MSAD #51 School Board Meeting September 19, 2022

001so i could do anything midday if you wanted yeah like i said i'm wide open until three just name it okay welcome to the msad 51 school board meeting for monday september 19 2022 i'll call them meaning to order and we have everybody here except for jared mike and christina we're away but we do have a quorum okay so uh next item is uh recognition we have nothing formally but i did want to mention um i visited the new uh historical society building you know that was moved the brick building and um they have a fantastic display on uh until december that has like msad 51 and the old miw and back when it was the greely institute and that's really cool so um i encourage you to bring kids there and browse through that

002and the interior is fantastic now and then i also just wanted to say kudos to the football team and how awesome it was to go to a game under the lights on a friday night so item number three approval of minutes for september 8th any edits okay any motion a motion to approve the minutes of september 8 2022 as presented thank you vanessa second thanks tom for the discussion okay all in favor all opposed and abstain unanimous motion carries okay thank you all right so this brings us to item four public comment are there folks here that would like to speak please stand up introduce yourself speak up hey grace right yes please all right just like that yes all right good evening superintendent porter and members of the board my name is grace wright

003i'm a parent in the district and by professional licensed clinical social worker who spent the last 10 years practicing as a trauma therapist encompassing individual trauma collective trauma and historical trauma i.e systems of racism marginalization and oppression i'm here tonight to speak about equity first i want to speak to the concerning focus of the board chair and newly appointed equity committee co-chair both have suggested that equity work should focus on a quote growth mindset in order to not create a victim mentality first i can say unequivocally that in my 10 years of direct experience with people who have experienced trauma and in all of the research there's no evidence that validating someone's experience in a marginalized population has ever created a victim mentality what we do know is that when we validate that someone has

004a harder hand to play because of their history or their identity we acknowledge their reality validate their existence and allow them to be seen from there we can work to support them in success it's an established and undisputed fact that children of color children who identify as lgbtqia plus and children who live in poverty have harder hands to play the concept of quote growth mindset is yet another racist theory that serves to tell these kids if you tried harder you could succeed frankly growth mindset is a diversion that people are using to avoid having to do the work that needs to be done and dismantling these systems of racism it's a cop-out born of immense privilege second i want to quote one and only one statistic in response to the board shared that comment at

005the last meeting that the policy relating to kids being able to use their preferred pronouns is under exploration transgender and non-binary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all or most of their people in their lives attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected finally i want to bluntly speak to the members of the board who ran and were elected on promises to do equity work ann tom kim leanne and mike and christina who are not here you've all made promises to do this work and you were decisively elected to the board to do so the community is clear that equity work matters and yet you've allowed the board chair to remove student members of the previous equity committee who represented diverse populations and a parent with a

006phd in equity education you allowed two members who lost recent elections to be appointed to the committee after the committee was clear the community was clear that they did not want them representing our students and families you've made statements to members of the public that your intentions are to block any work by the equity new equity committee but i'm here to say that's not good enough you have the numbers and you have the power to do better require the board chair to entirely change the committee and to represent people who will do the work of equity who will diversify the committee and actually represent the populations we're trying to serve and should you need to i will point out that you have the ability to vote to remove and replace the current board chair should

007he not be serving the best interest of our students and our families you were not elected to sit back and play a political game you were elected to do the work of equity to protect our students staff and families who need you the most the mental health and well-being of our students is quite literally in your hands and if these aren't your own children that we're fighting for i would ask you to start acting like they are thank you [Applause] thank you grace um just one point i don't need to get into debating all of that i appreciate everything you said um on policy jb from the last meeting um i used the word explored but don't read into that there's been zero discussion of changing that policy it was simply to ask for time

008for it to be reviewed reviewed would have been a better word than explored and i understand that word has some ambiguity there's been zero discussion of changing that at this point so others in a moment if you want to come up here i mean i don't mind okay hello my name is sarah i'm here also to voice my support for the equity committee and i agree wholeheartedly wholeheartedly with what grace has shared along these lines i'd also like to address the oversight now for the second year in a row of the district and planning significant school events on the jewish high holidays in this case on rosh hashanah aside from the initial disappointment and frustration of feeling like my kids and other jewish students are not being met with inclusivity from their public school administration

009the district's official response in last week's email was shockingly dismissive it read like a message that would be sent to placate parents who were complaining about a school event conflicting with a soccer tournament or some other extracurricular activity the jewish holidays are not extracurricular activities what could have been an opportunity for instance for a sincere apology and a pledge once again to do better instead sent the message that the administration can't be bothered to worry about and respect a few critical dates for their jewish students i imagine the sentiment would feel similar for muslim students and other minority groups as well this is not about my kids nor is it about a single field trip this is important for all the families in our district who identify as part of a minority culture or religion

010we all deserve to be included and actually this is equally important for our students who will never experience this sort of exclusion because they celebrate the major holidays they look like most of the other kids they're able-bodied and cisgender and heteronormative it's important for all of our students to see modeled that there's beautiful diversity within our community and to have the opportunity to respect the traditions cultures and lived experiences of their peers there's certainly a long list of issues that the equity committee needs to address and i hope that this is just one small one of them thank you thank you sarah others hi my name is lorian whitten and i am a member of this community i also have a child in the school system and i'm also a mental health therapist in private

011practice i've been working with teens and young adults for about 20 years 10 being in private practice but most of the bulk of my life has been to work with teenagers and so and at this point in time in my practice i almost solely work with people who identify as part of the queer community and i have students currently and in the past that have gone to the greeley school system and have worked at times really applauding what teachers have done for them using their correct names preferred pronouns and then at times really trying to help when that has not happened and they come into my office feeling really ashamed embarrassed that they you know maybe during the roll call in the morning the teacher uses a name that they don't use anymore and maybe

012other students didn't even know that they had ever had that name and so now they are basically called out they are bullied because of that and feel really terrible about themselves and so that obviously leads to more depression uh and self-harm suicide ideation and sometimes suicide attempts which i have actually had from this greely school system so luckily no completed suicides but um there's definitely been hospitalizations so i really just implore that we really just think about trying to take care of all students and how they identify and making sure that this is a safe place for them to be because sometimes home is not thank you [Applause] well said thank you others okay i've never done this before so bear with me um i did have a question about the difference between review and

013explore and if nothing's going to change why it needs to be reviewed some of our policies are long and you don't read them every single day so when things come up you got to make sure that you're doing what you're supposed to do and that was it asking for time uh my name is jessica whitton i am a resident of north yarmouth a parent of a child in the district a greely graduate and a member of this community i've been a psychotherapist for 17 years and over these 17 years i have treated children adolescents and adults with a myriad of diagnoses and symptoms and while they're all unique there's one common thread that runs throughout the pain suffering and healing and that is a desire for belonging and acceptance i know at this point you've

014heard and read the statistics around suicide rates of marginalized populations i know you're aware of the dangers involved with not protecting our youth who identify with one or more of these groups and i trust that you're all intelligent capable humans however there seems to be some confusion around the difference between the words resilience and trauma i'd like to take a moment to explain the difference and the implications of each resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties this could include something from a young child struggling to learn to tie their shoes and failing multiple times before fine finally making those bunny ears or losing a big game and needing to work harder next season or perhaps learning the hard way that procrastination doesn't pay off in the end this builds character tenacity and grit

015i respect this as a part of the mindset and encourage it to be part of our district's ideology trauma is a deeply distressing and disturbing experience that has long lasting negative impacts to the psychological well-being of the person trauma is what can cause chronic and severe mental illness harm to others harm to self and harm to our communities trauma can include a sense of horror helplessness serious injury or the threat of serious injury or death this can be in the form of physical sexual or domestic violence natural disasters grief and of course bullying it may be hard for some of you to understand how something seemingly trivial is not honoring pronouns or an off-the-cuff slur may lead to be may lead to what i described above if that's a challenge for you i'm going to

016guess that you are not and never have been a part of one of these marginalized populations and you're unable to fathom how these seemingly minor experiences lead to trauma not resilience trauma i don't expect everyone to have experienced this but i do expect that if you have not you trust those of us who have it's not just a word it's not just a protection it's not just inclusivity it's where it begins it's the message we send to our children in this community it's the tone we set in our buildings it's creating a sense of belonging a sense of acceptance it's telling these kids that they are safe and that the only thing they have to do when they come to school is learn and do their best no brain is capable of doing their best

017when it is in fight flight or freeze i don't expect you to be able to put yourself in their shoes or even to pretend that you know what it's like to feel isolated outcasted or less than based on your race gender sexuality or gender expression what i do expect is that you're able to provide every child that walks through our district doors to feel like they belong to provide them with a sense of safety and community i would love to have my child and yours know what it feels like to belong to foster growth and resilience for our students without a sense of equity and inclusion we are only fostering more trauma i'm speaking here today to ask you to please as you set your equity committee agenda to ask yourselves which do i choose

018what do i want my legacy to be do i want to create a sense of healing safety and belonging or do i want to perpetuate this trauma thank you jessica hi my name is vi i'm a student here um so anything that happens in this room will directly affect me i don't really have anything prepared to say but um when i hear slurs thrown around in the hallways it's not going to toughen me up when people don't use mine and other preferred pronouns it's not going to prepare me for a harsh cruel world it is just going to continue to tell me and other lgbtq kids that we are not enough and that we will never find a place where we are accepted it will continue to tell us that we don't deserve respect and

