001everyone thank you for joining us on a monday night it's a double header this week um i would like to call a special meeting of the board of education to order there will be another special ed board of the special board of education meeting um this is the wrong motion um i would like to call a special meeting in the board of education order the next regular board of education meeting will be held tomorrow january 25th at 7 30 p.m in the board meeting room so thank you all for coming and i'm sure we'll see most you tomorrow night um my chairperson's report is brief just thank you for all the public comment thank you for all the emails and phone calls it's important that we continue to hear from everyone as we go through
002the budget process and we look at some of these programs so in the interest of time i will turn it over to dr adley and i know we have some guests here from ces the executive director and open choice coordinator so we'll turn over you dr adley for discussion on open choice yes thank you mr chairman good evening everyone to those who are sitting in front of us thank you for coming this evening to those who are watching uh or participate in vaisom thank you for your participation i also would like to welcome our principals this evening by zoom they're here in support obviously of open choice and a warm welcome to dr chip demay chip is the executive director of our cooperative educational services ces which is one of the six risk organizations that
003serve school districts in the state of connecticut and eric nyquist eric is the open choice coordinator from ces so both will be available for for us this evening so with the board's understanding there you have received a powerpoint presentation there is an open choice fact sheet and then their questions and answers uh with your understanding i would go through the open choice presentation which should include a lot of what's included in the fact sheet and also the questions just to make sure that we get certainly to our two presenters this evening after the open choice presentation we can open the floor up for questions and also dialogue uh with the executive director and the open choice coordinator after that we can revisit the questions that we have prepared or that are still outstanding okay good
004thank you dr alex thank you sir so i i i honestly i'm excited to present about the open choice this has been on the table in different capacities for the last couple of years and it's nice to see it come full circle for consideration in the fy 23 budget so some of the background this was a state strategy at one point to address the 2003 chef versus o'neill the segregation settlement agreement it started out as project concern many many districts participated in project concern before there was compensation uh for any sort of tuition or grant that followed the students it has to this point existed in new haven and bridgeport and we have the opportunity as you know to participate here in norwalk in the danbury area uh danbury it doesn't seem it's going to
005go forward in all honesty that doesn't seem to be playing out in that area for different reasons of participation for districts or otherwise whether there's reluctance to participate or whether they want to revisit a different time i i would hope that we would look at that and also just i would hope that we would lead in this and not not be a follower in this capacity this is an opportunity for us to lead in this arena and but with that danbury is not going to be participating we are also required from the state of connecticut to talk to issues of how we are reducing racial ethnic and economic isolation this supports uh that that request from the state department of education and over 3 000 students participated across the state and chip can talk about
006the participation in our particular region it was mentioned before and i'll just share that i have testified on numerous occasions over many years on open choice have testified in front of the legislature from a superintendent point of view i've testified as the hartford area chair and president and have testified as the connecticut association of public schools superintendents president the idea of asking for funding more funding it's not mutually exclusive when you're speaking on behalf of either your district or other districts in the sense of advocating for additional funding for the program you can you can support it but you can also advocate many times i've had advocate for not just my own district in granby right uh at the time but all the other districts that are represented but i also did for my own
007district at that particular time that that is true um i'm actually i'm actually proud about of that uh we have been a participant of open choice from probably for over 40 years in my experience or the district's experience and have led in many ways in that capacity so uh we have there will be there is testimony there um that is correct and i also was i also testified on this new legislation to move this initiative forward i personally think in terms of moving this district this district and also the state of connecticut forward it actually is one of the most economic ways to actually expand diversity and the idea of choice in some capacity so as with that today you will see testimony that has been submitted uh current recommendations obviously darian was precluded from
008participating primarily because of the transportation and the distance in the right uh from uh bridgeport if that that's the case you will see a difference here we did say that it was three thousand there's actually three thousand in the grand but there's for participation in the first year there's an additional thousand person so for the first year participation it's four and for the years thereafter it's uh 3 000. so with the idea of like 16 students in kindergarten the revenue obviously would be 64 000. this is a partnership with ces that serves this particular region again i did sure that uh my local colleagues around weldon is considering it for the next school year that's fy23 and new canaan is considering it for fy24 they have pushed off their initiative for a year again i'm
009just sure that i think this is an opportunity for our district to lead and not necessarily wait for other people in this particular capacity i think this is the right thing to do for our students and also for other students who would attend there is a reciprocity for our students to actually attend schools in norwork should they they wish to do that we have several students at the moment here actually participating in schools and you'll see those in the questions we have four in the global studies uh with other students who are is participating in stanford at the moment uh five at rogers international ford the academy of information and technology and three at jmw wright technical school in stanford so there's a new norwalk high school that's being built people know about that if
010students for whatever reason would like to participate in that they would be able to participate there the selection process i'm going to let the chip dr dumay actually talk to the selection process because it's been described as a ladder by myself has been described as the lottery now it's been described as a selective process so i would like uh after this concludes just for for chip to actually speak really directly to what's the nature of that lottery right and hire students selected because i know that was one of the the questions that the board wanted to to be addressed i do think you know already that if the students are selected that they remain with us as a darien student throughout their tenure uh the investment in the open choice the short version that is
011it's the four thousand for the first year uh three thousand thereafter yes the district will encounter some some costs i'll just share just very briefly here just the cost incremental costs associated with being in kindergarten through fifth grade you know we have the formula that's in the budget book we also have technology uh that we account for although for the most part we have those we have those chromebooks for students so those those are the incremental costs and i have uh i will post what i'm going to show you in a moment i inserted a slide that i thought might be helpful for the board and for the public for that matter and i'll post this this slide here um i'll post that slide this evening once we're concluded so this just shows you that
012if you take the first cohort of students and the first cohort of students being hypothetically for next year we're taking the 16 students and if those students played stayed in the system through 23 24 and so on right so up until they get up to fifth grade fy24 you select the next the next cohort of students and so on and so forth so you see in the first year the incremental cost is 20 200 essentially that the grant is 48 so you have a benefit of about 45. so if we just go to to the end here this takes this takes the students right through until they're going to enter middle school and so you can see the total grant is that 264 that the cost just given our our numbers that we're using is
01337 000 and therefore you have a balance of about 226. if you were to say well what about the middle school the middle school is honestly it's a wee bit more difficult to actually hypothetically there's no formula for the middle school depends which classes the kids go in what resource what um uh sports athletics clubs whatever they have to do um but if you took the kids running through just for round numbers if you took the students running through and over about 40 students and let's save us even let's even say it was a thousand dollars it's not going to be that per student i mean that's 40 000 against 40 students times the 3 000 which is a hundred and twenty thousand it's it's it's you're the the cost for it is going to
014be outweighed by the actual grant but i can't do it just in apples for apples because there's so many choices moving forward but hopefully this gives you a wee sense of well what's what's the potential like i um outlay during primary school and just reason around numbers the middle school kind of i think you can safely say that it's not going to cost as much in the middle school unless you're breaking sections and so on and so forth so we here's that gives you a wee bit of a sense of just i think one of the financials that the board perhaps was looking for in terms of just rolling it forward a little bit you'll notice that there's 12 12 right there not 16 16 because we're not breaking sections by doing the 12 and
015the 12. the future enrollment i just talked we'll be taking 72 students after next year so that's that was really sort of again just rolled forward as we just spoke about the the enrollment at the middle school which would not exceed actually in the last 10 years twice that would be up at about 1170 that wouldn't exceed it wouldn't exceed those and trying to see what that that i can't confirm completely confirm what that middle school was built for um but it seems safely built for about 1200 people that's not with the kids running through there that's not gonna that's that we're not gonna touch that in fact we're not going to hit the the highs that we've had on two separate occasions over the past 10 years transportation is through ces we are reimbursed
016in that um i think i said at one of the meetings that the after-school program would be uh supplied by the ceos uh nine different in the crack area for instance it was at one point um it started out it wasn't then then it went to that it was uh i told you that it was here then i checked with chip and he says well it might be um and there's probably more opportunity to talk to him this evening it's likely that it will be so but i don't want to confirm that he can speak for himself in that regard the reimbursement essentially for special education costs we get all the reimbursement except for the initial three thousand four thousand actually if you see any testimony you may say you may have seen that i
017have actually complained about that in the sense of advocating for we should have the fourth by taking the fourth thousand officers to start with um i just don't think that's should be the case and in the past by the way i should have mentioned i've also advocated for an open choice grant that accompanied the uh that accompanied this sort of funding it's called this this funding is called a grant but there was a different academic support grant that also a company that and the the um the state took it away and so was advocate for that too but so basically you'll get back we'll get back at any special education costs except for the first the three thousand or four thousand would have to be returned program benefits i'm not going to read down this
018you've had every opportunity to look at it but there's everything from social emotional to intellectual benefits for students but the program is good by any capacity the diversity that it brings for our students as much in fact in many ways maybe even more so for our own students our own population um as well as the population of young people who come from norwalk i have included a link to not not in the powerpoint but in the questions i did include a wee link of a video i didn't want to play the video this evening but i think if you look at the uh sort of qualitative response from parents and students and past graduates who are who are in the program not in the ces area and heart failure i can't access a video in
019this particular area but it'll give you a sense from a parent point of view from a student point of view past graduate point of view of some of the benefits that they speak to in the program the open choice liaison this is what is in the budget as you know and this is an important part to make the program work this person will work with students staff community members parents from parents who are in our district and also the parents who are in the open choice program they'll this will also work with the ceace liaison because they have a liaison also and that person with liaison with our liaison in terms of anything from transportation to support services to enrichment activities stand late for games whatever it happens to be of course we have to
020remember we're talking about kindergarteners for the first year i've gotten way ahead of myself in some ways but um but we're talking about kindergartners professional development in the legislation there was a funding for professional development which would be offered through ces and probably in the most most likely in the spring and also over the summer i would say that we are doing professional development in the area of diversity anyway which sort of sort of passively addresses these types of topics so this was originally first discussed i think by me at the table way back in november 20th at uh 2020 when we were looking at possibly including it in the budget and then it's come it's come full circle another two times and you'll hear uh by the time the specific timetable from chip that's
021a quick synopsis for the moment um at this point with the boards understand that i'll i'll bring chip into the room and uh give him every opportunity um with eric to feel any questions and anything that comes out of this certainly we can we can talk about that too and the questions that we have supplied the answers for i i one of the questions i know is like the timing of this it's always the right time to do what's right for kids in my opinion and i think this district expects that we can pivot expects the highest standards expects that we can continue with the work and i think we should and and can continue the work and we should continue with this particular program but with that i will introduce if he's on the
022screen eric are you there and dr may you there i am here eric thank you for joining us uh tip thank you for joining us mr chairman if you want to lead leaders off with questions or you would like them to start that's fine too sure i think thank you for that presentation and update i think it would be appropriate um for dr dumay or mr nyquist if there's anything you want to add to the presentation that's just been done and then we can open it up to uh board comments i'll i'll turn it over to you um dr demay to start so the presentation was uh certainly complete there are a couple of them should i ask you to speak up just a little bit thank you certainly appreciate that yeah uh the presentation
023was uh complete we did uh provide information ahead of time to make sure that uh as many questions as possible were answered uh eric would you like to explain the selection process that's one area where we could provide some clarity sure i'd be happy to um first of all thanks for having us here tonight so we can answer any of your questions um the the process that we select by uh i know there's been confusion over the term lottery and the fact of the matter is is it does start with a lottery which is i guess where the confusion has come in uh it starts with a lottery um we put anybody who would like a spot who has applied for a spot in a particular grade level if we don't have enough spots for
024everybody that has applied and let's pick um kindergarten we don't have enough spots for everybody so we do a lottery and it's a straight out lottery it's it's a computer generated lottery once we get that number we then look at the makeup of the group to make sure that it's reflecting the demographics of the sending district so that we're you know i know there's there is concern about um you know that that it won't serve the purpose of the program but we make sure that it does based on that lottery uh but then we make sure that the the group that we're gonna send to darien or to whatever district matches or exceeds the demographic goal of the program based on the sending district i hope that that helps clear that up a little bit
025so mr nyquist could you just i guess you know the open choice program application is pretty simple and pretty straightforward so you know we the way it's proposed here in darien it's a kindergarten start and so um our neighbors in norwalk complete the application and send it in who's part of the process once it moves out of the lottery to looking at the demographics and does it fit the program is there is it a group of folks from norwalk and from ces like what is that comprised of in terms of that next step in looking at the applicants to come up with whatever number we agree to if we're participating sure that's a great question uh the fact is to be very very honest with you it has never really come up in the bridgeport
