001good evening thank you for joining us in person and thank you uh all those folks that are with us out in zoom land i will keep my comments brief as we have public comment updates from dr adley on a full agenda um i will say um i have to say a incredible thank you to all those that were involved over the years but it was just an incredible friday night lights football game i think it was the true feeling of our community out there watching our kids uh play a really great game so uh it was fun to see uh to see that i haven't been to really very many of those so it was it was a great night for the community um i also want to thank uh first selectman stevenson chief anderson
002dr adley members of the board that helped with feedback on the community letter that went out last week i think that was important uh based on uh the events that happened last week um i want to also thank the community for the thoughts comments and feedback over the events that happened last week while challenging and disappointing for our school community in town the board of education our town leaders our parents everyone here at the board table i know are committed to developing the right plan while we all serve as role models and leaders for our students we must continue to listen learn talk and provide guidance you must educate on diversity prejudice inclusion and treat all people the way we would want to be treated as individuals i also feel i have to caution again
003the use of social media to get the latest updates hear what's going on or look for what happened and even discuss possible punishment i think this is what makes social media dangerous i think everyone has to keep in mind if and when incidents do happen there are students really children that are sometimes involved and family members and other children of that potential family this is where social media becomes negative and dangerous and people must understand the privacy laws and ferpa laws protecting students in this information so i just caution everyone out there the goal should be first and foremost to help educate as a district and community be role models and provide support to those in need or facing crisis we always look out for the social and emotional needs of our students teachers administration
004and families every day we will continue to work through this and we will get this done together so thank you i will turn it over michelle to public comment good evening 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 you will notice a blue hand icon appear in the upper corner of your screen where your face and or name or number appears when it is your turn to speak the facilitator will identify you and announce that you're unmuted for public comments once recognized and unmuted please state your name and address you will have up to three minutes to comment jameis and riley you are recognized and unmuted hello hi my name is jamison reilly from 105 homes
005ave and my wife and i have two daughters at holmes elementary tonight i would like to discuss the issue of mass choice i know it's not directly on the agenda but i do know some of these topics health in particular is being discussed later one and a half years into this pandemic we know the risk for children to spread covet and fatality among them is extraordinarily small people following the science know germs can easily go through cloth masks and actually harbor more germs when not properly worn as most young kids are incapable of doing kids sneezing them drop them on the floor take them in the bathroom drop them on the bathroom floor and continue breathing in that all day long you want me to believe that wearing an unproven piece of cloth covering their
006face is going to keep them safe from germs does it even sound like a remotely good hygienic or scientific idea their masks are essentially a petri dish full of germs right in front of the place where germs enter your body how ironically stupid this obviously has nothing to do with keeping kids safe i'm here to argue for my children as their parent that this is an experiment exerting control and dominance over my young children and getting them to comply with the people in charge our governor is okay with emergency mandates that our grooming children to stay quiet follow the rules and not be able to say no there are a lot of adults complicit in forcing this on kids and i refuse to be one of them i i'm here to tell you this is
007harming my children both physically and mentally as another parent or board member you do not have the right to tell me it's just the mask you cannot provide proof that what you are requesting i do to my child is not harming them however here's the proof i have that forced mask wearing is harming my children the ex-mother has now worsened behind my daughter's ears where the mask was sitting causes her to scream when i have to apply prescription cream to those areas masks i throw up because they have been sucked on and anxiously holes are chewed through them the headaches my daughter tells me she has when she gets home from school the tiredness and irritability my children have after school the inability to understand things that are said underneath masks which is the reason
008why most elected leaders are allowed to take them off when speaking into microphones as evidenced by my daughter now meeting her recent great uh not meeting her recent grade level proficiency testing this is most certainly harming her ability to learn properly i can go on and on the point is only i am responsible for my children's well-being and this is counterintuitive to keeping them healthy my child should be in control of her body and when she expresses physical distress from being forced to wear a mask i listen and i am here to stand up for her bodily rights if you are a parent who is okay with your child wearing a mask all day at school without detrimental effects that's wonderful i'm happy for you and will hope your children continue to stay healthy and
009happy as we should want for all children in society regardless of if they wear masks or not ironically connecticut is the constitution state this is the most certainly an infringement on child children's civil liberties and time will reveal what real damage has been done dr fauci could only hope that there wouldn't be a long-term masking wearing offense affects children endured not very scientific at all in the meantime your job as educators and leaders is to represent all your children so please my children you need to follow through with governor lamont and take more action on behalf of my children and others restore parental choice let me unmask my children and receive the education they deserve we ask that you have the courage to make the right choice for our children not hartford thank you tiffany
010o'connor you are recognized and unmuted tiffany you're muted you can unmute please i'm sorry okay tiffany o'connor 48 lee warden road good evening i'd like to share some experiences related to the graffiti incident last week last year i was one of the co-chairs of the darion high school parents association the dhs pa hosted coffees for parents seeking connection and in some cases support we hosted a new to darien coffee parents of remote students coffee and in june we hosted appearance of lgbtqia students coffee we wanted to facilitate connection and i thought it would even be celebratory of the seemingly tremendous progress from past years and the community's widespread support during pride month and darion high school's pride week instead it was heartbreaking to hear about one horrific incident after another acts of bullying discrimination hate
011in the high school cafeteria hallways and especially during athletic practices and competitive events but never when teachers or coaches were nearby following the coffee my co-chair our incoming co-chairs and i met with principal ellen dunn and later with assistant superintendent of curriculum chris tramberg we also discussed our concerns with the dhspa's executive board and cdsp all shared our concerns and thankfully several were already addressing such behavior since last june i haven't stopped thinking about the incidents these parents shared with us i worry about their kids and other kids who may feel scared and isolated in the middle of a pandemic that is already making so many kids anxious and depressed i worry about the parents who were amazingly level-headed and calm as they shared their stories but i know they're hurting as much as their
012kids are maybe even more to the parents who have expressed opposition to the pronoun education please put yourself in these parents shoes i've learned from professionals that education particularly through curriculum is very effective in fostering a culture of acceptance inclusivity and respect i'm not an expert but it sounds like understanding pronouns is a step in this direction and i trust the professionals please ask a teacher or counselor why something is being taught before opposing it maybe these assignments will prevent future acts of hate like the ones i mentioned to the board thank you to those who have spoken up and corrected misinformation a lot of controversy was even caused by misinformation about assignment instructions not even opinions about the assignment the instructions i ask that all of you speak up and clarify the facts for
013the safety and well-being of all kids in the district thank you thank you for your comments miss julie punishall you are unmuted and recognized hello my name is julie punishall one second my name is julie punishal i live at 23 fitch avenue my title is miz and my preferred pronouns are she and her i first want to sincerely thank dr adley and the members of the board for the community message sent on september 24th i have been deeply upset angry and sad over the events that have transpired in our community not only over the last few weeks but over the last few years i greatly appreciate the sentiment and tone of the letter i honestly hope the strategic plan of equity diversity and inclusivity is quickly implemented and that the d-i-a-d-i-d-e-i team acts swiftly there
014cannot be any delay the children of the lgbtqia plus community do not experience a safe learning environment and culture in our school system and in particular on the athletic fields last week's vandalism is just the most recent incident that happened to get reported as tiffany has relayed that happened that we learned of in our coffee last june when discussing the most recent incident with my daughter who was a currently darien high school senior she said things like this happen all the time that is not okay at the gathering last spring the parents of the children in the lgbtqia plus community i was shocked and saddened just like tiffany to hear the story after story of bullying and outright violence happening in our schools the children often do not report these said incidents for fear of
015backlash and even more unwanted attendant attention the tantamount tenet of our school system must be the safety of all students as a self-appointed advocate for these children i will be insisting on meetings with the administration to ensure proper mandatory programming is being brought especially for our teachers and our coaches because as we know the culture will change from the top it will be us parents insisting on change it will come from the teachers and the coaches for other parents of any any school-aged child who identifies as part of the lgbtqia plus community i invite you to a brown bag lunch gathering we will be hosting at the picnic tables at pear tree point beach at noon this coming friday october 1st let us come together as a community to support one another thank you for
016your comments kate bates you were recognized and unmuted am i on you're on oh thanks sorry um is my video started wait hang on sorry this is my first time on zoom um good evening dr adley members of the board my name is kate bates and i live at 33 ridgely street i wanted to speak again this evening on behalf of the almost 200 parents who have signed a letter which began circulating today to request increased transparency and board oversight of curriculum in our district we hope you will vote tonight to establish a board member curriculum subcommittee and also request that you discuss and find a way to incorporate the community at the district curriculum committee level we parents believe there should be greater transparency and accountability for what our children are being shown and
017taught in our schools after hearing about several districts in separate incidents across grade levels and subjects we feel the board desperately needs to discuss and clearly state its expectations for instruction in this district i think we all agree that our children should be taught how to think not what to think some of these incidents appear to have crossed that line and we would like to see you establish both the protocol and policy to correct and prevent that from happening in the future we won't stand for the indoctrination of our children schools should be inclusive safe places to learn and share ideas diversity of thought is as important as diversity of any other kind and we need to support and encourage it in every classroom and every day thank you for your time thank you paul
018salmore you are recognized and unmuted hello um unfortunately it's it's not paul it's his wife emily salmore um i live at three berry lane and thank you for hearing my thoughts i would first like to address the issue of civility in the board of education meetings i have been troubled since the board of education meeting on september 14th during which two individuals made derogatory comments over other participants actions um to paraphrase the comments i noticed a small group of parents standing outside the board of ed meeting they didn't seem to know why they were there i asked one person why they were there and they told me someone texted and told me to come another said i thought it was a rally but then i realized it was just a coffee these comments as i
019perceive them are made to discredit and devalue the opinions and actions of others we must all be entitled to our opinions and to organize as we see fit without fear of being shamed or called out by our fellow dairy and parents i would ask board members to remind all participants that we must respect each other's actions and opinions with respect to board of education concerns even if we do not agree with them secondly it's very troubling to hear what's going on in our schools with respect to the solicitation of our children's sexual identities i'm referring specifically in this case to the silver team culture survey that was distributed at middlesex middle school on september 14th of this year this survey in part asked children to check boxes for age 10 11 or 12 and then
020ask them to select from a range of boxes labeled male female non-binary other in a section titled gender identity i'm particularly disturbed at the lack of proper oversight that enabled this survey to reach our young children our children at this age are very much minors and their sexual identities are not yet defined or even relevant to them i'm incredulous that someone would think it's okay not only to ask this question of children this age but then present them with the multiple choice answer options regarding their sexual identities as if they are checking a box for their favorite color this type of overstep is not only confusing for our children it's completely inappropriate in my opinion i believe our schools must be ready to fully support and accommodate any student whose parents have contacted the students
021to report that their student sexuality may be defined in a non-traditional way is non-binary or transgender our school community has an obligation as we do with any student to ensure that a child's growth is nurtured in the way that best serves the child our schools must always foster a sense of mutual respect among students for one another's identity and choices that said it is not the job of ourselves is almost up thank you okay it is not the job of our schools just for teachers to solicit this information from our young children the question remains is what recourse do parents or families have in current environment to address concerns over age sensitivity content and textbook sourcing and changes in corrections thank you very much your time is up thank you thank you for hearing me
022thank you very much natasha rose you are unmuted and recognized i apologize i turned off your video hi i'm natasha tomai and i live at 6 mclaren road south and i'm here to commend the board for re re-evaluating a curriculum committee at this meeting my hope is that there will be a vote tonight on reassembling a committee and putting that in place i think that there has been widespread concern over the cart for the horse and putting things out there that haven't been properly researched discussed talked about the community there are two slides um on the board of ed website that are talking about the dei initiatives that show the parents on the very outside or at the very end of the cycle um of these curriculums being developed and so i asked the board
023as you decide tonight or at a future meeting hopefully prior to elections because i think it is our right as parents to know where um where our elected officials now stand on these matters um that you think about where the parents are in this hierarchy and that the parents are concerned and we want to be included in this um you know in these initiatives if we're not included in the initiatives they're not going to be successful we have to know what's going on we have to be a part of it we want to be a part of it thanks thank you for your comments there are no more raised hands at this time thank you michelle thank you everyone that participated in public comment this evening duke yeah reading through yep yep thank you we
