001let's go yes um [Music] thank you sorry hello i'll give you like another 30 seconds that we can start right at 7 30. close enough all right i am pleased to call the dresden meeting to order i apologize that we're starting half an hour late first order of business this evening is to reorganize and in doing so we will appoint a chair so i will accept nominations for chair of the dresden school board yes kim nominate rick johnson for check hi second all right we have a second with dab and any other nominations okay then we'll have a roll call vote starting with lily carmen yes rebel yes department yes yes nelson yes fairy yes mcconnell yes johnson yes okay marcelo iblastias christian unanimously re-elected [Laughter] okay moving on to the vice chair do i
002have a nomination for someone who'd like to serve as my place chair i'll keep the platform together you have a second second again oh any other nomination any discussion i could just add that it does need to be a norwich board member by policy really simon yes rebellious can yes nelson yes aries mcdonnell yes marcella de blasio lisa misty asks i said yes welcome aboard neil thank you sir moving on to secretary i believe that was was that uh kevin he was our second kind so we're going to need a new secretary do we have a nomination neil i'll nominate willie charman do you have any other you were going to nominate someone soon or no no no no no [Laughter] so um any other nominations hearing none we'll go around you trim and yes
003yes yes eds nelson yes aries mcdonnell yes marcelo iblastias lisa christy yes dan johnson yes welcome aboard lily thanks so moving on to committee assignments um there's a list there uh i'll take the budget um john had athletic advisory so we're going to need someone so please just email me this week if you're interested in serving one of these groups evaluation is that what evaluation is that teacher valuable teacher that's been neil and myself historically i would actually like to step off that possible because i've been added to the handover budget so what i'll do tomorrow is i'll send an email out to everyone with the spreadsheet that we have with the vacancies on there um negotiations not needed this year um it says teacher support staff and then someone wrote question mark it's service
004staff so we need a service staff negotiation yes i mean from the year after this okay central staff development who's that now cpp that's been me you're still interested lisa sure happy to do it and then finance liaison kim will take that great we have one more that's missing hartford oh yeah and council pin council and council has been me nhsba liaison um i'm doing that for hanover i don't mind doing it still for justin yeah uh hartford and uh council lisa are you are you still interested in keeping council yeah i'm happy to stay on council and you're going to take nspa and then uh who's hartford before that was kevin kevin so you want to take ourselves sure awesome and that that's a usually uh 10 o'clock in the morning it's only quarterly
005though so i can do it i'll send out an email and if people want to horse trade oh i'm happy to stick with budget that's okay that's my favorite okay thank you ken well i just that was just the assumption i made and since you told us the chairs have to be on the budget committee [Laughter] so at this point we're going to move on to agenda review does anyone have anything they would like to move add or remove from our agenda today here again we'll move on to the public may address the board we have anyone in the audience who would like to address the board tonight anyone at home so at this point we're going to move on to charity bagels so i thought i was being pretty slick inviting him but apparently
006the valley news beat me to the punch this weekend so i met leo i haven't actually met him but i actually bought a uh received a gift of charity bagels i thought it was awesome i thought what he's trying to do here at hanover high school is is wonderful and so i wanted to have him kind of just explain to the board in our community what he's doing with charity picks middle school hello everybody um first things first i brought bagels yeah so it's you know 7 35 it's vehicle time yes um okay [Music] see if technology works [Laughter] [Music] okay hi my name take is of it now hello everyone my name is leo i'm a senior at hanover high school um and i am originally from los angeles california moved here three years
007ago and one of the things that i was kind of bummed about when i moved here was the pasty of delicious bagels so i started making them at home pretty quickly realized oh crap you can make really good bagels at home um and then try to sell them realize why nobody else tries to sell them because it's really hard to make bagels and sell them um and then it occurred to me in um social studies at hanover high school entrepreneurship class hey what if i sold do-it-yourself bagel kits and um i won't get in my own way i'll just go from there all right so this is a picture that i took at rms about a week ago two weeks ago where we ran a fundraiser to um to support the black youth project this
008was in uh this was during february and i had approached the principal and we ran a fundraiser uh before that i did one at hanover high school where we uh all the funds that were raised through the bagel kits and i'm going to explain a little more about that in just a sec went to offsetting the cost of prom for uh students who couldn't afford it so what is cherry bagels they are they are make it yourself bagel kits um and this is a this is sort of the pitch that i would do if you were a school principal ready here's some pictures of the kit i have a fully made one right here and what's in the kit well it has everything you need to go from desire to a deliciousness and bagels at
009home from scratch enough to make the dough there here and finally there website with in-depth video instructions also for those of you who don't want to get a flower on your ipad as you're trying to follow my instructions we also have printed instructions we've had over 250 happy customers in the upper valley here are some bagels that people have made and submitted i should have put your picture on there but i donated to the canaan elementary school oh it's getting cut off okay so how did the fundraiser work what was the fundraiser what's this kid talking about um so i approach a school and i say hey i'm looking to do i want to do a fundraiser with you for either a hyper local issue or some important national issue and you know we're going
010to figure out what issue that it's going to be together and here's the here's the idea you um we write an email and we send it out to all the parents and guardians in the dis in the school and um we tell them hey if you make a donation of 35 or more you're entitled to get a bagel tip and all of the difference between the price of the kit and the amount that they've donated at minimum 35 and maximum a million you know all of that goes to the cost um as i'd like to say it is a it's like an npr tote bag but you can eat it and it's delicious um and at hanover high school a couple weeks ago we sold 40 kits and cleared 1 155 for the senior class
011to offset the cost of problem and at richmond middle school we cleared 1052 i want to say and sold 50 kits i'd like to say risk-free delicious and different what could your school do with an extra household thank you um can you also explain for non-fundraising just if people buy it and then how it works with donating or giving it to first responders and stuff yes so uh why is it called charity bagels why is there a bagel symbol over the g well you're encouraged if you make your dozen bagels to put one over your head take a picture because you're doing a good deed when you make them when you make them um each kid is going to make a dozen bagels but most people aren't just going to sit around and eat a
012dozen bagels at all [Laughter] so for many people you're gonna have one you can have two you're gonna refrigerate one but you know you're kind of done even if they're amazing bagels which as you can tell me let me tell you they are so the idea is now you've used the kit you have an empty kit basket and 12 bagels you don't need 12. what if you take six of them you take half of them you put them back in the kit close it up you deliver it to a local first responder charitable organization or emergency service near you or teachers or team staff if you do or superintendents you uh get half off your next kitchen um what else about it um i so i've done one at rms i've done one at hhs
