Board of Education Meeting - December 14, 2021

001we are now let's see we are now recording and we are now live thank you [Music] good evening everyone welcome thank you for all those that are joining us in person we've got almost a full house and thank you for all of those that are joining us on zoom i would like to call this regular meeting of the board of education to order there will be a special board of education meeting on thursday january 6 at 7 30 pm for the presentation of the superintendent's proposed budget for the 2022-2023 school calendar year the next regular board of educating meeting is on saturday january 8th at 8 30 am in the board meeting room for review and discussion of the superintendent's proposed budget for the 2022-2023 school year of all responsibility centers thank you my comments

002will be brief just wanna on behalf of the board wish everyone happy holidays and safe holidays um as we all know covet continues to tick up and there's another variant so let's all continue to be diligent but let's all make sure we have some down time some rest especially for all our hard-working students and please happy holidays uh from everyone on the board also a big go wave uh go blue wave shout out to darian high school football for the state championships um that's just awesome news and then also we had the tudor choir and we had the middle school camasada choir palace theater in stamford so congratulations to them i did not attend but i heard many people did and i heard it was awesome i did get to go to a choir recital

003at the high school a week or so ago it was just phenomenal so as always we are firing on all cinder cylinders with sports theater there was a recent production from our theater group that was incredible in choir so all good things happen so again happy holidays and everyone be safe with that michelle i will turn it over [Music] anyone in the first row michelle do you want to just go over there absolutely you will have three minutes for public comment please state your name and address okay can i take my mask up or you want me to keep it on yesterday unfortunately you'd have to leave your mask on but i know it is challenging so if you just speak as loud as possible okay thank you so much hi i'm sheila quinn and

004i live on camp avenue in darien um so this morning i mean this afternoon my daughter got off the bus and she told me that she saw a swastika written on the bus seat and um i don't know how many times is this going to happen and i am i'm kind of wondering is this a rite of passage i mean is this just something that we're going to go oh this is such a bad thing let's move on to the next thing anyway that isn't actually what i was going to talk about today but it was upsetting so um what i wanted to say was that i know that this isn't a vote for a voting night for mr shelton but i do want to say that i've seen several emails and some information that's

005leading me to come tonight to speak so i'll just do that um chooselove.org should be in every school i think but the school and what our schools need right now is something a little bit different it's called dei and um i'm seeing um that this town is thinking about this programming in terms of their own eyes as adults and not through the eyes of children has anyone asked the kids what they want and what they need can there be a vote at the school can we bring it up to the children themselves and talk about it with them i mean this is for the kids after all it's not really for the parents it's for the kids to be able to go out in the world and understand how to manage and function um i

006mean does dhs want to pump out these sheltered unaware kids into the world to learn dei somewhere else because they're going to learn dei somewhere else why not learn it here why not learn it at home and why why not have darian public school system really model for the country what it can be and what it can look like so um i think we need to give our kids those tools now that they can go out and really use what they learn in our school system instead of in college or at a job so um doesn't really darion want to model this behavior and want to model this sort of progress that the whole country is kind of going toward can't we make this happen in a safe great environment that children actually grow up

007and they can learn these things and tools also i feel that there's a lot of fear about dei and i don't really understand what it is it's fear of the unknown i guess what is so bad about learning about dei and who is it going to hurt anyway if they do learn about dei it can only help and that was my last sentence thank you very much thank you so much for your remarks who's next step up thank you my name is rosheen veccarelli i live at 29 bayley avenue my family and i continue to be supportive of the district's efforts in moving forward with the diversity equity and inclusion work that you're doing the students and alumni we've all heard from could not have been more clear about what is needed in our schools

008and so we are very appreciative of dr adley and mr tranberg and team and the work that's being done in this regard so we thank you for that thank you very much hi i'm dr abigail hornstein and i live at 17 edmond street tonight i'm going to speak again about diversity and taking full advantage of the fact that i'm a professor at wesleyan university knows diversity university and i'm going to begin with an anecdote to illustrate why you need to do a lot more on diversity when my youngest child was in fourth grade she came home from school one day and told us that her teacher was jewish we asked her why that mattered and she said i did not know that jews are allowed to teach in this town in 2017 she thought jews

009are not allowed to work for the darian public school system that is the impact of representation then fall 2017 a jew could not be a leader in this town that is what your curriculum does when my children were at home from 2011 to 2019 their classes had materials on the jewish holidays if and only if i prepared them at the expense of my time and my budget why is that on the parents and please understand that that representation extends the dialogues among students and that is from the perspective of a white child in this system what about the children who are even less represented among the leaders in this school system to make my points much more clear i'm going to quote most of a 16 part thread from a satire account on twitter called

010jew who has it all trust me this is better than what i would do dear teachers as some of you may know if you have any students who identify as christian in your class they may be absent while observing the christian holiday of christmas officially the holiday commemorates the birth of their prophet in modern times the holiday incorporates many pagan winter solstice rituals as well some children may believe that a man named santa claus aka saint nicholas hakka dosh will visit their house on a sled pulled by flying deer while they are asleep as terrifying as this belief sounds apparently the children really look forward to his home invasion i'm going to skip a few lines this is similar to magical christian beliefs during a spring festival when a magic bunny visits children in the

011middle of the night to lay colorful chicken eggs in hidden nests throughout their houses or yards note saint nicholas hakadosh is obviously a religious figure and must not be incorporated into any public school classroom celebrations now skip a few more part 11 please do not assume your christian student will feel comfortable asking questions about christmas they may feel uncomfortable being treated as a spokesperson to explain how a bunch of things happen let me repeat the gist of that you're almost that time do not make a student explain their heritage to others thank you for your comments um okay i am armelle jacobs i am at 12 fish um first off i want to echo what roshin said um i i've heard a lot of calls for a pause and you know we need to wait

012we need to assess and i just want to say it feels like this has been discussed for quite a long time and we don't really need a pause anymore on something that's been going on for several years i want to say unfully my family and i are fully in support of moving forward with the plan that was already approved and ready to go it's you know i know i hear football's a big thing in this town so um i'll just use the quick analogy you know you're at the one yard line and like are we really gonna sit there and like fight over if we're gonna run the ball or throw the ball like just get it over into the end zone like we're there already um i also want to share just you know

013i'm speaking off the cuff here but i do want to share an anecdote like um our wonderful professor friend did as well um i went into the school you know us covered parents we we don't get a lot of access my kids only five so like this is our first year in the school system um so every time they're like we're looking for a parent volunteer i'm like yes i'm there so i went in uh recently to help set up for their christmas party and uh i'll tell you that a lot of people will say in this town and i've heard a lot of people say in this town my kids don't see color they're only four they're only five they don't notice that type of thing it's just not true all of these kids

014and this is before i even went into the classroom like at cherry lawn everywhere they have questions they ask me about my skin they ask me if my skin means that i celebrate hanukkah they ask me if i'm my daughter's mother because her skin is lighter than mine these kids are searching for context for what it means to be someone with different colored skin in this world because they don't get exposed to it so please please help them give them a framework for thinking about these ideas because they are asking they're asking me and you know this is this is it shouldn't be you know people don't want me telling their kids what this stuff means let's all get together and figure out how to move this stuff forward because the kids are asking for

015it themselves so that's what i have to say thank you guys for everything you've done so far and i support all the efforts moving forward thank you for your comments anyone else from the audience hi i'm laura pesh gray i live at 131 holmes avenue district 5. i've always taken pride in our schools and have trusted the board of ed to continue with the level of excellence we have known and moved to darien for but as the world is changing so is what's happening in our elementary middle and high schools we definitely need change we cannot continue on the path of bullying and discrimination but choosing the right program and having the right person implement this is paramount i don't support the choice of ken shelton one of ken shelton's biggest beliefs and strategies is

016to eliminate the traditional grading system which he finds racist and capitalistic why would we choose to find this extra money in our budget which we don't seem to have to work with someone if we don't plan to implement his fundamental ideas it doesn't seem like a wide spend of money there are many other programs such as choose love and i realize to other people's comments that it may not officially be the diversity equity and inclusion program but it's a program that was originated in our state it's being implemented at the depot i just would like to know if this program has been considered um it's as many of you know it's on behalf of jesse lewis the newtown first grader killed in 2012 shootings of sandy hook i find it surprising that you know given

017that it's originated here it's being implemented in our town why it hasn't been evaluated and i would love to know if it was evaluated the formula for choose love is courage gratitude forgiveness and compassion in action there's overwhelming statistics and proven numbers behind this program don't we simply just want our kids to be nice kind and respectful to everyone regardless of race gender and political position choose love i think is a wonderful solution to our problem not ken shelton i also would love to know um more about the details i know that ken has been with our district and has been working with our district and there's a lot of vague information behind what has been done and what our plans are moving forward um so maybe some insight into that and how those funds

018are being spent and how he'll be working with our teachers and would be insightful thank you thank you very much for coming anyone else from the audience sure please come up all right i'm diane urban 10 crane road i'll just keep it short because i think i have echoed um sheila rasheen or mel and many others and saying that we support moving forward with the board approved strategic plan on dna dei efforts and um don't want to keep pausing the students themselves have told us that they are waiting for us to move forward they feel like they haven't been listened to the people who are the students who are affected by these incidents that happen i think there's their lived experiences are what we need to be thinking about not how we as parents are

019perceiving someone else's experience so um we're supportive of moving forward with the di efforts as outlined with ken shelton thank you thank you very much for speaking anyone else in the audience sure hi everybody susie flaherty uh six lake drive um i'm here to echo the support for ken shelton and the dei initiative that's already in place and has been in place for a while and i really i'm thinking we have break we have midterms and then the school year is going to fly we need to act now for our children we need our children to leave the school year knowing that they called you to action they called us to action and we responded to them we can't put this off any longer these kids need to know that they're supported and that we

020are going to listen to them and give them what they need now not in may or not in the spring we need to do this now for our children thank you for coming up and speaking anyone else in the audience good evening my name is katie lublin and i live at 24 maplewood drive i'm speaking tonight as the cdsp special education subcommittee chair i would first like to thank shirley klein scott mccarthy kristin o'reilla o'reilly sorry kristen and laura straighten and all of their team members for the annual special update um annual special education update tonight the hard work that went into creating it and all of the hard work that the assess department does every day to make sure that all of our students including the ones with learning differences receive the robust education

021that jerry ann is known for earlier today i sent an email with a series of detailed questions that my committee and i are still left with after reviewing the slides for tonight's presentation sent out in the meeting materials concerns we are hearing from parents surround staffing both the national teacher shortage and dps staffing experiencing increasingly high caseloads literacy behavior social skills and mental health we expect to see referrals to special education rise as we continue to realize the impact the pandemic leaves on our learners it's crucial for the district to ensure that we are staffed appropriately and that the staff have the tools and resources they need in order to meet the needs of our students enabling them all to reach their full potential in future annual special education updates we hope to see data

022on staff caseloads broken out by our referrals initiated by staff and initiated by parents planning for the future including professional development new and expanded programs outcomes for students in special education and separate annual updates on srbi fitch academy and fiberboard plans thank you for your consideration of these requests and thank you for your dedication to our schools students and families thank you anyone else in-house here thank you all um michelle will move to your friends on zoom if you would like to speak during public comment please click the participants icon on the bottom of your zoom screen next click the raised hand option the facilitator will identify and announce that you are unmuted for public comment once recognized and unmuted please state your name and address you will have up to three minutes to comment

023cara gately you are unmuted and recognized you are still muted miss gately i carry you're you're muted we can hear you now thank you okay great thank you cara gately 596 hollow tree ridge road i just want to thank the board of education and our administration for taking seriously the mental health and the social and emotional needs of our students whether they be in special education or in general education across all grade levels starting at the elp level of which i had students go through that program and all the way up to seniors and those at the fitch academy i think the dei initiative is very important however i've become very concerned with the shift in the focus from cultural awareness uh and recognizing a need for diversity and a need for inclusion and it

024seems to me in looking at the materials and the professionals that we're looking to bring in that has become a social justice initiative which i think is different than a diversity equity and inclusion initiative and social emotional learning so i think we need if i think it's important to keep the focus especially given the needs that have been expressed by the students who have bravely come forward and the results of the learning of the the survey that was done that shows the high percentage of our students with levels of anxiety depression you know and the levels of substance abuse going on in our district that we keep the focus on social emotional learning and bring in professionals who have professional and and academic criteria and credentials in those areas i think ken shelton is an

025impressive person um he's the ucla football player i think that's great i think he can really he was an educator i think that really does a lot in um connecting with people but i think there might be others out there and i can think of some board members from a better chance darian in particular who have both the professional and academic credentials to really address the very important needs we have in this town especially given mistakes and given what we know from the surveys and from the studies of the high levels of anxiety depression and substance abuse so i think we really need as a community to take a hard look and ensure that we don't just follow trends and go towards social justice initiatives but stay within what social emotional learning means and a

026true acceptance of diversity and inclusion and i think you know i really appreciate the time to speak especially on this ninth anniversary of the tragedy of sandy hook keeping really the focus on kids who are hurting and those in need thank you guys i really appreciate it have a good [Music] peter night you are unmuted and recognized are your screens out yep looks like we might have lost them michelle oh i'll go over again characters thank you very much and uh thank you again uh for all the volunteers mr mr mcginnis just hold on just a moment having of course technical difficulties like that's great that we can hear you but we've lost all our screens so just pause with us a moment thank you of course thank you all right michelle can you you

027can see and guide us i can see mr mcginn i can see everyone on zoom all right so go ahead mr mcginnis you're free to speak thank you very much um and again thank you to all the volunteers on the board of fed i know this is a volunteer job and really appreciate your service uh i'm in uh 22 robin hood lane and um i just wanted to uh state that i've done quite a bit of independent reading and research not only on mr shelton's um information uh as well as listening to some of his podcasts there are a number of things i i hope that the board of ed has independently listened to as well which um frankly um if one were not in favor of grades and thought grading and attendance were capitalistic

028and uh racist among other things uh i could support them but i i don't subscribe to that i also do think that with a school budget of 1.9 million dollars in expenditures on guidance and psychologist expenses across the system uh i would think that um there is enough resources or should be enough resources uh the administration is not new to this school so i do question uh why we see so many students uh come into pain in terms of uh presentations on some of their experiences i do think we need to address this issue but i do think that there are significant resources available so i do ask where are the specific uh cases of bullying in in school or uh objectionable material found on buses we need to have in place a complete escalation