026region we've never had to dig into the numbers because the numbers come out because the vast majority of students who apply for this opportunity fit the precise demographic that the program is intended for having said that the group of people would be the group of people here at ces and that would be dr dumay myself and our administrative assistant who works very closely with the open choice program we would look at at it to make sure that you know again it satisfies the goals of the program that it it does what it's intended to do we don't we would not be involving norwalk in that decision-making process thank you and by the way you asked um dr dumay to speak up so i'm i feel like i'm shouting if i'm shouting at you let me
027know okay i will let you know if you're shouting too thank you i appreciate it thank you it's just we've got some audience members and um we've got all our friends on zoom so i just want to make sure everything's clear so thank you i will open it up to board questions and comments uh mr ceni gentlemen thanks again uh for joining us and dr adley what a great presentation i think mrs bess put together some great questions so i appreciate that your mic on mr cine so um i do we know the uh makeup of the norwalk demographic um i think you use targeted demographic or some term so can you help us understand you know if it falls short of that targeted demographic what is the general makeup of the norwalk school system
028so i do not have that information at my fingertips i have reached out to norwalk and i will get that uh it will be based on this year's demographic and is that a racial demographic is it an economic demographic is it a um you know uh based on uh sex uh boy or girl i mean uh currently that is a racial demographic okay thank you sure um if can't just this is warm so just by google right um the demographic is 25 white 15 black 4.6 asian or asia pacific 15 51 hispanic latino and 16 would be uh english second language just i i i have those numbers too i i didn't want to publicly use google as my as my source i i yeah no you you can totally do that i didn't want
029to do that but um that sounds fairly accurate to me that would be a great follow-up though yes yeah i think we'd appreciate kind of a official view of that um from a follow-up standpoint um mrs mccammon related to that the program is outlined has three criteria racial ethnic and and uh economic so how are we uh would the goals for a darien be different because of our location or how is that being worked up through no that that's a wonderful question um hartford the hartford area uses the socioeconomic as as part of their of of their decision-making process um i'm going to be very honest with you that i started this position july 1st and i am not somebody who wants to walk in change a hundred things all at once before i have
030a grasp of what's really important so we are currently using the current system which is um the racial makeup of of the demographic um however i'm working with the folks up at creck um to determine that we may need to add in the socioeconomic component i did not want to rush that and do that this year as the applications are were going out january 15th so so that is something we're looking at for future um future years thank you mr mckinnon mrs achman just given that we're asking for those stats i guess my question would be what is a board are we looking for because they're based on current year stats so if those stats change year to year our demographic group will change year to year are we saying that we would evaluate year
031year based on the demographics or what are we looking to learn by the demographics all right are you asking the person who asked the question or i don't think the board had a view if you want my opinion i don't think i don't i don't think i don't think we've discussed i mean we have not discussed it as a board and the administration hasn't brought anything to us as a recommendation so i mean i'm not opposed to it i mean if john has an opinion or or mr james i mean it's it was so like i proposed as a diversity um right it was possible to be part of our dei pro so i'll throw the question back perhaps to you gentlemen is how do the districts that are participating do they how do they
032look at this program and do they look at it um you know in terms of what demographics again i i'm just going to tell you about the the history as i know it and that is that the vast vast majority of students who apply for the program happen to be students of color um and so so we've never and it's not to say that that could maybe very very very very different with this new uh region that we're looking at but the vast majority of students that apply happen to be students of color so it it it does not uh that the question that you're all grappling with um to the best of my knowledge and my administrative assistant's been working with the program for over 10 years and you know we have not experienced
033the issue i know that it could happen so it's great that we're talking about it and making sure we have the plan so that it fulfills the the goals of the program but the vast majority of students that apply we have over 800 applicants a year in bridgeport and and it really does fit um what the goals of the program are how we're looking at it in terms of our ddi program and strategy no i just i just would be confident that uh the ces would be able to complement our student body and with the diversity that we're looking for i'd be confident in that process but if the board wants other information we can certainly bring it to you i was just going to say bridgeport is a much different demographic than norwalk i'm
034imagining so is hartford so we're citing districts with significant differences in norwalk so again follow-up i think would be i guess follow-up would be appreciated for norwalk but i guess what i'm grappling with you say the goal of the program the goal of the program is to match the demographics of the sending district no matter what its demographics are right is that what i'm gleaning from it because we don't have a goal as a as a board as tara's question i think man so no i i just so so we know what i was asking i was being very clear in the sense that we're asking ces to say provide us with norwalks demographics i'm asking how is that helping us make our decision of whether to go forward with this program and maybe it's
035just informational i'm not saying it's it's bad information to have but given that and someone could correct me if i'm here i'm going to guess that darian is 98 caucasian 96 i think i forget our last report nor has different demographics than we do so by default it meets a criteria of dei so we could get different demographics and and they might be very informational and help us just to know but i'm asking how does that help us make a decision i'm not against receiving it i'm just asking what we're doing with the information when we're receiving i'll open that up to board questions or comments mrs worm i think it is informational right they mentioned that they are they look at the sending district and the demographics of the sending district to mirror that
036so if you know just looking to see that we were looking for diversity if 25 of their students are white does that mean we're going to end up with 25 of that number whatever that number is to be white students so that was just the i think that was where that information is coming from or looking at just at this moment it's just um information gathering i believe okay this is best thank you um i know i might add that it might be interesting to look at this information for sure but i would stress again that if our goal or one of our goals is diversity that it's important to keep in mind the ethnic and the socioeconomic as well and while it sounds like that hasn't historically been what's been reviewed if there's any
037way for us to get a better handle on that or to have some better understanding of what what broader diversity this program would bring to our district i think that would be um interesting to look at okay thank you mrs best mrs mccammon i have a different question um i just i was um wanted some clarification on the transportation component of the discussion i did not unders my understanding was that more was to come in a few minutes so sure i i can address um there's two separate things first of all that the first piece of the transportation um is getting kids to and from school right and that is totally handled by our office it is paid for by the state it is coordinated by my office um we make sure that kids get
038to and from school the second part of the equation is the more challenging part and that is whether to provide for high school students uh extracurricular uh transportation right now in the original state state statute it says that we will provide the state will provide that transportation however we all know that the state sometimes says they're going to do something but doesn't fund it um and that's where the that's where there is a a gap that that i am trying to clarify with the state and i know that's not the answer you want you want a very specific solid answer from me but i am working with the state which is sometimes slow in getting back but i i want to find out um since it's in the state statute if i can push to
039make that happen currently i can tell you in bridgeport that most districts do not provide extracurricular transportation but westport does and they have been for more than 10 years they provide the transportation a single bus out uh you know after school hours um they're not gonna you know nobody the state or an individual district is gonna be expected to supply a bus at four o'clock for one rehearsal and five o'clock for a practice and 7 30 for the late practice um but you know obviously and that's what we're trying to work with the state to find out because we want students who are in this program to be immersed in the district that they're in we want them to have all the opportunities that that a district like darien offers um and so that is
040that is unfortunately to answer your question not clear from the state at this moment i i applaud darian for looking at that issue and saying we want to make that work somehow some way and my office is working with the state right now to try to find out and get clarification on whether that can happen and whether it will for the coming year and i'd be happy to report back to you as soon as i know so um did that clear up your did that answer your question even in some way yes thank you very much oh you're welcome mrs mccammon could you give some some your thoughts or feedback on um the number of students um and the starting at the kindergarten age um are there other districts that start at different ages um
041a little some sure um i would say the vast majority of our districts start in kindergarten or first grade and the reason being is i i think most districts you know want to get you know kids when they're young and and and immerse them in the culture of that district um and and allow the students not to have too many transitions in their lives you know if they come in in kindergarten they are darien students and they they know that they feel like they they are darien students if they come in in say seventh or eighth grade you know middle school is a tough enough time for any kid without a transition to add a transition like you know a major transition in is more difficult it's not to say we don't have the those
042occasions arise and i will tell you that we get applicants from every grade level from kindergarten right and up through 11th grade with with parents hoping that their child's senior year will be in in in another district but uh the vast majority of districts that we work with prefer to start the kids when they're in kindergarten or first grade so that they can have them for the long haul and they can get them accustomed to all of the all of the things that that are part of of your school system um for the and just to let you know we get uh and i asked my administrative assistant who has many more years of experience um she said we never get kids who decide after being in the program to leave the program the only
043time we have kids exit the program is when they move right so if they move from bridgeport or norwalk they're no longer eligible to be in the program that's the only reason other than that our kids go straight on through high school graduation can you just add to that um you know as we think through this we are a destination town in terms of our education our commute into new york um we are have been recognized recently for what we're doing in terms of thoughtful development in town um you know we have the potential for a lot more people and a lot more students to come to town so you know a big question from a community standpoint is so we may have seats available this year but we may not have seats available next
044year so what's the viability of participating in something like this where we can do x amount this year but we see a ramp up in in home sales and retirees leaving for families of five and we have 300 plus units coming online um over the next couple of years and so you know how does it look or what's the value of saying we can do 16 this year we can do zero next year the following year maybe we can do four it just seems a little too all over the map to make it really effective sure well i will tell you that for those 16 kids i think it's very valuable and i think for the 16 for the for the hundreds of kids in darien that those 16 kids get to know and get
045to be friends with i think it's incredibly valuable and i would expect you as a board every year to evaluate whether the program is working for you or not and so the only thing that you're guaranteeing is that you're going to keep those 16 or 18 or 12 whatever number you come up with the only thing you're guaranteeing is that you're going to take care of them until they graduate high school you're not you're not guaranteeing me one more person after this year it's just not how it works um and we have some districts that that go up every year and some districts that you know have gone up for three years and now they say well this particular year we know we're we're gonna have a lot of kids in kindergarten so they don't
046take as many that doesn't take away from the value of the program for the kids that are in it or for the kids that they come into contact with thank you very much mrs parent thank you i'm interested from an educational point of view if ces or maybe dr adley or any of the principals have an educated opinion as to what the appropriate number would be and is there is there an appropriate number is is it better to have a larger cohort of of these children each year or does it i mean does it matter um i would just love to have a just a educated factual um idea of what what is the best best practice for this i can take i'll take that question um so it also depends on in some cases
047what a board what a district's position is in terms of if if a district felt that bringing in open choice uh students to the district was so valuable that it would break sections for it then you could take a you could take a position of we would take uh i'll make it up 10 students because we've only got this many uh schools and this many classes and so on so forth so you could you could make that decision and regardless of enrollment you would decide to do that because it's the right thing to do for our kids you could also many kit many of the surrounding areas actually those that are most successful too also do it based on not breaking sections for the most part um so you so you could do you could
048do that we have a diversity goal like there's no point just sprinkling like i mean and not participating in good faith or maybe not the the right terminology but it would i would ask us to not back into it if we can if if class sizes was an issue i would say okay well then were we have identified for the 16 coming in where we would trip to class size maybe in 2025 2025-26 okay and then let's let's address that and take out the four four students if that was your the case and do the 12. we put in 16 because we thought that was important for the schools to participate and i would stand by that but if the board wasn't was concerned by tripping the class i could also understand that and uh
04912 would seem to be a reasonable but i think there's research is to support that students we have fellow students of their own races and in the classrooms that's a better scenario right if not that then within the school so i mean it's not we can we can implement them with certain considerations mrs ackman um [Music] thank you gentlemen for being here tonight my question has to go we've heard a lot about finances in town and there's a concern that the program will will cost more i mean we've seen projections anywhere from five million to one million um we've heard from our finance director that's not the case in his experience we've heard from aboard a finance member who's a finance director at a school that that's not his experience in the case dr adley
050has presented us with much lower cost and actually saying that we'll have a revenue actually come in what has been your experience in the programs you know have have districts in incurred high costs because of participating in open choice i'm just going to answer very bluntly if if they did they wouldn't still be involved i mean you know as big as a district's heart is and as much as they think they want to do what's right for all students if they're if they're you know spending inadequate amounts of money inordinate amounts of money on a program that is not supposed to cost them a lot they wouldn't still be involved and you know just this year we had a district add 30 seats um at the beginning of the year they think the program is
051working great they they like the way it's being run um and so they added 30 seats so so you know the the there there are costs of educating any any child but those costs jump up as i think was just pointed out if you tip and have to add a teacher when when you have to do that when you have to add a classroom that's where those costs come up but but adding adding a student here or there adding 16 students is not going to to multiply out by the per student expenditure as i you know i think you all all understand that um i i will tell you that i i have just not had any conversations with any districts that are telling me wow this is costing more than we thought it was
052going to they're just not that's that's just not the conversations i have with districts are the kids are on the bus for a long time you know if they're if they're going from bridgeport to westport and there's traffic that's the conversations i have with districts um it's it's not about the finances so um you know i i'm not a financial expert and and uh you know i'll leave that to the people on in darien who know it better than i do but the the costs don't seem to be a problem for the districts that have been involved for all of these years that the program's been running mr rudel anything you want to add you know the program you know our fixed costs you know the constant conversation about this is going to cost us
