MSAD #51 School Board Meeting September 8, 2022

001confirmed i've been told that you still have to sign something oh i'm at home good all right i'll call the meeting to order welcome to the msad 51 board of directors meeting for today september 8th september 8 2022. um so first item on the agenda is recognition which i'm going to hand over to jeff all right tonight we'll be recognizing um the girls the lacrosse state champions for their great season last year and we have coach here and i think some of the members of the team are here so just like to ask them to come up to the podium and the mic and uh i think they have some words of wisdom for us about a team that can go all the way yup and the podium is right over there so coach caulker

002and okay let's hold on for one moment this is not awkward at all um um good should i start the whole thing over no we don't need to do that do we okay all right take it away good all right so didn't i was speaking tonight but thank you guys so much for having us and for honoring our team um it was such a special season obviously the ending but also a really special group that we went through the whole season with from the very beginning when um covid things were still pretty unsettled to the very end where it felt like we were it was getting back to normal with just being together and we didn't have to focus on some other things but um it was such a great group they worked so very

003hard and it was the most selfless group i have ever coached and we had one senior and all the rest were underclassmen so hopefully we'll be back again next year go greely [Applause] nobody else wanted to speak congratulations guys i watched that final game that was a lot of fun especially the second half that was awesome okay so moving on to approval of minutes i think unfortunately we have to do these uh separately um i did notice a couple of edits uh the july 18th meeting jeff had adjournment by people that are no longer here peter and kevin so i think that was like a copy and paste issue so yep we will fix that any other edits for the july 18th meeting so i'll take a motion so moved thank you do i hear

004a second second was that mike mike and vanessa thank you yeah oh he is oh i didn't know that okay let me finish his vote and then we'll go back okay all right discussion all right all in favor okay all opposed do i have stain on that jason i will yep anybody that wasn't here you can abstain yep avery and tom and jared yep okay all right sorry about that steve i didn't know about that please take it away [Laughter] thanks very much mr chairman and good evening to you and to members of the board and to members of the district who are here tonight for the meeting i think you probably have an indication as to why i'm here i'm steve moriarty currently state representative for house district 45 which consists of cumberland and

005the southern part of gray and you've just heard words from the coach of the greely girls lacrosse team and i'm here to present a legislative sentiment which is the legislature's way of conveying its appreciation and recognition of unique and noteworthy accomplishments here at the local level it's a somewhat formal document and it's been my uh my greatest pleasure in serving you in the house to be able to occasionally come before the school board and make presentations of this type and to recognize the extraordinary talent that we have here in the district a legislative senate is a somewhat formal document comes in a binder it will be presented to the coach for display here at the school for years to come so i will read it to you tonight then bear with me for the somewhat

006formal nature of the language but that's how it's prepared be it known that we the members of the senate and the house of representatives join in recognizing the greedley high school girls lacrosse team of cumberland which won the state class b championship the team's first state title by defeating york high school in the final game coached by becca kulker and led by co-captains carly forense ali reed and charlotte taylor the team compiled an impressive ten to two record in the regular season team members include jane flynn lauren bennen kylie crocker jenny medrano maggie jacobson katie dubert asia kelman elise provencher katie hatch maddie hall rachel goldberg eva williams daphne campo kylie lord annie flick whitney bond and addison babcock we extend our congratulations and best wishes for your extraordinary accomplishment and be it ordered that

007this official expression of legislative sentiment be sent forth with on behalf of the 130th state legislature and the people of the state of maine and this is signed by the president of the senate and the speaker of the house and was introduced by myself and co-sponsored by the entire legislative delegation for cumberland and north yarmouth so to the team members the coach the parents and the entire msad51 community i'm very very proud to be able to present to you this sentiment for your championship [Applause] you don't have to speak again thank you steve sorry i apologize i didn't realize you were here for that thank you for speaking up okay so back to more minutes um for august 11th um that one i don't have any edits um does anybody else have any edits all

008right so do i hear emotion so moved thank you anne second second thank you all right discussion all in favor staying okay and opposed and abstaining there must be a few abstentions tom mike tommy leanne okay all right moving on to august 22nd which also had some the same adjournment thing which i think was a copy and paste and that's not accurate so um i think that was copied and pasted from the last meeting so we had more than five people there um any further edits on that one okay do you hear a motion moved thank you mike second okay all in favor all opposed i'll abstain unanimous thank you all right so we'll move on to public comment if there's here people here that would like to speak please come up to the mic

009and state your name and speak hello everyone my name is shauna mueller i'm a parent in the district of a fifth and a sixth grader and i am here because i had a conversation this afternoon with the chair who graciously offered a few minutes of his time and i wanted to share that with the rest of the board i had inquired about potentially serving on one of the board committees and did not know what the process was for being considered for that appointment i learned in talking with both the superintendent and the chair that the chair has authority to make those appointments and i just wanted to say what i said to the chair about that i i'm hopeful that going forward and i think this has been a long-standing practice i think going forward

010it makes a lot more sense to to at least advertise if not have a process in place to allow for people to request to be placed on committees i'm particularly interested in the equity committee but there's lots of other committees that i think are treated in this fashion i think in the interest of equity having that kind of a process is important and so i just wanted to share that with the rest of the board and also to thank the chair and the superintendent for their time today thank you others i am katie may simpson i live in cumberland on starbridge lane two kids middle school thanks to the board and all the teachers and the administration for a long haul through kovid and i know it's not over but really appreciate your time and

011effort and thank you all for serving based on what shawna said i'm updating my comments on the fly here but um i also was here to speak uh about the openings that i understood were coming up on the equity committee and express interest in being part of that process putting my name in the ring potentially i know some other folks who have some interest in serving i am curious about the process of filling those positions and whether they've all been filled or not if not i'd be eager to apply and or invite others in the community to apply um and i'm really particularly interested i don't actually care that it's me but i'm interested that the people on the committee actually care about equity and see that it that that work continue and be followed

012through on um i think seeking any sort of um i guess i'm just most interested in making sure that the folks on the committee share that value and would sign off on wanting that committee to actually exist rather than putting people on the committee who maybe don't think the committee should exist that would be my biggest concern finally i guess i'm just going to stand here until hopefully someone can explain what the process is to apply for a committee i'll do my best so the equity committee is no different than any other committee as far as process goes and that's spelled out in a policy that has been around for a while policy bde which uh basically when you're on a committee you're on the committee for a year and then all committees are rebuilt

013every year um and that does come down to the decision of the chair so this is not something that i've taken lightly i started this process back in july asking the board members here to weigh in on not only what they wanted what their skill set was and is and also candidly you know who they thought uh you know would be good in other committee places so i chewed on this pretty much for the entire summer i don't the weight of this is tremendous and my biggest worry was equity committee and um the passionate feelings around that um i don't there's you can't please everybody i'm sure of that and the new school committee was also a big stressor for me so i have talked to i spent probably cumulatively six or seven hours speaking

014to all the people up here they gave their opinions their desires and i had to blend that with their skill set um the history of me knowing them working on this committee and board our interactions for the new members over the last two months and i had to blend that all with trying to balance everything for the 2200 kids and families in this community so the parents that are on that committee are people that reached out to me on their own this summer yes you can put out a poll and you can ask everybody that wants to be on a committee i find that myself a little less compelling than people that take it upon themselves to reach out um the chair and our co-chairs of that committee equity committee specifically i have great faith

015will not divert from the mission i think that they will make sure that the groups that we need to support the most are supported and also things will move at a pace that [Music] the whole of the community can absorb and accept it's important work i don't expect it to stop but i think that it's appropriate that we give the new board members or the new committee members a chance before we tar and feather them and assume that all is not going to go well um i'm not here to do that i don't even know who they are well i think it's important to get to know them so i would encourage everybody to do that give people the benefit of the doubt i hear your concerns i didn't take this lightly um well who

016are they i guess would be my follow-up question i don't believe it's been enough yes the the finalized list has not been okay released so the information you're working on is probably accurate but it's not hasn't been released so information i'm working on is non-existent i'm here to ask what what the committee has been changed yes it has been abbreviated it won't include as many people as it did last year um so that part is accurate okay will there be public meet like will there be meetings of the committee that the public can attend that kind of thing yes all committee meetings i think can be attended by the public but it's a meeting in the public it's it's it's not a public meeting so like even other board members like last year i went

017to some equity committee meetings and you can watch the thing but you're not part of the meeting you're not a voting member right and so everybody has concerns around this topic and as a passionate topic i would ask them to address things specifics and send them to the new committee members and and focus on the specifics and i have no doubt i've had some great conversations in the last 12 hours and the differences in people that seem to be from opposite sides are very very subtle everybody seems to have the same goal um [Music] and it's just sort of a subtle difference in approach so great i hope you're right i'm not here to tar and feather anybody i'm here to good understand who's on the committee so i can talk to them about it

018thank you very good thank you katie others hi my name is elizabeth elder i live in north yarmouth um i have two kids in the school district and a third if she can ever sneak onto the bus without us knowing um but i i likewise want to echo those concerns i think it was abundantly clear in june in the elections that the community supports the equity work that the district has been undertaking and i think it would be really a shame to see that not being followed through on so and i i would hope for a more open and transparent process in the future fulfilling those committees thank you others jason i have a quick question how many committees can the public sit on outside of the equity committee jeff just out of curiosity it's

019been handled different ways um there's one committee obviously it's not open to the public and that's negotiations yeah that's the one that's closed but every other committee there's been different members placed on committees we've had students and parents on policy at one point or another we've had them on curriculum it just depends it's really at the discretion of the chair okay good evening scott jordan cumberland just wanted to ask a couple quick questions that was brought to my attention recently the first day of school i was out to dinner and a couple of students came up on their own and mentioned that on day one of school they were suggested or told i should say by teachers to use their preferred pronouns i reached out to a couple of junior high students families parents and

020they said the same thing is that a requirement from msad51 students are to use their preferred pronouns in school um i'm aware of this i get some reports of this from day one jeff and i have discussed it and there is a policy that's been on the books since 2017 uh policy jb which is being explored and um that's about all i'll say at this point yep but there's a policy jb that addresses transgender issues are the students allowed to opt out um i don't think it's a jeff that may not be the right word but i think you know what i'm saying i don't think it's opt out i think the policy spells it out pretty well and i think i'd ask you i guess to give us time to make sure that we