024did backwards we mixed it up a little bit now we'll go to in-person public comment thank you uh first thank you uh mr deneen for your statement opening um my name is anne reed i live at 15 libby lane i am a member of the rtm education committee but i speak only for myself tonight like so many in our community i was horrified by the graffiti found in the boy's bathroom and the social media posts made by a husky steven last week community leaders have rightfully condemned those actions and i hope the students involved face consequences for their actions i hope that those who are victimized by these acts can see that the vast majority of our community supports them these events made me think a lot about the vision of the graduate that was
025voted on for all by all but one of the members of the board of ed on june 22 this year darian has obviously done an outstanding job on academics and athletics i have been watching board of ed meetings since 2007 and i have seen the initiation of many wonderful academic programs for all levels of students it was gratifying to see the focus in the last few years on social emotional learning and understanding of the need for mental health professionals in our schools the committee on the vision of the graduate that worked for months to distill the qualities that darienne should expect of its graduates was right on target the statement read in part darien public schools recognized the need to identify through this vision the skills and dispositions required to raise compassionate resilient problem solvers
026and leaders communication creativity curiosity empathy independence and integrity there was a discussion before adopting the vision of the graduate regarding what were the metrics and measurements of these subjective qualities a math test results in a grade how do you measure compassion and integrity to quote mr moroney how to be a good citizen of the world the students in our town need to be able to see beyond darian to see outside themselves to the myriad of complicated people in situations that they may encounter at college and beyond to echo the comments of cythia talwalkar a recent graduate who spoke at the last boe meeting one thing she wasn't taught in her 18 years in the darian public schools was about diversity equity and inclusion i would hope that one measure of teaching capacity and integr compassion
027and integrity to our students would be the elimination of these kinds of incidents in our community thank you thank you very much for your comments [Music] hi my name is lori olson i live at 16 little brook road north i am co-chair of cdsp the council of darion school parents my comment tonight is regarding the curriculum committee in light of all the discussions we are having regarding transparency and collaboration we hope there's an opportunity for public discussion once we have heard more about the pros proposed committee's charter and mandates what work product the committee expects to complete and what decisions the board plans to make based on that work again we hope to hear a robust discussion tonight but we ask you to delay action until the next meeting so the entire public can have
028a chance to weigh in on this decision after hearing more thank you thank you for your comments [Music] good evening my name is lisa cerusi i live at 12 rings end road and i have two seniors at darien high school my family and i are deeply saddened by the recent acts of vandalism and hateful language expressed by one or more persons at darien high school this week despicable acts and the hate crime that was committed should not be considered harmless acts by kids being kids or kids that just didn't know any better our daughters were objectified and shamed our jewish students were ridiculed and our lgbtqia plus students were victimized and scared that an individual in their building their school their safe haven would like to see them dead no student or staff member in
029our public schools should be discriminated against made to feel inferior or unsafe this all happened in one week and it's an escalation of the bullying harassment and discriminatory acts directed towards students on a regular basis due to color ethnicity religion gender and sexual preference we recognize that these hateful words do not reflect the opinions of our overwhelming majority of students and community but unfortunately the voices of those few who are prejudiced and bigoted have created a significant harm to our community we need to come together now as a community to end this we do not expect our school administrators and teachers to be responsible for our students actions but we do expect that our district will address this problem and there are things that we can be done that can be done immediately such as
030working with our parents to develop and implement an effective dei curriculum we do not have time to wait until next quarter next year or anytime in the future we need this now consider a mandatory diversity and inclusion meeting similar to the mandatory commitment meetings already offered at the high school where students and parents attend and commit students commit to abide by a code of ethics in order to participate in school activities and finally as parents we need to come together and recognize that our own words and actions influence our children communication about diversity starts at home and we each need to take responsibility for our children's behavior encourage your children to learn more about their their peers of different color religion ethnicity gender sexual preference and those with disabilities encourage them to join one of
031the high school clubs that promote community and inclusion and let's all just work harder to be ambassadors for diversity respect and kindness within our community thank you for listening thank you for your comment my name is amy zurby and i live at nine more house drive my pronouns are she her hers i am sharing my pronouns to show my support and respect for the lgbtq community believe it or not i was writing i was in the middle of writing this speech when i received the email from the high school alerting parents to the homophobic graffiti found in the boys bathroom the truth is that there are many occurrences of anti-lgbtq behavior in the high school rather than the few isolated incidents that some would like to believe diversity inclusion and lgbtq topics fit nicely within
032the social emotional learning that darien has been implementing over several years social emotional learning is not an a la carte menu we and darien highly value strong mental health in our schools and have asked for your support you have delivered people who identify as lgbtq are nearly three times more likely to develop a mental health disorder such as depression or anxiety and significantly more likely to attempt suicide and abuse substances the risks are especially high for young people those between the ages of 10 and 24 are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers including topics concerning lgbtq in the social emotional learning framework before the students enter high school will not only help those who identify and often struggle with their identity but will also lead to more acceptance within the community
033we would hopefully have fewer incidents of lgbtq hatred within the schools amendarian community i've asked a few lgbtq high schoolers about their thoughts on teaching gender and sexual identity in middle school they have said that it would have helped clarify what they were feeling why would you choose to exclude this particular group from benefiting from our school's mental health programs to be clear you cannot make a person gay and you cannot convert someone to be heteronormative a person simply is there are many students who identify as lgbtq in the darien public school community from the elementary schools through the high school for some of these children it is a struggle to tell their parents and some choose not to you can see why anxiety and depression are so prevalent in this community as you are
034aware there have been lively and divisive discussions on diversity inclusion and lgbtq topics i fear that people will want to sweep this latest incident under the rug as some people prefer discussing social issues only in the home it is disheartening to see people in opposition to something that will improve our school community some say that these topics should be limited to discussing within the home but this is not working and never has worked i challenge you to find an example in history you are almost in touch where a community-wide issue was resolved by only discussing the issue within the home thank you thank you very much for your comments thank you everyone in the audience and again thank you everyone online any hands raised online not at this time thank you michelle we will move
035on to the superintendent's report uh dr adelie good evening everyone uh thank you for your participation both online and in person uh i too would like to reiterate a few of those comments made by the board chair that the incidents of the past week do not represent the values of our student body school district or our time and the message to those involved remains unequivocal that there is no places for vandalism sentiments of hate bigotry anti-semitism or discrimination of any kind in our schools and greater community yes it continues to be disappointing because the periodic behaviors are disturbing and unacceptable there are also complex social issues and not simply school issues they also require a thoughtful and strategic response i would agree that as educators parents and community members it is important that we collectively
036serve as role models for our children providing guidance through our actions and works on issues of diversity prejudice and inclusion at the dinner table i ask all our parents to have developmental appropriate conversations with your children around these difficult topics and issues yes in the days and months ahead we will continue our efforts to be thought to thoughtfully educate by providing our students voice through partnerships with outside organizations such as the national conference for community and justice the anti-defamation league for educational program and through the the district strategic plan and finally by outreach into the greater community for assistance and participation this uh that most recently as we look as to what are we doing in response i will give you a couple of uh just frameworks really we have in the past uh work
037with certain organizations we have administratively contacted those organizations now they defamation league and nccj the national council for community and justice we have a town wide call the action in the sense of this is not just a school system right uh this is a time-wide issue to be addressed so we must work at that particular level and re-engage at that particular level which which will include officials community members uh and time officials right and and access school employees also so we will re-engage in that if you remember the history of that uh we had we had engaged at that particular level and along came the pandemic and we could say that it shouldn't have put a stop to it but but that is what that is where it ended that particular time it's time to
038reengage in that collectively with the unified voice around these particular issues we also have the strategic plan and i i i command and understand uh comments i we must act like i understand that um but the strategic plan is a way of going about this in a strategic thoughtful way yes if it has to be expedited or we would consider that we have a lot going on simultaneously but also what are we doing tonight right there there has to be a response and an ongoing response we have talked with the defamation league and the nccj administratively and we are looking at different types of frameworks to potentially bring to the schools both the high school middle school elementary elementary school but we're not just going to jump aboard one of those uh without really serious
039contemplation and reflection because that would be a mistake doing one-time things isn't going to work uh particularly at the high school at the moment around these particular issues we've met with our district school climate coordinator the administration will be working with the school climate committee and uh student leaders of various organizations and uh athletic teams and then we'll be putting together a program for the next regularly scheduled or before advisor advising program as a as our immediate response to this but we we need to have some ongoing immediacy so i'm sure that i think this is sort of like three phases this one immediately two strategically how are we addressing it and three as a time way that is how i would like to address that that is kind of how we what the structure
040is sort of set up to be uh yes we have to respond immediately to these issues but that's not gonna immediately fix them so those are those would be the approaches that we would use and some of those already in place others we have to engage in but for the immediacy at the high school working with the climate committee and the students for to have a voice in this for the planning of a response uh to the school full school body we thought was the most thoughtful way engaging way uh to respond so that is that's a little bit of update to the community and our board on how we are responding administrative to the issue i would like to thank first student there was discussions about bus drivers not showing up as uh on
041monday and it was the first student has been has done a tremendous job for us throughout the pandemic and also really throughout the past couple of school years and doing whatever it takes i'm i'm pleased to say that the first student uh employees were all vaccinator are engaging in the weekly testing and i thank them for that because there was no disruption to the educational process or or to the transportation so it seems that the governor has extended the executive order that has gone through the house and it's gone through the senate we haven't received a facial word uh from him or uh from uh the office uh i i would anticipate we do we would but it seems that that executive order is extended into next uh february so uh with that then the
042mass requirement would actually uh still be in place we did send out this week uh the individual assessments for students that is on the board uh report effort for uh next time up and the next meeting is for the facilities uh subcommittee which i believe is the 14th of october any board questions or comments we i don't know what i think it's important that we open it up but i did have a question on on your discussion on the implementation sure um i was one of the people who sent the email in saying i thought we should sort of have a two-pronged approach something immediate and then strategic and i think having high schoolers hearing from high school parents hearing from high school students aside from the letter that was sent out to parents which
043kids aren't going to read the high school students haven't been addressed about these incidents and i'm slightly disappointed in that i think we have a moment to we have a captive audience and just to acknowledge what happened that it's unacceptable we don't tolerate it we expect better even a message over the loudspeaker during the day to stop class for the day and say this is not okay we we have to do better here and the students haven't gotten anything and they're the ones we're trying to reach so i appreciate the strategic plan but we're almost a week out and nothing has been said to the student body and i think it should be said in school in person take a moment from class i i feel very strongly about it thank you mrs stein mrs
044zachman so i'd like to follow up on that i i hear you say there needs to be an immediate response strategic response and a community response but what is the immediate response so uh to my knowledge that there was an announcement made so i'll have to clarify did they address all of the issues or did they address just some of the issues so to my knowledge that that took place but we can check on that the immediate response we did not want to just bring somebody in to do an assembly or something like that right our immediate response is to uh meet with the climate uh committee with our district climate coordinator and our administration and student leaders it's important that the students have a voice in this and that we're not just telling kids
045uh you just can't do this or or otherwise and just talk down to them it's important that over time here we really have their voice uh be magnified in this and also to have a real participatory role i would like to make sure that was done in a real way this is an immediate response what's quicker in that regard but for to sustain these things we're going to need to sustain their participation and presence around these issues over time and just taking programs and and put them in place with really just not strategically or coherently uh isn't going to serve the purpose we also have our staff right we have to train our staff and all these issues that they have they haven't been trained in these that doesn't mean to say we don't do
046anything with them i will say this too on all of these issues all the discussions we have going on i don't make that any easier but i'll just recognize that but it doesn't mean to say it shouldn't be done and can't be done but to do it we have to do it in a thoughtful planned way a coherent way a way that actually prepares the staff to actually talk to the children when they actually get there um around these particular races so well that's that's the response myself mr maroney yeah so i also tried to get this on the agenda for tonight um [Music] and and was too late in doing so but i think there's a and i and i really appreciate the three prong approach i think it's the right way to do
