10-27-21 Danbury Board of Education Meeting

001okay sure thing joseph britton absent rachel celeski here kate canetta here goddess cooper here lauren daly absent i'm here oh sorry there's lauren now uh joe da silva here catherine hodgkin absent richard genelli here catherine molinaro here albert russo spelino here okay thank you we're going to move on down to public participation and after you do the public participation you read our script for comments okay [Applause] the board welcomes public participation and asks that comments be limited to three minutes the public may offer objective comments of school operations and programs that concern them the board will not permit any expression of personal complaints or defamatory comments about board of education personnel and students nor against any person connected with the danbury public school system danbury residents are also invited to send brief comments and questions

002via email in advance to dps underscore public comment underscore b-o-e danbury dot k-12 dot ct dot us thank you kids uh since we don't have any comments uh that came in tonight we're going to move around with public participation we have one person that has signed to speak tonight kathy snow hi jim i'm excited to be here in person so i've been watching um on heather's tv so i appreciate that but i just had a couple a couple of things and the first one may have already been addressed and i just haven't seen it so i apologize in advance if it was it's just to clarify if the temporary policies are still in effect i think that policy 6114.81 about emergency suspension of policy during the pandemic and if the superintendent still has the temporary

003powers the statement ended with consulting with the board of ed that the temporary powers granted to the superintendent shall remain in effect for the duration of the 2020-2021 school year or until repealed by the school board so i'm just wondering if that has been repealed or does the superintendent still have those powers and then my second thing is about visitors in the buildings in the essential visitor forum as i know kevin is very aware there are a lot of questions around this form who fills it out when is it needed and my biggest concern is the inconsistency about who is allowed in the buildings for example we're all here tonight i understand some border bed members are going to go see the new kindergarten my husband and i are going to i'm sorry i'm going

004to be here tomorrow helping out with picture day but my husband and i cannot go see my son's school counselor even outside of school hours we were told the district doesn't allow that so i just appreciate if something were put together in writing to help clarify and make it consistent thank you thank you [Applause] okay what you do to consecutive i'll make a motion that the board of education approved the items on the consent calendar exhibits 21-110 through 21-113 as recommended promotion made by kate could i hear a second second segment by aaron and his questions discussion on that motion sent kevin yes rachel uh just to clarify on the october 13th minutes in my pto report it sounds like i'm talking about the same pto when there's um i was really talking about three

005the first was the gauge the dhs pto the second ais pto and the third was the citywide pto just to clarify there thank you okay thank you we'll make those corrections okay are there any other corrections to be made okay kate could you do the roll call excuse me i do have a correction to make on the calendar um i think it says november no i was gonna make that clarification when we got down to that on november the 23rd is our board meeting the last board meeting in november it states in the package that is the 21st right okay so just know on your package that's the 23rd instead of 21st because i think the 21st is on a sunday or something okay okay so we're just okay thank you any other kate doodle

006rolfer rachel chaleski aye kate canetta i gladys cooper yes um lauren daley aye joe da silva rich danelli bye kathy molinaro hi al russo hi amy spelino hi thank you all motionless okay thank you mr um watson as we move before we get to the act tonight sure um thank you miss cooper so given uh given the work with our committee meetings most recently a finance committee meeting i know we'll have often times a motion following my vacs chairperson cooper and mr ginelli if we have a finance committee meetings previous or prior to the second board meeting so the board has an opportunity to see the report and i thought it would be more appropriate that the committee or the board the board has an opportunity to review the report first for the entire board

007before actually going to the motion and voting on it um and it's also my wonder if it might not be a good practice for all of the committees i know all of them don't necessarily yield into a vote in a motion but perhaps we should have the committee reports first and then emotions actually so i just wanted to recommend that to clarify so you're saying just a monthly meeting for committees before an action item yeah i'm sorry so just to clarify um i had requested to chairperson group and mr jannelli that we schedule a finance meetings at least the week prior to the second board meeting of the month before the board approves the monthly reports other committees don't necessarily yield an emotion but it might be a good practice for us to review the

008chair committed reports prior to any motions just so there's any discussion anything might have an impact on the motion at least there's some discussion first i think it's certainly appropriate for the finance community to do it and it might not be a bad practice for all that they're doing first i just wanted to share that as consideration for the world so my question after you want mr janella to do it give a brief uh report from the finance committee and then we can turn it over to our finance company all right i think that would be helpful for the board but again kevin was only saying that basically we have a schedule i i understand that i understand the schedule right but i'm saying before we vote on the action item which you're doing the

