001al russo here amy spelino here thank you participation the board welcomes public participations 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 via email in advance to dps underscore public comment underscore boe at danbury dot k12 dot ct dot us thank you lord do you have any [Music] in our schools our children and all staff must remain last this year we must resume we would be wrong to assume that parents will do the right thing getting their children tested chronically
002or safe from them at home and the children now are going to summer camp with unvaccinated children their own age and masks are not being born many children like my own step children are family members that are at high risk have comorbidities or are immunocompromised some lately only grandparents all of them are susceptible even if they vaccinated and immediately remain unvaccinated and will continue to remain unvaccinated as well children who are also suffering from renewable compromised systems such as diabetic children are particularly at risk children with special needs such as many of the spectrum disorders are also particularly at risk as their awareness of intolerance to ability to communicate symptoms of bonus following hygiene and mask wearing protocols can also be hampered by their conditions therefore if falls upon you as leaders to protect the
003most vulnerable among us by mandating masks be one in our schools personally myself and my partner are seeing blessed to this variant even though we are vaccinated and lately brought two doses with pfizer due to our pre-existing conditions one of my partner's sons is diabetic and both have behavioral neurological issues they and we are among the most vulnerable categories and we are asking for your protection keep our children masked do all you can keep them safe help the buster all remain safe the next is from kathy snow hello first i'd like to say congratulations to mr walston on becoming the danbury public school new superintendent you have big shoes to fill and i know your experience with the district and partnership with dr cosborough and past years will assist in your continued success secondly i
004was able to watch the recording of the meeting that took place on august 25th and heard some numbers as well as chairwoman cooper mentioned that there will be professional development for the board members my question for tonight is when is that going to happen as stated during that meeting there's always room for improvement and as we have a new superintendent and we'll have a new member mayor and dan barry there is time of the essence for a review of everyone's roles and responsibilities next is from alexa dawkins hi my daughter attended dhs and i saw someone post a picture on twitter of the school hallway during class exchange and i am terrified there is no room to walk the kids are shoulder to shoulder my daughter said that there was a fire drill and it
005was a disaster something has to be done about this overcrowding how is this okay with the fire department is there not a building occupancy capacity limit a hybrid model where kids alternate the days that they come into school is absolutely a good way to solve this this is insane and absolutely not safe beyond coded worries i'm concerned for the life of my child and the last is from katie cavallo i'm concerned about lunch at broadview middle school the kids are only allowed 15 minutes to get food and eat before they have to switch and allow the other group into the cafe i know there are a lot of kids that need to eat but it would be possible for more room if they're we're in the courtyard i understand that bms does not have a
006tent as other schools do and the reason is because of a tree which is at least half dead why can this tree not be cut down in order to put up a tent isn't this something we should have reviewed and taken care of over the summer we have uh two people signed up from the public to speak we're going to start with uh alfonso you can take a seat there yet okay and you have three minutes good evening my name is al robinson and uh i'm here to um discuss the images that i've seen at being very high in this particularly in the hallways of students crowded students um walking in the hallways i was very very disturbed by that very alarms i applied and very concerned about that because as you all know bamboo
007high school is the largest high school in the state of connecticut um by far the largest high school to say tonight it's not even close and had that many people crowded up in those hallways i would like to know what is the protocol for students in the hallways i thought there was you know you know arrows and people going in certain directions and what i saw there was just very concerning it seems that the number of cases since the first day of school um i'm quite certain that number's going to increase if those images continue and i hope that members of the board that signed on to the uh covent plan for opening the schools we'll be equally as concerned open the images and try to do something about that because this is about our
008kids it shouldn't be about politics or or you know you know the stuff that's going on in the media right now concerning this this deadly disease that is killing a lot of people and scaring a lot of parents um you know a lot of people talk about imagining stuff i'm what you're saying about the number of kids walking around in close proximity to each other you have a lot of people who don't want to be vaccinated a lot of people don't want to be masked and these people are walking around with people who want to live you know for me this is why remote learning is necessary because i think we have too many kids walking around this school in close each other you know the images don't lie and i'd like to thank the
