001happy to be over there be out of school for a while. Um, and also members of the student leadership committee at FHS are going to the MIT to um next Monday to share their mission and further develop their action steps to um improve um to improve respect among peer here I guess among peers in high school. And then also this Thursday um the FHS and FMS spring band concert will take place at 6:30. So if any any of you want to come join and then also this Friday the track team will be hosting track meet at 3ort. Um please feel free to come and also um I learned that Miss Goodspeed has been hosting conversations um about installing um solar panels at Freeport. And also on May 13th, there will be a spring and coral
002um showcase in the Free Perform Arts Center. And also on May 22nd at Free High School in the gym, there will be a Red Cross blood drive. So if anyone wants to donate blood on on May 21st, there will be a college fair from 6:30 to 7 at High School. Thank you. All right. And that's exciting about the cleaning choir concert coming up. So, there's lots of good performances. Thank you. All right. So, now we are at our public comment um section. And if we do have people that are here for public comment, I'm just going to read um a little bit of our our guidelines. Um in order that we can hear from the largest number of voices, each speaker will be limited to three minutes for comments. Um for those who have not
003participated in our meetings before, these are a few of the rules. Um, we ask that speakers identify themselves, name and town of residents. Uh, but please try to be brief and not repeat yourself. Uh, we know discussions of school related issues can get emotional, but please remember our children are watching and your neighbors. So, please be civil. We will not permit profanity or shouting at one another or comments that disparage and attack individuals or groups of individuals. Speakers should direct all comments to the board. This is an opportunity to the board to listen to the public to the opinions of the public that relate to school and education matters. It is not a public debate or conversation. So no questions should be directed to the board. The board will not be responding to any questions
004or comments if they are asked. We want to listen. The board will not permit complaints or allegations against staff members. These are personnel matters which the board is not permitted to hear in public. If there are complaints against staff, these will be handled appropriately through our complaint procedure KB. And if you're interested in a two-way conversation on the RS5 website, individual emails and phone numbers are available for board members and superintendent. So, thank you for your patience and anybody would like to speak, you can see. Hi everyone. My name is Phyllis. I am the school counselor at Freeport Middle School and I had to do a quick edit to make sure that what I wanted to talk about fit your rules. So bear with me a little bit on on my um thoughts, but I'll
005start with as someone who rarely reaches out in this capacity, I write today compelled by a deep concern for the direction of leadership hiring in our district. With 36 years of education or being in education, 17 of those proudly spent at RSU5, I feel it is important that you hear directly from someone who has been deeply embedded daytoday in the realities of our schools. I have watched with growing concern as highly committed individuals from within our system have been passed over for leadership roles. These decisions have had a direct impact on staff morale. sorry, student outcomes and our overall school stability. A couple of examples I can't share um because it may identified, but several of the the people that I know that have applied for leadership positions um are people with doctorates, with Harvard
006education um degrees, uh teacher of the year finalists. We're talking highly educated um educators who may not have the years of experience, but that's my concern that I'll continue with. Um let me see. In the moment of uncertainty, what I've seen is several of the people that have been passed over stood up to take us through a really tough time. Um, I know everyone's aware that Freeport Middle School had some some situations with our administration this year. Um, and I just want to make sure that those are taken into account over how many years of experience somebody may have. Um, my concern is why are we not mentoring some of these leaders so that they can move into higher levels? um so they can move into administrative roles. Um I I I think we do
007that for students and that's something we're really proud of and I'm concerned that we're not taking that into account when we're looking um at our hiring process. Not everyone may have the years of experience, but how wonderful would it be if they were able to get that mentorship here to get that under their belt. Um, I strongly urge central office to consider long-term benefits of investing in our own educators. We must recognize and nurture the talent already in our schools. The district's failure to do so not only undermines staff morale, but it also sends a discouraging message to those who have committed themselves to the community and to their education that their dedication and contributions are not valuedever. Whatever districts are fortunate enough to hire these exceptional educ educators will undoubtedly benefit from their passion
008and leadership at our expense. How wonderful would it be for our students to see these leaders moving on within their own communities to see them at the grocery store and know that they've bettered themselves through the higher education and have been able to stay with Freeport and have people who can mentor them through so that they can take on those roles. It's just a real concern to me. It's not just one person. I've seen it happen multiple times. Um, and the result of one was horrible and we're dealing with it to this day and I'm concerned what that's going to be like next year as well. We're kind of back in the same boat. So, thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hi. Hi, Moon. It's good to hear you. Good to see you. Um, my name
