001so after the presentation she found a little bit more disconnecting and just sort of disorienting uh at the last meeting uh right after we conclude the workshop we're then going to go to the finance committee meeting uh to do what we have to do for that so uh with that being said we'll start and i'll turn it over to courtney okay thanks okay um i was just gonna text doctors out but i'm gonna get myself up and share my screen okay is everybody seeing that yes okay great and i'm getting a little feedback about it i think it should be okay um okay so i'll get started and and we'll jump in um i'm right here courtney oh good okay we had problems getting on with uh i don't know with some technology if i
002drop off i apologize oh i'm glad you're here okay is gladys are we ready to go yeah yes yes yes okay we already started dr sam all right oh i'm sorry thank you i've had problems getting on this no uh we've been having off and on we knew the school was having a problem today too yeah yeah um okay so um we've done some modifications to the budgets which um since we talked last week we've put some narratives in to help out uh we go tonight the best way to do it is sort of the way we did it last year courtney will go through and talk about the dollars and cents and some of the avenues and then we'll get to the end and um you know follow up with uh questions and and
003so forth at that time um for the board's perspective um and i know you know um you know it takes so much just to move the budget um over from this year moving forward and that's in five and a half percent thereabouts um and um the the remainder of the money the the other it's just under 10 total uh percentage increase was there to do some of the improvements that we need and i and i keep getting asked well what if you don't get the money well you know what happened last year in the years past i think one of the things that this board has helped and my staff has done is that we found grants and other ways of moving money around but the bottom line is this the money that you see
004in this budget our goal is to bring students to grade level or no more than two grade levels beneath the the teaching level that students are placed that permits the teachers to do small groups effectively and when we don't have those kinds of resources then instead of being two grade levels those of you that have no teachers and have friends they're three and four grade levels below maybe more because there's gaps um given we've been out since last march so i worry about it so the money in his budget to get to ten percent beyond the five and a half thereabouts is is to give us an opportunity to provide the kind of curriculum enrichment and support so the youngsters can access the standards at the grade level and the materials effectively and that's what
005we're going to attempt to do um yes there's money available from the feds but that can't be supplemented um this money here that's coming from the easter tube is very specifically to be used for um mitigating any of the coronavirus um uh challenges that we've had so we'll be able to do some braiding uh there's no question but uh what you're gonna see tonight is sort of tonight in terms of what we believe we need so um i won't talk anymore i know there's a meeting after this with the finance meeting the group um that can delve into it some more but i think courtney has done a great job of organizing it in a way that um is easier to uh follow along uh courtney please go ahead okay thank you dr sal um
006so i just first want to thank the board for taking the time i know it's a series of meetings and i really appreciate that and i want to thank rich and and al and kate and rachel who gave me feedback throughout the process and it it was so helpful for me to hear from you all to be able to help develop what cabinet had already developed so that we could come in and talk to you about it i want to thank cabinet for um the patients with me as we put it together their their vision and their priorities i'm really excited to present it to you tonight so um the first slide um is something that i combined from a few slides that erica had that i think tells a really nice story and you'll
007notice it's dated but i kept everything consistent with what one year data so that we could see a consistent story and this is really just showing you this nice visual about not nice for us but how the connecticut population you know in general the blue bars has declined it's gone down over these this ten years that i'm showing you here or eight years so everybody and danbury's the red line we're going up in a complete inverse so it tells that story that erica started to build for us or has been building for us about the ecs funding those many years ago when they established that metric it was to get us those dollars that we should have had on that day over 10 years later though and they do adjust every year so a few
008people have asked about this they do adjust every year to make an adjustment for enrollment poverty sped and l there's a formula and erica goes over it and it's a little complicated for me to understand but the point being it is still yesterday's dollars um and we are still growing um and that was because connecticut you know they really couldn't just take all the funding back right away okay from the suburban visa um and still leave what was needed in those schools and there was the funding challenge that connecticut had at the time so that partially explains why we had the ecs base and every year we get an eight alliance increment um but it's as a result of this story which is what's driving some of our requests here because as we know our
009population is going up has gone up it is going up and so further and this is you know again the story we all know but it's a nice visual to show that when you look at similar districts and neighboring districts danbury has quite a large a lot higher percentage of low-income families a much much bigger share of english learners and a similar share of special education students and the same thing now look at down here where i'm highlighting for our neighboring districts it's just you know a stark very alarm very big contrast between our percent low income and our direct neighbors and our percent english learners and why we point that out is obviously you know it costs more money to um educate children that are living in poverty as evidenced by a lot of
010research and english learners and special education students and so we're going to reiterate that nearly 60 percent of our our kids are classified as low income one in four english learners and we approach one and eight in need of special needs services and that means that not only is our population growing but increasingly it's more expensive to appropriately educate our population of kids and this this was a i liked this slide because i think it also shows you know something that's changed over a decade that we really have to be cognizant of we've more than doubled on the percent of students with free and reduced lunch over the last 10 years again that exacerbates the needs we're not the same school district we were 10 years ago and this slide is really highlighting our higher
011percentage of ell students which we're going to get into with our needs as you'll see and and you got introduced to when the gusto presented um and aguirre gusto is here with us tonight as well um the needs for the english learners um and and he describes it as we're on a path to success you know we're are we there no we're on a path to there so there's been some investments you know that we've done that he's asking for but there's more that's needed and he'll we'll talk to that but this is showing that compare this is going lower dollar per pupil the higher dollar per pupil for these comparable areas so danbury east hartford meredith and waterbury with a similar makeup but we're more than you know almost more than almost double just
012meridian and norwalk's alpine population so and this was this is dated so this is 1719 numbers so you know we've increased even since then just to make the point that we have a very diverse community as we all know and and um that takes resources um and then this is showing um a graph for the special education population again this was um sorry i don't think your slides are advancing right they're not oh they're not oh okay thank you okay well that would be that's that's i'm sorry okay let me go back can you see the one about um special ed here we're on the the that's where we left off right there that's the last stop okay i'm so sorry okay now you can see this one yeah the blue car okay thank you
013kara so so good that good that you told me because now you could just see eventually what i just described it's it's almost double and it's pretty you know significant when you see it visually with the bars representing where we've changed with um low-income students in the district and then this was the slide i was talking about with our um high percentage of ell learners so it's going from lower dollar per pupil spend to higher dollar per google spend and you know daybreak is all the way over here but the percentages are representing percent of l students so even though we're almost double meriden and norwalk which are the highest next population you know our investment per pupil is lower and then this is a special education slide to show that you know when you
014cross with enrollment and the investment over time we we know we haven't necessarily kept pace with the enrollment increase although we are meeting our member moe um kelly works every you know she submits the idea application and we're meeting our moe which requires that we are constantly increasing the investment in special ed but this shows that we haven't really kept pace with the increased need uh as demonstrated by our enrollment change um and then again showing just a break out of total funding for people per pupil compared to norwalk and stanford with a breakout of town and state contribution um and we know these stories i just like the visual this one was from um erica's slides with showing the state share we just showed it a little bit differently so you can see you
015know that although danbury is lower um the state share is quite low relative to some of our other neighboring districts or connecticut partner districts so now i'm just i'm getting into the budget so what does all that mean for our budget you know rich pointed out and i did add to this slide which i thought it was an interesting point to look at going back all of these years you know we've consistently requested a certain amount of funding um and this last year it was 10.53 and this year it's about 9.82 just under for a budget request of 149 million but if you added up the difference between the board approved budget and the city approved budget going back over these years it amounts to about 48 million dollars that we didn't receive year over
016year from our request and that's just the difference between the board approved and the city approved amounts so courtney may i ask a question it's joe um joe i think gladys is trying to jump in here uh what you need to request at the start of the meeting that we hold our questions okay i'll hold it to the end i just got the feedback that my last presentation was a little disjointed and so i apologize no problem yeah okay but please remember it so we can we can get to it but yeah this is just our standard chart of what we asked for and then and then what what the board approved and then what we ultimately received and the the total amount is just the difference over time of the city approved and the
017the board the board approved in the city approved and this is our total ask it's a little different than what i sent from the detailed spreadsheets that i sent on friday because we had some modifications and after this meeting tonight i'll send out the update for the detail as well um so our prior year funding was 135 million 686 000 and this is a breakout just a high level of our budget request and we've done it similarly to how you know i worked with rich and he thought to be clear you know what we did is we broke out the maintenance budget and then by type our different investment requests i'm calling them but our different needs and asks for what we're requesting and each of these has a slide with the total dollar amount
