Board of Education - Monthly Meeting - 4.9.2025

001call the East Academy Board of Education um meeting to order. This is April 9th. Jackie, can you mute yourself? You are muted. Okay. Yeah. Yep. That was perfect. All right. Um can I have a call to order? Um pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. In case of exits um or emergencies, there's two exits on either end. You can take a right or a left and follow yourself out. Uh Patty, I' I'd like to make a motion to add to the agenda tonight. Um, at this time, uh, the motion would be, uh, about last night's public hearing and the current stand on the 2526 budget. I would second

002that. Any discussion? All in favor? I. All right, let's add that in right now because we have a very hefty um, schedule this evening. Um I'm going to start this off with um after last night's meeting um I had uh spoken with a few board members and um they requested us having a conversation in regard to our support um for the upcoming budget. Um this morning I sent out an email to uh Selectman Haynes and Chairman Gellson and I'm just going to read it in case anyone did not see this. Um as the board of selectman prepares to call for the upcoming town meeting to move the board of finance proposed budget to referendum. I'm running on behalf of the board of education to inform the inform you that the board of education members have

003requested to add an agenda item to this evening's board of education meeting. This agenda addition will take place at the meeting this evening by standard rules of order. The purpose of this agenda item is to review and discuss the outcome of last night's public hearing and determine whether the board of education will support the proposed budget at referendum. This request for discussion is in direct response to the actions and comments made by the board of finance during their meeting immediately following the public hearing. specifically concerning the $600,000 reduction to the board of education budget. The clear disconnect between the board of finance decision and the concerns voiced by the public at the public hearing is deeply troubling. There there should be a significant concern regarding the potential impact this has on the public perception and

004the referendum outcome. Additionally, I am highly concerned that the collaborative trust that it should exist between the board of education, board of selectmen, and board of finance is now severely damaged. The board of education is taking this matter seriously and is committed to acting in the best interest of the community and its students. Best regards. So, um, I'm going to kind of start it off and then have you guys talk because I think we have things that we want to say. When you're elected by the people, it is to do the work of the people. And even though you are elected to one board in town, it's generally understanding that you are going to work collaboratively with other boards. Respect each other's boards and the roles and the responsibilities. This is the only way that

005the talent can function. I strongly believe that the board of education has acted in good faith uh to support to support all the aspects of the town and to be good stewards of the monies that have been allowed us in our budget. On March 10th, Dr. Drio presented the board of education budget to the board of finance. She was asked to come back with testing scores, enrollment, and staffing levels. On March 20th, the board of education budget was again on the board of finance schedule along with public works which was postponed at the last minute. Same thing happened last year too. Dr. Jabrio answered all the questions and more including questions on the athletic trainer capital and prek. Jackie and your board member Rose Marie Evans, Joshua Strucker, Cara Thompson, and Mike Callahan spoke during

006the public comment. I had met with Todd uh two times before this because I was traveling and um I couldn't get there for the dates. Both times, March 10th and the 20th, the Board of Education was on their agenda. On March 22nd, I was still traveling and was alerted that the board of finance met cut our budget by 600,000 and was asked to watch the meeting. The board of education was not on that agenda. Nor was there any indication that action that action would be taken at for a vote at that meeting. Matter of fact, it was clearly stated at that meeting that a vote was supposed to have taken on the next Monday. The March 22nd meeting was listed as a special meeting. And item F did say other budget discussion items as needed.

007Nowhere did that did the agenda say possible action or indicate a vote would take place. The board of education had no ability to respond because we were not notified. The vote on March 22nd, in my opinion, was a violation of FOI, adding in insult to injury. Last night, board of finance members stated that he had not heard from anyone. How does one expect to hear from the public if the public is not informed that their budget is on the on the agenda and is being cut? I along with fellow board members watched the March 22nd uh second workshop and I was appalled by the laughter and the comments at the expense of the school district, the students and the staff and even more so last night. I addressed some of the comments in my speech

008last night, not just to defend the board of education budget, but to ensure that the community had the right information. I believe I did it in a professional manner without calling out anyone's arrogant or ignorant behavior. As several board members know, I really struggled with my comments last night. I rewrote them about four times. because my anger at how the board of education budget was received by the board of finance kept coming out after listening to the public last night and the response from the board of finance. I often kind of thought today should I really have changed it? Board of finance is not listening to the public. However, I believe we must. We did not fill that room and fire up the parents regardless of common sense we have or don't have. There were

009parents there that I didn't even know. People stating that they want to move out of town. I heard three and we wonder what is causing our drop in enrollment. I think it's time that we start looking at some root causes. When I saw a grown man at the podium trying to gain composure last night talking about his struggles, I don't think this board can sit idle. Matter of fact, I'm going to ask Teresa to work with the school where the children are um so I can get his name and email address. I want to set up a meeting with him and I also would like to set up a meeting with the other parent about his concerns about AP. I also had tears in my eyes with one of the seniors that spoke. If anyone

010knew that man in fourth grade, you would have too. The only reason that child or that student is successful is because of the nurturing and the staff and mostly at the high school level. And I have to say much of that came through arts and the theater and music. I heard loud and clear a a student that spoke last year only to be accused of someone else running her speech and others advocating for more in school. They are the reasons we're here and the reasons that we fight for our budget. At this point, I want to hear from each board member regarding their thoughts. I feel like we're at crossroads. We want to support the town. We should support the town, but it needs to be a two-way street. I got up to speak last

011night and although I ran out of my three minutes uh time just basically getting to the points of why we need the school budget to be supported. I couldn't help but continue on watching the the um excuse me board of finance meeting that followed the public meeting. The cavalier attitude and the tone that was used when addressing the board of education members who spoke was outrageous. Laughing at board members, volunteers is unbelievably unprofessional. We are all doing the same job for the taxpayers. Jeff Corbett claimed that their minds were made up before coming to the public meeting. Melanie Coley got that out of him during the meeting that followed. Any discussion of concern by the public undid all the work to get to their foregone decision. So when exactly was the public or the board

012of education supposed to rebut this decision? The next available public meeting after they made their decision was the public hearing. Melanie Kle rooted out this comment made by Jeff Corbett. When Cara got up to speak, Joe Corvette, sorry. When um when Cara got up to speak, another member of the board of finance started laughing at her. This is unacceptable. Unacceptable. Um, last night I spoke during the public hearing portion and my prepared words and it was about public education which I think fell on mostly deaf ears especially on the board of finance side when I came up for the board of finance meeting aggressively. I can't sit there as a volunteer, as a parent of those kids in the school system, and listen to somebody make lies. I'm not naming this person, but it's public.

013It's on YouTube lying about people not coming to board of know, nobody comes to board of finance meetings when in fact, I've been present at that uh March 10th and March 20th. So, and I spoke at the March 20th one, I believe. So, I don't appreciate lying and I don't think any public member in this town should appreciate somebody who is sitting on a board and flat out lying. Um, I also, like I said, I don't have much, but I, you know, I pulled out the citizens guide today, and you know what this says on it right here? Your voice matters is literally what that says. Your voice matters. You listened to two hours of people at the public hearing and I don't think it it fell on completely deaf ears of the six members

014in the board of finance. They don't care. They didn't care at all. There was two people I believe in that two hours that said anything like not for the board of education budget, but everyone else does. We represent as a board in the school system children ages three to 22 and some literally do not have a voice and that's what we're here for and I'm deeply disappointed in the board of finances behavior. You know I got up and spoke last night. I spoke to special education and I thought I presented a pretty detailed picture of what teachers are facing right now of what students are facing when it comes to the shortage and how we were treated by the state at the state level. And I have to say I was totally disappointed in the

015tone of the board of finance. Um particularly when the behavior that just became bombastic and disrespectful. Um the disagreement I understand is part of a democratic process but the way that it is expressed matters. It matters a lot and civility has to be the standard when we're all here serving the same community. Like Patty said, I I after watching the rest of this meeting, um I have to say there was a lot of posturing and it was just disturbing to watch. We're all taxpayers. We're all concerned with fiscal responsibility. And the insinuation that the board of ed is anything less than responsible or transparent, it's unfair and it's demoralizing, especially to those of us who have to volunteer our time, who choose to volunteer our time to serve this community. the comments that were suggested

016that the out I mean the the comments that I heard last night to Kira's point to me suggested that the outcome was predetermined um if there was no intent to genuinely listen to us um you know then the public's participation and a number of people brought this up you know this participation was basically reduced to performance and not a meaningful exchange. Um, one audience member asked an important question. Why invite the community back if there's no willingness to hear it? I mean, we can't serve our town unless we restore a sense of mutual respect here. And we don't have to agree on everything, but we do owe professionalism and integrity. And I recall a resident asking a crucial question at the hearing. Um, if the budget is voted down, how do we know why? Was

017it because the board of ed didn't get enough funding or was it because the increase was too much? And this is a real concern. This is a valid concern. And it illustrates the total catch 22 here that we're placed in. How are we going to know If the board of finance has already made up its mind as one of the members so eloquently well not eloquently put um then the promise of considering what we've heard it's totally it's totally hollow. The process has to be genuine. Right? When community members show up in a large number to advocate for education and they're told that their input will be taken seriously, then we have to honor that, right? Otherwise, we're going to risk not just damaging our budgets, but the public's trust in this whole process. That's

018all I have to say. Um, I'm going to keep mine pretty short and sweet. Um, A lot of you shared I share the same sentiments. Um, last night came off as really arrogant and it should have been really thoughtful and considerate. Um, hearing I think Patty you said 40% of our teachers live in this town. They pay taxes and then they get paid by those taxes. And so everyone is concerned about fiscal responsibility. Um, it is of utmost importance to to know your audience that you're speaking to. Um, and to be respectful of people, the conversation, while a challenging one, could have gone a lot differently with some of the same messages communicated in a different way that could have been a lot more effective. Um, and so I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed because people watch

019that. I also personally spoke on social media and we found that there was a social media post put out by a member that was really upsetting after standing up there. Obviously, it wasn't heard at all. Um it's not professional. We're volunteers and we all have to work very hard to um be members in the community and also members of the board of education. and I um expect the board of finance to to uphold that as well. So, I'm disappointed and I'm sad. Um the economy is difficult right now, but the conversation at baseline could have gone a lot differently. John, I'm going to bounce back to you, Gabe. You're welcome to speak to this if you want to, but there's no pressure for you to. So, you can say pass without anything. I You're welcome

020to, but I don't want you to feel pressure. Appreciate it. But I think I'll pass. I don't have anything. Sean, yeah, this last 20 almost 24 hours now been pretty uh, you know, confusing. Like last night I came there and I had a the prepared speech just as I did before to get up and say a whole bunch of stuff. And you know uh over the course of the evening I I was just actually amazed by how many I was so proud actually of how many people stepped up and you know heard the things that they were saying you know all types of uh different walks of life and everything. I I couldn't have been more proud and it just took all the words from me and I I really I so I didn't even

021speak because everything that I wanted to say I felt like it had already been said and um so much more and uh when the meeting when the town meeting ended I was walking out of there I had to leave real quick and come back and I was so proud I felt so good about it and with that said though you know going into the meeting and us as the board and regard to the $600,000 cuts and of course that is absolutely extremely difficult but us as as a board we're in and working together we you know prepared and have talked to to do what was necessary um to make those decisions. Um and then just coming coming back to that which which was so confusing just coming back and taking a seat and then listening

022you know you hear hear the people some of the gentlemen had said what is the process now you know and what is the process now that we've heard all of these now what now what happens and then you know the finance chair you you directly answered to them. We will we will take that into consideration and we we have heard the people. We will take that into consideration. And it seemed like it was 20 minutes later after everybody had left that we had heard nothing that nothing we've heard and our minds are made up and and uh there's no reason that we should be changing anything. And I was just what what is going on? There's nothing. I didn't understand and it's it was very very difficult and then yes I don't need to go

023into what had happened the words were said just I I am just extremely disappointed in the whole scenario I really really am over the last year and a half that I've been on the board we have done nothing but try our main mission in life has been to um repair the board of educations and uh in this to this town our aura transparency, the way we present ourselves to the town, and I felt like we were doing a, you know, great thing, a great service, and and it showed because the amount of people that show showed up. Um, even from the the years be before, you know, it was like great showing up and we were making we're making a lot of progress. And then to end it off of that is just like mindblowing,

024you know, and especially that just so disappointed all day today. I've had this gut-wrenching feeling and it's just like that's I feel like that set us back so much, you know, and I could go on and I'm just like it's just I am just so disappointed really. I just I can't believe that happened. Jim, I um I'll try to keep this efficient, but it I'm not convinced it'll be brief. Um I am confused because I'm not sure what damage was worse, the damage to the budget or the damage to the working relationship between the board of ed and the board of finance. Having said that, and I said this to several people last night and a couple people I spoke to today, I have a lot of respect for a lot of the people on

025the board of finance. And I except for one individual, I'm really not angry with any of them. Here's what I saw. I saw exhausted people who want to get out and get done. And we've all been there. We've all been in a position where we're too tired to function properly and then we do things that are really clumsy at best and in some cases much worse. I would suggest a couple things. One thing I would suggest is if you're that tired, and I think that's legitimate. They've been working hard and I respect that. If you're that tired, don't make the damn decision that time. Go back later. I I worked for a superintendent who used to counsel me all the time to to pull my jets basically. And she was right. And she would look

026at me and say, "Jim, give yourself the gift of time, guys. Give yourselves the gift of time. Give yourselves the opportunity to break free from the exhaustion and think. One, I think it was a teacher got up afterwards and pretty aggressively addressed the meeting and said, "What was the point of all this?" It was a fair question. Um, I think, like I said, some things were clumsy. And I'm I'm going to cite one example. I don't want to embarrass anyone, but I think this is a a good example of what I mean when I say that I think they were innocent and ill intent, but they were exhausted and they weren't thinking. One individual from the board of finance said made the comment that they had to suck it up. And I think that person

027was talking about the board of finance taking the hit for people be being unhappy. That was how I took it. We had a student go up and address this individual. Nobody says I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. Last night, several of my colleagues got up at the end of the meeting and were furious. Clearly furious. I've seen Kira upset. I've never seen Patty Stricker like that. That was like one for the ages. I wish I had it on film. Um, it's on YouTube. It's on film. But I got up there and I'll tell you frankly, my plan was to say what I had to say, but be very careful, be be very calm, and then make fun of her later because she got mad. And I was the one who was sort of

028being reasonable. And I took one look at a certain smug sob and I lost it. I know. I lost it. And I called that person a fool. Well, there were two fools in that room and I was one of them. So, I will say right now I was wrong and I'm sorry. I It was inappropriate and I should have shown better character myself. Having said that, I'd like to suggest that the board of finance could have avoided all of this if they had been more skillful. And one in particular individual had kept his mouth shut. if they had been more skillful in the way they spoke or if not that if they had given us just a couple of hundred,000 as a token of respect to all the people they're speaking and saying because you

