School Board Workshop

001is queuing up are you all set and give it like five seconds no problem thank you kelly no circling [Music] okay i'll set with that i will call this evening scarborough board of education meeting to order this is our workshop portion of our meeting tonight today is thursday march 18th 2021. may i have the attendance please sure mrs giftis yes dr gill yes miss casalonas here miss leighton yeah mrs lindstrom here mrs scyther here mrs turner here mr bennett here and miscus gift sorry i'm here i'm having laptop troubles right now hey [Laughter] no trouble gavin no worries gabby thank you if everyone could please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under

002god indivisible with liberty and justice for all agenda item 4.0 4.1 is our 20 21 20 22 school calendar and i can kind of cue this up here and then i'm going to turn it over to diane i believe but for the board and the public just so that everyone knows um this initial proposal was brought before the policy committee on march 9th um as a refresher some of you may remember that we realized that our policy on passing the calendar actually suggests that the calendar go to the policy committee before it comes to the full board with a recommendation from the policy committee and of course we would recognize that during what is you know arguably been the most disruptive school year ever and so we just didn't feel like this was the year

003to have policy committee um review such a big um schedule change for our district and so i made the decision to bring this to the board's attention in the form of a workshop with that i will hand it over to diane great thank you very much april so this evening um we are pleased to bring forward information on and a proposal to the board in regards to next year's calendar um we do have all of the building leaders on this call this evening and so um we will bring them in to the meeting kelly if that's something that you could do for us while i kind of provide some background um can i stop you for just one second sorry i'm gonna make this uh zoom awkward we do have someone in the audience with

004their hand up and i i just want to address the fact that i see you um we don't actually take public comment during our workshops um and so if you would like to make a public comment on the calendar it is on the business and agenda for this evening and the business meeting will begin at 7 pm thank you great so as you know as you um had stated april we um some of the members of the board have seen this because it did come to policy committee um and i know you know last week when we brought that to you and there were um some principles that talked about that we wanted to make sure that the board had full information so if you take a look at this first slide this is the

005calendar draft to date if you recall in february i came to you with the necessity to pass the skeletal framework of the calendar because by state statute we have to um have a regional calendar that works with our partners for vocational planning and so what you see here um in terms of the pieces that are intact um and not ones that we're going um to move around would be the start of the school day uh of the school year um the workshop days etc by statute we have to be within five days of our regional partners um and so we meet together to compare our calendars and hash things out and by the end of the meeting we make sure that we're within that and um so that is the piece that you had previously

006approved we move to the next slide um the pieces that are part of the proposal that we would like to move forward are twofold the first part is to take a look at the release time that we have in the in our calendar and the second piece is a discussion about what the start of the school year would look like in terms of student days so we'll start with um the the professional development time and so the first ask is to increase the number of late start days for next year historically we have had right around 10 days we have most recently done these as late starts and prior to this year and those had been about one wednesday a month and so students would come into school 90 minutes late so that teachers could

007um work on professional development this year with the pandemic and the many responsibilities that our teachers have had in terms of planning planning for the students in person planning for students who are remote planning for the hybrid time um our teachers have really benefited from the professional development that you had approved which for this year equates to every wednesday afternoon three hours of professional development time and that really has been instrumental in quite honestly helping our teachers stay afloat um and so the proposal that we would ask for for this coming calendar for 2021 would be to have a early release every wednesday for 90 minutes with the exception of the first two weeks of school and the last two weeks of school um if we could bring monique in she can talk about uh

008she's going to share with us more detail about the professional development needs and the use of that time kelly can you move to the next slide all right and i believe monique is with us on the panel and so i will pass this over to her thank you so much yes the rationale for this time which is less time than we have this year our teachers have this year is really around a couple of factors one is next year is not going to be back to normal next year is going to be a transition year it's going to be a transition year for a number of different reasons one being that we expect that there well may be some distancing social distancing and masking requirements that are still in place in the fall there may

009not be we all have our fingers crossed but there well may be we also need the time in terms of helping our students transition back to what some students don't know what school used to be like we've all learned new social norms and it's going to take us some time to adjust to whatever the safe social norms will be come fall we also have always been committed here in scarborough to our culture of continuous improvement always trying to do better at what we do and that means all everyone within the organization the current time available right now is maximized uh as i've said um just a number of groups i have not been able to get any quel k-12 curriculum groups together this year because we prioritize the time for teachers to work together and

010planning lessons uh for this year's structure and schedule this option is the most cost effective option if we added additional teacher days and distributed them throughout the calendar that would be two hundred thousand dollars a day so with this proposal comes no budget impact what is very important about professional development is regularly schedule time embedded in the teacher's day for this to happen and i'll talk a little bit more about that um i do want to dive more deeply into some of these rationales so if we could move on to the next slide as i mentioned i think we might have skipped a slide there but i can go back okay maybe not alrighty regularly scheduled time for uh professional development is crucial some of you may not remember but here in scarborough we used

011to our students in mathematics used to score we used to have 60 to 70 percent of our students who do did not meet standards on state assessments and that was pretty consistent when we implemented a new curriculum k5 we took two years of embedded staff development time that addressed each one of these criteria for quality professional development so for two years k-5 teachers focused on mathematics it was focused in terms of content it also included adult learning theory it supported collaboration teachers worked together it used models of effective practice they studied quality instructional practices they tried out those practices they practiced them they came back together again with their colleagues to talk about those pieces they also coached each other and we had consultants come in they also had opportunities for feedback and reflection and

012we also had at the end of the year a bit of a celebration reflecting both years had a reflection celebrating the progress that our students made after those two years we saw three years of progress where within three years only 40 percent of our students were not meeting standards and now we have and that was further reduced in another year after that was it about 30 percent of our students and since that time we average around 75 percent of our students who meet or exceed standards so we've gotten that down below the 30 mark but that's an example of how professional development can improve student learning and that is the focus that's the outcome that's the expectation it's not just because we're interested in um doing certain workshops so we do have quite a bit

013on our plate uh as i said we can move to the next slide please the okay we seem to be missing a couple of slides but that's okay i'll work off of this one as i said before um the need for this focused time is that it's not going to be a year like previous years all the current time that is available as i've described is being maximized so teachers can plan their lessons within that available time staff time we have not been able to get to such things as the development of a comprehensive proactive approach to sel which we know we're going to need next year for our students that guaranteed and viable experience for all of our students we have diversity equity inclusion efforts we are on the threshold as a result of

014the steering committee to develop an action plan we've done a survey we need to do an equity audit we need to do a curriculum audit and then we need to make those improvements which will involve professional development we need the time to do that and that will be over multiple years grade level planning meetings has been a wonderful uh wonderful result of the work that our teachers have done this year they are finding great value in collaborating in planning those lessons and designing and sharing that in that work so we they need time to review their students data and plan for instruction as i said before we have not been able to get any k-12 content area together to work on vertical articulation this year that's art music include science social studies for example there

015are new social studies there are new social studies and science standards we have not been able as a k-12 representative group to come together to study those and make adjustments individually teachers certainly have been doing that they've been doing that on their own time this spring we have statewide assessment coming down the pike and the science assessment this spring our students will be taking an assessment based on those standards so that shift in state testing is another concern that we don't have enough time we're going to be asked for our students to engage in state testing this spring we will not have the time to really analyze the results this spring in the fall the state testing requirement will be twice a year next year and so we really do need to look at helping

016our teachers learn how to analyze and use that data for instruction and then take a look at our assessment practices across the board and back off on those pieces so this chart describes an early release schedule in terms of arrival and dismissal in terms of the total professional development times and then our rationale around those choices and i believe we're almost done and if you could hold those questions until we're just about done the next slide is really about comparative information um there's a link there that we can share and you can access if you want to see how other districts are doing it there are districts within our area that have far more release time or late start than we do at present and on that note i'd like to turn it back over

017excuse me um over to the principals um to share their proposal the other part as diane described is this um the start of school or would we like to talk ask some questions here it probably makes sense to do this part and then we can move on to what the start of school would look like right and so again um we have our principles here so you know we're happy to have a discussion i think we were prepared for that knowing that the workshop model is a little bit more fluid and and there's that dialogue so um love to engage with you um as we can help fill in the blanks okay thank you diane nick your hand is up so i have a couple of questions just so i can understand how this relates

018to our more historic model so um in the beginning of the presentation you talked about in the past we had 10 late start dates that was essentially what we had had i assume that this new plan this new approach would be in replacement of that it wouldn't be in addition to that right so how many hours do we get total and professional development time and it doesn't have to be exact with the old late start 10 a year model so that would be approximately 15 hours of professional development time so what we're talking about essentially is either doubling or quadrupling that okay that that seems apart of me for saying it because i'm just trying to digest it seems like a lot to me and in a year when we've lost so much instructional time

019with our students i worry about about losing that much time in the classroom one-on-one with students not one-on-one you know what i mean direct with students um i understand that the need for it this past year but as we move hopefully back toward everyone being back in person i know it'll be a transition and monique thank you for articulating that so well because it's not going to be a switch back on back to we go to normal type thing i'm just wondering it just feels like a lot more professional development time and um than what we've used in the past and to quadruple that amount just seems kind of extreme and i would love to hear from the principals about about that that kind of order of magnitude of increase so before we hand things

020off to the principles just a couple of points of information if i could offer nick um the the first is um one thing that i should have pointed out when um we had the calendar draft up is that as most of you probably remember there are five teacher professional development days in the calendar two of them are flex days for time that teachers put in for parent-teacher conferences so um that is not actual professional development time that we can deliver right like that's um in exchange for the extra hours that they work so that leaves us three professional development days in next year's calendar we have front loaded two of those days at the start of the year just because we anticipate still lots of protocol changes and information that we're going to need to

021give to our school staff and then there is only one other professional development day in the entire year calendar and that is in march and so outside of the time that we're asking for um the time that we have is the one day in march and then um two hours a month of um faculty meeting time after school so you know i just want to make sure that i'm um you know making those points as well and the only thing i would add to that is while it does it is an increase um from pre-covered it is and we are still going to be in a covid um environment come this next year it's half of what we have this year so it depends on your reference point um i'm still nervous about even having

022every wednesday for an hour and a half if that's going to be enough time to do the work that needs to be done our community has high expectations our teachers have high expectations they want to get better at what they do and they need time and you will hear about time as we move forward tonight i think as our teachers are struggling with enough having enough time now to do the work that they're being asked to do so while it's an increase over pre-covert still being in covet it's a reduction of half do you wonder if some of our principals could talk about your intention for the time i could give just a little anecdote i'm just to help eliminate what's what has happened and then what we're experiencing now when i first became principal

023at pleasant hill school i had the opportunity to meet with each individual staff member and just get a feel for what their um what they needed what their struggles were what their goals were and i will never forget um one of my one of our teachers who's been there quite a while said we continue to get asked to do things that we don't have time for the plate doesn't get it just keeps getting piled on she said i can i have considered leaving teaching multiple times because the list gets longer and we we are not given any time to learn and to do our best work together to collaborate with each other we don't have grade level planning time i mean her list of all the reasons why it was really difficult were quite long

024but the one the piece that really struck me was that she was considering leaving teaching because she just didn't have time to learn and do her best for kids this year that exact same teacher sent me an email and said this is the first year and as long as i can remember that i actually have had some time to do the things that i'm being asked to do and and yes we're in a global pandemic and yes we needed all of that time but it was quite the relief to hear that for the first time for her that she realized she she felt like she could actually do her job to the best of her ability because she had the time um and we gave her that time to do that alicia you have your

025hand out thank you we um had discussed in the policy meeting sending surveys out to the families and to staff could you tell us what the status of that is uh yeah when i spoke with april april had asked us to hold off on sending those surveys until after this workshop this evening okay thank you the reason for that alicia being and i did check in with policy um the reason for that being that we wanted our survey data to represent uh a knowledge of the plan and we felt like asking people if they supported early release days without really understanding the purpose of them or the frequency um you know without understanding the ask essentially that that survey data wasn't necessarily going to reflect um what people actually felt thank you i just wanted

026people to to know that that's coming and that that's going to be a consideration in the decision making great thank you leanne another question that came up in policy was with respect to community services do we know if there what the cost is going to be associated with these early release days or if they're going to be able to take additional students in on top of who's there in the normal after school program so in talking with community services um what they said was they usually package um those that time so for example it's 10 days for x amount of dollars but i think they are very willing to work with us and so again i think the price is dependent on the number of days the number of hours but in general they have

027their families like sign on to do that on a um you know like on a commitment basis not as a once a month drop in sarah thanks i have two sort of process questions that's going to help me sort of formulate my decision later but so tonight's just the first reading when do we have to have the second reading by in order for this because is there legislation around when we have to have an approved calendar can you remind me of what that date is anybody so by policy this has to come to the board before before april so we're bringing it to you tonight um and so we're meeting our mandate by doing so okay so we could technically approve this the second reading i don't know in august i mean we wouldn't do

028that but we technically could right technically we could i you know again i think in practice um yeah it would not be helpful for families and staff planning of course i think the reason why i'm asking that is because you know monique made a point that uh we don't we don't yet know what the fall is going to look like and so um once we get more information as to what that looks like then it may become more clear whether or not these additional the the one and a half hours or sorry once a week or every other week would become more important um so that is is to me a significant um data point to making this decision um so because i hear what you're saying in terms of the extra time yeah and

029i would just say remember we can always make amendments to the calendar this year is a great example i think that we have amended our our calendar multiple times this year based on the needs of the pandemic i'm not seeing any other hands so if um our guests want to move on to the second part of the calendar which references the opening of the schools in the fall sure and for this part i'm going to pass the torch right off to our k-5 principles who can talk about their proposal first and then we'll hear from six to eight and nine through twelve hi i'm going to kick it off as the wentworth principal i'm kelly crosby and i'm talking on behalf of k5 and my colleagues are going to jump in and help me out

030here with this proposal after so our proposal for this year is really considering how are we going to ease students back into what we really truly hope will be a full-time in-person learning experience next year so for many of our littles well if you think about kindergarteners they've not had a typical year in school and it's been quite a long time if you're 8 9 even 10 years old to transition back into full classrooms and an entire school together at once so what we're proposing is that um the first and the second day of school by this by the approved calendar on september 1st and 2nd that those two days for all of k5 are by appointment only now the only change from past practice in that is that third through fifth grade is included

031because um for several years that's how it has been for our k-2 schools they've had a couple of days of buy appointment only and in past years when k2 students have been by appointment only they've done things like um paperwork maybe some assessments things like that and this year we're really going to focus on those days truly just being connecting with families connecting with students supporting you know building relationships um getting families hopefully into the buildings because by next year two-thirds of our families won't have set foot in the buildings um and just you know easing students and families back into a more typical year of education following those first two days purely focused on sel and relationship building the next four day week because that leads into the three day or the labor day

032weekends um the next four day week we proposed that we would have students um come in for half days in kind of a phased-in approach so on the first day would be the first half of the alphabet for half the day and then in the second half of the day we would have screening appointments by appointment so in the beginning of the year we often scramble to arrange coverage and support for classroom teachers to complete assessments to get to know where students are in their learning and this year is going to be more important than ever before i truly believe to get a sense of where our students are we will have had some students who have not been as strongly engaged in their education as we would hope despite many efforts and um and

033we will have some students who have been privately tutored this whole entire time so there's going to be a really wide range of student needs and sarah to your point earlier you're absolutely right we don't know what school will look like next year yet but what we do know is that teachers are going to need time to collaborate to design quality instruction and strong interventions to meet an even wider gap with our students so regardless of what the um learning design looks like that that is a fact that that's just a fact um so sorry back to this proposal then the second day um will be the second half of the alphabet with screening appointments in the afternoon and then the third and fourth day all of this that will be the first time that

034they'll be in a group with all of their classmates so it's really important with young children to have that small group opportunity to support all of the safety procedures that will likely still be in place to support the routines that they may or may not have had experience with and to support all of the new learning that takes place in the first days of school wentworth has had um a first day traditionally we've had a one day with just our third grade class which has been great and and has worked pretty well in um previous typical not returning from a global pandemic years and um but what what we do notice every single year and the feedback we get from kids and families is they are wiped they are exhausted and that's not how we

035want to welcome them back into their school easing in in a way that feels good and child-centered and safe and methodical and well planned out is really just in the best interest of all um kelly and jess i'd love to i'm sure i've forgotten something no i mean i would just add a couple of comments and that this is about the same time frame that we took last year at k2 to transition kids into school and the feedback that we received was really positive um students were really um they just seemed to really respond well to it families responded well to it um so i i'm really excited that 3-5 is also going to be engaged in this what i'm thinking as i listen to to this presentation and i think as we move forward

036this spring i think what we're going to see is a lot more equity k-12 in our practices and i think that's what's going to come out of i hope what's going to come out of the pandemic is some practices for our students that are going to make some some more sense um so that is that's exciting only thing that i would add is gonna go go back to those days by appointment only on september 1st and 2nd um one of the one of the silver linings if you will of this pandemic has been that we have very strong connections with our families and if we can continue that practice that's one of our learnings from all of this we learned that last spring that they are truly our partners so if we can really be

037intentional and take some time with them to learn about you know what this has been like what they're excited about for this year in that small um intimate um hopefully face-to-face experience i think that that will just pave the way for us to continue to be good partners um and supporting their children they also need to know what the safe i think that's been a big question mark for a lot of families is they they really want to know like what does it look like what is that safety piece um and if they're physically in the building then they can actually see it for themselves and be even more reassured i think this is an opportunity for k-5 to go slow to go fast i think that the time that we invest in the very

038beginning of the year doing it well will pay off dividends so while it's really easy to like quantify this and look at it as like oh but this means that every student won't have x number of days and hours it's i think it's um i think it's risky to conflate you know seat time with um you know with quality instruction and quality learning time we've seen that this year you don't need to be in a seat in front of a teacher in a classroom right we learning has continued and i think that this is an opportunity for us to really like i said go slow to go fast with our littlest learners do we want to do questions k5 and then move on to the other phases does it matter no preference okay alisha you

039go ahead okay thank you um so for september 1st through 10th what will six through 12 be doing [Laughter] kathy oh hold on kristen actually i think has a has a phase level question for k5 i do on the a through k in the l through z separation can you just talk a little bit about why it's important to have them only go half one day and a half the other day um again that was our um our intent was to bring them in uh in small groups so if we imagine that our class sizes next year are going to be um in that 18 to 23 range bringing in 18 kids all at once or 23 kids all at once when they haven't experienced that you know some kids ever some kids have been

040at home just by themselves you know for a year that's um that's a lot that's a big ask for them to be able to navigate just the number of humans that are there so our thinking was if we could cut that in half and do you know half on monday the other half on tuesday and now we're going to join you all together that it gets them used to what the building is what the classroom is who the people who some of the people are um it's it's just a more careful um approach to doing that um as we start yeah and this this past year we cut our smaller groups in half so they had um only like three or four kids in a group and that was great and anytime that you can

041improve that student-to-teacher ratio is just to benefit of the students so in those first days teachers do a lot of talking a lot of explaining and a lot of you know showing and demonstrating and for them to be able to really do those checks for understanding with each and every student is is to their benefit thank you i don't see any other hand so kathy i believe it's your turn okay kelly are you moving the slide forward there we go so before i start about the first day just talking about um in the past it didn't happen last year but we have had an august sneak peak and that's typically been two hours for sixth grade families to come in and tour the building along with any new students so of course we're gonna have

042to see what our cdc guidelines say in august but i'm hopeful we'll be able to get families in and and even if that time frame is extended so that you know we offer a full day where families can come in based on you know how many people can come into the building and it really needs to be opened up to all families because our current sixth graders we sent a virtual tour of the building for families last year but parents of our current sixth graders have not been in the building so of course we'll do a lot more planning for that but a time you know to meet families before school starts and so i worked on this um plan with our leadership team so september 1st well let me start just by saying you

043know from all of their experience with students middle school students what they really want is they want to understand their schedule meet their new teachers get used to their routines and they want to know who's in their class and they want time to get to know their classmates so with kind of those pieces in mind um first of all it's all hands on deck that first morning when the buses pull up the seventh and eighth grade teachers are out too and everybody's helping the sixth graders to find their rooms so they'll be with their crew and their crew teacher and go over routines and some procedures and they have an abbreviated schedule that gives them a chance to in a short period of time but move through see what their schedules like meet their teachers

044see the students that are in their classes they they kind of stagger all of these activities so schools will each crew will have a you know time scheduled where they're touring the building finding out where the gym is in the cafeteria the clinics tour the learning commons and then the teachers work really hard to plan a lot of different team building activities and they make sure that they're not repeating them so they'll think of some icebreaker group activities then small group activities to rotate through could be sharing about what you did during the summer just to get to know you and then outside games to get outside of the campus and see where the fields are they practice their evacuation and an evacuation drill find out where they you know would go to stand for

045that and the protocols they find their locker and practice and practice and keep trying you know and they get quite a bit of time with that and then also during that day our student advocates plan a couple hours a block time where we invite new seventh and eighth grade students in so they go over some of our school protocols answer questions take them on a building tour and their teachers and the encore teachers come to speak to them so that they can become familiar with their teachers so then on september 2nd all students would be back the day is pretty similar to the sixth grade where there's a longer crew some social emotional learning activities again an abbreviated schedule rotation similar to what the sixth graders do they all students practice the evacuation and then

