6/22/22 Danbury Board of Education Meeting

001can you do the roll call for me please ladies cooper yeah lauren daley here julie juliana here ralph andrew president [Music] okay [Music] i'll make a motion that the board of education to prove the items on the consent calendar exhibits 22-83 through 22-86 as recommended moved by cape seconded by gladys um would you come through the little pub please theresa bizzy yes rachel chaleski michelle coelho [Music] cape canada yes gladys cooper yes lauren daley yes bridgette guertin yes julie emiliano yeah ralph anderson yeah albert russo yes luisa is a golda spring yes [Music] do you have any educational staff for workers language tonight student representatives [Music] specifications dated june 22nd 2022 career academy and according to it 22-87 second that motion moved by visa second by version virgin discussion [Music] teresa bizet yes michelle coelho

002[Music] michelle can you hear us [Music] yes [Music] so there you go michelle we're calling on you to see if you are uh yes or no on the first action item are you yes or no on the first action second night actually [Music] is can we just get your recommendation about the voting here because michelle can barely hear us so just abstain from the vote please [Music] practice moving forward so um the things are evolving with this we've had this conversation a couple of times because given um the post-pandemic world there is still an opportunity for people on the board to participate by electronic means it does require certain kinds of postings however so if there is a vote i'm not sure they met the technical requirements for the posting but there is a provision

003for someone to be able to do that ahead of time your original policies pre-pandemic did not allow for electronic voting so things have evolved a little bit since then but i i'm not sure [Music] yes gladys cooper yeah lauren daly yes bridgette girvin yes julie miliano yeah [Music] for an additional appropriation from the city council of 250 000 insurance deductible for the repair to the dhs standberry high school gym and associated projects as recommended by the sites is [Music] any extensions [Music] action item c al action ymc may 2022 financial report motion that the board of education accept the may 2022 financial report in accordance with exhibit 22-89 second moved by al seconded by ralph any discussion [Music] i know we spoke about this earlier but i really want to make sure that we are

004on track to include the 2.8 million appropriation that was part of the mayor's budget so i just was wondering if there's any update on that since we had the may meeting i spoke with the city director of finance this week to follow up and uh he said he'd try and get to it very soon he was aware of it and he had to do it and i'm expecting it in the next couple weeks for the question that the finance director is on board we'll move on within the next two weeks or some questions well that's my expectation in two weeks he he knew about it he knew he was something he owed us i told him we had spoken with it at the committee meeting and you were expecting an answer [Music] any other questions

005[Music] all those in favor please say aye on any nose the board of education except the superintendent's contract and salary [Music] any discussion all those in favor please say aye aye nays opposed awesomeness [Music] cabinet members contracts ocean that the board of education accept the cabinet members contracts as recommended [Music] any discussion [Music] all those in favor opposed abstinence [Music] and then um [Music] 20 22 2023 motion that world education and saturday extended employment salaries included target for 2022 2023 that's right [Music] any discussion [Music] all those in favor any opposed extensions so [Music] presentation thank you so much and i would like to ask the board's promotion it's okay with the board chair at the board we can move item roman number 12 the special legislative session recap brian bingham and exactly last name

006to share an update um again that's [Music] 12 discussion you can ask if you can move that up before the presentation um [Music] i'd like to make a motion that we can move ahead thoughts to item number 12 discussion 2022 legislative recap [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all those in favor from thank you so much ryan you have that thing working all right thank you so much agenda so you're welcome to stay around i appreciate that maybe i'll log in on the way home i appreciate it um so my name is ryan bingham many of you seen me we did a zoom um during the beginning of session so this is me in person not in a box uh you met zach dendis who joined our firm in november who's been my partner in crime on all

007things danbury this session first and foremost we thank you for your confidence in us uh to utilize us we've had a great opportunity to work with john and michael your team and kevin to try to advocate on your behalf share information as we see it and try to be an effective communicator not just with your legislative delegation but the broader legislators as a whole in the specific committees that that are you know trying to pursue action on things that could affect as broad as the budget as we'll go over but the smaller the more minute educational policy so um you know just briefly this was a short session uh you wouldn't know it because it feels like a marathon when you're inside the building but uh it started in february it ended may 4th at

008midnight it is technically not a budget session and we'll get to sort of why that became problematic this year but there is a budget that gets passed there's an intern budget and there was a lot of activity on that this year one of our major priorities was and has been to escalate the transition for ecs funding to the city of danbury you know the target's out there um we've pushed hard and i think through your advocacy through the advocacy of your legislative delegation um and uh in a lot of the districts in your sort of cohort um it it got a lot of traction this year to the point where um you know we really thought that it had a really great chance of passing and ultimately what ended up being the sort of dagger

009to its passage was because it was short of this interim budget period that none of the we'll say out year proposals not dealing with this year next year's budget but out year proposals all of them including the escalation of ecs were shelved for consideration this year and reconsideration for next year and i think that i'm sort of getting ahead of myself but in preparation for that long budget session in january of 2023 um i think we should all be sort of keeping our eye on the prize there um their momentum is has been great a lot of people talking about it kevin came up to the capitol with mayor esposito during a probably the highest attended press conference of the year at the capitol and there are many so i think with the pressure continue

010the pressure there because it's such an incredible amount of money for the district um so i'll let zach fill in the blanks on the budget side and then i'll hit some other highlights and we'll move on yeah thank you again for for having us um my mom cut her teeth in the border bed in a different town many years ago and you guys are the unsung heroes so thank you guys for for everything you're doing and for having us i think as ryan alluded to having the superintendent having the mayor up at the capitol was huge i think this is not only an issue on the ecs side that really a lot of groups wanted to see but a lot of delegation members from a lot of the major cities really pushed for they were

011very disappointed to see that it wasn't included in the budget as ryan mentioned earlier but it is something that you know is hopefully going to be a topic of conversation the governor during this short session really pushed for a certain set of things to be included in the budget and a lot of things as brian mentioned we're not we're not there but that isn't to be said that next time around they're going to address especially the dcs escalation but also a lot of work around hvac and air purification inside of schools technology around that as well we worked immensely closely with with your delegation but also with a lot of the teachers unions folks like that um as well as the hartford delegation and other cities as well to try and push the needle forward

012a little bit on this and like i mentioned i think there was a sense at the capitol that with the short session no excuse but with a short session and trying to push a budget through that there were some priorities that were going to be taken care of next year so that is kind of where that stands with the ecs funding the a lot of the things that were passed in the budget this year as you guys have probably read on the news times and all the wonderful papers that you have are related to tax cuts as in an election year you're going to see a lot of mill rate demo rates being addressed car taxes things like that that's really what had to be paid for in the budget and the use of arpa

013funds for those types of things kind of is not necessarily allowed so they had to make the cuts where they felt was necessary and unfortunately when it comes to new spending that gets impacted as well so in the packet that we i believe passed out and left here you'll see essentially our bill tracking report for the session which talks a lot about not only the car tax rates but also and i'll leave our cards here if you guys have any questions about this call us we could go for a long time here but we won't it goes through a lot of what happened with the budget the recommendations but also what's going to be happening with the implementer budget it talks about property revaluations it talks about like i said the car tax and at

014the end something that john and i worked on a lot with ryan as well of this document you'll see the town by town runs for the finance pieces of it all so if you have any questions or any concerns around those things we'll leave our cards give us a shout it's a lot of numbers i've picked just the damn very obvious numbers here but if you want to go through other kind of what other folks got in terms of comparison please go give us a call and we can talk a little bit more about it and i think we're very happy to to take a few questions if time was for that just a couple other quick ones i just want to say quickly that they brought the package when they walked in so i

015handed them to olga they'll be ready for you guys and then we do have another document that we share um to the team here on fridays during session which is the tracking reports another 13 pages they're click little clickable links um so you can see sort of where bills went what happened to the past things so um again we've got as much information as you want ready but um just quickly you know on the positive note you know obviously one congratulations on the career academy referendum passage your delegation did a phenomenal job carrying board changes in language carrying forward the 80 reimbursement for this wonderful career academy that you have for coming and specifically and i don't like you know sort of playing the politics there's somebody that i really need to thank and you

016see him for his service who's not running and will be a loss david r conte was [Music] really instrumental in a lot of the school construction funding over the years not just this career academy but high school innovations and you name it and he's been really useful for us because he's 100 for danbury for public schools in danbury and uh we're going to miss him for sure um but whatever happens in november in terms of the election they're confident that that person or those people who take the mantle and do a fine job but it would be you'd be remiss not to to thank him for for always being there willing to pick up the phone on behalf of the danbury public schools so with that said just two quick other items one as we