029know what let's be fair these guys are caught in the middle. They got a shrinking tax base while they've got a growing tax demand. It's not easy work for them folks. This is hard. They're they're not going to make anyone happy and they're not going to come out clean no matter where they go. And I get that if they had given us a couple hundred thousand dollars, everybody would have walked out saying, "Hey, look, they did what they could." I'd like to suggest, and I'm not sure that this what I'm about to say is even legal, and if it's not, then obviously it goes nowhere. I'd like to suggest that the appropriate way to address this is for the board of finance to call a special meeting They've had time to reflect. They've had the

030gift of time now. They're getting feedback from people on the board. I don't think they're evil people. I think they're exhausted people that were doing the best they could. And let them throw a couple hundred,000 back into our budget. It will show goodwill. It re restore a little faith. It'll suggest, you know, we're not always great, but we're trying. I think that's what's needed. And more than the money, I think what matters is the symbolism because right now the relationship between the board of education, the teachers community, the administrators community, the kids community, and the board of finance is broken. And that is not any way to run a town. And I don't believe for a minute that that's anything anyone on the board of finance wanted or sought. I really don't believe that they

031intended that. I I really don't. So, I'm I'm trying to give all of us a face saving way out of this crisis. So, for what it's worth, so my understanding last night is that obviously at the end of the meeting, the board of finance made a motion to approve the budget as it was presented. And then the board of selectmen met after that. And I'm looking back at selectman Hanks in the background there. So she can nod her head yes or no. That would be great. That um did you do a call for town meeting? So they did a call for the town meeting and so I don't know. So what that means is a call for the town meeting is is the call to put it to referendum. The way that that works is

032that's basically ceremonial if you will when this goes to the town meeting because at the town meeting it will read to discuss but not act upon the budget. So the train has left the station if you will that this budget is going to referendum. Well now go ahead. Sorry. No. Oh, Jackie, I am so sorry. Jackie, can do you want to say anything? Oh, you're muted. She She's moving locations. Okay. I'm sorry, Jackie. Take yourself off mute, kid. Take yourself off mute. We just need to turn up the volume first. Can you Can you speak up? Hold on. Cindy's coming. All right. Can you hear Is this better? Can you hear me now? We can hear you now. Yes. Okay. Sorry, that was loud. Um, I just had a few disjointed thoughts that I just

033wanted to add because I agree with what everybody else has said. Um, and you might be surprised that I'm a little bit softer than most. Um, I am happy honestly that the members that spoke freely did so. So then we I speaking myself know where they're coming from and who I'm working with and who I should speak with uh further. I did not attend the meeting last night unfortunately. I wish that I had. I listened to it today. Um, I do want to touch on the fact that while we're discussing how we feel about last night's meeting, I think we should tread lightly on telling another board what they should be doing. Because speaking for myself, if I was a part of a disjointed meeting and I had some other boards telling me and us

034what we should be doing, I would be less likely to work with them. Um, hold on, please. [Music] Um, I do agree that in hindsight it would have made the most sense to just put a pin in the budget meeting last night and meet further. Um, I think some of the members kind of just did the best of what they could at the moment because they were clearly being bullied by other members of the board as we all saw and need to take that into consideration. Um, I'm very very proud of the students who stood up and spoke because as a grown-up I get very scared to speak in public. Um, and I think they're really brave and awesome and we need to be very proud of them. [Music] Um, and I guess I just

035want to finish with one. How do we get a question on the ballot of why somebody votes no on the budget? I'm not sure of how to do that. Um, if that's something we can talk about. And second and final, our signs in our town say proud of our schools. they do not say proud of our bonds and proud of our debts. So, I think that's something we need to keep in mind moving forward um with the budget process. Thank you. Thank you, Jackie. Um Dr. Jabrio, would you like to make any comments? And if I may. Yes. Thank you. Um, it's of great concern that I have to address the mistreatment that I witnessed last night. I would first like to begin by acknowledging the voices and the expressions of deep gratitude for the

036outpouring of support from the community in favor of education and the future of our children. Your voices, your passion, your dedication to support education was heartfelt for me and for many others. And yet, it is with a heavy heart that I must also address the comments made directly to the public that the concerns you expressed had no impact on his stance. It was deeply disheartening to hear such a statement. As a community, we know that every voice matters and every perspective is vital in ensuring that our students receive the best possible education. It is our collective effort focused on actions for a better future for all our children that makes the difference. The public outcry reflects the love and investment placed on our school community. It is a call for understanding, a reminder of our

037shared responsibility to provide our children with the resources and opportunities they deserve. As we move forward, it is essential that we continue to advocate for what is best for our children in a constructive and respectful manner. What is said has repercussions and causes harm. We cannot be discouraged, however, by one individual's dismissal of wellfounded concerns. Instead, let us continue to build on the momentum created by all who care deeply about education. Your engagement and commitment does make a difference for the community, for your children, your grandchildren, your nieces, nephews, neighbors, for the community's children. We are nearing an accreditation visit by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, also known as NEAMS. This audit requires us to demonstrate that our community supports their school district. This includes demonstrating commitment to capital needs as well

038as providing adequate and dependable financial resources. We are making every effort to be able to prove that our district is reputable and thriving. Teachers and administrators at the high school are putting in time to be a part of NEAS committee visits to other districts. I also just less than two weeks ago was on a NEAS visit. I stayed overnight away from my own family to help prepare us. My point to all is that when we remain steadfast in our belief that working together matters and together we create a thriving supportive and empowered educational environment and that's what families want and that's what they deserve and that's what the community deserves. We are committed to this work. I don't want us to forget that. Thank you. Patty, can I add one thing? Of course you can.

039I apologize. Um, I I want to make clear, and Patty touched on some of this in her comments. I want to make clear that the discomfort on part of the board didn't start last night. It started at a board of finance meeting which apparently was a violation of FOYA um and which they were making decisions about our budget without us knowing about it. And in which the the first selectman referred to teachers as rapid educators and her finance person said that the um benefits which are normal standard employee benefits that they get are crazy. Um Miss Haynes, since you're here, would you like to apologize for this one? Now there's no public comment. There's no public comment and I'm done. Okay. I think so. As I said, I think that we are at a crossroads

040here and we all know the repercussions of not passing a referendum because that doesn't just hurt the board of education, it hurts the entire town. At the same time, I'm having a very hard time and I think the board is of ignoring the comments and the requests of the public. So, where do we go from here? My suggestion is that I try to set up a tribe board meeting with board of finance, board of selectmen, and board of education and talk about solutions. Each of us come and speak. Hopefully that would help because um I'm not sure what's going to happen with referendum at this point. Can I ask a question about this? Sure. Um given that we've already had the public meeting and the board of select persons have forwarded the budget to the

041town meeting for referendum and we're beyond comment period, right? So, how does the tri board meeting resolve the concerns? That's just a question. It's not a judge thing. You can still have meetings. I know understand that, but there's no things, right? Well, that's exactly that's where we are at because that vote also with the board of finance last night took place before there was an audience of citizens. just I I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that and and again, if it was a foyer, I think it was an accidental foyer violation. I don't think anybody intended anything, but if it was, it seems to me that the recognition of that fact provides grounds, and I'm not a lawyer. I can't be sure if this is true, but it seems to me it provides

042grounds for the the the board of finance to go back and kind of do a doover. I would encourage them to contact a lawyer if they're interested. Pat, uh, Jackie, if you're listening, I'm not trying to tell them what to do. I'm trying to find a way out. Um, the alternative, frankly, is I think it'll get voted down. And if it does, I'm afraid the result's going to be bigger cuts. Yeah. The I have the agenda right here from the March 22nd meeting. It was call to order, pledge of allegiance, the minutes, and then it was um public works, general highway, snow, ice care, um tree care, um transfer station, public works, capital, transfer station, East time ambulance, other budget discussion items as needed. It has nothing in here of a call or a discussion

043and possible action. Anytime that we put anything on our agendas, it always says possible action. at the meeting. If you listen to the tape on the 22nd, it clearly said so we were supposed to meet on Monday to make our our decision and they decided to take a vote and that vote resulted in $600,000 being taken away from the board of education without our opportunity to speak up. So, yeah, we're in a little bit of a quandry. Um, we don't have an audience as citizens. Um, listen until we're weighed down. However, I do know that um first selectman um Irene Haynes is here and chairman um Gelson is here and I would kind of like Can we make a motion to move it on the agenda? Yeah, we can do that. I would make a

044motion that we move it to now for the audience of citizens. Let them have their say. Can I second it? Any discussion? All in favor? I uh audiences, citizens, would anybody like to speak? If you want to Hello everyone this good evening. Thank you for giving me a chance to speak to the uh uh mentioned items tonight. To Jim's point, I use a bad word to relay a message which was that educators are get mad if you cut their budget. They're going to get rabid if they cut their budget. I apologize to all of you who felt that that was offensive. It was not my intent to offend anybody. It was my intent to tell the board of finance, don't cut their budget that much. They're not going to be happy. I've been told you

045asked this. I'm not gonna discuss this. This is my comment. That's that's my comment. I apologize back and forth. So, um, just to answer the question in regards to public works because there was an inference made. Public works was not notified by the board of finance to be at that meeting. So, therefore, they were not prepared to be at the meeting when they were supposed to be at the meeting. That's why they got put to the end and she was already in a situation with a family member in the hospital. So, that's why it got pushed off. Just to clarify if anybody had any questions about that. All right. Last night I was asked prior to the board of stuck meeting if we don't I'm sorry never mind that's coming later. Second Saturday workshop with

046the board of finance was noticed with the agenda item that said capital board of finance or I'm sorry board of ed and town. There was nobody from board of of uh ed there in regards to the capital budget on that Saturday. There should have been because we were arguing with about capital and I was fighting for both sides of capital and I was trying to get as much as we could out of order of finance and I have to say that was very sad the Saturday that we had the second where they came up with their call should say capital on there. All right, maybe I'm wrong then yeah I must speak. Um, we talked about capital and I believe capital on both sides was there and I was trying to get as much money

047as I could for capital. At last night's meeting, somebody asked about capital and how much was going to be done with the capital money that was given both the board of finance and the board of selectment. When the board of finance came up with that number, that arbitrary number that it came up with for capital, what they did was they went through what was on the long range capital list and there were priorities that were figured out and met and all that. So they said, why don't we just take care of this first page which $667,000 and then add another $600,000. So just make it 1.3 million. Like that's it's almost as arbitrary as that. I'll be I'll be perfectly honest. So I sit through those board of finance meetings because I do feel that

048it is very arbitrary how they get these dollars and they I do understand that they have to decide how much the town is going to you know b you know bear versus how much we need to do the things that we do both town and board. Um, but anyway, during last night's board of finance meeting, I asked, if you all recall, if they cut your cut by a half and it was only 300,000, what would that do? So, why did I ask that? Number one, I believe in the board. I believe in every one of these teachers here, and I love every one of these teachers here, and I always have. My kids went through these school. I love the schools in East Adam. I love Teresa. She's new. I love her. I love you

049all. And I appreciate every single last one of you. And just because you get mad about your budget, I get mad about the budget. That's why I sit here painstakingly sit here through all the meetings and all the workshops because I don't want our money cut because we need it. Okay? And it's it's it's very difficult. We're finance is a very difficult job. We have to come up with a number that the town's going to say yes to. Meanwhile, we're all sitting here struggling going through our our budgets and it's very difficult on everybody's part. But I wanted them to just slow down. I wanted them to take a breath. I wanted them to see that. said, "Okay." And then we did this before. So if you look at our the prior meetings with board

050of finance, we said, "Well, what if they cut it to 1.3? What if they cut it to 1.7? What if they did 1.69? What if they put put 175?" Like, we looked at all these different parameters. There's all kinds of numbers that we looked at to see and it's basically at that point a crapshoot as to how much money they think that the town's going to vote yes and how much they're going to think the town's going to vote no. And as much as we had a lot of educators and a lot of people prochool, which I loved, especially the students, they were awesome. They always are. But the bottom line is you get two or three people in there who are taxpayers who can't they're on a fixed income and they can't afford it.

051They're coming in there voting. No, they don't care about the schools. They love you all too. They don't care about it because they've got to pay the bill and it's so hard for them to pay the bill. So that's where these guys are. That's where the board of finance is. All right. Needless to say, I wanted them to take a break last night, too. That's why I asked that question. Even if they took a break during the meeting and they had more discussion, it didn't seem like a lot of them wanted to speak. So, I don't know what was going on last night either. Didn't work. They came back with what they came back with. Last thing I want to say is prior to the board of select the meeting when we convened to push

052it forward, I asked the question, "What if we don't?" I went and had a private sidebar with a couple people that I thought might know the ramifications. I said, "Look, if we just don't push it through, we don't we don't push it. They've pushed it. And if they give it to the board of selectmen, the board of selectmen don't push it, then what happens? Problem is is that if we push the budget through with the way it was without the cuts and it votes down and we go through the schedule the way the schedule is, then we haven't we have another alter, you know, opportunity to come back and rehash the whole thing and then go out with a better budget that they might approve whether they need cuts or they need whatevers. If we

053didn't put it through last night, then we would have lost an opportunity to have a second referendum if it's needed prior to when we have to set the mill rate. We had to do that last year and that blew up in our faces, too. So, we were trying to get it so that the schedule would work. So, we said, "All right, we'll push it through." I have sent a text to the lawyers to ask if there's a way to claw back a meeting call and see if we can do something. So, I'm checking. I care about this town. I care about all of you. I so appreciate all of you and all the people that do this for free, but at the same time, we are all on the same team. And I take offense

054to people saying that I'm not on the same team. Okay. Thank you. Um I just want to read off the agenda um from March 22nd and the one for the Monday. The agenda um that um Selectman Haynes is referring to March 22nd was call to order and pledge of allegiance. Uh approval of the minutes 20256 budget a public works general highway snow and ice removal tree care and removal the transfer station public works capital transfer station capital east ambulance association other budget discussions as needed. The Monday um board of finance meeting for March 24th that was cancelled had call for um order and pledge of allegiance 2526 budget operating and capital projects request board of education and town. This was the meeting that was cancelled. other budget items as permits. Number three, guest and audience

055comments. Number four, potential 202526 budget resolution. This is the meeting that was cancelled. The board of education had no opportunity or um ability to be at the meeting where capital was spoken. This is why we're in the predicament that we are. Tom, do you want to speak? Yes. This uh this whole situation frankly breaks my heart. I'm always a better person for transparency and cooperation. I've been also embarrassed by the in the meeting notice. I wasn't aware of those myself. We were told we can go ahead and decide on the budget on Saturday and it turns out we shouldn't have apparently must say apparently I don't know what the legal illegal what what legal is saying but um we're at the very bottom right now relationship and there's turns out there's multiple reasons for that.