046afternoon activities planned and again this is going to be according to cdc guidelines you know can we get a grade level together if it's a nice day i think weather dependent on some of these pieces and or or team activities at least one of the things that is really missing this year is getting that whole group together our whole school together for activities and grade levels so again based on cdc guidelines students the week of september 7th through 10th will still be going through their schedule but we will plan activities you know in the afternoon is there something that an entire grade could do together or a team or a crew so that is our proposal for the first couple days of school kristin go ahead i apologize if you covered this and i missed

047it but can you explain to me a little bit about how the assessment piece works at the middle school because i know that was a big focus in the k-5 where does that happen for the 6-8 students so we we don't have some of the same um assessments that the schools do um i know at i believe it's all of k five um the one does running records and has some other assessments with their lookie lucy calkins um curriculum so at the middle school on those days teachers are getting to know their their students in class so in math they're you know reviewing some of the fifth grade math um skills and they're getting to know them through you know formative assessments they're giving students we do typically have our benchmark testing that we do

048in the month of september so this year it was i ready and year before that it was the star assessment and so we do do a screening of that for both math and reading we also work closely with wentworth for our incoming sixth graders fifth grade to um sixth grade and work with the um tier two teachers to talk about who should enter sixth grade um in a tier two intervention thank you i can just quickly add the assessments that happen at k5 tend to require one-on-one um so it's an individual teacher working with a student listening to them read at middle school that shifts can those assessments to find out what students know can be done within a class period if student if teachers are looking to do those sort of assessments to find

049out where students are and what they know and students also in a tier two intervention are in a much smaller group and it is easier for that teacher to do those assessments because they're a small group already thank you kathy oh leanne go ahead i just want to follow up a little bit on that kathy um more because i guess i just understand for the fifth graders coming into sixth grade where they haven't had the same synchronous learning this year how would you know that they needed to be tier two without having those assessments in place for them and how do we ensure that they're all in the same spot walking into sixth grade so in wentworth right now they have they are assessing their students and their students in tier two now so the

050tier two teachers as a matter of fact we in may we'll have an i ready test and students will take the i ready test again so we'll have that data from their end of fifth grade that data is when we enter that data in the system whether that be in our student information system or in performance matters those sixth grade teachers will be able to have as soon as they're rostered into their classroom those sixth grade teachers will be able to look up the data on their students that existed as of the spring can i ask it a little bit differently monique so we would tell those students who are maybe on a bubble it that maybe weren't yet on tier 2 and didn't have those interventions in place yeah we also do our student

051support services also do what we call transition meetings in the spring where they get together across phase levels and they literally have lists of students with their data and they have conversations about students who is at risk what their progress has been whether or not they've been in tier two whether they're tier one and might be in bubble or and and having sat in on some of those conversations it looks like this it's sort of okay um uh you know kathy terrell yeah she did really well and made great gains in her um vocabulary but comprehension i'm still worried about the comprehension and you can see that dip in her data she might need this so we want to keep her on our radar screen moving forward she may be someone to look out for

052or maybe do more assessments so those are the kinds of conversations that our staff have um in helping to make smoother transitions for students and make sure we have a safety net for all students thank you yeah and i'll follow up with we also have two two different rti groups we have a social emotional rti response to intervention and an academic and we meet as a team weekly and a teacher with any concern at all would bring a student either for social emotional needs or academic to that meeting we discuss them so almost every week we've been identifying some students to put into tier two um so really it's an ongoing year-long process thank you very much kathy i think we are ready to move to sue okay welcome hi everyone um okay i just

053wanted to talk a little bit about um the first days for high school um on september 1st we traditionally um have a day with our eighth graders and also with our new students to the district so 10 11th and 12th grade are bundled into their own group and they spend the morning with mr coombs one of our building ed techs and mrs montgomery one of our social workers and they both happen to be the advisors of our natural helpers program so they meet the students and get them through the essentials that they need to get started at school they walk them around to their rooms um and show them where their locker is and help them get started that way they give them good general information um about the building and what they need to

054to get started and they typically go home just before lunch time and our feedback with our new students to the district is that that has been just about the right amount as you can imagine they feel like they're not freshmen and they know how to do high school even if they didn't do it at scarborough and so they really just want to come in and get what they need and then um head out because they feel like they've got this so we do um try to give them a little bit of a booster to get started and our feedback from them consistently has been that looks like we've lost too it does i wonder if there's um i think we have some other high school administrators on with us that might be able to pick

055up really putting me on the spot huh there we go it's part of the initiation year yep um yeah no problem hopefully she comes back soon um so yeah i think um as far as i i guess i'll go to the freshman now um and i see that nate's on here too so feel free to jump in um as far as the freshmen we put them into these different groups um well they start their day with a east um so they fought they figure out who their advisory teacher is they connect with that teacher they they're with a small group and then from there they're able to go to these different groups it's to get their school pictures is to learn to meet the two assistant principals so myself um and mr terrio um so

056uh we'll talk about different ways that they can succeed at shs we do talk about the handbook um so they kind of understand expectations um mr legage will be in one group so we'll talk about all of the different ways with athletics and clubs to be connected and they then wrap their day back up with their aes advisor so i think you know this was my first year um you know seeing that freshman orientation day and you know seeing the eighth graders last year and then seeing them come in as freshmen they were certainly nervous you know it's a big school um but i was able to connect with a lot of them at the end of that first day and they felt a lot better they felt comfortable they knew where their classes were

057i think the part that i probably missed was that they do go through their entire schedule so they go through both their red day classes their white day classes they're able to kind of figure out where those classes are navigate the school so i do think that that day is so beneficial for those those freshmen and the new students and i do think that when they leave at the end of the day um you know i think it's they feel much better they feel already part of that school community so i think it's a really important day for them nate do you want to jump in um sure yeah i would say the two big themes for that day are really about sort of grounding kids in the school the high school is i think

058so large in so many different ways both in terms of the physical space and the range of opportunities offered so that's really sort of the work that we do on the first day with students and we've gotten a lot of great feedback over that over the last couple of years we've tinkered with it here and there but generally we get really good feedback from freshmen and the day is really shaped around that they really value the time moving through the school when nobody else is there because one of the things they fear most is getting lost on the first day of class and so i think connecting them with as many adults as we can both the advisors and the teachers is really really beneficial and then also the administrators too have a pretty um

059i think have a pretty good presence throughout the day we we try to make sure we're out there sort of meeting and greeting kids in a lot of different ways in a lot of different areas but going through the high school routine in an empty building is sort of a really a really big deal and something that they really enjoy the other thing i would add too is we are sort of and this we'll probably end up tweaking it a little bit um and we haven't nailed down all the details yet um but we are sort of planning um i would say sort of a gradual entry into school um we usually do a lot of class meetings in the first month um and we'll likely do that again for um for all students just

060so we can sort of meet and greet them talk about you know how things have changed what the expectations are and then we also try to weave in various types of sel activities too um both through a east and advisory um and so we sort of even though um you know there's only one day up front um i would say our our transition back um is really probably a two or three week focus for us it just happens a little bit differently and that it's more integrated over the course of the first month as opposed to happening a little bit more up front and that's just because you know our students really crave that routine of high school and a lot of them want to get back and that that's sort of based on the

061feedback we've had over the years so i know we're going to add a few things and a few layers to it but for the most part you know i think it'll blend some old and new so there'll be some familiar stuff with some new elements in there for kids thanks jake and nate um i'm sorry i got frozen there um a couple of things i wanted to mention is that um at the high school level our kids really do want if they're going to come to school they want to be doing school they're quite clear about that if we're going to be there all day we want to get to our classes we want to do that work also we have some considerations in our get started in that we have vocational cte students that

062are going to need to be getting to their vote program right away and so we need to be in routine for them to be able to come and go go to either portland or westbrook for their program and come back and have the classes sync um also our internship program they're getting out right away to go to their internship so there are some outside components to the high school that we interlock with that makes it more important that we we get into our routine fairly quickly and like um jake and nate said we will leverage our a east in advisory times early in the year to do class meetings or some sel activities and things to get students started in the time we've got carved into our schedule to do that work so we will

063continue to be focused on some of those things we'll just be putting it right in our schedule and in terms of testing and things like that at the high school level we do not have assessments like that to start the year most of our assessments are done on a plan basis i ready with the ninth graders will happen um probably in later september september october that will be scheduled when the window is open for us to do that and we will create a plan to do that with the freshman as we know early october is psat testing for the juniors and it looks like now we'll also be doing some nwe testing but that will get scheduled into the calendar year and be managed um during that testing window so again that's a little bit

064of a difference for the high school is we don't have those assessments right away as some of the other phases do i think i've covered most everything except for on september 2nd i just want to highlight that we're so excited that we're going to be able to um likely do some some good senior things on the first day have that parade from the senior parking lot into the building and hopefully a breakfast and at the end of the day hopefully we'll be able to go down to memorial park and get that senior class picture for the front and back covers of the yearbook um so some of those things um happen on the very first day of school along with um our set school day so those are just some things that that we will

065be slipping into the the start of the new year thank you so much sue um unfortunately as the steward of this workshop and the next meeting i actually need to call the close of the workshop in order to start our business meeting on time that being said the calendar is under new business tonight for our business meeting and so if you could jot down your questions um and kind of put a pin in them for now i will offer diane the opportunity to kind of close out this conversation um during the business meeting and then we can as a board we can have more discussion at that time so with that said um are we all said kelly and diane to just stay right on the same link and just call the next meeting okay

066perfect thank you so much it is now 701 good evening and welcome to the scarborough public schools board of education school board meeting for march 18 2021. may i have the attendance please sure mrs giftis yeah dr gill yes miss casalonas here miss layton mrs lindstrom here mrs either here mrs turner here mr bennett here and miss giftus here thank you please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all agenda item 4.0 is adjustments to the agenda do i have any adjustments to the agenda this evening yes i'd like to make a motion to amend the agenda to move the start from 7-0 to 8-2

067under new business okay alicia has made a motion to move the start committee update from 7.0 under new business and make it the new 8.2 does she have a second second discussion just and the rationale for that is just so that we can um vote on that if we choose and obviously if we're not ready we could table it but that would give us the option to vote okay i i think that that's a reasonable approach um and so i would be in in support of that if we're ready to vote i'm not seeing any other hands okay this is giftus yes dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss layton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs cyber yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes okay are there any other adjustments to the

068agenda this evening seeing none agenda item 5.0 is public comment on agenda items i will give my little spiel that i give at the start of all public comment these days is to remind everyone to please address your comments to the chair to please state your name and address when you begin your public comment to keep your public comment to three minutes and this evening um i i admittedly did not keep time at our previous meeting when we had multiple speakers and um i would like to do that a little bit better tonight in terms of time management and so i will be setting a timer um i will politely let you know when your three minutes is up and i ask that you respectfully you know finish up your sentence and and um yield

069your time so with that we again this week had multiple people send us public comment via email um kelly johnston has graciously offered to review us this evening so that i may be fully present and you know take in the public comment with the rest of the board as opposed to being a person who delivers those public comments we're going to run it similar to how we ran it last time where i'm going to ask kelly to read three public comments from our email and then she'll bounce back and i will call someone in from the public and we'll do a few public public comments and we'll rotate back and forth like that did i miss anything i cover it all okay with that um crystal i'm going to promote you to a panelist and

070allow you to speak first you should be all set all right april you can hear me we can hear you thank you thank you um good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board my name is crystal ash cuthbert i'm a fifth grade teacher here in scarborough and president of the scarborough education association thank you for the opportunity to address the board this evening i'm speaking tonight with one voice but it is a voice that represents more than 325 staff on tonight's agenda is an item entitled start committee update prior to this evening the central office administrative team met and consulted with the association regarding scenarios one two and three on monday march 22nd i wanted to share with you what the sca executive board expressed during that meeting at this time the scarborough education association

071cannot support any of the proposed scenarios to increase in-person instruction the educators of scarborough believe that it is in the best interest of our students education and safety to stay the course there are multitude of reasons that you the board of education should choose to stay the course for the remainder of the year the most important reason being that changing teachers and entire schedules with just six weeks left to school would be devastating to our youngest students by redistributing students into new classrooms instruction would be actually lost not gained secondly due to staffing budget and square footage some of the scenarios aren't even feasible not only is there no money to hire new staff the district can't fill the vacant positions we currently have positive coveted cases have increased in our district over the past

072month not decreased within the past few weeks both the high school and wentworth were classified outbreak schools by the cdc recently both staff and students at the high school were fully remote for a week several of the scenarios would also require an overhaul of curriculum with students potentially missing or repeating learning objectives which is not fair to them nor is it possible for all the staff to receive their coveted vaccines and be inoculated by the suggested timelines like our educators around the world we want our students back all of our students but forcing an increase to in-person instruction before it is safe to do so is short-sighted and irresponsible we encourage the board and administration to take a stand like cumberland kennebunk south portland wyndham lewiston and several other communities stay the course for it

073is truly what is in the best interest and safety of our students thank you very much kelly i'm going to turn it over to you and ask that you please read three public comments from our email okay and before i begin i'm going to just say if i say someone's name improperly or incorrectly i apologize before i stop the first letter this evening comes from chris carey good evening and thank you for sharing my story as we have all heard and are well aware it has been the mothers who are primarily been the ones sacrificing their careers their passions and some patience some cases that social outlets so they can be their child's teacher caregiver discipliner and so on in my personal case my wife is also the one who cooks cleans does laundry is

074the captain of fun for the household as a present involved loving father and husband i would and do do anything to support my family some days the pressures can be overwhelming trying to balance a 10 plus hour work day socializing with your family over dinner which is the most difficult time for our three and five-year-old to hold it together and then assist your tired spouse in bedtime preparation which usually involves stern voices and sometimes tears while hurting cats as a father who wants to be involved with his family it is heartbreaking and frustrating that my time is limited to these couple short stressful hours of the day family is what suffers and takes a back seat while our children are falling behind in academics and social interaction they are also being negatively impacted at home

075for the dynamic i speak about here my family is fortunate that we do have two parents that are able to work and our home is safe many families are not this fortunate the kids are depressed abused and hungry because the parents aren't working dad in many cases takes the stress out on mom and the kids and the children have no safe escape these problems don't disappear with kids back in school but what does help is the ability to balance responsibilities for the parents and the children are provided with a safe fun and educated environment to help them develop with teachers of the majority of us parents being vaccinated by the start of next school year the recent data provided by the cdc that three feet is considered safe and the large vacancy of local grade

076a commercial real estate in the area if needed for additional space there is no reason why our children and teachers cannot go back into the classroom safely with enough space we moved our young family to scarborough almost three years ago for the school system and the sense of community i am optimistic that we being a strong community can come come up with a plan to safely open our schools in the fall someone on what some neighboring towns and even states are doing right now to prepare for the spring let alone next fall i'm worried that we are lagging behind these other communities close by i.e biddeford that are open to plan on opening for five days a week thank you for your time and for listening kindly guides chris perry okay the next email is

077from courtney bell good evening i have a first grader who always enjoyed and looked forward to school she started to hate school and feels like she has no friends she's having too much screen time and not enough meaningful education or social interaction i'm not okay with continuing the remote or two day a week hybrid model people are getting colder well outside of schools going to the mall restaurants etc while our children are not able to get their education that our taxes should be paying for instead parents are unable to work or to try to reach from home and forcing children to be on computers not engaged as you need to be i'm able to pay for private schools that allow in-person learning five days a week why can't scarborough figure out how to do this

078for our children it's already been a year why do our children continue to have to pay the price for this we are not okay putting up with this until the fall it is doing damage to our children every day many other schools are back 45 days per week already or within the next couple of weeks where is our plan as of yesterday i didn't even see this on your agenda for today i've seen meetings with those on the school board are spending time joking about everyone's difficulties taking notes on the zoom meetings and planning for your teacher's professional development at the expense of losing even more in-person instruction for our children the first thing at hand should be getting the children back to school five days a week i understand that there may be hurdles

079however you've had a year to figure this out please do what is right for the children now not next year respectfully courtney bell and this third email is from judith demucci respectfully having our students back to school full-time is something that 100 of this community wants teachers staff families administrators this is not questionable what is important is the how and when i've listened to many different scenarios regarding getting students more time in school and through the benefits have been stated and other benefits have been stated they are general benefits we know students do better with more time in school we know it's best for the social emotional and academic growth and well-being that again is not questionable however we need to take a breath and think about planning fully for our students so that they

080will reap the full complete and consistent benefits of being back in the school setting changing course with limited time left though with best intentions will most likely have a periodical effect on our students and staff we need to use this time to plan carefully with their return in the fall we have come this far everyone parents teachers administrators and have given so much we just need to stay the course a little longer please reach out if anyone could use additional support or resources to keep up the hard work all we want is the best for our children respectfully judy damucci licensed social worker wentworth student advocate thank you at this time i've promoted amber hoxa you may take yourself off mute hey everyone thank you so much for your time tonight and thank you for

081the board and superintendent prince and um all the leadership and the teachers i would like to begin with just sharing an excerpt from a book my daughter read to me the other night it's called pete the cat snow days pete wakes up to more snow it's not a school day it's another snow day pete makes a snow fort he throws snowballs he makes a snow dog then he has fun sledding he can't wait to tell his teacher about it but the next day is a snow day too there's too much snow pete and bob can barely even open the front door before you go sledding please shovel the walk says mom but shoveling is hard work when pete is done he's too tired to go sledding pete misses his teacher he misses the other kids

082and cats in his class pete can't wait to go back to school tomorrow but when pete wakes up it's snowing oh no he says not another snow day pete wants to go to school so pete plows the streets all by himself the other cats rush outside they help clear the snow everyone wants to go to school the streets are clear and safe the bus can drive the school is open all the kids are excited to see their teacher he has a snow day show and tell when it's pete's turn he tells everyone about the fun he had in the snow i love snow days said pete but i love school best um so why am i sharing this story i think it really struck me when she read it to me um i kind of

083thought of it as a little anecdote so um the snow is the obstacles that we're currently facing okay budget teachers doing double work lack of transportation no nurses no substitutes no space bad hvac how to organize feeding times feeding locations mask breaks how to vaccinate all the teachers low morale in the staff how do we rearrange all the furniture to maximize space in the schools this is the snow you guys we can see it it's visible the virus is not i totally understand that but the snow the obstacles is visible people are willing to help lend their services of expertise and in some cases they're empty their office spaces we as a community the teachers superintendent school leadership parents the board we are the plow in this situation and i believe that we need to

084say what we need what do we need help with and we'll jump in and we will help you guys but we need to start school this year in some shape or form whether it be just with cohort d students because those are the ones who need it most this year it is very important and the other question that i did have for the board is in regards to the srt committee do you have a child psychologist on that committee at all because i really think that um i don't think you have one and i think it might be really beneficial to have that voice on the committee um we really appreciate thank you so much you guys thanks thank you you're on mute april i brought that thank you shannon jones promoted you i can't

085tell whether john if you're oh sorry it it just kicked off on me and kicked me back on so oh no good give me everyone a jumping cosmetic uh atlantic drive in in scarborough i've got uh two girls and pleasant hill and i think um you know the kind of my request is i think i think kind of what the community is needing is is some optimism and hope that there's there's something that we're really striving is this task force tries to figure out how we're going to start you know more in-person learning um that that that one were kind of moved past the phase of kind of the thought i thought this kind of phase of abundance of caution like when we had so much we didn't know the disease would know things and

086we kind of just had to do the extreme because that was the the way to go and now we have so much information so much science and the articles that are just coming out every day that they're clearly schools are not a place where the disease is spreading if anything it's actually safer for kids to be in a school environment because it's controlled there's social distancing there's mass wearing top of all the other benefits of having kids in so i think i just think we got to be careful not to be you know paralyzed by fear or allowing the kind of the lowest common denominator drive kind of what we're trying to do which is opening schools um you know and i think the other thing i was thinking about someone said this comment to

087me in terms of kind of as a definition of elitism is kind of where you you're kind of making decisions for other people when you're not you're not living their experience and i think they're our town has two different experiences there's some of us that are that are loving this because you know we've got our camp we've got our lake house we've got our ski house we've got nannies we've got we've got the funds to put our kids in enrichment and they're we're filling the gap and we're working remotely and um for us it's just been this interesting experiment and we got a lot more skiing and whereas others their careers are suffering their marriages are suffering their children are suffering and i think we've got to just be cautious that we're not making a

088decision based on that the the on groups that aren't sharing an equitable amount of suffering um as we're trying to think i think it shifts their urgency i do think just writing off this year and just saying well there's only six weeks left like you you're telling people that are suffering it's just six weeks you know no big deal um i think we just got to be careful we really want to kind of make these decisions really with with uh some empathy of what others are going through um and i think the fact that i think the latest statistic is 49 public schools in maine are opening four to five days a week are we learning from these other people what how are they able to pull it off we're reaching out these other districts

