past experience something very similar the board ended up being so involved for like a three year period um that it it really in to not inform you to tell you as little as possible ended up being the best way to handle that um as as crazy as this scenario sounds um something very similar i have been involved with so the board ended up having to like go through the entire um process and learn a lot about the situation because the person wanted the board to not because i wanted to so it just protected the board um by us keeping it as confidential as possible and addressing it ahead of time
070because it could run away get away from you really fast right so again just know and trust in your ceo that you're going to get the information that you need and that is relevant for you as board members and as frustrating as it is lindsay because i know you want to be able to say to your constituents your friends in the audience right parents that you're probably friends with or you could say yeah or you could say either you know thank you like jeff said thank you um for your comment today jillian is that right for jillian's comment today or you can also say someone stops in the grocery store thank you very much you know the the appropriate person to go to would be the superintendent of schools to address that situation okay here's
071another scenario board members facebook friends with a teacher we've never run it [Music] so if you remember if you remember lori one of the reasons that you established an hr department is because a few years ago you didn't have an hr department right so if there is a complaint about the superintendent of schools we'd send it to the hr director the hr director or the board chair the board chair is likely going to call legal counsel to address next steps but that is exactly why this board you contemplated this exact scenario you were missing that avenue and that has been michelle's charge that there is a place and not specifically to the superintendent but that there is a place where people feel comfortable saying you know i'm having this personnel or employment issue and that
072would be the first start absolutely and actually what really happened there is once it got to your former chair then the former chair brought us in and we sort of because the board of education can't investigate right you don't have the ability to go and investigate that situation you have to bring in if we're talking about someone high up you have to bring in an outside person to investigate that yep okay scenario two a board member's facebook friends with a teacher in a post on her facebook page the teacher complains that her principal unfairly denied her three days of personal leave to attend nature's classroom in a neighboring school district to serve as a chaperone for her fifth grade son the board member calls the principal to find out what the problem is the teacher
073files a grievance which is denied at the lower steps and is now before the board so here's the question can the board member participate in the grievance hearing or does the board member have a conflict of interest preventing him from participating okay the question is can the board member should the board member participate in this grievance hearing okay so i would say that i would have a concern again in our scenario if we go back you have a board member who is calling the principal to find out a problem about one of their friends who's a teacher why is that a problem you're absolutely overstepping your boundaries right because whose authority is it to discipline this teacher it's the principal and then ultimately to suspend a teacher that has to come from the superintendent of
074schools so that's ultimately her venue her jurisdiction if the teacher appeals that it then comes to you and you serve as judge and jury if you know here i know that this teacher this board member was trying to support the teacher so the union may not have the same argument to say well we have tainted board members but if it were the opposite and you took the position of this teacher should have been you know disciplined more than three days they should have been fired the union can make a claim that again they're not going to have an opportunity to have a fair assessment from the board of education so we really we really need to be careful about that the other thing too is i've seen a scenario where now remember your board of
075education members right technically your superintendent of schools is the chief but you have to understand the the influence that your role has and so if i'm a principal and i get a call from a board member that's pretty intimidating to me and so i may view that as well maybe i shouldn't do this maybe i should undo this and now you're really unduly interfering with maybe something that's perfectly appropriate for this teacher to have this level of discipline because we also have to make sure that there's consistency in application of employee matters which only our superintendent of schools is really going to have that type of knowledge um but i know it's very difficult to be a board member for those of you who are parents you don't shed your first amendment rights you don't
076shed your ability to be a parent you don't shed your ability to be an advocate for your child but you always have to keep in mind that people view you as a board member even if you are sitting there as a parent right that's that's a lot of influence and and power that to that principle you have um so we just i think again you have to remember that it might be lost on you because you're sort of used to this role but how it is perceived by others now i've also had a scenario where a board member does call an administrator and remember all of our administrators are unionized they're all part of a collective bargaining agreement if they view this as somehow you are unduly interfering with their operations or you're threatening them
077in a way they can follow a charge against you right so those and i've seen those things happen where a board of education members stepped too far berated administrators in a public meeting and they all collectively organized and filed a charge against that board of education member then you as the board have to because you can't investigate your own board members conduct you have to authorize an outside investigation to look into the conduct of your board member because you have to protect yourself from liability you can't just be deliberately indifferent and turn your head to a serious comp and again we were able to work that out but you still incur so much unnecessary expense to work those types of things out it ruins the tenor of the relationship right and then you want to
078spend your time and your energy on our students not on things like this now you should know that all these scenarios are actually things that have happened they're they're slightly revised but these are not just oh i made these up out of thin air these are all based on unreal scenarios yeah of course based on what you're talking about with who you contact with questions i've found that sometimes when i have a question that's specific to a school i've always wondered is it better to contact that principal i'm talking about as a parent although a board member as well but then a lot of times it ends up going to the superintendent anyway so who what is the correct avenue to take if it's so if it's you as a parent selena right so if
