001test this is a test of the live stream test test this is the test testing oh [Music] here okay there we go my a little less stressful i think yeah all right good evening it's 703 we'll call the meeting to order heath will not be able to join us tonight just like to remind folks that masks are required in school at all times and unless snacking or drinking need to be properly in position we will start tonight with the uh all right next business pleasure of the allegiance states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] 21. any discussion are you hearing them all in favor next we'll discuss any adjustments to the agenda i would like to add to the
002superintendent's report a recognition session uh we i believe people have signed up to speak uh honoring our three-minute presentation i believe the timer and please be respectful of each other's time and hopefully we can hear everybody's thoughts thank you my name is city open hour and i am a sophomore engine academy i have come here today to talk to you guys that has come up many times in my five months at home that issue is the dress code though most schools have dress codes i think ours is targeted to women and completely unfair mr crane just called me every day for three days until i started wearing pajamas to school i have also been dress coded a few times since then and my sister had a long talk with mr tracy about how sexist and
003unfair mr tracy said that they did not agree with the dress code at all given that information i thought that we were on the same page and i thought that there would be a temporary hold on enforcing the dress code until they could get it changed since then i have not been dressed quoted until last thursday january 13th when someone told me to button my shirt when i was in the office i said okay but i did not then i was approached by ms kenny and i told them that ripped jeans were also against the dress code and many people were wearing them i also told them that i thought mr tracy would be okay with my outfit because i thought that they would be then they told me that they could take me to
004mr tracy's office and i said okay mr tracy was in a meeting so i said i'd just button up my shirt and i thought that would be the end of it it was not miss kenny emailed mr tracy saying quote good morning i wanted to let you know that this young lady has been told by multiple people this morning to button her flannel she assured me that mr tracy would be okay with her top underneath so i asked her to meet me in the office so we could talk with him about it however he is in a meeting i am writing because her shirt is unbuttoned after people's holding a button i do not like this email for two reasons one because it came from the guidance counselor who is not mine they had to
005ask for my name to email mr tracy about me and two i ended up doing what they asked so i did not see it necessary to email mr tracy after receiving this email mr tracy called my second period teacher and pulled me out of class to talk to them at 103. i showed them the email that my dad sent me to show to mr tracy or anyone else who wants to dress for me it stated that the dress code stems from a religious belief that we do not believe in mr tracy read that email and called my dad with me in the office mr tracy then talked to my dad for around 40 minutes and told me i still have to button my shirt let me go back to class at 10 51. pulling me
006out of class for 48 minutes not only did that affect my learning but i'm also prone to stress headaches and got a stress headache which affected my learning for the rest of the day i thought that that was the end however mr trustee after having her meeting email and miss kenny back see seeing all of my teachers saying quote i just spoke with sadie as well as her father billy about the dress code he does not agree at all i explained to him that it is for policy and will need to be followed she will be in compliance and if she is not please send her to me i also download this email for three reasons one they emailed my teachers and the assistant principal telling them to target me two they said she will
007be in compliance and it sounds like they're trying to use power to control me and nor me or my father so there are being complaints and three they say and if she's not please send her to me that sounds like a threat though i know this email was not meant for me at all it still fenced away to me and i thought that you should hear it too i wanted to share my concerns about how the dress code is sexist and unfair given that mr tracy also said that he didn't agree with the dress code i think that it should be admitted thank you for your time thank you billy wasn't wrong [Music] hi i'm billy open our parent from hammond academy uh thank you for taking the time to listen to us today just
008a couple things i'd like to start with first i want you to know i'm not passionate about what my kids wear to school i'm not here because i'm passionate about their outfits i am passionate about my kids having control over their bodies and i am passionate about men on power trips not having control over their bodies we cannot send them the message that that is okay as i've been trying to address this issue with the school i have heard time after time again that this is all because of a board policy and that the administrators have no control over which is why i'm here talking to the board okay well i want to make sure you're aware you have a policy that's in conflict with itself right so if you look through your policy as
009far as the dress code is concerned that policy has has language that states the responsibility for dress hygiene and appearance of students rests with individual students and their parents right it says it rests with the students and their parents the responsibility for deciding what's appropriate so when i have a 40-minute conversation with an administrator and the result of that is an email going out to other administrators and all my kids teachers telling them to target my kid seems like we're not following that policy about letting responsibility lie with the students and their parents policy goes on to say the goal of the school district is to provide a safe healthy and non-discriminatory environment okay it says keeping with this goal the board will not interfere with personal choices unless these choices create a disruptive influence
010on the school program or affect the health or safety of others i've been asking somebody to explain to me how the stress code is related to creating a disruptive influence or affecting the health and safety of others nobody can answer that question i want to support the school i'm an educator myself i want to be able to say listen to the educators but if nobody can give me the reason to say this is how it's disrupting the school or this is how it's impacting other people i'm not going to tell my kid she has to blindly follow a rule that we've got a long list of arguments related to how it is sexist in nature okay talks about articles of clothing not being sexual lewd or indecent and then list clothing that reveals the midriff
011so are we saying that if my daughter's midwife is visible that she's being sexual vulgar or lewd if that's the message that we're sending then we're objectifying her and contributing to rape culture all right i don't think these are the things we want to be doing my final ask to you tonight obviously i know you're going to be reviewing this policy but there was an email that was sent out to put a target on her back i know you're not responding to to requests from public comment but i want the target off her back i want that message retracted concerned families and taxpayers in rsu 22 group over 200 strong last meeting was asked our are we teaching critical race theory to our teachers and staff members the response from your employees superintendent nichols who
012has their annual review tonight was quote we are not teaching critical race theory to our students nor staff unquote i'll prove that either your employee is either ignorant to what crt is or lying content of character is what this school should be looking for not color of skin mlk junior would be ashamed to see what you've done to turn the clock back on racism also how pathetic the district's mdo e assessment scores are crt is a praxis it's a pedagogy it's an overall practice being taught here at rsu 22. i'll provide the community a video recap with my dozens of examples as you don't allow enough time to actually dig deep into public comment crt states racism exists everywhere in everything is judged through the lens of skin color here are some crt code words
013used here equal outcomes equity versus equality oppressors versus oppressed institutional racism white privilege social justice fact in 2019 a board member claimed racism with her child this sparked the search for equity fact twenty thousand two hundred fifty dollars of taxpayer funds were spent on a 137 page equity report and i would estimate another two hundred thousand dollars was used on the 16 weeks of meetings and teacher surveys and trainings and that taxpayer dollars are wasted on indoctrination efforts to students fact kelsey stonyanova pushed the ever mex kennedy book stand candy in his own words states critical race theory informs everything i do and is the foundation foundational to my work unquote fact principal tibit overreads rook supported blm the marxist organization fact the civil rights team poster at reedsbrook lists race and skin color the
014recruitment video also shows the blm black power symbol and speaks to the client the cultural competency institute you use pushes crt i have dozens of examples rsu 22 is training and teaching crt fact by the main department of education assessment data 62 percent of hanon academy students don't know how to do math 48 don't know science at 34 don't know english but you keep pushing this woke ideology instead of doing the very basics lastly to sadena mcavoy and beth kilgore the co-presidents of ea 222 local teachers union thanks for the t-shirt idea thank you for the t-shirt i did i may be selling these to continue to fund my work just one you know i am me if anybody wants some information but thank you very much [Applause] thank you sorry i didn't see you
015catherine collins my name is catherine collins and i'm a member of concerned families and taxpayers of rsu-22 i currently have two of my six children enrolled in the district i want to address the issue of the hyper-sexualized environment that our children are immersed in at hampton academy and apparently in all the schools in rsu-22 adolescents today are served up sexual messages via every type of media and that's also exactly what they're being taught at school especially in rsu 22. from the book teens speak out overall almost one in three teens think that their sex ed classes make it seem like sexual activity is an expectation for students who receive comprehensive sex education the pressure to have sex is more intense don't have sex but here's a way to do it fairly safely amounts to a
016green light for sexual activity protected sex is offered as a responsible second option the emphasis is on making your own decision rather than making the right decision as a rule if educators believe that a given activity is ethically wrong harmful to self and others as teen sexual activity clearly is we help students understand why that is so and guide them toward the right decision we don't say for example drug abuse is wrong but make your own decision and here's how to reduce the risk if you decide to become drug active in rsu 22 family life class students are required to watch videos including the cringe inducing are you ready to have sex trans students explain why pronouns are important porn fact or fiction and std myths students are not required to memorize the multiplication tables
017but they are required to memorize a myriad of sexual definitions at the age of 14 or 15 including pansexual cisgender gender fluid and non-binary they are required to be in group discussions about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases for weeks on end this is especially uncomfortable for children who do not want to share their feelings are shy or are devoutly religious they are chastised for not participating even when they tell the teacher they plan on being chased until married rsu 22 schools have become a hyper-sexualized environment for children one's identity is centered around his or her sexual status or preference and teachers push this with bulletin boards book selections celebrations of non-heterosexual status and an emphasis on sexual expression expression pronouns the faculty has instituted a cognitive behavior modification program to sexualize and groom our children
018the average of non-heterosexual population in the average the average population is approximately eight percent however data reports from the 2019 main integrated health youth survey show that high school students report they identify as lesbian gay bisexual or unsure in maine from 13 and a half to 18 percent or over this did not come naturally they are being taught this rsu22 spends over 13 000 per year per student i'm going to ask you to refund your retirement thank you [Applause] good evening uh vice chair frank members of the rsu 22 board of directors uh good evening also to any undercover fbi agents who may be surveilling this meeting tonight under orders from mayor marlon our attorney general i want to start by following up with something i started talking about last at the last meeting it's
019a teacher training document titled history of racism in the united states through a legal lens and this was this teacher training took place august of 2020. here's a list of racist legislation that was passed in the united states in 1990 congress passed a comprehensive new immigration law which includes employer sanctions for knowingly hiring a worker without papers discouraging employers from taking job applications from asian americans latinos who knew that that was a racist piece of legislation to make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants then in 1996 another piece of racist legislation personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act a cornerstone of the republican contract with america is passed president clinton signs it into law fulfilling his campaign promise to end welfare as we have come to know it the reform burdens poor families and communities
020already in distress this is the kind of rubbish that teachers in this district are being indoctrinated with the other thing i wanted to move on to next um i want to share with you a recent news story about ibraham can be he is the high priest of the critical racist fury cult and his writings are the sacred texts of the cult his book stamped racism racism and anti-racism and you is on the teacher of the year's recommended reading list kenny inadvertently blew up his entire life's work in a now deleted tweet back in october when he shared a news story of a recent survey that discovered more than one-third of white students lied or misrepresented their race on college applications four-fifths of white students who admitted to lying or misrepresenting the race said they did
021so to improve their chances of being accepted half of those students who admitted to lying explained they did so to improve their chances of being awarded financial aid earmarked for minority students kennedy didn't apparently realize that he just blew up his entire life's work by posting that and finally in closing i wanted to say that here's my suggestion for every board member administrator and teacher you are unqualified to teach anyone about alleged systemic racism marginalized minorities intersectional identities white privilege transgender ideology drag queens or kinky sex all that stuff is way above your pay grade educational assessment scores in this district indicate that you're having a real hard time conveying the basics of math science and english so just do your job and toss the woke curricula and teacher training materials into the dumpster thank
