MSAD #51 School Board Meeting Nov. 15, 2021

001we're live thank you welcome to the november 15 2021 board of directors meeting for msid51 we will start tonight with a good and healthy recognition um i've asked some other board members to share in recognition so it's not just me presenting these because i know everybody enjoys um participating in recognition so peter would you start us off well first of all congratulations to heather gagan heather has been named high school fiscal education teacher of the year by the maine association for health fiscal education recreation and dance heather has demonstrated a genuine commitment to improving the physical and emotional well-being of our students she has had an extensive understanding of the continuum of motor skill development and how to support all students with their personal progress heather successfully engages family and community partners and is willing

002to put forth the extra effort necessary to bring quality programming to our students she has recently developed several new curricular offerings that include unified in conjunction with our adapted pe program paddle and racket sports in collaboration with valhalla and lifelong lifeguarding co-taught with our aquatics director heather is also a national board certified physical educator representing a very small cohort of educators in our state to hold this certificate congratulations and well done heather we have a certificate for you all right i have the next all right thank you peter so second we have congratulations to becky bellmore for being selected the maine association of health physical education recreation and dance otherwise known as map herd there's so many um acronyms 2021 distinguished distinguished leadership award becky is being recognized for her work as the adapted physical

003education representative on the map herd board of directors and as an active member of the main adapted physical education task force becky also served on the maine department of education health and physical education standards review committee congratulations [Applause] i have the next one don gray will be accepting the award for the 2021 u.s news and world report naming our ghs and gms 6-8 school number one school and main distinction the u.s news and world report reviewed 17 850 high schools in the us for the this year's 2021 rankings ghs was 490 in the us the ghs was number one in maine out of 126 high schools that were reviewed number one in maine for college readiness and curriculum breadth number two in maine for reading and math proficiency proficiency and 254th in u.s for reading

004and math proficiency which is a great for our teachers our administrators and the students so thank you for all that you do [Applause] and i am lucky enough to get to honor greeley middle school who is also ranked number one in the state of maine uh out of 209 middle schools reviewed by u.s news and world report in the state 122 000 in the u.s we are ranked number one in the state our reading and math proficiency scores at gms are at the top uh it's an incredible honor of being named the number one middle school in maine by u.s news and world in front and principal mari trebek is here to accept the word so congratulations [Applause] so as we mentioned last time we were together we wanted to put some real emphasis on

005our recognition and this was a great way to start so thank you for everybody for taking the time out of your evening to be here for us to recognize you and for all the hard work that you've done last year this year all the time so thank you again moving on to our next item we have an approval of minutes do i have a motion for november first so moved in the second second any discussion jason this one uh typo on 9e my last name does not have an s on it so you could amend that okay as amended second second thank you all in favor thank you okay then we'll move into public comment is there anyone here from the public that would like to speak this evening uh feel free to approach the

006podium good evening familiar face for you jason curry from the ms 8051 education association and also from here at the high school i wanted to give you an update on the progress of the debate team greely debate participated in a remote tournament on saturday this last saturday and we took first place in the congressional debate category congratulations go to madison dalton student member on the board and ruth weeks for their high ranking participation in the student senate and also to tucker norwood and meredith brubacher for their very high ranking participation in the student houses of representatives so greely debate plunges onward into our season and uh we we're looking forward to continuing to update you on us being a remarkable team in the state of maine thank you so much hello ron garco community member

007father of two young girls eighth grade and third grade um i didn't plan to come tonight but upon picking up my daughter at her girls basketball practice tonight i was greeted without with yet another example of the bigotry and the sexism that is rampant amongst msad 51 particularly with female student athletes it's disturbed me for years i've complained about it for years i've commented on it for years as others i know of other parents with student athletes that have been extremely close to filing title ix lawsuits against the school because of this and i got to be honest i'm getting really close myself even though i have a daughter that's only in eighth grade so it's pretty much getting to be the beginning of her career in high school or school athletics and it's already

008disturbing the trends and the things that we see she came out of practice tonight to let me know that the seventh grade boys had come in and they needed to leave practice because they needed the space for the gym and she said it's really odd but it seems incredibly sexist to me that the 7th grade boys and the 8th grade boys get to have their own gym times and home practice slots but the 7th grade girls and the 8th grade girls have to practice together this is just in part of a larger trend that's been going on for years within the high school and down through and i know i don't have time to go through all the examples tonight but i will make sure to return from time to time to follow up and

009make sure that things are actions are being taken to start to address some of these issues this is really these are things that are not hidden in our community it takes a simple walk into our high school gym in the middle of the basketball season to get a blatant example of how we feel about female athletes at this school when compared to their male counterparts it's shameful to me that any of you have not seen this have not taken the time to hold our administrative uh people here accountable for these things this is 2021. this is not 1980 this is not pre-title nine as i look at the board it's very diverse here and gender there's no excuse for this none whatsoever and i hope that we can start to move forward as community and

010treat our young women as they ought to be equal to their male counterparts thank you for your time thank you good evening my name is tara williams i'm the parent of two ms 80 51 students and the executive director of the maine association for the education of young children and i'm here in both those capacities this evening to speak in light of potential district initiatives around or for example the new primary school and potential oversight of special education for young children there are current early childhood opportunities and potential changes on the horizon school districts may be charged with governance of three and four-year-old special education in the near future school districts have already been asked to help expand publicly funded pre-k and can receive grants to partner with child care programs pending federal legislation could

011involve school districts being coordinators and fiscal agents of universal publicly funded preschool when it comes to general and special education for preschool there are four very important considerations to keep in mind number one during the first five years of life children's healthy development is inextricably linked to their secure attachments with adults our youngest children need consistency in their care and education to be able to learn with as few transitions as possible going every day between multiple settings is not just less than ideal it is actually or can actually be detrimental to their learning and development number two parents should be part of the process in deciding the best environment for their children's preschool education and care including where they may receive special education services some young children benefit most from smaller family child care programs

012some thrive in child care centers and some may learn best in an elementary school classroom number three every community in maine has established places who have been educating and caring for preschool children for decades who are the professionals and places of expertise in their town and who should be partners in early childhood decisions that take place and number four through no fault of their own most school districts lack anyone in leadership or on their board with a background in early childhood education this has not been the purview of public schools and therefore it was not needed before but it is now so please make it a priority to hire or consult with someone with experience in training in early childhood education when you are making decisions that affect young children and families not one of

013the current or potential changes are directing school districts in maine to serve all three and four-year-olds in-house instead our district is being asked to become an early childhood leader this means understanding that many children will thrive when services and preschool programming comes to where they already are during the day early childhood leadership is community leadership and so it will take innovation and new ways of thinking to excel in early childhood systems is to be able to coordinate services among many partners and locations and to collaborate more deeply with families and i believe that msad 51 is up to the task and can be known for excellence in early childhood just as we are in secondary education so thank you all for your hard work and thank you for listening thank you i have a quick

014question if we have written public comment like i wrote tonight what is the best way to have that be part of the record of the meeting or the minutes you can email it to me and i can distribute it that way okay thank you very much is there anyone else from the public that would like to speak this evening good evening hannah berry here resident of cumberland good to see you all again i haven't been able to make it to as many meetings as i was like to but today i made it a priority i left everyone home said fend for yourself in normal fashion i do not write my words down ahead of time i speak best just kind of letting you hear my words as they come and um first and foremost the

015number one thing on my mind was the email today declaring that we're going to get two snow days but not the rest so i'm just praying we only get two snow storms because i don't want to be there for that third one i i value tremendously the work that our district is doing i value public education tremendously unfortunately my experience the last two years as a citizen and a taxpayer has not been super positive i've got a lot of kids in the district three one i have pulled already because his needs were not being met and that was sort of a joint decision but the other three are still struggling and i just ask that when you think about your policies your programs and all the wonderful work that you do that you just think

016about being a kid and just not being on a screen all the time so all of the hours spent checking google classroom all of the time they just need a little bit more of a break and i say that after coming off of a four-day weekend but this morning they're all right back at it like just dialed in dialed in and they feel the pressure of the high performing district which i realize is important however i'm trying to stress to them the importance of a balanced lifestyle and that we do not all need to dial in and be so focused at such a young age i just feel like they're missing out on a lot of the joys of childhood and adolescence that being said transitioning to the items for action i was definitely overwhelmed

017here i would love to hear more about those tonight so i will hopefully stay as long as i can and lastly when it comes to the covid response i know we're doing great work trying to keep it out of the schools i just stress again that if we could try to normalize that we are going to be living with this for a long time forever and i think that some people's mental health might improve if we could just relax a little not about the specific policies we have to follow but just relax a little about the level of intensity at which it's discussed at school i just think it's starting to wear on the mental health of teenagers and the likes so um just that's all for tonight thank you for your work and enjoy

018your evening thank you anyone else like to speak okay so we move into communications we don't have anything listed here however i did want to make a mention that last week last tuesday evening our board here the town council of cumberland and the select board of north yarmouth including um town managers scott poulin superintendent jeff porter all met together and we had a meeting um that i think probably will be doing more often but talked about cumberland's comprehensive plan we talked about the school project we talked about ways that we can collaborate with our budget um just to increase our working relationship so that projects that are coming down the line especially with our new school that we have a better working relationship so i just wanted to share that it was a very positive

019meeting and i look forward to continuing those meetings soon um i believe that's all does anybody have anything go ahead jason um just very quickly i wanted to share with the board in our ever ending quest for equity in the district and all the various books that i've read i came across one recently it's a new release woke racism by john mcwhorter i encourage everybody to read it it it written by a black guy that shares the same concerns that i have about the approach that we are taking and potentially that they are not as helpful as we expect um so that's it woke racism can you say the author's last name again look racism john mcwhorter and to add on to that i uh some board members here have passed on other books that

020i am part way through and appreciate that and i'm only two thirds of the way through this one but thank you jason anyone else they have anything to share all right so we will then move into uh communications and we will first hear a presentation i'm sorry presentations and first here a presentation from the greely climate action team so you guys are welcome to head up to the podium and we'll be able to see your presentation here as well as slide changes uh what do you have it on your laptop dirk um i should you should be able to just present it right from your laptop and control it there you might just have to ask dark where you're connecting to it should be just airplane yeah [Music] yes tyler tyler while they're doing that

021uh can i just jump in because i think there is uh some just really good public comment on on everything we heard oh well first jason that's awesome about the debate team um second i think the the the point about pre-k i'm obviously biased um full transparency that's my significantly better half uh tara is uh but i think that's something that that issue is something we should take a lot of time and effort and look into how we're dealing with pre-k and not just regarding special education but the whole plan regarding that and so i think that's really good advice uh third um i agree with hannah about the screen time piece i think it's worth us giving some thought to how to lessen that and then fourth uh ron that was the first i've

022heard uh of a situation like that but i'm horrified and i would love to hear more and i think that's it that we should absolutely address an issue like that that sounds terrible so thank you for sharing that instance i sure do thank you mike all right i can see i think we're good go ahead guys all right um so we're a group of girly students we came together in february uh this year um we didn't really have a name we just knew that we um you know we want to take action towards the climate and whatever form that tick so uh for maine specifically we you know climate change is something we're constantly seeing um you know data supports that our state's temperature is rising pretty rapidly and it's something we should really get

023a handle on our golf is super in danger ocean acidification is rising at astronomical rates due to the carbon emissions and the gulf is getting a lot warmer mainstay weight annual temperature has increased 3.2 degrees since 1895 which doesn't seem like a lot but it really really takes a toll and uh climate models project that maine could warm an additional 2 to 10 degrees by 2100 everything from main ecosystems traditional main careers like lobstering and shellfishing increasingly threatened by this issue so the news has really never been grimmer [Music] and you know it was found by a you know recent survey by bbc news that nearly 60 of young people are regularly very worried and extremely worried about climate change and we conducted our own survey at the high school just about the level of

024concern regarding climate change and in our school from those who responded the majority of students are very concerned for our climate we expected this and we believe that you know climate change has a really very real effect on the mental well-being of an entire generation so you know being regularly subjected to predictions of the failure of our ecosystem and having you know very little ways as minors to cause any real change kind of takes a pretty huge toll so then from the data that we got from this other survey about how adults in the community are concerned many students felt as if adults were you know not as concerned about the crisis as as they themselves were and you know you could chalk it up to teenagers kind of disliking authority but we see it

025as a legitimate concern from our student body so uh matching this concern we come here today to just kind of make a couple requests for the board to consider so we read through the climate action plan i'm just kind of grasping the idea where the town intends to head in terms of sustainability this plan had some key data that is fully in favor of ms 8051 solar farm we know that ms-851 has agreed to go zero ghg by 2030 which is on page five of the climate action plan phase one the main question to this goal is being how on a survey on possible sustainable energy options seen here [Music] securing renewable energy sources for the community was the third ranked option with the highest percent extreme approval rating so although it is number three

026it is the highest majority of residents to strongly agree to any of the items hello as well as positive public support feedback from the student body was positive as well we know the town has recently undergone a street light change to led which received high public approval annual electricity consumption was reduced by 69 from 137 000 to 42 000 kilowatt hours annual ghg emissions will consequently be reduced by an estimated four percent of the total town and annual savings are expected to be around thirty four thousand five hundred dollars per year uh for a project payback period of 4.5 years this example of a successful sustainability-based change is exactly what we as a town would be aiming for with this solar fields transferring msad msad51 energy consumption into solar energy would not only contribute to

027a sustainable cumberland and address concerns about our rapidly changing climate but actually save money each year on electricity bills and be financially beneficial for our town if we use 2015 as a baseline msad51 would make up seven percent of cumberland's emissions however with the emma city 51's district expansions in recent years with the girly center for performing arts and most recently new classrooms for them for maybe wilson and the grilley middle school the district most likely holds a much larger percentage of cumberland's ghd emissions now amid new district developments along with the support of the public and much of our student body now would be the perfect time to incorporate a solar farm into your goal set when we went with bill shane back in may he told us how great of a success the

028solar field on drowned road was for our town not just from an environmental stance but from an energy and cost-saving stance as well he told us about the power purchase agreement that the town had set up and how it has saved our community money in the long run our request is that this board continues the work it has previously done in solarizing the msad51 campus there is no better time than the present especially considering the urgency of the climate crisis this action request on the screen is directly from an improved climate plan from our town all that we want you to do is to continue the work that was put on told mr porter has also made us aware the district is planning on purchasing 76 acres for development this could be considered as an