009financial report tonight you're committing math so do you want to give a brief summary of what we committed to discuss and then we act on the action outcome all right so in roman numeral 15 um typically the board shared their committee reports really almost at the end and i'm recommending to move up the committee reports prior to motion so that there's a discussion you can catch everyone up and then go to your vote sure discussion possibly would it be more advantageous to have our our cfo uh give the contents of his monthly statement sure absolutely absolutely rich no problem okay you know the the finance committee met i think was tuesday of this week the meeting was for the three-month ending september 30th there was a and she received the attack a brief description to

010some of the events through the three months john went through and indicated that he didn't see at this particular point any issues that were really an anomaly here uh and that there were certain items that would continue to to watch as we call the ticket ticket movers such as the health insurance essentially is one of the items line numbers or expenditures that you know that would never really sure how much it's going to be because they're self-insured and also with the catch-up of the coding in the last two years we have to watch that closely so with that i'll add it on to john to go through and elaborate a little bit more thank you very much um the reports in your package on page 12 so just very briefly what i what i like

011to do in the beginning of the year like this is just let you know if something if things are happening the way you plan them to be when you adopted your budget or if something else was happening and the message because it's really too early to compare uh to budgets and things like that we'll do that as we get further along in a year but each of the each of the programs and services that you budgeted to be put in place are in place and they're running as planned i did mention a couple of things although you had that in mind i thought it was worth talking about um you heard about health insurance but also the tents that we plan to use here we're not going to use as many tents i think there

012are three that are left up they'll be up for a while you had budgeted seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars uh it turns out we'll only be paying about four hundred thousand dollars so there's a savings there and then we also discussed at the committee food cost and what's going on there um we'll get molten met with um sodexo a food management company um the other day and we'll have we'll be watching that closely if there's anything significant we'll certainly put it in our report so we can see what's happening here the idea being that if our if there are things that happen in the service program um we want you to know early and not not towards the end of the year we don't expect there will be but it's it's good to keep

013our eyes on stuff thank you mr thank you jeff a question i don't know there's so much for john i it might be for kevin i'm from food and school lunch and kevin you and i spoke about this a couple months ago or maybe a month ago i heard from a lot of parents once baseball started for my son i started running into lots of parents and lots of kids talking about school lunch both quality and quantity portion size was much lower much smaller in their perception than past years and quality was down i think you would mention you were talking this at exo is that anything doing with the cost are those two things connected it should not be um and so we were john and i actually just had a meeting with with

014sodexo yesterday it was really kind of a get to know the new superintendent meeting which i certainly appreciated as part of the meeting they had shared their challenges with uh production and production costs and i guess those are challenges that i think are across most industries right now and that and that it has also had an impact on supply as well i mean so menus may change at the last minute as a result of production and so that's those things are certainly understandable quality we should not compromise on quality under any circumstance and certainly that's something we made clear in the meeting i've also asked sodexo to have a representative we have a representative from sodexo that works in the district and so i have asked him to come and speak to our parents make

015sure there's a process in place in which our parents from 912 68 and k5 have more say in what's in the menu make sure that menu is representative of our school community obviously the fda has guidelines on what can and cannot be served but but our parents and our kids our students should have more of a say in what should go into the menu um and my hope is if once they have a saying what is driving the menu then they'll be a little bit more happier with what's actually you know giving to the food every day and then if we're not happy with sodexo then that's a different story right but at least give them an opportunity to have a say so in the menu so that's something that we'll be working on um

016very soon so i want to speak i'm going to start with uh citywide pto and ask if they'll entertain the idea of having to dexo club and speak to the families and then we will try to put together some committees apparently there's already a representation group representative group 912 but we'll make sure we have one in place with six eight and then also k5 we'll get that started so that next year we have this in place thank you gladys i have a question yes okay i have a question about the uh the food cost and the contract is there a cap on food cost in the contract okay thank you that's what i mean any other questions i'm not sure okay go ahead if this is a good time but um again i wanted to

017say about the finance that i appreciate the summary that came along with the packet i think monthly meetings are a good idea for the finance committee um i was again able to watch and so i'm pretty up to speed on on what happened um but i'm a little confused about you know having the report before the action item i think it just in my opinion it's a little confusing i think you know there's a place for discussion um within the action item and then another place for board report and comments and questions but i did also want to say i think it's a good idea i know this was mentioned at the committee meeting to report regularly on grant money i don't think that happened in the past um as i understand it there really

