MSAD#51 School Board Meeting 11/16/2020

001and yeah just like increase family time like everything it's definitely sometimes that's really bad yeah so go for it okay um welcome to the november 16 2020 borah directors meeting for msid51 thank you to everybody that took their time out of their evening to be here we generally start our meetings with recognition i know for myself it's really important and something that's valued because it gives me some insight as a board member of what happens inside our classrooms both with our students and our staff their successes and achievements something that as board members we don't have an opportunity to see firsthand and honestly they make our meetings a lot more fun unfortunately tonight i was unable to get anybody to show up and that is a result of these meetings feeling uncomfortable and unsafe so

002unfortunately i do not have anyone here for recognition and as it relates to that there's a few people in this community that feel that i am unequipped to be in this seat that i don't follow policy that i don't know what i'm doing and so i want to recognize that because there's a lot of people here and there's a lot of people watching and if anything our kids are watching too so there is it's clear that there are some policies that we need to review and as a matter of practice in the past four years that i have been here we have never had comment before anything um for items of our action nor has anyone ever interrupted the chair or anyone else on the board however tonight i will follow that policy and i

003will offer public comment to anyone that wants to speak in front of the items for action to be clear if you choose to speak on the items for action which tonight are approval of minutes for the october 19th in october 27th meeting as well as a vote to enter in to executive session that your comments be related to those items for action you will receive three minutes just as everybody else does if you choose to change the topic of your public comment i will stop your time and respectfully ask that you keep your comment for the public comment section that follows the approval of minutes if you choose to speak i ask that you respectfully approach the podium and ask to be recognized i'd like to be able to hold this meeting in a respectful

004and civil manner and conduct the business of the board for the value of our district so with that can i please have a motion to approve the october 19th 2020 minutes so moved and a second second any discussion all in favor oh there's a discussion okay you can approach the podium sean mcerty cumberland madam chairperson i appreciate you following the policy has set forth however what should really happen is you should allow for public comment prior to the vote that's the point of the policy i'd also like to request that the minutes be updated for the 10 1920 school board meeting to include the superintendent jeff porter illegally withheld my first amendment rights to free speech redress of grievances and peaceful protests by having me removed from campus on 10 1920 with no reason given

005furthermore cumberland police chief charles rumsey who she's here tonight stated that no laws were broken by me i'd also like to ensure that every comment made by the board on that night is placed in the meeting minutes including the slanderous remarks made by kate perrin regarding stalking i'm not sure who does the minutes superintendent jeff porter is listed on the msad 51 website as the secretary which would be a huge conflict of interest i'm not sure if it's mario harrington but generally speaking the limits the minutes are limited in detail and sometimes this summer we're not provided to the community for two and a half months after the meeting it's almost like the school board and msc 51 administration don't want the citizens of cumberland in north yarmouth to know where their tax revenues are

006going 70 percent of cumberland tax revenue or your bill goes to msd 51 with only oversight being this school board thank you is anyone else that would like to speak on the minutes great so we will do redo the vote all approved or all in favor thank you moving on to the october 27th 2020. do i have a motion so moved thank you in a second second any discussion okay would anyone like to speak on those minutes all in favor thank you so we will now move into our public comment which are for items that are not on the agenda once again i ask that you respectfully speak we do not personally attack people and that everyone gets three minutes tyler if i may uh gentlemen can you bump up these here so that we

007can hear a little bit better and maybe it's just me but no me too that's bad it's both of us thank you so speakers because we all have masks on if you can it is hard to hear so please do your best to pronounce and speak loudly ready go ahead i'm mike doyle i live in portsmouth new hampshire i own and write for falmouth today.me i'm here to make a couple of comments the person spoke a few weeks ago about all the hard work you guys do probably has never done a hard day's work in its life because all you guys do is sit around and talk to each other so i don't consider that hard work then he commented that he had a second grader and fourth grader that came here from portland and

008wanted to enjoy the diversity training that you guys are going to provide for him i would suggest he moved back to the west end of portland and put his kids in the reiki school and he got plenty of diversity training right there now it's it's a harsh thing to do to call somebody a liar and it takes a special situation for that to happen and i was at the council meeting recently i was very disappointed to watch kate and ann lie at the uh council meeting you lied about being stalked you lied about people chasing you out to your car i think ian said that she was afraid to have her kids play in the in the driveway well i've had three kids i would never let my kids play in the driveway unsupervised on

009a road like tuttle road so if you if you behave incorrectly and you worry about your kids that's your problem and i watch these two people malign a guy that had done nothing except ask questions and if you think so many asking questions is terrorizing you i'm going to bring it to a whole new level for you i'm going to sue you under the ada law in the united states i brought a chair today because your chairs do not fit the ada requirements for someone like me that's not in a wheelchair and you're going to have 30 days to correct this or cure this problem this facility will be shut down by the federal government now i can hear people laughing wait till you see the federal suit that you can serve on you laugh

010then thank you very much have a great night we are going to ask people to leave so that we have enough room for everyone to speak sean mcbridey cumberland superintendent jeff porter and several members of the school board chair tyler mcginley and maximowicz kate perrin margot harrington and mike williams have all illegally retaliated against me several times something i'm protected by the first amendment of the constitution united states and the supreme court all for pointing out facts to community and asking for transparency many of you in the audience have this information in hand but superintendent jeff porter threatened me again by premeditated arrest tonight in which he stated he may request the district attorney's office to file criminal charges superintendent jeff porter also stated any further inappropriate conduct could result in my issuance of a

011trespass order removing you from all school-related activities they've recently spent thousands of your taxpayer dollars on legal fees to try to figure out how to squash dissenting opinion rather than simply follow their own rules which i do appreciate you doing tonight education does not equal intelligence folks what jeff porter's tried to say here is if i didn't comply with speaking out about the hypocrisy and responsible decisions he wouldn't let me see my twins graduate in june let that think in sink in he would not let me see my kids graduate in june for simply public comment the only people superintendent jeff porter reports to is the school board they fire and hire the superintendent he'll do all he can to save his 212 thousand 873.89 a year job compounded by three percent annually by the

012pay raise as he gives himself three members kate parent and maximowicz and marco harrington are all democrats and they're due up for election in june two of these three illegally hired a socialist and anarchist company of cci with no diligence done and spent hundreds of thousands of your taxpayer dollars in training fees travel and teacher payroll chair tyler mcginley moved on to a partnership with usm which urged all students to sign the black lives matter pledge a marxist company with black lives matter they also have an association with a butthead the butthead being ibramex kendy who was called a butthead professor from boston university by a u.s senator recently your school board the leftist elite at your service several with emotional intelligence of a petulant spoiled child you need to voice your displeasure with your

013vote your children's lives may just depend on it maybe it starts with your kids yelling curse words from a car one late night along tuttle road if you don't act now they may be out riding in the streets with blm or worse antifa torching police cars and assaulting an innocent people maybe they get arrested or worse it's time to take a stand citizens thank you good evening my name is mandy levine and i'm a resident resident of cumberland and the mother of two children in the elementary and middle schools i'm incredibly proud to be a resident of a school district that supports these vital conversations among our school community about diversity equity and inclusion issues statistics about the demographics of msid 51's predominantly white student body are not some sort of litmus test as to

014whether conversations about race equity and inclusion are necessary these statistics which mirror the reality of many towns in maine misleadingly distract us from the lived reality that many students of color experience in cumberland north yarmouth and many other predominantly white maine towns has demonstrated about the incidents of hate speech in our district in 2019 there is diversity in our school district whether we are talking about diversity of race or color or gender or sexual orientation or gender identity or socioeconomic status or age or disability or religion and so many other aspects of our identity i applaud these efforts to create a school environment where differences are both recognized and embraced where all of our students can bring their authentic best selves to school every day without fear of bullying cyberbullying or personal attack to be