017mentioned next session is critically important to your biennial budget pushing forward for the ecs escalation as the ability for more people to be in the building becomes more where more people come into the building more often what we didn't do this year because of restrictions on the public's access was we didn't do danbury day and you may think you know maybe it's not you know relevant or meaningful it is and i know that since you know we've started working with the danbury board of ed to to bring up some of the great things that you're doing here in the public school system um to have your local chamber come up and talk about all the things that danbury's is doing is so impactful to people because sometimes they get in such a narrow lane focus

018to be able to meet you to see the hat or mascot and eat some local fare it's um you know it's pretty impactful for an opportunity for all of you to lobby for yourself so so i commit to you that um that we want to do damn every day we're gonna pay for um you know maybe one or two board members to help us organize that um it's a future you problem i know there's some very current you problems um but we think it's a pretty useful activity and we want to make it a big splash as a return and then the second thing that we're going to do an off session is work on with your administration the opportunity for federal dollars so you know obviously you've heard about this federal infrastructure fund but

019there's also investments in clean air and hvac from the state there's money from the federal government on that so as we get into the summer months we'll be working with michael kevin and john on accessing those in fact i called your former mayor mark bauman who's now the fisheries and the czar of the infrastructure fund on the way over here and i said i'm going to drop your name because we're going to be working on getting some money into the district from the federal dollars instead absolutely 100 committed so so those are the sort of things that we're doing as next steps um because we certainly think there's opportunities to help you know at least deal with some of the budget constraints that you have so that's sort of our pitch and update um you

020know we're obviously very easy to reach um on a dime so you know we'll sort of leave you with uh an opportunity to follow up on anything that we've provided if you have anything now or in the future please don't hesitate ryan the last time we talked exactly last time we talked there was some movement on the government governor's initiative around providing support for districts under the sel work and i'm just wondering what does that mean for districts more specifically what might that mean y'all follow up with me on that [Music] is it too early to start being attentive to certain deals that would be given additional [Music] we're not at that point yet because anything that didn't pass as of may 4th at midnight 2022 is dead and so in january when session starts

021in 2023 all the new bills start getting filed but there's a time between probably november election in january where we really want to get together with the you know we'll know at least one new delegation member talk about the priorities and see if they'll introduce bills that might be specific to danbury so i think we'll end up having to work on our uh legislative priorities earlier so that you know we sort of can retrain and train new foundation members to to make sure everybody's sort of up to speed yeah i'm sure question it's my understanding there's a bill on its way to the senate which will give 16 billion for school securities is there any way to influence that at all zach's our federal guy he worked in congress for 10 years for one of

022our senators so thank you for your service i'll let uh take that one so yes um basically all that money i worked for senator murphy for about 10 years five of which were in dc and a lot of that money is has to be appropriated so that bill still has to pass and we're knocking on wood uh because as you know i'm biased i guess he introduced it so former boss um but yes there will be money that you can leverage especially for larger school districts it's it's key to kind of know that that money is going to go to the state so you know having delegation members briefed on on how that works is going to be important and we can certainly handle that piece of it so short answer yes long answer hopefully

023by friday we'll know more well i suppose the answer i was looking for is service your influence to influence that body of government to pass that do you yeah i think you have the support of your congressional delegation at this point as far as i know yeah every every um every house member has mentioned in the state of connecticut um that they would be supporting that bill senator murphy introduced it and senator blumenthal is a co-sponsor of it so not only would it provide a lot of other things related to school security but a significant bump up in mental health support and kind of general school funding thank you questions thank you both so much for coming in we appreciate it thank you thank you you our budget strategy presentation so i just want to

024share with you for one in your packet you have a copy of the this friday the great thing about posting presentations prior to the meeting is that a lot of feedback and with that feedback has required a couple of updates to the slides so that's what's coming around now their minor revision but nonetheless [Music] typically i move when we do presentations if it's easier to turn it off that's fine like the moonlight i will get started so good evening everyone happy to see we also have some folks from the community in the audience one i feel like it was very important before the year closed out that we planted the seed for our legendary needs to put a 22-23 school and when we made our presentation budget presentations i was saying last year this past

025school year particularly over the last couple of months as part of our 152 million dollar ask i was continue to be asked well what happens if what happens if you don't get your full ask what does that mean for programming what does that mean for physicians and frankly i was reluctant to share publicly what that meant number one because we as a set as a team we had not gone through the exercise of walking through what that might be two i did not want to create an alarm for my staff and we have a mad exodus out of this school district as a result of some realities we've been faced with however is our original plan of spreading our essay 2 and sa-3 grants over a three-year period the 11 million dollar gap meaning the

026152 million dollar ask and a 141 million dollar that's been authorized we have to find ways to close that gap and that's 11 million and so the strategy we are looking to implement is one that will accelerate the spin down of the eso grant and instead of that being spread out over a message three being spread out over three years that now means we will spread it out over two in summary that means the cliff is in front of us this time next year will be the last year of the expiration of all three at that time of our relief monies period part of the reasons why we feel like it's critically important that we escalated in this fashion is one we as we try to provide provide relief for kids this school year we

027were faced with some unforeseen challenges staffing challenges due to shortages staffing challenges due to coping and just staffing challenges period meaning the additional positions that we invested in with the relief monies student support specialist i.e interventionists those folks were used to cover classrooms as were our coaches who typically support new teachers disrequired were instead deployed to cover classes because we just did not have a choice the little girl who's on the front page of this presentation in many ways is representative of danbury public schools so this little girl who calls her fourth grader at one of our biggest schools in the district with daniel and we're gonna say she's in the fourth grade because she looks like she is and as a fourth grade student our class size is typically within class guidelines 24 in

028the classroom in third grade that's right in fourth grade and in a typical classroom in danbury particularly our bigger elementary schools their 24 students in the classroom approximately four students with an iep 10 students that require some type of tier 3 intervention support because they're not reading at grade level we may have five students who require english language support and frankly not every classroom in this new school has a new teacher but it's very likely that there is a teacher with first-year second year or third year new teacher in this building all of those teachers require new teacher support particularly given the fact particularly given the fact that those new teachers have not been in school our second and third year teachers have not been in a school building full-time until this year so we've

029had a workforce that is does not have the typical training of our workforce in the past which is which means our coaches have a very different work ahead of them this year particularly this is kind of what we call this little door ariella by the way and just want to talk about this idea a little bit more because right now arielle is classroom day she will go to specialist class of what we call in district and so she goes to a rotation of art music and pe which we used to publish in and and so that's certainly part of that rotation also ariel gets an opportunity and her classmates to go to um library media classroom as well so that's part of her experience but what she will also notice in her classroom as a

030cooperator is that maybe 10 students who leave the classroom for english language support because those students are learning the language and so there has to be a certified staff member waiting there we have four students and again this is a typical classroom in denver public schools we're going to be at least four students with an iep that requires some type of service some students may have a service pushed in some students might have to push out will be pulled out and some students may get services pulled out some at some point and then we may have eight to ten students but in this case ten students who are not reading at grade level and so we have a tier three interventionist teacher who's waiting to pull the students out at a certain time of the

031school schedule to provide tier 3 support and when i see tier 3 and someone intentionally sitting down with students helping them learn how to read so that they don't become a special ed student which requires a greater investment in becoming specialized critical strategies ariel right now is a fourth grader certainly in what we are seeing as critical staffing that's needed in all of our buildings with no flexibility on support and for english language students for our special ed students or our tier three students all required services that we have to provide for kids certainly our classrooms when students go to specials we have to provide those because our staff our teachers by contract or to get prep time and lunch time and when our kids go to specials our contracted staff this is where they

032get prep times i'm just talking elementary right now however when ariela goes to middle school the services look similar although the classes there is certainly a more robust class offering course offer and then when she goes to high school she will be faced with a schedule at the damn very career academy that is robust in his offerings which we're all very excited about if you've been in danbury for just a little while you know that we pride ourselves in the fact that we can offer a comprehensive list of offerings for kids from ap in every content disciplinary you can think of the same is true of honors courses and the same is true of our regular courses or college prep courses we don't want to compromise that experience very well the required services i just

033talked about the other ones are optional and as we go through this presentation i cannot impress upon the board and our community enough that just the basic services that we have provided and enjoyed in this district are are at a point right now we can be compromising just the basic services we have provided in this school community for a long time and so this school year meaning 2021 we had an opportunity to reopen our school buildings and we're very excited about that and quite frankly very proud of what we've done this year i had an opportunity to meet with our administrators today sent a letter to all of our district staff this past week thanking everyone thanking our families thanking our staff and thanking our administrators we've needed everyone's help to open up this school