018wasn't a need um but i feel you know that amount has grown over the years and um you know we should we should be made aware of what's happening with grants um and i just i look forward to you know in open early discussions for the next budget season thank if you are no other discussions uh question concerning our finance we'll move on to the action honor kate could you uh do the action hiding please i'll make a motion that the board of education approved the september 2021 financial report in accordance with exhibit 21-114 did i hear a second second by air in the questions discussion saying that we move on to kate we can cooper yes lauren daly hi joe da silva rich danelli hi kathy molinaro hi al russo hi amy spolino hi

019thank you emotion is so care next is the superintendent's report thank you mr peter so i i wanted to make sure we had an opportunity to just kind of number one make the board aware of how the school year is going now that we've kind of got off over our transportation hurdles although not totally but just wanted to share how things are going in our classrooms impact on the social emotional throughout our school district and just kind of overall general operation that was necessary given it's almost november just kind of get kind of a state of how danbury what kind of shape we're in right now number one i've had numerous conversations with administrators across the district teachers across the district particularly at our lower levels in our elementary schools but this is not to

020say that i have not heard from representative representatives from middle school in high school a great deal over these last couple of weeks the the challenge is we we anticipated some challenges last year you might recall during the budget season and as part of the sf3 presentations we have talked about the need for school climate specialists because we are anticipating increased concerns with behavior we had anticipated social emotional challenges and so we had requested additional social workers and guidance counselors across the system and in in those regards we hired additional people what we did not anticipate with the social emotional challenges across the system we certainly anticipated academic gaps that would need to be filled you may you might recall words like acceleration is going to be necessary when we come back and we were

021prepared to accelerate in every regard our curriculum department was ready and armed and ready to support teachers and provide coaching and intervention and everywhere in the system where we could and when we got back and we opened up our doors we were reminded that our kids would have not been in school full time in two and a half years i'm sorry in a year and a half and so we had a middle school we have a middle school with sixth and seventh graders who have never been in middle school before we have k one and two and our k one and two great none of them not kindergarten not first grade or second grade has had a full year of school yet and then our high school dan had you know spoke to those realities

022here when we talked about the challenges of overcrowding and you know taking that picture with kids walking down the that one hallway no one knows the building right no one knew the building in the beginning of the school year um and and we are feeling the impact of that of that change right now i was in a meeting today the advisory council to the superintendent it's representations of teachers across the school district a very informative group much like our school citywide pto and so very informative and they really give the superintendent a pulse of what's going on in the school community um and frankly they just reiterated the challenges that i've heard district-wide i'm i'm sharing this with you for two reasons one to share with you how our staff is feeling right now they

023are overwhelmed our administrators are overwhelmed and our and our kids are it's probably overwhelming from them because they haven't been in school in so long and so some of you might recall some of the social media challenges and i mean literally challenges like go do something bad and videotape it and so our kids have been out of school and you know all the routines typically associated with school they have not been exposed to it in some time now and it's it's taken us some time to get to get them used to being back in the building i'm confident that we will get there i reminded the acs group the advisory council to the superintendent group today reminded them how challenging it was from march to june with the implementation of teaching kids remotely but quite

024frankly i'm not aware of any district that did it better than us no one um i reminded them the challenge that we had when we thought we were going to open our doors last september um and we figured out a way to make it work until january um it that was challenging for all of us for our families who learned at the last minute for our teachers who had to pivot at the last minute for kids who had to pivot at the last minute but we figured it out um we're not alone right now i mean you can turn on you can google it and find out whether it's in this region in the state in this country everyone has similar challenges um i'm i'm optimistic that our staff will also figure it out but

025this does not mean does not mean that we don't need help right now so i john had just shared some of the savings that are that will be represented in those tent savings um and i'm just using that as an example i'm not necessarily talking about necessarily from those savings but the cabinet and i will be looking at our budget we will be looking at the commitments that we made as part of our sf3 commitments by exit two commitments and any penny that's left over from cares to revisit those budgets to figure out how we can resource this school district while everyone is in such a needy situation right now this is not to suggest good things are not happening and at the beginning of the school year i recall being in our brookfield site