015global citizens our children need to be prepared to successfully live and work in an increasingly diverse world able to navigate different perspectives and to participate in civic life creating an equitable school environment means understanding both the unique advantages and disadvantages faced by students in our district and striving to ensure that every child is provided an equal opportunity for success on a personal note i've devoted my professional career to diversity equity and inclusion related work and i applaud our district for undertaking this essential work i'm also the mother of two young jewish children who are very aware of their differences for most of their peers whom i've already had to start educating about anti-semitism that is rampant in today's society and that thankfully they have not experienced yet personally in school thank you for supporting a

016school environment where my children feel safe and included every day thank you superintendent porter the school board and the equity leadership steering committee for supporting this urgent vital work thank you so much [Applause] thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is brian o'connor i have two children in the school district a sixth grader and a fifth grader as is common to a couple of speakers before me tonight i'm a white cisgender heterosexual male so drenched in privileged that the floor is probably going to be wet when i leave so be careful if you're the next person up here i'm not all together comfortable speaking tonight both because while i'm on a journey similar to a lot of us in learning more about diversity i'm not an expert i also recognize that for

017the last 400 years or so people that look like me have been heard too much we make the rules sometimes we hold ourselves accountable to them we certainly hold others accountable to them that said i might have to go to announce privilege is power and when people like me sit quietly on the sidelines it typically serves to perpetuate inequities and oppression and exclude voices that don't typically be heard the voices of women the voices of people of color the voices of the lgbt community my children especially my son will walk through life armed with with privilege similar to mine but their world will be a more diverse one if their education is like mine conveniently ignoring the racism and oppression prevalent throughout our history and entrenched in so many of our country's institutions criminal justice

018housing banking you name one it's there just to keep white people comfortable they'll grow up less informed less empathetic and less prepared for the world they'll know as adults whether or not my children benefit though is beside the point whether you hear my voice is largely irrelevant i stand before you tonight to thank the school board superintendent of the administration for your bold leadership on diversity equity and inclusion issues and to urge you to continue to use your power and your privilege to lift up the voices of families of color of families of lgbt students and other people who are not often heard i'd like to see the floor to someone else thank you [Applause] good evening my name is miklos van helen you can probably tell from my accent i'm an immigrant i came

019to the united states when i was already 13 years old i'm very appreciative to the people of this country and maine for taking us in and letting us make this our home this is a very sensitive topic for me a number of levels my entire i come from a family of school teachers and they also survived and i grew up behind the iron curtain under the rule and obsession of communism i find it absolutely disturbing and disgusting that this is even being discussed at this level 30 31 years later after the berlin one well fell a number of people feel like we have too much white privilege so i would like to tell you about white privilege my family uh worked very hard saved up for a corner store hardware store they had all of

020three employees communist came took it at gunpoint my father was taking my grandfather's taken at gunpoint to a hard labor camp deep inside the soviet union working under sub-zero temperatures for four and a half years most people in that camp died they were either literally worked to death or froze to death died due to disease and malnourishment my grandfather was one of the few lucky to survive after four and a half years i could tell you a number of other things but only have three minutes so i just want to remind the board that communism is responsible for more deaths worldwide it's in the hundreds of millions more more deaths than any other concept in the universe so before we start educating and hiring companies to educate our children during their most impressionable years i

021would like the board to think about that is that really a good idea i also want to point out i mean this is well beyond democrat versus republican the these are not compatible ideas the communist stated goal is to overthrow our entire system of government no more elections one party no freedom no freedom of speech this is very very serious i would urge everyone to take this very very seriously and you know one of the other playbooks from the communists to silence those who disagree so i think we're seeing some of that here that people who exposed some of what's happening are being harassed uh you know silenced and you know literally driven out of the premises for speaking up thank you very much good evening my name is shawna mueller i am a parent

022of a third grader and a fourth grader in the district and i will keep this very nice and short the board has already heard me before speak about how grateful i am to the work that they have undertaken and the district has undertaken in equity i am here tonight to express my gratitude for all of the board members and the superintendent for doing the hard work that it is to be an elected local official and and a superintendent i know it is not easy and i just i'm really grateful for that i know that the last number of months have been really trying for you in particular and um and i know that you know you're all trying to do the very best you can so thank you for that have a good evening [Applause]

023hi my name is gretchen mccloy and i'm here on behalf of my family just to express express some words of gratitude in a big picture gratitude i would like to say gratitude to all the teachers administrators everyone working tirelessly behind the scenes especially this year to educate our children we appreciate how many long hours all of our staff are putting in to help make sure that our children are educated and i'm so so very grateful for all of that hard work to those who've been able to speak here that at the meetings and speak at the town council meetings and to all those who are at home juggling child care and nights at home with our children we thank everyone who's speaking up and being part of these tough conversations i'm an educator in another

024school district and i absolutely understand and recognize how important the work around equity diversity and inclusion really is for our young people and i thank you and i appreciate you for taking up these difficult conversations things that need to be happening in every community across our state and especially to the elected members of the school board thank you to each and every one of you on the stage we see you we thank you we're grateful for each and every one of you we know that there's a lot of long hours late nights lots of meetings time away from your own families and we are very grateful for all of you we hope that as a community we can work together to allow you to do the work that you want to do for our schools

025and the work that we have elected you to try to do for our community thank you i'm oh okay good evening i am hannah berry i am a parent of four three are in the district at this time and i'm well aware enough to know when i am the black sheep and apparently tonight i didn't get the memo about what the topic was for the conversation i'm actually here to give my public comment about so far the response to the coronavirus pandemic and the way that we're educating our kids which i guess i'm just super focused on right now probably because i have you know a lot of outnumbered people in my house but i have kids at all three grade levels elementary middle and high school and i am thrilled that we have had

026no positive cases among at least the student body that i'm aware of which is great it proves that masking and social distancing is working what's not working great is virtual school and i don't want us as a community to lose sight of positive change that can be made in the coming six months i know right now our numbers are not great but i also know that we can do better there are things that we can do for our kids to get more instruction time it's very clear to me that there are certain subjects where my children are not able to get the instruction they need and i'm trying to supplement them because again i guess back to the white privilege theme i'm able to make ends meet and try to find a way to help

027them but in the long term they really need their teachers they need face time for spanish math sciences i mean you name it they're they're struggling at home to try to learn on their own they're feeling a little overwhelmed that they are sort of instructing themselves so it's a little bit like college but they're only 13 and 15 so they're a little overwhelmed so i would just ask that as a board we try to focus in the community on ways in which we can add back any instruction time whether it's you know on a screen or in person anything we can do in the next six months to a year to get them back more in the classroom with their teachers would be awesome thanks for listening and it goes without saying i very much

028appreciate you all hello i'm jennifer mancini i work i live in north yarmouth i have two kids in the district and i want to voice my support for the school board i love the fact that so many of you volunteer your precious time away from your family and try to do so much hard work and juggling so many different priorities right now and i want to advocate for respect for volunteers that serve our community and i think that you deserve to be spoken to respectfully and understand that you can't make magic and make everything perfect and i really want to thank you for your time and i also want to thank you for your dedication to the very sensitive topic of diversity and inclusion and equity there are some uncomfortable truths about american history and

029current american situation for example genocide slavery jim crow redlining racial profiling it goes on and on and unfortunately this is a part of the american experience and i don't want my kids shielded from that because i don't want them to perpetuate it and i know it took a lot of courage um for you to face this subject and make it a part of the curriculum but honestly i'm so glad because i wouldn't want my kids to think that this is you know their privileged life is how it is for everybody it's hard enough you know to see beyond their really comfortable community to understand these complicated issues so i want to say that thank you for your courage and your dedication and thank you for your precious time [Applause] so it does look like there

030are some people standing in the hallway to speak and i think it's important that we give them the ability to speak i think we have maxed out our capacity so if anyone is comfortable leaving we appreciate your comments and also appreciate you giving space for others to speak thank you good evening annika hole from cumberland i have two students in the district one who is in first grade and one in fourth and i spoke with you all not that long ago but i'm back again and we'll also try to keep it brief this evening to express my appreciation and gratitude for the work that you all do as elected officials and for our schools as staff and administrators and particularly wanting to again express my appreciation around the hard work that you all have undertaken