053what our per pupil student cost is but we are talking about empty seats based on you know our class size so anything from a finance end you want to add to that so i mean just what was said providing you don't break a section it's really your direct cost so your consumables your materials um any technology like a chromebook things like that those are really your direct costs everything else that makes a part of that per pupil whether it's teacher salaries special education costs special education transportation or utilities those are really all fixed costs those aren't going to change if you add incremental students it's only going to change if you actually tip a section and so that's where your large possible coming from thank you mr rudolph mrs worm um i actually have a
054couple questions um one back to the bus situation you spoke about high school and that you were going to check on that so that means that there would not be a late bus ever for like middle school elementary yeah not according to the state not the state will not provide that um it's not to say that darien couldn't um but but the state does not provide for that it says in the statute for high school extracurriculars and um two more things um the students and this might not be a question for you i'm not sure about um the english as a second language learners is that considered special education or is that a cost that we take not sure who answers that so what what is your experience in the program with students where english
055is a second language i i you know i i would be i would be answering a question that i don't truly have the answer to um i know that our that we have many english um language learners in our program um the districts work with each other to determine the the the cost that it is costing uh if if you think it's going to cost x amount and norwalk disagrees and is going to refuse to pay for that um that goes to the state the state makes a determination um it's it's the reasonable cost the reasonable costs up to the that four thousand dollars that you would get as a grant anything beyond that you are able to charge back to norwalk um now whether whether the state would consider uh english language learners to
056need more than that cost that that i do i couldn't answer that for you to be very honest i don't want to speculate then my last question was just um you mentioned there was a district that added 30 seats could you tell us what district that is dr dumay am i okay to do that sure that's fairfield fairfield added 30 more seats this year thank you sure to mrs worm's question which is a good question as we've seen an increase in english language learners if those students come to the district and the costs associated with that would have to go up over and above the four thousand dollar grant before we would then negotiate with norwalk as to a reimbursement on those costs in other words they feel that grant encompasses um some of that
057programming that we might need to do for these students so that's basically what the grant is for yeah the well yes and and the grant is an incentive of course but it also is meant to cover educational costs um it specifically talks in the the statute about special education costs because as we know that those can be um those can be quite hefty and so it talks in the in the state statute it talks about um reasonable special education costs after whatever grant you get can be billed back to the sending district thank it's much like tipping a section we talked about this because we had so many students that needed it that do we need to add someone so costs would be included but it's it's like teaching a section you don't pay a
058thousand dollars for your english each student for their english as your second language teacher this board would have to discuss are we adding an fte but that we we did that three years ago this board with all dairy and students so it's not a special education class being english as a second language learner you're not in special ed um it's just like a teacher because they're just general ed students correct and i don't think i don't think through the program chip uh that it's directly reimbursable so therefore what mr zachman says is correct that was the answer to the question [Laughter] okay thank you for that clarity around that mr sini is is uh english as a second language is that something that we'll learn in the demographic um break out of norwalk that we
059asked for uh you could get yes you can get that yeah okay um second i'm sorry but i'm sorry but it won't will not be a determining factor whether the student is accepted or not okay just wanted to clarify that no but i'd be interested to understand if just the ratio so we'd have to understand whether or not we tripped any oil a lot of the 16 if if yes the four that come here we need that additional person and based on our current enrollment and numbers we have it could lead to another fte yeah um yeah thank you that's where i was going um appropriate services is that the same definition that we use for our own students shirley do you know or anybody [Music] i think the term was reasonable um was it
060the using on the notion of reasonable services so reasonable services when you once you come to the 4 000 mark you would build back the district i have checked with other districts that do participate and they have not had any difficulty reimbursement for those services above the reasonable services right so alan's memo said appropriate services so are we swapping appropriate and reasonable as uh synonyms right in the past i've said there hasn't been to my knowledge right um and i've been participating in the program for 20 years any problem of of getting reimbursement i think in the whole of experience that i've ever had there was one dispute with with hartford that didn't last long at all okay so i'm just trying to understand it would be the same thresholds for special services that would
061we would use foreign yes um the other question if maybe we could get a little more color what happened in danbury because that danbury and norwalk were i think the newest districts that were added to the program so if i could get a little more detail what happened in danbury doctor domain you want to talk to that sure so um in the norwalk area you already have a couple of communities that are participating westin and westport who participate in bridgeport um are closer to norwalk and will be shifting some of their newer students towards that so you already had two towns that are participating uh danbury the surrounding towns won because of enrollment and the potential for breaking those sections is not participating in the first year another district that is in the process of
062redesigning their elementary school structure and building a new building is not in a position to take on additional students this time um one of the communities chose not to participate and we're still waiting to hear on two others at this point there's not a critical mass that would put us in a position where providing transportation would be reasonable at this point so we're going to push out danbury one more year thank you thank you mr senior mrs achman um when would the lottery occur or and and really i guess i'm not looking for the exact lottery when would dare darien be notified of the students um joining us next school year so you know idea that there's a difference between ideally and practically uh ideally uh we would find out from districts on march 15th
063dutifully that they have so many seats available um but we know that that it just never happens um people are still dealing with budgets at that time they're still trying to get a grasp on their enrollments and so i i've put out to darien um when i was asked this question that may 15th would be the day that we would need your final you know your your number by um and and and really honestly that that's generous i would like it before then march 15th is the general deadline but um we can work with it if it's may 15th what happens is as soon as we get commitments from the districts um the second we get a commitment from a district that that that fourth grade has availability in their district we run the fourth
064grade selection process um so it's i i hate to use the term rolling but it rolls as districts tell us um you know what what they're offering once darien tells me how many seats if any that they're going to provide us next year we will do the lottery immediately because the the fact is that um that the applications are due by march 15th and so we will know what our pool of students is by then uh and then we will we will run it we will run the selection process so my goal would be and i i'm dr dumay's going to yell at me for giving this but i would say by june 1st would be my goal for for telling you provided that you let me know by may 15th i would think that
065by june 1st i should be able to give you so my point in asking the question is that um by then our budget is set and so whether it's esl or other than setting sections which we do um you know what at the end of july right we said sections of that july meeting but by then our budget is set come july 1 our budget is done so whether it's english as a second language learner or we've already determined what our staff is with we have our flexibility of budget control but i guess again as we ask for information i guess my question is what are we what are we doing with it we won't know who will have what needs until we know our students and at that point we've accepted them as our
066students and will meet their needs and so you're talking you know the summer at that point our budget deliberations are over and the town has hopefully improved our budget well i think also when rich could you just um remind us i mean kindergarten over the last couple of years sometimes that enrollment drags out and it's almost we're looking at it at every board meeting over the course of the summer so traditionally one of you kind of really firmed up that kindergarten enrollment so usually the board doesn't set sections until early august right okay just just just for the record all right i guess my board thinks i'm i'm crazy here uh the date the original date we got for the the seat request was april 15th and then the final one was may 15th just
067no not that of change is too much but mr moroney yeah sorry um i have a couple questions going back to the presentation so there's there was a the term bonus grant and it's a one-year bonus grant is that a one-time bonus grant or is that in every year there's a thousand dollar bonus go ahead the first year of the pilot just the first year so it's a one-time one-year bonus okay so then the cost is only three thousand every other year other than okay and then my other question dr adley was on your cost graph you have and i don't i just scratched down some numbers but the first year the cost is 2200 for 16 and then the next year it goes to 6500 for 12. and i don't understand how you got
068to that number rich can you bring someone bring that slide up oh sorry so it is uh it is the cost of technology so uh we do have enough chromebook tablets uh for the proposed 16. so the expectation in the future is if uh more students are added you are going to have to purchase additional k2 tablets i'm sorry but then but then why is the second cohort 49 for 12 and it's 22 for 16. what did they be going into kindergarten they wouldn't have technology so the first cohort uh you would end up having to buy replacement k2 tablets and so then as you go forward you're also going to have to buy the chromebooks so the second cohort which you see is the 4920 includes the cost of materials consumables things like that
069plus the k2 tablets the k2 tablets again then chromebooks then chromebooks i think chromebooks okay thank you thank you mr moroney mrs mccammon just a technical question back on special ed i'm curious to know who owns the iep um one and two related to that if we are have a particularly challenging case and challenging may be in a in a blessed way um and we end up with an outplacement situation or um a suit that's brought to the district how are those lines uh handled is is everything handled within therian or sure so um the iep is darien's iep their darien student very often the sending district will send a representative to the ppt um to you know to to to just be there to be a presence to hear the situation um but again
070an out placement would be one of those an outplacement is certainly going to cost more than three thousand dollars so that would be billed back to the district to the sending district um i did speak to one of the sending districts one of the districts that are participating and that goes beyond reasonable costs and yes they pay for the out of district or if a paraprofessional was needed that goes beyond reasonable cost also and they would provide the funding for that you know make sure i haven't missed your hand up are you good all good duke thank you all right thanks david mr moroni yeah a question on siblings and and question would be how do how do other districts handle siblings of children admitted into the program if at all so siblings uh siblings
071get priority um it's in the legislation it's in the statute the goal would be to keep um siblings together um ideally in a perfect world in the same school if not that in the same district and if not that then um then then they have to go to school in their home district and their their sending district but um you know if you have if you accept a kindergartner this year and next year they have a sibling who's going into kindergarten and you have a kindergarten spot they do get priority again we want to keep families together how does that work in in i don't know i know it's the reverse that if you have a if you apply are you allowed to apply as a kindergartner and you have a second grader what happens
072to the second grader well that if you had a second grade spot that you gave us they would get priority and we would have to give that you you always have to give it there there's never a time ever there is never ever a time where my office or the state says to you you must do this you must take this student it just doesn't work that way and so if you know if you had second grade spots available you know by the the by by miracle well then that student in second grade because their brother or sister's in kindergarten could get that priority seat um but but no you would not be forced to or um you know we would not say well you have to take them because their sibling goes to derry
073and it doesn't it just doesn't work like that um you know we we have many we have many families who are split who have one child in in say uh westport and the other child because there were no spots um given by westport they're they're at their their um sending district they're still in bridgeport or they make another option they make another choice for the child but um we do give priority because we again we want to keep families together so if you give us a a vacancy a seat and there is a somebody who applies that's a sibling of another darien student we do give it to them they get preference but i so i if i use the word force i apologize i did not mean to use force my question would be
074though if you apply with a kindergartener how does how does the process work if there is a child with so tommy comes in as a kindergartner but joey is a second grader do you let us know that joey has applied as a second grader or do we does he only come in if we say we have a second grade spot open are there other people who want to come in it's a little wonky typically what would happen i guess would be the cmc scs would give me a call and say would you be interested in taking uh and generally whether if the board has uh if the board has approved that type of selection to the superintendent or not then they said we would consider it or we wouldn't okay and i've i've had both
075of those scenarios play out i've we've called a district and said hey we have a sibling would you happen to have an extra spot and they said you know the superintendent calls me back in two days and says nope i checked on it we just don't have the room i've had other situations where the superintendent calls me back and said we actually do have room we'd be happy to take the sibling we love the family we're we're happy to have the brother thank you dr adley uh please excuse me i have a class that's uh started a couple minutes ago thank you dr dumay appreciate you participating and helping us with questions thank you good luck with the class any additional board questions comments mrs mccammon are there any measurement criteria you're using whether they're
076academic or otherwise for you to feel like the program is successful from the ces or legislative point of view sure um well i started in july so uh a longitude study has not been been undertaken yet uh and i'm not saying that facetiously but um to be very honest um the state has had has done a study um using test scores um but it's limited it's uh and i did share it with folks in darien i'd be happy to share it with anybody here who would like me to share it i it's a very easy document to share it does show that students who are in the open choice program not only did better up front but over the course of time grew exponentially more than their counterparts who stayed back in the sending district
077i but i'm going to be very very honest with you um it's not a big enough study for me to put my flag into and say this is the end all in be all i just it's just not it's it's a study that was done in 2015 um based on scores for i think it was 2015 based on scores from 2010 and 2012. um the the the other thing that i can go by is the fact that when students get into the program they graduate from from the schools that they they go to um i did try to find information to be very honest i tried to find information about um you know success after high school did they go to four-year colleges they did they go to the military did they go to two-year
078the state has not undertaken to um find that data at this point so part of my uh my new job is that i'm going to try to collect that data um what i can tell you is that as i've looked back over the last eight years and that's about as far back as i could really grapple with the the data it's been really successful students go and they they they do well i just had a mom in the other day whose son was a valedictorian of the school that that he went to and and i said so did the program work for him and she said i have no doubt she said he wouldn't have been inspired to do what he did if if he weren't surrounded by these these other students who are all