019love and putting that type of energy and um allowing people to continue that form of hatred is not going to create a safe community for everyone and i don't want to go to a school where i'm not going to be safe respected by everyone thank you [Applause] thank you hi my name is elizabeth elder i am a north yarmouth resident i have my two older kids are in the district um and um i'm don't have a lot of great prepared remarks but hats off to everyone who has spoken because that was amazing and i want to ask now the chair in light of all of these concerns that are being voiced is there any chance that we might see the equity committee expanded again to the numbers that we had last year thank you before

020we wrap up this topic is there others that would like to speak on it go for it good evening everyone i apologize i was late i couldn't find the geiger room my name is mandy levine my pronouns are she her i am a resident of cumberland and i have kids who are freshmen as well as a fifth grader and i am here to implore that the equity committee continue to embrace the the importance of of gender pronouns i am a cisgender heterosexual woman i am not part of the lgbtq plus community but i'd like to think that i act in the capacity of an ally to it every year i facilitate the world of difference program at the middle school for the 7th and 8th grade and i can say in the numerous years that

021i have facilitated that program with a group of peer leaders that the aspect of identity that uniformly comes up as the reason that these students are the most routinely bullied is because of their sexual orientation and heard some really tough stories over the years of what these kids have gone through and i just today got an email from the the trevor project it's suicide prevention month and i apologize if this was covered before i walked in the room but lgbt lgbtq plus youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide i just read a really startling statistic today and i don't want to misquote this so i'm going to read it because i wrote it down if an lgbtq plus youth has one adult a single adult in their life who loves and accepts them

022they're 40 percent less likely to try to attempt suicide that number to me is so startling and it for me it just reinforces how critically important it is that we create a school environment for all of our kids where they feel welcome where they feel safe where they have a sense of belonging it is such an easy easy gesture for me to to introduce myself with my pronouns it doesn't mean a whole lot to me but when i say it to someone who is part of that community it is such a powerful signal to them that i respect them i include them i want them to feel safe with me it's a tiny tiny gesture i can do to embrace inclusion and belonging and i just hope we can continue this conversation i really thank

023you for your time thank you so much thank you mandy um i'm sure that i can't answer all the questions of this i agree with so much of what was said here tonight and this is obviously a passionate topic um since the time that the draft committee list came out um i did add some folks that reached out and the current committee is 10 people and five of which are returning members and the process that we i followed is exactly by policy and i understand the exact makeup is you know not to some people's liking but i would ask you to reach out to the members all of them and have conversations with them i think some of the concerns that were said here tonight you would find that you agree wholeheartedly um and um

024i would ask you to reach out to them have conversations um and then belonging and inclusion actually are words that are in our our draft goals for this year so i appreciate that um slurs if there's slurs please report them honestly go to administration that shouldn't be happening um any other public comment before we move on down the agenda um i appreciate just you know the trying to empower students to to report um i think what happens though is that if we have a community that is set up where kids aren't feeling like they're actually getting support or it's that it's not actually an inclusive kind of community then they're not going to actually feel even okay to go and report it because they feel like they are outside of what the norm is and

025so i guess i ask more that we need to change our culture in the schools so that that other people are also standing up for those kids who are getting that are getting slurs that the teachers that people are just coming together that this just doesn't happen that you know again i hear empower the students go go report it but it's so it's it's it's much more invasive than that we have to get to the root issues which means we have to create a better community thank you i promise we don't plan to do this all night however i have to speak to some of the same thing is that your response involves us reaching out to the community and students reaching out to the administration the onus is not on us the onus is

026on the committees the onus is on the administration the onus is on the students i mean excuse me the other students the teachers the faculty the school board chair the committees the onus is not on the people who are trying to fight for these rights the responsibility is on those who are creating these policies and procedures agreed there was a suggestion more to help alleviate concerns and share ideas and stuff uh first i want to say jason i appreciate your willingness to have a conversation i think that says a lot about your leadership uh i will also say that i commend the type of leadership that you are using i don't agree with it you don't have the numbers on the board to support your version of equity the six people who were elected on

027equity do and i applaud the fact that you are leveraging your position and your ability your powers because you are within your powers to elect that committee however you want uh so i give you total credit uh i'm looking at the six on the board who are elected uh to do the equity work i think you and i both know that the person that you appointed as equity committee co-chair lost an election on an equity platform and the person who won that election is sitting in a seat up here on the board he is somebody who i have questioned length at depth in depth uh i would argue that there's not going to be anything that comes to light other than this growth mindset is is really just a racist term to say to these

028kids who have the deck stacked against them if you try harder you can do it you can succeed right but the deck for a white cisgender heteronormative catholic wealthy male is not the same deck that a black child or an lgbtq child a trans child a queer child has those are just not the same decks they're not starting from the same point and every statistic in the world will validate that so i'm looking to the six of you sitting on the board i've run with robert's rules of order you have the power to vote to overturn the board chair and replace the board chair he you can't remove him from the school board but you can take away his power and you can do the equity work correctly and i'm looking at you to do

029that because you have the numbers it's six versus three i think everybody in the public knows that so jason's playing a savvy game and i respect that and that's an honest true comment i respect it but i don't agree with it so the six of you need to do the work thank you i'm i'm curious to know what the six three ratio is at this point [Music] okay we're not gonna keep doing this back and forth i i i i know um i've heard everything you say i appreciate it uh i'm just just it's great input very no this is not a game to me or anybody i assure you expected entirely for you not even to know what my platform is it's extremely disrespectful i'm where i stand okay there uh everybody here that

030wanted to speak on equity has spoken is that true okay no no please sit there there's a policy of three minutes and i've extended that to the degree that i'm willing all right others that would like to talk during public comment okay moving on down the agenda item five presentations from our district leadership team sips julie thank you for being here absolutely thank you for having me oh good evening i'm julie olson director of instructional support and i'm actually speaking on behalf of myself and susie robbins director of academic services i think susie's pulling up yep she did we have a co-sip this year which is similar to previous years for those of you that have followed the last few years between my role of instructional support and susie's role of academic services we really

031capture all students so we've we capture students under special education section 504 esl gifted and talented regular education every student falls under one or both of us and so we partner very closely to support all students and all teachers in our work and so it makes sense that our sips combine to do that work so as you can see on the top i can't really see the screen so just bear with me susie as you scroll down while i talk it's instructional support and academic services we're really looking at supporting the academic mental health and social emotional learning of all of our students and connecting this to our strategic goal of every student college and career readiness with a foundation in teaching and learning so our data supporting this is really looking at non-categorical supports

032for students academic and behavior looking at sort of the wellness committee that has been the last few years and has really morphed more into the mental health ad hoc committee as well as the work in that and then our current response to intervention systems of supports that's in place and we really um are looking at there has been a pretty large pause in the last couple of years due to covet around our response to intervention we have really been as you all know just keeping keeping afloat in terms of remote services and then hybrid services and then getting back to some normalcy and so our two goals really look at academic rti and behavioral rti and those really span across all grade levels and all students and all staff the academic rti really looks at

033we had had a three-year rti plan which ended up being a five-year rti plan due to covet and it was time to re re-lift that and look at setting goals for the next three years and where we needed to go we have begun that work this summer with a group of our rti leaders and administrators in the district and taking feedback on sort of what's been working and where we need to go and then including sort of updating all of the essential standards for that work in our academic rti work and then behaviorally continuing to work with both regular ed and special education staff to continue to provide non-categorical supports and interventions for all of our students who demonstrate any sort of interfering behavior whether that's internal or external behaviors that interfere with either their

034own learning or their learning of others and so continuing that work across our pre-k through age 22 students that are accessing um so not just sort of k through 12 right but we have students who span all of those ages in our building so 4 to 22 both academically and behaviorally across all of those grade levels with our adults and students so i'll open questions and then if there's anything that susie needs to answer she'll pop up questions for sue uh for julie sorry okay thank you julie absolutely so sure susie can you put mine up thank you okay so um the areas that my site improvement plan pertain to is everything that relates to finance human resources and operations and the areas that um are the goals that i have for the site improvement

035plan is the first would be the successful planning for financing a financing plan on the building project a successful referendum and bonding a new primary school project as well so related in the finance area most of the bonding in that and that would be through the use of you know the facilities building committees uh the board and also working with bong council and our financial advisor to do that so uh and we had a meeting recently in which a plan of financing was presented and it seemed well received so the other areas in human resources and during the budget process we created a new human resource position for the central office and we're looking to consolidate human resource functions all into one position right now it's spread across four people in the office so we're

036looking to centralize those and streamline our human resources processes the area of operations in transportation we're looking more greening of our bus fleet and so we're looking at the purchase of electric buses and we've already had an electric bus demonstration at the bus garage and we're hoping to make that part of our next purchases is to move towards electric vehicles excuse me the the other area around facilities is to assist in the oversight and planning of the construction of the new primary school that's probably the overwhelming goal going forward uh update our five-year capital plan that's all the summer work that goes on every summer you see all the work around the campus and the upgrades to the facilities we'd like to upgrade that plan through the building commit through the finance committee and through

037our facilities committee one area that should help us out this year is there's another round of revolving renovation funds that are coming up in which if you remember those are interest-free and also about half of that principle is forgiven if we can acquire that through our state application and we'd be looking at trying to apply for things for greeley high school such as hvac improvements so that maybe we can get some air conditioning down in the other end of the building uh better air quality even though there's nothing wrong with the air quality now okay we're looking to improve it and add ac and um and also address areas of windows and some of the envelope of the building doors and windows so those are the areas that are in site improvement plan for finance