013uh my understanding is this school board is hhs rms um ray and now hannover is the ray school the members are here tonight but they're all here we're all on those boards too and then marion cross so i just talked to the principal of marion cross and seems like there's a little interest there uh the article did help um and and pursuing it with the pto at the race school so i guess the reason that i'm here um well i mean first i didn't know that these two schools were going to want to do it and who's going to turn down an invitation to have a bunch of adults but [Laughter] but the other reason is because um i just sort of wanted to ask you all who you know do lots of school stuff
014the whole time what would be a good way to go about taking it out of this school board and to other school boards perhaps it could be having this meeting but at the lebanon school board or at the mascoma valley regional mouthful that that one um maybe it could be that i'm just sort of a little curious so we have we have certain restrictions that we can't be like pushing businesses and all that but we can um i would assume with the newspaper article i think you've got a very easy sell to the lebanon school district to the mascoma district so i don't know if jay as a superintendent can make introductions as seen on the valley news yeah yeah so i um maybe a question back to you like can your operation scale i
015hope so you're on talks with king arthur right now right um i might have talked with king arthur right now um yes i talked to them i don't know i don't know how much they talk back i met with the ceo well before you you don't need to answer that question i guess my question to you is so i can um i i can uh i have a potential of introducing you to all of the school boards in the state of vermont but i want to make sure before i offer that to you is that something that you would want to have are you prepared for something like that yes uh kids take 24 minutes a piece to assemble so that would be a lot of time in the basement and gets but yes um
016you know i initially started this you know through the entrepreneurship competition at hanover high school with dartmouth a while back and one of the things i learned because i didn't want to have a real business and i still do was you know if i'm selling an individual kit to you know if i'm selling just one kit i can't afford to have a 15 minute conversation to convince someone if you sell the kit for 25 dollars if i'm selling you a helicopter maybe but you know so anyway um yes i'm interested in in i think it will work at this point um and if it doesn't i'm interested in pivoting to find a way that it would okay um let me uh i i so i sit on the vermont school boards association and through that
017organization we may be able to introduce your charity bagel company to school boards in vermont all right but let me talk to my executive committee tomorrow thursday morning and see what they're thinking and if that's cool with that awesome thank you and uh you won the entrepreneurial competition last year at dartmouth is that correct yes um hanover high school has paired with the magnuson center which is the new entrepreneurship thingy um and um the the seed money for the business actually came from winning that competition which is really nice so you're doing all the packaging in your basement well i do have family who helps me i mean that's where it's located yes got it yes and um yeah in the basement um if you go down there now it's very organized but uh you
018won't have a lot of space thank you thanks if you guys wanna look at the kit or eat the bagels that's why they're here i did bring cream cheese and i brought a knife and they're all cut so we may grab one in a second so moving on to reports i'm theo i'm here in place of uh cape mccall um so we council met on wednesday and we passed a couple of allocations including one for the volleyball club by annette um one for the broadside to fund uh fourth quarter edition um and we discussed a course standardization policy which would essentially make all courses of the same level standardize their retake policies latencies policies test take classes but i don't think we voted thank you so uh and was there any feedback you all received
019from the official naming of our new mascot um i would direct that question because okay oh i think i think once the um once the the ranked choice voting was finished bears had around right [Laughter] nice well kelly suggested we call them the marauding bears [Laughter] i just want to say these pickles are really good [Music] neither and i i was very nervous but it was actually very simple a lot of time though but rick can do it anyone can do it so hey thank you theo so kim okay um i submitted something on friday and then i resubmitted something today because we had some changes so i just went through it uh first welcome and welcome back to our new board members from the rms community with recent changes and i know this came
020up in this meeting we're really looking forward to welcoming people back in the building so if you want to come take a look at rms or a tour or look at some classes or anything just go ahead and give a call to the front office and we'll make sure that nicole knows who you are when you ring the bell so we did have a couple today we had uh march intensive started today so we had a number of high school students show up i was like you're not a sub and you're not a student so i'm not quite sure who you are and i was like oh marge intensive so we figured that out so those students were here today very enthusiastic had a great time i'm kind of jumping around a little bit just
021a quick update i'm sure many people are curious about today was our first day with students at rms in terms of our mass welcoming a quick non-scientific observation today because of the way the doors are set up we basically have to open the doors for everybody to come in in the morning so nissan the associate principal are standing there opening doors letting everybody in so we can do a pretty good count we probably had at the beginning of the day between 75 and 80 percent of the people coming still when asked i think just because they felt like it was one it's habit two it's something that's they know some of their friends need to remain masked so we do by the end of the day that number had fallen off so we've got people
022who are gaining comfort with the idea of being unmasked after two years and part of it too is i i wrote a little bit on friday just remember the sort of contextual part of this to us two years seems like a long time to sixth graders that's 33 percent of their school career they've been in math so to switch out of masks as a sixth grader is kind of a big deal they haven't done it before but we're working through it it's going to norm slowly but i think we'll get to the point where everybody's comfortable and everybody's doing something that would be helpful we wanted to thank we had our professional development day yesterday we wanted to thank the pto for lunch for coffee and for a great book fair that they put together
023they got a lot of donated books from the community so we all could choose a couple of books that we could read people all over the place and in a nod to my sort of non linear random way they were also totally unorganized which was kind of cool because you had to look through all of them to see what you can do and then we got a really nice book um busy couple weeks since the last meetings i sat down to write this and i'm like oh it's only been three weeks nothing's happened oops a lot has happened so we had uh eighth graders met with the counselors at the high school to discuss course selection seventh grade families did their check-in with our counselors last week with almost two counselors met via zoom this
024is another bonus of covid uh almost all the seventh grade families so they're sort of halfway through middle school check in see how everybody's doing sixth graders we had another outside speaker come in we talked about this is a really cool presentation about basically how brain waves can be used to control machines now so you can have prosthetics that basically run off of thought or even thought to text as opposed to voice to text so it was pretty cool the bath counts we placed eight of the top 12 in the regional meet including our top four so we had the state meet at the end of the month um we've got it scheduled next week we're going to meet with the ray and marion cross parents as a very introductory short meeting basically setting up