047this and giving taking 24 hours after i sent an email to the chair probably made me think that it's better to take some time and understand and do this in a proper way as opposed to a knee-jerk reaction i think my question is what can we expect as a time frame for these plans is this is this six months is it a month what is our time frame so the strategic plan outlines the time frame year by year so that that's pretty if that wants to be expedited because of something we just have to understand that there's other things that are going to give in that particular perspective this immediacy this immediate issue in response will be done before the next advisor advisee if not before so that's basically eight days i think page school
048days but if not that will be done before then we have to rein i will have to re-engage our public officials uh engage with the board also in terms of the greater community how to re-engage that and uh reactivate that and how people would like to proceed with that so that's not a quick thing i just but that takes time to actually get up and running but i mean i'll do that as quickly as i possibly can it's not something to be kicked down the road but uh but i need to contact people and people who are on that committee and i've already contacted the nccj at adl to see if we can get facilitation for that but i also want to make sure that that that is what we want to do mrs zachary
049sorry just one more brief comment to take on mrs stein and mr maroney's comments i appreciate there's a more thoughtful plan here and i am probably the biggest advocate for bringing kids along and understanding where kids are but there is a point where there are as people said children involved here and we are the adults i believe our staff is trained to say homophobia and anti-semitism is wrong and i think i think while we do not do the day-to-day operations of the school i think certainly as a board table we can say that publicly i'll speak for myself but i i wouldn't exclude any of my board members from from feeling the same and i do think in immediate action i would go a step further than mrs stein i don't think an announcement over
050the loudspeakers enough and i do think some things you just say no to and then you say i'm going to follow up we're committed to this i think the strategic plan deals with diversity inclusion and equity we are talking about two very specific instances and in the case of anti-semitism we've seen repeated incidences over the years so it's disappointing we don't have a plan in place because it's not like we've never experienced this before and it's not like we haven't experienced it in recent history so i would just like maybe at the next board meeting at the latest and hopefully in between that the board is fully fleshed out on what the plan is we're going to talk about a curriculum committee tonight and i think if we're going to get into the ins and
051outs and intricacies of resources and curriculum we certainly should be knowing what's going on with these types of issues as well i thank you i will say categorically that uh court of course the staff would take a position to say no to these things and i do believe that that had that that that comment has been made and made clear to students uh that certainly you don't have to it doesn't take much to do that and you should certainly say that but that but but i respectfully say that that in itself isn't enough but but yes but i believe it has been done and said accordingly mrs mccammon um i agree that um with you that that there is something of a tiered approach i think when we're looking at attitudinal changes those certainly take
052time they require seeds and they require a long thoughtful discussion i think sometimes though what i was wondering as i was thinking about this is behaviorally sometimes we can take the opportunity to reinforce behavioral standards whether we have someone come and talk to the uh the school about hate speech and what that looks like and what the legal implications are or something like that if we keep it fairly black and white but focus on the behavior in the short term um that could just be something that that uh we could do more quickly that wouldn't require some of the same long term thank you thank you mrs mckamet any other comments from the board i will add um again from myself i think if we don't do something this week um we're missing an opportunity
053i appreciate all the comments around the board table i do think the teachers the administrators us we are the adults while they are young adults in the high school in the later grades we are the adults i don't think an announcement cuts it i think a visit to the auditorium even if it's reading the community letter that went out to the parents to the students might have an effect on it but i think more can be done in the short term and i would like to actually hear and see more that's going to be done this week to for these students to understand the gravity of the issues all right thank you can i just make mr chairman just i don't think it cuts it either i don't think any of our employees thinks it
054cuts it i just want to make that clear just but yes thank you sir all right we'll move on to the uh thank you again for all the comments and the conversations around it a lot more work to do here and a lot more work that needs to be done i think this week um approval of minutes may have a motion to approve the minutes of the special meeting executive session and regular meeting held on september 14 2021. so moved mr moroney second by mr ceni all those in favor aye that is unanimous for all those people that are here thank you mr brown are you good sorry i didn't mean to ignore you i i yes i i'm good good and i'm i'm sorry did you have any comments mr brown no no okay
055thanks david i was keeping my eye on you then then i let it down no worries dude you'll hear me don't worry thank you i appreciate that um we will move on to board committee reports mrs stein the policy committee met um two fridays ago on september 17th we have a batch of our first group of policies we're reviewing um for a first read on tonight to be discussed later thank you mr stein any other mrs ackman the finance committee met last thursday to review the opening month's finances mr rudel will do the full report but i think we had a good review of all the data thank you good thank you a quick update on oxridge and dr adley can add in here too as we spent some time on this over the last
056week as you all know there are continue to be problems with production with supply with all that good stuff um all across the country we have been incredibly lucky with the oxridge build in that some of the contractors actually ordered ahead of time including steel and other type of things that needed to be sourced however we did run into an issue with insulation and we ran into an insulation uh in the roof and so that caused a four week delay the good news is based on the insulation we were looking for we were able to get it in four weeks some of the other insulation products are going out to january which would have really um you know changed the whole scope of the project uh through the building committee meeting with rusty kipp and
057myself with the contractors rusty shriner myself met with the superintendent to go over potential options to keep the project moving forward the good news is the project is on schedule for completion and it continues to be under budget the change that the building committee has recommended is that the move-in date move from the april break of 2022 to june so have a summer move in um which luke forshaw and the principal and dr adley uh all agree makes sense the project will continue in terms of getting that academic win wing done and then it'll enable them to immediately start demoing the old school as soon as the the principles in the classrooms get moved over so we will order the furniture for an april move-in because there are production and supply issues with furniture but
058we have been told if we order it now which is being worked on from a committee standpoint will be ready to go in june so again no changes to the ed specs or anything like that we are working through a potential change in the lighting and the windows on the gymnasium side that continues to work through the building committee the good news around that no real financial impact on that and that's kind of the way we're trying to look at it the cost of moving uh the move-in date from april to june will be somewhere in the range of ninety one thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in overtime just to keep the project on course uh it seems like the best option uh we could move the whole project back which would
059actually be two months based on the month we lost in the month that has to be made up in terms of how they work construction schedules so we feel um i'm just bringing to the board to inform them that the move date will go from an april spring break move to end of school year will literally start to move into that building the day after school closes any questions or comments i think it's a good thing again we're on track for completing and delivering the school in the the time rank the time frame and it continues to be under budget good thank you i would just say mr chairman that yes in general it's actually probably a better plan because i'm not sure the collective mind himself included when we were looking at the time
060frame that the movement in a week is just a significant challenge so it's gonna leave a lot of that of that uh pressure i think we have such faith in mr lynch it's a good thing mr lynch is in agreement also all right moving along uh presentations and discussions uh durian public school status update dr adley and i believe uh we have our director of nursing mrs this evening alicia alicia you're online [Music] i'm here okay uh so some so some of the things that um where we are at the moment i'll give you a couple of covert metrics uh a week quick update on elementary school contact tracing uh uh lisa's gonna talk about some of the testing clinics teacher vaccinations and uh sort of where we are with the american rescue idea uh
061so this is kind of uh for the the correspondent dates of 11th of september canadarian uh this was just put in just to give you a sense of of the state of connecticut in general is 2.15 positivity right this is kind of where we are as a district we basically have had about five a week type thing um as you may have seen through we reinstate we reinstituted the communication that whenever something happens we tell everybody now just to keep it uh i sense that it's hard to keep track of a little bit for people to spot a pattern or otherwise so uh we've reinstituted that communication and uh recently we've had a couple of elementary uh covert cases and we've been able to reduce uh some of the quarantine and that that's needed to
062be take place i will caution that may not be always that way particularly if it's uh have been in kindergarten classes today like those young kids a small kid are literally all over the place but the teachers are doing a phenomenal job trying to do the instructional practices that we want them to do as normal as possible but also uh keeping them in some sort of pod situation cohort situation as best as possible uh first it's for september the darien month uh darian attended therians are 22 people if anybody was watching last night you would have seen that the vaccination rate is over 90 percent uh for for the the time collective uh collective age groups so here you can see the weekly sort of five shows it actually has about five a week at
063this particular point uh alicia i'm sorry about that uh alicia can talk a little bit about uh the testing for parents uh so we're ready to go with that and we have the date ready and we have the information ready to go so that's going to start next week but alicia do you want to just give away update on that please sure so um progressive diagnostics which is based out of norwalk is going to be doing our testing and that will take place on tuesdays uh in the mornings um there will be two teams that will go out to the sixth school so one team will go to three schools the other alicia i don't i don't know if you're coming across very mumbled so i don't know if there's any adjustments we can make
064because it's important information hold on thank you try another spot in the house maybe it's where i am is this any better yes yes thank you so much you're welcome sorry so um there's two teams that'll go out to the six schools they're they'll start in the morning so they'll be done about noon um and what will happen is the families that have opted in to the testing their children will be called down to the location we're still determining those for each school where the progressive diagnostic team will do the anterior nasal swab the swab only goes up about a half of an inch into the nose so it's not that deep nasal swab that we were all if you had to experience the kova test in the beginning this is a very shallow nasal
065swap that they'll use and the tests will be pulled together in groups of five if there is a positive that shows up in that pool testing then they will do reflex testing on each swab um there's markers on them so they'll know which swab was positive it'll take a little bit longer to get those results they won't report the positive results until they know which job is positive so if you get a result back in the first 24 hours and it's negative that means the full testing that you were in is negative and then um if you if it takes a little bit longer it could mean that somebody's in that pool testing was positive and we just have to wait and see um so within 24 to 48 hours from the testing on tuesdays
066we will know from the pool testing if there's any positive cases and then then we'll do notification and the contact tracing will happen after that parents will be able to access the results online and also we will we will the school district i will know who's positive and then we'll start contact tracing from there um so that's it about the testing and then just you know cases where like dr adley said we're seeing about about five a week or so um and you know i think that the level of vaccination across the district has helped quite a bit hopefully uh with this vaccination of younger students will see even less uh cases and less quarantining needs across the district so we have about five percent of the staff who are participating in the weekly testing
067and the others are fully vaccinated our contract workers are also compliant as they're required to do and any other contractors who have contact with kids hereafter who are being hired cannot participate in the weekly testing so they have to they actually have to be vaccinated so we'll monitor that as we go uh the american rescue act it's just over the 200 thousand at 218 000 at the moment it would just be under the contracted services um for ot pt and speech that's not completely uh defined yet as a as a proposal but it's likely that it'll be of that nature that we'll bring back here for you to see as a proposal [Music] thank you dr adley i'll open up to board questions and comments mr ceni alicia could you talk to us about the
068new protocols uh the seven-day protocols and how that's working out um whether or not you're seeing a backlog for the quarantines are you being able to handle the uh the volume in the processing in the seven day versus the ten day thank you um that seems to be working pretty well i will say at home because we had to quarantine so many kids in those initial cases that we had there i think and they all the five day testing window with return on day eight it was about 70 kids so that was a lot to manage but but my nurse was fantastic and she did it and uh so but we haven't seen that level since then so i think it's pretty manageable at this point if if things start to change we may find
069it to be a little bit more cumbersome but it seems to be working okay thank you this is parent thank you alicia can you remind parents and myself how to have their children opt-in to um testing and what the what how we get them signed up so we sent out several um emails that had the link that you can sign the consent form online also um i believe that is on the reopening page the link to the testing consent form and then if you are not able to access that online each nursing office has a consent form that you can sign if you're not signed up and you want to get signed up it's not too late they do progressive diagnostics to make it consistent really wants people to stay in it but if there's
070a week you don't want your child tested or you want them tested every other week you can opt for that we just have to have clear communication from parents about what their expectation is yes do you have any idea how many families have signed up so far to this point yesterday when i looked at it there was 216 students signed up thank you any other questions or comments about the reopening and the testing yes mrs mccammon i have an academic question um i know the s back scores got back to parents this week um of course all of anything i would have is anecdotal but i am hearing about some parents receiving unexpected results um are we going to hear when are we going to hear at the board level about both what the results
071were and then maybe not immediately what an action plan might be if we see any variability the schedule for the next board meeting the testing results yes yes so that includes spec yes okay great thank you mrs mckenna any other questions comments all right thank you all uh we will move along to discussion on thriving youth the survey results uh miss shelley sheridan ms emily larkin and mr mitch dickey are with us i think our friends are remote from a thriving youth and this is a survey that have been given uh a couple of times that in the district uh by different assets and behaviors of students i want to thank shelly emily and mitch mitch is the statistician involved and there is a community presentation of this uh in october uh at the ala