056They see some misses in judgment. I see miss some misses in clerical work what's written in meeting notices and but I want to tell you nobody is on the board of finance is laughing anybody. We don't laugh that much anyway. So if the if you have the impression we're laughing at you, I apologize for that profusely. And uh we had one individual whose behavior was deplorable. It was a complete surprise to me and uh we as a board will need to address that. I assure you it's not going to happen again. And uh so we are as as Irene stated, we're in a tough spot for the finance. We have to uh everybody hear me? We have to represent the entire town and work for the entire town and and we have to make hard

057decisions. We don't like and we have nothing against the board education particularly when you come to your our meetings. Fact you brought the students in three times I think and uh the last time was last night. It always impresses us and uh but we al also have to put our serious hats on and what's affordable, what's not, where we can cut and where we shouldn't cut. So, it's um and we don't get a lot of people to our meetings. Yes, we do get people on some people every every meeting. Thank you very much. Other people not so much. So, um it was really frankly very good to you for everybody last night. all across town. And uh that's something we keep in our minds all the time. The question is, will the budget pass? We

058want the budget to pass because we know from past experience that when it fails, it's not so good the second time, not so good the third time. Just gets worse. So, um this is time to start building again. And uh I uh I think Jim said it quite well last night was damage to the folks in town to to our relationship as a people town's people. There also damage to our budget chances but I believe it can be rec we can recover. Uh there's uh all we're all people of goodwill. Some don't behave quite well enough frankly. uh we'll have to fix I said earlier so we need to come back together again and this is a free country thank God and if we do something wrong or something we that we regret or we

059didn't think was the right thing to do we can change our minds and I haven't had a meeting with the board of finance yet but we have a meeting on Monday regular meeting and we will discuss it and and uh I'm all for uh coming back, but I know um one of the things that crossed my mind last night, I thought of a small uh change in the budget, but I didn't want to do it what appears to be a token change. Didn't know what I didn't know what was important to you. We want to give you give you reduce the cut where we can uh put money back in what's what what item is most important to you but I didn't want to do a token job. So and the thing is if it's

060if it's defeated uh anyway we have to come back and do the same thing. So uh we have to talk about it as a board first. can't we can't say much here but I I uh my words are not strong enough I don't think so just a simple word of apology is not quite good enough for me right now but I deeply regret the behavior last night particularly one individual and I I deeply regret how the meeting just uh caved in at the end and and we had the best intentions we're trying to pass a pass a budget propos the budget and the town will pass and going back to Irene's numbers and a 600 cut to the board of ed results in a 6.3% in taxes if we reduce that cut by 300,000 it

061adds another percent to the taxes we take it completely away it adds another percent this is my rough calculations not exact a little over 8% and I don't think the town would certainly not not accept that. So, it's uh it's a tough call, but uh let me see. Uh I uh I am very disappointed that you folks are and uh I believe we're all good people. We can rebuild. There's nobody on the board of finances against education. There's nobody. And there's no the board of finances against the town of Easttown. So I believe things can be rebuilt and frankly they have to be because if here's a hard fact of life. We have to stay together as a board of education, board of finance. The town is just not going to go into that voting

062booth with confidence knowing that the board of ed finance are split. It's not going to work for anybody. So, as I keep saying, the ultimate decision makers in all this are the taxpayers, the residents when they go into the booth. And we wanted them to go in the booth with confidence and pride. Jim's right. We do get tired of this job. And I don't know how you would and in hindsight, it really hurts. We should have waited until Monday to make the decision. I bet you we did that. It would have been different. You had time to talk. It's like in politics, in government, it's like good cooking. Everything has to season well, cook well, the right temperature, the right length of time. Microwaves be damned. Oh, um I just I uh civil behavior. I

063heard the comments from you folks. Civil behavior matters. Not only does it matter to people voting on a budget, but it matters to the kids in the audience. What are we teaching them? And there's been complaints how our society has become very univil. Language used in public is not very good. And it's coming down to East as well. So, we got to work to fix that. And last night was not a good fix. So, I uh I pledge that uh we'll get back together. We'll become more civil. We'll become very civil and we'll work something out. I'll meet with Irene after this and see what we can do. and I'm going to be meeting with the board of finance on Monday and we'll see what they think. I can't speak for them now. So, I

064think the door is cracked, so to speak. So, but I can't make the promises. Probably don't you folks don't believe me as much as you did before, which really upsets me. But I uh I I apologize for the behavior. Deeply regret it and uh I will work my board of finance as well. We'll work to improve the situation for all people in town, the kids, the teachers, the rest of the residents and taxpayers. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. And will you um just um let us know about that vote if that was actually a legal vote? I will definitely find out about that because um this is the first time I'm hearing this and I'm Yeah. Well, I just happened to look over everything and I was like it was never

065on the agenda and so um you know where do we go from here? Um, I would like you to have your meetings and I really think that the um that we need a tri board meeting and I think that will work probably best. Todd, what what time is that meeting on Monday? 7 o'clock. Is it here? Here. Yes. If there's uh nothing else on that Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Can I? Yeah. I just want to let you know that we're going to work on also doing some kind of exit polling. We're going to figure it out how to do it. So, we're looking at that as well. I think that we need to know if it was a legal vote to cut the budget before we even talk about exit polling. I think that's where

066we need to start. Melanie Koh, Clark Gates Road. Um, I'm not going to be very long because you have a very long agenda of regular business tonight, but one thing that the public didn't get a chance to really say is to thank the board of ed for that amazing presentation that you gave last night, the explanation that you gave and the support that you gave for the school, for the teachers, for staff, for your thoughtfulness, Dr. Drito's very thoughtful analysis on where we're at. Um, I can recall years of coming in at one 2% and trying to make it work. We are not at that point anymore, right? Um, I'd also like to thank Mrs. Haynes and Mr. Gelson for their comments tonight. Um, it's a step in the right direction to try to bridge

067the gap of a very bad 24 hours that has left this community very soured. Um, I'm not in the schools. Um, but I like to think that in my role as parent and as lawyer that I speak on behalf of the people that can't come to meetings that will try, as I do, to look online when I can't get to meetings, but just understand that your good work is truly appreciated and we commend all of you for being there. Our administrators were there last night which was so wonderful. Some of them spoke. Some of our teachers bravely stood up and spoke about how much the schools mean to them, not just because of where they work and where the paycheck they get, but because they really care about education, public education. And some of them

068don't have kids in the school. They don't need to to care about public education. So, you are to be commended and we will get through this. And you have our support, parent hat. You have our support and the administrators and staff in the school have our support as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, so we will have something. I have one young audience member that's past their bedtime but wanted to uh this is a much lighter topic uh later on. Is it still on audience citizens? Can I can I read the note from This is from Dustin. I like bookworms better than witten wisdom. Love Dustin. I love it. All right, that um last time kind of going around kind of ending this subject. Sean, anything else? Nope. Thank you for everybody what

069they had said. Thank you, Terry. I agree. Thank you for your insight, Mr. Gston. And um I appreciate Mel for coming in and speaking to us. Thank you. Yeah. Um I do want to make it very clear that yeah your board of finance member was definitely directly laughing at me and it's very visible in the board of finance meeting and as a community member and a volunteer I definitely don't appreciate it but I appreciate your apology but I'd rather hear it coming from him. I don't think it will happen but yes that's I also do have to say commend Jim for apologizing. So, I appreciate Mr. Yston and Mrs. Haynes statements tonight. Um, this is the community that we are all in. This is the community that comes together, acknowledges and accepts the responsibility for

070misstatements and moves forward. And I really hope that that's what we're laying out here tonight. I look forward to the tri board meeting and I look forward to us coming to some consensus on the budget. Um Todd, I very much appreciate your stance. I believe it's completely sincere. Um, I don't think we necessarily agree politically on a lot of things, but I don't think that matters because as happens with this board, all we're focused on is doing right by kids and families and taxpayers. And that's all any of us are looking for. And I give you a lot of credit. I really do. Thank you for your um compliment there. I'm turned 65 just recently and I'm work in progress, but I am working on it. Yeah, I just want to thank everyone for being

071here tonight and all the people who spoke. Really appreciate it and I think that it sounds like this is a beginning of a great repair and I think that's what Thank you, Jackie. I'm gonna close out comments with you. Um, yeah, long story short, I didn't have any of these on my bingo cards for tonight. I'm just really proud of uh the the folks who showed up to give more nuance and everybody speaking their honest truth and us getting through that conversation. And I know it's not over, but I'm just really proud of everybody in this room for being able to get where to where we're at. So, good job. Thank you. And we have another audience of citizens that wants to speak. And I just want to before that, I just want to say

072Todd, I have known you for 50 years and well, maybe a little bit older. I'm trying to stay a little under the I've grown up respecting you and I will always continue to respect you. Same here. Um I've attended the league last night and I understand both perspectives to some degree. Um I was extremely disappointed in last night's meeting. I walked away thinking that the the board of finance and the board of education are uh 10 10 miles apart. Um, and I went I looked at what it says in the Connecticut handbook for finance department in in the state of Connecticut. And it says if fundamental differences of opinion arise, they can in final analysis out only by mutual understanding between two boards. Both boards have important work to do. the same community drawing on

073the same financial resources for healthare uh from the same aspects they should strive to work together the causes which are of mutual interest amen and I support you thank you I forgot to I forgot to thank one person I have a raging headache So, Irene, my apologies for not mentioning your name, but thank you for coming. Okay, let's take um just a a quick breather. I I don't want to keep the middle school um kids out any later. So, can we we'll do that and then we'll take it to recess. Thank you. Um middle school update, student council, are you still here? Thank you. Come on up, guys. Thank you for coming tonight. Thank you for having us. Um, so we're here to give you an update about what our student council has been doing.

074So I'm Neilie Earlson. I'm in seventh grade and I'm the middle school student council president. I'm Paige Delisa. I'm also in seventh grade and I am the student council secretary and treasurer. So this December we had PJ day for the kids. Over $600 was donated and it's also a statewide event. Um this is mainly for kids with cancer. We also attended the cast convention. Our seventh and eighth graders that wanted to go were able to attend this field trip. We the theme was mission leadership decided by the student council president in high school. We rode a bus with the high school students of their student council and we collaborated with student council members in high school statewide. We also heard an inspiring speech from Deb Hol who is um a motivational speaker. We learned that

075leadership is influence. It's not about titles or seniority. It's about taking care of those in charge. So, at the cast convention, Neilie, our president, was voted to be the middle school liaison for the second time. Um, Neilie presented with a high school student for her breakout session about amazing things happening in student councils in Connecticut. Um, our meetings have now changed and we now have a schedule for them. So, our first Monday of the month, we meet every single Monday. Our first Monday of the month will be an officer meeting. So, all of our officers get together and talk about things that need to be covered. Our second meeting will be a leadership meeting, which is a new thing that we're adding. Our third Monday is a service project. For example, we've made dog toys.

076that will be and then our fourth Monday is our spirit meeting that where we talk about dances and things of that nature. So our service project that we did this year was a competition between all the grades so that we could get the most donations as possible. Um our seventh grade won and we received an ice cream Sunday party. We the service project was came up with the cast convention. So when we went to the convention, we brought our donations and those were turned which were t-shirts that were turned into dog toys at convention which will be don which have been donated to dog shelters. And we the leftover t-shirts that we got after we attended the convention, we made them at our service meeting in April. So, we have um nominated someone from our

077student council and they have won this award for the Connecticut Association of Student Councils. Her name is Quinn Thod. She's in eighth grade. She was nominated for the unsung hero award. She joined student council last year. Quinn has recommended, planned, and engineered themed dances, hot chocolate giveaways for Thanksgiving, Stober, spirit days, and more. Quinn has never run for an office because she knows she will not be able to attend every meeting due to her other obligations, and never looks and she never looks for or expects appreciation. She enthusiastically participates simply to bring joy and inclusivity and promote camaraderie within the school. This is why Quinn was the recipient of the middle school unsung hero award. So, a couple of our upcoming things include a dance which will be taking place April 25th. Um, this is

078going to be a spring dance. And then we also have a blood drive happening tomorrow, April 10th, which is hosted by the seventh grade. And anybody can come to donate over 16 years old. Thank you. Thank you guys. [Applause] Good job, guys. As always, you always impress us. It's excellent all that you're doing. I just think this is extraordinary. Now, does this mean your Monday meetings you're partnered with the high school students and so the student councils are working together now? So, we are talking about that because we we still haven't like decided of that as a student council. We are hoping to not we are hoping to meet with the high schoolers, but like throughout the year, but not our meetings right now are with the high schoolers. Yeah, this is a great opportunity

079for you guys. Yeah, I always appreciate hearing from students. So, thanks for sticking out with us tonight. Absolutely. No questions, but great job. You always do a wonderful job. Sean questions. Also, I just want to say thank you very much and make sure to tell Quinn that seems like a great person and we thank her for everything she does as well and good luck on your softball season. Jackie, Jackie, anything? Yes. Um, just to uh go on what everybody else said, y'all are amazing. Um, I think I've worked with many uh both of you and many others in the middle school that helped with our dance. So, thank you so much. Um, and I'm just really really proud of everything that you are doing and I hope you're really proud of yourselves. Awesome. Thank you.