025electives so we can get people's elective choices so we can build our master schedule over april break during our pd yesterday we had offered and that's at the end of the document we'd offered a number of things that people could do that would be helpful for them going forward the question about scheduling sort of took off took on a life of its own it was one of the first things that we did had about 45 people there and after an hour they said we want to keep going so they kept going and then they wanted to come back another 40 people from two to three in the afternoon in a professional development which if you've ever been to a professional development day that'll tell you something about the enthusiasm that people have if your choices
026are go do something or work in your room and people came and did something people are actually moving forward with this with an idea it's a complex situation but there's basically a chance uh right now because of some personnel changes to make some changes in how we organize the richmond school and move it to a more i guess it's something that's even more based in equity and social emotional learning and individualization so move to smaller teams more specific skill building et cetera so we're trying we have another meeting tomorrow staff meeting i think we're pretty much set for staff meetings from here on out to try to figure out how exactly we can make this work but that's something that is sort of gaining energy last friday we had a pretty cool organism where a
027pretty cool event i was approached on wednesday of last week by a number of students three students from our stage group came in and they originally said we want to stage a walkout on friday and i was like oh what did we do wrong and they said oh we want to walk out because of the impending legislation in florida it's been called the don't say gay bill the laws against transgender youth in texas and they said no we feel very i was helped out they said we feel very supported on rs rms but we need to offer our support for other students i said okay let's call it rally because those of us who've been doing this for a while walk out implies that they're not doing what we're supposed to do so we organized
028that the students took the lead on it so between 1 and 120 we probably had between 150 and 175 students come outside spoke in support of those students who are being affected in other places we had a number of community members who met on the sidewalk to offer support it was a really sort of a cool day in terms of students organizing to support other people and support themselves and i a lot of the adults were talking afterwards and i said one of the things that i think adults don't understand is that in situations like this for some adults this is sort of a nebulous concept expansive youth but for our students these are their friends so these aren't laws that are attacking people they don't know these are laws that are affecting people they've
029been going to school with for six years and that changes the whole dynamic of what's going on so that was something that was nice for us to see we also have another group seventh graders they did our seventh grade social studies in terms of what i don't know what the new term is what used to be called westward expansion um they did a whole unit on the trail of tears they talked about land acknowledgement they had expressed an interest of creating a land acknowledgement statement from archivist middle school so they're now meeting thursdays and lunch with mistake and mrs officer to sort of try to come up with a statement that we can go for let's see undertaking a benefit dinner for the ukraine nurse abby went ahead and gave that to go ahead for
030the 23rd so we're going to create something austin is going to help us cook ukrainian food we'll get more information high school students are here for march intensive we're planning two parental round tables for april break again now that we can let people back into the building things are sort of exploding i'm going tomorrow to a conference that's been set up through uei examining sort of strong schools and divided times how schools can help sort of bridge the gap and ever whitening seeing engulf between people i'm heartened by it because our students are pretty able to talk to each other even if we disagree with each other despite the lack of adult role models and they're only 12 weeks of school we're also trying to gear up towards the end of the year one of
031the things that happened when max mask protocols were relaxed was we got a ton of emails about what about graduation what about this like it's march we'll be okay we're gonna try to plan for it but obviously i would just say again sort of thank you to the incredible support that we've felt at rms for the last two years from the board i am looking forward to actually be able to meet people in person i've been sitting on the pandemic response committee for two years with people who i've never actually seen in real life which is sort of a weird concept to think of i've been meeting with these people for a long time every two weeks and i never know so i'm looking forward to a time when we can sit down and smile
032at each other so that's uh that's my report thank you 23rd is that april 23rd i'm assuming for the dinner on march 23rd oh so like next week yeah yeah strike while the irony yeah because i was also just wanted to say um that i just think it's wonderful that these kids are so engaged in what they believe in and that they feel supported to do that and as we solve the charity bagels as well i think that i think it's wonderful so kudos yeah and one of the things that we we realize is that we have a number of people is your march 23rd meeting for incoming parents online or in person so high school is at seven and married crosses but i'll go back and we're gonna try to make sure that we
033can report it if we can figure out how to do that so that people can come and it's really just an introduction we'll do bigger meetings and school tours leo and theo you guys i know you're in the middle of uh march intensive so if you want to believe you don't have to sit around through the whole meeting but we love having you here really hi so for in terms of the mask welcome today um i didn't i got what i didn't expect i asked my middle schooler as he was going out the door maybe chased him with a mask i didn't take the ass with you and he said no thank you so i thought i would come to a school full of people without masks and i was wearing mine and um it
034was about 80 dr chapman came in today to talk to us and check things out and he thought it was about eighty percent layering and twenty percent weren't and as usual we worried about how that would play out and our students lead the way and surprise us all the time about how easily and kindly they deal with things and how things are a non-issue for them and are a huge issue for us so we were happy and so we'll see how it goes but they're doing well with it um we have the we're the bears and yes there is a mascot that someone went out and purchased a day after we found out we were the bears and he's been wearing it everywhere so that's been pretty exciting and the mayor has come to school
035and been leaving its students as they come in the door and makes appearances so that's been good our logo contest or design contest will end at the beginning of may so we'll have a new logo that hopefully will be official but the marauder was more like a clip art logo and no one and it's different everywhere you look so this one will be actually official and hopefully will look the same in terms of branding hannover high school so um we are state champs in nordic spain for the boys and girls hockey since the last time so that felt pretty good um and we had a chorus concert the masterworks concert our course says it's more what we call serious concert in the winter orchestra and forest it was beautiful it was hard not to imagine