031with the equity and inclusion work it's work that i followed closely since the very beginning since the spring of 2019 when jeff porter brought to our attention some incidents that had happened within our schools that really spoke to the need to do this work and so it's been kind of a long road already back to the spring of 2019 and looking at all of the communications that came out of that both to inform the public of those initial incidents and to invite us into a process starting back in may of 2019 to be part of the conversation around this work through having you know the opportunity to participate in a workshop in the fall of that year an update from the chair from the school board in the fall of 2019 various other updates and

032avenues of communication that have happened since then which i've greatly appreciated you bringing us into that process and providing that opportunity and i just have found it so incredibly disheartening over the past couple months to watch what has been happening and how in the efforts i think to to distort this work frankly i think that as a community we need to get on the same page when we're talking about diversity equity and inclusion because there are so many things that i've been hearing recently that just don't fit i think with really what the district is trying to accomplish and are steering us in a direction that is not actually the path that we were on so i'm really hopeful that we can get back on track i appreciate all of the efforts that you all

033are making to do that um and i really look forward to continuing that with this community so thank you all hello i also have two kids in the school district and i just want to thank you all so much for uh putting up with what you've had to put up with and for focusing on the importance of equity in our school systems and our community we can't thank you enough and the vast majority of the district supports your work so thank you so much hi good evening my name is stacy caulk i live in north yarmouth i have a fourth grader in the school it's been in the school since kindergarten and i just want to start by saying thank you to the board it's the jeff and to the administration this has been a

034challenging year for everyone and i'm really proud to be a member of this community i think with all the challenges we've faced you have all pulled together and i've been really happy with the what's been happening in our school system and how great the teachers have pulled together both in the spring and the fall and i just want to say thank you a lot of that's from your leadership on that same note i want to say thank you for your leadership in the equity work i've been following it closely since the beginning i received some emails quite a couple years ago that came out of the racist incidents that happened in the district attended the meetings that were open to the public have been following the work closely and i want to say thank you

035very very much this is vital important work in our community um and regardless of what it stemmed from which the racist incidents obviously made it necessary but had they not happened i still think this is vital important work that needs to happen and i just want to thank you for your leadership in that thank you hi my name is sarah allenby i have two students in the district live in cumberland i want to thank you all of the school board jeff porter the administration and teachers and staff for all of your hard work um as others have said this is a very trying time both with coronavirus and with um the tensions in the community around an issue that frankly shouldn't be tense at all um divisive i as as stacy and annika both referenced

036have also been following this work the diversity equity and inclusion work since the school started communicating about your efforts which was over a year and a half ago now there was a meeting held in may 2019 that was open to the public i attended that attended that and um was very interested in continuing with the work from my understanding the workshop that was held over a year ago now was so um there was so much interest in it that you weren't able to accommodate everyone who was interested in attending i was not able to attend but i was i had applied to attend i was not accepted and while i would have loved to what that said to me was this is amazing we have a district that is so committed to this work people

037from all aspects of the community staff teachers parents community members are committed to this and agree with it so so strongly that there's too many of us to participate in a formal organized way but we're all here to back you up to still participate in um in whatever way we can and to thank you very much thank you [Applause] good evening my name is kathy carlson and i want my name is kathy carlson and i'm the parent of sarah carlson a junior who is highly invested in the music program here at greeley thank you so much for allowing me to address you this evening i am here on behalf of her and a group of concerned music parents to advocate for the music students and educators to help keep music alive in our schools during

038this pandemic in tonight's meeting sarah bailey will be presenting a report on behalf of her district music colleagues of how the main coveted safety guidelines are greatly affecting the delivery of our music curriculum because they are not in alignment with the national standards or our peer states i will defer the science and the facts to her presentation my hope is that you will listen with an open mind to better understand how these strict guidelines are impacting our music programs within our district and across the state and be responsive to what you hear please know everything presented tonight put safety in the forefront we are not promoting any changes which would jeopardize the safety of our students or community we recognize this must remain the top priority in this time of covid and we greatly thank

039you for all your effort so far engage empower inspire these words surround everything we value as a district as a board mental health and developing healthy well-rounded students has been a priority in your strategic plan music education is at the heart of this balance it not only engages empowers and inspires but also offers meaningful expression and connection our students are longing for if louis armstrong's words music is life itself embodies any truth then now in this environment of increased stress and anxiety it is critical that our students have some access to this healing and supportive outlet studies not only show the tremendous health benefits of playing music they also highlight the vital benefits to their social and emotional learning in my daughter's words we need music to thrive our music teachers continually think outside the

040box to keep their students engaged but these requirements are taking a toll on everyone with winter upon us these rules will be even more devastating already we are losing talented musicians and prospective students at both the middle and the high school with no inside singing the root of music instruction we risk losing even our youngest learners before they even get started the ripple effect is real main stricter guidelines are slowly eroding the core of our programs programs that have been recognized at all levels if we are not careful and this trend continues the future of our music programs here and across the state will be in peril excuse me um your three minutes has has come i apologize but i do have to stay consistent with everyone thank you good evening school board members and

041superintendent porter thank you for hearing the statements of us concerned music parents tonight in addition to being willing to listen to the perspectives of the caring music teachers who work with our children it is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words tonight i hope that the reverse is also true that a collection of words allows you to see a picture in an effort to directly represent the collective voices of the students who have been impacted by the state of maine's guidelines for covet safe music instruction greeley music boosters whom i serve as secretary sent out a simple two-question survey to students and families we asked for words or phrases that described their music experiences at school before and during the pandemic in your digital packet you will find a link to slides

042of word clouds generated from the responses to this survey for those new to this term word cloud software creates a graphic where the most prominent words used in a collection of text are sized the biggest it shouldn't be surprising that the biggest words those used most commonly in describing music students experiences show a change from fun to difficult we know sorry i'm just waiting for the visual to come up we know that most curricular areas are experiencing difficult circumstances right now in pandemic times that parts of school in general are just less fun right now and this is understandable what we parents are most concerned about is the change shown through the next biggest words before the pandemic hit it is clear that students found music to be an activity that was relaxing that it

043allowed them space to process to transcend stress and studies support this as you have heard the next slide shows during the pandemic you can see that music class is actually now often viewed as something stressful to our kids we are very concerned that a vital coping tool has been removed from our children's lives with how music classes have been utterly silenced if there was ever a time to provide children with a safe place to become better life learners equipped to face challenges with perseverance to find moments of collective joy in the world chaos that swirls about them we feel that now is that time excuse me your three minutes has come up thank you thank you i'm curious if there's anyone else from the public that has public comment this evening i don't see anyone

044waiting in the hallway okay thank you to everyone that made the time to speak this evening so moving forward we have our presentations for this evening and as i mentioned the music department is first up how we doing andy i'm not seeing it there we go good evening everybody my name is sarah bailey i'm the choral director here at the high school and i'm here tonight presenting on behalf of my colleagues what i have to say tonight very much is a collaboration of all of the music staff grades k to 12 in the district thank you so much jeff for allowing us to come speak to the board tonight and a huge thank you to our board members for your tireless work on our behalf we appreciate you also just a shout out to our

045building administration who have been tirelessly supportive of our efforts during a very difficult time so we're here tonight to share information and to ask for your help music is the most heavily impacted academic discipline during this pandemic and without change we fear that there is a bleak outlook for our music program so what are we dealing with these are the recommendations that come from the main doe and the main doe is of course under the governance of the cdc and the department of health and human services currently singing and playing is restricted to outside only it's a little chilly out we are also required to distance 14 feet when we are outside masks are encouraged and students must face the same direction i do want to point out that these are only recommendations from the