079you as a parent are saying you know i feel that my child was treated unfairly because he got a lunch detention you as the parent the appropriate protocol i assume in cromwell would be that you go to the building principal and you make it very clear i'm contacting you as a parent right i parent of you know my son these are my concerns we don't ever mention the board in that email because i've had that happen too and i've had ethics complaints brought against board members when they use their role to influence situations at the school level for their students or for their children so we we have to be very careful about not blurring those lines that being said though you have every right as a parent to say i don't think that my
080son was treated fairly and i want to talk to the principal about it don't do what i had to happen in another district though where then the parent goes into that meeting tells the principal how appalled she is from his behavior and his actions and that she's going to make sure that all the board of education members know about how poorly he handled the situation right so that's just that was a nightmare that uh you know board of education member uh there was an unfair labor practice filed and there was also um a pending ethics complaint that eventually was didn't go anywhere but it's still really embarrassing for the community it's embarrassing for that member it's problematic for the principal because now you have a principal who you know doesn't feel welcomed in the community
081so it leads to a lot of issues um okay so we can talk a little bit about board meeting essentials this is probably stuff that you have a pretty good handle on um but i i mean do you want me to talk a little bit about foia you do okay okay all right so foia what is foia tony flanders what is foia freedom of information there you go jillian right i'm impressed jillian what does that mean jillian if it's relevant to a situation like you said with the board of mem the board of ed members so if person a i know no one's names but if they were talking about somebody they could say well let's show their emails and then we'll decide if they already were saying this teacher is blah blah blah blah
082blah blah blah and my son said this and my friend said this and this was on facebook and then they're in front of the board who's supposed to make a judgment call and how are they when they're clearly biased exactly okay you are i love it so okay so you are a public yeah yeah she needs a clicker you want a clicker you are a public entity that means that pretty much any document you receive or you create is subject to disclosure unless there is a narrow exception so that's why i always say all of our administrators all of our teachers and all of our board of education members don't put it in writing if you wouldn't want someone to see it right or maybe just pick up the phone or maybe walk down the
083hall right i mean we always say this to our administrators so here's the definition of a meeting too any hearing or other proceeding of a public agency any convening or assembly of a quorum and any communication by or to a quorum whether it's meant to discuss a matter that you have jurisdiction or power over so that means if lindsay texts five of you and you all start to reply to that that's an illegal meeting because you have not properly posted and notified a meeting and there has been an exchange of dialogue let's say if lindsay says you know i think we should vote for you know jeff as board chair and you go back and forth on that that's something within your purview that you have jurisdiction over its board of education business you've now
084held an legal meeting to discuss whether you're all going to support jeff for board chair not board business that's social now however and i i hate to be no but listen it's totally fine but if you go out to that restaurant and you take advantage of the fact that you're all at a restaurant and you start talking about board business that's going to be problematic you also should think about the optics of it all of our board members are out to eat right i'm not saying you can't do it but you gotta think of the optics of it um i'd rather you know i almost i'd laugh with people but i'm like if you're gonna go you know to mcdonald's and i'll sit there and eat post the meeting at mcdonald's and then you won't
085have the issue because people will find a way to complain if they can unilateral communications are fine so if jeff you know dipty sends an email to all of you to say um you know please make yourself available for july 13th at five that's fine even communication on that it's fine because you're only talking about scheduling you just can't take advantage of the fact that you're all in the same chain and talk about something that's business related and then remember even if it's not an illegal meeting it's still subject to foia it's a public record that if requested you'd have to disclose and so you you would just want to be careful about what's in there so just i just want to take this opportunity because every time we do this training it comes up
086about personal email a personal email address versus a specific board of ed email address because if you have one email address for both personal and board of ed stuff and you get a foia request or there's litigation and your emails are subject to discovery then you might you have to turn over all your personal emails for review to see if they contain any relevant information or something along those lines so we've had that debate many times and for whatever reason years ago we came down on the side that we're not going to have dedicated board of ed cromwell email addresses but if you wanted to have a specific or set up a specific email address only for board of ed emails you can do that but if you wanted to comment on on that issue
087so i would say so not only would you have to hand them over but the freedom of information commission can subpoena your emails and if they feel and there's evidence that you're holding back from your personal email they can subpoena your personal email if it's related to board business so i always advise as best practice not a legal requirement everyone should be using a cromwell border vet email because scenario many school districts are dealing with the changing of a mascot it has generated a lot of there have been email requests to certain districts i want any and all emails between all of the board of education members the superintendent of schools the school administration for the last year everyone who sent a communication about a mascot for the last year and guess what we have
088to hand that over it's quite the process because the school district has to first retrieve all the emails by plugging in search engines but you then board of education members if you're using your gmail account you're going to have a very explicit obligation to go through all your gmail hand everything over there also could be a litigation hold placed on your personal email to say you can't delete or destroy anything related to this because if you do that could be viewed as you are intentionally interfering with this process particularly if we find ourselves in litigation over this or before the freedom of information commission so best practice would be that it's on the email on the network server so it makes it much easier to gather that information but people cannot hide behind their gmails
089or their yahoos and i've seen and john i saw you shaking your head i've had foia subpoena gmail accounts yahoo accounts of public officials so to me i would say best practices you're using cromwell that just keeps it clean you keep your separate business away from your personal business if you are emailing a teacher about your child use your gmail account right because that's one area where i'd say that's not board business that's your personal business now you've kept those two separate that would be my advice [Music] yeah where did enza go eversource is here oh okay yeah lori so you guys you absolutely should have that and that's that's pretty standard and i'm sure you don't want to be using your yahoo or your hotmail for this type of business it well look you