022you for your attention [Applause] hello my name is david kasim and i'm a parent of a student here at camden academy i'd like to address thank you for your time and i'd like to address two misconceptions this evening the first misconception is that parents are unsatisfied with rsu 22. i want to assure you that my wife and i are both very satisfied parents we're also both educators my wife pre-k through 12 and i'm a higher education administrator we have four children that went through the rsu 22 system three have well three have gone through and we have one in in as a as a high school student we've utilized a broad array of services utc special needs the visual uh performing and um musical arts theatrics and athletics we haven't used all of the fine
023services here but we are very satisfied parents we want to thank you very much for your efforts the second thing i'd like to address is critical race theory it might be helpful to understand that i have two law degrees one is from the university of oxford and the other one is from the university of maine school of law and there are some genuine misconceptions regarding critical race theory um it is derived from critical legal studies it takes a systemic view of social injustice so just as with proving discrimination you can just you can just you can demonstrate despair treatment individual treatment you can also demonstrate despair impact where there's a series of decisions that result in discrimination so critical race theory mostly simply moves from individual social injustice to an examination of systemic social injustice
024teaching critical race theories in schools is perfectly acceptable so it's a genuine misconception regarding critical race theory that's been presented to you today the argument is that critical race theory creates divisiveness this was advanced by executive order 13 950 which was revoked by executive order 13 1985. there is no shred of evidence that critical race theory divides quoting out of context proof nothing let me give you an example if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and even wife and children and brothers and sisters yes and even his own life he cannot be my disciple that comes from luke 14 verse 27. it's a hyperbole taken out of context it would appear as though christ also you know we know that christ calls for loving one's neighbors so taking
025that statement out of context does absolutely no good people who write on critical race theory also use hyperbole quoting out of context serves no purpose last month i borrowed from a guns rights expression which says guns don't kill people people kill people theories do not divide it's people who are dividing so in studying individual and systemic racial injustice this leads to understanding which leads to empathy which leads to unity not the business despite the attacks there is no need to retreat from critical race theory i want to thank you again for all of your efforts and for your patience and listening and i hope my brief explanation of critical race theory has proven useful to you thank you very much [Applause] brook miller please good evening my name is brook miller of winterport and i
026don't think all parents are happy right now i think most parents would agree that students in every classroom across america are different levels of learning since april 2020. the students showing the most academic decline based on annual testing are in the elementary and middle schools however all students and staff are being put through the ringer emotionally and mentally the american rescue plan of 2021 or r esser allocated nearly 122 billion in federal funding to support states and safely reopening while addressing the academic emotional and mental health impacts of covid on the students and the educators of that funding maine received over 411 million and rsu 22 received roughly 2.49 million to be used by september 30th 2024. the application submitted by this district is available on the rsu 22 website and i have made some
027copies available at this meeting which i'll leave with red masks if you'd like to take one you'll hear tonight how our district plans to spend the money granted in their application we also hear it in meetings going forward pay close attention by the rfser rule the federal register recipients must use at least 20 percent of the funds to measure and address the academic impact of lost instructional time seems rsu 22 went for the bare minimum when it planned exactly 20.00 on tutoring technology transportation professional development among other things the remaining 80 or 1.992 million is planned to build the third floor to the hampton academy while you hear some lovely arguments as to why this is a great use of the funds i would like to share what the secretary of education in washington dc
028thinks in a letter to colleagues who i can only assume are administrators it states and this is dated december 16th 2021 so last month the most common reason for educators exciting leaving in last year in the last year is stress followed by insufficient pay let us speak and these are quotes let us be clear arc provides vital resources to hire additional educators and school staff and to improve compensation to recruit and retain educators and school staff school districts should act with urgency to keep schools open for in-person learning and ensure they do not waste this opportunity to make critical investments continues on to offer strategies that can help to fill currently open positions and add and fill new ones such as providing one-time initial hiring incentives or short-term investments in addition to additional staff to
029support the students and educators by addressing increasing emotional mental health and academic needs these are all quotes out of that letter it's online it seems the district may have a different idea of exactly what the current student and staff needs are a beautiful new addition to a building should not take precedence over the needs of an education now i will let joe speak more about what those needs may be thank you jill dairy please [Applause] good evening my name is jill deary i'm a mom and two children in the district i stand up here tonight to ask all of you where do we go from here i know we recently received an email to hear about rs22 strategic plan be held on january 26th maybe some of the concerns i speak about tonight will be
030addressed at that time i come here tonight to share my thoughts on what has happened in the last three years since the start of what some like to call the new normal i don't think this is a new normal i hear from so many teachers that stress is at an all-time high their job is no longer as rewarding as it used to be and so many are burnt out since all of this started teachers students and parents have had to adapt to new ways of learning the curriculum has changed more than once and lesson plans are becoming harder to keep up with they've had to learn to teach while wearing a mask and the students have had to learn how to understand them and what expression they are using when listening to a lesson they
031went a year and a half not being in the classroom five days a week and then once they all returned they had so many changes masking was required mass grades had to be added time need to be allotted for full testing and then they might be able to focus on the task at hand which is to figure out the level of each of their students are they behind what did they learn in the past year and a half what do i need to do to catch them up if not behind will they be challenged enough with the rest of the class etc i have heard that the older students may be doing okay except one parent shared with me their son went to maine maritime and was grossly prepared for college the younger students that
032are behind have had had so much homework in order to catch them up and you hear stories of how overwhelming this is in a lot of nights when the work is not completed without all this happening the teachers started to get inundated with emails from parents who simply are just trying to figure out what is going on and what needs to be done to help their child a lot of times those emails are probably taken the wrong way so then this creates much stress frustration emotions get at an all-time high not for just the teachers but for the parents and students i'm sure you've heard of many who have major mental health issues or anxiety is a big issue i wonder why the reason i bring all this up is because once you have issues
033like this and stress becomes a problem you then see people to look to find a child elsewhere i can't imagine that this time rsu 22 or any other district can afford to lose the great educators that we have we need to focus on retention keeping the teachers and staff members i did take a look at the salary of hampden teachers compared to bangor the reason i did this is because if we're looking to spend money on a third floor at ha and want to attract people to our community we need to remember this a teacher with any year of service that has a bachelor's degree in hampton is paid around seven thousand dollars less than that of a bangor teacher if they have a master's degree it's around ten thousand dollars less if a teacher
034is looking to retire they need to look at their top three years of highest earnings that is the number that will be used for their retirement if we have teachers who are unhappy and they have their years of service why would they not leave to get better pay at another district and retire after three years after hearing about the money that rsu2 was granted knowing only 20 was used for our teachers and students i think we need to be sure that the needs are met for our teachers our students in rsu 22 before deciding on a 1.9 million uh floor aha and this i'm going to close and say if a leader does not inspire his or her team they will expire [Applause] [Music] good evening my name is stephanie dao since august parents have
035stood up here citing multiple sources about the lack of efficacy that cloth mass provide but unfortunately the district did not care if you haven't been paying attention let me do a little recap of what has been going on with the cdc dr fauci and the fear-based media one cloth masks are a little more than facial decorations dr leanna wen cnn omicron looks like the flu the flu of course can still be dangerous but we don't orient our lives around the flu chris hayes msnbc many people including children are being hospitalized with covent not because of coven fauci on msnbc natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn't been as virulent dr fauci it's not about cases it's about severity xavier barrica the secretary of department of health and human services it's been very clear all along
036the cloth face masks do not work we have strapped these things on our children's faces for the last three months to protect others when really they haven't we have seen many headlines claiming that child covet hospitalizations are up but they bury the truth at the bottom of each article dr paul offit a vaccine expert at the children's hospital of philadelphia said we test quote we test everybody who's admitted to the hospital for whatever reason to see whether or not they have covet and we're definitely seeing increase in cases however we're really not seeing an increase in children who are hospitalized for covet end quote i don't wear masks very often by omicron is very contagious its symptoms are that of the common cold or flu there is also data to support that omicron is the
037rot on the rise and delta is decreasing cases are also rising from the continuation of unnecessary testing pool testing among schools also helped inflate case numbers to jillian brooks points this seems to be all about the money and a new cnn politics article the biden administration warns arizona it could take back pandemic aid for undermining school mass guidance i could stand up here and give you all the resource research until my face turns blue but this has never been about the science it's been about politics and greed to close i'll leave you with a quote from martin luther king jr to ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it thank you [Applause] yeah i didn't realize why you guys would need my last name is that so you can meet my kid at school
038usually it's for the minutes of the meeting oh well my name is david [Music] concerned parent taxpayer here in rsu 222 i've come into these meetings here for a while and i don't understand why you guys don't seem to care do you have our concerns you guys roll your eyes some of them look like they're sleeping don't seem to care at all what the taxpayers here in this district care about you're just uh basically all right yeah basically i just can't believe that you guys come in here every week every month and do what you guys are doing and don't care what the people in your community care about why aren't you worried about our kids education our kids are falling behind they're barely passing math i barely read i graduated from this school myself
039with kids that can barely read a book like why aren't we concentrating on our education you guys are more concerned with the kids gender fluidity than you are with their education it's sickening like work on it like we need to work on the education in this in this district this is out of control i'd say i graduated from here and i was behind everybody else when i went to college because they all had better education than we had here in rc22 thank you please [Music] good evening superintendent nichols by the chairman frank and esteem board of directors my name is brian libby and i live here in hampden with my wife angela sign and our two children one of our children will be matriculating to pre-kindergarten uh next year and i'm here to show my
040excitement and support for a full day pre-kindergarten program for hampden residents as you know newburgh and winterport already have extended hours preschool and with this proposal newberg will move to full day of pre-kindergarten as well there have been numerous recent studies that have shown that academic and social benefits of full-day pre-kindergarten and our neighboring districts of brewer and bangalore are already offering this one recent study by the university of virginia in 2018 showed that when compared to peers the children that attended full-day pre-kindergarten had greater school readiness skills at the end of the year they had larger improvement in their receptive vocabulary and also outperformed their peers in cognition literacy math and physical skills all of these were statistically significant another study published in jama researchers examined full-day programs in chicago illinois and used the
041gold assessment to compare school readiness at the end of the year they found that children enrolled in full-day programs have better socio-emotional development language math and physical health outside of academics and social emotional development full-day preschool will offer will better align with parents work schedules and also offer food security to children i want to thank don moore and jennifer nickerson for their hard work on this grant and the full day pre-kindergarten program thank you [Music] thank you very much yeah my name is scott cuddy i live in winterport and i'm a father of two kids who are both at wagner middle school and they're both actually recently back at wagner i'd wanted to be here on december 15th because that was the day they both got back in the wagner we pulled them out my