034district safely and successful we felt we feel very good about what we've done very good however what we've learned this year is that the supports needed for kids are greater than they have ever been the reports needed the supports needed for kids are greater than they ever have and i think this board has heard enough from our families and our staff i think we've heard quite a bit what that reality has looked like in the schools in the attach i had included a letter to the board and also included a letter to the greater community i do not have it shared in this presentation however the presentation pretty much encompasses and so this slide that's called funding sources city plus state plus federal plus sr it was important to me important for us to find

035a way to share with the board and share with the community provide a little bit better understanding of where we are as a district in terms of our financial state and what i did not do this year which will change in next year starting tonight and that is being as transparent as possible of our budget in our financial situation as part of our budget process we have talked a lot about our operation budget and i and i think gave detail in significant detail because that's where our focus was trying to advocate for all monies in our operational budget however it was important for us in this presentation to talk about the other funding streams because we believe there's a perception we want to acknowledge it that there's a perception that you have extra money and

036so this presentation is designed to speak to the idea of having extra money and where these additional funding streams quite frankly how we've leaned on these additional funding streams for years and i don't think the community really understood how we've been doing this for years this is not new for me as your superintendent your new superintendent this is something we've been doing for years and and we're just at a critical stage right now where there is no more room to ask a question so i'm almost funded sources and i agree with you understanding where it comes from on you guys i was back on past the budget i mean when you get to those basic services i mean based on past history and you really think the city was going to give us 11 dollars

037exactly what but i mean they've never had a history of the school took on a um longer i mean so to your point what like in some community i mean how do we inform people i mean we have budget meetings and workshops we can get 75 people and most of their politicians you know chicken things just can't i mean it's just i mean we have to this let people know i look this this is johnson who is your co-taught in your cultural kids class who hasn't i mean she's not gonna be there anymore i mean i don't know i mean i understand i understand why we don't do all that stuff but it's just i think that's what we're doing here yeah so so i mean i agree with you but i also think our

038obligation is a decision about what is a lot of us you know our due diligence is putting together a budget that supports our schools and making sure that we put that forward to the city right you know um you know i think what mr wilson was trying to do here is that he's breaking down in that transparent way that we may be having to do it so let's keep getting into it sorry oh you know that's my highest no i understand um so and and i want to and i'll circle that with your questions about um did i think about the 11 million because we will need more next year um and as a as a community we will have to make some decisions on what's important to us and i think it will be

039perfectly clear to the school community if we don't make the right decisions um that it will be even more clear when we get to the end of the 20 years so i opened on this one earlier and we had proposed initially a 152 million dollar budget to your question route um we've authorized 141 million dollars which leaves us with an 11 million dollar gap and let me be clear the fact that we had four million this year is in my eyes progress given my short time in this instrument um but we need more four million dollars covers salaries and benefits with just the staff that we here have with step movement for all of our staff that's with the 4 million dollars that is not acknowledging one additional kid in the school district oh by

040the way we've had a couple of hundred just in one year not to mention it two years prior in which we got less than four million and so that's what's happening and so we've used alliance we've used title one title two type of three title iv to cover those differences there is no more and by the way while every other district in the state of connecticut has gotten some type of relief money their enrollment has been flatlined even as cities have had flatline movement milwaukee stanford has experienced also some enrollment growth but even the big districts have not gotten the vote that we've received our monies are going away those monies will go away but they're not experiencing the same enrollment goal we are and without an investment to address that growth we're going to

041have some problems so next week so what we try to do when you'll there'll be a continued with the cadence will be similar in that we will talk about alliance we'll talk about all the grants and then try to do a visual breakdown of each one the 141 million this is essentially our budget book revised 152 million initially saw in your budget book this now reflects the 141 million and this is for the breakdown and i'm sorry the asterisk is at 82 million because in in our presentation we had moved purchased services and i believe john you said that was from paraprofessionals for two years to two years i'm sorry and so we had four million dollars in the purchase services line appropriately we moved that up to salaries because during the 2021 school year

042prior to ed and john's arrival that those monies were in that line so for the new school year we're moving in to salaries so that's why they asked her but the bottom line 141 but it still stays the same so just wanted to acknowledge that change so this is an update in your presentation in your slide and previously we did not have one of the cost-saving strategies that we implemented this year the first one i want to talk about is we used eso funds to address social distancing district-wide we hired k5 elementary teachers classroom teachers to help spread out class size in our classrooms through attrition meaning resignations retirements we were able to fold in nine of those 11 positions and so which means nine people on this side retired or resigned we had nine

043people in these extra positions for social distancing they came in they replaced the nine people leaving not only was it cost neutral it was actually at a savings because the folks on this side of the room were a little bit cheaper than clothes this cost difference saved us 500 i'm sorry it was 554 000 and we were able to move make this move um with without impacting class size in our clay pipes classrooms we did however because of enrollment world have to keep two of those positions so we were unable to get rid of all 11 but we were able to um through attrition who nine of them the other two cost-saving strategies like to talk about and that is these are projecting we have more than 40 certified staff members who have announced their

044attention to retire or resign and we are projecting a savings of close two million dollars and this is through what we call bridge meaning our staff who's leaving at the top of the salary scale your strategy we will look to replace those folks with less experienced staff members which means they will come at a lower autonomic pay scale last but not least but this is a savings we get to realize our hiring has a higher um hiring has to reflect this strategy so we have to be look at every single scrutinize every single hire there are some highers that that are hard to build that are not going to have a choice but the other positions we will have to maintain and stick to stick to the uh to stick to the play and higher

045people at lower at the bottom this year last but not least we are examining the economics of a retirement incentive plan for teachers typically districts do not see a cost savings in year one and so for the first year probably we're not going to see a savings because any incentive monies would have to be poured into the first year question subsequent years however typically districts do see a savings and so at the very least we feel like we need to do our due diligence to see if there's a savings opportunity across the district with that however comes we need to make sure there's a workforce behind if we create an incentive to incentivize they have to leave we need to make sure we can find teachers so at the same time this analysis needs to

046improve to make sure there's enough folks ready to become teachers to replace them the next one is alliance budget i think this will allow us to go a little bit faster so our operation budget includes over 1300 staff members our alliance budget we have close to 200 staff members in the line 191 specific of the 19 million dollars that's projected for next year 16 million dollars is in salaries and benefits which leaves us three million dollars for supplies three million dollars for initiatives it's not a lot of money and the 1.3 million that we talked about as a budget driver as an example on this is a place that typica i'm sorry the science of reading bringing in a new reading program that's required by districts this is a place where we had looked to

047and hope to put those monies and so we're excited about the fact that we're looking to experience a two million dollar increase on alliance next year one million dollars certainly will just go to salaries and benefits just because of set movement and moving up and then of course it's that one million for this initiative that we're hoping is going to cover our scientific reading initiative and then of course on the next page again you'll see a breakdown in a table kind of representative the next one is title grant and this is not one we've talked a lot about publicly in the past i do think it's important one we have what we call title one title two title three and title four these grants those salaries and allocations are very specific and they also just

048so you know include public non-public schools as required by statute and so when kelly cara and i are planning at the beginning of the year i'll budget how money's going to be deployed we actually have to we're required to also meet with our non-public school peers they meet with them typically to be right here in this room we give them an overview of how these monies by our source of expense and then kind of as their parent district we work with them to provide services and then that happens for every single one of the grants because all of their students also require services and those services and that support comes from us and we use for example type ones to help to help in that regard we also have so you know um and again

049this is again anticipating um and a bump from i believe 3.7 to 4.4 next year overall grants of the 4.4 million dollars of all the grants collectively 3.3 is dedicated to salaries for 37 staff members these physicians mostly are support positions for schools again this this is not a new strategy these positions have been in there for years probably that they wanted to a couple of more this year because they've become improving operation budget which which leaves a very little bit for supplies but you can see in the screen specifically it's mostly staff funded and then the next slide camera this gives a breakdown and again just kind of a visual presentation and i am happy to go back a very specific question by the end of these slides last but not least and that's

050other grants and certainly as a district we've talked about on title one before um i think this slide provides even a little bit deeper look into the funding stream that the district receives and that's our ida grant which is specifically for our special needs students priority schools which is connected to alliance just for some more specifics priority schools a little over 1 million has funded since i've been here reaching endeavor and the ace of staff almost in its entirety i think with the exception of the two principles so the entire staff is in this budget typically in districts frankly these are operational items um for us they have been in grants for years magnet school so this is our this is ais elementary school this grant helps us provide funding for it's pretty much a