090guys got significant foia requests a couple years ago if you remember significant and we had to ask board members to go back through their emails i think there were a few that had to be asked maybe not all of you but names were had emerged as possibly having some information and some board members you what john mike got mailed yeah so i think we just have to be very careful about that and my advice and best practice would be you should be on the cromwell district email i don't see why that's a heavy lift in terms of them providing that too yeah i just don't recall the reason for that but i'd have to go back and look but okay it's at the top of the list okay no but lori thanks for bringing that
091up and jeff you too those are great questions um okay so we defined a meeting a meeting is very broad right obviously we're here at a meeting it's properly posted what does the meeting not include personnel search committee so when you appointed enza did you appoint all of you to the personnel search committee yes great which means you could interview candidates you could talk to candidates you could talk to consultants and not have to post any of it right because people like enza if they're not getting the job they want to be able to protect their livelihoods and anonymity so it doesn't impact them elsewhere so that's that's really the the purpose of that any social meeting we talked about look you guys can be friends just don't take advantage of the situation if you
092all show up at the basketball game just don't take advantage of that start talking about who you're supporting for chair right negotiations as we know i think most of you have been involved in negotiations at some point or another all of collective bargaining by definition falls under a non-meeting which is actually a legal term a caucus of a single political party now people this is an area where people violate this a lot that absolutely means that i can only meet with democrats or i can only meet with republicans i cannot bring in the town party chair to a single political party caucus because he or she is not on the board of education so that's going to wave that ability to have that be a non-meeting the other thing that people also get confused all
093the time is well i reviewed those documents in caucus so they're not subject to foia absolutely not just because you reviewed a document that would otherwise be subject to foia in caucus doesn't mean that that actual documentation isn't then later subject to foia if it's requested it just means that the contents of your discussion can happen in a non-meeting without you having to post it so that happens a lot um so just be mindful of that you can of course you don't have enough members to oh [Laughter] okay i was gonna say that's creative john i like it but just be careful that you're not deemed like a subcommittee of anything right because subcommittees also are subject to foia so even if there's just two or three of you you have to be mindful of
094that um so enza one thing that we just confirmed that we're not gonna have power until 8 30. so are we out of how are we out of power because everything else is working oh the generator so enzo one thing we talked about that's actually pretty important and jeff raised it and lori raised some really good questions about it is my recommendation would always be the board of education members use cromwell emails for board business not their own personal emails specif really because of everything that i've seen when board members are subject to foia and their emails are subject to foia it's really difficult for board members to have to go back through their personal emails not that this would ever happen here but i've also had board members who have had their personal account
095subpoenaed by the freedom of information commission because there was evidence to suggest they were hiding things or not being as forthcoming as they should be this way we can avoid that so i did say though if i'm contacting a teacher or principal about my child i should use my personal email for that because that's separate from board business but but best practice and what most places do is that you would have your own personal cromwell email okay so um you know i want to be mindful of time because i know we started at six do you want me to just go through some scenarios that are helpful because i'm sure you're very familiar with regular special emergency i think let's keep going i think this is okay so unless someone disagrees all right i'll go
096very quick through some of this reducing the generator yeah i'll go very quick so we know we have our regular meetings we have our special meetings we have our emergency meetings our regular meetings pretty much the annual schedule is filed with the town clerk by january 31st we know our minutes have to be available for public inspection within seven days of the meeting even if they have not been formally approved 24 hours in advance the posting has to be there the one big difference between a special meeting and a regular meeting is what agenda and what about it on a special meeting you can only talk about the items on the agenda you can't amend the agenda like in a regular meeting right but if today let's say selena said i want to talk about
097a proposed turf field could you do that here okay and how would we do that right yep and how many people do i need to vote on it to amend the agenda to amend and now include this new business item i need two-thirds of those present and voting remotely i should say did that change that they're able to vote now remotely so i remember a couple years ago when we were going through that whole butt thing and i was joining remotely when i voted it didn't count because i wasn't in the room so just we had a pile yeah that's a board issue not a government issue not a higher government issue we had a policy that says if you participate electronically remotely that you wouldn't be able to vote but you can participate the
098discussion just couldn't vote covet i think there was well coveted it was different right so cover there was an executive order but what you're talking about exactly to jeff's point was a policy that you decided now there are other boards of ed who have policies that say if you're there and you're audible and people can hear you you can vote just like any other member even if you are remote i don't know did you update that policy is that still in place so it's something you could certainly look at because it makes a ton of sense i think it worked fine you know during colgate doing it remotely right because there was an executive order that was in place i don't know if expired i don't know yeah well all the executive order most of
099them are still in effect through july 20th um but we're gonna see a lot of changes i think in the coming weeks and you know john and you know it is nice to see you in person john it's been a while i have to say that you guys were a lot more intolerant you've got something to do well they could put you at right they can mute themselves jessica quick question yeah of course right here and you had said you can add a new business item to a regular meeting agenda i thought the purpose of posting the meeting agenda was so that the public has the chance to look at what's on the agenda and then the chance to comment on it publicly if they want to at that meeting you're saying any kind of