072at the uh middle school uh so here they're gonna give us some highlights of it and what potentially next steps are in that particular process but uh thank you for you for your work as i look at some of you online here a little bit um i think i'll just turn it over to emily first of all and like to just sort of delete off but i do see shelley and mitch online so uh welcome and uh the floor is yours emily thank you thank you it's actually gonna be shelley that starts um thank you yeah no problem thank you to the board of education for having us tonight and specifically to dr adley and the public schools for helping us administer this survey amidst the global pandemic um shelly sheridan i'm a parent of
073a freshman at the high school and a seventh grader at middlesex and i'm a board member of the thriving youth task force at the community fronidarian tonight as dr edley mentioned you're going to learn about our findings around substance use and mental health so we're going to split it up a little bit i'm going to be covering the findings around substance use emily will cover the mental health and i'm going to introduce mitch to set the stage of our survey methodology um and just a few reminders before we start if there's a lot of content as dr adley mentioned we're just going to hit the highlights there is going to be a extensive community presentation on october 20th the survey was given to the students about two over 2000 took it it was anonymous and
074they were asked to self-identify their gender and parents also had the option to up their children out of taking the survey if they weren't comfortable for whatever reason of any of the content so at this point i want to introduce mitch dickey who is our genius statistician he's a licensed psychologist and has his phd in psychology from yale he's nationally recognized for his research in emotional intelligence and he's also working with a similar coalition in greenwich on similar survey so i'm going to have emily switch it to the next slide and um interrupt you shelly um i'm unable i was going to share for everyone on zoom the slide deck but i'm unable to share my screen i'm not sure if the host might be able to allow me to screen share yes we are
075going to figure that out hold on just a second okay there you are there you should be able to share now try sharing now thank you so much great you're set perfect thank you all right myth it's all you okay um welcome everyone and thanks for the opportunity to talk with you about this uh darien has actually implemented these surveys every few years since 2008. and in those surveys we had two different we've done three different things this year uh that i think helped the survey uh in the past years there have been two separate surveys one about what's been going on with the students and this in their lives and things and then second one about substance use but that meant that we couldn't relate what was going on in their lives to their
076use and so we combined the surveys to be able to do that this year secondly we added a several sections of the survey that um kind of represented what really mattered to students their peers the family stress mental health that kind of thing so we could get a broader and more holistic view of the student and then the third thing that we did was we did a different set of analyses and i'll describe that to you briefly in 2018 we got what you call descriptive statistics which means that you could tell from the survey responses this percentage of the students said this this percentage of the students said that and it kind of gave you an overview of what this the survey said but that doesn't really allow you to understand what drives those risky
077behaviors what kind is causing the the student behaviors and we were able to do that this year based on these newer statistics there are items in the survey and if you just do one simple correlation matrix that's 90 000 cells and it's not impossible to kind of get any meaning out of that so we needed a way to reduce that complexity and we wanted to shine a spotlight on the data rather than a flood light that kind of cast a pale over of everything so we clustered students into groups meaningful groups about this set of students has these core common and crucial concerns and behaviors and that's uh we did that clustering for substance use and for mental health and in essence that kind of matches up with the unit of intervention or programming that
078you can design based on these acts essentially it just makes the survey much more actionable and then once we formed these groups of clusters of kids we said okay well now we want to understand what's driving it so we used what's called decision tree analysis uh to do that and essentially you know that is legitimately an artificial intelligence uh statistic it is machine learning it may not be the fanciest in the world but it is legitimately ai and i think it's correct uh to say that i don't know but uh this may be the only time or the first time that these kinds of analyses have been used with this kind of survey so darion is is on the leading edge of this thing and the the benefit of using these techniques is it can
079make what's invisible in the data what would be almost impossible to see outside of using these techniques more visible and as you'll see in a moment uh it really it did work so i'll pass it across to is it shelly sheridan first or is it you emily yes back to shelly thank you mitch um if emily goes to the next slide you'll just see i'm just reitering a bit here what mitch said this is different than our presentations in the past where we just were giving statistical information on who said yes to what this is really trying to understand and using this ai technology and get more insight into why so that we can actually use the information and conclusions in the survey to make it actionable for our schools our community to make our
080community a better place so if we go to the next one we all know that this was taken in the middle of a pandemic in february when people were at home so to look at substance use we need to take that into account so it's probably not surprising for most to see that our our use is reportedly down so the if you look at the graph gray is 20 21 so across all forms e-cigarettes alcohol and marijuana use was reportedly down and i think there's a lot of anecdotal reasons that we could see people weren't out and about they were home online more often and again we need to just dig into this a bit more but i think it's important to note that there was an impact of coven 19. so what do we
081learn from the substance use perspective the good news is eighty percent of students seventh through twelfth grade reported no use so we were excited to see that number and then wanted to dig even further into what did that mean and and look at other areas of where was there moderate to heavy use so although it's not a huge percentage what we did learn is that these moderate and heavy users are not just drinking they're what we call poly users they're using multiple substances so we wanted to look into that as well if i go to the next slide mitch had mentioned the clusters so one of the biggest predictors and it showed conclusively in many ways that he looked at it the biggest predictor of alcohol use was age so as you can see the
082gold bar here is is no use and in seventh grade that's quite high and as the student progresses along in age and in grade use goes way up so by the time they're 12th grade 45 percent reportedly are heavier heavy and moderate users i should also note that that correlates with um the parents disapproval of it also going down so their use goes up as the disapproval of parents goes down so some of these observations again in the why as we're trying to answer that question um grade is is just the biggest predictor of of that we did think it was interesting and it doesn't necessarily go along national norms that they didn't report that sadness anxiety and loneliness predicted use and that parent disapproval declines rapidly as i mentioned and that is one of
083the most [Music] biggest impact that we would note that would be able to predict less use so quickly just to dig into what do we mean by moderate and heavy drinkers so again it's 30 percent of the 11th grade and 45 percent of the 12th grade is reporting that they are moderate or heavy drinkers and what are they doing they are playing competitive drinking games they're experiencing hanging overs they're trying to purchase alcohol out at stores outside of town so these people are really wanting to use and we want to just look more at the frequency of the use the quantities that they're using and again we mentioned that they're polyusers so they although alcohol is the biggest substance they use they're also using other things so on the flip side what are the factors
084that we have found are associated with students who choose not to use there are hundreds of variables as as mitch mentioned and we just wanted to highlight them in individual protective factors as well as family protective factors we thought it was interesting that a lot reported i just don't want to um and then they also said their parents are strict which sort of lined up with the family variables if you are a parent who has very clear rules about alcohol use and you strongly disapprove of substance use your tip you would tend to be a substance free student as well so parents have again a big impact here so again the key takeaways um are listed here i want to wrap up this portion to give you just again a snapshot we could go into
085this in a lot more detail but in the interest of time we wanted to just lay out the groundwork of what we found so that we can come together as a community to start to decide what we might do about it and we want to work on giving parents tools to help them support their children that's our big big takeaway so now i'm going to turn it over to emily larkin our program director at thriving youth to talk about what we found in the mental health area awesome thank you so much shelly good evening everyone so again we're keeping this very brief tonight but what did we learn about student mental health before we dive in i think two quick things are important to keep in mind firstly that we are not asking students in
086this survey diagnostic questions we are reporting student responses to questions about how how they're feeling are they feeling sad depressed anxious or lonely so these are the kind of questions students were asked and second this is the first time we've asked darien students specific questions about mental health so we unfortunately don't have past survey data to look to as a point of comparison so those are just a few things to keep in mind now you'll remember from shelley's substance use cluster slide 80 of that pie chart was blue representing students not using substances which is excellent the mental health clusters you can see tell a different story while we do have 31 percent of students in the blue thriving we also have 46 percent of students in the anxious distressed and vulnerable categories which is
087very concerning now for students who are reporting good mental health what do they have in common we found that the number one predictor of good student mental health is students feeling valued and this is challenging to define very precisely it probably would mean something a little bit different to each person listening but it's something we need to and want to explore it's also worth noting that there are a lot of ways families are having a very positive impact on students mental health another new series of questions this year was around students sources of stress and pressure and you can see here which areas students endorsed as high sources of stress and pressure and which were minimal what's most important to note here is that students began reporting stress and pressure in these areas in seventh
088grade so stress around getting good grades getting into a good college stressors that we might expect to emerge later in high school so that was a significant takeaway another important discovery is that while grade was the greatest predictor for substance use gender was the greatest predictor for student mental health an important imbalance to point out is there are far more girls in the distressed category and far more boys in the thriving category when you think back to the clusters the kind of stress students report experiencing is also different we found girls reporting more stress social stress due to peer relationships and social media and boys reporting more academic stress now tonight has been a very very brief overview of the findings there's lots more that we can unpack in our october presentation but you've probably
089noticed that in terms of substance use the drivers are fairly clear and it's clear what parents can do to be part of the solution our mental health findings are much more nuanced and we see tonight and the presentations to come this fall as just the start of a conversation we know that students feeling valued and control of their lives is essential for youth mental health but now we need to understand what that means to kids and how we can have a positive effect on that so thank you so much for your time and attention tonight we're very grateful and for those of you who are not board of ed members and haven't gotten to see this presentation in advance we'd love for you to join us on october 20th we'll be sharing much more in-depth
090results um and we'll have a panel with q a so please join us for that um and we'd like to open it up for uh questions from the board well thank you very much for the work that goes on behind this and for uh the presentation much appreciated and um we'll open it up to board questions and comments mr c thank you again for the presentation i think you mentioned that this is the first time that you've looked at certain aspects around the mental health of the students and you ran the testing or the i'm sorry the survey during a time that was not normal for any of us especially our students so let you comment a bit on a couple different factors that appendix a is is really enlightening and you look at covid
091you know and how that would create stress or covert related issues and and how that might have compounded some of the other anxieties the stress is you know throughout the number of categories that you listed in appendix a want me to take a crack at that or who sure mitch go ahead that sounds great so uh yes you're absolutely right there's very little doubt that uh with covid substance use goes down kids are not seeing each other in person they're not going to house parties and that's a covet effect it's also true that the mental health and the stress effect that there are more than likely covet effects there there are national norms uh for the increase in covid because they have given these surveys before and have no way to show that those apply
092to darien but you can basically take all those bad numbers down by about 10 percent total and due to covid but what i would say is the sources of the stress are a lot about achievement they're about standardized test scores grades getting into a good college meeting parents expectations and those were around well before coveting probably haven't been that much exacerbated uh by cobit but certainly things like uh sadness and loneliness i would think that those would be substantially impacted by covet thank you mr senior mrs ackman i think this question is from mitch um but it goes to kind of overall and as a board what we do with this one of the observation you said surprisingly sadness anxiety and loneliness did not predict substance abuse and this is counter-international norms because we're asking
093kids to self-report i assume we're both we believe they cannot even identify whether they are anxious or lonely or depressed and then if that interrelates to their substance use um and i think that's a big leap so as a board of education what are we supposed to do with this material is it all self-reporting are there takeaways because some of these findings seem to be you know true kid answers but i don't know if they're really predicting anxiety depression am i asking a clear question or not let me if i'm being clear i'm struggling because the facts seem so startling and i don't know what we do as a group although i understand we can look at this as this is how kids are currently feeling i'm not sure i understand the question so let
094me give it a try and then you can tell me if that works um if you think of it like this the levels of stress and distress are pretty flat from 7th to 12th grades and they rise precipitously around 9th and 10th grades for the substance use so over the entire population those two things aren't going to be correlated but what i hope we don't want to leave you the impression is that there aren't pockets of kids for which substance abuse and depression are related that was the whole point of doing these clusters and if we kind of dug down more into that i think we would find it i think that was one of your questions um but uh but there was also one about what do we as a community do about it
095well i think specifically what do we as a board do about it right i mean the thriving youth task force has done a great job i think in terms of presenting this to the public but as a board of education we're giving this in our schools what do we glean from this we're hearing it here what do we do with this so there are a great number of very specific findings that we're not going to go over tonight tonight was a broad pastiche of the findings and those findings at a more granular level are very actionable whether they and you know i live in greenwich i live in darien what you all do about that you know you have to figure out um but they are very they they can get very specific um and
096that requires a kind of a further understanding of the data but i think there's i don't think the mental health or the you know that me the feelings of sadness loneliness and isolation anxiety are not diagnostic they're not i am depressed right because that's a diagnostic category there i've been feeling sad i've been feeling lonely i've been feeling anxious and it's unlikely that any one group can solve that problem at the town level i think there are a lot of things you can do but that does take a coordinated town-wide response and yeah and very helpful i think that's the important part that these aren't diagnostic but this is what our kids are reporting they're feeling that's very helpful thank you broader perspective um you know the thriving youth is hoping to convene all of