029option for a portion of the land used for the solar field clean energy and sustainable practices should be of importance in the construction and planning of the new buildings put in place here um our second request is we really want this board to commit to a climate resolution for our school system um some suggestions from us are um just kind of that that we'd love for the board to recognize that uh climate change is like a vital children children's issue climate change should be taught in schools from elementary through high school the board recognizes the root of climate change and their solutions the board has a responsibility to minimize district greenhouse gas emissions and demonstrate leadership the board has a responsibility to promote actionable solutions with salut with students and community members as partners um

030it's really imperative that future generations know as much as possible of this crisis if we want to do anything about it more people that pass legislation and create policies towards bettering our climate the better off we'll all be that's all we have for you today [Music] and if you want any of these sources or we found a great resource for a climate resolution we can send that over to you as well that's all we have for you today thank you for listening thank you so much i know you all have waited a long time to come so i really appreciate your patience but i do think that things happen for a reason i think your timing is is really great right now i want to open it up to the board jason anybody just go

031so then mike great job guys i share your concerns and i think it's well justified um i encourage you to reach out to the town council and the select board and do a similar presentation to them uh in the towns that's where potentially we could build policy that affects these things just last week um we put solar panels on my house and uh it's kind of the right thing to do but it's tremendously painful financially speaking um but uh great job guys and i encourage you to keep pushing the right message forward because you guys are certainly the ones that are going to feel it if we don't get this right good job thank you mike good morning thanks uh yeah i think um you know doing whatever we can to reduce climate change is

032great i also think that by incorporating it into the district uh you know it sets it sets a good tone it shows you know the upcoming upcoming adults how uh you know solar electric buses all these different things can be incorporated into life to help to reduce the role of climate change not to mention setting an example for surrounding communities yeah just echoing um i i deeply appreciate you using your voice you putting in the time and effort into building a presentation and and uh thinking it through and presenting to us um i think it's it's well-founded i completely agree with jason and avery i strongly support us not just exploring but actually completing a solar project uh as part of especially as part of our build out i you mentioned electric school buses there's

033more and more i would encourage you to keep thinking big and pushing us hard just again for transparency the issue of climate change is my professional work i've worked on it for 15 years and i will say if folks paid attention to what happened in glasgow the last two weeks the only reason why we got to a point where we are and it's not perfect is because of young people standing up and saying not enough not enough not enough um and so i really appreciate you doing that and i hope you'll continue yes anyone else like to say something i just want to say it's hard to go after all that i agree with whatever everyone has said and i know you've been working on this like i said for a while i appreciate that

034you were able to connect with those at the cumberland climate action team as well and danny galda i know that you have probably been in touch with these folks as well so thank you i want to say that thank you for holding us accountable and also giving real easy examples i thought the example that you gave of the street lights and how easy that was to understand those simple actions make a big impact so like mike said keep pushing us keep holding us accountable and i know that there's been a couple of times where i've been able to meet with you to talk about what would be helpful i know mike is still available for that support so please don't hesitate to reach out and keep doing this so thank you so much thank you

035[Applause] all right and now for our next presentation we have a greely ghost green update you know i just want to thank the students who came to present tonight i had a chance to um also with mr scott and the students and i think it was mr shelve last spring go down to the solar farm it was really an interesting visit and to actually visit us a solar farm in um and to you know listen to the questions that were being asked i think obviously people young people have way better sense about this than than we do and a lot more information and i i do think it's something that should be seriously considered as we're looking at a new building project in this district i would suggest that we hook the architects up with

036you know you you folks and um and really get some more information and get information to the architects about what this could look like i think it's a very worthy very worthy cause and we certainly should be moving in that direction so tonight i get to update you again on the grilli goes green plan as we i have since the beginning of the school year i won't go through some of these slides these are just routine reminders that we have many mitigation strategies that we have in place in the district and that we use a lot of data and metrics when this update is put together every two to four weeks depending on the board meeting so this is all the data and metrics that we are using for these updates we have 20 people

037who are on the greely goes green think tank which is the advisory group we have almost 100 attendance at our meetings um and i just want to thank this advisory group for all of its uh great work i mean these are really high level deep discussions about topics that are of um importance to many people so for november 15th the update and i haven't put out they don't all the updates that i've done do not fit on this chart so you only see three at this point but the latest november 15th there's been no change in state guidance since the beginning of the school year we've been told there might be new state guidance coming out midway through the school year at this point cumberland county transmission is still high that has not changed since

038the beginning of the school year so that's one of our data points we have 34 uh covent cases that are either active or are archived at this point in our district which is more than double the last time i provide an update which was on october 18th about a month ago we have more than triple the number of individuals exposed as a close contact or were tested positive for covid however i think the really good news is and this is something the one of the doctors on our advisory group highlighted for us at our meeting is that the numbers are going in the right direction for our school community and that is even though the numbers of exposed people is up the number of individuals being quarantined the percentage is actually going down and if

039you look at 36 percent of those individuals who are quarantined versus exposure on october 18th versus 21 percent now and that really has a lot to do with vaccination status pool testing and now that we know that younger students will start getting back or have started getting vaccinated once they're fully vaccinated i assume this number will even go down more but it's just a testament to a lot of different things that are going on and that are giving us options so that students are not out of school as frequently as they could be if there were close contacts our pool testing enrollment has been climbing since the time that we introduced pool testing back in mid-september so it's gone from 43 in mid-september to 60 percent now we have 60 percent of our students across

040the district who are now enrolled in full testing and we have not increased any positive pools since the last update so we're still at three positive pools that have come back since we started pull testing that means that we do not we're not detecting through our testing any new cases of covin but the three that we did detect we're able to do the secondary testing and make sure that we were identifying anyone that was positive and then and taking precautions with the other students so that's been helpful so our monthly comparisons these are the monthly updates that we give the department of education for staff our staff vaccination rates which are required by by the state now to to report each month at the beginning of the month you can see that the percentages in

041all of the areas have inched up slightly since my last update or at least since october 1st so we report those at the first of the month so those percentages have all been steadily increasing the number of staff or vaccinated in our district student vaccination data has also been going up you can see it's a market increase at the 6 8 level we're just getting a lot more families providing that information to us so we have 81 percent of our students now in six eight uh who are eligible to be uh vaccinated now uh have now given us documentation that they are and at the high school um again i think 61 is low i think it's higher than 61 percent however um that's the amount of documentation that we have right now from families

042at 61 but again both are up from from last time so recommended adjustments these are recommended adjustments based on the advisory group and i did take their advice in all these areas setting data benchmarks so that really has to do with saying if there's a percentage for example of students who are vaccinated or staff that are vaccinated or a combination thereof should we be relaxing certain standards and the advisory group is saying no not at this time for a variety of reasons removing the masking mandate and requirement at any of the levels again the advisor group is not recommending and i'm not recommending that tonight parent volunteers that topic came up at the meeting this we do have parent volunteers who are able to come in outside and work with classes so the idea of

043parent volunteers coming indoors um the topic was brought up there was a lot of discussion about this particular topic the group advised that we revisit this in january get some teacher input and bring this back and put it on the agenda capacity limits for athletics and for the art center it's right now at 50 percent capacity um as we go into the winter season which is about 600 people that would be in our gyms and in this room it'd be about 250 people for seating capacity um the advisor group advised that we start with these percentages and then we can reassess if they need to adjust upwards and look at those capacity limits again so i'm also recommending that these are administrative adjustments that were not brought to the advisory group and were just adjustments

044that i made in concert with other administrators music concerts and drama productions um the advisory group had said it at 25 was their advice i upped it to 50 after the meeting um because 25 was not bringing was probably not going to provide the uh the audience um it was it's really not necessary to keep it that low so i put it up at 50 and again i just talked about bringing that back to the advisory group which they asked that it stay at 50 percent now in advise that we do that reviewing the procedure to require a doctor's note for return to school after being symptomatic so most people know that we have added the negative pcr test as an option instead of going through a your children's physician it can be one or

045the other it doesn't have to be just a doctor's note anymore if that doesn't work and student teachers coming back in classrooms that change was made also back in october we're now we'll be bringing student teachers back into classrooms starting at the mid-year mark and we're treating student teachers as basically as staff members so we'll be checking to make sure that they are complying with all of our other procedures so the summary is that both student and staff vaccination rates have increased over the last month since my last update pooled testing participation has increased from 54 to 60 percent over the last month i want to thank all of our families who are participating in that that is a an added layer and it's peace of mind for families it's peace of mind for the

046school community it's certainly private discussion with families as to whether or not they want their children enrolled in pool testing i would just encourage parents of younger students who are getting their children vaccinated that full testing shouldn't be one or the other should be both and that's something that will encourage families to continue enrolling their children if they so wish to do so reported covet cases have more than doubled during the last month as i mentioned earlier and even though we have more more than triple the people who are exposed to covid the number of uh quarantines the percentage of quarantines has been dropping which is exactly the direction we wanted to see so that's good that means we're keeping fewer kids out who are exposed for quarantines and that's that's exactly what the point

047of all this is keeping kids in school the advisor group is largely advised to stay the course for now again these updates come frequently and we'll be i'll be updating you again not very long from now and the continue messaging the importance of pool testing as i as i just mentioned the advisor group gave three bullets of advice to families if they wanted to participate continue participating and knowing that it helps the collective safety of our school community the value comes from increased numbers and pool testing and that it's a weekly kind of peace of mind for families classrooms and the school community staying current we have an faq just reminding people we have an faq on our website we have a new website just changed over a week ago but all this information is

048now right on the front and you can click right at the top of the website and that information will pop right up and the entire unabridged version of the greely ghost green plan which is the plan that's keeping us on the right track this year and continues to be updated is also linked there and it's on our website the next advisory group meeting they meet on december 14th and then i'll have my next ggd update on the 20th of december so that's the update for this meeting thank you jeff um open it up to the board for questions or any discussion jason nope tom so jeff i was wondering if there's an explanation for why we've had such a steep increase in the vaccination rate at middle school six or eight and we haven't seen

049a similar increase at the high school i really think it probably just has to do with documentation and people getting that documentation to us um i i can't think of another reason why that's that's happening um sixth graders obviously are kind of more in the group with the younger kids 5 to 11. so that might have increased a little bit but we haven't had fully vaccinated 11 year olds it might be kids that have turned you know 12 during a period of time but it might have gotten fully vaccinated but i don't think that would account for that that percentage to change that much i think it's just families giving us that documentation i really think that's it and with the advisory group has there been any discussion about how to incentivize that particularly with

050high school we did discuss it very briefly i believe at our last meeting but there wasn't any real resolution on that except to try to get more kids to give us the information the problem with the survey putting a survey out is that we already have students that have given us that stuff we'll get duplicates of it again and we're really looking for again that documentation some districts put a survey out students and staff and then just take that information and that's what they're reporting we've never done that a lot of districts don't do that either um and we're actually saying please upload you know your documentation so we know that it's it's actual that we've got it thanks jennifer um thank you jeff for your update my question is around the pcr testing and

051what i've heard lately from friends of mine is that it has a it's a um has been increasing in time and kids have been out of school that are not sick for a large amount of time i would hope that our technology investment that we made last year that kids are able to live stream their classes if they're out for four or five days because of this because they have a sore throat or or things like that and i think that i'm not sure how the better way of it is is that but you're going to have kids that are going to school sick and then leaving and then other kids that are saying that they're sick and then have to miss a whole week of school you know it's taking at least one to

052two days to get the test and then it's taking three days to get the results and if you hit it on a monday then your the week is gone and all this classroom time is so valuable to our students i would say i was gonna say especially the high school but really for anyone and we have so much technology that it should be seamless that they can just jump in and i hope that there's some focus to that especially as we go into the winter and there's going to be more colds and i think we want to encourage people to stay home if they do have a little bit of a cold and not just go and say they're fine behind the mask and this kind of in between is really kind of making kids

053kind of separate into groups or i'm not really sure where what that is but we need to kind of clarify that if we're going to stick to our guns on the pcr test if there's a quicker test that we can do and we're fine with that or some sort of documentation with it i mean as we all know we go through a winter we all have a runny nose and a sore throat every day so so i hope that especially the technology these kids need to be engaged especially if they're i had a friend that their her son was really just fine and he could have been doing schoolwork and he couldn't come to school so thank you jennifer jason um so when we get to the action items later on i'll be asking again

054to split out the mask portion and to move the verbiage to recommended and not mandated but that's a little ways away as far as the cases and exposure numbers we have no ability jeff to get hospitalization numbers is that right for our students you mean for our specific students yes i don't know how i can ask the nurses or our physician but i don't believe we would be able to have access to that unless families gave us that information i would find that much more useful than cases and exposures which to me are well less useful um as far as benchmarks go i would encourage the advisory group to come up with benchmarks so that we don't just keep moving the goal posts i mean they their advice or their recommendation was to not set

055benchmarks but that doesn't move us forward i mean we've got to have a finish line here at some point that if we get to this spot we can move towards normalcy so i'd ask you to push the group towards that um what would uh warrant a change in the event capacity so you changed it from 25 to 50 percent what was that based on and how would it change off from that 50 mark what would determine that yeah the the 25 part of it i'll be honest with you i met with the the music teachers in the district and um you know they had told me that 25 what 25 really means for people coming in to watch a concert was very low numbers and the fact that we have a huge room that has

056um appropriate hpac and air filtering and that there's a lot of venues that we're using far more capacity in uh even for people that are not regularly in this in the space or in our schools so the other thing is i just checked in with other districts and quite frankly what are they doing and they were all at you know 50 or more for capacity and um you know looking at the space that we had um for you know whether it's the gym or the gca it just made sense to increase it seemed like too low we had gone a little bit too low on that one so i just made an adjustment but going beyond 50 i felt like i needed a little bit more advice on that one we are we are starting

057the winter season um and we've already started the concert season um we had a concert rate what was it last week and then we'll have many concerts coming up in the next month um so if we're going to increase you know the percentage i'd like to make sure that we we do that in a way that makes sense um you know that i think that the music teachers right now have adjusted their concerts so they have smaller venues of kids um so instead of putting the band and the choral concert groups together they're separating them so they have fewer kids which means fewer people coming to watch which makes sense for the schedule going up to the holidays for athletics um you know 50 is still you know 600 people in a gym of you