089how how'd you do it what works what can we do to pull that off and not just kind of just surrender this year i think and i think that i think the other thing we got to realize is that the the word i wrote down is just reputational damage like people move to this town for the schools and if the and the feeling at least from everyone i'm speaking to the community is they're having doubts for having having done that and i think for families that are looking for their next destination they're going to start to realize all these towns are opening and we're not why would i move here and you're going to get all the families start selling you know who's going to be buying the people that don't care about schools so

090the next time there's an issue with budget oh sorry well thank you guys so i really just appreciate that something hopeful and urgent would be my last two words thank you thank you kelly i'm going to switch back over to you um so you could do three more for us please okay uh this next is a comment from a second grader this scarborough school board my name is bryson i'm in second grade at pleasant hills school i asked my mom to send in a copy of my homework because i learned that kids voices are important i want to be back in school full-time because it's too hard learning remotely i don't feel like i'm taught everything and i don't have my teacher to ask questions to when my mom doesn't know the answer we tried

091googling it lastly i learned better in class home there are too many distractions my sister wants to play with me and it's too easy to lose focus on my task plus i miss my friends and my teacher thank you bryson this next comment is from ailee derosher hello i'm writing this email as a very concerned parent this year has challenged us in all in many unimaginable ways but as adults teachers parents we have learned to bend and mold to adjust to changing times i feel scarborough school systems has done well adjusting to the changing needs to keep our children safe but now there is another crossroads that is very important to address to keep our children education and emotional needs intact while parents and teachers have done their absolute best to meet the needs of

092our children's education remotely there is no substitute for in-person learning as a mom of three young children one at wentworth when going into kindergarten in the fall depending on school models and a two-year-old this year has been nothing short of challenging my daughter wentworth third grader he refuses to do any work at home and has now developed anxiety and lost her drive with caring about anything if this continues into the spring and i can't imagine next year getting her to do anything or our children as a whole to do anything when we can't even work to find a solution for them will be impossible it not only affects her view on school which breaks our hearts but her relationship with the two little brothers who are busy boys and deserve the right to play around

093the house and her father and i we have all lost sight of the goal of our children and pushing the curriculum is taking a major toll on our entire family our children in this community i grew up and deserve more i truly believe scarborough and the school board has the power resources in love with the community to do so use alternative sites for classrooms reach out to the community for substitutes bus drivers offers and nurse personnel we as a community need to rally together to rebuild and support getting these children in classes for their health and well-being as a mom as a community member i am pleading to help our children where there is a world there is always a way please help our children a very concerned parent this third email is from rachel

094powers she's a resource math teacher at scarborough middle school dear community members i'm a teacher at scarborough middle school and i'm voicing my belief that the best course of action for the remainder of the school year is to stick course and remain in the hybrid model i'm also serving on the stock committee and my focus group agreed that none of the options presented really serve our community well it is premature to believe that our community is at the point where it is safer or sound to expand the hours students are in school as my sister who teaches at greisinger's medical school in scranton pennsylvania noted don't be fooled by the low incidence of covert at our middle elementary schools these students are likely as symptomatic what we're doing is working and has been working scarborough

095drafted a plan by the stock committee and we're doing a wonderful job in fact school districts like portland are looking at are looking at us so please make the right decision for the community not the one seems to please the growing fury on social media sincerely rachel powers thank you kelly i will jump back over to our attendees um betsy i'm going to promote you and then kate you're on deck hi can you hear me we can hear you great thank you my name is betsy fallinsby i live at 359 pleasant hill road and i'm actually going to speak regarding the 21 22 school year calendar i'm speaking tonight to urge you to carefully consider the potential impacts of the proposal for increased professional development time next year to give you some context and transparency

096i'm the parent of a kindergartner and a second grader and i also teach elementary school in a neighboring district the leadership council has asked for their priority number one plan which would mean early release every wednesday for increased pd time while this would result in 54 hours of pd for the teachers it also results in 54 hours of lost learning for our elementary school students after a year of being out of the classroom so much i think it's crucial that we give students all the instructional time we can next year that 54 hours would amount to almost nine full school days the teacher side of me knows that professional development time is needed welcomed and put to good use however as a parent whose children have missed hundreds of hours of instruction this year i

097cannot support a plan that would result in that much more mis that many more missed hours next year the leadership council did share some data from surrounding districts and of the towns they surveyed in cumberland county most give teachers an average of 16 to 20 hours per year so to ask for 54 is far and away beyond and i feel would come at a detriment what i need as a teacher after this year of learning loss is more time with my students in front of me and what my children need is more time to learn in person from their teachers finally as a result of many factors of covid parents of our youngest children have been hard pressed to find child care for before and after school it is difficult to pay for child care

098on two full-time salaries and it's nearly impossible to get a spot in some of the few private and the one public programs in our town having our youngest children out of school every wednesday afternoon would further strain family budgets and create an overwhelming demand in our town that is already bursting at the seams um so if that professional development is truly needed and i and i do believe it is i would offer the following suggestions perhaps as a compromise um every wednesday of this year is a half day for students so possibly using the remaining 12 wednesdays in this year's calendar to start planning and preparing for next year or number two the option number two that the leadership council presented would have early release every other wednesday so that may be that's more comparable

099to surrounding districts and maybe a better compromise for all involved i thank you for your consideration of all sides of this proposal thank you very much betsy kate i have promoted you to panelist you may unmute and speak when ready hello hi oh thank you i got redirected and put back on my name is kate palzano cowan i live in silver book circle in scarborough and i thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening i'm a mom of two daughters attending scarborough schools and i'm speaking tonight to advocate for returning scarborough kids to in-person learning five days per week as soon as possible as a patient-facing healthcare worker i was very much in favor of the hybrid model at the beginning of the school year covid was a great unknown and was justifiably worrying

100the known benefits of in-person learning and our kids mental health needed to be weighed against safety and an unknown level of potential spread of covid within a classroom setting clearly we're in a very different situation this pandemic has been going on for over a year and over that year significant amounts of data from schools that returned to fully in-person learning models have been collected analyzed and published by experts in both public health and education the cdc website updated on february 12 2021 states that based on the data available in person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission and perhaps more relevant to our conversation this evening the cdc goes on to state that students in a school setting are unlikely to spread covet amongst themselves or transmit covid to staff this

101is because schools like hospitals are concurrently utilizing a number of mitigation strategies to minimize overall risk of infection this is because we know there is no single magic solution we all need to employ a variety of mitigation strategies to the best of our abilities in order to reduce our overall risk this information when considered in conjunction with expert opinions of numerous pediatric specialists that have repeatedly stated that the emotional behavioral and learning gap risks of keeping children isolated within a hybrid or remote learning model likely outweigh the risk of contracting or transmitting covet in the classroom make it clear what we must do in order to support the growth and well-being of our children keeping our kids at home in front of a computer with reduced instruction from teaching professionals is not working speaking from

102personal experience there are struggles and or tears at my home almost every single remote day my children are absolutely being failed by hybrid learning the situation for my younger daughter is of particular concern she requires additional math and literacy support that has proven challenging to effectively deliver in this hybrid model despite our significant efforts at home to work on literacy she remains just as we began this school year below grade level in reading my husband and i are paying out of pocket for private math tutors for both our children this will continue over the summer in an effort to bridge the learning grab that this hybrid year has created and the emotional toll this year has taken on my kids is nothing short of heartbreaking it is agonizing to see my children who were previously

103excited to go to school to learn to see their friends become increasingly moody disengaged unmotivated and distressed they find little joy in online learning and have a diminished desire to take part in it i'm extremely hopeful this is a temporary speed bump that we'll be able to overcome once they're able to fully engage with their teachers and classmates once again to close i'm asking you to return our children to school for five days per week in an in-person learning schedule children need to be in the classroom and their teachers need to be safe there are so many schools public as well as private that have shown it's possible to accomplish both of these goals through a thoughtful implementation of science-based mitigation protocols the knowledge around coveted transmission has greatly evolved since we opened our school

104and it's now well past the time for scarborough to catch up with the science so we can continue making our best possible decisions and keeping our kids overall well-being in focus thank you all very much i appreciate your time this evening thank you kate kelly at this point i'll turn it back over to you so that you could please do three more okay um this next email comes from gabrielle raoul i apologize to that incorrectly good morning i'm running to you as a scarborough mother of three two of my children attend pleasant hill and my youngest will be in the coming years although i'm blessed to be able to stay home with my children and do my best to assist in their education is not ideal my children and i are struggling we struggle to

105communicate well during our learning sessions we struggle to be patient and kind with each other during our remote learning we struggle i'm educated i'm a business owner i am capable i am still struggling i understand the circumstances covered 19 has provided us on a daily basis i remind myself to keep perspective and to take it one day at a time my children and i need to return to school to keep our relationship healthy i am not an educator i am not their teacher they want me to be their mom the dynamic created by remote learning in our home is not one i wish to sustain we need school we need teachers who are gifted with the ability to teach and empower children we need the social connection and peer relationships building that school provides we

106need in-person learning i deeply urge all of you to be as creative as possible and open up new ideas and suggestions to me as possible the next is from cassandra salvi first grade teacher at eight corners school hello i write to you today as a teacher to share some thoughts on the proposals of opening school in whatever way is decided first let me be clear i slash we want our students back this current situation is not ideal for teaching or progressing normally through the curriculum students and teachers of this district work very hard to manage the system to be safe i want you to understand the numbers may look low but keep in mind how hard the staff and families work to follow cdc guidelines some of us not see in our own family so

107that we keep ourselves safe and our students safe when you decide on a proposal please keep a few things in mind one does this make sense is it worth a big change in movement for such a few additional days in school two is this manageable for my child students can they handle a change in the current schedule or will it cause added stress slash anxiety about when do i go to school or am i getting a new teacher three can teachers teach the curriculum in a proposed format would some students get the same lesson over again if there was overlap of cohorts four think about what is the goal of this change do we want students to have more of a social experience or gain more academic time does it propose does the proposal achieve

108that five please don't rule out leave things how they are teachers and students are finally on a roll with something that logistically makes sense let's end this year with a sense of achievement rather than confusion and stress thank you for your time sandra salvi this last of this group is from winnie lee dear chair i'm the child of a chinese immigrant family growing up in the 80s in brooklyn new york where everyone in my family including myself was mugged in my neighborhood walking to and from school was literally a dangerous affair there were metal detectors in my school there were gunshots stabbings and fights happening all at the same time outside of school however as soon as i stepped foot in the classroom the smiles on my teachers faces melted all those worries away education

109gave me the hope that i can do better for myself and my family school was magical for many of us and for me it was just that i made it from wall street to uptown new york because i had wonderful mentors and friends throughout my schooling it was not without challenges but it was some from some of these difficulties that i gained fortitude to always press on fast forward to present day a scrabble schools are what seems to be to me something from the hallmark channel i'm continuously amazed when our amazing principals teachers and staff warmly greet my children by name each morning and afternoon they've even recognized our vehicles by now please keep this going for my children i never for a moment take this for granted our children need to be in classrooms

110as much as possible all of the scenarios presented by the restart are achievable and are not mutually exclusive we need to peel off that band-aid at some point these are the exact words of a westport coffee shop owner told me when he was preparing to open doors to a small cafe for outdoor dining i know public education and part exists to provide equal opportunity at education because i experienced it firsthand hybrid schooling doesn't do that when half of our town can can afford tutors nannies enrichment classes and do remote days at their ski camps while the other half can't help their kids with any at all homework because they're living paycheck to paycheck you have responsibility to uphold for our children in our community and i truly believe you can do this thank you at

111this time i'm going to promote allison and stella you are on deck thank you my name is alison nieland i am relatively new to scarborough my family is a military family and we've moved all over the country and are thrilled to be in maine with our three children uh one at eight corners one at wentworth and one at scarborough middle school and i'm here today to advocate like many parents for five days a week education as in person as soon as possible not waiting until fall i need to first give my deep gratitude to the school board to the administrators and to the teachers who have worked tirelessly in this year i truly am grateful for all the work that you have done and just amazed every day at the creativity and the warmth and

112even the enthusiasm and joy that teachers bring and it's it's really with my utmost respect that i say my kids need their teachers five days a week and six weeks although i hear that that sounds short in the grand scheme of life that is essential to our children's growth the next six weeks is when they need hope and joy and their classmates and their teachers most desperately um my i'm particularly concerned about my kindergartener and third grader who only see their teachers for 40 minutes a day on the remote learning days and get absolutely no social interaction with their classmates on those days um even that teacher interaction it's really that their teachers see my children as small pinheads on a screen during those those precious 40 minutes that they're together with all due respect

113to the teachers who are advocating to stay the course the teachers get to see the joy that comes into the classroom because the children are so excited to be with them what they don't see is the struggles that are occurring at home especially with families that are working two parents are trying to work at the same time as managing their kids remote i agree with other speakers who have talked about this as an equity issue it absolutely is i commend your thoughtful and careful planning for the hybrid option at the beginning of the school year i fully supported that option when we began because it was best for that moment with the information that we had in august and september but we have now arrived at a totally different moment so our plan needs to

114be different we cannot stay the course through the spring we must adjust to what our students need vaccinations are now available to teachers dr shah's update today said that 25 of maine people are now at least have one vaccination which will increase a lot in the future health and human services just announced today that the 10 billion dollars advocated for testing to be able to do comprehensive testing in school we'll be arriving to school shortly we have so much data new information the state of massachusetts is all flow open now will be opening their elementary schools um starting next month uh new york city has dedicated to opening their schools in the spring and here locally biddeford and falmouth and other districts are finding creative solutions to do this scarborough amazes me with our collective

115creativity and willpower but i'm just not seeing it applied right now in this situation and that's very concerning to me we have the people to make this happen and i appreciate that you will consider moving towards five days a week this spring thanks thank you alison yeah i'm you april yeah trying to you think i could manage a timer and zoom at the same time stella you should be all set stella you're on mute now can you hear me we can hear you now i'll start over uh good evening everyone i live on woodgate road here in scarborough and am a parent of a primary school student and i just want to begin by thanking the school board for your hard work your time and your energy you have a big job and no one

116denies that this particular school year has been a great challenge so thank you for listening to the community for listening to our comments our concerns for responding to emails and exploring and considering options and suggestions for more in-person learning i have high hopes for tonight's meeting i'm eager to hear what the restart committee brings forward as best proposals for increased in-person learning the education model put in place in september of 2020 is no longer working with scientific data supporting that schools are safe for children teachers and staff our district can adapt to provide full-time in-person learning i was encouraged to read the school board's educational philosophy mission and goals from the district's website putting the needs of students above all other priorities as the board listens and makes decisions both tonight and in the near

117future i would ask that all keep in mind these particular statements from that document the document begins with and i quote as advocates for children the board recognizes that the thorough and efficient education of children is its primary statutory-based responsibility end quote the document concludes with six goals two of which seem most important during this time of decision making and problem solving goal number two is written as follows serve as advocates for all children teachers and other staff by adopting kids first goals policies and budget goal six says shape the aspects of the school system based on the values and desires of the community the desire of the community has become clear with nearly 80 percent of responses to the parent survey desiring more in-person learning time it can no longer be something that is

118put off until another time or another school year as part of this community i also want to let you know that we are ready and willing to support this endeavor in whatever way possible can we donate desks or funds for more desks donate cleaning supplies volunteer to wipe down tables between lunch groups help teachers rearrange classrooms or research additional spaces for classes to meet in whatever the needs are please allow us to help we are more than willing to assist now more than ever scarborough schools school children need you to be their advocates children's mental health social and emotional well-being and their academic education are suffering under the current plan you have the ability to provide a better model you have the ability to help pull kids out of their mental and social slumps by

119getting them back into the schools you have the ability and obligation to put children first so please be bold in your thinking and decisions for our children thank you for your time thank you very much stella kelly back to you okay this next email comes from florent haksa from 11 minute man drive wanted to share my thoughts on the return to school plans i moved to this country 20 years ago to get a better education slash life back in kosovo in 1990 another country that had occupied our country closed all of our schools they did not want albanian people to get educated it was a tough time for a country that could not educate their kids the teachers did not accept this people donated their homes and teachers worked for free for many months to

120keep kids education going since this was illegal because they did not want albanians to go to school and the teachers were risking their lives every day eventually people got organized and donated enough money so that the teachers started getting paid somewhat but the schools and private homes lasted for 10 years until we finally broke free from the suppression with the help of the usa for me education has been the most important thing in shaping a country's future the number one reason we moved to scarborough was because of how important and strong education is here last month last march felt very similar to 1990 for me even though the enemy was so unknown and different closing the schools felt very familiar this time i was not a kid so it made me understand how my parents

121felt when this happened to them and just like them the teachers stood up and sacrificed even their lives to keep the schools going and do what they could do to help the kids and i want to thank them because throughout history they seem to always step up and sacrifice a lot for the kids in our future having lived through close schools and seeing how impacted me as a kid and now it is a doubt and how it's impacting my own kids i want to say that we must do everything in our power to open the school's five days i know it's not an easy task and i know we'll take a lot of sacrifice but kids are suffering and we need to put them first they are our future i believe our town is a

122leader in this state when it comes to education you need to set the tone for the rest of the schools this next email comes from mary twombly i am running to the board to express my serious concerns about changing the structure of the school week so close to the end of the year do the kids want to be in school yes the teachers want to be back to normal yes but we cannot wave a magic wand and restore normal we can and are doing our best to teach as much as we can as well as we can during a pandemic i think what a lot of parents hope for is normal school experience i'm a parent too and would love for my children to be back to normal but changing the school schedule now in

123the spring will not be restoring a normal experience the proposals you ask for are simply an alternate abnormal and they will come with risks and challenges of their own let's look at some of those risks we will risk higher rates of transmission with more bodies in smaller places we will risk more quarantines of more overlap with groups of children we will risk our ability to focus extra time and energy on students who need specialized services to accommodate peers who may not have as many needs we risk the time spent learning if students have to re-establish routines and procedures we risk the mental health of the staff who have to redesign their schedules their lessons heck their profession yet again let's now look at changes it will change the days and hours families need child care

124it will change schedules that families have planned their work and days around will change the expectations on the students time be it classwork homework or remote learning we'll change the service times available to our most at-risk students we'll once again change the various structures and routines that children have finally learned and have now come to rely on in the k5 proposed model the average student will get one more school day per month how's that possibly worth all the risks and changes every parent adult and school staff member knows how essential consistency structure and routine add to the health and well-being of everyone but children especially you will find no mental health experts who recommend changes to routine in times of prices and we are still in a crisis the pandemic has not ended we risk

125furthering its impact if we make changes too soon let us put the time and energy and focus into our proper reopening in the fall so we can welcome students back the most normal way possible finally i would be remiss if i didn't address the emotional toll this conversation has out on me and many of my colleagues while the families of my own students have been nothing but supportive the feel of the community at large is less so i've seen comments on facebook questioning our work ethic work ethic suggesting we must all love this time off blatantly stating that we aren't thinking about the children not only are these comments hurtful but they also out of touch with the reality of the massive undertaking that is teaching this year so massive in fact that we cannot

126find people who are willing to alleviate staffing issues so massive that when a teacher is out sick there were literally no other people willing to do the job perhaps it's because no one can wrap their mind around what teaching in 2021 must be like well perhaps that is because the pay isn't worth the high risk setting we are in day in and day out to have these realities then compounded by a lack of understanding and respect to our profession when it has already been reinvented in the face of an ongoing endemic is demoralizing it comes down to this people who haven't walked into our classroom since march 2020 should not be in charge of restructuring our reality it's not possible to know the full impact trust us we can do this safely and for our

127children marie trombley fourth grade teacher wentworth school this next comes from elise tarello good afternoon it is my understanding that the committee and the board are meeting this evening i wanted to send in an email for public comment i appreciate the dedicated time this task force has taken to look at and analyze the data i reviewed all three scenarios and only one the first seemed to really need meet one of the basic needs of our community the second scenario seems to be missing the headache and turmoil of parents families and caregivers would go through for the extra day full day per month parents do not need their children to go to school an extra day per month they need extra days per week the following reasons scenario two cannot work one parents are currently currently

128paying for alternative care on wednesdays as it is alternative care programs will not allow you to keep your dedicated spot on a wednesday regardless of need without paying what most families now have to do is to pay for a spot that they don't need two a half day on wednesday is already disrupted to a family's work day most families doing their work from home have to navigate the work day to be done at the same time their child's work is being done when their work is over they need to supervision think of a first grader finishing his work and if mom's still leading to work the remainder of the day now you're going to take that half day and move the child on site so now people have to facilitate transportation families cannot cannot commit

129to a midday pickup on half day wednesdays so really have the business to now support transport all of these half gate kids home i know i can't leave work midday to go sit in a pickup line three disruptive schedule every other week is a very disruptive school for families it has to be consistent every week i currently have three children who live in scarborough i have a daughter who is a sophomore a daughter in kindergarten and also a daughter in preschool my preschooler has gone to school five times five times a week no distancing in the classroom the daycare has not been shut down once my kids my just excusing my kindergartner is disengaged from learning on the day she's not on site my high school is frustrated and slightly struggling but she's hopeful with