051third of their staff and in districts that are able to the magnet monies allow them to do something over and above what your typical comprehensive elementary schools for us it just helps us to cover the cost and in our case it helps us cover the costs as that so that's how we deploy these magnet school monies then school readiness also kind of rounds out of the other grants these grants title up to seven 17.3 million in which 5.8 is dedicated to salaries for 70 staff members we don't have as much in here for staff that's because their grants are specific and these grants would be totally all up a little bit more specific in terms of what we can spend on and how we can spend it so you'll see the additional 7.2 is allocated

052as necessary equipment improvement supplies and other programs salaries and applications are grant specific great next page and to just round out kind of the cadence that's going on this is the last page of those grants and slides um you'll see the breakdown here so i'd like to go to the summary slides slide 13. funding summary city plus state plus federal plus estimate so first go to the next slide the first slide is staffing summary and these are all of our staff members and how we pay for them district-wide and this is certified and not certified and so you'll see the vast majority of our staff is in operation budget close to 200 an alliance 37 entitled 70 staff members and other grants and 155 staff members in the two s grants so i i think

053it's very important that we emphasize when we receive our first grant in the we 2019-2020 the cares grant in the second half of the year from march until and that was six seven hundred thousand dollars i remember the exact number and then we received we were in receipt of two additional relief monies opera funds which we call hearing district essential free and those the positions that we on that we hired with those monies serve multiple purposes one the physicians help to address social emotional needs in this district psychologists social workers counselors deans of students we hired these physicians under that umbrella of addressing mental health and social emotional leading students anticipating there was going to be a significant need given a pandemic and time kids were out and to the faculty presented after the opponents

054many nights to our community we also hired 30 plus staff members specifically to address social business and so we needed additional we needed 15 high school staff members dan was close to 30 20 29 30 students at classroom if we have an eight period day plus 15 extra teachers it allow him to get down to a more manageable at that 26 he felt a little bit more comfortable safer that we can socially distance this was a priority when we reviewed our schools in the fall going back how i opened in other school districts the additional staff is socially distancing non-initial non-issue a higher extra staff is social distancing the money goes away you go back to normal because enrollment has not increased dan needs every single one of those positions right now plus by the

055way in our budget he needs more because the enrollment that we've experienced this year has been heavy middle school in high school so we've been able to through attrition let go of nine teachers at the elementary school those eleven nine of the eleven positions because we've experienced the majority of our enrollment growth six twelve this year we have not been relaxed at the middle school in high school and so the investments we've made with the relief monies are now monies that we just need for loaning growth but we didn't get the additional monies for that employment program and so we have to park it in places where the funding streams are and so you are seeing in that 155 a number of staff members and these are not all certified staff members and certified and

056non-certified staff members that we we're going to need a significant investment in 23 24 to make sure we're addressed we're ready so this is just a funding summary for the remaining american relief funds the cares act which is the initial one that was shared with districts in 2020 spring of 2020 that expires this june next school year and initially scheduled to expire in june 30th 2023 is esther 2 6 million 404 million sf3 originally we had planned to deploy that disperse that over two more years and given the gap we are looking to move all those monies to next year to 22-20 preschool and i'm almost done enrollment growth plus funding and this next slide this is a little different from what i had shared with you previously that current enrollment is 12 100 in

057grid this year and in this slide we tried to put together a slide that had enrollment versus funding streams and what you're seeing in 2022 which is the year we're in now is our budget of close to 175 million this year next year because we are holding in all of so3 that's going to be a little closer to 190 million to cover the position that we just previously talked about next year is the year of uncertainty this is assuming um a four billion dollar investment again by the city of danbury and everything else not flatlined increasing gradually like title one of alliance but the gap is significant and this is the gap and this is where it brings us this evening and where we're trying to plant the seed for the coming stone we understand

058and again going back to perception we understand clearly i think a lot of folks in the community i mean this is typical in school districts any position that is not directly in front of a student districts typically begin to look at the physicians that are not directly in front of kids um if any tough decisions have to be made as a superintendent i'm always going to say we have to start everywhere else first before we go to a classroom however what is important as we begin to as again we're just planting cc's right now and beginning to think about this here we have talked about in my short time in this district talked about danbury public school doing more with us right i think we're proud of the fact that we've done that but i

059don't think it's clear however is how much more we have done with less certainly we have celebrated the fact that we've had a number of schools at this nation in this district blue ribbon schools in its district that's about growth because our kids no matter where they come in our staff and our principals they take them to the next level but we do more with less and so can we read things and so if you look at public available data and so that's insight for us we were able to find 2021 data which is most recent 2122 data this school year and so when looking at how many students per administrative district-wide not in the school but across the district we have more students per administrator than our comparables and again i have conquerables and

060i don't had mentioned previously in meetings talking about um a district reference group we've also added an additional district middle town which is not in the dirt group but we tried to find comparable districts for the board to see meridian stanford no more are directly in our comparable groups middletown is outside an actual terrible group for certainly similar population uh as denver public schools the next slide is the number of students per staff and then this one you will see although the slide doesn't seem as significant as the administrator it still means her classroom our teachers are doing a lot more with less but the emphasis i'm trying to place here is cutting just further separates us from our peer groups cutting right so well going back to your question about the 11 million and

061frankly which is even more next time we ask again cutting anything in this budget just continues to separate us from the same comparable districts that we've been compared to by the state we have done more with less for a long time and i understand that that's a reality of districts but the investments need to be different right now because we have maxed out our funding streams that's where we are ready this next slide is really just reiterating kind of what we talked about already and it's it's really going to require a different kind of investment and in ralph tonight frankly is like day one of trying to have a different conversation a different dialogue with our partners and because this is a city problem right now and i feel like we need folks at the

062table to help us address this issue that we're about to face and it's the cliff that we've talked about a couple of years ago is upon us sooner that sooner than i really liked it and so ken before you go to the next slide i just wanted to share um and then open it for the discussion anticipated maybe a little um when we are because i again please understand and appreciate your reluctance to talk about what might we lose if but the first thing we are required to provide services for students in this district and so opening up with ariel's class about hey her kids are peers in her classroom some are going because some of those students have an iep services you have to provide english language support we have to provide tier three

063support we have to provide and then there are supports we just should be providing given our strategies around trying to save us money district-wide and so having coaches to support new teachers because as a strategy we want to bring them in by the way we have a cohort of three years of new teachers in our district because they have not been physically in front of kids right now you know we're trying to add to that very young core of teachers we close the door and we have a principal who's running all over the building of 400 because they don't qualify for the system principle and they're struggling to get in classrooms because they're addressing all the mental health challenges that you've heard so much about and it's the coaches right now that are providing that

064support plugging in where hey this is the new math curriculum you've heard about in the district this is the new reading program you heard about someone being face to face with helping answer those questions because by the way their graduate program wasn't even in person because they were learning remotely when they graduated these are the people that were put in front of our kids so collectively as a team we begin to look at programs and services that are not required and service that we have to have a discussion about if we're looking for savings and they're not the kind of things i'd like to ever talk about in any district but we have to okay and so the bigger buckets we are we have to provide kindergarten we have to we are not required to

065provide full day candy park as a superintendent it would be crazy our focus should be paid one and two so that we can change the trajectory of learning in this history that's what we should be pouring in more resources more interventions more coaches but we're not required to provide full day and it could be a significant savings in half day high school electives which is probably i want to say the most but there is a lot of money in a high school schedule again it's because our students our community we enjoy a comprehensive selection of electives for our kids it's what a comprehensive high school should do however we could offer a schedule that looks like the middle school schedule it's fixed in nature you get seven eight classes the schedule is what it is

066that's what we're required to provide but that's not what a high school experience should look like and so because it doesn't look like that we have the teachers to make sure that we can we have the teachers to make sure that when kids request honors chemistry we have to go back chemistry we do not have to provide honest chemistry and ap chemistry right we want to provide ap chemistry but honestly don't and so we can maximize if we really want to be efficient we can maximize classes and maximize ap maximize our college college prep courses if you don't have these classes because right now we have we just went through an exercise a couple of days ago where we had 60 plus classes that are less than 24 students in the classroom and and so