042wife and i did when the board originally went with the mass optional policy but we watched what's happened since then and we were both given a lot of comfort by how the board the administrators and teachers have handled the pandemic as it's going on we know that they're going to be a lot of cases with the omicron variant the disease is traveling through people a lot faster but the way that the board has given the administration the ability to handle it and what the administration has done with that has really impressed me and additionally i cannot say enough about the teachers we have watched teachers and the administration on the fly come up with a try to come up with a new way to educate the kids when co would first hit the teachers knock
043themselves out for the kids in this district and they have continued to do so and the teachers that i have spoken to about this are certainly feeling the stress of this environment everybody is we're in the middle of the pandemic distressing uh each of us it's changing our lives we're watching the hospital numbers really climb that's obviously a scary thing for everybody but we know that when our kids are in an rsu 22 school people are looking out for them and as a father of two i really appreciate that i know how hard this time has been for all of you guys sitting around this table i know how hard it's been for the teachers i know how hard it's been to be administered and i just want you to know there are a lot
044of us out in the district who really appreciate what you are doing we appreciate that you're here every every meeting listening to the people who come here to speak with you and i appreciate everything you guys are doing for the kids at this district so i just wanted to come in and say thank you from the bottom of my heart from a lot of people's hearts for the work you're doing the administrators are doing and that the teachers are doing and please keep it up [Applause] operations policy reviews um basically at this time we're just looking at policy db which is the annual budget and dbb which is the fiscal year as we continue each month we look at different policies that govern our board and these were the two that were chosen from the
045policy committee we felt it was appropriate that we present those they are in your electronic folder that was sent to you and basically with the beginning of the budget process we thought it was important to just kind of update yourself on those two policies thank you next item is personnel this evening i have resignations to announce we have brianne smith grade six ela teacher at samuel wagner middle school tracy meyer science teacher at hampden academy we have kay kassiniak retiring from alter alternative ed here at uh aha at the end of the year and we have patrick mishu retiring from music here at hampden academy and leroy smith school at the end of the year and i'd like to say in announcing these resignations that you've heard some long-standing uh tenure in these names and
046i'd like to publicly thank especially pat and kay for their tenure here it's been absolutely a wonderful run incredible achievements with our students and with programming and we have been so fortunate to have your influence for our students so on behalf of all of us i just wish them a special thank you and they will be asked to attend in our june meeting to honor retirees we do not have any nominations tonight so we can move right on can i ask a question please um the um ms smith and miss meyer are they done at the end of this year no they are they have concluded their service with us thank you great nickname superintendent of schools so i would like to ask jessica hamilton to read our essential behaviors and outcomes proclamation essential behaviors
047and outcomes proclamation education enables all students to learn the skills acquire the knowledge and develop the attitudes necessary for them to reach their potential as citizens who can meet the challenges of a changing global society we believe that one all citizens in our community share their responsibility to educate our children and themselves two our schools are community support systems and should welcome and encourage all members of our community to participate and last our schools will have a supportive and empowering atmosphere for all of our students and community members thank you next i'd like to take a moment and offer some recognitions so the first recognition is one that is critically important to recognize because it involves our students and stepping up in a time of need so you all are aware that we did have
048an unfortunate bus accident last week and we did have a school bus in the morning in newburgh be rear-ended and we had many students on the bus already at that time of the morning when i arrived at the scene i was able to talk with students that had been transferred to another bus it became clear that there were a couple of students who really had taken some initiative that i felt would be important for you to hear about and so i'd like to tell you those stories tonight so our first story is around a young lady at hampden academy named audrey white is audrey here with us hi audrey so i'm going to tell you a little about audrey when the accident occurred the seer bus garage needed to be able to speak with the
049driver but the driver also had duties to be checking on each of the students seat by seat and progress to the back of the bus because the back rear window had been smashed and so of course with a microphone system you can't reach all the way to the back of the bus so audrey took the home and served as a communication liaison between the bus driver and what he was reporting as he went from seat to seat and see her bus company and she did an outstanding job talk about maturity in a time of chaos and uncertainty i just want to express audrey how much that meant not only to see your bus but to your fellow bus riders so congratulations to you for having the wherewithal to step up in crisis is there anything
050you'd like to say or share [Laughter] [Music] now my second story is about what you all have experienced to our parents with multiple children in your household sometimes there's sibling rivalry well on this day there was incredible sibling support so this is a story of tyler eldridge and aaron rose brother and sister and aaron did have some minor injuries in the accident and also had medical needs that needed to be communicated and tyler stepped up not only to attend to his sister instantaneously because he knew she would need to have that support right off the bat but then communicated to the bus driver and to ems personnel who came so that she would be taken care of and they would be aware of everything they might need to know so her care would be spot
051on and in talking to tyler and aaron's mom she said you know as they grow up you never know how brother and sister are going to get along but this was absolutely impressive and so they're both here with us as well if you'd like to stand up to be recognized tyler [Applause] um beyond these student stories that i thought would be important for you to know there were other stories there as well our sear bus driver michael lowe who was driving the bus at the time was absolutely just impressive stay cool and calm made sure all the documentation got done but he put his children first and i did talk to him the next day after the accident just to see how he was doing and his only concern was needing a report about any
052of the children transported the hospital and where were they now and uh just really impressive sierra bus overall does this i've been to other accident scenes and it's the same thing every time just professionalism children so well cared for and then i need to say a shout out to ems and our own dan stewart's here tonight he was there at the scene ems came in droves to help from every direction so just sometimes you get lemons and sometimes they are unfortunate ones like an accident but i will say the students who do go to the hospital were in great hands parents were well communicated with and i think all is well with some recuperation that needs to happen in a couple cases okay beyond that i would like to turn it over to tina to
053recognize one of our employees we've had a special notification this week this person that's been recognized is a truly inspirational game changer for rsu 22 and maine's children her leadership has always been appreciated but in the past two years it's been essential not only for the success of the school but for for schools that she works at because she has two goals one in a building specifically on one in a district role but for the survival of our issue 22 as a whole she works hard no matter what she's doing whether it's collecting vaccine data for state reporting nursing pre-k through two students at mcgraw school calming and counseling nervous parents contact tracing managing two school gardens writing grants to restore the rsv-222 hoof greenhouse serving on the board of the maine school garden network
054or coaching volleyball at hampden academy we'd like to honor and thank brittany lehman surprised she's been honored as a state finalist for the rise award which is recognizing inspiring school employees to promote who promote commitment and excellence and that's [Applause] thank you i'm humbled and i'm honored i um they asked me for a quote and i said that we are tired but we are strong and this is the best workplace i've ever been in and it is the best district in the state and someday i will go back to being fun and i will go back to being not the covid lady when i walk into a classroom i will be the garden lady and the kitchen lady again and i know we will get there so thank you very much [Applause] the next recognition
055is one that is going on across the nation and i would like to express the community's deep appreciation to all of you on the school board january is board recognition month across the nation and we would like to honor you and let you know that your time and service is appreciated it's a volunteer job sometimes a thankless one but tonight we hope that you will take this certificate of recognition and know that there are many many voices that appreciate all of the work you do and the late nights you spend so on behalf of all of them we'd like to distribute these to you tonight so [Applause] thank you reagan i think i can speak on behalf of the whole school board to say that it is appreciated but unexpected so thank you all right
056so we'll go on with our presentations and the first presentation we have for you tonight is an update on the kovitz standard operating procedure you do have a powerpoint that is available for you on your chromebook and i'm going to present it to the audience on the tv so one moment please um so we'll get started with slide one uh there were changes to the standard operating procedure basically over the holidays we saw december 30th where we did have a cdc update that guidance on covet isolation and quarantine procedures would change the main cdc and department of education followed suit and issues sop standard operating procedure revisions so our district of course did issue communications so that families would know what changes would take place in our district on january 11th the maine cdc and
057doe issued an amended revision to the guidance and we clarified that with the community then on january 14th last friday rsu 22 issued updates regarding allowable revisions that we have the latitude to make in districts and we did that because of district specific data that we were reviewing and experiences we're having in our own schools and so i'm going to ask brittany lehmann to join me to talk about what those revisions were and why all right kobe's lady is back so um we saw with the revised sop that came out from the department of education that mirrored the cdc guidelines for the five-day isolation period we tracked are the cases that we were having in the district and we were seeing children and staff members return on day five symptomatic so we had a conversation
058with our advisory team and we made the decision to move to a seven day isolation period in hopes that we would stop having students and staff members return to school symptomatic we played with a couple different other versions of that including a test to return program but we've been unable to do that because of supply chain issues so you can see up here that we did move to a seven-day isolation period it aligns with what healthcare workers are doing in the area including northern light who is on our advisory team another piece of data that we were quickly seeing is that household members were testing positives so the allowance in the sop was that as long as a person hadn't tested positive and weren't symptomatic even though their household close contact was positive they could
059continue to come to school so that meant that my 11 year old could come to school even if myself and my husband were positive and what we saw is every three days those household numbers would turn positive meaning they were in school and potentially transmitting a coca-19 walk here uh it was interesting talking to parents when they're like so my child can go to school yeah that seems a little funny maybe so we um we're seeing data that supported a decision to move to then have folks who were positive have their close house on contacts [Music] days of available especially being exposed in the house um so so far so good it was what is today wednesday it's been a couple days so you don't give me a little bit of time to be able
060to review the data but i'm feeling very confident in that decision and why we made that so i'd like to just talk about the goals that we have in making these decisions so that you have clarity on that and then also invite some of the members of our medical advisory team to speak about the rationale here our number one goal was to decrease the transmission rate we were seeing that of course the positives were escalating so rapidly last week and while it is not all due to school transmission we certainly have seen an uptick in our occurrence of school transmission we we previous to this haven't seen as much of that and have been fortunate as the school district we also knew that we knew that our coga data dashboard would start showing us a
061nudge either way and we have seen today that our dashboard has improved ever so slightly i do not want to overstate that but certainly we see it's going in the right direction so probably good call here we want to keep our school doors open we are seeing other schools make decisions even if it's not a full district it might be school by school having to close and believe me that is on our radar we know that there might come some type of precipice that we cannot make it from but as of right now i think we are doing a fine job of staying open but i have to give the recognition to the nursing and health team for monitoring and the teachers for keeping themselves healthy enough to staff our schools we have a lot
062of absenteeism right now both adult and child so we know that's vitally important and then we do want to utilize the approaches that are mirrored in other work environments like northern light health so i would invite any members of our medical team that would like to share some details about what we should be watching and thinking about thank you eric jarvi and i i have been on working with the team since since the get-go and first off let me say that i think everybody on the team really appreciates how easy it is to work with the administration and with brittany and with the nursing staff and the communication that goes on between those folks and and the team is just second to none when they need advice they they are very forthcoming oftentimes that's technical