080Thank you ladies and have a [Applause] great Okay, next on our agenda, um we have the report of the principles. Do we want to just take a two-minut break to stretch our legs real fast and that way you guys get set up? Two minutes. Literally two minutes. Make it fast. That's right. Please stay on my stretch. I did that the last week. Would you have some Velcro to join with you this evening? Yeah, that will be much better. Much better. There won't be any bruises or anything. Um, Gabe should go home after the high school. We got to study for exam. No, he wants to see our presentations. Well, we're before Gabe, I think. All right. Can we go home after before high school? Can we Yes, you should make a motion. Are you making

081fun of my way? Are you absolutely not even your headset to Gabe? You should make a motion to move his self up. Oh, I'm sorry, Gabe. Don't worry, man. It's okay. He's going to make a motion soon as you come in. No, he can make Mr. will buy you breakfast tomorrow. Okay. You will pick up. You may pick up tomorrow. What do you want for breakfast? I don't have a Starbucks. What kind? What kind? Oh, right here. Like a plain bagel. Thank you. You want a drink, honey, too? Gabe, do you want to go ahead of them so you can leave? Are you okay? Tick tock. I think it's two minutes. Um, while we're on limbo here, I have a question. I think I just have to push this back over. I'm not me rally

082up my my crew brownies anymore. Just saying. Use an espresso brownie right about now. Yes. Draft again. There's a shock. Time is our friend. No, I was just thinking espresso. Oh, yeah. Espresso right now. I was really I'll get you soon. I was trying to like mentally send messages to Alison about espresso. brownies. Go with brownies. I apologize. I'll make them over. It's not enough to Who am I missing? Yes, but that's not I didn't do it this time. Sorry. I'm parked in this chair. I didn't know this. Okay, that's on deck. This will be on deck seat. Breakfast. Breakfast. What do we want? Talk loudly through that wall. Really close. I know. And I apolog I apologize. I'm not even chocolate. Starbucks. So, as we're coming back together, um my sincere apologies for holding

083you guys up. I know that you have a special presentation for us and um we just had to get this other business taken care of. So, thank you very much for being patient. Are you folks ready? Yes. Do we want to wait for Carrie or um want me to go get her? Where's she? Oh, okay. Just two more minutes. Sorry. Sorry. that came through audience than wisdom. All right. So, I'll I'll get started. Um we're here to uh talk about um some of uh school data and where the implementation of our 4DX framework. Okay, the interest of time, I'm not going to read this. We all have we all know our vision and mission. Um, as you'll recall back in December, um, we we gave a very similar presentation and and oriented everybody to this

0844DX framework. Uh, my colleagues discussed how they were, uh, planning and implementing the model in their schools to drive student achievement. Um, and today I'll provide you with a refresher of this work. Um, and my colleagues will update you on the work they have done to date and how it's impacting student achievement. Come on, stay there. All right. So, um the first part of this framework is a focus of wildly important goals. Um and this is identifying one or two or sometimes three um in our schools. Goals that will make the greatest impact is a unifying focus and in alignment with district goals. Each school recognizes student achievement and communicates a wildly what is wildly important. Our elementary school has identified connections and belonging um at our previous meeting. um improvement improving achievement in reading

085um and continuous instructional improvement. Our middle school has been uh focused for their wildly important goals on engaging engagement and connectedness, restorative practices and building thinking classrooms. And our high school uh the Slackers who only chose two um goals is building a culture of leadership um and student achievement by obtaining fees are better. They're extremely uh competitive bunch and I just need to point out when they're losing Oh jeez. Wait till we present. So the next part is acting on leading measures. Um and this is focusing on measurable actions that directly influence the wildly important goals. Uh we've done we've done uh we dove into student data from ESPbacks and SATs to attendance data behavior data next generation accountability information as well as feedback from many stakeholders to develop the wildly important goals. and we

086continue um to use these tools as drivers to adjust approval. You'll see that schools are using interim assessment blocks tools directly connected to the ESPback and the standards that we teach as one of these measures in for grades 3 through 12. In addition, staff are constantly monitoring student progress and universal screens and progress monitoring measures for high for grade uh levels who receive letter grades. These are also being reviewed and you'll see this at our high school who use this to drive both student engagement and achievement and we are using survey tools and other metrics to understand how we are doing with connectedness. The next part of the 40x framework is keeping a compelling scoreboard and this is making things visible to everybody on the team. Um and it clearly tracks developing clear um a

087clear tracking system. My colleagues will show you great examples of how they are making progress toward the wildly important goals visible often to the entire school. Um this is done at the classroom level as well and in the hallway spaces celebrating student achievement toward these leading measures. And then finally um you'll hear my colleagues talk about um how they're creating a cadence of accountability and this is fostering regular disciplined meetings uh team meetings to stay aligned and ensure accountability. You'll see uh they'll talk about using this information to impact change in the classroom and throughout the school. They'll discuss how teaming and accountability partners have supported the advancement of this work to drive student achievement and improve the learning community. All right. So um at the elementary school we have started with really digging in

088as a staff on the 40X work. Um we started with a general introduction to the different disciplines. Um then we dug into each area as a faculty. We had team meetings where staff talked about planning scoreboards. What did they think would be great to have visible in our school? What would motivate staff and students to continue to excel and achieve? Um, and then we you'll see some examples of some smaller models that exist and then some big ideas that we have moving forward. And those really come from our staff working together um to to see the importance of making our learning and our thinking and our growth visible in our schools. So, one of our first wildly important goals is to improve student achievement and reading. Oh, let me back up one second and say

089we we're doing our 4DX, but we're also providing you with data. our achievement data to to date and it kind of rolls in together because a lot of it is connected to the wildly important work. We also were asked to share some of our student climate information which for the elementary school connects right into one of our wildly important goals. I also gave you a very very hearty packet of our third grade data and our K2 data for you to look at later. Um but that's you'll kind of see all of this happening in our parts of the presentation. So in reading you can see our beginning of the year benchmark assessment work and then you can see the comparative to the middle of the year assessment work. Now this is you may remember I

090ready from the past which is a computerized assessment that was adaptive and that each student took on their Chromebook. This assessment is the dibbles the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills which are a series of short assessments that are administered one-on-one with the teacher and the student. and they're really key assessments to look at those foundational importance important skills in literacy. So, this this is a series of depending on the grade level, it could be four or could be up to seven one minute assessments that are done and they're looking at our basic foundational reading skills up through comprehension. Um so you can see here we've we've made some growth in students who are performing above which is that blue students who are in that on level and then we have our work cut

091out for us with our students who are still working towards meeting those standards. Um and this assessment in the middle of the year was taken in January. So as a result of this we dig into the data we look at professional development in science of reading. Um, we have the addition of knowledge building decodable readers which align to our phonics program but also help build some of that comprehension and content knowledge vocabulary. And then our phmic awareness instruction has really been a big focus at our school at the tier one level K and one and we even brought it to our prek students this year. So they're learning some of that that phmic awareness work and some of those oral literacy skills. Um this is a quick snapshot of where we were at the beginning

092of the year, the middle of the year, um by grade level. So you can see the percentage of students in the blue who are above where we expect them to be at this time. Students in the green who are performing at that that expectation and how we are moving the needle across the board. You can see we had a little dip in third grade, but we have some more data to show you from their IABS and how they're really digging into building that vocabulary and that comprehension. And we have a long way to go from January to June when we take another look at this. Um, these were some scoreboards that were done in the first grade level. Really, they're very invested in their Heerty um phmic awareness program. And so every time they completed

093a lesson, they got to add a sticker to their chart. And when they completed all of the lessons, which they did just a a week a about a week ago, they created their Hegerty hero posters to show off the superhero powers they have gained in their reading skills. And they had a whole celebration um to really honor that. The Heggerty Phoneic awareness program goes up through first grade at the tier one level. So, they had a really good time with that. This is one of our ideas as a school for a new scoreboard that would um be including all of our kids. We uh administer the core phonics survey as progress monitoring and also another checkpoint on how we're doing with that our early reading skills and the components letter names, consonant sounds, vowel sounds

094and so on are part of that assessment. Um and so our idea, we actually have a high school student who's helping us recreate the school uh picture and that's going to be a mural on our wall and then we're going to have banded colors with the colored dots that match. So when students master that part of the core, they're going to get to add their dot and we're going to create a beautiful mural and show all of the progress and mastery towards um our core phonics survey or core phonics skills. And that was one that a team of teachers helped come up with those ideas which I thought was really creative. And there's our east soaring through the core. Okay. Um math performance. So here's a quick snapshot. We also switched our math from I

095Ready to um what was called the M-Class math which is very similar to the Dibbles. They're quick short one minute assessments that we give onetoone with students. Um at the second and third grade level, some of them are done paper pencil and then scored by the teachers and put into the system after. Um we didn't make the kind of progress we were hoping to from the beginning to the middle, but we're doing a lot of work. We're practicing the concepts in the format they're taught in a various in various ways. We're adding in our building thinking classrooms work classroom by classroom. Our vertical math team is working on developing tier 2 strategies and resources to help support students who may be performing below that expected mark at this point at this point. Um and our

096data teams are reflecting um and coming up with action steps. So after we had the midyear and we dug into some of this data, um each grade level team responded to some questions about what they noticed about the data, where we need to improve, what are we doing well with. Um you know, some teachers noticed that kids might get nervous or maybe the way the questions ask is tricking them up. So teachers have created games for students to play to practice these skills. They've included some of them in their morning work that they do. just making some tweaks to help our students have repeated exposure and also the opportunity to practice those skills. So again, seeking the teacher feedback, having them dig into the data and talk about how do we move our needle forward

097more than this. So here's another picture, the beginning of the year to the middle of the year data, grade by grade. Um this assessment doesn't have the um above level picture. It's on approaching um and not meeting yet. And so we again we have some areas to work on here. So another thing we did is we administered the number corner assessment which comes with our bridges math curricular resource. It's a snapshot of skills that students have been learning up to this point in the year. Um so it's not a a summitive assessment like we just learned addition subtraction so now we're testing on addition subtraction. This is all of the learning that's happened so far. This was given after our benchmark assessment. And you can see some different information here about where our students are.

098And that was some of the feedback that teachers gave after the mid um the middle of the year assessment was that what they were seeing with students on their summit of assessments within the curriculum was very different than what they saw on the MClass assessment. Side note, McLass's test that we're using now or assessment we're using now is being transformed. There's a brand new model. It's been piloted and tested and now it's being released for next year. And I have a meeting on Friday with the representatives to talk about how we can incorporate that and I think it's going to be much more aligned to the teaching and learning that's happening in the day-to-day. Um some responses to the math work, some individual um scoreboards in the classroom looking at some of those areas from

099the MCAST, the missing number assessment, the quantity discrimination. So they're doing some more practice and charting their growth. And you can see they have a goal at the bottom um of 15 out of 17 students are going to reach that end of the year mark by the time they get to those end of the year assessments. We also had a fun um multiplication madness for students who wanted to participate in third grade where they did a competitive multiplication game. Um and it's hard to see there, but our final four contestants, one from each class, are ready for ready for the finals. And so they're able to practice that learning in a fun way. um if they're comfortable doing doing that kind of work. Um Josh mentioned the interim assessment blocks which are connected to the

100smarter balance assessment which will be coming up at the end of April, beginning of May. And this just shows work that the third grade has been doing um both within the ELA realm and the math realm. Um so we have been giving a number of assessments. Again, some are done instructionally to kind of look at how it's how we tackle these questions. um how a lot of them have two parts and other things that they have to really kind of analyze how to respond to them. So, they've been working through that. But each teacher has given I believe at least five of the interim assessment blocks. They look at their class data. They look at um over here you can see that you get the five items which are um students had the most difficult

101time with. they're analyzing that data and they're bringing that back into instruction to help students with those particular question styles or the content. Um, and so they've done some amazing work at really digging into the learning and analyzing the data and bringing it back into instruction for students. Um, our other wildly important goal is building connection and belonging with students and families. So, here's some a couple snapshots from the student survey which we administered just a bit ago. Um, staff had developed goals and strategies they were going to use to help build that connection and belonging. We're using restorative practices. We have our PBIS. Um, and we had some teachers also be trained in responsive classroom. So, we looked at the questions that really felt we felt aligned to this work. So, adults care about

102me. The K2 96% strongly agree and agree. third grade. 86% strongly agree and agree. The blue is neutral. We haven't quite figured out. We try to explain what neutral means. We're not sure why kids pick that. But enough a number of kids also pick. Yeah, I'm not here and I'm not there. I'm just kind of in the middle. Um, also in the student survey, I'm treated with kindness or respect. If it's the third grade assessment, treated with kindness by the principal, I'm treated with kindness or respect by other adults in the school. You can see we have really strong responses at the K2 and slightly below with third grade. Another something that we dug into as a staff. We analyzed our student data. We looked at those areas that maybe we didn't feel like we

103were making the mark with and teachers have made suggestions and action steps to move our students forward um for the remainder of the year. Um other areas, is there adults that I can talk to? I feel like people at school listen to me. Um, how do you feel when you're at school? Or do you feel like things are going well? Um, I know who I can go to when I need help with how I'm feeling or I can control my emotions. I have friends at school. My friends help me. So, we really looked at these particular questions to help us um continue to do better and continue to support the needs of our students from their perspective on how things are going. We have our PBIS scoreboard. So, every time a student gets an acknowledgement

104for showing safety, ownership, attitude, or respect, they get a feather. And all year, we work to build Easty's wings as a community. And I can tell you, we've been doing this for a number of years now. Third graders who've been doing it for four years are as excited to skip down that hallway with their soar ticket and their feather and wave it in the air as they're walking by the office. So, it it means a lot to them. They still really like to be acknowledged um and to participate in this. And as a school, we're at 6,2001 grand ticket total as of the end of March. We also track at the end of the month the students at each grade level who get the most tickets and they get a special certificate um and picture

105with East's rates. Some scoreboards under construction in first grade as part of a project the teachers are doing. Um they're working on some additional social emotional learning with choose love. So they have caught being kind in the compassion corner and they're going to be using the hearts that students earn to create a board with those. So that'll be up before the end of the year. And our prek and K teachers met and talked about what kind of a scoreboard they'd like to see for their little ones. So they've drafted the um seasonal tree that's going to be in the hallway by their classrooms and they're going to work in the fall on friendship, in the winter on kindness, and in the spring on cooperation. and they're going to add their uh their leaves, their snowflakes

106or their blossoms to the tree as students are showing those those expectations and learning about them, which I thought was really creative. And our last I'm sorry I'm taking way too much time, friends. You're doing great. Um a thanks um is the building connectionist and belonging with our families. We've worked really hard to um help our families feel included in the school in as many different ways as we can. And I have an ongoing survey on our parent square uh weekly message so that they can provide us feedback. Um so some questions, do you feel like you're getting regular communication? 25 out of 27. Yes. Um one opportunity was to connect with specialists teachers in a different way. So they offered conferences in the spring and the feedback was unbelievable. So positive. Um does the

107school communicate regular with me? 96% they suggested something in my message moving my calendar from the bottom to the top. We did it. It's been receiving positive feedback. The small things give us feedback and we can make shifts so that you feel like we're all a part of that same team. Um opportunities to come into the school 89% yes. The number one was conferences, number two classroom events, number three PTO events, and number four is being able to come in and support learning in the classroom which is awesome. And 92% of families agree or strongly agree that they feel connected to the elementary school, which is our goal and that matters a ton to us. Our cadence of accountability, we have full staff conversations about areas of focus to measure our wildly important goals and

108scoreboards. We have our instructional facilitators who work with leadership and vertical teams. We have volunteer leadership team generating ideas for those connected um experiences and building relationships with the community. grade level teams who are analyzing data and ter determining how to support student growth and family connections and then our MTSS or intervention team supporting student growth and teachers in the classroom with resources. We're also working on our accountability plan for the 2526 school year and how we're going to continue to um build on our wildly important goals and compelling scoreboards. And that was very fast and I hope you that was phenomenal. Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, tough act to follow. She has to do the job of two. We only get two. Good job. All righty. So, um, I'm going to start

109by talking about some ask questions before. Oh. Oh, well, it's fresh. Well, well, it's fresh. Yeah, but I don't want to hold up too too long, but go ahead. I'm not asking questions. I was trying to get your attention. I saw some people vigorously writing down things. I'm just uh Yeah, I just don't want to forget the things that Yeah. Do you want to bring it up now? Go ahead. I don't know. Go ahead. Yeah. That way once you're done, you can just walk away. Watch the other. Oh, okay. Okay. Um I I had like a lot of things that I loved the student climate survey. Like I just thought that was so awesome to to see that data. Um the scoreboards. Um I love the school updates that come in our emails. The communication

110has increased and I just love like reading over that every time. Um the ability to meet with the specialist teachers for conferences. Amazing. like we didn't really have that before and I always felt bad because they're they work so hard and then we just meet with the classroom teacher so now being able to meet with them allowed us to have like one-on-one conversations um and also just appreciate and wanted to call out that you come to every PTO meeting and a bunch of the teachers come to the PTO meetings as well and so like it's really involved we get a lot of information about the school and it's really nice um I similar to the high school it would Nice. And I don't know, maybe I missed this, but just having like a academic goal