067many people would say well you shouldn't buy those classes oh but wait it's it's it's ap chemistry with 18 kids in the classroom who's going to tell a kid you know we don't want you to take ap chemistry we're we're educators of course we're not going to come that class but then we have ap physics with 15 kids in the classroom well if we're trying to be efficient with our money we should not be running ap physics if you want physics you just take regular physics and we max it out at 26 to 28 kids but why would we want to tell the kid they're not going to take ap physics we are educators that's not what we want to do but if we're looking for a significant savings this is when you begin to

068realize there's significant savings because the middle school schedule is very tight they have a thousand kids we have the staff exactly associated with that number done but in high school we give kids more choice so they have the opportunity to sit with mr miller in his class but we don't offer that class right so it's very structured and but just looking at some of the other offerings so class size certainly we have some range could we maximize more in our k2 which right now is at 22. it would be pushed up to 24 yes 35 is we try to max that out at 24 that go to 26 yes high school in the middle schools of course the middle school's already bursting at 26 to 28. could that go up i would not recommend that

069um in schools i mean physically the schools and ralph and rachel had an opportunity to walk through the buildings physically both both middle schools are thirsting at the scene they don't even have the capacity to oh my gosh that's all the story and then the high school we we're at 26 to 28 the majority of dan's college prep courses are maxed out at 28. and so could we push that up to 30 yes but i i taught new york city my roles were 30 to 32. this is not where we want to be in teaching in our classrooms um so certainly some other initiatives we've talked about i've been in board meetings where we talk about counseling as a priority trying to provide um and improve that ratio but all of the things that you

070see in front of you are things that we would have to consider and certainly and i have to mention administrators because that's i know that's oftentimes clearly the first place we could look because they're the furthest ones from kids but i just have to remind everyone no different from the teachers we're already doing well with less with every single category and we will share the insight the connecticut site it's a public available site where they can share all comparable districts you can look at any district in the state of connecticut um this is how we look compared to our peers we have been doing more for less with years that has not changed despite the investments you've made in the last couple of years and i know you must be tired this is the last

071one and so with that i will conclude the presentation assistant superintendents and chiefs are here to help me answer any questions that you might have and we may or may not need to jump back to a couple of slides given the questions but the answer is [Music] um [Music] you know facts came out to the meeting uh between the candidates meeting like the new board members specifically asked each board member i think before athletics or against it and somebody so there's a lot of fun issues here that people draw attention to um you know just getting people more informed because you know i didn't have two kids in the district like that sometimes you're saying it doesn't really affect your kid i was on the board right if it didn't affect my kid if he

072was playing soccer you know when he soccer i'd be out screaming the streets the average person doesn't know like you know if uh you know people come and we have a room full of you know seven thousand people at the high school graduation you know i mean if we got you know 50 people from there who came to a budget meeting or something like that just it's it's it's great if we could attach dollar analysis you know just to kind of see and say you know put it in front of me we will work on that that is important uh first i just want to say thank you this is a very clear presentation i really like how you laid it out because i think one of the things that we struggle with at the

073board level is sort of understanding what our spending looks like we talk about our operating the budget a lot but we don't talk about all the different components of what we're actually spending dollars wise so i just want to thank you for that and thank your finance team as well um i had a quick question about the alliance budget slide um you mentioned that there would be a one million dollar allotment for the science of reading program is that correct so it's i think we presented that at one point great in terms of our budget drivers this year and i don't know if the real number has been solidified yet right it hasn't been solidified yet but the the point being we had to pay for that initiative somewhere and so we were anticipating our

074recall in our presentation we would use one of our grants to pay for that um and if it is alliance given the two million dollar anticipated increase we anticipate we're going to need at least a million dollars for salary just movement that the other million dollars could be from alliance to pay for the signs which i okay and as i was saying that um cara was reminding me um kind of shaking ahead that we've actually moved more positions in the line for the last couple of days uh so we're going to have to find extra money to try to figure out okay that's what i just want to clarify because the slide itself you know adds up to the 19 million but does not include anything about that programming so um i did do some

075quick math here um and i just want to make sure i have my numbers right if this sounds good to you our total spend is somewhere in the neighborhood of 208 million point for 208.4 million dollars that includes all of our funding sources and do i also understand correctly 26.3 million are expiring one-time funds so as of next school year we need to source and figure out how we're going to come up with 20 at least 26.3 million dollars is that accurate no we we are we would like to keep every single position that would be hired in the district in every single um like all of it but we understand we can't keep all of them uh and so we're anticipating the 11 million the 11 million dollar gaffe will still need to be

076killed um and i think we're projecting a number and john i feel like she said probably more like 15 million this time next year next spring and that's again that's anticipating no enrollment growth and the 11 million plus salary movement and labor movement of our staff so it's and this is going into contract negotiations but we're anticipating about four million dollars in just operational typical contract contractions given that we're spending some of those esser dollars on salaries and those as our funds are disappearing i mean we're using that the plan right now is for 23.5 million in esser funds for this coming school year so that's what i'm looking at is that substantial gap in funding that we're just no longer going to have and what that's going to mean i mean if even if

077you're pulling in let's say 15 million um you still have a gap of funds that's pretty substantial larger than any increases we've had on our operations side in quite some time thank you madam chair sir looking over some of my notes before elementary school i in an iep 10. did i get that right not really a great level yes five at uh english language support and eight eight to ten another grade level deficiency given worst case scenario sir what [Music] support the gifted and have to be forced to uh reinforce the lowering of our spectrum that needs additional services is my point clear what do we do do we drop ap so we can accommodate the kids that are struggling basically in a nutshell okay so we have services that services that we are required

078to provide and so we have to start with the requirements uh for the district will be even more trouble and we will have to we will need even more money and the classroom ratios will be great smaller because we will have more students requiring more services so we have to start with the required services because they are required and and then we look at what's optional in terms of staffing um and in terms of services kids and um that's going to the biggest way to save money unfortunately so we would be forced and pushed to look at um to get the people furthest away from kids first so we understand and recognize that's going to be administrators and then second that's going to be the folks who don't have kids in front of them every

079single period these are the interventionists and coaches and then the next layer would be our teachers right and i'm telling you right now there are not enough administrators to cut to to find a significant savings there are not a lot of coaches to cut to find a significant savings organizations the real savings is going to be teachers and it's going to be programs so now we're going to find savings there again it's going to be required versus optional and what the potential impact slide that you saw or something some of the optional programming that's available so to go back to your question yes right so honors in ap is optional what's required is to provide three years of science which is similar to what we provide in the middle school schedule very very structured very

080seven periods a day limited choice and then that's what we have to provide our kids and i think we're very proud of the fact that we have a comprehensive offering of electives for our kids those electives will not be there without a significant investment they will not be there thank you sir so superintendent report and just wanted to share with the board in the community this summer will require some significant planning by the team and i and with that um i'm going to ask my team to provide some updates uh for planning for 22-23 these are some things that will be happening over the next couple of months and so the first item of the next two items i'll just say if you don't mind move this around and that is finalizing the strategic plan

081and then also involving the all microphone [Music] all right i've got two items on the uh on the superintendent's report here um enrollment monitoring and violating the strategic plan i'm going to start with enrollment monitoring just because it follows the message from the presentations and it just gave [Music] so we ended last year's school district with just over 12 100 students at our peak we were just below 12 300. our internal projection for next year is about 12 350. uh the the two big areas that we're going to see movement are really kindergarten and first grade and i'll say a little bit more about these as we as we go through them so so far as of today we have 787 kindergartners registered last year we had about 959 and this year we're projecting to

082be pretty close to that number once we hit our october first number the one that surprised me a little bit was today we hit our 1000th first grader our projected high was only going to be 941 we already went over the 1000 mark today it's not july 1 no and last year our end of year was only 923 so our suspicion on this one is that there were a lot of parents that held their kids back out of kindergarten and now we're seeing them all show up uh in a russian first grade so that's gonna be um that's gonna be a a big a big class and um you know to sort of genuflect on on kevin's comment you know comments these are kids that didn't have kindergarten so they may not know their alphabet

083they may not be able to count to ten so these could be you know additional supports that are even needed in those schools so that's a number we're definitely going to keep an eye and also at the high school uh at the end of the year last year we had about 3553 we're anticipating about 200 more than that this year so we should be uh they're about 3750. so we'll have more updates on that as people enroll and register over the summer the other item i have is just a little update on the strategic plan so we've been moving forward with the big six goals is what we're referring to the strategic plan that the board here has seen multiple times and worked on in their own sessions we have been doing our action planning