038hr and operations thank you scott questions for scott okay thank you actually sorry one did it occur to me it's about the revolving funds yes are there limitations on how frequently we can apply for those uh they have cycles that come up from time to time that we can apply and we take advantage of every cycle that comes up okay so and are we at any disadvantage because we received funds before the waiting cycle is treated just like the previous cycle and so the next cycle ends in seven weeks so we've got a little bit of work to do over the next few weeks to get our application okay thank you all right so move down presentations be an enrollment update from our superintendent all right good evening i'm here to this is something that

039i do annually about this time we wait for school to have gotten settled for a couple of weeks and then i give you an idea about what our student enrollment looks like the state does not actually certify our enrollment or i don't certify the enrollment and give it to the state until the middle of october it's called the october 1st account and that is the actual enrollment count that the state requires each year and then they use it for state subsidy purposes but i can give you a very pretty close to accurate number of students that we have and kind of walk you through that process so planning decisions um is the company that in 2016 the district hired along with the town of cumberland and north yarmouth to do a joint study on our

040enrollment projections going forward they also did the study in 2019 and then we hired rebecca wandel who was a staffer at pdi and she has continued that work and in march 2022 she uh provided to us an updated enrollment study so all three of these studies and i know i'm just summarizing debunked the 2009 studies there are two of them done back then that showed that we were we were looking at declining enrollment in msad 51. so these are factors that impact enrollment in a school district and certainly in ours the kindergarten class that comes in every year is a very important number we always look at that number very carefully we start looking at that number the number of registrations for kindergarten begin in february and we begin tracking that number all the way

041through the summer right to the first day of school outgoing senior class do we have an outgoing class that is a small class or a large class that impacts our overall enrollment the number of new housing units in the district how many new housing starts are being given in each of the two towns we look at those numbers turnover housing sales number of houses that are selling in the community that's a very important number to us obviously there are more houses selling right now than there have been in many years in many communities private and charter school enrollment how many students are going to private schools every year how many students go to charter charter schools from our district homeschooling students how many students are being homeschooled superintendent agreements are agreements made between two superintendents

042those agreements basically say a student can go to another district than the one they actually reside in and both superintendents can say yes if one of them disagrees then the commissioner of education breaks the tie transfers in and out would just be regular student moves um you know students move in between towns and states and and whatnot we get a lot of students actually from out of state that move into our district the reputation of the school district that actually does play into it somewhat many people tell us that they move here because of the schools among other things and then finally the economy and the housing market what does the economy look like if the economy is good we tend to have an uptick in the number of students this is an uh interesting

043statistic when the economy is not so good people try to move closer to portland um for some reason we have a group of people that will do that so you'll find that in in most areas that have a city and then suburbs so this is this is information that comes right from rebecca wandel's march latest report and it shows the number of resident births this used to be the ingredient that we would look at when we're looking at student enrollment would be the births that are to residents in the two towns we know now that this is only a fraction of the information that is available that we should be looking at but it is certainly an important variable nonetheless so you can see um starting in 2005 and going all the way through projections

044or i'm sorry 2021-22 which was the last school year you can see that the birth rates pretty much showed exactly what our enrollment in our school district or some sort of a parallel where we went down and then we've gone up and we've generally been maintaining since 2014-15 or so likewise we look at new housing units in both towns so in cumberland north yarmouth you can see that the housing units that were approved in both towns had been in 2004 there had been a lot of housing units up to a little bit over 90 and then they dropped way off by 2010 which was when the recession was in full bloom and you'll see that those housing new housing units dropped below 20 in both towns this represents both towns and then by 2012 2013

045those housing starts had gone back up above um 70 up to about 75 dropped a little bit and then you'll see a huge spike in 2015 through 17 where those housing new housing units were over 100 in both communities and then up and down a little bit and then somewhat maintained since then so it kind of gives you an idea roughly of of two very important ingredients than when we look at enrollment and if you look at the pre-k 12 enrollment since 2011 you'll see that that has often paralleled those two pieces that i was just talking about so with 2100 students in 2011 the enrollment certainly took a peek i'm sorry took a dive for several years although it wasn't as impressive as a dive as the two studies in 2009 forecasted and then

046the enrollment started to stabilize around 2016 and then it has started to increase since then which is exactly what our school enrollment is mirroring basically the projections that pdi started to forecast back in 2016. and with the latest enrollment projection of march of 2022 you can see that the enrollment will be projecting to go up until 2031 into about 2 600 students or so so there's three different lines you'll see a pink line you'll see a line above that which is dotted and then you'll see kind of like a road marker line below that rebecca wandel in march 2022 said that she was not 100 sure because of the covid variable what exactly is going on with enrollment so the pink actually represents an adjustment based on covid so was kovitt going to um reduce

047the number of of students that she was forecasting that was basically her her covet adjustment and then the line that's dotted above that is the projection without covid being a variable and i'll show you a little bit more in just a moment specifically mabel i wilson school which has had over 200 students since 2016 added to that school you can see again that the enrollment um and this goes back to 2009 those those studies um at first those enrollment projections especially at the primary school level dropped somewhat and then started to stabilize and then started to increase by 2016 and 17 which is exactly what we've been seeing at mavilei wilson school and then it has generally been increasing and is expected to continue increasing and then stabilize um over a period of time again

048the pink line represents the covet adjustment that rebecca wasn't sure about in terms of the two and a half year covid ordeal that we're glad that is over and just what has it done to those numbers she wasn't sure so those are things that she certainly cautioned the district to continue exploring for the next couple of years as we look at our enrollment and see if we've recovered so this is what our current enrollment is um looking a year back to october 1st of 2021 this is the state certified enrollment and i'll just go through this very quickly we had 713 students a year ago on october 1. and uh rebecca wandel's latest report to us projected 741 students which would be the covet adjusted projection so it's important to distinguish there's two um projections

049i'm giving you from her report the covet adjusted adjustment which is 741 and then she gave another uh projection which was 770 with no cove adjustment in that number she also provided some other models but those were the two that were really significant in her march 2022 report our actual numbers um as of today are students at mabel eye wilson school so you can see that we're certainly over the cove adjustment number that she projected and slightly under the normal or typical enrollment had we not had coven is basically what she's saying so the one year change from a year ago was an increase of 49 students at mabel eye wilson school so again if you follow the same trend 323 students at gms45 a year ago um rebecca's covet adjustment projection was 307 um

050and she also had the same exact number for no covert impact at four five and our actual is 317 students and we're down from one year ago by six students but we're actually up on the projections that's another way of looking at it as well at 6 8 464 students a year ago rebecca projected 481 students using the covid adjustment she also projected that for no covet adjustment and the actual is 478 and that is up 14 students over last year and down three students from her projections and at the high school 602 students a year ago she was projecting 594 students with or without covid and we actually have 602 students so there is no change covet or no covid we have the exact same number of students enrolled at the high school this

051year so if you look at the total numbers pre-k through 12 across the board you'll see that we're up 57 students from a year ago and rebecca projected uh with a covet adjustment 2123 students um and then with no covet uh variables involved 2152 students and we have just slightly beaten both of her or her latest projection which would have been no covid variable we beat that projection as well so 57 students more the home school private and charter school enrollment numbers are interesting to look at um sorry jeff can i just answer the question tom yep i'm sorry if i missed this before um rebecca's uh projections those are she's projecting as of the um snapshot date october 1st correct yes she uh the certified enrollment is what she projects okay yes and do

052you have a sense of what the typical variation is between early mid-september and the october first snapshot um by now we're into week four of the school year so the beginning of week four we will see almost no variability it might be five to ten students at the most we've cleaned up all of our records at this point we've sent records to students that we have found actually did move or students have moved in since didn't register at the beginning of the school year happen to register afterwards so this the number between this time in september and october 1st very little changes okay yeah we're pretty much settled uh by this time in the in the month so these numbers won't won't be a huge difference if i reported these numbers or if i did

053this report at the last board meeting which was i think the fourth day of school trying to remember what day fourth or fifth day of school you would definitely see variability in those numbers and i pulled those numbers actually starting the first day of school for the first few days and they were higher than these numbers and that happens every single year until we clean up all of our records and send the records where they need to go so we don't assume students aren't coming until we know for sure they're not coming and they moved and that's usually what happens yeah so these numbers should be pretty solid um for october 1st since you came back to the slide connection one more question is the increase at miw that 49 is that pretty much spread

054out across all the grades or are you seeing a particular grade that really has much larger numbers than others i'm just wondering where if there's a bubble and where that might be the bubble um it is all over the place but we have a smaller kindergarten class this year than we did last year but that is like an every other year thing um but we still what we call a small class 174 students uh in kindergarten um is far exceeding any numbers that we used to see in kindergarten we were at the 130 mark at our low counts for kindergarten when we had years of 130 135 students and now we're seeing i think last year was 185 so 174 but we're toggling in that 10 student range now we've been doing that for years

055thank you any other questions before i move on to the next slide we can come back to we can answer questions at the end um these are interesting numbers to look at too and i i really think covet has a lot to do with this and i think this is what rebecca was concerned about when she started putting her march 2022 report together was was what was the impact of coven so you can see in 2020 21 uh two years ago we had 57 students that were being homeschooled we had 55 students being homeschooled last year and we have 36 this year so 19 students um are not being home schooled or a reduction of 19 students in homeschooling that doesn't surprise me um we had a lot of parents who made a choice to