063advice and and i got to tell you when we received a request for technical advice we really dive into the literature and try to present them with a synopsis that that they can use making the decisions they have to they have to make and i'll also point out that one of the the advisory team is on board with these goals 100 a matter of fact i would say keeping school doors open was our top goal i know it's number two there but i would say that was our number one concern because we recognized how important that is and to that end uh as you're probably well aware we do weekly reports with britney's help that's one uh gauge that the administration can use in helping those decisions that they have to make over the weekend
064but the other thing that we're very closely monitoring is what's going on in the community because the advisory team is is sensitive to the fact that the school and rsu 22 is only a snapshot of what's going on in the community and while the numbers are promising it's only a snapshot of what's going on right now and the medical advisory team is unfortunately very discouraged that the community transmission rates that we're seeing in waldo county and penobscot county are still very very discouraging and i think the opinion is is that we have not yet seen perhaps the worst in the community and yet we don't know how that's going to reflect our issue 22. so thank you thank you um so we have been working with the state of maine and we have uh just
065put a request in tonight to order more disposable masks including k and 95s their pediatric size and adult size we have used funding to order um our own shipment of masks and those disposable masks have arrived this week so we do have our resupplied with the well-fitting disposable masks for children and poor adults we also ordered km95s there's been an interest for our staff members who would want to wear a can 95 and and and older children just because they're a bigger size unfortunately they're on back order but we do have that in and we hope that they arrive as soon as they can and i when i put in our request for masking masks it's just to help bolster the amount that we have now excellent so i was able to secure our next
066round of vaccine clinics so we will be hosting a booster clinic here for students 12 years and up for eligible this includes our employees and that will be on monday february 7th from 3 30 to 5 here at hampden academy you will notice that some of the times are different than our last one we're working with a new provider and bangor public health will be partnering up with us for these clinics we will do a second dose clinic down um at smith school on wednesday february 9th from 7 45 in the morning to 9 15 and that's an effort that when parents drop their kids off and they want to be there with their their students they can do that and then in the afternoon we'll do a session at weatherbee same idea the parents
067can pick their kids up and stay and do the vaccine if they're interested we will again do a second dose on march 2nd then i want to remind everyone that this is voluntary that you need to the consent needs to be completed for each dose and we but we're encouraging that vaccination so now we'd like to turn it over to board members who might have questions about our standard operating procedure these days or questions about supply chains um i was just wondering i believe we are no longer contact tracing at the academy is that right yes so um currently this has been my pitch for the last two weeks that there is community transmission of coded everywhere so i'm encouraging people to put on there i may have been in close contact half no matter
068where you go so to look at yourself and your children for signs and symptoms of covet and then reach out to a building nurse if you have concerns we are not contact facing at the high school on a whole we are looking at vulnerable populations and contact tracing when we when we have to on that and then for our staff we are averaging i mean if you've had a free moment and checked out our dashboard we're averaging 15 to 20 cases at the beginning of the week especially and it's very challenging because each of those cases takes us well an hour to go through so um we do it when we can um but we have to take the kind of a triage method when it comes to so just to statement you made about
069um at risk so i did have a parent reach out deeply concerned about that and they are at risk so i can i'm gonna have her just reach out to you and see if she can get that coordinated because she was quite worried about the family environment and not having to appreciate that yeah we appreciate that so certainly have them reach right up to us have you seen an increase in the number of students and staff participating in the pool testing and how is pool testing overall going so um full testing we have had an increase i've only had two people withdraw from pool testing but we've had probably 20 times you put in quite a few of them have enrolled in pool testing since the new year started um last week pool testing worked
070to perfection so i don't want to jinx myself because i'm waiting for the results to come in but um we were able to get our pool testing results in thursday morning after testing on tuesday we got to do the follow-up we found our positive people we isolated them it was magical it was great it was a lot of work we had 32 positive pools last week so it was you know trying to go through that but it did what it was supposed to do um will pool testing continue forever i can't predict the future i'd love to say no but for right now it is a great tool for us to be able to use that so we will continue using full testing and sample is that i had seven i had 17 positive pools
071at the high school and we found 17 positive students so all of those students were asymptomatic so that's what it's designed to do at one point they thought that you wouldn't be able to get the materials you need to do the pool testing has that [Music] yeah no that's okay i actually am like anxiously waiting for maybe a ups truck to show up at nine o'clock at night i don't think it's gonna happen but we are waiting for our shipment of bionics now tests to come in um they were i was told they were overnighted but that was last night so i'm not quite over there but i'm hoping they'll be here or i'm going to go to augusta tomorrow so that'll be a fun road trip i'd like to say thank you to the
072staff i think we kept barb on the phone quite a bit during most of our christmas and school vacation as we spent at least 500 on and positive and spent most of our our time talking to you and thank you for the time it must spend just going through that contact tracing i did actually have a question for the next booster clinic what is the current protocol for folks who may be positive asymptomatic to receive a booster sure so if you've been diagnosed as 14 days from your diagnosis as long as you're symptom-free you can have a booster people get a little muddied with some of the recommendations but that was because of lack of vaccine availability when they said the weight but as long as you're asymptomatic and 14 days out you can you
073can get your booster shot so and we're encouraging that it's uh you know five they've changed the rules but five months from your second dose if you were one of the few people who got the monoclonal antibody to treat because you are at higher risk you should wait 90 days until you get yesterday that's part of the confessing process they have those questions on there and that uh nikki and i are going to build out the um appointment portal and that will have a flyer to release shortly won't we tomorrow yes i know we don't identify the data to that level but anecdotally do you feel that mostly what we're seeing is overcrowding now given something yeah and the way the state is is running too um so yeah [Music] okay thank you so much
074and thank you to our medical advisors as well because it really does help us to make some critical decisions so thank you very much [Applause] so the next presentation we have is related to grant funding and proposed construction projects and the discussion will relate primarily to the america rescue plan arp and school revolving renovation funds they're separate funding streams and have different aspects to them so we'll discuss them both what i'd like to do though is start off and talk in general about grants and rsu22 you've been familiar with grants along the way over the last 18 months because we've reported to you about that corona relief funds elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds known as esser and then the american rescue plan which is also an esser fund that's we're number three have
075been allocated here and rsu 22 has worked to capitalize on every funding stream that's been available to us our district has taken strong advantage of those one-time funds and i really want to emphasize the one-time funds aspect the money is not here forever it is not sustainable for year after year and we have been advised through we've had workshops with different funding directors whether that be from the federal side or the state side around being thoughtful around not creating a cliff for your district so we have done that to think of ways that the money can be used that would not be demanded later on when the budget could support it but to be very thoughtful to address the situations that are present now for students struggling with covet impact so i would like to
076focus just for a minute on the newest funds that our schools are getting which of course are the arp grant that we've applied for and you've heard that we did have a pre-k grant that we just were granted we also have been a recipient of pbis programming grant we actually are quite fortunate because we have a team that really goes after making sure that funding is pulled down we also have srrf which is school revolving renovation funds that is competitive it's not just allocated to your school district you must qualify for the funds so elementary supports are something we need to talk about you heard that tonight in public comment that there is a definite community interest that our elementary population has served well through these funds of course elementary grades are a backbone of
077our system and we want to be sure those students are well supported what i need to communicate to you is that we have had several grant streams already and a significant amount of that funding has been dedicated to the elementary environment that might have come in materials equipment services and some staff but we also have maintained class sizes that you'll hear about tonight that are at a rate that we feel we can be attentive to the students even though they are having a covet impact so we'll talk about that i also want to talk about federal funds that come in every year title 1 is a primary funding source and our schools in winterport absolutely benefit from title 1 funds so the benefits of these earlier expenditures are are in place and i would like
078you to hear from our elementary principals about how those services are happening right now in our buildings they're not waiting for additional funds to come they're actually working on those things right now so i'm going to go ahead and call on jennifer nickerson she's principal at mcgraw school and she her school has been a recipient of grant funds for crf sr one and two and for pbis i'll turn it over to jennifer i think it's yeah okay good evening board um and guess uh yes we last year were able to return uh at the end of march beginning of april due to all of the grant funding that was purchased for additional individual desks and chairs so that kids had that space we were recipients of three carports we were very lucky and we still
079enjoy those this year we use them for snacks in the fall and also some outdoor classroom spaces as well so we've continued to use those right now they're a little snowy so i think it was i think it was you rob that mentioned getting some sides maybe on those some days so there's always room for more uh but that was one of the uh key pieces for us to be able to come back in person was the those carports one of the things we're doing right now to support students and learning is to think about our rti program last year we put that into place this is our second year with that process it's really looking at students what they need maybe where their gaps are and there's a team at our school that meets
080every other week today we met and we looked at students and we look at them in the areas of literacy math and also behavior and emotional supports we also look at them where they might need intervention and or enrichment and so the teachers have a referral form they come with data it's really a data-driven team to look at where they are where where should they be and put a plan into place last year we came with a request in our budget to add an additional day for our math interventionist and enrichment person that was given to us so this year we've had a five day a week program for that so we've been able to see more kids and provide more enrichment and that's happening right now and uh great success with that so thank
081you for supporting that in the budget thank you very much next i'd like to call up dawn moore to speak about what is occurring at smith school with elementary intervention and learning plans for students i turned it off on your sorry hi everyone um so smith's school also received a carport we've put benches underneath that which is really we put it out in the field with your grades provide provide shelter and shelf from the sun it's a great place to escape and go to when you want some quiet from the playground we've also received lots of supplies for the kids that allowed us to do hands-on learning with the children we have um this year unfortunately our class sizes well fortunately and unfortunately our population has decreased this year so we have smaller class sizes
082so our teachers have been able to use these materials to do individualized planning with the students we've set individualized goals based on the wheels in the fall and we're looking forward to the success that happens in the spring when we retake them so the grant money has really been beneficial to provide students with more individualized learning [Music] or we did get a green house sorry but bernie's already left but we also received a greenhouse that we are using for outdoor outdoor learning and right now we're doing winter kids and our greenhouse is going to become where our podium for our gold medal winners go so a lot of fun thank you and then our final elementary campus is weatherby school good evening so i can echo so much of what my colleague says that is
083well in addition we were able to go one to one with technology which was transformative on a number of levels and so that allowed for our flipped training that our district partakes in and still continues one of the areas of response to intervention or rti that our school is also really dialing in on to double down on that learning loss is to identify in fact what does students know who's there who's not there who's beyond and what are we going to do about it and so we created which i've reported in my school board reports before a win zone what i need and so that is data driven using our nwa data as well as supreme post assessments and our curriculum to identify what students need and so that's a spectrum from all the way
084that students may be tangled and needs specialized instruction and special ed all the way up through gt that is that exciting work and work that we're building upon that's been a 30 minute intervention weekly and we are looking to expand that coming after february break and very excited to use our upcoming in-service to continue to drive that work so we're so appreciative of that opportunity thank you so as we transition into discussing the american i'm sorry mary i was just going to add um we also used quite a bit of money last summer for everybody to know i coordinated the k-8 summer programs and so we ran three different programs we ran a middle school program all the students all students in the middle school worked here at the high school so we could have