009students who are providing those images i encourage you to continue to do that continue to speak out it's your righteous because your lives are going online and we won't know unless you tell us what's going on so thank you free time and good luck thank you uh yeah it looks like is that carly done what i didn't sign up to see i think she was just oh were you deciding oh i'm that's sorry thank you anyway okay if there's no one else that want to come before the board we're gonna move on with [Music] i'll make a motion that the board of education approved the items on the consent calendar exhibit through 21-98-21 have recommended second most removed by kate settlement by joseph silva any questions for concerned concerned amendments and corrections cape canetta i
010gladys cooper yes lauren daley i'm joe da silva catherine hodgson hi al russo uh next on the agenda uh you know having our educational staff here to report we're going to move on we don't have our student dress we're going to move on to the southern tech report i can get the mic on this google i know the room can hear me but i don't know about people at home good evening everyone so good evening everyone is it not working we're just going to start out this evening number one just by welcoming back our kids welcome back our staff welcoming back our parents last week we almost made it a full week without both school to my fortunate surprise we had to close school last thursday so we almost made it a full week i
011can't believe my first 10 my first week as a superintendent we had to close school already but i i'm hoping in all seriousness i'm hoping that families are safe because i do know that it impacted many of our families many of our kids in the community so certainly the district hopes that our families and our kids are in good standing and healthy and safe and certainly the district is available for them as a result of baby aisle i also just want to also share i know it's been a tough week for bus busing and transportation district y and so as part of the superintendent's report this evening we're going to have danbury high school speak to a presentation just talk about the first week of school of danbury high school we also have danbury high
012school athletics we're going to speak to this evening and then covert related absences and vaccine verification process amongst others i i just want to start out by saying i'm not sure if our parents are aware and our community is aware but i know transportation has been a challenge for us the first four or five days of school so i wanted to make sure i acknowledge that for the board and for the community this evening we have danbury public schools but also the state of connecticut this particular region and it's a nationwide issue with shortage of buses across the country we have i was hoping quite frankly that this would be a problem that will pass us by but unfortunately we have also had to deal with the shortage directly right here in danbury our bus
013company has been an amazing partner to date and they remain they continue to be an amazing partner but they are also challenged with the shortage we have talked to sta about bringing on additional buses to the fleet to help with efficiencies and buses they've informed us they are able to get the buses and so it's not about money and resources to fund the buses the challenge has been finding folks to drive the buses so that is something we are continuing to work on my understanding is myself my understanding is some of the qualifications for bus drivers has been relaxed a bit so we're hoping they're going to be an increase in available drivers for us here in danbury and hopefully those things will improve soon i've also talked so our district will continue to monitor
014and continue to work with sta one of our our bus transportation partner uh to make sure that you know we continue to stay on top of this and we'll continue to have updates for you and the board in the community as we move forward there are also things in efficiencies we can find right here in the district as in regards to transportation so now that we've almost completed five full days as a school district i'll be meeting we have our first official admin meeting tomorrow with all the principals so we'll be talking about how we can get better within the school district just in terms of our practices to try to just make sure that our buses are a little timelier than they have been so far so i just wanted the parents and the
015board to know that it's something we continue to work on um acknowledge the challenges of the first week and we look forward to some improved efficiencies over the whole whole time um i've asked our principal dan donovan to join us this evening um of course we could have asked all the principals to come in here this evening to talk about kind of the first week of school but uniquely dan is positioned a little uniquely in that we have tents erected at danbury high school he's not the only school with tents outside to feed kids however his tents are there for the purpose of feeding students for for lunch to spread you know up to eight to 900 students out there and lunch and we are going into the winter months the board might recall i
016believe it was like i know it was last spring when dr pascarelli and i presented to the board um our budget for the 21-22 school year the district has budgeted for tents for the rest of the school year up until june and that is through inclement weather and weather lighting right now inclement weather would mean we are heating the tents that we are cooling the tents we are we have closed tent open tents all throughout the school year and it comes at a significant cost dan has some options that he would like to review with the board and for the community and though although i'm certainly not asking for a solution this evening i am asking for an opportunity to talk about this further in committee but i wanted to make sure that the board