021understand that policy and are following it so you can look it up on our website policy jb and read through it yourself and that's what we will be going by um and just maybe ask ask you to give us some time to review that absolutely thank you thanks you want to add anything to that okay further public comment okay seeing none i will close that and get to presentations and why all the principles are here thank you so um yeah you want to take it away or somebody starting or each year we ask our four principals to come before the board at the one of their first meetings in september and just talk about the beginning of the school year how it's opened and talk about the site improvement plans each of our schools and

022departments in the district have a site improvement plan for the year they've worked with their building leadership groups to develop this plan it's aligned to the strategic plan and i'll be talking about the strategic priorities for the district after um the principal's talk but cory muncie will lead off for the four principles tonight and we'll go from there thanks jeff they always uh they always say save the best for last so when my colleagues nominated me i took a little bit of offense but but here we are so uh first i just want to say thank you for the opportunity to come up and kind of share on behalf of all of the administrators how our school year has started and some things that we're working on we do appreciate the interest that you take

023and just sort of the questions that you ask and we appreciate it so thank you i also wanted to start off by introducing the new assistant principal who some of you may or may not have met but her name is mallory orzachowski and i practice that all summer so i nailed it but she's up back there so just give her a wave and i also wanted to start out by um giving a big shout out a big thank you to don foster we had some construction projects at our school this year this summer as we always do and we redid the office so it's a lot it's a lot safer environment for our staff and our students we did some playground work to expand the fencing out our playground and just a number of other

024projects throughout the summer and don foster was amazing he was all over it i feel like i saw him every single day and he was really asking what do we need how can i help you what's the next step so i know jeff and scott you guys were great as well but don was definitely there every day and we really appreciate it so just a big thank you to don um today was the first day for mabel wilson where we had all 762 students there um pre-k started today and and they are the world's every kid's cute but they are incredibly adorable when you see them i need to choose my words carefully but they're incredibly cute and curious and excited and just just such a great addition to our school and we're very glad

025that they're there we are working through some arrival and dismissal changes which you may have been aware of um with just the sheer number of students that are getting picked up by their parents um and the amount of just the total number of enrollment we had we really had to redesign our entire dismissal procedure so it's going better it's not where we want it to be but i'm sure you will hear if you hear some questions about it we're just asking for a couple of weeks to work out all the all the bugs and the kinks but generally speaking our students and our staff are smiling they're happy they're really enjoying being back in sort of a more normal type school year which we are equally as excited about our school improvement plan is broken

026into two goals and under each goal there's a number of areas that we are going to be working on i'm not going to hit on all of the areas but just focus on kind of one of the big areas and i think that's kind of the approach that everybody is taking so the first goal is really around social emotional learning and support for our students and our staff the overarching goal is that we want all of our students to feel a sense of connectedness we want them to feel safe we want them to have a trusted adult we really want them to feel like they belong as part of a community and so a number of quick things not quick things but just a quick snapshot of what we're working on we are continuing the

027responsive classroom model this year we are starting for the first time since i've been there sort of monthly school assemblies to work on again bringing all of our kiddos together staff morale is a part of that as our staff are happy and well taken care of they're also able to be continue to be highly effective at their jobs and then atlas training was another piece of that for our staff just again to help everybody feel safe and connected and supported in our school the one big area that i do want to talk about under that goal is sort of the parental involvement piece i think i think everybody would agree that during kovid that was a huge loss for our school community and certainly at mabel wilson we had a number of we have a

028number of students who are in third grade who their parents kind of never were in our building until late last year and i think the elementary school in particular in our in our towns is kind of the heart of a community and we want our parents in there we want to partner with them and we want them to know what their kids are working on and learning and so that really is one of our big goals that we're going to be working on this year so a lot of teachers have already done supply drop-offs we have an open house coming up we want volunteers back in our room back in our school we've been working with the pto on re starting again the grand event which is a huge event which is wonderful we hope

029to do some learning walks throughout our school this year and just different ways to partner with the community and parents and we think it's a really really important piece that was lost during covid that we want to reestablish so please please be on the lookout for information and to help us support that goal the second goal is an academic goal and it's really just ensuring that our students are meeting their learning targets and making growth each year and again some quick hits for that is we are fortunate to have our early release wednesdays and we're able to utilize those for professional development we're hoping to do a k through 12 math audit to really look at our math program and to see if it's meeting the needs of our learners and we have a brand

030new master schedule this year that really supports some some different rti work which is very exciting but the number one thing that i want to talk to you about is we are transitioning to something called the science of reading um and it is we are one of the few schools in the area that i'm told that are making that shift and we're one of the first schools um so i am by no means an expert so i i will tell you what i know and it's sort of a work in progress one nice thing is as a school we are all learning this together but essentially there have been thousands of studies of ways that students learn to read and for a long time it was thought that students learned to read sort of automatically

031and it just happened and the approach that many of us had was sort of like the whole language approach or the being immersed in a classroom with lots of rich literature and um and we now know that's not true that kids actually learn to read in a very specific way so a to b to c to d and there's actually very specific steps and as a staff we are honing our skills and learning about those steps and we are already working on some parent parent information around and how you can support your students at home and so it's going to be an ongoing goal for us at mabel wilson but it is one of the key areas that we are learning on um learning about to continue to support our youngest learners as they learn

032to read and then outside of that mabel wilson has had a pretty we have a pretty new staff i think 40 percent of our professional staff have been there four years or less that's a rough number but it's a it's a large number anyway and so we are going to also take time this year again with parents in the community but also as a staff to work on a three-year plan um and what are some of the goals and areas and things that we hope to accomplish in three years for both or for math for literacy for technology really what do we want our our youngest learners in our district what do we want their journey to look like three years from now and so we are going to be taking some time this year

033to really focus on that and to have lots of conversations and dialogue about it so that is a quick summary of lots of work that will happen this year and i will gladly take any questions or none is fine as well go for mike no i'm not going to get you let you get away with that corey sorry um uh just science reading can you share more info about that when you get the chance i'd love to just learn more about it yeah you want to email you some stuff or yeah absolutely that'd be awesome cool um the only other thing is just how is it feeling space wise um how are things flowing modulars to building how does it feel now with everybody here especially today um we have we have a lot of

034kids and a lot of people in our space so we make the most of it and like i said i think there's lots of smiles and kids are happy and staff are happy to be back but we have 14 classrooms in the middle of our playground right so it's uh even in the best of times it's cramped and it's the hallways are packed and one group is waiting for another group to get by and so you know we are refining some of our processes internally to help with that but there's a lot of a lot of moving parts in our building so okay corey go ahead jared sorry you um about the science of reading program um you mentioned that you're not an expert on it yourself what was it about the program or the

035the data you read about it that uh persuaded you that it made sense to adopt yeah that's a great question so it's not it's not a program so for our program we use it's called phonics to reading as sort of their tier one program so this summer i spent a lot of time listening to podcasts and doing research and reading some of the new literature on literacy and all of them are starting to refer to the science of reading and and sort of the the literacy movement i guess for elementary learners is sort of um there's a large body of research now that supports so this is how kids learn to read and so as a district we underwent a literacy audit a few years ago and i think that work was really the foundation

036for starting the transition to the science of reading so it's been something that has been at mabel wilson we've started to work on for probably the past three years but this is the first year it's sort of been announced in a goal and part of our plan i think there's been bits and pieces of it along the way so it's really just the totality of all of the research when other schools have adopted it um are there results that you are public that you've been able to study that uh helped to convince you that this was a good path to pursue so like i said there's a lot of bodies of research that have happened in particular around kids and they're learning to read in terms of local schools we are the first local school

037that is actually fully adopting it there are a lot of schools that do the phonics to reading program which is based on some of the information for the science to reading but there are studies out of almost every other state that you want to people don't people don't often study kids in maine but texas and new york and massachusetts and there's a lot of a lot of kids in a lot of schools that are similar to ours that point to this is how kids learn to read i'm happy to send some of those along if you'd like they're riveting so i love the idea of um getting the kids connected getting the parents connected to the schools that's huge so thank you for making that a value i'm curious about where the assemblies will take

038place given how many kids i can't fathom a room so i'm curious how that how that you're going to pull that off and a question about the parents involvements are will they still be required to go through the finger printing process as i recall and will they need to be trained in alice if they're in the building all right so i'll answer the first two and i think jeff will have to help you with the atlas feast but um so the assemblies is a great question we don't have any space in our building where we can all come together and we even explored using the gca and that's not large enough for us either so our plan is to have half of the building together we'll say kindergarten in first grade for a number of

039assemblies and then second and third grade so having two assemblies on the same day and then throughout the year rotating those groups so then kindergarten might be with second grade for a few assemblies and then with third grade for a few assemblies so it is definitely not ideal and it's not what we want to do but i think it's the only way to make it work we also explore if it's nice out possibly using the amphitheater and coming outside and doing that so once we get our kids into a good routine and the behavior expectations set i imagine that we will explore some outdoor spaces as well and then yes any volunteer does need to be background check and fingerprinted and central offices they process those as fast as they can so if there is

040an event or something coming up that you would like to volunteer for we ask that you get that done i think it's at least two weeks in advance just to make sure that um you're all cleared and ready to go and then jeff in terms of alice training yeah the first one to add for the volunteers we've had a lot of parents starting last spring that started getting their background checks done again because it had been so long that they had lapsed so we redid those for a number of parents who wanted to start volunteering late last spring and so they're already ready so we would just tell parents if you're interested that's the process it does take a while but in terms of alice alice is just something that we're training our employees on

041and we will not be fully training our substitutes or our coaches either just for capacity reasons but we will be providing some training to coaches and substitutes but not to volunteers but all of our regular employees are receiving four and a half hours of training and anyone that missed any of the training if they've been hired since we did it we will be doing that again either in october or november for new employees thank you and any board members that want to jump in on that that missed it could jump into those if we have rum yeah we can we have to keep our groups to 16 or less for practicals thanks any other questions of corey i would just want to add one thing the alice training i participated in it at the high

042school thank you very much just to see what they were experiencing and as a teacher i know how terrifying the whole topic is but i i'm curious how did how did the teachers react are they generally feeling empowered or what was your take on it so i can speak specifically to the group that i helped train um they were feeling i think i think at the beginning they were nervous and they were worried like everybody was but then once they went through the training i think empowered is a great word i think they feel like they have different options they they still have questions and they still want to learn more and practice you know teachers are perfectionists they want to practice practice practice but i think generally speaking um our staff felt very empowered