026in the kindergarten building um where kids quite frankly were in crisis right and this is the first week of school and they had no idea what school was like now typically when you drop off your kindergarten baby kids are crying and have a hard time being removed from home anyway that was escalated times 20 it felt like um and and i'm a high school guy so i couldn't stay long anyway so but but i but i went back and and and the point being i know the teachers are not necessarily feeling this but and our administrators are probably not feeling this um but it's getting better right because i was in the buildings beginning of the year then a couple weeks later and then now and it's our schools are getting better but this is

027not to say they don't need help um so um the cabinet that i we're trying to figure out how to do how to deploy our resources in the way that they're going to get that help i am poor john the guy ed ed and john they've been here for a month and maybe one to one or two hours and they are looking at every single staff member in the district every penny that we've committed to and i've asked them to look at it in different ways to make sure that we can redeploy our resources in ways it's going to help our school system specifically in classrooms with teachers and the principals that have readily available so i just wanted to make you aware that this is happening some things that we're working on um i

028anticipate at our next board meeting we will be able to share more specifically what that would look like and any plans that we have but i just wanted to make you aware that that is happening we're planning on working on this um and it does impact some of the candidates we've made so you might recall those power points uh with all of those i itemize um positions we're looking to hire a lot of those positions we have not been able to hire because we can't find them right so those are some of the positions and opportunities that we need to revisit um so just just to name a few just name a few um and they were interventionists and i'm looking at carousel i can't help but remember this like we had we had committed

029to a bunch of interventions we couldn't find them and so we pivoted at some school at the middle school level and told them that they can hire school climate specialists which was to support behaviors in the building just as an example but there's there's a lot of work for us to do so that we can resource our buildings a little bit better right now um and we will also of course be mindful of the financial cliff that we've all talked about and warned ourselves of kim and john have also been looking at agencies tech agencies to also help with staffing and i feel optimistic that that's also going to provide some immediate help but we don't have to worry about long-term commitments to staff so again i just wanted to make the board aware of

030that at the same time there are some good things happening i mentioned one just about the incremental growth that has taken place since we've been back in school but two academically there are some good things happening um challenges that i'm going to ask kelly to speak to but you know that doesn't mean that we're not also trying to find ways to support staff across the system and then just some of the operational challenges which you know we started off the school year with busing but you've also heard our challenges around testing and i wanted to provide an update for you in those regards as well so if it's okay i'll start with um start with kara and then we'll go to kelly and kim and john sure um so so to mention some of the

031things that kevin uh discussed in terms of uh challenges social social emotional needs of students um it was clear within the first couple weeks of school that we needed to go back and replace all the pacing that we worked on all summer and in the spring to get ready for this year um you know it was almost the perfect storm if you will in terms of the curriculum world in the readiness we've had all this additional infusion of funding which to buy programs that we've had our eye on for years and it was the perfect time to finally get those in but maybe not so so much of the perfect time to roll them out at the beginning of the school year and so we pulled back on in some areas all of our plans

032are still in play i'll talk a little bit about some of the professional development that the teachers are engaged in um but we're really trying to uh listen to the needs of what's up the teachers uh and understand what's going on with the students and trying to support the administrators through this process but that said we still have taken on quite a bit we are still rolling out our k2 program with illustrative math to really build that solid foundational component for mathematics going a little bit slower than we initially anticipated but we're still moving that forward we've implemented the k5 dibbles assessment um and i think i've mentioned some of these in a previous meeting but it was takes a lot of training and application and working with the teachers to um understand this new

033assessment uh the devil's assumption is that dynamic indicators and basic early literacy skills um very critical right now especially because we're trying to assess where students are you know given the fact that we've had some disruption um and it's an assessment that will help the teachers make better literacy decision skills literacy decision making in the classroom we've combined that with the reader program which is a new foundational literacy program as well so we have a lot going on at the k2 and k3 level um and this is also where some of our greatest challenges are in terms of behaviors with students and the sort of the need so we're going slowly but we're still moving forward uh and folks are excited about the quality of the curriculum uh and the materials we just need to

034tear back a little bit and make sure that we're meeting the needs of our of our teachers and our students we have uh we're rolling out in grades three through five uh stem and science uh programming and we're also going slow with that some of our coaches are doing road shows in the buildings which is great modeling how we are going to implement how we teach students we haven't had a lot of science at the elementary levels we're really trying to build a culture around science and excitement and to do that we're going into classrooms and we're modeling with teachers and working with teachers to show them how to build that love for science and hands-on engagement so that is going again a little bit slower than we anticipated but we're moving that forward we