017in the community had an opportunity to hear um what the high school has been thinking about in terms of options in the event we want to pivot and consider something different so mr donovan we have a mic here and i don't know but we may need one fatigue um [Music] [Applause] nope you for having me it's not working i'm closer to that thanks rob before i get into uh talking about a couple or at least the one option that we think may work i'd like to talk about you know the opening school and how it went it was absolutely fabulous to see students back in this building i forgot what 3 400 students looks like coming in the morning maybe in the afternoon it's quite impressive for us to you know get them on the
018buses on the way home in 12 minutes you know it's impressive to see and then have them roll out you know the first day we did it we probably got 2 20 before they left and now we're down to about 2 10. so our goal is usually about 208 uh eight minutes to get all the students out about we'll get there but as we this is only you know with the day off our fifth or sixth day of school so it takes a little bit uh to get it going so we're going to continue to work on that part uh the next part is you know to address the overcrowding in denver high school denris was crowded that's why we're building another academy you're all aware of that that's why we're building stuff on the
019west side the pictures that you see on the internet as the gentleman said pictures a lot it's very crowded um normally but i can tell you this being my 16th year in this building it's not anymore or any less than any sort of school we've had every year when we come in we have to teach probably about 850 freshmen how to walk through the hallways and where to go as many of the board members they come into the building everyone uses the first ramp when they come in the first bridge coming down there's four other ways to get around we just haven't figured them out yet so we're out there with the safety advocates and administrators and teachers and everybody making our one-way stairwells and all that stuff work this year's a little bit more
020challenging because we have two grades that have not been in this building so now we have a larger amount plus some juniors that were only in the freshman academy building until march so they're not real familiar with getting around so we've done things one-way stairwells made some directional changes and we're going to monitor it probably for about another week or so that doesn't we don't see the improvement that they want it's always going to be crowded if we're not out there we're always monitoring and looking at the cameras in the school to see where our congestion points are it's always down here at the end of d3 right where the first bridge comes so we have people stationed there to try to work the traffic going through i stand at the bottom of c3 which
021is a down stairwell and we put the doors in to circle people around so now it's kind of like a little roundabout to drive through everyone's got to go a little the same direction it works pretty well actually so from there uh if it doesn't improve to our satisfaction which like as i said will take another five days or so uh to see where we're going telling kids the way teachers direct them uh you know there's a whole other bridge over here you can use or you can go downstairs there's no reason you're proud of there we'll start talking about dismissing at different times out of classes and and different populations of students whether it's you know a through l goes first or something like that we can't do grades because if i dismiss half
022the building at one point they know where to go so they're gonna stand in the hallway which calls us a bigger problem so we have to create spaces in all buildings so they can go and walk into those classrooms so those are all the things we're looking at but it is crowded we're well aware of it we're gonna monitor it closely was masks students have been doing a fabulous job with the mask you know the you know the most thing you get is this under their nose and you just go like that and they put it right back up you've got no problems with that so far uh you know they break and when you see a student walking i feel like that uh you know you know that their nast broke somewhere so we
023give them another one but they've done a nice job and i applaud the students and staff for their work for that you know the first couple of days it was really hot in the building it was tough today it was a little warm but as it cools down i'm hoping that that that changes you know comfortable and stuff you know but we have to do it and so we're there working on it lastly is the lunches that we're talking about with kev as kevin mentioned you know we have to feed approximately 850 per i think our lunch weave range from about 790 to about 8.50 it's 30 minutes to get kids in and out it's worked out pretty well the first day was a little tight so we had to make some adjustments on where
024students line up to receive their lunches and then uh the 30 minutes is what it was two years ago so that's not much of a change for them and the outside part you know as much as we said hey there's three tents outside and there's one right out all the way down at this side the students stay in the cafeteria we're looking for places we're like come outside it's starting to uh the nicer days be more students outside and inside which is a good thing more students are starting to use down here the concerns we have is inclement weather you know we've got big rain storms yeah they're covered but then the ground is soaked and one of the tents is on the grass courtyard so we couldn't use desks down there because the desks