043and like this makes a lot more sense and it feels like uh it feels like a very natural way to keep our kids and everybody safe in the event of an emergency so i think i think the morale was really good around it at the end actually and a big shout out to our cumberland pd and i think jeff gave one already but um amy owens did an unbelievable job organizing it and and helping lead that and i think she made our staff just like collectively take a deep breath so it was very helpful good to hear yeah and i'm just gonna let you know we did put out a survey um to our staff and i'll have that for the board um at the next uh board meeting the results so okay others go

044ahead tom uh corey um i guess first of all i'm interested in whatever you have to share about the science of reading but my question is about transportation i know that there were a few changes both with parent drop-off and trying to discourage that this year and the let out time for walkers and then there's also everything that's been going on with busing is there anything that you've learned through week one that might inform how the rest of the year is going to go with transportation so i think um yes i think our times are actually already improving which makes me feel hopeful we do track the dismissal time so our walkers get dismissed last now which is a change in practice and we do track it every day and today was a little bit

045slower than yesterday but we expected it with the first day of preschool um and then but we were we were actually already getting relatively close to our overall goal and it was only the third or fourth day of school so i think that we're feeling like we're on the right track um we do know that there's some the the walkers are being dismissed last and we know there's some frustration around that in the timing but we do feel like it's the safest approach for our kids we had many conversations last year with jeff and the police and we had lots of or we had many unsafe situation with kids sort of darting in front of cars and trying to get to the middle school or get to the high school and so many elementary schools

046don't necessarily even allow walker dismissals at our level and we didn't we didn't want to take that approach so we really do want to support kids who can walk or ride their bike to school but we also feel like we have to keep them as safe as we can and the best way to do that is to get as many buses and parent pickups off campus as we can before we release them so i think i think we've learned that our idea is working it's just going to continue to take some time to work out the the king senate leanne go ahead i just had a quick question around the alice trainings again is there any special considerations given the like the portable setup um at the school um and obviously the number of students

047as it relates to the training i know that you know not having everyone in the one building i don't know if that creates additional challenges um so as jeff mentioned i think the i think the premise of the training is really to use the tools that you have in your space wherever that space is whether it's the cafeteria portable the office and so i don't i don't there wasn't any there wasn't necessarily any special considerations given we did train um staff in the portables who are typically out there just so that was their training environment but generally speaking i think it's about being aware of your surroundings and kind of knowing where the exits are and knowing what you have available wherever you are so thank you okay others okay thank you corey and carol

048macarthur principal of 4-5 is next i think they were clapping for me corey not you that's true [Laughter] thank you for the introduction um it's always a great feeling to welcome our students back into a new school year and this one in particular because it already feels more familiar to the days of old despite jumping back and forth between indoor and outdoor recess procedures the first few days of school the school year actually has started off really quite smoothly even some of the bumps that we've experienced seem insignificant compared to some of the things that we've run into the last couple of years so that's promising our first school improvement goal is emotional well-being we know that students academic performance is improved when they feel safe valued and a sense of belonging in their classroom

049and their school community last year many students demonstrated lagging skills in their social interactions which led to challenges with students making safe responsible and and excuse me safe responsible and respectful behavior choices and also struggle with their sense of accountability so as a part of our master schedule this year we have allocated an extended time for community building and social emotional learning we're going to continue to implement restorative practices and trauma-informed practices and we're using a framework that was developed by the collaborative for academic and social emotional learning more commonly known as castle to deliver a more coordinated and intentional effort as well as having shared language across our settings so staff spend some time during our professional learning days and we'll continue to have time throughout the year to plan how they'll incorporate the

050core competencies of self-awareness self-management social awareness relationship skills and responsible making into their daily work with our students our second school improvement goal is academic improvement for the second year in a row we have an extended math and reading block to support teachers having time to provide meaningful instruction in the core curriculum at the tier one level and then targeted intervention at the tier two level we're ensuring that our assessments like universal screeners common classroom assessments and progress monitoring tools are all providing us with actionable information and we'll use our professional learning time to analyze our student data and collaboratively plan timely and responsive instruction we're also returning to our work from a few years ago around high impact teaching strategies to be able to maximize our instructional time with our students so we're looking

051forward to a great school year that remains focused on students social emotional behavioral and academic growth and development i'm really excited to be leading this work i think it's really meaningful and we have an incredibly collaborative cohesive and supportive staff who really like to dig into the challenges that we put in front of them so i'm looking forward to that work and what our students most care about um you know this is what we talk about with the adults but what our students most care about is that next wednesday lou the therapy dog is coming to school right sydney so thank you and if you have questions i'd be happy to answer go for it leanne um you mentioned your progress monitor monitoring tools are those the i readies or is that something different so

052our i ready our universal screeners all students are given that it gives us a baseline of how they're achieving in math and reading progress monitoring tools are really more designed around specific targeted goals so if you have a student who's struggling with a specific math skill the progress modern monitoring tool is designed to sort of measure what it is the student is working on so they're a little bit more precise given at a more regular interval and you know can be changed up as students achieve goals are there questions go ahead go ahead kid will you also be encouraging parent involvement i was trying to remember when my kids were fourth and fifth grade i feel like i was in the classroom now and then definitely um you know as student anyone who's had children

053who've grown through their middle years they they definitely start to um be less inclined to love their parents to be around but yes we do use classroom volunteers you know for the home rooms teachers have different types of you know whether it's reading buddies that are adults or maybe it's clerical support coming in and volunteering for special projects and things of that nature we also love library volunteers art volunteers and then we do a lot of community building throughout the school and often tap into our pto to help bring volunteers in to help us run things like our project aces day and things like that yeah so we're looking forward to it as well i'll wear a dog costume perfect that helps with the kids other questions i just have one more have you had

054similar staffing i know corey mentioned that 40 percent have been less than four years do you see similar numbers at four or five actually um i think there you know there are some blessings and curses being so small of two grade levels and i would say one of the blessings is um you know that just our population in general is smaller we have uh in terms of our classroom teachers we had very little turnover from last year we were able to hire on some of our one year only staff to fill openings so even people who are technically new um aren't necessarily new to the building so no we we have a lot of veterans amongst our staff definitely new people over the course of the last four to five years but we're operating with

055a lot of familiarity great thanks okay thank you carol all right and mari troublecock is up next [Applause] hi everyone um so icrely middle school 6 8 we're off and running middle schoolers have a lot of energy our focus has been on establishing routines and setting settling into the structure of our new schedule one major adjustment for all students is that they have lockers again none of our students in the past three years have had them so it's new for every student including eighth graders so all of them are learning the process of working that combination figuring out when they what they need to tote to each class and how frequently they need to visit their lockers in between classes to be efficient with their time so this is a big executive functioning ask for

056middle schoolers who tend to be pretty scattered in the first place but they're doing great and teachers are allocating lots of time for them to be able to do that nobody's getting fussed about i can't figure out my locker and needing some assistance with that we've identified two goal areas through our site improvement plan for this school year they're a continuation of what we prioritized last year with some adjustments so our first goal is centered around meeting the academic needs of our students with responsive timely and tailored instruction and some highlights include a focus on tier 2 instruction in literacy math and behavior with some creative problem solving on the part of carol macarthur julie olsen and myself we have a new 48 behavior teacher who is able rti behavior teacher who is able to

057provide students who need additional support for example identifying expected and unexpected behaviors in social settings with some direct instruction around that we're also focusing on the 20-minute lesson we've altered our schedule to streamline what happens from one day to the next and that has created consistency for our students which is an excellent thing but in doing so we've also increased the number of intervention days in the week um but had to decrease the number of instructional minutes within a given day so same amount of time overall more days with interventions just shorter minutes so we're being intentional with planning our instruction to maximize the daily and weekly time to hit their skill development pretty hard because 20 minutes isn't a lot of time you can either really maximize that time or you can waste that

058time so we're really focusing on maximizing that time meanwhile for students who don't need literacy math or behavior interventions in a tier 2 setting we're providing direct instruction and transferable skills the example i like to give of a transferable skill that we teach at the middle school is how to write an email to your teacher and i know that our students are learning that because at the beginning of the year i'll get an email yo mrs t and at the end of the year it's dear mrs trevilcock how are you today i would like to know if x so they learn how to write more formalized communication to adults to get what they want and i think that's a life skill that's just one example our second goal is about supporting a healthy community of

059learners with this goal we're continuing our development of our advisory program that we started last year advisory meets twice weekly and is focused on building relationships with a core group of students through community circles this structure lays the foundation for restorative practices as well as supporting a sense of belonging among our students and so advisory allows us to do a few things it allows us to forge relationships with our students both in the classroom and outside of the classroom because we know a little bit about each other so we can see them in the hallway and say hey how was your game last night it provides pro social opportunities for students to forge relationships with each other and after several years of some isolation that's really important and finally it allows us to attend directly

060to those who do not feel connected to our school community for whatever reason we can really hone in on developing relationships with every student in the school and at the risk of geeking out a little bit too much on this topic some research has indicated that it's not enough to provide academic support to students we have to provide personal support as well because students perceive sound teaching at least in part through their teachers caring behaviors not rocket science but it's important to note it so finally we're attending to these goals through our professional learning time we use some of our time on the pd days before school started to focus on that 20 minute lesson and to plan how we will use our advisory time in the beginning weeks of the school year this time

061is incredibly valuable and important for teachers and staff to make meaning of our goals and transform them into action so that's a brief overview of six eight questions for me i do have one question the increased intervention time is that because of the lapses in the last few years you're recognizing that or it really i mean it really isn't that it's it's a nice kind of like icing on the cake but we're really focused on developing our response to intervention programming and have been for a number of years and with every opportunity we're looking for ways to provide excellent tier one instruction but also to develop tier two and tier three our tier three programming has been pretty solid for several years now and tier two is where we have room to to grow in

062the immediate sense so it's kind of happenstance that it's happening right now can't hurt okay others all right thank you all right carl you're next [Applause] hi everybody my name is carl francis and i'm the new principal at greeley high school which is an exciting thing for me i wanted to thank you all everybody educators community students for a great welcome it's been a really nice first month or so of school working with educators in the community it's been educated students community really kind so i really appreciate that welcome i've also noticed how fortunate i am to be in this community and in this school the school has incredible educators working really hard for kids really hard-working polite students that want a great education resources that are provided by the community which i haven't seen