084process and that is something that will be ready for the board to review in the fall and we'll also be meeting with our principals our elementary and secondary principals so that they can work in that action plan into their school improvement plans and their continuous improvement cycles that will be happening and some of those are august days we've got to before the start of school mike i'm sorry did you do this i know it's not only up here but can you speak to what's next with security um you and our director security yeah we had a a great uh sights and facilities meeting uh with louisa last week uh we just gave a sort of high level overview of some of the things we were doing as you know the audits are still an ongoing

085process we're about 12 or 13 now i'm not sure they've been chipping away at those we'll be looking really closely at the audit results when they come through we're going to be rehiring healing vacancies in our safety advocates we have additional cameras and alarm systems going into the schools and we've been looking at our facilities budget to see if we can add in a few more vestibules in a few of the schools where they still don't have them so that's going to be our big summer lift is doing some some overhaul on the security work and i'm looking forward to have a lot to report out when we come back in the fall quickly reached out to me recently about security and we've had several discussions about security as a board as well we will

086throughout the summer at least every two weeks provide some updates to the board regarding all this planning um specifically around security and we'll talk about that so we'll make sure that we continue to provide some updates throughout the summer and if we see anything that's concerning regarding these audits we'll certainly make sure that's high rising kind of updates throughout the summer so next unfortunately graduate next steps sorry okay so wrapping up the year with the portion of the graduate we saw a tremendous amount of work put into the continuum we did share that draft out with the curriculum committee and ultimately the board um and so uh we have we're able to create a pilot group um of teachers to begin to field test and pilot out some of the items um and the characteristics

087within their lesson plans and to experiment uh running lesson experiments with students in their classes and or background network and then submit lesson plans for reviews that we dig in to see how teachers would be reading and integrating the attributes into their work and to give them sort of a very safe space to do that and an opportunity to receive feedback and so we had about 30 i call them pog pioneers who went out ahead of their peers to begin to do that work and they're going to continue to work with us next year as we get to infiltrate these characteristics embed them into our curriculum talk about assessments talk about how we grade students and how we provide feedback along these lines so we'll be going a little bit slower and i think we

088anticipated because there's a lot of work one of the benefits of having some of the facilitation with the future design school on the group that you met was really digging deep into foundational underpinnings of pedagogy and teaching and learning around these attributes and we realized that um we need to have a lot more conversations about writing standards-based grading providing feedback um along the lines that are not necessarily along the a the b the c the d but really meaningful feedback um on the portion of the graduate so we're going to be continuing that work next year the work that we've done was so well received by the bar foundation which is who sponsored us our work this year they have offered us to apply for a third round of funding um upwards of four hundred

089thousand dollars so dr martens and i uh completed that application and submitted that today and we're gonna be diving into the grading aspect of this and continue uh with a small group of teachers in ninth grade will serve as a pilot group to help us really get smarter and gain some more feedback around this so we're excited about that we should hear about an award at the end of the summer um should i go on to the academy planning some of it's time um so the damn recruiter kind of playing as you know that specs were went on the board tonight that's wonderful that is all moving forward um there's been a lot of work in the background with a small core team to work on curriculum and the planning for that we've got six

090foundational courses which will be the 10th grade courses that represent the foundation curriculum for each of the academies have been posted for the summer and we'll have teachers and some of our leaders working on the development of that at the same time brett dean who's been hired as the director of academic partnerships will be coming on this summer which is super exciting because we really need him to get out to the community to start to build those relationships and partnerships with the businesses to help sponsor some of the academies and the pathways but also really to make those super um critical connections with internships externships um and bringing in industry experts to help us with some of the curricular electives that need to get developed in to fulfill the academy would you mind telling the

091board of the community where we met brent number one and kind of what he does there and what we're really hoping is going to happen here because we feel strongly that we found someone as we were interviewing candidates in this room interviewing candidates we didn't even we know how to interview we've done that enough but what we did not realize is what this position really really required because it's so new for us as a school district and because we had the benefit of visiting nashville the academies of nashville and a person from nashville interviewed for the vacancy i'll stop there because like we are just tickled that we were able to find someone to lead this work for us and frankly guide us because we this is we're charting this is uncharted waters first of

092the district [Music] no we are super excited because as kevin mentioned this is someone who brings a wealth of experience from the place in the country that's best known for these fitness academy models so even within our questioning and the interview process um brent was filling in filling in gaps of information for things that we're going oh yes okay so we we wrote more notes we got more from him than he got from us in that interview um and he you know we were tickled thinking he had heard about what we were planning here and there's a lot of talk about it and so um when he when he learned about the scale with which we were trying to plan this and the uniqueness of the pathways um and he asked us several questions he

093wanted to make sure that we were committed he wanted to make sure that we were going to engage in the training and that to do things in a certain way to guarantee a specific outcome for students and so he was also looking for the fit and the commitment so he's just an amazing person he has a very charming personality i can't wait to get him in front of the chamber of commerce i can't wait to get him in front of our our our partners who have already reached out and said how can we partner with you um and it's been very difficult to kind of establish and keep running after all those relationships or kind of school system here so this person will be dedicated to doing that and i think uh that position will

094pay for itself tenfold um you know as as we as we look to open up the academy and to continue to move forward so we're super excited about that um but we but we do have uh we have been meeting uh with a small 14 group we meet every friday at 7 30 in the morning at denver high school we work on every aspect and we have a quite an agenda and a list and an action plan that we're following and we are our well through we are very much on time with our development planning and um you know uh we're hopeful despite some of the things you were uh this evening um we have to find a way to make this happen and to be able to staff the academy in the way that

095it deserves to be staffed and to resource it appropriately because this is special and academy or no academy we still have um you know several thousands of children that are coming up the ladder that we have to find classroom space for and an educational program for so this is really important um and uh so that's that and we will uh you know there there are i'm gonna say one more thing that it's hard because you know we just had this this presentation tonight um and we've been talking about the funding for this for a while i'm gonna get choked up but um you know the city has to invest our partners have to invest and you know what we're trying to do you know advanced placement courses are pretty standard in most high schools you

096want to get into uconn you want to get into area colleges you have to have circle classes um so we can't let this go we have to do everything in our power to make sure that that we preserve our funding the academy is the next step for us it's progressive it's innovative it's going to be amazing and and we have to find a way to to back it to get the funding and so i look forward to partnering partnering with everybody in here to help make that happen thanks i'm sorry question about um grading you're not going to do any more of the exterior grading is that correct no we're going to look at how how we grade and the feedback that we give to students along with the lines of grading that's more meaningful

097and substantive can you give us an example what's more meaningful sure so we have talked a lot about standards-based grading and so if a student has a sometimes we give students credit and points for well you did all your homework right whether or not it was maybe as accurate as it needs to be um or as high quality as it needs to be you did your homework you get x amount of points um you turned in all these particular projects and things but perhaps the quality of the work within meeting a particular standard in an area is not where it needs to be so sometimes extra points extra credit things like that can mask um where a student stands in reality to a standard of performance relative to a great level and so things like

098great inflation happen on a routine basis and really we do a disservice to children by not giving them an accurate picture where they stand with their academics and not only that but to give feedback and feed forward i felt feed forward um how do i get better from here so this is where i am now what's the next step to get better in my work and how do i have provide models and examples of how to do that and the support along the way to do that so rather than just you know we dish out a b this paper's a b you know what does that really mean and where in this paper and where this work do i need to improve um to get better so that when we send students off to college

099um we are certifying that they are really ready beyond the grade level we've actually what prepared them well um for the rigors of college and beyond anything else that they would like to pursue is it possible that you can share the plan how you can work that out so that's part of our grant is to explore that so this is this is a a mechanism to the one of the reasons why vars funding it is because they too realize that this is a key critical component to actually feeding into student achievement and improved outcomes for students and so they are going to support us in exploring how best to do that and so this is really an experimental design with with teachers to explore how to best do that this is not like getting uh

100an athlete that told me just because they show up is it sorry giving an act you know a student a trophy they might not great that they get a trophy anyway this is the opposite it's right yes it's completely the opposite it is it is assuring that we're we're providing feedback in terms of grading along the life of grading that's meaningful to students has criteria and outcomes attached to it and and a mechanism to help that student improve as opposed to interview thank you very much so it's actually it is the opposite in the sense that it's more supportive of the student and it's designed to push forward and increase student achievement outcomes because you're actually trying to improve an area based on a standard relative to where a student is at a grade level

101to get them to move forward so um it's it really is to to dig deeper into into the work of what teachers do with students and how students receive feedback on their on their products to that end you anticipate that you're going to be spending most of the next year working to answer this question absolutely so perhaps by the end of next year we might be able to see you know something a little more definitive is the body of work that you and absolutely yes so it's really like what is possible what what and then what training would teachers need and so this is very much an experimental design to see um how this could inform best practice when it comes to grading students and getting their feedback and not only the teachers but the