035have been working with the administrators with our with the future design school if you remember uh this group worked with future design school for a little bit we started to talk about the academy and the transformation uh they're a very dynamic group and they're helping to facilitate conversations to build our k-12 continuum as we build out the porch for the graduates there's a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on there very exciting and of course we're still engaging in the academy action plan so we're you know now into this with some of our training with our ninth grade teachers we're continuing to develop the programmatic uh course overviews for what each pathway will have in terms of the electives the course sequencing and the graduation requirements and um again that's kind of work that the curriculum

036development team is working on in the background that we're excited about so lots happening in the curriculum world um but we're taking some things a little bit slower than we anticipated but we're still looking forward thank you oh kevin can i mention the right to read legislation yes you just don't get that on the table so in the spring of last year passed in a most recent round of legislation and implementer bill there was a bill that was passed called the right to read legislation and so it's kind of early on right now to determine how this is going to affect danbury but basically this is the state's effort to have a kind of statewide coordination with local school districts on foundational reading to get behind the science of reading and it's going to impact

037districts in the way that it's going to determine the curriculum uh in schools it'll also determine the professional development and it can also determine levels of support and training that the state will say districts are required to to engage in if you're not meeting certain criteria by particularly very little great right and so the state has developed a consortium has named a consortium to begin to vet research based reading programs they will name five by 2022 july 1st 2022 and districts will have to back in to the to one of those five programs there is an option for a waiver we don't know what that waiver requirement looks like just yet and we expect to hear more in the spring about what that will entail as a district thank you okay sure uh so just

038to take back on that i'll start with uh some curricular and academic things just not being for the board um your special education and speech and language pathologists um from preschool all the way through high school um we'll be doing an extensive reading training which maybe backs off of this new legislation and working gallingham so all of the staff members will be trained in that model approach it's a specific systematic essential way to teach students that are struggling particularly with phonics or phonemic awareness and reading so we're excited to bring that to them we're launching it in november right on our professional development today to support the social emotional needs we're doing a training for people services staff on cognitive behavioral therapy which is an approach of how to support students that are going through

039any different type of trauma anxiety of school avoidance acting out aggression behavior and that will give some additional tools and resources to our staff um on how to work with some of the issues that we're seeing in schools today um so just regarding quickly some of the social emotional behavioral things that we're seeing i think it's really important to remember that our kids haven't been in school in several years many of our early learners were kind of robbed of the early childhood experience because of cloven and because of the pandemic so when you walk in a you know elementary school you're seeing kindergarten through second grade really learning how to do school for the first time and so that has put an immense stress and pressure on our teachers and our administrators um and on

040top of that we're understaffed we're short staff we don't have subs in the building we're under south as far as higher educators so not only are they dealing with more than what's usual at the start of the school year but they're covering an extra lunch duty they're subbing for a teacher during their prep time and so all of that is just really adding and contributing um to the pressures that the staff are facing um so we're working together as a team to try to alleviate each one of those issues in the best way that we can um so i just think we need an acknowledgement of the teachers and our admin team our non-certified staff members of the stressors that are on their plate and a little bit of the okay that social emotional has

041to come first if kids are not doing okay we need to pause sorry they're reading curriculum or the curriculum whatever it may need to be to kind of regroup reset and then move forward we all know kids don't learn unless they're in a good place to learn and so while you know high academic standards and high achievement for all of our kids is always our primary goal we also need to be sensitive to the realities of what they're going through today um and so we're trying to find that fearful balance that we're still keeping those high expectations but we're also kind of stopping in the moment re-teaching re-planning and regrouping um and reaching out um some of our families are needing some additional support services and silver time and then come up with different different

042community agencies and so forth so um i definitely uh reiterate everything everyone before we have said we're seeing um an improvement since the start of the school year um but it's still a lot and it's felt like we're going through this process for a long time and i think that's just adding to the heightened feelings and emotions of some of our staff so we'll continue to work through and strategize how we can best support them we're trying to elicit and engage their feedback and make sure that um you know okay um okay so operations um the the biggest thing that i've been talking to you about has been the compliance with the executive order we're in real good shape um we've got a testing a weekly testing pull this down to just about 150 it