056homeschool their children for the last two years during covid for a variety of reasons some of them even wrote on there can't wait for a typical year i'm going to send my kid back but not not this year for whatever reason um it could have been they didn't like the protocols we had for kova they it could have been that we didn't have strict enough protocols there were different reasons but i'm not surprised the 36 is actually very much in line with our typical numbers uh going back before coven we are usually in the 30s for charter schools the number i'm going to predict one is not not it i can tell you that much we've not heard from our largest charter school which is baxter academy in portland we tend to have between 10

057and 12 students 10 to 12 13 students every year that go to baxter so i would say that that number is probably the same as last year if i had to predict a number we tried to get that number they're usually pretty good about getting it to us we just didn't have it as of today but i would predict that we're around the 13 ish mark for charter schools so probably no change for private schools we had 109 students two years ago we didn't have all of the numbers in most of our private schools are pretty good about giving us those numbers we do hound them a lot we'll mult multiple times we'll try to get those numbers but we don't always get them in 20 20 21 we didn't hear back from some couple

058private schools we didn't have complete numbers last year we did hear back from all of our private schools students were privately schooled last year and 98 this year i will say in looking at our private schools that haven't reported they're small so we have two or three that haven't reported that we typically have kids go to so i think we'll probably be in the low 100s for numbers this year so i would i would think somewhere around 100 to 110 somewhere in that range so a lower than last year and i think again no surprise i think um some parents decide made a decision over the last couple of years to send their children to private schools i think 109 two years ago is not an accurate number it was probably closer to 150 students

059two years ago as well um and that is no surprise we had a lot of parents saying you know we don't want to deal with these covered protocols or you're not you know we also had a hybrid model two years ago that wasn't very popular with many families so there's a variety of reasons so i'm not surprised to see the number dropping and for more kids to be coming back to the district this year and we did rebecca actually forecasted that as well first superintendent agreements in again those that's an agreement between two superintendents whether a student comes in or out of our district so we had 49 students coming in two years ago to our district 43 last year and we have 19 that have requested and been approved to come in this year

060so that's a 24 student drop in superintendent agreements for students coming in now why is that number low and that's actually low based on our historical numbers as well we've historically before coveted had a lot more than 19 students last year for summary actually the last two years we've had a lot of families that have been building a home in cumberland north yarmouth however we do not if they have not actually moved here we don't count them as a resident we count them as we require them to get a superintendent's agreement even if their home is being built because it takes several months for a home to be built and in the meantime the students are going to school in their old school district or they can request to come here for some reason we

061had a large group of students that were in that spot last school year especially and have since be have since moved here permanently and are now residents we do not count them in our superintendent agreement obviously counts so that was when we were looking at the numbers a little bit more today and digging into why this number dropped that is definitely one factor i couldn't tell you the others we're not always told for superintendent uh agreements out for students going out of the district or requesting to go out the district to another district um we had 11 two years ago 18 last year and we have 10 this year that tends to be more typical for us around 10 so that's a change of eight students who requested to go out and so the summary

062is the enrollment in our district continues to increase we have found that the three reports we've done since 2016 and i want to thank the board for its due diligence the board has asked repeatedly that these reports be done so that we're absolutely sure about projections and we're not relying on something from years ago so in this case we're relying on something from only six months ago projections continue to be very reliable i want to thank rebecca wandell for her outstanding work she has worked on all three of those reports for us mabeli wilson school has seen an 86 percent uh increase of all the student with 49 new stu 57 new students this year or 57 students increase um and out of the 57 students 49 of them are at maybelline wilson school which

063means 86 percent um and that has been a trend for several years although now we're starting to see the four or five numbers they're going back and forth but we're seeing them stabilize and we will start seeing an increase when you look at rebecca's report you start seeing four or five stabilizing and then increasing six eight does the same thing and then down the road 912 does the same thing students are tending to go to their own public schools this year rather than the past two years we're seeing students families are opting to send their kids to public school and that's not just here it's everywhere instead of private schools charter schools or homeschooling i think a lot of that was covered obviously families send their students to other places for many reasons other than

064covet but for students who did go to another placement because of covid they have largely come back so that is my enrollment summary for you any questions jason what happens with the finances for the superintendent agreements like costs associated with those kids so we um there's no exchange of funds between districts for superintendent agreement so if if we accept a student we take on the cost the state reimburses us through the subsidy for so it counts for us as a student increase and it counts for the other district as a student decrease so it doesn't cover the complete cost but it covers most of the cost of the student and um like teachers that work in our district and opt to bring their kids here they would be in that number yeah they still have

065to request it they still often request an approval if we have class sizes that are already at maximum or capacity then i will not take a student if we're already there but they can request it okay thank you other questions jeff could you go back to that slide that we were asking questions about before this one that's the one so um we're 49 up at mabel wilson and i i can't remember exactly how the projections looked when we looked at them six months ago but at what point are we so hopefully we'll have a new school opening in 2026. at what point are we going to need more portables if we keep adding students to maybelline wilson that is a that's a somewhat difficult question to answer but i'm going to start i'm going to

066be really honest and say that i believe we may have to be looking at it in the next next budget cycle when we look at the increase for next year at mabel i wilson school i do not know if we have enough space and we've been saying that all along we held and did not put any more portables on that property this year this summer and it's the first year that we haven't we've just held and said we're going to try to get by without putting any more but it is possible that we're going to have to add another two unit building on that property i'm not going to say that for sure we have to look at all the numbers and where we put students and what class sizes look like the the modulars

067have a cap that is different from the main building so we tend to keep those classes a little bit smaller slightly smaller and whatever grade is out there it makes a difference as to how many classrooms that we can really fit in the entire school with the modulars in the main building so during the budget process we look at all of that information and then decide if if it's we can get by with the modulus we've got which during the last cycle we're able to do that we had enough space so that we could get by even with increases i am going to say at this point i'm probably 75 sure that we might be asking for another two room modular but i don't want to say that for sure until we've studied it all

068during the budget process and are really sure that that we need to do that and scott can you remind us what the cost is for those portables every year for jeff 335 000 that's for the entire 21 minutes for everything on the campus that we have right now it's 335 000 a year that we have to spend that's the least each year that's correct but the cost to install them is somewhat significant too because of the prep work absolutely right that's an added cost right yeah and when does this start putting pressure on our middle school um i know i was asking about the bubble earlier so what point do we need to think about more modules at the middle school as well or do we have the capacity there for a bit longer that

069i that's another ques that's a question i cannot answer right now we do have um currently we have six rooms i'm sorry seven rooms at the middle school we have six on one side and we have another room on the other side of the building so we have seven rooms total right now and the fourth and fifth grade area has been slowly and incrementally taking over space in the six eight wings both wings so upstairs you'll see fourth and fifth grade classrooms now the fourth and fifth grade in the sixth through eighth grade principals have been shifting things around there's six eight classrooms now out in the modular so that's how they've made the shift how long that can continue i don't know 2026 when it gets all re-configured that question i really i i

070can't answer right now i think the mabel wilson school i have a little more knowledge about okay so we'll have a look at it avery uh yeah i know that the high school is pretty big but um i'm wondering if this enrollment bubble will ever become an issue for the high school's capacity it will i mean the enrollment for the high school uh her the projections that rebecca wandell did would be the school right now is 602 i think um the in projected enrollments if you look 10 years out uh the school will be over which is about the highest it was at at one point years ago so the difference with a high school and nobody likes this answer at the high school level when i when i say this especially staff it's a

071tough answer but the high school is different because when a teacher is not teaching a block of 82 minutes or so and it's not the case in every classroom but often that classroom is empty it's considered a prep time for a teacher or whatnot we sometimes we sometimes schedule classes in there and sometimes we don't and when we looked at classes that we can schedule into those rooms when enrollment increases we can still get by with the space that we've got so that does not seem to be the same issue at the high school as we would find it other for at the other levels that's the easy answer my short answer and a lot of high schools operate that way now they have to provide their staff other places to work during a prep

072time if they're not in their classroom okay so like uh those classrooms can be you know full of students while uh the teachers who need their prep time can yes do that somewhere else so we don't always sched right now often we don't schedule a class in when a teacher has a prep but we could other high schools do that and if that's the case we just have to find other places for teachers to prep tommy how would how would study halls move because i know that a lot of times when people don't when teachers don't have a period there would be study halls it during that period would there be more large group study halls like in the commons or the cafeteria no because we didn't account for those smaller study halls we just

073accounted when a teacher has a prep okay so teachers have um prep time that's personal and then they have group prep time as well so we took those out of the equation so the study halls you know we're not looking to increase study halls because we're still accounting for a teacher having a group of students in their room yeah during that time we're only accounting for the times when there's nobody in that room so a teacher has a prep so that's the time we just need to find a place for the teacher to work okay and then my next question will the modular um classrooms be moved once if if the new school is built or would there still be a need for that at mi the current plan is that no modulars are needed

074so we should be able to adequately have all of our students in all of our facilities with no modulars in room to spare we have we have um at mabel eye wilson school i think there's three rooms built into the plan for flex that can be used in a possibly a fourth room and at the six eight building which would become the six eight building currently four eight um we have um several rooms that will be flex rooms in that facility and should take us right through the foreseeable future based on our plans so there will be no modulars based on the current information we have today all the current projections and building in flex space at all of our facilities including the new building yes kim uh as of this year how many classrooms