018and the information behind it so for example our maintenance budget is about seven million and dr sal mentioned that's about five percent and i mentioned before normally in a maintenance budget you'd see three percent or under three if you're able to reprioritize some items we did do some reprioritizing within our maintenance budget because we've been able to get some savings on fuel and some other partnerships that we have with the city but even after that reprioritizing it's about a five percent increase just on our maintenance budget due to the related nature of the funding request from last year um just the cost of collective bargaining and and the contractual agreements as well as busing services and all those pieces and i'll show you the detail we have a request for 945 000 for graduation requirements
019and kindergarten and elementary enrollment we have a 1.2 million dollar um request for student social emotional intervention and um it's one of our bigger requests here and you'll remember parts of it from our previous many i guess a couple iterations a couple times it's come up it's a restored request and then um special education and related services 425k curricular programming and support 1.8 million english learner programming a million and learning loss mitigation for summer school 250 000 and then some district operations the bulk of this is a technology agreement that's expired and i'll explain that but it's 575k so those all get to our nine point eight percent nine point eight two percent ask our total funding ask of three point thirteen point three and you'll recognize we went in over this like six million
020dollar number in detail the other day it was 6.4 we had a few meetings and we modified the request and so now it's 6.1 so it's um rich also asked if i just break break out for us just to see it in a simpler way to carry forward budget you know what's a restoration and what is a mandate so this is the 13.3 just broken out along those lines um and here are our budget priorities with a nice picture of a student so we're investing in teachers we're funding state required curriculum updates and supports we're we're grossly behind in that we're funding student support student technology to accommodate the much-needed expanded need that you know kara's team has put in place this year during you know remote learning and distance learning we're enhancing students social
021emotional interventions and we'll we'll talk a little more about that because people had some questions about what does that really mean and we're keeping our obligations to mandated contractual increases for services and meeting and maintaining required levels of services for english learners fed and sped students but not just meeting and maintaining like we're like i think to reiterate what augusta said we're on a path you know and and cara really wanted to highlight as part of this budget you know this isn't just this year's budget we're building the of a graduate we're building the future academies we're we're putting forward a budget that helps us get into place where we can be successful you know not just next year but but in the upcoming years so the first category was the 945k invest in teachers
022so just specifically it's three elementary teachers um for our general regular teachers and it's projected makeup growth for kindergarten it's that's two of them and then one is for um regular general enrollment increase so what does that mean that means there were there was a group of uh about 140 elementary kids that we would have expected to show up this year that didn't probably be because of the pandemic maybe their parents kept them in pre-k and we think they'll be a bump up in kindergarten and the challenge there is that they might not just all show up in perfect blocks of 20 at their school so that we have to plan for that um you know not knowing where they'll they'll be exactly and we've prioritized that with the regis registration group so we can
023get a better sense of that earlier on high school um is a business health social studies and half a music teacher that's to bring the music teacher up to full time and then for kindergarten and special ed their kindergarten teachers and high school teachers for special education um and then you know to describe the need this is again investing in teachers so the basic elementary ask is just to meet class size requirements in our contract and what the board aspires to have us achieve in elementary schools for danbury high school we all know that the graduation requirements have changed and getting the class of up to speed so now we're on the sophomore class requires adding teachers so the ad of the three and three and a half fte does do that it gets us
024this next year's cohort closer to needing those graduation requirements which changed from 25 21 to 25. um and there's a benchmark for how many students you know need that assistance and that's why uh we needed to add the additional teachers to make that special education there's growing enrollment in the pre-k class and expected to roll up to kindergarten and as well as the new uh court decision increasing the age through 22 is anticipated to have an additional i think 100 students i'm going to have kelly clarify that at the end when we go through but there is a number that she's projecting associated with that that ties into that need so again it's staffing to me class size graduation requirements and mandated age increase for special education services the next category is student social emotional
025intervention and support and and what is this so it's a big investment in social emotional intervention to be able to more appropriately deal with the emotional needs of our kids which increasingly over time um been more challenging and also particularly during covid and so um this has been a need that's been put up in the past there's there's um assisted three principles for the elementaries um supported in the other elementary schools so that's at shelter rock stadley and ellsworth and there is a threshold i don't have my notes here of i think 350 or more that determined the assistant principal being located at those schools and the remaining schools would have a student behavioral specialist which is a per diem staff member to do restorative work with the students there's also a request for a
026psychologist or a social worker at pembroke um and left the student and three student behavior specialists one at each middle school an additional school counselor and that school counselor and a multi-year budget grows to be one for each year so that by the end of three years each middle school will have an additional counselor and a high school dean to address behavior and emotional needs and two additional student behavior specialists a parent liaison and two school counselors and again that's a three year goal so two two and two to get to six school counselors by the year 2023 and so why do we need why do we need this investment in student supports and social emotional health um number one to respond in the ask requirements for appropriate student engagement and discipline practices number two
027to improve the overall student outcomes by assisting students to make positive choices and third to reinforce the positive school behavior and contribute to overall social emotional well-being and goals of the school and provide support using restorative practices and enable the leadership staff within the school to better utilize their time as instructional leaders so that what does that mean kevin described it really well if there's a child with a behavior issue and it's not escalated to the point where it requires a heavier more intensive intervention with a social worker or another staff member it's a behavior problem a lot of times the principal at the school or an administrator gets involved and it takes away from their day leaving the building and leading instruction for it could be up to half a day to you know
028be engaged in a problem this will enable not just support of the administrative staff but also enable support for students that you know need a little bit of a guide they need to be back in the class appropriately and and maybe they're hoping to identify additional reasons because restorative practices are looking at additional reasons why the behavior is occurring and so helping as part of a team support to get the kid back in the class so they they're not being disruptive so um it's it's spread out throughout it's a it's a consistent policy spread out throughout the whole district at every every um grade level the the next request is for 424 000 and 157 dollars and it's for one speech pathologist one ot or pt an assistant director for special ed and related services
029two nurses and a preschool secretary at granville the preschool secretary we didn't hire this year at greenville but it's needed so we put it in the budget for the upcoming year um the two nurses i don't i don't know that we have to say um why we need the nurses but i will because um you know kathy is phenomenal and we could clone her and make five more people but we can't so we she desperately needs additional support one would be at dhs and that was there in the past i believe um so you know obviously the population of kids we need an additional nurse there and then the other one would be support for mandated non-public schools we don't have enough nurses in the non-public schools and overall support for kathy so where she
030needs um backup staff or coverage or other things throughout the district so desperate need special the assistant director for special item this is you know kelly managing a very very very large system many supervisors and this has been a need that's been put forward in the past as well um and it's a school-based position and then the otp and speech-language pathologists you know we've kelly's been increasing these to meet the growing demands um as well as the growing enrollment as we mentioned before um and um this is just adding to that effort and so it's a multi-year approach because you can't just add everybody at once so she's doing it over multiple years again this aligns with the ask me ask requirements um and service levels that are needed to provide mandated support and and
031english okay so oops i'm gonna move this out of the way english uh a second language esl and el english learners it's a 915 000 investment you know i think the slides earlier speak for themselves about our population and the budget has spoken for you know our lack of ability to invest appropriately and so this two psyop coaches are just restoring two that we had before because right now they're sharing one site coach amongst three middle schools um there the certified student assessor is needed to appropriately place assess and place kids in the appropriate school setting or with the appropriate services and then this big 300k is parody between um the l programs at rogers park and broadview so it's saying that now the kids would be able with this investment of uh three teachers
032and 3.2 paras the kids would be able to go to their home school rather than just going to um at rogers park um and so yeah that's putting forward that investment again and in addition talking about the population and the need for a certain student-to-teacher ratio to keep pace um again moving in the right direction five um bilingual spanish and portuguese teachers at westside morris as king street primary and then a shared uh teacher at salt street and king street intermediate as well as new curricula and an expansion to the elg program that um tara and gustavo invested about 250 000 in and again um i'm not going to do justice to it because they've done some amazing things so we'll get to that um and so addressing increased enrollment um continuing efforts to provide
033meaningful content matter instruction and providing appropriate bilingual education not only is it the right thing to do but it's the connecticut mandate that uh ell students receive up to 30 months of bilingual education if they're in a school with at least 20 students who speak the same non-english native language and need assistance learning english so again connecticut bilingual law initial identification requirements we're required to offer bilingual education programs we must follow the required home language survey guidelines for initial identification and placement and also for kids to be at their home school so um you know the be able to not travel far away from their home school they can go to rogers park or broadview depending on where they live this as as augusto said and it will say again moving in the right direction