043drops every week as more and more people are starting to get their second doses and become fully vaccinated so that's actually um making life in our suite a little bit more beautiful because they're not so many people we open the testing window to saturdays as well so folks can now test saturday sunday monday with monday test results or sunday monday tuesday with test results just that additional day on weekend has given people an opportunity to relax a little bit find time to get a test that's convenient and get the results submitted into us in a timely way so we've seen a lot of kind of reduction in stress and pressure on that right now what we're seeing if anything is some delayed test results from a few of the testing locations and so we're working

044i've been working with the union particularly teachers union on some ways we might be able to resolve that and still be in compliance with the executive order so we're looking constantly ways to make this a little bit more manageable for those people that for whatever reason might be in that weekly testing pool i did receive earlier this week some communication from the state department of education they have opened a survey asking districts to please report on their um vaccination percentages and testing so we're now going to take all of this data we've been gathering over the last four weeks and implemented into kind of a response to the testing window or the the survey window that the state has opened this week so we'll be able to get that and we're in real good shape

045to be able to comply with that so we will go ahead and check that boxes we can continue to monitor as we go through time what we're seeing in addition to kind of regular absences which have been super high i think last friday we saw something like 133 teachers out we're seeing high high absences which i think is a reflection of what we've all been talking about here not only is it illness starting to go around in that season but we're also seeing people are really some are struggling in addition to that those folks who have not got their test incomplete are also absences that are going into the system because they can't come to work if they don't know the test results so this has all made um finding a subservice i think all

046the more critical and the cabinet team has really put a priority on that um john and i have worked through presentations from the two big industry leaders in that subservice provision and we're poised to ask a few more questions and make some decisions about whether that's something we can implement we would see a slow increase but an increase nonetheless in our ability to fill gaps and with these agencies as they start to bring on onboard some additional subs in the areas of teachers care professionals secretaries and we're hoping some nursing staff those are the four areas where we have really been hit pretty hard particularly nurses we've been hit very hard and we have exhausted our access to temporary agencies no one has anyone left and so we're all kind of fighting for this limited

047pool of folks even on a temporary basis so we're hopeful that using service may be able to give us access to a wider pool and maybe a more efficiently deployed pool as well so that's something that we've placed a priority on lastly the one thing i do want to mention is several years ago many of you remember when we brought on an eap program an employee assistance program one component of that that we did bring on is the provision of kind of workshops and presentation and professional development and so from time to time including monthly christine goodsolar insurance coordinator is forwarding out information to all of our employees um anybody who works here whether they're in the plan or health insurance plan or not has access to these wellness videos tips newsletters so we're going

048to look at seeing if we can't roll out some social emotional health modules maybe during pd time to help our employees to kind of get through this period of time i think what we're all finding is this has really been hard and so if we can leverage some of those dollars that are set aside with that plan for providing some more resources for folks to access either with us or on their own time that's something we're going to prioritize for the coming weeks thank you yes i don't know whether this is a question for kim for kevin somebody should i meet anybody nurses i had i ran into a friend at a supermarket i don't know where their kid goes to school so i will apologize off the bat they were very disconcerted because their

049child got sick at school and they got a call and there was no nurse in the building they were really really not happy now i suggest that they obviously contact beaver brook and maybe they did maybe they didn't i have no idea but i promised i would ask the question it was their understanding their nurse had been pulled out of that building be sent someplace else is that happening and if so why i can address that um so we are looking to reupload nurses some of our buildings have multiple nurses in them um and so when there is an absence or a shortage we do need to occasionally pull a nurse and we have had to do that quite a bit this year i they were under the impression their their school only has one

050nurse and their nurse was sent someplace else they were very not happy there have been a handful of occasions this year that we have had one nurse covering two buildings and it's based on kavanaugh looks at it very very carefully and making sure that someone is floating between the two buildings when we need to again not ideal um but in this situation it is something that we have had to do it is done on a rare occasion but we have had to do it um so i would need to look into the particulars of that situation and talk there are certain buildings based on the medical needs of kids in that building that that we cannot do that there are other buildings that we have let's say two buildings on one campus then we can

051have a nurse that covers both buildings with another person that's a mediterranean administrator that would be good to me in the absence cathy o'dowd is also um filling in i don't i think there might have been one day this year that she has not been a small nurse um so she is also stepping into those kind of things i don't want to say it's never happened it's happened rarely but it is something that we have had to do which is why we're reaching out to agencies to elicit i mean logically king street there's two buildings you can have one nurse mill ridge and west side i don't think they were on a double campus school because i i want to say i think they're a great plane or sadly rough i know they're that into

