001we're going to present the board later on this present the budget again to the board later this to the committee finance committee later this evening with a deeper dive into some of the budget drivers for the 22-23 school year but between now and april we're also hoping to get out in the greater danbury community um to share with whether citywide pto uh some of our parent groups that n has been able to organize last year and also this year and continue to get feedback but mostly try to educate the community on the rationale behind the 6.2 ask and so i know anne has started to kind of map out what these what this budget cycle could look like for us in terms of the the community members that we will be inviting in uh we
002have some experience i feel like we had a reasonable reasonably good experience last year as part of this process and we want to replicate the good experiences and kind of build upon those successes and so ann if you don't mind kind of given how you facilitated last year just kind of walk the committee through uh kind of the plane and expectations for this budget season sure sure hi everyone how are you tonight great to see everybody so we have um several different target groups i think that we can ask uh to meet with them to encourage them to get their folks together um i think that's the easiest way versus just having open forums though i i'm open to just having an open forum too if we wish but i think there's um some hispanic
003groups through our frc that we can target um and those workshops would need to be done in spanish for the families to understand i think that's really important um i'd also like to see our parents seeking educational excellence the group right now we have 29 folks going through that course i'd like to see that offered on a thursday night they have already asked some of the really hard budget questions already and last and last tuesday night's workshop where we talked about um you know equity in education and equity and budget funding and things like that um and then i think we need to look at you know different times i'm not sure a first thing in the morning would work for folks but certainly an evening one and perhaps a saturday one so i think
004we have the opportunity uh for three really um well-planned uh targeted groups um to to do our forums with thank you anne yeah thank you and i i don't know if there's any feedback on kind of the presentations from last year how perhaps we maybe can improve them a little bit um i know ann has been strategic in trying to go get out into different parts of the community and make sure our families feel comfortable asking questions in small smaller spaces um i have found that that's been really productive for those families to make sure that their voice is heard but that doesn't mean we can't get better and so i'm just wondering if there's any feedback on our experiences from last year and maybe how we can kind of build upon build upon our
005experience from 2012. so one of the things we didn't do last year was really set kind of a level setting playing field for folks to understand the budget process so might this year do we want to invite in erica haynes and the folks from connecticut finance project to really kind of do a budget 101 in helping folks to understand why it's important that we advocate for the ecs formula why is it important that we have our legislators on board you know really the big picture piece of it not just that we need to go to city hall and attend the forums there or send in comments when they do their public hearing in april um but rather you know what are the nuances of the budget and how do we parse out pieces of it
006for folks to really be able to uh target their comments to and i really think you know just that education 101 um on budgeting from eric erica or anyone from connecticut school finance would be uh well worth our time to do that what do other folks think about that about this did you have something uh i i just want to say i think that's an excellent idea uh my question would be is how can we tie in the community groups with [Music] a lot of the local churches or any of the local churches involved in that list that you have and i know some of the churches are still not in full blast and i know my church um they are still doing some things on sunday uh but it's a limited uh amount so
007uh my question will be that there's a a segment of the community that we're sort of leaving out how can we sort of partner that information with the budget concerning the budget to that group of people yeah absolutely good good question mrs cooper um i would suggest um you know we in previous years probably five or six years ago when we were doing some of the work we did partner with the churches and we met with them in a coffee hour after mass and i think it wasn't your it was at new hope that we met with folks then and you know they were already there at church we provided light refreshments for them we came in and i can't even honestly tell you what we were talking to them about but they were very
008um attentive because they were there already uh for mass so that's something we certainly could do oh okay and we we got out into several churches um throughout nelly maywork i don't remember with saturday or sundays but i i do recall the brazilian church in town um new hope there was another african-american church that we also visited yes um and then i i feel like we also had an opportunity to visit some of our community centers as well i don't remember which one we did we did so i mean we can target all of those all right so um ann and michael be working together with the proposed schedule um and you know making sure that we and and i don't know the best places to kind of post these events like for example last
009night citywide pto uh volunteered to post some very important information from our high schools i know obviously we have our own facebook page but i i do think it's important that we kind of leverage all these media outlets um that we can access leverage to kind of get the word out to invite folks [Music] mr wallston i is a lead into to the next conversation that you're going to be having with us the website update um are we going to be putting a budget presentation on the website for folks to access i'm sorry i want to make sure i understand your question okay can you say that again i'm just wondering you know with regard to the website i know we're working on redoing the website and kind of updating some things is there going