046doe and that there is room for local decisions regarding these recommendations these are among the most restrictive guidelines in the nation and we are the most restrictive state in the northeast we'd like to provide evidence tonight that we hope proves that it might be safe to now change these guidelines so i want to share with you some examples of how we're adapting and what music looks like right now in our district this is my high school chorus one of the cohorts rehearsing outside they are 14 feet apart in two rows and in a situation like this we have unprecedented acoustical challenges they cannot hear each other it's essentially playing and singing in isolation when they are distanced this far apart um in addition to that we're dealing with things like moving major pieces of equipment

047outside for every rehearsal i don't know if you can see it in the bottom left but that's my piano which i move out along with an amp and other things here's a picture of kevin's students upper left moving their rhythm section equipment out which they do for every rehearsal on a cart that kevin on his own time built so that they could do that middle school chorus is in the lower right they are inside on the day that this picture was taken because it was too cold or too windy or too rainy to be out and so they can't sing these are chorus kids who are practicing their rhythms they're wrapping their rhythms next picture is on top it's a little bit dark but this is our middle school band distanced outside trying to have

048a rehearsal at those distances i think that's mrs cummings right in the middle there and then just an example of an adaptation that we have been using lower right you see our high school madrigals who did some virtual choir collaborations last spring they also did one this fall you might have seen our reni's ad on tv which seems fun it's really fun for the community to see the kids on tv but they will tell you that it's not ensemble it's not fun they are alone in their bedrooms singing by themselves they're not with their friends and they're isolated so while it's a great product it's not a great experience outside temperatures winter temperatures are going to end these rehearsals very shortly today we could stand it for about 15 minutes before we moved inside so

049our ensembles are going to go silent very very difficult conditions so how does this compare to other disciplines i made the assertion that we are the most heavily impacted well the the discipline that is most closely related to what we do is physical education so again i'm going to show you some guidelines for phys ed coming from the same state agencies so phys ed creates approximately the sum approximately similar rates of aerosol production based on the activities that they are engaging in however phys ed is allowed to engage in class activities inside or outside with masks on at six foot distancing if they are outside at 14 feet they can take their masks off and there are no restrictions on which direction students are facing so there's a clear and obvious inequity between these two

050disciplines which are governed by the same state agencies it really doesn't make sense another comparison how do the main guidelines compare to national guidelines so i have a graph for you and represented here you'll see several national agencies so across the bottom you'll see national cdc the national federation of state high school associations the national association for music education and then a state agency the main music educators association the vertical represents the distancing that they recommend all four of these agencies recommend six-foot distancing and blue means that they say inside is safe to the far right of course is maine with its 14 foot distancing and its outside only restriction another comparison how does the state of maine compare to our pure states so in this graph you'll see data from every northeast state except

051rhode island i didn't get any responses from rhode island peers connecticut and new sorry connecticut and new york do recommend 12 feet so their distancing is pretty restrictive however they're doing it inside massachusetts gets its own color because recently they changed their their guidance to be that wind instruments band can come inside and be distanced 10 feet however their singers are still out in the cold at 10 feet i i don't know why but that's what's happening there new hampshire actually has purposely vague language in their state documents because they really want it to be a local decision so you'll see a spectrum in new hampshire if you did a sampling of school districts but it is as the least restrictive is six feet indoors and then of course we have vermont which is red

052like us um so they have to be outside but they have six foot distancing and speaking to colleagues in vermont their their singers can hear each other they can actually hold a rehearsal outdoors at six foot distancing and of course again we have maine man is by far the most restrictive so i want to tell you a little bit more about nfhs which i mentioned just a moment ago so this summer the national federation of state high school associations co-sponsored an unprecedented study of aerosol production in the performing arts coalition of more than 125 arts organizations co-sponsored the event including the maine music educators association the the the science was performed at the university of colorado and the university of maryland they studied wind instruments singing as well as speaking in a theatrical context they

053have released three rounds of data and the most recent was just released on friday so here are their recommendations in a nutshell according to the science this is what they feel is safe mask everything put masks on your students put masks on your teachers put masks or bell covers on your instruments it's important that you have two layers or more of dense fabric on your instruments and that your masks fit well it's important that you are distancing six feet with your masks on they also talk about timing so excuse me if you are indoors you should rehearse for no more than 30 minutes and then you should allow your air filtration system to clean the room out and then you can reuse that space after you've done a full air exchange of course proper hygiene

054is important and airflow and filtration is important but we know that the district has already increased the air the air filtration and the airflow in all of our spaces so we're already on track to meet these require requirements so let's look at some of the data because it's pretty compelling what you see here sorry it's a little hidden on the bottom what you see here are brass instruments and the tall graphs it's hard to see they should be gray bars the tall bars are showing the aerosol production of an instrument that is unmasked just playing an instrument normally next to it to the right you will see small orange bars this is the effect when we put a bell cover on an instrument it mitigates it so much that it becomes almost negligible this next

055one shows four five woodwind instruments notice even the oboe which is uh the fourth one over has really high aerosol production but as soon as you mask that instrument it's it's tiny it's mitigated to almost negligible singers in the middle we see soprano aerosol production speaking as a soprano there might be a joke in there but as soon as you mask her look at the orange bar it's almost nothing once that mask is on speaking of masking i am wearing to demonstrate tonight a singer's mask and this is something that we have provided to all of our high school singers so you can see that it has a little more space in the front it's got some structure here to hold it away from my face and that means when i take deep breaths in

056i'm not getting a mouthful of masks and it also gives me a little more vertical space but it's tight around my face and it's safe it has been approved by our health team so i think this data is extremely compelling i hope you do too so what's been happening locally i do want to speak to the work of our local agency so the main music educators association executive committee has been working absolutely tirelessly since july they have been looking at their research looking at the data and early this month they released their guidance for music education this guidance was unanimously approved by the sports medicine committee of the main principles association excuse me on october 22nd you can see in the graphic on the right very similar guidance so they are basing their guidance on

057the data and so it looks a lot like nfhs except we have fresh mate and air which not everybody has so if the mpa says it's safe if science says it's safe to come inside if we are adjusting every other part of our life based on science based on data why are we not looking at these music education guidelines here's what it's doing to our program in our general music k-8 classes this includes teachers so teachers are not even able to demonstrate what good singing sounds like there and singers are not if our students are not able to participate in singing at all and what we're hearing from our primary teachers at the most fundamental ages is that when students submit distinct learning distance learning assignments they can't even produce a singing tone they don't

058know what it sounds like they don't know how to do it because they're not receiving that education it's really critical there's no recorder i know that those of you who have heard your students play recorder it might not be your favorite thing but it is the foundation of our very successful band program so we take away recorders from our students and they're not going to make an easy transition to whatever that next instrument is elementary ensembles third grade chorus is gone that's the picture you see by the way gone grade 45 chorus online only bethany is doing her absolute best to teach 4-5 chorus she has 60 fewer students than normal grade 5 band online only sarah cummings spends all day on wednesday teaching in small group lessons students who have never even held or

059put together their instruments before she's doing it through a screen and she has half the students that she normally would and by the way fifth grade band is normally our largest group six eight sixth grade band down 37 percent chorus 14 7 8 band down 24 7th chorus 38 8th grade queer is 10 these are devastating numbers to our program high school the band is down 16 percent and the chorus is down 17 those numbers may not look big those numbers are huge at the high school level we generally just don't lose students if they've committed that far they're in it so it's a big deal i gotta catch up on my notes and i just want to point out that not only does it impact it this year it's easy to say oh we're

060in a pandemic of course everything is difficult it'll be better next year it won't be better next year we're going to have to rebuild these programs instead of maintaining the robust programs excuse me that we have built so the next thing i want to tell you i think is extremely compelling in addition to the data there are states where they have been implementing the nfhs guidelines all year so far starting in august and here's the result we have not heard of a single outbreak as a result of safe indoor rehearsals it hasn't happened they're working dr mark speed who was the study co-chair and he is the president of the college band directors national association says that he's happy to report that there have been zero transmissions during music activity that is in spite of