052town it just struck me as odd that there's no nurse in one building you pull them out of a building they're already assigned to to put them in another building so we're going to have a building without a nurse in it anyway that are that that require consistent nursing supervision and so if there is a situation in which we have to pull a nurse we have to look at the medical needs of the students in that building and and that's where kathy's position to make the best decision um so again i'm not minimizing we need more purposes um we need more support um but we have had to make those decisions this year and that's the first time we've ever had to do that right again you can't manufacture nurses out of whole month again

053okay thank you so at least it's rare yes yeah just like to comment and congratulate kevin and his cabinet i've had very positive remarks made about the social emotional uh use of tenants for the kids up to high school and i want to congratulate kevin and again kevin for utilizing the gymnasiums so we can uh possibly redeploy those additional 300 000 resources in other social emotional areas so well job well done sir thank you thank you are there any other questions okay uh we have our student rep and i apologize uh we want her to come out just thank you for allowing me to present and speak on behalf of the alternative center for excellence this week a student and staff are participating in spirit week where each day we have fun by dressing up

054as the following days twin day decades day cover wars by guidance groups monster day and costume day themes were voted on my students using the google form today was cover and it was a really nice day you know it's nice to see you like my friends and you know other students you know um like be close with each other ace and you know get all excited about you know what we're gonna wear and it's it's nice that we do that too you know um on october 26 during professional development the development staff participated in a workshop regarding generation z their skills challenges and attributes ace guidance groups participated in a halloween recreation challenge each guidance group worked together and teams to create a halloween themed classroom door that will be judged by our main office

055staff social worker and guidance counselor the winning guidance group will receive booking safari ace would like to publicly recognize student the september student of the month aboard winners i'm sorry we're a little late dominic perez and spencer roberts we would also like to congratulate spencer and risa diaz for earning the ace of hearts awards for caring the ace of spades awards is for hard work when we're earned by the ace of spades award award was earned by kade palace andrew lattimore and chris pies congratulations to all of you for a great month of september thank you for allowing me to share what's going on ace and stay safe stay safe everyone and stay strong thank you and on behalf of the board thank you uh for uh coming and bringing the report to us for

056the alternative son thank you again you're late thank you have a good night so just um i believe everyone has in their packets the superintendent goals for the 21-22 school year just looking at previous previous board board agenda items it appears depending on the year the goals were shared with the board in the board meeting prior to divorce consideration and then there was a motion on the subsequent board meeting so in your packet you may see at least exhibit 2-1-1-5 and there are not terribly different from the process and structure of previous years so there's a focus on student learning and achievement college and career readiness for all students fiscal responsibility planning for growth and talent acquisition organizational systems for learning opportunity and equity and those are the three uh big areas and then within

057there you'll see um goals under those three those three those three areas and so just ask the board i know if there are any questions this evening um clarifying questions this evening certainly we here to answer them because the cabinet and i put the goals together so this is for information and then at our next uh board meeting we could have an overall open discussion about this and um looking forward and was moved forward as a board after the election uh then the committee was coming together the four boy would come together and then we will draw up our goals and see how those goals will be in line with the superintendent goes that has always been the practice so hopefully after the election weekend and we get through the christmas holidays and the first

058of the year we can come together as a crew okay is that okay with everyone okay so can we not ask questions now okay or do you want to hold the questions um so this is coming to a vote at our next meeting not a vote okay okay no no vote okay okay so we'll have an opportunity to do this yes okay yes great thank you okay it's all but you know everybody's in favor i'm looking forward to um 2022 what our direction should be okay um i don't have um anything to report but um there's quite a few questions we went over the calvin the correction and the governor i i sort of wanted to ask mr uh washington to sort of bring us up to date and talk briefly about security because so

059many things are happening in a different area of the country as far as kids with guns dysentery shootings and what is the protocol it comes to a lockdown for our school i know that we have a protocol in place but i think we haven't talked about that in a long time and we don't ever know what can happen in any of our schools so could you just briefly tell us about the football sure sure my pleasures so so one all of our schools are covered or no cove it's still required to have monthly drills to ensure the safety of the building so those drills can be typical fire drills and and or those can also be drills for lockdown drills and unfortunately we from time to time we have to have a lockdown drill we

060may be notified by the police that something has happened in the school community or in some rare instances we may have something happen in the school that requires a lockdown but the point being monthly all of our principals are required to have some type of drill to make sure that the school the students the staff is ready in the event of emergency and so i i just want to reiterate that the school you know despite our time away from the building uh full-time the staff is still participating in drills to make sure we're prepared for real emergency um that that remains unchanged for us in the school district for sure and and and i think in time miss hoover as we move to as the cabinet and i move toward developing and revisiting our district