111for math and reading, like a goal like we want this percentage of our students. I don't know if you had mentioned that you're already doing that. Um, it would be nice to see that for the teachers because the 20some percent of students that are below it like it makes me sad for them and you know, I want them to to um be able to understand what they're learning and progress and because obviously elementary school is the foundation. So yeah, we do have goals. They're more like on the leadership end. The teachers are know of them and they're part of our conversations. Um but you know, I have found historically we either will see a huge bump from the beginning to the middle benchmark or from the beginning to the end and a smaller. So we

112didn't see in some areas the big bump at math specifically. Um, and I have faith in all of the work that everyone is doing and what I'm seeing in the classrooms that we're going to see some significant growth. That's good to know. Yeah. And I think it's good to say it to the public too while we're, you know, live because some people might see those numbers like, okay, so are we going to So, yeah. And it's one assessment that we give the three times a year. We do use it for progress monitoring as well, but we have a lot of other data in the day-to-day and the work the kids are doing in the classroom which you know teachers really feel like is showing that growth. Yeah. Okay. That's awesome. Thank you. Anybody else have

113any questions? I'll just say you were talking about why kids choose the thing in the middle. Oh, neutral. Yeah. It's because they don't have to make a decision because it's blue. My favorite color. No, I'm I'm serious. I I we used to design rubrics. We never allowed there to be odd number because everybody chase chooses the middle because then they don't have to take responsibility for a decision. Kids are no different. And you'll see in that in your your examples of the full survey, there's a lot of questions. So part of our school climate work is to see how we can really get to the nitty-gritty of what our students are thinking and feeling so we can address them. I'll just wrap it up by saying I'm so impressed. So impressed. And the data is

114just showing and even more than the data because numbers can go all over the place. It's your energy and what you're putting into this. Um, you could just tell and I I think it's great. It's fun because we have three three board members that could attest to exactly what Jackie of course can show that of course and uh just amazing things that we're seeing contributed to what you're showing us. Thank you. Thank you. No. Oh, okay. I'm really exhausted. Okay. Well, thank you all the teachers. We said thanks. Thank you. Yes. Okay. Middle school. All righty. Um we're gonna start with um some of our data about our wildly important goals. We starting with this idea that 62% of our families feel consistently informed. We um I think find that really an interesting number. um

115with the amount of communication that goes out and we've really been talking to our staff and Ryan and I have been reflecting on the um the need to increase that posit that proactive communication, right? Um 64% of uh grades six through eight and 71% of grades three through five students feel engaged. Um and that's really focusing where we want to highlight that tier one instruction and kind of strengthen that um that tier one um opportunities for our kids. So um our first wildly important goal because yes um is maintaining a positive school climate and we know that with the initiative that is rolling out we're getting ahead of this um momentum and we have since uh last year. So, our leading measure is really the number of intentional relationship building strategies that have been implemented.

116That starts with our positive phone calls um that started um in the beginning of the school year. I mean truly it started with Raina's individual postcards to every student over the summer. Um and that kind of really fueled and I think Raina's demonstration of like I can do this, we can do this really kind of builds the staff's capacity. um their restorative circles. Um the movement and the the way our staff has embraced restorative circles and restorative practices is is amazing. Um just today we were talking about we had a staff member um who has sent out um on on their own initiative to do staff restorative circles um after school hours at a way to kind of just process what's going on and it really has created a culture of of talking and building

117um each other's capacity. um circles are now also integrated into daily lessons. Um it's an opportunity for students to highlight themselves as well as members of the staff. And then we've done other things such as um our New Year's resolution, right, to send postcards where students got postcards from um every student got a postcard from a member of our staff community. um our impact data. We'll talk about the um number of student spotlight submissions, the number of students that feel connected, um relationship mapping exercises, phone calls, and as well as the postcard. So, here is an example of some of our visible score uh scoreboards. Um what we do is um we kind of have these these running um data um collection tools that uh we talk about during our monthly um faculty meetings where

118we talk what the names of kids obviously are um kind of covered over but who is calling what those phone calls are about and we not only track this here but we also track it in power school so that it sticks with them as they travel up through high school. Um on the right hand side, this was the way that we tracked to make sure that every child received a postcard um over uh the winter break. Um and it really went out to all staff and it was you can sign up for none. You can sign up for 30 like some people decided to do which is perfect. So um this is also some more data about our school snapshots. Um we have um the chart on the right are the school snapshots that have

119gone out. There have been 61 of those snapshots and if anyone has seen those I know a lot of you have seen those snapshots they are very very detailed with images uh descriptions um and opportunities to embrace feedback. Um the uh chart on the left talks about um the direct messages and the post comparison. So for the number of posts that um we have done from 2024 the increase from last school year to this school year um is is a lot. Um so the direct messages are those individual messages that teachers are messaging um parents or family members. So there are a lot of messages that have gone out um through this school year. Um and we really um are understanding what an iterative process this is. Um we welcome feedback like Meg has talked

120about um with our school snapshots. Um we've got some feedback that you know it's a it's a lot of great pictures but u too many words. So we're taking that right and we're creating more bulleted focused um ideas and summaries. Um we're adding more pictures. We've also um recently introduced uh Rain has been really great about taking feedback where we have student and staff spotlight. So um community members, parents can kind of submit who they think is someone that should be um a spotlight. So we have an example of that right now. And then really understanding and knowing our audience. Um I think when we think about the transition from restorative practices and this is something that really Allison has done for years and years. Megan and I went to a training over the summer

121and then when Raina and I were kind of building our kind of vision um and I was supporting Raina's vision for uh the middle school, we had to be really conscientious about the restorative practices and I think we've learned a lot and I think we know kind of where we need to go for next year. And I and I do want to say that um Bridget did a wonderful PD at the beginning of the year for restorative practices. She even gave out like um talking pieces at the end and the next day I go to a sixth grade teacher science room and then he's implementing them. He bl circles at the beginning of class and at the end of class and it was a way that you rolled it out. So um that was I'm

122going to step over here but it was amazing. Um our next wildly important goal is creating a culture of reading and this was really established by um our teachers Mr. Anderson, Miss Mishode and also Miss McKenzie. as part of their SDCS project and um talking about like accountability um partners, they are the ones who are really like leading it. We had read bowl um as our leading um measure and that was established by Miss Quinn. It was an idea she had and we took hold of it as a school. Um we have the reading stars what we are reading signs that every staff member has outside of their doors and that idea came from um Mr. Blaine and also Miss Dilia who had the idea of like why can't we involve um teachers in it

123and also our par educators they have the signs for the teachers classrooms so they're like primarily in we also had the balloons and again that was the the group that they came up with and it was read your heart February and they put the the picture of the book that's like your favorite one so you can hang it in your classroom and students would have conversations with like their math teacher about their favorite book. So just making reading visible. They also had like reading over the announcements and it catered to a lot of students. One person read the book about like Yellowstone. I thought it was like the most boring book to be honest. And I go into a classroom and kids looking up Yellowstone because they were intrigued by it. So it's kind of

124cool to see like the the students interest. Um reading during rises. Mr. Ricko brings his classroom to the library and it it's kind of symbolic of like when I was in school too because everyone's reading a book and they're in the library all spread out. some kids laying on the ground and they're all just reading and he's passing out the stars. Um we had an author visit that was led by Miss McKenzie for Read Across America. We also um were focusing on on reading for home and school communications and we've done that since uh October 25th. Some of our lagging measures are the total number of books read schoolwide, the growth in reading proficiency based on the Ames web and I'm going to show you the data for that and the number of students and

125staff members of course who can identify a book that they enjoy and we have like a visual representation and Miss Masho is the one who created that. So as of um what is it as of today I mean the actual number is 168 but we started with one star that Mr. Mike put down um and we've kind of just blossomed from there. So, it's been great to see the the wall just grow with our students reading and students like they all have a book with them. So, if they finish something early in class and they're able to to start reading that and it's nice to see who's really competitive because Mr. Ricko brings his classes down there and he's like fill out your stars when you're done. So, that's kind of cool to see that

126we're all banding together. Um we make our data public so we include this in our school snapshots and the school snapshots. A lot of the submissions are done by teachers like they're like, "Can you check this out?" or or here's something cool that's happening like the tier one level. So, it truly is a a group. Um it's a where we collaborate on it to create it. And these are just some graphs that we made from the amount of minutes and also the amount of books that were read for Read Bowl. We had um one football represented 150 minutes of reading and we sixth grade they were the winner of their division. Also, fourth grade was the winner of um their division. And every week the teachers would tally the minutes and send it in and

127then we would put it into like the Readable um database. But this was only um like something I heard about through Miss Quinn who was like I guess looking through Tik Tok and she saw it and she told us about it and then we just went forth with it. Um this is a scoreboard that was created by Miss Masho and it says the books we love. So every student and staff member they put down a book that they enjoy and they made a heart out of it. Her her students and her class helped her with that. Um, since October 25th, we've had consistent messaging on reading and the importance of it. And that is, like I said, what Bridget said, an iterative process because those snapshots were very wordy at first. So, we went from

128like, here's some advice from Miss McKenzie to now talking about the reading that we're doing and just promoting and taking pictures of students like reading around the school and making sure that's being made visible. And then this is for Readable, the total amount of reading minutes over time. So we track that so everyone can just see like how we are progressing and this is our as web data or um like some visuals of it. But the fourth grade their tier one that increased from 45% to 71%. Fifth grade it rose from 47 to 68%. Sixth grade tier one for the reading went from 64 to 78. Um, I think the seventh and eighth grade like very impressive because we went from 81 to 87 and also 87 to 89. So, we see progression on on

129every level. And I do think it is because the emphasis on reading. Um, even if you like go to Mr. Anderson's eighth grade classroom, he has like a little like fake fire and the kids all circle and he's reading out loud and he performs whenever he reads. He's he's truly amazing. I can fall in love with him. He's reading as well. It's awesome. Um for our read bowl we had some rewards for the students. So sixth grade and also fourth grade won. So fourth grade they won the trophies with the books and also um sixth grade they won the football and the everything matters that comes from our noise makers. Um Mr. Moore his his slogan was like everything matters. So we had that designed and the winner um had that. But next year they

130have to return it and whoever wins read bold and we're going to push it back out. So we we have like a tradition that we can start and they're very competitive. Very competitive. That's great. Oh yeah. Definitely. Yes. And accountability partners are truly the staff. I feel like whatever we we roll out whether it's restorative practices that Bridget rolled out or just like reading in general, they they take hold to it and make it their own. fourth grade had the idea like when we were rolling out Read Bowl, everyone dressed up in like sports um like a jersey so everyone in the building did that and then with the balloons like everyone had a balloon and then they had the read your heart out shirts and we took pictures as a staff. So it's very

131much like a team and we're all like driving and trying to reach the the goal which is making sure that our students are successful. Um these are just some more pictures. So that's the the first staff book club and that was established by Mr. Anderson, U, Miss McKenzie, and also Miss Masho. They all read a the same book together and they got together to to discuss it and they had like games and it was really cool. Um, we have signs around the building and I believe that was designed by Miss Tull, but they just like for every like month they just have a slogan for reading. We have the balloon and that's actually Mr. Mike's balloon and they attach it to his cart with his favorite book on it. And then that's Miss Rafal who

132over the announcement she was reading like um a part of her favorite book. And this was all teacher driven. Fireplace in the background. That is the fireplace in the background. Yes. Um the second goal that we had was to continue to strengthen tier one um instruction. And I had the quote what you water grows. So there's a lot of great tier one like things happening within the building. So when you when we like publicize them, when teachers are able to like go into others teachers classrooms and kind of pull that out, then they can implement it within their classroom. So honestly, we're just celebrating what's already there and making sure that like teachers know that they are appreciated for their tier one instruction because they're they're doing a lot of work like outside of school

133and inside of school to plan. Like fourth grade, they had a book tasting event and like I'm looking at room 300 and they have like a little thing on the door like booktasting happening here. Like the little details that take a lot of time to do. Um, our leading measures are the implementation of IAB tests, implementation of a test, which in full transparency we are never doing again. That took entirely never doing again. You had to like self-score them. They took entirely too long and it was a lot of testing for the students and we don't want to teach the test. We want to make sure that our tier one supports the test that we have and IABS do that. So, it was a first year and year like that's not going to be something

134that we revisit. It's it's exactly much more streamlined and and less taxing students, right? Um a celebration of engagement strategies, intentional classroom visits, and that means they're not gotcha moments like we're coming in to celebrate the work that you're doing. We're not trying to like see what you are or aren't doing. We know the tier one's there. So, we just want to go in to bless you, see the amazing lessons that you have. Um intentional time for our data chats. We use our our PD time like we um we collaborate to make sure the teachers have enough time to do what they need to do to be successful for the students. Um breaking breaking of silos so teachers can get into each other's classroom. Um Bridge and I have covered classrooms so teachers can attend

135PDS so that they can go into each other's classrooms but we are making sure that we're available to support this. And you also cover during absences that we do. go in and actually teach lessons when there's a shortage of subs. So, I'll make sure you all know that. I would say Bridget's amazing at fourth grade. I I definitely struggle. They were they know that their routine. So, the fourth grade like they the students knew what they were doing. It was awesome to see. Um and we also have partner teachers. So, teachers are able to partner with people off grade level so they can get into their classrooms as well. Um, our lacking measures are the number of IEPs that IAB tests that were given, the number of a tests or um, data chats that happen

136again, never again for ICA testing. Um, and the student work, it shows evidence of of deeper thinking and the feedback from student and teachers also tell us that tier one is engaging. For instance, in Miss um, Harris's science classroom, she used a lot of board work. She recently hasn't because they're like engaging in a project and the students are like, "When do we get back on the boards?" So, they're wanting to like collaborate and do the board work within our classroom. Um, our visible scoreboards, we um have the the our school snapshots of like 60 so far have been sent out. We have the reading updates and the school snapshots, but um I I broke the the school snapshots up to make a word cloud. And the the big words, the ones that are used

137the most. So, you can see like learning and student, those are the the biggest words. So, that's really what's in the forefront of what we're writing about in the school snapshots. So it was reading, um, instruction, peer connection. So all of the things that, um, really embody are our wildly important goals. We have a commitment to see engaging practices. Bridge and I talk about like the wonderful things that are happening within the classrooms. The teachers are talking about the great things they're doing and like teaching during PD sessions. Mr. Miller just taught everyone how to use snorkel and how it relates to building thinking classrooms. So they're wanting to share with each other, which is great. and we give them the avenue um to do so as well. So giving PD time so that they

138can go through um learning with each other and then again breaking down the silos with the um the school snapshots and it's really cool because staff members like they'll send in like great things that are happening or pictures or tell me like please visit this classroom or you know you haven't written about this teacher please write about them or you've written about me too much please write about someone else which is feedback I also receive sometimes um we have our building thinking classrooms cohort and this is into our um school snapshot. And this is just a way to hold ourselves accountable to make sure that we're implementing building thinking classrooms with integrity and fidelity whether that's like the randomized grouping or the vertical boards or just using different practices from it as in like starting