025would sink through so we put our blue round tables out there which caught our seating a little bit but you still have adequate seating for everybody the solution that we kind of came up with changes our schedule which is something that i don't want to do because adjustments are difficult when you're talking about trying to communicate with 3 400 kids and families out there about how we're going to do it but that's the only thing i can see that i would like to pursue a little bit further if the board allows it to kevin allows it is we would have to end up serving our lunches in the classrooms allowing them to go at certain spots get their lunches kids that wanted and then go back to the classroom eat there the teachers would have
026to monitor those students because i do not have enough security guards or lunch ladies or anybody to cover those classes and then we'd have to dismiss 10 minutes early at 150 so we can contractually give our teachers their half hour lunch between 150 and 220 and it's the only way that i feel that we can get their prep in their lunch throughout the day so we're not violating their contract which is a big thing we don't want to do that or put the district in jeopardy we also looked at a solution to pay our teachers duties but that came out to about six hundred thousand dollars for the year so it really wasn't a solution for us so what it looks like is actually more instructional time for students i think the classes go from
02774 to 77 minutes off the top of my head but students will have a 20 if we want to extend that to 25 minute lunch in their room where they can talk into sodexo set up kiosks in the hallways and we'll just do it like a lunch wave and where they go and then they'll just go back to their classrooms so i i asked principal donovan to come this evening i think certainly requires further investigation and conversation so i don't i shared with dan because we've talked people talk about this for some time now but i shared with them i was really concerned about the board and the district investing these monies in intent for 10 to 15 minutes we're talking the board might recall we budgeted almost 700 000 for tents and we may
028want to revisit that number and revisit this option and see if there are other ways that perhaps we can reinvest those moneys but i think if in in committee we can have an opportunity to review in more detail kind of see what our options are what the impact would be on the community to see if this is a vital option for us but that is certainly my recommendation thank you thank you thank you just a question and all credit again for managing an unmanageable situation and mr robinson's comment was well taken in his private just to for claire to say i've read two articles one of the news times one in the north hour they made it abundantly clear we are not allowed to do distance already this year correct it is barred by the
029state so we have no other option but to be here full time all right those things are not acknowledged in other words if we're hybrid or dl any game we're not physically in the building we'll not count to the 180 so in other words we don't have an option correct yeah thank you thank you donna thank you sir thank you and so just to say the consistency i also asked our athletic director at this opportunity to join us this evening there was actually an impact on busing and transportation on our extracurricular and athletic program i'm not suggesting we're not asking the boyfriend solution but i just wanted to make the board and the community aware of the impact that's happened on our extracurricular activities chip has done an amazing job finding solutions so i just
030want to employ you probably but we thought it was important to make the community aware because it does impact many of our families and potentially some of our kids programming the bus issue for you know let me just say as far as athletics is concerned uh we're an educational based program and what comes first as far as busing and i made this pretty clear to the bus company i certainly understand the need to handle the daily routes for kids getting back and forth to school and what i what what i'm going to tell you about is that we're a program that is absolutely huge in comparison you hear stories i've just heard a few people talk about the size of the high school the crushing of facilities it's the same in athletics i mean where
031we work with what we have but from a standpoint of growth and size we have six maybe 700 athletes it hasn't really balanced yet but we're about that many for the fall and with that comes approximately 350 interscholastic athletic events during them during the fall 20 teams half of those teams half of those events of 350 160 give or take are on the road meaning we need buses not to mention because of the we have beautiful facilities don't get me wrong but they're not we don't have enough for the size of our program so what we have to do is we have to bus our kids all around the city of danbury to get to practice facilities because we just can't put 700 kids in a two to five block at the end at the
032end of the school day and that leads us to the bus issue so not only do we depend on 160 trips to send our kids down to lower fairfield county to participate we deal with as many as 10 trips a week just to get our kids to different parts of the to the town to the city so on august 11th i get an email from sda and say you have to make a decision we're not going to be able to give you buses at 2 30 anymore we can only give you buses at 1 o'clock and 4 o'clock that particular time i i don't know what i want probably blank because we build our program based on 230 departures kids go out they play at 4 o'clock teams go out they go to different parts