085kind of a double opportunity of a getting them all together would be having a widget for students in our camden newberg and frankfort students all co-mingle and get to know one another a little bit we offered one in at smith school down in winterport that was well attended as well as one at weatherview which was also well attended so we spent quite a few thousand dollars on that specifically for our students and also as the board knows i'm also the coordinator for some of the federal grants that we receive here or have allocated our title 1 funds for this year for smith and wagner 350 000 have gone to those schools as well as we have another funding line called title iv and that's specifically for students and it helps with in the past we
086use things for technology so we bought robotics to be used at elementary middle schools we have done health types of things so when brittany was able to come around and do things we offered health cares and things for our kids and then we've done things with the arts and humanities so i just wanted to add that those are some other things that we also have in place that are used at the elementary middle school thank you so as we transition to talk about the american rescue plan money i'd like to let you know that there is an amount it is about 498 000 so approximately 500 000 that will be dedicated to the k-8 environment we have had meetings to decide what models will be used for high quality tutoring k-8 interventions and enrichment programming
087leading into summer programming as well so i do feel the elementary environment is well supported and as you heard earlier we do have some class sizes in winterport right now that are what i would call small but we are supporting that that occurs and we maintain those sizes so that we can have solid support from teacher to student she referenced the nature of the programming and i would just say that the elementary principles have been researching susie pepper rollins work and it's about how we address gaps in learning and we don't totally front-load kids but we give them enough prior knowledge so that they can attach new knowledge to it and so the model of instruction has worked well in our district in the past we've seen as much as a 20 rise in media
088scores for students who participated in the program based on that model they're doing the foundational work right now to see what that might look like in each of their schools and how it might be staffed and orchestrated based on the needs of this kids in front of them so should it be embedded in the school day should it be an after school add-on does the kid have the stamina and need additional or should we try to fit it in like whether he is through the win program so it'll be really tailored to the students in front of them and i'm very pleased with their research and that work i want to thank them for that so we do have a significant amount of the american rescue plan dedicated for a proposed expansion of hampden academy
089this occurred this discussion really took a flight because in 2021 in april when we came back in all elementary venues uh we could not come back full time here at hampden academy we had to stay in hybrid and so our building committee your building committee started talking about remedies and just for everyone to know this idea of a hampden academy expansion was planned when the original building was built the building was built to have the steel beams already in place to do this classroom expansion expecting that there would be an occasion down the road where this might be needed so we're going to hear tonight from principal tracy about the vision of programming for this expansion of hampden academy but also the need and i capitalize need for you because we absolutely have programs that
090don't have space in this building right now so i'm going to invite mr tracy up to talk about how this expansion will benefit all students from all four my screen towns all right folks thank you very much uh for listening to this tonight i feel like we have a strong plan going forward with some of the pieces that we already have some of the technology we have that we technically can't even put into place right now for students to access so i want to emphasize the neat opportunity we have at hanon academy to serve all four towns in our district it's where all of our students converge and so being able to put some funding towards us to be able to support all of our students needs across the district is a unique opportunity so
091it's no joke right we have an amazing building it's nine years old it's phenomenal state of the art but we have grown our student population has grown and while it is a beautiful building it has needs and we've seen that especially over the last two years as we tried to spread out and as we got to different programs to support individual learning so our mission statement is hand in academy challenge all students to achieve individual excellence we feel that by adding the third floor expansion project we will be able to address the growing needs of our students supporting them with their social emotional development supporting them by linking them in through different programs that they want to be a part of and providing more programs at ha that entice more students to want to be
092here and be engaged so let's talk about the rising enrollment for a second if you look down at the numbers we have let's see back in 2012 2013 uh in 2014 we're right around that 700 low 600 high 600 mark as you can see up to 2018 we're at 7.95 currently we have 808 students at handmade academy just signed five more papers today so we get more students next semester we're always looking we're right now in the season of recruiting our tuition students we've been to three different schools to talk to them and we always talk about you have your option you can look at all these great schools that have things for you and ultimately what we want to do is talk about what does hampton academy have that might be a good fit
093for you and some of these programs tonight are competitive programs in other schools but there are also things that will help set us apart as a school so looking at some of our other student needs our special ed population is certainly growing we have added classes in areas in the school that have traditionally been kept as meeting spaces so our admin conference room uh some of our meeting spaces down in the drop-in center some of our spaces up in next to the computer lab our pac our mpr we're using all that space for as much as we can but thinking thinking specifically excuse me about special ed we have a number of programs and they are growing in need our life skills and our behavioral program right now are really bursting we are we're certainly
094at our highest number there and we're looking at a growth of plus 13 students stepping into next year and we're trying to figure out where those students will go again with that theme of bursting at the seams we still are offering some of these courses and these are really to meet individual needs and try to support the learners at the level that they come in at so we have a foundational math one and two a consumer math class a different level expository writing career communications so in the hopes that we can catch students early and make those gains that first year so again push them really strong for the next three we also have a student math and writing center we've had the writing center for a long time but the student math center is
095new this year and again that's using a space just off the cafeteria this year but those are programs that are supporting students and they're run by students as well and again as i mentioned we're using all of these spaces that we uh that we've identified just to be able to push people i've got study halls in the arts center i'm feeding students in the npr in the past we've run some classes in the npr we've had district meetings in the npr and events during there using that for other things our conference rooms and meeting spaces i'm actually using my student services space behind all the school counselors as our esports lab which means they cannot access it during the day but they'll access it about 3 30 and it fits about half the devices that
096we normally that we have actually purchased so we can't get to our full expansion of that program so let's talk about what our opportunities are and what the chances are we have to meet all students needs we know that we did a survey with our students a few years ago and talked to them about what they wanted and one of the big things that came up was a jrotc program we had 35 plus students that said i'm interested right now and i really don't know a ton about jrotc the beautiful part about this any student again while we're at hampton academy frankfort winterport newburgh hampden tuition students can all join this you don't have to be a four-year program with jrotc you can come in and join when you join that is your first year
097co-worker so students can jump in and do that i don't have a space for that right now i don't have a classroom space which i need a classroom space for and they need some physical therapy excuse me physical training space we're going to have to be really creative on where they go i still think we can try to make it work but again trying to utilize and find those extra spaces are going to be difficult without this program we're looking at by adding these eight classrooms up on the third floor we're looking to create a stem floor that mix between science and math really the idea of being able to have an esports lab up there during the day again i'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute but the goal would
098be to have a true floor of stem opportunities esports again like i said i have that in our student services center right now each unit which is a cpu a monitor keyboard and other things takes up a minimum of three feet right now that space only accesses about 10 or 11 units technology right now is only being used by that program and only can be offered after school this is a challenge for our students who again this is at 3 30 so they want to be involved in this at 3 30 and it's about transportation back and forth which could be difficult we're able to offer some of that during the school day we're able to link more students in and get them engaged at an early time in their career the other thing i'll
099say about that is you know again i don't have a space for that so i need i need a classroom space to be able to do that and to be able to access it during the day it's beyond just the esports those computers those units are the most powerful thing we have in the school so it could be really utilized for some more programming as well as robotics as well as some of our computer programming classes again something now if we can do that in a classroom space with this renovation all of our students at hampden academy can access that we have tons of equipment i'm embarrassed to say this but our technology department has done a phenomenal job using the tibbetts funds working the prologue foundation we're utilizing some of the 3d printing opportunities
100i have a bunch of great technologies sitting in storage because i don't have a space we even looked at the black box as a place to try to put some of it which is kind of a training space it has no no windows it's not it's not a great space for a classroom and it's utilized on a rotating basis sure last year you heard me uh boss is probably a good word about the fact that we have a brand new beautiful high school excellent air quality they wouldn't give us credit for that we couldn't come back because of social distancing and when we went in to measure classrooms nick and bill and probably fred measured every single classroom and the problem here was that with this beautiful new building we have a lot of built-in
101furniture so at the middle school and elementary schools we can go in and remove wardrobes and extra tables and maximize every inch and if you our high school students can tell you that there's several departments in specific classrooms that have built-in furniture that's not going anywhere so we made sure in the design of this this floor the whole floor right though it is a bare bones stripped down if we ever had to go through this again we can fit in as many desks and chairs as possible because these essential classes that everybody has has to take the universal courses are larger classes than these electives so that was where our hang up was i think last year a lot of times beyond the eating and so if that were an issue again this floor would
102be the floor to address those larger classes what am i missing on that uh no you're absolutely right i think just trying to measure that space out we sat in february vacation trying with a tape measure working on our spaces to see whatever we could look at to make work and again with those built-ins between the cabinets on the wall um and then the bookshelves over by the window it just ended up cutting that much that much more space down so yeah we really want to look at that space on the third floor as wide open space some of the other stuff again i was talking about are maker space but 3d printing we have textiles with screen printing laser printing graphics uh some fashion uh printing as well we can't put that anywhere right
103now without displacing the classroom and then i have a classroom that full of students that can't put anywhere we have used some of that technologies it's just to make sure it is something that will work for us we printed our senior awards last year with it using our the wooden plaques and the laser printer we printed decals with it this year so it's something that has great opportunity for our students and again it could make with class ideas it could it could work for clubs uh we could have students that do some design and do some graphic design with it so a lot of great opportunities there something i talked extensively about with our technology department is the ability to have our high school students act as mentors and leaders with our elementary middle school
104students so to actually be able to pull the students to come up and have an experience in that room and do some designing and have that so it's again building that continuum across the entire district one of the last things i'd like to mention is the possibility of satellite programming at utc um utc we know so we have 132 130 students there right now they are bursting at the seams as well we know that they've expanded to emcc and they have some programs running there we know that this is a constant problem for them to be able to find space we've seen this happen in other tech schools is that they've offered satellite programming in other schools so we believe this would be a great opportunity we might have one or two classrooms to be
105able to actually create a satellite program at aha for our utc students so that would be a really neat opportunity to do that again a seamless fit for our students i think one of the challenges we have for some of our aha students is that they it's not that they're not interested in tech but what happens is we have students that don't necessarily want to be gone from the school setting they really enjoy the school setting so to leave the school for half a day is really difficult so we will have them to go to utc a program that's housed in our school could be a great selling opportunity and again this is very innovative and something that we could look at if the need when the need arises finally i guess dream big a