139from the the ground or consolidating and synthesizing the information. So we have like co-eing opportunities, PD opportunities, and for some of the building thinking classrooms, um PD, our teachers attended from like 6:00 to 8:00 PM and they they did that on their like outside of school to bring back that learning. They're taking notes at night and then bringing it back to teach the the group at large. We also had two site visits and that was um orchestrated by Miss Tol. So our 35 teachers, they were able to go see um building thinking classrooms in another school. Sorry, our four five teachers able to see building and think in classrooms another school and then our six through eight teachers were able to go see building thinking classrooms within another school and we were covering we found

140the coverage for it but to make sure that they had that opportunity because it's I mean you can go through PD and you learn with adults but if you can actually see it done in practice with students who are um like our students and you can kind of like take and and see And also we have the partner classrooms. This is an example of one of our scoreboards that we had for IAB data. So um on the left where that's kind of blurred out, that's where the teachers names were. And every month they would just put the what they're focusing on for their IAB. And this is just a way to make sure that we are all um implementing our our IAVs. And it's not just about taking the test. Like one teaching their classroom,

141they gave an IE. They found that like um I think like 20% of the students had it correct. So they went back the next day and they used it as a formative assessment. So they're not just having students take the test. They're using that feedback to then teach the tier one and drive the tier one instruction. Um so so far we've had uh 555 of the math IABS, 651 of ELA and the AAS, which I'm going to keep saying we are never doing again, but we had 259 math and then 252. Um, at this point after we did the last, we we paused on doing IABS and ICAS just to make sure that we're focusing on the tier one and we're using the data that we got from ICAS and IABS to drive that instruction

142because we also don't want to over test or like get to the point where we're testing testing and we're not analyzing the data. Um this is our I Ready data and uh below is where we were for the fall and then up top is where we were for midyear and we're using building thinking classroom driving the the tier one to figure out what we need to do to make sure that our students are successful and this is I ready for math we use as web for reading and Miss Tol is is really great with meeting with the math teachers and figuring out where to go and looking at that data and we're using MTSS and Um Bridget and I are talking about like what to do for MTSS next year and where we want to

143go. We're involving Miss toll and Miss McKenzie, but it really is like building on itself every year and looking at what we had and figuring out if it was effective or not. Like ICAS for instance, not effective. So we're going to do away with that and figure out what we can do in the future for cadence of accountability um for sustainability. I have Mr. And the reason is because so we did eight to celebrate and that was something that was created by fourth grade that we now use schoolwide and it's a way to celebrate students as they're testing for using all of the eight strategies like for instance like going back over the testing making sure you're using your note paper and he's an accountability partner because he took the raffles very seriously like he

144would say where are the tickets please put them in the jar like he would go he had like an entire system students were helping him out he had like the um the the rewards for students to get. But and I mean this is all about the community as well. Mr. Troder actually sent out some postcards too. Um and students go to him when there is a like a problem in the school because he made himself like have a relationship like with the students and get them get to know them beyond like just being a figure in the building. So he is a big part of our testing and a big part of our reward system in our school in general. um all staff, they're a part of the sustainability as well or our accountability measures

145because they give very honest feedback. Um which is great because you know where everyone's standing, you know where this the students are and also they give really great suggestions and ideas for how to improve and also the staff attending new PDS are fourth grade teachers. They're going to be going to Iceland which is cool and so um for us they earned a grant and they did it on their own. know is outside of school hours, but they're going to bring back all that new learning to our our students. And that brings us to end of our presentation. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Hard act on a disaster. This is not I am so impressed. Oh my god. So impressed. So am I. Sweating. Do you guys have um anything to say just quick? I

146mean just all all great stuff. I just wanted to um the reading bowl stuff is just amazing. I mean just bringing everything I brought from wearing the clothes to the competition. I mean friendly competition amongst the students and everything just brings so much collaboration. I just love that whole idea. I mean, amazing. Um, you can show you can see the results. Uh, I love the fact that you can recognize and admit when something isn't working. Um, what you said that's a that and then swiftly taking action to get rid of it. That's that's commendable. You know, a lot of times that doesn't happen and just drags along. So, uh, which doesn't help anybody. So, that was very nice to hear. And then just lastly, I really apprec that that that beginning you mentioned that staff

147uh came up with a restor the restorative um circles her own. I really think that's very impressive. Um that really shows an open door policy and um and that's contributed by good leadership. So just want to say that's great to hear. Thank you. What a team. What a team. You guys are doing awesome. Anything else? Can I make a comment? Of course. Yeah, that's an ABL. Um, I as a parent uh at the for the middle school level appreciate the my son really appreciate the postcards. We got one at before school uh from uh from Raina and uh I think yours came uh for the winter time and the phone calls are interesting. Um we got a positive phone call day one. I almost didn't answer because it said the town of East. like I

148I can't do this on the first day of school. Um and I do believe that the teachers have upped the game with like the reading is amazing. Like for my speaking for my student, he doesn't like totally love it, but now he's really getting into it. Uh I know in their class, I don't know if all the fourth graders, they do flashlight Friday and they like read their books with a flashlight and uh that's come home too. He like builds forts and reads with a flashlight. That's awesome. And so I think that's impressive. And uh while we're on the night of budget stuff, I really appreciate all the UAS being available and like the after school activities um uh like bike club. That's really cool because how many schools around the state have that many

149acres and have these mountain bike trails? It's a really it's an amazing thing. So keep up the good work. Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much, ladies. All right. Here we go. High school. We're both normally asleep by now. Uh truth be told, it is competitive nature. So, we do have seven wigs for you in um I am going to present uh how we've got uh two wigs. Why important goals? And then Miss Joy is going to present um her third wild and importantly goal. So I want to share some uh survey data with you. Uh the the graphs on the left uh our teachers actually really really proud of these two because they are the result of hard work over the past couple of years. Um at the top it says the adults at school

150care about me. And if you add the percentages up between strongly agree agree and believe it or not our teachers believe that neutral at our level means good, right? and we'll take it. Um, so the majority of the kids that they said neutral, we took that as a super positive because it's not a no because we hear nos when it's a no, right? If you if you have a teenage son or daughter at home, you know what we talk about, right? It's how was school? Good. Okay, we'll take it. That's neutral. So um we're very very proud of the work that we've done with building relationships with our students, building positive relationships with our students and these are the result of the past two years work because that was our focus goal for our teachers

151and throughout our building. Uh I am treated with respect by my teachers same deal. Uh this is fall data as a result of hard work over the past two years and I share that with you to present where our area growth is this year. If we look at uh the survey data from our families where it was 58% of our families felt that they were connected or consistently informed about information that's communication and that struck us as as is hit us right in the heart. It's um we thought we were doing a good job of communication but it is very clear to our stakeholders that we're not doing enough. So we our hope at the end of the year is that we can take the survey again and that is a tremendous increase. So our

152teachers saw that our administrators saw that and I wonder if I should change the question to as compared to the middle school or elementary school. Are we getting the same amount of you really want to lose? I don't that is because they're getting tremendous results. But I mean so I I took some good things from this presentation believe it or not around areas we can grow on for communication. Starting there, we took this survey result and built a buildingwide goal for our teachers um that says this. By the end of the school year, we're going to be increased parent and guardian satisfaction with communication upwards of 20%. That'll push us closer to 80% which is a good step in the direct right direction. It's not wonderful. It's not ideal. We want to be close to

153100%. But being at 58% right now, we need to take a large step forward. and I think 20% was a realistic um way to do it. So that's one one of our wigs. The second wig is going to be more around um academic achievement. And so what I'm sharing with you today is the results of our PSAT uh in October for our grades 11, 10, and nine students. Uh, as you can see, um, there's the mean score running across starting with the class of 2026, which is our current juniors that also took SATs. And I say that now because we're going to come back to that number in a second. Um, at 9:40, the the 10th graders at 9:07 and the 9th graders um at 880. And that's for their PSAT scores from October. It's

154split into ERW and math um below as well. It's uh the s equals and n equals represents the state mean average and the national average. And you can see class of 2026, we're not surpassing that. Class of 27, we're not surpassing that national average either. And so we've got work to do in these areas. So our teachers seeing these results, we create another wig around it. Now, even though the wig is going to be central focused on one group of students, it we are doing it throughout the entire building. So, I'm going to show you the next slide. It's going to focus on one group of students and one assessment alone because we've seen data uh because we've seen data from the past around our SATs. But many of the things that we are doing

155are 9 through 12. So, our Oh, before I get there, um, this is a comparison of our current seniors in the gray to the far left on the three columns. That's their results from PSAT when they took it in their junior year, last fall. Uh, not this fall, but the previous year school year. Then the school day SAT, remember, our 11th graders take PSATs in October and then they take the schoolwide SAT in um in March. of that same school year. Okay. The seniors right now took SATs again in the fall. That was in October and that's the mean average was 1090. So I'm sharing that information with you because our wig goal is going to be around the current juniors right now. But if you look at the progress that our current seniors have

156made from the time when they were juniors from 965 on their PSAT score, then moved to their first attempt at the SAT to a 104. That was a jump of 40 points. Then they took their SATs again in the fall and we had an additional jump of 86 points. Tremendous growth each time they've taken the assessment. Okay. So I present to you the 11th grade group right now, our class of 2026 that achieved 940 in their first PSAT attempt. So our teachers saw that score said we can do better than 40 than 39 points. And so the goal was around achieving a greater than 940 but really jumping 40 points. That was the overall goal. So here's the wig. Students in grade 11, again it's focused on 11, but the work we're doing is 9

157through 12 for this for uh standardized test improvement. Students in grade 11 will improve their SAT scores by 40 points during the spring assessment that assessment. And so what let me go back. What we don't know right now is it the result because we did take the SATs in um at the end of March. We won't get those results back until the end of April. So, we're very anxious about whether or not we accomplished our goal. Okay? And I I hope to celebrate that very soon. Um, so I don't have that data for you, unfortunately. Um, so some of the things that we did to get ready. So, first, if you want to uh if you look at the middle area, we this was our communication focus. We made a a physical effort or and

158a really direct effort to improve the numbers of communications that we have utilizing parent square and remind app and my newsletter. I um that was backed by popular demand. I actually stopped it I think a couple years ago and then um a very popular board member Patty Sugar yelled at me and I brought it back and we've had it ever since. Every week. Every week it comes out every week. um in inclusive in there are the many many things that we're doing in our building as well as some of the the um the the the data that we share with our students around student achievement and whatnot. Um we've got 288 direct messages and 806 threads that were just for the month of February. I thought that was pretty cool, right? I was like that's

159pretty awesome. Let me grab the biggest month and that was what we did. But I saw your data and you were like at 20,000 like I don't know what you're doing. So I'm like so I we gota we gota we gota step it up here shortly. So um but the the other things that we've done to in working with our students in terms of improving their um communication was we we we've implemented on track conferences with students all grade nine through 12. That's a one-on-one conference with one teacher and we're really talking about many different things from academic to social emotional to home life to, you know, communication. And so we take on track conferences grade 9 through 12 as a means of adding to our ability to communicate home um adding to our ability

160to communicate with students one-on-one about their post-secondary goals. And it's not just with their counselor, but it's with another trusted adult. Who did you meet with, Gabe? the following with Miss Evans. All right, save Miss Evans. That's perfect. Um, and so you'll meet with her again at the end of the year and it'll be for seniors, it'll be more of like an exit interview kind of how can we continue to improve communication and student achievement. Um, but for everybody else, it's going to be have you achieved your goal? What are you what are you looking forward to next year? And um, again, it's a means of improving our communications. Um the other things around when you look at Khan Academy, we've asked our teachers um to align or utilize Khan Academy as an implementation tool

161or an instructional tool. Um that is a direct correlation to student performance on SATs. The better you do on Khan Academy or the more you're on it, the better you do on SATs. So we are hopeful because they've utilized that and they've part they've connected that to College Board. We're hopeful that the that method is improved their standardized assessment performance and again SAT data will be out soon. Um also our teachers are rookies at utilizing um let me take it back. They're not rookies at utilizing uh interm assessments. They're they're um newer to the concept of utilizing an assessment that's already created for them to measure interterm assessments. Is that a good way to say it? And uh Dr. Drio introduced our squad to utilizing smarter balance interterm assessments to help um assess the student

162progress as they're moving through the standards that all align to the SAT. And so the better they do on those interm assessments as interm assessments, one would assume that they're going to do better on SATs. And we hope for that. Um as it got closer, a couple other things we did for SATs to kind of prep. We had a schoolwide assembly where we stressed that SAT matters. Believe it or not, feedback that we got around SATs was, "I don't care. I don't want to take it." And some in the past have come into the building, logged in, and put their head down. And that impacts our our school. And so, we tried as a staff to to stress the importance of SAT is not just an assessment, but it's so much more than that. It's

163about your future. You never know when you may need that score. So that's good to have. Um it is a measure of your strength and skills that we can build on as a school. It's very very important for college admission. It's becoming even more so now because the implementation of AI colleges are swaying back to the SATs as more of an important assessment. So anyway, we've tried to stress that. We've also implemented some classroom instructional strategies to do better on the test like test taking tips and whatnot. And then we had a huge breakfast form on the day of SATs and hopefully we put filled their belly and they were on their way. So, uh, I am terrible at scoreboards. Admittedly, my accountability partner and partners have all told me that I'm not very good

164at scoreboards. And so, your scoreboards are awesome and I can't wait to use them and steal them. Um, but one of them that we did was making a commitment to doing your best. And so the goal, our students um put their palm prints up on a wall and said, "I am going to try right hand up. I'm going to try my best." Well, surely sorry. I'm going to try my best on the assessment. Um they were allowed to decorate it any way they want to, but they were just committing to try their best on the assessment for SAT. Um I didn't see any students with their head down. Saw students energized going into the assessment and we kept saying, "Do your best, do your best, do your best, do your best." That was like the

165the mantra leading into SAT. Um, we are going to be creating a scoreboard that All right. Now, this is not working surely. So, this is Here we go. So, and we are going to be creating a scoreboard following the results that says I improved over 40 points and then we're going to put a something. Again, I'm terrible at scoreboards, so I'm going to rely on Shirley for that decorative artwork that's that shows all the um not by name, but the number of students that did make that improvement over 40 points, and we get to celebrate their success there. Accountability stuff. Um our if meetings, we have a standing agenda item that talks about what are you doing in the classroom in terms of student performance and um SAT preparation, PSAT preparation, what uh interimm assessments

166are you utilizing. We have a standing weekly meeting if meetings that talks about that. Faculty shareouts. How are you doing these things in your classroom? What does it look like? Can I steal some, borrow some? Um, when Shley and I go into classrooms, we if we see things happening, we have the con uh the the conversation afterwards of a many observation. This is what I saw. you were implementing this strategy that aligns directly with what we were talking about around SAT performance or communicating home or with kids and that happens throughout the year. And then we also have grade level team meetings that um work on the the they did the actually the grade 11 team put that whole presentation together around the importance of SAT and whatnot as an example. So those are my