061students unknowingly coming to rehearsal infected rehearsing indoors six feet apart with masks and good ventilation it didn't spread it's safe so what are we asking you to do we have a couple of asks tonight first is would you consider adding your voice to those who are requesting change at the state level in the letter that i provided to you in preparation for tonight you may have noticed a link to a letter that was written by the freeport school board freeport has set the precedent they heard from their music educators early in the year and they wrote a letter to the state agencies requesting that they review their guidelines we would ask that if you find this data compelling and these anecdotal anecdotal evidence compelling that you might also add your voice the second thing to

062consider is i will say again that these are guidelines they are not recommendations i'm sorry they are not requirements they are recommendations so you do have the power to make a local decision and i would just ask you to consider that that is a possibility and i just want to close by saying excuse me that we know how terrible the timing is of this request believe me we have our our finger on the pulse of see the of the coronavirus cases spiking in maine we know we we listen to dr shaw we know what's happening but we're here we're here in person for now we hope that we hope that we can stay in person as long as possible and the conditions that we're rehearsing under simply are not working so thank you for listening

063and we would encourage you to speak with us speak with your music educators we're happy to answer your questions and to work with you moving forward thank you so much for all of that i know that didn't take a short amount of time to prepare so thank you um i'd open it up to the board for anyone that has questions or feedback i'd love to head yeah um well first thank you so much uh and just you know to bore you with background um i wouldn't be who i am without music in my life i started in band in sixth grade played through college um it's deep part of me uh playing music so i really appreciate it and it hurts my soul what the kids here and across the country have not been able

064to experience it regardless but then especially the additional impact here so i really appreciate you bringing this to us uh so just start with that um and also my just personal further personal my daughter's in fifth grade has been so excited to start with trumpet so we've been doing the the online and i think mrs cummings is doing a great job but it's hard um my daughter's lucky i've played trombone since i was 10 or whatever so we have a little bit of back and forth all that said um a couple quick questions um uh so i totally understand singing with mass i understand playing with um uh bell covers and such um it is it would you see as in practice of playing band inside that kids went like you know you have a

06516 measure rest they would just pop their masks back on yeah and in fact people have developed adaptive masks for a lot of the band instruments so for example you mentioned your daughter plays trumpet so people have developed a mask where they would actually have a slit in the center of the mask they would slip the mouse mouthpiece through and they would actually be able to play with a mask on in an indoor setting and you know different instruments have different needs but yes people have come up with adaptive masks great um the second my other question was um you know given that you mentioned at the end this is a tough time to bring it up covet cases are brutal right now is it something where if looking at this if changes came by

066on say january 1st or something like that is that something that you felt would be an improvement or do you feel like it really needs to happen as soon as possible i mean if if we're forced inside and can't sing and play till january 1st and then there's a positive change i that's great you know we would take it when we can get it but i will tell you that the weather's already brutal yeah i just i find it's crazy that we there's indoor dining allowed and we can't have music so thank you sarah appreciate it thank you mike peter and madison i just had a question to jeff has main school management uh way down weighed in on this differential between other states if they had any interaction with the department of education yep

067made school management and the department of education um have been talking along with the cdc the main principals association uh the maine educators um association as well all of them have been talking um they just finalized the winter sports for athletics and they were we were told that music is next so we have been advocating that there is some sort of guidance that's provided to districts from the state on music so i we're expecting those guidance i'm in those weekly meetings with other superintendents and we've been told that that should be coming soon i don't know when that will be no sarah that may be uh may not be the whole thing but hopefully uh with the statistics they can read as well as we can that hopefully they're going to make some decisions that

068will get you guys on on track well thanks jeff that's good to know thank you peter and i think the anecdotal evidence which is brand new from friday will will help with that process i hope it will help madison uh i just wanted to express appreciation on behalf of all band chorus students for you guys actually coming up here and explaining this because i know that band has been seen and chorus have been seen as like a release from the hard day because it's just so much fun to be around your friends um i just had one question uh do we like do we have the space inside in the chorus rooms in the band room including the middle school and elementary school do we actually have the space to maintain whether it is 14

069or 6 foot indoor social distancing during the winter that's a great question at the high school obviously we have this space this place has excellent air exchange and lots of room middle school might be a little more challenging but you know what we've been adapting and we'd figure it out right mr thurston [Music] i just wanted to thank you for your presentation i also grew up playing music from middle school through college and it is really sad to see this happening you know it's just a part of a child's life and it should be and it just helps their education in so many ways that that musical foundation you know how you can apply that to every other subject and i definitely would be in support of you know speaking with the board to take

070a local action to help improve your programming thank you so much thanks kevin thank you um thanks for putting the information together i was lobbied aggressively by an eighth grader at the dinner table tonight uh that that we listened very closely to what you had to say um i guess my question to the superintendent or um mr poulin would be is it a recommendation that that we could do something locally or are we constrained within the state right now from doing our own thing i think typically i'll just answer and scott can talk about the health team um response to all this but um you know we've really as a county and as a state we've we've followed the cdc guidelines that they have and we haven't deviated from them i know the superintendents in

071cumberland county have been very active with our voice with maine school management with the department of education to say this isn't working very well and that we need new guidelines made school management is in our superintendent meetings every single week a representative from there and they're taking those conversations back to the commissioner of education who also is an advocate of education uh in in the musical arts and everywhere else at this point and knows the constraints so i think what we're trying to do is use our voices as you know county superintendents to try to push the state to have guidelines that make sense for music education we've been able to pull it off through the main principles association for athletics um we should be able to pull it off for music education as well

072um so i i have to say there's probably no district that i know of they might deviate a little bit here and there but for the most part districts are following what the maine cdc is saying that you need to do we would prefer as a county and we've been advocating that there needs to be a change in the guidelines from the state i just feel and not not to reiterate what what the rest of my colleagues have said and as i watch the talent over here on the left um that this is critical and there are a lot of folks that depend on this for everything and and i know that we're in challenging times to make the right case to the state but uh i mean we've got a district physician we have

073so many folks that we could leverage to have science behind this approach and um and and i do i tackle my colleagues i think it's critical so you mentioned the amazing resources that gca is just for keeping the 14 feet distance inside do you foresee the middle school and even elementary school being able to utilize this space when the high school abandoned course isn't in session or is that kind of too risky to mix well i mean it is a district space that's been clear from the beginning but you bring up a good point um about having students go into other buildings i don't know that would certainly be a decision that would involve our administration and our health team but it's something we could look at being able to share this space is there

074anyone else i just want to say thank you for preparing that that was super helpful i've always been a little curious when sports get approved what about music that's always a little confusing to me so i will speak for myself not as chair that i support looking at this and bringing it to the board to see what we can do the only question i have that hasn't been answered is do you know if freeport received any sort of response from their letter as far as i know they did not which is disappointing um my my hope is that if more school boards or administrators would add their voice that we might be able to affect change sure okay thank you so oh thank you can i ask a question tyler what could be the process

075for us considering a letter like this i'm sorry can you say that again i already mumble and now i have a mask so it just makes it really hard what would be the process for us to consider a letter like what freeport said um i think to be honest i'm not sure um we would have to set aside some time in the agenda to speak on it and give the board some time to digest what we receive tonight and i think we can follow back up on it in our next meeting if not before i would request that perhaps we can create an agenda item for that for our next meeting sure thank you i don't know if sarah if you have a draft also they could share with the board that might expedite that

076because i think some of it quite frankly is time sensitive and you know each week that i'm in these meetings we're being told that there will be a decision soon shortly whatever that is um and i think to prod um you know the the board has a representative in maine school management which represents the state school boards association and steve bailey is the executive director obviously you all have met steve so he would be the person to contact um for advocating for a decision to be made soon and they're at the table for that so in the letter that i put in your packets there is a link to the freeport letter and um kathy who spoke earlier actually spoke to a member of the freeport school board who said please use it please it's