034the theory of action we're getting to one to 65 other comparable districts of our size target much lower ratios of one to fifty you know but this is moving us towards the right direction in addition um it's supporting the new need of supporting the implementation of new english language pld curriculum that's the el achieve and it's the blueprint for serving ell students throughout the day and it's systematic eld instruction a dedicated time that provides explicit language instruction organized by level of proficiency so appropriate for the student student and language instruction for content learning so this is explicit instruction to support el english learners in understanding and using language necessary for their grade level work really important like augusto has explained before that you know levels of proficiency matter when you assess and then the appropriate
035learning for the levels and the bigger chess investment you'll achieve from what i hear has been um good and carol will talk more about that curricular and programming support so this is 19.2 staff and 1.8 million dollars and it's to ensure equity align curricular programming and support across the district um we've seen good success with um you know what what kerosene has been able to do with the funding we were able to get during the pandemic and our curricular budget has been very very low and um hasn't really supported the curricular needs of students so this gets us closer to there one the first thing you'll see here is technology and student classroom support this is giving us um not buying 14 full-time it's converting 14 part-time staff into full-time staff and adding a full-time
036staff at the high school to support all of the technology needs for teachers and students and buildings the k-12 fine and applied arts health and special area individual is a crucial need that is lacking we don't have anybody that organizes throughout the district for fine and applied arts and the cabinet identified that as a big priority and the student intervention that says building on the um investment that was made this year and seeing great success with intervention with students they're part-timers and this doubles the amount that we would we're doing an intervention from 13 to 10 and that again they're part-timers and adding a humanities literacy coach to guide work at the middle school level um and then we also are requesting support for summer school training and it's a blank on the end but
037this is basically adding hours to some of our administrators in the summer because we need them to work on getting things up to speed for the upcoming year and also for summer school and then there's some non-personnel curricular development training curricular resources and then hardware and software that we just don't have in the budget that we should have in the budget so the training is um ela stem srbi text kits and supports um actually have another slide that has a little bit more information but this about 500 000 of this is a library you saw that before you go around our schools and you see that you know we don't we don't have the library materials that kids need so this puts to forth an effort to start to build the libraries up so a
038little bit more detail the tech and student class support um niask noted that the industry standard for it maintenance is one tech for every 350 devices and we have a lot of devices now and if we get the resources we need here we'd have one tech for 750 so again not there but moving in the right direction it seems daunting to me but gina is able to handle it and we also added approximately 10 new digital platforms so it requires setup training maintenance help desk in it and data you know you can all imagine and i've all been a recipient of gina's great support too so curricular development this is just a little bit of detail um for the curricular area esl algebra world language all the things that we need to be doing for
039knee asking graduation requirements and just for basic advancement um training in intel training that was a big one in mathematics illustrative math k through 12 and then for the academy college career prep and then basic resources you know there's a list here you can refer back to um we have kara invested in decodable text this year this is expanding that basic supplies that we need um and then i went over the staffing earlier the curriculum administrator the 13 100 day interventionist and then the middle school literacy coach we're almost there i know this is long and then this is a big ask for technology and operations bus we're adding the bus not just for enrollment growth but because we really need a bus like even without enrollment growth because our kids are crowded they're sitting
040through to a seat you know when we go back full time we're still going to have germs so you know we we put in money for a bus admin offices this is for the osborne reconstruction so um kelly and ann meade were able to get a deal with sacred heart to allow us to have the registration group and and meets a few of amneed staff over at sacred heart so that's been really nice because it's a great central location for them and it's also pretty affordable we have a good relationship with sacred heart so we're really happy about that and we were able to rent a space right up the road from beaver brook for um all of our storage needs and also for rich galbert's team and that's for a year until the um
041ellsworth annex is complete furniture supplies that's just uh you know we should be doing that regularly it's not in the budget we should be doing some refreshing to furniture and supplies and we also have some enrollment and some staffing growth so this would support the students that were projecting there and then network maintenance so this is um you know our current network components are in at beaver brook and at the high school and the appliances have been in place for eight years and i can attest to the fact that they crash and gina has to get called those hours and they restore them and it's bad and it normally it's a five-year life cycle these are on their eighth year and the maintenance is expired in the contract so we have to replace the appliances
042it's not in the budget so we're putting forward 345k um to get the network support as well as the materials in place so moving the servers and all the components so that's the budget it kind of transitions awkwardly here but to next steps so um you know we went through the different budget components there's the maintenance budget which you know you just see this big number of seven million but i can give you more information on it and you see the components of the new needs um and as we think about what we do with the budget i just want to remind us that we are still lobbying the state for the acceleration of the alliance funding meaning we're just asking them to move it up a year so that we would double the amount
043we would get next year now we have that 10 million dollar commitment from the federal government so yeah we'll discuss what that means for that as we roll out the budget um in the upcoming months but we also are reviewing the priorities for the use of what we call it's called the coronavirus supplemental relief act funding it's too many words it's just sr2 or cares2 so it's a second part to the cares money that we already had which was about 2.6 we've gotten another 10.1 and it's allocated to us on the title one you know rules so we have that money we just have to we have to apply for it there's eligible categories and kara set up a meeting with the administrators to start to generate ideas for how we would utilize that those
044funds and has a follow-up meeting with them tomorrow this application starts to open up on february 22nd so there's kind of a fast time frame for it and it's a lot of funding and then we'll also be planning for the upcoming alliance increments so as we talked about every year we're getting roughly you know we expect maybe 2.8 million more this year some of that's already spoken for for things that we did with cares one that we're now going to talk about how to braid for next year which is a little bit you know we have to be mindful of the fact that as sal had me put in red here the funding cannot supplant operations so not only is it dangerous to do that because we build a risk into the future but you
045know the state literally said and the federal guidelines say you can't supply it so and then we have to build community support so this is just a visual for what we provide to the um legislative agenda um this is just accelerating the alliance funding so we're just showing you that we're saying okay just give us two million dollars ahead you know just move it up so that we get it faster and that's kind of that visual for that and this is just giving you the timeline for the cares funding um and um so they released it very recently and i mentioned that 20 second date that's when it opens up it'll be open up for about a month but we want to get our application in soon so we can start working and then um
046we have a year to spend the s or one funds and another year to spend the s or two funds so till 2023 and then if you for your interest like the detail in the maintenance um uh um request the 7 million i mentioned is here with some notes explaining it if you want to refer to it and then this is just the summary of the program improvements and then a summary of the staffing requests that we have put forward so and with that that is the presentation thank you courtney uh thank you gladys so i'll open it up to you for questions or to the board mr denelli is here okay mr g anybody who wants to let me i would suggest that anybody who wants to request a a question identify themselves and
047direct it to any other cabinet or courtney we can just receive that way rich i have a couple questions when it's appropriate go ahead joe you had the first one courtney um just a couple real quick questions um the first one can you guys hear me yeah okay sorry it seemed like i froze up on my end going back to you had a slide in the school budget history and last year's budget it appear i just want to and i think i know the answer i want to make to make sure i'm right when because people are going to ask we wound up meeting our number last year so we asked for x we wanted to get x additional funding we went up getting x but it wasn't the same x correct yes correct you
048mean yeah yeah we asked for 9.5 and we got something like two and change yeah right and the rest in raw dollars we asked for 10 million more we wound up getting close to that 10 million but it wasn't the same 10. because it was the brand it was the the surplus and the cares act and all of that right yeah yeah just only because of the pandemic really we were allowed to roll over alliance money that was unspent because of the closure we didn't spend as much of it but they don't normally normally you can only roll afford like a cup percent and then we had piers yep and then we had um some additional funding what they were from our operating budget that the city council allowed us to put in reserve okay
049and then my only other question and this kind of goes to you were talking about replacing some technology and some different varying things this arose and somebody asked me the question like in the fall when we were talking about replacing laptops for the high school teachers i've heard from multiple elementary school teachers in very in multiple different schools that they're using laptops that were current when george w bush was president um that are 10 15 years old or more and they're not functioning very well on distance learning is there any sense that we're replacing those or doing anything is that anywhere in this budget yeah we didn't put out the multi-year budget and we probably should have but gena did prepare for a refreshing replacement for the student and teacher technology you know and and
050there is a component of that as we build up the cares budget too you know because we want to look for things that are not going to cause holes in our budget not that you know your refresh should be an ongoing refresh but yeah so she did put that in not for this year because he considered that she had her technology needs met um understanding that i know i'm hearing that there are some antiquated commuters out there but i think she did move down correctly from around everybody uh some of the resources that she got all those brand new computers through the high school and then some were not so old from there you know um reallocated some of the um those that we had at the high school that were newer and not the