033of the city for practice we build it at 2 30. now they're telling us hey wait a minute i can only give you the bus company says we can only give you about 50 trips out of the 160. so we are left three weeks ago attempting to find transportation so the point being is that we're we're in trouble uh we're managing it uh as i told uh superintendent this afternoon we're looking at two week blocks so for the next two weeks i know i can get the kids to where they need to go but after that it becomes real tricky real sticky uh from now to october 10th i have to find somewhere between 25 and 30 carriers to pick up trips for us okay normal trips as an example might cost us a couple
034hundred dollars to go to stanford but when you go to outside carriers now that could quadruple okay and find them because the of the bus issues across the country all the school districts across connecticut new york westchester county have gobbled up all the transportation carriers so we're all out there fighting each other for space what could happen we're not going to look try not to let it happen but i don't want to be faced with a situation that we may have to say to our teams you can't go that would be a real problem and that's what i wanted to bring forward across the superintendent to frank connolly about three weeks ago it's a real issue for us uh like i said we're managing it uh we're trying to get through and sda has been
035absolutely wonderful in fact uh we started out with about 110 trips that we needed we're down to probably 50 60 because they've been able to move things and help us that could happen the rest of the way but not likely so as the superintendent said i think it's important that you hear that uh maybe have some discussions to to maybe figure a way or maybe just talk about it because we can impact up to six to seven hundred kids here at any time and uh as again i want to point out that sda has been over backwards to support us with this and they're you know training the drivers and doing all that kind of things but it may not be enough and we felt this a little bit last spring when norwalk stanford we're
036starting to feel it if our companies were able to get us through and then the door has fallen off the hinges because bridgeport was just sold last week the three schools down there they don't have buses now for kids to go to their games that's what their company just told i'm afraid i don't want that to happen to us so that's kind of what we're dealing with at this particular point and i'm very hopeful that we can make it work but it's it's going to be a difficult task chair thank you um and chip and i just want to say in front of the community and the board chip has been an amazing advocate for our kids in our program he's been faced like dan like all of our principals quite frankly in the district
037been faced with some impossible tasks these last couple of weeks in particular chip i want to thank you for trying to find ways to make sure our kids have access to these programs to program so thank you so much thank you so talking about difficult uh i'll just transition to number three and holder related absences and vaccine verification process do you have a mic uh nobody ever really loud so kim thompson is going to walk us through this process which is become another another challenge for the district for us to work for this is like one of those bad jokes how many administrators did it take to turn on and wait yeah does it work all right i'm just going to yell can i yell is that all right can you hear me okay over
038there yes okay um so as many of you know um not all that long ago um the governor issued an executive order that is now requiring us to obtain um records of vaccinations so vaccination cards from those of our employees who have been vaccinated or to inquire as to whether or not they are in progress or to discuss with them exemptions and to process requests for certain kinds of exemptions or ultimately for those who are not fully vaccinated to engage in testing so it's a it's a pretty complicated executive order it's got a lot of steps to it and not a lot of guidance so um i somebody told me recently this really funny um analogy about when you're in the room with a large elephant just bite take a bite of the elephant and
039start so that's what we have done we started today a mass email went out and i included all of you on it today that went to all hands in danbury public schools including apparently a couple people who don't work for us anymore so go figure but what that did was it asked people to do two things one to go into our new super duper recently launched employee portal um which has a few bugs anybody listening at home has a few bugs in it that we're trying to work out but it asks you to go in and log into the employee portal that employee portal as an aside is going to be a very robust place where we will have things like your employment history your pay history um your time off all kinds of things
040and information about your insurance so right now it houses a form that asks you to follow a couple of prompts telling us what your status is and then part two is if you are fully vaccinated or have a vaccination in progress to email to us to dps vaccine at danbury.k12.ct.us a copy of your vaccine card so we are in the process actually you may have seen me typing we are in the process of now moving those cards into our system and trying to get a handle on how many people um or if you have some sort of a covid related illness so our protocols have changed somewhat um and they're changing based on the guidance that we're getting for example if you are fully vaccinated and you have m exposure you are no longer required