130everyone getting vaccinated that things will be better in the fall and she's just think of this as the last year her words it seems to me that we have to think about each age group and attack these in stages and looking at other schools they sent their elementary school students back first then their middle and then their high school stage of them weeks in between is this not something that we can do utilizing the gymnasiums library or art rooms and elementary schools to make sure classrooms if kids wanted their specialties could these teachers not travel room to room i appreciate the time and consideration and looking at a return to school it's most definitely time thank you thank you jennifer ladd i'm going to promote you to speak and after jen i do not have

131anyone else who is in attendance with their hand up so if you would like to speak um please raise your little blue hand and let me know you hear me now we can hear you okay great um i just want to start out by saying a very sincere thank you to this board um for stepping up to represent our community by sitting on in the seats that you're in you give you've given a lot of your time a lot of your time probably more than most of us know um and i'm going to say that it's probably close to thankless work because i know that you're often scrutinized i want to say thank you to to you but also to every single one of our teachers for the incredible amount of work and creativity that

132i know they're putting forth this year but this year is not happening solely because of our board or our teachers i want to take a public moment to express deep gratitude for our food service workers and custodial staff our bus drivers and our coaches our counselors and our business office staff todd jepson and everyone that works in facilities our i.t folks we know that it takes a village to educate our kids and for that bigger village that i think sometimes goes unnoticed i know we're all really thankful i also want to clearly ask you to vote and do whatever you possibly can to get our kids back in person as quickly as possible and there is almost no amount of in person that i think is insignificant it's so important it's urgent it's critical for

133their safety and for all the other reasons that you're hearing about tonight i've read all the committee notes on the proposed scenarios and i know that there are a lot of concerns about how to do that in the event that you or the restart committee feel that there is anything that stands in the way of allowing any of those scenarios or future scenarios to happen please ask this community for ideas and for help no ask is too big or too small call on us we're raising our hands need 10 000 square feet of heated ventilated accessible space need more desks more bodies to help in the morning with drop-offs or recess monitors so the teachers can have planning time or eat their lunch need masks or storage containers or help arranging furniture or installing plexi

134glass you need help creating outdoor classrooms or lunch base i would actually really love to do that it sounds like fun um do you need nurses do you need us to sign your letters to the state and federal representatives asking for their help in putting our kids education and mental well-being first we can help with those things and so many other things please just call on us ask for donations ask for volunteers we are many with many different skills and networks and i know that i'm not alone in offering our collective help as you've heard already tonight we're hearing the same conversation play out in every other district right now and because this is so important emotions are running high and sometimes words get ugly it's really hard to stay positive and to come together

135but i know that this is what each of us our parent or teacher would ask of our kids we need to model that for them teamwork creative problem solving not giving up common sense active listening help when we need it kindness and gratitude thank you thank you jen back to you kelly okay this is the last one that i have received and it's from lisa and again i apologize bellagio bellagion i'd like to start by thanking the school board members and administrators for being here tonight like most parents we do anything for our children last year when colby started we noticed right away that our son who was six at the time now seven was struggling to learn remotely on a computer we made it well known to the school how hot of a time

136we had at home trying to help him get his work done we intended on sending our son to a private school this year after the battle of hybrid learning last year and lack of confidence we had seen him develop however one week before the school year was about to start our son was diagnosed with dyslexia and adhd we were encouraged by the school psychiatrist to keep him in public we encouraged by the school psychiatrist to keep him in public schools so we can access special education you see dyslexia requires a specific way of learning to read it must be done with certain programs administered with fidelity unfortunately private schools are not required to accommodate special education with one week before schooling school started we had to remove him from the private school enrollment and we

137enrolled him back in the public school we didn't have a lot of time to think this over and knowing how important reading is we took the psychiatrist advice this school year has been brutal with two parents who are essential workers we are doing the best we can to help our son we see him struggling getting frustrated becoming angry and giving up on the schoolwork sent home to do some nights it can take up to 45 minutes to get the last five questions done we have started choosing mental health in these scenarios i have found myself writing notes to his teacher explaining why the work was not completed we are told he is great in school by his primary teacher it's been encouraging seeing surrounding towns opening the schools back to five days a week private

138schools continue to be five days a week during the pandemic successfully private schools we keep hearing about the cdc guidelines and the spacing issues preventing scarborough from reopening fully scarborough school building footprints cannot be that different than of other schools who have gotten creative and found ways to bring the kids back one day has purchased tends to utilize this classroom when weather allows other districts have found alternate locations even an empty macy's building has governor exhausted its meaning in attempting to find alternate locations for teaching there is a building police right next door to the eight corner school for example that we considered utilizing a building in nearby town kate considered the old wax building in south portland many parents are currently and according to the last survey still willing to provide transportation to and

139from school if that means they could open and allow children to go back five days a week as a parent of a child who is struggling with a hybrid model please give the families like mine this model does not work for the option of getting our kids back into school his education confidence in itself mental health and the need for socialization depend on it let's make a promise to keep our kids to fulfill the second goal under the educational philosophy with stage to serve as advocates for all children teachers and other staff by adopting kids first goals policies and budget thank you for your time hello sorry this is signed mr and joe griffin that's the last one i have thank you kelly one more came in and we actually bumped this gentleman last time

140and so if we could get his public comment read that would be um appreciated and i'm happy to do it i i have it open on my computer i'll i'll just yep no problem i am going to turn my camera off though [Music] this is uh oh happening in real time here this is from mr noah dimnick dominic apologize uh i'm a scarborough resident parent of a second grader at pleasant hill and a pediatrician i feel horrible hearing all the stories of families and children that are struggling during the pandemic you are not alone this is stress and hardship that permeates through our society however i would also be naive to think everyone has been affected equally the inequity is something that we need to address as society but we can ask our schools to

141instantly fix the problem i know parents feel the struggle trying to play the role of teacher in addition to all of the other roles they fill it is one that both my wife and i have felt and if anything has increased our appreciation of our teachers and should strengthen our community support for teachers and advocating for passing school budgets being safe and being so successful is part of the excellent work of staff and the adaptability of the teachers to create alternate learning programs during this pandemic going to in-person learning requires three things at minimum number one all teachers to be vaccinated number two being able to comply with cdc guidelines number three having ample space teachers and money to meet these guidelines we are working on the first already doing the second and we do

142not have the ability to do the third i think it is extremely important to realize that we cannot meet the cdc guidelines to have everyone back in person lastly i agree that having kids back in school will help the increased anxiety and mental health concerns however even if we are back in fully in person the pandemic still exists mental health problems will not magically go away by putting kids back in person learning i would also plea put a plea to parents and students to support each other reach out to a neighbor safely and seek out mental health professionals or your primary care providers for help many mental health professionals have expanded their hours and practices to provide services to at non-traditional hours thank you for your time please everyone keep following cdc guidelines and stay

143safe sincerely no it didn't and with that i do not see any other emails and i do not have anyone else in the audience with their hand raised and so at this time i will close public comment before we move on to agenda item 6.0 i would ask that we please take a five minute break the time is 804. let's call it 8 10 please okay everybody if you can hear me it's now 8 10. um before i move on to agenda item 6.0 i just want to thank all of our public speakers this evening um for your composed and measured and respectful comments and for doing your very best to adhere to the time i know that that's um difficult and i would also like to thank those that submitted public comment to our

144email um it's really important for the board to have that feedback so we are all appreciative of your time and participation in our meeting agenda item 6.0 is a superintendent search update um i want to let the community know that on monday march 15th the interview committee met uh to discuss our interview process uh each member of that committee was asked to sign an nda and the the details and the specifics of the superintendent search process are really highly confidential as many of you can imagine these are people who are currently serving other roles in districts in our state and across the country um and so until we have named a finalist um each of our participants in the search process has been asked to stick to strict confidentiality um on monday march 22nd and

145tuesday march 23rd the interview committee will be conducting their first round interviews after which time that committee will make a recommendation to the full board as to who should be put through to what we are calling the board round so at that time um the board will interview the recommended candidates that interview will take place on thursday march 25th and the timeline from there becomes a little more uh bendy because we're not exactly sure how many finalists we will have um coordinating with those finalists in terms of making an announcement um and publicly letting the district know their names as well as inviting them to do site visits and you know potentially have some coffee with some of our district staff as well as opportunities potentially for the candidates to interact with the public obviously

146given kovid those opportunities will most likely be remote but i did want to put it out there that the board is considering those types of things and we're looking forward to the next steps of the search process it's happening quickly but at the same time you know in a really measured and thoughtful way does anyone have any comments about superintendent search uh agenda item 8.0 is new business agenda item 8.1 is the first reading of the proposed fy 22 school budget and with that i believe i will be turning it over to administration thank you very much april uh i would like to start things off and we'll be talking about the fy 22 leadership council budget proposal and kate bolton director of finance and business will be joining me throughout this powerpoint so as

147i go on to the next slide which is the mission and why we exist as a reminder it is our mission is to remind you of our purpose each and every student is empowered to be a resilient lifelong learner we have the resources through our budget process to support that mission and if we go on to the next slide and then i think we are right there perfect so you got ahead of me sorry about that our purpose in kicking off the first reading tonight we're excited to have so many folks watching this meet him and want to take this opportunity to encourage you to be involved in the budget the budget book is linked with tonight's school board agenda and does contain a great deal of information we hope you will take the time

148to look through it all the work we are doing now and preparing to do next year will require resources which means funding which means budget support and approval from our community at this point in time is going to talk about the budget development focus thank you hi everyone i'm kate bolton i'm the business manager for the scarborough schools and uh i know it's already been kind of a long meeting and it's likely to be a little bit longer there's still some work to be done so i'm going to try to zip through these slides pretty quickly i want the public to know that we'll have the slide deck posted after this meeting and also as sandy mentioned most of what you're going to see here tonight is reflected in the budget book which is posted

149as a backup document for this evening's meeting so everything's on the website um so the first thing that we're going to take a look at is the budget development focus and um pretty much like everything else we've done in the pandemic and environment in the past year our budget development has had a different focus this year as well with safety as well as student recovery uppermost in our minds so what you see are some framing questions that we've used in our budget process so far and i won't read slides to folks because i know people can read and again this will be available as a document to review later on i first wanted to mention uh take us backwards a little bit to last year's budget process for this current fiscal year we're in fy21

150right now and as a result of the pandemic shutdown that we faced during the budget process last year when we were developing our budget the original leadership council's proposal which was presented before we shut down was then diminished greatly by the time we actually reached the opportunity to have that budget approved so we have a significant reduction in what you see here is what was originally presented and then was finally approved as the school department's operating budget this year and then a little extra twist in fy 21 in july we were given four million dollars in federal grant funds and so those those were able to supplement our budget to support school reopening and again for the public there's a great deal of information about that cares act funding in the budget book i've got

151way too many fancy transitions in here this is a fancier slide deck than my usual so the budget process in any year is really complex um and takes a really long time and um in this particular year we followed a lot of the same methods that we typically do we started with listening sessions with our staff which is critically important to get feedback on what's actually going on in our schools and what resources might be needed to keep that moving forward we do line item review and reallocation we do individual meetings with each department we do budget reductions and we do budget reallocations and this is just the basics of the process in this particular year one of the biggest challenges that we faced is to identify a reasonable approach to staffing requests in recent

152years we've been able to rely on very accurate enrollment projections to inform our budget planning but as with so many other areas in this year the pandemic has kind of upended most of those predictions and we've had to rethink the way that we plan for the coming year and what kind of enrollment and class size we're likely to see we also recognize that in this school year smaller class sizes are going to be critical to our ability to address students needs more individually as we transition back into in-person learning and again this slide talks about the worries that we have the concerns that we have about bringing our students back into in-person learning staff resources have been a critical tool this year to ensure both health and safety and delivery of instruction and we know

153that having sufficient staff in the coming year is going to have even more of an impact on our ability to meet our students needs um so in any given year again we have um salary and benefit cost drivers about 80.4 about roughly percent of our budget is made up of personnel costs salaries and benefits and so salary and benefit impacts from year to year responsible for the majority of our budget increase and here you see some of the areas that we've been looking at we do have a number of collective bargaining agreements that are currently under negotiation so there's some wonders there in terms of our estimates this year health insurance rates are going to be very unusual we don't really know what to expect there between the combination of the coveted impacts on the

154health industry and their uncertainty about the future a couple of other items here that we'll be watching here you see some of the common themes in the leadership council's requests for budget resources really this if you look at the entire district k-12 these items came up in every single building leaders and department heads requests for resources talking about higher staffing levels lower class sizes really being concerned about being able to be there for our students in a more individual way than we sometimes can be you heard a little bit from some of my colleagues about the need for professional staff development there were a number of investments made in curriculum resources both carrying on what we have already purchased in the current year and building out on some of the items that haven't been addressed

155in recent years and again monique has spoken to that very eloquently the final bullet on here is about all of our support folks um we have added school nurses we're delighted to have them we need them we want them and we have them in our budget proposal also a full complement of bus drivers custodians and maintenance workers will be critical to our coming year so here we see some of the themes again sort of broken out into items that we have budgeted for in the current year that we'd like to maintain summer programming and coveted recovery i think we'll be hearing a lot about that in the coming weeks health supply sanitizing supplies and ppe we'll still need those um we have two items that we are increasing social work services which you'll hear about

156a little bit more in a minute funds for repair maintenance and supportive technology devices we all may have noticed that there is a huge influx of technology that's been purchased with federal grant funds this year that has supported our ability to do remote learning as well as classroom learning in a much more effective way and those things will require service and support as well as software to operate them then we have three restorations which again we'll talk about in a minute of positions that were left behind in the fy 21 budget so the leadership council's proposal for fy 22 includes several items which were cut from or reduced from the fy 21 budget funding for the assistant athletic trainer which is actually a contracted service we have one employee who's our athletic trainer and a

157contracted service provider that gives us other assistant time hours that was cut down in about half uh in fy 21 and as we return to what might look a little bit more normal in the way of athletics we're going to need also to be able to have those services back so that we can keep the health of our student athletes strong the athletics and activities secretary position was also eliminated in this current year's budget and we're proposing to re um reinstate that at a half time level at this point for this year to again allow some support for that that team as they begin to rebuild um athletics and activities we have two instructional coach positions um which one one was cut at wentworth school last this current year and one was cut at the

158middle school and i think um many of you heard during the budget workshops um very eloquently expressed by our building leaders about the loss of skills and abilities and work that that that has created in this current year and the final item on here is the uh central office receptionist position and um that position was cut again in the spring of 2020 not having that person here at central office has actually placed a huge burden on our existing central office staff because everybody has pitched in to cover the front desk and to cover the phones and to you know take on those roles and they all have their own jobs to do so as we open back up again as we expect to see folks coming in and out of our building as we expect

159to have families and parents having greater need for communication with the district we'd like to have that position back and be able to address those needs in a timely and responsive way this next slide talks again about the high school social worker position that i mentioned a moment ago um social work services at the high school have been in high demand and uh strained by this year's um this year's difficulties for our students um there are there is a great need and there is an opportunity because we have uh an employee who is retiring this year who is a long-time employee who has been at a half-time level and in replacing that employee when we make a new hire we propose to make that a full-time position and some of the cost will be offset

160by the estimated turnover of that retiree position this proposal also adds two edtech positions to support students at the high school whose eligibility for service has been extended and again you heard about that in the budget workshop and it's described as well in the budget book um one of our favorite phrases is items in motion what that means is that the first reading of the school budget every year is just that it's a first reading and it's a long road to the second reading and the actual vote of a final budget and there were a lot of steps in between which we'll call out at the end of this process um but the the items in motion that we usually deal with again in a normal year these ordinary items are because we're receiving new

161information as we go through the process the collective bargaining agreements again we may have more clarity as we go through negotiations as to what those are going to look like anthem health insurance and dental delta delta dental insurance uh rates usually come in in the month of april um other insurance premiums and then we have some enrollment updates on new students and these are things that we typically address between first and second reading in any given year another item in motion is additional staffing and this is um this is again a coveted impact um right now what we're looking at is adding two classroom teachers at wentworth school this would replace three classroom teachers that we currently have that are funded through federal grant funds but would still allow us at wentworth to keep some

162lower class sizes than what we would see if we went back to our original budgeted level and at the middle school we would be adding three core content teachers creating a new team and allowing again middle school to have some lower class sizes for all of the reasons that we've outlined in the past and the reason these are items in motion is that they are an ad to the budget they are an ad to our what we would call level services budget um and that we are pondering the potential of having federal grant funds come along and help us pay for those but because we don't know that right now we don't know what the newest stimulus package is going to look like or when it's coming or how much we're likely to get we

163feel it's appropriate to put it in the budget for first reading because we do want to advocate for these positions we think they're going to be critical for this coming year you could also consider this an item in motion because we will have better data on kindergarten enrollment by the time we get to second reading that will start after april vacation i think my colleagues can tell me if i've got the timeline wrong but it's usually right around there um we also may have i have all my fingers and toes crossed that we may have other guidance from the department of education on on safety protocols and what does that mean in terms of staffing so this is really again responsive to our current situation responsive to our uncertainty about enrollment and to our knowledge

164that having more adults present in the fall is going to be critically important to supporting our students there are two budget cost drivers that we're calling out in the capital budget and the capital budget is on page 41 i believe of the budget book and it's uh it's separated out we we don't consider it part of our general operating fund because these are large investments to facilities transportation and technology that are kept in a separate area and are typically funded with bonding reserve funds occasionally tax appropriation this slide describes our current estimate for the turf field and track renovation the turf field and track renovation project was started by this the town of scarborough two years ago and it has been taken on now by the school board at the request of town leaders who

165feel that the school department as primary users of the facility will be better placed to raise community understanding and support for this critical work the second cip item that we have in here and i started using an acronym that's capital improvement projects that's what cip stands for also in the fy 22 cip budget is funding to continue the work towards development of a solid plan for construction of a new consolidated primary school in january of 2020 the school board voted to endorse the recommendation of our building steering committee to begin the planning process but the funding approved in fy 21 was not sufficient to take on that full scope of work we currently have a hundred thousand dollars budgeted and uh we are going to add the amount that we believe will be sufficient to

166begin that work um with the scope that was outlined by the building steering committee and again we're calling these items in motion because again we're expecting to get updated material excuse me updated data about what the correct cost is that we should be carrying in our budget and we'll be looking to the building steering committee to help us with some clearly defined scope of work as far as the the k2 project is concerned timeline what can we do with the funding that we have now what do we need to move forward so that we can take the next steps on that project and as far as the turf field and track renovation is concerned we're working with the town to gather information to lay out the costs and to begin to understand as accurately as

167we can what that estimate will be before we take that on in our budget and then move it towards referendum so this slide is the budget laid out in three funds general fund operating budget adult education budget and school nutrition the general fund operating budget is the portion that goes to public referendum it's the k-12 operating budget adult debt and school nutrition are considered separate funds but each of those funds has some support from local taxes which impacts the change in our tax request to the town and then the capital budget isn't shown here but that as i said is in the budget book on page 41 the town decides what portion of the capital budget would be funded by tax dollars versus funding or reserves or other funding sources so we don't include that

168here so as you run down through the chart you see the the operating budget you see non-tax revenues and then the bottom line is the tax request overall and it's important to note that the increase in the school's tax request is not the same thing as the projected increase in the tax rate and april is smiling because she loves that math that the um the school's tax request is combined with the town's tax request and the capital budget and all of that is filtered through um a formula for increase in valuation in the town and ultimately we have an estimate of what the increase on the local tax rate will be there are a ton of charts in the budget book and they're very pretty and shiny and i hope you look at them if

169you're a chart person but that's my only chart for tonight um i've listed here the numbers for the different budget the budget funds so the first one is general fund adult ted school nutrition capital equipment these will all be motions that will be brought forward to the board for your vote so as you pass the budget in first reading you'll be actually taking these four motions to approve the numbers for each one of these separate funds and i believe sarah will probably tee that up for us when the time comes i'm not sure with this with the shift in agenda if if this is that time um but the the last slide that i have here is just a timeline for the remainder of the budget process and again this is um sort of posted

170everywhere there's there's budget calendars um oh i should mention the budget portal there's the the town has a budget portal on their website which includes school information the town's a little bit behind us in their budget process you'll see that the um first presentation of the the full budget the school and town budget isn't until april 7th the town council will have its first reading on april 14th so they're still processing through their materials but as sandy said up front this is a really really important time in our lives for our community to be engaged in supporting the budget process the budget process isn't particularly sexy it's got really great spreadsheets if you like that sort of thing but it can also be a little bit of a glaze over topic but if you think

171about the fact that the budget process and budget approval and getting the resources that we need underlies everything else that we do and that we're able to do i think you know the community will agree that this is pretty critical work for them as well as for us so that's pretty much all i've got um and i can go back to the motions if that's what where we're headed or i can just clear out of the way here and let kelly go back to her slide down i know kate i think it would be great if you could go back to the motions and i'm going to turn it over to sarah as chair of finance all right did i talk fast enough sarah keith uh i think you crushed it so that's all yeah

172and now we get to the exciting part where i just i read a bunch of numbers um so so bear with us everyone okay we're going to kick this off so move approval to adopt the leadership council's budget proposal as presented for first reading a total general fund operating budget is proposed at 56 million 219 146 dollars with offsetting non-tax revenues of five million four hundred and thirty seven thousand uh five hundred and seventy dollars in a tax request to the town of fifty million seven hundred and eighty one thousand five hundred and seventy five dollars so moved second is there any discussion we should probably just say just for the public service we've all had workshops on this and have gone through this a couple of times so this isn't the only time we're