077a great template and they they want people to use it and add their voice great thank you so much thank you so next up we have jeff presenting listening forum's response plan yes is this being is this up here i'm going to go over probably over there uh [Music] okay all right tonight i'm just presenting um on the forums the listening forums that were held about a month ago we had four forums and we've put out communication on some major themes but we also have now taken a look at the leadership team has taken a look at the plan the actual plan that we want to develop to be responsive to the forums that we heard about and i don't want to digress too much but on the music education piece i was just thinking

078if the board was interested in pursuing that tonight if you wanted to talk about it at communications and we could certainly draft something up from the before the board um you know quickly if you'd like us to do that using the freeport template um and then um the board can sign it if that's something that you're interested in doing and talk about it later tonight we can certainly get that to main school management soon um so there are some major uh areas that we certainly were talking about uh being in yellow until the end of december obviously at this point and given that the state has not adjusted the guidelines from three to six feet of social distancing which has kept us in yellow at this point and i think for a variety of reasons

079with the conditions going on in the state right now obviously it's going to be very difficult for us to be looking beyond yellow for the foreseeable future so obviously we're going to be looking at that as we get closer to december and making a decision but i think at this point it's fair to say that unless something pretty drastic changes at the state and national level in terms of the state guidance or where the pandemic is my guess is and this is not a decision but my guess is just based on the conditions that will probably continue in yellow after the holiday season is over unless things change in being in these weekly county meetings that seems to be the sentiment of my colleagues as well in the county at this point number two one

080of the largest things that we're coming up from especially from parents of elementary students is can we please open the playgrounds safely and that has been completed we have been opening the playgrounds the principals have been working on that for the last month or so and so after these right after these forms were over actually is when the playground started to be reopened for kids to be able to use so we're pleased with that one the next one major area was around supporting parents as they are working with their students at home there have been a number of things that have been done at the school level since then mabel wilson has been offering seesaw activities for our or training and information for parents live streaming there's been some training and guidelines for parents as

081students are introduced or there will be some guidelines we have a group that's working on that and as we've been talking about we have 15 teachers right now who are live streaming in the district after the holiday season is over we'll be expanding that number quite a bit we have some interested we'll be recruiting interested teachers as the equipment comes in that equipment has been on order and hopefully we'll be seeing that arriving in the next few weeks the next area is live streaming we have a work group right now we've had a couple of meetings with that group that steering committee is helping to lift this project and make sure that we are expanding live streaming to more students in classes beginning in january these are all again topics that have come up at

082the parent and staff forums the next one is around student connections when they're learning at home we have about 130 or so students that are in the remote school right now that certainly came up at the remote school meeting as well as the regular parent forums offering daily check-ins for students and being able to make sure that individual schools are working with the tech department around student access through google meets and google meets has changed a lot in the last three weeks students actually have the ability to connect with each other through google meets and continue connecting with each other and there's new features in google meets that i think is enhancing the communication there as well this i'll be honest with you that was a challenging one for us to start looking at during

083a pandemic is how do we support student connections when they're at home articulation of standards the teachers have been working in administrators since the beginning of the school year to identify the essential standards for students that link went out a couple of weeks ago those standards will continue to be updated as the year goes on and making sure that at each segment of the school year those essential standards are being developed and they'll be up on our website that's a live document and as teachers complete those standards um anyone can go in and look at those considering the amount of busy work this was an item that came up from parents and from staff staff being worried about this item concerned about students when they're not in in person remote school concerns about busy work

084as well just overall what does a hybrid model look like in our kids disconnected in terms of meaningful work when they're not in person so i think you know one of the things we've talked about is stressing those essential standards making those very well known making sure they're connected to curricular work so that it isn't busy work those are curricular connections and making sure that live streaming becomes a major focus which it has been and as january comes around we expect that that will be expanding a lot more with interested teachers taking that on for parents more consistent outdoor learning we have actually asked the building leadership team although i know the outdoor learning community committee is also talking about how do we make the winter months you know something where students are going outdoors

085winter should not be a time of the year when we're not being outside i think elementary kids tend to go out more in the winter but we also want to see older students out there but making sure that we're connecting that with the curriculum and finding new ways of doing that so we have asked the building leadership teams to work on that and i know the outdoor learning community committee had that on their agenda as well for remote school parents making sure that we're clarifying their remote school goals and having more check-ins since these forums took place there have been parent meetings with the director of academic services we've also had our staffing more solidly in place for the remote school we haven't had any staffing changes since the forums actually in the remote school

086area and i think from what what i understand in talking with susie recently is that any concerns that have come up she's addressed them one-on-one with parents but that overall we've been able to put more things into place since the forums the next item was from remote school parents as well there are issues and problems around some technology platforms like ingenuity for the most part those have been solved and as they continue to come up they will continue to be solved by the technology department student and parent student and student student and staff workload both parents and staff talked about workload demands of students staff talked about workload demands on students and themselves we have asked the school work life balance group which is a group of teachers this is an area that we've asked

087them to look at is the amount of stress among students and staff this is also an area that individual teachers are looking at for students as well in administrators rti support one of the areas the leadership team talked about is how do we continue to provide support for students that need it we have added extra staffing especially at the high school level for students in fact we were just adding staffing last week again for students that need extra support and are struggling academically rti is still a huge goal of our districts but right now we're focusing on rti tier 3 which are the students that most need intervention that's where we're spending a lot of our focus and time right now and not rti tier 2 or 1. the next one was a lack of

088materials these this came from the remote school parent group um susie robins did a great job distributing along with some teachers in the remote school materials that came in they had been ordered and so we had some actually some nice feedback from parents about that and then the last one is allowing families to change cohorts in the middle of the school year if we're still in yellow and the leadership team discussed the merits of doing that but had a lot of fairly significant concerns if we were to go ahead and make those changes child care transportation cohort sizes staffing schedules and we have a lot of staffing shortages that we're going to continue to monitor as we go into the winter we have staff that are coming back after taking some leaves of absence but

089at the same time we know that there will be a lot of demands on our substitutes we have 15 long-term substitutes and how are we utilizing them and how many absences are we going to be working through with staff especially considering that we haven't been telling staff and students please don't come to school if you have any of these symptoms so we're we're anticipating more absences uh this winter than than probably normal as well so changing cohorts we think would be very challenging especially for your parents of younger children and trying to secure daycare that was a huge i know it was a huge feat continues to be a huge feat for a lot of parents and we have generally been saying we can't change cohorts at this point if we stay in yellow so

090these are the the larger areas doesn't mean that there were other things that we didn't hear and i think members of the board and the administration for being at a lot of these forums we are considering doing another round of forums in the middle of the year but we're also going to be giving you an update in january as to any progress some of these things we're going to keep working on but these i assume these will be the the major issues that we'll be tackling throughout the school year this year is in respect to the pandemic thank you jeff it's so awkward with this presentation behind us so i apologize for rolling in and out but does anybody have any questions or feedback or i just have a small question jeff when will we

091have the numbers back on who will continue in the remote school in january so tomorrow we're planning to send out a survey tomorrow to ask parents that are in the remote school if they would like to go back to in person and then we're going to be asking it's actually going out to everyone if somebody's in in person and they want their child to go to remote school starting in january if we're in yellow still we're going to be asking for that feedback by the i think november 30th we're asking for that to be back so we'll go out to everyone so everyone will have input on whether they want to switch okay thank you so tomorrow i have a message going out to everyone in the district all families just saying that we're anticipating

092that we'll be in yellow after the holidays and in lieu of that unless something changes between now and then we're asking people to make that decision again and just kind of make it indefinitely until something changes will that give you enough time knowing by the end of november on staffing and where our staffing will stand i know that we have a concern on who's been out and and how that will evolve december is going to be a busy month for us we're going to be looking at students that want to switch back and forth looking at cohort sizes the administrators talked about what date would make sense for them and by the 30th of november they really needed that information that's why we're putting out this early but in terms of staffing scott is handling