051antiques that we were having at the elementary but you're right courtney gene is not here right now but he is looking at uh some kind of cycle he played yeah she put forward a plan for a maintenance cycle um to right address like for multi-year um needs and the life cycle of the computers and how many she would need for student and teachers it's just not in this year's budget because she thought she had enough to meet this year this upcoming year you know when you're through yeah joe are you done yes i am go ahead now thank you sorry about that i kind of froze up at the end courtney is this the same budget that we had last week uh there's just one item that i caught in the curriculum like last week
052we're at a million six and now we're at a million eight so yeah okay it's just that we re i recap i re-categorized some of the things so that you'll notice the total dollar amount didn't go down but when i sent you the budget last week like for example i think the instructional coach might not have been in there but it really belongs there i think we had that under um humanities and arts and we combined the categories and second uh what was a climate specialist last week as a behavior student behavior specialist do we have an exact job spec for this this job yet yeah and we thought the climate was people were thinking we're talking about maintenance so we you know we've had these folks before we've had them in the budget we're
053trying to be more explicit these are these are individuals that are that um that are part-timers as it's saying and there is a job description that they'll be working with lower tertiary kinds of department activities as courtney mentioned more hands-on in order to get to um issues with kids earlier um and that would assist with the general department therefore making a more of a positive environment at the uh school that's why we came up with the word climate but it's it's it's it doesn't make sense to the general public right so we there is a written job specification and i can go online and read it yes kim you're on right somewhere okay kim will be joining a little bit later she had something with her son oh okay okay yes she did mention there
054was we just don't have anything posted right now because there's not like a open position for it at the moment but they're what that she does have an existing position oh yeah i am curious if i'm going to vote for this i'd like to know what exactly what it is and if you could forward me your tentative job specification for that well i i don't i don't um disagree that it's there's a need for an interim level of behavior uh you know is that and is that something like uh a safety advocate no more education no no i no i i think i think if we had all the resources in the world or even the resources in uh not the whole world these would be um folks that would be certificated and had some
055workings in the counseling area but if you look at the amount there you could see it's it's not a lot of money they're they're part-timers these are just as as we said albert just hands-on folks kind of the principals do not have folks to help them with moving through the halls getting the students bringing them in following up for them so that's the kind of help that we thought they needed we looked at some districts they had what they call working aps which are working assistant principles um we looked at that and those are teachers who uh during their open time would be able to assist the school principals well our elementary teachers don't have open time you all know that they're working the whole day and to try to have them take their prep
056period it just didn't work so these folks are hands-on after school helping with the buses helping with the recess issues just um another pair of hands for uh relatively achieved money and some of these folks are administrators that haven't gotten jobs that are looking to get some experience but we do have a job description we could share with share with you okay now and there's also going to be a dean of behavior no the dean is much different the dean is uh certified we've had deans in the past they have they're able actually to work with students parents to issue deportment and or sanctions um and and really um look into higher levels of incidences not your lower uh kinds of things that these folks would be our deans are are disciplinarian type i mean
057in terms of what you might be used to um they're not at the level of an assistant principle your assistant principles are going to be running academies down the road participating in those academies they're doing teacher evaluation and these folks helped out with period issues that are happening in the hallway uh kids that are cutting classes following up with phone calls all of that kind of stuff that takes nothing out of time away from the um the administrators that are working more as curriculum and instructional leaders in in the in the school um so that those are and we have job descriptions for that as well albert thank you and just uh i noticed the spec was uh 26 esl are we down i thought i saw a number last year of 28 i think
058that varies that the kids do leave and go into mainstream and fin and change categories you may when you may open up in september that may be 32 i think my number was old i think if last year was 28 my number was the year prior so i think i think that's the what's happening but yeah because my number's a little bit dated because i was aligning all the numbers to be in the same year yeah okay thank you you know okay thank you listen before i had asked this question i was going to mention that part of the the conversation i had with courtney this year was to try to to relate or to humanize to the layman to the board and public and the public what these figures really meant or what the
059impact was uh in everyday life in the school and the reason for it if we didn't get it and and to to that point in some of al's questions i just wonder whether it would be good if the such as like mr walton can speak to to the the social emotional part i know courtney did it but she doesn't have a financial point of view if you get those that are in the trenches such as as kevin or kelly for the special ed um i think they can be more descriptive more detail which will help further questions such as the ones uh al had asked and and perhaps clarify things to the board a little bit further uh if if that's okay if as an example if kevin feels more information is necessary on the
060social emotional part perhaps he could ask courtney to bring up that slide and speak to it and again to have kelly speak to the uh special education slide um i think the impact that it has from these people in the trenches is a lot different than you know coming from the financial part as well as character the curriculum part rich i think you said partly what was on my mind possibly the cabinet member that is head of uh esl mr gusto should present esl but i didn't see him here but kevin to start with do you have any additional comments or to support the 1.2 million so that you know we get a good feel as to the the need of it the impact of this and if we don't get it you know what
061happens all right let me unmute myself here mr jim canelli um so one i i'm gonna i'm going to uh predict that we are going to request is going to be honored and i will as part of your request explain why i feel like it's important to start with um and just to add on to what uh doctors i was talking about with the with the behavior specialist position and so you know i know we alluded to some of these things prior um but it's it's very important and i know we had talked about it before particularly in our k5 schools uh with the majority of our principals or the loan administrator in the building and so certainly you know they have support from um from the special ed staff um but you know when
062we have students that are having meltdowns when we have students who are having um challenges with behavior and social emotional um concerns um you know these are these are occurrences that can you know a principal's entire day which will later impact the principal's ability to support staff throughout the school day impact the principal's ability to support other students throughout the school day and many of us are projecting that a lot of our students are going to come back with you know even more social emotional concerns and demands that they had previously um and so we we are seeing this position being critical to support the principal leadership but also just to support the overall school climate in the building um you know something we also alluded to in our last conversation you know we've talked
063about the investment this district has made and restarted practices and this person can be trained you know using those same restorative like practices to work with the children if harm has been done to another child or within that classroom or classroom community you know this person can help get that child back into the classroom you know after they've been um um um you know had an opportunity to de-escalate um which you know whether this person comes in with those comes in with those skills or we teach these per this person these skills um you know these are things that we can these are things that would be um you know very beneficial to a principal uh but most importantly to the entire school climate um you know we will also see this position building relationships
064with all of the students in the building it's not just the ones in crisis so like dr sal said it could be you know this person could be available in the cafeteria available for dismissal uh we want this person to build relationships with students staff parents uh you know the greater community but whatever it takes to help improve the overall school climate you know this person can be a very very valuable addition to the staff um you know they can overall assist students to just make positive choices you know throughout the school day uh whether that's one-on-one whether that's you know in the cafeteria whether it's dismissal whether that's on a playground um obviously they're going to be collaborating with the school administrator to help reinforce positive behavior building wide um and you know we're
065going to continue to have social emotional goals you know throughout the school district and i think this work is going to continue to evolve and this person can certainly play a role now they're not going to be necessarily leading this effort but they can play a valuable role supporting the principal to help implement you know implement these goals at our respective buildings um so i'm i'm i'm really hoping that the board and the community is going to appreciate this recommendation um you know in and you know ideally we would have an additional assistant principal all by elementary schools and i'll just transition to that one um you know we have three elementary schools right now with over 450 students in them um ellsworth is well over 450 at 467 and close to 470 students in
066the building and as we all know in this call we're building an additional annex which means we'll have more students soon um and so uh doc um marnie duncan has you know considerable ground to cover in that school and and and frankly the numbers suggest 450 students is typically the standard for to consider an assistant principal we have three elementary schools one at close to 470 the other two averaging 500 i believe uh steadily rough is like 490 and and uh shelter rock is a little bit over 500 like 505 or 506. and so you know with these numbers uh you know these are i think all three of these positions weren't all three of these schools weren't an assistant principal um i believe kara spoke to it um articulated the fact that you know
067we need we need support for classroom teachers and to help lead instruction um and so you know it's as big as as big as these numbers get and we can think about this this in a similar way we think about class size in our classrooms uh you know we have guidelines where we would like no more than 22 in a classroom in k one two and three um and and frankly you get up get up to 450 students in the building your staff gets bigger obviously there's more needs greater needs and your school-wide um and so to have one principle to meet the needs of all of the students and staff in that building and parents is becoming to be a little unwildly and so you know with that that's why the request for three
068assistant principals at these three schools with more than shelter rock and statley um you know almost 500 respectively at each building and then um and so i i just think it's important to really reiterate those things and those requests um you know when speaking about when speaking about the social emotional support and just the overall growth of those two areas so i'll if there's more you'd like me to speak to i'll be happy to but certainly i just wanted to highlight those two areas to start with i have one question is what's the of the school counselor the function of a counselor when i think of a counselor is is like a guidance counselor how does that differ from the psychologists of the social worker in terms of the role or what they perform yeah