036you weren't like i thought it was a professional performance they were amazing for anyone who's there i brought someone from the outside who doesn't work here and they said they forgot that they weren't at the professional concert so if you ever have a chance to go to our concerts they're they're amazing uh march intense is in full swing we're really really proud of it you're welcome to come and see people um we're proud that it made it through the pandemic um we shut down right after the first mi and that we shut down that week of mi and did modifications and survived those modifications last year was all local and it was still really successful now it's people are going within four hours of hanover plus are here and it's working out well too so
037really proud of the program and and that it survived the whole way through and we're working a lot on sectioning for next year right now and trying to figure out where to put our resources and able to run the classes and by the way the e lab report for e-music is fully they're stocked all the fundraising worked out and they're ready to go and so we're going to run that course in the fall so sometimes you don't need budget money to get it done [Laughter] in a brief moment just curious to know how the response has been to that but more broadly i'm wondering if there needs to be a more focused intentional discussion about substance use and and are we doing what we should be doing what we can be doing what we ought
038to be doing so we started those conversations today actually i mean we've had those conversations all along um but we started today is there something else we could do is there an educational campaign like that alert created through the education to the kitchen table right like parents here you go start having the conversations you might not know how to have them but you got to have them because and maybe i might be ahead of myself so i don't think not every board member so we had recently had three students go to the hospital not from school but they went to the hospital um for taking something that looks like xanax that might be xanax that might not be xanax and the um and the police wanted us to alert everybody and we wanted to alert
039everybody um and so we sent it out thought it was better for people to know than not know so they could have conversations about prescription drugs with their kids and what you know dangers of that but also dangers of taking things and we don't know where they come from and they might not be what you think they are so i sent out an alert to parents was it monday yeah just letting everybody know um and was it a student that was distributing them or selling them or it's an yeah so so the police are investigating it it just felt like it was i mean there's stuff that goes on all the time in high school and we were dealing with the whole population of the town and it's in all of the great things within
040the population and all the bad things with the population so the the fact that people might be doing substances is not a surprising um fact to anyone who works with high school students and anyone who's raised them that that might be happening um but the and and i think we're always trying to work to make sure it's not and we're always working to to make sure we our students are educated surrounding that but this seemed like a higher level community issue that was you know sort of like a fire where we just wanted everyone to know so that they could be on the lookout so we explained what the pills looked like and we alerted the parents and the students to it so the kids are all right all the kids are all right and
041what is that uh prescription drive so is it mellow or is it it's a schedule for it's it's not overly prone to abuse but it we don't know if that's what it really is it's right being sold as that yeah yeah and so i mean i i wanted to bring it up tonight just so that board members were familiar with the situation but also to you know ask the question is there a broader level discussion that ought to be had you know not only at the administrative level but also at the board level you know are we providing the right supports both financially and and otherwise for this effort you know are we doing it in a coordinated fashion across all of our schools age appropriately things like that and should this be a topic
042for a future board discussion i mean we could if you wanted to know what we were doing with the middle schools doing what the elementary schools were doing like that could be something arranged for a board meeting or we could report on that and then people could decide whether they felt that they were comfortable with however things being dealt with or whether you felt like more resources needed to be thrown at it i was going to also suggest the other school in our community which is dartmouth and sort of how we're coordinating with them to some extent too um it just occurs to me that i and maybe i always wonder what i don't see that the students get and vice versa it was very communication channels aren't always the same there but i've seen
043nothing about not this specific incident but you know substance in general and and i'm sure that that community also has its fair share of right um substance use and so something that we should also be probably coordinating with because i think our older students certainly crossed paths with dartmouth students more than well more after right maybe we had a two-year creature right more than anybody always recognized no offense to the school board but i think that um what might be a better way to do this is to have a community forum and we did that with bullying or uh i think shortly after i got here we've had a couple of years of not much interaction in the schools with large groups of adults but i think if we had a public forum there are
044a lot of different things we could discuss there's just so much when you think about so we've all this has been an issue for us to discuss in schools since i think i was in middle school or earlier but um but now we've got school or states all around new hampshire that have legalized marijuana for one thing so it's readily available and there are all sorts of different forms just of marijuana that students are experimenting with and with these other drugs with with the prevalence of fentanyl at this point where one one bit of curiosity could turn into an emergency room visit or worse it probably is time for us to educate ourselves as adults i'm sure we could find somebody who's qualified to do that for us have a forum and and uh we'll
045probably draw a lot of folks sounds good separate issue in your notes you mentioned that there's going to be an upgrade about 350 computers yes what is happening with the old 350 computers it's a good question they usually get repurposed into carts and things that that we use but a lot of them are actually dying they have donated some before because that is one of our disposal of assets um avenues uh so i will say that i don't think we've done anything recently because we've been using them what they normally will do with if there's machines coming out of dresden that they can't use ingress then they'll repurpose them to norwich and ray school for the littles to use right because you know maybe right the processors might not be large enough to handle what
046you know they need at the high school but they're okay for the elementary schools um so they do repurpose quite a bit of them if they still have life to them um and we repurpose them within first and then if nobody you know picks up on those then we sometimes will offer them to outside but usually we haven't done that in a while because normally when they're offered outside the letter of thanks will come to the board so that you know where they've gone any other questions thank you julie thank you and the access points are wrong so moving on to policies so these are second readings again these are two of the policies that were read at sau as well questions discussion okay topic template for subsequent year meet norwich uh well we went
047over the agendas and they're sort of similar so we did not i guess in our hannover discussion did we have anything we wanted added or removed or changed i thought kelly wanted to add legislative update yes that's what it was in april before our board retreat yeah and then i was saying that um in the facilities updates which in this one is um in august but basically that as recommended by the dresden budget committee of which trick was on last year and here um you know kind of encouraging um kind of a more longer term view of facilities and so um sometimes it's been kind of what things have broken over the summer but kind of looking more of a kind of capital expenditure type of plan but we acknowledge that august is a very