093a lot of those return to work or not kinds of requests january on for the most part we're saying to our staff because there's no federal legislation at this point that staff need to return and make other arrangements um that has generally been our our line at this point is that we need our staff back mike uh similarly remote school uh transportation is there also going to be an open for families if they you know because they made a decision on whether kids would ride the bus or not are you going to reopen that or is that staying through the rest of the year do you want to get to that spot scott is saying we have capacity so we've been reviewing so i don't think we have capacity at this point i think you

094know we've had a lot of parents that have taken us up on driving their students so we believe we can do it and if we can't we'll figure it out okay uh the other thing just you mentioned uh i think this is incredibly valuable and so i appreciate that we held forums and you mentioned more in the middle of the year i would just strongly encourage uh that we we follow through with that and potentially sooner rather than later i think it's really valuable uh just the input and the processes that have come from this so i appreciate that that you've done all this work and i just think it would be continually valuable and especially just also wanted to note that i'm very interested to continue here and hear from the ad hoc committee

095on mental health and to hear how that what comes of that because that's something that's just been really concerning both staff and students and how this is how this is affecting everybody yeah i think i mean it's it's you know it really depends on the day the week um i think there's certain weeks that have i've noticed just anecdotally that it has been a lot weightier especially when we have a coveted case that's active and we have students a group of students that are out group of staff that are out that tends to be the most stressful time for us thankfully you know i'm not going to say it too lovely but over the last couple weeks we've been able to bring back you know most everyone that's been out and quarantined so actually as

096of today i think we're all back in i don't believe there's anyone being quarantined today does anybody else have any feedback or comments um mike you took all my questions every single one oh elias as far as the cohort changes um the i'm guessing in referencing the difficulty as far as contact tracing and all that that's till the end of december or is that for the rest of the year that the cohorts wouldn't be changed right we're expecting to keep our cohorts the same okay yeah i think it's we're just anticipating a lot of issues if we try to switch the cohorts at this point that makes sense people are on a schedule um as i said mike you've got most of my questions um i do want to also just say that i i

097will advocate and hope that we provide um another round of these because i think they're really helpful and the ones that i attended parents had a lot of great creative ideas and it was really insightful to hear from our staff and i also would be interested in hearing from the work life balance committee and and um seeing how that work because i think that that's a committee that can exist past this and i think it would be great to um support them in the best way we can so thank you for all the work you might as well stay there because it's superintendent's report next so the superintendent's report there is a lot going on believe it or not even with a pandemic in terms of a lot of great things that students are doing

098and staff are doing pandemics don't slow this district down i can tell you that much one thing i do want to just point out and this is now live on our website i want to thank fran prentiss and donna green for really kind of being the brainchild of of helping with this but we now have on our website a link we've taken all the covid materials and we put them into one section of our website so you can either go to our website i'm also going to provide this link in the blog as well but we have an information center that people can go to and just get whatever they need about covid in our district we have a lot of information and resources all in one place links you can just click on whatever

099you want you can click on the icons and it will bring you to if you want to know more about masks or whatnot these are kind of the pertinent items that we think families would want to know about the thing that's brand new is the dashboard we are keeping track of all the cases coveted cases in our district and this is up to date as of today so you can see that at this point we don't have any students quarantining in our district right now when there is an active case we've had an a in the second column just you know emphasizing that that is an active case until we clear it but you can see what school it is the number of individuals who are quarantined that includes students and staff together and then

100if they're related to a different case and was there a school closure as a result and if there was what was the date so you can kind of go through and we'll continue adding to this list as needed so day of caring we have a day of caring that takes place at the middle school each year um actually four four eight is involved in it in different ways um so these are uh even with a mask on day of caring continues mass don't don't stop anything so it was nice to see that these activities continued in different ways students were involved in activities of welcoming and including their fellow students and making people feel welcome in the school i actually had another picture up there and i must have not saved it at the high

101school we had a ranger pledge day where students were invited to sign a pledge helping to welcome and include their fellow students and staff at the high school as well i was up there one day and i had a took a picture of it actually if you've been out in the campus we now you can see the 35 picnic tables that are kind of all around at different schools we have students um i've seen students using them all different ways it's a great place to read a book like to thank mr poolen for making sure that those 35 picnic tables came in before the snow came in there's been a lot of ordering going on we had two students this was on our social media feed as well but you might have caught it on

102newscenter 6 at the high school sean allen and charlie moore were featured they started their own business non-profit business where they were selling calendars to help students out in the community i think it started off in one way with backpacks and filling with school supplies and its transition into making sure that every student in the district has access to winter weather clothing and school supplies as well as continuing so it's a great story if you're interested i'll have it in my blog tomorrow when it goes out and it's a link to the news center story energy savings update we had a major energy savings project that some of you might remember about six years ago that we had completed in the district working with siemens industry and we get periodic reports it's really amazing to

103see the um i remember when we were doing the project and they were saying you're going to save this amount of money and i was thinking to myself okay several years from now we're going to even know that we save this amount of money siemens does an amazing job making sure that we're up to date and that we never forget how much we're saving so they calculate these reports we have this on our website you can go in and actually look at the entire report and see the amount of energy that's been saved over the last six years um it's the equivalent of 839 000 which is 22 percent more than what they had guaranteed us when we signed on to the energy project so these are things like updated led lights these are winterizing

104your buildings are not winterizing but making sure the the um the boundary and cover of your building is not letting energy out it's just a whole bunch of things that you know in the boilers making sure the boilers are energy efficient retrofitting a lot of different areas of our district to make sure that we're not burning energy unnecessarily [Music] you want to say that scott's got an anecdote for you um when we did the financing on this project there were two portions of it one was you know about an 850 the other one was somewhere in the 700 000 range so as you can see just in a short period of time we've already met the savings on just the value of one portion of the bond so over half of it so the payback

105has been very good on that project and we really thank siemens industry they've always been there for us and they've always whenever we've needed them for anything along the lines of the energy project they've always been right there helping us out essential standards i introduced this i think at the last meeting but just to let you know that we do have these essential standards linked to the curriculum page on our website teachers have been continuing to work on the essential standards as i mentioned earlier and here's the link that can be found on the curriculum page of our website you can go to any grade level we have math and literacy at the elementary grades and we have all the other content areas of the secondary grades as well you can go in and see

106where those standards are at this point in the year and those standards will continue to be built um as the year goes on and as we continue to go through the uh the quarters and trimesters all right um you mean on the spot day every year melissa fowler who's a one of the counselors at the high school she will host um on the spot days for usm umaine we had that recently she wasn't going to let the pandemic stop her from doing that and we had 37 students on one day who were accepted to the university of maine because of this on-the-spot program that umaine is involved in and we've been involved in this for years so it's great to see um students that have got the grades come to the table are ready to

107be you know admitted and you mean we'll go ahead and accept students on the spot so it's it's wonderful to see that and a lot of financial assistance also goes with these yellow zone update as i mentioned earlier we're pretty much giving everyone a heads up in the community that i don't see things changing um and tomorrow there will be a more formal announcement again not a decision it's too early but just kind of giving one heads up unless something changes we are you know expecting that we will continue in yellow after the december break and then we'll also have on the blog the listening forums uh response plan so and these are just some of the things going on in the district a lot a lot of great things going on thank you jeff

108it's really nice to see life in our schools and seeing all the things that you're reporting on so i appreciate the work you do for the blog next up we have committee reports and i'll start with finance so for kevin please all right thank you um a few things that i wanted to share the first is that i alluded to by not alluded to but spoken to by the superintendent the applications for both crf uh one and two were completed i i think the thing that we miss out uh here is all the work that's done um by jeff scott scott's team to make sure that these are are able to be completed and there's a lot of people that worked weekends and nights to get them done the commitment piece of the funds have

109also been done and what that means is that contracts have been signed in accordance with the timeline that they gave us purchase orders have been issued and to the extent that was necessary salaries encumbered encumbered and that spoke to both substitutes in a remote school as jeff just talked about moments ago about live streaming um that was a big piece of that that the technology work has begun and there's a timeline for that uh you can see and this might be stepping on peter which is fun to go first um is that the the outdoor seating project uh was part of those funds that is completed and then there's more work going on down by gms uh the last thing that came out of finance was the uh protecting the bus drivers with shields and