100random topic only at regular meetings so you're right that foia says the agenda should be clear enough so that the public is fairly apprised of the business to be transacted that's why it has to be a two-thirds vote right so that we can have kind of a check and balance of that so that a two-thirds of those president voting not just a majority right because then you can get into minority representation versus who has more of one political party to kind of control the agenda right but that absolutely is okay at a regular meeting it is not okay at a special meeting an emergency meeting is very different okay all right so we talked about that all right so let's do a scenario a parent is all over social media after her daughter was suspended
101for insubordination two days before the prom the parent calls you and every other board member with her concerns complaining about the fact that her daughter has only won junior prom in her life will not be able to wear the expensive dress she bought for the occasion this is an actual scenario this happened two years ago in light of the pressing circumstances you talk it over with a couple board members and with the agreement of the chairperson you decide by email to convene an emergency meeting for the next morning to review and possibly rescind the action by the administration is this legal john do you want a clicker but i have extras you want extras or jillian's your delegate okay rob do you want a clicker okay all right good everyone got that right just just
102you know an emergency meeting people will always say to me so i had people even with covet and the executive orders coming down saying it's an emergency meeting we have to be able to meet right away really isn't the only thing that i've ever seen upheld as an emergency meeting is what happened in newtown right so because you have the ability to post for a special meeting within 24 hours so in most cases an emergency meeting is really not appropriate so just be mindful of that and if you do post an emergency meeting within 72 hours you have to justify the reasons for doing it and so sometimes it's too much of an onus or burden on you you're better off waiting the 24 hours all right board member conduct i know that we all
103get along very well in here but there are some other places where there's some negative interactions between board members or sometimes between our superintendent and our board members so we're going to talk a little bit about board conduct what this is a mooney example absolutely so board member mal content had been causing issues for the nutmeg board during meetings he would often verbally attack the motives of other members and staff and it was suspected that he leaked information from executive session which by the way we all know that that's absolutely not acceptable for board members to do he would visit school buildings unannounced demand to be able to visit classrooms to quote check on underperforming teachers but the last draw for the board was when he voted to approve the new teacher's contract even though
104his wife was a teacher in the district in a special meeting where mao was not in attendance they voted eight nothing to oust him from the nutmeg board just remember that just be prepared that the answers here are a little gray intentionally um so that it's not so obvious okay so which statement is correct a board member never can vote on a spouse's contract b the board member should not be serving on the board because his spouse is a district employee c the board's vote to remove the member from the board was invalid since the member was not in attendance d none of the above so we can yeah we can talk about that lori so let's let's see what the the voting is and then we'll go through them each john do you want
105one let me get john a clicker where did my clickers go can i have extra ones oh there you go all right let's see okay see we purposefully okay so let's go with lori with b this is not a legal question this is a policy question and so there are some boards of ed that have very specific now if you're a charter school you're required to have a nepotism policy that's statutory boards of ed are not required per se to have a nepotism policy though it doesn't mean that you don't choose to do so you can limit or you probably have a policy because most districts do where they would say lindsay's spouse could work here as long of course as lindsay had no supervisory responsibilities lindsay didn't vote on the contract so you know
106you could be very specific on that policy but it doesn't mean that your spouse can't work here we actually went to court over that about 15 years ago well which is why a which is why the right answer is d right but this is right right so this is why we throw but a if you have a highly recommend to protect you lindsay that you're not voting on the teachers contract because that is let's say you're part of the teacher negotiations then you vote on the teacher's contract and you're on cromwell's insurance doesn't that look like a conflict of interest i would be concerned that that would be an ethical issue for you so i would say best practice best policy is we don't allow that you don't negotiate the teacher's contract you don't vote
107on the teacher's contract however you can vote on the full budget even though the biggest line item one of the biggest line items is going to be the teacher's salaries you absolutely have the right to vote on that but i would stay away from you and i don't even know if you have a spouse who works in the district i'm just using you as an example i would stay away from that kind of involvement you so you could have a spouse you yourself cannot be a board member and work here that's statutory um i have had cases where board members have applied to work here while they're still board members what do we think about that well i've had some say well i'm not going to resign until i know if i got the job
108or not i would say resign and then you can apply for the job because if you don't now what does that look like if the superintendent hires that board member who has not yet resigned right so these are all appearances of impropriety even though i can't point to a statute ethical issues we need to be very mindful of right because it's going to look like we favored that person to get them the job okay so the other thing that did not come up in the questions but also if you remember in the scenario they talked about voting mal out eight to nothing to oust him from the nutmeg board because they were so fed up with his behavior so do we have the legal right to do that so let's say i'm fed up with
109lindsay we want a voter off the board do you have the right as an entity to do that you don't no she's an elected official right i mean i i had a town council person who literally fled the country and lived in jamaica for about three years and wouldn't resign and we had to advise the town council you cannot vote him off the board i don't think it was three years i think it was probably a year yeah yeah it was so i exaggerated a little bit with three years but it was a long time and he wasn't showing up to anything and you would think that's you know and he wasn't even technically but he still had a residence in town so you couldn't say his appointment or election was null and void because
110he still it's in the town but we couldn't vote him off we had to wait till we got his resignation so you're never going to be in a position to do that that doesn't mean that you can't censure a board member for behaving very badly it doesn't mean that you can't meet an executive session to discuss that board member's performance that you have concerns with but that board member can attend that executive session they can't tell you you can't tell them you're not attending like we could if we wanted to discuss the performance of the superintendent of schools she'd have the right to have it held an open session which we would have to do but she couldn't demand to be at that executive session you as a board member can absolutely demand to be