009is Mary Federly. I'm a math teacher at the middle school and I too am standing up with concerns. Um, I didn't know no names. So again, I've edited and I'm going to try my best here. Um, today was a really sad and discouraging day at Freeport Middle School. The staff learned that our acting principal was not chosen to be the principal for the coming year. Um, some of you may not be aware of the difficult year we've had at FMS. Uh, the principal who was hired for the year to lead us struggled. Nope. Can't say that. Okay. Sorry. Strike that. Um, we had a lot of difficulties this year. They could be felt by the staff and it could be seen in student behaviors. Um, not sure what I can say, but we were left
010sort of high and dry. Um, no explanation, no goodbye, and um, the person who had to step in um, was able to pick up the pieces. Um for those who don't know that person is um don't want to say too much identifying information I guess um but is a dedicated caring kind and knowledgeable educator. Um she was able in a very brief time to write our ship. um we felt abandoned and that person restored trust and guidance and along with um the assistant uh acting assistant principal has made uh FMS feel the way it should welcoming, safe and focused on the needs of students. For seven months this year, it often didn't feel that way. Um and it may sound like an overstatement to say that this person turned things around and to today that
011this qualified educator was not hired as our principal raises questions and red flags and I just want to encourage you all to ask those questions and look into why it was that she was not offered this position. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Anyone else? Okay. All right. Thank you. And we will move on to our number eight which is the reports from the superintendent and she has a strategic plan update for us. Jean, are you going to use the screen up here? Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay, this evening I'm going to update the board on the work that's happened this year with our strategic planning process. Um, and we know we're really just at that beginning of our journey and our strategic plan is going to be a roadmap to s for success for
012all students. Back in the fall, um we started with getting an inclusive membership for our strategic planning process committee. Um we wanted to make sure that there were parents, community members from each town. There's a student rep on there and um we're looking for a new student rep because our student rep is graduating, is going to be off to college soon for next year. Uh we had two teachers, two board members, two administrators, um director of instructional support, the assistant superintendent and superintendent. So we started with that group and you will see as we move along that we're going to definitely we'll be expanding and if already expanded that group. Uh we sent out requests for qualifications from some potential consultants and our the committee um got those proposals in and we actually had an
013organizational meeting to look at all those proposals. We interviewed two of the three consulting groups who submitted to us and we selected great school partnership to begin our work. Um we began in in November actually we're collaborating with our facilitator to lead the our committee uh so that and we were going to complete a draft of a comprehensive five-year strategic plan. Um so Cynthy and I met with that person and then um to start to discuss the whole scope of the project and in January met again to really be develop that work plan for our committee and for our staff for the remainder of the school year. Um, if you look at this graphic, this is what's going to guide us through this whole process. And I'm going to go through each one of those
014steps in a minute and say what we've done and what we have yet to do. So, there's a portion of laying the foundation, um, seeking community input, drafting a portrait of graduate, which we'll talk about in a minute, and then drafting the strategic plan itself. So, laying the foundation, this was really um, critical work we did. We were looking at who are those stakeholders um that we want to help support this work and we developed a timeline with really specific goals with our train with our strategic planning committee. Um J I'll say January to September 2020 you'll see that September that gathering data from community groups using focus groups and surveys. Um and then at the end the last part will actually um finalizing that portrait of a graduate and we'll get in a little
015bit deeper to what we've done in each one of those categories. You may say what does a portrait of a graduate have to do with a strategic plan? Well, a portrait of a graduate express our community's hopes, dreams, and priorities for our our kids. What what do we want to see when our kids walk out the door from Freeport High School? It's a process designed to engage all stakeholders in our community. And when we have that portrait of a graduate is going to guide the work for the strategic plan. Uh these are key questions that we've asked so far, staff members that we've worked with. Um and actually Cynthia and I worked with um educational technicians who are unable to attend a PD we had for other educators um in March. And these are the
016key questions we asked groups today. First of all, what are your goals, hopes, and dreams do you have for our young people in our schools? What knowledge, skills, and experiences and character traits do you think will be essential to achieve these goals, hopes, and dreams? What ways you think our schools currently help our kids to develop the knowledge, skills, and characters traits that are identified? What ways you think our schools can help students have the experience they need to achieve them? And at what ways do you think our schools could better prepare learners for life? So, those are some key very broad questions that we ask our staff members. And we'll be doing a similar pro process with community members and also through um a survey. Um a portrait of graduate is really our north