069so kelly the best person to answer but mr genelli if i can just open with this and kelly if i could just open with this because in the last meeting we had you know i had talked about you know my experience as a sister principal decades ago it feels like um in norwalk but you know we had two assistant principals in each in each house office so we had assistant principals in the building of sixteen hundred um and and i just wanna reiterate we are under staff in terms of counselors ratio again i believe the standard is 225 to 250 and i believe kelly in our last meeting um shared with the board in the community that were over 300 per counselor and so as we talked about our goals around college and career-ready students
070um counselors play a critical role in this planning process you know whether it's meetings with families meeting with students and when we when when our counselors are understaffed we can't have the same expectations in one of the biggest high schools in the district i'm in in the state of connecticut and continue to operate um and dan is leading the school that continues to be on demand um and so i know that we were um noted by knee ask as you know this being an area of improvement for us um and quite frankly i think it's a critical need for us to help to continue to meet the ongoing needs of our students in student population thank you very much if i could just piggyback on that um it's important to remember in our district that
071our school counselors that we have school counselors uh sixth grade six through twelve um and as mr walleston indicated primarily their role is on college and career readiness um you know making sure that students understand their pathways what they need to do to get on track uh teaming with parents students community agencies um you name it to track grades attendance all of those interventions um partner with classroom teachers at the secondary level our school psychologists and social workers a majority of their role is working with our students that are already identified as needing supports um so our special education students are 504 students that's not to say they don't work with other students but again due to the large caseloads that they each have they tend to play a bigger part in those mandated services
072that are provided at the elementary level we do not have school counselors currently so our school social workers and psychologists partner to meet any of the social emotional needs for both our general ed students as well as our um legally mandated services through special ed and 504. so it does vary a little bit on level um of course the overarching goal for all of those departments is to meet students needs to partner with families so they all build um up to that ultimate goal of having a student to be successful in school but there are um definite differences based on our numbers based on our needs of the students and it does vary a little bit based on the level that we're talking about at the high school the current request of the two additional
073school counselors i i didn't hear um kevin's request how much would that bring our ratio up to in terms of the the ratio of counselors to the students at the high school if we added the two to two more this year you would need to add two more each year over the next three to four years to get closer to the ratio of about 250. so it is a it is a small um kind of drop in the bucket but ultimately my fear is if we don't make um if we don't start moving in that direction um our numbers are going to continue to build and we're even going to be further and further behind the april 8 ball so for those of you that have been on the board in the past i'm going
074to relate it to what we have done with our speech and language pathologist for the last four school years we have brought in um about two a year into the district because they had the same problem their caseloads were well in excess of the caseload that was recommended for it for them and so doing you know the first year we brought in two made a small um you know den and then the next year a little bit bigger and now we're at a point where while we do continue to grow and we still need you know we've requested one in this budget um we are feeling the effects over the last handful of years where we've made a supportive model for these positions so i would correlate it very very similarly with what we've done
075in the speech with the speech and language pathologist which has been very successful more of a leading question kelly because i think it's very important that people understand the high ratio currently of counselor to it particularly in a high school counselor to the the student as to how basically incomprehensible it would be for that person physically to handle that many students and and therefore the student not getting the proper services that that's necessary so i mean that's what i was trying to bring out and i also assumed that the behavioral specialist would eventually lead us to better academic outcomes um i suspect that would be it i think the important thing mr genelli is that our school counselors our administrative team our other pupil services staff do a phenomenal job in meeting these needs um
076but you are right the individualized attention when they are tasked with a number of students in excess of what is recommended the ability for us to provide individualized interventions particularly to our most needy students becomes compromised and so we want to provide the best for all students and some students need more from these staff members so that is why it's critical that we add these positions thank you kelly did you want to stick to the slide on special education to elaborate more on it thank you um so the first i'll speak through is the speech and language pathologist as i had referenced just a few moments ago um we have done a nice job in adding positions and while we do still continue to grow in this need particularly with our youngest learners our preschool
077um and this is no surprise to the board continues to grow in numbers and so we do have a need um for additional speech and language services at that level um so we are requesting one additional position to support our early childhood center with speech and language services um in addition our ot and pt services again at the preschool level our young our youngest learners typically require more of these related services as they have a multiple multitude of needs coming in um and so we have a need for additional ot and pt support um what i can speak to with many of these services is providing intervention early to our pre-k kindergarten early you know our early learners and early students um ultimately our goal with some of them is to no longer need the
078service and to support them to mainstream more into the general ed curriculum which we are able to do with success um so the hope is is adding this additional support for our youngest students will help to make improved outcomes for them over time additionally the assistant director is something that we have brought before the board on two previous occasions our department is is very large there's nearly 1700 identified special education students um it is myself and the five supervisors which are spread across the different levels and so one of the areas that is in need of additional support is certainly working with families on creating additional programs within district to support our variety of special education students we also need to have additional support for some of our related services uh staff members to go
079to to provide professional development and um continuous learning for them in this position would assist with that the nursing position i do feel the need to speak to it a little bit but i think particularly in these times speaks to itself the high school is under staffed and that was noted in the niask report um so that would be where one of the positions would go and as the board knows we are legally obligated to provide services um nursing services as well as special education services to our non-public students um and so we do have a need in that area for some additional support as well as um that that additional nursing position could also be used um frequently cathy o'dowd will become the nurse when we are down a nurse in a school um
080and as the supervisor um she does have the need to to be able to oversee um and support staff and so that that additional pers person split between the non-public as well as an assistant to kathy would allow her to be able to put a certified nurse that knows our kids and students in the building in the event that we have a need somewhere which comes up on a very regular basis and lastly the preschool secretary as you know we've opened an additional site and there is not currently a building-based secretary there so this person is needed not only for the general operations of the building but at the preschool level there is a heavy emphasis on scheduling uh ppt meetings um coordinating you know subs interpreters and so forth um there are extensive legal
081mandates that we are obligated um to have our secretary assist with as far as special education policy and procedure and this person would be trained in assisting the supervisor there in doing so thank you dr casamayor i'd like to talk to the 1.8 millionaire curriculum would you prefer this slide camera is this better for you or would you prefer the one with the budget the budget one yeah numbers in there no pressure no problem okay um so uh just going line by line so as you know i think it's no secret we had a tremendous amount of technology in the district as a result of our shift to remote learning um in some ways it's been a little bit of a silver lining in the way that we've been able to get a tremendous amount
082of of laptops in the district for our students and we're continuing to work on increasing that and hopefully we'll maintain a cycle over time now that we've gotten everybody to one to one so that's exciting um but with all those machines and chromebooks we now have a need for tremendous tech support and so we've had to increase our part time to 14 full time our media text to with an increase of 4.2 and so these folks can do it everything from setup to troubleshooting to repairs and particularly now that we're back in in person um you know they are very much needed to support teachers in the buildings um and our tech department um is is fairly still quite small but mighty and these folks will help to support that um and it'll be very
083very valuable as we continue to round out our technology supports for students and staff one area that was noted in the ask actually i'm not sure who on the board remembers this but we did have a k-12 curriculum administrator for fine and applied arts and at one point in time and we did lose that in one of the budget cycles we're trying to restore that in this budget cycle you know over the years we've had you know have not been able to keep up with curriculum development in this area we now have new knees knees did make some mention of this and we also have um some new graduation requirements that require increased health credits um and so we need curricular revisions there and there's just there's a lot of classes and courses in areas
084that fall under uh this umbrella we've got media art music pe health science so you can imagine the span of that k-12 and so we we are desperate for some additional leadership to concentrate in those areas so that we can um really start to produce high quality curricula particularly as we go forward with um academy development and rounding these things out we'll need someone who's an expert with to help with integration and to support teaching and learning in these very critical areas last year you remember one of the big asks in the budget was the student support specialist which are certified staff members this is a huge component to us delivering in a systemic way intervention services for srbi and to support student learning at different tiers of need and so we with that those