111at the executive session because you don't have the authority to box that member out of the executive session the board chair does have the ability to say look your behavior at negotiations is unacceptable you're belligerent you're rude to our teachers or our custodians and i'm taking you off the committee you have every right to do that you can strip them of of all committees but you can't strip them of the right to be a board member you can also censure them through robert's rules that's a long process but that is something but ultimately you spend a lot of time and money to issue a public reprimand but in some cases it's warranted okay so we talked a little bit about this right so you cannot be employed by the school district we have no statutory
112provision that says a relative can't be employed uh your actions are governed by board policies or ethics provisions in local charters so i don't know cromwell's charter off the top of my head but most charters incorporate a code of ethics that is applicable to all commissioners including board commissioners so you know it might be worthwhile if you ever you know want to look at what the charter talks about with respect to a code of ethics and the responsibilities that you have as board of education members to the town that you're serving um the other thing too is i don't know if this ever comes up for you you know i know you don't have a lot of disciplinary proceedings here but let's say you you came to a dis disciplinary proceeding and i think this
113actually happened once here you need three affirmative votes of a board member to expel a student we had five of you here we typically don't give the student's name in advance because we want to protect the confidentiality of the process five of you came and one of you recognized the student and said i don't think i can be impartial because of the relationship that i have with the family so i'm going to recuse myself we can't force someone to recuse themselves but it's really up to the individual board member to you know kind of have a moral compass about it you know should i be recusing myself and my train of thought on that is always you know dipty if you don't think you can be impartial because of your relationship either with the teacher
114the employee or the student you should recuse yourself all right let's talk a little bit about executive session so here's a scenario this is another tom mooney scenario john okay so tom tom mooney is um he's the guru the guru of school law he's the chair of our practice group he wrote the treatise that all education the bible the blue book that everyone has so he actually wrote the book i mean i read that yeah it's in my hands all the time yeah right so he works at her firm wrote a book he's very well known um and so some of these scenarios i stole from him but some of the earlier ones are ones that that actually i i went through okay the nutmeg board was in a special budget meeting when it learned
115of dire economic news that meant significant staffing cuts were necessary knowing that the board would need to discuss and decide the elimination of specific positions and not wishing to needlessly distress or excite its employees the chair added an executive session item to the agenda to discuss quote personnel matters with a five to three vote the board entered executive session after an hour of discussion the board members agreed without a vote to direct the superintendent to cut 10 staff positions okay which statement is incorrect a the board's agenda must state that the board will go into executive session b a vote to go into executive session must be by two-thirds c stating that the reason for executive session was for personnel reasons is insufficient or d the board cannot add an item to the agenda during
116a special meeting of the board so which statement is incorrect thrown for your loop jillian dorner for loop everyone vote okay okay anyone want to share jeff would you go with i said a yeah would you say lori yep so an executive session has to be done by two-thirds now again of those present in voting right so if there's you know six of you you need two-thirds of six if there's nine of you who need two-thirds of nine um stating that the reason for executive session was for personnel reasons is insufficient so 11 said that was incorrect why do we think that's incorrect okay discussing matters but not if you just say personnel reason so there's actually very specific case law that says if you just put personnel reasons because the actual provision is discussion
117concerning the performance or employment of a public official evaluation performance employment so if i just say personnel reasons in my scenario i don't have the right to discuss if i want to cut positions that's not specific to anyone that's not specific to jeff metrulo that's specific to i'm looking at positions not people and i need to make that cut so that was an illegal executive session because it wasn't specific to the evaluation performance or employment of those individuals it was specific to whether you could afford to keep those positions which is not a reason for executive session there's also if you just say attorney-client communication that's not an appropriate executive session there was case law recently from foia that says you have to describe briefly what's in that attorney-client communication so every time i've ever
118sent you one you've seen on the agenda item i don't just say discussion concerning an attorney-client communication i say discussion concerning an attorney-client communication related to the turf field or related to a school mascot naming issue i always give a brief descript or else you're in violation of foia so jessica is on yeah see going back to personnel reasons you know when you say going into executive session for purpose of discussing performance or whatever the words are do you have to should you or should you not name a specific person i assume you shouldn't well you don't name the person but just think about it this is why this is so wrongly applied everywhere because people are going to executive session for personnel reasons all the time but i just told you how limited it
119is so you're probably violating it if you actually are because the only person you're really discussing their performance of or the employment contract is your superintendent of schools now you might be discussing the employment contract of the business manager of the hr director because they're not affiliated i wouldn't put discussion concerning the employment contract of michelle demaro but i would put discussion concerning the employment contract of the hr director um you might be discussing a request for an extended leave of absence that contractually has to come before the board you wouldn't name the teacher but you would say discussion concerning um you know the employment request for leave of absence made by a teacher something like that because you're discussing his or her employment and the request for the extended leave of absence now if
120you are discussing let's say the superintendent's contract she has the right to have that held in open session so that person needs to be notified so in the michelle demar example she would have to be notified at least 48 hours in advance that you're discussing that she can say to you the discussion has to be held in open session you have to adhere to that request but if she declines the open session she can't demand to be in your executive session i took care of it so again it's actually on the agenda oh it's actually real yeah well i think i think that probably yeah subconsciously came up yeah yeah if it's a legal matter and you're coming to give the board an update about a legal matter or what which the district is being