048quick turnaround for that vision to come to fruition but basically that's kind of when we're talking about an ongoing topic template that's kind of the transition we'd be talking about when we're talking about facilities well do you think you'll have your strategy for facilities done by them the other thing that we've mentioned at hanover is just making sure that the mentions of retreat topics and such might align with our actual calendar because i think we have for example determining retreat topics in this meeting and then discussing them in april and then we don't actually have the retreat on our calendar at all um which might be good to put on the calendar especially for new board members and such on this sorry on our template it's on our calendar sorry thank you retreat topics the
049retreat is scheduled for saturday may 14th we haven't picked a location yet um in hanover we talked about uh fighting our legislators inviting the legislation legislators and discussing this strategic planning and we're going to talk about uh the patel work in all likelihood yeah does anyone else have any other additional topics they want to have here so can we approve the first thing look at all of them right in the budget what's that no that was part of the didn't we put it into the budget fifty or sixty thousand dollars and we ended up not adding it we're gonna try to fund it through surplus monies and so that's what kim's talking about here with trying to start to kick that off this summer so that in august we can bring an early capital assessment
050a capital assets plan correct you know without years and then we can engage with folks who do that kind of work to do a formal one so that by the time that you get your strategic plan in place that they should be on the same time frame so that hopefully by the time we get to next may we would have a more formal version it i'm sorry because i thought we'd get the last section we're gonna find it right jamie said don't fund it we should be able to hopefully take it out okay that's my comment as we get like not i thought i i would really like to add um at least sharing the climate action plan that came out of the hanover high school council or the environmental studies course i mean it
051was shared with me this just a couple weeks ago by someone who actually called me and said will you be committed to doing something with this for you for this or something for the board well i i think i think it should be a retreat topic but you can't take any deliberative action during a retreat but can we just talk about it sure sure you can receive information give you kind of presentations well i would just love to have it shared with the board i'm i mean maybe i'm the only person who didn't get it or hadn't seen it but it was shared a couple of years ago right they updated all the time i was going to say i think i think that's definitely should be a piece of our strategic plan right i
052mean i i don't think we can do a strategic plan without thinking about that element oh i completely agree it's just i've been on the board since the end of last summer and i've never heard about it so we got a couple years ago but i think it kind of went in hiatus over covets so right um so do we want to make it a retreat topic or just have a presentation at one of the next resolutions that's what i was that's what i was thinking that we'd make it a public available presentation so called an update yeah that would be great whatever you want to call it the council yes julie the climate uh document is that a council product or was that a sustainability club yeah could you coordinate can you coordinate with
053them and would love to have them come in and talk to the dresden board maybe in april or maybe okay great yeah um so a couple things one just the clarification so if it's if the retreat's going to be a warned public meeting of the world i mean you could make decisions at that meeting there's nothing that says that we can't make a decision i just never know what was that at stores pond that morning we don't traditionally traditionally we have not made decisions but it's going to be a warrant meeting so you would be elected the other thing i want to mention i don't know sort of where we landed on this conversation during the sau meeting about training but if we wanted to use portion of their treat to make sure that everybody
054was up to speed for example on new hampshire open meeting law that might be a good use of so who would give that training can we ask someone from nh you could ask someone from nhsba to do that um and i you know depending on timing and arrangement that should be fine doing it the third thing that i want to bring up especially to the chair because i was going to bring this up later on during future agenda topics i would like on behalf of the norwich board 20 minutes or so on the agenda um probably at the next meeting but maybe also on their treat to talk about the waiting study in vermont because there's a potential there for a very significant impact on taxpayers in our town as a result of some legislations
055being considered this session that is going to have dramatic implications i think for the entire district and so good like good impact no bad income like we're looking at a potential 30 tax rate increase in vermont um norwich sorry not vermont norwich um so you know i want to put it out there one i'd like some time on a very near future dressing agenda so that we can get everybody up to speed on it but you're still going to be on may 14th right tail end of the session where we'll have probably a better sense as to what's going to play out and i think it should be brought up at the retreat then excited to the retreat we've had the legislative update i think we're doing that sorry would that not be part of
056the legislative update if we're doing that but we certainly could but i just want to i mean this this one in particular is a big deal so we were going to invite the new hampshire legislators do we want to invite your norwich so you guys will take that you can yeah then i would if that's what you want to happen i would issue those invitations now because they're still in session right so i'll i'll do the invites to our legislators here and hannover if someone can reach out to whoever it is in vermont and i'm just i'm going to miss and then deb could you talk with nhsba about maybe getting someone to give us a it got a little in the weeds and it got a little lengthy and we have a lot of
057things we want to talk about so i think um we should just as you plan it maybe look at the time frames that we have and see if it's worth having someone come for 30 minutes if it's worth it to them and if not then you know there are other opportunities to achieve well there's a webinar on the 4th of april on right to no law meeting right same thing right with the new hampshire school board association and jim said she got a pdf as a result of attending that but covered everything so maybe you know i can go to the webinar and maybe that's all we need is yeah maybe you can yeah oh yeah that i'd be really good at we'll see what they have if you can see what they got okay
058okay i remember at the last four chairs there's some discussion about what should these elements be because by choosing the one thing you're also choosing not to do the other things trying to figure out what so is the open meeting the one thing you need to learn about what about all those other things well it's the one that's going to get us in trouble um i don't know what other what other things you're talking about i know equity came up um well we're talking how long are we talking the retreats like typically an hour you're really tearing it down no we've had half days before all day really when i first came here you've had uh all day well let's pick the halvard center do you wanna get leo to make donut bagels bigger there