106little bit here thinking about a final piece but an extended learning opportunity coordinator to be able to manage some of these things but also really thinking about those internship opportunities these programs that i've mentioned today are are things that are successful in other schools we know that they'd be successful here with our students they're things our students have been asking for but they have someone who could help coordinate this and help talk with students about their goals and build those partnerships out beyond that would be another thing i'd be excited to offer to our students so that they have those same community partnership experiences and start to think about what they want to do after high school before they actually get there any questions so with the high school attendance said 808 students what was
107the original design for hamden academy to be able to have for students so that's a great question um nine years ago so as i look back at this um if i jump back to 2012 we're at about 707 students uh 2011 743 so i don't know exactly what year whether they worked on a projected number or whether they worked on the i'm seeing rob shake is that a projected number it was either 800 or 850 and i can't remember that including the third floor classroom so it's safe to say that we really are busting out the seams and you look at the student student attendance okay thank you very much jrotc it's my understanding that you were basically ready to green light that was funded we had a person but we didn't have a space
108to put them am i remembering that correctly uh we have the opportunity to either have signed last year uh this past spring or this coming fall and so we are ready to go we've already been through the approval process so we are pretty much ready to go with that program thank you very much so i'm going to quickly turn you to another aspect of the funding which is the srf the school evolving renovation fund and that is available in your chromebook powerpoint and it's up on the screen so the srrf fund allows school districts like us to apply for money that lands in priority buckets and it's very competitive and you have to uh really hope that your project is a priority one or priority two project we are hopeful that reeds brooks issue is
109going to be a priority one project because it does involve water infiltration and we have had the building assessed quite thoroughly and we recognize that it does need a fix and we have asked for tiers of fixture so that we can select what is feasible for our community to work on that project so we've got everything from the band-aid fix to get things started up so the building will be of course functioning well for us but know that we have future work to do all the way to the complete renovation of the facade of the building so we do have materials deterioration on the building and the thermal barriers and the sheathing behind the concrete is in need of fix our building committee has been working diligently with the assessors to understand what the needs
110are so we did apply for the money and you see the timeline here that the priority list was scheduled to be delivered on january 17th i have not heard that update yet february 1st we would hope that doe would issue eligibility certificates that's basically the award date if a district is going to get the award so we don't know yet if we do get the award we would be entering in to an agreement with the main bond bank and we would need to make sure all of that paperwork and agreement was done by july 31st and then we would have until september 30th 23 to get the project completed i need to just make sure the board's aware that for both of these situations of the aha expansion with arp or srrf they require construction
111or funding referendums so the hamden academy project qualifies the school construction the school board would need to call for a school construction referendum in order for us to pursue that level of a project a public hearing is a required component of a school construction referendum so we would be calendaring that so that we could have public come in to get their questions answered their comments made and it would be more of a back and forth forum and we did this before with the turf many of you might must remember that the reeds brook middle school revolving renovation fund if we receive that re that award we would need to be going to the community about our ability to access funds from the main municipal bond bank and just so that you understand how that works
112those are zero percent interest funds we would only have to take out the amount from the bond bank that is opposite of our subsidy amount and we just received notification we're at 70 subsidy right now so we would maximize the srf award if we get that you would have to call for an election so here i explain the funding model to you in the slideshow and explain that there is forgiveness of the 70 since we are a high receiver and then we would pay back the loan for the remaining amount uh over five or ten years at zero percent interest it is quite a deal and rsu 22 has had significant srf money pulled down in the past i do want you to know that the maximum loan is capped at 1 million dollars and
113the projects to do the fix with reedsbrook depending on the tier we will well exceed one million dollars for some of those choices but i will also say to you that we may see a bit of a reduction if we did get a maximum reward because in the past five years reedsburg did get srrf money for a water infiltration issue around a front window so my project summary to you is that i think there are advantages to both of these building projects you've heard those of the access to one-time funds is significant here for the arp and the srf and i think that will benefit not only the students and our staff but also our taxpayers to be able to have that offset for funds for these projects so what our next steps i would
114be coming back to the school board on february 9th and proposing to you the calling of an election for the referendums both for school construction and for srf if we get the award happy to take questions so we only have to have a public comment for the in an academy construction project we have to have that for the srr project as well anytime you call a referendum there is a public hearing component so it would be for both and i would suggest to you that we not combine them i think that they are separate enough projects and have different funding streams so we should hold separate public hearings yeah i i would agree that the projects are two very different projects i think it would get awful confusing to have a public capacity was 800.
115any other questions okay thanks to all for the presentations tonight and uh thank you for your attention to this seeing the time i would like to suggest vice chair that we consider tabling items four and five tonight at the superintendent's report that's the school nutrition administrative review i can bring that back next month and report and i can update you on the enrollment projection census uh we don't have final figures i would like to let you know that we do have the budget date set though and i'm going to project those dates so everyone can see those thursdays 4 30 in the afternoon starting on march 3rd not every thursday but many so i will put those up i move to table those two agenda items i'm not sure we need a formal motion to
116do that but one that's made in second and so to take to table anything you must have a table you're correct yes yeah all right i do have the budget dates posted up on the screen for people and the board has received those dates so hope to see you there if you're interested next we have the monthly financial report i'm going to be brief because you got my written report however i would like to ask board members to consider helping recruit someone for the ed foundation it is an action step and a goal in our strategic plan we've had three amazing people come forward and then be unable to be chairpersons so that board is existing by the skeleton board right now thank you very much peter witt for hanging tough he is the president
117and our bylaws in the ed foundation allow it to remain alive if not active through his participation so we are looking for a president vice president a chair a treasurer and a secretary of that organization if you can think of people who might be passionate about um additionally supporting actually 22 schools that's what the foundation does you can talk more about it just point them in my direction have them give me a phone call or an email thank you that may be a challenge to read up on the screen but it is in your packet as well we are tracking uh well with our budget right now uh you can see that we are just about halfway through the year because we're about to hit that semester switch and uh we're tracking around 50 expenditure
118from our payroll lines in articles one and two which are our major payroll lines of course in article four that is athletics and activities we have had some athletics that has had a slow use of funds but we are trying to keep as many games and trips open as we can further than that the system administration and school administration is right on track as is transportation article 9 facilities management we have expended a significant amount of that fund because we have had many projects in the summer and also we have had recent expenditures with uh arbiter architectural and engineering fees preparing for the projects that you've heard about tonight the debt service article will be paid out in may assistant superintendent update i did it in between while she was pulling up the monthly financials
119okay so we actually have a presentation uh which we hate to be informal about this but just because we're going her computer would it be all right up the stage here opposed to tv awesome thank you what is the name of tv cart all right so this is for our student satisfaction survey conducted last month in december um yeah this was sent out to all handed academy students on december 10th it was open for two weeks so i want to say right before christmas vacation we stopped accepting responses and we ended with 123 responses overall so one of the biggest questions that we wanted to ask out of curiosity and also just to report back to the board was how students were feeling about the school year since it's very abnormal schooly school year for
120all of us so we wanted to ask how factoring coven everything was going which we got a surprising amount of um fours and threes which we rated this from one being not too well to five being very positive and we're very fortunate that we got a lot of threes fours meaning neutral or good which overall reflected really well for the hamrin academy student body so the second question was how are you adjusting to a full scheduled school year and there were five responses which were very well good enough mutual or no strong opinion could be worse or very poorly so a majority we have 35 20 saying good enough uh 27.6 is very well 18.7 uh neutral uh only 11.4 percent said could be worse and it doesn't even give us a number for very
121poorly so that's i'm guessing really so uh after this we asked a few free response questions we gave students enough for them to type out as much as they would like or as little as they would like and uh we got a variety of responses thankfully and we got things ranging from code protocols which are students reporting that they believe they're working or they believe that they're working well across the student body we got a lot of things for in-person learning people enjoyed things such as spirit week and sports being more open and available as students there was a lot of students talking about how supportive the staff's been being about work getting things done receiving extra help and the same thing with friends it's a lot easier for a lot of students being in
122person because they're able to keep those connections utc has been going really well for people who are in utc which is good to hear a lot of people were talking about uh how transportation is going fairly smoothly and cool testing has been going good since we're able to catch a lot of cases before and so we also thought it would be nice to include some of the actual student responses that we felt were representative of the majority of the responses so the first one was i get to see my see more of my friends and peers since we have the whole school together and i like being able to go to school full time i also appreciate the mass mandate because i feel safer than i would be without them although some people still don't
123wear them correctly it has let us stay in school for the whole year so far and then another one was teachers understanding this year is great covet has really made teachers more understanding and patient activities after school are also going well i'm very happy that we get the opportunity to have activities uh so for what could be going better this year we had uh some really interesting responses that uh things that i wasn't even aware about so um there's been a lot of issues around inappropriate bathroom use for reasons listed drugs vandalism but probably even things beyond our knowledge uh vaping has been an issue across the school which has been kind of interesting especially with history around cigarettes and nicotine it's almost like it's you know coming full circle um mask has been an
124issue for some students because there's just that divide between students who want them students who don't which is understandable we were expecting to get this anyway which it's i think it's healthy to have discussion on both sides uh the belt intercom system has been having issues so students have been complaining about that a little bit it hasn't been consistent but i'm i know the office is trying their best so this is not trying to slam them at all it's been it's been doing its job uh communication between teachers and students uh could be better in some cases a lot of cases cases it is fine but some things can be unclear or lost uh lunches has have been a little bit confusing especially towards the beginning of the year it's smoothed out now but there
125have been complaints about the amount of food or the quality of food pac study halls we've been having study halls with the balcony of the pac which have been difficult for a lot of students since we have a small it's almost like a uh half of a oval i guess is the best way to describe it it's very small space to do work that might require a computer several different papers and other required tools or belongings uh behavior which behavior is always an issue we're high school students but it was mentioned a few times about things such as levels of respect language things like that and then workload which uh speaking with workload it's obviously different between each types of classes but there were quite a few students who were thinking that the workload was
126rather high you've been the gun my inner tony got very good we'll speed this right along not rushing so the next question was what is a change that could benefit the student body regarding this year and this was another open response and we got a lot of really unique uh responses um so one of the ones that we heard a lot was like an increase in school spirit so that they're talking about maybe pep rallies when we can do that shorter classes weighted gpas i can't really speak much on this because i i don't really know that much about that but i think it was looking at like a c in ap class and comparing that to like an a um um so the option to go remote um that one was on there quite
127a few times less workload and then a longer lunge and then with that larger portions so the quote that we decided to pull from this uh was there are many little things that could benefit the student body one of which being having some sort of spring activity perhaps the whole school pepperelli-ish to re-establish school pride this is definitely not doable at the moment how bad cove it is right now but in the future when weather is nice or when kobe cases aren't as bad perhaps we could look at something like that which personally i completely agree with things like pep rallies are a highlight for a lot of high school students but getting the space to do that currently with what we have in place is obviously difficult so the next question was is there