075are being used for pre-k one just one class you have two sessions in am and pm but they use the same classroom okay in the same staff so when you're looking at projections for possibly adding portables is that um increasing the number of kids who come to pre-k or is that first through third we would leave the pre-k program exactly as it is um we have no plans to increase pre-k okay so projected numbers don't include no pre-k increase okay and the only reason we included more rooms at the new school for pre-k is we'd like to look at a full day program down the road and give us that option and that flexibility and the state may change its rules which they've indicated that we may have to take um three-year-olds for special education

076as well um who are who are in iep and if we do that we'll take regular education students to complement those rooms as well so we'll need more rooms at the primary school the new one so we've set aside five rooms at this point in the plan at the primary school but we have no no plans to increase space full day programming anything any numbers with the current school that we have pre-k okay wilson other questions thank you jeff thank you so moving down the list um so that some of our uh administrators can go home a little bit sooner are you guys okay if we move the executive session up we'll leave the room do that and then come back and do the rest of the agenda okay so if you guys are okay

077with that i'll take a motion on 6h i'm just trying to find it okay i remember i recommend vote to enter executive session discuss negotiations between msad51 secretaries educational technicians and library technicians at the msad 51 board of directors pursuant state statute mrsa 405 60. thank you vanessa in a second a second thank you leanne discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous thank you okay so i guess we'll leave the room or we can nobody's here if you just shut off the mics yeah as long as as long as we're not sure being recorded i guess that's the important part do you want me to let the students go about the report yeah it's only five of us right six what about the student reps are they no they're coming back okay so we're back

078from executive session that we took out of order so we will continue down the agenda on um item six a which is to approve professional positions jeff you want to take us through that yep we had a late resignation actually first first week of school we had someone a teacher leave and so this is to replace that uh that person uh in fourth grade we had um three candidates interviewed and i do not have the number of uh applicants for you i'm sorry about that um but um we are hiring a existing teacher in another school district who will be transitioning to our district and there is a waiting period when we hire this time of year so there is a 30-day hold and we actually have 60-day hold on two other teachers that we're

079still waiting for from another two other districts but we are pleased to be able to bring this teacher forward this is a person who actually worked in our district before in a different role and we're happy to have this person back thank you so do i hear a motion a motion to approve the appointment of professional positions outlined by the superintendent thank you vanessa i'll second that motion thank you kim further discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous thank you emotion caries so um before we get um to the motion scott can you take us through the technicalities of what we're doing here on this next one for the new school referendum yes um the board needs to basically vote to send a notice of election to the community and also a notice of public

080hearing and this is on the new primary school project we have warrants and we have notices of the public hearing that need to be signed but the whole purpose of this is that we're going to that this is calling the election on the new school the 73 million dollar school and then also we'll have a public hearing on october 17th and the election is obviously on november 8th and so the warrants will be counter-signed by the selectmen and the council and then they will be posted in the communities as notice okay thank you scott so this is this motion is pretty important that it's worded properly is there somebody down there at the end that wants to do that i'll be happy to um all right recommended to vote the warrant and notice of election

081of maine school administrative district number 51 presented to the meeting be approved that a referendum election for the district be called for november 8 2022 for the purpose of approving the issuance of bonds or notes of the district for school construction project purposes as directed therein it is further noted oh sorry it is further voted that the notice of public hearing presented to the meeting be approved and that a public hearing on the issuance of bonds or notes for school construction project purposes be held on october 17 2022 at 7 pm as provided therein thank you vanessa do i hear a second second thank you leanne scott sound good to you sounds good okay further discussion okay all in favor all opposed unanimous motion carries and so after the meeting stick around don't run out

082because we need to put signatures on lots of paperwork that scott has so don't run away okay moving down the list item six c we discussed this last time and france and an email to us this morning sort of explaining more clearly that we do have to appoint one delegate delegate for the msma and outlining the two things that are coming up one of which is virtual and you sort of represent this board in voting on some matters possibly and then the fall conference coming up so the question is does somebody want to be the delegate moving forward and i guess i would okay anybody else okay do we have to vote on that then to appoint the delegate uh you do motion second in a vote we need an alternative i'd be an alternate

083okay and an alternate i'd be interested okay sounds good to me everybody okay with that somebody want to put forward the motion for those two people to be the delegate and the alternate i'll move that and maximovich is our representative and that uh leanne kinder is the alternate okay representative being delegate okay thank you kim uh second second uh thank you tom all right further discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous motion carries um and then the fall conference is coming up as a separate thing right anybody can go to that that's right everybody can go to it um fran will register any board member that would like to go and i don't know i think she might have put that information on i can't remember she did yeah okay so just email fran and

084let her know if you want to go one day both days whatever can i ask a question is that that's administrators too is that correct yes um i usually go okay yep um it's usually district administrators it's not usually principals okay great yeah it's exciting food is good but the sessions are better okay so item six d uh appoint a district physician jeff can you take us through the technicalities of this we are required to have a physician yes state law requires that every school district have a physician and that's an annual appointment that the board must appoint by state law a physician annually for the district so i'm recommending to the board dr charles de say dr say has been our school physician for two or three years now and really helped to guide

085the nurses and the administrators through the covid situation and is recommending him for continuing employment he also on in a typical year really works with the nurses directly for medication issues they might that might come up if they're trying to work with a parent in a doctor's office sometimes he'll intervene and help the nurses with that he also provides his licensure for the nurses for other purposes where that needs to be he does training for the aed machines those are the kind of things that dr desai he's also a consultant on health matters that come up that the nurses need needs some sort of a clinical answer or not just an administrative answer and rough current costs to have him in this position believe we're paying 3 500 if i remember correctly mr pool does

086that sound right 3 500 a token for what he does okay we would not be able to do that otherwise thank you jeff uh yeah so there was some contention uh last year mostly because related to covid and you know the discussion was basically if you want to change paths from what we're doing now with dr chuck um it would be significantly more and so okay so i will entertain a motion and so that's a good reason i have a question so the nurses feel supported with him in this role absolutely yeah they they have felt supportive with him all through covent now that um and actually really his role last year was a lot less especially the second half of the year as we moved away from a lot of the rigidity of covid

087um and so he's really took on more of the typical duties at a physician but yes he's very well so you know the nurses feel very comfortable with him the nurses actually interviewed dr chuck when we first hired uh dr chuck they were actually part of an interview process to hire him and select him and um as you said jeff they're extremely comfortable with him so thank you anyone emotion um i moved to approve the appointment of dr charles desai as the district physician slash health officer as recommended by the superintendent thanks tom is there a second second thank you vanessa further discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous motion carries thank you all right so moving on to six e vote to dissolve the outdoor learning committee so we've talked about this a couple

088of times previously uh at the retreat being one of them and certainly we can discuss it more here the general thought is a couple that we have a ton of committees and then also that outdoor learning potentially could become you know part of the charge of facilities as far as providing a space and then you know emphasis within curriculum to you know encourage teachers to you know do pointed you know lessons that include the outdoors do you want to add anything to this jeff no i think the outdoor learning committee had um a lot of importance and significance um you know i keep i'm trying not to say the word cover but i feel like i'm having to say it tonight jason prompting me um but it really did have a lot of um you

089know interest in and there's a lot of things that we did during the pandemic um with federal money that was um provided to the district um and that money had to be used very quickly and some of those areas that we looked at such as the amphitheater were paid for by federal dollars and we're part of the outdoor learning space that are now being enjoyed by students and staff so i think the outdoor learning committee did a lot of work during that period of time to secure some physical features on our campus but i don't think that the um the purpose of that committee is i think it's kind of probably sunsetted and to be clear we're not discouraging outdoor learning by any means no but um okay i was just going to add another

090place where you'll see this is with the new school project i think outdoor learning is one of the focuses there as well as they talked about the features of the area so i hope to see more of that carried through yeah absolutely i think you know pointed lessons that include piece of the outdoors is fantastic and um and also we had to provide a space for teachers that just want to have class outdoors but those sort of two different things i don't think we need any this committee specifically anymore that can be blended into other areas sort of so is there a motion i recommend to dissolve the outdoor learning committee thank you vanessa second a second thank you leanne further thoughts discussion okay all in favor all opposed unanimous thank you motion carries so

091this next one uh 6f is also to dissolve a committee which may seem counterintuitive to people and we've discussed this one before as well again we have a lot of committees as far as the communication committee goes and i wish mike was here to talk on this matter but my feeling is and you guys can share your views as well but communications is is the job of all of us all the time and especially the chairs of each individual committee i think um it really shouldn't necessarily be land on one person and we have to funnel everything back to them i just think that's what every chair should do on an ad hoc basis certainly i think we have areas where we'll have to put extra effort into communications like kim's job on the new

092school committee and that sort of thing thoughts from others did they figure out who's going to be responsible for the miwu sign someone's been changing it someone's for changing it corey that's who it's gonna be okay great that seemed like an open item so as far as streamlining communication so that it doesn't appear that just one of us is answering for the board whatever that may look like improving the website or you know whatever that that in includes if it involves a facebook group i know nobody wants to hear those words but um is that something that should fall to a specific person or is that something that as a board we are you know trying to figure out how to communicate these things so let's say for example i start a facebook page for