173seeing this presentation um and as kate said this is just the beginning i'm not seeing any other questions so diane if you could call the vote please mrs giftes yes dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss layton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss skiptus yes thank you one down three to go move approval to adopt the adult education budget as presented for first reading total education adult education buzz budget is proposed at 689 dollars with offsetting non-tax revenues of thousand one hundred and eighty nine dollars and a tax request to the town of ninety thousand five hundred dollars i think i'll lift technically your first oh i thought she just moved it did she just move it my the language i used was move approval to

174adopt you tell me april uh no you're making the motion yeah okay is there any discussion alicia looks like she's stuck we're good the language is good sarah's moving the question alicia seconds that that's proper procedure is there any discussion okay i think we're ready to vote this is giftus yes dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes okay move approval to adopt the school nutrition budget as presented for first reading total school nutrition budget is proposed at one million eight hundred and six thousand nine hundred and sixty three dollars with offsetting non-tax revenues of one million six hundred and six thousand nine hundred and sixty three dollars for tax requests to the town of two hundred thousand

175dollars second discussion okay mrs giftis yes dr bill yes miss casalonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs seither yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss skiptis yes and finally move approval to adopt the capital improvements budget as presented for first reading capital equipment proposed budget is five hundred and thirty six thousand five hundred dollars and the capital projects proposed budget is three million three hundred and eighty one thousand nine twenty 929 for a total capital budget of 3 million 981 429 dollars sarah you inverted your numbers there on that last read i believe you said 81. oh sorry let me start again just the last bit uh total capital budget of three million nine hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred and twenty nine dollars discussions thank you very much sarah i

176think we're ready diane skiptis yes dr gill yes miss castellonis yes miss layton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs seither yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss skiftus yes excellent thank you everyone and welcome thank you very much kate and to all of our staff who work so hard every year to develop the budget and as everyone has mentioned this is really just the start of budget season so thank you all for your engagement and i look forward to hearing more as we go along here agenda item 0.2 is now start committee update and with that i believe i will turn it over to sandy and diane thank you very much april okay so we'll move right on to the next slide and talk about our as a reminder to everybody it is about

177safety and i want to adhere to the cdc and doe requirements and you've heard something about that already tonight and we'll continue to abide by those also the second bullet is creating opportunities that can safely increase in-person learning while make minimizing future disruptions including increasing the ongoing potential of needing to go fully remote parentheses right full disclosure all possibilities have a give to get and include strengths and challenges the goal is to identify a solution whose challenges meet the goal of increasing in-person learning without doing harm example health and safety equity of access to supports meeting students needs next slide please at the top i'm not going to read what that shows because i think you can scan that but it is about the number of cases to date with each of our schools and

178throughout this year as of march 17 2021 we've had 69 total cases that's two percent of our total student and staff population scarborough high school fully remote from march 8th to march 12th as a reminder okay let's go on the next one why consider increasing in person time now concern for students social emotional and academic growth and we've heard that from the parents tonight vaccines are becoming more readily available for our school staff support transitioning students to in-person learning before fall 2021. decrease in positive covert 19 cases at the state level so that's the good news next slide please realities that present challenges across all the scenarios that we'll be talking about tonight particularly in maine we're looking at spaces in classrooms even at three feet between students planning for six feet distancing for breakfast

179lunches as a reminder trans transportation we have limits on bus sedan and safe drop pick up cups for the families in addition to that we can only put one child in ac on each bus so you know typically you might have two or three students to receive now we can only have one consistently all year we struggle with substitute shortages coverage happening by other staff which we're blessed for and the percent of usual sub pool is available for instance one third of our sub pool has decreased and we're just aggressively trying to get more people to be substitutes but this is this is across particularly across maine that everybody's having a hard time getting subs the need for quarantine presents increased staff staffing challenges hoping these decreases with the increased availability of vaccines for all

180our staff we continue to have unfilled positions custodians bus drivers long-term subs in time for teacher planning in person hybrid remote these are all the challenges that i think most people have heard of but we wanted to just remind people tonight about these okay update on recent actions taken we did a parent survey thank you all for filling those out just over 900 responses staff survey we had about 337 responses if you hit that link tonight or another time you can look at all those survey responses our k-12 leadership team considers potential scenarios and we will be sharing those tonight the stock committee reconvened on march 11 as a reminder last summer we started that committee it did great work to open the doors this fall and then we reconvene again just recently with those

181participants i won't read all the groups that are part of that you can see that it's across collection of different people and there were four groups health academics social emotional and operations and we thank the staff committee for their input met with the scarborough education association which we typically meet with them every month but we particularly talked with them recently about this whole subject the exploration of alternative space continue to look at that and our ongoing reworking of possibilities by our k-12 leadership team so at this point in time i'm going to turn it to diane and she's going to talk about feedback from our start team to date great thank you very much sandy so again um we were um really blessed to have uh the majority of the uh people who were on

182our start team last summer who had done some really deep and thorough uh work on our reopening plan were able to reconvene and what we did was prior to the start team reconvening our k-12 leadership team had come up with three scenarios that they saw as uh being possible um for an increase of um in-person learning and what we wanted to do was we tasked the start team with examining those three plans um from the lens in which they looked at so for example the health committee really looked at those three plans from the health perspective the academic group looked at those same plans from an academic perspective et cetera and we went through a pretty tight protocol that was very similar across all groups wherein we asked the participants to identify the strengths and

183challenges in each of the scenarios that we presented and so we wanted to start off tonight by sharing that start team feedback with you so if we take a look at the first scenario we forward the slide um scenario one was proposed as a k-2 solution um for four days of in-person learning and um i'm not going to read every word on the slide but i will give you the overview of what this scenario would consist of and so in this scenario k2 students would be on site four days a week monday tuesday thursday friday um and we would work to make sure that there were 16 or less students per class because as we look at three feet distancing for students that really is our max um todd jepson who is our maintenance director

184has gone into all of our spaces to check that for us and this would be for cohort a b and d students and as for cohort c students which as a reminder are the students who are 100 fully remote by choice um they would be accommodated back in person as capacity might allow knowing that you know families made a specific choice for 100 remote and might not be as interested in going from 100 remote to just about full time in person wednesdays would stay the same with the morning being remote and the afternoon being for teacher planning and preparation the implications of this scenario would be that uh teacher assignments might have to change because as as we know in some of our classrooms uh our class size is greater than 16 and so we

185would have to reassign some students and also some staff members so that we could have teachers for those students curriculum expectations might be modified and we would certainly need a little bit of time uh to redesign spaces we might need we're gonna we would need to move some furniture um we have a lot of things in storage right now and so we would have to make space for these kiddos um and then we would again um have teachers look at you know what what those curriculum changes might be and the plan for this would be to tentatively start after april break if that was easily possible because of the existing spaces that we have in grades 3 through 12 this option really only works for k to 2. if we take a look at the

186next slide um this is a a collection of the greatest strengths and challenges that were identified amongst all four groups in the start team if you are interested in reading all of the feedback from all of the start teams those are posted on our district website but for the purpose of our conversation tonight i just wanted to hit the highlights and so um scenario one again we heard a lot tonight from our families about the social emotional strain being placed on our students and so that would address this by bringing our littles in four days a week start to address that normalcy as we would like to all consider school we have also seen that our younger students are faring better we've had much fewer cases in our k2 buildings and our students have been

187fantastic at adhering to protocols and quite frankly we understand that our families are really struggling right now um and at the same time this model would recognize the pd time that our teachers need because of all of these many changes that continue to happen challenges really are around spacing during specific times even though students can be three feet apart in classrooms when they are eating and not masked they have to be six foot distanced and so um that does create a little bit of a challenge um another downfall to this is some students and teachers would have to be reassigned um and um it it it does provide a specific bent on k to two and isn't equitable across other phases and as such that could create um you know still a difficulty for parents

188who might have children at other levels so that was kind of the big overview of scenario one scenario two um if we look at that next is um we can go back one more slide please kelly thank you um in scenario two scenario two would basically be a three two solution um so it would be a solution that's viable k to twelve and it basically is the solution wherein cohort a would be monday tuesday wednesday week one and on week two they would be monday tuesday and cohort b would be wednesday thursday friday and so students would have alternating wednesdays so one week they'd have three days of in-person learning the other week they would have two days of in-person learning this model could begin relatively soon because there's not a lot of leg work

189that would have to be done um you know no moving of furniture no reassigning of classes some of the things that you saw in the last it would increase in person time for students um to a lesser degree by about one full day per month if you think about the every other week and the fact that um there is still built-in planning time for teachers um and all in-person staff obviously who have been working remotely on wednesdays would be expected to be in person with their students if we look at the overview um of that if we look at the strengths and challenges on the next slide um as identified by members of our start team again strength of this is it doesn't require additional staffing it maintains those existing cohorts and there is no

190need to change classroom configuration and we all value and want that in person learning time to increase and could have this could happen relatively soon the challenge um would be how would lunch happen on wednesdays um we might we'll probably hear a little bit later we've been working on that um and so i think we have a solution for that um the every other week schedule is probably not as convenient for parents because it would still require a lot of flexibility on their part and we would have to look at some phases for a different time for remediation or small group support because depending on what school you're in they're using that wednesday time either for those small groups to meet for teachers to provide extra support for students etc the third scenario that the

191start team was given was a k-12 solution also and we're calling it the targeted solution because it would involve the implementation of a targeted return of students and there are a couple two approaches that that were considered the first approach would be um let's identify students by individual need and so take a look at risk factors for student safety look at needs of students for social emotional learning for academic support we certainly have students who are not faring well academically in this environment and so we want to be supporting them um and so that would be one approach the other direction that we could go in with this targeted solution might be to say let's identify a particular grade at a phase level for example perhaps the youngest students at a phase level perhaps the

192oldest students at a phase level perhaps um we look at how are students fearing academically and is there a specific grade in a school that is struggling the most and let's bring those students in so there are different ways that we might be able to slice that again we brought that scenario to our start teams and their overall feedback around strengths and challenges if we look at the next slide um is again this scenario would meet the needs of our most vulnerable students um we have already to a large extent been doing this with many of our students um and and so we have some students we call them cohort d students who come in for extra supports beyond their two days and we've not seen any further spread um even though they might not

193belong to a specific cohort so it's been safe to date it provides more consistency for these students and again depending on how we looked at it it might serve to um assists those students who are getting ready for a phase level change challenges in this scenario um lots of questions around who decides the eligibility criteria because again we totally appreciate and understand that every parent in this community um or many of our parents in this community feel strongly that their children need to be back in school more and so it does feel somewhat uncomfortable um having to rank order that or select some students and not others um and and that leads to this perceived inequity of opportunity and the other pieces um that was raised was around confidentiality concerns if we're being if we're

194saying we're going to select kids based on their level of risk um then you know if you find out that so-and-so is going to school four days a week are you you know it is that sharing too much information or is that identifying something about a particular student that we really don't you know want to go down that path so that was the overall feedback that we had from our start team of course we didn't just say okay that's our feedback like we'll just sit on this so um if we look at the next slide basically that spurned continued thinking right i think the thing that we all recognize is that we're constantly thinking pivoting and looking at what are some other steps that we can take because you hear feedback and then oh there's

195another idea another light bulb comes up and so our k-12 leadership team has continued to problem solve um since the start team met and they have examined some other possible solutions as as we worked through those um scenarios that we did with the start team and really examined that feedback and the process as recognized is definitely very fluid and so what we would like to do now is to hear from our building leaders um about some updates and some other um proposals that they would like to talk with you about that have kind of come from um the work to date so we go to the next slide so so we're going to go backwards because it always seems like we go k to 12. so we're going to start with the high school and

196we're going to go backwards um and we'll end up at the elementary level so if um i could have stu catch talk about the high school solution sure thank you um one of the things we would want to do um first or need to do first we have checked in with families at um getting ready for each new quarter through the year to find out um students that may be in cohort c but want to come back to their in-school learning and vice versa and um and i would say very clearly that our cohort c group has gone up through the year um especially in january when the numbers were so high across the nation and in the state we did um see many more families opt to do more cohort c we have a

197wonder whether that may reverse itself some for fourth quarter spring is in the year there's been a lot more talk about opening um and um and in general both in the nation and in maine those numbers are dropping and we're wondering if that will lead to more students wanting to come back to the building so we would want to check to see where those numbers are first before we start to look at our other options we also felt like right away we landed on doing the wednesdays um i'm pretty sure the board all knows but for the community as well that might not have high schoolers we have been have running a full day of school um albeit a half day but we've been running classes on wednesdays one week it's an uh a red

198day the next week it's a white so to go to a wednesday option for one of the cohorts each week we it would require teachers to be in the building to to do the in-person learning we but they are already teaching those classes on wednesday that would not be a shift um and again it would add a half day every other week for students so they'd have three days one week and two the next and we see that as an option that everyone that's coming to school and doing in-person learning everyone across the board could have um additional time with that piece and then the other piece that we've talked about is expanding cohort d um and like diane mentioned for some um phases it might be looking at the younger students and it's some

199the older one of the things the high school looked at right away was looking at our seniors that may be in danger of not graduating not getting across the finish line and how we might get them in school more to assure that they have options and support to get graduated in june we know this has been a really hard year for seniors and we really would like to minimize or eliminate non-graduates this year so we've talked about that but also we know that um seniors tend to be in more classes together and there would be opportunity to look at the younger students as well and see where there's room um i will say that this work will will be a little bit of a workload because we're going to have to go into every class

200and look at getting to the magic number of 16 and at the high school where where really the cohorts the the groupings kind of change every period depending on a student's schedule we'll have to drill down to every single classroom every single period to figure out those numbers but we are confident that we could um do some work there and maybe get students that are not currently passing courses and able to do that work we could get more of them in-person days um and it is important to note that first quarter we had about 60 to 70 students um in cohort c and we managed to make um the school days work with with just that few now we're up in the 200s for cohort c so we know we can make it work um

201with fewer students fully remote so that gives us the idea we could have um some some options there to to do a little bit more i think i covered everything there um and then again for the strengths it would allow all students to have more in-person time and it would have students that are in need right now also we could kind of do a little bit in both baskets if you will um we would certainly um want to continue to meet cdc and the doe guidelines and keep it safe we would be looking at 16 in a room um as as that's what the guidelines are um it also allows not only that across the board but a targeted approach um the challenges is that we wouldn't be able to provide all students with five

202days a week because of that 16 number and we would be somewhat in some cases mixing cohort a in cohort b and that's just a consideration because um just in general if we have more students in the classroom if we have um a quarantining happen more students and staff are likely to be quarantined because more were there in the room so that is a bit of a challenge and we do know that there are potentially some transportation challenges with having enough room on the bus although at the high school we've been very lucky to have very helpful parents dropping off and picking up and our phase is lucky to have we have drivers at our face so some of the kids would will be able to transport themselves and members of their family so a

203freshman may be able to come to school with their senior sibling and so that may help along the way too but for some in some cases we imagine that may be a challenge for us to consider thank you sue we're gonna move on next to the middle school um and we'll hear from kathy terrell our principal there oh let me unmute um so some similar themes to the high school um we will start by sending out a survey tomorrow to our families to see if they would like a cohort change for a fourth quarter i have already received three emails of fully remote students who do want to come back to the hybrid so it was great to have the start committee help us process these scenarios and so for scenario two for the in-person

204option for wednesdays right now at the middle school our students log on to their crew at eight o'clock they have four um blocks of intervention and rise in enrichment and um intervention time and then the fifth period is a social emotional learning activity block and then they log off at 11. our teachers eat their lunch from 11 to 11 30 and then we have professional development so if we were to come back in person on wednesday we would need to build that lunch block in for students so our we would extend the students time until 11 30. the dismissal our dismissal takes 20 minutes and so we need to start dismissal at 11 10. so i think we'd probably call it a brunch and have our three times four lunches would start at 9 30

205and be 25 minutes so 9 30 to 9 55 105 to 10 30 10 40 to 11 05 and we'd only have about 10 minutes between the lunches so i think we would have to you know the lunches would need to be prepared ahead of time for all three grades now on a regular school day our our um nutrition program they have a 50 minutes between lunches to um get them ready but on kathy if i could add just one thing yes people are probably asking about why have brunch um we feel like it's really important that we offer lunch to our students and you know in a previous year we might have offered a grab-and-go lunch and have the kids take a bag lunch home however in the current situation wherein um the rules

206are are very strict about busing we wouldn't want to put our students in a situation where they've got this bag lunch they're on the bus and they want to look in and they're hungry and they decide they want to eat something now their mask is off now they're eating on the bus and aerosolizing the new vocab word that we've learned this year and and creating a greater risk so we really felt like we needed to accommodate um lunch within schools so that we don't create a health risk on our transportation sorry yeah well and i think um students could eat at any moment of the day so they'll appreciate food so in scenario three it would be expanding our i'm not on that one yet i'm still on the other side thank you in scenario

207three we'd be expanding cohort d at the middle school right now our d cohort does consist of some special education students so we have not been able to extend it to our 504 students or struggling students in general we have two support systems we have a social emotional response to intervention team and we have an academic response to intervention team we talk about students needy students every week so we would use that system to identify students for cohort d we'd also teachers also come to those meetings to talk about their students that are struggling we would have that would be mixing our cohorts um at the middle school we have done our best to follow the cdc guideline that we keep students in pods as much as possible so our students come in to crew

208and they are in that room for the day while the teachers move to the pod to the crew they do go to their snack break and they go to their lunch world world language students are mixed in cohorts and in some support classes they're mixed so this would be mixing the cohorts our desks are at four feet apart we would move them to three feet we would go from 12 seats in a classroom some classrooms have 13 to 16 maybe 15 16. there are some rooms that have some furniture so we'd be able to get a few more students into a cohort and then a few more students into a cohort b day to come four days a week um that would right now we're using all of our lunch spaces we use the cafeteria

209we use the band room for lunch and we use the music room our band and music are remote so those teachers are teaching remote while we can use their bigger space we would need to put desks down our corridor from the cafeteria to our lunch lounge we also use a lunch our rotundas for lunch we'd put them down the sides we'd also have to look at utilizing our learning commons which is now being used by staff to do remote teaching or for a break we'd have to figure that out now my next slide kelly so one of the things with wen with our schedule is for many years now we have had a program called rice um and it's been scheduled at various times before the pandemic it was in the morn well in the

210afternoon um crew was a couple days a week and then we had rise for a few days a week during rise a students look at powerschool they look at where they need help and they tag a teacher teacher tags them to get extra help finish work relearn something take a new assessment makeups our gates um enrichment for art music science and social studies happens during that time our world language just recently started an accelerated program with for spanish and french students who chose to take that enrichment we also have some special education pull-out services during that time in order not to mix our cohorts um it's worked out great that the students are remote so there could be an eighth grader a seventh grader who both go to see the um one of our health

211teachers or um the tech and engineering teacher but they're not actually in proximity to each other so one of the things that with this um scenario we really have to figure out how we were going to continue with rise because we we have to have it it's just so important in our panorama data both teachers and students talked about how much they like having the rise and how it's really helped them so we would have to talk about um how would we set up each block if we did it on wednesday so that possibly tech and engineering for the first block was just sixth graders going so this would be our either our students moving um similar to that what they do in the high school you know they move from class to class or

212students would stay in their crew and remote in to their um rise block so we would you know we'd need with the leadership team to look at how we would reschedule this um if we ran our uh sixth period schedule on wednesday the classes would be about 20 minutes and then we also have the potential transportation issue of parents coming from 11 10 to 11 30 would they be able to come and to pick up students in scenario three we are um you know targeting our students who are struggling right now it would get them back into school they would have um you know more face-to-face time with their teachers the challenge is you know we're just not able to accommodate everybody who would you know would like to come back for four days or

213the five days if wednesday was put into the schedule um and there is again some mixing of the cohorts but i i know with the start committee one of the things from we heard from community members was you know it's really hard to say who can come back for four days and you know who is just is just going to be in the hybrid for two days as diane said earlier on that side it's tough so i guess i'm i'm done with mine as you know i mean there's there's strengths and challenges to each of these scenarios thank you kathy and now we will hear from our k-5 principles i'm sorry that's okay i have to interrupt you um board policy says that we can't conduct business after 9 30 and so i actually need

214to have a motion to extend the length of time which the board can conduct business this evening discussion okay thank you diane mrs skiptis yes dr gill yes ms casamonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes this is either yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes thank you everyone i apologize for the interruption that's okay i feel like we all need a um a brain break a screen break um so that was good um so as diane mentioned after the start committee meetings last week um our k-5 that really was just last week our k5 leadership team took a really close look at that feedback on the three scenarios and i do have permission to tell you that behind the scenes we have had some really grueling discussion and debate and

215um i feel like our k5 team has really pushed ourselves and each other um and across leadership council actually to stretch our thinking and to be as creative as we can be as you heard during that public comment this hybrid situation is particularly challenging and complex for our k5 families and we also see every single day that teaching in a hybrid model is very intense for our staff so that's actually why at k2 our preferred scenario was scenario one but as we read the feedback it just did not appear that our stakeholders felt the same way so we put our thinking caps back on and we attempted to create a solution that could work across k5 and we did this work together on tuesday um just two days ago and then we presented this fourth