097the um you know amazing people that participate on our board to help address it through programming and we're working closely with dr adley and and scott mccarthy with the climate at the schools and we'd be happy to work with the board as well if there was a a good way to do that so just wanted to put that out there too great thank you shelly so shelly i would ask um how do we get this information or do you get this information out to the broader community we've got a core audience that always listens that audience continues to grow which is good but how do we get it out there and then i would go back to the administration and say does this fit into the strategic plan under social emotional learning and the wellness
098of our students so shelly just how do you get this information out there because it's good information sure great question so we're we have a big um more thorough presentation on october 20th which is uh showing up at the middle school there will also be in addition to all of our sort of here's what we found a panel of experts um including you know we're still finalizing who they are but licensed clinicians things like that so that parents can take okay here's what's been reported what the students are reporting now what can we do as parents as teachers as administrators as a community to help our students specifically around mental health i mean even from the beginning this meeting this is something that we all as a town need to come together on and we
099would love to help facilitate that with data so um i don't know if they answer your question we're going to do a big push to get as many people there as possible we're also providing online zoom um for whatever reason the the auditorium isn't big enough at middlesex great thank you quick question sure mr brown so thank you i like hearing a uh survey with 90 000 data points that's wonderful um i just had a question and maybe the brevity of the presentation but on the student mental health slide where we had the five different buckets is that just a condensed presentation because i just look at the dispersion of the different categories and it seems this may be 60 20 or 60 40 positive to negative and i don't that's somewhere else in the
100data or that's just a function of trying to get this out here quickly yeah say that again yeah there's there's 60 percent uh little that that are doing okay right we'll know but if you look at the criteria the five of them i i would argue that anxious distressed and vulnerable uh so three out of the five those are not positive categories it's not what we want to see that driving is one we want to see which would be 20 so it's 20 60 or if you want to include okay then we're 40 60. just seems like it's a little skewed so again it may be elsewhere in the data i was just concerned questioning the presentation here and it may just be because it's high level well i think they're saying that a you
101know roughly half of the kids are feeling some kind of distress and roughly half of the kids are feeling okay good but if i have five choices and 60 of those are negative then i'm going to skew more negative correct no oh sorry okay good okay now i understand your question so uh no these are not questions on the survey these are buckets that were formed from several questions on the survey this is the result of that clustering technique okay so this is the result it's not yes yes it wasn't limited to five choices in the questionnaire that's correct that's one thank you mitch just to clarify do you have the top of your head to have an example of what one of the questions would have been and how they can say i you
102know it's extreme one way or the other yes um in the past 30 days i've been uh feeling uh lonely for instance and then they could say uh never rarely sometimes and often got it so four four selections four selections and there are six yep and six questions in the mental health uh section got it thank you so much thanks mr brown mr maroney yes so i have a question on the mental health as well so and we're talking about 46 or whether it's 69 that with the okay group that are feeling some levels of sadness or anxiety we're saying that's the global but in your writing you're saying that females are much more prevalent than this so with 69 of the global population is feeling anxious what is the what is the level of
103female mental health issues um i don't we did we do have that information i don't uh have it at the tip of my tongue but we did analyze it and if you look at those five categories uh the boys and the girls are almost reverse images of each other so if you have say 31 thriving let's say it's 40 for boys it might be 20 for girls it it's uh it's a dramatic difference i i don't have the actual numbers right off that my hand we can get that easily for you but it's it's a big difference i can chime in with those numbers if that would be helpful i just pulled it up and we've got 76 girls in the okay anxious distressed and vulnerable just to chime in with that yeah 76 percent
104a big number that's a big number yeah thank you mr murphy so so i guess to follow up on kind of mrs or to build on mrs ochman's question is i'll answer that ask this to the administration is what is our plan to deal with 76 of our female population and and total population that are experiencing distress or feeling vulnerable so probably yeah i don't know how far back it goes emily and some some of the other staff members from the thriving youth and i met my first question was because i've lived this experience we come in and i know we've done it in our own district here for some time so i wanted to learn as a what what did we do in the past but i've experienced where these these tools are administered
105and then we're left to deal with the fallout at the school level in terms of trying to make sense of it i want to thank them because they spent a lot of time uh with us on the questions on letting us review the questions our school psychologists and clinicians reviewing the questions to make sure that when we get results back we cannot understand and it's not we don't have to do a lot of interpretation around the questions that are not ambiguous both for the people who are taking them and for those who are evaluating them uh we had agreed that uh as driving news i can't say at all what they're doing in terms of the outreach of the community but that's that's that's one of their charges to do that um i believe that's
106what they'll be doing we will be looking at uh with our school climate uh committees and our clinicians as to the the additional data that's behind us that's what we what they agreed to but that's what made most sense to me administratively uh we can't just give it and then like the school's a big part of this and then just walk away from it right and uh and they're not doing that so i'm not suggesting that but uh i use that language just to describe the situation that you're sort of discussing the moment so it's our intent the principals have seen it seen the data uh so they've had the opportunity to review it as well and we will be uh going to our school climate committees and our clinicians to for them to dissect
107the other levels of of information behind them that's most meaningful to them and that they want to address through their own action plan thank you mr c i believe the next meeting we're going to see the school psychologists uh presentation or an could you have them kind of reconcile maybe what we're hearing tonight to what they're seeing in the schools and again not directly reconciling to this study but we're definitely hearing a direction here and i just want to make sure that i think we're addressing some of the things that are raised yeah we can certainly that they can certainly speak to where they are in the process with it i mean that's so we can do that when you say clinicians who are you referring to uh social worker school psychologists okay thank you
108dude quick call up to mr uh sonny's question if we're going to request if possible i'd be curious in light of some of the recent events um mr senior's request if there's any information on the effect or how we're measuring social emotional learning and you know continuance of certain things how we're measuring how effective that is since we've been doing it for a few years would love to hear that as part of their presentation if it's jermaine so what i think was a great for the board i just want to do one that's the development i have adults in them i have to sort of dissect it differently um was a psychologist to come back and see actually what mr brown is sort of saying in the area of social emotional uh learning uh what
109what are they seeing and how they responded in their time and so on so forth that was i think what the charge was so that's what we're trying to do um and we can maybe blend a little bit of this in thank you brown mrs parent i just to build off of both of that when the psychologists come report to us i would love to have a little more historical anecdotal knowledge maybe not metrics don't know that they have it but are we seeing because of covert are we seeing a big growth in these are these numbers so high because of covert or were these numbers high prior um just anecdotally from the high school because they're it'll probably be anecdotally because the unfortunately tight of this just yet without dissecting it mr brown i'm
110sorry i cut you off did you have something else i'm good duke thank you so much all right mr brown mr sorry one more thing that and and i appreciate your slide on the um let's celebrate the fact that there's 80 of students who are not using alcohol and drugs i think the the question the part that i also looked at in that slide was that i see a trend that it's going down from even 2014 not just 2018 to 2021. and if memory serves as well the board of education or the superintendent at that time changed the commitment policy from being a punishment to more of a educational process which i think and his words were schools are not meant to discipline schools are meant to educate and to me that was a big
111step and i'm wondering if if there's any data to support that the school has had an influence on the drop of of substance abuse or even educating the parents because the parents are required to go to some of those meetings as well as that have we can we decipher anything of that i'm not sure you could draw a correlation but certainly you could you certainly look at the data and see for time frame how those matched up but i i don't think you could correlate but but you could certainly look and also interestingly if this survey some many of these kids in the survey have never had that experience because it didn't happen last year the middle school kids wouldn't have it um and it has only happened limitedly this year so if we find
112a correlation we'd certainly have to make that program more robust to make it helpful no i'm actually i'm agreeing with you like if it's helpful then we should make it robust because it seems to have um very impactful and my honest point of asking this question is that if it does work to me this is the answer to the diversity education the dei discussion that was had earlier and it's it's about education and its education of parents community and everything and hopefully we can see a similar drop yes right thank you mrs mckerman i just had a question about the social media um line item that you had the particular concern for girls can you talk a little bit about what the survey actually asked and what you actual what actually we can take away
113from that line i could speak to that but i think mitch you might do a better job um i can speak i don't have the full report in front of me but for uh younger girls uh social media was associated with uh feeling more anxious and depressed now there was a small set of girls and i don't remember the numbers but maybe fewer than 100 where they did get some self-esteem it looked like from social media use and likes uh but for the majority of them it wasn't so great is that helpful or is mostly the yeah is that something you all are planning to monitor going forward and it's not exactly aligned with substance use but certainly it might be with mental health you monitor it going forward you mean sorry would you continue
114to survey it is this so is this a permanent part of the survey um oh i would think so thank you mrs mccann any other questions or comments around the survey again thank you for your time um i appreciate all the hard work and the presentation this evening and look forward to hearing at the um presentation in october thank you so much for having us thank you we'll move on to discussion and possible acceptance of contemplated gifts from the blue wave booster club dr adley and mr manfredonia well that's our man for doing this right front and center hello christopher good evening everyone so you have in front of you tonight two contemplative gifts to consider for some of our winter and spring athletic teams the first um is uh some speedo parkers for our
115boys swim team these are similar to what the girls have currently uh they're deck jackets for the team to wear in between events between meats to stay warm while competing and the second gift you have in front of you is for our girls lacrosse team to have a set of rain pants uh to be worn during inclement weather need to be matching to what the girls got last year in terms of rain jackets both of these gifts will stay with the respective programs in the school and will be reissued on a year-to-year basis be happy to answer any questions anybody may have thank you mr manfredonia questions or comments around these gifts just to thank you to the blueway booster club again for the generosity and all those parents that support those clubs may have
116a motion to accept the gift from the blueway booster club pursuant to the memorandums dated september 23rd 2021 for the speedo parkers for the swim dive team and the rain pants for the girls lacrosse program this is richie ii by miss mrs achman all those in favor that is unanimous thank you thank you mr manfredoni thank you we move along to discussion on the august 2021-2022 financial report and possible action on proposed budget transfers mr rudolph [Music] so this is the first financial report of the new fiscal year uh we are forecasting a year-end positive balance of 167 740. uh this does exclude any flood-related expenditures under the assumption that will be reimbursed by insurance uh there was a requested finance committee to provide that detail and we'll have that detail for both storm elsa
117and ida at the next finance committee uh the general education rcs are forecasting a positive 170 332. the special education rc is essentially flat at 208 dollars and rc 28 cobia does have a 20 2800 forecast for uh out of district transportation cleaning uh we did include a breakdown of so far the cobit expenditures and the first arp grant we have that 2800 transportation cost and then the breakdown of the grant for the million 25. uh overall salaries are forecasted at a positive 59 000. the previous middle school uh principal transition to the new principal is a pending uh transfer before the board at the negative 51 000. uh we do have some salary savings associated about 26 000 ymca overtime at 34 000 uh and then budget control portion 0.6 has not been used
118at a positive 43 000. um operating expenditures are forecasted at a positive 91 000. um legal fees are trending uh positive similar to the tail end of last year um the correct partnership fee corrected receive a grant from the state of connecticut which reduced the membership cost to partnering districts and so that is a positive 11 500 and then dss has 66 000 of savings and operating costs fixed is a positive seventy three thousand dollars uh utilities are forecasted um quite a bit better so far at thirty two thousand uh we had some favorable renewals with kerma for our property insurance workers comp insurance and general liability insurance and then uh favorable renewal in student access insurance uh revenue is forecasted a slight decline of 56 000. the primary driver is summer school which is
119a related transfer before the board this evening so there are three transfers for consideration and approval uh the first is for 51 425 uh this is to cover the cost of three months of uh the previous middle school principal as they transitioned to the new principal we are recommending taking uh savings from some of those kerma renewals and the student accident insurance renewals as well as some savings and unaffiliated salaries that came under budget the second transfer is essentially an accounting adjustment but it does cross broad categories uh revenue for dairy and summer school was forty thousand dollars less than budgeted but there were corresponding expense savings in um consultant services for that forty thousand dollars so we're essentially looking to collapse those two accounts and then the third transfer is for twenty three thousand
120two hundred and eighty five dollars uh the budget did include the purchase of a third suburban uh there is a car shortage nationwide uh we did order the suburban second budget open uh we're not expected to get that suburban at this point until early november uh so this transfer is to cover the cost of contracting out those services at least through november if that car is delayed or delay and hiring a driver for that third suburban uh we will bring another transfer uh forward to the board thank you mr rudolph i will just also add that the board of finance approved the appropriation transfer request for mr lynch to order the three vehicles that were damaged in the flood so thank you to the board of finance for moving that along um out of their