029process we need an intervention process we need peer mediation processes have they been established where is the established peer support structure where allies can self-identify themselves to support students that might need that support so i'm not sure any of that's been done and to go outside the district to a consultant a 3000 miles away that does present uh so much material that is objectionable i do really question the motivation here and i ask the board of ed education to seriously think about this decision because um i do believe choose love uh on this anniversary of this uh tragic event is a real possible solution at all in concoct thank you thank you very much there are no more race fans at this time okay thank you um we will have public comment at the end

030again so thank you for all those in person and uh we will move on to the superintendent's report dr adams good evening everyone again thank you for participating either in person or remotely i too would like to pass on my congratulations to our football team on their state championship and to our middle school students and high school students who accompanied xavier colon i'm not a big voice person but javier was the winner of the first um voice competition and he came from stratford so it was i think he was in our of our kids as opposed to them being on him but uh it was it was just wonderful to see i want to thank him too because i think he had laryngitis and uh he stuck through it uh to to allow our students

031to perform on the stage at the palace so we thank him for that when i also congratulate victoria caruso victoria is a 11th grader at the high school and she as you may recall we instituted an app an elective course an app development class at the high school she has taken independent study with lorraine westerville who's a teacher of uh computer science and she's just she can't fit the class in but she's doing an independent study on it she actually won the congressional app challenge for connecticut district 4 by creating an app called blossom and it uses the swift apple programming language uh so this congressional app challenge is one of the most prestigious prizes in student computer science that will be displayed at the capitol building for a year and the the app itself

032was designed to track progress towards building healthy habits i will i don't know if i can download it just yet or what the status of it i tried to get it this afternoon but um i'll pass it along as soon as i get it but we congratulate her on on that noteworthy achievement uh thank you to all the parents and uh teachers who are streaming or doing live uh concerts and uh seasonal activities at this particular time it's just nice to see these come back either live in person or or remotely uh staff development this particular week is focused on elementary teachers teachers college and the focus is on literacy small group instruction differentiation and uh realized just to name a couple of topics thank you to uh kelly who's in the audience this evening

033and spoke earlier uh and to members of of the cdsp especially the special education group for uh their recognition of special education day in december uh second uh this past week or so and it sort of recognized the establishment of the idea law back in 1975 i want to thank them for the acknowledgement and appreciation of our wonderful special education support and related uh services staff marilyn friend is in residence in the district for the pa yesterday and today looking at the best practices especially design instruction and she's looking at that as part of this the study at the elementary school could be back again for another two days in january i want to recognize also uh charlie for the uh workshop that was that was held at the high school last week and almost

034determined that you attended that there was a transition work workshop for parents and i know that was very well received thank you to our our students at the high school for working with the stem outreach they participated with second and fourth grade last week in person third and fifth grade will have an opportunity to participate in april uh last night the board of slackman approved the board at the board of education as a building committee for the royal roof project so we'll get that up and running robotics has been up and running uh both last week and next week and the first classes will start we had to limit the classes just for just this year number of supervision and the number of staff that we have trained for it uh at the high school

035that there is not a club at the moment but we have a number of students who have come forward and will be advocating to start a club on their own and there are a couple of upcoming meetings that i just want to mention in the facilities maybe january 13th policy on the 12th finance the 20th so there's a wee bit of space to those but i just wanted to uh to note those and of course the curriculum committee january 27th and the budget presentation is on the thursday when we return uh january 6th the board will get their packages just before the break and i just want to take this opportunity in many ways it's been a a very challenging what seems to be a very ordinary back to school normal year as some of

036the comments that you've heard even it's been anything but that so i just want to wish all our staff students and families seasons greetings and a relaxing and happy holiday thank you doctor uh any board committee reports mr maroon the facilities committee met on thursday december 9th we discussed the solar panels which is item 7d and the committee recommended to the board of education to move this forward pending the attorney's review we also discussed the libraries reimagined at tokenique middlesex and darien high school thank you mr martin ox ridge that is a agenda item in terms of the next phase around furniture fixtures equipment and also the technology so we'll get an update and hear more about that shortly and you had a inaugural curriculum committee meeting yes sarah is out this evening um but

037we did kick off our curriculum uh committee meeting it was a good meeting thank you mr ceni um we uh touched base uh with mr tranberg we kind of started uh kind of at the beginning a little bit with a good overview of kind of the curriculum structure all the players and kind of the process that we go through um also spent some time looking at the new edu planet 22 or 21 um in terms of technology that will help us organize and track curriculum um and also enable not just an internal view but an external view for for parents and students as to kind of the formation of curriculum and and what's involved resources and books everything associated with it so um we will talk later about a curriculum committee charge which was developed

038by the curriculum committee to kind of guide them along with the administration on the work going forward so thank you any other committee reports no good we will move on um perspectives on the fiscal 23 budget process um hi jill do you want to go back and approve the minutes oh yes sorry thank you i missed that approval of minutes thanks for waiving um may have a motion to approve the following minutes of the special meeting an executive session held on november 23rd 2021 in minutes of the regular meeting held on november 23rd 2021. this is best and second by mr moroney all those in favor that is unanimous with everyone at the table are you good joe thank you jill is under the weather so we thank god for zoom um so moving along

039uh we wound up with a scheduling conflict so mr palin and the board of finance will come visit us early in the new year from a board of finance perspective so we can move on to the darien public schools update dr adler thank you so again you're very familiar with this uh there's a couple of changes since uh we last spoke to some some changes of process that have put in place and obviously you've heard mr chairman has mentioned the new variant and there's been an uptake uh in cases uh we we continue to meet weekly with our medical team today for surprisingly enough i'm not sure why uh the state department uh on friday uh issued a notice that there's no meeting today and that's very very unusual right um i'm trying to get

040a sense of what's what's at the back of that or something if something's on the on the about to come up um a new strategy or otherwise but that's very unusual just not that it's just a cancel i mean the fact that they've never they haven't canceled and i haven't really given a reason to cancel it so we'll see what comes out of that uh clearly uh things have changed since you know in a month's time uh the the state itself is read the cases in darien have increased i will say that even our cases here if that was that was friday i believe so the bottom line would really read 46 cases 40 quarantined and 30 uh screen and stay at the moment that today for instance there's two staff members at the high

041school one uh sixth grader and i will say that we're beginning to see a number of breakthrough cases people who are fully vaccinated even people who have a booster shot so that's just an interest and it's just an interesting development and it still seems to be predominantly attributable to other activities are outside the school for the large uh most part most part we did extend all those distances to six feet uh for the various schools the elementary schools particularly because that's where we were seeing uh the cases so we did that as a preventative strategy because that's where we were we were basically uh quarantined and from because of the six feet at the elementary school we will have one modification to that at the middle school still with the sixth grader because they're not

042fully vaccinated and we just had to work out a wee bit of coverage arrangement and that has been done and so then notice with diagram friday said we expanded the distance and we're going to expand it further by going to a third location uh so that sort of completes that and that has been helpful throughout the process and these are just uh your standard uh numbers of inquiry of uh the town of varian you can see yourself just the numbers where the played out and if i just go back uh the contact tracing we conclude contact tracing just about five or five 5 30 weekdays and then we resume it again on monday i will say that there that has worked well and but i would say that you know we certainly we understand the

043idea that potentially somebody could be in there and a notice may not go just just absolutely immediately we have discussed that with our medical team and they felt that that was a that was reasonable uh given uh given the level of sickness we're seeing or not seeing our hospitalizations although hospital organizations so they were comfortable enough for that and that's why i would be comfortable staying with that particular process it's uh it's been helpful we've jumped on it on monday morning early it's also uh honestly it's it's also helpful to our nurses who are literally run ragged um with kate with these follow-ups that really aren't matriculating in anything uh for the most part so that that that really was the logic behind it so that's kind of what we're doing at the moment and

044it seems to be working well the ciac guidelines we will be after the break we will be following the ciac guidelines uh where particularly basketball ice hockey indoor track mass for the most part are not required as long as people are vaccinated after school if that doesn't apply to some of these roles are confusing because uh it does apply to pe during the day but it doesn't apply to these competitive they're carving out they're saying that like the competitive sport in the afternoon after school is more controlled okay um i i can't like honestly i can't really yes to some degree but medically i don't know that that that's the case however we are going along with that um there is some reason to think that they may be going down the line of opening

045up the whole discussion about mass that's not definitely any means or no neural has been a public discussion about that um my antenna is up since there was no meeting this morning but uh we'll have to sort of see how that plays out given our high vaccination rates and so on if we had to make a decision we would make it based on the high vaccination rates that we already know and for the most part we know the kids whether they're vaccinated or whether they're not vaccinated and if we have to find out we can find find that out pretty quickly uh the safe return uh plan that has to be submitted to the state they have not yet uh indicated anything for for us to do that but originally when when we at the

046start of the year this was it this was an update that they wanted to be one of those to provide so we'll do that what does that mean that just means that the safe return plan that's online right now has just been revised it's revised live but anything that decisions we have made here or super tenants made or administratively uh with contact trace and our quarantine and our screeners today that will all be reflected in the actual plan itself that has to be submitted to the stake uh with that i'll open up if there's any questions thank you dr adley any board questions or comments mr brown thank you um i guess maybe it's a bit of a comment but just following up maybe a question worth boarding i should say the comments that were

047made by the governor last week i believe a week and a half ago talking about how its localities in the state have done a great job of making decisions for what should be gone with masks the fact that i think the current mandate is going to expire in january and we're not going to meet really until january i just wanted to throw out is there any thought on perhaps having a follow-up letter tell me about the importance of local control and how much we'd like to be making the decisions here for mansion going forward uh i think that's a new decision yeah i think that i think it expires um mr brown in february so there's a bit of time for us i i would honestly i think probably we're trying to do is really

048get a read behind the scenes a little bit as to what the status of that is certainly it's not gonna do any harm to do that um if we wanted to reiterate it um but uh i i'd like to get to be sent behind the scenes what has happened actually first or what what does that actually mean i actually sort of alluded that tonight as to uh what is going on behind the scenes and what they're what they're planning to do are they actually planning to get give over to local districts that decision-making part there's some thought that for instance the athletic part was the first step in that direction whether that's going to happen i really don't know at this point um certainly you open up for this the board was wanted to do

049something i'd certainly consider doing that thank you thank you mr brown mr ceni i mean i i would love to maybe have alan come back to us in early january and get a better read you know after uh the holidays i would agree maybe it's time to just reiterate that um i just to be clear the level of illness is pretty um we're not seeing hospitalizations they're relatively mild still yes the the actual hospitalizations and the the nature of of the illnesses are still mild cold like symptoms for the large for the most part and then but this breakthrough is just a new dynamic and then just the distancing that he increased i realized you're doing it for quarantine purposes mostly to avoid quarantines at lunch or from exposure at lunch is that temporary until

050we get the younger population vaccinated or they have a chance to get themselves vaccinated i should say well that's that's obviously the unvaccinated uh until their fully vaccinated population so that's that's where we were actually uh quarantined students the most from so we're trying to alleviate that a little bit i think it's going to be in place until further notice until we see a pattern or decisions are made otherwise or the actual time period expires where the kids are actually fully vaccinated thank you so did the meeting that was canceled today do they have the ability in short order to call another meeting based on statistics increase in caseload increase in hospitalizations and then you're moving into gathering another gathering season of in traveling season well they haven't canceled next week's meetings i would say

051just that um uh this afternoon uh we we mentioned for hockey that uh if there's a limit at the rank well i will let that go to that limit but we are asking people in that cold cramped environment to wear masks and i think that's reasonable because people can actually go and see see your kids see cheer on the here on the team and stuff but in that environment since it's our home game if we were playing hockey inside that we would ask people to wear masks in the ring but that's the only restriction [Music] any other questions or comments on this good thank you dr adley we will move on to a presentation of the furniture fixture and equipment ffa package in budget and the technology and telephone package and budget there are two

052meetings coming up starting tomorrow um at the office of construction grants and authority up in hartford and it's the next phase in submission um for both of these budgets there was a meeting last week of the oxford building committee and there have been several meetings some meetings katie um has been a big part of that uh in terms of the design the look and the feel of furniture and fixtures and equipment everything from paint and colors and all that good type of stuff they've done an incredible job with all of that jeff and the team it has been very involved as has luke around the telephone and the i.t mr lynch has been part of this also so there are literally i'd have to say almost daily meetings and calls at this point around oxridge

053uh in terms of getting to the next phase which is exciting to furnish it and get it set up for our students to arrive so we have amy samuelson from slam to make a quick presentation there are documents that the building committee has signed and that dr adley and i have to sign to submit to the state and a lot of this is based on the approval process that the state goes through and is also tied to the reimbursement that we get so amy's got a good high level deck to walk us through this and um amy good evening thank you for joining us good to see you thank you good evening to all of you thank you for welcoming me back to the board of ed meeting um you may recall that last month

054i presented a selection of furniture that will be procured for the oxford school and this month i'm looking for approval from this board of ed to allow us to bring the documentation to the state of connecticut for their review after their review will be allowed to go out to bid and procure the furniture and the technology equipment that that includes your smart boards wireless access points and network cards and all of that will be procured and installed in phase one of the completed construction uh in may of this coming 2022. the remainder of that will be installed in may of 2023 when the phase 2 construction is completed jill if you're controlling the presentation you can go to the next slide or it i'm not sure who's controlling that we've done it up on our

055boards amy okay thank you um but i could see it in my screen i just couldn't make it go forward myself so this is this is explaining to you the process um we do have meetings tomorrow and thursday with the state if you approve us moving forward as mentioned by mr janine we were able to get approval from the building committee last week with these same documents and we are moving forward with an on budget actually below budget technology equipment package and we were able to gain approval from the building committee to exceed the furniture package slightly in order to furnish all of the spaces which will allow for 760 students if you can go to the next slide so the design capacity of the school is 760. the enrollment projected high enrollment that the

056state allows us to look at is and the highest projected enrollment for the school is 694. by procuring enough furniture for slightly over the highest enrollment that gives the district some room for flexibility moving forward next slide please this is a list of of the furniture and the cost estimate that we've calculated once it goes out to bid we expect that there will be a competitive bid situation and state contract procurement for some of the packages and these numbers um will be proven uh out and hopefully the bids will be competitive enough to even bring it in a little below this budget next slide this is the budget and the systems that will be included in the technology equipment package and this was vetted by jeff adams uh dr forshaw and our technology specialists next

057slide and and so this is just wrapping it up so that you know that within the technology equipment budget we were almost three hundred thousand dollars under budget and for furniture and equipment we were about almost four hundred thousand dollars over budget but the contingency for this very package um does allow us to go to bid with the remaining funding so if we can get approval from your group we will move forward and bring this to the state thank you amy um real quick i think i'll summarize it in that i think the building committee we had a lot of discussion around this at the end of the day um if you recall going back to the very beginning and the state understood this you know there is no room to expand this school once