216scenario to our case uh five staff yesterday on wednesday um in this fourth scenario you're gonna see that we we really are thinking outside the box but we focused on some priorities that you'll see listed at the top so first um priority is that we have a commitment to increase that face-to-face time the second priority is that we have an ask from both our parents and our staff to maintain their current teacher the third priority that we saw was a desire to maintain those small class sizes which in a k-5 solution would be a max of 12 because wentworth has a max of 12 and they're building so we wanted to make that across k2 as well and then lastly this plan adheres to those physical distancing requirements and we went to the three foot

217model for students but we have to maintain that six foot model for adults so i'm going to present we broke this proposal down into two parts so i'm going to present 4a so in this um we would increase our in-person learning for our k2 students that are hybrid from two days a week to two and a half to three days a week so we would have to leverage our wednesdays in order to do that it would provide a consistent so that means that we would be having as staff and teachers in the building face to face five days a week this would provide a consistent schedule so there would not be a rotation so students an example would be i already come to school on monday tuesday and now my third day is thursday so

218i come to school for the rest of the year on monday tuesday thursday it would also maintain the current cohort d schedule and cohort d our students were already coming in for extra support so we didn't want to alter that for them how we would do this is that we would be in school our regular hours monday tuesday thursday friday um which are 8 50 to 3 at k2 because we do release a little bit earlier so that families to accommodate all of the many people who are transporting their own child they come to us first and then they get to wentworth by 3 15. and then on wednesdays we would be in school from 8 50 until 1. we would start our dismissal around 12 45 and ask for our buses to arrive around

219one our focus on wednesdays would be that face-to-face core academics students would still get lunch and we would want to ensure that equitable academic time for all students so if you see in the give to get what that means is that we wouldn't have in-person allied arts or specials on wednesdays because we'd want to make sure that we got that core instruction for all students on wednesday um so in the give to get for scenario four the other two pieces are that we wouldn't have some students would not have um that full you know day all the way to three o'clock or three fifteen but again they would be getting the core academic time and then in this scenario our teacher prep and pt time that we right now have on wednesdays is reduced by

220about 30 minutes we would definitely be maintaining that duty-free lunch i think kelly crosby is going to do 4b so before we even go on to the next slide just to i saw a couple of confused faces and we've been in this scenario and worked for so long and i know you haven't had a lot of time to absorb it board members and you're really hanging in there this is like a lot of information so good job um so just to give an example if i'm like using the top of my screen if april and leanne are both cohort a students um the way that we could increase to three days per week is if on monday and tuesday um there are nine students in the class and on thursday and friday there are ten

221that means that there are two extra seats on thursday and friday so april's april's week might be monday tuesday thursday and leanne's might be monday tuesday thursday but now those seats are filled so if diane is in cohort a and needs a third day her schedule would be monday tuesday friday and then gabby could join monday tuesday friday it's filling up all of our 12 seats in every classroom on every cohort day because there are a few um seats open at this time on some of our cohort days so but there's not enough to add a third day for everybody and that's why we would need to leverage the wednesdays so i'm seeing more heads nodding but i'm also still seeing a lot of confusion um can i just interrupt you for one second i'm

222sorry but i can process that using the leveraging the wednesdays you would get everybody to three days is that what you're saying we could get everybody to three days if we used the wednesdays in this scenario well we could get everybody to either two and a half or three days so it's not completely equitable given the shortened day on wednesday um okay but you'll see in 4b that because that was a look that was a concern um i think we can go to the next slide okay thank you so um increasing our k5 students to three days a week um this was the second adjustment to this new proposal and so it um includes those same four priorities increasing the face-to-face time maintaining the current teacher et cetera et cetera what jessica just um talked

223through but it also meets two additional goals which is to address the inequity of the increase where some students would be two and a half days and some students would be three days and it also addresses the fact that scenario 4a reduced teacher planning and prep time by 30 minutes so this solution mitigates both of those concerns so for scenario 4b we would again be able to increase k5 students to three days leveraging wednesdays for in-person learning but instead of some students having two and a half days and some students having three days we would we're proposing to adjust all five days either start or end times to make all five days equal so for example let's take late start first if monday through friday at k5 the school day began at 9 30 the

224teachers could have their prep time instead of in a chunk on wednesday afternoons spread out over the week so they would have their prep and planning time spread out over the week in the morning and then students would come to school at 9 30 and then would go to the end of the day all of the days wednesday wouldn't be an early release anymore um the same could happen with an early release across all five days so um but that creates a tricky situation with busing given that the middle school and high school are picked up at 2 30 so we could um we could figure out that solution if car riders were picked up at 2 30 and then we could hold an end of the day recess or end of the day supervised

225activity for bus riders because there aren't as many as in a typical year but this scenario would create a consistent three-day schedule with no rotations we could maintain our current core cohort d schedules for students who are already attending in person learning more than two days per week and it maintains the pd and planning time and we do have in both of these scenarios a net gain for students in person learning of four hours per week there are some give to gets here too that their students regular in-person cohort days would be impacted you know we would have to adjust the schedule across the board monday to friday whereas 4a would only adjust the wednesday schedules and the additional days your typical two cohort days would stay the same lunch recess morning meeting allied arts

226times would likely be abbreviated to preserve the core instructional minutes because we'd be compacting the schedule for each day the pd and planning time instead of having like one afternoon of it would be spread over the week and this scenario again would um create a significant need for families to change their child care arrangements so if you go to the next slide we're going to talk a little bit more about some strengths and challenges of these two adaptations so remembering that this was not one of the scenarios presented at the start committee um the feedback that we um that you're seeing is from our um from our staff um and so they are our best thinkers on what's going to work and what might not work so the strengths that we've identified are that this

227does provide that net increase for our k5 students it absolutely maintains their current teacher we have the small class size there's a predictable schedule of days and then of course our cohorts d students are minimally impacted so as you can imagine as the school leaders we felt that we were extremely brilliant in coming up with this potential solution and we felt really great about it but upon really close examination and some deep really hard conversations um there are a lot of challenges with both of these scenarios and the first being how do you determine what the third day is for students how do you figure out okay you're a cohort a student do you come wednesday do you come thursday do you come friday it would be impossible to afford families choice in that and

228then that would create um i think a really huge hardship on families with coordinating child care arrangements um in both of these scenarios we would be unable to accommodate a large transition back of cohort c students so this is really focused on our current hybrid students um and we're afraid that there would be an unintended impact on community services and other community child care providers um the potential staffing shortages i have to share are really significant um they are significant currently i pulled some data for you today because i know how you love that and as of january 1st at wentworth school so from january 1st to today at wentworth school we have had 273 reported absences via asap okay so 273 not 273 full days but 273 reported absences and of those 273 reported

229absences we have had 16 subs 1 6 16. so less than one percent 0.06 of our absences are covered by substitute teachers the rest is all on our staff we are pulling people um every single day all of these every school leader this is not unique to wentworth every school leader begins their day solving a 1 000 piece puzzle with 900 pieces and that's on the backs of our staff they're they're doing double and triple duty every day in addition to teaching through a global pandemic teaching students remotely teaching students um in front of them so sorry for the little that you know um the little side road but it's really critically important we can't do this without people and um this doesn't eliminate any remote learning um requirements for staff in fact it adds

230another group of students to think about um and to plan for and to creatively um to creatively source figure out their week and plans um it will this these proposals would potentially increase quarantine impact um due to the increased number of potential closed contacts and i think that that's pretty much everything except for the fact that instead of now having a cohort a a cohort b a cohort c and a cohort d we would have um eight plus potential groupings and schedules to manage so just logistically a little bit of a nightmare in terms of who is actually in person in school every single day i think that's it on that slide just you want i'm carrying on with this that's right so we shared yeah we shared those scenarios um just in full transparency

231quite honestly in full transparency that we have the scenarios from the start committee as well as the two new proposals um and we just want to know we want everyone to know we want to bring our students back we want to bring our students back safely we miss their little faces we want them in our schools our teachers want them in our schools we we need to do it in a way that is that is predictable and that is consistent and those are some of the really big challenges here um given the barriers of space and staffing and transportation as well as the challenges that we just outlined for you we re-examined scenario two so we went back to scenario two which was just really shared in a lot of detail by the high school

232in the middle school so i won't get into too much of the detail for k5 but it would be really similar increasing in-person learning by leveraging wednesdays it's really the most viable proposal for k-5 at this time to safely increase in-person learning at this time so as as 612 described this is what the schedule would look like um our lunches would at wentworth anyway be at i think at k2 they would be a little more typically ranged around lunches but at wentworth we would definitely have a brunch as well beginning at 10 15 but it would increase the student in-person learning time in a very incremental way and it would maintain you know our staff planning time and support you know many of the concerns that were brought up with the other three day a

233week scenarios kelly could you go to the next one please so some of the strengths i just mentioned for scenario 2 for k5 as well is again it's an incremental increase it maintains the current teacher which was a real priority for our age level and the cohort placement the schedule is predictable you can look ahead and know exactly what your week is going to be it maintains those class sizes and the cohorts would we wouldn't have eight cohorts we would maintain the cohort groupings there are some challenges that jess is going to run through so without reading all of them out because they're similar to other scenarios the one that really stands out that we recognize fully is that this rotating schedule really does likely present some child care challenges i think there was even

234a public comment about that um that you if you pay for a wednesday you pay for a wednesday you don't pay for half a wednesday um and if you your child goes to school wednesday morning and you have to leave work to come pick them up to take them home or to take them to another child care it's it is a complicated um situation so without really going through each of them we we just want our families to know that we do hear you and we do understand that that is definitely going to be um a challenge um for families and another thing i would want to add um is that ann and cal and lovejoy and kelly mullen have absolutely been part of all of this ann is in texas with her mom and

235so we are sending her daily wishes um every single day and i'm kelly's actually on the screen so she's going to answer all the questions [Laughter] just one final challenge that i think i can speak on behalf of all of the school leaders is the biggest challenge of all is just feeling that we can't find that perfect solution that would satisfy the needs wishes and wants aside from having a magic wand and just like having everything be back to normal which is really what we all want we miss our kids we love our kids we have empathy for the families and what they are navigating with the hybrid and remote learning and there aren't more hours in the day or in the night that we're not constantly thinking about potential solutions we won't give up

236but we need we need um we need to do this safely we need to be thoughtful about the spring and and bring our kids back safely this is our best thinking at this time thank you um and i thank you to all of our building principals um for all of the thought and time that you put into being able to present something to the community and to the board um i'm gonna lead off kick it off with some questions here um and we'll see where the conversation takes us in terms of what the board would like to do next and and what at what admin would like to see us do next so nick go ahead i thought you were going to ask couple questions i thought i had a minute um andy actually had

237one more slide oh oh sorry that's okay pretty much next steps um we'll need direction from the board to inform us as to any amendments to our learning model and then on the second bullet you can read through those but pretty much what we're looking at is a commitment survey to families about the model and transportation needs rebuild transportation schedule within requirements update school drop off and pick up procedures attend to any furniture needs update plan for lunches update protocols within schools to ensure safety ensure that iep 504 which is special requirements to continue to be met and in conclusion we'll continue to work within our capacity towards a solution to bring more students back to school safely thank you sandy ready now nick i'm ready um so first i just want to say uh

238i am a person as many as probably everybody on this call is appreciating thoroughness and so thank you um but as someone that works in data every day i think we're on the verge of analysis paralysis with this i mean and kelly said it best that there is no perfect solution uh in the middle of a pandemic that keeps changing and variants are coming out and and new studies are emerging every day and that makes all this very challenging i guess for me as i look at all this information what i'm trying to kind of get to is what will allow us to get if we make a change what will allow us to get some more classroom time for our students but in a way that is digestible and able to be carried out

239by our families and our community and and we all live and breathe this stuff and certainly our all the district leaders that are here more so than the board members do but i'm i'm i'm gonna i'm dizzy from all the information that was shared and and i think i'm just trying to i'm just trying to think of the scenarios we looked at the one that stands out to me and i'll just leave it by saying this it's scenario number two seems to be a way that is consistent that would be easy to digest but it does get some more contact time without creating an absolute tailspin the last six weeks of our year because i appreciate all the public comments that spoke to that that while you know a goal of ours needs to be

240more classroom time and more social emotional opportunities for our students we also want to do it in a way that's not going to completely throw everyone into a tailspin when anxiety and stress levels are already as high as they are so i i'm when i look at this i'm trying to balance what can we carry off relatively straightforward and what will get our students some more class time um there is no perfect solution as kelly said but at least scenario two and some of the other versions seem to get us part of the way there so thank you shannon thanks april um i just had a couple of questions the scenario one i wanted to go back there i know we we talked to me when i look at um kind of down the same

241line nick's going when you look at the logistical implications and how can we do this um with you know safely and with minimal impact um this i wonder if we can mix and match so can we have a scenario one for k2 and have a scenario two for three through twelve would something like that work i don't know we can we can go back and look at anything that you want us to look at um i think that the biggest challenge was scenario one for k2 was the potential for teacher change um because of the capacity but that doesn't mean that we can't you know go back and amend and look at scenario one that was certainly our preference um so i mean i think it's the will of the board for what what our

242next steps are okay gotcha how many i'm sorry did i ever speak nope um how many students are we talking about that that impact the um the change in teachers is it a fairly significant number do we know we would need to get more information from families um about we we only have the data from the last survey that we did k-12 so we would really need to get more information about how many families would would be looking to come back which we think is going to be significant and then you know it's really those classrooms that are you know at 20 or above which you know we we know um who those are actually who are over 16 students and really look closely at those classrooms that are a little bit smaller in size

243and make sure that they can handle 16 which we're pretty sure that they can but just just to double check and um it's just going to be kind of auditing each classroom and working with each teacher to make sure that that we can handle the students that are coming back safely and i think that's the i think that's what kelly was kind of speaking to um in terms of just we don't want to rush into anything and run into a situation that we're you know cramming kids in and and it's not feeling safe and we want to be as careful and methodical as we were in the fall and we because we did a really good job i think at keeping kids safe and making everyone feel safe so thank you max and then kristen

244um so i just wanted to offer like a comment like my opinion on what i think we should do um i can only really speak for the high school level because that's obviously the only thing i know i can't i can't even really speak for like all high school students but like you know i'm their representative so i'm just gonna say like i don't think we should change anything at the high school level actually um as much as i like i'm so appreciative of all of the work that's been done and like i think it's gonna be great for the younger levels i think for if we're looking at like scenario two there are already like a lot of students who just skip wednesdays and they're virtual like they only have to roll out of

245bed and get on their laptops and they just don't go like if they're moved to in person then i think there are going to be even more students not going which is taking away more classroom time and then scenario three um the targeted solution i think that like i really like this idea in theory but i think it would cause more problems than it would mitigate because of the whole like a the confidentiality thing and then be the like well my kid didn't get picked that's that's stupid whatever like that whole argument i i'm not interested in hearing a lot of the comments today i'm sure there'd be a lot of that so um i like as much as i want like i'm a senior and i like want to be back in the building

246full-time like i'm gonna graduate this school having no full year of school i've been doing five ap classrooms from my bedroom like this is not fun for me but like people are literally dying from this disease and if there are going to be people coming on here and saying like that their needs are prioritized over the people who are dying i think that's ridiculous so i really encourage us at least at the high school maybe the middle school to stay the course that we're on [Music] um can someone just speak to why scenario one works out for the k2 schools but not wentworth is that a question of the class size is bigger the runes are smaller some combination yeah it's that um it's a couple of things that um the k2 schools um because

247of their setup they can fit 16 students per classroom whereas wentworth it seems really counterintuitive because wentworth is the new school and we're always saying k2 needs more space right but wentworth has all of these lovely built-in storage in the classrooms and so the actual physical space for students is we can only accommodate 12 in a classroom we've measured it every single way we've turned desks in every arrangement um i'm intimately aware of the square footage of our classrooms um more so than i ever thought i would be in mr stoner as well and and mr jepson and we 12 is just the max in a wentworth classroom with three feet of distancing between students and maintaining a six-foot path at the front for teachers well and actually what what it is is that we

248um at k2 we're eating in our classrooms um so our we have space students six feet apart all the time because they to give them the flexibility to be learning and then to be able to have a snack and lunch where at wentworth they're seated closer to three feet apart because they're leaving the classroom to eat elsewhere so bringing students back we would seat them closer together and we would have we would hopefully be you know either eating outside or we'd be eating in the cafeteria and using other spaces we would have to reconfigure that in order to bring students more students back the the last thing to know the difference is that we can't fit 16 desks in a k2 classroom um we can we can only get 16 students when we get our

249tables back so we can only fit 12 desks so we would be doing some furniture shuffling no matter what if we were in scenario one but we cannot fit 16 desks either thank you alicia thank you i have um a couple of questions april do you want me to ask them all at once or you know like ask them all in one go around or raise my hand multiple times whatever you would like to do i think it's i think the floor is yours all right well for i guess first i'd like to say thank you to to all of the administration and and teachers if this doesn't show how hard um this presentation how hard you've all worked to try to meet the um needs of the students and the requests of the parents

250on their behalf and i mean i don't know what could you've clearly gone through every potential option and um you know it's it's hard to hear repeatedly that you know just get our kids back to school because i know we all feel that way and this shows really why that's that's so hard so i'm glad that we're we've gone through that and i hope that people have really listened to it and understood that that it's it's not for lack of effort or for lack of trying that there are real tangible um obstacles that that are in the way so so thank you for that first of all um my first question is is there a recommendation from administration i don't know sandy is that something that you want to speak to or is that something

251you want individuals to speak to well maybe we could start with each k2 and move up as far as if you've gotten to that point i think it would be helpful to at least talk about what you think your best model may be so would it work for k2 to start with that okay yeah i mean as you can see it's very complex and um i mean what could we do the the easiest and the fastest as nick asked would probably be scenario two um and as i've said you know what would we like to do in our ideal world would be scenario one i guess that that would be my answer and jess would you agree i do agree with that and i i think that um if given the opportunity to explore scenario

252one with more data about what our families want um that that again is our preferred scenario we just don't have the data and that change of parent teacher really seems to be a deal breaker so if we get to that if we have that information and we know that that's going to happen then you know we we definitely would choose scenario two three two five um yeah this is really challenging because i i've said before i feel like i'm like in the middle of a bermuda triangle um with you know parents and families wanting one thing and you know other parties feeling maybe really differently and everybody is coming from their own perspective so it's really challenging i um i want students back we all want students back but we need to do it in

253a way that's safe and i think if the question is you know what is your what is the most viable option for increasing in-person learning time for right now for wentworth it's scenario two the every other wednesday plan now is that just you know kind of a drop in the bucket for families it's very incremental it's it's it's it's not as much as we wish it could be um i also think that if we you know if it's decided that maybe it's just not even worth the change the potential disruption to students schedules for one extra day per month staying the course is also a good and viable plan we've done really well we've kept kids safe we've kept staff safe and healthy we have our data is actually really positive in terms of learning

254outcomes but i recognize the sel impacts i have two children also i recognize the sel impacts on honor our children um yeah i guess that's what i want to say about that it's a hard question i agree it's very hard and scenario two for the middle school is hard because we are you know we're our students are really benefiting for the way we've set up the interventions i think you know at the middle school i would say scenario three is probably one that i feel like would be in the best interest of our students you know bringing back at least some of our you know strugglers um needy students who are struggling with the hybrid um but i i think you know kelly really spoke to a lot of the things that i'm feeling too

255it's hard you know we want our students back planning for next year is so invigorating because you know i feel like we're really going to be in a place with teachers being vaccinated and um you know our numbers coming down and cdc guidelines you know being lifted but it's you know it's hard right now you know at the middle school we can have 16 in the classroom we have some class sizes of 25 it would take 10 additional classrooms and 10 additional 10 15 additional teachers to bring back students full time vicarcath high school um i concur with all of my colleagues this is this is really hard um i would say that at the high school since we're already doing classes um you know and have a set schedule for wednesday albeit remote right

256now i do think we could um come back it would require teachers to be in the building and um it would give students an option to be there an extra day every other week and that would all be good and at the same time i would um encourage looking at students that are really struggling and how we might get them back in the building more um at the high school there's that the extra layer of students need needing to pass courses to get to that diploma and if we could do some work to help mitigate some of those um challenges right now um but there's going to be a lot more digging in and a lot a lot more research to figure out how we can do that and who should do that but um

257we did do school with only about 60 or 70 remote students at the beginning of the year and we did that successfully so i think you know we could look at um there is room how could we how could we bring some students back and help and um while i appreciate a lot what max said i do think there are students that would be at school more if they could be at school more um so i i do it's a but it's a complicated situation so i have two more questions one um alicia can i just add one more thing that i forgot to say i'm really sorry um it's that at the risk of like opening any sort of floodgate the the reason that um 6 8 and 9 12 are also including scenario