010to be a presentation of the budget on the website yes something that might be narrated to walk the people through it well i didn't think about the narrating part but uh we were definitely going to put the uh budget presentation and kind of requests up there that was uh mentioned in the previous meeting right but the the narration part is something that we can relocate or perhaps like a link to the um the budget workshops or something of that nature to sort of give people a little bit of uh access there because sometimes looking at that information by itself in a presentation form is a little a little tough to digest okay enough thank you all right so if there are no more questions on that um i will share with you there that we
011do have some updates on the next two items and that is the district website in parent square our director of technology is not here this evening not because she's not here i didn't invite and didn't invite her um but ann and mike have been intimately involved in updating both of these programs for us um so i'll ask them to provide an update i'm very excited about both uh parent square and the website work is underway um there's some technical technical things that need to take place before parent square is released to the community but i'll ask ann and mike to kind of give us an update of those in those two areas thanks kevin um and i'll talk about the website first and then we can both ping pong on parent square so uh the
012website um we had a parent letter that went out yesterday that gave a bunch of updates on everything from covid to the website and in that section on the website was a survey soliciting feedback about what people want to see on the website how they're going to use it questions about mobile capabilities you know shortcuts sports schedules all that kind of stuff uh the survey is in english spanish and portuguese so the letter went out also in all three languages and the link is right there and the first thing when you get in there you select your language and you go from there um that survey will be open for a little over a week it's going to close on february 16th we're hopeful we get some good feedback um our partners it's a company
013called lumi out of hartford uh they're going to go back run the numbers on the survey and let us know what they found out and how they're going to incorporate those requests and that feedback into the design from an aesthetic standpoint it's going to look a lot more like the danbury city website than the current uh school website which i think is a big plus um you know some of the things we talked about with with the agency just right off the bat was the sort of uh that landing page is is a bit busy and there's a lot of stuff happening on it so we want to make sure that it has a just more professional aesthetic to it you know it's it's much more well organized things are there's a better logical flow
014to it and uh it doesn't seem like that everything's sort of it feels like the las vegas strip sometimes when i go on it uh so you don't have to uh you know everything's fighting for your attention so it's just going to be a lot cleaner um aesthetic and i'm very excited about it um and that will live also in my shop too so i'll be i'll be overseeing its maintenance and making sure that it always looks sharp um let's see okay so that's the website um please sheriff if you do um if you encounter folks in the community um that they can get that link off that letter and go and give feedback on the site um so the second piece here is parent square and i know we've been talking about this for
015a little while you all obviously been talking about it longer longer than i have um so we are in the process of switching over from power school um we are not switched over yet um i would say we're probably in a beta testing mode um there's a very horribly boring but essential process of data tagging going on and what this is is um because it links to power school we want to make sure that if one teacher sends a message out to her students it only goes to her students and not the student's brother who might be at another school or if they send a message to the parent that it only goes to those parents not a parent who had that teacher last year all these little quirky sort of digital logic tagging things
016that um systems like this really sort of hinge on to become effective because if we don't get that right we're worried it would just be uh become a nuisance and then people won't pay attention to it so we really want to make sure we get that get right um we've been testing it internally with some of our staff to make sure that you know the initial logic works and we expect to have that done in the coming weeks um and do you want to i'll add to it um we did send out to admin council from last summer we sent out a short video for them to look at um then over the last few months we've been doing this deep data conversion over and then we resent it to them again um just two
017weeks ago and then at admin council on thursday morning darlene from parent square will be coming in to walk folks through it to answer any questions that they have and then they'll be able to start to set up their classes all the information in their schools that's already loaded in there and then we're hoping that by the end of february we'll open it up to the parents so um we're very as mike said very excited about this um the voice is wonderful on it it's got a little peppy step kind of thing going on um when the gentleman gentlemen speaks it's it's just that kind of that drawl or you know you're getting a robocall um so hopefully that will change um a little bit of the perception of our families as well as to
018uh the new and upcoming um and for those of you that don't know about parent square one of the great things about it is if you have three children in three different schools and you're getting different robo calls or calls during the day you can elect to take those calls and put them all into a digest at night and so you're not throughout the day receiving all these calls from your schools at night pick a time that you want to deliver to your inbox or your text or email however you want to have it delivered and then you read it at your leisure however emergency alerts on school delays or cancellations or early dismissals or whatever would supersede that digest and come directly to the device that families have chosen so we did a lot