063in other communities and i think i'm grateful to be a part of that so thank you positive start to school year you know smiling faces rested faces um really enjoy getting to know the students i've been able to say hi to avery and tommy in the hallways which is really nice i wanted to introduce to you some really strong educators that we have in our in our building and the first one is our new assistant principal which is jackie hayes and she's our ap student sir of student services um so jackie's off to an incredible start she's got a strong background in working with students and supporting students and really looking at that intervention part and helping the whole student with whatever they need uh she's got a lot of experience as a teacher as

064a school counselor and we're really happy to have her overseeing the guidance department um working closely with grades 12 and 10 and really working to support kids in the building so be fortunate feel fortunate to have her thank you jackie don gray is our other assistant principal you might remember him he's put a lot of time and energy into this community as a student and an educator so we're real happy to have him overseeing our broad cove academy our students in grades 9 11 and a lot of really helps me a lot with the daily logistics attendance assessment intervention part of the day which is really helpful safety as well i chose three areas tonight to focus on as a really brief overview of what we're doing the school improvement plan you can look at

065jeff is going to speak to that in greater detail but three areas that i wanted to briefly talk about is the first one is the ranger support and advisory time which is dedicated intervention and support time during the day a 20-minute block that we have during this during the school day and that really is about relationship building social emotional learning academic support really the combination of those two days we alternate maroon days and white days with advisory and intervention days and and that's important to us we really want to continue to build and strengthen those that time we've dedicated time out of our school day and that's that's a lot right so we're going to get that right and our educators are feeling strongly about that too i haven't had a chance to speak to

066students about their experiences but we will so ranger support advisory is something that's very important to us we're going to get it right we're going to build an effective system that adds value for our students rti mari talked about art i guess we all talked about it a little bit academic support for in um and intervention we really want to start looking at some data we have been but get really good at that the state assessment now has shifted to nweas and we're really getting to learn that about that assessment and learning how to best use that and support our kids to identify areas of of need with a mindset of continuous improvement we'd really like to look at our our support systems that we have in place we're a strong system right we're a

067strong academic system with all the resources we talked about before i've noticed that but you know there's always room for improvement so this year we're looking at those systems and reviewing them and really going to make some good decisions about how do we get better the final thing is collaborative interdisciplinary discussions basically mixing it up a little bit a little bit and getting different departments collaborating with different departments and just talking about teaching and learning talking about resetting things a little bit and and getting past the covert craziness and talking about um kids and curriculum and strategies for the effective instruction in the classroom so um i'll end there i i really look forward to getting to know all of you um and the community and i encourage you to call me talk to me

068at any time any questions you have love to talk to you about greeley high school questions for me i was wondering if you could um just spend a little time talking about what the the dedicated time for student support like during the day actually looks like um i'm learning it uh but it really is a 20-minute block of an area of time dedicated to meet students needs so uh you know our vision our goal goal right now it's it's um it's an area that needs improvement which means it's dedicated time for kids to do uh academic work that needs to be done in classes and it's also time for them to collect themselves and prepare for the remainder of the day i'd say that what we'd really like it to become is a an area

069where students can ask for individual support from teachers and assign themselves to individual teachers for support have teachers reach out to students and assign them to a specific day and time or complete an assessment or maybe it's a small group of targeted students who a teacher identifies through formative assessment that they just didn't quite get it and they invite four or five kids back to talk about that content so before they get to the next class period they're ready to roll that's my vision of it i'm not sure if we're there yet but that's that's the idea of the intervention piece and the advisory piece is just about to get to know each other and have a place in the building where you feel supported and that a teacher knows you really well and a

070nice comfortable place for you to um adapt and learn and grow as a student as a person so that's the um the idea behind that dedicated time thank you you're welcome others oh go ahead hello okay so i have a freshman and um i he has three older sisters who all when they were at the middle school were able to take advantage particularly of the seventh grade uh focus on executive functioning um which carol mentioned with regard to lockers and time management and building up their binders things like that um and so this group of kids maybe even the sophomores as well i pretty much missed out on on that because of covid so i realize you probably can't quite speak to this yet but i'm curious if teachers are taking that into account if

071they're going to work with these kids who um the teachers may be used to kids coming to them with with those skills from the middle school who aren't now yeah we haven't specifically discussed that but i but i know that our educators are are bright and they're paying attention to our and want to support our kids so you know there are some kids that come to us with identified need in that area and when that's identified ahead of time of course we have formalized programming to support those kids in that specific area but i think advisories time is a time that teachers could dedicate to their academic programming of kids and review their classes and their areas of need and areas of their struggle and how to organize themselves and support themselves so that's something

072we will look through advisory but i think our teachers are all over it so the teachers are able to identify those that are coming prepared to class those who are able to take notes properly those are prepared for assessment and doing well on the the work in the classroom and they're not you know conversations about why and then um from there we can i start to identify some specific students that might to enhance those skill um instead of doing a a blanketed approach it's probably uh identify those students who need that support is how i'm thinking that would happen i hope i answered that question okay okay like i said i know you're new so it that's something visionary stuff too yes thank you others go ahead tell me well i'm very glad that you're

073doing more of the ranger support time i always have enjoyed using that for meeting with teachers and getting extra help with needed but in terms of advisory and the specific curriculum with that are there any like big changes that you're looking to make or more just kind of like honing and making the um specific lessons more like directed and um useful for the students well there's uh there's a graduation a credit associated with it so we're going to need to you know still have some of those lessons uh we have a advisory committee of educators that really spend a lot of time working on that we'd love to have some student voice and what that what that looks like um and i'll ask you maybe some of those bodies of students who are the best

074to ask for that um to me it's it's a it's it's a combination of both i i don't think that the whole time could really be spent on on that content i think it's important that you're doing team building that you're collaborating with peers that you're doing some um you know buddy advisory activities that we we mix it up a little bit and and enjoy our time a little bit there and have some team building time as well so that's my hope uh for that time but i'm certainly open to hear what your suggestions are we're just getting started on a school-wide evaluation of that and have some conversations and collaboration around what's going to be the most effective way to use that time so your imports input's going to be important tommy do you

075have specific suggestions that you're thinking of no i was just wondering if you had anything in mind like coming into it but um i would say that i also agree that just having time to like kind of rest and recharge before your other classes is definitely important as well thank you go for it how do you think you're going to achieve those goals in 20 minutes a day i noticed that time block i did and i would say over time and one thoughtful conversation at a time right so that's that's my answer to you avery uh but it's a tall ask right so it's a tall ass i have you know the last thing i'm going to do when my first time speaking publicly is talking about a schedule change or something at the high

076school so it's it's really not what i'm what i'm not interested in doing but i need to grow and learn about the school and the true areas of need and if that is something that surfaces i'm i'm hoping to to take that on if we need to good just a follow-up on what you just said so what what what do you mention true areas of need how are you going to work to identify those being new in the district yeah again i'll go back to one thoughtful conversation at a time so i'm spending a lot of time in my first few days meeting and talking to people i've identified i set standing meetings with my instructional leadership team members which represent the entire school departments and we're meeting monthly for regular conversations about progress in

077areas of need i have strong [Music] assistant principals and so far the the staff seems to be very communicative they really are looking for improvement in some specific areas so they've been vocal they've been vocal to tell me and identify some things and and a lot of those things have been already identified in our improvement plan we met this summer as in a leadership team and really identified that and talked about that but it's it's it's not realistic to really to tackle them all at once i think and i have the support of the superintendent by by saying that um it's important to address them but we really need to get in there and feel it and understand it and learn it before we make any substantive substantive changes to the system because we're doing

078a lot of great things here right so there's a lot of positive things happening in our school in our district and a lot of our elementary and middle school students are coming to us very strong so it's a lot of positive things happening but i get your point and i'll stay right on top of identifying those areas in need and balancing that with reality of how to accomplish them others okay thank you carl thank you [Applause] i'm always so impressed with our principals and administrators come in and makes me feel very confident i appreciate you all coming okay so jeff is next they don't need the wave but they're we're going to let our administrators leave so that they can get up in the morning and do it all over again thank [Music] a wonderful

079group of people um our principals assistant principals directors and our district uh great group and um really uh we've started the year off as many of them mentioned on a great note really smooth start to the school year so i'm going to be taking uh what all of the four principles talked about and moving it into a more of a macro level and just kind of giving you that that piece so you can think about the pieces that each principal has talked about and how that fits into our district plan so obviously we start with our district's mission statement what we do which is rooted in our mission to guide all students as they acquire enthusiasm for learning assuming responsibility for education achieving academic excellence and discovering and attaining their personal best and when we

080meet with new teachers new staff to the district this is actually the the very first or second slide that i put up at orientation for all of our new employees is our district's mission statement and then we go back later meeting with all the new teachers in the district and actually pick apart these words that are in maroon and talk about what those really mean this is also a question that's asked of all finalists for teaching jobs in our district supporting the vision i won't read all of these but basically the vision of our district is to make sure that our students are prepared for the 21st century and that is not just a cliche but actually they are that they have the skills to be successful we know that students will change jobs tommy

081and ava will probably have eight to ten jobs as research by the time believe it or not by the time that you are ready to retire that's just the way the millennial pieces and i've actually done presentations on millennialism and how it's different from folks of my generation and just how things have changed aligning to the strategic plan so our strategic plan is the same one we had in 2018 it was supposed to have been sunsetted in 2021 however by extension the board annually has extended that to 2023 as a result of you know what we won't say the word but we know something happened in the last two years so our strategic plan has four areas skills for the 21st century wellness early childhood education in every student college and career ready and i'll

082go into that a little bit more the board adopted the current strategic plan as i mentioned in 18 and in 2020 the board at that time put the strategic plan on hold due to something and in 2021 the original strategic plan expired was supposed to expire and the board chose to extend it at that time at my recommendation to 2023 and the board will have to make a decision in june of 23 and i'll put a recommendation uh before the board at that point based on what the leadership team and i um have discussed and the board can make a decision on what you'd like to do at that point so goal one strategic priority for this school year is wellness obviously we're tying them to those four foundational goals that we have promoting wellness

083initiatives that advance and sustain healthy balanced and well-rounded students and staff and we've got two areas and you've heard some of the principals talk about these areas in different ways obviously safety and around the alice approach to safety and i'll talk a little bit more about alice in a couple of minutes and then belonging in connection i think you heard every principle talk about belonging connection in ways that they'll be doing that by the way we do have and as of today or maybe it was yesterday we have a brand new page in on our web page we've been making a lot of adjustments to our website we have a new website that's been around for about a year now and we do have a new page and on that page we have materials around