058it opens so uh for once if you look back at some of the other projects we've done we've built in capacity to the school and i think at the end of the day that'll be very helpful as we start a renovation on how do you really feel about that michelle as we start the next three renovation projects um it gives us some flex space um and also if you think about the amount of projects that are coming online shortly you know we're gonna have to have some additional conversations about some of these projects and additional increases in enrollment so i think overall a lot of discussion at the building committee level but it makes sense to fully furnish the school the state will decide on a reimbursement standpoint in terms of their classroom size and

059max classroom but katie luke uh mike and the whole committee amy and the whole team there have done a great job presenting this we're still within budget even dipping in 100 000 into our contingency budget and um this also incorporates um any type of increase or chain issues with procuring this equipment and inflationary costs and you know all that's been taken into consideration so i'll open up to any questions or comments and then we can move forward with the approvals which are required by the state i think i'll just clarify there are no specific changes to the ed specs that we've been working off of it's just furnishing and outfitting the classrooms yes mrs ackman um my only question would be has the admin done a full review so we have adapted furniture and we

060feel as if we're meeting the students needs that's luke and the whole team have been part of every step of the way we even discussed at the meeting um nursing rooms and cots and beds and all that type of stuff and they made a presentation on the different ability of tables and chairs to move up and down and heights and stuff like that yes so i appreciate the kid i made this work i guess i'm asking dr adam you feel from an education standpoint we're meeting the needs of kids with all this furniture yes and then the staff from uh from from history and practice uh it really is important to involve all the staff in that decision making because they have a good viewpoint on that but yes yes thank you no thank you

061great so we'll move forward um they have a motion to approve the submission of the construction documents for furniture fixtures and equipment phase two of three for state project number 035-0117n oxford elementary school 395 mansfield avenue darien connecticut to the office of school construction grants in review for review at the pre-bid conformance review pcr meeting uh mr brown second by mr moroney all those in favor that is unanimous jill with all those folks that are here thank you they have a motion to approve the submission of the construction documents for the technology equipment phase three of three for state project number 035-0117n oxford elementary school 395 mansfield avenue durian connecticut to the office of school construction grants in review for review at the pre-bid performance review pcr meeting i have a motion mrs ochman second

062by mr brown all those in favor jill that is unanimous for all people here amy thanks for spending some time with us this evening and uh appreciate all the hard work on this next phase and luke thank you thank you all right i'll see you at the meeting tomorrow amy thank you okay see you in the morning we'll move on to presentations and discussions uh we have an update and discussion on the connecticut green banks proposal for the installation of solar panels at hindley homes royal and oxford elementary schools um i know this was discussed at length um at the facilities meeting it's also been discussed at a high level previously so mr lynch and miss basham um from the green bay yeah mr lynch is kind enough to be here in person to let

063him do the introductions and contacts and feedback so um has been mentioned this is kind of the culmination of about two years worth of work mr rueland myself talking with different vendors um getting some input from rusty shriner from the town who's very familiar with different solar projects throughout the united states and um so we we settled on um the connecticut green bank as as the uh this method that seems to offer us the best rate and the best chance of having a successful program and uh it was also the only group that didn't really bark at the idea of following around behind us as we re-roofed our buildings uh everybody else just wanted to put solar panels on they want to put them on everything these people took into consideration our architecture you know

064we didn't want solar panels on the front of this building the face of it brand new roof um it's so they took all those things into consideration and they've come up with a very good uh program for you to look at tonight and i'll turn it over to emily thanks mike can you guys hear me okay yes and see the slides are up um thank you for having us tonight i'm emily basham senior manager of partnership development at the connecticut green bank and i'm joined by my colleague mackie dykes who's a vp of financing programs here at the green bank thanks for having us we're here to present the final project proposal for solar projects we've been developing with darien for the last some time now maybe a year at the four elementary schools we

065were last here at the full board meeting about six months ago to present really preliminary project scopes and savings numbers and with the board support we continued on developing those projects since then and tonight we're here with with final figures uh since it's been a while i'll give a quick refresh of who we are and the solar map program uh that darian's been participating in and then i'll turn it over to my colleague mackie to review the power purchase agreement and the exciting part of the savings numbers that come with these projects so the solar municipal assistance program or solar map is a program at the green bank and it's supported by our technical partners at csw energy we both have extensive experience working with municipalities to develop solar pv projects next slide please the

066connecticut green bank is a quasi public state agency so we were created 10 years ago by the state legislature to use our financing tools to really catalyze and deploy a lot of clean energy so we we've been doing that through our programs and products to help the state meet our our energy goals and our climate goals and through our programs we work with municipalities quite frequently to install solar projects and we know that it's a lot of steps a lot of work to to do these types of projects so we created this solar map program to really simplify those steps and make it easier for towns and to adopt solar next line uh so this is the solar map program we are providing technical support for every step of the process um so that towns

067can use our green bank solar power purchase agreement next slide and this side just describes sort of the the support that we provide the support that that darian has been participating in the last few months so we started really with a comprehensive list a fuller list of all the school sites looking at those for where the best candidates once we narrowed to the four projects we're bringing to you tonight we really got to work developing those projects got on site developed system designs we've secured the utility incentives for these projects and we've also run an rfp for a construction partner you might remember a benefit a feature of this program is that you're working alongside other connecticut towns and cities who are going through the program to also install solar and we are bundling those

068towns together in those projects together in our rfp so that allows us to put a larger portfolio of projects out to bid and we saw great success with that um we received great pricing um and were able to deliver um really attractive ppa rates this evening and with that we yep go right to the next slide um this shows um the the towns that we've been working with last year was our first round we worked with five towns to develop 15 projects those projects delivered savings between 20 and 50 percent so our power purchase agreement provided discounted solar electricity from your utility electricity and this round on darian joins nine other towns for 26 projects and these projects are receiving an average of 33 percent discount to the utility rate next slide uh there's a

069lot on here it just shows sort of the milestones that we've achieved and and pulling these projects together we're right here at the bottom presenting the final projects to you all to execute a power purchase agreement and then start construction in 2022 um i believe the next slide is um a list of towns that we've done a power purchase agreement with either on a municipal building or a board of ed building um power purchase agreement is is a very attractive pathway for going solar for towns and cities and i'll hand it over to mackie to sort of dive into a power purchase agreement um and and describe the features of that good evening everyone uh thanks for allowing us to join the meeting again again this is mackie dykes vice president financing programs at the

070green bank i believe we we talked about a ppa a power purchase agreement um the last time we were here so i'll just in the interest of time i'll try to move through it a little a little more quickly but of course if questions are moving too fast please interrupt me uh next slide please and then one more yep so this is a structure where uh and this is sort of the culmination of all the work this is the actual agreement uh between us the green bank and the boe to make these projects happen um and it instead of you going and purchasing a solar system uh or hiring someone to build it for you you're instead signing this agreement uh to purchase the statement plus purchase the power from us will actually be the

071owner of the system and you'll purchase the power from it from us next slide the primary benefit with this is the savings that you see from that because the power from the solar will be cheaper than the purchase excuse me than the power you would have purchased from the utility so now you're paying an energy bill to ever source afterwards you'll still pay an energy bill at eversource it'll just be a lot less because you're not buying as much power from them you'll be paying us a bill for the green power from the solar system but together those two will add up to less than what you're paying now next slide there are numerous other benefits uh the the fact that we own the system so we're responsible for all the o m uh the

072lack of any upfront or ongoing cost to you um so you're able to go solar with no money up front and uh you start saving money from the beginning because again your your electric the solar ppa rate will be cheaper than your utility rate and you're locking that lower rate in for the full 20-year term of our agreement so as utility prices as we would anticipate will rise as they historically have for for decades um you'll you'll see you'll be sort of cushioned from that uh to a certain degree by the by the firm locked in power rate that you have um we're also uh mostly able to monetize a lot of the tax federal tax benefits and pass those on to you which you just can't since you don't pay taxes next slide so

073again sorry for rushing through that just want to get to the actual project so last time we were here we were we talked about the some of the details of these but we were missing the key thing which was what is the actual um ppa rate that we can offer you what are the actual savings we we did some estimates very conservative estimates about what we thought we could do we've actually as emily mentioned we ran the rfp we have uh a uh a connecticut-based installer or decision we have an installer to to install these we have a price and we've used that to calculate a ppa rate which has resulted in fairly significant savings uh and much more than we'd initially estimated so um actually can't see the mackie could we i mean could

074we scroll through i think the visual is good so everyone can see aesthetically and then i think slide 18 does a good job of summing this up great yeah let's just do that then um i think y'all are we've got 18 in front of us there we go i can see it now so all in um you know you're looking at discounts between 37 um and uh greatest of sixty percent um yeah i i won't read all the numbers to you um but uh very pleased overall over the term saving over uh just over 1.1 million uh and we're using fairly conservative estimates about power escalations there and then you see all the the the environmental benefits that accrue from these projects so i'll pause there for any questions or uh or comments otherwise we

075can i can happy to move on to what the next steps would be yeah that's a good place to pause mackie thank you i'll open it up to any board questions or comments yes could you just comment on the oxford assumption um just we discussed it in the facilities meeting but i think it's important to know that you put a pretty conservative assumption out there thank you um yeah i could i can jump in and speak to that i don't know if you can see it mackie but the um the oxbridge elementary school doesn't have an established uh utility rate quite yet so we put a placeholder in um we used um this the lowest of the electricity rates that are at the other schools to come up with the most conservative estimate of savings

076for what this project would generate um so with a 4.8 ppa rate um we're confident that the discount would be at minimum 55 percent so you'll you're seeing the the corresponding savings numbers for that figure any other questions or comments about the proposal the rates you want to move on to a quick mackie on next steps yes um so the next steps would be to actually execute the uh the agreements of the ppas for these projects um typically we uh we work directly with boe staff on that you know they're fairly late the illegal documents so we we work with directly with staff and and then council to to review those and negotiate those um but again it's reflecting sort of the project details and the rates and savings that we've we've talked about here

077um so yeah we sign those really and then we we get the project started there's a fairly lengthy amount of desk work that has to happen the full engineering of the system we're coming in you know with the structural engineer and doing assessments of the properties um permitting and all that and then later in the year we would expect to actually begin construction on the projects great thank you any further questions on the timeline yes mrs achman um just one quick question mackie in terms of servicing um the solar panels in terms of if there's a problem and i'm sorry if this was covered in facilities and i miss it um who's responsible for that what do we do if there's a problem um what's the district's kind of liability if there's any you mean

078problems in terms of just the operation of the panels yeah yes okay um is that any any issues with the performance of the panels is is our liability or our obligation to to correct um we're monitoring those systems remotely and comparing what we expected to produce to what it actually is so if we see issues there or we see no production then we're probably going to catch it before you are and we'll have a contact for part of the contract will be for you all to give us a contact for each each school uh we'll reach out to them to coordinate a site visit as soon as we can uh you'll also we'll you know we do a sort of a once the project's done a kickoff meeting so you'll have our contact info so

079if you notice something or notice any problems you you can reach out to us and we're also doing at least once a year just you know preventive maintenance visits which we coordinate with whoever our appropriate contact is but i guess bottom line any performance issues equipment issues anything that's our responsibility and our cost and because we don't get paid unless we're producing power and selling that to you we have every incentive to make sure that it's operating to you know to the to the expected level okay thank you thank you yes mr brown follow-up question on liability and then also a follow-up i thought there was a question last time about the town and who owns the building and if we can put the stuff up there and do we need to coordinate with them

080i don't know if we have an answer to that yet or if that's in the works with staff and then to miss uh mr dockman's liability question just thinking of a hypo um if we have one of these panels blows off the roof knocks little timmy off the jungle gym and he chips a tooth who's in trouble who has a liability on that um i'll have to you can come back to me yeah on that i don't know that specific situation so good you unders you understand the equipment takeaway yeah i'm just trying to illustrate the point is who who has liability for if this stuff comes loose or you know there's physical issues with it and that's part of my question i and i appreciate mr brown's hypothetical because i servicing is great and

081in terms of liability installation i assume you'll cover with the lawyers and everything as you do contracts that you know installation being done properly all that the district will be free of liability yes that's first mr lynch my understanding is as we have care custody and control over these buildings i'm not sure what involvement town hall has have we clarified that yet no that has not been specifically clarified if the first selectmen signs the actual document as the property owner okay um i mean we have solar on some we have solar on these buildings now yeah we have solar at oxford and um at the high school yep and um you know it's similar to power purchase agreement from 2009 okay so we'll get those good questions answered good thank you well thank you both

082for joining us any other board questions or comments around this um shout out to i know luke's been part of this shout out to mike lynch and his team and rusty shriner has dedicated a lot of his time over and above ox ridge in helping out with looking at this and providing some introduction so again kind of a good team effort all right yes dr adley mr chairman just to clarify it would be our intent to bring back the ppa agreement once it's reviewed by council to here thank you yeah there's no action this evening good thank you both for joining us this evening we appreciate it mr lynch thank you thank you everyone thank you thank you thank you emily thank you thank you all we will move on to the uh special education

083update uh mrs klein and i see a lot of the team online there so i'm sure we'll hear from a few people so i'll turn it over to you mrs frank thank you good evening [Music] uh firstly if i may just you're able to hear this right first of all good evening um if i may just before i begin dr adley you were kind enough to acknowledge me before in terms of the presentation on the transition program we had for um from post-secondary um to 18 to 22 year olds i really wanted to give credit to um to dr scott mccarthy took christina brass taylor eileen whalen um sam partner our new social worker in the high school who really put together a program as many of you know we've been working for for years

084to try to really reach out to agencies and support for families so i just wanted to acknowledge them all their great work i just want to talk good evening to members of the board of education to the families to students and colleagues every year we thank you for this opportunity to come before you just to give you some updates and overview of our current practices and some of our programs um in special education uh here with us this evening on our zoom by zoom are all program directors i'll begin with our youngest learners laura stratton is there our program director for elp kristin o'reilly our program director for k-5 and scott mccarthy our program director for secondary education for middlesex and for dhs thank you all for joining us this evening after i go through

085a brief presentation there will present for questions you might have for more detail on some of our programs so thank you and thank you to cdsp for a follow-up also and some of the questions and all the work you've worked with us this year as well thank you so if i can start with um just for your information the department structure just to know who we are i've made those introductions tonight but i just wanted to acknowledge also we have department chairs in middlesex which is teresa fox and we have christina brass taylor in our high school to support all of our programs as well for the program overview and you'll see it's consistent pre-k through 12 and the reason for that is we want to make sure that our students as they go through