085student support specialists joined some interventionists that we already had in place from previous budget cycles and so we were able to create somewhat of a nice little team in each building to start to service students in a more systemic and equitable fashion but as i mentioned last year that was really the beginning of rounding out the services and so this would be sort of a 2.0 layer to continue in this area it was critical last year that we got those student support specialists in um at a time just as this pandemic hit because they were able to quickly jump in and run small group instruction they have continued to run small group instruction in this environment meeting with students and checking in to make sure that we are continuing our our support services the student
086interventionists um if i can add a student support specialist in every single building a second one i would but we know we're trying to be reasonable um having a student interventionist which is a 10 month part-time employee you could almost equate the student interventionist at this level to the climate position that we spoke about earlier right so it's not a certified staff member um per se but somebody that we can train to do very specific things that fills a need in the buildings and so the 13 would supply us with enough for additional coverage at the elementary level and expand on our intervention support structures that we're really trying to build um and will be critical as we move forward you'll see that there's some other asks in the budget related to intervention is so
087that we can help to mitigate some of the learning loss that may be occurring right now the humanities literacy coach we have had this position before in our budget this is while it's new for this budget um this is just um us trying to get this back into place again critical um to support intervention to help coach teachers on on implementing targeted small group instruction in the classroom and to help coordinate that effort across the three buildings this is a very much needed position the support for summer school and training again we anticipate many different programs running to whether it be boot camp summer school additional intervention experiences this summer for our students to try to extend their learning um and with that as you know many of our administrators are not year-round administrators we
088have um they stop off at different points in the year 10-month 11-month 12-month and so we anticipate needing to extend some of their work into the summer school and so that is an approximate amount that would be needed to do that um curricular development we are continuing to work on curriculum um there's a little bit of a pause this year in the pandemic with certain areas but we need to pick back up on that again some of those areas include english language arts stem of course as you know we're continuing to roll up our stem curriculum for elementary so in grades four and five and we have some graduation requirements that were mentioned earlier that will need uh refinement and curriculum um there's about 190 000 worth of training again this is related to many
089of the programs that we're implementing um there's some text and kits and uh that belong in there as well the curricular resources um this is a large number a a good portion of that if you remember um we had that has been in the budget are around the library materials our libraries at the k5 level are sorely lacking in many buildings um you know we've had title one schools for a long time and non-title one we've recently have made all title one but many of those years of um being a title one school and not a title one school we've developed different levels of resources across those 13 buildings and so in some places the grade level libraries are not what they need to be um our expectation is that kids are going to be
090chomping through books and they're going to have lots of choice those books will be diverse they'll be at different levels and they'll be um you know they'll be enough to support the programs that we have and so we are desperate for these library books and so um you know last year that kind of got set aside with the budget with that can't happen this year we really need to push forward to get these books um we've also had a lot of books that we've um sent home with students during the pandemic to give kids books to read physical books to read that we know will not come back so so in addition to having a low supply of techs in many of the schools we will have lost even more um because of uh because
091of coving so we're hoping to to shore that up um that in that curricular resources there is also a large ask 165 000 or so something called decodable texts and if you remember last year we we implemented a new phonics program at k5 so there's a lot of resources around phonics and intervention and so we're going to continue to round out those resources and intervention get more intervention kits in the hands of teachers in the classroom not just with the interventionists so that our teachers can start to deliver some of these targeted supports and fill in some of the gaps that may have occurred this year the decodable texts support the phonics program and that we're providing students with uh texts across k1 and 2 um that are kind of that are progressive and so
092they're called controlled texts um or to quotable text some people call them um either way and so it allows students to practice um very explicitly a phonetic sequence have skill with a phonetic sequence um that they've been exposed to rather than haphazard haphazardly encountering these in the text that are on the the book the shelves in the in the classroom so um very important for structured phonics very important to improve our um students ability to read by third grade which is our ultimate goal okay and hardware software there's these are a lot of these are just now now that we have made this shift there are document cameras and all kinds of things that will go along with utilizing digital instruction in the classroom a little bit more um so that incorporates some of that
093the digital tech tech book is a digital resource for the science curriculum k5 so last year we did the year prior we did grade three we held off this year on rolling up grades four um but this year moving into 2021 20 20 20 20 21 we have to do grade four and five so the discovery uh textbook is is a quote for digital digital software to support that curriculum thank you you're welcome i'm going to ask courtney if he can on the slides if it's possible to identify somehow with an asterisk or some sort of a footnote what are these of the dollar amounts indicated if they can indicate what's uh restorative and what's basically compliance the other thing in the curriculum resource over here we have 901 000 i think we should indicate
094maybe in brackets or separate line numbers as to how much we plan for the library and how much we plan for the text it's a big number that's just a you know a global number and i think we are we're obligated to if we specify a little bit more detail on what we're looking to spend it on sure yeah of course yeah because even if you break up it's 500 000 cara mentioned for the library but even then it's 441 is a lot um complement the numbers okay i know a vessel is not here but i recalled his conversation the other day and dr sal filled in and courtney you had went through the the the uh the the make fun of the hardware type of situation uh if you want to do that or
095again sure yeah the hardware oh yeah um agusto has joined us just so oh yeah so should we go to the um english learner section and the esl yeah exactly they wouldn't mind just addressing the importance of this and again pretty much reiterating [Music] did you hear uh mr genoa's question okay can you repeat please sure i guess so what i'd like you to do is again pretty much repeat the conversation of of the other the other day and support the actual needs of why you feel when you have a thousand dollars in your program and the benefit that it gives to the district and the problems that you have now because you don't have some of this stuff sure sure so as i as i have the uh the opportunity to um share with
096you the last uh last time um in in a in a brief description of the what's driving the uh the request for esl bilingual i would say i would start by saying that it's definitely connecticut bilingual law and initially identification requirements um if you remember i mentioned that every school in danbury um is is required has been required for a few years now by state law to offer bilingual education programs in spanish and portuguese in addition to providing the standard esl services and at the same time we we must follow the required home language survey guidelines uh that are in place for initial identification um another component that contributes to the requests is what i would call a realistic teacher to english learner student ratio we are targeting 1 to 65 again as i as
097i explained before other school districts comparable to our size norwalk being one of them new haven another one they they target much lower teacher to english learner student ratios around 1 to 50. so we are still um being very conservative but again if this is approved we believe that we are moving in the right direction um we are implementing a new um english language development program eld program called al achieve um okay and this initiative is aligned to the the department's theory of action which is based on what i call a blueprint for serving english learners throughout the school day it's a it's a two uh two-way approach on one side we provide what we call systematic eld instruction esl instruction this is a dedicated time that provides explicit language instruction organized by level of
098english proficiency and at the same time we look at what we call language instruction for content learning uh in our case we um you know that by psyop which is explicit instruction to support english learners in understanding and using language necessary for good level work and this is done in the regular education class so the need to sustain a strong psyop coaching component this is definitely important the psyop coaches play a crucial and essential role by providing stability consistency to the initiatives from the esl department um their encouragement and support definitely are being very useful and help teachers develop and maintain fidelity of implementation and fidelity to the model throughout the school year um i i would like to refresh your memories again to what i mentioned the last time which is we are not
099requesting new positions the requested psyop coach coaches and the assessment data english learner l specialist are not new we are just restarting what we had before if you remember we used to have three psyop coaches at the middle school one for each school two positions were eliminated in during difficult times in terms of because of budget budgetary constraints and we are currently down to one uh one coach for the three middle schools um and and and the restart l specialist we'll make sure that the district follows all the steps that we must follow in order to comply with federal law ensuring that students in need of english language services are appropriately identified and offered those services so i would say for example at the high school which is not even a part of this budget
100request but we used to have two coaches we're down to one so again i think it's important to reiterate the fact that we're not asking for uh new coaching positions these are positions that are being restored the other ftes have to do primarily with um legal compliance uh from connecticut bilingual law and also trying to come to a student to teacher ratio of 65 to one and again that's shy from what uh the districts are currently targeting but it's much better than what we had two three years ago in uh particularly at the elementary level where we had schools that had one to 100 and over 100 students so uh that's basically where we are and why we are asking for these additional ftes and positions you know the board i know you're listening and
101you're hearing these numbers so you keep saying to me what happens when we don't get the money well this is what happens you keep going going then you get to the critical mass and you get to where we're going so you got to keep trying to rebuild um and that's what we're doing so we start fighting for this budget and they you know bring us down to two and three percent uh you could see how over time you know that critical mass just starts it's a house of cards we can't afford to do it because you're bilingual kids your ears so that they are our student population in more ways than one so uh we got to be able to come up and and shore up this department uh gusto's been working very hard at