093the school board which the sole purpose is to promote the information nights the vote you know just making sure that people are aware of what's going on when the vote is done is someone else going to perhaps use that to to communicate you know for their group does it their committee does that make sense what i'm asking so i think um if we opened up a new avenue of communication i think the board would have to be you know on board with that we'd have to discuss it and i think all those sorts of things we could do like on an ad hoc basis i think you know we talked about this when we were talking about committees a month ago or whatever um i like the idea of improving some of the communications i

094like the idea of how the crier is laid out for the town and you know maybe more uh graphics and can we somehow do one crier that has a hierarchy so parents only get one thing every week you know tackling that sort of project could just be an ad hoc committee where we focus on that we improve it and then goes away so we're getting rid of communication as a standing committee but perhaps creating uh absolutely ad hoc just to streamline and well that's up to the board but i think there's all kinds of opportunities for little projects here and there but i feel like the communication committee was almost like a crutch like okay mike make sure you inform everybody but it's really it falls on all of us especially the chairs of the

095committees in my opinion i don't disagree with that i just want to make sure that we're not piece mailing it and it it's like like this is coming from this is coming from jason this is coming from ann so that the community isn't confused you know they're seeing that it is coming from the board um well everything sort of falls under a committee and uh you know so finance we would ask vanessa to elaborate on things if anything i think this this would put a greater responsibility on each of us to inform in our areas that we know about not less instead of looking at someone else and we could also include the communication with the board if it needs to be written down and dates it's in the superintendent's report a good piece of

096what we're doing anyways it's highlighted at some point if i'm this isn't to reduce communication it's just yeah what we were feeling is that like mike williams didn't have anything to communicate on yeah like who's the finance communicated the equity committee communicated and then mike was like hi like he didn't have a committee to communicate on so it's not necessarily getting rid of how we communicate it's it really wasn't and of course we have a communication item on our agenda every day every meeting that is kind of a catch-all for future topics or whatever further discussion all right is there a motion i move to dissolve the communication committee thank you kim is there a second a second thank you vanessa for the discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous motion carries um i think

097on this next one the climate and environmental committee because mike isn't here nor is christina which is who sort of expressed interest in doing that i'd like to put that off if you guys are okay with that because i think we should have a charge figured out ahead of time or at least a draft of a charge is there any objections to postponing that so this next one is not on the agenda but it's largely symbolic i would like to move that we dissolve the covet advisory committee oh gosh i think that has been dissolved we haven't met for months it's never been dissolved officially has it no but if you really want to [Laughter] is there a second the second thank you vanessa discussion all in favor [Laughter] who was the first and second

098i'm sorry i was writing it down i'm the first vanessa's the second all right all opposed okay motion carries unanimously i think yes okay and we already did our executive session so uh superintendent's report please all right uh superintendent's report for this evening um we have uh just a few highlights and then i'll also talk about um a couple of other items so these are things i was just walking by actually and uh i saw a class outdoors at maple lesson school and maureen driscoll is the librarian there and she was doing some outdoor learning she was reading the kids outside they had a nice patch of grass we've seen a lot of students outside these days as the weather is okay not today of course the madrigals were at the sea dogs game a

099couple of weeks ago and had an opportunity to sing for the crowd before a sea dogs game or it might have been in the middle of the sea dogs game and they um i wasn't there but i heard it was um they did an amazing job representing the school team katahdin while some of their team members were on kyle island which took place last week some of the team was staying behind and then had an opportunity to go a different day they were doing some community service and cleaning up the campus so you can see some bags of trash and debris that really needed to be taken care of so we want to thank team katahdin for all their work this week on thursday thursday is a very busy day for our district we have

100multiple things going on uh all afternoon very exciting one of the events that we have going on is the hashi reception this is part of our exchange with japan and the amore city precinct that we've had a partnership with for decades and our students have been creating block prints and these block prints are now on display at the art center they've been on display for a couple weeks now at the art center and we have a very special delegation from japan that will be from the amore precinct that will be attending this ceremony and members of the public are invited we'll have students and staff there um and um dr suzuki from japan um is a is a um as the delegation chief from uh amore precinct and he will be there to say a

101few words um and he's also getting a tour of the area linda mccann olson has spearheaded this entire project in the district she's one of the art teachers uh here at uh mabel eye wilson school so i'd like to thank linda for all of that and everyone is invited i believe it is um i should have written the time down but it's thursday um it's on our district calendar let's put it that way it's on the district calendar it's late afternoon one of the safety upgrades and at some point scott will be doing a complete rundown of all of our summer projects that happened this previous summer but one of them one of the many projects that was taken care of including one of the many safety upgrades that we made was a complete revamping

102of the mabel eye wilson school office in order to give our office staff better line site and eyesight on the corridor and the main doors going into the building so that included a complete reconfiguration and rehab of the maybelline wilson school office so that's more safety conscious so really pleased with those changes can i ask a quick question about that one in the presentation about the new school and then mabel wilson when it talks about safety and security upgrades is that what's been done or is there further we have further work to be done at the school for safety that's certainly one of the many we had actually talked about that um prior to those renovation money's even being received we've been talking about upgrading that office um but we have a lot of there's

103a lot of other safety upgrades that will be done in that building as well as part of that money so this this is not part of what we're vote what part of the referendum okay thank you also on thursday evening at six o'clock just a reminder that there's an alice info session i'll be putting that on social media again tomorrow is providing additional information people that would be parents that are interested in attending that evening can attend in person we also will be live streaming it and we will be recording it chief chip rumsey and sro amy owen will be at the meeting including several of the our administrators but the chief and officer owen will be really the ones leading this parent information evening you'll be talking about the alice program in more detail

104and the specifically each school's plan for rolling out alice it looks different in each one of our four schools and they'll be talking about it as well as the chief will have gun safety locks from project child safe on hand for families that would like to have them they're free um and i think i don't i think he's got at least a hundred he told me that he has on hand so he'll be giving them out to families that would like those and that also was an initiative of the safety and security committee and finally this evening we surveyed our staff we had about 400 staff that went through the training about 95 percent of our staff i probably should have said four out of four hundred not 422. um we had 169 staff members

105respond to the survey which is about 40 percent of our staff and we have four questions that we asked plus we had an open-ended question for any other comments i don't have the open-ended question because there's a lot of comments that were written but i'll just give you the the results of the the four main questions did you experience discomfort or apprehension about the training prior to your two-year participation about a third of our staff who responded so that they were apprehensive about the the alice training and just kind of going into it about a third said somewhat in a third said that um they did not they did not have any apprehension for those who said they did did you feel more comfortable after the alice training again kind of reminder this is four

106and a half hours of training three different modules two hours of hands-on online training and then we had an overview so out of those who said yes um about 73 percent said that they did not if they did feel more comfortable after the training felt that it was something that met their needs we had um a small percentage that said no we didn't put the number in there i'm sorry if you can do the math and we had about 22 percent that said somewhat feel felt more comfortable we asked staff do you feel that the alice training has prepared you to handle serious safety incidents more than a traditional lockdown and we had about 80 percent of our staff say yes and 19 of our staff said somewhat and we had one percent of our

107staff said no it did not um and the final question was overall was the alice training relevant and helpful to you 96 percent said yes out of the 169 respondents we had um i think it was four percent um i'm sorry three percent that said somewhat and one percent said no so you can see that you know an overwhelming number of our staff that responded which is about 40 percent said that they found the training to be useful and helpful and kind of help them alleve any concerns that they might have had this will be important as we go into the rollout for students in october and again that parent information night this thursday evening will be to talk more about that in detail we do have plans we've discussed this with a leadership team

108and we will be rolling that out in october so that's the superintendent's report this evening jeff did you get any insights through some of the comments of those who may have answered no or somewhat as to why they didn't find it relevant or helpful yeah the comments that i saw were that it was a lot to take on the first day back after summer there was probably i think i read three comments in there that said this really was a lot and you know and it therefore it wasn't useful because it was like coming right back and then jump right into this topic which felt really really heavy and i think that may have accounted for that one percent i mean obviously when you have when you're training 400 people not everyone's going to feel

109that this is um a training program they agree with or they you know but we did have a lot of skepticism going into it a lot of people that were a little bit apprehensive about it it's a tough topic but i think you know we had some great trainers we thank our law enforcement from cumberland pd yarmouth pd for doing this including all of our instructors who were trained as well to help and i think for the most part you can see that vast majority of our staff felt that responded felt it was a good training i don't know what the other um 60 thought but my guess is if they didn't respond they probably were okay with it right right it would be much biased there you may have filled it out right so

110thank you jeff further questions of jeff okay so we'll move on to item eight committee reports this is pretty early in the season for committee reports but vanessa do you have anything to add for finance yep um scott and i are gonna meet on wednesday he's gonna bring me up to speed on the board rolls and then we're going to formulate a com well reach out to our committee members and start the next first meeting the following week great thank you policy jared is not here but i know uh i said in a meeting with jared and jeff just sort of bring him up to speed on the process add anything to that no i think we'll follow the same sounds like we'll follow the same process which we have policies from last year that

111are still in the docket plus um there's a whole list of policies that you know our legal counsel a couple years ago gave recommended that we look at so we're certainly going through all those policies and and deciding what rises to the top okay and where do we see what policies are on the docket we can share that with a whole board if you'd like that'd be great thank you i'm sure or if you want me to ask jared to do that you can do that uh facilities uh mike is not here scott do you have any update on that is there anything planned not at this time okay one thing about policies is um it's up to the chair and jeff what's the most important that needs to be reviewed sometimes it's within the