086our programs have a continuum of services that really support them at different developmental stages as they go through elementary middle and high school so to start with i'm going from different tiers of levels of instruction when we look at one of the most integrated opportunities or for our general education and students who are in for special education students who are in general education classes and receive related services only so there may be a child who only receives speech and language service as a related service and the rest of their time is spent in the general education classroom the next tier that you look at is what we refer to as supplemental services within the general education classroom so currently in our elp program which is the most integrated program our students are there throughout the

087day in elementary in k-5 there are special education teachers who which is recommended by the ppt will push into a general education classroom to provide supplemental services and in middle school and in the high school we have co-taught classes in english language as well as um mathematics is this loud enough because it's not sounding like it yeah you're fine so if you look on the next tier and again the tiers change as ppts recommend that students require more services and when you look at that very often they might have to be pulled out for services and those services we look at as supplemental services that are provided by a special education teacher in elementary school and middle school we call them resource rooms and in dhs we usually use the learning center as the description

088of those programs those are programs that are taught by a special education teacher they supplement instruction from the general education class but they're more direct instruction in a separate environment also on those supplemental services we have in our middle sex program we have the aim program in the past that really is students are spending the majority of their day in general education classes yet they have a home base to go to for a learning center or for a teacher that's there because they may need some support throughout the school day that program goes into our dhs program and its core there and again students are in general education classes throughout the day they'll have a learning center in court but again if they need to come in and get some support from a special education

089teacher they're there throughout the day those programs also have a community component to it as well as a therapeutic support to it and then we move on again to students who might require a higher level of support we do have modified classes our modified classes on middle school or in the aoc program and in the high school or comprehensive classes the alc programs are small classes taught by a special education teacher in the content area in high school because the level of support that we require are our comprehensive classes those are taught in the course subjects by a dually certified special education teacher who's also certified in the content area that said there are times that we may not have a teacher who's duly certified in order to comply with what our recommendation is we

090would have a content teacher in that classroom as well that has happened more often in science it's hard to have a goodly certified teacher in science so we've had to do that in the past years and lastly our specialized programs and again to make sure that we have a continuum when kids enter our programs in kindergarten and to support them if they require that same level support we have our dlc programs in the elementary school currently they're housed at hindeling and oxford we have our alc programs in middlesex and we have our excel program in high school the emphasis there also in addition to academic support and social emotional learning is a vocational component and and you'll see as we go through our presentation of how we provide that opportunity and most importantly in this

091conversation has come up over the years of our post-secondary programs so in our in within our own dhs we have um programs that really support and prepare students for vocational or for other work activities what we finally have been able to really do in our excel program is really align ourselves with agencies and other local opportunities for post-secondary whether it's norwalk community college or ableist we have opportunities or neighborhood programs for post-secondary to make sure our students are really prepared for that transition to post-secondary pathways and the early learning program overview as you can see i won't go through the same opportunities because if it's in the continuum but we looked at our eop program with 16 hour programs 20 hour programs and 22 and a half hour programs all of those are determined at

092the ppt and again the level of service is really designed by the multi-disciplinary team that really requires that understanding of how can we implement the goals and objectives and what services do those students need our updates and highlights we're continuing with margie gillis still um not still we're excited to still work with marty margie gillis and looking at really phonology looking at pre-dyslexic understanding of how children read and this year we've worked in collaboration with julie droller and katie as well as chris on really implementing um the hegerty program which really looks at phonology in a very systematic way it's actually being implemented in elp in kindergarten in srbi and in some of our special education programs um hegerty has again multi-sensory scientifically research based instruction that students have been very responsive to and we're

093excited about rolling an atmosphere we look at mathematics again everyday math is what we're using and if you look at the framework one thing to keep in mind as we go through all of these is we've had the conversation of special education should be supplemental children still need to access the same curriculum that all of our general education students are accessing so when we look at the different the different programs that we use the different fields we're going into they're consistent with their peers in general ed and it's just how do we have sdi to really support them social emotional keeping same things zones of regulations our responsive classroom we continue with michelle garcia winners programs on social thinking which are some of the most effective ways in our social groups and we're doing that

094throughout elementary middle and high school our para professionals continue to be trained in rbt and pmt to make sure that we have safe de-escalating matters to really address behaviors as well as some of the higher level supports for students instructional technology it's our responsibility to continue to train all our speech and language pathologists we've trained them in devices augmented devices and we continue to learn from other contracted service providers as well connected dots is essential it's part of laura's program and how we really measure success for all students in our program and it's been rolled out for three years now and been very successful elementary program overview again the same continuum of services um from supplemental to specialized planning and placement teams i just want to highlight that the reason we've asked dr marilyn friend

095to join us is we really want to ensure that um how we meeting the needs of all our students do they need to be out of the classroom in terms of services we're providing and what's the best way to make sure that we support their goals and objectives so when we look at our supplemental and we look at our resource programs we look at our dlc programs at the end of this year somewhere around may hopefully dr fred will come and we'll share our results of what our self-study is our literacy program is always multi-um censoring so we continue to train our staff in og wilson we use spire we use vnb we use seeing stars and of course we're introducing hegerty this year our math we use the same materials and attributes of our

096math programs for language we continue to make sure as i said that everyone is trained in that the same areas that social emotional assessment training is a little bit different on these levels it is our responsibility requirement to implement new assessments as they become available so this year we trained everyone on the y at four month ramo which are achievement test memory tests and tests for autism our self-study again dr friend will be here um back she was here november 2nd she was here yesterday today she'll be back in january 24th and 25th parent coffees as you can see continue to be part of our most essential way of relating and sharing with families and we continue them in all of our schools elementary middle and high school and lastly lastly most importantly you were

097kind enough to really support the assistant principles and as we go through the year we'll speak more to that but what we do want to share is they started off from day one in this robust manner of saying we're here to approve teaching and learning we're here to really look at what sdi looks like in your classrooms the evaluation process the supervision process all of that is designed to really support that level of instruction and the overarching theme which we said which was special education is not a place where children should go it is access to the curriculum in the general education class and what can we do to work in tandem with our general education teachers and the curriculum that's going on in the classroom so that has been their charge they've been doing

098it in plc's they've been doing it in evaluations they've been doing it in supervision they've been doing it in coffees and parent coffees and they've been doing it in plc's so the excitement of having them there has already changed and i know it doesn't seem like a short period of time but it is since september of the way we're beginning to see our special education teachers designing instruction so we appreciate greatly the access to having those aps and will continue to report out and of course excitingly at the end of our elementary part of the presentation is um is the notion of when oxford elementary school does open the opportunity that we'll have for two things um one for our elp population we wanted to be one site one community for the last seven years

099and that really will be happening um two for the idea of our dlc program because when you have specialized programs that can put your students your k through five students in one community you have a different opportunity for different related service providers you have a hub where you have ot slps pt's aba specialists bcba specialists and special education teachers really designing a program for those students k through five we realize that it won't be year one necessarily but we are going to start working with families working with staff working with our related service providers to begin to build that dlc capacity to get back into the school i didn't want to comment on mrs aflan's question about furnishings so very often many of our students will have specific adaptive equipment furnishings and that's really recommended

100at the ppt level so we provide that um and very often that's that will travel with them throughout school so that's not in the original plan of furniture but we have we're on that so just so you know that will be fun equipment follow students so when a ppt recommends equipment it follows the student throughout their educational career um it does change as as students grow um and as far as the transition i know luke has spoken to that looking at the ffe we've considered that also because our rooms do have to have certain um requirements also um for many of our specialized learning um sink areas bathroom areas that's all been done in the design so again thank you for everyone's commitment to making sure that we had a safe environment mrs klein if

101i could just add um and i'm not sure if everyone knows this but the elp space on that side of the building will also be used as transition space for the cafeteria and for kind of meeting and gymnasium type space so again the capacity we built in the school will help with the phasing of it and that we will not have a cafeteria when we open or a gymnasium so there's a very detailed plan that luke was part of as was the rest of the school i believe katie was part of that too as to we know the classrooms we need and then we'll have some movement around in terms of lunch space and kind of play space thank you mr we also consider equipment for playground also when we were looking at that you

102know luke's actually done that in oxford prior to this also for accommodating students so that's been a consideration also to make sure it's accessible for non-ambulatory students or students who have different physical needs for equipment when you come to middle school again you have the same continuum of services this describes and at your time you can look at it um just to keep in mind also that we do have three speech and language pathologists in the middle school we have three school psychologists and we have one social worker so as we know that you know over the last two years in terms of challenges of really addressing the mental health needs of all of our students having a robust clinical staff has really helped to support them during our kids during our time and our

103staff we also have six school counselors in middlesex so again those are resources that really can address all of our students needs as far as our coachball classrooms we spoke to that we spoke to the aim program and we spoke to our learning centers the one thing to keep in mind also again in terms of our alc is again we begin to have that nexus between middle school and high school we have a little cafe in middle school now also that our students have designed and are working so we make sure that we're vigilant about giving them opportunities to really be part of the community making sure that they're really designing exciting vocational ideas our program highlights consider again multi-sensory reading going through that i think the one area that's different in our instructional focus

104in middle school as well as high school is really looking at ongoing refining of co-teaching implementation what our focus is making sure that with all the work marlin friend's been with us three years with dhs and two years at middlesex but making sure that we just don't stop new staff has to get trained new administrators have to get trained in making sure that we're really monitoring and supporting our co-charging and co-teaching on methodologies focus on mini lessons continues also to be part of our middle school scope and focus our parent coffee series is again essential they're posted um we have actually finally gotten our website to to to really be more accessible and have more connections so all of those parent coffee series have opportunities for being posted or available we've been using zoom as

105our platform and that's been very helpful more parents have been able to attend um and and we've been excited about having both mother and fathers and different parents and guardian audience able to access that um throughout the year on the next series to look for is our articulation series and that will be coming up for fifth to sixth grade many of you are familiar with that and that will be our next series in darren high school again looking for our our highlights same continuum of services that we ensure focusing again on our transitional opportunities for post-secondary as well and um learning a lot about assistive technology so um the the idea of really having assistive technology so our students can become more independent and making sure they use those devices for that purpose and they

106can do that so we have a strong emphasis on that as well and our parent coffee series continues there one of our most popular ones are did you know that's already been completed this year um in all of our um we'll speak later to it when i get to that slide also is that there will be a new iep being rolled out as of july 1 of 22. connecticut seats so we'll be speaking to that also and we will be rolling out parent training for that in the spring as well consistent with the rollout from the connecticut state department of education um we're looking forward to eight to ninth articulation pb um workshops that will be coming up shortly also in our parent coffees um unified sports will continue um and best buddies um and

107we're also looking at opportunities for rolling one out in the middle school and we'll keep you posted updated on that as well and lastly on connecticut seeds you know ip direct is something everyone's become familiar with and whenever a state shifts over to an entire new operation system there's a great deal of training that's involved um kristin has really um really worked strongly with the kansas state department of education our new aps are really rolling it out in their respective buildings in the elementary school our chairpersons and secondary will be doing it alongside the program directors as well there is a schedule that comes from the state we are not one of the piloted districts but we will be required to begin to roll it out in july superintendents participated in a workshop also to

108be informed so we'll keep you updated as we're updated but know that it's ongoing training and as the state provides it for us we participate there's actually every monday afternoon there is a phone in time that we can use and that's been consistent since the beginning of the year for ongoing help just so you know there was an era it wasn't really 805 it was 804 students last year there's one off in the c deck so when you look at the numbers just know that it was really 804 students as you can see that we are up to 873 students just keep in mind that cdac is october 1 to october 1 so that's not what it looks like by the end of the year you can see that 804 was very flat was it

109was a it was during the time of covid there weren't as many opportunities for evaluations initially so we know that was flat for last year but we are 873 students so you can see a significant increase of 69 students across the district um the prevalence in special education which does change based on that you can see it continues to be speech and language as one of the overarching um prevalence as well as other health impairment learning disability is is also your third and then you can look at the other areas that really have remained pretty much the same and of course there's a glossary of acronyms every year just for new families also are not familiar with it to be comfortable knowing about some of the language that we use and it is statewide and

110very often nationwide and our program directors are here also for any questions that you might have in any of the areas we discussed tonight um thank you again for all your support and your continuation support and all of the families and students and colleagues for all that you do every day thank you thank you mrs klein and thank you to the team i know it's a collaborative effort to put all this information together so thank you for the overviews um mrs klein i'll just start out with a real quick question on ct saids um in budget season is there a cost associated with that and it seems like is it a project and you may not have the answer now but it'd be nice to understand are there resources that you need to implement and

111implement it well while doing your day job so just kind of that thought process it scares me that it's coming from the state um as do all these things but like let's make sure you have what you need from a resource standpoint and of course the dollars so on an individual school level the state informed us that they're going to give a small stipend we can have two people in each building and they will give a small stipend to to support that that said it's a small stipend to support that um we're already working with the um christians arranged with the assistant principals the elementary school to do it scott's working with the chairpersons so i think we're okay on and rolling out the real challenge is going to be taking all of that data

112that we currently have in iep direct and and downloading it and when they speak about it it's a little bit nerve-wracking of the laboratory to take all this data and put it there what's going to happen to it um i i think they're saying that frontline which is we've already and rich can speak to that we already pay for front line which runs the operation um that's dollar before you spent so we'll be continuing to use that and they kind of speak to each other the new system and front line so we're hoping that will be it we do pay iep direct so hopefully the dollars that are allocated to that will be able to use that but i will continue to reach out to the state and inform rich of what we may need

113to do but right now i think that's our understanding thank you mrs klein i will open it up to further board questions and comments mrs mccammon staying on the topic of said to start um is there a reason that the state is mandating that change is there a change is this just a simple a switch of technology or is there something that the state is trying to do differently are the goals differently structured is there is there an educational reason for this change so the goal is really wonderful miss mccann the goal is that um look at that every student will have a drawer so they'll have a drawing in that drawer will be srbi will be um rti will be ames web will be everything that that's that belongs to that student it'll tell

114the story of the student in addition to that it will cross walk with medicaid it'll cross work with other systems that will cross walk with us back it will eliminate a lot of the state reporting that happens now in other words cdac will not you won't be seeing cdap that will all be part in one large repository so the notion of it and there is a new ip the ip will look different and that'll be training also it's from it's similar to what we have but it's supposed to be friendlier and have a stronger parent voice so the notion is that it will be a much friendlier system more accurate reporting um and in the long run once we have the first ppts in 2223 we'll begin to roll everything into that data system and