059we go he just left four hours four hours for the retreat or do we want i i think a half a day's reasonable to help us answer that question um so what is on the retreat agenda because i know we we suggested things at the hanover meeting i don't know if norwich had a separate discussion and so i just wanted do we know what that short list last slash long list is right now that's what was the agenda item tonight we're trying we're just creating a list now and then i think in april is when we pare it down to okay so we'll have another discussion right so so far that we've when we're at the hanover meeting there's a lot of discuss discussion about doing another legislative meeting and when we did that last
060time we recall at the richmond middle school we had legislators from from both sides of the river and we had sort of a general presentation and then we broke into our respective states and then had the legislative the fever dive with the legislators in those sessions i don't know if that if you felt that was useful or not but we could set something like that up but if if we're going to have a training i don't know that a 30-minute training is going to be worth having someone travel up here maybe yeah unless we did something by zoom so um just so i'm going to repeat myself from the hannover meeting but just since we're adding to the list um so i actually think the strategic plan needs to be an agenda item here um
061i think the most important things for this because there's obviously an existing group that talks with the strategic plan but i just want us all as board members to understand what it is because this is going to be a strategic plan that the board will adopt hopefully um and so just kind of get on this page about what it is what it isn't and the timeline i think it's really important kind of who who's going to be involved because i'm pretty sure we're going to be asked as all board members to participate probably somehow in some venue for that so um that's one thing um another thing that i think um is kind of bored goals like kind of as a group thinking about that we will be establishing board goals if you're going to
062kick off that thought process that's a great time to brainstorm um another thing is um how you know kind of really thinking retreat and we're thinking relax you know kind of kicking our shoes back and thinking bigger picture like how do we improve how what we do in meetings um what have we learned we tend not to really reflect a lot and discuss um improvements on how we do and so i think having a discussion about um how we consolidate meetings what uh committees do we not need uh what's what don't we have that it seems like we need um you know something like that because we tend to kick start every march with just kind of using what our existing committee structure is in our existing meetings and and all of that and if
063there's any sort of lessons learned um i think we could kind of talk about that and be and then retrieve the format neil i would make a suggestion to the chair work together with the administration to try to take all of the ideas that have been brought forward this evening and tear it down to a reasonable agenda so when you say chair which chair are you referring i'm talking well the one that i'm looking at the four chips because this is terrible if that was how the chair wanted to operate then sure so but i just wanted to walk away from the meeting tonight with the sense that somebody is going to own the creation of the agenda here yeah the four chairs will be the source um now kim's point about looking at how
064we're organized and what we do part of the strategic plan is the government's gov governance section right and it wouldn't that fall into there so i think we can walk and choose them at the same time i think we can walk into gum at the same time i don't think we need to incorporate that into a systems level because i know we're talking about like the level three kind of pieces it also includes the budget includes a bunch of other things and if we can just say hey we should always have for example in a four chairs meeting which i know i'm not four chairs but i attended and made a comment we could look about consolidating our meetings and can we do concurrent meetings and i know jay was gonna ask our legal about
065that so i guess the question is what does legal say you know that kind of a thing yes we can yes we can great so i'm just saying like we can make improvements you know sooner than later so we'll add that to the list i got it and when's our next four we haven't called the four chairs that's right okay so we'll probably have one in the next two weeks and then we'll have something to bring back to each of the school boards in april but are we fine with a well i'm speaking against dresden are we fine with a four hour retreat lunch or something like that and discuss with them maybe two hours in the morning lunch and then two hours later yeah sounds good jane have we ever actually talked about the
066four subgroups of strategic planning who's doing one sure i can run around quickly right now the chairs have each volunteered to spearhead one of one of four subcommittees and one of the things they'll do when they actually meet is decide if they're aptly categorized but like there's essentially an academic one a student support social emotional learning committee there is systems and operations and there's a facilities and so ben has academic one lisa volunteered for the social emotional one rick's doing systems and operations and tom has a very disappeared facility since he deals with every single board meeting in norwich so if anyone else has any additional things i'd like to see on the list of agenda topics please email one of the chairs and we'll add it to the list so moving on to uh
067business requiring action does someone want to make a motion by descent move to group items b c d and e by consent check it hello trappiness yes johnson yes thank you okay moving to committee reports um do we have any reports from any of the existing committees at this point i don't know if this is technically a committee but from the new hampshire school boards association i'm just going to repeal the liaison so you're right well as kim reported and then it eventually made it into the newspaper but she broke the news the the new hampshire legislature killed house bill 1255 they basically said it's an expedient to legislate and i think this is entirely the result of things like 3 000 people sending messages being against the bill the school board being against the
068bill and writing the resolution they really were not expecting such an outcry and they're going to fiddle with it and they're going to come back with it in the next legislative session but at the moment it's unless it comes up in the next two days and a majority decides to do something other than what the education committee is recommending it's it's um asleep right now it's not dead yep um so related to that i want to let the board know that um a former work colleague of mine actually sits on the rivendell school board and every now and then we talk you know because we're the other interstate school district um and he is very in tune with some of the stuff that's going on related to some of the voucher stuff that's being considered
069up there and he's quite alarmed by it and um he was wondering if there was some interest in in our board maybe getting involved um in some you know advocacy stuff or at least you know from uh uh informational standpoint of all of us getting up to speed on this sort of thing i said let's wait until after we have our reorg meeting because i don't think that i'm the right person for that i just i got a little bit too much going on the vermont side to keep it all straight i would like to pass this connection off to another board member and dresden hopefully a hanover board member i'm kind of peeking at deb because i think the match would be good but to establish like i can do the introductions especially the
070relationship but we would have a little bit more of a connection with rivendell on some of these issues and so what are he's thinking we would put together a joint nope at this stage i think it's just a matter of the two boards having a way to communicate with one another he's got some perspectives that he's shared with his board on some of the voucher issues that are going on right now that i think might resonate with this board as well and what i could see coming out of the relationship are there times when maybe the two boards decide to issue joint statements or come up with joint resolutions or testify together you know before the legislature those sorts of things to leverage maybe a very small economy of scale on these things and i