041to quarantine um so it has a chart in it that walks everyone through all of the eventualities which had to think of as many as we could and pulled many from the reentry plan that is sitting on our website as well and we have modified slightly some of our aesop automated absence categories so that our employees know what to do if they have code like symptoms depending on their vaccine status so um it starts to get a little complicated um but we've tried to push out as many charts and and helpful guidelines as we can until everybody kind of becomes more accustomed to the manner in which we're going to operate so those two things are all ongoing right now and you'll find that my team is is busy trying to figure out the best
042way to corral those information to make sure that we keep it as confidential as possible and to try to give our staff and our employees and our substitutes and our itinerant workers and our vendor folks to give everybody as much guidance as we can about what we need to see and as we round the bend to the end of the month it will become tighter and tighter because no one will be allowed to come to work without meeting one of these criteria so um we're busy trying to craft the pyramid for that as well question we did it really successful we managed kelly i think was chief in charge of organizing the the uh herding of the cats in the sky a really successful clinic yes it may sound straight is there a way to
043use the information you have from that to go okay this sixty-five percent of this group we know all these people yeah we do what i mean we're trying to kind of cross purposes here um we also can under certain circumstances access vans and i know kathy has had a lot of conversations with kara party about what the scope is of what we can access as well so um and i know um as recently as last week kathy pushed out some advice to folks who lost their vaccine cards and how they can get new cards so i mean anybody who's kind of been out in the world you're starting to see you're going to have to produce it um and so people i think have have you know looked to us for some guidance on how
044do they get another copy or that kind of thing so yes short answers were cross referenced thank you thank god for computers i'll say that thank you thank you and so the next one i want to speak to enroll in update i know the board had an interest in how enrollment was going in the district so i will start off the enrollment update by saying to the board in the community that danbury remains popular amongst families seeking a place to live in connecticut last year october 1st we had a reported enrollment to the state of 11 660. that was as of october 1st last year um as of september 8th we are at 11 711 and we have pending more students with outstanding paperwork but we anticipate the majority of those students will be joining
045us and typically this time of year next week and the week after we typically get an additional wave of students and families coming into danbury so we anticipated an additional hundred so that'll that'll be a plus of we're anticipating at least 400 to 450 additional students by october 1st so last year again we were at 11 660. we're expecting close to 12 000 another 450 students by october 1st of course we may continue to receive families we always continue to get another rush of students in january and february um but in terms of what we report to the state those numbers don't become official until the following october so that's my long way of saying danbury remains it continues to be popular and we continue to open our doors and we will continue to advocate
046for all states in our schools so let me just also update the board about the solar project i believe an update at our last meeting there was an interest by the city to have solar panels installed at our schools throughout the throughout schools in the district that project is moving forward i just wanted to make it more aware we are trying to meet um the middle of the month deadline at the latest that will be submitted by the end of september we are working with the city the city helps us with the grant submission so there's kind of like a relay a relay if you will we kind of hand the baton to the city and submit a number of materials and documents to the city and then the city follows up the kind of
047respects that is needed for the actual grant and then we also work with the providers to provide that um any outstanding information that the district does not have so we don't anticipate any issues with the submission but just wanted to make the board aware and we'll come back with the finance submission probably that's right for you i just wanted to make you aware that the city and us and the vendor we've all been partnered on this project and anticipate that it'll be so many months and last but not least i wanted to speak to the two gentlemen in front of me this evening the new gentleman from the district in front of me one we have the board might recall we had two important positions leaving us for another district this summer our direct finance
048left us this summer our assistant director of finance also left us this summer and we have been fortunate enough to find two capable talented gentlemen in the audience one joining us from higher education in the state of connecticut and another one joining us from a school district in upper connecticut worked on a municipal side and the school business child so i'll start with mr eduardo miranda mr moreno comes from us from higher education in the hartford area strong background in operations but also a strong background in finance and mba in finance we are very excited to be bringing him aboard we've this position again i had mentioned earlier used to be the assistant finance director we have changed the title number one to make a little bit more enticing a little bit more appealing but