115you'll be able to have a much more cohesive student drawer and be able to access that there also will be a parent portal so that will have that will have a piece also that would be wonderful yeah fingers crossed thank you mrs mccammon other board questions coming mrs achman wonderful i'm coming from the state such an interesting idea well i mean i think we say like i'm scared of it that's coming from the state iep direct came from the state state came in and like helped us fix special education we have to we have to be careful about stuff like that um can we talk about we have 69 extra students or i'm sorry that's the wrong way actually we have 69 more students that are utilizing special education can we talk a little bit

116about caseloads um are we within our best practices for caseloads do we have areas that we're stressing that we should know that we might need more providers or are we meeting kids needs just kind of give me a prospectus knowing that we have more students than maybe we could have anticipated so um yes we have additional 69 students and yes i'd say and and we certainly will we'll look at it um our high school right now so we're looking at 24 more students in high school the high school was already very large in terms of numbers of caseloads for our practitioners to begin with we've been able to um to support them this year by being creative and doing that but we will when we come to support um and speak to the superintendent's budget

117and look at some additional staffing that might be required as far as middle school and as far as elementary school we're looking at our aging out so our articulating fifth graders that are coming out so our numbers look like they'll be manageable on elementary school and and middle school as well um and we see i'm sorry i mean drop go ahead and so often what we do is when we look at how many of our elp kids are coming in and how many of our fifth graders going at that's really how we really balance our caseloads and and i know each child or child's needs are individual but are we seeing any um generalized needs you know it's it's hitting more one bucket than another in terms of new identifications or is it no very

118generalized um and based on very much individual experience i think the social emotional needs as a result in terms of the wake of of covid is where we're seeing a lot more needs um especially with some needs where some students when they were absent from school and not involved in you know in some way it assuaged some some challenges that students might have had if you've got social anxiety and you're not coming to school your social anxiety will be reduced and then when you return to school you see a higher level of support and need so we're monitoring that also and again we'll speak to that at this at the superintendent's budget meeting but i think that would be the one area that we saw the most i think all of our interventions because of

119our emphasis emphasis on reading instruction in elementary which is really what we're looking at looking at dyslexic behaviors looking at early identification looking at ways of of how we've trained our staff for will center and trained our staff for other multi-sensory i think we're able to address it and we're just going to continue having a really strong pd on that level okay thank you sure mr brown sorry i just wanted clarification from this zochman's question so you mentioned we have 69 additional in the overall system but there's 24 of those are in the high school what was the starting number in the high school just to know the ratio the starting number the 24 additional how many just on a base of how many but i don't have the exact number of the high school

120secondary moment and there it is so we started with on 2021 october 1 october 1. we had 254 [Music] in the high school now we have 278. all right so it's 254 plus 24 is addition so it's about a 10 just under 10 difference which is about the same as like a nine and change for the entire population so pretty close okay thank you thank you mr brown any other questions or comments or thoughts mrs mccammon staying on the on the chart with the numbers of students so looking at the the one year change that is pretty significant but looking at that five-year trend it's also a pretty big growth can you talk a little bit about what we're seeing on the on the five-year trend um because you know that isn't as explainable by

121the last year it's consistent with the connecticut with the trend that's in many districts it's mechanical so you know we've seen that trend when we compare ourselves to other districts also we're higher but it's certainly that has been the trend i think it's many things have happened and we've spoken to that one identification you know we've improved our our way of really assessing students i think we've improved our way of really looking at students diagnostically both formally and informally so that may be part of it there's also numbers that have really changed if you look at the autism numbers right now and it's 1 in 44 and if you would have had this conversation with us five years ago it was one in 80. so i think a lot of trends have changed also in

122terms of identification now again the number increase in on looking at autism spectrum disorder is because again tools and assessments we have to really make those those those determinations so i think both things have occurred i think identification i think the the band of how we measure different learning differences has changed as well and our tools in doing it so building on that given that i would think that as we move forward we only get better at identifying learning differences do we see this number continuing to grow or how are we looking at that in a long-term way um um there's well it's hard to hypothesize but i will say this when we when we look at instruction in general education and we look at our practices and that's why i'm saying i think the

123overarching piece is having this crosswalk between general ed and special education so when we look at let's use hegerty for example we're doing that in our classrooms we're doing foundations in our classrooms you know we have our first cohort after last year that went through foundations for five years i think as we as we come through but as we look at the robust program we have in general ed to really addressing literacy we may very well see um a reduction or need for special education as we do that so that's one part of it on the other part of it is um and again not knowing it's it's your really it's your it's your student population you know you have students if you remember one year we had 68 i think it was remember that

124year where 68 students moved in with ieps so that's an anomaly and that was an incredible number to have that year and you'll see though so i think it's student population i think it's early identification and i think it's really looking at our crosswalk with general ed nsrbi this is best um thank you for the presentation thank you always everyone for a glossary um just a question on the educational classifications does that look different over a five-year trend i look back at last year and it looked pretty steady would it be pretty steady with a bigger picture i think again it's your it's your student population and also since we know that the asd trend has been really one in 44 students as opposed to one in 80 students you you know we very we

125may well see a trend of increase in that mr c i hate to talk about economics or special ed and economic terms but it sounded like as you're you know answering jill's question that by identifying the students earlier we might be more productive or better meet their needs you know through their life cycle at in the darien public schools so maybe the intensity of services is you know we're not playing catch-up if you will is that a good way to think about it it is and it also is that early identification shows that there might be also early exiting from special education you know if you really that's why margie gillis and she's been a wonderful support if you look at early childhood the acquisition of reading in in pre-k kindergarten first and you really

126have intensive services there you might see it's not a decrease in services and exiting of services as you go on the years thank you thank you mr c mrs um well i think to mrs mccammon's question it's important in terms of long-term planning because we've seen this many years i mean mr maroney and i have discussed bubbles going through and what does that mean right year after year we go back and forth at each other about bubbles but this year is another great example of saying we planned as best we could and yet what we're still doing as a district and we should be proud of is meeting the needs of 69 students that all want to and need to learn just like their peers and so i think it's a credit it also shows

127the hard part about planning because you can plan as much as you can in a forecast but if 69 kids show up and have needs we are committed to meeting those needs so i think i think that's an important kind of you know we can't quite map this out or excel spreadsheet this as much as we can because the kids are dynamic and if we're catching them earlier um all all the better for it so so thank you i'm not entirely sure how you all do it sometimes but i do think once again we're in a year that illustrates even with our best estimates um one this is difficult to plan for and two we are committed to planning for students um and i certainly hope that continues thank you thank you mrs mr moroni

128yeah so we've done and thank you for the presentation and and to mrs ochman's point and everyone's point of all the work that's being done um question going back to the the s e s e s saps and the school psychologist that worked on two years ago is part of the rationale for bringing them in was too much time was spent in ppts but and and we wanted to have diversity but there was also a little conflict about the the ses s aps and that they were going to be only in special ed so i'm curious is do we have a breakdown of how much time is being spent in sdi ppt and general ed for for not only the ses the school psychologist the general ap and the regular principals as well do we

129have a breakdown of that we haven't done the numbers on that we certainly could run that it will change also um of course as we go through the year and as more referrals come in but we certainly can do a snapshot and look at it from september to january i realize it's early and you're still working through the kinks but i think it's something that we need to try to track going forward thank you mr rooney mrs klein have you seen um with the increase um and i worry about the challenge with getting teachers getting paras getting folks to provide some of these services um you know how are you managing that and if the the trend continues you know we had always looked at investing in where we could do it best ourselves and

130keep the students in-house so to speak versus putting them to outside services do you see that shifting um you know and going to more outside specialized services based on sometimes an inability to find the right people to come in and be part of the team and is you know how do you see that a little bit long term i i think it's again hard to predict long-term messaging because it depends on your cohort of students i can tell you from last year to this year we have two less students two that have been iep placed so we have two less than last year that said it depends on students who move in and what their needs are as well as what we have but i don't see the trend as going up i think as

131we build programs we're better able to address our students needs again it could change if you have a different population coming in but i think we've gotten much better i mean if you look at our dlc program when we started here seven years ago in henley there was one student there were 13 now so i think that's really you know a support of all of the wonderful work our special education teachers and clinicians are doing and administrators so our hope is we continue to build programs to keep our students here and that number should actually decrease again depending on student need if they need a more intensive environment mr brown i sure like just to follow up from something that dennis said and i apologize um because i didn't prepare in advance but going way

132back to when we were about to put in the new school psychologist you'd given a main presentation then you had a follow-up presentation and in the follow-up presentation towards the end of that slide deck probably bottom right of the slide the service breakdown of our derg and what the breakdown was of the school psychologist versus social workers and if you're going to give us an update of some of the stuff which you had mentioned into the budget would love an update on that just in terms of there have been any changes in that trend if it's not a lot of work for you that'd be great and also what kid off was dennis asking about what's going on in terms of the workload we had seen i think last year the year before a breakdown

133of the scheduling and how people's scheduling had been affected with its second psychologist being in so anything in that information workload and schedule would be great to see and thank you for all your work thank you we can certainly do that thank you and i remember the slide also mrs klein the other thing i would ask and i think this is for our overall population but i think it plays into you know down the road is i think we have to keep an eye out for um the amount of dwellings that are going to become available over the next couple of years there are literally hundreds of apartments ranging in size from studios to three bedrooms so you know to everyone's question here and to your response it's difficult to look out and strategize but

134i think we have to be prepared in some instances and i think we do to turn on a dime as these buildings come online and people start coming into town and they're coming into town for the education and the services that we provide so i think it's something we have to stay close to in terms of a board and administrative conversation so i'll just throw that out there mr maroney kind of switching gears a little bit to srbi um have we if i recall we were there was talk that we were seeing an increase last spring have we continued to see an increase in the fall or has that abated or somewhat and second question is do we have a capacity threshold for srbi or can we just keep going with that right now we

135we do have the additional 2.5 fte that we had through the sr funding so as far as capacity there's there hasn't been a need right now the challenge with srbi is ideally students are exiting srbi because you don't want to stay for an extended period of time because then that means students needs are not being met but as of right now i feel like we are adequately staffed so you wouldn't see any changes in the proposed budget that's coming have we seen an increase though i can check it changes every six weeks but right now there's not there's no concern about the caseload numbers thank you one more thing when caseload numbers do emerge it's usually in the spring as the year goes on so we're at a stage right now where that wouldn't be

136an issue thank you mr chamber mrs zachman so i'm my favorite topic of slp sorry slp because i love to follow that line for so many reasons but we're always um it feels to me that historically that's a line where we we consistently look or need to make transfers into which again very proud to do to meet our students needs but as you're talking about new programs are there any generalized needs you're seeing there or changes with our earliest learners that would help maybe identify those needs earlier or catch is there anything with that line because we do seem to consistently need to fund that line and meet those children's needs and um even when we thought maybe we'll dial it back we still see the need exist so again i'm appreciative of us continuing

137to meet the need but i'm just wondering are we learning anything holistically over time um that we can employ or know that's just the current need and um band i won't steal your word that we're in i think both things are true mr zachman i think the notion is that we are learning over time that said um our student population still requires a very high level especially when you have programs that you built like our dlc programs our alc programs that really require a lot of augmented devices require a lot of technology require a lot of um different levels of speech and language um you know looking at prom therapy looking at different you know alcs looking at those opportunities i don't know that i don't see it changing um i just i do think

138that building our own capacity you know and training our own pd for our speech therapist would be our best opportunity for that of doing that and i think that's where our emphasis is and we'll continue to do that we're not there yet but i think that's what our growth would be um it's also very often that um especially with with children you know with children who are non-verbal or children who really require different levels of speech language therapy um you have multiple people working at the same time so you may not have them all employed you know it's that if i if you you might have we're very robust we've got 17.5 i believe okay okay i'm close um speech-language pathologists across the district um and and yet when you look at our high school

139we don't we don't have the the support you know we need support in high school so we have to look at the trends of when kids are arriving and where they are and that really determines it but i think there's a combination we probably will always need to do contracting because of the nature of levels of support that kids need and the simultaneous level of support that's really it's really simultaneous also and just a quick follow-up i'm sorry you don't need to have an answer now but if we're looking at increased caseloads which the numbers would seem to be we are looking in areas are we also looking at our communication back to parents and at one point we had you know guidelines parents check in with everyone on their caseload or i'm sorry people

140are checking in based on their students in our case load you know once a week or you know twice a week are we making sure that with increased demands on our providers the communication is staying consistent and getting home to parents because they do think there's still a fair amount of concern in the community you know of time out of school and what that means going forward so i just want to make sure communication is happening between providers and parents we're maintaining the same practice of been secondary in middle school and high school every other week okay so they are reaching out um it's either by phone or by email whatever the parent whatever the families and the provider have decided so we are maintaining that um again i'd ask anyone who's not getting that

141so please reach out to the chain of communication where it's not but they are our staff is committed to doing that um on the elementary level we we have not implemented that um it's a very different design but very often ppts will recommend that there's a weekly communication book you know with our younger learners there's a different level of communication also there might be a lot of google docs are happening now also um in the elementary school we're using google docs and at middlesex as well to communicate parents parents can write in what's going on at home teachers write in of what's happening in school so we have been able to be efficient by using electronic communication also thank you mrs mccammon okay go ahead hold on jill uh dr adam what mrs klein said

142just about the need to they're not her words but the need to address slp and harvard provided that the high schools um as we move forward we'll looking specifically at the category of of um learning disability and i know we have a lot of children with learning disabilities who might be classified otherwise but i know we've done a tremendous amount of investment in in reading related disabilities are we seeing any growth in mathematically related disabilities are we doing some future planning for for kids are you seeing any changes in the classifications there um and specifically interested in math no i mean i haven't uh miss mckenna but i can certainly ask on the other program directors you know if they've seen that i haven't seen a trend in that honestly in terms of just calculator

143or math over i'd say over a decade um now you're right maybe it's because the predominant um you know learning difference is in literacy and and we don't focus as much on on the mathematics so it might just be the way we're focusing on it but i i have not seen that i haven't seen that in the trend thank you mrs mccann we have the whole team on here any of uh any other questions or comments from the border on this good this is klein any last comments you or your team no just thank you for all your support and and working with us and and as you said in stockholm that we're able to really address the needs of all our students and we'll just continue to do that thank you thank you let

144me just close out by saying that and visiting the schools the care and dedication of our support staff from elp up to high school students is just absolutely phenomenal i mean it does make you extremely proud of the work that they do so congratulations to the team thank you thank you mrs klein thank you for the team on zoom thank you for zooming in being with us this evening and for all the hard work and organizing uh the presentation thank you happy holidays we will move on to update on diversity equity inclusion dr adley and mr tranberg good evening everyone the memo uh includes our last dei update as well as just links to the initial memo and the slide deck regarding uh the work that the equity team is uh going to complete uh