084our safety approach obviously nothing that would be compromising but this is just high level summary information there's information on alice there's information on the summary of our emergency management plan which is undergoing changes and we'll be adding to this page and then the members of our safety and security team so if you go to district and go under safety and security you'll find that information so strategic goal two for the year early childhood education this is really focusing on which it has been since 2018 what do we do with enrollment you heard corey talking about enrollment challenges obviously at mabel wilson school this is nothing new this is the year when the board will be asked to make a decision actually in less than two weeks on the 19th as to whether or not you

085support sending a bond to the voters on november 8th so this is the timeline we have a joint meeting on tuesday night the sad board in both town boards at six o'clock on the 13th to discuss the primary school project the financing plan will be the major topic of discussion that evening september 19th is when the board is being asked whether or not you support sending the bond to voters in november and then there'll be two public information sessions if the board votes to do that on september 27th and october 12th one session in each of our two towns and then november 1st is not the date it's november 8th and i will change that and we also have a page on our website for the new school project if you'd like to check that

086out any member of the public can do that and the only other piece around strategic goal too is that we are starting right now the renovations for windows doors and hvac systems at the wilson school and that was approved by voters in june so thank you to voters for your support on doing that that's a million and a half dollars half of it is free free money for free money from the state and the other half is low interest so strategic goal three for this year every student college and career ready again you heard the four principles referencing different areas of this particular goal what should students learn there's four basic questions what do students learn how do we know they're learning it what do we do when they're not and what do we do

087when they've already got it and that's all research based and we don't like to get too researchy here but everything we do is grounded in some sort of research these are all clickable links this will be on our website and the public can go to these these are the individual site improvement plans for the district at your next meeting on the 19th julie olson susie robbins and scott poulin will be here to talk about the district sips that they oversee in addition to the four schools that you heard tonight so that there's alignment to the strategic plan and finally strategic goal four skills for the 21st century skills for life this goal has been tweaked and we're asking you tonight to approve these strategic priorities for the year and so by extension you're approving the

088changes and there are changes in this particular goal from 2018 and part of it is that the relevance of the goal in 2018 was not here in 2022 so we tweaked it and now reads students require portable and transferable skills you heard marie talk about that and then the other principles referenced that as well to be successful in the 21st century together we can redesign what it means to be a greely graduate this is the part that was tweaked who leads the way portrait of a graduate is something that many high schools in the nation are now undertaking that that planning process around what does a graduate from a high school look like what does it mean to go through a district and to graduate from a high school what are the skills the transferable

089skills what are the content skills that students need to be effective and these five that you see in front of you are actually from the state of maine so the work is actually done for us and clear and effective communicator self-directed in lifelong learner creative and practical problem solver responsible and involved citizen integrative and informed thinker and that encompasses a lot of the work in our district for example equity work comes under responsible and involved citizen how do you how do you go about doing that work how you go about being a good citizen and those are pieces that you also heard reference from the four principles tonight so next steps in the strategic priority process these were also introduced on august 26 to the entire msad 51 staff and i'd like to thank jason

090for actually opening the all staff meeting on august 26th we had all of our staff in the auditorium for the first time in three years three school years all together in one room it was impressive we also had all of our support staff we don't always have all of our support staff in the same room that's our transportation food service custodians maintenance and our district office staff all in on one place with our teachers and our educational technicians and our specialists so we had over 400 people in that room and it was it was exciting on september 8th which is tonight obviously i'm presenting these priorities for your approval and the principals obviously already talked about their sips and on the 19th you'll hear from the three district level administrators as well and on january

09117th i will provide a mid-year progress update on the strategic priorities that hopefully you will decide to approve tonight and on june 5th i will provide the board a year and progress report on those four priorities if you approve them tonight and then again i will ask the board on june 5th to go ahead and make a decision about what the strategic planning process will look like in the future after this year and i'll make a recommendation at that time so those are the next steps in the timeline and those are the uh proposed strategic priorities for 2022-23 happy to answer any questions questions of jeff i think we've seen this a couple of times now they will say the board also had a chance to hear that this is not the first time they've

092heard this is you've heard this at the retreat um so it's been a few weeks since you've you've first been introduced to this okay thank you jeff all right i don't know if mike did you have a question mike okay all right thank you yeah i don't want to give the public the impression that we don't care about this stuff but we did have a fairly robust conversation a couple weeks it was very little five hours on august 22nd yes yes just so the public knows it was 10 56 i think is when we clocked up so it was it was a very long discussion okay so moving down the agenda for uh two items for action we have three um approvals for professional positions and uh if there's no objections i'll take a motion

093for the group of them and then we can have jeff go through them emotion i motioned to appointments to professional positions as recommended by the superintendent thank you vanessa a second second uh ann thank you okay jeff you want to take us through yes quickly we have three professional positions we're recommending tonight the first position is an occupational therapist which will be at the mabel eye wilson school and this is a new position because we have as you know we have a number of educational technician vacancies in our district and this was a a way for us to think differently about the programming that we are providing in our fls program at the wilson school and instead of hiring two educational technicians that are vacant we are hiring a professional staff member which is an

094occupational therapist to assist in that program and also other needs in the school but primarily be working with students in the fls program julie olsen and the leadership team and myself have been talking a lot about different ways to fill vacancies in our district and we feel like this was a really good fit we had some great applicants for two of our ot positions that we ended up posting um and so that's the first one the second one um is also of the same thinking that we're we're trying to put some other professional staff into our programs this is our program at the high school again in fls we had 20 applicants for both of these positions we took we looked at the pool of 20 applicants for both of these folks that are being

095hired we did have someone leave an edtech position and then we took another position and put those together and to come up with this professional position again supporting primarily the fls program and other support uh special education programming at the high school and then the third position is miw special education uh position and um again we're looking at our vacancies and and with educational technicians and decided after discussing it that it made more sense to bring in a professional level teacher in the district to start um looking at the way that we are staffing our schools in special education so we felt this was a good fit um and we were able to hire a really dynamic person actually all three of these people were very fortunate to have uh in our district and we

096had um again 20 applicants for that position uh and we uh interviewed one person that we really stood out um and then we had um we actually ended up interviewing three people out of the pool of 20 for uh the occupational uh therapist positions so it really should have said three of three of three on the first one and it's a little confusing because we advertised one of the ot positions we went back and advertised for a second one we had a pool of 20 to draw from and ended up um going from in that direction so we ended up advertising it two different times so you'll see those numbers the way they are okay questions of jeff okay i think that 20 number is very encouraging that was our that was our initial um

097number when we put it out there yeah and and all three of these are just the miw one this is this one position is sort of filling two we're uh covering more than one edtech position in some cases um two or three depending on the on the position that seems smart jason so uh jeff with that many applicants was there any potential at all to recommend them for other positions that are open in the district where we actually talked about that um where falmouth is doing the same thing that we're doing so a lot of those applicants we're also going to possibly falmouth and we know that they hired some out of that pool um actually we just talked today julian and i were talking today is there another applicant in that pool that we

098should go back to and think about a different program so julie's going to think about it and we're going to get back together tomorrow right so okay other questions okay all right all in favor and opposed and i'm staining unanimous okay thank you motion carries so moving down the list here so the next item is approval of the primary school building committee plan no or the committee itself yeah the phases yeah so um before staffing the committee we have to form the committee and i'm happy to go through this um again we talked about it at the retreat and you can shoot holes in what i'm envisioning at this point if you want um jeff finally helped me get my head around the phases of the new school building and so for those playing along

099at home pre-referendum we already have our concept design which at this point isn't going to change a lot it can change in the future a bit but we have that locked down more or less and pre-referendum now it's all about communicating to the community and and to the public answering the questions um really kind of a marketing and pr fees so that's phase one um and as i think you guys have already seen in the draft of the committees which this is not formed yet but um i'm envisioning that i will be a coordinator or chair but i use that very loosely coordinator of this committee and will lean heavily on our three vice chairs and the first phase of the program or the project really aligns with one of those vice chairs which will

100be kim who seems to be excited about doing marketing so she will carry the ball on that first phase and then the second phase being uh post-referendum through like ground breaking so uh you could call that you know the structural phase where uh you know the people that we really want involved are um you know would include engineers people that we want to make the best building possible for the best value and the best day-to-day operation just smart things to do people that have been through it before you know we have a great architect firm but we will bring in some people from the community that can help with this thing and help us avoid pitfalls or help us do smart things for the future to build the best program building that we can and

101then the once we break ground sort of like around that time will be the third phase which i guess we'd call like the design phase where you're getting into the more nitty gritty details of colors of the wall and where cabinets should be and certainly teachers and administrators would be involved there and just trying to make sure that we do things right and the second and third phase don't really align perfectly with the other two vice chairs but the other two vice chairs would be vanessa who will be heading finance this year and then mike who will be heading facilities so whereas you know community members that have certain expertise they may come and go with these phases i can imagine that people that love marketing you know don't want to listen to engineers talk

102about structures but the people on the board here and many of the members will see the whole thing through and for people that i've talked to about this thus far especially people on this board even if they're not on this board they're willing to to the degree possible see this thing through to groundbreaking and potentially three or four years out to ribbon cutting which will help with continuity um so that's my thought and those three vice chairs are going to be important to sort of be expected experts in certain areas certainly in finance and i will lean on mike and vanessa collectively to sort of spend time on especially like the environmental stuff if we aim to build this as a net neutral sort of building mike has a lot of experience there and we're

103going to have to see what smart things we can do as far as rounding up grants and this and that so i don't have every last detail nailed down i have talked to some community members that at least for phase one to have expertise in marketing and some of them have committed i still have some conversations to have most of those recommendations came from the town council members or select board members or administration here jeff often many some of the names came up from many different directions i know i got some recommendations during conversations here when we talked about committees and that came up so i've reached out to a lot of them i'm i'm positive again like any committee that not everybody will be happy and but we'll try to include as many voices

104as we can so i guess that's the gist of it so tonight we need to approve the forming of the committee um i guess essentially uh approve those phases and see if that you guys agree with that logic and then over the course of very soon we'll will form the committee members including members of the community for at least phase one and you know again i'll continue to take input on who do you think should be there but i think it will be hard to keep the um committee small enough sort of to be effective um just if you include board members and administration units already you know 10 people and so we just have to be cognizant of that thoughts comments and we've been over most of this before at the retreat jason ivan