110things remarkably similar to this there will be a scheduled finance committee meeting that will follow the holiday and scott and jeff have been having preliminary discussions about the budget schedule and will inform the board as that that time of year comes up and it will come up shortly that is all thank you kevin and for policy miss we just met this evening prior to the board meeting and we're able to review a number of policies that will be sent back to drummond for review and we're also looking at ways that we can increase student engagement with the board so we'll be passing on the agenda and the newsletter to all the high school students so hopefully we can get them more involved and then we have two policies up for first reads tonight and that's

111policy gcoa supervision and evaluation of professional staff and first reading to policy gcoc evaluation of administrative staff and if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out to me and i can give you an update on the changes that were made thank you man facilities peter we'll discuss anything there later on this evening thank you um curriculum mike simmons would be reporting on that he's not present this evening so we'll move on to student reports uh elias well yeah i guess we are just streaming along till february i mean thanksgiving break um next week and i think as far as i guess it's been a while since we've been given an official student report so i guess i'll just touch on overall how yellow school i think is working for a lot of kids

112i think it's definitely been a great improvement this year just to be back in school as i'm sure it's not not a surprise to anyone but it's just been great that we've been able to have that continuity of learning for two days out of the week um and i think one small point of concern is as the quarter came to a close it was almost as if at least i experienced this and i think a lot of students as well that it's almost a lot of classes came down to like a single grade or like a big assessment so i guess that's something to look at moving forward just to try and space out the assessments throughout and this is obviously mostly just at a high school level but throughout the quarter to not have

113it come down to one cumulative exam but aside from that just one small point of um consideration i think it's been a great like student morale is overall very high at the moment um with and especially with the sort of ominous cases rising in maine that hasn't detracted from the productivity of the in-school environment and i think everybody's adopted the seriousness of what of distancing and math and all that at this point in time that much more so i think it's definitely been great to see that accepted throughout the whole student body without any um protests so things are going well awesome thank you tyler could i ask elias a question to follow up that sure or is that elias have you found in the high school with your grades among your peers that there's

114been um minimal amount of individual grades that are going into your final quarter grade yeah i think that's what yeah it's it's i think that that if like just given an example for me i take ib bio and that would usually like usually are the grades listed in our like that had been graded would be like double or maybe even like one and a half times as much as it has been this quarter just because and that's just strictly due to the amount of time we're in class and just the amount of assignments you can give in grade is that much less when you're in school for like one one half of the time but yeah but i guess it's something that is the reality for all i've just heard feedback that there's a struggle

115with the the smaller number of grades that everyone's grades are sometimes lower than where they were last year at this time so it's good to get your feedback thank you yeah madison um i have to agree with a lot i saw many many points um so but i'll just bring up some new things um i'm really excited to say that mr hoffman and i have made time to discuss getting student input through google forms and stuff like that and advisory uh to discuss something that was on the communications and committee something that we are communications and curriculum something that we will talk about and something that we have talked about about adding and social studies and or science programs because they feel somewhat limiting to a lot of students as well as sending out another

116google form or something just to get student feedback on how they feel about coveted safety you know we saw in mr porter's uh listening forums that it was only parents and staff and i think that as a student that was like it was exciting to see the uh results of what people were thinking but it was a little disheartening to see that no student had any input and it is the students you know being taught in school and so i'm really excited to get student input from at least the high school and then from there we can go on to the middle school and possibly uh elementary school just reactions from students to teachers as well as i definitely have to agree with what elias said with um it some things i don't know if

117it's just teacher based or if it's curriculum based how everything's been limiting it definitely does feel like this quarter it was just a couple really big grades and that was your grade i know that i felt that way and so many other peers junior peers and i'm guessing senior peers felt exactly that way that there was not everything was kind of riding on three grades and it was really tough to make it through the quarter for a lot of people but i think that a lot of right now is trial and error so it's definitely better than what i was expecting coming into my junior year awesome thank you both it's so great it's so valuable to have you both here so thank you both for adding this to your schedule right now um we

118do have ad hoc committee reports and in this moment the only one that i'm thinking is outdoor learning and i didn't know if mike if you wanted to add a note about an update regarding that sure i can keep it quick too so uh just so folks know the outdoor learning committee we put we hit pause on meeting we had been having regular meetings roughly weekly and effectively because it's you know it broke down the work of the ad hoc committee broke down into two phases the first phase being uh the crf funds the immediate application of the funding that's coming in uh regarding dealing with the pandemic and that was because of a lot of great work by scott and folks we got that out and there's going to be some really great things

119being built on on campus which is great but the next phase which is going to be a long-term application and implementation of outdoor learning that we're hoping to start to flesh out and think through what that could be we're going to start to kick back up sometime in december or so to start thinking that through and we'd love to actually have more participation from folks either board community staff so on so forth so gonna see about getting the word out of it to see if other folks be interested in engaging in this discussion and just as a side note i plan there is a group in maine that has put together an outdoor learning forum that's invited a whole bunch of districts um or anyone um in the education field to attend to learn from

120each other so i plan on attending that i believe it's i don't know what day it is december 2nd it's in early december yeah so i don't not stressed out about it too much yet not knowing the date um but i do plan on um learning from other districts and and maybe offering a bit of what we have done so far and bringing that back to the committee as well i believe that's it for committee reports we move on to communications which is a report out from maine school management association fall conference i've attended that i believe three times in person it's just not the same online um i attended a few and i have also been grateful that they recorded some so that i was able to catch up if i wasn't able to

121do it all in the two days that they had them scheduled live i believe mike williams and i know that kevin desmond spent lots of time with them on friday evening as our delegate so i didn't know if either of you wanted to share um a moment of that oh and ann did you do so i'm sorry and ann as well well the biggest thing that i'd like to update is i left my notes on my desk and they were profound and extensive um but i will have to share from the friday night meeting which was the the delegate discussion um i'd like to i would like to share that in greater depth and and if if i could grab time subsequent meeting i will say i don't know what meetings uh my colleagues had

122attended but there were some that were unbelievable and hearing from the judge in new hampshire about real issues and struggles and understanding of mental illness things that that quite frankly don't see the light of day in many people's discussions and the way that he articulately broke that down um was absolutely profound and uh is something that um i think all of us would benefit hearing his recorded comments but if it's okay i'll defer to mike and anne thank you not a ton more to add that judges co it was gut-wrenching the story and how he he told it through it was really really impactful but yeah no there was a number of really good workshops the same i have notes at home but a workshop on racial equity you know there we had a debate

123here this is being dealt with across the state as well as across the country so we certainly are in line uh with the work that's being done across the country so uh kudos to my colleagues um this is not something out of the norm at all um and it was a good workshop uh and a number of others but again i have my notes at home apologies for that um but yeah thank you yeah i um definitely agree that it's not the same virtually and one benefit has been that i've been able to still continue viewing sessions um and i like that i didn't have to choose between you know one or the other for a certain time period because otherwise like i i mean i only went last year but i had so many

124times i'm like i don't know which one i want to go to and i'm actually still going through some but i focused on the equity and mental health related topics and you know it's just great to see how many equity offerings they had well thank you all for putting in that extra time i always think that that conference is really valuable to all board members so our last item for action is to vote to enter an executive session do i have a motion would you have to read the whole thing we vote to enter an executive session to discuss property acquisition second all in favor great thank you um okay so um i'm looking for a vote to authorize superintendent um to conduct real estate negotiations i um i'm sorry it's a motion i would

125like to move that we vote to authorize the superintendent to conduct real estate negotiations with any contract to be conditioned upon approval by the board of directors second any discussion all in favor thank you and then lastly a motion to adjourn so moved second all in favor thank you he's thank you have a great night that was good that's really good i'm excited to do that oh thank you oh the camera's still running lan good night have a good night thanks