121well that's a pending claim or pending litigation which is a separate exception which we would never do under personnel reasons right so we'd either do an attorney-client communication but it would be to discuss a chro lawsuit i'd have to at least give a description of the chrome lawsuit or it's discussion concerning a pending claim i can't just say pending claim i'd have to reference something so that at least the public had some indication of what pending claim i was discussing but it actually has to be a pending claim it can't be the threat of legal action you actually have to have been served yeah so we basically went through all of this so we talked about and so uh you were step ahead and uh secure no no no it's great collective bargaining strategy we
122can do that through a non-document or a non-meeting or if you have actual records of strategy you can discuss that in executive session as long as you're specifically discussing records of strategy otherwise you would hold a non-meeting to discuss it and then come back to open session to vote on it the security devices in real estate is very interesting and actually this was passed after newtown which blows my mind because i would have thought that after newtown they would have said well no one should have access to schools security information like where we keep the cameras where we keep certain safety equipment things of that nature but instead they said you first before you can deny someone asking for that information you actually have to go to the agency i think their acronym is d
123e s sp they're like the department of emergency protection or something like that and ask their permission to say we think this would be detrimental to the safety of our students in our communities so we don't want to hand this over and then you need permission from them before you cannot hand it over which i just find unbelievable because i would think it would be the opposite based on what we've experienced with with school safety issues um so that so that's that's interesting um so just in closing on executive session it never has to be an agenda item you legally don't have to put even though selena to your point we do have to fairly apprise our community of what we're discussing in executive session you know at a at a regular meeting you can
124decide i want to have an executive session on this and if it's appropriate you can add it for two-thirds and then you can go into executive session for two-thirds i always recommend though as a courtesy you say propose for executive session anticipated executive session so that jillian then can read the agenda and say okay they're probably gonna go in executive session now i probably know that that's my time where i need to leave and then i can come back when we go back to the public meeting all right jeff let me know how you're feeling about time um there was i was just looking you want to go through yeah do you guys want to just if you have any questions or anything you want me to cover selena had a question i think sure
125no not a special meeting only a regular meeting when we had those four options that you could add because that's incorrect right so we revert yeah no so let's go back let's go back to the scenario just no it's which statement is incorrect um let's see no no c is right because that's correct stating that the reason for executive session was for personnel reasons is insufficient that's correct a is incorrect because you don't legally have to put executive session on the agenda but it doesn't have to be because you might not know that's exactly right lori too if i put executive session four we've pre-ordained it means that like i already know i've talked to all of you that you're willing to do an executive session that's what the perception might be and that's in
126a legal discussion right so that's why it's proposed for or anticipated because you know you have the right to do it you just don't know what your votes are whether you're going to have the two-thirds of those present voting anything else jeff maybe just the you let me know what slide number it was page numbers should be down at the bottom somewhere on the left conduct during meetings just uh yeah what slide i passed it um best practices i think it was uh 58 58 all right let's jump ahead just the high level stuff trying to get there i am yeah they weren't very nice i'm so sorry i'm so embarrassed i'm so sorry about that that's terrible my sincere apologies and i you know what john if you hadn't pointed out i don't know
127if anyone else would have seen it but i appreciate it okay so what do you want to talk about here just uh if you want to hit the highlight yeah absolutely so what should you not be doing as a board member right so this might seem self-explanatory but again i can't tell you how much dysfunction i've seen in in board rooms um you do not talk about administrative matters right that's again just not your purview it doesn't mean you're superintendent of schools can't update you on administrative matters or share information with you on the aggregate but that is not within your purview we have to trust our superintendent of schools to do that work you never single out or criticize individual employees again i talked about i told you the case i had where at
128a subcommittee meeting a board of education member was belligerent and attacked administrators for being in his mind not prepared for the meeting they filed an unfair labor practice against him he had an ethics complaint pending after it it incurred significant time and energy of the board remember too as volunteers you're technically indemnified if a claim is brought against you because the the assumption is you've acted within the scope and responsibilities of your duties and so if you act in good faith you're going to be indemnified if you the board of ed are sued if you are negligent and don't act in good faith you can be held personally liable for your conduct so then in that situation we got into the argument of whether the board was going to indemnify him or not based on
129his actions again it just became very difficult time consuming very expensive process don't debate with the public i think we know that right i think you guys are very respectful i saw how you did the public comment here jillian was excellent her presentation and you said thank you very much we will take that under advisement don't tolerate root or inappropriate behavior so we should expect professional decorum from all of us right we should expect that even if we don't agree with our superintendent or if we don't agree with dipty's opinion that we express it in a calm professional civil demeanor right again i know that that seems self-explanatory and then you know if if it is becoming escalated then jeff that would be your responsibility to step in and say point of order here this
130is we're not going to tolerate this right don't discuss or spend time on trivia or unessential matters and don't make it personal so again board of education members you have every right to be a parent you have every right to be a citizen a community member but just remember when you're here you're here serving in your capacity as a board member and so it's not really appropriate to bring your own personal agenda items to the board right we need to think more broadly think more globally that you're here to represent a constituency and a base and not here to make things you know better for for your personal situation so we just need to be mindful of those things again everyone here is so lovely i've always enjoyed working here i don't think that you