112time frame of the state that we have to have it done by a certain date okay so that really drives when we review policies that's yeah that is a good point there's several policies right now that there was a statutory change and um i think there's about four right now that we've we've got to finish yeah they've been sitting on the docket so that does drive some of the decision making thank you that's helpful and one thing that i asked of the process in that meeting was we're going to add a column to the spreadsheet to sort of designate what is you know a state mandated thing sort of versus what is you know optional you know because of whoever on this board or whatever wanted to do it so and and to me those

113are very different things like one okay we got to do this versus you know let's have a lot of discussion around this other one that's optional and is there any on the to-do list yet so that uh the to-do list like jason just mentioned that um it's a long list but all the stuff that's at the top right now is state stuff right yeah we've already prioritized high priority are the ones that are state driven state mandates or a state law that changed and our policies need to comply and conform to state law so those are the ones that we've we have at the talk i think there's six right now that are that we've prioritized right away as being just lawful changes that need to get done and have you flagged any other ones

114jason that you're looking at i don't even recall the list myself i'm happy to share that there's it's a public document so i can share it with you thank you okay curriculum tom anything no but this is a good reminder that i'm the co-chair and i need to get in touch with susie so thank you okay um equity jared and tim um nothing has happened on that yet uh student reports avery and tommy are not here ad hoc committees um kim with the new schools or anything you want to talk about a couple things yes so we have a meeting scheduled for wednesday evening for those of us involved in phase one who officially is running that meeting is that me running the meeting i don't feel strongly about it i don't care it's up

115to you um because i have an agenda going i mean i have i have it in my head but i i didn't want to presume that that was that i mean it's gonna be informal it's really brainstorming if you want to run it go for it okay okay um and then as far as policy is that a meeting that needs to be advertised to the community the regular policy committee no i think i said it wrong um as far as our procedures or our bylaws is this a committee meeting that needs to be recorded recorded um and public notification what she said thank you because it's going to be there because it's an ad yeah it's an ad talk an ad hoc committee of the board technically doesn't but i would very much recommend that

116it's noticed just because it's of the nature of the topic um i think it's really important yeah i i'm fine with it yeah okay so how do i go about so fran is your key to success okay all right and i'll make a note too so that she can touch base with you if tomorrow as soon as possible so we can get that noticed okay okay very good very good um and then uh in light of well i mean we've talked about this before i i was not aware that that might be under fall under my job um as far as phase one to potentially reschedule the parent information night that's on the second night of rosh hashanah um it's been on the calendar for a long time it doesn't seem feasible but is there

117a way to so i've had a few requests about that we do have two as you mentioned um and i think it might be the first one the first one yep um that i had a request to reschedule that i think um because we have a second session that's a duplicate session on the 12th of october um you know and i probably had three or four emails or requests about rescheduling um my feeling at this point when we looked at the calendar for the rest of september and october there literally was not another evening that the schedules matched up with the people that have got to be there and running this and available evenings um and so there was literally no other time i think what and i don't want to go into the weeds

118on this too much but one of the things that i noticed when i looked at this year's calendar um is that um yom kippur and rosh hashanah are four days out of a two-week window and it's very difficult um this year just the way that the holiday calendar fell usually um one of the other is earlier in september and there's there's some spacing between but because we've got a very short period of time and there's four days that we're trying to work around and we've got a building project we've got to get done with absentee balloting that starts you know mid-october if not a little bit before that there was just no other time with all the other events that are already scheduled pre-scheduled so trying to find another evening i completely understand the concern

119we would have tried to stay away from it otherwise but there are just a lot of competing demands and very little time to do that and just the way the holiday calendar fell it was very difficult um that's been my explanation and when i looked at it and tried to figure out why are we having this challenging with with scheduling that was really what what we found yeah i when i was looking at dates i noticed young yom kippur as well i i just want to somehow acknowledge that um given the anti-semitic acts that have been happening at the school that this just feels terrible that you know of of all the the religious events it's it is a jewish holiday um i just wish there was a way that we could somehow communicate to

120the community maybe just a little bit better that we get it um i don't even i don't even know what to say about that it just it just feels like another you know another little twist of this very sensitive i think if there was not a duplicate session i would feel much more strongly that we've got to reschedule but you know when i sat down and looked at the calendar there was literally we'd be displacing something else in order to do this um there's just it's like a domino effect with our calendar right now and it's very scrunched there are no other evenings unless we're looking at a friday evening or something right and those are often football evenings so um that was it that was all that there was no i i have to

121completely understand that how difficult it was to schedule that i just want to make sure that people understand that how many days do we have before that to send tv ballots go out 18 yeah thank you okay i wasn't sure sorry yeah and we have a short window to get these informational sessions and um and a lot of work that gets done that we've you throw alice in there the parent nights you throw the schools evenings in there you throw athletics in there there was no other available date before the middle of october um and again i think having two different sessions you know they're exactly the same um if people you know people miss these dates for all lots of reasons i understand the important nature of the jewish holidays but their people have

122work schedules where they can't get on a certain day either and so that's why we offered two to make sure that people would be able to at least access one and if somebody can't access either one of those they will be recorded and they will be out there as well so there's different ways to access the information but very sympathetic to the concern i think in another year you know the holidays would have been more spread out as they typically are they're in a very short window here to deal with just an unfortunate convergence i want to just thank you kim for bringing that up um you know and i think then it's just something that as a district we need to make sure that it doesn't happen again since it has happened before so

123we don't want to keep making these same mistakes well i can't guarantee it yeah i can't guarantee it we we have so many events that have to be scheduled and i know there was a concern about the cumberland fair and the ag day and our students going to the fair from the second grade again those are dates that are not even scheduled by the district they're scheduled elsewhere we try our best but there is no guarantee that we can stay away from some of these scheduling issues these are things that happen you know annually that we're scheduling we have open houses we have all kinds of things going on we do our best to schedule around the 2200 or so students that we have and their families i cannot guarantee that we're going to continue

124there are other people from other groups that are always talking to me about scheduling we shouldn't have been scheduled on this date or this day we have this issue a lot we try our very best to be sensitive to that but i i cannot guarantee it and i've said that to the people who have talked to me directly yeah and i know there was a review of the the school calendar at the end of last year and maybe just going forward i don't know how the calendaring system works but if there can be a more clear block out of scheduling these other events yeah we tried to when we looked at the calendar we did involve someone who had really brought this to our attention a year ago but those were the big parts of

125the calendar that we made sure we stayed away from um then there's all these events and and um meetings that get scheduled after the calendar is adopted i mean we didn't schedule these and well we scheduled them about a month ago maybe three four weeks ago but we don't schedule those kind of things that far in advance when we adopt the calendar obviously so um those things are going to happen but i cannot guarantee it we you know it was like also fielded concerns about the cumberland fair and the scheduling of that there's certain i mean the fair is only one week we can only we only have so much wiggle room um we do our best but we have a lot of people that we're trying to navigate and listen to and try to

126work all these things around so i don't want to mislead anyone when i say that either thank you jeff and i just want to make sure that the community knows that i am basically considering this my full-time job until november 8th so if there is someone who cannot attend either meeting especially if that particular you know that's a reason that they can't go because of rosh hashanah they cannot go to the north yarmouth one please have them come to me i will come to them i will you know whatever whatever i can do to arrange one-on-one meetings you know that's that is my priority for the next seven weeks or whatever it is i should know the exact number of days but um please spread the word that you know that this is we're committed

127to being able to answer anybody's questions and be available as possible regardless of whether it's an official meeting or not so i don't know if that'll help but thank you for doing that i put a countdown widget i i just wrote that note too 19 days to absentee ballots but actually that's a sunday so it's really can they come out on a monday i guess um okay further ad hoc stuff i guess i can't think of anything else actually um i'm gonna put you on the spot jeff since leanna and i couldn't make the safety meeting last week is there anything else other than the alice stuff that um is pertinent yep uh so the safety and security did have its first meeting meeting monthly for for the year a lot of work to be

128done a lot of the meeting was spent going through a bunch of safety items from the alice training last week and just kind of making decisions as a committee there have been a pre-committee with the chief and officer owen scott and myself met and looked through those items first make a recommendation to the committee but we have a lot of items to go but we'll be meeting monthly and we also discussed the emergency plan is another piece of the safety committee's work this year we started that last year and we'll be completing that work this year so a lot a lot of things going on with safety and security in the district and then again scott will be doing a presentation where he really highlights all the projects that were done this summer including several

129safety related projects so it's been good good stuff being done okay um other liaison type stuff athletic advisory board wellness committee uh the gca uh community partners in the rec department any reports on any of that nothing on the rack right now okay all right moving on to somewhere all right so communications are a catch-all bucket for everything um you guys i sent out to you the draft goals um so [Music] you know our major discussion should happen at the retreat for that um and the raw submittals this was not an easy task and these are meant to be very broad and i can't lie that i was glad to hear all of the various school strategic plan priorities prior to this and generally they sort of align do we want to talk about this

130at all major concerns i'd like to entertain one possibility okay under wellness number four encourage enhanced cohesion inclusion and mutual respect i think that's a great way of putting it i'm wondering if it's possible to somehow work in um in accordance with the equity policy the established equity policy something to um perhaps comfort the community that um we are working with the policy that's been established um that that's our lens as we look at inclusion well um okay equity is certainly an important part of what we do it's one of many many things that we have to do yes it is i just i thought perhaps that would help us swag the situation okay other thoughts concerns comments on the first area to support the administration's focus on academics i like that this is first