145just trying to keep everything in one place for ease so that is there since we last had an update at the end of october the middle school did bring in the anti-defamation league to address some of the anti-semitic behavior that was happening it was the program occurred over several weeks with hearing from first-hand someone related to a holocaust survivor there was also a high school student in a nearby high school who shared some of her story about dealing with bullying related to anti-semitic behavior as well and that happened over zoom and the students actually had an opportunity to ask that student questions as well during their flex time there was also follow-up a flex class talking about the importance of symbols and and what those mean and trying to develop that understanding further additionally the

146middle school uh students um initiated a gender sexuality alliance club gsa and they found someone to be their advisor and several other staff agreed to support the students in that as well and since we met in october ken shelton was here during our professional development on election day at which time he met with our middle school staff and he met with the high school staff and he also met with a group of middle school students and high school students knowing that he may not be continuing that work but we were trying to offer a space for students to to have a conversation and engage in some of their experience and learn about mr shelton's experience as well at the high school additionally there have been some focus groups and from the focus group there also

147came a student leadership forum and so these are students who are wanting to partake in the work and uh from that group another partnership is emerging with adl uh to bring in the names can really hurt the names can really hurt us program uh which is to the board's question were there other things that might happen so here are two collaborations with the adl that have come since then um as far as uh continuing to work with mr shelton we did have him contracted for some work and there were additional funds requested so the all the work that we've done with him so far is under what we have initially contracted and i will say at the in the initial presentation of mr shelton i talked about him being a consultant and the importance of

148a consultant is they're not here to deliver a program because with the dei work right now we need to build the capacity of our staff our students and our administrative team and that's what this partnership with him is designed to do there is no ken shelton method of of doing the work he's here to evoke the talents of our staff and i will say the very first week i was here not on the topic of dei at all but i was working with another outside contractor that the district has worked with for years and he welcomed me to the district and he said i want to let you know that your administration and your teachers are raging with talent and competence and that is absolutely true this area is an area where we need to

149learn and mr shelton was selected because he can evoke the talents and make sure we remain excellent in the area of dei i also hear and understand concerns about a specific article or blog post that mr shelton had written he's also written other things and he's presented on other things on an unrelated topic one of my favorite authors in educational leadership wrote a book on a philosophy of instructional coaching that does not resonate with me i like someone else's approach to instructional coaching but i have not cancelled that author to do other work and so i just want us all to keep that in mind that we have many positions and we have many levels of work that we do as professionals and mr shelton is not here to work with darian public schools on

150grading so i just want to make sure that is clear for the record so uh the final portion of the memo talks a bit about if we do not have a transfer to work with mr shelton for the other services as originally presented um we would really focus on having him return to do some work with the dei team and the faculty and if those services can be expanded that goes to our community partnership really working with those student groups as well so that's all that's a high-level summary of the memo and i'm glad to answer any questions so we thank you mr chamber go ahead uh so again we have adjusted uh the plan accordingly given that we have i haven't come closer on this issue i wish we would come to closure to

151be honest with you um as quickly as we possibly can on this particular issue because it's important to our kids and it's important to our staff i think and many other issues we would actually come to closure more quickly and all honestly uh but that being said we've modified it so that in the event that if the transfer doesn't go through um then mr shelton can complete something and not just be itty-bitty doing bits and pieces and have to leave again at least it is completed so it's with that intent that uh i would look forward to january of bringing that transfer forward and hopefully with approval to move forward with the important work and yes as christopher said he's not here to take away ap classes and deal with grades that's he's here to

152deal with inclusion actually if you deal with inclusion diversity and equity will follow and that's a main thing our kids need and um and to give them the voice in that and to support our staff through that so i just wanna i recognize what people say and i recognize what what what they're what they're citing but that is not his charge to do that and anyone that we get to do this work is going to be confrontational to some degree in some capacity uh it's thought-provoking and this difficult work i'm totally confident ability to do that he's been he's worked with ces which is our risk to do trainings across the region he's done uh professional development with staff not just recently but like two years ago and was very well received they've been extremely

153well received by the kids and they're extremely well received for the staff since uh so i'm confident that they can continue the work but with that uh we'll be we'll be bringing the transfer request forward to the board thank you dr mr trademark can you give a little more detail on the work that he's done i've heard very positive comments from students that he's met with specific to the high school a number of students that i've spoken to so i think what helps the board and what helps everyone that's paying attention in the community is you know what has he done up there what does the work product look like what what is the end product of that work and you know we heard i think during one session i think actually mr shelton said

154it himself that one of the takeaways from meeting with the students at the high school was they weren't feeling they were being listened to and that we needed to do more listening um so i think it would help knowing that what's the work that's been done when are we going to see or hear about that work even it's even if it's part of a bigger picture and that to reiterate so far what i've heard has been positive in terms of his interaction with the students i mean he did he is a teacher he's an educator so so his work with students was extremely limited i think he had 75 minutes with the high school group and 75 minutes with the middle school group so as you can imagine on this topic that is not much

155time to dig in deep well yeah i don't know necessarily what the topic was or what the questions were i know he made a comment about what he got out of the session so what that session what occurred in that session is he told a bit of his story and his experience because when you're doing equity work at the heart of it it comes to story and when you can understand someone's story and experience a perspective it helps us think no and understand and be able to do things potentially differently and sometimes not so he talked a bit about his story and then tried to hear from the students what has some of their experience been and that's a different conversation with middle school students than it is with high school students and you're right

156the the loud and clear message from the high school students and it wasn't only in that session it's kind of transpired in other places it's really about the adult language and our preparedness and ability to say what's actually happening right and not masking what's happening or using general terms so instead of saying a an inappropriate symbol but to say an anti-semitic symbol so that's that's the language that the students were using and they appreciated the time and the space for someone to in a relatively smaller group and and safe setting to is a who's they're going to go to that we're here he's here to listen to them and it's a safe space to have those conversations and since then the administration at the high school has tried to replicate some of that to provide

157more spaces for students to have those conversations with the goal being the goal of any work is that it lives on past the people that are implementing the work so mr shelton is not going to if we continue working with him he's not an employee of the darien public schools we're not contracting him indefinitely he's building the capacity of the people that are here so we have the ability to do that work and continue beyond him and the work with the students is really about creating conditions for them to not be bystanders when they see things that are not okay and when you hear a story about seeing a swastika on a bus the the type of thing that we need students to do is if they saw the student drawing the swastika on the

158bus they have the they're empowered enough to confront what they're seeing and it sounds like a simple thing but it's something we're actually terrible at as adults when we see things how often do we engage in things that might be none of our business so what this work is at the core is we're asking students to be brave and courageous enough to do things that we have a really hard time doing ourselves and i think that's some of the fear that comes with it is how do i how do i have the conversation because they're messy like if you try to engage in a conversation like this it's gonna be messy and it's going to be messy for a long time until you have a lot of them and after you have a lot of

159them you've practiced and you're better and you understand so that's really what this is about and i know there's this desire for specificity and measures hey if that existed with any of the people that are doing this work um someone would be very very wealthy and we'd be in a very different place as a society this is messy and we just have to be willing to have the conversation so sorry to be somewhat ambiguous with my answer but it's really about providing space to have the conversation and help us develop the plan that's going to work for darien not a plan that's predetermined that's prescribed that this is what it looks like when it's done and because we have some of those that are in the works we are in our ruler implementation year which

160is a year of staff training and yes we're developing our own version of ruler but there are specific things that we are doing to develop common language around social and emotional learning and we have to do the same thing with with dei and the talent exists with the staff and administration we have to do that work we're just saying it would be helpful to have the support of this person not to tell us what to do but to help us articulate our own goals and develop that plan over the course of however long we have to work with them i appreciate that not that you're ambiguous i think that helped a lot it helped me a lot i think it's i think it's something the board needed to hear um i look at any consultant

161that comes on board is being driven by our values our community values our district values our kids values i think we heard it in the audience today are we listening to the students you said we are listening to the students i think this what i heard makes a lot of sense so i appreciate that i think you added some clarity to some of this which i think is helpful but i'll open it up to additional board questions and comments mr c so just to get the timeline correct you presented to the board i think in a presentation dated september 14th that mr shelton was given a keynote address was that part of the initial contract that you were working on uh with him as a contractor so mr shelton did the keynote address for convocation

162in 2020. okay so that was the previous school year that was our first contact and the first interaction that the district had with mr shelton and then uh in september i believe it was an overview of just the committee work itself and then in october if the memo proposed mr shelton as the person to do the work so then let's fast forward to this year after discovering you know let's use the blatant language you know symbols of hate um and some phrases of hate this board approached the administration um i guess it was in october at some point and asked you to do more if i remember correctly than just a assembly and a one-time kind of assembly and then move on and so i guess my question to clarify this next uh memo or

163which outlines that next out of work is outlined in page three of the memo that you supplied and we're going in and that is going to be processed hopefully through a budget transfer that you're going to come to the board in january correct yeah this has been this has been modified and truncated because uh his anticipated start time was earlier but since with time has went by uh we've truncated it but yes essentially yes so right now this board hasn't had the opportunity to weigh in in the opportunity that for this board to weigh in is going to be basically a budget transfer you're comfortable with mr shelton he's been working with the district since 2020 you've heard the concerns of the community um and some of the questions and you know frankly from this

164board you know during the opportunity that we had to speak with mr shelton here still a comfortable move yes yes we are and i understand that there are other opportunities it's nice to see the kids giving their own voice and having the courage to come forward to say this is the need we have for instance the club at the middle school it's nice to see our two administrators at the middle school the high school taking on initiative to bring in other agencies when it's not as if it's going to be mr shelton's show right um because we have to do the work we have to it has to come within we have to build our capacity within and people step up and so there'll be lots of different opportunities hopefully along the way for other

165experiences for kids and adults thank you this is worm um well so i have a few questions um one a question that was asked of mr shelton when he was here that was never really answered um is about his experience working with a school district of our size um i'm i think we're still waiting for an answer on that one um two curious about the students he's talking to how those students are selected how how it's coming about are they signing up for that are they chosen how is that working and you also mentioned the the audit and i'm still curious about what's going on about it you know would you say that ken's not gonna have anything to do with grading or any of that but it does mention grades in the audit categories

166and i'm just curious how we're looking at grades in it within that so when it comes to the audit you're looking at many data points and how they impact students in different groups so it's their whatever their current grades are so if we're using report card grades or we can use gpa depends on the data point that we decide to use when the audit is designed and you look at that data point across say gender special education identification race socioeconomic status and then from there where disparities exist where there's over representation of a subgroup that's when you just determine specific actions and goals for those areas so grades in that context is related to how students are currently performing out of operating practices the first question you had when i for the first memo that

167was proposed in october i talked a bit about mr shelton's resume and the different districts he's worked with he's worked with some big cities he's worked with districts like ours um in the follow-up conversation because i did ask like that that wasn't a super clear response um i can certainly talk to you more about what they are but he says it's not just practice i know what they are but he tends not to talk about the districts he's working with because it's it's messy work so to go around and say yes i'm working with darien because they're having uh all of these challenges that's not typical but there are districts that profile very similar to ours that he's worked with um and i think i actually did mention them in october well i think if

168it comes to the top of my head the one that's most familiar i believe uh i'll i'll check myself but i think it's part of uh pa uh from if i remember correct i believe that's it as well and i missed a question in there sorry oh i was curious about the students oh the students um i believe the principals or administrators sent out an interest inventory or survey and student self-identified that they'd be interested in the work and one place there wasn't a there were enough spaces and i think at another school there may have been more students interested than possible to manage for the size of the group thank you mrs warren mrs best thank you um thanks chris for the update uh and i think it is helpful to hear you talk

169about how this is not ken shelton coming to durian public schools to implement his program but rather to facilitate our administration and implementing the correct program for our district as as i hear it um i was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the relationship between sel and dei i feel like we are hearing questions from members of the community where those two things which i understand are related but they're being confused for being the same and it might be helpful to spend a minute on that sure thank you for that question i heard that a bit as well and i'm going to um steal the phrase from my colleague and and boss they're not mutually exclusive but they are they are different things there's certainly an overlap between diversity and inclusion and

170social emotional learning diversity equity inclusion is really looking at the differences that exist and the disparities that might exist as a result of differences when you're talking about social emotional learning it's it's looking at um what are our what our understandings of our self and how we work with others and how we navigate the world through our uh i'll say emotions but that's that's an oversimplification but there is a there's definitely a venn diagram where in the middle yes there is overlap like there is with everything because we can't do anything without having awareness of um our own emotions and how we regulate and navigate the world work itself manage manage ourselves make decisions but they're not the same at all and when you're looking at programs specifically there are programs that really are dealing

171with social emotional learning there aren't too many programs that are dei focused but there are also pro like character programs and those are another different thing so when we're talking about the importance of kindness and respect and everyone has value yes that is really important it's something we believe to be true but right now we need to develop common language around dei so we can do that other work because it's there's more to it than yes we just need to be nice and kind to everybody um i'll stop there i could just add if i had read an article today that that referred to dei as the house so to speak and that sel was sort of the tools how to operate within that house but until you've created the house you don't have that

172space for the common language like you're saying within which to operate is that kind of i like it i i love it but i'm sure that people that are in the in the sel research world would say that sel is the house and dei listen just out of respect to them it's whatever whatever your lens in and view is how you make sense of the rest of the world some people make sense of everything through seo some might make sense of it through tei some might make sense of it through none of the above and that's okay but something we know for sure because we're hearing it from our students we're hearing it from our staff is we need to learn something about dei so we can at least try to have a conversation without

173being afraid to have a conversation because our students that have graduated have told us loud and clear i had a wonderful education i was very prepared for just about everything except this part i didn't know what to do here and i think we have an obligation and it's something we can do and like i said we have the talent to do thank you mrs best mr brown thank you so sort of two questions chris and one is going to uh mrs worm's question about the survey design and you mentioned that you would take different categories of groupings and then you look at whatever test results if i'm understanding the the actual design of that test if your criteria is going to be grouping you see disparities by group then by definition wouldn't that test indicate

174that it's those underlying characteristics of the cause how do you take causation like we did here math scores wrong and we split it by men and women and men do worse and women do better then is it because i'm a man i'm not as good at math like just that design i don't see how you don't get to that result so when once you have the results with an equity audit it's not end of story that's the start okay and the first thing you ask is okay why is this the case so it's called the root cause analysis and so typically um with root cause you might just put things that we know because of research it might be this it might be that but what we do with the whole point of an equity