102this and um i do thank him for his diligence and doing what he's doing with uh with the staff that he has so that's really important thank you thank you investor dr south your point what i'm trying to get out here is these numbers that are critical and if we don't get them have serious consequences and the more that the board understands we could do more community outreach in explaining what the impact here or the the impact let me say with that word or the this document supports our formal budget then to a reader if we have commentaries on here they can go through and see what the the effect and what the need is for the numbers not just saying you know one psyops coach or two science coaches 150 000 um we've got
103to make more of an inroad so that there is a complete understanding as to the need of what we're asking for and and then as to the consequence if we don't if we don't get it and that's why i'm asking each of the individuals that are i call it responsible for the areas to make the presentation because i would hope that if they spoke with courtney we could have narratives so that anybody who gets this presentation can read it you know i i would like that when you present it to the common council they have a binder in addition to this and they understand you know the the backup to this rather than just looking at numbers and then us going through making a presentation uh i'm hoping it has more of an effect than
104what we've historically done uh and uh with that being said i'll ask courtney to move ahead with her face oh sure yeah and and dr sal took your suggestion too and we started to reach out to build um sort of video vignette since we're still in a virtual world um so whether it's invited guests to talk specifically about their experience for example the site coaches or the investment in decodable you know uh workbooks and things like that um dr cells already started to reach out to individuals to get that video so um yeah my piece is really straightforward oops i'm sorry i'm not trying to make you dizzy i apologize okay here yeah it's it's um the bus that i mentioned you know we need a bus i think everybody knows how crowded our buses
105are um especially during covert times so put in for a bus um again the administrative offices minor amount of furniture and supplies you know we never we don't usually add that when we add enrollment growth so we are doing that now because you know we saw kevin and i really specifically um how bad the furniture was in some of the buildings when we had to go in and and distance the desks with with the rulers and sit in them ourselves um we you know we're gonna have to do a recycle replace refresh refresh we do reach out to other districts when they give up their goods and and sales always get enriched to get a truck to go to some other district to pick up some nice equipment that they're getting rid of but we
106do want to put in a ask to buy some additional furniture for those kindergarten classrooms and then i mentioned the network maintenance i i can't stress enough how critical that is not just to um the office functioning because um you know we need to pay people we need to have our network up to be able to run reports and do the things we need to do but critically because we need the infrastructure or support for our classrooms where they're more technologically advanced now and um we have wi-fi we have chromebooks we have um software that we're using and so in order to really utilize that investment um i think jane has put together a really prudent ask with a partner um to do up um just basically not even upgrade our network but bring us
107to the 21st century within our network and so yeah that's that's the operations piece the bulk being that network maintenance um and the contracts actually expiring so we do have to do something at some point i think after we get funding but we had talked about i think mentioned during the course of the conversation about uh putting together a three-year budget because i think that a multi-year budget but i think that's very important considering the the new academy coming down uh down the fight and what we're building now in order to support some of the elements that have to go into the new academy whether it be curriculum or whether it be staffing etc and i'm sure over the next year or two we're going to be implementing more of those though so those costs
108are those factors any of the board members have any other questions uh to the cabinet or to the courtney uh on the budget um thanks rich um this is just a general question i'm not sure who can best answer it but obviously we got a laundry list of items from me ask about you know different things that need to be improved and i'm just wondering if this budget covers all of the necessary improvements or if there's anything that hasn't been you know considered in this you know what it was hard for me to hear that i'm sorry i'm sorry let me try that again is that any better now it is go ahead okay i'm just i i know we got like a list from niask about things that had to be addressed and i'm
109just wondering if this budget um covers all of those improvements oh geez no i mean there okay when you put together a knee ass visit there are many things that go into it um that that they recommend and and it's hard to achieve all of them but the essence of what we're doing you have a large high school of you know 33 3400 and they they um spoke about the the need for more hands more time for classroom visits i think some of the things that we've done here with the dean some of the things with the behavior climate people will help um probably the biggest one would be the council ratio that they would they would endorse in terms of adding more um and that's i think kelly probably could speak better to that
110one than i can but that that's um something that would they would feel that would be important kelly or cara any other comments about the knee ask itself it would be helpful for for the board to hear i was just going to comment on the counselor piece then carol certainly uh turn it over to you because i know there's other curricular elements um for the counselors i think it's important to understand that they're recommending that we get to the ratio of 250 students so um this budget attempts to move the needle a little bit closer to where we need to be um but at the end of next year we will not be there um so i think it's important to keep in line that we're you know adding on things in the appropriate direction
111um but it doesn't fully eliminate the needs in the report um the other piece that they certainly cited in in the report particularly to my area was also the nursing support services so an additional nurse at the high school um will remedy that need um there there are some infrastructure needs as far as expanding the health services office um that is not fully spelled out in this budget but that's something you know courtney and i have spoken at length about along with kathy and cabinet um to look at some other funding sources to do that so those are just a few things um that i can speak to thanks for [Music] of watching the specials and carrie you can do that sure yeah um you know i think it i think this is a start
112um i think this is a minimum i think we can't go backwards from here you know it's it's hard to continue year over year every year to ask for the same things and not get them and as we continue to grow you know what happens with staffing and supports and leadership you know you stretch it to the max and you move from high quality to just compliance driven right so what do we need to do to just you know meet the basic minimum requirements and that's not where we want to be we you know we've spent a lot of time in portrait of the graduate you know talking about what we want teaching and learning to look like in danbury what we want our students to what those outcomes are going to look like and
113the type of students we're going to produce and if we're going to if we're going to make serious moves in this area we need to be able to rely on a budget that continues to support that and you know we we we have a lot of plans um this academy you know again it's not just a building there's a vision behind this and we could do something really great but if we don't start digging out of this hole and start to make uh incremental growth in these areas to support the growth that our school system has experienced we're not going to be able to to realize those those dreams for our kids so um you know establishing a budget cycle for curriculum has been very difficult over the last 10 years it has been uh
114randomized because of the budget so we don't get xyz okay um here's an extra ten thousand dollars that left over from a credit in june and what do you want to spend it on you know so it's you're just which child do you feed do you feed the special areas do you feed the social studies the ela the intervention and and it's it's been difficult so you know i i think that um you know to kelly's point you know with the with the counselors we have to get going right we can't we you know we've reached a critical point now where um we'll start to fall behind we have tremendous staff we have amazing teachers but we push everything to the brink because we're always on edge and and we need to start working on
115um you know deepening the work that we're doing we have to start building the budget to a place where um we can rely on it year to year so we so we have a sense of our programming going forward um that's sustainable and kate just in addition to the curriculum upgrades um and i'm channeling my my my dan dan donovan right now because they were we were also cited for insufficient science labs at the school um and i think there are some other issues that are being resolved as a result of the pandemic but you know that there were official complaints about any uneven heating ventilation plumbing and bathroom issues i think the ventilation and heating may have improved a little bit during the pandemic in terms of the services and our concerns about ventilation
116they were also concerned into courtney's points about upgrades needed for furniture et cetera they were you know we were also cited for insufficient funding overall for instructional supplies to derive deliver instruction um but you know they also said that we had outdated and corrosive and toxic chemicals in our science areas and throughout our facility um insufficient technology and support for staff and technology which again i think i'd like to think that's been satisfied now as a result of the pandemic um and so in an ada ada compliance for elevators furniture and fixtures and so you know there's still some other work to be done outside of what's been presented in this budget and this is just specific to the you know to the knee as complaints you know this is outside of all the other
117things we're presenting just to keep just to keep the ship moving forward thank you i really appreciate that feedback um and and i think it kind of highlights some of the um concerns that that you know um i've heard expressed and that i share which is that uh you know the budgets that we're putting forward um although they will certainly help move us in the direction we need to be moving they're just not even what we're asking for is not going to meet the needs that we have in our community so thank you guys the uh stuff too kate is in the uh maintenance budget and from the city um you know which which blindly comes in um but i think you're would be accurate to say answer your question directly no it doesn't meet
118all the expectations in the ask and it's going to take some time to get a lot of those things done thanks dr i have a question are several um i i really want to support the budget um i want to be an advocate for you know all of these items um you know my two kids are in the school system i have an incoming freshman you know next year um i i understand the need for counselors um and especially assistant principals i'm i'm so appreciative of these workshops um and hearing you know the more you hear about you know the this what are they called now student behavior specialists um you know it it makes sense but um with the numbers changing it makes me very uncomfortable even from the documents that we received last
119week you know just to point out um like the six four nine four in the um you know the breakdown the categorized breakdown doesn't match you know to the to the detail it's a six four eight four you know so and then for the numbers the the bottom line numbers to change you know just when i was feeling like okay i got it i rewatched our last workshop in you know slow motion and like took the time with like printed out the you know your presentations um it's just it's frustrating and we have not had a lot of time to really digest so you know i don't i can see where you re-categorize things and i see a you know a few things where things were changed like with the bus um you know in