019of back work on this um in prep for bringing parent square to danbury we are taking it slow because we want to make sure that it's done right and so um the data does take a lot of time as mike said and we're almost there so we're really excited yeah one last thing opportunity that it brings our district yeah yeah thank you thank you man so there's one last stage to to have the sort of manual control and was talking about where you can get a digest instead of the daily calls folks need to go in and activate their accounts it'll verify their email there's also an iphone app that you can download and have everything stored in there but you have to go in there and toggle your settings the only way you can
020do that is once you activate your account so there's going to be a little a little push to sort of get folks to to click on the activate emails and do all that but i'm i'm i'm optimistic that once people realize that you can control the way you're getting your information people will will go and do that it's just like push notifications on your phone two or three of those come through you're very quickly and they're trying to to to manage it to make sure you don't get overwhelmed for this program are really wonderful they're easy to walk through our family liaisons are ready to help the uh families in the school and the board of ed will have their own group too so you'll all be trained on it to be able to communicate
021with one another as well did you ever clean these lenses [Music] that's going to be my next question so thank you yes uh thank you michael thank you i'm sorry yep go ahead rachel when did you say the rollout was going to be for parents mid-february we're hoping by the last week of february we'll be able to push that um that button to notify parents we do have i think it's close to uh 1800 that have already registered that have gone in and have been able to to do it just because they know it's coming and so um they're they're ready to go so that's how easy it is yeah that's exciting thank you yeah and i'll just give a little props to to our technology department one of the things that makes this possible
022is is the the student um contact data is so clean um because during covid we had to make sure we had all the proper contacts so that has made it really easy to sort of at least get the first you know the first thrust of these um data tags going because and there's certain districts where you know a kid moves he lives with dad and then he moves to mom's house and then he might be with grandma for a little bit in between or there's two dan smiths or something like this and the data gets crossed we've scrubbed all that stuff out and that's actually a tremendous tremendously huge job to do um so you know props rit department who was able to do that where you know that big that big lift is is
023largely largely through any other questions about the periscope or the website update i see um michelle and aller on now i don't know if the either one has questions so kate if if i can add um well al and michelle might be considering questions by luis as well um currently we use on school messenger as a means to communicate with our families for messaging for announcements etcetera we will parent square will replace school messenger as our primary means to communicate in terms of our robocalls etc and so our expectation is these next several months as we close out the school year we will get the school community up to speed on really benefiting from all that parent square has to offer [Music] our families whether they register preparing square or not will still receive the
024calls from the robocall system however if once they sign up for parent square they will realize the benefits whether it's in english spanish in portuguese they can begin to receive their messages um they can receive them in a catalog fashion as ann was referring to earlier where if you have particularly if you have more than one one child in the school system um and you may get various emails whether from yes yes your teach your child's teachers or your principals or the district they can be catalogued in a way uh where you could just kind of get them all the end of the week or all at the end of the day um and so it's you know a number of different options um in which you can receive this information but you can only
025do this once you register again otherwise the um the default is you would continue to get them in a fashion you did before but the parent square offers some additional options and for our families that are familiar with classroom dojo and remind we have a number of teachers across the system that are using those platforms now um parent square will allow for communications directly with your teacher in this platform um and with your principal in this platform as well so we're really trying to increase communications in that in that space um it's not necessarily you know just about the district and me pushing our communications to families um this allows for more um this really forces more communication between our teachers and our parents throughout the school community so really looking to build upon the
026gains that we've made and strength how we strengthen partnerships with our parents during the pandemic we don't want to lose that momentum when we feel like this is an opportunity for us so our teachers we will work on training our staff our principals for the remainder of this year um pushing out one way at the very least one-way communication for my office principal's offices before the school year ends we will make sure that our staff is trained uh before this year ends um so that we can open up next year um you know fully communicating with families um with what this means uh so we're really excited about parent square i know you've heard heard this from me a few times um i was um really quite like i don't know if one is the
027right word but um i was encouraged to kind of wait with the official launch just to make sure we've ran a couple of more tests and that's what mike was speaking speaking about earlier because they were really our tech department was really concerned um that we would have a couple of challenges if we started the communications before we ran ran these last number of tests so it sounds like we're talking about a couple of more weeks before we're in position to do something and then i i have um although nothing concrete kate i do have another update for you regarding the academy but i don't know if you had any more questions regarding district website budget season or parent square for that matter thanks mr wallston i just want to open this up to committee