058know they can see 1200 um i most of our events do not have that many but as we go into the season and certainly um there's certain programs like basketball which will draw you know at least that many and usually more usually a lot more so the other piece is the mpa has once again weighed in on this and just this week um or today i should say the mpa has signaled they might be giving some decision on this um i i'm interested in hearing more voices on the capacity limits and what makes sense i think it's going to be very difficult and challenging at an athletic event to you know say to people i'm sorry we've got 600 people in here we need to shut the door it's easier in this space but i

059also want to be consistent so if we if you know we're having trouble with the athletic area we shouldn't be limiting in the art center either for concerts or any other events that occur in here so i think um i'm kind of at a crossroads in my own mind about capacity limits and you know is this an opportunity in the next couple weeks to to either stay at 50 or start inching that up more you know i'm keeping an open mind and i going to keep using the advisor group for that purpose too i'd uh encourage you to draw up benchmarks now that maybe if we get to this point that we could do that and um if you just look at as a from a seating standpoint every other every other seat of course

060that's 50 but then you've got family units that come in that are sitting together so i would think it would be reasonable that we could get to 60 or 70 percent and that would be pretty easy to figure out i would think yeah one other district that um i was looking at they did do a limitation of four seats per family unit and then there had to be a seat between a family unit and the next family unit either behind or beside or however it worked with the aisles so there was an actual percentage it was based on look at the number of seats every every student gets four seats that was just how they determined it and then there had to be a seat between and that's how they they came up with the

061math so yeah um that just means that you know set limits she looks at the number of kids that you've got in that concert and then however many family members you can bring in in the space that you've got so that might be another way that we we can approach this yep well i think that would be easy to lay out in that fashion maximum number of people together a space maximum number of people together yeah i would push for that anything to get back towards normalcy um i had a family reach out to me frustrated with their situation recently with the quarantines and their kid specifically has asthma which creates an issue where they know it's just asthma symptoms but they're trying to be good citizens and follow the rules and so they go

062down this list and now they've got to keep the kid home they know it's not covid but they have to keep kid home and then they have to get a doctor's note or they have to get a pcr test so now i guess you don't need a doctor's note you can just have a pcr test but their complaint about that was that it was two or three or four days to get that result so i would ask can we accept the binax test so that kids like that can get back to school quick quicker so dr shaw who met with superintendents two weeks ago we asked we at there was a question asked exactly that question can you can we accept a buy next antigen test can we accept home tests the answer was no

063you shouldn't be accepting either and so that's the advice that we have continued to go on in our district we checked with yarmouth that's this we're doing exactly what they're doing right now i believe falmouth is doing exactly what we're doing too i think we're all doing the same thing which is either doctor's note or pcr we were off by not allowing the pcr option um and so i think we need to get back you know kind of get into line with other districts and how they were doing that i think um i don't know i i don't want to comment on that particular family but in a situation where there's a chronic medical issue we know where it's coming from i would hope that the family would work with the school nurse to get

064a doctor's note that's on file saying look in the doctor's office is working with the school nurse saying look this is a chronic condition and you shouldn't have to get a test every time again not knowing the specifics of this particular case but i think that makes sense to me if we already know that there's a condition i'll forward it to you as you can imagine they reached out to me because they were frustrated so i will i'll pass it on to you just a couple more things i did hear from the advisory group and the nurses in there that of all the pulled testing that we've done hundreds of polls we've only had three positive tests come out of that so you made the point of peace of mind which of course peace of

065mind is important that's a big part of what's going on here but i think it's just sort of interesting to note that all the efforts and all the angst and everything we're going through has only resulted in three positive tests and then not to put you on the spot i know we've discussed this over email but could you reiterate what the expectation is as far as teachers in the classroom and their um rights if you will to ask students about their vaccination status or their intent to get vaccinated yep nobody should be asking a student's vaccination status or a staff members vaccination status that's private information um the only time that it comes into play is if we have that information from families and it's the school nurse working through close contacts and we have

066that information on file and then a nurse can also check the registry if needed to make sure we're not quarantining kids unnecessarily but that's the only time that any vaccinations should be or vaccination status should be discussed and that's a private matter between you know the nurse and the family and making sure that we're not quarantining kids but for teachers or staff members to ask students or ask each other who's vaccinated we can't do that good thank you that's it thank you jason mike yeah i'm harping on one point just a little bit i and i i don't claim to know more than the main cdc but i hope that maybe by january so that um once kids are vaccinated that if there's if if a kid is vaccinated and then a vaccination plus a

067binax test plus a mask hopefully that can mean that they're in school um that really should be the case i mentioned glasgow before is the global climate conference i have a number of colleagues who were there there was more than 10 000 people they were doing daily tests every day and so if it works there we should hopefully start to move to a process like that for here so we can keep as many kids as possible in school and not have to go through the process of a pcr test yeah i personally don't disagree i think a binax test is acceptable in my mind however i'm not the one setting the standard operating procedure for the state which is what we operate off of and we were told by dr shaw though two weeks ago

068at this meeting that we had that there will be updates to the sop standard operating procedure mid-year he said they will be favorable for people so that we're keeping more people in school so i'm hoping that that changes i i am but i am not the person to make that change or to recommend it well when you have an audience with dr shaw again you can share that members of your community are pushing and making these he did hear that from yeah from many people actually he's aware of it anyone else have any comments coming thank you um i appreciate the update jeff a couple of things you know i am happy at the outcome that we were targeting which was to have people in the classroom in the gym in the theater fields and

069of course most importantly the pool a number of different places um and and we've been we've been doing that i um i think jennifer made a great point in using the technology that we spent so much for if we have instances where people are are out if they're quarantining or really any other reason that ability to use the technology that we have to stream really does give us a a competitive advantage and certainly the family's an advantage um you know as much as i look at these numbers and and i i guess i have the chicken and egg thing based on something that jason said talking about you know we spent a lot of time looking for three people within the pools and i think that the protective measures that we try to put in

070place and the awareness may keep us at three and we confirm that so i i see it as uh yeah we spent a lot to find three people but maybe our practices are giving us only three people so i really see that bifurcated um a question for you though so i can stop rambling our authority versus does authority versus main cdc's authority to do what we want in this district if if we removed all guidelines as a board and said tomorrow nobody wears any masks and we're at 100 capacity what would happen to us that that is the question that i think has been asked a hundred times since this whole thing started honestly is where does our you know ability end to you know where's the board ability to kind of set those parameters

071where does the state come in and and whatnot so that can that's always that's been moving for two years and that's been a contentious item for two years the standard operating procedure sop where we're expected to follow it um we can follow it more strictly than the then it's that it's in place and that comes from the main cdc and the main department of education then gives it to us through them which means we have to adhere to it masks are recommended so a board in maine can say no masks that's that's totally fine that's not in the sop as a requirement okay the way that we um close contact trace and quarantine that is not something that we have the ability to set here there was some leniency with the pcr test and so

072we were a little bit stricter than the sop in that area so we just we're basically in alignment now with the sop okay is the health team unanimous in their decisions no and and the advisory group um is not is not really voting on any of this they're advising okay and often on topics they're discussing there's a lot of discussion um and then there's some sort of a you know a general summary or feeling from the group this is the advice that we're giving and that's the advice that i take forward so i wouldn't say it's unanimous has the group ever wavered one way or the other on making masks optional i wouldn't say they've wavered the only place that they might have thought of or questioned it is at the high school level but

073that was closer to the beginning of the year that came up and that was an area where there was more discussion you know if students are vaccinated fully vaccinated and there's a percentage of kids that are fully vaccinated shouldn't we be advising that some measures like masking could be removed and i will say that we have what four medical doctors on the group none of them thought that was a good idea at this point considering the community transmission that hasn't gone from high to to even moderate and during this time um and then the other you know areas such as uh transmission cases that we've got in our district all the data points but the community transmission is the one i kept hearing you can't isolate a school community from the entire community okay but

074no i that's the only area that was there was some gray or some discussion i should say that that piece just just the the last thing is looking in areas in districts around us where some recently have been at that point where they've had to go back to virtual and i know none of us want to be there um that's the only thing i i always knew i always knew growing up and probably similar to many of us on here that when you deviate from that path that made sense that was when you were going to get into trouble and if our outcome because i always did if our outcome is to keep people here if that's what we're driving toward i i think that we have to can continue to look at all those

075things that give us an advantage but and the soonest that we can and as soon as that you can get a recommendation i think optional in in the schools where people are able to be vaccinated has to be paramount to the effort i agree and um it is hard i mean every meeting to come and say look we're not we're going to be wearing masks until the next update or what or whatnot or it's a recommendation coming out of it i think we all want to you know that's like the first thing i think people want to get off their faces or the mass all day and you know and i think many of us thought by now you know this might have been a possibility um but i i agree with you kevin completely

076that you know we are seeing schools where they're deviating from the script in whatever way there was a school in maine that you know that is shut down right now or a district that shut down they're not doing pool tests they have no alternative mitigation measures that they can go to so whenever they're you know kids are quarantined in large groups um and thankfully we have not for the most part had to do that you know we'll have you know we had a case at gms what two weeks ago 88 students were closed contacts and i think we only quarantined there's less than five students at the end of the day so i think those are those are the things that we've been trying to put in place to reduce you know the likelihood that

077kids are going to be out of school because of some exposure in school so this is this is a different year than last year in that case i i want to be careful you know that we're not just taking things away but there's also a long list of things that i could also remind the board and the public of that we've moved ahead with and made changes since the beginning of the school year so there have been a lot of things that we've you know we started the school year off saying no we're not going to do that yet and there's about 10 things now that we've relaxed and opened up since then and i think um so i feel like we're moving in that and maybe i need to recap that more or talk

078about that more in these updates think you know just kind of add it to the list of things that we keep moving ahead with because there's a lot more than just the masking but i i do understand your point peter jason so i'm sorry peter peter sorry uh just a couple things uh just as long as the reported high school rate is 61 and it may be more i don't have any warm fuzzy feeling about doing anything about mass especially i know in cumberland county vaccination rates are up but still people are traveling around the state state cases continue to go up and and until the parents start reporting accurate vaccination things i'll continue to say it's totally irresponsible for the board to do anything on the maskings now to follow up on jason's thing

079on the on benchmarks i mean this stuff ain't rocket science i i would imagine that uh within other school districts either in maine or around the country that there's probably a combination of vaccination rate positivity rate within the community and two or three other factors and so i would imagine that there there are benchmarks out there already that are people are using so this isn't something where we've got to get the mayo clinic or mass general hospital to come up with this stuff but it's got to be out there somewhere so i think we can i i think by december somebody needs to do some research uh so that we have some statistics as to what those standards could be because i don't want to see the can kick down either nor nor the parents

080so we've we do need to start getting off the dime on what the standards are i i will bring i have heard that a couple times now so i'm going to make sure that it's that we there are you know some criteria or benchmarks that are developed by the advisory group even if they're not implemented at least they can be developed if i can just say one thing jason then i'll hand it over to you but in regards to what you're saying um peter about benchmarks it was kind of i was kind of thinking the same thing in our last advisory meeting and one of the first benchmarks whether we want to call it or not is community transmission and that really is our first benchmark and knowing that that has not changed if anything

081that's gotten worse that i mean we can all say it's not a benchmark but it is and i think vaccination rates are also a benchmark right um and so i think we need to just work with the advisory team on figuring out a better way to present those because we know we're all looking at those um every time we revisit this uh jason so to that point vaccination rates are going up and community transmissions going up is that right in general correct i know that makes no logical sense i could see it in your eyes but um that's that's the information i read as well yeah um so there is one one place still the mass where we're more restrictive than the state right we say mandated than the state says recommended so what would

082happen technically speaking if we changed that to a recommendation not a mandate how would that change that is completely up to the board to to make that decision if that's what you choose to do there's there is no i mean there's nothing that says you can't i mean of course we can't tell people not to wear a mask but my suspicion is more than half the high school would still be masked and it might be a good test to see what happens because to avery's point from a couple weeks ago the kids are together outside of school always anyway i don't think it's going to move the numbers so to move things towards normalcy is what i would advocate for and then why aren't we voting on the recommendation of the ggg plan should we

083not be doing that each time you know that's a good point that really should have been um that really should have been on here and i just i had thought of that too while we were going through this um the board can add that to it it should be on every agenda i apologize it's not i mean there's so many from policy that i am feeling if there's no changes just fell through the cracks but yeah thank you i wanted to just add to jennifer's point that i feel like i didn't add to earlier about the technology i am going to bring this up to the leadership team because we do have teachers that are using whether it's live streaming equipment or they're using their computer and there's a student that's out and they're getting

084the student into the classroom we do have teachers that are doing that we also have teachers that aren't so i'd like to talk about a little more consistency because you're right we're going to have more and more students that are out for just illness and how are we going to handle that our red plan addresses a lot of that but it doesn't really talk about the technology using technology consistently and i think with that jeff is that students are still having a really hard time hearing the teachers through the mass and i'm not sure that i think we've lost our way in making sure that it's still projecting and that kids can hear them in the classroom and i've heard a lot of feedback that it's i don't know if avery wants to speak to

085that that it's very difficult for kids to to follow along and to be engaged during the so whether it's live streaming so they can see it that way or i know last year they were wearing a mic but i really think that we should focus on that too go ahead avery yeah so um my thoughts on it is if there are you know any mask restrictions to come off first then it should be the teachers make it optional for the teachers especially with things like spanish or french there's a lot of pronunciation that goes on when speaking a different language and there's a lot that you gain from seeing someone's mouth and you know even in other classes like social studies or like math there's a lot that you take from someone's face and i

086think it would be very beneficial to look at making masking optional for teachers thank you um i see mr curry's at the podium did you want to share something thank you i i know this isn't public comment uh and i appreciate your recognition here i do want to make two brief points number one i would like to remind the district that you are employers and the responsibility for the health and safety and welfare of your employees is a paramount duty and obligation that you have and i have to say that teachers in our 50s which i qualify for now teachers in our 60s which one of my very best friends at the high school qualifies for are at higher risk uh especially if students are suddenly optional with masking at the high school the the