017star for our process and it's going to articulate how we're going to make this vision our values a reality over the next five years. Um and then that will result in hopefully our culminated in a strategic plan. So now let's look at each one of the laying the foundation. What what do we mean? What have we done? These are things that we've actually completed and all of these first ones were done in January. Um this is the first is Cynthy and I met with um the members from GSP who were doing our work with us to really um look at make sure we want to make sure our committee represented um community and students. We put together a calendar. Um we wanted to make sure we had our plan had equitable community engagement and look
018at populations and plan like what would the outreach might be. We did that with our committee. Um, and then develop a plan for some updates to the board. Tonight's that update for you because we're very early on in the process. And then establish a plan and timeline. The next part went into seeking that. So that was that's just the foundation and then seeking community out out input. Um, sort of that why statement. We're looking at what's our process. We've had multiple meetings. In our January meeting, we really looked at for questions for community input questions for data survey. What are those focus groups we might meet? We might um meet with um crafting those questions for the community for input on the portrait of the graduate, our mission, our vision, our core beliefs. Uh identifying
019outreach for the community feedback is certainly one thing that was super important to all of us. I know it's important to the board and to the the um members of the committees like how do we get to some of those marginalized populations so that they have a voice as well and then we were to develop the key questions that you saw tonight and also questions that will be part of the survey. In fact, we moved on to really look at what are those stakeholders and and we started looking at well where would we go when might we go what's our communication plan and that's where we de we work some more in February to bond that survey in March um we did some the um some community conversation training for our facilitators and I know
020um Karen Kelly were both there when we met with our our our staff in March and they help support that work and that's when we had that initial conversation on the March 14th workshop day and and folks who are unable to attend that the March 14th day and that was primarily some of our support staff they met with Cynthia and myself today and we collected their data and that will be again added as part of the larger pool of data in April we met again looking at you know dates times messaging community outreach um we found it important we found that there weren't enough workerbees at the table. So, we've solicited other folks to join us. Um, and there's um several other teachers from various schools who will be joining this group to be part
021of this work. During this month, there are going to be student conversations. Um, the committee felt it was important if we could capture that from students right now and our partners at Great School Partnership are working with our middle school and high school principles to talk about when that might be ideal to work with kids for that. the community outreach. Um, we really took a pause on that because we were worried we were rushing too fast to do it this spring, especially where we got annual budget meeting coming up and and then there were all those things like graduation. All those things are coming and and we really felt it was best to do that in early fall when people are fresh and they have fresh ideas. So, that's the plan for early fall to
022really get that get the word out that we're doing this and have that those conversations, have our um survey launch and so forth to gather additional insight and information. And then we're really going to start what are those emerging themes and doing some coding of that data. Here's where this is when you really look at that data analysis. We got to we have more to collect because we have more we have a survey we need to do. We need to talk to community groups. Um so there's not there's not a timeline there because that's sort of the next step once we have that. Um we're certainly going to um also we're going to look at what are those other pertinent data sets we may already have. For example, we're going to be providing achievement data.
023We're going to providing some demographic data and so forth. So we can put that all into the bigger picture. And then we'll certainly be looking at analyzing that data all of the data that we have existing data our focus group data and things we've already the survey data that we'll be collecting and that will be created um the strategic planning committee will look at that for analysis great school partnership that's one thing they do well is they put all pull all that data and so that it's it's decipherable and the committee can look at what all of it together and start looking at those emerging themes. and and that will be their their step at that point. Um and there's all again once we have that all together we have our themes that's when we
024start looking what are those draft we're going to draft some categories for portrait of a graduate. Um there'll be data under each theme that are going to be used to catch that capture that. Um there'll be a working group of that larger strategic planning committee that's really going to help craft that initial portrait. Um and the school board will have a once we there's a draft of that it'll be presented to the school board so there can be some questions asked by the board some refinement on what the portrait of the graduate is and after that's um then then we'll be able to work on mission vision and core beliefs. Then phase four of that is that when we that's when we dip into the actual strategic planning based on that portrait of a graduate.