102students and family one as well because that's going to be a huge learning curve yes for all of those involved as well yes i'm not saying we're changing grading for everybody next year this is a small group of teachers that's going to dig deep into this topic of grading oh and and getting how do you provide feedback you know on being a good communicator and a collaborator and where does that fit in with my classwork and coursework and so it's it's it's very much exploratory in nature and we will develop the process of how we're going to take that information and apply it to you know take what we've learned and apply it to our teacher training [Music] during this experiment will you be running parallel rating systems as if we were implementing a new

103financial software system actually we are that's exactly what we're doing we're going to ask teachers to keep two great books okay thank you eric can you explain a little bit more that pog adopted a pog with the characteristics of the fortune to graduate and just kind of looking at the faces of the border i just realized everyone wasn't here we adopted the pog number one but two like what plays a role in the rubric itself which is actually the characteristics that play with the movement when i heard you mention the listening community etc everyone on the characteristics of themselves or the characteristics and how that's kind of driving the rubric sure sure so so as part of the portrait work with those with pioneers it was very clear as they were working the feedback that

104was coming in because we met with them continuously to get feedback on how things were going what are you struggling with and how are your how are the students reacting to to talking about what a what an advocate is or what a learner is or what an innovator is in classroom and how are you working that into your biology class that's different from your math class and it's different from your art class and what might that look like and so as we were working with the teachers it was very clear that the teachers are like how do i rate this and i'm finding that i'm having a lot more discussions with the students on this because it's really it's a lot of just it's really discussion based right um and that the students really um

105appreciated the level of feedback and discussion that was happening but it also opened up kind of more discussion around the grading aspects of of their work um and how these attributes kind of layer in and overlay overlay that work as well so so it was very clear that we needed to dig into the grading piece and explore it more um and and you know there was quite a few folks that were excited about about that work so um the characteristics of the graduate uh the portrait i'm the advocate communicator collaborator innovator and learner and i'm just you know i'm glad to have pointed out there might have been a few people who might not have seen that or have been part of the curriculum committee i can certainly share out what that continuum looks like

106but the continuum itself is a rubric of sorts delineated by grade level middle school and then high school that indicate sort of characteristics of each outcomes and then characteristics with each of the portrait attributes that sort of describe the nature of those and then we ask teachers to work some of those into their lessons and we'll be working very slowly deliberately next year over the course of the next year uh to make sure that you know we're supporting our teachers through that and also learning how best to to to implement and integrate these across and and what i have learned is that not every district was going through this length to to to integrate um many times often you'll see portrait of the graduate um it's relegated to a poster on a website or a

107flyer you know yeah we're all learners and that's really the extent of it right we went to a conference or there was some funding and that's what we're doing but but one of the reasons why bar is sticking with us and now this is our third round is because we're taking it very seriously and we're exploring it and when our group went up to massachusetts to meet with the other funded groups um you know we realized that no one had reached a certain point yet no one had broke this barrier with the grading no one had no one had gone to the extent of where we were going and um you know we were a little bit surprised by that and they kept asking us a lot of questions about how did you do this

108and you know they were impressed with the continuum but finally i don't want to take up too much time here but but basically we started giving them more information than they had to share with us on this and so we were kind of further ahead than the group and so now we're out there experimenting further and taking a little bit further to see how can we best um you know bring this bring this freedoms home for our kids and make sure that we're making things as rich as possible in our curriculum and their experiences you have um specific classes the learning that you're going to be implementing or experimenting with we're we're going for the freshman academy so we're going to try to get a team so it'll be across the board as far as

109like history english yes yes we're still soliciting some volunteers we have to win the award which we expect to hear in august but we have some you know we have some leads and people who we know we like the candidates so um you know we're that that's the intent [Music] which would i'm sorry the proposal that that that is there is a a textbook a book that is part of that and that's part of the conversation [Music] so three more updates social emotional program [Music] implementation good evening everyone um so the next thing we'll talk about i'll start by being that we're following on the budget presentation is that this is a free initiative by the state department of education so we are fortunate enough to get asked to apply for it um we have

110spent a great deal of time energy and effort on training our teachers and supporting our students particularly during the pandemic and upon a return in social emotional and their needs um and we have seen i think far greater than what we could have ever anticipated the social emotional needs of our students and quite frankly of our faculty as well this school year um and so this uh tool is a little bit uh different it will provide us with an assessment so it's considered a universal screener for students social emotional strengths so what are the areas that students possess that are positive that will help them to be productive students and good members of society and then where are areas that they might fall short on that we need to teach them just as we would

111teach students letters and numbers we also need to teach students social emotional skills and so this program will provide us an opportunity to use a district-wide tool to assess students and we've never done that before right we kind of we size up kids we get to know them really well we kind of identify the students that they need a little bit more but it hasn't been done based on a research proven tool and so the assessment is called uh the company is called aperture um and the assessment is the desa and it's the um deborah student strenuous assessment um and so there's two different assessment tools one tool is used k8 and the second tool is used with high school age students and so what the school does is it provides a one minute screener

112that a faculty member so a school staff member that knows a student well completes and that initial screener then kind of buckets kids into who are students that seem kind of within the typical age level for that skill who are students that are above average in that skill and who are students that may need some support there's then a follow-up more detailed assessment that can be given um at the elementary and middle school level it's given by an adult at the high school level there's two versions given by an adult and then the student gets their own screener um and so then we're able to really dig deeply and look at skills that students might need or support in the tool also gives us the ability to progress monitor kids so after we've provided some

113support instruction and intervention have they made progress just as we would progress monitor our student than reading or mathematics so i'm very excited about bringing this to district i think this will give us some data that i can bring back to this group and share on where our students are at where are some skills that we see in need it also dovetails really nicely with our school counseling curriculum that we're in the process of rewriting um so that we can start to look at deficits that we have across the district as well as strengths and then provide some more strategic intervention and support in certain areas at certain grade levels um so with this we're currently in the process of applying um we've uh mr wallston has given uh kind of the go ahead to

114apply and move forward with it um and so we did hear back from the state um we've kind of been a provisional acceptance but we haven't heard officially yet um and so in year one we'll recruit about half of our schools to participate in this and then in year two will be full district implementation and so with that every there'll be a district level social emotional team um that will be comprised of district level leaders as well as school leaders and then every single school will have to have a school social emotional team that will kind of be the champions that get trained through this initiative to roll out this program to their school so this will continue our heavy emphasis on the social emotional needs of our kids and so the things that will

115be covered in this are um when we talk about social emotional skills what is that um so things like self-awareness self-management the ability to have social skills and social awareness with your peers ability to develop relationships with others responsible decision making personal responsibility goal setting and optimistic thinking and those are directly aligned with the castle model which is a research proven model for social emotional learning that many of our our programs are so along with just the assessment it's okay after we identify where kids are at so what do we do and this program will provide us with some additional tools and strategies lessons that we can use to target students and provide interventional support and the sole goal of this program really is around two things one is to improve academic outcomes for kids

116by making them feel you know connected to school and connected to a positive learning environment which is something we all strive to do and the second is to provide equitable sel access as we know not every kid needs the same thing right so this helps us to identify what kids need what and then be able to intervene and progress monitoring to see if we're making a difference so more information we're hoping to hear sometime in july from the state and this initiative would start with training between august and october um so i will continue to keep the team posted but if there's any questions on the program or tool or rollout please [Music] so this is our busy season um you heard um superintendent wilson alluded earlier to um we're watching carefully departures and incoming

117folks um and so so far today in teaming up the fall hiring we've seen about 49 departures and about 45 new hires so right now we're kind of running neck and neck here although the new hires will certainly start to speed up again at our elementary level we're doing considerably less hiring than usual because we've had the movement of some of the elementary teachers due to the reduction section so we've had less new hires in that area but certainly we are doing some robust hiring particularly in the stem areas in the middle school and at the high school so that will certainly ramp up soon in the meantime while we were waiting for that to happen we fulfilled summer school to date we have done about 90 staff members for summer school so that's about

11875 teachers plus another 15 ancillary staff so those are largely if not all right now our own staff who need to be re-characterized reclassified and put into these new slots for summer school so about 90 of those folks about 100 in the special ed departments especially at summer school and then about another 110 folks that we have moved into handmade's programs that run through our 21st c grant and the summer sensational programs so um we've done several hundred processing now we've got summer school more less locked down and ready to roll and we are focused on new hires of teachers we also are going to push make a push this year with paraprofessionals you might remember us saying over the course of last year we've been had about 75 to 80 open paraprofessional spots this