121board of finance account i will open it up to board questions or comments mrs mccammon sounds like it's just a technical issue but i understand that the dss revenue was up excuse me i understood that dns says enrollment was significantly up so i'm curious why we would have it so we uh when we build the budget we look at all potential classes that could run uh so in some instances they have to have a certain amount of students to run that enrollment in order to run the class uh if that class didn't run there's also a corresponding expense savings this is what we're seeing here uh revenue as a whole was about five or the highest in about five or six years so we did have a high revenue collection period because of that high
122enrollment but it's just a factor of which classes ran in listen thank you mr c i just wanted to reiterate something i said that the finance committee meeting it's good to be in a somewhat normal quote-unquote budget year um you know only six months ago we were talking about uh including maybe up to uh 827 000 in covet expenses that number is only 2 800 right now uh full your view and last year we're running you know well over 1.1 million deficit we have a very small surplus so it's good to be here thank you thank you mr c any other questions around the finance committees mr rudel's report we have a motion to uh approve the budget the may have a motion to approve the august budget transfers as presented in the memo uh
123by mr rudel uh mrs achman and seconded by mrs stein all those in favor that is unanimous thank you very much moving along discussion and possible action on the establishment of a curriculum committee mr dr adley and mr tranberg have provided some information for discussion at the board level around a curriculum committee at a board level and also presented some information on some future uh article that's coming out from cabe on the board's involvement in curriculum and also a district curriculum committee so i'd like to hear from mr tranberg and dr adley their thoughts on the curriculum committee at the board level i was part of that many years ago we are operating as a curriculum at large committee at the board level which is okay in terms of the statutes but i think based
124on feedback from the community we want to really look and have a discussion around a board curriculum committee and also look at the district curriculum committee so i will turn it over to both you gentlemen i'll turn over to you in a second i'll just sort of sort of frame it a little bit i hope the board finds uh this article uh informative and helpful it's certainly an objective point of view right that sort of addresses many of the issues that we're looking at including confusion from the community clarification i do think of the county together categorically about this right i do believe that curriculum is a board governance issue there's no question about that and uh certainly uh this district has been well served by the system that's been it's been participating under but
125i certainly uh have no clams around the board getting involved in curriculum and this gives a wee bit of a sense of some of the issues on the table it also gives a little bit of a sense of some of the requirements that are that are are required and how you get how do you get there and what uh what vehicle is is best to get there so i i heard mr chairman say looking at potentially two committees there um it would be my recommendation i think it'll be christopher's recommendation that uh if we're going to do any committees that we uh we have one of those committees but haven't said that i'll let chris maybe talk to specifically what we might be looking at or recommending or otherwise good evening everyone um and first
126uh i just have to say as a person who identifies with the lgbtqia plus community um i want to thank everyone for the comments tonight um i think about if i was a kid in high school this discussion would never even be happening um acknowledging that something like that happened just wouldn't have been part of the discussion and so we've come far not far enough but i just do want to say i appreciate that and for the kids out there i know they're not they're not watching board of ed meetings but if one is if one is i'll say i see you we see you and and we can do better for you so i want to put that out there thank you mr for uh the curriculum committee what what i had proposed last
127time and um i think uh mr brown's question was i haven't had a chance with you uh in my role just yet to have a a non-covet minute i came during kobit and so the the traditional what i would traditionally hope to be presenting to the board there hasn't been an opportunity for it because we have not been making curriculum changes we have not brought in new programs um so the what i proposed this year was can we use our time as a curriculum as a whole or the committee as a whole um to do what i what i think and what i've heard you say you'd like to see um with that said uh when you when you read the legislation there might be a question about okay so what is our district curriculum
128committee oh we have a district curriculum committee that's on a board committee but we have a curriculum leadership team that is made up of the department chairs that were hired to provide that direct oversight of curriculum and they work directly with me and they also work with two other committees and one would be the professional development and evaluation committee which we refer to as pdec and there's also a curriculum council at the high school so that's kind of a triangulated group of how our district curriculum committee functions so it's there what's not there as described in the cave memo which you have a fun preview of hasn't been released yet is that committee being a district committee where board members may sit on that committee um so that's a structure that we could change i
129have no personal opposition to that changing and i said it last time i'll say it again curriculum work is not secret i want nothing but for curriculum to be transparent so if that's what we feel like we need to do as a community i'm glad to do that and support it and i'll support whatever you'd like to do as a board i will say there's not been a second of me thinking that this board is not involved in curriculum and involved in all aspects of the success of the school district so if we're making changes collectively i would i would hope that it's part of the bigger picture not because of things that are happening right now and i don't know how else to say that in a more articulate way um the third piece
130is a sub a curriculum subcommittee that would be a board committee uh similar to the finance committee or the policy committee and to be quite honest if you'd like to do that absolutely fine but it's adding another layer of the same information so we have a district curriculum committee and we have a board subcommittee and ultimately as board you're still going to need to hear and see and approve those things so then the committee as the whole is going to see it so if you are the lucky board member say that got to be on the district curriculum committee i would assume you'd also be on the subcommittee and on this committee you truly would be going through that vetting process on a triple and so i don't i don't see the added benefit of
131that that's my personal and professional uh recommendation there so if it makes a mistake if um if the board is looking at two of those i would honestly ask this not do two of them it just seems redundant and uh given all the work that we're we are doing at the moment right to have two of those committees uh it's just like hey i have a heavy lift and b i just think it's redundant in that way and if you're asking for a preference uh we would say the preference would be the district uh committee because there you're going to be in the presence of uh our instructional leaders right so that would be our recommendation and if you're talking about a start date i would have a recommendation about that too but we can
132maybe talk about that as you discuss it just discuss this particular issue of establishing a committee all right thank you dr adley i will open it up to uh board conversation around this mrs mccammon i i'm first of all appreciative that we're having the conversation thank you because it's come up a couple times so i'm glad that we're talking about it um my interest in the conversation is um that i think that we're at a point in time where we actually have a fair amount of curricular work we potentially need to do we know we may not understand all of the scope of it and that we're but we're responding to covid and we know there may be some curricular adjustments as a result and they could be tricky um plus we always have some
133things coming from the state or other types of adjustments as we as we continue down our responsive curricular model um we haven't really tried on what a responsive curricular model looks like at the board table beyond um you know some of the presentations um i do believe that again drawing at a point in time moving forward that curriculum needs a focus and what i like about our subcommittees is that it does enable a small group of people to really focus and spend time on developing um i do respect that done inappropriately you don't want the same conversation to happen at a subcommittee level that happens at the board level i've seen that happen before and i think that's that is a waste of everyone's time but i do really like the idea of there being
134a small group who are very strongly tasked with focusing on our curriculum um and focusing on as the k memo talks about the connections to policy the cabe uh policy um sample policies have a lot that are really focused on curriculum right now we're deriving a lot of that content from our strategic plan but policy is a way to memorialize some of those things and we'd have someone at the board level who was prepared or a group at the board level who are prepared to have those conversations and to take them into policy um and so anyway i think i think this is a worthwhile conversation about having people focused on it defining a scope i don't know that we have to exactly understand the charge today it is something we could look at and
135develop um but i do strongly feel that we would have to commit that it really is a subcommittee that does work and that it isn't a committee that does the same work that then the board does two days later thank you mrs mccammon mrs stein um having sat on the old curriculum committee um and being on the board when two superintendents sort of felt that it wasn't an appropriate committee it was really to jill's point because of redundancy that what we were doing at the curriculum committee was just being regurgitated at the board table you know in policy and finance we drill down we we have those deep conversations and it's a much more abbreviated conversation so i fully support that concept if there is a curriculum committee i have two meetings left so my
136position on it isn't as important as the other board members what i would say is i did look on other district websites today just to see and about half the the towns in fairfield county have them half don't on one in particular and i think it happened to be ridgefield they say that they have a set number of meetings a year so whether you got we decide i'm so on board to do it as a whole or a subcommittee i think having a minimum number of curriculum updates will appease a lot of people and also give us sort of a framework so i just i like that idea versus saying we're gonna have some committee or we're gonna all be part of it but maybe it's four times a year maybe it's five times a
137year whatever it is come up and think about time of year and when those updates would make sense and you know in terms of i defer sort of to the board members that are staying on what you guys want to have i i am fine with the curriculum committee i i have said at the you know at our last retreat i think a few of us actually raised the idea that we really haven't addressed curriculum we had that conversation chris because of covid and and we need to have the conversations um uh you know i know there is a survey circulating around saying some of us didn't support it or did i'm putting it out there i'm fully supportive of discussing curriculum it's our job how we do it is for this board to decide
138thank you mr stein mr ceni first thank you for giving us this preview of the cabe uh you know memo i think it was well well written and a huge resource and probably fed into the memo that you both drafted to the board as well if i could take a minute and just read like one of the key aspects of this memo that i'm taking away and will be in support of a subcommittee and again a true subcommittee and i think this board has proven that we can operate subcommittees and not replicate the work perfect example is just the the finance report which took a fraction of the time of our finance committee meeting but why i think it's so important is this memo goes on to say curriculum encompasses everything presented to and provided
139for students under the jurisdiction of the school board and the superintendent of schools it is so important that it will inevitably cause controversy a major reason some boards may shy away from this critical area of responsibility boards need to be prepared and respond appropriately to curricular controversy when it arises i'm going to speak for myself but i've noticed a bit of controversy around curriculum most recently we have subcommittees that operate effectively i think it actually might drive productivity of this board i'm sorry it might create some a couple extra meetings or a few extra meetings for administration but i think guided properly and i think we have some great guidance already through your memos and the cave memos we can have a really effective uh subcommittee and i think we'll serve the board well in
140the community thank you mr c mrs offen so forgive me i have a few a few comments on this first thank you to mr tramberg tranberg for your comments about the board being involved in curriculum i take issue with the idea of the opening comments of the board getting involved in curriculum it is one of the three main things that boards of education do approve curriculum pre covered so mr trumberg you haven't had your moment in the spotlight yet dr dasilva brought us curriculum every year and we reviewed it as a board of the whole we can create a curriculum committee and it could be any iteration of what we've talked here and that is fine but i think first we need to establish we have been a proven curriculum we have been doing it
141as a committee of the whole and we can choose to have a subcommittee just like we do with finance or policy or anything else i think um i did not get the email i i don't know if i was inadvertently left off about a petition circle circulating however someone did send me the petition to sign um i don't know if anyone on the board asked got questions about it before it was written but again i think facts matter this board of education did not vote down a curriculum committee in september of 2020. we voted down an amendment to the agenda to discuss the issue that night i don't know if anyone remembers september 2020 we were trying to open up schools a communications committee was discussed a curriculum committee was not discussed so i just
142think before we go out and rile up the public we have to set the stage with the actual facts the facts are the board can decide for a curriculum committee i do think we should i think probably some board members are used to our the way we've been vetting curriculum some are not there may be other ideas too but there is going gonna take some training and guidance to understand what that means and how to do it so i think the administration has to come forward with a plan of how to get people prepared for that 2020 was not a year where we changed curriculum so the curriculum that we have had some controversy over has been in district so i think that i think that if we decide to do a curriculum committee that
143is a fine adventure and decision to go on we need to understand what the work is how it's changing from the work we do and then what people on those committee are expected to do because i assume the chair will assign members but we have met all of our statutory requirements we are not getting involved in curriculum the sport has been involved in curriculum mr tramberg may not have presented it but because we weren't changing curriculum in 2020 and i really do look forward to the curriculum that you bring forward to us i think mrs stein is correct it would be nice to have regular updates um and i think that if anyone knows dr dasilva they recognize those updates were thorough and fair and the board vetted a lot so if tonight we decide
144to move that down to a subcommittee or we decide to push that decision whatever it is that's fine work to do but let's not negate a lot of the great work that has been done and if there's if there's a need to be responsive let's just let's be responsive let's do the work thank you mrs zachman this is parents um i agree with a lot of what this zachary said and what i agree with a lot about everybody i said tonight colorful is one of our major jobs in this role is to make sure that the curriculum that we have in our schools is appropriate and meets stature statute and is what we want our children to be learning i think we have to be careful about the charge of a commit subcommittee if that's
145what we end up with we have to be careful that we are operating at a higher level it is not the drill the role of a subcommittee to vet every single piece of paper every single video clip that is presented to a student that is not the board of education's role i think there's some mis uh misunderstanding of what the role of the the board's role in curriculum is um i have heard both mr schramberg and dr adley suggest that the best use of their time and the best use of our time would be what was presented in the in the cave memo the district curriculum committee and i'm wondering if i'm wondering out loud if having a board member or two i think more than one is probably appropriate on that committee would that