025That's where we're going to be driving those objectives, strategies, those action steps. Um there'll be progress indicators for all of those and certainly way how do we know we're getting the correct information there and certain there'll be there'll be again draft will be presented for feedback for that on that before it's um gone to final approval be a lot of refining revision defining working groups to look at all those objectives um we're going to be working to look at what you know what our data tracking structures for that for example like how what's our frequency of progressing monitoring to doing to say if we said that we're going to do this, how are we monitoring? How frequent are we monitoring this? And also, it's going to be very important for the board that there are
026regular updates that it's scheduled in that you will know on a regular basis, how we're doing on those strategic plan goals. Uh, and that will include drafting a progress monitoring calendar so you'll know exactly when you're going to receive those updates. And then in you know the the pie in the sky is on June your June meeting of 2026 there's there's a finalized plan for that. Um again you know I would say sometimes slower is better. So if you're not ready in June then wait till the fall to do that or do it when you have all that information. The plan is truly what the plan the portrait of the graduate you want and the plan is what you want it to be. Um and then we start the new journey. Uh I certainly appreciate
027members of the um we've had some really dedicated members of our committee that have shown up have done this work. It's good work. We're just at the baby step stages. The excitement really starts I think when we start having some of those focus groups getting some more of that data in and I know for some of us who are really data once we're like dying to get our fingers on it to see you know what are those emerging themes. Um, but we'll be we're we're taking a pause for the committee to look at that so that we don't have any preconceived notions until all that data is in. So that's where we're at. All right. Thank you, Jean, for that update. Anybody have any questions regarding that? No. Okay. All right. So, we will move
028on. Oh, letter B. Oh, letter B. That's right. I'm sorry. I'll do my letter B really fast. Um, my resignation for B is Meline Lean. She is a DCS teacher. She's resigning at the end of the school this school year. So, her name will be removed um for folks going on for continuing contract because she won't be with us. All right. Thank you very much. Okay. So now we have no administrator reports, board comments, policy review, look at us whip and blue. Everybody's happy. Um all right. And so no unfinished business, but we have um new business. So which is consideration and approval of the comprehensive education plan. Do you want to say or Oh, Cynthia. Hello. Okay. Cynthia is gonna talk to us a little bit. Thank you. Is that on? Yes, it is.
029Okay. Um so uh this is our annual um review of the updating of the comprehensive education plan. By law you are required to um Sorry, I should get a motion on the floor before we start. Great. Yes. All right. So can um do I have motion for consideration approval of the comprehensive education plan? Kelly and Malik. Thank you. Okay. I'm writing that down so I can take it back with me to put it in my notes. Okay. So, we'll take two. Uh so, uh annually you are required to um approve the comprehensive education plan. That is required by law for us to do. Um so, I'll just jump down to like halfway down um where it says here are the updates to the comprehensive education plan. I would also invite anybody who's curious or wants
030to see the binder that's this thick in my office. it's it's always accessible to you. So, um there's several categories and I usually just will uh the ones that are underlined and bulleted are the categories that have been updated this year. So, there are probably 20 uh 20 or 25 other categories. So, um so the first one is affirmative action and as you all know because you sat through these board meetings where we've updated all of those affirmative action policies, those were all updated. uh in the personnel plan. Um the uh we just uh recently updated the supervision evaluation of professional staff policy. Um student dropout prevention. Cheyenne is on that committee and she was at that meeting where we reviewed uh the and approved the comp uh the um dropout prevention plan. Um and
031then uh special special education plan is an annual thing. You see that on there every year. And then the crisis uh response plan was updated this year. That's when we how we respond to incidents. So there was a very um detailed update to that this year. And then the ESSA funds, that's the grant money, the title uh money. That's what those grants are what I oversee uh every year. So every year I just um change that out to the updated uh grant um approved application. and then the school facilities plan. And that's it. Thank you, Cynthia. You're welcome. Anybody have any questions? All right. Thank you very much. All right. So, um Oh, yeah. That's right. We got a vote to approve it. Thank you. I'm getting there. All right. So, uh if we have
032no questions, All those in favor? Great. None oppose. Thank you. All right. So, now we will move on to 14, which is um personnel for consideration and approval to accept the nomination of the following personnel and to authorize the superintendent of schools to issue contracts for the 2025 2026 school year. Renee. Oh, educators. Do we read them out and then we Okay. Educators for the second year probationary contracts. Renee Bucknell, Cara Constantine, Elise Dumpy Hendrix, Kent GML, Abigail Jerves, Allison Jyn, Gabrielle Hanky, uh Abigail Height, Tristan Ingram, Juliana Kylie, Renee La Ro, Rachel Lera, Katie Lutz, Jessica Mccertie, Katie McFarland, Elizabeth Nes, Dana Reynolds, Joshua Schmidt, Carolyn Bul, Maline White, Alina Woods, and two for educators for continuing contracts. Jacqueline Adams, Claire Bowen, Molly Brooks, Paige Brown, Emma Dorian, Laura Dunar, Dorothy Eckhart, Emma Everett,
033Olivia Gladder, Abigail Hunt, Morgan Johnson, Melissa Luche, Kayla Mcinley, Heidi Richards, Jessica Trean, and Kelsey Williams. Do I have a first and a second? Mara and Danielle. Thank you. We have any questions regarding them? All right. All those in favor? Great. Thank you. None opposed. All right. So, we are right back to public comment. If there's anybody else that would like to make another comment, All right. So, look at that. We're at adjournment. I would take a motion to adjurnn. Steph and Danielle. Okay. All those in favor? Guess we're good. Thank you.