087risks involved it almost seems like you're just rolling the dice with the health and welfare of the employees at that point i would seriously caution you regarding that and i know hundreds of employees would as well also my my second point is that if masking is optional at the high school for students i would remind you i teach psychology at the high school and one of the things that that's uh fairly recent over the last 30 years or so development in our studies of the human brain is that the human brain doesn't fully really understand the consequences of an individual's actions until it's fully developed in its twenties a person doesn't understand until they're 24 25 26 depending on the individual the full implications of a lot of their actions and masking could be a

088really great example of someone that we feel looks like an adult but doesn't really understand the consequences of of having the option and choosing not to be masked at school even if they're vaccinated we know that vaccination while it really limits the um harshest effects and limits the mortality rate it does it isn't a complete immunity to getting covid and so if we allow students to to have the discretion to be masked or not they can still spread covid kofit can still go all throughout as we can see from rates going up at the same time that vaccinations going up it's not a complete immunity to getting covet it's simply a decrease in the likelihood of of being on ventilators being on on life support and of dying of it so two factors to consider

089perhaps thank you thank you vanessa i would be a mess if i did not mention this but volunteers in the classroom if we can come up with a creative way like just the students parents in that classroom to volunteer in the classroom so they're not bouncing around something like that to move that timeline a little bit earlier i think the next meeting was june december 14th and just like a yes volunteers can go back in the classroom as jeff and i heard today from our community partners the pto and foundation 51 they're really wanting to get back in the classroom to volunteer and i know we're opening up the gym the art museum but i feel like this is a piece that's kind of getting dropped and not paid as much attention as it should

090and i am passionate about volunteering but i think it's something that brings the community a little bit closer together in that so we had a really good conversation about volunteering and um one of the things that came up during that is is the the different ways that um educators use volunteers and so there may be uh some classes that use them and there be maybe some that don't and so one of the things that came up was was that another thing that came up was the concern of managing volunteers and who was going to do that um knowing that everybody's a little spent and taxed for their time and then the other was um just kind of the concern of health and safety and what that feels like for our staff so it was um

091definitely a good conversation i know it's kind of like we could use them last week but there's a lot of pieces to it that i think came up and also having our teachers part of the conversation to figure out what the best places and it was really focused on miw yeah and i understand that and i just feel like um we're opening up the art center we're opening up the basketball courts teacher everyone's going out going to dinners we're getting back to normal but we're not able to go into a classroom where a teacher may need just one parent and i'm sure a volunteer would be easily say i'm vaccinated so i just think the fear it it just it's a disconnect we're going to open up this to 50 we're going to open up

092the basketball court we can't open up volunteers like there's a huge disconnect here yeah i think i think one of the good things about having these updates regularly is that this all this discussion is happening um all the time now you know we've talked about all these topics openly and in public i think volunteers is one that we can solve um and i think it's one that we can bring back volunteers i just um i don't think we're quite there yet but i do believe we can do that um you know you know and not very long from now we do want it like tyler mentioned one of the big things out of the advisor group i think it was number one really was let's let's hear from the teachers first let's let's find out

093what they really would like and what they need right now in the classroom um you know and you know in any typical year forget the pandemic there are teachers that you know have many volunteers in their room at the elementary level other teachers that don't you know have as much need for a volunteer in their classroom for whatever reason they just have a different style or whatnot so it just depends depends on the year sometimes a group of kids or whatnot so okay but it is definitely on the advisory groups list so of things to keep dealing with the other question i had um before we move on unless anybody else has anything else they'd like to share okay is when will we start um asking for uh vaccination information for five to 11 year

094olds um we are we already um actually we actually got an inquiry i think last week about um from parents you know when are you going to get that information but i'll make sure that we start talking about that more formally yeah i would assume um the same ways that we've been asking for the higher grades we would be doing the same and hopefully within our next update we would have some information on our younger younger students vaccination rates good point related to that the clinic happening wednesday very excited for that uh i waited till my kids left to say that um are you going to be collecting data from that just directly like this person got vaccinated check we have that um yeah we did we did that last year too when we held

095our own clinic problem is that majority of the students will not get their vaccinations from us they've we actually had some sign up and they they got their first um shot somewhere else at their doctor's office walgreens wherever so it doesn't give us really al the full information we just need to ask families to get it but we definitely use the clinic data and then we go from there that's what we did last year yeah okay thank you everybody for the discussion again we will talk about this every meeting but for now we will move on so jeff again uh north yarmouth property introduction before we move into our workshop so this will be a briefer i think discussion um this is just introducing um you know the board um to the uh property that

096you are under option agreement at this point that you approved at the last meeting um and um you know we're talking about the um the idea of now two campuses and one school community people have asked us for the actual address we've had people emailing calling saying they want to eyeball it the address is 80 gray road in north yarmouth and that these pictures have all been taken by either myself or or others tyler took some pictures as well and so you see those in this presentation but again this is a fairly large piece of property this all aligns just as a reminder to the strategic plan believe it or not that thing is still around early childhood education the critical building block and this has been in the tickler for over three years now

097a strategic priority around making sure that our pre-k five facilities are the facilities that work best for our students and the long-term planning for our district and again just a reminder more than anything this is our enrollment trending and going all the way from 2009 when the first two studies were completed i'm showing a decrease in enrollment um to where you can see the enrollment starting to level off the actual enrollment which is the gray line and then the yellow line which is um the beginning of the project projections excuse me from 2016. those projections were updated in 2019 and i believe by the end of this week um again i've been communicating with rebecca weindel frequently in the last few days um who is doing our numbers and she did the original 2016 and

098the 2019 numbers as well she believes she can have us that data by the by the end of this week so i'll be able to hopefully share that as soon as i get it and again these are projections that were from the 2019 study which showed about 600 more students in the district enrolling in the district by the year 2029 so just a quick reminder we've gone through three iterations plan number one was the north yarmouth village plan from 2019 20. there were concerns about that site which was located behind the current north yarmouth community center about the proximity of the school to the aqueduct traffic congestion in the village center and then we also had that wonderful covid that hit just as we're kind of putting all the pieces together which ended up in

099a six-month kind of moratorium on the idea of pursuing anything based on covid and so plan number one was abandoned at that point phase two or plan two was the board as you know approved back in 2020 about a year ago two and a half acres of land abutting the campus that was under option agreement and just expired a few days ago but the biggest obstacle after design was created was the department of transportation told the town of cumberland that it would require a lot of infrastructure changes on main street and tuttle road those were things that we did not find out until after the design sometimes you don't know until after design is created what exactly is going to be the the issue um and so at the end of the day um these

100are things that could have been overcome the first plane we could have overcome working with the water district i believe that's my opinion but i think sometimes it's it's better things come along i guess we'll put it that way and so there was a lot of uphill concerns here enough to say is this worth it and you know the other big concern was expandability of this plan basically we're building out on the two and a half acres of land that would have been purchased under that option agreement and we wouldn't have had another place to go for expansion so introducing plan three which as you know the board you approved this at the last meeting an option agreement with ben grover at 80 gray road which is just under 77 acres [Music] so this is

101in the village center district in north yarmouth site distance is already fine on gray road in terms of traffic going in and out of the site scott poolen myself and basically the team from oak point the entire team from oak point we met with them what was it friday went out to the site met with them friday and walked up through the forest from the gray road all the way over the hill and down sounds like going to grandmother's house it was a nice little trek through the woods to see where the proposed road would go and it did make sense after looking at where the access road would go in there cost effective turning lanes a lot of the stuff is already in place where we've had concerns about congestion traffic coming in and

102out of a site a lot of these things had already been taken care of like to thank mr grover for having a lot of these tests and studies already completed by the time the option agreement was signed so additional soil tests are being completed right now but there are some initial soil tests that mr grover had completed three-phase power is very important natural gas transmission um that is in the works there's a meeting that i know is being held just to make sure that the natural gas transmission moves ahead more quickly and the water district the yarmouth water district is fully on board with this site in terms of serving the school and making sure that there's water that would be in play near the site so a lot of the things that we've run

103into in the past have already been reviewed and our architects are feeling very confident that you know any obstacles at this point or any big obstacles anyway have been cleared which is an important factor here so as a photo of mr grover is in the middle with tyler and with peter just on the site a couple of weeks ago right after the option agreement was signed ben met with scott and myself and tyler and peter just to kind of show us the property boundaries and just kind of give a quick lay of the land and make sure that we understood where the property was and where it was going these are some aerial photographs um as well that we were able to acquire of of the property um so some of the properties in the

104field that you can see but the vast majority obviously is to the left of this field so the vast majority of the this uh almost 77 acres is to the left and here's more of that 77 acres to the left of that field as you can see just basically a lot of trees this is these photos right here coming off a field and going through the woods that would go to the proposed access road that would wind down over a hill in onto gray road and the grading wasn't i thought the grading was going to be steep and it was about five six five or six percent scott would you say i think that's what oak point told us it wasn't as steep as we thought and he thought it was very um very doable

105for an access road some other photos again coming over the hill looking down on the field where the you know the school be the most likely places to put it in a field that's already cleared i think questions need to be looked at as to the exact location of where the school would be in any more clearing of trees that would go in there excuse me just additional photos there's another aerial photo really of the of the the acreage itself and that's again to the left of the clearing of the field to kind of get an idea of the expanse of the land so tonight um i know right after this um the board will be going into workshop the facilities committee has already discussed five different options and i know peter will be talking

106about that in a few minutes um and the the committee did narrow it down to two preferences i should say and again peter will talk about this but pre-k to 2 or a 2-5 building in north yarmouth again the board can discuss all the options and not limit it to two but these are the two that the facilities committee discussed last week and leaned on is preferences so the concept design after the great spans are there's some direction from the board on the grade span oak point will begin immediately developing a concept design that will then come back to the board in concert with facilities committee the staff that are the applicable staff involved pretty much the same process that was used during the last design concept design phase so we hope that this concept

107design will be completed at least in you know the ability to share it out um by april if not sooner um and then again this is all assuming and this is all a board decision um for a june 2022 tentative referendum to be decided at a later point and finally this is a schedule of major points to get to referendum this doesn't include all the statutory steps that we have to take but it's more the public process that we would be taking you can already see three uh five of them are already green which means they're completed and we're up to the first yellow which is tonight where the board discusses the great spans and goes from there great thank you so we're gonna try and maybe put a few of us in front we're

108not gonna this is gonna be on camera so it's a little different than we've done workshops in the past but a lot of times we've done our workshops at like 9 30 at night and it's hard to think a lot about these big decisions then so we figured we'd put it in the middle um so what i'd like to do is just maybe try to make a horseshoe that the camera can still see us i know we have julie and susie joining us is don joining us don you're not joining us dawn wants to but go on i didn't think so um so we'll grab some chairs and our mics can come off of here so we can grab a mic and pass it around or we can move tables i hate looking down watch

109this now's the timer if you want to come in the front we just want to put our backs to the screen that's the only thing just so we can kind of all see each other it looks great all right peter you want to guide us well i i don't have uh do we have the uh who's going to put up the option chart that you're looking at well uh suffice to say that the facilities committee met we also we also had uh two representatives from oak point uh susie robbins uh was there uh don foster uh jeff and uh scott and we actually had a just a very open discussion of the five different options and we really went back and forth it was just a very open mind discussion and i think you know

110i i think several of us changed our minds a lot based on kind of the new information and input from everybody so it was a very open discussion but the end of the day we had to recommendations that we came to the board and the first one was option four where we would have pk through one mabel wilson two to five at the new north yarmouth school six to eight at the middle school and nine to twelve no changes again the educational values and we'll do this for the public was keeping the fifth grade in the elementary setting keep six to eight as a middle level and uh keeps folks from bouncing back between the towns at an elementary level and we could build a new elementary school with new structure in mind this is

111the least expensive option is that we would not have to build on to wilson and uh also that it would cause the least disruption during uh construction and then option five was a pre-k to two uh at the new north yarmouth site uh with about 650 to 700 uh grades three to five would be in mabel wilson and then six the same six eight and nine twelve in the middle school it would be a smaller size primary school plenty of play space school configuration matches main learning results it's a good use of facility space and future capacity and but we would have to add the proverbial number of classrooms on to wilson to accomplish this uh so that's kind of in a nutshell where we are i think we were kind of leaning toward uh

112option four but we want to throw this out to the board to see where we are and i guess at this point tyler with the discussion absolutely we'll go around um and give everybody a chance to ask questions and please utilize susie and julie while they are here um there's a lot of pieces that go into this so i i think it's hard to just talk about it in one way so that's why we're having a workshop so maybe what we should do is start with option four and kind of discuss that and then we can move on to option five unless um there's a strong feeling towards another option that um wasn't presented as a recommendation from the facilities committee i just have one question i do have that's not strong but just the

113question number two what would be the reasoning because i don't believe you'd have to build um mabel i wilson up is it because it'd be a large primary school i yeah i don't want to speak for anyone else on the committee but i think that was the biggest concern if i remember from our conversation is just this the number of students that would be in a pre-k to grade three school we have a pre-k to grade three school right now and then with projections add on to that and we're talking about a school that would be you know anywhere from the projections 850 to 900 students i would think depends on what rebecca's new numbers come back at um but we're talking about a very large primary school okay because it doesn't seem like option

114two an option four in the projection size of students is different the new school two to five you have eight hundred eight hundred and fifty whereas option two is eight fifty it's 50 more students so i was just kind of curious on um how they landed on four not two keeping four or five together you have still that same principle with still same group of teachers and they they work well together and then to shift it so you don't have i mean it's going to be a different administrative structure four or five so that's just yeah i mean i think you just um and i think it should be the committee answering probably not me but um i think with older students um two to five having a school you know not quite that big

115but a large school we can make it work a little bit better or the architects can make the design work a little bit better having the youngest learners in the school of that size i think is a real challenge okay and even creatively you couldn't have like a the cafeteria that have the break off wings this is pre-k kindergarten this is first and second wing and then that would be allow for more expansion and growth for students and then four or five would be that design can certainly be you know the the architects can work on a design that would make it work so we can make anything work yeah that's what i was gonna say is that this is the whole point of having this right that's just my um what's your preference it

116is my preference and i really i i mean i don't know all the administrative stuff that goes on for four or five but my daughter to go through during covid and just the teachers and administration and the communication and how they all get along to disrupt that i i think it's going to be a challenge yeah the only thing i'll say and then i'll stop saying is that on option 4 there is a way to also maintain the four or five i think that was also part of that discussion okay if an arc you know again the architects need some direction on this but you can put the four or five in part of the building and two three in another part of the building so you still maintain that four or five that a