071know that our compact has language in there about one state cannot detrimentally impact the other state's students has that have you guys started talking about that we have vermont yeah not on the vermont side but this rivendell board member he and i have talked about this before as to you know is this finally the issue that might trip that clause of the interstate agreement um i don't know i don't know that we're there yet but i just i want to be able to hand off this relationship to somebody else on the board that might be able to just run with it better than i could i'm happy to be put in touch with him okay so i can do the introductions and get the vermont to see which was oh he's from new york rivendell
072so that's don't know how about septic systems [Laughter] what's that oh yeah i just wanted to not not to add to deb's workload but i had a conversation with the um lebanon school board chair today um she had called me about a couple of things and it just occurs to me that it it might be worthwhile to have some sort of a relationship with them as well um especially if we're trying to make some powerful statements about um changes we see coming and how they how we might be able to work together thank you lisa any other committee reports report the chair i don't have anything to report at this time um moving on to jay i could report that i broke a tooth today and i'm really uncomfortable talking but um i do want
073to quickly mention that as we talk about retreats and we talk about strategic planning we're making solid steady progress on the sort of prerequisite work with a strategic plan that we talked about with portrait of a graduate we had an initial organizational meeting more or less with the towel we've scheduled the first formal design meeting and patel will they will manage that meeting completely and then robin and i will receive subsequent training with patel to manage the three follow-up meetings that first meeting is about a two and a half hour session and the three follow-up meetings are about an hour and a half and we should have essentially our work almost complete with portrait of a graduate at the conclusion of that fourth meeting and the intent is to have that done by may we
074we now have our board chairs designated for our subcommittees and so we're working on templates for that work as we speak so that each of those chairs will be paired with a senior administrator to get those off the ground in advance of and sort of parallel with the portrait of a graduate work we just don't feel we have the time to wait until the portrait is done before those those committees subcommittees actually begin their work so that will happen and what's encouraging to me is sort of in different realms we have three uh important committees doing work that will ultimately converge so the equity committee made i i feel like as neil outlined earlier um the equity committee made some strides i think the last meeting we separated and we began to work on a
075skeleton of an actual policy regarding equity and we had people with some divergent views working together and actually put together uh the heart of a document that we we borrowed essentially from a vermont school boards association a model policy but we've now we're adapting it to make it our own meanwhile the evaluation committee is almost done with its work in uh and it's it's pretty significant work it's it's a committee that was that was [Music] uh launched as a result of not not the last negotiation with the ata but the prior one and we agreed upon a new framework for the entire our entire educational program with regard to teaching and we've adopted the charlotte danielson model that's our intent anyway which is a a widely used internationally used framework for teaching [Music] that focuses
076on professional development it focuses focuses on enhancing enhancing teacher practice so the evaluation supervision process becomes less of a gotcha and more of a collaborative effort to make sure that we're all trying to continuously improve that work is advanced to the point where we're we're just rewriting policies and as you saw in tim's presentation there's already training work being done on the danielson model and that probably the key change for that is going to be that instead of us going through what sometimes feels like a very perfunctory observation process every single year with every teacher teachers that have already been identified as being quite proficient in their craft will be on a three year cycle in the intervening two years they'll have a chance to do things like action research conference presentations other things to
077to sort of showcase their professional development and have that count toward their evaluation and then our our more novice teachers will have a much more formal structured approach and once teachers achieve tenure again they'll have that opportunity to do things that are more creative and then then the third obviously is the strategic planning committee itself as these two very important academic pieces and the equity piece takes shape they all need to be housed within that strategic planning context so we end up you know be nice if we had the strategic plan done first and then and then had these other committees doing work but as we said from the outset um for whatever reason we're in a position where we're essentially building a foundation under a building and so um once we have that underway
078and outlined it will provide us all a lot more structure and direction as we do all the things that we do um we shouldn't simply be relying on a an agenda topic template we should actually have a plan that we're working and uh that's uh till the bitter end what i'm uh i'm committed to and i know our team is too so that's my report any questions or comments just preparation so that there's a meeting coming up on monday and that that is sorry has that one been warned that is we're it has not been warned and we're actually thinking we don't have to so we're going to um i'll have an opinion on that tomorrow i would i would if you're going to extend an invitation to the board and the board can join
079and it's covering topics that would fall under the board's purview well i guess topics that fall under the board's purview would be like what do you aspire for for your children it's that's the the nature this is still arguing if it's part of strategic planning i mean we can take it offline but i think the right thing to do is to warn that meeting okay we can talk about it what do you do well the larger issues that we're hoping to do by zoom because we have so many people we're trying to let that reach so sure but then the body would need to attend in person or foreign but if the school board is not invited no this is a portrait of a fortune why don't i follow up with rick and jay offline
080about this and running a reference statute but i i'm just curious as part of that if if somehow it happens as a non-meeting or if it does not involve the board and then it's reported out publicly to at a board meeting or at this retreat i'm wondering if that is more what you want to achieve and i guess that's the question right so you guys talk about online that would be my if you don't want board input per se at this stage then i have i have a call tomorrow with lobby star peter so we'll make sure we're on board any other questions or how much okay well you heard good news about our moved mask welcome that was across the board from all the schools i heard positive things and it sounds like the
081elementary schools had fewer students within this they estimated about 50 of our students at the elementary school so i think we're easing it into it nicely and i'll keep you posted as how that's going and what our numbers are looking like they're still reporting any cases to me and it's remained very consistent so i'll keep looking at that and making sure we're still going in the right direction um we have we got our curriculum work once again this week i'm meeting with the elementary first and second grade and next week i'll meet with the math team at the high school and on the 30th we'll meet with all of the other subject areas of the high school and that's the nsat day it's a great day for us to actually do curriculum work for the