079driven and motivated and had that support at home she said it was so helpful to him and he was the valedictorian he went to college on a full ride so um i know that's anecdotal rather than hard data but the state had doesn't have they have that one study and it it's it's positive um but the data that i i am going by right now is that the parents that i talk to the fact that so many of the the people who apply have siblings already in the program again if they weren't happy with the program if they found it to not work for them they wouldn't apply for their younger child to go but instead they they apply and they call us and say i want to make sure you know that their sibling
080is in the program and i i think we get priority because i'm i'm so loved the school i really want my my younger child to have the same experience um so i i wish that there was hard data long studies that have been done um but i don't i don't find that information um currently so i will be working on that myself thank you mrs parent i i just like to do the inverse a little bit so it's it's we've seen or we're hearing that that is successful for the sending district students how do we measure success from our side and how we how i know that once open choice students are in the district their dairy and students but for the durian students who reside in darien how can we measure the success of
081this program so whether we have an el student and i don't say this i say this sincerely actually [Music] i believe he said that he thought the question was great as i said in one of the studies the idea of going to school learning with playing with growing up with engaging with a diverse community has been proven to be beneficial for for all students i mean i will just say anecdotally again every single education class that i've sat in whether undergraduate or graduate has taught me that being in a diverse classroom whether it's first year thought diversity of skin color diversity religion diversity of whatever is a better place for any person to be in that's what i'm going on thank you mrs parent this is best thank you um mr nyquist i know it
082wouldn't be hard data but for example when a district like fairfield calls you and says they would like to uh bring in 30 more students this year do they cite reasons um that they are asking to increase their participation uh they they did not other than they told me that the program is working great and they believed they had seating capacity to add 30 more students there are incentives for districts the more students you you add the the higher the the state pays you per student um so i you know the the practical the practical side of me thinks that you know that probably had something to do with the number that they arrived at um and uh as a percentage of your whole population that's where the number goes up um but but i
083i wasn't here when they made that call so i i really couldn't speculate as to why but again i can extrapolate that if it wasn't working for them they would never have given us 30 more seats and asked for 30 more students to come this is best just i think just for for a bit of color to that question is that they're also responding to a estate plan for racial imbalance so i think it's an extra incentive or a natural requirement or combination thereof that has an influence there dr adley that's true i i am not aware that this specifically that number helped them specifically with that i know that that's why they've been involved in the program so i i appreciate you adding that thank you additional board questions or comments all right anything
084else you want to add doctor uh if eric is if we're signing off eric i'll i'll say thank you to to eric and for his participation this evening if the board would like to go through the open choice questions or do they feel as if we'll we'll open it up we'll um if we're done with um eric nyquist i will say thank you very much um for helping us out this evening and answering those questions we appreciate it thanks for your time you're very welcome and just so you know anybody on the board who has further questions you know go to the open choice website and my information is there i'd be happy to to answer any more questions and i will get back to you on the the questions that were posed that i
085did not have direct answers for immediately thank you very much everybody have a great night have a good evening thank you i will open it up to the board to continue with any questions or comments relative to the questions that have been answered that have come up through the budget process so those questions have all been answered in the package so any additional questions around these questions that have been answered or any additional questions you'd like the administration to um over and above what we discussed tonight want to add i will say that uh under number three i'm not i'm not bypassing stuff here just uh i think number one and number two talks to either running through 16 students or running through a cumulative 16 and then 12 and so on so forth um
086i will say that fairfield westport western i haven't talked to all the superintendents new canaan welton the fairfield westport and western are very strong supporters of it are advocates for it i will also say that i can't respect you any particular but honestly i'm not sure that there's a professional will to do it and in some places and i do think that the climate the social claim that we're working on has influenced that too that's unsaid and i'm not talking about any particular district but i'm just thinking that there is some of that and i hope we don't let that interfere with our decision making as we go but again fairfield westport and western think the program enriches the whole school community dr bradley enrich we are looking at in our budget um a malone
087and mcbroom demography report for the upcoming year which wouldn't be done probably much until october it turns out those programs work so you know i think a big question from the community question from the board is you know this is a town it's a destination for education it's a destination to live it's a destination to commute you know we've got a lot of these developments coming online and i know over the years we've built those developments into our enrollment projections you've recently worked with town hall to get updates on when those projects are coming online the amount of bedrooms that are involved there's even a question i heard today those apartments wouldn't that have showers versus bathtubs which makes it a difference in terms of people that may come live in those apartments so i
088think it's important for the community and the board to hear that you know when looking at our enrollment projections and taking into account those developments that we know are approved coming out of the ground some people already talking to leases you know that is how you're coming up with number one that we want to participate you're recommending to participate in this program but we know our numbers are not interested in tipping classes or changing our class size it's a real value to how we deliver education from our local community neighborhood field elementary schools on up to the high school so just a little more color on the time and energy that's been spent on the enrollment numbers sure they were included in the 2020 and then uh you want to talk about some of those
089discussions so we do factor in the new uh the new developments we do work with jeremy ginger over in planning and zoning to get an idea of the breakdown of uh studios or one bedrooms two bedrooms et cetera so when we look at the enrollment projections for next year uh this the schools that we're recommending adding four students in um based on the enrollment projections have a capacity nearly three times of what we're recommending so even if the projections are off by a little bit you still won't likely tip a class section so if you have 14 students let's say capacity we're saying we'll take four it still leaves you with essentially wiggle room of 10 should you actually see the influx of additional students from some of those new developments this is worm uh
090so aren't there some of those buildings aren't approved yet though all the apartments it's planning and zoning and still going through that process so we don't really know exactly what we're dealing with correct so it's just the the approved ones that are in the pipeline do we know how many which buildings have been approved and which haven't been approved or do we have any idea we know the ones that have been approved um so like corbin's been approved federal has been approved um palmer's has been approved so there's a few of them that have been approved so still not still no parklands correct anything else parklands hasn't been approved yet by planning and zoning so but those the developments this came up at opc meeting last week the developments that have been approved and are
091coming out of the ground are built in um those other developments that are not approved yet have not been built in and would have to be built in as soon as we know they're approved and understand the timeline is that just parklands though or is there something else my understanding is the only thing that's on the map right now is parklands which i think is 60 some odd units and again i'm not sure the makeup of studio versus one and two bedrooms so but yeah to that point in your question for a town in in development i mean and so the minute another project comes online or gets approved we need to understand the timeline of ground up and leases being signed so that we can continue to build that into the enrollment projections senior
092and duke if the board does decide to go through i mean i think we should consider whether or not you know royal is the destination for federal which is the first uh project that's coming online um i believe they're going to start um this you they'll probably put some units uh residents in some units by this fall um so i heard today on a podcast but um so i think we should consider if we do decide to go forward would make adjustments maybe around or consider adjustments around royal for instance or you know so just think strategically of the others you know where these new developments are sending children also to have an extra layer so if you have you for the current year um you've taken into consideration those schools and where people may
093start to be yeah so actually royal is not included even though the second line on these questions say that royal is no matter how many times you read these questions right so absolutely i'm sorry exactly royal is not included okay so the budget book has the correct correct thank you thank you mrs achman so i wonder when we ask those questions and and forgive me if my numbers are wrong mr ceni may know better because we talked about these numbers when he was chairman over at pnc i think what's estimated is something like you know one 1.25 kids or 1.3 kids i can't quite remember in certain units but we did never ask the same question of homes being built five bedroom homes who are we filling those with so again i think as we're
094looking at data like what kind of data are we looking to collect we can look at units and and 16 units and 1.5 kids but then we also should at least if we're going to ask the question ask what do we look at at empty five bedroom homes or what are we i mean if we're going to use that kind of purchasing to determine whether we have room for this you would have to really do this map it across town if on the other hand you're saying our injec our production enrollments have held and we've had them right for the past year you know since i've been on the board and beyond we've had a couple years that were wonky and we will evaluate this year to year because we embraced the program i think
095that's a different like again i think we can we we have to come to a decision on a board of whether we feel this is a value of the town we can ask for stats from here until tomorrow will they help us make a decision on this program and i think that's what we have to keep keep in mind as we deliberate thank you mrs eichmann this is apparent thank you so the 16 i just want to get a little more clarity why you chose the 16. did you say i want to get to 95 of max capacity or you know i'm just trying to think going forward how we do this year after year are we going to take up to x to get us to 95 percent i'm just playing that number but
096how how do we know what are we looking to eat right so so we haven't we haven't capped out at the max by any means and the four in each of the school was relatively one for each grade level or i did say with some flexibility it might be two kids in a class and another two kids in a class because there is some some logic an argument to actually have company um in in some capacity and also what we would do is what we do now uh when we place kids and we look at each individual need and you come up with the class list so wouldn't preclude that but essentially it was where we could where we could uh put a child in each section we would do that so into the point
097of the 16 in your previous comment there so with the 16 we still have capacity um in terms of number of seats in classrooms based on enrollment projections because last year we had 41 kids show up for so uh so based on the board's class size guidelines uh and the number of sections where at the elementary level you're about 85 capacity um you know it varies by kindergarten first etc uh but you're about 85 percent capacity but you would have still haven't you mr rudolph so that's still have room before tipping is that weird so mr rudel to tara ochman's question the mammographer when they get on the ground they look at home sales you know i don't know do they get into the fact that a retired couple moved out and a family of
098five moved in like do they get do they try to get as much of that data so they try to get as much real estate data as they can in terms of units sold um if they can get information on you know what families moved in um they'll try to get that so they look at turnover they look at birth rates um anything that could uh affect the projection thank you a quick question rich sorry following up on the averages about 85 percent like that doesn't actually play out evenly across schools because we could be five percent on average but if you have one that's one student away from a tipping point and still an 85 average now we have a new section right correct yes okay so we have any idea on how to
099calculate that how close we get to the to the uh you know tipping point for sections so the one area that's closest to tipping is royal um especially in kindergarten so that's actually you know within a few sections are a few students from tipping when you look at hindley holmes and oxford primarily those are the ones that are closer to that 85. so i guess the 85 maybe may not be that useful as a guide it really isn't a case by case it really is uh case by a case in grade by grade thanks rich thank you mr brown mr moroney but to that point as well we're not tied to doing sick four kids for each school if one school is at a hundred percent or 98 capacity you may move seven kids to
100homes and only two to royal correct if it made sense to do that okay yeah we would consider like we would certainly want to make sure that the enrollment is appropriate right um yeah let me do that this is best thank you dennis actually asked my question but just to clarify so when you set the sections in august if it's looking like you would have to break a section at a particular elementary school to accommodate the four students you could shift and do two students at that elementary school and end up with six at another that had a little more room is that fair um i just want to be had my hesitancy is not that that's not fair i just want to make sure that there's a fair way to say it as soon
101as we take a student and we commit to the student it's the same way for one of our own students i would hate to commit to a family and say you're in this school and then go well we're moving you completely to another school uh with that sort of exception as aside as we would make accommodations and try and balance out as best we could so i'm a wee bit flexible in that question because i just would want to see what it actually plays out to be but so does that mean that in june for example when we find out which students would be coming to our district those students would find out what school they would be coming to rather than what districts they would be coming to well they would find out they
102find out relatively at the same time what what school the placement we have we may have a wee bit longer depending on processes would there ever be a time when say you have a influx of 10 third graders and you're you've reached a tipping point would the open choice students then be made to go to a different school oh i don't think we would do that i don't they are our students when they when we enter here uh so we will treat them the same way as we're treating with uh as a darian residence thank you mr moroney yeah maybe this is more of a question to our guests or that we're here but part of the appeal is that we have a neighborhood school is do you try to build in would you try
103to build in students from norwalk who reside in similar areas to keep them in similar schools say the last part again uh dennis so so we have neighborhood schools would you want to try to keep the students from norwalk to be you know someone from west norway could you try to keep those four students to go to royal someone from roway and those four students would go to tokeni well i'll not matter yeah well ultimately the enrollment would drive it and ultimately uh the transportation um but since that darian has been um grant information to participate in the program any school in darien would we be able to take him to any school i don't think we would but would you try to keep the because that to me it's kind of the neighborhood feel
104and that would provide a neighborhood feel from that area as well from that other the other district myself and we don't have to have an answer yeah i don't know hopefully i'm understanding professionally you're thinking that the students from norwalk in some area are together kept together what you're asking or no yes well i think i think you mean that where norwalk abouts darien there are some natural almost neighborhood-like so you know there's on the border of north korean and norwalk would you send kids from from that area of norwalk to royal or oxford potentially because transportation plays a big part of it so that in itself sort of defined neighborhoods okay thank you mrs ackman so we had a question about um um sorry it happens i lost it but it's back in fact