175audit and we have some opportunity because our groups are going to be small right there these subgroups are going to be smaller subgroups which actually gives you an opportunity to get to someone's story faster because we want to know the root cause of that person's story to help us have an understanding and so we don't want to say it's causation we want to understand if there's trends that exist and perpetuate themselves over time and then ask is there something that we're able to do about it within the scope of the school because schools can't do everything but there are some things that we can do god i guess you know the ques it's and i probably don't know the answer now but the initial reaction is that doing this by grouping i'm not sure what

176that tells us as opposed to focusing on our individual students it would be more important for us to help our individual students that's kind of where the question is but maybe maybe i'll figure that out over time um the other thing is you had mentioned that you know you had an author who had certain ideas you liked and certain ideas you don't like and i mean i think we have an obligation in our schools to have a space where people can have their thoughts and ideas and we can have you know people's ideas can compete in the arena and fight it out and that's how you learn how to it's an important skill we need to have our students learn over time so without going to the question of do we think you know ken's

177the best guy in kenneth's point the best point of view like i don't want to go to that question right now but you know i will note that there's been a lot of concern for the parents so just keep that back in mind for a second so what concerns me from an oversight from a board perspective and what i'm struggling is i look back to dr layman's and we had dr layman's kate come in he was the best of the best of the best is that doctor lemmons yeah that looks like a tree i just died no i didn't i didn't i can take this off so dr lam came in and you know he he was touted and had great credentials and a couple things happened over time a few things one was that

178i remember a particular slide where our committee had verbatim used the words from his website completely accidentally according to dr lam's which it was a little incredulous but you know that seemed a little strange and then we had a very small vocal group that kind of developed that plan that we're still following um strategic plan and as that plan's come out and it's become more known to the public really isn't what the public general throughout the town wants it really reflects the views of a small group and some of the stuff's not been well received and we've heard people talking about the pause and you know i think there may be a reason because i think some of the top items we're looking at aren't really reflective of where people's interests are i think it's

179just a small coder and then i look what we're doing right now with um with ken and i think it's the same thing and my concern is he comes in he does this stuff that we already know the parents a large number of parents are alarmed about it's the same thing it's the same model we really had with dr layman's where he came in did something a couple people thought was cool but then when it got known to the broader public it really wasn't what we're looking for here in town so how do i as a board member have confidence that we're not going to go down that same road i would just respectfully disagree i'll go back to just one thing here every now and again you gotta look at the scoreboard okay not

180continually all the time but where are we on our journey together whether it's with kids groups of kids or categories of kids or whether it's achievement or whether it's participation but the kids that are standing up here talking about what they're talking about and other kids who are talking about things that they're not up here that's what the culture and climate is of this of the schools our schools it's not what we want to just talk about right that's experiences that they have in that school building every single day and some of them are great and it's time we do something about it and i would want like this board quite honestly to step up and support this initiative david i just just respectfully say that there couldn't be any more inclusive that there was

181no forced agenda uh yes yes there was something on our website okay but dr lemmons is highly respected across the nation you'll not get a better person who's more educated who's highly thought of again across the nation not just in connecticut and that that that that process that the board went through was extremely inclusive you couldn't have a more inclusive process it started with my entry planet of young people it went to all these constituents yes admittedly and i i don't blame people in the sense of like people signed up they're doing their work and so on and then getting tuned in to some point and maybe going aha wait a minute i can understand that that's that's a bit of a natural process but this board too went through the process had their input

182supported it voted for it and it's a blueprint now it's honestly if you ask the staff i think you would find that it's it's a a real hopeful and inspirational document and it's not just gonna be inspirational i think you know that it's not gonna you're not gonna let it you wouldn't let let me let it sit on on the shelf and not do anything about it it's uh and we'll be a live document it'll be revised as we go but mr brown i just said like i i don't know what other uh inclusive process you could possibly implement the district i give the district and the board tremendous credit for for the way that we had approached it yeah but i mean you wrote a good point and again this is part of what

183i'm struggling with uh dr adley is that yes i voted for it we all voted for it um but then over time you know we we find other things that wind up on dr layman's site which concerned a lot of people in town and then we also had the situation where we're told that part of his plan is provocative if someone was voting for something provocative i might add some more questions before i voted for it hence my concern here what am i getting into and how do i as a board member get that level of confidence to approve the budget allocation in january thank you mr brown thank you um one respectfully mr brown i will disagree i think we had the plan we read the plan we voted for the plan and then

184we live by and we can alter it as we go but i don't think there was anything provocative that we weren't able to read his comments were on the website maybe people we didn't find it they came up after we hired him but we had choices then we could have stopped the process we as a board didn't we chose to move forward so i would also ask that i think as board members we have to start to quantify when we hear we heard from you know most of the town or the community of town i don't know we have any way to to measure that we heard from some voices who felt a certain way we've heard from other voices i feel another way and we just need to be careful how we quantify that

185because i think there are some people who are really proud of this plan and i think there are some people who have issues with it and that's okay that's what we're supposed to hear is nine but the nine people who were sitting in these seats at that time voted for it had all the information now i will say on the cei i have been someone who has put up a bit of a stink i don't like the process it sounds like now the process will be that we will receive a request for a budget transfer to mr senior's point which is strong and valid we have not been asked for that to make that budget transfer yet so we actually haven't been asked for action yet so when we're asked for action we'll have to

186make a decision and my last point and and i get it it's going to get me with in some hot water with people in the community but we went through a fall of hearing about how people had the right to different political opinions we had board members go so far as to want to protect political party inside a policy and now we're going after mr shelton's personal opinions now i agree someone can have personal political opinions that are so egregious that you just can't get behind it but homework i mean we had a superintendent who took homework out about 10 years ago the community said i wanted back and guess what we got it back so i feel like we have to be we can't talk out of both sides of our mouths is anyone

187really surprised when we were sent an email that said that they were mr shelton supported black lives matter that's not overly shocking to me like i just i just i just think that people can ha if what we're saying in the falls people can have their political beliefs we should support the idea that you can have a range of political beliefs then we have to think that individuals are going to have political like their own political beliefs and if we think that the district and the teachers and our students are so weak that mr shelton's going to come in and we're doing something wrong in the district to begin with we've had teachers say that they think we need to look at grading during covid we adjusted grading we've had teachers say they think that

188finals at 20 is too much of a percentage for kids on tests like it's not i think to mrs worm's question which i think is valid you know when i see grades in the equity audit what does it mean to me that's what it means you could tell me like something we've heard teachers come to us for years and say look at this for us and we haven't so i don't know if we'll end up there i don't know if it's valid i don't know i got one kid who loves finals one kid or hate's fine my own personal i would need an educator to guide me down that path actually but i would no i'm just saying i think that we need to be careful anyone we hire we could start to go down

189and start to decide whether we agree with their political beliefs short of something being to me really extreme and for me my own like on either side then i think then i think that we need we need to just maybe take a deep breath i don't love that this is going to come to it as a budget transfer i've been clear about it that's how it's going to come i'm not going to forestall the process because it's going to come to us as a budget transfer i understand mr shelton not wanting to answer some of those questions in public which is why typically we interview in executive session so they can we didn't do it that way because we also thought it was important for the public to hear so we had a lot of

190competing factors i didn't love the process it's what's made me really get a little stuck but i agree with mr ceni we haven't seen a budget transfer when we see a budget transfer we'll have to make decisions and stand by our votes at that moment i mean that's that's kind of where i land on it if you're looking where in space board members are that's where i am thank you mr maroney yeah so building on that um and agreed we haven't seen so putting on captain obvious hat for me i would just like to see what we're getting with our 40 000 lay it out where where you know do we we're never going to get to 100 to get to 75.80 without it are we at 15. are we at 50. i mean if

191i misheard please correct me but you did say that if we don't approve a budget transfer he will still come to us with some sort of program without the additional 40k spend is that correct so again to help me as a board member what do i get with with that am i at twenty percent of what we hope to achieve versus the eighty percent what we you know i i think i need to to help me get there of what we're missing and what we what we get for the spend thank you mr marine all right uh miss rooney at the bottom of page two of the memo it talks about if we don't uh retain additional services it will be the completion of i'll have two more on-site visits and four virtual visits to

192focus on some staff pd and launching and supporting the dei committee and then the third page lists if we uh the transfer of the 40 000 helps retain additional services it would be those other things that are there so i can i can expand on that too if that would be helpful thank you thank you mr moroni this is warm um i'd be curious as to how much we've actually paid mr shelton up to now for everything he's done since he's been here since what was it 2020. he said um just curious you know this is going to be an ongoing you know it's almost feeling like booster shots at this point you know so he right now he is contracting for 23 000 of which 7 000 has been suspended this year and he

193did a keynote presentation for us i would need to confirm that i believe it was either 1500 or 1800 dollars last fiscal year mr ceni i i'm just going to state the obvious this board in a unanimous fashion i'm not sure we voted but in again what we did this fall earlier this fall as a result of some of those instances of hate ask this administration to do something i think were some of the words that were uttered by our board these professionals talked with experts in the field are utilizing a resource that already exists in the district which up until this point until his name was uttered for a second time or third time it was caught on by some folks i am in agreement that there is no way as a board member

194one i want to get involved in the hiring individual resources because i have zero expertise in this matter these these two individuals are responsible for that expertise but two judging people by their views we go down a real slippery slope if we start looking at people's views and decide as a board especially or as a community to hire them or to pass and so i'm not going to signal my my vote going forward on the budget transfer but again reiterating this delay is not this board it's we haven't had the opportunity to weigh in so i look forward to the january request thank you mrs mccammon i want to make sure i didn't miss your hand mrs mccammon yeah um just a point of clarification on the some some of the information in the memo

195looks like work that was outlined in the strategic plan so i'm curious to understand if we're moving some of that work forward if this is all incremental work can you help me understand basically why we would be approving a transfer versus just uh handling this as part of the regular budgetary process again with respect to the point that mr ceni made earlier but about you know the board's ask still if you could help help me understand that please i'm not sure i understand the question okay jill could you just so jill if i were to kind of recap it and it's kind of like we we've got this work built into the strategic plan are we pulling work out of the strategic plan and moving it into this dei project or kind of what's the

196overlap and we have dollars are we accelerating so we work yes thank you john are we accelerating something out of the strategic plan into this dei project does that make sense jill yes we're essentially executing on on the plan for go ahead so we're definitely executing on the plan and that's why uh we'll be able to in year one it says we're going to have a dei committee we will do that and that has been budgeted for appropriately but we also asked for community conversations which is a continuation of what the nccj started prior to covet and we also asked for something uh specifically for students and so these student leadership groups are in addition to what was originally proposed and that was not necessarily um it was not directly written as any strategic action

197in the plan so those are two additional things that were not necessarily within the scope of the plan but yes they are enhancements that answer your question joe mostly i'm just going to push it again just so it's clear so but you're not saying it's forty thousand dollars for the community work and the student work you're saying that we are access escalating or excuse me accelerating certain portions of the strategic strategic plan otherwise that would have showed up as part of it absolutely like we increased there's more professional development included as well than the original scope yes and then i want to ask just one or two questions about specific bullets because i think one of the things that happens to the point that you've made chris in particular is that this is very new

198work so i find that um a lot of times we are all filling in the blanks in terms of what we mean when we talk to one another um so if i look specifically for example at um bullet number two under the facilitation of a of a district-wide dei committee and it's where it says analyze data following and strategically identify root causes of inequities would you please give two or three concrete examples of what you're looking what you're planning to look at and what you think you might be doing with what you turn up again knowing that it's new work so the analyzing data would specifically address the equity audit so once the audit is completed we would look and see well where do the biggest disparities exist that we feel like we can do

199something about so for example we might see that students with learning differences are significantly underrepresented in advanced placement courses at the high school so if that happens we look at that compared to all of the other things that we see and then as a group we make decisions of well what are the most actionable things that this group feels like they can and this group is an advisory group they are doing some research they're working on root cause and they're kind of try to help and give us ideas as to what to do so they're going to look at data at that level when we talk about i'll use one of the most common that's data that exists all over the country no matter where you are looking at say in school suspensions and then

200we do that data analysis and we see that black male students are disproportionately over represented within school suspensions so number one we have less than i think two percent so the chances of us having a large enough number um if that's happening that's uh to your point mr brown we need to be doing something anyway because we need to do something for every student and that's something that we that should already be actionable so we would make those types of uh determinations but it's the point when we when we do this is when you have someone with that expertise they can guide the conversation and also bring it into the context of well what can a group like this actually do and how can they advise and how can they learn so those are two

201examples i hope they're concrete enough you one of the questions that i've heard from multiple community members is um why are we prioritizing this work now over some of the remediation and academic work that we might need to do coming out of covid can you take a few minutes and talk about how this work in your mind how would you answer that question i would say that this work is in the way of students accessing their learning if students are coming to school and they feel like they are bullied as a result of a learning difference or their gender identity they aren't available to learn so yes everything's important and it doesn't mean we're only doing this it's and but if we don't do this we're missing a very important group of students who aren't

202able to access their learning at all because often the groups that we're talking about that need the academic supports often are the students that we're talking about with being a a subgroup so to speak for the lack of a better description that we might identify as needing supports in that area as well again sorry dr adley not mutually exclusive i think you're on mute jill thank you one more question um so going down to the um support administration and staff and their professional learning in order to develop curriculum that are culturally responsible responsive to student needs and we've had a lot of or there's multiple things there but we've had a lot of discussion about transparency in in um curricular development and we've had a lot of conversation about um some of the some bits

203and bobs of content can you talk about uh one how this dovetails with our general move towards transparency and curriculum again with the understanding we haven't done much with curriculum in two years um and and then secondly um what does it what does specifically it mean to be culturally responsive in your words so in my words being culturally responsive means that we are being thoughtful of the representation and the portrayal of all of the students that exist within our community and beyond so we want to make sure that we are that they can see themselves in what they are learning that's what culturally responsive um is all about as far as in the spirit of transparency the curriculum subcommittee did talk about that a bit and just in the presentation and the clarity and consistency

204of how our documents look is certainly a way that i'm hoping to make things more transparent for everyone and i felt like i ended with a question right there but is there more i can offer on that no that's fine thank you thank you mr mckenna any other board questions okay dr ellington you want to no i i i i i thank the board for the discussion and the actual community and i honestly think there's more common ground on this than than than separates anybody any offices i just think there is common ground that when you look at our kids you look at our staff and look at our needs you look where we are and i i think i think there's a lot of common grind that we and fertile ground that we need

205to actually get to work on but thank you so i appreciate that i will appreciate all the conversation from the community all the emails and all the conversations i think a lot of us have individually we listen we will continue to listen it's important to hear i want to thank the board you know not an easy conversation and we're doing it in public as we should and i think we're responding to a lot of the feedback we get from people that we know chris i want to thank you i think you you know you helped tee it up or you know bring it to the point of you know we're in the driver's seat from a community standpoint around our values and what we want this to look like and what we feel we need