117lot of people have said is very important yep um and um and those grade levels do you know coalesce a little bit two three four five when you look at that all right so avery you've been waving your hand so i'll start down there with you and then we'll just go down the table oh my gosh yeah so um over the summer i taught preschool preschoolers at the of the camp so i feel like i have some sort of a reference for what it's like to teach uh preschoolers and kind of like how their minds work so first of all i think that you need small classrooms you can't have high school size classrooms and pack like 25 kids in there because you know you can't have the same approach you also can't have the

118same ratios you can't pull off the same ratios of high school students to teachers as you can preschool students to teachers at the high school you can probably i don't know what the numbers are i'd imagine they're somewhere around 16 to 1 for students to teachers but for a preschool you want something like five to one because it's just you know they need so much more they're so much more demanding than high schoolers or middle schoolers or even you know kids at the elementary school i think another important aspect is not to have too much of a range of students that preschoolers are around um because they do get scared they get intimidated by a lot of things so anything that's not you know like kind of intimate like uh i i'm just thinking for

119example at miw how you walk in and then you have like kind of this great big space with the library and you know a stairway and you have the multiple avenues of of wings and i don't know how well that would work for preschoolers so i think that you know taking taking an approach that keeps in mind keeps kind of uh like yeah i just i i don't know if miw is the right fit for kids at the preschool level um so that's just one thing to consider thank you avery i did not know that you were a preschool teacher this summer yeah nice work uh mike i just had a question so on uh focusing in on keeping pre-k and k in mabel wilson uh and a question about bathrooms and if we're going

120to be expanding that um because it's it's either i don't know if it's mandated and julian looking at you but to have bathrooms in the classrooms for kids that teaching kids at that young age so i know our i don't know if we have enough classrooms with bathrooms so we would have to do some renovations to the bathrooms is that right yeah yeah and the toilet sizes we had to put littler toilets in for pre-k and we would need to do that so even the classrooms that have some toilets i think that scott has sort of said all along mabel i will need renovation sort of one through five on this document i mean there's going to be work that will have to be done across the board depending on what's decided but certainly the

121toilets are one of those things and sinks right there yeah that totally threw me off hearing your voice come right here if i it was delayed in my reaction that's why um so i just thank you for that and i think that's also something whereas we note that this that option would be not potentially not as expensive overall maybe probably but maybe not i mean we that that will require some uh some renovations within mabel wilson i think we should be prepared for that and we want to avery's point we want to take this opportunity if this is the avenue we go down to make it the best possible place for the earliest learners yeah i guess the one thing i'd say is that any option you choose is going to require something to be

122done at mabel eye wilson school so there's no just building on another site and not touching maybelline wilson school we have security issues drop off flow issues to the building so that is going to require work regardless okay jason um so i was on the call the other day i had to jump off but uh so my very first choice would have been neighborhood schools but i just don't think that's feasible i think it would create a great environment but going through the process and looking at the numbers that jeff sent it's important to point out that cumberland is twice the size as north yarmouth on each grade so if we even tried to go down that road we'd end up with two huge projects we'd have a full-on north yarmouth project and we'd have

123to do a similar size project in cumberland i just don't think that's feasible so my very first choice vanessa was actually number two um and uh and because i'm telling jeff i want tiny schools but then i want the efficiencies of scale of building you know one large unit um but that that kind of was my original first choice with a heavy emphasis to avery's point on wings and sort of a you know common areas and this is little kids and this is the next little kids and just making it feel smaller and i'm i'm confident based on what tyler barter said from a point that we can do that breaking things up um i uh being that i couldn't be on the entire call i talked to susie today and and sort of got

124her feedback on number four uh as well i'm kind of okay with two or four but i'd like to hear on the rest of the call and maybe from susie and julie um how did we get away from number two and on to number four because they are only 50 kids difference and somehow logically number two is kind of better in my mind they start there and they come down and we could actually build onto the new building over build for future flexibility because if this pre-k stuff gets to be bigger and bigger numbers we don't have it it'll be more expensive to try to fit that into my w so how did we get from number two to number four and what's your feelings on those i can't speak to how you got from

125number two to number four i'm going to pass the mic to susie but she keeps telling me to go first so i'll give you my opinion and then i'll pass it to susie i think that a piece of how it probably got there is that there was a committee who did this study for quite some time and their recommendation was really a pre-k 2 school and then a 3-5 school that's what the committee that had a bunch of stakeholders had and then that sort of shifted to a pre-k-1 school and so those are really four and five and i think taking some of that historical data certainly um and then i just want to sort of side note there are really clear regulations at the state level avery about number of teachers per students in

126pre-k and it does not match high school numbers so that is certainly something that we don't even have a choice and we have to have higher number to teach your student ratio certainly um so susie i'll let you talk to how you guys got there since i wasn't on in that meet and anyone else who is on the committee i think julie said it well jason that the original committee really was looking at a pre-k through two building when we met three years ago and the pre-k one seemed like a better fit than the pre-k three because you're taking the largest i mean the smallest students and putting them in one of the largest buildings if not the largest in the district so that's how we ended up on four um like i said to

127you on the phone number five is obviously the um one that was recommended by the committee and fits best with the main learning results and those benchmarks but um number four seemed like a compromise with the group that we were talking to last week for the facilities people so anyone else who was there on a conversation last week feel free to add to that i'll just add that one of the conversations that came up and i want to say thank you to jeff for kind of pushing this as he said and i i appreciated this because i remember it he said if we want to be serious about outdoor learning then we should think about how this new space is going to be used in that capacity and one of the things that came up

128in the conversation was there's a lot of access to outdoor space in this new place our new location how can we best use it and one of the things was we all know that pre-k through one can learn magical things about outdoor you know in outdoor learning but they don't need trails necessarily and their stamina is a lot shorter and so if we really want to be serious about outdoor learning and engaging in the in this beautiful new property um engaging with two through five grades will be a a greater use of that space so that was something that came up knowing that you know fourth graders can go on a hike whereas kindergarteners might last a half an hour so that was definitely something that i remember as a big part of the conversation

129especially if we are looking to greeting our campus and spending that time outdoors and really taking advantage of that 76 acres anybody else from the committee that would be able to speak to how we got to four peter do you remember any kind of major no i just think it it evolved and uh it uh i think susie was very very helpful on this uh because we really needed that uh input and i just think it was the thing it evolved and said and and then the other thing to be fair is that yes we're going to have to do some substantial renovations to wilson but part of it hopefully is going to be helped by the energy thing so that uh again uh it may or may not be as costly i mean we

130will find out but uh but a couple of things did pop up and i think it was well brought up uh on the tonight with with the pod thing that we can uh now that we have this input from the board that as we work with the uh architects that uh that there is a feeling and and obviously uh uh susie and will be bringing more folks on and i think once we get to a point where we think we want to go i'm not sure after the discussion we had the other night with the council and the school board that we might want to [Music] once we get the configuration done that we might want to reconstitute the building committee again and get again more input from our staff and our faculty also i

131would just politically i think it would be good to have you know representative from the select person and the town council and also some of the folks that were on that committee before from both communities that you know we've got some body of knowledge so the facilities committee can community total sense of ownership ideas came in we kind of shifted i felt good after the meeting we'll see but i prefer kevin do you want to give us your thoughts sure um it's nice to be in the middle and you guys do all the heavy lifting um so so a couple things uh i i think uh susan made a good point about that original committee talking about you know staying true to to that vision and i came in at the tail end of that

132and uh it was i understood why the decision was made and how it was made for that and there was a lot an awful lot of expertise weighing in on why that made sense um a couple of the things that that jump out at me is as i as you look at those options for north yarmouth and if i'm just going to restrict this to four and five even though i kind of kind of like to but um here's my concern that cadence of transportation that we're going to be up against depending on what the great configuration is over there um the cascading impact of start times the other things that that jump out the larger that school is um you know i always look at things and i think we all are so i'm

133not going to pretend this is unique what's most cost effective and then more importantly than just what we can afford in the moment is that ongoing operating costs and they honestly some of those things feel like they may be extreme and then if you play it out just one step further um i i like the smaller buildings so i'm looking at well any of these so we've got pre-k to whatever that middle block that uh of two to whatever six and eight staying fairly static and the high school is always staying the same and one of the things that is absolutely clear in this community is nobody wants to hear from us within 10 years of saying we need another building project but you're going to have that confluence of events that is each of

134these different buildings have to go somewhere and that's the unchanged building and that scares me because if we've got 600 plus people coming into the community they're all going to end up in one place and i mean it's not saying that that's going to start in one grade and bubble up but i think that that has to be part of any of our discussions i i guess if i i look at this when i think about who would be off of campus when i look at four plan four i like the smaller scale of mabel eye i think that that lets people be on campus and could have an implication on the ability of high school students that are interested in something with early childhood education having that opportunity of a a big bigs and

135littles that type of configuration the two to five uh it does give a large school but if we've learned anything about oak point they are prolific in the way that they design and having been in a number of those buildings that were of this size it sure didn't feel that when you're in the building my fear though is what two to five loses by not being on campus and one of those things happens to be swimming lessons and some of those other things that can happen here on campus but i guess i side towards that and um taking enough of your time okay so i have two questions for you lots of answers ready um did you say that we should be including conversations about renovations to the high school no i i'm just saying

136that we are naive as a board not to think about where those people are going to end up and i look i'm i'm off of this board in a few months so it's going to be easier for me to stand there and say bad things to you but at that point the both towns are absolutely right when they say they don't want to hear from us looking for more money and those days are going to come so i either you know when you look at the way you you bought space here uh again look at four so mabel i can handle that with not a lot of work other than really small facilities two to five you you can build that to scale six and eight buys you some space over there so you bought

137capacity in each of those but all of that capacity goes to that one building mike question related i think it's a good point um also be wary of somebody launching a writing campaign to put you back here just so you know um did we buy space for the high school here does this provide us additional space um and related when we did those number of projections i'd love to see that that chart again of when we were looking at the um the project that was going to be on campus you we showed the projected numbers of students through like 2029 2030 and what they look like in high school as well and how the high school reacted and what the extra space was or not um because i think that would be helpful to your

138question as well and in that scenario do we include this spaces because we're connected to the high school um so i'll answer a couple of things this is a really great question it's going to come up a hundred times so kevin thank you for putting it out there because we've got to answer it um so the high school i'm going to offer a couple of things and i don't see don here i think don could speak better to this than i can but we lose five to eight percent of our incoming ninth graders um to private schools every year so we don't retain all of them that's historic we used to lose ten percent we're now down to five to eight percent depends on this on the year um but we do lose some students

139in private schools um going into ninth grade so that's one piece that that we that we see about high school that's a little bit different the second piece that's different about high schools is that when a teacher is in a classroom and they are not teaching a block because of meetings or prep they have a block where they're not in their room at a high school level you can schedule another class in there when the teacher is not using that room or does not have a class in that room so at the elementary level um that doesn't happen you know basically you can't schedule things into an elementary room kids go to a special for 40 minutes they really might be gone for 35 minutes because it takes time to get in it out of

140the room um and um at the middle level kids are in teams they go to allied arts the same situation so those rooms are being used almost continuously throughout the day at the high school level it's a little unique so we do have classrooms where a block a day that room is not being used or it might be you know two blocks in a three-day rotation or whatever it is my point is that a high school schedule you can schedule in another class into that room when the block is being used it's very different at the high school level so the space issues are not the same now we can have a study done to see exactly look at our enrollment and can we handle that but my guess is if i was going to

141give you if i couldn't if i couldn't do a study and i could just guess we could largely handle the enrollment coming for just that reason and i know that when i've had conversations with high school administration in the past about this that is what we've talked about yeah i think it's important to note that probably in the late 80s 1990 we had probably 850 in the high school we actually had to bump up to a class a school for two years because of the enrollment so we had about a 125 to 150 more students without what we did here just a little bit of history tom you had a you just raised your hand oh yeah uh yeah sorry to jump ahead it seemed like a pretty good segue though um i have the

142spreadsheet open with the 2019 enrollment projections because i'm a huge nerd like that and i have spreadsheets in front of me all the time um so i agree with all the points being made that um this would de-densify our all of our schools except for the high school and it's something that we need to keep in mind looking forward um so back back to the bigger point so i'm i'm i find uh option four really appealing because it avoids having the young kids in a gigantic school and it adds a lot of capacity to the district which we sorely need uh but so we're looking at this opening up maybe like fall 2026 is that right 25 if we're lucky uh if it if it if the referendum is held in june 22 i mean

143we're talking about roughly three years maybe a little less 25 if we're lucky okay so uh so uh looking at the 2019 projections and i'm really eager to see the the new ones um if if they were to hold in fall 2026 so say we opened this brand new school with 800 850 capacity the the current projections for grades two through five have us at 8 73 for fall 2026. and we don't want to be in a position where we're opening a new school that is crammed or we're adding portables to a brand new school we cannot do that no we cannot do that so this may be conservative here and we need to think about having a bigger school than what we're currently projecting here but what is our level of comfort for having

144a school that's grades two through five like are we willing to have a 950 students school for those grades um so i think we should pay really close attention to what these new projections look like because that could have a huge impact in the direction we're going here i think tom one of the things that i think that was the struggle for me between four and five when i looked at it that's why i was leaning towards five as opposed to four so yeah i think that's a good point tom i think the new numbers are going to be really important um i i mean we don't know but kova definitely you know took down our projections a little bit just like they did most districts in maine so we are just now rebounding from

145two years ago our enrollment so we've just gotten back to where we were two years ago we're just a few students less than we were two years ago so we're definitely not anywhere close to the projection that we would have been at this point i think we're about a little over 100 students off the projection that we probably would have made that projection if covet hadn't happened but parents made different decisions and they've kept those decisions at this point and so that's where our numbers are so i think and rebecca she's aware of all that we've had these conversations she's looking at all these numbers and trying to project out based on kind of the covet hit what happens next for projections and new numbers so you know obviously it's not going to be magic

146but it will give us something better to go on because you're right do we want a school of 950 students probably i mean i know that's too big okay jennifer all right a lot of people have gone before me so i have kind of some i think all over the place i had tom's comment also when when looking at the projections um i would can we table this discussion or like the decision until we get her numbers because so many kids have gone private at all the grade levels that i feel like it's not um responsible of us to make a big decision until we see her numbers i think it would i think that would be a huge part one thing is by putting the six 6 8 in north yarmouth we could actually