105about you know developments and what sending schools and as i understand it you've mapped it out this year because we have incremental space at schools but if we ever felt that a school was too crowded we would redistrict right i mean if we felt that the federal property was going to overwhelm royal we would redistrict i mean we did it with avalon avalon students used to go to homes we redistricted techniques because tokenique had space homes didn't so it actually would be the larger projects coming on online that would determine districting more than 16 kids that you're really placing into slots that are open is that correct yeah so we have like large numbers of influx of of of student impact in school so the developments would drive that more than any student from open
106choice well certainly development would be more than 16 students right so yes thank you mr zachman any other questions or comments all right we will move on then thank you everyone for further discussion on the bring your own device for the darian high school dr adley and mr tranberg so again with um we'll walk through the presentation and mr tramberg then come and walk through our we'll work through the questions again uh together at the end and we'll go from there just so thank you for your questions actually some of the questions that we've answered tonight for open choice and someone included some of the rtms and some of the committees that we got questions for anybody who made a question or regarding open choice we're included so the same as to a lesser degree
107i think on the bring your own device good evening everyone this first graphic is one that you have come to know over time this was the implementation timeline for the one-to-one program with our uh first cohort graduating in 20 21 i've also included along the bottom that 40 teachers have completed professional development over the past few years in the vanguard program that specifically focused on developing their skills using mac devices whether those be macbooks mac airs ipad pros and the use of those pencils so we have um 40 teachers that have had that training and that's important for what's to come so as far as the catalyst for the change and i'll dig into these a bit throughout the presentation one is something that we have talked about speculated heard from in teacher focus group
108and we'll see some data just about the implementation and the student usage another was uh regarding the steepness the staff feedback um integration with instruction and the general message here will be uh things have changed and our knowledge and our skills have changed with how we can use technology over the past few years especially personalization to the learner giving the students the choice and the voice in their device and then just the developmental appropriateness so we talked about this a bit with the previous presentation why not middle school one of elementary school high school students have the capacity to do this and then of course allocation of resources which is a cost savings in in this budget so as far as the instructional drivers and i won't do every bullet here i'll just pick a
109few highlights um the first will be a byod program at the high school really allow us to talk about instruction i feel like we've spent a lot of time together talking about devices and it's been really hard getting to the instructional conversation so feeling like we could implement a very high quality program um without the ipads at the high school that is certainly a driver for me instructionally um and the other piece that's really new in research is about the diversity of devices and how that can actually provide differentiated learning experiences for students in the classroom because they can show their work on different in different ways with different ecosystems and one very simple example is presenting a slide deck with google slides versus a powerpoint versus keynote um there are different opportunities and different
110ways for students to show their work um and also they have different fluency because of the devices that they've come to know and use and there's an obvious one of the this device is faster it's better why do i have to use my ipad has come into play and the other is the google and we've heard this along the way the google apps in general don't necessarily interface as well as we would love them to with an ipad because while google and ipads do work together as you might imagine it's not a match that has been designed to work super well for many reasons that you can guess as far as the instructional model we just wanted to include this as well because it's a big factor in the budget so this is how classrooms
111and and teacher devices work the only actual change for next year is teachers getting mac errors so we do have the 40 that have already received them through the vanguard program so the rest is equipping them with mac errors at the same time that the desktops have aged out so this is not giving them another device on top of a device this was the regular replacement cycle to replace those classroom devices so this will just support the mobility of teachers between classrooms and the ipad pros it just happens to be it's the replacement year for those as well so how we would transition out the end of this year would be the collection of the ipads and those pencils and there's repurposing in several ways one would be going to the ipad carts which you
112would anticipate putting about 50 of the devices to cards for teachers to use and sign out for different classes and assign those by department we'd like to send some to elp special education and make sure the library is equipped with ipads as well in case students forget a device in case you need to sign out an ipad for some reason professional development would continue not only in the summer but throughout the year for our staff if there is a need the families would work with a counselor to complete a waiver process which is similar to what we do for other times when there's some considerations that are needed and then in the fall students would register their personal device and make sure it's equipped with all of the applications so as far as what students
113have to do is they would bring a charge device to school every day as always adhere to our acceptable use policies and then the counselor is a resource if there is a need and again we would make sure in case a student forgets or doesn't have a device they would have access to one this is also included in your questions but these are the minimum specs for the different devices one of the reasons we do want to keep 50 of the devices at this time is the secure browsers are required for testing and that will be sats for the first time as well as ap testing and then when we have ngss we need to use the secure browser and there is no option as of right now to not have a school issued device
114for those reasons we did have a focus group in december we had about between 40 and 50 teachers and there were some takeaways that ended up reflecting not only i don't want to say what we've speculated but we have had some speculative conversations but what we've heard from students what we've seen from students what we've heard teachers say and then the data from the survey reflected this so the big one that i think you saw when you looked over is just the inconsistent use of those devices so that was a big determining factor for us the technology integration itself it's just shifted and i will not say it's because of the pandemic but that was an opportunity where we learned how to use technology very differently and very often to enhance learning so we know
115some more there students are very fluent with devices especially the devices that they've chosen to use and one of the pieces that the teachers anticipated or they reflected in their conversations with students the kids wanted a bigger screen so i'm going to use my laptop because the screen's bigger than what i have on my ipad um this also this group also included members of the technology committee all the department chairs and at least two members of each department that were considered heavy tech users by their department chairs so this just demonstrates the number of survey responses we had 928 which represents about a 65 return which is a nice return for a survey and this also shows that relatively we have a normal distribution across grade level so the the data is representative and here
116this is just finding out if students had another personal device other than the ipad and as you can see 86 percent of students do and interestingly of those 86 72 bring their other device to school on a regular basis anyway this just does the breakdown of that data by grade level which is uh represented similarly here uh one that stood out for me on the first graph all the way to the left um that i need to use my ipad for learning so we have 34 percent of students that say i don't use my ipad at all for learning uh that number jumps out for me and then when you look at what devices students do use you can see that we're a heavy mac user community and this is when you do use your
117ipad what do you use it for so that 57 would be for school work and then again another number that jumps out is 37 so if we've issued 1400 ipads and 37 of them are sitting on the shelf that's not a number that we really want to see there was an open question of why do i have why do i use another device and these were the top responses from the data so that again that preference for the larger screen the laptop that works much better with the keyboard than when it's an accessory to an ipad speed and then the use of ipad for notability only notability is a not only a note-taking program uh but it's a way to annotate uh documents so that's has high student usage so those are the highlights of
118the byod transition thank you mr tranberg appreciate that work and appreciate doing that survey and getting that information back to the board um i will open it up for board questions mr senior it's more of a comment it looks like this policy as you guys outlined it is more of a you have a choice basically that's the way i read it we were talking opt-in it seems to lay out like that is am i missing something like if a student wants to bring wants to maintain an ipad via the schools they can they can still do that if they re refuse to bring their own device right i would say using the word if they refuse yes but if we have to maintain everyone having an ipad then we're still going to be financing a
119one-to-one program so it's uh there has there has to be a process that they would go through to say they need a device and if they are if that's the device they want it would also be expected that that's the device they're using for their learning based on your data i wouldn't expect that i mean there'll be some people that have their own device but prefer to use a school device but that's going to be at least based on your surveys for a minority of students yes okay this is best thank you thanks for the presentation um for notability what are the swap outs if you do not have a touch screen because it does sound to me like science and math classes tend to rely more heavily on notability and i don't know of
120a substitute that doesn't require touch screen so for the note taking part obviously any word processing uh we'll use will work for that the other is you can annotate pdfs through without it without a touch screen so touchscreens are great you don't need to have a touchscreen but you can annotate pdfs through several different programs that some are free and some are four or five dollars if you don't want ads okay and we don't know that faculty rely on notability in classes in those areas or there's anything particular to consider for the maths and the sciences that's part of why we want to maintain the parts so if there are any teachers and classes so english in the english department are heavy users right now science departments heavy users in the music classes all of
121the notation is on ipads so right now they're thinking that they want to maintain the carts because they're anticipating the use and i would speculate since i've said speculate a lot during tonight that when students have their own device they're going to figure out how to use it on the device that they want to use that tends to that's the trend of what tends to happen thanks mr zachman [Music] so did the administration investigate um i feel like what we heard from the board is a lot of different kind of wading into this before kind of telling parents go home the expense is on you go buy a device which is a philosophical change and and i do think a significant one we really don't do that in other areas under the statutes of free
122and appropriate education but did you look at what would it be to phase this in to do an opt-in and and see the results of it to say to parents we're not expecting you now on very short notice to go out for if you have three children in the high school to go buy free personal devices but we we will honor and opt-in and and kind of collect data was there any thought to the conversations of either a true opt-in program or a phase-in program all of which were different ideas that were kind of bantered around on budget saturday i'll i'll start by saying there hasn't been a survey so nothing formal but we did look at well what do we need to run the rest of the programs with the ipads that we want
123to preserve distribute to elp to special education and make sure there's enough in the library and once you do that there's actually not that many ipads left which leads to another question that appeared um i think it was mr suny's question about well how what does the replacement cycle become because ideally you're not replacing ipads every four years when you reduce the usage from whatever it was to let's say 40 percent less so we're expecting the life of the ipads would be longer um any type of if you call in an opt-in at phase in we certainly want to work with families that that need to need device and help with the transition and we will certainly do that but it's not going to take that many devices to i'll say compromise the plan because
124we need to have so many devices for testing so if we have so many devices out and not enough to issue two grade levels to test that are testing at the same time um then we would have to collect devices from students mid-year which would just be i don't want to say management like managerially impossible but it would be very challenging and then we're taking away devices from students that might be using them so i guess just to follow up given that we don't seem to or we haven't heard kind of a clear standard of when you get a school issue device or when you don't i'm a little worried exactly about that snare we we do need devices for testing we will have to replace because in three or four years from now we
125won't be having the kids use these old recycled ipads to take their sats or trust me we'll have even longer public comment here but so what do we do in that eventuality i mean i do think there is a planning issue for parents here so what happens next year if a significant number of kids say i need a device i don't have a personal device like do we have a standard or are we crossing our fingers and hoping it'll be okay i wouldn't say we're crossing our fingers the flexibility that we have is we don't need to deploy devices to elp and to special education and to the libraries until we know we have devices to deploy so step one is preserve the 50 of devices we need for testing and classroom use on the
126parts to identify how many families might need that support with the device and then number three we can continue with our deploying and also the recycling which we were planning to do with the grade 12. so we would just hold off on that until we know so thank you mrs zach so i think to that point i mean mr tranberg what i'm hearing is there needs to be a very defined communication approach to this and you know and uh some drop dead deadlines of when we need to hear back from families as to what the needs are for planning purposes so uh you know and i think that this first year needs to really be looked at as a real transition year um and over you know you may get people initially not wanting to
127bring their own device but over time when students see how everything's working in the schools you know it continues to to move towards bringing your own device but i think we have to be really careful about year one and how this transitions and the communication around it this is fine if i if i may just add some color to the notion of how ipads are used for um for special education for instance many of our slps prefer using ipads for some of the programs polo pro is one of them that's used also ot therapists also very often for handwriting purposes used for ipads if we have those available it's something we would distribute and use but it's not it's it's for specific programs that we're able to run thank you mrs clinton i also clarify
128sorry we're not withholding devices from special education and elp because i think that's what you're trying to say also i just want to be clear there are devices and students have access to devices so thank you mr chairman mrs warm um i know i saw it in here but now i can't find it without having a purchasing agreement so that people can purchase um if that's the case would it be up and running by before graduation only because uh very yeah so i think what the board was was whatever data we wanted to present the specifications which we have there and then that was the other question so the staff is working with apple for one and we already have an agreement with i think it's apple at this point and we're working with i
129think it's dell and one other company to make sure that you could actually purchase you could actually purchase it through that purchase agreement i guess so they'll be more than more than just the one on correct correct yes but i fully anticipate those agreements being ready in time for you know the end of the year especially for the middle six students yeah graduating mrs ackman so i i thought cpac had an excellent question again on our budget saturday like what are the implications for assistive technology with this what what is our theory i understand things are written in ieps but i i i'm really struggling i actually understand the financials of it and kind of love it it helps our budget what i'm struggling with is theory on it and if we're saying kids are