049we were that um encouraged by mr miranda's talents and we just we couldn't let him go and so mr miranda had an opportunity to meet with the interview committees all the interview committees um fell in love with him we met with we met with the two candidates as well we fell in love with her and so we decided we just have to figure out a way to make this work we just felt like he was too important of a fit and too good of a fit to let him get away we made the offer attractive enough to encourage i think i shook his hand really hard encourage him to join us here in danbury i mean he accepted um and so i just want to start out by interim introducing our new deputy director of
050finance on this position we'll be reporting to our chief finance director officer i'll be introducing shortly but i want to start by introducing this eduardo mourinho miranda thank you thank you for joining us this evening thank you guys thank you and secondly mr johnstein is going to be our new chief finance officer and in this role uh one eduardo miranda will be reporting to him uh we quite frankly i think we feel like we're just in a amazing position right now to find this talent at this time of the year in the summer just before school john is currently working in a district in upper connecticut prior to that he has worked in high performing districts as assistant finance director and director of finance we are really fortunate in that john is currently working as
051the finance director on the city side and a finance director on the district side so we have someone who's going to help us navigate the budgeting process when that time comes john and i have had an opportunity to talk several times before this evening the same thing with mr miranda i think they're both going to be amazing fits to our team amazing fits of our school community so without further ado and also introduce mr john sping and welcome to danbury and it's a pleasure to have you here thank you very much i'm absolutely it's an honor to be here our privilege uh to work i'm very excited to get started thank you thank you thank you and so it's miss cooper that is mr lawson yes um we also need to talk about the primary
052mental health um i jumped over jake see i was so excited to introduce ed and john jump right over the ground thank you kelly yes okay thank you um congratulations both eduardo and john i didn't mean to steal away but i didn't want to lose the opportunity to chat um as the board of education knows we have applied for the primary mental health program grant um for well over 10 years as far back i could find records with ten years we call this uh our special friends program it's currently running at three of our elementary schools uh park avenue moore street and ais and the purpose of this grant is to hire in what we call child associates or there are children special friends to serve as a tier 2 intervention to provide social emotional
053and behavioral support to students that we see are at risk for having any of those precursors to academic um failure and so we want to intervene with them we engage the parents we provide one-on-one uh counseling support through that child associate position as well as some small group social skills um we also do a parent uh evening where we provide an educational program uh for parents on how to support their children at home and we also do some nightly activities that are ice cream pizza party and so forth to bring parents and children into the school environment after school i have to give credit to our pupil services staff our social workers and psychologists in the three of these schools are the primary contacts to identify the students that could benefit from this and then
054work with our child associates to give some support and intervention um so as a priority and alliance school district we are allowed to apply for the grant again um it is a 20 000 grant one of the terms or conditions of this grant is that the district also supports with six thousand dollars and we have done this historically um throughout the grant process and we have budgeted for that this year see um and so we want to we just want to make sure that we informed everyone of our intent to move forward with this application i don't know if there's any questions um so just to update you on where we are um we have had a banner year um so far today we have brought in 189 certified staff members and 98 non-certified staff
055members um and those are folks that we have brought in we have fully processed um one of the silver linings of coved was it had us all virtual in onboarding so we've been able to really run really quickly and i think more efficiently we had some temporary help in helped my crew push all of these folks through the system and so we are looking now at very few gaps we still have a couple of holes to fill um but we're doing pretty well we continue to struggle in all the usual areas um special education teachers continue to to pose some hardship for us and finding enough of them and paraprofessionals i think we have 75 open spots right now so if anyone knows a paraprofessional this is a an advertisement for anyone interested in working
056in the danbury public schools but those are the areas that will continue to work now on trying to go out see if we can find some more candidates to fill some of those really hard to fill but really important spots for our special needs kids so that will kind of drop our attention so i'm hoping to be able to bring you as the weeks unfold not only some um vaccination information but also some demographic information so we can continue to look at the profile of our workforce um and see how we do kind of year over year but so far um i think i speak for all the administrators and saying that we have some really terrific people across the board in all categories and we've been very excited to bring them in and see