147put sports fields around there and it would make that a little bit easier when we have issues with sports fields um i know we shouldn't make that decision on that but i think that as we're doing this we have to consider what type of fields we're going to put out there and how we're going to get the kids after school there and i know that's minor at this point um and to tyler's point about the outdoor space i think it's really great to to keep that in mind it shouldn't be the biggest factor because in the middle school in the high school we're really not using our outdoor space at all at this point and during the fall so maybe it's just based on the on what grade level would actually go outside i think

148it's been disappointing to see that we haven't been able to go outside as much you know in the middle school eating outside we're not able to really do that or to learn outside so i think you know that's a huge missed opportunity that the middle school in high school has hit this this fall um the i guess the only question i have is with um the different proposals what sort of administrative fixed costs are there that are different so is one if we're looking at four versus the other one are there more principals administrative staff gym teachers or things like that that we're going to have and one scenario versus the other and and have we looked at that um that is a very good question i think if the pre-k one if it was

149a pre-k one school we would just have one administrator for that for that um age level and for those number of students and i guess i'm just saying this off the top of my head but at a two-five school we would certainly need you know two administrators for that size of the school if we're going to do that um and um i think those those are the configurations that i had looked at in terms of administrative support so would it be adding one versus what we currently have or are we saying that the administrators that we currently have we have the right number it will we're just going to move them around so we have three elementary administrators full-time right now so in that scenario my first look you know we'd have to study this

150more and look at all the numbers and make sure we've got it but you know it would work with two at the north yarmouth site if it was a two-five school and a pre-k one school would have one administrator um but again this is just like my first like this is what it might look like jeff can i just jump in on the second part of your question which was like pe and some of those other things i i don't want to speak to allied arts although i think it runs a similar structure to special education and when you have a smaller school you end up with part-time staff there and then you have staff traveling and you lose time right and you also lose the opportunity to sort of group students in special education

151so you need allocate more resources so there definitely is a staffing implication that i'm not sure has been fully i wasn't in that other conversation that happened but i don't know how much that's been flushed out but in terms of special education there's absolutely a staffing implication depending on the option the smaller school you have the more part-time staff you have those staff are then traveling to other buildings and they have less of an opportunity to group students so more individual services require more staff right so that's just something to keep in mind and i would suspect that that is similar for allied arts and that sort of if they don't have enough allied art schedules to fill a full week they would go to another building and you then are planning for travel time

152and whatnot in there yeah i was going to see that is that is a really important point because what we don't want to have happen even though it's eight minutes away we do not want to be sharing staff you know between campuses as much as possible we really want to reduce that because every time we do that we lose a lot of time in the middle of the day yep so and just the the fact of um following up with the teacher i know it's more like in the middle school in the high school but when they go to another building i think it's hard for kids to make the connection on trying to get to them if they need them on a different day or time right and that's a big concern so for

153the ieps and the 504 plants and the rti is it better to have pre-k first second and third together because they streamline across the board then to have pre-k one here and then two three in another school because that same special ed tech teacher services say up to third grade or can they need to see what i'm trying to say yeah so the special ed certification allows them to do differently than what you're articulating it really pre-k to two would be full-time special ed staff i would speculate depending on what size the the committee wants to do in terms of pre-k um and then uh certainly three five i also would just sort of highlight and i know jeff you're not on that page right now but the alignment to sort of the main learning

154results the common core standards all of those pieces for number five um that pre-k to two building and the three five building really does sort of allow for full-time allied arts full-time special ed staff and what that looks like um again projections around pre-k may change that a little bit if you you know maintain one classroom or pre-k like we have now that's going to be different than if you have a couple of classrooms of pre-k so but certainly having full-time k12 what we've seen is three grades is about perfect for allied arts teachers to have a full schedule and similarly for special education i like jeff i'm talking sort of globally without really specific numbers in place but again you you know you have to think about not only special educators but related service

155providers like occupational therapy physical therapy social work nurses school counselors and you know if if folks don't sort of have a full-time job they are traveling to another building and not only the students sort of finding them and being able to connect but them themselves on morale failing part of either building right which stop meeting do i go to which supervisor do i report to and some of those pieces so i would just sort of say from my very narrow view which is the percentage of the population there is a consideration there around grouping and staffing and likely if other sort of if we started looking in other areas i think their likely is for the structure of teaming at middle level or co-teaching or allied arts or some of those other areas as well

156so you would lean towards option five if for from a iep 504 rti allied arts perspective from instructional support that would be the the most effective for students certainly and again i know when the committee did this several years ago that that was a piece of the conversation and the data that was reviewed i i mean i should say really transparently will make anything work it just will have different price tag attached to it right but our students will benefit wherever we are and we'll make that happen i do just think there is a cost that goes with having folks travel from one building to another that's not just i mean even if we have people walk across the dis right now the campus somehow we lose big chunks in the middle of the day

157yeah because i know sometimes we did it for 30 years or four and then some come to three exactly the math i think it's the math the specialist shares that responsibility so um no that's good to know that so this is the three groups pre-k first and second full-time they'll be within that umbrella they'll feel like a team and a part of the group okay thank you but we did just for institutional memory before one puts one in uh that we operated on this model for 30 years you know we had we had wilson and we had north yarmouth and i think you're right the some of the special ed has probably changed significantly from when we had nyms but you know we operated uh two schools quite successfully for 30 years geographically apart and

158i don't see any reason why we can't do it again absolutely peter i worked here only one year when nyms was open and we did i mean absolutely we just shared staff right some special ed staff came to the campus and vice versa and just sort of pointing out that if we're projecting forward we know that cost and we know and we foreshadow that that's what's coming and that we're we don't have blinders on to the implication of what that looks like from an instructional support standpoint certainly it's also a difference of great configuration too mys was only four or five there's a there's a difference in the number of students in the buildings in the needs and some of it's even like um i mean there's a lot of nuancing you know that goes

159with special education but even like caseloads like right now we have a 4-8 fls program but at the high school we have a 912 fls program but we're actually adding another you know fls program 9-22 a big difference so age 22. so i mean it really sometimes it depends on the students that you have and there's a lot of different factors i think generally speaking that does make sense and it also depends on the projections i think rebecca's numbers will be really important um in looking at like how many students are we really talking about and what do we usually have for this number of students that are identified students are identified for each program that we have but it's it can change just to let you know just depending on the students that we

160actually have that year jeff can i just ask a question in her projections is she including the percentage of students that have gone private into those it's not just households with kids nope she asked in fact she asked for our private numbers first okay and then she asked for her homeschooling numbers okay she asked for everything that we have okay she's pulled the permits for housing again which she did in 2019 as well so yeah she's looking at all those things okay so i want to give anna a chance to give some feedback but i do i do recognize that we are waiting on a pretty significant amount of information and i think there is some value at having this but then also bringing this back to a workshop which may be something that we

161have to add to our calendar i'm not sure but it's obviously a priority and i would assume that most of us would be open to coming back to this conversation in the um near future so ann yeah i mean well i would first add that based on the materials and the agenda i wasn't anticipating us making a determination this evening um and i don't feel comfortable doing so i would want to wait until we've had time to think about this and get additional information that being said i think one thing that i struggle with too though is i'm looking forward to having those projections and it doesn't mean that the students who have left for private school would necessarily stay in that private school you know once things are in a different position copied wise

162and same with homeschooling so i think i kind of struggle struggle with that out of all of the options um i think i lean towards five and i recognize that that would be a i mean that that could be a different change for staff or maybe not in terms of grouping um [Music] otherwise i don't think i had any other questions or concerns that hadn't already been brought up by other board members so thank you thank you avery yeah um has it been considered to build multiple buildings on this land well i know that when we talked as a as a facilities committee the concern of large buildings with small students was was part of the conversation and thankfully as has been mentioned multiple times tyler barter from oak point has said they have the

163ability to make wings or to create and i think for those of you that remember the campus design that was on campus it was kind of to that point so there was a very distinct area where the youngest learners were and then but it was still one building and i think just for efficiencies it was still one building but they were able to talk about creative ways that they could um create areas of each part of the building to make it feel like it was multiple buildings in a way okay but you know what if you know you could even have a bunch of maybe like smaller buildings like i want to say 10 like maybe a little larger than those portables out there and have them completely empty with fittings so you can make

164classroom sizes however you want i'm just throwing that out there it's kind of but yeah and you could orient them to if you had to build them into each other you could uh if you had to if you wanted to go a different direction maybe you want to put middle schoolers out there maybe not maybe you want to incorporate nature more into the the campus then you can plant trees around but that's all i have to say about that so anything's possible avery you did just kind of make my brain wonder something which i hadn't really wondered about before although jason had brought up the points so i did go to the multiple buildings out there but i hadn't thought about it this way you know maybe there's a pre-kk little facility yeah doesn't have

165any infrastructure with it but it's its own little facility on the property and you have a one through three building out there next door yeah nobody says you can't do it a pre-k building wouldn't have any needs in terms of infrastructure you know you'd be a big gym you don't you might need a little multi-purpose room and that's probably all you need yeah but i'm just throwing that so even more of a reason that we should probably continue this conversation so i know that there was a hope that we would probably leave this workshop with all of us giving some guidance on a direction it sounds like we're not quite there yet because we have some pretty and for pretty strong information coming our way however this was still a great use of time and

166i think it's really important that we have these uh workshops so we i will work with jeff to figure out when the best time is to workshop this again with the new information peter what are your thoughts uh well i i think that uh if that is important that we if the contract with oak point uh is approved tonight that i think we need to continue with uh with the site work where i assume everybody understands that we're still going to build a building over in north yarmouth and you know we can have 30 little euros over there or god knows what else but on the other hand we've still got a we've still got to have a sewer we've still got to have electricity gas lines and all that thing so i'm i'm assuming

167that the that the board is going we're going to continue with the structural stuff but i might add as soon as we do get this you know as soon as we do get the enrollment figures you know i think we can strategize all we want to but if we want to get this thing built before uh 2030 uh we've got to kind of get off the dime at that point and give the committee some direction but i think you know this has been valuable i think the key thing coming out of this is certainly if that we do especially for the four or five wanted to develop uh to tile it to tyler to do the some kind of a pod model so that we continue so i think that was key but uh you

168know we need to keep going forward if we do want to build this sometime [Music] before who knows totally agree um so again i think we need to have a facilities meeting we need to have uh once we get this information again and um if it looks like it's important enough for us to call a special meeting i just looked at the calendar our next meeting is until the 6th of december because of the holiday so just thinking about that i think what we'll do is we'll wait till we get the information then figure out when the next best time is to workshop this tyler can i just ask scott to talk about transportation because kevin you had mentioned that and i know that's a concern of elementary parents too how do i pick a

169child up in one place and then the next right okay yeah i mean the the whole issue of picking up students and stuff we actually uh had a little bit of alternating times between the two buildings when we had uh you know north yarmouth memorial school there so there were different pickup and drop-off times in both locations a lot of the students were on the playgrounds is the buses you know we're waiting there um you can also alternate the start and end times of both schools so that the buses would basically be loaded at each building and then they crisscross okay and then you arrange the route such that you know uh the buses that are going the further way out are actually going over to north yarmouth as the other buses are coming towards

170may line wilson school in order to do that so uh but that's i mean that's that's not been an issue for us to deal with in the past so and we'd probably look at adding a few buses in order to maybe reduce some of the run times out to some of the longer areas in town and we would just stagger scott navy and i think this was done before to stagger the the the time the school times just by like a few minutes yeah you just staggered a little bit on each end so if a parent also wanted to put their child up and they have children on campus and they have a child out there they if they had if the staggered times were you know for dismissal or arrival there's a 10-minute window

171then they have plenty of time to get to both places and get their children if they can they need to and not worry about it okay it'd be even better if they took the bus better if they took the bus but if they're not they but if they don't they can there's a way to get that done okay i just um i i think for a lot of people that aren't that haven't lived here for a long time that don't have the memory of um nyms being in north yarmouth that feels like a huge concern how am i going to get two kids in two different places so for us that have attended there and have experience working with that model it seems like oh yeah we just do it but i think it's totally

172a valid concern that people are um people are worried about what's interesting about it too tyler is that the new location uh that we're looking at now really isn't that far i mean it's like almost a rock's throw from uh you know the old north yarmouth memorial building i mean when we took our rides and stuff it's like what a mile i think it was eight minutes no traffic eight minutes so it was almost like just miles different miles from where we were so yeah i mean just you know oh sorry i don't want to interrupt no jason was gonna yeah uh one of those new numbers be ready and to what degree do those numbers have to move as a percentage before it changes this chart i just don't want to delay things if

173we don't need to and i think something to keep in mind is is this needs to be something that the voters are going to support and i think there's a significant number significant difference in the total number total cost if we do a significant renovation to miw so i'm just thinking happy medium here because we have a lot of older people in town that don't have kids and we need their support yeah i think that is a good i mean i don't know if the enrollment numbers will shift these these um five options for example all that much um it will just shift in the sense okay are we talking about you know 800 kids if it's certain grade level um or are we talking about you know 850 kids i don't know but i

174the numbers are supposed to be in this week um and that was my latest communication at the end of last week so are we able to narrow this down at all i mean i'm willing to do to listen it sounds like we've had a pretty variety of responses to i'm hearing five four and option two are the most common that i'm hearing is there any that we can rule out just draw a vote let's just see who's comfortable moving forward at this point and if it's well actually i've shifted now that julie has smoked you've shifted yes i like i understand where she's coming from with the iep and the 504 and the whole arts and it made a lot of sense i what i was hearing is that people were feeling un easy making

175a decision without the new enrollment numbers if i'm hearing that differently i'm more than happy to move this forward i i just think we're never going to be 100 comfortable um and i just don't expect that the numbers are going to change this chart they're certainly valuable for sure but i just i think the numbers have to move a lot before that chart changes i you know i i do agree with that to a large extent but um i've seen ms wandel's numbers um not not these ones of course i don't have a secret copy much cooler if i did but that being said her numbers have been right on and so when i think about using the implications of data at least to further justify what we do to apply uh deeper knowledge i