128at least one adult in the building that you trust and could go to for support and 88.6 said yes and only 11.4 percent said no uh the reasons behind this uh was partiality uh some students believe that uh teachers might have um favorites a lack of personal connection between a student and a team and teachers or uh lack of trust for whatever reason and i do want to say the reason that there's only three on here excuse me is because they're like as you can see there weren't a lot of no's so they're really worth that many explanations um and then we ended with is there anything else you would like to say or add um so one person actually mentioned the fitness center and then it should be open more often and it needs
129updated equipment because i believe there's still the same equipment in there from one handed academy open this was one response that i really liked i loved this year and everyone here in this school i thought that was really sweet and then most people just said that they enjoyed filling out the survey requested more and some kids mentioned the dress code and mostly with that it was about hats so yeah any questions thank you that was informative and well done good job guys uh before we move on i would like to give a huge thank you to stephanie she threw most of this together this was really spearheaded by her i helped like you know with the surveying questions but for the actual project she really took thrive and initiative with this and i just want
130to give a really big thank you [Applause] any questions board members of the student survey have you asked for larger portions at one uh i don't believe anything has been um established or talked about yet this hats is common topic in our household as well so i just told him i would defer it to the policy committee thank you very much of course uh questions and board members um um i was looking for um an update on bus situation uh just wondering if we could just keep everybody abreast of um are we in fear of any shortages or i mean do we seem to be doing really well in that respect we have leveled out since we had that week or two where we had to put out messages about not having adequate drivers and
131i will say that we feel like it can be day to day if we have a heavy athletic afternoon where we have to send buses to sports but i have not received a warning call about an issue knock on wood for weeks and my hope is that we're through that space of time i will tell you that we do have some drivers of course who are approaching retirement age and many of our drivers are already retired and they just choose to come back and do this as as a job so we're working really hard to keep them with us and also recruiting new you'll see in the link 22 that will be coming out bus driver recruitment um i'd like to follow up with the same question uh regarding substitute teachers how's that been especially
132with the increase in in transmission of the school well i could direct you to look at any principal in the audience and they'll give you uh some eyebrows it's been a challenge we have had substitute shortage in buildings previous to the omicron coming and since then every day we are having to find creative ways to eat their cover classes sometimes make really hard choices that some programming can occur in a school but i have to give credit to our principals and our administrative assistants who do the calling because they create relationships with people who want to come to their building and keep coming as they can but i also have to say thank you to staff members who do different jobs than their usuals so we're calling people off planning time to fill in in
133a classroom principals are going into classrooms and teaching we have all kinds of different scenarios where you might not even have the same substitute in classes rotated basis so everyone's working into the max but it's really hard out there yes we have a link ad for substitutes as well and sports officials in the spirit of um sort of responding to um some concerns addressed from the public earlier i wondered if you could touch on negotiations are over it's public um but just our focus as a board on true um retention of and acquiring new talent um especially as far as competitive pay i guess is what i'm thinking in particular some folks might not realize what that what the forethought is from us thank you for that uh we did just conclude uh teacher negotiations
134last summer and we did make it a priority that competitive teacher pay was going to be our main goal and we did a work with ea 22 and i'd say quite successfully to carve a pathway toward becoming competitive and bangor was absolutely on the list along with about 13 other regional school districts so we made some considerable ground and we also added in additional pay for national board certification because we know that that threshold is critically important to achievement for students and we also know that it is a highly reflective professional development opportunity so we did increase uh the bachelor scale by five thousand dollars if a teacher had national board certification so thank you on the same topic i was wondering if you could um speak just for a moment on why the great
135money is not being used for um hiring teachers if it's like a one-time grant so if we chose to hire teachers with the arp grant money then we would be limited at the time for which those teachers could remain being funded by that source so every one of the grants has had a limitation to its availability the corona relief funds we've already passed that timeline they're no longer available for use so if we had hired teachers with those monies we would be coming up with that in the local budget now esser funds have had timelines which are still in force but will conclude in 2022 and so we've had to be attentive about that now we have actually gone after some service from personnel because you have to education's a personnel business but we've been
136very cautious about that so we don't create a cliff arp is no different 2024 we would no longer be able to fund those positions and i would just add our principles with that go to that those positions that we have advertised and our colleagues in other districts are telling us that they we're not mean to struggling at the same level everywhere so let's say we had allocated all of the money to additional staff teachers aren't there there's heart it's a teacher shortage it's hard to find a match so i don't know if any principal wants to jump in on that but i know we have had single-digit candidates to interview and when i was a principal here we would have 20-plus candidates and now we might have three and we are waiting and hiring the
137very best but here's our gt example gifted and talented we waited months but we got a really highly qualified person a good match so there is a layer of that in that decision-making process i think is not also true that unless those teachers were to serve in more of a remote learning capacity which was a minority desire of our several family surveys that went out that we really don't have a place to put them to bring them into this building at least in the high school setting that is true at the high school we are definitely maximized for space and i would say we do have a couple of elementary schools that are also filled to the gills just like the perfect example as i look at mrs nickerson as her members came in higher
138for kindergarten and we did hire additional staff so there are pockets where that did happen and i should have a list i can't think of them off the top of my head but where it needed to happen it did still happen and just to clarify one other thing um our parents and community members welcome to come to the education committee meetings so that that occurs right before this meeting does so that way they can have a better understanding of um what is being done to lessen the learning loss that was occurring during the pandemic yes the public is invited to attend any of our subcommittee meetings thank you any other questions the board members yeah one quick question um during public comment and then brittany reinforced it sort of the stress level uh amongst the
139administration and our in our teachers do we have any sort of stress relief mechanisms that we can offer our staff to help cope with it so we actually have been meeting weekly with our ea 22 union representation to talk about what employee experiences are and we are hearing about the stress levels so we are investigating right now professional development related to self-care and tina may be able to speak to that dr delvina i can't remember something is in the works for february and we do have a special march in service where teachers select it's like an ed camp so they pick what's meaningful to them and that does have a lot of self-care choices there are a lot of examples embedded in what we do on a regular basis that i could again i should
140be able to pull up and highlight i'll give you one example when we do offer professional development feedback that we got was you know teachers are exhausted and they need time to calibrate or meet as a team and while we have meetings on a regular basis of team members they're often tied to an agenda so they needed time just for them and that time was built into the professional development schedule so if you're a teacher you know that the gift of time is a huge as a huge gift so that's one that's most recently coming to mind because the last several professional development days we've done a block of time as a district a block of time as a building a block of time for a team whether at the high school be a department
141meeting or at the elementary school or grade level meeting but then there's also that another block of time that's just specific what do you need to do as a teacher what would make you feel the most productive and ready to face tomorrow so we are very aware of that and get a lot of good ideas and feedback from teachers and that's how that one came into play they said this this is one of the most beneficial things you could do for us and so we instilled so there are a lot of examples like that and i will think more and get them reported out to you i i will say that teachers are feeling the stress day to day and so waiting for us to have an in-service opportunity where we give them time and
142space is really challenging and what we're hearing is can we please understand what the true experience is and the substitute shortage is a perfect example when you come into work and you're not sure exactly what your day is going to be because you might be pulled to do something different than your usual job you know there needs to be some grace around that and so we are trying to be very attentive and think about what is it that a district can do to move forward and have people feel support instead of feeling entirely you know stressed having there be some level of decision making for them and brittany does wellness wednesdays and there are a wealth of resources and information i can forward a couple for examples because they have personal strategies resources that the
143state can offer resources that the district can offer everything that could be personalized to uni to what you need because everyone's having such a unique experience in all of this it could be that mary emails and says here's a moose uh what are those called mary this moose module which is a lesson that has been created many of our teachers participated in creating those lessons but if you wanted to be able to kind of show up online and guarantee the quality of your lesson the state department has moose modules and so we put those reminders out there that here's a here's a resource for you because beyond time resources are another hot commodity for teachers all right next is thank you everyone uh next is committee reports you have those in your packets hopefully the
144chance to go down through those unless folks feel the need to call at a high point for the committee chair to call something unique to attention we'll move into policy hey i'm going to ask that each of you open your in your google folder policies that we'll be discussing this evening as reading shared with you they're not printed out for you this evening so if i address something it's from the google folder that you have sent to you we'll start with a discussion on second readings of policy k d b the public's right to know freedom of access at last month's meeting we approved it for the first reading no recommendations were made at that time i did have a question that was posed to me to ask about certain parts in this policy please
145note that a lot of it was based on the law that is part of part of the policy itself and so if you do have questions regarding why certain language was changed uh please make sure that you look at one mrsa subsection 401 and that will probably answer some of your questions i move at this time move to accept policy k d d as written here we promotion in a second any discussion not just a clarification um it's the title 1 subsection 401 and all of the following the remaining um sub chapter are included in that reference as well thanks lester yeah so i didn't get a chance to deep dive into this um this was in our folder and it wasn't in the electronic folder doing a deep dive into that i did see
146one um discrepancy with the way the policy is written and the way the law is written so on section 408-a where it's really the meat and potatoes for it uh it states so well let me back up a little bit so fifth paragraph down second sentence it states otherwise inspection and or copying will be scheduled to occur uh we struck out 10 working days and then a reasonable time following a request at the time that will not delay or inconvenience the regular activities of rsu-22 the law states within a reasonable time which was corrected of receiving a request the agency or official shall not will but shall provide a good faith non-binding estimate of the time within which the agency or official will comply with the request as well as the cost estimate which we
147addressed in subsection nine um i don't know if it really needs a uh you know an amendment motion or if that's uh something you guys want to talk to a little bit can i can i ask you to clarify what language it is that you're asking to be inserted in this policy please yeah okay so the way it's currently written it it seems really ambiguous so um you know so somebody somebody does put in a foia request uh we're not really giving them a timeline or an estimate timeline whether it be non-binding as far as when we're going to comply with that so if if i'm submitting a request and i call the office two weeks later i can get the answer yeah we're working on that we'll get back to you and then two
148weeks later i can i can still get the answer but there's nothing really saying hey we expect to take 30 days 60 days to get you this request back and then i know what i'm i'm expected to wait so if i hear you right chris i think what you're saying is we need to communicate whatever reasonable timeline is going to be with the requester today it could take you two weeks to gather that information um but there could be another time where depending on the environment we're in if you might need three weeks yeah and what i'm really saying is that the law is telling us that we have to that we shall provide a good faith non-binding estimate of time within which the agency or official will comply with the request the policy doesn't