258three and i didn't bring that up for wentworth um is because we've already done a lot of that work and we've just done it quietly and throughout the year but at this point we have 28.3 of our students are already attending more than two days in person so we've already um figured out a way to bring in students who are you know who really needed that additional support um and so i just wanted to share that that it wasn't that i was ignoring that option but it's that we've already really explored it thank you that's good additional information i have um the the two other questions i have are about um our mitigation techniques and the testing um at schools i know that we had discussed testing at schools and i'm just going based on

259what the cdc has has put out about the reopening of schools and so i really wanted to get that update from you and i'm sure that um some of that work was done at the start committee level but i was hoping that you might be able to give us an overview of that for tonight's discussion yeah and we also have um dr fanberg who is our school physician is on this call unless he has now fallen asleep which i wouldn't blame him if he didn't if he did so you know this might be an appropriate time um to get some weigh-in from him about um you know the physician perspective on that so i'm not sure kelly if um you still see him in the audience he's there i do and i just promoted him

260oh bless him it's been a long night it has i am here i have not fallen asleep thank you so i'm gonna put my medical goggles on i'm john fabric i'm a pediatrician i'm also an adolescent medicine sub specialist and although i'm not a psychiatrist every day i feel like one now i um i i gotta applaud this group because this uh the start group has looked thoughtfully at all the various options and this is a challenge because opening fully is a problem doing nothing is also a problem every day we're getting calls about depression anxiety eating disorders like we've never seen before and then the kids who have adhd or learning disabilities they are lacking motivation lacking attention and simply disengaging yet at the same time covets a problem uh kids are getting affected

261we're seeing positives come through most kids do okay they may have no symptoms or just some symptoms rare kids have major symptoms they're getting hospitalized in the portland area getting ventilated in the portland area rarely uh having cardiac changes in the portland area rarely and then the big fear is the long-term stuff which we don't know if exists or not but that's the um the multi-system inflammatory syndrome type thing uh and then american pediatrics published a statistic back in december that 127 kids have died of covert across the u.s which i hope doesn't happen in maine so at the end of the day what's going to get us through this is getting kids back to school is going to be the cornerstone of the piece is going to be the prevention of illness going along

262with uh distancing masking again the low prevalence as possible as we put as low as probably we possibly can prevalence and that those the three pieces they're going to be the cornerstone of it um now to get kids back to school to make that happen is to how to get those masks on 100 as much as we can how to get the distancing effectively in place and getting people immunized and that's going to be ways off for kids and that's a frustrating answer the positive note is there are some options for titrating up the school exposure a little bit from what you guys have discussed tonight and the positive note is we were rolling out vaccines by the dozens actually thousands okay in scarborough they're given one to two thousand vaccines a week a day

263at the moment i was there on tuesday and i had the privilege of giving 50 people vaccines in six hours and some of them were your school teachers which is really nice to feel um the um as far as testing there is a role for testing it's a limited role um it's most sensitive when it comes down to kids who are symptomatic it's not to go to school and then get tested but those kids who show up at school who are feeling well have symptoms catch them while you can find out their diagnosis and that's where it's most sensitive and quarantine or figure out who needs to be notified right then before they go home what questions can i answer for you for my medical goggles my questions were just about the the cdc um

264back to school um you know guidelines were around testing in schools included testing in schools and the mitigation techniques used by school by our schools and so i those were the two that i really couldn't fill in the blanks on i should say and so i was just really wondering how we were doing with with those two specific um subsets i guess so mitigation comes in layers and each one is a separate layer and so one of those layers is just the distance the next layer is the mask next layer might be testing if you have it available i don't know if we have a testing available at scarborough presently i don't believe we do based on the installer but it is one option it's more for after the fact when somebody's symptomatic thank you

265and i can just add a little bit on to that testing piece scarborough did not choose to sign on to that when that became available in october and that was a decision that was made i think that we may have discussed it here at one point or another and um we really chose not to pursue that because there is so much testing readily available in our area um there are areas in the state of maine where testing is not as readily available and certainly was not in october when the doe pushed this out and as we looked at it it there was a concern that people might come into school when they were symptomatic if they knew that the nurse might test them and so we felt like our nurses have enough go-to um advice

266places in terms of like you can get a test here go down the street here that um testing really is readily available it's also a little bit of a problem with testing in a low prevalence area like we have presently uh that you really will get false positives if you have a false positive you're going to end up excluding the number of kids for the rare false positive that comes up several people have their hand up and they had their hand up before we brought in dr fanberg so if you have a question specific to dr fanberg just go ahead and unmute and and we can all just kind of yield to each other i i'm going to take that opportunity um i thank you for being here dr fanberg it's been a long night

267long day for you i'm sure is there a sweet spot that you would recommend as far as how many teachers should be vaccinated before you would say we were in a safe place to have more students in the buildings and not the right answer in my perfect world i'd have them all vaccinated um as quick as we can uh yesterday um but if not months ago i don't know if there's a statistical number for that i know the cdc and the american pediatrics is pushing for gum back to school where we can in the safest way we can and grant different age teachers are going to have different risk factors um as far as covered by itself um i have a question um in the absence of like mental health issues would you send your

268own children back to school that's a great question um i would give them a safe exposure to school and so one of my kids is in college level at this point uh and uh she's in a very safe setup it's one of the most conservative programs in the us the most as far as what they're doing with coven it does fit make me feel safer about that and it's not that i worry because of her age i say yeah the if she's gambling it's low risk that she's getting a major issue my concern is it is possible again to major issues another big big issue is all the unknown downstream as far as what's doing the body for those people are getting infected um this concept of covet fog we don't understand it we don't

269fully understand how to diagnose it but we know it exists and it means something and so it's all the unknown behind the positivity piece anyone else for dr pamberg great great thank you for allowing me to participate tonight thank you for hanging in there with us alicia were you wrapped on your questions yes thank you you're welcome okay um admittedly several people have had their head up for a long time now so i'm gonna say sarah and then shannon thank you um i know there's been well first of all let me just say because i haven't said it already thank you guys for everything you did putting this together uh like everyone else said it's clear that an incredible amount of thought and work has gone into this so appreciate that um i think probably

270this is for sandy but you know there's been some offers i believe of alternative locations to expand our learning within town and i'm just curious if you could provide us an update on you know what we've done to explore those possibilities happy to uh so scarborough downs is one location that we did visit and it's um it's a wonderful again it's the scarborough community is great to step forward and offer locations and this is one of them there's challenges that you know we're going to have to work with our law firm on because obviously there is gambling going on there there is alcohol in the building that we looked at that makes it complicated to visualize that you would have a school with those components as a business being in that school so i did

271talk to our law firm and i've asked to do some research first of all just to see what the law would say about that but um there is when when we went up there there's i would say it's like a if you visualize a university almost like a good-sized lecture hall where you could get probably i'm thinking 80 students in that location but again there's is sort of these obstacles not sure if they allow people to smoke outside of that building the public and again that would perhaps go against our policy well it's it's it's a wonderful offering for us to consider it's just we need time to look at is it feasible does it make sense with a straight face and the other thing the whole programming piece it's one thing if you just

272put a school within a building all day it would almost make it easier then to try to have teachers drive up do a two-hour class with students and the business it just feels a little complicated and we haven't even looked at the program in peace we've been so busy with just doing our own models here within our schools so that's one location i know todd looked at another building um apologize for not knowing the name of the building or the business but they did something with go-karts um the problem with that building only had one bathroom so obviously that just did not work he did talk to a church to see if they had uh any space at all and uh they don't they have a lot of programs going on during the day so

273you know long term long term i mean hopefully we'll be fine for september but long term these situations might make more sense than to try to think that we could do it in the short term and and again i i really appreciate that people have come forward and and but there's the magnitude of the planning um air quality everything needs to be looked at for the safety of our students so that's a short answer sarah to your question okay uh april i have one more question if i can um when you guys were going through the presentations the one that stood out to me as uh well just in the way my mind works i like to kind of uh rule rule things out to narrow down the the choices and and i had kind

274of ruled out scenario three because to me it seems the least equitable um then kathy something you said would you know if we can bring back any students the ones who need you know the most support maybe that's what we do and i guess i'm just wondering is there a way that we can accomplish that without committing to this as a scenario so kind of regardless of of any decision we make can we still find a way at the middle school in the high school levels to accommodate those students who you know two you've mentioned maybe at risk of not graduating and if we can get them some more in-person hours we can sort of mitigate that assuming a kathy question yeah i would love to work on that you know i think it's getting

275taught involved in talking with todd because it's um bringing in you know more deaths into the rooms taking up the tape and doing re-measuring it's it's then you know then we would um we'd also be able to just bring back students you know as we talk with their parents about returning too i think um while there would be work to it i do think it would be valuable to try to um mitigate anywhere we could so and we've actually had some teachers come forward and say could this child be back in school more often we think it would be helpful so we would certainly look at that as an option if it was approved yeah i mean i'm not going to speak for the board but i'll speak for me i think regardless of what

276happens but being approved unapproved that's something that i would support you know looking into but i'll say sarah um leanne your hand is still up and then shannon your hand is up and gabby your hand is up too i haven't forgotten about you um i have a question specifically for sue you were really excited in the beginning talking about back to school it was pretty infectious i'm wondering with the relaxation of the rules looking to get students back in does this give promise to the seniors in their last few weeks are they going to have an opportunity to have some of their last senior moments now um the rules have changed again as of like a week or two maybe two weeks tomorrow and we are looking at all of that and looking at options

277the problem is still the cdc rules students being three feet um if they if they're eating or no mask it's got to be six feet um we are looking at that but we haven't made any firm decisions yet okay great thank you um and then kelly quick question on the 273 absences which is holy cow um i don't know how you guys have managed that other than being everywhere at once is there an opportunity for parents to be able to come in and volunteer and offer support without being a sub sure about the logistics around that but there is definitely an opportunity for parents to be a sub and i heard a lot of really wonderful um community members offering support what do you need we need subs we need subs so badly so for

278all parents who are um you know hoping to pitch in and um and help out uh in in in our schools please sign up to sub um diane and sandy could answer if uh if we're able to have volunteers of course we'd love to have volunteers the challenge we have is bringing more people into the school exposure to the students so we just have to think about that i'm not sure i get an answer tonight but you know in normal times my goodness we want volunteers all the time they do wonderful things they can come in and read to the kids and it's great but i'd have to think that over because i the more adults that we have coming into the building the more risky it could be for our students to be honest

279with you and to cover a class to cover a classroom unsupervised you have to have a background check in the fingerprinting requirement completed so if we needed somebody to cover a classroom solo which is the case then we wouldn't be able to use an un background checked volunteer for that right and that's what i was just what they could go ahead but they could assist with like maybe a lunch duty or recess that would still give teachers a little bit of time to plan so um in general like recess supervision i think we would still need to have some dedicated staff out there just because uh you know a disciplinary situation might arise etc and if somebody you know if we just had parents out there and it's a similar situation in terms of supervision

280um so if if it was a shared model i think that we could definitely consider that thank you it was just to address the number of people who have said we'll help we'll do whatever you need i agree yeah no because seriously there are like new substitutes shannon and then gabby um i just had a question and a comment my first is going back to scenario one which for the k through two students so if we're going back to tables it am i to assume that means partitions between for safety yes which that's another uh question is um do we have enough plexi at this point so there's there's some logistical planning and timing of uh can we accommodate that and when so that was another challenge gotcha okay and when i was saying i

281realized um in hindsight when i was saying when i was telling you kelly talking about the mixing and matching i didn't mean like at a school i met throughout the district right so it seems to me that logistically for for k through two the the scenario one works um i'm kind of troubled by the middle school because i'm not quite sure how we fit how we how we get more students in without compromising the learning time um so i i i echo what sarah is saying i would really i would be in full support of really um working and finding the students that do need that additional support and trying to find ways to bring them in it's fantastic what kelly's doing at wentworth and so maybe if we could uh do the same at

282the middle school that might that might solve some of it and then at the high school i too hear what max is saying but i almost wonder if wednesday was back on the table as an in-person learning day if it might um if it might actually create more of an opportunity to participate in school versus skipping i wonder yeah it's a rolling out of bed and just signing onto your computer but i almost wonder if it's more of a you know i'm just going to be on for a few hours on my computer maybe i'll just skip it but now if i have to get up and go to school and participate that might be a different a different scenario where we do see a rise in participation in wednesday classes gabby um i just

283have like a question so is this are we choosing just like a like straight scenario two or could it be a combination like scenario two and three like together like kind of what sarah was saying earlier with introducing back into it since like this scenario three situation but you do both kind of we could definitely do that like a mix and match and i think if you um recall the slides from the middle school and the high school they both had scenario two and scenario three because they were thinking that they could look at the wednesday and bring more kids in for cohort d so you know i think any opportunity that we have to increase that in person learning time for our students safely we want to really be considering those things anyone else

284alicia well so um i don't have any more questions but i did put a few i didn't want to write anything because i didn't want to have my mind made up until i fully heard from everybody and so i i thought it was best to just sort of jot down some of the things that i've been thinking about with what when trying to make a decision um and so obviously we have an obligation to consider the feedback of parents teachers and community members as well as our administration um about their own personal experiences and their concerns for themselves their their family and others um the decisions that we make will have an implication to the health and safety uh potentially of our students the teachers in the greater community um but our guiding principle is

285to always consider those students and what's in the best interests of the students the the evidence that i've seen and and heard has been that um this has been overwhelmingly challenging um period of time for everybody um but that uh students in particular are struggling with their um mental health as a result of not being in school um full either full time or at a rate that that meets those emotional needs um i've been thinking about equity about uh how these decisions could impact students with health issues how they could be disadvantaged by some of these decisions and then that a hybrid model might be less equitable to other student populat populations socioeconomically different kids of different races other than you know scarborough's majority caucasian population um socioeconomically we've heard stories that some students are

286seeking and receiving private schooling supplemental education some students have parents who have the financial or educational capacity to provide them within home learning and then i worry about equity and phase levels the um cdc i i've looked at what the cdc has said obviously i've relied on the start committee um the cdc indicates that there are two things that we should consider primarily the that um the numbers should be less than 50 new cases per 100 000 people where at um as of last week in cumberland county 11.52 and a seven day positivity rate of less than eight percent we're at 2.25 percent but the cdc also has um uh made statements that really acknowledge what we're hearing um or acknowledge the the concerns and the realities of what we're hearing our families state that

287their their kids are experiencing the cdc has said um schools that are open for in-person instruction either fully open or hybrid may decide to remain open even at high red levels of community transmission these decisions should be guided by information on school specific factors such as mitigation strategies that are implemented local needs stakeholder input the number of cases among students teachers and staff and school experience also the cdc spokeswoman emphasized that the recommendations were not intended to prevent in-person learning she said the agency objected to categorizing counties by recommendation level adding that decisions about learning mode full in-person hybrid or virtual at each individual school should be made based on a combination of factors including levels of community transmission mitigation and the number of cases in the school including individuals in isolation and quarantine i've

288thought about uh the kids mental health the impact that um any of these proposals will have the the to families and to children the change um you know there's a debate about whether the uh child care concerns should be considered as a student's first issue but the reality is that when our families can't meet their child care needs then that impacts the kids um i've considered the number of outbreaks in our various schools and have also considered um the the senior high school seniors um population the grade 12 that that's that those seniors and what what how they have unique social emotional needs i think because they are missing out on potentially the ending of their school experience and although i don't have a senior to me that's just such a devastating thought that that

289they've lived um half of their high school career in through this pandemic and potentially the that this is the way their senior year is going to end and and for me i would love to find a way to fix at least part of that um and so none of these options are going to to to meet all of those needs and that's the reality and i think as i said before administration has done a great job of putting forth the options that are viable i i i would like to see um option one implemented in place for k2 if possible um although it's i hear um kelly saying how she's worried about the disruption to the k2 kids um [Music] i and and i'm worried about that too but i really worry about those kids

290though not being able to focus in front of the computer on a on a daily basis and and socialize and get what they need and that's such a critical age i and then i'd love to supplement wednesday's um do the do the part the number two option and the number three option for the for the um older kids that don't have it and maybe consider if if number three as the option could consider seniors grade 12 as some of those kids that we bring in to um try to add somehow to to their experience so those are my thoughts and i thought it was important i'm sorry to sort of hold the floor we're all tired but i really think it's important for people to know why and how we're making these decisions and i

291i don't want people to think that i've arrived at a conclusion before tonight and i haven't seriously considered what everybody said thank you alicia so we you know we find ourselves now in a place that you know sandy and diane and i talked about this earlier today in terms of what people's expectations were going to be in terms of what decisions were going to be able to be made this evening um you know we've said i'm going to be so cliche but we've said it's not the board's job to run the district it's the board's job to make sure the district is run well and so in terms of developing the plans you know that's not the board's job the board's job is to take into account all of the stakeholder information to listen to

292our experts who are our building principles and our administrators and make an informed decision about how to move forward i think at this point and i hope i'm not talking out of turn and please correct me building principles if i am but i think um you know nobody nobody wants to continue to pursue this really hard work if the district if the school board isn't going to approve a plan to go back and so i think one of the concerns is that you know k2 would develop would spend between now and the next board meeting time developing a plan um and then have the school board reject it um because it's just a tremendous amount of work and so what we've been presented with are their recommendations but it sounds like to me that you

293know they have unanswered questions that they still need to work the details out and so i think for me it feels premature to say i would like to vote to approve scenario one at k2 i would like to vote to approve scenario two you know at a different building because i just don't know if we're there yet um and so you know as we continue to to think about this i i don't want none of us want to let anybody down let's be honest i don't want to let the our administrators down by not making a decision um and if a decision is required then i think we should make one i don't want to let the community down because maybe these scenarios aren't enough and unfortunately just the nature of public process nobody else

294has had time to weigh in on these scenarios yet except for us um and so we may find that we are trying to solve a problem we know we're trying to solve a problem and we we may have missed the mark with our community and um you know that there are certain things that i'm hearing you know our deal breakers i know on a personal level there are certain things that i hear that set off a lot of alarm bells in terms of not wanting to compromise on various things but i'm just one vote um and so i i can appreciate that not not everything i think is a deal breaker other people would think is a deal breaker and we're all just trying to make an informed decision here um sarah you have your

295hand up maybe you can help yeah i don't know it's just gonna offer my thought process and i think you know we are all like it's not just the school board's responsibility to look out for the best interests of the students it's it's everyone's responsibility and so i'm making an assumption that of course you know the scenarios that are brought forward the feedback that is being provided is with the best interests of the students in mind um and that being the case like you know we make decisions based on recommendations and i did not hear a strong recommendation from anybody i heard scenarios and preferences but i did not hear recommendations and that makes me very uncomfortable to potentially vote on something that doesn't seem to have broad support across the administrators it we heard

296that it pretty clearly that it doesn't have support across from the teachers and while i know it's the preference of parents to get their kids back in school it's everybody's preference um and i think that there are some things that we can do like you guys presented a lot of options and i think there are things in there that potentially we could pull out so i would be in favor april of seeing this progress even though i know it's more work and like i said earlier maybe there are things that we can cancel out that we know we're not going to pursue because either it would be too much work and not enough benefit um or it would be equitable whatever those reasons are um to help narrow the scope a little bit but i

297am not comfortable with the information that was provided especially given that some of those scenarios were made later in the week and i understand why that happened but i don't think it seems like maybe there wasn't a significant amount of opportunity for teachers and staff to weigh in on feedback um and really process it and so i would like to see that the conversation continue i see diane has her hand up and you know she was going to correct something i said no i just wanted to clarify that i'm not sure that that we're all hearing this the same way because i did hear all of our leaders make a recommendation to you okay well i didn't hear that i i you know if the i heard uh i didn't hear a strong recommendation so

298please correct me okay so again i'm just gonna go from like i wrote down as i heard it i heard k2 say that they could go with scenario two or scenario one i heard three five say they could go with scenario two six eight presented scenario two and three and said they could do that and so did nine twelve and building principles certainly correct me if my information is not accurate kathy can you do so can i just follow up on that do you guys um diane and sandy do you guys also like is it your recommendation that we actually select one of these scenarios too and which one you would support i think that we have spent a lot of time working on this we are really sensitive to the fact that the community

299is really looking to increase in-person time safely and i trust our administrators um we have you know dug in and sat aside from each other and really done the work and this is where we are at this time and you know again i think as we think about moving forward from tonight um even if the board isn't fully prepared to vote on a recommendation to go back to something i heard april say a few minutes ago when we had a conversation this afternoon it was really um with the ask of uh some direction from the board even if it's not like we will approve this but if we know what support we have from the board for any of these recommendations we will go back and dig in and find those final answers we'll survey

300parents to help us get the details that we need but as we said to april for us to kind of continue to explore each one of these rabbit holes would be very time consuming and almost impossible so i'd love to hear from you i just wanted to add that i believe k through 8 all had meetings planned um yesterday where they did get to consult with staff and at least have a conversation about that and the high school did not have a meeting planned for wednesday we've scheduled something for monday but i just want to in full disclosure say that our leadership team has not yet been able to have a discussion um with the staff we did send them the slides for tonight and give them a brief update about this um and it