176i i think i'm inclined to to wait for that so that i don't feel emotional in my response that just my perspective one week jeff you're thinking i think you know even i was looking thinking about the next meeting december 6 i think even if you workshopped it again on that date i think that would be fine i think if we get much later than that i think we're putting off the design phase but i think you know as late as december 6 is probably fine you can check with um oak poi but i don't think there's a major major problem with that okay thank you tom so i have a question related to number five here so there's one piece that's in incomplete so if you look at this you think we're adding 650

177to 700 seats in our classes but if we're doing a substantial renovation to mabel i wilson we'll also be adding capacity there do you have a sense of how many additional students we would be able to take on in that new newly renovated school so um okay this is a complicated answer so the architectural capacity of mabel i wilson school right now is 540 students now i think it's i keep saying this but i think it's lower than 540 only because we have some very involved programming in our district that probably brings it down more comfortably around 500 or so that's just my take but we can you know with the existing facility 540. now we're right right now we're about 200 students over that and that's why we have so many modulars to to

178work with students um it also depends on the grade level you know and and what you know grades are actually in that facility but the last plan scott remind me is it was it eight or ten classrooms or eight to ten classrooms eight to ten classes eight to ten classrooms and at one point we talked about twelve i don't know if i think there's some disagreement as to whether or not we really needed that much space but there was some discussion about flex rooms so i guess use anywhere from eight to twelve classrooms nine million but that's when we were building a different school that's when we were building a right a pre-k to one school right um it was we were going to make that right no that i think that was um the

179three to five player trying to remember we've gone through a lot of different plans right now but i thought that it was going to be that the new school wasn't going to have grade two in there right right right that's right so it wasn't a three five school it was a two yes you're right thank you two to five two three i thought it was a two three and four five six eight i mean we're all staying at the middle school it was a two to four now that you remind me two to four and then it was gonna be a five eight at the middle school um so it would be two it would be three that's one more grade level than what we're talking about right so really you can only put in

180like 2.5 grades at the most at wilson school going forward with the projections that we have so you're talking about a fairly sizable increase in classroom space at the wilson school if you want to put three grades in to be comfortable with all the programming that we have um and not to fill it up immediately um that that is the way to look and i think something should be should be said too that what i've heard all along is that wilson school needs a major renovation even if it stays at two two grade levels that school needs a big and i don't know this is what i've heard all along that those rooms need to be done the whole the whole thing so like for us to look at it and say we can just

181put some little toilets in there i think we're gonna have to do a lot more and i think everyone should be aware absolutely and that's what i've heard and maybe i'm completely wrong but like i think those costumes you know we're doing the window wall or whatever but it's it's you know maybe not a big addition but everything is going to be touched really in that school when we do a renovation yeah i mean there's some there's some areas that are fresh right right they need some things done to them we can't go blindly no there are some areas as we mentioned you know the parent entrance the existing bus loop entrance the flow the security i mean there's a lot of things like that that need to be addressed in that building and then

182of course some of the classroom spaces that need to be uh looked at as well so especially on top okay yeah so there are pieces not to get in the weeds i'm just saying that everything we need all the information so it's um we still have our i just want to stay focused knowing that we still have an agenda kevin peter and then i think maybe we'll call it for tonight for workshop no i i'm you're good i i'm good to go but i think like you know we need to come to some kind of a decision uh the 6th of december we're going to fall behind agree so the the only thing that i wanted to add or ask is if um if there was a sizable addition to wilson which we know that

183additions in any case and you do represent this on the slide renovations and additions are more expensive than new construction would those fine folks at the d.o.t look at anything changing on campus as an opportunity to mandate any of those changes to main street or tell road leaving us right back where we were before right that's a that's that's a really good question that's a very good point that's a very good question yes everybody stare at the ceilings tonight you'll be fine it's a conversation and then if you're pulling a lot of students off the campus so that they can help offset some of those thoughts or conversations but you're much right that's that's a major bodies may be leaving yeah oh yeah because if we have pushed that down the the street a few

184times i would just hate that to come back as we everybody says my god okay good can we take a non-binding straw vote between two four and five just some maybe looking at the crowd we can eliminate one of them do people feel comfortable doing a straw vote no knowing that's not binding knowing that we get new numbers in a week uh i'd prefer not to just it seems like a lot of people are unsure with their numbers but uh i agree okay um i appreciate wanting to be efficient i totally appreciate your efforts in that but i think we're just not there yet so we will add a workshop to the sixth um we will make sure that we have the updated information to us as soon as it's available so we can digest

185it uh answers about uh dot concerns and i think that's it for right now okay so we will now move back into our business thank you julie thank you susie thank you tyler actually a question for you and peter is it worth having a uh facilities meeting after we get the numbers but ahead of this yeah yeah okay so thanks everybody for your flexibility and doing this a little differently tonight we're going to move into superintendent's report unless you want me to do committee reports first um i know i can why don't you do committee reports all right that makes kevin first for finance uh so a few things but um so my apologies the uh the dlt i believe begins work tomorrow on the construction of the budget having some of those first conversations

186um you may recall that we had at least some tentative discussions around the budget calendar and that will continue to be clarified especially as we look at some of those dates where uh the community uh committees the community boards had expressed interest in maybe uh trying to see if we could land on different dates that is uh that is all thank you uh policy ann uh we had a meeting um just prior to this meeting tonight and um we'll be moving along one for first read and a few other policies recommended for deletion thank you man uh peter facilities anything additional no okay um curriculum i'll make this quick we had our first meeting on november 4th which i think was productive we talked a lot about the state mandating testing and different things around

187that in the timeline and trying to get that a little bit clearer we did have a student rep that was included in our meeting which i think was very nice and our next and let's see i was trying to think of if i missed anything else that we talked about um our next meeting is the first of january thank you uh communications mike just really quick that we're going to be putting in a big amount of effort to making sure that we get out as much information as possible and as clearly as possible about the school project so if folks listening want and need more please contact me happy to listen thank you equity leadership steering committee i will just report that we haven't met since last time we reported but we do have our

188first meeting or our meeting for november this friday afternoon and that will be our first meeting where we welcome uh justine and lawrence to the meeting i just have a quick question is that going to be recorded and the only reason why i asked there's a lot of teacher conferences going on this week on friday afternoon yeah um i don't know but it's not something that's off the table we all talk to um fran about it yeah it's not it's not a big deal either it's just i have a conference and i can't go to places [Laughter] um okay i will make a note okay student reports avery uh yeah you know i think it's all all pretty good the only thing is you know as as our days get shorter um more more and

189more students have wanted to look into uh junior privileges i know that like portland high school for example has junior privileges lots of other high schools have junior privileges and uh yeah it's people people want it for consideration okay um all right any other i don't believe there's any other updates to committees thank you everybody jeff are you ready for your superintendent's report yep i'll try to go really quick uh we had dave welcome um and it was really uh it was great we actually extended the day of welcome um greeting part to the high school as well in not just the middle school this year so grades 4 through 12. you can see um one of your fellow board members is was greeting at the middle school as well so four eight had two

190different greetings and then the next day at the high school so we had the cumberland police department cumberland fire and emt also helped with um with greeting students as they came in um during the um and every i remember you were greeted weren't you greeted did you enjoy that greeting yeah okay i mean i was like the last one there and i was maybe a minute late yeah we weren't going to say anything but you were toggling that tardy zone veterans day activities our schools have been really active with veterans day activities at maybelline wilson school in the library second and third graders got to hear a book called reckless this is a story of how american soldiers were helped in the korean war by a horse third graders had a virtual visit with veteran

191gentile she's a parent in our district she's had a long connection with us as well around veterans i remember years ago talking to her about this she's the commander of post-91 and yarmouth legion 91 in yarmouth and she's been a great resource for our district in connecting us with veterans at 4 5 a lot of different things were going on last week the book 21 steps was read to students all students in fourth and fifth grade along with cemetery keepers of gettysburg actually i think one book was read fourth grade as one book was read to fifth graders but matt tavares who was the illustrator of 21 steps is actually a mainer graduated from bates college in 1997 and this was all commemorating the anniversary of the 100th anniversary of the tomb of the unknown

192soldier i was in one of the classes when the students were having that book read to them and then watched the changing of the guard at arlington which was really kind of always a fascinating um to watch whether you're in person or even watching it on video so you can see sally soames she works in the library at the gms she's reading the book the fourth and fifth graders and then another project dean and mcfarland and kathy folic are teachers at the middle school 4-5 and they teamed up and had a project called wall of heroes so students went home asked their parents and grandparents who in our family is a veteran of anywhere in the united states and this is the wall of heroes and every veteran's name that students could come up with

193they added those names they had two walls worth of veterans names and they are still up at gms 4-5 it's really kind of amazing to see that in grade six eight in social studies eighth grade teachers spend time talking about veterans day the history of veterans day and then one of our eighth grade social studies teachers peter gillingham this is something he's done for a number of years collects cards from students in the eighth grade those cards are then he delivers those cards to the veterans home in scarborough and [Music] it's just it's a you know i haven't had a chance to actually go and see it but i have been told that when those letters are delivered the um the residents of the of the scarborough veterans home are absolutely thrilled to see those

194letters each year from our middle school so i don't think it happened last year so this year it was really great to return to that university of maine or no application day the admissions office basically from umaine came to greely high school last week and um 38 c i think it was the week before actually 38 seniors were accepted to the university of maine on that day and we had two other students who were accepted prior to that so it's 40 students now who have been accepted to the university of maine 125 000 was given to students should they choose to continue and go to the university of maine next year so that was offered and then who done it ken fowler is a science teacher teaches biology at the high school and um they

195his students were involved in a murder mystery and this was also put out in the ghs newsletter so if you're interested in learning more it will be in my blog tomorrow and then finally a greely alumni spotlight we have a student who did something very unusual and graduated not too long ago ryan pooler 2017 has joined a very elite career which is rodeo clown bullfighter and this was actually in the ranger review one of the students from the ranger review wrote this up and i just took his information and put it up here i thought it was fascinating so chase kopp from the ranger review wrote this up and uh this is ryan pooler on the left in what i consider to be a dangerous spot but apparently he has been trained otherwise and i

196i lied there's one more thing paths always announces students of the court of the quarter and it's always nice to see really students are in there these are you know many many high schools from the area send students when we see greeley students who are um you know recognized by the school it's it's it's terrific in these programs quinn richter from greeley in the cyber security program gabe pollock and culinary arts and nate dixon from uh also from guerrilla of course in the music program so congratulations to those students so that will be in the superintendent's vlog published tomorrow thank you jeff all right so we will move into our items for action which we have a lot of tonight and i know anne is doing a lot of heavy lifting with this so thank

197you in advance yeah policy committee has been quite busy the first one to give a little information we're recommending deletion because we've combined it with the policy that you've all received for first read tonight jea compulsory attendance ages so i recommend to vote approve removing policy j-e-a-r compulsory attendance ages from the policy manual second any questions or discussion uh avery yeah when i when i read it it refers to students as he she and i was wondering if there's any way that could be changed today that we have been doing this policy we're deleting it from the policy manual so it won't be there anymore oh okay but thank you for for that and can i ask a quick question should we wait to remove this after we do implement the other policy so i'm

198i'm just asking is there going to be a gap should we wait until the second read of the other policy and then i hadn't thought of that so we don't have a gap in time jennifer i think you're right yeah you're you're right i get one for the night you are right we should probably have that so why don't we just table it i think tabling it sounds like a great story nice work jennifer thank you yes perfect thank you it's probably not a big deal in all of it you know if we had done it the other way no i appreciate that yeah you're right okay so as far as tabling um emotion to table do i have to do a second for that we can just okay all in favor to table thank

199you all right and i'm just going to let you go with these okay um the next one we are recommending to remove policy bhab school board candidate orientation from the policy manual um i don't know if anyone has any questions sure so um oh i should sorry i should get the second version second thank you okay open up for discussion jason why are we removing it i read through this and nothing seems particularly offensive except you know potentially we could reword it to take a little bit of burden off from jeff uh things that don't it doesn't seem like he should fully be responsible for for candidates but why are we removing both of these actually um we were voting to we had recommended removing the candidate one because it is um i mean putting

200burden on the district four candidates who are wanting to run i think you know jeff has been willing to provide that information to anyone who was asked but to have it as a formal policy was above and beyond what was necessary for the district i don't know mike or vanessa if you have anything else you want to add yeah just the the candidate one just focusing on that for now is that seems at least especially to me that seems above and beyond what a district should be providing to the candidate you're a candidate here for office you should you know jump in do your own thing and they can the candidate themselves can do outreach uh to the district and to the other board members to the superintendent but putting this on uh the district

201in particular to me seems like it's unnecessary and it's not common is it it's this is not something that's done elsewhere no i mean occasionally someone will ask to come in and talk or or whatnot but or meet with a board member um but we you know it's not practice that we generally reach out and say hey do you want an orientation if you're running we just haven't done that so we're not replacing it with anything not even a statement i mean it just seems just the optics of it seem bad i i thought can you just i'm sorry i didn't bring my notes from this but i did feel the same way jason and then we worked through it that it was more um on the candidate and not a policy that the school

202needs to be enforcing or that we need to be enforcing and there is a book school board new school board member that outlines all of that yeah but i did i did have that same first actual thought on that the only thing that i would add is i think it's kind of unprecedented when people are running for office to have an orientation for it and there's any time that anyone has run for this normally you hear from the from the candidate they will reach out to folks they will ask questions about what the role is before making that correct decision to run for school board okay is there any other uh tom jeff is there any way that this might actually protect you or save you some trouble like for example just clarifying that um

203the candidate is not entitled to privileged information um could you foresee a situation where somebody might approach you feeling entitled to certain things that now it's suddenly your discretion to determine this i don't think so i mean it's just like anybody asking for information we have to say well we can't provide that it's to you know that level of information we can't provide at this time so i mean i have parents that ask me for information i have every everybody asks for information from time to time and you know it's the same answer that just doesn't something we can provide but um so i don't think having a policy on this would make any difference to me any further discussion okay all in favor and those opposed thank you all right and the next one

204before i um make the motion i will add that um all of the deletions also have been recommended by drum and winsome and this one we are recommending to delete because the information is found elsewhere so it's unnecessary so i recommend to approve removing policy bia new board member orientation from the policy manual second any discussion on this one no questions that would have been helpful information i should have asked that question that drummond wouldn't recommended that thank you okay all in favor thank you can you pose i saw everybody's hands up oh you're a post okay yeah thank you and now we are moving on to a number of motions related to um all changes in the statute related to title ix we in fact were out of compliance with um with title ix

