Norwich School Board 20211103

001i'd like to call to order the norwich school board regular meeting of november 3rd 2021 at 6 35 pm um the first uh item on our review but i would like to introduce the board members in the billings is our new note taker for our minute thank you linda for being here tonight with the big desk and uh appreciate you doing this for us um i do have some proposed uh edits to our agenda if the board is willing given that we will be appointing a new member to the world tonight uh to kill kelly percy's uh recently vacated role i was hoping we could move up to the front of the agenda actually right after this the um couple of items will be welcome reward candidates which would include a question and answer piece

002and then a potential executive session followed by the appointment of the new board members that's the first piece so we also have uh the member student services great now here tonight who is following up on a request for some more information on a report that he did earlier in the year the school year and uh he was going to follow up on that discussion uh it's posted currently to principal's report that was hoping to move up to the beginning seeing that then we will [Music] go into the welcome of our award candidates and this evening we have with us in and half of the quarter stephanie cashman see stuart richards and willie traynor so thank you very much first of all for putting your names forward for this seat um the board members know what

003uh a big uh job this is i think that's a big job and we uh like to district we do have that pleasure working with our colleagues like ben keane with us tonight from the hanover school awards so thank you for that this is uh it's good work and we're uh very fortunate to be able to work with our educators so we're looking forward to hearing from all of you tonight the way i like this to play out is i'll invite each of you to give us about two or three minutes background on your interest in the board and then i'll open it up to board members for a short period of question and answer and we'll do uh that with each of you starting with a front here if that's okay for the microphones

004and whatnot and just uh your full name and uh where you live so we know where you live yeah so let me just give like a little brief cover a little bit while you're interested okay um so i'm originally from southern new hampshire um i have a degree in journalism and then also got my mda from university um i now work i actually i run my own business doing medical device sales um in the last 10 or so years we've lived in austria um connecticut pennsylvania just outside washington dc and then we moved here um because my husband took the men's ice hockey coaching position at dartmouth um and so we were looking with this move to kind of establish the roots and settle down and raise our kids and be here for a while

005and so we feel really invested in the town we primarily chose norwich because of the school and the reputation here so i guess you know i personally just really want to be involved in the town the school and the community it's really important to us and um you know i'm a newer member of the community but i would hope that the board would see that as kind of you know a different perspective and a new remember making a nice addition to the to the team thank you thank you well if you don't mind we'll just uh oh sure questions okay so my question then is are there any specific issues uh that ward faces that you're specifically interested in taking behind um not specifically nothing no yeah nothing specific but just kind of general issues

006yes uh as far as committee work goes are there specific needs that you might be interested in um i might be interested in the budget and i'm kind of navigating that uh they'll get kind of repetitive by the time we get through all the candidates so um aside from the septic issue um can you think of like what the what the other two big issues in in either norwich or just school um i mean again my involvement is minimal right now but i would think that some of the major issues are probably involving the budget um it seems like there's an influx of young families in the town so finding the resources and staff to accommodate that in schools is probably one issue and then um just being you know in a time of a

007pandemic i would imagine that's another major issue that you deal with on a daily basis but i would like to think that um maybe within the next year we'll be coming out of that where there will be a lot of gray area that the school board's really going to have to navigate so i think those are probably two major issues that i anticipate if i'm working and this is more so in the process of appointing someone i just want to make sure that we don't inadvertently appoint someone who might have a conflict of interest just some pro forma questions i'm assuming that neither you or anyone in your family currently works for the school district no okay um and either you or anyone in your family work for a company that contracts directly to the

008school and either you or anyone in your family have any current um legal requests or challenges the only other thing i should mention in full disclosure that i'm expecting my third little girl and so um you know that will happen this year i don't anticipate it um hindering my ability to pursue any responsibilities or attend board meetings because my husband will be out of season [Laughter] um um i have one but um just so you know um when i joined the board one of my fellow new journeys was also present at the time so it doesn't it doesn't appear to be there's a lot of issues that come up that engender strong feelings um on the part of many people in town and i'm just wondering um if you and truth like i have one