206our students to help our students with and i think the most important thing is that we are listening to our students and we need to continue to listen to our students i appreciate the comments around the strategic plan i mean we've talked about a strategic plan for almost eight years that i've been on the board i think a lot of work has been done around the strategic plan i think a lot of people were involved i look at it as a fluid document that'll continue to drive the district we'll but we'll continue to change and adapt as we do as a district so thanks for the conversation and all the questions um we will move on to discussion and possible approval of the charge for the board of education curriculum committee sarah parent and chris

207chainberg sarah is not with us this evening um i will chris you can jump in and i have julie and everyone else whoever else is part of the curriculum committee meeting what we discussed and we've discussed doing this with each of the subcommittees is looking at a charge to define what that subcommittee is working on and also define the responsibility of that subcommittee when it does its work and making a recommendation to the board much like the finance committee does its work of reviewing the finances and making sure they're in agreement and that the transfers are understandable and making that recommendation to the board so the curriculum committee had a good conversation around a proposed charge that they wanted to move up to the board and the charge is the responsibility of the curriculum committee

208is to review new curricula and courses review new instructional programs review current curriculum and curriculum updates review data to determine curriculum effectiveness and student growth and ensure policy alignment proving curriculum remains the responsibility of the full board of education and the curriculum committee will provide recommendations to the board as appropriate i think if you hadn't seen the curriculum committee meeting it is posted and you should go in and look at the link we really kind of stepped it back to the beginning and mr tranberg made a presentation kind of the overall structure and the people and the players that are involved in curriculum and brought it back to the whole process of how curriculum works it's been a little bit of a challenge and i would say nothing much has been done with curriculum over

209the last two years other than trying to execute on the curriculum we have and deliver it through a pandemic and there is curriculum that was approved and being implemented prior to chris even coming on board so hopefully as we move out of the pandemic and we have this curriculum committee set up and running we'll get back to really the work of looking at curriculum um mr tranberg anything you wanted to add to that no well okay thank you julie now i think the only thing i would add is that in our discussion at the committee meeting we did discuss the fact that this is the work that the board has always done um and most recently hasn't been done by a designated curriculum committee subcommittee of the board but that all of this has always

210been the practice of the board good thank you good so we'll move forward with a motion to approve the charge for the curriculum committee mr ceni second by mrs ackman all those in favor that is unanimous with the folks around the table are you good jill and thank you for all the all the work around that and we look forward to the ongoing curriculum committee meetings um we'll move forward update first semester board master agenda dr just the first semester calendar um is there as it's recorded what we've done in many modifications for um i'm happy for the board to do even reflection on it there's any changes addictions that you think we should either protect from it but it reflects the work that we've done [Applause] yes mr senior just one item that we

211still have to uh have follow up on is the uh lights agreement in a meeting yes exec obsession committee yes thank you mr sini uh just uh dr adley and i spoke about that last week so we'll be um getting that on an agenda item it's a busy january but yeah well i didn't see it anywhere so we fit it in yep any other conversations about the first semester board master agenda all right again discussion any comments or thoughts just uh let us know we will move on to presentation and discussion of the proposed board master agenda for february through august of 2022. so so for anyone who's new to the board perhaps the last one we just did was a historical document a little bit and now we look ahead to uh february uh

212through august and the actual budget calendar also providing you with meetings that will be happening up until february so this is the proposed passage and again i'm certainly open to the board looking at everything from retreats to anything in between it's a bit like that any questions or anything right now on this again first kind of conversation and look it over and again anything between now and the next meeting let us know and we'll moving on to action items personal items appointments resignations and retirements assignments so we continue to experience a larger than usual number of people leaving us in the middle of the year but we managed to hire four including um three who are certified staff good thank you any questions or comments all right they have a motion to approve the par

213as presented for december 14 mrs best second by mrs ockerman all those in favor jill that is unanimous with all folks sitting here at the table we will move back to michelle and public comment i will start out with any of our friends in the audience please step up thank you hello julie punishable 23 fitz avenue i have three points i'd like to make tonight first of all if you are not a student a parent of the students or have not had an in-depth conversation with said students i would really appreciate as a parent of one of the students who has spoken if you no longer try to speak for them i'm speaking to some of the parents who spoke earlier tonight using them and invoking what they spoke about about for your agenda is

214really offensive because you haven't taken the time to reach out to my daughter you haven't been dr adley or chris tranberg who has taken the time to meet with them and speak with them and i would appreciate if you stop using their words on your behalf that's my first point my second point is mr brown i do not believe that most parents of darien have issues with the strategic plan and i'm really quite offended that you said that and i don't feel like you represent my views and i would appreciate you not trying to invoke that most parents think one thing or another and my third point why you can tell i'm really revved up is i'm disappointed i mean these incidents happened in september in october these students came and spoke to you in

215october and asked you to act and in all honesty aside from what was done at the middle school not much has been done and that looks like this boat's gonna get pushed back to january and i feel like there's some very loud members and parents of the community who are trying to push the brakes on dei and i feel like you are allowing that to happen and it's very disappointing and the students are disappointed because they don't see any change they don't feel heard to what mr trenberg was saying they don't feel like they're being listened to and when mr hadley talked about how they talked to my daughter she talked about with her sexuality issues and coming out there is probably less than five teachers or administrators or adults in the school system that

216she felt were safe for her to come talk to how is that okay that's her you know the marginalized students students of color they don't feel safe they don't feel like they can learn and i'm just very disappointed that action has not started or is happening and you're continuing to debate and delay so thank you thank you for speaking kcta 10 lane uh first dr adley i want to thank you for defending the strategic plan um i'm very proud of the work that we did on that committee um and i'm proud of the board's uh support for it uh dr adley as you put the final touches of your budget together i ask that you put together a budget that prioritizes meeting the needs of our students do not let any outside pressure from elected

217officials that do not understand what is going on in our schools and what our students and our staffs face every day impact your judgment listen to your staff your cabinet your department heads and your principals and make your judgment based on that mr janine as we enter the budget season i ask you to protect and defend the board of ed's authority and the process as i know you can thank you thank you for speaking are we good in person we'll move to zoom michelle if you would like to speak during public comment please click the participants icon on the bottom of your zoom screen next click the raised hand option the facilitator the facilitator will identify you and announce that you're unmuted for public comment please state your name and address you will have up

218to three minutes to comment conor godfrey you are unmuted and recognized hello um so i i would just i'll be brief and i would like to say i do believe mr brown got it right and that there are many people in town that have an issue with the strategic plan but i'd actually like to comment on mr tranberg's description of the dei initiative uh and also as it pertains to mr shelton you know you said uh a couple different things you know when you're doing equity work and an equity audit and frankly i have a real problem with with with this terminology okay equity is not equality okay we should strive for equality because that promotes fair opportunity equity indicates a guarantee of of results it's a marxist construct and represents the opposite of the

219founding principles of this country in the u.s we have the right to pursue happiness we're not guaranteed anything other than life and liberty rewriting history isn't going to solve the ills of of the downtrodden you know mr shelton refers to the grading system as racist and capitalist capitalism it said is the unequal sharing of prosperity communism the equal sharing of misery i feel that ken's presence in our educational system and his dei initiatives are proof in themselves that the end goals are marxist in nature and destructive by design it's marxism masquerading as tolerance and i for one am not in support of it thank you very much for speaking doreen godfrey you are unmuted and recognized doreen can you can you hear us doreen yes am i unmuted yes you are thank you go ahead

220thank you so much uh for listening today i am at one red mill lane i have three children in the school district two in elementary one in the middle school um i just wanna start by saying i was not raised in darien connecticut i'm from queens new york and where i went to school i was the minority i took public city buses to school and uh the things that i saw on buses and in bathrooms in schools that i went to palin in comparison to what we are seeing here but when i did have questions i went home and i asked my mother when did it stop becoming our job as parents to educate our children to expose our children to diversity i moved here to darien with my husband who's also from queens because

221of the incredible reputation that the schools had here and we fell in love with this community i knew it was my job and our job as parents to expose them to the world to educate them on diversity and to teach them to be loving and understanding people in this world but we also stress that hard work and determination help you reach your goals it's not expected it's earned i don't believe that this aligns with what i've seen and heard through mr shelton we also are teaching our kids the importance of social media and how it could affect us in getting jobs and how we should be careful of what we put out there and that is something that i stress to my girls that's something that like miss miss said we can't speak on both

222sides of both sides of our mouth here you can't say it's okay for somebody to get one job or what they're putting out on social media to represent them and what we see as a representation of them does not align with what i would want to teach my child as parents we are responsible if you need to educate us so we can educate our children there are children just like that mother said don't represent my child's voice you haven't spoken to my daughter let me speak to my children and you speak to your children if your child sees something on a bus and comes home you should be talking to them about it not running to mr adley who i love and i've always been such supportive i love this board of education i've served

223on a pto i love this community but we should be doing the work we should educate us on how to speak to our children about this but it's not your job your job is educators and you do a great one of it teach our children what they need to know in the schools and let us have the conversations at home for our children and i don't believe that what ken shelton is putting out there and what i see he represents is what i want to teach my child thank you very much for speaking peter mcginnis you are unmuted and recognized mr mcginnis can you hear us i can hear you thank you so much and um i could not have uh said anything better than the godfreys have just said so i'd like to uh

224turn to another topic which is open choice and specifically section 10-266-a of the connecticut general statutes as i understood the proposal or discussion maybe it's not a proposal at this point but as we enter the budget season uh as we think about adding 20 students from the norwalk system uh to the darien system i just want to uh make the board aware that this provision is really intended to be a provision uh to allow suburban communities to uh take in students from more urbanized communities locally and that's because the suburban communities have a shortfall in terms of students two things one is i don't think we're going to have a shortfall of students as we project uh the new development that's happening in town that's a very important fact i think that the board in

225the administration needs to consider the second thing is if we take in 20 students at the kindergarten level what do we do next year the kindergarteners become first graders we bring in a new set of 20 students and so on and so on where we get a capacity of 260 students 260 students and we take three thousand dollars per student from the state and those students cost us let's assume twenty three thousand dollars not inflation adjusted so we have a difference of twenty thousand per student times 260 students over the entire life for the program that's 5.2 million dollars the other thing too that's a 5.2 million dollar commitment that this system would be stuck with because we're not allowed to take those students and return them back to the norwalk system so in terms

226of budgeting and planning i'm asking the administration to give this a present value cost of the entire program as it runs its way through our system not a 20 person count but a 260 person count going into the future you can discount it at present value but let's be honest in the numbers thank you thank you again christa carnes krista karns you are unmuted and recognized krista can you hear us yeah i can great go ahead thanks hi i'm krista karns i'm at 45th avenue very popular street i guess um i'm just a little gobsmacked here i really thought we were going to be um i mean we're talking about marxism and yet we're also you're you know there's there's talk that this is representative of a large part of this community um mr brown

227mentioned that you know these are not reflective of the interests of the majority of the school well my interest is keeping people safe and i feel like that is be you know we're whittling this down to an interest group these internet interest groups these are creating safe spaces as mr tranberg said which i thought very eloquently and very um much in depth and well needed um of what the eei actually is and if mr de nin said that we are dr you guys are the driving the bus right you're driving the bus here but if that bus is making all kinds of scary noises and everybody ignores them you become not only a danger to the people in the bus but it becomes a danger to the people in the streets and that's where we're

228at so if someone like mr shelton who has experience putting on different lenses and if you've read some of his other blog posts he talks about everything from microscopes to telescopes to to magnifying glasses there's so many ways we can look at what we're doing and maybe not all of it's so bad and maybe not all of it is going to apply but if he can find those areas and pinpoint what we need to fix to make people safer and so that everybody is enjoying the ride then i say go for it because i don't think there's anybody that's going to please this board and some of the people in town and i'm also a little offended by the fact that there are people talking out both sides of their mouths and they're talking about

229picking choose love and other sel programming which i don't think on its face is a bad thing but that's not an apples-to-apples comparison of what dei is meant to uncover address make recommendations and then you as a board will help determine what steps we take he he's not here forever he's just a first step hopefully in a long process of identifying what we need to do as a community and to [Music] to whittle him down and cancel him for things that for opinions that he's had about a range of issues because i'm sure if we all sat in a room together i love a lot of you guys that just spoke that i completely disagree with does that mean i'm not going to frequent your business does that mean that i'm not going to want

230to talk to you at the next football game or whatever no because it is about dialogue and if we really want to have a community conversation then let's have it let's have a forum let the board of education pull the people together because saying oops we started to pay attention isn't good enough because it has been the work has been being done and now that you are at time chris thank you but thank you very much for speaking laura pesky gray you are unmuted and recognized laura can you hear us you look like you're muted laura there you go thank you thank you please go ahead um i mr worm had stated um i think that there's a disconnect between the strategic plan and the way i don't think anybody thinks the strategic plan it's

231beautifully written it it looks amazing but the execution of how we're going to get there is really so vague and unclear and i think it's making the community very uneasy um i'm curious to understand that if we've paid ken shelton for two on sites and some virtual visits why is the extra money needed for these like additional visits in an effort to get to where where are we getting to that the current money isn't going to cover also um somebody asked about how the selection for the leadership form when it comes to students was done my son actually had filled out a questionnaire that wasn't very detailed it was basically during a flex period he was asked if he wanted to be part of a leadership forum and it didn't explain that he was being

232pulled out of two classes that he had to figure out how to make up that work um which was social studies and uh spanish he was not clear on what he was getting him getting involved in and i just feel like the selection process for students i would imagine would be a range of diversity right because that's the whole purpose of how did the how did the diverse students feel about our community correct so i feel like the process of sending a questionnaire out to all students in the school you're not really getting the exact um pool of people that really have a voice and want to explain what the norms are and how they feel in the school do they feel welcome um and lastly um jill brought up a really great point about

233transparency um and cultural responsiveness i don't see i don't feel that that's happening and i think that i would feel more comfortable if things were more transparent and clear and i understand and really appreciate her trying to get clarity on those things i'm still not feeling clear on that and lastly um you're almost that time laura that's it thank you so much for listening and um hearing me again thank you thank you for speaking have a good evening there are no race hands at this time great thank you all i participated in public comment again on behalf of the board happy holidays to everyone and a big thank you again for our teachers and staff for all they've done to get us to the holidays everyone please be safe and uh enjoy the holidays and

234um happy holidays we have a motion to adjourn mr ceni second by mrs best all those in favor jill that is unanimous thank you