205and working under an old policy under our old policy that hadn't been updated so i'm really glad that we have all of these before you tonight um i recommend to approve policy ac nondiscrimination slash equal opportunity and affirmative action as presented second any questions or discussion on this jennifer um and with saying that we were out of compliance with a few of these things what is that the policy approach of having drummond woodson look at all of our information so like have they gone through everything that we have or is it like on a cycle basis and that's why this is just getting hit now no um it's on a cycled basis and we had these on we had been trying to get these on the agenda last school year but unfortunately there were things

206that did come up and pushed that process back so what it just means then is that if there was a violation of the policy that we would have to follow our um our policy that would have been outdated and i will just add that german whitson did a complete audit of our policies um they've done them done a complete audit of our policies twice since i've been here and they just did another one and that's why a lot of deletions are coming forward and stuff like that so that was just completed in 2021 yes okay yeah ann chapman from darwin whitson i asked her just look through our policy manual like give us some priorities and deletions and tell us what we can get rid of and we should probably do that every three years

207or something we should it's been it's been a few years now but i think it probably should be more often with things yes things are changing i asked also asked ann we haven't done this for a while either asked her to audit all of her handbooks and make sure they're in compliance she's doing that right now in compliance with our policies given that these are all the same topic and we have the same rationale can we vote on them as a block you can if you want to um d through j no no d through h because um i and j are chapter 33 so i would like to separate them sure um i can so i guess uh i propose a recommended vote to approve policies a c a c a a r a

208c a b uh a c a b r and lastly j k a a as presented no no jk oh no justin nope sorry yep i went too far sorry dude that wasn't right second any discussion or questions here so do these all replace aca which caused great concern a month or two ago no we don't have a policy aca that that was that was a draft policy that was brought for first read um this isn't replacing anything these are all current policies with those names they're just being updated yeah they're edits to the existing ones okay we don't currently have an aca on the books yeah there's no aca right i understand um i do have some questions um the uh can you elaborate on familial status and then i can imagine what this

209means but just go into the examples of of that and then genetic information in there what does that mean in the second ac second paragraph my understanding would be that no one can be discriminated against for um however their um for their for their genetics for and then familial status would be regarding who either their parents or caregivers or whatever their family composition okay is that correct that is and it was recommended that um by drummond and woodson that we add that language to all of our policies those two pieces were added by statute and so dominant woodson recommended that we add those two pieces to all of our policies gender identity was also was also added by statute i think the legislature passed that an update to the main human rights act either in

2102019 or 2020 and so we're just coming into compliance with that all of these recommendations come directly from drummond woodson to bring us up to date legally speaking correct yes avery uh yeah there's certain things i'd like to see like for example on the harassment and sexual harassment of students uh acaa i'd like it to have an aspect that gives students like the right to like it's like you know students don't have to go out of their way to know it it becomes part of the curriculum like knowing certain policies and certain rights that students have like for example in boy scouts when they restructure that with the ypt they made part of certain rank requirements knowing the ypt rules like you can't have a one-on-one adult and child adult and child you can't have

211certain things and i feel like as a student i'm entitled to know this stuff without having to attend a board meeting i i agree with you avery and that's one of the reasons i asked drummond woodson to audit our handbooks because that's what you know i mean it's not physical handbook anymore it's e-handbook but that's what students look at more than they look at i mean if they're interested they're not going to look at a policy book the handbook also is a place where the school is supposed to highlight certain things for students at the beginning of the year so we're going to be working on that as well but the first step was to make sure our handbooks are current and should have everything in them such as these kind of is this a

212policy that all of our students should know getting that advice now from legal counsel to make sure we've got all that in there but i hear what you're saying even if it's not legal counsel recommending are there certain policies that you as a student should know about and not have to search for yeah i mean no one really reads the handbook either i have because you know i'm that type of kid but it's 37 pages long of very dense information and like you know kids don't kids aren't reading it yeah and i think you know that raises another question are there certain policies that should be gone over for example at high school level in advisory at the beginning of the year so that all students are hearing it or at a class meeting you

213know and i think those are the things we're trying to iron out now with getting the handbooks making sure that they're where they should be and how we communicating because there are certain things that we can just put out as communication there's certain things we should be communicating yeah and differentiate differentiating the two so i appreciate your comment on that because i've had a parent reach out to me that has expressed the same um interest um just making sure that that kids know about communications with adults and all of that stuff and i think that there's always room to make sure that um everybody understands that so awesome uh feedback and just to triple or sec whatever uh they completely agree with that you know the staff have collective bargaining units so the association the

214multiple associations of the bus drivers and so on so for the teachers and such they have them who can then update them on changes to policy our students don't have anything like that and so we should be proactively thinking about this so thank you for bringing that up oh yeah no problem um avery i don't want to put you on the spot but um i'd love to hear more of you thinking about this if you have a chance to think more about it maybe you and madison yeah can talk and think about you know what is a way that we could you know clearly or more clearly articulate some of these policies to students that are interested in learning more about them but have them in a in a in a way that you know

215all students have access to them and you know you're right they're not going to go to a policy manual right online or in paper and read this stuff you know is there another way we can do this yeah i think there's some i think it'd be great to have some sort of workshop where we you know get together and then me and madison because i know we're both very passionate about um you know students rights uh the policies and uh everything surrounding that i think it'd be great to sit down uh go through the weeds of it all and just you know fix what we find so if you both wouldn't mind doing that maybe uh mr gray and i could meet with you after that and then we can go from there perfect hear

216your ideas okay i think that's a good point awesome any other discussion before we vote jason um specifically the one that i've heard grumblings about is gender identity so can you talk specifically about kind of what that means and the concern i guess is ambiguity around that topic so is there a process when a person you know identifies as changing sex what does that look like and how does how do the kids around them then know that information because my concern i guess is like pronouns so somebody transitions to the opposite gender and wants to be identified that way then what happens when somebody doesn't use the right pronouns that sort of thing does that come under well we i don't know if this is something that is within this conversation um well i don't

217know when to have it we can also i think there's a lot of information in our district and resources that we could have if the board is interested in more information on just that topic but in a very general sense when a student is making a decision and is transitioning to another gender we try to honor the preference at school if they have a preferred pronoun preferred name however on educational records it is up to the parent if they're under 18. you know at the end of the day what pronoun and name will be on educational records but in terms of preference used at school during the day a student can you know say this is my preference and this is the pronoun i want to use and um we've you know our staff has

218been we've done a little bit of training in this area for staff to make sure they understand um and um generally have had a fairly good response from students and staff on this topic i also just want to make a mention that we do have a policy jb that's transgender student guidelines that might be something to review when you're hearing that feedback and getting some of those questions because there is a policy that speaks directly towards some of that and so does misplaced pronouns come under the category there isn't a specific mention of what happens if and when but um it's more awareness um you know at the high school there are there is some awareness um and avery you probably can be more specific than i can but i you know mr scott's been

219involved in that in helping um mrs perkinson the civil rights team just awareness around pronouns and the correct usage yeah i think that you know someone changing their gender is kind of it's a process they go through it's something that's very personal and i think people respect that you know unless you know you're a bully essentially you're not going out of your way to call someone by uh pronouns that you know they don't prefer you know sometimes people do slip up uh say you know he instead of they or or she instead of him something like that but it's all taken very you know people don't take offense to it it's all you know and i don't i don't think it has to be that way or i don't think it has to be this

220way of like um like the death penalty uh for calling someone you know by the wrong pronouns i think it's it's it's a very personal thing and that's that's the way it is in high school and we also as part of this so the process for if there's a complaint that's a c a a r and so it spells out exactly the process of what happens what defines what harassment is and how do you go through the procedure of addressing it thank you mike so i understand this is bringing things up to uh state standards does this include basically the uh ability and rights of say a trans girl to then go into the girls bathroom with biological girls that would that could so that is also outlined in policy jp and i can say

221just practice in our district um is that we have it's all very individualized and i our administrators have done an amazing job i have to give them huge credit working with students working with families to make sure that um whatever plan um it's comfortable for the student it's it's comfortable all around and it's very discreet some students who are transitioning prefer to use a staff bathroom for example away from students others prefer to use a student bathroom and there's some education around that it's very i can't say it's one way it's never the same way it's always very discreet and it's always very individualized in all the all the times i can think of that we've gone through this recently with students who are transitioning and trying to figure out a plan and it's always

222been very careful very careful does this force the population as a whole to declare their gender no no no for example pronoun pins and i'm kind of speaking more than i probably know at this moment i know those were made available to students but they're made available in a couple locations in the school students could choose if they wanted to take one or not um and if they wanted one that's great if they didn't they didn't need to take one and so it's no one has to declare anything and and people can make that choice it's totally their decision and that's how we've kind of approached this this whole topic and i think that's the most comfortable way for everyone just the same too is that if someone um has a change in their gender

223identity it doesn't mean that even anything about their appearance has to change you know i mean um it it isn't this thing that if someone decides um that they feel more in line with the opposite gender that they have to pursue any anything different than what they're already doing it's it's all about just you know making sure we're providing respect and in this case also following state statute and there is uh in the policy it does talk about consistency so there's some consistency with that so it's not every day there's a change and there's some reasoning behind that as well in the policy that so what and just said though basically somebody could change their appearance zero and go from male to female without correct anybody around them knowing and that's their personal choice and

224i i think we're getting a little outside of the conference i move the questions yeah that's kind of what i was hoping for i will say if there's interest in the topic from the board we can have more information for the board on this and um if that's of interest i'm always willing to talk more about this if there's more time outside of this policy review so if anybody from the board would like to create time for that i'm more than happy to to talk so all in favor of anne's motion i'm sorry it was a complicated one all in favor okay and those opposed and those abstain was very opposition just uh uh almost almost done um then the next two um policies that were coming uh for a second read j k a

225a and j k a a r um were both related to chapter 33 changes so i recommend to vote that we approve policy jkaa and policy jkaar as presented second any discussion or questions i assume julian council have reviewed that julie was was involved with all of these discussions good okay all in favor thank you and lastly the changes in ikf were twofold one was increasing the age where a district follows iep students to 22 previously it was 20 and then also when we had revised this policy july of 2020 we made an error when calculating the credits for graduation reflecting the changes in guidance so i [Music] recommend that we approve policy ikf graduation requirements as presented second any discussion or questions can i say a super quick thing is jeff can you um

226have someone look over the handbook because it's not quite right with the in line with this with the numbers i think that was we figured that out don gray um jim hand and i figured that out after everything got published like oh no yeah so so a revamp on that and then a little side note on if um the senior project needs to be included with that graduation requirement in the handbook okay it's not it's not noted anywhere and i think that um that volunteer work i think would be suited expressed somewhere okay for the for the high school yeah we're trying to push the senior projects more and make it universal anyways and to see how required it is i don't really know so thank you jeff yep okay all in favor thank you

227and was that it for policy thank you so much i know that was a ton of worms so thank you so much thank you um all right moving on uh looking for a motion to appoint professional provisions perfect positions thank you would anyone like to make a motion so move thank you and a second second thank you any discussions sorry who's the motion in second i did jennifer vanessa and i just want to i'll just mention that these two positions are new positions um in the district and they are new replacing vacant positions that we've not been able to fill and julie olsen myself talked about it and felt that in with don gray at the high school and felt this was a good use of our resources and this would be a permanent solution

228as well our numbers caseload numbers at the high school for fls have been increasing steadily over the last couple of years and having a new program a second program at the high school made a lot of sense especially with the age 22 now requirement we have students staying with us now longer some students staying with us longer and then the resource room position again that's a programming change so instead of having ed techs working with students which are vacant right now those positions we're now having a teacher who is working with those students and we feel like we can program the same way but those changes so i think these are going to be permanent these will be permanent changes and we're really happy that we're able to find at this time of the year

229two very strong very strong candidates for both positions so i'm very happy though will we be um moving forward in any of the other schools to switch ed techs with permanent teachers and special ed too to just as another way to possibly help with our staffing there's another there's a third position um that is in the works right now that we're looking at um taking two vacant edtech positions and it's not completed but we are looking at another position any further question or discussion okay all in favor thank you okay next up is an approval for an agreement with oak point associations there was an agreement in our board packet looking for a motion so moved and a second second questions or discussion on this these are the same numbers we saw like two three

230weeks ago yes yep yeah there's so the 245 thousand you might remember and then there was 5 000 i can't remember if it's called supplementals or resources but yes it's the same number that you saw two weeks ago okay all in favor thank you and then looking for a motion to enter executive session how about the ggg plan first did you want to raise a motion um sure uh move to i'm gonna split it up again though this is on you yeah but we also have to approve the plan as well right just there were no changes the updates um so there were updates that were recommended on the recommended update page so those are the only things that you're really approving are those updates right so we have to do that anyways that's what

231i'm saying yes yeah and i apologize that that was not on the agenda that it should have been right do you want to do a motion for that i interrupted jason okay so i'm going to break it up into two parts i'll move to a vote on the portion for masking the high school kids only grades 9 through 12 and to change the verbiage to be from mandated to recommended okay do we have a second for that motion i'll second it thank you any discussion or questions okay all in favor and those opposed and those abstained and i'll move to accept the remainder of the ggg plan as laid out by jeff second any discussion or questions thank you just just uh not the remainder but approve the plan as recommended changes i just heard

232remainder i thought that that was oh um well no because then you're forcing me to accept the part that i don't like so does someone else want to make a motion uh move to accept the updated religious green plan thank you on a second second thank you any discussion or questions and all in favor and those opposed and i'm stinking you had a motion on the table that you ignored procedurally i believe right i made a motion she seconded it and then we didn't do anything with that i'm sorry which one there's been a lot sorry i'm not just the remainder the the motion that i mean for the remainder of the ggg plan so i think okay so we are are there any other motions that would like to be brought to the table

233this evening okay please feel free to scour the minutes because i think i got it right but you know i'm taking it so we're looking for a uh vote to enter executive session [Music] go ahead i vote to enter executive session to discuss negotiations between msad 51 education association bus drivers and msad 51 board of directors pursuant to state statute mrsa4056d second all in favor thank you stop over there you