057them get started in person which has been great thank you [Music] you would like for the board the entire board to hear this as a workshop and really understand it and and uh sort of think about it because the winter months is getting closer and we need to do this before the kids you know we're going to start getting outside we have a time frame that you're going to bring this report forward yes thank you for the questions cougar i think by the latest we need to get back by the first board meeting in october and this will give us time to meet in committee and have an opportunity for the board to discuss and kind of digest what they heard from principal donovan tonight and i think we should double position us for the
058first board meeting i am trying to finalize a date with kay to do more self-evaluation we need to get that done before uh the end of the year so i haven't finalized the date yet but i will try to finalize without any and in that that presentation should be a part when we talk about roles in responsibility and professional development but the main thing is to do board certification that needs to be done at least once okay and then the next project that we are working on and i'm trying to get set up with our sites and facility committee is to really sit down and talk about as a board looking at our structures how we can sort of improve we get and prove too many of our schools because they're overcrowded but have some
059type of a vision and support to talk about or notice another middle school or elementary school okay it won't be you know something but i think we need to start talking about so i haven't finalized that yet with recycling facility committee along with our superintendent but some of us some of the things that uh uh sort of uh i have been had a discussion with other board members so um that's our end of my report i don't know if anybody has any questions madam chair if i can just circle back towards uh the lunch issue at gamery high school uh we're spending 600 000 intense mr wilson so we're budgeted for a little over six hundred thousand dollars expense this the first month for the leasing district y is close to 70 000 my was
060we need to modify the teacher's contract and put the kids in classrooms for 600 000. can we do that instead of the tense or do we need both resources i'm sorry uh to modify the teacher's contract for teachers in the classroom so we can have class lunch in the classrooms with students it's approximately six hundred thousand now could we take we could recoup some of the tent money and put it towards the teachers to keep the kids in the classrooms for lunch or do we require both resources okay no we will not need both so the the option that principal donning donovan was referring to if our if our students were to eat in the classroom we would certainly have to be with the teachers as a balkan unit to talk about the impact on
061their work day however we would not be feeding kids in the cafeteria so the tents would no longer be required however we would be talking to the boston unit to just talk about what does this mean to their workday so that they had mentioned earlier we still have to make sure they get their lunch and their prep and so that's why it would be important for the students to leave earlier this school day and i think that's what donovan was referring to earlier um there may be an impact in terms of the cost but it would not cost us nearly as much money as we're talking about uh and perhaps no cost but that's something that needs to be discussed i'm sorry i thought i heard a 600 000 option to make the teachers hole
062in their contract to have them monitored classrooms during lunch no uh no no we would not yeah that would not be quite okay they may ask for it now though [Music] yes so i wanted to make the board aware that the t-val committee is meeting on monday the 13th in an effort to hopefully finalize the teach evaluation plan for the 21-22 school year we the district is required to submit its final plan no later than october 1st in our last meeting i believe it was the end of august we had charged some teachers and administrators on the team to come back with some recommendations for the evaluation committee for the upcoming school year um this this the 2021 school year we had essentially great priorities in our student engagement parent engagement and supporting social emotional
063social providing social emotional support the students and staff the state has has asked districts to continue without those three priorities except this time this time it counts toward the final evaluation and so from the administrators and the teachers leadership right now i feel like we're on solid ground in terms of uh the plan and moving forward with that as a plan as a district there's just a couple of particular examples that the community need to work on and so for our next board meeting we will be recommended we will have a recommended plan for the board to approve hopefully um and we'll be submitting that plan but within october yes i think we [Music] i mean all three of us don't have to represent the board but yes you know if you'd like to invite
064one of us yes um like amy was at the last meeting i mean i'm signed up to go to the one-on-one yes thank you okay no that's fine i'm not sure if i'm still on it was it t valentina i don't know a motion to adjourn and i would like to thank you for coming here and being a part of our meeting and to be a part of our family uh we might fight a little bit but we still want to go but it's good thank you for coming and welcome thank you i need your motion to adjourn this meeting two move seconds f all in favor good night [Applause] you