082groups that are not proctoring so that will be a big day for us but we'll continue that work through april one other thing i'll add to jay's discussion about the evaluation piece is we um over the past two weeks have extended that to the administrative team and i've started to really look at calibrating the danielson framework i have teachers across the schools volunteer many at the high school and middle school allowing us to bring several administrators at the same time into their classrooms to do 20 to 30 minute observations and following that the administrators were involved met just to go through the danish and rubric domains two and three to see where we all stood and celebrate so that was a really fruitful effort and i feel like we're making good progress in that area
083as well so that i'm going to try to continue maybe to do this a couple more times over the course of the school year so we're in good shape when we actually begin doing and using the danielson framework and that's it for my presentation tonight thank you any questions comments for robert okay thank you moving on to jamie yeah i was checking out rivendell's page boy their clas ball of 92 and the captain story what's going on can you translate that what did she say the clas below it it makes sense through the vermont votes here the cla which is similar in new hampshire to the equalized uh equalized valuation or your net equalized valuation they call it a cla common level of the person then it adjusts the tax rate and so the more
084it drops the larger your tax rate it's not a good situation you have to reassess re-evaluate um anyway so uh let me get back to you folks here we'll just shut that one reading through their annual report i know it's sad when things like that fascinate me isn't it uh so when you speak to only star peters tomorrow would you ask them where the legal letter is so i could have my audit finalized they'll save us a call so we have a draft audit posted because we're still waiting for the legal letter um they have to the minute the audit comes out in draft format you have to send a letter to legal so that they can you know formally file a letter with the auditors as this status if anything's changed so we're just
085waiting for that to occur um this will go into final format as soon as they get that letter and then we'll bring the governance documents to you in the next month which is fine because it's not a part of the official audit documents that have to be filed with the state and the feds we did find we came in very close to where we thought we would the easiest part to read is the last three pages of pages excuse me which is the schedules the governance letter we have no findings the audit is is fine um the governance letter does mention a few things i've seen it we're just gonna we're waiting for some responses um there's some repeat comments that we know about um you know one is about maintaining the treasurer maintaining a
086separate set of books um and you know our treasure is very engaged it's just one thing that new hampshire requires so we'll continue to work with her to to work through that the other one is the manner of which and we've had this conversation many times the manner in which we've historically done our budgeting here for dresden because we're an interstate district is that we budget for general fund and then we run most of the other funds through it out to their own forms and in new hampshire they want you to budget for all your funds when you do that we haven't embraced that because it will totally skew all of our numbers on our prior historical budgets i did speak with the head auditor and so next year um i said to her what
087if we put that out on a separate warrant article so we would basically put out you know your total of your grants funds your food service funds your special revenue funds which are self-supporting funds you only spend what you take in on a separate article and that would cover that that governance discussion that's right yeah that was fine yeah she said that would that would be fine she said that's an odd way to do it most districts don't but it would it would meet the guidelines um i think that keeps it cleaner for us because historically we've always showed you know the same type of graphs and charts and if you go and add another you know say million dollars to it people are going to go oh my god it went up by a
088million when really the general fund won't have gone up by a million right there are special revenue funds that are outside of the general fund um so we can handle it with a separate warrant yeah but we'll have that discussion yeah we can talk about it we want to go home we don't want to talk we'll talk about it next month we'll bring the letter and i think that then there was just a few other mentions of you know deposits in some of the student activity accounts and you know normal stuff that they do uh small samplings and they find little things um so that's really it and then what i would like to do because the um finance committee is usually interested in having um you know a meeting we usually meet at the
089same time that the towns audits come out so that we can do it all at once and so that does require your permission because these documents do belong to the school district and you're the you know people in charge of what goes on so for us to be able to have our auditors come and kind of go through the audits for the different districts with them and then um for them to be able to ask questions about it um and you just at the next meeting you can just say you know you're fine with doing that and allowing for them you know to ask questions because kim kim would be there as a board member you know on the finance committee and i would be there as the person you know from the district for
090the finances so they don't really ask about knowledge they just ask about president so no no um no you know crazy different weird things this year which is amazing because we had to keep telling them that you know it was a code review any questions or comments for jim and we're working on we've been having meetings already about all of the bond articles that pass so we're working towards um some you know what the steps are through that with the athletic folks uh megan and the coaches and everything we're going to try to get a hold of our track coach and set up a meeting so does the athletic advisory committee are they intimately involved with anything going forward right now do we need to get someone no as the chair immediately no be right
091because and i would say that it would be nice if they want to be but because we have negan's involved the coaches involved myself tony um you know anybody else that is you know the parents of the baseball parents we're going to let them come in and be involved they want to do some fundraising so um yeah so we're moving along with projects and trying to wrap up some of the ones that we have open thank you okay okay uh we have to move into non-public so people at home we're gonna move into non-public for a few minutes to discuss teacher nominations for next year and then we'll come back here and vote on it in public so do i have someone who wants to leave us and did not help okay we're taking it
092on a public session on the rsa 91-8432 [Music] personnel remember the second step yes christy yes and tom will you send us the link again please or is it the same one yes and i already did okay thank you and uh johnson yes i just wanted to amend uh the reason why we went into nonpublic one was to talk about personalization and then we also had a student issue that came up we discussed that in college so now that we're back in the public i have a motion to approve the nominations move to approve the 2223 certified staff nomination list for both richmond middle school and hanover high school as presented stephan deb [Music] is there and johnson yes so agenda topics for next meeting please get them to me i know one of the
093agendas will be talking about finalizing the retreat um waiting studying and um our next meeting is scheduled for tuesday april 26 at seven o'clock here in the library anyone have anything else you got a motion to adjourn i moved to during the meeting at 9 21 second yeah yes johnson yes thank you hope you feel better lisa thank you they'll have a lobster on me