131have the the issues that other places do but these are just general guidelines that board members should should be mindful of sure [Laughter] how do you intend to deal with if god forbade it ever happened there was some unruly crazy person such as myself here but really if there was you know you see it on the news right now right with everything going on with the political climate and you know our town is so wonderful and we're all quiet and calm there's nobody here but if something did come up so you know like you said don't debate with the public don't be rude but you know you see it on the news and there's people just being dragged off yeah i mean honestly i would if let's say if you feel something like that might
132happen so let's say you've had a member from the public or member of the community who has made you feel unsafe or threatened you i've advised boards to have police presence at meetings it's gotten to that point where in some places it's gotten scary there is threatening behavior i wouldn't um advocate for you holding meetings without having a police presence if you don't expect it and it happens you know jeff you you would first interject and say look we expect that you're going to have a professional civil demeanor i know you you make those opening comments with the public comment as it is but then if they don't listen to you and they become belligerent i would call the police you have every right to do that um hopefully it doesn't come to that but
133but that's what i would do in that scenario yeah no absolutely and i and i think enzo you've you've been in situations where the police presence has been necessary yeah and there are some places just by every meeting their sro officer is there whatever obviously is we could have that happen and there is a cost to the district if you would like that you just let you discuss it and let me know what you would like me to do but i have i have experienced some scary situations and luckily that hasn't happened here it's unruly sometimes but nothing where any of us felt like we were our life was in danger but there were times um when we did conceive hiding underneath things and no one should feel that way especially when you're volunteering no
134one should ever feel that way um so you let me know but there is a cost any other questions or any other slides you want to go over yeah selena i just had to look this one up because i knew i read it and thank you lindsay for being able to open it on your phone but the removal from office going back to that our bylaws do provide for that so i don't know if that's something we need to update what is it ours say removal from office any board officer may be removed from a position of a board officer officer yeah that's an officer so jeff has the ability to say you're no longer vice chair you're no longer on this committee within the board guys yes okay so you absolutely if you felt
135this vice chair or this treasurer they were not acting appropriately you have the board have the ability to address that don't have the ability to say you can no longer serve on the board um please me just put the w in slide four and then yes you can yeah no absolutely absolutely and i know we did this some years ago i guess it hasn't been in the past recently but um but i remember tom coming in and it's always been very good so i wish we could have done it like i said the past couple years but you know so thank you so much yeah i'm happy you know there's a lot we didn't cover but feel free to you know in your spare time you probably don't have and if i can answer any
136other questions just let me know so we do have two members who aren't here if we could take materials for them to can i fix that slide and send it you can fix that to enza to send to them thank you in my sincere apologies questions i have one more question oh there's just uh celina has one other all right sure of course dr macri i had sent you that email earlier today so i printed out i know that he provided two of our one says board-related responsibilities and one says limits of the authority but then there was another um 9012 a that says legal responsibilities of the board of education and there was just a lot more on there than i expected so um for instance i'm going to show you got to just
137do you want to see it yeah sure do you have a copy i just circled some of the ones that seemed like weren't listed maybe i'm misunderstanding them yeah so again do you have so we don't have the page when this was adopted so some of this i'm not concerned about so for instance like number five when it says determine the number classification duties and remuneration of employees you are doing that through collective bargaining right it is the board of education who ultimately decides whether you're going to have an hr director it might be that the superintendent brings that as a recommendation but you're going to vote on that you're going to vote as best practice what the pay increases would be for any non-affiliated staff so that to me is encompassed in number three
138which you've circled and you can't pass a collect you know collective bargaining agreement has to be voted on by you then for certified staff it's sent to the town and they have the ability to reject that when it says establish the policy for employment promotion and dismissal in accordance with state statutes again you're negotiating the termination provisions in non-certified contracts and you also negotiate the business contracts that you have with your you know hr your superintendent so i'm okay with that and then with state statute the certified staff you don't have any say in that that's all governed by 10 151 to provide for the appraisal of the performance of personnel i think that probably should be updated because again the only person you're evaluating is dr macri and for certified staff all of that
139is now because this was probably adopted before they did the education reform where we did an overhaul of the teacher evaluation system which you can't legally circumvent now you can be through the pdac committee you can decide what some of that's going to look like but again that's something that you're really going to rely on the recommendation of your superintendent you're probably not going to get too involved in the weeds on that and curriculum you actually do have some significant oversight over curriculum though typically by practice that is delegated to the educators who have that expertise but i assume that you vote on curriculum changes major ones exactly so that's pretty standard so some of that so i i think that i think you it probably does need updating selena but some of this i'm
140not i'm not overly concerned of because it's mostly collective bargaining i would take out the appraisal of the performance of personnel because with education reform i just don't jessica i can i just because sure talk about curriculum and instruction and such as my love we would vote on clearly things like adopt adopting the state standards which are statute common core all of that as far as programmatically like if we're if we are purchasing a program to support a specific curriculum that's research based and so on you wouldn't vote on that because no but it would be part of the final budget right exactly so exactly right so only meetings every day right if i had you here you wouldn't want that so the major ones like jeff clarified all the major things you're voting on
141all the other things that you're making recommendations in your budget the board of ed can absolutely say well hey enza you know i see that you've set aside 30 000 for this program what's the benefit of this program and they would rely on your expertise for and that right right right and i do think it's very important i think you do it here um that any non-affiliated contract is brought before the board um i think that's i know that that's been happening under dr macri's tenure and maybe wasn't always happening what do you mean as far as so like you're you're voting on the hr contract tonight oh yeah you're voting on i don't know that that was always happening so i think that that's again going forward we want a record of all of