009yeah it's hard to say this um like just sort of how do you anticipate handling that because the people that have these strong feelings other people that you stand in line with the gym and that other things happen and so there are rules that we have about being able to represent or you can't represent the board when you go out in public you you just start speaking as a private citizen right um but i just was also wondering have you given any thought to that and um yeah i mean i think that there's like that issue and there's probably more that aren't necessarily like black and white and there's going to be opposing views i think it's kind of the school board's responsibility to hear both sides and satisfy that but come to some sort

010of neutral ground um i mean i guess that would be my thought towards it any other questions um is there any experience you've had in all your past my kids are young and i kind of figured it would be this chapter of our lives where i would get involved and so you know and all those other places while i you know was involved in the town in different ways it wasn't directly at this school thank you questions thanks for listening all right stephanie would you spell your last name for me yep it's passion c-a-s-h-m-a-n hmm and i'm not sure if i can allow [Laughter] so i guess the first question you might ask me what am i doing here and the answer is pretty simple and that is that uh i've got uh grandchildren sam

011is eight samantha is eight and jackson was six and then in the way school and i feel that they are the future of uh not only this town but perhaps of this country mary and my wife at dartmouth for 17 years uh and i moved to norwich 38 years ago in taxes ever since for better or worse and we moved our two boys daniel and jordan here to provide a better education for them uh it was most unfortunate my boys were greeted by bullying when we arrived here in knowledge at the cross school they were big kids who ended up playing football at darkness and at middlebury and so they were able to resolve that situation on their own because at the time there really was not much help from the administration unfortunately so and

012i'm hoping that the problem no longer exists or if it does that it's dealt with appropriately so before moving to vermont 53 years ago my background was at general electric and citibank and that was in human resources since that time i've been been a successful real estate developer and entrepreneur as the first and largest ski area developer killington far cry from my first job in vermont as a professional you're talking about school my first job as a professional ski patrolman earning the grandson 1.65 an hour at that time you work 70 hours a week the times they are changing retiring from real estate in my 40s my son drafted me to help him with a new business called local rescue it started with three guys in a room in boston and now encompasses hundreds of

013employees worldwide with a majority of employees who are round or black and there is a strong partnership with jobs officers there are also hundreds of air providers doctors hospitals and clinics on the global rescues network today global rescue is an exceptional crisis response company offering medical and security advice and evacuation and that's from anywhere in the world actually mount everest the amazon doesn't matter where you vote it gives me great pleasure to save lives worldwide i love the letters and emails that say thank god for global rescue you save my life they come in a weekly bi-weekly basis the relevance of my professional life to serving on the school board relates to having managed multi-million dollar budgets and having a strong financial skill set i've worked with children and addressed their names most of my

014life having won the balfour lakes summer camp and founded and directed the ford's air speed academy both experiences have given me a great opportunity to work with and understand kids provide an educational experience as a member of the sau 70 equity committee i've been given the opportunity to make recommendations that ensure that every child has the opportunity to achieve and that the resources that are needed to enable the achievement are available at the same time that we provide opportunities to achieve i would hope that would make sure that we uphold the highest academic standards for every level of learning in doing all school board and or committee work i think it's essential that every opportunity listen to and held in regard and that an open mind be kept at all times and that all children

015and adults be treated with compassion and respect thanks for considering my appointment i'd like to answer any questions and i'll start with the first question as well which is are there any particular issues before the board manages our specific interests you've seen me here a number of times bugging you about about the wastewater system and i probably will do that again tonight so if you forgive me so i mean there are other issues there's plenty of other issues that are part of the uh school system i mean not the least certainly is financed um teachers pay the academic curriculum socialization of the students i mean all of these things weigh in the balance and it's i wouldn't i i'm not going to write them one two three four i don't think they're all important so

016they all need to be given the right consideration specific committee work that i've been interested in subcommittee work um well i have a lot of background in development and in wastewater so to the extent that i could be helpful there i would like to be i mean i'd like to have a nickel for every time i've gone through a zoning board meeting or act 250 or any other things that are involved in yeah um thank you for playing i really really appreciate it and i and neil serve on the equity committee with you and i just wondered um if you could talk a little bit about how serving on that committee um has informed or will inform your work with the more general board of dresden sau and norwood i think the charge the very