146fulfill the same purpose of a subcommittee with an a is to take that further is it better to have board members on that district curriculum committee where they're actually talking about curriculum at the table with the instructional experts to ensure that the board members are we are elected to represent everybody to represent the entire electorate of darian is it better to have us sitting on that committee than on the subcommittee where we're getting reports and not necessarily engaging in the work thank you mrs parent mrs mccammon um the other thing i neglected to mention earlier when i was talking is that i think there's also maybe an opportunity for the curriculum subcommittee to also talk about special education we used to have special education separately and i know special education isn't necessarily a curriculum but
147there are there are potentially could be touch points um i do want to pick up on what mrs parent was saying and what administration we're saying about having a board member or board member serve on the committee the district committee i do think that serves a slightly different function in that i think that that's not as transparent yes the person would be representing the board but that wouldn't be the public wouldn't be able to see that and their fellow board members would not be able to see it so i'm not against it but i think it serves a slightly different purpose than than what a a subcommittee would be intending to solve um so i'm just throwing that out there thank you mrs mccabe this is ackman so i'll be quick dennis but i agree
148with mrs mccammon um those are different roles so a board is a proving curriculum and if it's going to function as mr ceni drew the correlation to the finance committee we don't sit with mr rudel and draw up the finances he comes and he presents it in the old curriculum model and this is prior to my time on the board it ended when michael harmon was chair um there were no district chairs but the assistant superintendent would come and sit with the board members and present what was going on and they would run through curriculum but they weren't designing and sitting on the district committee for it so possibly the model could be that the district chairs or department chairs i'm sorry common present to the board members on the committee curriculum changes and they
149vet it much like we do the financials we they ask the board questions the public can view it the public can ask questions so if if we're gonna run it in a model like we do policy or finance i would agree with mrs mccammon that that's a very different role than sitting at the district level um the district level because in some ways that's only going to be one or two points of view and you are going to repeat the same process at a board meeting so i would agree that if you're going to model it like a subcommittee of the board then you do it like a true subcommittee of the board and you have mr riddle comes and presents to the finance committee mr cyan does the policy committee whoever is the appropriate
150person comes and presents to the curriculum committee and another and that's the way it would work that is the way it would work that was actually exactly my point i think you need to have to repeat it i'm just going to say to me the the big part is is having it i think the advent of the the video has changed the game i think pre-video was everybody had to go to the meeting to understand the work now that we have video you can do something else watch the video at your leisure and be able to have the answers and as mr ceni said i think the subcommittees have run much better thanks to the the channel 79 and jeff and everyone here who tapes these things so thank you for that i think side
151note mrs ritchie made us tape all committee meetings before she was on the board of that but that has been a big bonus and i think that will help us do the the work of a curriculum committee to allow us to go deeper and understand because otherwise we'll be here till midnight every night and and i will say katie i think your point of of a structured meeting is brilliant have having it be like like put it on our master agenda and have have curriculum updates regularly and it's specified i think very good idea thank you mr maroney mr brown i want to make sure i don't overlook you in the bright lights of chicago no problem thank you very much duke i just would like to second um mr ceni's comments that i think
152we should have a subcommittee of the board to do this work and um one of the things i'm just looking through the meet minutes of a prior meeting and we did have this on action for i think we read it we did have this on action for regarding the formation of a curriculum committee so i'm glad we're finally getting around to doing this again as a board and i would welcome having this as a subcommittee of the board thank you thank you mr brown mrs ackman just a quick question so i think finances many of us have experiences and can read policy many of us have experience with and can read is there any does everyone feel comfortable if mr dineen wants to assign them to the curriculum for me that they would know their
153work and know what they're looking or is there some training i feel comfortable some of us have masters in education but i think it's a fair question right if you get assigned to the curriculum committee do you know what you're doing that's right i think to that point there's almost one question that was on my mind is there's almost a learning process or professional development process that maybe we could look at for that specific committee so mrs richie just um for chris thank you for all this information and if there is a board curriculum committee what does that do to the district committee that you have in place would you do the structure that's outlined here in the cave memo would if there is a board committee does that then change would you me i
154don't think you would need to have a board member on that committee because it seems a lot of redundancy there can i rephrase if we are you asking if we did if there was a board of ed subcommittee does there needs to be the district well like there does need to be the district because it already there already is right but we don't know i don't think we need to have a board member on that committee then because it seems to be a lot of repetitive no yeah i would say not necessarily i kind of think of it as if it worked perfectly it would be a funnel so the district curriculum committee is kind of doing the largest look and then a subcommittee would take a more fine grain and then the board event
155is ultimately um approving the summary of what the subcommittee moved forward um i from from the relationship i have with you so far i would feel like the full board would want to know what was happening in that curriculum subcommittee and so my hesitation is about that this is the most public setting that we have and my thought is that and i would welcome board members on the district committee because if the interest is in learning about the process that's where that happens and that's where you have professionals across content areas great levels of disciplines that do that work and discuss it and it would give you some insight into the the thinking that goes into curriculum there um i i just i i feel that the subcommittee and this whole board would be somewhat
156redundant and that's okay if that's that's my job and i'll and i'll do my job and i'll do it well um that's just my thinking now i i can't articulate how i would see the subcommittee being different than what i would guess you would all like to see as a whole board i mean again i go back to the cave memo and it's very specific how you would structure this and it says one or two members of the board may be appointed as liaison members of the district curriculum committee so there is a funnel aspect and we don't want to duplicate work i see maybe the chair of the subcommittee being the liaison if you will you know that person is going to be very busy and and qualified i'm looking at you sarah sorry
157with a grin um you know and and so i i think it you know again this community has asked for a bit more focus on curriculum you know again from all sides um and i think it would be a great tool to you know and maybe we find it redundant and then we adopt better practices as we go forward but we will uh i think we can vet certain things in the subcommittee and bring a more streamlined uh presentation to the board mrs stein i was just going to say there were times on the curriculum subcommittee when it was beneficial to have the subcommittee meetings and so those were times when we were bringing in a new math program and we looked at physical manipulatives here that weren't at the full board table right we
158had opportunities to sort of go deeper so i think it also is year to year right in terms of what we're doing curricularly are we having big initiatives are there new textbooks is there new science standards like for certain meetings yes um i don't know maybe you guys decide to try it for a year and if it's redundant then you've already established the fact that you have regular curriculum updates and maybe you go back to the full board but to me what i'm hearing is the community really wants it and it seems like several board members want it we've done it before and chris you have an opportunity to do it better you know and and knowing what the concerns are this is richie thank you i'm just curious katie since you have the history
159why was the subcommittee disbanded when it when dr brenner came in he felt that we didn't need a curriculum subcommittee he felt that the full board should be part of it and so we would have you know dr dasilva came in and she did do very thorough curriculum updates you know i think those of us on the board at the time felt like we were doing a good job reviewing curriculum and that dr dasilva was really bringing robust curriculum to the full board but you know the messages i'm hearing just doesn't sound like that's the direction that people want to go in let me switch over to mrs farren thank you mr stein i'm just going to throw out that there's the potential that after in november four of the chairs will be filled by
160different people on this board so i wonder if for this upcoming year do we go back to the more robust curriculum updates that we have not had in the past 18 months and think about more just more thoughtfully how this curriculum committee is structured what the charge is what the purpose is um so that we do it so we do it well and we do it we're not we're not floundering i think that the timing of it i'm just questioning the timing of it thank you mr parent mrs achman so to mrs ritchie's question because the curriculum committee has come up and and being chair it's it's come up at different times with different superintendents and the feeling at that time was almost the reverse of what we're hearing now was that it was only
161the people on the curriculum committee that really understood curriculum and so when the board was asked to pass curriculum a lot of members were like this is my statutory obligation and i don't know as much as someone else now mr moroney might be right now that we that committee meetings are taped and technology's evolved that might be solvable but it's it's funny to see the swing right that the board's now like oh we feel like it's been so dispersed that we really need a committee to drill down which shows you there's no right or wrong way to do it there's just different ways to do it so there's nothing wrong with trying something different um again i'd say when we went to a more responsive curriculum that makes it a little more different than a
162flat curriculum and and that's where i wonder if at least for some period of time or for the first curriculum updates pre-committee the whole board sees it and then people know is this really their bailiwick where they can get down and dirty when they want to get on that committee maybe in terms of mrs parent's timing we bring some curriculum in the next quarter so people really understand what it feels like what it might be like because a responsive curriculum is so different than other types of curriculum i don't know how board members feel but i think part of the concern before was the whole board wanted to be informed on curriculum and felt that they weren't and so now if we feel like the whole board maybe needs a little education on curriculum and
163people dig deeper i i just want to make sure everyone knows what they're looking at and understands the curriculum we currently have is there a way to maybe just make sure that when you form that committee that people involved know what they're doing thank you mrs zachman dr hadley uh so thank you for your discussion and uh again i reiterate i'm fully in support of governance and participation and oversight over curriculum completely i would say though if you're going to do to go from where we are to a new a new process i would say if you're going to do the curriculum committee great let's do that but i would not recommend two of these things that's just it's very unusual actually to have to they may recommend it and they may may say just
164not and it's very objective so i left like it is what it is um but in most districts you'll find that there's there's either one of the other um that there's either a board committee uh call a subcommittee if you want to call it that that is curriculum you want to bring people to that then we bring people to that i would also suggest that with the election uh i would honestly suggest that we transition this into potentially the new year is when we started because everybody's got planned to do you can't just put something in uh we have to accommodate that and make sure that we do it properly both with the training information a nice transition into it i i think that would make sense and i'm honestly have a bit supportive can
165i just add to that point on the timing in in previous years we have had some issues whether it was a curriculum subcommittee or not having curriculum come during budget time when it's a dollar number not talking about the actual program so i would just be mindful that you don't have big budget initiatives that are curricular meaning textbooks programs whatever and that's your introduction because to tara's point i don't think that's a great way to onboard the board into curriculum no and actually the process we've been working on there up until this year because we corrected was curriculum decisions were made after the budget which made no sense um so now it at least is front loaded as to anyway yes mrs mccammon um alan what did you mean when you say into the new
166year did you mean after november did you mean after january did you mean after well i was i was just thinking that uh january seems like a reasonable transition point get people on board uh we've been to training in terms of what we're doing and how we do it with the committee in transition because even just schedule scheduling these just not even but just even that alone that's going to be a challenge to schedule but the things that have to be changed cancelled other committees that we're working on i just think that it would be a reasonable transition period okay so thank you for clarifying um i think there's been a fair amount of discussion while we've been happy with you know certainly we have been approving curriculum there's been a fair amount of discussion
167about what the board wants to see in various kinds of curricular documents and um i think that's a discussion that can be very easily held by a subcommittee so i do think that there's some work to be done on i think there's an opportunity to really have a couple of people really focus on curriculum how we talk about it what we talk about really streamlining the work as it was used before and back to that point in the cave memo also creating a process for as notes boards need to be prepared to respond appropriately to curricular controversy when it arises i mentioned last week that this is the third uh controversy that we've talked about when we talked about the library uh display we talked about um the the uh israeli-palestinian materials now we're talking
168about some some materials lately so it does seem like this is something that does persist over time and it's an area that a subcommittee can focus on so i do respect your point about just you know making things happen um but i i i strongly feel that curriculum is an area that could use a couple people focused on it so i go ahead and then i'm gonna recap and move it along so i well i agree with mrs mccammon i actually think it's a subcommittee not a district committee if we're going to pick one um even your example is where i think that the board needs just some conversation of outlining what it is because i would say that display in the library wasn't curriculum right right i would say it was a display but
169mrs mccammon might rightfully argue i feel like that's part of curriculum and then and that's why curriculum's so nebulous it's even nebulous in actually how the statute is written so i think we need some common understanding if we're going to do this subcommittee and i would just really urge again i think you make a strong point of like well we have we some people know what they want to see well is there a board agreement on what they want to see and i don't say that to hold it up i say it to actually make it work because when it's the nine of us we can all kind of argue it out when it's a small group i think the communications committee came back felt like they did a lot of work and the board