130responsible for their own devices in order to access their education what are the implications i understand special education has federal law to protect it but those two theories seem to be combating each other from me right now that's where i'm wrestling um anyone want to talk to me about it just fill us up the two theories of there there is a theory that is saying what we are saying is you need a device as part of your educational experience in darien schools and we are saying we are going to bring your own device you need it right much like you need a textbook but we're providing the textbooks we've decided we are not providing technology i thought cpac had a great question when they said what are the implications to things like assistive technology which
131follow the same theory although i understand they're protected by law who will uphold the law they will be in the ieps it's the same thing in order to access your education you need certain technological devices and and we will provide them for you i feel as if those two theories are competing against each other and outside of ida i'm wondering as a district how we wrestle with that yeah i think some of this some of the assistive technology software hardware uh where where this is provided under iba is provided so that that's fine but i think this is this is this applies to all students like that so uh the same way as you would have probably uh suggested books applied to all students so so it's in that spirit that uh we would ask
132all parents and students to participate and i don't really see it conflicting other than you certainly the threshold of public education everything everything else would be free that is certainly a philosophical decision on this issue i i personally don't necessarily see it as a plan i think there's enough evidence to suggest that we do this contextually and also culturally and for the community itself i wouldn't recommend it if i didn't think it would work in the community but i respect difference of opinions on that um mr brown thanks duke um three quick things first to chris this is probably getting way too into the weeds from the board perspective but just following up with the notability question um do we know the teachers can just export that as a pdf that the students can then
133read and access and have copy to sorry mr ryan can you repeat that yeah no problem uh the notability that was discussed the software for taking notes and doing annotations um that can be published to a pdf and viewed by students later i'm just trying to confirm that yeah i don't expect you to know off the top here maybe you do but that i was just want to make sure that that actually pushed out that's correct it can be public so once it's notated it can be published and then they have a new version of that pdf all right so if they just had the free reader they'd be able to get to it okay um the other thing i wanted to ask is the survey that you put out how long did that take
134to generate and i asked just thinking ahead as we see how this works and kind of trim tab the numbers and things we need to have what's a turnaround to do this kind of work so the survey took probably three to four days to make sure we had the questions right going back and forth with the administration then it was open for about five days for students all right so if we want to do this month by month i wouldn't want to ask you with that but that wouldn't be unreasonable it wouldn't be unreasonable i would suggest that surveys tend to be much more effective especially with students when you ask one or two questions at a time okay i'm more likely to complete them i think that's actually true that's actually human behavior not
135student behavior it works for board members i'd say um and then the only other question is i was just saying this conversation about um providing access to tools and education um you know we we have a dual hat here we're also responsible to the taxpayers and i think when you see this number here the usage rate um we have to ask ourselves you know if we're being faithful to the taxpayers as well and this is not to you chris it's just the board and i guess the thought there is you know we had a long period where people were going to school online we weren't providing internet connections for these people that wasn't something we did so we do have instances where we expect people to have technology or just have things day in day
136out that you know maybe when someone's at the table went to school wouldn't make sense or been excess but now it's just kind of just kind of a given so i'm not sure when we look at both groups we're responsible to how that this isn't inappropriate thank you mr trenberg so i guess this popped into my head around the survey so did we do a survey of the eighth grade class to see where they're at we did not because the program is different so they've had a device and they've not used ipads so it would be hard to survey them on ipad usage because we know they're using their chromebooks as part of as part of their programming in middle school but ipad would i'm not sure what insight that would give as far as
137us understanding ipad usage i think it's more about understanding how comfortable they are with bringing their own device up to the high school or would they be looking to get a device from high school so the how many have a device types of questions yeah i mean i that's a big component you've got a whole class moving up to the high school do they understand that they may have the option to bring their own device or need a school device you know how does that play out mr ceni so we're talking about providing devices but i read question one and it says all students will be provided a device if they do not have one right so we're covering that those who are unable to purchase the device due to financial reasons will receive a
138school-issued device as well students who refuse to participate in the byod program so we are providing devices for those who don't want that who can't afford them or unable to purchase a device for some refuse i guess so i guess i'm still i think it's great so the it's in my mind it's an opt-in i i guess i'm struggling why why would we hand out ipads if people don't use them and that's what this survey was showing too i think it was six yeah 40 i'm sorry yeah 40 percent of students are blessed we're using the ipad on a regular basis that's why so i want to follow the superintendent's recommendation so that the survey of the the survey from our students played out in line with the focus group that were just we're just
139relatively in a different place now and the investment has been well made over the years but we're just we're just in a different place one of the things if someone asked me whatever they ask like why would you do one-to-one periods right my answer to them would be for students to take more ownership for their learning and that's actually what they're actually doing at the moment it's into us let us take more ownership for learning through our own devices tonight this is i so that's the answer that mr simi is reading is the exact question i'm trying to get at with chris so are we prepared so we have 65 percent of students answered us of that 65 percent 40 aren't using it are we fully prepared if we roll this out to hand a
140device to any child who shows up at school and says i don't have a device and if we are then it is a true opt-in program and i'm comfortable if we're going to say no show me your qualification for free and reduced lunch or else you have to go get it on your own i'm less comfortable because i just think it's such a drastic transition and i understand we have a responsibility to taxpayers but we've rolled this program out since 2015 under the idea that we provide what's necessary for school so what i just want to make sure is if a student shows up at school and says my mom and dad are the meanest parents in the whole world and i don't have a device right they're getting them to have a device they
141will be able to borrow a device yes okay now i'm not calling i don't see it i'm not calling an update i spoke to several superintendents uh who's the system works pretty much the same without the labor you get right um and it's not really considered an opt-in if it's perhaps it's a wee bit semantic but just call it an app then we will provide anybody who needs a device a device if someone genuinely can't afford one that is a bit different yeah i'm just saying are we asking that if someone can't provide it or will we provide a device for some reason yes we will yes so you're not you're not necessarily gonna if a student says they need a device you're not necessarily gonna ask why go down the path if they can't
142afford it it's just i mean if a parent comes like they do for a field trip or something and say there's a process to to deal with that particular case this is parent thank you so you just use the word borrow in terms of it so if students just going by your verbiage here as well students will refuse to participate in the byod program so if i being the meanest eighth grade parent on the planet say to my eighth grader sorry i'm not buying you a device and she shows up first day of freshman year i needed advice device from the school my mom's the meanest person ever will she have that third year will she have for a day if if someone wants to buy it for a day because they've forgotten it or
143they just want to buy it for a day or their battery's dead or something else they do fire for the day they want to buy it for a semester they go bar for a semester we're going to try and work with people in the transition of this the same way as you're advocating can you work with people because it's a tough transition we we will definitely that's what we'll do mr moroney so i have two questions one is the first question was going exactly going to the question in the first second second sentence after speaking to our peer district that this is a model that is implemented this is not a model that is implemented in those districts and the expectation all students bring a device my question is do our peer just did our
144peer district go from providing one to one to not providing one to one or have they always been a bring your own device oh i've been needing a clarify on an individual district gravity to clarify that i don't i don't think they changed uh richard do you know of your district particularly i think most of them have always been uh byod i don't know many that have had a device and then i don't say i don't because i think that's what we're struggling with is we're going from one to another it's not just this is the way we've always done is we've we're changing to mrs ackman's point radically changing what we've said we were doing for the last five years i think that's at least for me that's what we're struggling with and then
145my other question is and maybe this is too rich so if we're going to provide a device for a student how are we going to budget for that in going forward in years if we don't know how if we don't know what the number is how do we budget for that six months before the first day of school or 18 months or 18 months so i think the expectation right now is if you forget your device or if your parents refuse to provide you a device we're going to provide you with the ipads that are existing uh there is money in the budget uh to purchase a select few of macbook airs and that could be for students who might not uh be economically available to purchase the device this is mccammon i have a
146couple comments uh thank you for all the work particularly looking into the purchasing consortium and things like that um i agree that this is a change in program philosophy i don't think it's inconsistent with how we approach public education faith or free and public education is not a standard for it's for special education or 504 it's not for what we use here we do have things for the entire school system excuse me we do have things that we expect students to purchase they have to purchase pencils and pens and folders and calculators and so i think it is not without any it's not completely unreasonable that students be allowed to purchase their own tools for education and again i've said i think um the data i think just as a person um it's easier to
147not switch environments and i think the data supports that um so that's my comment beyond that um just to confirm if we do have a student who has a particular need then that is sometimes that's hardware sometimes that software sometimes that's components that go with hardware there are provisions under special ed law or fape where they would receive that that absolutely okay thank you this is best thank you so a couple thoughts um first to be totally honest i will admit that i'm much i'm surprised at how convinced i am that having your own device and not everyone having the same device sounds to be as workable and perhaps even preferable as it does i've been someone who's kind of supported the ipads for everyone since we rolled this out so i will i'll give
148that one up um what i will say is i think obviously we've all agreed there is a need to have a device every student has to have their own device it is a need and what we're saying now is we'd like to change the way we look at it and and say that you are expected to provide that yourselves and the hope and expectation is that each student will unless they are unable to or unless they decide to say that they will not do it and that's where it gets that's where it falls off for me a little bit especially with the timing because we have always provided them and we provide them through the elementary school and the middle school to make this change without even a holiday season in between when we change
149the practice and when you have to have that device by it seems really quick to me and it seems aggressive isn't the right word but it seems like a lot to ask parents to to either go and do it or say no i will not do it um and so that's why it feels to me like some kind of more defined and and detailed or you know let's get the data opt-in is a better approach to moving forward with this if that makes sense thank you mrs best mrs achman so a few points i think i'm landing where mrs best is the state of connecticut constitution section 8 provides for a free public education for elementary and secondary that's that's where my conflict is coming that's not a district thing that is guaranteed by the
150state of connecticut and we do ask parents to buy crayons and pencils and scissors and calculators but we also budget for all those things and we budget for them based on a long period of experience of kind of knowing okay we need 10 scientific calculators at the high school in case someone can't get them doesn't have them and has to take a test i'm not opposed to going here but what i would be more comfortable with for consideration and it's my opinion is saying to parents as they enter the high school do you want to opt out of this system right will you guarantee for the next four years you'll get your own program i'd sign that right i had one that use their ipads i have one that uses her personal device then we
151would know how to budget and i am really looking at it to move mr moroney and mr um again dave from banking because you're not next to me to mr brown's point then we could budget we would know okay and our incoming class 65 of our class has said don't purchase one from me so i can actually budget in terms of my fiscal responsibility now i'm not saying that's the only way to do it but to mrs best point it's a little like well our fingers are crossed i think we can do it i'm not doubting you i'm just worried how to exercise my financial obligations and buy enough and not too many because it would sound like currently we are buying too many and that's not good but i don't know where to do
152this 18 months out unless we start asking parents to truly opt in or opt out so one of the current one of the one of the concerns i have just is we're sort of recognizing that uh the ipad is not being used in the way we're but by an opt-in we're actually given the very divisive with that that essentially we're saying it isn't really working as well so that that's that's a wee bit of that goes with the whole app then apt-out discussion i'd like to try and make the transition as quickly as possible but but also as reasonably and thoughtfully as possible and we do have some data right now so we know that 86 of current students have a device and 72 bring that device to school every day so if we were
153going to use that as a metric or as an indicator now we also know that we have 50 of our ipads that are still available and aren't necessarily going to go to carts so we have the devices now so that gives us a year and some space and some time to plan more appropriately for fy24 because if students need a device we're not we're not anticipating that we need to add more um to this budget [Music] but i think to the point about the budget conversation is i think until you go you have to be very clear about that eighth grade class and that starts the clock as to what percentage of those kids opt in or decide they need a device and then that starts to carry you through to start to see what
154the four years look like mr moroney yeah so from what i just heard it's what i understood was we have enough devices to have half the half the class be provided half the high school to be provided devices and in the following year which in theory would give parents and students enough time to purchase new computers we will be going to bring your own device but will there be the option that the school will provide it or will it just be a bring your own device and maybe that's a different question but to me it's part of our discussion here today it would be the same for the students who can't afford it and there's a method uh as there is for anything else right so so those those special situations but the parents who
155refuse to buy who are the meanest parents if if mrs parent is maine and fifth grader should meet in sixth grade if she continues to be made will continue to give advice to the student right good conversation good questions any further conversations around the bring your own real quick dude yeah mr brown chris i just want to say thanks for running the survey um it's good to have the data here i really appreciate it and i think that as a board member just a quick comment i think that this process we've gone through uh the board put it into policy it didn't work we had data that showed it didn't work and we've had a conversation now we're realizing we need to make some changes and i think that it's a great exercise this has