017charge of the equity committee is really important i think that we have to be extremely mindful of that as one has pointed out to me it's been publicized a number of times so i won't repeat it here but each of them all of the ei films are are quite important so and there are obviously different points of view i think as to where the emphasis should lie and how how things should be how we should move forward with that so and i i think that the opinions of of the 19 and perhaps soon to be 23 people or 22 people or whatever the number turns out to be they think that those opinions i think will weigh in the balance in terms of trying to understand the direction that we take to try and be

018as considered considerate as we can providing the proper resources for those that need them and also trying to be mindful respectful and understanding of those that need some special help thank you other questions same two there's from the first candidate so aside from the separate system what do you feel are the two biggest issues you're going to force talk about septic okay so i think the probably the budget is probably the most sensitive issue in town or could be the most sensitive issue in town how how to spend our money how to spend it wisely what we should emphasize in the spending of our money i think that's really important um the things that interplay with the budget considerations are i mean there's a bunch of them there's transportation how we should how we should

019manage our transportation and make it environmentally friendly how we should work with our teachers to make sure that they are compensated fairly and i think that they're if i'm not mistaken i think that they're well first of all 80 of the of the budget eighty percent of the town budget if i'd like to say it correctly here come wrong but eighty percent of the town budget comes from the school and i think a further 75 percent comes from paying teachers does that sound right to all of you it's close to 65 compensation 70 okay so i'm a little bit higher a little bit higher okay but whatever the number is it's certainly it's the bulk and it's an important part of the whole picture so i would i think that that needs um that needs

020attention from the school board and there there are ways i believe to to try and understand how to fairly compensate our teachers my understanding is again currently there there's something wrong my understanding is that we do compensate our teachers at this point why you know this probably better but that we do compensate our our teachers on the high end in the state of vermont that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay them more but i think that has to be recognized because and along with that you have to understand that the that the cost of living in norwich is on the high end as well i think everybody who lives here understands that so i got into a second a second area that is separated apart from the budget but um and that's what you said

021yeah um and then so related to conflict of interest just um no like you or anyone in your family work for the district i do know you normally aim as anybody in a business that has a direct contract with the school district no we did offer some free services actually global rescue offered some free services to uh the ray school to try and help with the security situation there and i don't know that anything has happened i don't know that we did offer anything here at the crosswalk i think it was offered to the to the race because there were inexpensive measures that could have been taken that were taken to provide better security for um for reasonable now that now that we're talking about that it's making me think that that's a very important

022feature that i should have mentioned when we asked for two so i that declared by no current arrangement between global rescue and any of our sources [Music] do you or anyone in your family currently have a legal uh action or legal request before this before any of our boards uh i don't think so i don't know of any all right that's the best way i can answer that is i'm not aware of any and if i do find out i certainly can change my answer other questions [Music] that's what maybe just help me double step my head because i also need to talk [Music] i'm just kind of confused like where those issues stand so the last time you were here at the last word meeting about when you talked about a concern about that

023memo and the use of pronouns and the use yes i expressed my concern i thought that it was inadvisable and improper actually to have um boys walk into girls bathrooms and potentially expose themselves in a girl's bathroom simply because they they were transgender i think that it would be a much better situation if it's the transgender folks had their own bathrooms if that was what was necessary to safeguard the the health and safety of thank you hi i'm lily treyman i live in norwich 236 main street and i think i know most of you um i can give you my background and a little bit about why i like to serve on this report so i [Music] my background academically is in both history and biology and master's degree from oxford in biological anthropology i

024have a phd from mit immunology so i can spend your year about the pandemic for as long as you want me to um i moved to norwood with my family seven years ago i have three kids they're currently in grades three six and nine in the school system um we moved to norwich because we heard it was a great community it had a lot of active members and we found that to be very true i put my kids in the child care center when we moved here and i served on the board there for two years i've served as the pto liaison to various classrooms with my kids from dr marion cross um i am currently president of the women's club and i've gotten to know a whole cross-section of the community from parents at