105um generally fully supportive uh the only thing is just in terms of uh so i have one very specific thing that we talked about it just ensuring that there is a an expert on early childhood on that committee you know just even thinking about the specific point of like where the pre-k classrooms are located in the structure like are they next to the cafeteria we're not like a play outdoor space that wouldn't make sense for doing napping things like that things that i don't know but um a person very close to me has pointed out uh multiple times so just making sure that voice is there i think that's really important especially if we want to make sure that this is in center of excellence for early childhood education so it's really important the other

106point is again just just in terms of what we're voting on um i'm a little confused exactly what we're voting on uh so how you described it i again i i'm supportive of that but i just want to make sure we're when we actually vote on it that we can be as clear as possible is something where we want to make a motion to approve a primary school committee charged with a multi-phase process that takes on the marketing construction and development of the project something along those lines i just think we should be pretty explicit in the in the motion yeah maybe i'm being pedantic but no i think that's important it's really up to you guys we can just form the committee but i think it does make sense to probably form and define

107those phases now i think the first phase is logical to call it communications or marketing i don't care i think the last phase being phase three i think design is a logical name for it um i really don't know about the middle one you could call it engineering or structural um i'm fine with whatever and and whoever wants to make the motion i'm fine with you know nailing that down so long as we don't have to um staff each of those phases at this point the phase one being the most important at this point so what should we call phase two so i feel like we're trying to hammer out something on a committee it's like we approved to get the equity committee and then everything got hammered out there after so i'm not sure

108why we have to get into the weeds with the details of the subcommittees i don't think once we know we need a planning board committee do we need to get those details like i feel like we don't need to get those details all right we've got the committee just three phases then you've got the people on the board that are going to go to the committees and then we can figure out from there exactly what we need um so you want to just define formation or the motion you think should be formation of the committee and a three-phased plan for the project yes and we don't have to name the phases yeah i don't feel like we i don't feel like we're there yet to name the phases without having a little bit more information

109on someone who has an expertise on what phases that are involved but um i could be overstepping yep nope i think that's fine i think we also need to specify the type of committee in the wording that's a special ad hoc committee okay that's a really good point vanessa that's you know the first meeting or two of the committee to basically explicitly lay out what that multi-phase process is rather than us doing here um i i think that makes sense we could in the motion list things like that deals with communication structure and design among other issues if we wanted to uh but i um i don't feel like we need to i think it's pretty obvious given the makeup of what the committee is going to be that we will deal with those things

110so i think being more general makes a lot of sense you have pivoted my opinion thank you vanessa sorry okay so if somebody uh is comfortable making a motion i wrote one down unless somebody else wants it please no no make a motion to create an ad hoc building committee charged with a multi-phase process the new primary school building okay i revised i make a motion to create an ad hoc committee on the new primary school building charged with a multi-phase process second can i ask one question about that i know um there's other things that are being included in the referendum other than the primary school but this is specifically focused on the primary school i just want to better understand yeah i i think that the miw renovations in particular that probably is

111something that could be dealt with in the facilities committee the existing facilities committee great thank you i think so but if you push back if you don't if you just no i was just tying my mind to what the referendum was which is you know obviously we're gonna have to do reconfigurations but this is specifically about the new school i just i think so yeah thank you um yeah that's a good question the renovations that happened at miw i had sort of assumed would come under facilities um but in this motion i don't think it addresses that so we could do whatever down the road okay um that's a much smaller scale right um certainly they're tied together but yep okay we have a motion and a second further discussion okay seeing who was the

112second who was the second i was yeah okay that's what i thought all right sorry okay all in favor okay all opposed unanimous okay thank you so moving on to jeff's strate strategic priorities that he presented we need to approve those um is there a motion i'll i move to approve the strategic plan thank you sorry for the second second thank you christina okay discussion on the matter go ahead and i just want to make sure that um the strategic priorities include as we had talked about at our last the last board meeting of last school year to develop an equity and belonging plan yeah i mean i think that's that's up to that is implied in the strategic priorities that that's part of it um under responsible involved citizen further comments concerns discussion questions

113okay i'll only uh go ahead jared this is not a request to change the plan in any way but i'll just chime in on one thing on a for priority for skills for the 21st century i see a lot of plans that talk about turning everyone into leaders and it'd be terrific if every single graduate goes on to become a leader it's also really important in life to be a really good team member and be able to work well with others and be a good listener in addition to a communicator so i would just ask that the school keep that in mind that uh it seems increasingly important to me to be able to work well with others as a team to be successful i would agree um we actually had a we convened years

114ago a business roundtable um probably six seven years ago and the business leaders that came to that roundtable with educators said at the same tables board members were part of that at the time told us we need we don't the content's important however more important is we need people that can work together that's what we're we need more of that we need people that can collaborate we can teach and train as much as we can we just need people to work together so that is definitely a skill that the state of maine um through these as well has has talked about that a lot the collaborative piece um we'll keep that in mind thank you okay others okay um all in favor all opposed unanimous thank you motion carries okay so um so that our

115tech guys don't have to stay around forever i'm gonna move the um 6e to the very bottom of the agenda and we'll do that as the last item um if there's no objections d and e or just e uh so d sorry d has been cancelled because scott is sick he got the kovid after two years of never getting it so he's okay um sick so and he was a big part of that and i'm actually quite bummed uh we're gonna kick it out two weeks and we'll do it on the 19th yep and and it's an important one i'm bummed we can't do it but um scott's a big piece uh piece of that so is there a time sooner we can do it i'm happy to entertain that but um so we only

116have we only have ten days or nine days between board meetings this time okay um and just given scott's schedule at this point and not i've had it as well and i know it takes some time for people of our age a little bit longer um i don't want to imply that he might be ready okay all right no teeth again hopefully in 10 days right yes he'll be ready though next tuesday yes [Laughter] okay so 6d was uh canceled unfortunately and 6el moves to the end so we will move to jeff's superintendent report please yes superintendents report for tonight um just um we again i think the principal's a part of this but here's a photo of uh students on the very first minute of school walking into wilson school um and uh being

117greeted by staff and buses it's kind of a rainy morning that day and i was thinking oh please don't rain all day and it actually stopped in time for most of the students not to get wet for the day but it's exciting we had new staff orientation we had about 40 40 new staff members there's a little bit more than 40 on the screen however we count anyone that is in a different role completely changed a role in our district um or was a one-year only and was hired back we counted them as a new staff member so we actually have probably 50 faces on here but we end up hiring about 40 40 new staff since last year we do a day-long orientation of all our new staff they hear from me and other

118district administrators and then they spend time with their building administrators um before the school year starts and then we had our staff back starting on the 26th as i mentioned and then two more days after that and this photo right here is all of our staff back in the same room as i mentioned and they are all looks like they're waving but they are throwing away a piece of paper with whatever they wrote on it that has something to do with a challenge or something they'd prefer not to continue thinking about from the last two years so people had a chance to throw we called it emptying the trash or throwing the trash out into a trash bucket and and collecting all of the things that we don't want to continue with from the last

119two years and basically having a fresh start did we collect those and tally them up no the custodians enjoyed that though can the board do it too yes if the board wants to do it you can actually i thought about inviting all the parents in and have a nice big throwing it at us have a nice big fest of throwing everything out the alice approach on the 26th 29th and 30th team of law enforcement officers led by sro amy owen provided alice training for more than 400 of our staff and from every school and department we trained the operations staff first actually the first day this involved online training and overview and then two hours of practicals what we call practicals which is hands-on scenarios um many of the staff i had a chance to

120talk to and then talk to administrators if they got feedback and then we have a survey going out as well um that we just put out a couple days ago for staff to give us their feedback um about the training but just the the anecdotal stuff that i heard is that people were feeling like the training uh did what it was supposed to do which was to give us the tools to think about and the mindset to think about things differently in terms of school safety that lockdowns a lot traditional lockdowns are not the answer for school safety or safety in public places at all um as the sole sole tool that we have um so we had a team of of law enforcement officers we had um five people on friday six officers on

121monday and then we had four officers on tuesday and each was partnered with a staff member we had 27 total staff groups that we trained each with about 15 to 17 staff members in it i don't think we exceeded 16 and then completed the alice training prior to the first day of school and so about four and a half hours of training between all the components i really like to say just publicly thank you again to amy owen um our sro officer ryan pinchon officer nick descano sergeant tony ridge chief chip rumsey all of the cumberland police department and sergeant mike pearce of the yarmouth police department uh all for their efforts in uh training all of our staff it was a huge huge undertaking also like to thank our staff members who were trained

122to assist the law enforcement officers we had multiple groups being trained at once at any given time during those three days up to six groups being trained so don gray jackie hayes johnna mulligan aaron pollock erica serapis peter scott jason lareviere pete gillingham carol macarthur corey munsey mallory orris orza chesky clara evans and myself all were paired up with law enforcement officers to help with that training so it was again the two-hour hands-on we have an informational session for parents that will be held on september 22nd at six o'clock and i know that there's been a lot of dates that have already gone out this month not just this one but others where there's conflicts with other meetings and other events and i'd like to just say we apologize but we also do not have

123any more time in the month there are so many events going on right now as we get back into school that it's been very difficult to find nights or times that work for everybody but that will be the night that we roll out the alice info session chief chum rumsey excuse me and officer owen will both be present to talk about the alice approach as well as the chief is going to be introducing that evening for any parents that are interested who attend that session project child safe which is a gun safety program these are free locks that are available to families that have firearms and want to make sure that they are secured this is a program that the safety and security committee of the district has been discussing as well for the last

124few months the chief was able to get free locks from project child safe and we'll have them available if families are interested they certainly don't don't have to have them but we'll have quite a few of those on hand and the chief will have information in literature as well available that evening for anyone that is interested and then i just finally want to say we need ed techs and subs we still have 11 openings for ed techs in our in our system and we need substitutes we have been hiring more permanent substitutes and we've made some inroads with professional staff but we still need educational technicians in our district and we also need daily substitutes in our district especially as the winter months come upon us and there's illness we're going to need more folks

125that might be available for daily substituting the information has been put out in a lot of places but if you go to our website www.msad51.org we'd love for you to sign up and i guess that wasn't my final slide my final slide is football is back and i know that's exciting for everyone because tomorrow night is the first home game of greeley football and i think it's been three or four years at least maybe four years at this point since we have fielded our own team at the high school and this is the group of students who i met with many of them last spring along with david shapiro at one point we ended up having multiple meetings the students came forward as you know many of them came to a board meeting and really