170was like whoa what's this and so some people might have felt like they spun their wheels and did a lot of work and then it wasn't received and other people might have felt like they went too far so if we're going to do this i think that we do it and then we make sure it's really tight and defined or you know heart horse and cart decide which way you want to do it i personally think if you're going to do it you do a subcommittee not a district level and then i think we start the work but everyone has to know what what we're agreeing it is it's not every piece of paper and the district is not curriculum thank you mrs zachman this is richie and then we'll mr and i'll give you
171one more opportunity and then we got to move it along so just to add a concern as the discussion has progressed sub-communities don't make decisions the board does so i think also when you're forming this committee we have to be very cautious about what the charge of this committee is and to ensure that the decisions are made at the sport table and not at the subcommittee level so thank you mrs richie any last comments mr brown yeah real quick i just want to follow up uh from the section that uh mr ceni read the curriculum encompasses everything presented to and provided for students under the jurisdiction school board so whether it was in the library or whether it was on the playing fields or whether it was in you know in the cafeteria that's on
172us so i just would like to reiterate that point thank you although the clause there is under the jurisdiction of the school board thank you mr brown i'd like to make a motion sir yes can i recap some of the things that i think i heard to start just to wrap it up quickly so mr tranberg first thank you very much for the presentation dr adley for all the information i think it is important to go back to some of the earlier points that you said we have been in a pandemic there have been no real changes to curriculum there was a lot of work that was being discussed before susie da silva left and there's a lot of things in motion but curriculum has not changed i think that's been part of the challenge
173is we haven't had curriculum updates to the board and we're going to have new board members coming on board um what i heard and some comments from mrs stein and other members around the board i'm almost thinking we need a curriculum master agenda so people understand where we are in the life cycle of curriculum whether it's existing curriculum that may or may not come up for changes or whether it's new curriculum that people are bringing i think the other component to this is we've invested a lot in people in terms of these department chairs and curriculum people um julie droller and those roles that you know we've got the right people in place but i think what i'm hearing from a board perspective would like to understand more how it's organized how it's working what's
174the flow what's the process even i think sometimes an inventory of what's out there from a curriculum standpoint and then how does that curriculum move or go through the process even in terms of what you do over the summer with curriculum right so my recommendation would be that we get a we get a vote a motion from the board on the concept of having a curriculum committee i think it's a challenging time right now as we go into people going off the board new people coming on the board but spend time over the next month or so getting information that will organize what that curriculum committee looks like what its charges what its function is while we have good people on the board over the next month or so before anything changes we can pull
175that information together mr seaney can i make the motion make a motion mr seaman i'd like to um make a motion that the durian board of education establishes a curriculum sub committee thank you mr senior do i have a second second mr brown made a second all those in favor hi that is unanimous all right so thank you all as always good conversation um again i think we all agree we need a curriculum subcommittee i think what we really agree on is there's a lot of work that has to be done to understand what that committee is going to do how it's going to function who the people are that are going to be on it and then we'll continue the dialogue of the coordination mr tranberg with what you do at the district level
176and i think that's all important work all right thank you very much for the conversation um we will move on uh to first reading and discussion of proposed revised board of education policies policy 1075 green cleaning protocols policy 1200 use of school facilities policy 1225 visitors policy 1250 school volunteers student interns and other non-employees policy 5220 student discipline policy 5175 bullying prevention and intervention proposed new board policy 9280 student representatives on the board of education policy c 19-1 health and safety policy 9310 meeting conduct i will turn it over to mrs stein and miss sion in an effort not to be redundant and because you all watched our riveting policy meeting two fridays ago i think the quickest way to go through this is we can just touch on each policy i had received two
177questions from mr moroney but they're on the student representative to the board of ed that we can address at that point but i haven't received other board questions so marge if you want to just quickly we can go one by one and if you have a specific question let us know um marge will just give a high-level update so i think this sign you'll work through the cover memo i think it's good to go right so the green cleaning protocols it's the same provision that we added last year for code but shipment is recommending that we make it permanent it just makes clear to the public that we are able to use any cleaning product that the federal law allows any questions policy 1200 uses school facilities adds back the provision that expired on june
17830th which requires people using our facilities to abide by any health and safety protocols and wait was one of those edits the y there um yes yeah so the one edit we made at the subcommittee level is the y was on a uh separated out from other town um usage so we put them on the same line so that they were same priority so i'll ask as you go through these so we don't so we're since we're focused on one at a time any board questions or comments on either those two policies all right go ahead and decide so policies 12 25 and 1250 both again reinstate the provision that expired on june 30th which requires volunteers and visitors and non-employees to abide by health and safety protocols also shipman and goodwin recommended that we
179add because it is best practice that certain volunteers those who are alone with students or go on overnight field trips um submit to background checks every five years questions or comments on that policy okay go ahead so student discipline again adds back the provisions that expired on june 30th which make it clear that any virtual school platform is part of the school then the student would be subject to discipline if they violated any of our standards of con conducts and mrs mccann's suggestion and we did check with shipman and goodwin it does provide that expulsion hearings can be had virtually parents do have the right to now request the policy this is what we added a virtual hearing but it is still up to the superintendent to decide whether to grant that request based on
180the totality of the circumstances there is a strong presumption to have expulsion hearings in person okay thank you questions or comments from the board all right thank you go continue policy 5175 bullying prevention and intervention the led the legislature made significant changes in the definition of bullying in on the composition of the school safe climate committee and certain other requirements of things that need to be posted on the website these are all mandated by a change in law questions or comments okay thank you continue so student representatives on the board of education we did add a provision that says that um family members of sitting board of education members um cannot be chosen for these positions and also we made sure that the if the student is subject to discipline in the same calendar year
181that they're ineligible this lines up with the athletic policy okay questions or comments dennis do you want to ask here mr moroney so i had two questions one is on number six student representatives will be seated at the board of education meeting at the board table at each board of education meeting should that be uh should or what if we have a virtual meeting will they do they need to sit there and my second question was um student student representatives will provide updates to the board at the start of each meeting should that be a should as well in case if we have a meeting january 3rd we come back from vacation maybe there's nothing to present do they have to present something because it says so i think it was worded that way in
182the model policies that we looked at because we they wanted to make sure that the student representatives had a role that's front and center but we could look at changing that so i understand what you're saying and if the board wants we can look at changing that language so we could change will to may so it's not with that i don't know if it's a big deal to anyone else but for me it just kind of jumped out to me so i guess the only amateur that's right the only intention of that would be that the same way as a board member here will set the table but you could be sitting remotely if if if because it's aligned eye right if it's necessary to do that so i don't think it would preclude it
183but there's a better way of saying it certainly would you consider that i think the intention of the will is so that at some point the student can't be mitigated to the audience by the board so you know if let's say future boards are like well you have to be honest you're not one of us that it by policy they must be there so i think i think we just need to think about that if we do the may i mean i i hear your point i think it's more to make sure the student has standing than to force even if their report is i have no report that meets the requirement of a report but it might protect any board from mitigating the student or relegating the student during a meeting not mitigation this
184is the comment uh thank you for adding the the family uh line in i think that makes a lot of sense uh the way it's written you could have however two student representatives both of whom are related i'm probably okay with that as a person but i wanted to mention it if you had a senior and a junior just to make sure the board's okay i actually didn't hear that uh i will have a senior and engineer at the same time technically if i'm not sitting here both of them could serve on the board um i'm just confirming that we're okay with that i think it's fine but i just wanted to say it out loud but you could have siblings siblings yes it's possible yes everyone alright with that okay anything else around the
185student representatives on the board all right good so policy c191 health and safety protocols this reinstitutes the policy that the board enacted last year um and expired at june 30th it's the same wording as the policy from last year questions or comments on that last one and finally meeting conduct um allows the board the maximum flexibility under the current executive order which will expire in april of 2022 to hold board meetings remotely and it does include an update to the policy that says that smoking is not allowed in any room in which board meeting is selling questions or comments on that we do these as a group um i think we have to vote on them next time say that again i believe we vote we vote next time it was just our first discussion
186good thank you all right so this will be back for a vote at the next meeting thank you so we move along to further discussion and possible action on board master agenda for august 2021 february 2022 dr so this has this this has been revised actually one of the that includes actually pushing back a little bit the school psychologist because originally schools to college is on here at the end of the day uh it just was not possible to collect the data that you would have wanted to collect in that time period um there were a couple of other suggestions so if those would like to be put on a table i'm happy to consider those teleports we'll be happy to consider them for any amendments to this there is one um that has come
187up um it is the update or the expiration of the agreement on the uh dhs field and the lights so that should be added to the agenda sometime in uh early october as that expires i believe in january that needs to be added um mrs achman well i'm just wondering and given that you have that update as well should we maybe push this off for action um because we just asked for curriculum updates to also come in here and prior to budget so maybe we should i don't think it matters if we maybe push this one more meeting cycle we could add in the lights renewal and we could add in um a curriculum update if mr tremberg thinks it's doable or if he could come back and tell the board why it's not doable
188you don't have to have an answer tonight i'm just saying it would give us some time rather than amending the master agenda yep i'm fine with that and then mr rudel the only other thing that came up too and i just i don't recall from our discussion um we were going to make some accounting changes to the student activity account in terms of gate receipts is that something that in the administration's view we need more conversation on or are you set with that being part of the upcoming budget cycle i think though excuse me i think the plan was to bring the student activity manual to the policy committee yeah right um and then have those edits along with a couple other edits within that and then it would go forward all right so that
189needs to be added to the agenda also mrs mccammon is the um forgive me if i'm just not seeing it the um enrollment the the enrollment projections that we talked about usually they're malone in the room but we're doing just in-house is that in here um i don't i don't know that it is where's my camera so if it's not we'll add that in so we typically have those beginning of october it will be the superintendent's version oh like so many other years alan and i are going to keep going back and forth on us good any other yes mr ceni i think the foyer review came up good point good point so we should uh build in a regular review of the foil log into the agenda and i think one should be sometime
190this fall good anything else and so let's move this to um a decision for the next meeting and anything else that comes up in the meantime uh please let me know good thank you uh we'll move on to um action items appointments uh resignations and retirements ms scion we are fully staffed with all of our classroom teachers we continue to have some movement in the non-certified staff but that's pretty typical okay great any questions or comments on par great i will move to accept the par motion mrs richie second by mrs ackman all those in favor aye that is unanimous thank you mr brown we will move on michelle back to our public comment good evening if you would like to speak during public comment please click the participants icon on the bottom of your
191zoom screen next click the ray stand option the facilitator will identify you please state your name and address you will have up to three minutes to comment would you like to start in person yes let's do it this time so do we have any in person thank you [Music] hi my name is katie lublin and i live at 24 maplewood drive um and i just had one comment tonight that um i wanted to say thank you to mr tranberg for his um wonderful comments of support to our students today um i can't tell you how important that is as a parent to know that um our school leadership um will act in that way and um go so far as to say publicly um what they believe so thank you for that thank you very
192much kate laurie olson 16 little brook road um i just have a few comments um thank you for having the curriculum discussion thank you for being considerate and civil to each other um it did strike me while i was in this meeting that some people were talking about this side and that side and i just want to remind everybody in this room that we're all on the same side uh we're all here because we're all on the same side so thank you lori we're good in person all right we'll move to zoom you were recognized and unmuted hi uh can you hear me this is clara we can hear you clara right um i just wanted to say that i'm happy that you decided on a curriculum subcommittee this evening i um just also wanted
193to point out i heard some comments about previous curriculum committees being considered redundant i was on a curriculum committee when i was on the board of ed for probably eight years and under four superintendents and never was there a complaint that the work was redundant so i just wanted to point that out um the most important thing about the time on the curriculum committee was that it provided a time for a deep dive into what was being discussed as possible curriculum initiatives and most importantly it brought in the community into the process because having the subcommittee meetings open to the public allowed for people in the community parents to come in and to express their opinion either publicly or even privately and those thoughts were shared some things were presented as i think opinions were
194always presented but uh some ideas were taken uh into consideration and um but just made for a better process all around so i did want to share that um based on my experience thanks again for all your work good night thanks clara clara would you remind us of your address please clara do you just hear a dress please we can get that we can find it i think it's darian michelle there are no more raised hands at this time okay again i want to thank everyone uh in the audience and everyone on zoom mr tranberg i will thank you again personally for your comments um and the board well done and well said thank you so much um and again thank you for the board conversation i may have a motion to adjourn mr ceni
195second by mrs stein thank you all and have a good evening