025marion cross to the people who wander into my yarn store to the women's club um i am winding down my involvement with the women's club my president's term comes to an end in june and i was looking around for something else to do um since my kids have been at marion cross for the last seven years i really thought it might be a good time to try and join the school board to weigh in on all the things that i see going on around the school and over in the high school and next year i'll have the trifecta of one kid at each school so um i think that would be a great addition to the board coming from several volunteer positions within norwich knowing the wide cross section of the community and having kids

026in the school system thank you i'll start off with my are there any specific areas of interest that the board is facing now to use i'm very interested in diversity equity and inclusion connect with the committee and now i would like to focus on them i'm also interested in the teacher uh salary compensation negotiations well with that i think you answered my next question support for that committee work the dei aside from the septic system what do you think are the two biggest issues that um either norwich or dresden face um so the word on the playground right now um is very much focused on the playground and also the woods so those are two issues but i think the larger issue there is communication between the sau and the norwich school districts and working

027out the mechanics of use of green and the fried nature area at the same time perhaps bringing our playgrounds up to the standard you see the race school um and another issue and when you say communication i think there's some lack of communication between the town of norwich and the school board and yes um and as everyone else has said budgeting is always an issue but that is really not what's occupying the parents minds on the playground and then my standard conflict of interest questions the you or anyone in your family currently work for the school district you or anywhere in the family currently have a business that has a direct contract within you and um did you or anyone in your family filed uh legal action or requested the school district that's it other

028questions thank you very much [Music] doing my best with that thank you to all of you for all the background and answering the questions very much appreciated um i would like to entertain your motion uh move to enter executive session in accordance with title 1 section 313 item a 3 the appointment or employment or evaluation of a public officer or employee provided the public body should make a final decision to hire or appoint a public officer or employee in an open meeting and shall explain the reasons for its final decision during the open meeting i stepped [Laughter] thank you so we will retire to the library classroom so first i'll need a motion to re-enter a public section this is all in favor attempt to call it session and that i'd first like to say

029thank you again to our three candidates tonight this is not an easy process and i can relate very directly because i have been through it twice myself once getting appointed [Music] do i have any other nominations all those in favor of what they turn during school so thank you lilly thank you also stewart and thank you very much stephanie for your time coming out and uh your desire to serve on board i can assure you that there will be many more opportunities to serve the board if not directly on the board at this time but also future iterations of the board when there are times to run for the board we do stuart as he's mentioned is already serving on one of our board committees in the uh committee we also are entering into a

030strategic planning process that we need lots of support and a lot of volunteer time and commitment to those communities which we will be having i think we've set along for basically subcommittees that uh should uh cover areas that are of interest to everyone it's certainly of interest in us and we need support for people who have expertise in those areas so thank you very much for that um i will note and i should have noted this at the beginning that this is obviously a position that lasts until the town meeting day if the early industries decides to run again or if anyone wishes to put their name into the um for the vote on time meeting day we would have to go through the process i don't have the extracting telling me it is in

031january when we need to get signatures to get out you stephanie thank you stork and thank you lily um you're welcome to obviously stay tonight really you're not an official member until you're sworn in by bonnie monday so you won't have to make a trip over to town all i meant to reach out to her today someone would be coming um but i did not i will do that first thing tomorrow morning she knows what to do anyways um [Music] kind when he we mentioned that briefly that i will tell you just for the folks that did not get selected tonight when tom was appointed i actually the first time around i was the one that asked tom if he would be willing to apply for the physician board and then he didn't get it

032and so i just want you all to know that and somehow i i think it ended up okay but i'm not sure but yes that's how it goes uh but at this point in time i think we just did the board felt that lily was the best fit thank you all sorry yeah sorry um again just to say thanks to all three of you but also wanted to say um thank you to kelly percy um for serving and we're sorry that she had to resign and we miss her so thank you i've reminiscent of speeding that she was a great member of the award serving for many years in her last uh days as the seo board chair which was a huge role coming through the pandemic here and taking inside strategic planning so she