126advocated and i really want to say great job for the students for self advocating um and i also want to take a a second to thank the falmouth school department um for being part of a what i consider to be a really high quality co-op program for football i know a lot of people were skeptical of that co-op when we went into it because we didn't have enough students interested in our high school at the time and i want to thank falmouth for just graciously welcome us welcoming our students we had several students that played for the co-op falmouth and greely during those years but we are ready to field our own team and i know there's a lot of excitement about the first football game as with everything else that we're doing there's all

127kinds of athletics and clubs and activities and open events open house events and um i think people are just really excited about what i'm hearing is there's just a lot of buzz about everything um and feeling like this is a a great start to the year and people are feeling a little bit like it's settling in um so that's my report very good thank you questions go ahead kim jeff for the i apologize if you said this uh for the parent information night for alice um as you mentioned that's there's a lot um and i'm thinking parents with babysitters for back to school that will that be streamed will that be available for people to watch we haven't talked about we haven't talked about doing it because we thought the end person was very important

128for that oh sure um and we originally had thought should we do it remotely and we're like no it's probably material that should be in person and the chief i know is very you know adamant as well it should be in person um so i will bring that back and ask if that's something that um we should be talking about or streaming you know some of it is sensitive material we like to have people face to face but sure there's a lot of information as well that we've put out to parents and newsletters as well and on our website if they want to access it but i will get an answer for you okay sorry related to that um perhaps we could investigate if um the recreation department if if we could provide child care

129or maybe through the pto somehow yeah the pto i think they've helped us with that before i'm not sure if they can but i can certainly look into it could we hold another session in october or november we could um but at that point we would have already rolled it out to students and we're trying to get in front of that before we do that i think that yeah totally and i don't think we should wait to but in uh to roll it out to students but uh for those who miss it to have an opportunity to then learn what's happening i think it might be worth it i'll bring both those idea actually all three of those ideas back to um we have a team that's been working on this and also at the

130the back to school nights will that be addressed at all will teachers be promoting that reminding parents to attend will they get any sort of a preview of it um probably not i mean we've we've put this out in different places and we'll continue putting it out on social media newsletters it was out it went out again tonight i think it was in this newsletter this week if not it will be back in next week's newsletter so we've we've been putting out as much as we can i was just thinking if the teachers especially if they've been through the training can say to the parents yes while they're there to say you should you want to go to this you want to be there for that do whatever you can to make it happen um

131that would be much more impactful as a parent than an email yeah i'm sure teachers will will have something to say about it i know that um you know if they're asked at least you know what it means um we have not um gotten back we've we've trained all of our staff obviously and we have a small group that we still have to train that missed it but the other piece of of that training is that we have not talked to our teachers about how we're rolling this out because we we do not have a complete plan yet so officer owen is meeting with our leadership team on tuesday and that is the kind of the basis of that meeting is to talk about what is our plan for rolling it out we want to

132make sure it's developmentally appropriate it's age appropriate what it looks like at mabel i wilson school being rolled out to students and the kind of language we use with them looks obviously very very different than high school and in some of the links that we've put out our age-appropriate ways that alice the alice approach is signaled to students so the way we talk about it with high school students we do go through the whole process which is including countering which means countering an intruder that might come into your space with primary school students elementary students we don't even we don't even talk about that we don't talk about countering obviously our staff understand that piece but not our students so it depends on the developmental level of our students and that is going to be

133talked about at the informational session okay i would just want to add add on to what mike said not only for convenience sake run it again in october if you can but also i think once the students have done it they're going to be a lot more questions and concerns and interest from parents so all the more reason to do it again to address that it's so different in many ways at all it is different it's a very different approach than any of us were trained as students or adults i guess um my last thought then too is since we're still figuring out sort of what the rollout would look like if it makes sense to um [Music] have it rolled out not universally across the district at the same time but if we started

134with the older grades that would also then allow us to have you know we could have some more staggered parent sessions and to be able to properly provide child care if we can for for families at miw just a thought yeah i think the staggered approach actually is a great idea and i know that the way we're going to without giving a lot of detail yet because we haven't finished this yet um i already know that the way we're going to be approaching it at mabel i wilson school and the way we roll it out with students is going to be a very different approach it's going to take longer than it will at the other levels just the way that we're planning it and we'll be finalizing that but i cannot promise child care

135it's very short notice for the meeting that's another layer that we didn't discuss but i will have absolutely put out the live streaming piece and i know that our wonderful tech people over here would be involved in that um so we'll we'll look at that okay go ahead leanne i mean i know that i'm very excited to have this parent night to learn more and i think there's probably going to be a lot of interest it's going to be in the gca um and if are we going to plan for overflow um we haven't usually had events that where we have more than the 515 seats that are in there um so we were not planning for overflow okay because if it's not going to be streamed i mean i can see people if you

136know you can watch from it sounds like streaming is important um so that's something i'm gonna certainly look into um and i'm not advocating for such but is there an option for parents to opt their children out of this training um it's going to come up i'm sure so the way that alice the alice approach is you know there's really no opt out it's basically personal choice now for younger students it's not personal choice it's following the teacher's lead as kids get older they're trained that they have some autonomy over their own safety and if there really was an event what would they do and they're they're given a lot more tools and options for younger students um i don't see opting out being something that we can say you can opt out of this

137this is part of it's like a fire drill it's like a safety drill an evacuation drill these are things that keep the entire school community safe so we're not looking at opt-outs to that i think that was a really important question um and i might be actually advocating for opt-outs if but i don't think i'm let me clearly ask the question first because i'm babbling uh because my understanding of alice is that it's we're pivoting away from the traditional lockdown effort so we're not imposing lockdown practicing on practices on kids anymore right that's my understanding and that's like one of one of the more better reasons for it is that in that situation where kids would have to go through lockdown practices in that situation i would definitely advocate for parents being allowed to opt

138their children's out but alice is different right so alice is a multi it's a multi-option approach so the traditional lockdown that we all know about maybe we should do a presentation for the board quite frankly but um so the the traditional approach is obviously students are hiding or securing in a room and it's usually the same location in the room when there's lockdown the door is locked if you can lock it um you know quickly it's supposed to be done in quick time and lights are out you know shades are drawn that's a traditional approach we've all been through it's been decades of that since the 50s this approach recognizes that basically based on all the incidents that have happened over the last 25 years that is not an effective approach and that people need

139other options available to them and that includes students and and their teachers there's been too many incidents in our country and that's where alice came from is really this idea that sitting in a room and waiting for something to happen is not acceptable and all the governmental agencies have now signed on to this including homeland security u.s secret service all of the law enforcement agencies the national um police chiefs association sheriff's association all of them said you can't keep doing this it's not effective it's not safe and there's got to be other ways to to deal with this and people have to have other options so when it's safe get out when it's not safe barricade we actually part of the training that one of the i was in several groups of practicals helping and

140one of our groups opted to make sure that two people were designated as the adults and everybody else were the students in a primary level which means the students just kind of stood there waited for the teacher's direction the teachers were the ones moving the tables before we had a mock invasion of the classroom or intruder and the amount of time those adults were able to move the tables and barricade the room was very fast people didn't think they could do it but they did it and that's that's kind of the visual that we're trying to help people with help our teachers our staff our students um i think obviously the infiltration will help our parents with it but it's a very different approach and i know that this is a scary subject but it's

141scarier if we don't address it so it's something that i our safety committee has looked at for three years and settled on it but um these are good suggestions i think the live streaming piece you know i know there's some has i have some hesitation about live streaming because i don't know how much information we want streamed out about this obviously anybody can go on the internet find out information about live streaming about alice um but that's something i'll have to take back to the chief and officer owen find out licensing issue they're pretty tight with their license as long as we're not um duplicating i think if as long as we're just talking about it not duplicating or showing a video without their permission yeah i agree it could be a license but we'll

142have to talk to our expert tech person over there i certainly want to get the information out but i also agree that maybe it loses some of its impact if it's not in person but yeah okay other thoughts questions of jeff's superintendent report okay moving on um we would normally do committee reports here um does anybody want to add anything to any of that oh i guess we could do the student reports yes take it away avery student reports first yes well no only just the others are non-existent in a little bit just because we didn't have the community stuff all right great uh yeah so for the seniors it's the beginning of the end and everyone's pretty happy about that yeah it's good everyone's excited to have the friday night under the lights football

143back something to a sport that people actually care about um okay move on and uh yeah everyone's back at it hard at work uh figuring out how to skip their study hall and uh yeah okay all right thank you avery tommy yeah i would say that during the first week of school um the thing that i noticed most about um my peers and the students in school would be just the kind of like camaraderie and i would say the sense of being back is very nice and everyone's excited to see friends faces and stuff like that um i would also say that one thing that i particularly enjoyed and um some of my peers have also spoken to this is getting to meet our new administrators that were here today specifically um miss hayes and

144mr francis uh and i would also say that the class meetings that we've been having have been very informative and helpful and the juniors are very excited to get their own parking spots yeah i was gonna say the juniors are getting quite a bit this year that didn't happen last year at avery they're all getting privileges uh already in the fourth quarter they're coming so that's great so it's your legacy i suppose okay very good thank you tommy anybody else want to add anything for any of the committee reports okay all right so moving on to our catch-all of communications um so we have a request from the msba msba for a local delegate to attend the annual delegate assembly so has anybody here ever been to that before and do you want to tell

145us what that's about um so the state the msba has a board that meets throughout the year and they approve various motions and so the representative would just be from someone from our district who is there voting either to approve or oppose the state agenda items okay and jeff you told me a little bit about this it's usually a two-day thing right yeah it's in person this year it was remote for a couple years it's actually really great conference and it has a lot of sessions that um you can choose from you can go for one day you can go for two days um there's there are two days thursday and friday it's at the end of october and it's um it's very informative yeah the conference was really good i i will say um

146since i was a representative before that um there were some conference sessions that i was hoping that i could have attended that year that i wasn't able to just because i was then in this other meeting so just just throwing that out there okay and are you sure it's in person it says this year's delegate assembly scheduled virtually so i think the delegate assembly is virtual but i believe the conference is still being planned as in person i can remember correctly so um based on your recommendation i'm kind of thinking i would attend the first day myself um but others can attend and i don't have to be the delegate so if somebody wants to be the delegate they can and any of us can attend is that right yes anybody anybody on the board