167two wigs. SAT performance again focused on 11th grade, but it was really standardized assessment performance as well as our communication at home. And then I think you take Thank you. Good job. Great. I'll try to be efficient because I know we're getting late. But um as you know from our December presentation, my wildly important goal was really focused on our ninth graders because you know, as I shared with you back in December, nth grade is that make or break year. There's significant literature out there that suggests that that transition from eighth grade to nth grade is where where you can lose kids and lose their energy for their education um to come up with post-secary goals and just to maintain success throughout their high school career. So my goal and I thought it was a

168little lofty but I said I'm going to set it anyways 100% of nth graders will earn at least B's or better in all classes. Um some folks will put just core classes but all of our classes are important. So we went with we agreed as a ninth grade team this is it all classes. So I'm very proud to share with you that at as of quarter three 94% of nth graders have met bees are better at least one quarter this school year that's um as of quarter three last year it was only 72% of nth graders. Now I want to just give you some other little bit of data. All right. Last year at this point today last year um just for nth graders I had 157 referrals submitted. That is small referrals like tardy

169to school up to big referrals like um possession of a vape. Um if I were to ask you to guess how many referrals have been submitted that was just for nth graders 157 just for nth grade last year. Um when we put the focus on academics guess how many referrals have been submitted for nth graders this year? 24. All year. all year up to this point. um I mean that is so just as you can imagine when my time is not spent um primarily issuing discipline to students and having these conversations I mean we're spending more time focusing on academics and so our nth graders in 2025 there have only been three referrals for nth graders so um they're the kids if you ask any I mean you can even ask any kid in the

170building they all know the goal for that that was the goal for nth graders and it's trickled up they're jealous Yes, every kid wants this. And so you may be thinking in your head also want to set this goal for every kid. Um it's because you know the focus was on grade nine as the make or break year but it has trickled up already and we have been celebrating kids um in all grade levels. So one of the things where where I'm getting that data and where my lead measures have been it's each progress report and each quarter we're celebrating students if they've made B's or better. Now, every single week we're looking at student data to see um anyone that's got a C plus or lower. We're taking a look at any ninth grader

171at our weekly team meetings to say, is there anyone we really need to focus on helping them lift? Um so, we've got strength-based interventions that we've implemented to help students get these grades that they are reaching for. Um our RISE teachers, now these are the specific teachers that host ninth graders um at in their RISE's classroom. They'll receive a star for students to put in the jar at the end of the quarter. It's and that's on the scoreboard. You'll see in a little bit. And at progress report time and um end of the quarter, students that meet that bees or better goal are getting um a little treat. You know, you're a smart cookie. Bees are better. You slam dunked it. So, that's where Mrs. Little Finnegan helps me come up with these creative treat

172ideas. Um here's our scoreboard. And I'm really proud of um some of these students came up for the first time this quarter to say, you know, this is my first time getting these are better. I had some kids ask if I could take their picture while they were putting it up because they were so proud of themselves for getting this goal. Um so this scoreboard, I've showed you this before in December. It's right outside Miss Colone and Miss Ponetk's class on the second floor. Um it's our visual representation of this leading measure. It's an inspiration for the ninth graders and all other students. As I mentioned, you know, the 10th grade team, they did a um these are better bagel celebration. Bagel bash. Yeah, bagel bash. Because the kids were like, "Give it to us,

173too. We're doing it." But it really it it displays progress and then promotes accountability. All right. So, my I've got some really fantastic accountability partners and, you know, as it's budget season, we want to express our appreciation for um having some great PD funds and we've been partners with the Rise Network now for two years. Um I've worked with them historically when I was in Hartford as well. And this is um my queen Lindsay who is just fantastic and always she brings the energy. She holds eight formal meetings with um myself and our IF team. She does PDS for our whole faculty. But she's on call. She met with me one Friday morning when I was struggling trying to get four students up to the bees are better goal at the end of the quarter

174and she's um at Penn State on a college tour with her daughter and she's zooming me from the room. So, she's an amazing accountability partner um with data checks and intervention recommendations. Um grade nine, I've got the best team there. They're fantastic, the um teachers, counselors, and support staff. We meet weekly. And I picked this picture because if you notice, that's a nice little um double chocolate sour dough that was delivered by a grateful parent um whose daughter, she came from a different middle school, but um her daughter had never had such wonderful grades, and she was so grateful. She's like, I'm going to send snacks to the meeting. um which is great. So in these meetings we review student data and we really focus on those strength-based interventions to try to lift kids and

175and elevate their learning. But the real accountability is coming from the kids. So um they if you ask any single ninth grader in our entire building what is your wildly important goal, they're going to tell you bees are better. Every single one. And so they're holding each other accountable. Um Dr. Dr. Drito's had the pleasure of coming to one of our events, our um Coco and Climb. And that's an afterchool tutoring event that we hold at the end of the quarter to really try to help students lift each other. We just had our popping up for bees are better at the end of the third quarter. And you know, in in these sessions, we've got National Honor Society students tutoring um our ninth graders, and they're, you know, ringing a bell and celebrating when they

176complete an assignment. um they've created their own visual scoreboard to show the assignments they complete during these events. Um they're asking me to take videos of them as they're posting their, you know, as they're getting the belt. They're like, we just want all documented and caught on camera. Um and you know, our ninth grade rises teachers really do a great job monitoring our student progress and, you know, celebrating their successes. So that's it. I'm really proud of the work that they're doing. Um and hopefully you all are too. Wow. Wow. I don't know. I think the B's are better. May take the A here. Yes, I do have a question. Yeah, sure check. I do have a question. Um I I understand about the repeated SATs we're taking in the the scores improve with time

177and and as a board and as the school system has come to understand, you know, getting them involved in the schools is is a really great way because they're expensive when the kids take them independently elsewhere. Do you think that the response prior to your intervention program that you put in reflects any programming changes. I guess I'm trying to frame this the right way that indicates students aren't necessarily indic interested in the college trajectory. Like is there a trades argument here where we don't have offerings in alternative areas that would direct a student a career path that isn't educational. So SATs become less important. Absolutely. And so I just I don't know if there's any sort of backstory to that that you know great students are picking up and they're investing and they're putting their

178efforts into these tests and ultimately in the long run maybe they will need to use those scores but is there an indication that there might be a need for a different look at what we're offering? Different look at what we're offering. I think we could expand. Um, I know that our students love the auto clothes that we're in. I mean, if I could offer an auto shop, I would tomorrow, you know, but there's a tremendous amount of work infrastructure. Three or four kids every senior project are doing cars, right? But, um, we have really great partnerships in the community. So, Carol from Eddie's Auto Body just called me the other day and she said, "We've got these um mechanics coming from Sweden, got a grant and we'd like a few of your students who work

179for us to be able to have an extraordinary educational opportunity and um would you excuse their attendance so that they can attend this presentation?" And she wrote, you know, a lovely note why I should grant them that opportunity. Um, she called me back to say how amazing it was, sent pictures for me of their work, and then she said, you know, I'd really like to talk with you about trying to set them up on a schedule so they can have an internship next year. You know, these are some students that that's what we want, right? I mean, it's it's beautiful and these are students that are great in that field, but we have to persuade to take the SAT and and that's, you know, that's hard for us to try to encourage them to do

180that. But at the same time, you know, we hear we hear the voices from our community that say, "We want to see these good SAT scores." So, we hear that. But we know what our kids want and we're going to help them get both. Yeah. So, I'm just I was looking at some students on Instagram of I was looking at some posts on students on Instagram who are excited about their their college course or college work next year. And I I noticed a student um posted about MCC and they're they're going for automotive. Um so it's not that trades are not part of college courses now. They are starting to integrate right now. That being said, I don't know if you need SAT to get into like all of those courses and my kids you

181don't need SATs to get into University of St. Joe or Central anymore, right? So but I think it's a a component of how we measure our curriculum. Great question. What I was gonna say like we have to measure it somehow. So I think like like what you said Alison like getting them to do both like they might they might not take that route but giving them the opportunity to if they change their mind I think is a really great thing and we want to measure how well the students are doing and I know that sometimes the SATs aren't directly correlating with like the what's being taught in the class. It's not exactly, you know, apples to apples, but um it is it is developing students in a way that can be utilized in other areas

182of their career down the line, even if it's not academic. So, I am I I totally hear everything everyone's saying and definitely agree. Um but th those measurements are important because they tell us things about our students and then they give students opportunities and and also as you guys work with them to improve on on their skills in the classroom too. It is important even if they're going to do something like a trade school which I'm super supportive of. Awesome. Okay. I have one question. Sure. Sorry. Are the SATs done on the computer now? They're not done like a little learning curve. We're hoping to I just want to make one comment too. Sure. Um the work you and the teachers are doing and this is for all of you makes what we went through

183last night worth it. Thank you. Thank you. Amen. Thank you. Well said. Thank you. Go home. Okay. Thanks. Thank you so much. We're gonna stay for that. Yep. All right. We're moving uh Gabe up next. If he's late tomorrow, excuse it. Exactly. All right. So on the last weekend of March, our drama club brought the magic of Beauty and the Beast to life with outstanding performances by all the club members. From hand painted props to dazzling costumes, the show was really unforgettable and it was really evident how hard the members worked to put on the show and it was great to watch. Um on Thursday, March 27th, the unified sports team faced the staff in the electric unified vers staff annual basketball game. The loud, supportive environment was so special and the entire school was

184able to recognize how hard the unified sports team works. We had the lights dimmed. We had glow in every section. It was really special and I'm glad that they got recognized because they deserve it. Um, recently seniors Mackenzie Albert and Airman Yebo received prestigious performing arts awards and were celebrated at the aquat. This recognition reflects their commitment and their talent to the performing arts programs and we're super proud of their accomplishments. Last Monday, ELA students went on a field trip where they visited the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island. Through exploring the architecture and learning the stories from the Gilded Age, students gained a deeper understanding of the literary connections tied to these estates. Students in Mr. Ricky's steam guitar class have begun designing custom logos to engrave onto their guitars, adding a personal touch to

185their hard work. Uh, spring sports are off to a wonderful start with the softball team beginning their season with two impressive victories. They defeated Portland 25 to zero and defeated Koganog 10 to3 and tomorrow they play against Berlin and this Friday they play against Westbrook. Baseball currently sits at a record of 0 and2 but has continued to put in so much effort into practices and games and I'm sure that they will win shortly and they play Kogenchuk Thursday. So best of luck to all of our athletes. And with graduation inching closer, seniors have continued announcing their plans after high school. So, just congratulations to Kaylin who's going to CCSU, Zero who's going to Yukon, Grace who's going to Quinnipiac, Nikki who's going to CCSU, Jackie who's going to Sacred Heart, Aiden Matish who's going to

186Kentucky, Julie who's going to Gordon College, Abby May who's going to Yukon, Kayla who's going to Western Connecticut, and Mackenzie Albert who's going to Sacred Heart. That's all I have. That's Thanks everybody. Okay. Um, can I just say real quick that we um I brought Theo to the high school play of Beauty and the Beast and it was so great. Um, y'all did a great job. I'm really proud of you. So, thank you for putting on another great performance. Awesome. Thanks, Jackie. All right, I'm gonna try to move this along. Right along. Yeah. Um um report of the board chair I am passing out a email that I received actually um Sean received it in regard to the um reading and the person um wanted to talk to us about her experience with Wit and

187Wisdom. which and bookworms um and how thrilled she was with um wit and wisdom and how she strongly advocated for it. So I want you guys just to take that and you can read that. Um I did receive a email from a parent in regard to golf. Um, I took that concern up with um with Dr. Jabrio and I today I received one from the PTO chair supporting our budget. So um wanted to share that with you as well. Other update things um Teresa and I uh met with Tim Cahill and Chase Frecker. Um was that this week? No, it was last week weeks running together. Um, in regard to the endowment and the Cornell, um, we got some back history and we got a lot of history because he's one of our zero boys.

188So, yeah. So, it you have to explain the zero boys. What is that? Um, it was um the soccer team that went undefeated. What year? It was like 1956 or something. No, he's not that old. Yes, he is. Yeah. Yeah. He was on that team. My son did a video on that. My son did that documentary. Yes. I raised money for it and with the historical society and um it was it was a pretty amazing story. Yeah. So, we got a lot of information. Um and then we finally got some information about um the endowment. So, we're waiting on more information. Tim is working on um on setting up a committee which will be very much like um the Ray board. It'll probably be really a lot smaller, but it's going to be a community

189member, a board member and stuff. Um just to kind of keep up to date on that. So, we'll keep you posted on that as well. That's one of my goals kind of coming up. And um and I also just you know want to thank everybody here for all of their work through the budget season and stuff. Um, my last comment is going to be I think we see what happens when a board member goes astray. And when we all stay together and we all stay focused on what our goal is and why we're here, we can make great strides. And I am very proud of our board. I am very proud of our board. Um, and that is all of my comments there. Does anybody have anything back for me on that? I'm trying to

190move along as fast as I can here. Audience of citizens is done. Um, is there a motion to accept the minutes of March 12th, 18th, and April 1st? So, second change. Thank you, Jackie. Give Jackie the second. Hold on. Um, before you say it though, let me just get them so I can make changes. So, we're going first with the change on March 18. All right. March. So, we're on the 12th, though. No, we're on the 18th. Are we done with the 12th? Yes. I don't think we didn't take a motion. Yeah, we did. 18. What you got? Uh, I'm going to toot my own horn. I call that meeting to order. Okay. Motion to um approve minutes for March 12th, 18, and April 1st as amended. All in favor? Hi. Hi, Dr. Jabrio. Good

191evening, everyone. It's been a whirlwind, but it's ending very well because of the Japanese administrative team. I wish they were here to hear that because I all that hard work. Everyone needed to be a part of that. Um the presentations were great tonight and was really excited about all the work that is from our youngest all the way up and specifically with the change from I Ready. Um Dibbles is pretty powerful number one because the kids are not on a computer. Number two, the reason they're not on the computer is because they're actual teacher is watching them as they respond. And there's nothing better than that firthand experience to see how they're processing, how they're responding. Um, so super excited about all the work. Um, in regard to reading grades four through eight, the middle

192school now is going to pilot and do their own review. Um, just want everybody to know that that is not legislated. So there is no deadline. There's nothing like that like there was for the K3. um that they'll have their opportunity. Um Yukon reached out to me with an opportunity to do some research and I've worked with them in the past and the way it works is that professors come in um they meet with teachers. teachers will have an opportunity to get stipens um because they do get some training in the summer and um there is random selection of um classes that get additional training and others that don't just to really see how the impact in instruction control right exactly a control group an experimental group or a comparison group as I call it