033is greatly missed i don't know if hope she's watching getting some rest um but at some point in the future we'll hopefully be able to thank her more properly in person too so thanks um so with that uh we can move on to our regular business tonight thank you again all uh the next item up on our agenda is public input and public comment and so if anyone would think i really wanted to join i'm sorry we don't have a name for you [Music] just uh so yes that's a public in the public commerce uh are there any public tonight who would like to make any comments and if not here i'll check as well [Music] so i should check and see yes i can hear you can you hear me hi everybody um so

034i sent a report to tom i don't know if you guys can see it but it's not too much stuff um for the month of october we had our very fun and popular tea towel fundraiser and i want to thank caitlin eastman for coordinating all those lovely portraits of the kids and ashley clapp for help administrating it um we also had halloween which was pretty cool because this year it felt a little bit more normal compared to last we had our regular um candy collection and we're able to kind of having the boxes kind of where they normally were and collecting candy and then able to distribute it to the towns so thanks for everybody who participated in that and molly genting who helped me distribute the candy the other big thing we did this

035month was our fall grants and we had 19 applications which is kind of a lot for us in one grant cycle and um we were lev able to award um i'm going to get my piece of paper 705 in grants so 11 out of the 19. for us that's a lot we tapped into our um reserves to do that um christina our treasurer is listening and she is very valuable with this stuff keeping us on track and making sure we are doing our you know appropriate spending but we thought that this was the year to tap into our reserves considering what the teachers have been dealing with with a pandemic for the last two years so this was a good year to say yes and try to go um big and we did so it's

036pretty cool um we got lots of stuff document cameras die cutting machines educational kits lego technology kits headphones and another big donation to the mcs swing set that they're trying to fundraise for and lots and lots of books money for books um so that was kind of our big thing this fall so thank you to the everybody on our finance committee because us processing 19 grants was a lot and we had um some long meetings but good results in november we have just um planned our meeting for tomorrow night at the fire pit um sean helped me get a burn permit for that so thank you sean it's gonna be cold but we're gonna do it anyway and hopefully it'll be fun and then we just have a coffee with sean on wednesday morning uh

037november 10th so people can come and kind of talk to sean and greg those are very useful i think and then we're going to try to do the staff appreciation fall brunch on the 19th of november as well and um sean has been helpful with that we can hopefully get some teachers to drop some um things off for the teach the i'm sorry get some parents to drop some fun food off of the teachers thanks very much stephanie as always thank you yeah okay well thank you very much thanks for all the pto is doing as always it's an incredible amount of i will ask in a moment if anyone here has any questions but well i've got something on my mind or are you raising your hand i'm sorry so i have a comment

038that's kind of was would have been in public comment but i can kind of kind of tie it into the pto thing as well so it's half me as a public comment as a parent and half as a pto comment um we got a lot of requests for books um and i kind of felt in the finance committee were kind of noting it it was a little bit beyond it almost seemed like it was supplementing the curriculum as opposed to a um you know extra and my son is a middle school student and which is great but he has two sets of books for his math one he gets to keep at home and one he has at school and then i'm also doing something where i drop off the breakfast helping greg drop off

039the breakfast at the high school and my son is now a middle school student and between the books and dropping things off at the different facilities equitable distribution of resources in the schools kind of just is going through my head and i know this isn't something that the board has you know hasn't created or anything like that had it ever been looked at in a um between the four schools in a in a neutral way of seeing how these resources are distributed and the equity of them okay i will thank you for that comment i think that will also be part of our strategic planning effort to make every effort to look into how those resources are distributed but what you just mentioned also related to something i was going to ask you and the

040pto which is to stay engaged in the budget discussions that are coming up that work right now and lisa is our liaison to the pto but in past years we have asked for some time on your schedule to present to people at a ptr meeting uh the budget as uh as it will be voted on moving into the january timeframe so december january [Laughter] um i think i so i had a little bit of a hard time hearing you but i mean any support that we can give or i can give the board and especially with the budget process and getting people involved i'm completely in support of that we don't have a meeting scheduled for december but we could do a special meeting just to talk about the budget i think that would be