147if they'd like to attend the conference one or two days and you're interested in doing that fran will register you okay yeah i really recommend that board members if you're able to make it if it works for your schedule there are some really great sessions and just being able to meet other school board members throughout the state is also helpful yeah and there's nice food they have lots of food okay what are the dates no good question and if this the dates um is are the the same since that the delegate thing was in um it's virtual so is that a different date then maybe because because you said and when you went there was a conflict because they were both in person happening at the same time yeah well um we'll get you a

148little bit more information sent out through email to the whole board i'll have um fran send that out tomorrow actually she's not here tomorrow we'll send it out monday yeah i know i put it on my calendar it's october 27th and 28th yes okay um i just didn't know about the virtual meeting date but it's probably in that letter you shared all right so i don't think we need to decide that tonight um anybody that wants to go let jeff know and um i'll plan to go the first day um assuming i have no conflicts um and if no if somebody else wants to go and be the delegate fine just let me know and if by default nobody else is there then i guess i'll do it if i'm there i also wonder um

149relatedly i mean so that there was like there was a regional meeting this evening for the msba and i'm wondering um you know the time that i've been on the board we haven't had anyone who's kind of been following along with those meetings as they're happening we've just been attending at the conference and i think it's worth considering whether we want to change that so like do you know what type of commitment that would be like offhand i'm not sure but i can reach out um i know um our regional representative from rsu5 mara pillberry i can pillsbury i can reach out to her so i guess somebody that wants to do that speak up i might be interested once i learn more about the commitment okay and i am also depending on yep this

150is a ridiculously nitpicky item is it msba or msma yes of course it is why wouldn't it be msma is the umbrella of msba and mssa which is the superintendent association they're both housed under the same umbrella um but both have different um obviously you know uh presidents and missions and so when we say the board delegate to the msma conference so so the delegate is just for the uh school boards association it does not involve the superintendent's association uh superintendents have their own you know issues that we deal with in our own conference day that we have we also attend these two days but we have a separate day just for superintendents i don't know that anyone is going to care but when we approve the minutes will that be reflected that it's msba

151versus msma i think um i may be the only person i will tell you it's interchangeable obviously because it's under the same umbrella so either way it won't just so if the person doesn't go to the wrong conference it won't change anything because it is the msma conference but it's the msba delegate assembly so that's the differentiation yeah and it looks like the virtual is saturday october 22nd so there isn't the overlap this year thank you yeah okay so anybody can go i guess just send an email to me and jeff and if you want to be the delegate we can work that out if there's more than one person um and then somebody wants to put some time into figuring out being the delegate for the year and what sort of commitment that would

152be you know we can work that out um that would be good i guess to get reports back on sort of that sort of thing stay connected to the state so okay any other thoughts on that before we move on okay so before we go into executive session last item here is board committee assignments you all have seen the drafts i've emailed with many of you and had discussions with many of you and during public comment went over some of that um do we want to discuss that more are there specifics i'm happy on your personal assignments to go through that you know um i don't feel like that's appropriate to do here but generally anything i have a general question bde which is what governs the board standing committees where in that does it

153address parent um committee assignments i don't believe it does publicly jeff no so those so that policy is just for board members right however it can be at the discretion of um the chair to appoint others to a committee so to serve on those it doesn't specifically say that but it doesn't say it doesn't okay yeah because i was i didn't see that yep it kind of seems like that's a returning topic it was the topic last year of who gets appointed to these ad hoc committees from the public so maybe that should be something on the policy committee to just have something clearer for everybody in the community to realize it's i would agree it just last year was the same topic that came up why does the chair get to choose this and

154the community doesn't have the involvement it came up again tonight so it just seems like if it's going to come up every year maybe we should create a little bit more structure around it to be clear so we can answer to the public and the chairs aren't put on the spot of their directive from a policy that's there well yeah um reducing ambiguity is obviously good and what we aim for in policies of course you know it's a double-edged sword you tighten things up too much and then you can't do anything but i i agree you know it would reduce everybody everybody knows what's going on and yeah because yeah there is a very clear statement that says the board chair will appoint members to a standing committee from among the membership of the board

155but it doesn't go beyond that i would have to say that past practice has been that there have been chairs who have appointed others to even standing committees but certainly ad hoc committees regular committees have had um different you know stakeholders on those committees again at the discretion of of the chair and it's been past practice to do that okay yeah i'm new so no i'm just well and some of it you know you read a policy it's like where is it but it's past practice it's been handled that way for years well and though the equity leadership steering committee also just had a little bit of a different you know it's origin story it was a little bit different too in the fact that it wasn't originally a board committee so when it was

156first developed it it wasn't chosen by by the board chair it was it was a joint effort in coming up with that that committee membership that being said now that it is under the board's control i think i would like to make a motion that the roster be amended so that um co-chairs for the committee are board members and i would recommend then that kim vine replaced tim valente for co-chair and i would also encourage us adding principal francis you know principal hoffman when he was here he was a really great addition to that committee and just knowing principal um you know that principal francis has an interest in um you know getting to into some of these other community building um and responding to the anti-semitism i think it'd be helpful to reach out

157i'm not going to accept that motion i think it conflicts with bde so i hear what you're saying but i think we'd have to rewrite that policy jeff where's the card on that um i mean i think we'd have to go and look and see if that that i mean i know anyone can make a motion um whether the motion would be able to carry and have to look at policy more in order to do that i mean the way the policy is written is the chair does a point okay further discussion on committees in general sorry you said what there's a conflict where was there conflict i believe that what the emotion that was just proposed conflicts with our own policies so i'm not going to accept that motion i i think that is

158the case that we as a board can't we can't approve the composition of a committee that's solely the discretion of the chair okay and a co-chair can be a non-board member we have precedent for that oh we do oh right thank you again i'm new okay other comments on committee assignments and i'm happy to have conversations on your personal assignment some of which i've already had um i think anne's idea is a good one so it's worth considering especially principal francis i think that makes a lot of sense uh where do we put him on he is on he's on policy policy which you know being that a lot of the issues that come up originally from the high school we thought that was good and um and i'd like a chance to talk to

159our administrators before we appoint them to committees because jeff should be on all committees because i did actually talk to um mr francis about that committee um and he had somebody else in mind that he thought would be great for the committee and jason and i talked earlier about that yeah you may have noticed there was one staff to be determined um and that was based on jeff having to have those conversations um i did speak specifically to mari who was on the previous committee and so did jeff so that is one administrator okay i have another item go ahead um so the um prince memorial library along with it's a joint effort with um uh one of the high school english teachers um has a race and equity book group that i've participated in

160although i have been i've been somewhat of a dormant member over the last three months or so um it was me and jennifer stewart as part of the board participated in it uh it's a phenomenal group uh and i you know jennifer's not on the board anymore so if people are interested uh in participating that it's basically a book is chosen each month and there's a wonderful discussion with people from the communities usually about anywhere between 10 and sometimes 20 but mostly around 10 10 to 15 are on those discussions it's usually virtual uh no way not usually it's always virtual at least so uh i just wanted to raise that up the first meeting is this coming wednesday which i again i can't make because i won't i'll be out of town um but

161just wanted to put that up out there folks in the community and if there are other board members who want to join tommy i know you've been part of it uh hopefully it wasn't just because your mom dragged you in and you're actually interested um yeah no it's really good work by kelly greenlee at the library jackie young at the high school just really excellent work thank you so who should they contact mike you have the information they can contact me okay yeah okay okay can i clarify jeff go ahead i just wanted to clarify the committee piece because i i just had a chance to look at your bylaws so i'll just read it and i think it's important for the board to just know this but um it's for other board committees it

162does this is the way your bylaws is worded the following other committees of the board are hereby authorized and members of the board shall be appointed by the board chair to these committees on an annual basis as needed other representation from the staff or community may be consented to by the board additional other communities can be added by the vote of the board but i think it implies that that comes from the the chair of the board and i know that this has come up in the past as vanessa you mentioned that this continues to come up and i think you know some clarification about appointments but just to make it clear by policy and by your bylaws all these appointments initiate from the board chair okay sorry i think when i had maybe reviewed

163that i wasn't reading it the same way so i just wanted to bring it up and jason i'm sorry i didn't have a chance to mention it beforehand i tried to get here sooner no problem kim go ahead i just had a question about the environmental committee do we need to approve that as a board so we've got a few things that we need to do obviously that doesn't exist yet um i'm sorry i'm pointing randomly um yeah i just think we could probably do that next meeting yeah i'm thinking maybe next meeting we can talk about that and also we need to sunset and have the discussion around the other two committees that we've discussed in the past we don't need to go through it right now um and i actually had a great

164conversation with mark segrest today and they have a climate action plan that cumberland has and i'm wondering you guys can chime in but i'm wondering about if we somehow maybe dovetail with that um instead of having our own committee i'm not sure no well so they have a they have i don't there's a there's the the climate action plan of the town that was spearheaded by the council and a couple members of the community danny gallaudet's uh been a big a leader in all that work danny presented to us about that um and i've also talked to him and he's presented and under other forms about that it's great and so the town of cumberland has a climate action plan it's not outstanding committee of sorts so i don't think it would work but but

165i think the work of the committee having its its vision and operations that reflect that plan because it's very good uh makes a lot of sense yeah okay and potentially like integrating community members having somebody from that committee uh from there is i guess there is a committee related to that maybe there's a climate action committee but having somebody who is from there as part of our committee could make sense but i don't know if we would want to i think we should have our own committee is what i'm trying to say okay um the purpose of mark reaching out to me uh was to talk about the new school building and he had recommended and send jeff and i that denny be on the new school building committee with is because he spends a

166lot of time is very passionate about the um the climate and environmental stuff and puts a lot of time into knowing the various grants and options that are out there so um you know i'm i've put him on the list and uh you know i don't know if that's phase one but certainly phase two maybe partly phase one as well um and so that was the purpose of his call mostly okay um anything else under communication that people want to bring up future topics for discussion or whatever this is our catch-all okay so i think liam had something so when are the committees made public um let's say early next week how's that um there are a couple things i'm waiting on for jeff there's one question outstanding um and then which are just a

167couple of tiny changes and then we'll make it final sound reasonable yeah we typically post our committees on the website typically what we do okay all right okay moving on uh so we've got to still have our executive session so i will entertain a motion for item 6e i make the motion that we enter executive session to discuss property acquisition pursuant to state statute mrsa 405 6d thank you second thank you mike okay discussion all in favor all opposed unanimous okay thank you where are we doing executive sessions over here um we're probably going to just stay here they're going to shut down yeah we're going to get rid of them or because are you guys going to shut down yes peripherally