142that okay so that the board is informed of that and that you can say no board see you did vote to approve the two percent here for the hr director you did vote on this contract for the business manager things like that oh okay no so absolutely no we are not as far as the hr because um there's a direct line to oh god i'm trying to not break any violate violated any laws here that's the only one that's being that is brought forward i negotiate and i'm consistent okay across the board with the other directors but i negotiate with them based on you rewrote all the contracts for us right but you don't put it on the consent agenda or have the board approve them no yeah i just never have i would just
143say honestly i think you have the authority to negotiate that they absolutely can do that i just think i would at least have it brought on the consent agenda i just think i've seen so anyone who is not part of a bargaining unit or the big positions just the big not the big ones right so i think you can certainly delegate to your superintendent of schools to say you know some of the you know um non-affiliated positions that don't have significant decision-making authority but i want to protect you in that instance too right so that your board and i've seen this happen doesn't say well i didn't authorize you to give this person three percent i didn't authorize three percent to that i always want you to be able to say nope i brought it
144to you and i have a record of it okay yeah i've never it's i've never done that before in any either district so and again that that's not a legal requirement okay that's just if you guys came to me and said what would be the best practice for something like that i think that that protects both the superintendent and the board that they that everyone's just on the same page and there's been transparency on it that's all in the consent agenda you do it on the consent agenda right so it you know you'd see the contract so you'd see that there was i would notify them of the increases um sometimes what people do is they have um you know in executive session you could be discussing the contract of the hr director and in
145that executive session they can authorize you to give her let's say a two percent general wage increase and then later at the next meeting you'd put it on the consent agenda knowing that you had the authority to do that okay so that authorization can happen in executive session it doesn't have to be well you can when you're voting on the contract later in the consent agenda you can have an understanding without voting she makes the recommendation and you can have that understanding that you know i think across the board we could support a two percent then it would still come to you later once the contract was ready for you to vote on it oh you don't have a consent agenda well you can just put it on as an action item we could add
146if you can add a consent agenda that's that normally expedites meetings so yeah it's so great i love it right it's a beautiful thing i was very sad when i saw that cromwell didn't do it let's do it i didn't know about it i didn't know about it until 10 seconds i'm sorry and i didn't bring it up consent agenda well consent agenda would just be items where you have a group of items that rather getting into the nitty gritty in the consented it might just be approval of this contract approval of the vendor contract approval of the i.t contract you know what you're voting on but you're not going through each item separately it's all grouped together and in one full swoop you're voting to approve what's on the consent agenda so there's no
147discussion or debate or anything no that happened ahead of time or if there's any questions it can right or you know sometimes the consent agenda are very so i don't know again every board is different but let's say you decide that you hire teachers or you accept resignations all that's going to be on the consent agenda because you're not going to go and talk about every single hire you're not going to talk about every single resignation in one full swoop you can accept the hiring of six new special ed teachers accept the resignations of two special education teachers without having eight different items it's one full swoop is a consent agenda so so technically what cromwell does i'm used to both we have a personnel action a personnel report that says this for you know
148resigned retired whatever this person has been hired you know whatever and that is made but no it's it's i guess it really is a consent agenda without us saying it is but are they voting on it no right but you might have an understanding or a policy here because again it's not a legal question it's a business judgment of do you board of ed want to approve and when i say approve i don't mean get into the weeds of it i just mean having a record at a meeting that you approved accepting these resignations and approved these hires now you don't have to do that you can delegate that to your superintendent it sounds like she keeps you apprised i'm more talking about where i've seen the relationships really deteriorate and i've had situations where
149they have said to the superintendent when the relationship soured and i don't expect that here i never authorized the two percent for that contract i didn't authorize this three percent and so you always want a record remember board of members change so this board might say we absolutely gave ends of the authority but in a year you could be looking at a different composition of of members who say we never approved that so that's why it's just best practice the transparency of it but it's not a legal requirement okay okay any other questions for jess well i think you heard positive feedback here i think everybody benefited from this so all right well thank you guys so much it's always a pleasure to see you thank you you john she got you back i think
150you already know but we working with a lot of attorneys we are very lucky we have a very good one who knows what she's doing thank god we'll have you back more regularly now yeah exactly this is great thank you jessica oh yes gotta collect your clickers i'm make sure you get them all back excellent um okay so that was excellent thank you uh next comments updates and announcements from board members and administrators let's start with mr flanders alessandra lindsey lori dr macri selena jen dipty all right uh next is their motion to go into executive session uh okay for the referrals of discussing superintendent's evaluation self-assessment and human resource director's contract possible action regarding human resource director's contract uh motion by john is our second second second by laurie any comments or questions we'll
151also invite dr macrae in for that discussion hearing none all in favor i opposed abstentions so the motion carries unanimously and we'll go into executive session at 7 45 inviting dr macri yes so we'll declare ourselves back an executive session i can't see what that clock says eight fifty fifty one uh okay is there a motion to lotion by mr flanders is there a second wait wait wait motion session we just declare ourselves back in yeah but there was a motion yeah there's a motion by john to accept the uh hr's contract and second by lindsay any comments or questions to every nun all in favor i opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously is there a motion to adjourn by john is there a second second by gen comments and questions hearing none all in favor
152aye opposed extensions motion carries unanimously we are