301was my understanding when i sent that out that this would be a board direction um for us to be following so i just want to share that thank you sue nick and then kt so i almost lowered my hand but i'll just say what i wanted to say very quickly and that is that throughout this entire conversation there's two things that have stood out first the the thoroughness of the work i said in the beginning and i'll say it again is unparalleled but i also want to say this we all have had a lot of experience with anxiety during this last year and each of us in our own ways and what i have learned is that anxiety thrives in an environment where you're searching for certainty and there isn't any and that's exactly where

302we are it doesn't matter how many surveys we do it doesn't matter how many interviews we have with staff it doesn't matter how many times we talk about or how many slides we put together we're never going to get certainty i do think we have a very wide breadth of information and i do think getting some more staff input can't hurt but at some point we're going to have to take kind of a little bit of a leap of faith make a decision make a choice knowing that it could fail it could make things worse um and there's no way to be certain that won't happen but whatever everything i've heard tonight and the summary that diane just gave of the different scenarios that our building principles stood by it sounds like those recommendations if

303if i'm speaking for myself here as a board member if those are pursued and more directionally delivered to this board i would have no problem supporting something like that because i believe in the work that's been done there is no perfect solution it doesn't matter how much we try we're never going to get that certainty and until we accept that i think it's going to be very hard to make a decision and that's that's what i see happening across all the different levels of this conversation kristen i think i heard this the same way that sarah heard it i saw choices being made but i'm not sure i felt like any of them were ringing endorsements for any scenario i'm comfortable supporting whatever the administration feels is best i guess i just i don't know

304if i got that message that this is the absolute best thing for our students it felt like you know if we're forced to choose a little bit this is what we'll choose but i guess i didn't hear a solid recommendation either max and then alicia and then leanne i would um i would have to agree with uh miss turner and miss cyber uh miss uh was it miss layton um just like honestly i don't know and this is not coming from like a lack of gratefulness for what you guys have done obviously you've put in so much work and i'm so grateful that like it's we're trying so hard i don't know if i support any of the scenarios for um the high school or i don't know about any of the schools actually i

305just like that's just my opinion i just i don't support any of them that's all i'm going to say well i guess i'm just is april's gone oh there you are you moved um i'm just gonna i think ultimately somebody's gonna make a decision i i don't think it's good for anybody for us to keep in this interim period i share nick's concerns i i hear what you're saying about the way it was presented by administration i think that there's probably a variety of reasons contributing to that and um it it may not be due to lack of support i mean there's a lot going on um and if if i have to take on the complaints when if this miserably fails i'll do it because you know somebody's going to be upset no matter

306what because this ultimately this is not going to meet the needs of our entire community not none of the solutions are going to meet the needs of our entire community and people are going to be upset and we've heard that um what the the best ideas of the people that we we put in charge of these decisions and and they want to make it happen and they want to make it happen safely and so um i'll make a motion to approve the option to an option three for all phase levels as i heard to be recommended by the administration can i just ask a clarification quickly or no she needs a second first second okay now we can have discussion um in in fairness and in trying to manage the meeting um leanne had her

307hand up before alicia made her motion so i suspect leanne had something to say that was unrelated to the motion itself and two building principles also have their hands politely raised and so while this is technically discussion of alicia's motion i do want to give um a little bit of air time here to the people who have had their hand raised um and so leanne go ahead and then kelly and jas i appreciate your patience too um sorry i got a little thrown off for a sec um everyone has said thank you for all of the effort that you put in here um i appreciate how many hours that have gone into this but i have to agree i didn't hear a resounding yes this is what we want this is what is best interest

308for our students this is what's in the best interest for our staff and i'm really uncomfortable with our making a broad decision on something and that you're going to implement it because it's our will i do think that i was expecting you would come back and say this is absolutely what i want but i actually even heard stay the course it's working this is this is a really awkward spot to be in i know that people want more time i'm also really concerned about that every other wednesday and what it's going to do to disrupt our families we implement that they have to they have to adhere to it i'm i know that this is an in connection to alicia's motion but i just had to say that part i think it's connected to alicia's

309motion yeah absolutely um kelly and then jess please um so i think you guys are really insightful and that we're not all coming out like really strong about about something because um maybe it's the type a perfectionist in each of us and maybe it is in me like there's not a perfect solution there's not a perfect solution so there's not something that i'm like passionately this checks every single box and works great for kids and it works great for my staff who are working so hard and family it won't completely inconvenience families and destroy their child care situation and it brings our kids back more because i know that that's what they want and that's what we want there's just not that solution and so that's why i'm not passionately expressing my support of one

310thing or another um i even used this quote with my staff yesterday larry david comedian quote you know a good compromise um is when both parties are kind of dissatisfied and that's a little bit where i feel with situation with uh scenario b like nobody's crazy about it you know i don't think it's going to be if i'm speaking really candidly which i think is what you're asking us to do um it's a step forward in terms of in-person learning for families who can manage it i suspect that there will be families who say we can't do it so we're just gonna stay remote on wednesdays but for those who can they can attend in person on those every other wednesdays i think it's the most manageable for staff um if we're asked to make

311a recommendation to increase in-person learning um if if again if i'm speaking really candidly and i think you heard in the public comment um staying the course is a viable option we're doing a good job with that we've we've really worked hard to identify students who are really struggling and we've brought them in for additional support but i'm not so uh arrogant to say that we've figured out every single you need more in-person learning time and brought them back i know that there are students who look like they're doing great but they're you know we heard in public comment they're crying at home but they're doing great at school um so there's no perfect solution i've said that 100 times tonight and that's why i'm not coming out with like my full passionate support behind

312anything thanks kelly jess um thanks so i just i wouldn't want um this tonight's presentation which we didn't really even begin until 9 30 after full work days and weeks of and intense meetings and all of that to be misinterpreted in any way is not having um a strong opinion one way or the other um but we are in positions where um we know that our opinion matters um but we are navigating and we do have strong opinions i have a very strong opinion which i have voiced you know in our leadership council and among my peers um about what we should doing as have my colleagues um but but the role that we're in is to navigate what our families need what our staff needs and this is a very complex situation so we

313can't be as passionate and um that it sounds like what you're looking for from us because um it is our job to do the will of the board and i i hear what you're saying that you you wish that we had come to you with with stronger um but i think you know what i i guess i was hoping for was to know that if we did like stick our necks out there and we came forward stronger that we're gonna have backing um and i i just really appreciate what april said um however many minutes ago that there's there's more things that we can look at and get more information from our families um i i just don't want i don't want my boys to be misinterpreted that i don't i don't have a strong

314opinion about this and i i want to see kids back in school more face-to-face time that's as passionate as i can be at 11. shannon thank you jessica um i i didn't mean to interrupt so i apologize for overstepping and i'm sorry liam i did certainly did not mean to to interrupt you i just i have a clarification question i thought i heard that the k through two number one choice was scenario one so alicia is your emotion that they don't get scenario one that that everybody gets the same thing across the board everybody gets the two and three combo i would also yeah i would say can you sorry now we're talking over each other i apologize can you lay out your motion by phase level because i also i'm not 100 sure what

315your motion is oh well because i think i i spoke differently two different times i mean my personal preference would be recommendation number one for k2 but i didn't hear that um [Music] first of all i didn't hear resounding support from the board on that um and i heard uh kelly say that she was concerned about about that so i mean i guess from my perspective a good compromise is to approve two and three for all phase levels as a starter i mean gives us something and yeah okay that helps does that help shannon yeah thank you other discussion april i don't know if you can see her but kathy has had her hand up oh no i'm sorry kathy april yeah i just i want to follow up on um sue mentioning that she

316didn't have a meeting with her staff to talk about it i had a meeting with my staff but it was to share the information that came out of the start committee so i shared middle schools scenario two and three and the strengths and the challenges so staff did give feedback and really most of the feedback was the same as the teacher um comments at the beginning you know we've done a great job we are teaching students you know when they're at home remote they're also logging in you know they they have a regular schedule um and you know staying the course so a lot of you know staff that's um you know the comments that they were making and i'm sorry i'm like really tired but that's totally understandable kathy thank you um i don't

317see any other hands and i i haven't i haven't weighed in i don't think necessarily to the extent that i would like to and i also appreciate that as chair sometimes my voice gets more weight than anyone else's and this is not a scenario where it should um i am an equal you know decision maker with the rest of the board here um so my first thought is in terms of my own principles and how i run meetings this action goes against my own personal principles about what i think is right for public process um i am struggling a little bit with the fact that none of the scenarios um were necessarily laid out in a way that was informative to parents um and that we are then gonna take action on the same night

318that's not something i would typically set the agenda up to do and so i just i i'm as we're processing this like i need to i need to say that um secondly you know we are in this position where the administration is looking for guidance um and i couldn't trust their recommendations more i mean they are our experts this is the best case scenario i trust that they have turned over every rock um and looked at every single possible scenario to get our students to have more in-person time and so in that sense um i kind of feel like what what else am i waiting for um and and i could approve the plan as presented by alicia um and allow our staff and our admin to to move forward and to really plan for

319that scenario for our district um i don't give me one second it's late so so so this is where i'll land um i i again i am not 100 comfortable with the um process i can appreciate that people do feel ready to make a decision um and so when push comes to shove i i think i i'm ready to start alicia's motion if there's more discussion you know now's your time leanne i would piggyback on what you just said april um we've done a really good job of making sure that we're very transparent and we're communicating with people that they know what's happening um these were just laid out tonight these new scenarios um i'm not sure we've had enough time to let everyone get up to speed we're approaching zero dark 30. um it

320just feels like we're doing this without getting all of the input i totally appreciate the analysis paralysis i do think that that can happen um but i think in this situation is two weeks going to make a difference if we did this at the next meeting and give people that opportunity to understand what's happening figure out what they can do best for their families and then understand like if they can't make the wednesday's work can they be remote is that allowed are they going to be in the same classroom how is that going to work to understand those pieces before that they can make their own decisions as well i appreciate and thank alicia for taking the reins i think it was great to get us moving forward on it i personally would be more

321comfortable with just giving a pause but again it's the will of the board alicia i know i've already spoken but what i mean i guess i'm not super opposed to that but what would that do for the preparation is is my concern about that i in order to make this work i heard that there needs to be preparation time from from the administration and so if we waited until april 1st would what would that do if there's strong consensus behind making scenario 2 work um you know with the addition of scenario 3 when applicable because we heard that that varies by phase then i feel like that is that's our guidance for tonight um and so in terms of you know what what does it do um you know it's it sends a pretty clear

322signal to administration that we would like them to tighten up scenario two and present it to us a formal recommendation on april 1st sarah i would be supportive of what what you just said april so we have the option to table alicia's um amendment not amendment motion um you know that's that's available to us we haven't we haven't voted shannon i see your hand and i i see i'm sorry i don't mean to beat a dead horse but i keep going back to the scenario one for k through two that that from what if i'm wrong please correct me kelly that that was what the preference was is that am i correct i think that was that was was our wish but it was not it presents a lot of challenges i think scenario two

323is the only sure thing for k-12 so i think what alicia is saying is correct okay as far as where we're at as a k-12 leadership team gotcha okay thank you can i just add the the challenges presented are are there because we don't know what our families would choose so without that information we can't do scenario one there's no way yeah i guess that was going to be one of my ques my questions is if we tabled this per leanne's in in april's discussion would it would it give you enough time to flesh out the details of scenario one so that in two weeks you could come back and say between scenario one and scenario two this is what really is going to work for k2 is that enough time my well i mean

324and justin i may not agree depending on what we already know about our the data in our buildings and then eight corners isn't represented here but i would worry that what we would know in two weeks and then what we would need to do and to prepare for the start date of whatever that is say after april break would be a tight crunch so that would just be my concern and i'm not saying it can't happen but that would just be my worry uh and i you know just knowing bluepoint i know most families i only had a handful of hybrid families who did not want to come back to the fullest extent possible so i would be expecting to be maximizing all classrooms so um and i know pleasant hill is a little bit

325different so hands are jumping up and down chan and you still have your hand up kelly use your hand out sarah's throwing her hand up and down and go ahead kelly kelly this kelly is that old hand kelly it's an old hand i'll put it down sorry no worries sarah go ahead my only thought and maybe this is something if we move forward if you guys could um if you haven't already considered it is the timing around coming back right after april break because i think in the past we've come right back after vacation we've seen an uptick in cases so i'd be curious to know what the impact of that is and yeah obviously not ideal timing kristin um i might just be super tired and forgetting we talked about this but when would

326scenario two start is that also an after april break or would that be before so again i think that um the goal would be for us to and i know the slide deck is now long gone um but there were a number of items on that last slide in terms of you know we would be looking to put a survey out to parents to get a commitment from them about that we would be re-examining transportation as it relates to those wednesdays schools would be working on updated drop off and pick up procedures and you know as if we're talking about also bringing in more students who are struggling then you know it's the time for those um schools to take a look at who are those students that could really benefit from that so you

327know again i think if we have some direction from the board then we can get to work on this and provide you an update in terms of where we're at certainly we would um our goal before this meeting was regardless of what scenario we might be looking at to be implementing that after april break you also to kelly and jessica for your additional words that was helpful okay ladies and gentlemen do we have a motion to table or are we voting i'll make a motion to table until our next school board meeting is there a second second discussion kristin all right i know i'm just like getting tired at this point but i think what i'm hearing is the administration needs some guidance from us that's correct so okay i just wanted to make sure

328you understand i mean i think basically we want to keep working right towards a solution um but we want to keep working towards the solution that you all think has viability and get behind thank you nick and then alicia um so i have concerns about tabling primarily for the reason that of timeline i'm really concerned about kicking this can down the road for two weeks and then it gives our administration and our leaders two less weeks to plan and to figure out what they're going to do on that monday after april break the other thing i wanted to share with the group was a conversation just i'm not doing the whole conversation because i'm tired too but i will just say that in the start committee team that i was on the health group one

329of our members is an infectious disease specialist at maine medical center in pediatrics and one of the things that she shared with us is that the health community in general is very concerned about a possible spike after april break because families are tired of not traveling and they're they're going anyway that's what she's hearing from a lot of her patients and so when i heard that i and she said you know might be a good idea not to do this directly after april break but then she immediately said if you kick this off 10 days because that's what the cdc would recommend that you do to make sure you mitigate for any spikes following mass travel then you're at a point where is there even time left of the year to make any of this

330useful so i think if we are going to do it we do have to try it after it will break otherwise the amount of time we gain isn't really worth the effort um but i i worry about tabling this guidance call it a decision called guidance i worry about tabling it for two weeks because i just think it puts our leadership in a very challenging position to come up with an actual plan lesser than sarah i i appreciate the rationale for for wanting to table it you know we're all coming from a good place but i just don't think that it um does anybody any good because i think it's going to leave our our families wondering our kids you know the sooner we have a message and the sooner we can work on implementing

331it the better for everybody and i just think that we've heard and we've heard the options i think we're going to hear very similar things than in the next two weeks let's just pull the trigger let them get to work let people start to make plans i mean i i don't know what what more information people need or or will get i mean this was publicly noticed as to address the start time recommendations people know what this is talking about we were inundated with with public comment and um teacher emails and you know the administration met with the sea everybody knows that this is before the school board tonight and i i just think that the that the chaos is is not good for anybody tara i think i feel the same way i guess

332i just don't understand why we need a vote when we've given it's uh i think we've been pretty clear on what our direction is and so i i'll vote on it if it means you guys carry this forward but i guess um when we vote on it it means we're proving it and if there's still some questions that need to be answered i would rather have those questions answered before we make it official um is my only like i i think i want the same thing as you alicia and nick do i guess i just don't know if vodeon is the if that kind of cements it rather than giving a little bit more time for some of these questions to be answered like i think it was april said like come back with a

333more like fine-tuned plan and then we go i don't know i would be okay tabling it with the very clear assumption being made that it's full steam ahead on the recommendation for scenario two and scenario three when when applicable sorry what happens if like we have intervening forces between now and then you know we can't say we're not we're not going to vote on it tonight but this is what we're gonna vote next time i mean anything could happen between now and that right and i and i think that is a concern for sure kristin yeah i think i just i wonder so it's easy for us to say to leadership go ahead this is what we're thinking but thinking about the families i do think maybe an actual vote we need to give them

334a concrete answer and time to plan as well okay i'm calling the vote on sarah's motion to table mrs giftas no dr gill no miss casalonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom no mrs either no mrs turner no mr bennett yes miss skipjust no the motion to table fails back to alicia's main motion are we ready to call the vote okay mrs giptis yes dr gill yes miss casalonas no miss layton no mrs lindstrom yes this is cyther yes mrs turner yes mr bennett no miss giftus yes you everybody agenda item 8.3 is first reading of the 2021-2022 school calendar do i have a motion to approve the calendar as presented second discussion alicia do you want to discuss this as policy chair since this came to you or do you want me to send

335this to diane to wrap up our workshop which also went right up to the last second yeah um well i think diane is actually better equipped to do it than i am first for sure so if she doesn't do you mind diane yeah thank you all right so in summary um the proposal that you heard during the workshop this evening um to have um i think there were two there were actually two proposals if you looked at the piece right so the first piece was about early release time and um it was the leader the k-12 leadership team's recommendation for weekly professional development time of 90 minutes they did have a second in the table that if that wasn't a proposal that the school board could stand behind that if if you could honor the

336request for every other week that would go a long way towards providing the professional development time that is going to be needed to move forward our efforts on our social emotional learning plan our diversity equity and inclusion efforts and the curriculum work that hasn't gotten done this year um you heard about this the um start of school plans from the phase levels and um so in summary uh what we have provided to you this evening aligns with our regional partner schools it exceeds the number of state mandated school days and state request meets all the state requirements and again i think you know the pieces that our team tried to highlight this evening were that this proposal provides the professional resource of time for the improvement efforts as i've just outlined and allows for a

337smooth re-entry to school for our students in the fall alicia do we have to vote on the professional development stuff tonight or can we just vote on the the calendar pieces so we're we're actually in a little bit of gray area there um because if all we're voting on when we talk about the calendar are the the actual days start day and day number of student days number of faculty days then that calendar is not dependent on this conversation and could potentially be approved at first reading the late start or early release has always appeared on our calendar you know printed on our approved second reading calendar as have the start of the school year plans and so i think it is a little bit um dodgy to approve the calendar without this language on

338it for the start of school and either half either the late start or the early release days indicated on it um because that's certainly not what has been approved in the past um as a reminder to everybody this is this is just first reading um and so there can be significant deliberation between now and second reading um and that can happen at the policy level that can happen with board input but this this is just first reading i'll move to the calendar as presented we already have a motion who made it did we not i don't remember it we didn't i wonder if kelly can verify that for us kelly did anyone make a motion [Music] no i didn't have anybody to make a motion thank you alicia just now okay really no april read

339it and i said so yeah i really think i said do i have a motion to approve the calendar as proof sorry i missed his eyes oh my god i missed it too well i i mean i don't i don't um necessarily agree with some of the professional development dates um but i do think that it's late and we have time to have those discussions and um i know we can have them and we plan on having them in the policy committee um and so my hope would be we could just um approve it for first reading tonight and have some more discussions and and move it forward with that the other thing that alicia had requested through policy was that we get some parent feedback on their preference and availability to accommodate the wednesday

340whether they preferred late start or early release or what the implications of that and leanne had asked if we could gather some information about the cost of before and after care um and so there were still some unanswered questions and moving pieces you know around this again just to reiterate like you know this is first reading so sarah would the policy can maybe be willing to can get those answers and then come back at second reading with the recommendation i think that that is the procedure we should follow okay and great okay are we ready to call the vote oh diane did you want to add something yeah i was just going to add in that you know if if it would be very timely if we are going to be sending information out to

341parents about our learning model we could um batch those questions together in one survey and ask these questions at the same time but that's a little bit boring yeah thank you for that all right ready to vote you said yes please this is giftus hello did you hear me oh sorry about that yes dr gill yes miss castellanos yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs scyther yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes great thank you agenda item 8.4 are the meeting minutes of february 25th 2021 which was a workshop do i have a motion to approve as presented second discussion seeing none mrs giptis yes dr gill yes miss casalonas jeff miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes mrs turner yes mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes

342thank you agenda item 8.5 is appointment agenda item 8.5.1 is the district-wide instructional technology and library media specialist andy do you have that i sure do so again this is the district-wide instructional technology and library media specialist elizabeth gartley has been chosen to fill this position created by a nation ms gartley received a bachelor's degree in media studies from emerson college in boston she received her master's degree in library and information science from simmons college and a second master's degree in media services from the new school in new york she has had positions in school library settings since 2010 most recently she was the library information integrator at mahoney middle school in south portland the recommendation is to appoint elizabeth gartley as a district-wide instructional technology and library media specialist thank you sandy do i

343have a motion to approve as presented hello second discussion congratulations and welcome mrs giftus yes dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes mrs turner mrs turner yes thank you mr bennett yes and miss giftus yes agenda item 9.0 is adjournment do i have a motion to adjourn so moved second discussion thank you almouth beat us they went till 12 50. no come on we got 30 minutes left in us they they they get to clean black bragging rights that they went longer there was a prize involved never missing out i could start a whole new conversation if you all wanted me to i'll give it to them wait did they start at six o'clock [Music] discussion about adjournment this as dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss

344layton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes mrs turner yes mr bennett uh yes and let's get this yes everybody thank you