061our strategic plan to 2022 23 and beyond you know our school climate which was certainly highlighted in the first iteration of the strategic plan but we'll definitely revisiting that and being a little bit even more strategic about school safety for perhaps some type of audit for our school district to make sure we are maximizing our grant dollars because right now we are a recipient of a secure school security grant which will get a significant reimbursement those monies and john as well one of the many things i've already put in john's office and in his lap and making sure that we have a plan in place for to maximize these grant money security grant monies um to to make sure we have high quality security for all of our schools so this could be anything from

062cameras this could be anything from upgrades and cameras upgrades and for our schools and communications it could be vestibules you know walking into our school areas i believe some of some of our schools already have have been outfitted with new vegetables you know to to to help with school security we will have some type of audit done with these monies to get an assessment for the entire district and then come up with a security plan to make sure all of our buildings are safe so that's definitely something that we prioritize against the school district thank you now next uh my question would be and maybe some of the other members might be able to answer as i go to the early learning center on granville avenue which is a beautiful facility and who is responsible

063for putting a sign there to make people that are flying up and down that street and parents are crossing the street with the little ones there's nothing when they come from white street to turn up granville avenue or come down osborne street to say that there's there's children so i don't know if the city is responsible for that because it's very important and it's not just for granville avenue it's for all of our schools but most of the people are not used to that school being the church being a school and they just come 100 percent at homeowner and the parents are trying to cross over to get to the school so my question is who's responsible making sure there's some type of sign that says that you know parents of course when we have

064small kids or whatever this sign has to say yeah sure yes that starts with the chief police okay okay thank you i didn't know he's our chief traffic guy also okay he will filter it down so kelly how do we make sure that that happens i certainly want to thank all of our board members because for the last year and a half we all have been on all kinds of schedules and and being at the meetings and being here to support uh what we could do as elected officials i really want to thank over who has done a beautiful job and putting together our minutes you know we all have different talents and i couldn't do the minutes to save my life but thank you over you do a beautiful job okay are there any

065other questions um mr uh watson do you have anything you want to move forward none from my side okay i'm sorry just a question before i'm sorry committee's report or whatever not a committee but um just a question as to um the progress with our transportation um we're closing in on quarter one of the school year so is that still a work in progress i know kids are still on some really long bus routes so the reality is there's still parents out there who are still asking same question and the answer is it's two-fold one it's gotten a lot better to the point where it's not the overwhelming item in my office in our respective offices and we're worried about how late kids are getting home every day that's not the same kind of issues

066as we had before but now i think we're at a point where we're comparing it to regular school and we know we're not as efficient as when regular school goes so we're certainly better i don't know how much better we're going to get right now um just kind of given the bus shortage the bus shortage challenge has not been resolved when when we partnered when we contracted with sta we received additional buses but we didn't receive the additional drivers with those buses and we we just have a shortage that we're still dealing with and then when they have one or two people that are out if they do um the routes are combined and the routes are longer for kids and it's it's daily um i i anticipated we would have challenged with testing sca

067has done an amazing job making sure tests are available for their drivers my understanding is on monday they have the results on wednesday they bring the test results to them so it's actually been less of an issue as i as i had anticipated i'm happy to report that they still have normal absences the way we do as an organization and when they do given that they're already stretched you know we feel it as a school district with with all of that said it it's so much better than two months at the beginning of the school year um but i'm hoping we can still find some efficiencies within how we do things to see if we can't make it even better i think a lot of our folks are still reluctant to just let all the

068kids get on the bus because we're trying to avoid everyone gathering in one space but as a result of time and just timeliness and being efficient i don't think we have a choice if we're going to get kids in the time to get home in a timely fashion so there's things some other things we're still working on any other questions okay amy do you wanna no i'm gonna wait now you wanna you wanna wait man yeah okay okay okay if there's uh superintendent doesn't have anything else on the agenda and there's no other communications or comments i need to entertain a motion to enter into executive session [Music] the board convened an executive session for the purpose of discussing negotiations with dsaa administrators and the teamsters union local 677 international brotherhood of teamsters school lunch

069personnel with possible action in public session second promotion made by l seconded by joe all in favor all right motion self-care take a break if someone needs a