156been for us to realize we get new data we get new facts and something we're doing doesn't work then we should be able to go back and change it which we're doing here so i'm glad we went through this exercise thank you mr brown a support of any questions specific around the questions that were answered in the back of the deck we're good all right thank you all we will move on to uh public comment michelle let me just tee up public comment as we've had a lot of comments and questions about public comment excuse me what i can't hear you johnson no no no i've got something to say about public comments first i think michelle will go through her process but i think it's important to just reiterate and i think it's a
157good opportunity and i spent some time even with our with our board council on this so public comments an important agenda item for the board district and community it gives us the ability to hear from the public and the option for zoom for meetings has contributed to more people being involved a professional constructive and respective dialogue is how we listen and work together the board has discussed how we make public comment more efficient with the goal of always listening reviewing some recent public comments and getting feedback from the board and the public it seems like a good opportunity to review public comment i've also reviewed this with board council who agrees that we have a good public comment process many districts are looking at public comment three minutes versus two minutes to allow more public
158comment the timing of public comment beginning of meeting or end of meeting or both many districts i've found only have one public comment so we will continue to look at what's best for our community and district some reminders around public comment public comment is three minutes per person you cannot speak for three minutes and look to speak again during the first public comment section session but you can speak at the end of the public meeting in the second session for an additional three minutes should you choose to do so keep in mind that you are addressing the board of education with your public comments nobody else board of ed public comments should not be used to respond to or argue a point made by a person that has made a public comment it is not
159a debate forum comments about other town committees or organizations should they should be made to those entities at their public meetings or public comments section of their meetings should they have public comment if your comments align with what has previously been said you can acknowledge that with your name and address that you agree with comments that have been previously said that evening about the topics you agree with also the darien public comment should focus on the darian board of ed agenda and programs and topics specific to the district in education so i think that's a good reminder around public comment and our goal as always is to listen learn and continue to move forward with what we hear from from the public and many times over the last year from our students so michelle with
160that i'll turn it over to you and we will start with um you can start your spiel and then we'll turn it over to folks in the audience good evening if you would like to speak and this is presumed if you would like to speak during public comment please click the participants icon the bottom of your zoom screen next click the raised hand option you will notice a blue hand icon appear in the upper corner of your screen where your face name or number appears when it is your turn to speak the facilitator will identify you and announce that you are unmuted for public comments once recognized and unmuted please state your name and address you will have up to three minutes to comment the people in person the chair will identify you so we'll
161start with our friends in the audience anyone would like to speak please come up to the podium okay i'll come back to public um michelle we'll go to zoom land okay miss julia geisin you are unmuted and recognized hi it's julia gison thank you i'm at one womsley i just have a question in regard to bring your own device has the board um or anyone else for that matter had a conversation about um if there needs to be controls right to be to put into place from students bringing maybe you know unauthorized having unauthorized app apps or you know you know i don't want to say this but like bringing pornography or anything like that that they could share at school and would take away from you know the education and learning session so thank
162you for your question stefan omrali you are unmuted and recognized uh good evening my name is stephan m raleigh i live at 531 hall sweden ridge road i have four children in the school district and my comments is mostly about uh open choice um i i want to just start by saying um i was born in alexandria egypt myself and i'm very much for diversity however the the mission of the school board in darien is to serve the residents of darien and the citizens of darien as i look through the numbers about the cost of the new students um i don't see it uh the the indirect costs adding up to the numbers that we've seen so far uh there's a lot of indirect non-fixed costs associated with that and the concern is also what
163what the impact that might have on our school district um from bringing students from other schools whether that's in high school elementary school um darien is a beautiful community and we've been living in darien for about five years now we came from um from hamptons and quagg and a lot of day in families that have homes out in hamptons and we lived in what used to be the best school district out in hamptons and they have instituted the quad school district directly instituted a similar program where they can intuition in tuition in school students from other school districts uh the school was rated two out of ten um uh sorry nine out of ten in terms of the quality of school um and um after they started this program they have lost a lot of
164students in the program and a lot of people moved out of the town and the school's now rated six out of ten darien has a deep history and heritage and being a community and a destination town for education that's the reason why we're here um and i fear the impact on the program would have on darien itself might be far greater than has been implied through all the conversations and that was hurt tonight and that's all i have to say thank you very much for speaking catherine bailey you are unmuted and recognized catherine can you hear us we can't uh just a second yes i can hear you now go ahead thank you hi um i am a person of color and i believe that this program is detrimental to darien i feel as though
165i'm all for diversity and while the state says that it offers 300 300 3 000 per student the fact is that the annual cost for dairy on students is 23 000. i'm concerned about the additional 20 000 per student that the district might be not paying for also i've been in town for nine years and i've seen class sizes increase and we all know that instruction suffers with larger class sizes this program i think would hurt durian students by increasing class size and i think english as the second language students are not ideal candidates for this program because entry into the darienne schools offers less support as their home districts would probably have greater esl support and experience and would cost syrian more money i also have concerns that non-disadvantaged families will exploit this program
166for disadvantaged families and wondering what tests are being done to make sure that that doesn't happen while i would love for all students to be in great schools we have paid a premium to live in durian because of the schools it seems unfair to let students into the school when we weren't afforded that luxury thanks so much five spring grove street darian thank you for speaking can you repeat your address i couldn't hear you sorry five spring grove street thank you alicia skinner you are unmuted and recognized thank you uh alicia skinner cliff avenue look i'm not sure why this year in particular we've decided to propose a program like open choice in my opinion the timing of it can't be worse given all the stress and anxiety and educational deficits that have been faced
167by our children and the additional pressure that's been put on our teachers the main priority right now should be making sure that all of our children are back in a proper classroom in a normal setting drn has not shown any decrease in school enrollment in recent history the current budget does not project a decline in the student population if anything our enrollment is likely to rise we have been discussing that on this call that there's currently 280 or 300 apartments in construction or soon to be in construction we do not yet know how many of the residents that are moving in to these buildings will have children what ages those children are how can we commit to take on kids from another district when we don't even know if we have the space in our
168classrooms for our kids the board of education members are elected to serve us first the darien residents the taxpayers and our children with each student that darien takes on from norwalk we are making a 13-year commitment okay let that sink in this is not something that we are just piloting for a year if we take on a child we are committed to that child for 13 years and i don't see how we can commit to taking on children right now given all the new construction in town and the other unknowns and lastly i think if the main goal of open choice is purely to help diversity statistics then we should not ignore the path that we are on as a town i'm an immigrant from poland there are many immigrants in this town from poland
169russia ukraine morocco austria i think we heard some other callers today do not overlook us we represent a wide range of countries different ethnic backgrounds different religions different cultures this town is indeed becoming more diverse every year and certainly it's become more diverse since i moved here eight years ago and i think it will be even more diverse in eight years time when the construction projects are completed and that's a wonderful thing why because it's a natural evolution it is done organically so again i think the message for this board is to please focus on our children before you take on a commitment to other children through this open choice program thank you thank you for your comments this evening kdb you are unmuted and recognized katie can you hear us yes can you hear
170me go ahead thank you yes my name is katie vanovich i live at 118 hecker i have four children in three different schools one in ninth one in seventh and two in third grade um i just felt the need to comment on the byod program i appreciate the detail and the discussion this evening it didn't exactly give me comfort since the first budget meeting in which this was discussed a few weeks ago i'm glad to hear there's consideration for students to not participate in the program although i do not particularly like the wording of refuse my students have always used the school issue devices and we don't have access to another device in our home so admittedly i was quite shocked when i first heard of it as far as i'm aware it's my understanding
171that my children in high school and middle school can't function in the classroom or at home with homework without advice so it is clearly an absolutely essential part of their public school education that might not have been the case several years ago when a device was a nice to have item but considering a device is now fundamental i don't understand how the district could even consider the possibility of not providing a device a pencil and a device are not the same thing what i'm hearing from this program is that our free public education may come with a significant cost i can understand budget needs i fully support that if it is a waste of budget for every student to be automatically provided a device then don't issue a device for every student however for those
172of us who have students who do use their school issue device who do not have other devices at home i would strongly request that you do not impact our public school education by implementing a significant financial hurdle thank you thank you for your comments this evening bow or tell you are unmuted and recognized can you hear us style or tell i can hear you can you hear me yes we can go ahead thank you i'm sorry it's joe ortel i just happen to be using my wife's computer thank you so much any confusion around that um look i i uh i would just like to say that you mentioned class size several times and 85 of max and i just want to ensure that i completely agree uh we don't want to use open choice
173as an excuse or a reason to i think move our class sizes up substantially i think we all agree that the larger the class size the education will suffer and i completely agree with the woman who spoke earlier uh saying that we have far more important things to focus on with our students here given everything that they've been through i think ever we've all read all the studies that say everything that they've lost during this these prior years of covet i think that should be our main focus at this particular time is ensuring that our dairy and students be able to make it up and continue to improve and increase their uh educational capacity over over the coming years to make up for what they've suffered in code thank you for your comments this evening
174mr artel may i have your address please 48 shields road thank you peter mcginnis you are unmuted and recognized can you hear us peter peter can you hear us peter can you hear me can you hear me at this point we can hear you thank you peter go ahead okay great thank you so much so thank you so much for having this special meeting i really appreciate the attention i'm going to really speak very quickly because i only have three minutes um one thing um mr uh um uh chip dumas did not mention was the 2015 connecticut state department of education report page 17 on analysis of choice programs indicates that open choice programs actually result in a negative outcome for sixth to eighth graders he presented that to the new canaan public schools but
175he did not present that here so i ask you to have him take a look at that with you all again second it i would just ask you to look further into english language learners english language learners are not special education that comes out of darian's pocket i've mentioned this before and specifically i mentioned if you had a couple of spanish uh immigrants and maybe a brazilian immigrant you all would need to pay for that uh lastly i want to talk about marginal costs back in december i mentioned marginal costs and i gave you the analogy of an empty movie theater and a full-service restaurant we understand marginal costs marginal costs in the case of an empty movie theater marginal cost is zero you have those empty spots you would take people in and charge
176them just one dollar we're not in that scenario we're in a full service restaurant with four waiters three course meals and we are setting a menu price at twenty three dollars and we're agreeing to serve for 13 years in return for a fixed three dollar reimbursement back in december when i tried to explain this issue i also looked up quite a bit on marginal costs we understand it the best place i can refer you to is a georgia public policy foundation report february 2019 the only way to determine marginal costs is through a multiple regression analysis that has not been done so a good example is 410. you may not break the tipping point this year but with that class you could break it in the third the fourth to fifth year so remember that
177is a static model so this analysis that i looked at um says some people may be surprised at the size of the estimated marginal cost values again this georgia report they were at 10 11 on a marginal cost basis after all shouldn't a district be able to squeeze in one more student in a classroom for almost no additional cost the answer is that while at times additional students will impose a very small cost on the school [Music] okay take a look at the report thank you thank you mr mcginnis mr mcginnis can you please remind us of your address your address mr mcginnis please he's muted go ahead michelle mr mcguinness robin hood lane thank you so much thank you mr mcguinness paula sartoni you are unmuted and recognized paula can you hear us um
178yes i can um so um hi my name is paulo cerdone 15 power drive um so i just would like to share an experience we had last year i hope like some members of the board will remember this as well um so last year our school anticipated only three sessions for fourth grade uh which probably was calculated on the budget around the time in may probably and there was a lot of house overturned in the summer last year and my kid ended up in a class with 26 students it was difficult for the teachers the parents came in front of the board september last year asking for uh not last year but this one i don't even remember but it was 2020 asking for another session another class uh it was the night because there
179wasn't on the budget there was no budget for another teacher um so i my question is how can we commit to a student in may uh without knowing what's going to happen in the house market in the summer and all that happens to us and like this the school had 19 students and per um in three classes and then by the end they had 26 by the end of the summer um and there was no way to accommodate the students that were here in town so i heard the discussion so i really hope that you consider that the house market happens a lot uh in the summertime um so so i can support spending this program that would make this type of problems more frequent both by bringing in more students and farther is training
180our budget i heard a discussion from the board in regards to the elementary schools but the concern is also the middle school the middle school for as far as i know right now is really full is that capacity um they are trying to accommodate more students there was a consideration to have fifth grade there there was not there was no way to do that because they don't have room so i think our middle school should be under consideration as well um so well those are my two points that i hope you guys consider during this discussion thank you thank you for your comment username deb you are unmuted and recognized deb can you hear us i can hear you can you hear me yes go ahead please thank you good evening thank you all for