193nowadays um so I'm looking into our policies to see if that exists how I can bridge that I know how we can bridge that because parents need to give permission. Nothing personally identifiable will be there at all. That's just protocol when doing research. But there will be communications that go home. So I um alerted the admin team initially about this, but we haven't moved anywhere. It's just started to surface. So I'm going to come back to the admin team. Um there might be yet another opportunity too. So, like they're reaching out. I'm It doesn't cost us anything. They're the ones that get the funding. Um and so happy to do that for our policy changes. Just let me know. It would be good to have a policy on it. Um we're not breaching anything, but

194it's critical that families know that families have opt out opportunities, things like that. Um wanted to also give a shout out to Beauty and the Beast. I did also go see I saw it on Friday night and I heard it just got better and better like so whoever saw it Saturday night whoever went it right it was fantastic in my sixyear words were you up front that's impossible were you up front like three seats back oh see that's worth it so um just kudos to that whole department because the lead role was the young gentleman who spoke last night and he just is just blossoming and and shine be a movie star someday. I think he absolutely will be um a movie star and um I will get a communication out on the last day

195like the last day of school is continuing with what the calendar is and unfortunately we do have one extra day for elementary because they did get actual long weekend where the others didn't because there was no power. So we'll get a communication out um regarding that but thank you to the entire board for your support. Um it's been quite a roller coaster of emotions in a very short amount of time. Um and the teachers are trying to stay focused on the important work of working with the children. So um and the admins are helping support that as well. So thank you very much. Thank you. All right, moving along. Um you don't need to a committee report because all your stuff is here, right? Um I well I also wrote it out anyway. Okay. Well,

196when we get to those policies, we'll go over it. That will be your report. Um personnel and negotiations subcommittee. Uh we have not met. Okay. Um capital improvements. Uh we met March 26. Uh update on the HVAC project. I'll just tell quickly there is a um always a problem uh switch gears which has to do with electrical because we need 1200 amp service and now we have 600 amp service at the elementary school and those parts are not going to be available till November. I live with switch care issues. Okay. So um and we approved outstanding invoices but it's uh chugging along but it's just not going to be uh It won't be ready until probably December 31st. December 31st. It has to be done. New Eve celebration. Yes. Okay. Um Terry's not here for

197learn Rayborn. So yeah, Sean and I um took extensive notes and then also both forgot all of our notes. Um but just as a little Sean can give his and I'll just give a few bullet points if that's okay with you. Sean, we um talked about the budget. Chris is kind of working on um the budget on the high school side with the teachers. Then he's going to bring that back to the Rayboard and kind of explain what you know what they're looking for and just give them some more information, do their whole budget process. Um I'm looking forward to learning more about that. Like Sean and I were talking after like I have a lot to learn about the RA board. Very interested in it. We also got a little tour of um the

198wood shop. The wood shop. Very proud where they make the maple syrup like um a lot of the um instruments they use are very like it just looks cool. But yeah, I don't know. Welders welding machines. We saw the guitars that were referenced earlier. Um really cool. that that was really cool. Um so yeah, they're doing a lot of good things, but we will have to um share notes. Yeah. Uh just also they were working on the brochures that they're that they're been working on putting together to for to try to bring their outside in. Um so that was a big talk. Um they were discussing scholarship night that's going to be coming up. was a little bit disappointed because at that moment they hadn't yet had any applicants and at that time there were

199zero applicants and the deadline was just about then. So they were extending it a little bit further. Um, so they were discussing ways on really how we can get the word out more and really it just didn't doesn't seem like uh enough you know enough is being emphasized out there to get people interested in that which you know so that needs really be something and then um uh yes just talking about the budget deadlines took a really nice tour and uh that's all I have question yes please uh on the scholarship I I'm drawing a blank because it's been a couple years since my daughter was a senior. But is their scholarship only applicable to college programs or can they use that to a trade program? Do you know what I thought it was? Yeah,

200it's I think it's college and they have really strictulations because um I believe that theirs is for four years. So you get scholarship money each year and it's it's a good chunk of money. So be talking about how we can broaden the horizons of life anything and I'll be happy to meet with you guys in regard to the budget um preparation and and everything as far as history goes for the May board. It would be nice collaboration because there's Definely a lot here on our end that you know we have to figure out with the budget and then the Rayboard has their resources and that has just to the high school as I understand right so it would be nice to figure out some collaborations as just some history stuff we'll get together and have

201a cup of coffee and go over that um learn is not here that's Terry um oh long range capital improvements we've talked about the budget enough and um Not that. Yes. Been there, done that. Safety and security. Um, has not met. Old business. None. New business. Jackie, you out there. Jackie, I'm coming back for you. Someone Yes, ma'am. Oh, you are here. Okay. Discussion and possible action on the elementary school greenhouse. You have three minutes. So, I sent everybody my presentation and I'm here for any questions. Okay. So, in this role, you are stepping out of your board role kind of and you're Yes. Okay. Oh, yes. Yes. I am now just a citizen. I um run the garden at the elementary school which is funded outside of the board of ed um funding. It's

202all through donations and community input. Um, I was awarded the East Hatam Community Foundation Hero Award this year. And with that with with that, um, I'm putting all of that obviously back into the garden. And part of that is a greenhouse so that students when they start their own seeds has a place to grow um, and be successful. So, it's a six foot by eight foot poly greenhouse steel frame. Um, Megan, it's already approved by business and planning and by everybody. Yes. Okay. Yes. The only thing that has changed since the business and planning meeting is that I met with uh Mr. Anger Sola to solidify the proper placement at the school because what I had in mind did not work long term for the HVAC project. So he approved what's on like slide nine

203or 10 um for the placement. Awesome. Is there a motion to approve the element? Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? I Yes. Thank you, Jackie. You've done such good work with us for the last year or two. Yeah. There was no way that was going down, right? Yeah. You've done great. We're moving on now. Don't take offense. Don't take offense. She She turned us off. She's like, "Bye." Time discussion impossible. I'm still here. I'm just not like escaping. I'm still listening. Um discussion and possible action on the reading programs bookworms and um I I just want to kind of highlight this a little bit. Uh policy and instruction has gone over this in large detail and has asked to bring that forward. I think that it's really important that we continue to share the

204common goal of elevating um learning. And as we review and we start looking at new programs and we start looking at curriculum, things can get bumpy along the way. And I think as we do more I think the the processes and the understanding is going to get better. Um and I think that we are all always learning whether it's board members whether it's staff members and obviously the goal is our children. So as we enter this new program, I think it's going to be important that um it does elevate learning and also it will be adaptable if we want to add things on to that program to even build it higher. So I want us to keep an open mind as we go through this. This was the first process I think that the board

205has ever taken on, right? We've never looked at really curriculums and programs. So, we're we're going to have another one that was going to come forward at some time in the future for the fourth through eight. So, um those are my words before I call for a vote. Do you have anything to say? No, I think the teachers worked really hard. That was visible. Um and there was a lot of front loading for that particular program. Um I think that they understand the um expectation that rigor and building robustness um in our learning environments is really important and that we're building knowledge that kids actually are increasing knowledge so that the reading that they're learning as far as phonics they can actually then apply it and build comprehension as they get older and older. Um,

206the other thing, and I just thought of this, I think it might be a good idea that the policy committee really be named like policy and educational programming as opposed to policy and instruction or policy and just curriculum. I think it falls under the umbrella of educational programming because it's text and it's curriculum. It's just a brainstorm just came to my mind and I didn't want to lose it. For what it's worth, I have no objection to it. The name that to me the name doesn't matter because the portfolio is not changing. Yes, exactly. Thank you for that. You may clarify it. Yes. Which is not a bad idea at all. Yes. Um and so I I do think that it makes sense because we absolutely can add other texts. We absolutely can create units

207and lessons that can adapt as we need it to adapt. So that's always with any program but they really understand the structure and another thing they really um had shared was the schedule as well that the other had so much they really were struggling to try to fit it in. So the schedule that's currently at the school that this one aligned better. So I think there were multiple reasons for um their desire and so I I don't see a reason to object after all that work has been done and I would I would agree with that and especially um with our budget issues. Um we have invested $4,500 into it. I believe that um our grant covered it, right? The grant covered it. There would be probably about $5,000 more, I believe, that might be

208needed for supplies or things of that nature. Oh, don't worry. Next year it's going to be way more than that to build the libraries and the classrooms like it next year's budget is going to happen. But if we started with another program, we are going to be way back in the So this conversation is versus Whit and Wisdom. Correct. Okay. So, the recommendation is to and I'll be looking for a motion to um I'm I'm going to make that motion in a second because I know what you're looking for. Um I do want to sort of jump on to something you said and reinforce it. Um you're right. It is a learning curve for all of us. Yeah. Part of that learning curve has to be a recognition that there needs to be a clear

209wellestablished protocol before any evaluation of materials or curriculum is started. Especially when you're looking at multiple programs. They have to be clearly it it's like any other scientific effort. You you have to know what you're doing. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to record the data. All that stuff. Having said that, um the teachers appear to be very committed and I would like to move that we adopt um Book Worms as the approved program for our school district. Second. Anyone? Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Um I'm all in favor. I just want to say that to kind of go on top of what Jim just said and Teresa and Patty, what's done is done. I am going to vote with this motion and going forward if we can create

210clear guidelines and boundaries. I think that would work best for everybody. So that's it. All those in favor? I hold on, hold on, hold on. Sorry. I was gonna say I would like to thank I I watched that policy meeting and I would like to thank the teachers and also you should thank the students who participated in two pilots. I think we uh missed the student aspect of that. So, okay, you got another one? No, Sean's got No, I was just gonna say Oh, all those favor say I. I Thank you. I All right. discussion and possible action on copy machine bids. You missed the Never mind. I'm so tired. Sorry. Copy machine bids. Copy machine bids. Is there one pin? So, there is in your package results. We had eight competitors for the copier

211bid. It's in there. Um it's the colorful page in there. Um I do want to just quickly Teresa will talk to you about the contract. she has that in her hand. But I do want to just mention that we did have a group of people that went together, reviewed all the bids. There was one bid that was actually lower. Um, but the reviews did not come back as positive and it was significantly lower to the point that we were a little concerned as to necessarily why it was as low as it was. And the review um references that we did did not come back in in a positive way. So, the company that the the committee all chose was the company that we currently use um which is Office Works and it's Toshiba. Um and

212I will let Teresa talk to the rest of it, but I just wanted to point that out to you and point to you where I did watch the emails go back and forth. I am 100% comfortable with the committee's um recommendation on that. So, do we want to go into a big discussion? Do you want to discuss? I don't think we No, I've got the contract. I don't feel like I know enough about it to judge. I'll take advice from others. The other thing is like they threw in a new copier at the high school like at no cost. Yeah. So, we're able to continue and I I'm hopeful Toshiba will be a better than what we currently have through them. But our new copers, our copers now are seven years old. So every time

213you open a new contract, all the copers are replaced with that new contractor. Correct. So this is a really great upgrade to and they want to do it over the over the vacation week. So is there a motion on the form to accept second? Any further discussion? All in favor? I All right. Um I'm trying to move this as long as as fast as I can. healthy food um certificate. This is our annual um discussion and I know you're moving it quickly but per state of guidelines that you do actually have to read it. Yes, you've got it. I got it right here. I'm reading it right now. Required vote for participation in HFC motion healthy food option pursuant to Connecticut General Statute section 10-21F the East and Board of Education certifies that all food

214items offered for sale to the students in the schools under jurisdiction and not exempted from Connecticut nutrition standards published in Connecticut State Department of Education will comply with the Connecticut Nutrition Standards during the period of July 1st, 2025 through June 30th, 2026. This certification shall include all foods offered for sale to students separately from reimbursement reimburseable meals at all times and from all sources including but not limited to school stores, vending machines, school cafeterias, culinary programs any and any fundraising activities on school premises sponsored by the school or by non-school organizations and groups. Still moved. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? I. Motion B. Required vote for food and beverage exemptions to healthy food options. I'll be looking for a motion for the east and board of education will allow the sale to students of

215food items that do not meet the Connecticut nutritional standards and beverages not listed in section 10-221Q of the Connecticut General Statutes provided that the following conditions are met. One, the sale is in connection with the event occurring after the end of the regular school day or on the weekend. Two, the sale is at the location of the event. And three, the food and beverage items are not sold from a vending machine or school store. An event is an occurrence that involves more than just a regular schedule practice meeting or extracurricular activity. For example, soccer games, uh, school plays, interolastic debates are events, but soccer practices, play rehearsals, and debate team meetings are not. The regular school day is the period from midnight before to 30 minutes after the end of the official school day. Location

216means where the event is being held and must be at same place as the food and beverage sales. So move second. Any discussion? Move. All in favor? All right. Um policy 0521 non-discrimination. Jim, um this is a policy that um was out of date as all of our policies are. Um we are making a change. This you guys already went on a first read last month and Dr. Drito asked that we make a change. She heard advice from an attorney. Um so and it's it's all the same thing in one form or another. It basically I had put in that the compliance officer which is a required position under law um would um handle these things and then if they could be reported to the compliance officer or to the superintendent. Um apparently that's not

217kosher according to the attorney. So everything gets switched from to to the compliance officer who will inform the superintendent. So the policy requires that she be kept up to date and that kind of a change appears in a bunch of places. The only place where it's any different if you look at step two investigation um in the very first paragraph it currently reads the superintendent of schools who shall then well no I got to read the whole sentence or it won't make sense. Upon receiving a complaint of discrimination the building principal shall immediately notify the court uh compliance officer and then the change in language who will inform the superintendent of schools. But then the next thing was who shall then authorize the building principal to investigate the complaint. That grammatically is incorrect because it

218means that the superintendent is going to give that permission. It needs to come from the compliance officer. So the word who needs to change to and okay and the rest of it is as I said it just that change and I would ask that the board approve those changes and then put it back into the consent agenda where it belongs for tonight so we can get this done. It doesn't have to move. We just do it right here. Mhm. So, is there a motion to approve policy 0521 as amended? Second. Any further discussion? No. All in favor? Remember where I'm at. Thanks, folks. Discussion and possible action on the following policies for first read. Policy 5114, suspension and expulsion. Policy 0521.3 institutional neutrality and policy 5144.1 safe learning environment. Did everybody have a chance to

219read these? Yes. Yes. I' I'd like to address a couple things real quick. Um the suspension expulsion policy is 15 years old. It had to get updated. Yeah. Um, and other than that, there's not a whole lot to say. The only thing I did that varies from CABE is CABE talks about suspensions for multiple events. The law for bullying specifically, the law does not require multiple events. They put it in there um because of the tension between uh uh restorative practices and punitive practices. I changed it back to a single event knowing that it shouldn't happen if it can be avoided and handled through a restorative mechanism, but wanting to leave the administration the ability to do what they have to do. And then I added language at the beginning that explicitly says we prefer

220restorative when possible. And other than that, it's exactly what K had. Okay. Is everybody in favor of moving this along? Is there a motion to approve policy 0521.3 and 51441? So move. So move. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? I. Acceptance of consent agenda 1 to 10. Still moved. Any discussion? All in favor? I. Motion to adjurnn. So move. I second. All in favor? Have a great night everyone. Thank you guys.