149need to give a definitive timeline but we have to acknowledge that we are going to communicate a definitive timeline with the requester [Music] is that what you're saying i would just copy verbatim what the law states i think i'd just like to add that if we look further than paragraph five if you go to page two and you follow down to letter e and then the following paragraph says as required by law the school unit will provide the person making the request an estimate of the time necessary to complete their request and the total cost and if the estimated total cost exceeds 30 on and on and i will say i i'll speak to this being someone who intersects with foia requests this year has been unprecedented for foia requests and so the ability for
150our school district to run all of the normal functions and respond to some of the requests because of the degree and the broad nature of them has been incredibly challenging and even to learn how to estimate how long it would even take has been something now i'm going to be quite frank 80 of these requests or 90 even we're getting back in very reasonable times and some of them we're turning around as quickly as as we can because it's just a simple document poll but when you have to go through a search for the degree of digital archives that a school district has and you're looking at thousands of documents that might have to be redacted for privacy might have to be pulled because the whole document is not qualified to be released it is
151truly a work that is challenging to estimate but he's right that the requirement is there and i i guess i feel like it's represented unless there's a different um yeah if you look at the law um paragraph nine that basically states what you're saying but what the intent paragraph nine is that the agency or official having custody control of the public record subject to a request under the section shall provide to the request or an estimate of the time that doesn't give you it doesn't it doesn't direct you to give them a time frame so if some somebody puts in a request it still we're still back to square one where i could call two weeks down the road and have no idea when i'm ever going to see the request i guess i guess
152i'm either i'm not reading it correctly because what we have that's in red it says um the school you know will provide the person making the request an estimate of the time necessary to complete the request right so if we're charging 25 an hour and we say it's going to take five hours we're complying with paragraph nine of um section 408 a we're saying it's going to take five hours but we're not giving them as it states paragraph three we're not giving them an estimated time in which the agents here official will comply with the request those are two distinctly different elements so here what is correctly one is asking for an estimate of the time it will take for which a fee will be charged the other one is providing uh how long it
153will take for you to get back so it may take you five hours to fix the car but it may not happen for two weeks that's the distinction using a car analogy i will say that in practice my interpretation has been that i'm supposed to give the person a date and there are times that i don't give the person a date because the turnaround is fast enough that there hasn't been a date but i certainly respect if we need to take this back and discuss that nuance so i know we're still in discussion i know that it was the intent that we heard to incorporate the language of the law in the policies i guess looking back at the first rating i didn't see any edits to it it was blank am i did i
154not have it in my electronic file last time no okay so what ended up happening last time and i guess i wasn't clear enough in making that happen but when the board folder went out electronically we had not met as a committee at that time and so it went out on friday and so we went out with the policies as they existed on that friday we met on a month the following monday and the board meeting was that following wednesday so you didn't get a chance to see the work that we had put into it between monday and wednesday and so when you looked at the policies in your folder they were exactly as they were but then we had made changes so when we came to you on the last board meeting we came
155with this and it was printed for you in your blue folder at that point in time so if you hadn't looked at the blue folder and i didn't and i didn't say oh by the way you should probably look at the ones in the blue folder that may be why you didn't notice those changes that occurred okay so given the typical workflow of the purpose of a first reading to maybe massage things and the second reading to button them up given the dialogue tonight we do a motion in a second uh he can either move forward or there'd be an amendment to the motion to address some of the comments we heard i guess that would be up to we're well we're still in discussion so before we put it to vote i guess yeah
156i'll make the the motion to amend uh to include um a non-binding estimate of time within which the agency or official will comply with the request so there's a motion to amend the motion between the second second so the motion is to amend the original motion to approve as written to include the language in the law as stated by board member lavonte let me make it clear i think i think vice chair frank kind of kind of put that in a good perspective you know when you drop your car off for an estimate you know they're giving you a time in which you're going to get your car that's non-binding and a price and essentially that's what what i'm asking that we do as a district sort of give them a non-binding estimate on how
157long it's going to take us to do this and give them a price i mean we're already essentially creating that that estimate for the person that has the foia request but at least we're giving them sort of a time frame which which they know the way they can expect to hear from us can i ask superintendent nichols is that feasible considering what has been discussed this year with the amount and the time that that has taken is is that feasible for us to do it's required for us to do but the the uh the interpretation that i'm using as a practitioner of this is that that is already required unless we're able to turn the request around quickly enough that we don't charge because we have to give two hours free and we have the
158ability to do that request quickly mr rice chair i move that we extend the meeting by a half an hour thank you motion by lester seconded by john holmes to extend all in favor thank you thank you stop looking at me it seems that in in the past uh when the second reading has come before the board uh minor amendments which i guess i would consider the the language really to be a minor amendment given the amount of changes occurred but we do run the risk of creating policy in a meeting which is unusual normally we would send it back to policy to address the issue and bring it back for that final reading so we're serving a new area here on this one and i think in the past i think when things have
159gotten this far into a minor amendment or typo we generally have the policy committee take it back and basically have that discussion and maybe bring it back with an amendment do we want uh we have a motion to amend the original motion to add the language in the law has stated any further discussion on that and i ask chris to state that one more time so i can script it motion to amend to include shall provide a good faith non-binding estimate of the time within which the agency or official will comply with the request it's uh it's written right in the law thank you and you'll find that paragraph three in section 40. and where is it you want that listed i think you're looking for the paragraph right it should go in the third
160paragraph the fifth paragraph is only for denial of requests the second um sentence of the fifth paragraph states otherwise inspection and or copying will be scheduled to occur so i guess perhaps we need it in well you either need to separate the paragraphs or so perhaps uh maybe a motion i make a motion to okay so we [Music] so we have a motion to amend as stated by uh member labonte um our folks clear on the request in i guess also the placement of where that language should go as part of this amendment uh vice chair um if it makes it easier i can remove my amendment um and then you know another good faith uh see go back to committee and and then i can come into committee and make this a little cleaner
161for just kind of non-typical being a second reading we're having this discussion i understand that so um i will i will remove my motion on the floor for the amendment i will remove my second okay so the amendment to the motion has been retracted now the original motion is on the floor to approve as written um it's understanding through uh conversation that we may see this one come back to us with another minor amendment after policy is a chance to look at it but we're basically proving it as written before us here today second second reading yep the only way that this can happen is from what i'm hearing in under parliamentary procedure is that this the original motion would have to be denied if the original motion fails then someone can then make a
162second motion that says it goes back to committee and so if you wanted to go back to committee then you need to vote against it not that i'm asking you to okay it'll come back um so anyway so it would come back to committee and then we would bring it back the next time for a second reading it it may actually use up less time to do it that way [Music] all those in favor of the motion to approve exactly as written raise your hand or say i or both i guess all those opposed raise your hand all right motion fails i believe the policy committee will be bringing it back to us for a second second reading you would then refer back to the committee just couldn't resist we are going to second reading
163of policy j k d which is suspension of students so please open that one also because what you will see with what is in your folder is quite different than what we brought to you last time but i also know that when i brought to you it to you last time saying that the law had changed we were waiting for msma's policy to update it we then received that policy and has now updated it a second time for you to review for second reading the part that we had added at the last meeting was that students under suspension will not be permitted to attend any school activity at the principal's discretion the suspensions may exclude the student from the school campus or other activities if you look to the new one you'll notice that that's
164basically what's in highlighted in yellow so note that we didn't get rid of that concept it is now just stated in a different format and at a different place in the policy itself um this is based on the msma's policy and i uh to approve jkd as written the motion second discussion i have a question actually in the bracketed optional is it intended that that option is included so that should be no that should not have been in there so right we would cross that out when we fix it all up for them okay got it any other discussion alright hearing that all those in favor opposed or extensions right the next policy is for first reading and it is jic student code of conduct what we did while we were reviewing our policies is
165realized we didn't have policy jic which had been listed in many of our other policies and so this is a new policy that we are adding we already have a code of conduct um program and and and handbook that's already out there but we didn't have a policy to support it this is a policy that kind of oversees many other policies that we have in our handbook and if you notice all the cross-references you will see a great majority of cross-references that certainly talk about student code of conduct and so i move that we approve for first reading jic student code of conduct all right leave a motion a second discussion seeing then all those in favor opposed or potentials motion curies next policy for first reading is policy jk which is student discipline again
166this one was also revised based on the new laws that came out in the past in the past legislature this is also updated based on msma guidelines regarding those laws and how it is listed in our policies and so i move uh to accept for first reading policy jk student discipline moved in seconded discussion hearing none all those in favor of the last one this evening is policy jke expulsion of students that i shared with you at the last meeting this one also needed to be updated based on the changes in law and we were waiting for msma's policy to do that again we received that policy from them and what is presented before you is the recommendations from msna and also the recommendations of the policy committee to be adopted so i move to
167approve a first reading policy jke expulsion of students moved in second discussion i'm hearing that all those in favor opposed for extensions carries based on tonight's um conversations we will now be having a policy committee meeting on the 25th if i remember correctly thank you and thank you bill board members for being patient as we work through a motion an amended motion again we didn't do too well in the last one so we're getting better as we practice thank you for everyone's uh professionalism working through that all right next is old business we have no old business tonight we can move into new business if you want yes i'll write new business to discuss and act on calling the school closure referendum election in the town of newburgh i'd like to update the board that
168on december 29th i did receive a response from the department of education that our cost proposal for closing the newburgh elementary school had been reviewed and had been approved and so we could go forward with the next step of closure the next step of closure is for the school board to vote to have a referendum and to call that referendum for school closure to call school closure referendum be approved informed presented to this meeting and that a copy of said vote be included with the minutes of this meeting second moved and seconded so this would be a roll call hey anderson hi jessica barnes hi jane dyer hi rob frank hi bless your friend hi alan gordon hi jessica hamilton hi john holmes kenny humphrey hi tony jean-jacques hi colleen jelly aye crystal bonte hi
169keith miller oh absent sorry jillian sardacki woods i just want to make sure folks are clear um i did after the motion second i mentioned discussion that didn't seem like there was any but we didn't maybe pause long enough so we did go on a roll call um what did are there any folks that feel uh they were inclined to discuss anything during the discussion period if not we're all set all right thank you okay so with a vote for school closure comes the need for all of you to sign multiple documents so we're going to do that in order and so um we have a couple of extra pens if anyone's in need and i'm going to start those going around while i'm having you sign i'll share with the public a few other
170details about this i would like to request that the student representatives get coloring books to pass the time you asked that 124 each of these will have a line for your name specifically so look carefully for that good night um as you're signing i'm just going to give some details there will be a public hearing regarding the closure of newburgh elementary school that is proposed the public hearing will be on february 8th and that will occur at newburgh school at 6 00 pm so february 8th at newburgh school 6 pm for public hearing the referendum itself will occur on tuesday february 22nd and that will only occur in the town of newburgh that will occur with the polls being open i believe eight to eight newburgh only actually uh thank you uh oh it's pretty
171quick um all right i move that we enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing per ml one mrsa 405 6a superintendent's valuation promotion is second discussion are those in favor of going to executive sessions i believe that was unanimous