119year so we're going to be looking to be a little bit as aggressive as we can be in filling those and so that's going to be an ongoing process with regard to administrators um thank you to those of you who have been participating on our interview panels um the broadview principle panel continues to to go through the system and we're working on that in addition we are preparing for the denver high school assistant principal opening um those interviews will be outgoing in july um reach endeavor is one that we continue to kind of watch the pool we're getting ready to put those together now for probably again sometime in july and a new assistant principal opening at broadview middle school with the departure of one of our existing aps so we'll be busy with middle

120school and high school hiring and with rich endeavor at the administrator level in the coming weeks between those items we're going to head into negotiations on the big one this year is the teachers obviously again thank you to those who are intending to participate on that we're going to have our first meeting tomorrow and those negotiations will be late summer fall and they will really kind of amp up as the summer wants to close in addition we'll also be doing paraprofessionals and also the custodians so it will be super busy and my team is ready so off we go [Music] and to wrap up the update summer planning [Music] thank you you know when kim said we're going into our busy season she stole my opening [Music] july and august are clearly the two busiest

121months in a school business office and i i think it's because we have to have everything ready when the students come back but when the teachers come back for their classrooms and that's august 24th so right now principals program leaders the budgets are open the new budgets they're using them we are ordering classroom materials and student supplies and many in many times they're using a big pricing for that low pricing we participate in a number of multi-school bids with area school districts to get low prices so that's going on and then what as materials are ordered of course in the schools they have to get checked in and look at taken to the classrooms after that the invoices come into the business office for processing so it's quite a bit to get done in a

122short period of time meanwhile you know things like at the high school the athletic director is doing all his ordering to get ready for the summer seasons which begin in august before school starts so that's going on and over at the bus yard all of our buses have to get reinspected every year by the department of motor vehicles their commercial safety division so they'll be looking underneath every bus and checking every engine and they're not allowed on the road when school starts until they pass this inspection [Music] transportation coordinator is uh making the new routes up for for kids when they come back they've changed many have changed buildings uh bus drivers will be practicing those routes you'll see them out there as we get closer to school so a lot of that is going

123on and meanwhile we'll also be doing all of our state reporting to the state ed department there are a number of reports they learned again that show how things are panned out this year so busy time for us too happens every year thank you john john just a quick question i know we're at june 22nd today it's about eight days left in the fiscal year um last we spoke you were feeling pretty positive that we would end up with a small amount of money left over at the end of the school year and i just want to check in and see if there's any update on that [Music] thank you kate um we're still waiting here for the health insurance piece um so like the month of uh may and june um you know we've

124worked with our consultant and you know it looks we're going to get really close we do believe that we'll close even this year if for some reason you know health insurance because of streaming you do have those reserves um you know reach out to um the city to request um john and myself the finance director wherever i know it's closed i just want to make sure and and um will you guys be updating the board depending on what happens with that you know so we're aware of what's happening financially as well yes i know we're off for this summer but we're still paying attention thank you interrupted so i this may have been the longest superintendent before all year and i i know this is crazy but i want to ask kelly if she can

125invite one more update and this is frankly related to many offices district offices and this is go guardian and given that the mic is in front of tell you so i don't know mike also needs i just want the board to be aware and equally as important our family's aware this is something that we're exploring just kind of sure and mike please feel free to jump in so go guardian is a software monitoring where we can have access to monitor the technology and the usage that our students are doing during the school day and if using a district device outside of school hours as well so what it does is it flags um our tech department our school administrators myself and other members of central office um if a child is searching something inappropriate um

126so if there's you know any type of inappropriate com content on there we are able to have access to who the student was what exact time uh they searched it what exact page they went to um and then were able to follow up on it um so we've had a couple different instances where kids are just curious and they're searching different things and others um are searching inappropriate uh you know sites trying to get into different things and it enables us to intervene uh to communicate with parents and let them know so we can make sure that their you know our school is monitoring the usage of our students devices but also families are monitoring at home at home it also enables us to have conversations with students about what is appropriate what is reliable

127information on the internet and how they should be using their school issue the chromebook device whether it's inside or outside school hours there is another piece that is a suicide screener that if students are searching high risk words or terms it will also immediately alert the district to those so we can intervene um and so we have also been able to follow up on a few of those and we're currently exploring um you know how to monitor those how best to follow up and internally in the go guardian software um it keeps track of what what the usage is the alerts that are coming up and the district response to those alerts because this is something we will be exploring over the summer and i'm just appreciating the impact that we have our kids and

128families i just wanted to make sure we got that out but we provided updates for the board as we continue to investigate and research um [Music] reports thank you first i just wanted to say that theresa and louisa and myself were at the we raised graduation last night that is a phenomenal program for those who don't know that's our adult education program here in the district provides an opportunity for students who you know are looking to complete their their high school diploma and be able to graduate which opens of course many other opportunities for them so i just want to give a little recognition to terence who's the director for that program um you know he really makes that evening special for people who have worked very hard to get to where they are so

129um i also have a statement i'd like to read and i want to preface this by saying that i am offering this statement in the spirit of transparency and partnership with everybody in the room i'm concerned about some of the things that i'm reading in the paper things i'm seeing at events things i'm hearing in meetings and i'm also hearing from parents and community members who are concerned and upset by behavior that they perceive as being increasingly political in nature and which they also believe is starting to appease the work that we're doing around this table um i think it would be an abdication of my responsibility to the institution of this board to remain silent in the face of these concerns it needs to be understood that we come to the table as a

130single unit of 11 people under the leadership and the voice of our board chair we're board members when we sit at this table and we're board members when we leave this table so our actions outside of this space reflect on the board whether they're supportive or unsupportive of our responsibilities and goals and if there is ever a question or confusion for any board member about what is appropriate we have 10 other individuals that can be asked and we have an additional resource in cave we can bring forward meetings for our board to discuss roles and responsibilities and what is appropriate as representatives of the board we've done it before and i think it's clear we need to do that again it's my hope because this has been a very challenging time we've had three new

131board members this year alone and we are obviously after tonight's presentation facing a very difficult financial situation so it is my hope that we'll come together as a board and keep the focus on our danbury public school system and the work we need to do to support this district it would be very unfortunate to permit behavior which moves away from accomplishing those goals and it would be very unfortunate for the health of this institution to see the spirit of rules selectively applied we need to come to the table in cooperation and partnership and we need to agree to operate by rules that keep it fair for everyone involved regardless of who is in charge we should not and cannot allow participation that makes this board political because at that point it's a matter of personal

132interest and we're no longer operating in the interests of our students our schools or our community thank you are there any other board member reports not so much a report we had the superintendent evaluation committee meeting and uh we didn't have so many reasons so i don't know which one but anyway there was a worksheet that we were presented with some board members were not here and did not participate in the process so what we what what happened tonight was becoming a contractual agreement for the superintendent was taking care i am proposing as of the superintendent evaluation committee that we hold off on the worksheet and discuss that in september because that worksheet has to be completed and go into the superintendent so since we did not have participation [Music] i did not get the

133added audition until late today and once i get the edit position as shippers and the debt committee the process then i will sit with the superintendent we will go over that position that was made if there's no objection to it then i bring it to the board with free on it and then it goes into his graduation so since i'm not able to do that with the commitment i would just like to postpone only the worksheet at some point in august that we can come back and have a full discussion and put that into the evaluation process no i'm asking a question so you just want to have like come together for another meeting to do those sheets and get them finished and then get them to you so you can discuss with yeah because

134the process is not going to move until i meet we finalize that fortune and i meet with the superintendent and go over that worship and i don't know what everyone i know everyone is talking vacation you know but we need for more participation in doing this or you know get committed and just go over the additions that were made and then bring it to the school board and you need to take care of it because i can talk about this episode we started the process [Music] that has to be done by uh july 1st okay so that was something i'm just saying that worksheet was very important because it was edited okay and we need to talk about that you know you might not agree with the editing part if someone else did but as

135a group we need to understand what we're [Music] so i'm just asking at some point if you know if somebody's going to throw out a date when you can get it together [Music] just if the committee is i need five people so we can go over the edit version of the worksheet [Music] i have [Music] are you around your life any other table two lessons i can't your wishes [Music] okay another one me so just fine okay i just need a little wednesdays are later but i can make pretty much i can make okay good questions thank you all okay anything else can you make it [Music] notion that the board of education convened an executive session to discuss [Music] okay