181this special meeting tonight my name is deb denial i live at 66 middlesex road i have three children each one in the elementary one in the middle school and one in the high school i'm a 22-year resident here in darien and i agree with a lot of the callers that i've already heard about the diversity in this town differing over the past 22 years that i have lived here but i want to address a couple of things about the open choice first and foremost i have read two studies online or two published papers online about one first and good morning wilton talking about the westport school districts and the allocated funds that are given by the state and then those that are actually uh spent by the school district and we're talking a substantial amount
182of money in the difference um they're saying uh 29 2900 per student is what they're given back and they're also saying that the average cost per student is 22 000 which is a total net cost for westport at 1.2 million dollars that's a very large number i'd also like to address the fact that um you talked about fairfield and expanding their program in fact fairfield came out with a paper today in the fairfield citizen online saying that half the board is split on that decision on whether or not to open up the school district to more students because of the cost funding uh to their uh boe budget so i think i've heard a lot of great information on this program but i've also am left with a lot of questions we don't know capacity
183size we're saying that schools are not at full capacity i heard specifically that uh home school is not at full capacity yet we're using two trailers to house the students so i don't know how we can't be at full capacity when we're still using trailers out in the back and we have not considered any of the impacts of the pandemic on our students that has not been addressed we don't know what that is going to be so that combined with the fact that we have housing developments going up and we've had an influx of people into this town in the last two years that have moved out of the city or have moved from other areas we don't know and you the board has already admitted that you don't have data on the housing development
184and how many bedroom housing is going up or being built in the town or or anyway any significant data i think more research needs to be done before we can implement this open choice in the town and we i agree with the other residents that say we need to think of the students here in town first and how to best meet their needs we are the residents we are the taxpayers we fund you your time is up thank you very much for speaking thank you miss caroline carolina maguire you were unmuted and recognized carolina can you hear us hi hi hi everybody good evening karina magoi 28 kansas at lane i wanted to thank the ces gentlemen who came to the presentation tonight i thought the information was fantastic and i'm even in more support
185of the open choice for our schools i have two children who arrive at esl's not to this district but two different countries as kindergarteners and you would be surprised how easily my children learn portuguese and spanish when we move to those respective countries and i just want to say um i'm quite surprised about a lot of the comments about uh the racial divides in town and i do think we're listening to our children by bringing this program to town they're screaming and have come to our meetings to tell us how much they need people that are different so we become a more open and accepting school system so i'm totally pro open choice thank you have a good evening thank you very much for speaking this evening nicholas lalarge you are unmuted and recognized yes
186hi uh can you hear me yes we can nicholas thank you that's great thank you um so um nicholas could you just give your last name and your address please yes uh nicholas large 17 wilson rich road thank you so um so i'd like to make a comment about the open choice and i do have a question about the process to dr radley in in the board of education um i'll start by saying that i'm originally from france and i moved to during 12 years ago bringing some diversity to the town of darian as a parent with three kids in enduring school system two in elementary and one in middle school i disagree with the uh the open choice initiative for darien for the following reasons our kids have suffered for the past two years
187because of the pandemic doing remote learning witnessing teachers being absent stressed of being quarantined because of kobe dressing wearing masks for six hours and more and attending classes with overcrowded students we've also witnessed the incoming of many new families into the durian school district from new york and other states and putting additional pressure in our school system on our students on our teachers we have to deal with overcrowded classes so my view is that we should focus on our resources and energy to the education of the current student in darien instead of increasing their in schools to other districts what would we want to implement open choice now therefore my question is that i'd like to understand from dr raleigh in the border bed what would be the process to change of course of action
188at this stage and reconsider this open choice initially at a later stage do we need to call specific meeting do we need to show by popular vote like a referendum the magnitude of the parents that i think we disagree with the approach so i guess this is a question to you directorially and to the board thank you thank you for your comments this evening username bill's iphone you are unmuted and recognized hello hi we can hear you please continue okay cool sorry i'm uh struggling technologically all good as i usually am uh i'm here to just say that i'm opposed to the open choice program at this time could you just you just state your last name and address again please sure uh leonard and once i went away road thank you i'm here to
189just say that i'm opposed to the open choice program at this time uh dr adley's already testified to the state of connecticut explaining to the school budget when he was a super up in the granby schools didn't work and he had to cut existing programs to make it work then uh the numbers didn't work then they don't work now uh i think he said he needed ten thousand dollars per student per year back in 2009 i heard mr nyquist say will never be guaranteed any funding from the state going forward as well um i hope hope is not a strategy going forward here and i hope dr adley's experience um with this program informs the board meanwhile in darien four or five grammar schools are still using trailers to school our children kids are eating
190lunch in hallways kids reading staying in their classrooms to eat lunch the social distancing decisions have completely upended our school social and emotional learning that should really be the priority uh moving forward when we have inevitable budget shortfalls which programs will be the first to be cut the board should identify these ahead of time we deserve to know exactly which programs are inferior to open choice i've signed a petition against this program with another 900 plus town residents and parents and i urge you all to please listen i've said in the past good intentions are admiral admirable but we are lacking data and we're lacking some perspective i think open choice is not the right choice thank you thank you for speaking this evening karen cummings you are unmuted and recognized karen can you hear
191us yes hi how are you good your full name and address please thank you hi yes my name is karen cummins i live at 19 point of woods road south and i have two kids in the darien school district i am here to advocate for the open choice program in darien i believe this program will benefit both dairy and students and up to 16 norwalk families who don't have access to the excellent public schools we enjoy here in darien i did read dr adley's document before this meeting um based on that thorough analysis um based on all of the great questions that the board asked tonight and the answers that were given and particularly the fact that this this program offers tremendous flexibility year-to-year analysis even with 16 potential kids coming in for for the
192next 13 years um uh i believe there is much more upside and very little downside and i just want to reiterate a handful of the points that were discussed um based on the analysis uh that dr adley and the team did the revenue exceeds the projected expense over the next several years and the fixed costs of 23k per student is not a factor that will not change regardless of an additional 16 students as i understand it there are approximately 4 800 students now in the darian school district we are talking about adding up to 16 open choice students which is .003 of our student body even if you assume 2 000 of them are kindergarteners across all of the schools um that's point zero zero six percent of our total student body and based on
193current projections uh we can implement this without increasing student capacity any more than we have in years prior where we hit we hit uh higher levels um just for a corporate anecdote um and a personal one as a longtime corporate executive i have seen firsthand that you can innovate you can experiment and you can move out of your comfort zone to grow learn and often succeed or you can keep the status quo and stagnate i think it is worth trying and testing the open choice program measuring its success over time and if it does become burdensome on our school or our budget we can always discontinue it and just commit to the students at least in the next year for the next 13 years i think we have the chance to do the right thing
194here set a great example for our kids that darian is a generous caring and open-minded community one who is also willing to ex to to get our own kids out of this bubble and try new things and bring opportunity to those outside who are in less fortunate academic circumstances um thank you very much thank you very much for speaking this evening john dunn you are unmuted and recognized can you hear us 175 raymond tonight we heard from the connecticut educational services and the open choice coordinator this organization has an obvious vested interest in and financial incentive to expand hartford's open choice program to our small town more importantly i would ask the board tonight to hear and heed the concerns of nearly a thousand of your constituents who are opposed to funding both the open
195choice program and dei consultant ken shelton there are so many concerned parents and residents in darien right now over the past five days 920 people representing approximately 650 households in town have signed a petition objecting to funding open choice and dei consultant ken shelton in the upcoming budget let me repeat that 920 people representing approximately 650 households 27 during a special meeting alone until that's a phenomenal response in such a short period of time for a two issue petition the petition simply states quote we under we the undersigned daring residents and taxpayers right to state our strong objection to open choice program that is being considered as part of the current budget process into the hiring of dei consultant ken sheldon from california we urge each of the members of the durian board of education
196to reject these expenditures from being included in the 2022-2023 budget end quote a link to the petition can be found at openchoicewrongchoice.org that's openchoicewrongchoice.org have proponents of hartford's open choice program demonstrated the same level of community support in such a short period i believe the answer is no open choice is the wrong choice for daring in continuing to work with mr sheldon is the wrong choice for derrick the board should listen to its constituents their message is clear do not fund these initiatives is the obligation of the board to vote for what our town is clearly indicating as his preference let's shift our focus to getting back to normal for the benefit of our children before even discussing such drastic changes to our schools thank you for speaking this evening miss armelle jacobs you are
197unmuted and recognized can you hear me so carmel is actually my wife my name is scott vittoon i live at 12 avenue and we have a kindergartener and a two-year-old i wanted to start off by saying thank you to mr nyquist for taking the time at the beginning of the meeting i think he gave some very clear and concise direct answers to a lot of the kind of nebulous fears and misinformation i think going around about the open choice program um and a couple of points i wanted to reiterate number one being darien controls how many kids go in we're not making a commitment to accept 16 years this year or 16 kids every year if we have space we let people in and i think we're losing sight of kind of the bigger picture
198here what we're talking about is giving families and children from underprivileged areas the opportunity at a better education we're talking about letting kindergarteners in and i don't think anybody is necessarily focusing on that and when you object to these types of programs i want you to think about what you're actually objecting to what you're objecting to is bringing in maybe a minority maybe a kid from a poor family and letting them get the same education as your child there is no tangible negative impact of having that student in your child's classroom and to say otherwise and to focus on these other you know objections we don't we can't predict our future enrollment this is going to cost us 20 000 which obviously is wrong i think is disingenuous um and i think it's cruel to
199be honest thank you thank you for speaking this evening krista karns you are unmuted and recognized can you hear us krista yep hi this is krista karns i'm at 40 fitch avenue um i just want to echo out first mr dean thank you very much for clarifying the ground rules of the public comment i think that was really helpful in order to sort of keep us on focus i do think that the presentation tonight was very clear i think it was very thorough i think as a board you guys were very deliberative and i applaud you for doing that i think some of the other some of the commenters tonight came with uh preconceived um comments and i i don't know if they took the opportunity to truly listen so um i bel i think
200miss cummins uh had some excellent points as it did mr with him um this is an opportunity for us to be better this is an opportunity for us to put our trust in you as a board to manage this program because it's not only the right thing to do but it's going to make our our students better there's plenty of research that shows that diversity in all its forms helps academic performance it helps teams work better in the workplace there's a lot out there so make a measured approach do use your best judgment this is something that can be managed year upon year and i think we would all be better for it thank you thank you for speaking this evening there are no more raised hands at this time okay thank you michelle i'll
201go back real quickly to our folks in-house sorry i need to get to my notes um my name is natasha tomai i live at six mclaren road south i'm speaking as a mom and a member and involved member of this community and a strong supporter of underprivileged youth in stamford and norwalk i am also a strong proponent of charter schools and toured achievement first in new haven first when i was 23 years old so what i want to convey here is what i want my children to learn is that two things can be true at the same time that you can be pro diversity equity and inclusion and want the right person to do it you can be absolutely pro equal opportunities for education in fact we have seen proven success in charter schools i
202think the question we should be asking ourselves because i will get behind anybody here who wants to go help charter schools get built in norwalk or stanford and let me tell you i will get behind you and we can get it done i care about the youth in our community i care about our own youth i am worried about their mental health i'm worried about the 69 new ieps the you know over 80 percent increase in children with autism diagnosis 1 in 44 now based upon the last report i mean that really concerns me here in town um you know again the unintended the unintended consequences i think that open choice is something that can be looked at further um but i think anybody who's virtue signaling anyone who's saying that you are good or
203evil um you know you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing um anybody regardless of their position or how likable they are who's sending that message out should really take a step back and say is it possible that true two things can be true at the same time i think we're making immense progress here as a community we're hitting bumps along the road and there's some you know discourse among ourselves but we are moving forward like let's move forward right and get our own stuff sorted out get it sorted out like you know how do we talk to each other how do we talk to our children and then open up you know decide if we want to open up to the community or decide if we want to band together and get
204some charter schools built and make a real impact not on 16 kids but on all of those other kids that we heard the person speak tonight say that they're outperforming kids in the district that they came from how unfair is that how unfair is it if a sibling gets in and somebody else doesn't want to split up families so anyway anyone wants to get on board with me you know to help the communities outside i'm happy to do that um and i just want to say that i personally um i feel like we are moving forward and i'd like to keep doing that thanks thank you for speaking this evening anyone else from our audience we have a new website sorry katie loveland 24 maplewood drive um just one question for right now regarding um
205the one to one versus byod um is it possible that the low rates of student usage are due to the choice of device issued my understanding is that when the ipads were chosen that was a sensible and compatible choice at the time when one to one was first implemented but it seems that now it might be time to change the device that's issued rather than discarding the policy entirely as people have said it it's not possible to access our curriculum without a device anymore um and i just wonder if perhaps we're not looking at the reason the ipads aren't be using because they're ipads and you know we heard from the technology um chair that um when that was introduced a lot of the application a lot of the software needed to be used were
206application-based but now that it's web-based the computers are more effective so just a question about considering the change of the device issue thank you katie anyone else from the public here all right good um with that thank you all for participating the questions and emails much appreciated um we'll continue to move forward in the budget cycle and may have a motion to adjourn mrs achman second by mrs best follow