131and overall i think you got a lot of different notes and i think this is a great way to put them together the first is around identifying any gaps related to coved and provide resources to bridge gaps i do like that and i'm just wondering if we even had to mention kova there i think we should just be you know identifying gaps generally we know coved um probably had more of an impact um that crew may have created some additional gaps but um i think just identifying gaps generally um although and otherwise yeah sure i i think acknowledging that we just came out of a ridiculous time is important yes i i would do either no if they're not covered gaps yes you should ignore them okay um and you know i really think forward

132to you know what what are the actual steps that we're going to use to create change in some of these goals and you know once this board has come to a year how do we reflect on these and how we and so just trying to think through how we would measure some of these things as a board and so um i'm trying to understand number three under academics as well improve clarity related to curriculum and provide processes for transparency i'm not clear what we're providing clarity on i guess i have a thought with that it was um something shifting say the reading fundamentals we first did phonics and now we're doing the science of reading great so it's when do we shift those how much do we shift those and what's the process to shift

133that i mean obviously we're we're not the teachers we're not administrations or the group that provides that information but just for us to understand as a board that if we're going to shift how the math is being taught how is that process and can we understand a little bit better is that could i could i just respond because i actually um there were some questions that were raised about the science of reading um after corey munsey had talked about that at the um at the last meeting and i corey and i met um to discuss it further because i i just said talk to me a little bit more about specifically um you know what you're referring to so the science of reading is not an approach um or a program in our district that

134that we're using um all it was is that cory is trying to ground all that they do in reading at the school in some sort of research basis which is what our literacy audit which i think we did three years ago now it's been three years there's a lot of things that came out of that audit it was a year-long audit that sally lachlan and then susie robbins ended up leading the end of that audit and they looked at every piece of our literacy curriculum in our district k through 12 actually to make sure that and find those gaps and there were gaps in our literacy program that we identified a lot of them were at the pre-k through three level or the k-3 level we found and in order to so we're not discontinuing

135any part of our reading program that we had we're simply trying to fill in the gaps that we found which one of them was phonics our audit absolutely found that we were not using enough enough of the fundamental components of phonics in our reading instructions especially in kindergarten and first grade so that was that's been added and that was actually added right after the audit was completed that very next year we added that in so the science of reading um and and i think um i don't want to speak for corey but it's really about grounding ourselves in research it wasn't about departure or practice at all okay because there was that understanding among the community like is this another program it isn't okay no and it's actually it's um i'll equate it very quickly

136to um high impact teaching strategies which john hattie who's a researcher does that is not actually a program either but it's a practice that we use throughout our district um we took a little bit of a hiatus from high impact teaching strategies during the two-year event that we just had and we're now returning to that full force this year and those we call them hits they are john hattie outlines all these effective measures in a classroom that should be used if you want students to at least make one year's growth and the goal is to make even more than one year's growth that is what the science of reading is the science of reading i always i think about it's john hattie with just reading in mind it's research about reading okay it is not

137a reading program or a new approach and um so cory will be back in a couple weeks or a few weeks um to do um recognition and when he comes back he wants to talk about that a little bit more but i thought i'd throw that out um before he gets back why one of the board goals thank you thank you so hopefully that answers a little bit um it is more just about looking at research and making sure everything we do is grounded in it um and um and that's what we do across the board actually it's not just reading but that was the whole point of that and some of our um reading program that we found when we did the literacy audit um yes it was grounded in research but there was

138there were gaps in between those research points because the program's been around for a while and that's what we're trying to fill and so i that was the clarification and when i talked to corey moore about it just to make sure i understood completely it was it wasn't about program change or course correction it was about just looking at articles and you know helping teachers understand you know why do we do what we do is it research based or is it not and so it really is about that it's more professional learning for our teachers than it is anything else so thank you kim um did you want to elaborate i know it was on in your list include improving clarity around curriculum do you want to um right it had to do with parents

139who are concerned with what is your b or isn't being taught um specific to [Music] three little letters um c r and t um is there a way to uh it open up that communication a little bit better so that parents can have more access to what is and isn't being taught so not so much a program but alleviate their concerns alleviate their concerns okay yep we um i think the curriculum committee um susie robbins um who is the curriculum director for the district director of academic services and i did talk about um we've actually she's made a lot of inroads and transparency with curriculum over the last three years or so making sure there's more stuff on our website the essential standards that we follow all of the state standards are linked right in

140that we have units of study and sequencing on some of our content but i think that we can do more and i'd love to um we talked about the idea that that's a curriculum committee topic that we'd like to talk about more at the curriculum committee level and exactly what are we looking for in terms of you know the public part of our curriculum so i think that's certainly a welcome discussion for us to look at and to me that kind of goes with communication at the curriculum committee can perhaps come up with ways to make sure that parents have a very clear way of finding out what's going on in their kid's classroom that's great yeah okay so this one jumped out of me also um and i had a similar suggestion for goals

141i i think i went back and looked at it to see if like this is one of my suggestions but what i written was improve transparency around student learning outcomes which are which is related to this um i i i'm in favor of of this type of work and having something like this as a board goal i'm i think we do need greater specificity about what this like really means maybe just to do some wordsmithing one thing that i i and i'm all for transparency one thing that makes me a little bit nervous about this is that there could be this perception that we are policing what teachers are doing in the classroom and i don't want to give that impression um so i mean we could sort this out in the committee um but

142i just want to be clear about what it is that we're trying to do here and this is the can i give the 15 second i was going to say 10 seconds but 15 second rundown of curriculum uh in our district in in in a standards-based state like the state of maine we start with the state standard and that's what that's the starting point for every teacher is to start with what is the state standard and then what's the learning target that comes from there what do we want students to actually learn the essential question the learning target and from there those are kind of non-negotiables you got to follow state standards you got to have a learning target what are the essential questions that go with that um and then we give teachers autonomy

143around you know what is the lesson design that they're they're designing for the activities the learning activities for students based on the non-negotiable standards and learning targets and that's the way our system is designed so sometimes we'll have parents and i have to talk to them about that on the phone or through an email they'll say show me exactly where all your curriculum is 25 years ago that's how it was done the district would adopt every material every book that you would read it was all in this one static notebook um but we've because we've become a standard space state we've we don't do that anymore that's not how we do curriculum so it's a really different way of looking at curriculum and design i think it's way more robust and it's way more responsive

144than it was 25 years ago but it is more um ambiguous to the outside you know parent or community member who's asking where where is your curriculum why is it more specific and so i think we can talk about it more in curriculum for me um and susie can certainly talk to that more but it is it does feel different for people who grew up thinking you know remembering those big notebooks of curriculum that their teachers had to thumb through but not like that anymore okay does that answer your question liam yeah that was really helpful and just as you know thinking through again operationalizing these i think a lot of it will come out in the committees and in which items um you know apply to which committees so we can have like a

145full report out on board goals i think will be really helpful um and given that i think this is the first year where equity doesn't appear as its own board goal um i think it was a great achievement to have the equity policy approved at the end of the last board year and you know i'll just say again the recommendation that i had given when we were giving draft goals is that um that the equity should be you know overarching commitment that should be in all of all the things that we're working on as a board in the committees um to uphold the the policy that was adopted by the board the equity policy okay for the thoughts comments concerns i just want to acknowledge that this was a lot of work i can't even

146imagine how you did this so thank you jason this was very challenging i presume so thank you appreciate that ken okay um so i'll finalize this very soon if you have other thoughts that come up in the next day or two or whatever just let me know okay jason do you want that on the um board page on the website yeah once it's finalized yeah yep we can get that up okay other stuff for communication [Music] random things i just wanted to note that um to be sure that everyone is aware that we are in the middle of suicide prevention month and also latin heritage month um and i you know i then also kind of going back to equity i know that it was a rough start to the night um but wondering if

147maybe jason you would consider adding me then as co-chair to the equity committee just throwing it out there then all the committees have been locked down i mean i've had some great discussions i did make some changes in particular with one of our counselors in the school was just an absolutely wonderful discussion but i feel very confident in the way that those 10 people will move forward thoughtfully carefully representing all groups and continuing to improve on what's been done thus far in a thoughtful way and i hope that everyone in the community including the people that are here tonight that will will give them a chance and absolutely the onus does not fall on the community but reach out to the members and form that relationship and give them your thoughtful input i appreciate the

148expansion of the school staff and i don't know if it's staff and teachers that are representing the committee i thought was an important expansion to the list and just to be clear it's only the staff members that are the well and maybe avery that are the you said there's four previous members there's five returning members um avery jeff suzy mari and katie campbell um yep and then jackie hayes uh came out of that and it suggested carl and carl really couldn't commit to that so he suggested jackie and yeah i think expanding the parent presence by one or two members would go a long way in our community i understand um i think it's also important to remember that this is a committee that you know does have to you know potentially put things forward

149and large committees become cumbersome um not that everybody's voice doesn't isn't important but this is also the first year that it's gone through this process i think that's important to point out so previously this committee did not fall under bde and and this is the first year that it has and it's our largest committee with 10 10 members so i i think they will do great i encourage you to talk with them everybody further anything any communications okay so seeing none i will move to item 10 which is to adjourn the meeting is our emotion so moved thank you tom second second thank you vanessa discussion all in favor might want to wait till it stops raining it's hard [Laughter] to sign the papers yeah hang around right now yes absolutely stick around all in

150favor to adjourn all opposed unanimous thank you thank you dirk you