028members and see if anybody has any questions about the things that that the staff just discussed i do actually have one question and i might have missed it because i i got on late um is the survey list like on the website that is out until february 16th i guess that time frame does do you have the ability to go online and see that survey you talk about the website survey yeah the website from earlier the um yeah it's currently linked through the letter that went out yesterday and actually don't know if there's a link on the website i'll make sure we get one up on the front page oh that would be great thank you sure just to build on what mike said um tomorrow i'll do a blast out to the community to
029all of our community partners and ask that they share it with families too um so all families will get it a couple of different times to be able to remind them to make sure that they take the survey [Music] and again parent square for parents it'll be live at the end of february or is that just staff will be live i'm sorry i was confused [Music] right so think i had mike so we are aiming for february at the very end of february we still have a little bit more data scrubbing to do and work with the admins because they need to be very comfortable in using it so that's our target is the end of the month but it potentially could go another week past that um you know depending on where the administrators
030are in being able to allocate time to get up and going yeah they're big trainings the 16th so i think a lot of that will depend on their comfort level right got it and that will i'm sorry sorry no please go ahead and that will ultimately replace remind talking points um every every other app that we use for uh school messenger at the very least and or down the road potentially a few more thank you yeah right and and we've been we've been made aware there are a number of different platforms that our teachers are using um in absence of one provided by the district our teachers are using classroom dojo teachers are using remind um and other means to communicate with their families we will be encouraging everyone to make sure that parent square
031is the only one that they're using for this form of communication so yes who will be replacing all those others okay um i don't see any other questions so feel free to continue mr wilson okay so um given that this was not part of the original agenda i just thought i'd put an asterisk danbury academy update i'm not sure why i wrote this in because i don't have anything concrete for you in terms of an update uh but i do want to re reiterate what what most people have heard in the community um so as as i think everyone is aware on this call it sounds like the talks with the summit regarding our students moving there our danbury academy moving to the summit it sounds like those talks are at a point where um
032that is no longer going to be an option for the district um i know i don't think the mayor has announced um has announced it's definitely a dead deal if you will but um it does not sound i'm not optimistic that that's going to happen the city did make us aware that they are happy to explore uh one of the options that we have talked about prior to seeking out the summit as a possible location that option was actually at danbury high school obviously that comes with some challenges but the city is certainly prepared to revisit that idea and as i think most people on this call in the community also where um the mayor had informed the community there was potentially a third option out there as well um and so at this time
033um waiting for confirmation on the two alternate options i'm hoping to hear something by the end of the week in terms of how what direction the city wants to go in in terms of a venue for a heist for new high school and in middle school space but again as of right now it does not sound like this summit is something we're going to be able to move forward on um and i'm hoping to hear something more concrete about um our concrete next steps so hopefully we will have something who knows maybe i'll have an update going into the board meeting tomorrow if not if i get something more concrete certainly i will communicate that to the committee on board sorry kate it is what it is right um i i do hope we'll we'll
034find uh we'll find some solutions together i know um this is a really great project that has a lot of potential not only for the district and our students but for the community at large so yes so hopefully we'll find a good site for it and and all of the hard work um that we've done to date um we'll we will find a venue like we we will have a danbury academy um still the venue is still to be still to be determined but i'm optimistic we're going to find the right place for our kids and for our staff and for our school community i think we have to back in the support by the city um i i'm confident we will we will find the right the right the right venue for our new
035school thank you for the update mr wilson and i appreciate your optimism because um we certainly could use more of that yes i understand [Music] all right do any committee members have any other questions about any of the subjects we covered today or any suggestions for um this committee okay any and yet i'm sorry i mean we kind of skipped over committee goals and i just was wondering if there was anything there that you had in mind it's it's i like to see that you know it's not just used for communicating out the budget and and so that it's used in other ways which is exciting but did you have anything else in mind for the committee um at the moment no i mean i think you know we could use this committee um in
036it in a number of different ways uh it would be really great to have you know sort of um [Music] i don't know if a meet-and-greet with board members would be something that folks would be amenable to but i just think that you know whatever we can do as board members to be more connected with the community whatever that looks like um this might this committee might be a really good vehicle to develop some of that agreed good thought thank you anyone else all right uh in that case i'll look for a motion to adjourn please [Music] thank you gladys can i get a second please okay thank you michelle all those in favor aye aye thank you so much and hopefully that gives you guys a little bit of time before our next meeting
037thanks for joining us you