120the operations i can see where some things change there um but it just you know it's not really would it help would it help rachel if we give um just a side by side with what changed so for example we asked for six teachers in the elementary school but when we really looked at it we only needed three plus the three specials that was one change the bus was a second change and there was a ten thousand dollar change to the um to the um interventionists because i had miscategorized them and i i missed ten thousand dollars so as we went through you know iterations of the budget we kind of refined them as we continued to talk talks that we would have normally have had them you know a month ago but there i
121can assure you that it's it's minor and i can even tonight get you that that same detail doc i sent as a draft on friday i can send that tonight that ties out to the whole budget doc up to the whole presentation um tonight so it's in the same format and i can just explain those changes we also had something called humanities and um it was my misunderstanding it really didn't belong in its own category um and so really it was part of just to simplify things to consolidate we moved up the uh humanities and special areas into the curricular subtotal so net the new needs went from 6.4 to 6.1 mainly because of those adjustments we lost three teachers we said we didn't need them when we really thought through it and more carefully
122you know we really had to consider a lot of things like that the climate you know of the city uh the new 10.1 million dollars that we got and what what where what we have in terms of enrollment projections for next year so you know ideally that would have been done two weeks ago and you would have had the materials well in advance but those are the changes um really nothing more substantive than that and i understand your concern about not seeing a solid document my hope was to get you that detail knowing that we were still workshopping you know a few of the items so i do apologize and also you know since we we are expecting you know 10.1 million and for um through the cares and sr um you know are some
123of these items in there knowing [Music] you know expecting you know that to cover those items you know i would i would have to say that these are the true needs these are the true operational needs if we didn't have any other funding right the fact that we braided funding this year was just i think i would say an act of desperation and and need to do so but i these these funds are not intended to supplant operations that's not the intention um and that's not the that's not the hope because you would build the really big big cliff in your budget if you did that right it's not sustainable to budget that way um that's right yeah and so in some of this um is it building toward the new career academy well somewhat
124and i think you need a three-year budget um to really lay that out some of this some of this base work will assist it um rachel we got very we're very fortunate to to get some some other funding that has been um uh able to guide us through the this process with advisors but soon for staffing and others will will be for future budgets this budget there's not much i'll let kara who's worked intimately i don't think there's really a lot there is there cara no there's some there's a little bit of money in there for training for staff right so we need to start to build capacity in-house to do this work additionally you know we're bringing in consultants um and actually we've used a little bit of grant money that we've had dedicated
125towards this to bring in consultants who worked with the nashville academies to guide us in some of the process and we're engaging in that now and i could speak to that a little bit more tomorrow night when we talk about kind of the update um but you know with the opening of the of the building being 2024 you know it changed things a little bit we thought it'd be a little bit sooner so i think we would have put some some more in there so for example we you know we will we will likely purchase a course um at the end of next year to start to work with and to train students uh teachers on and our administrators around this college and clear exploration um net i think you're going to see a lot
126more uh in the budget next year in terms of deeper levels of training right now you have you know kind of cor core folks uh myself dan donovan meg martin sarah roy melissa nate do who are really kind of around the table with some of these consultants and that's kind of what we're spending a little bit of money on right now um but you know one of the things that i'm concerned about is that you know if we don't create the staircase that leads to this new building opening up in this new vision um i don't know how we're going to make that leap when that when that building opens up i don't know how we're going to resource it staff it fund it so you know we we have to continue like the counselors
127counselors will be an integral role in helping helping with this process um you know our our assistant principals at the high school now be you know probably each taking an academy becoming leaders of a specific academy and really really driving a lot of the thematic approach that's going to happen in those areas and we need hands on deck to make this happen this is going to be a game changer for danbury it's going to be very exciting but we have to shore up our core programs that we have now to get there we have to build science pathways and math uh change uh you know and train teachers in in conceptual mathematics across a k-12 continuum in order to be able to have students access the kind of learning that we're talking about by the
128time they exit our our program so um we have to just we really have to dig in and keep going and and we can't take our foot off the gas now on this we have to we have to dig in and i know we're over time and i i've uh you know i mentioned this to courtney but um if there if there's any plans for you know more permanent solutions through the cares lesser money um you know like the the science labs and things like that but you know water refill stations instead of the fountains and automatic you know whatever is more permanent than temporary um and then all just one last thing the the the proposed um i'm sorry the school budget history i don't think the last few years are correct and the
129percentage increases okay i think la i thought last year was not considered part of the appropriation the one two seven three it was a mid-year it was it was it was a mid-year ad so when you do the budget you do it based on um the actual appropriation at the start of the year that the council votes on and that enrollment ad they didn't consider it part of our budget so the percentage increase would have to have been based on the prior like the actual voted on approved council amount the one two seven three was considered just a special appropriation but they did include it in the next year's budget amount the the consecutive the following year's budget amount okay i was just looking at last year's binder it was you know it looked off
130well that's why there was a confusion last year of a 9 million dollar increase versus an 11 million dollar increase you know whether we include the additional mid-year appropriation that we had yeah we've kind of changed the way we talked about it because we we wanted to like not put forward to the city the city that we we really wanted them to give us both the 1.2 and our ask on top of that because if they didn't then we would just be further behind because we already you know invested that those funds and teachers and buses and things that we needed for the enrollment growth yeah and i think it's very important that we again focus on and dwell on the comments that karen and dr sal and throughout the conversation today is that we've
131got to continue to advocate that number one we take care of the compliances but number two is that we continue and start to support and build our foundation because of what's down the price we can ill afford now to to further go back and and to create new new concepts such as the academy and put that on the backs of our existing staff without the proper funding it would just be an inappropriate foundation and and so it's very important that that we understand this convey this to to to others so that we can advocate as to why we need the money and what we're doing with and what's down the pike and i think the multi-year budget once we get the appropriation would show essentially our thoughts as to what the increases will be in
132the next couple of years to support uh support the funding and for the reasons for it so it's not a shock to anybody when they look at our budgets in the subsequent years uh and they could feel assured that we do do some proactive thinking and planning and just don't go year to year you know flying from the seat of our pants so that we have some strategic plan and mr rich i would add we spoke about that and and looking at um keeping it simple focusing on the current year but as we plan in the next month or two when we advocate for the within the community and present the budget to the city and have the feedback for what we're doing with the 10.1 million cares funding as well as the next alliance
133increment you know that's going to be an opportunity for us to really robustly build out a multi-year plan because there's you know a consider different consideration for how we'll use the care spending like you said facilities supports and things like that there you know there's a different consideration for how we'll be utilizing the alliance and then depending on the city's response to our need and what we'll be doing with this operational budget in addition while we continue to develop the academy programming and all the elements that are needed building towards that so we're looking towards that in the spring being the multi-year multi-fund you know roll up your sleeves and really kind of start doing that good work you are there any other board member questions that being said we are going to leave this
134meeting and in the same meeting we're not going to come out and go in i'm going to then have a finance committee meeting which will be open just to the committee members in that meeting i'm going to ask for a vote that we recommend that to the full board that we adopt the superintendent's budget as presented other is there any objections to that statement okay that's great gives me the confidence that i can go ahead and and do it uh with that being said i thank everybody for their participation and input um for those that are part of the committee which would be kate al russo um katherine kathy and myself uh we'll just take a few minutes to adopt the the uh the motion and then we're going to adjourn for the evening so
135if you want to stay for that fine if you don't i won't be offended so i'll see you all tomorrow night rich uh cara sent out a second link for the finance committee meeting um are we supposed to be moving into that second meeting uh she said we didn't have to just to save time we can just continue okay it's it's just a you know it's just a statement so there's no sense in logging in and logging out and stuff like that just want to make sure it's clear for anybody who might be trying to track down the information from the video vault yeah it's it's fine it would it's all being on the same link okay fine yes great thank you karen you're welcome all right so what i'm going to do at this
136point here i'm at um kathy molinaro would you be just take the minutes for the meeting and kathy should give you a hit a thumbs up rich he helped me see it uh so at 7 55 i'm going to call the finance meeting to order and just to take attendance um kate president uh alvaruso catherine president okay and myself and kathy molinero yep i'm here okay um can i entertain a motion or the acceptance of the budget to the full board still moved all right so what we'll do is a motion b that we will recommend that the full board accept the superintendent's budget of 149 million 10 and dollars for a 9.82 increase over the prior year uh to be adopted we get a second second okay all in favor aye aye okay thank
137you very much so we'll see you all tomorrow night we'll just summarize this stuff again thank you all i appreciate it good night guys tonight good night okay thank you red good night good night thanks mr j thanks for all your help pal too good job courtney thank you yeah thank you courtney thank you