041great okay well let's just work together with lisa on timing for that i think it may actually be that in january and that's when we have our budget discussion too so that may work out but it has been a useful opportunity for the board to uh reach out to the parents to let them know where we stand with the budget process yeah that sounds good yeah i just got a question and um i assumed this was happening but i realized that this would be an erroneous assumption um are we getting the budget meeting dates to both sean and yo to publicize um as far in advance as possible and as often as possible i just feel like people actually read the pto notes and they read sean's notes and if we have the open budget

042committee meetings publicize that's just an easy way to come as you just show up and the public's always welcome to comment so the budget committee meetings we are settling on a date for the march today which will likely take place next week budget presentations for the board which take up much of those meetings our descended december meeting which is the first wednesday december and then we have the two meetings at least two meetings in january then i remember that our budget is also affected by the resident and sau budgets too so watch those schedules here and all of the junior schedules kind of have the essay on the website as well as the subcommittee meetings for the uh yeah i just realized not everyone checks the 70 website on a regular basis so if we

043could have it in as many places as possible i'll get you that information other questions i have a comment so we're about to publish our november newsletter so if you guys want to give me a concise um of the upcoming meetings on the budget i can put that in there in its own section sounds good to you all right not seeing any other questions thanks very much stephanie we'll see you soon i'm going to move you back over to the attendees thank you all right with that we'll move on down our agenda and uh the next item that i had asked to remove which is uh business requirement discussion and great matter of freedom for student services is uh has a follow-up report which if you're interested in viewing board docs is posted to the

044public content for this principles report on uh track-like products so are you able to stay in the computer is it yeah i can see it okay try to speak it's okay to be here is it are you picking up something you should okay um and thanks i do want to say thanks really quickly to stephanie and brie some some parent volunteers there's also enrique pauletta and katie cormier who are helping get breakfast from high school every day the last six weeks um for our kids so that's great but we should be covered next week so that's also good news or we can get cafe services to do that so i just need to say thank you because i heard her mention that um but i am doing a follow-up uh to the presentation i made

045in september about track my progress and a couple questions from my presentation were about how our remote kids did over the course of last year and we also had some questions about gender if there are gender differences and ethnicities as well so i collected data i looked at data from track my progress test so if anyone's looking at the document i just added some bar some column graphs to the far right side the first two graphs to the far left side are all of our students last year there are and what that shows is in math that the percent of growth of our kids was about seven percent in math over the course of the year and in ela it was about one to one to two percent maybe and if growth continued the same

046it'd be at zero percent because every if you test it in the 50th percentile in the fall you stay at the 50th percentile in the spring even though your standard score grew throughout the year so growth is really great but lack of growth i mean we want to see more growth in eia for sure so that that's just to understand the graph i compare that to iep kids which are the next two columns and then 504 students which is a very small number of 13 so you got to be cautious reading those graphs and then the final two graphs which it has added were the remote students than how they did over the course of last year so interestingly enough you can see that our students did better in math they grew more in math

047over the course of the year all students iep students and final four students um and they all didn't grow as much or went down in the l.a but for our remote students they went down in math and up in yellow so i guess i don't have a reason for that but that's the data so that was something i looked into there's more to i'm not going to read through this but i did also note the starting point consumers typically regress over the summer so they don't start as high as they did when they finished the school year before so our remote students coming back this year also arrest a bit um but that i don't think is statistically significant but i'm not sure about that and finally one other important note is that our remote

048students last year were kids that typically achieved pretty high on these kinds of tests so um check my progress doesn't do this but other tests do if you if you're achieving at a high level like if you're 80th percentile in the fall your growth is usually less than someone that's in the 50th percentile um so that might have something that's important to me another question i had was about gender um kids getting placed typically they only get placed in math when they go to middle school seventh grade at richmond middle school um so i put a bunch of information here last year we had 38 total students in sixth grade that includes remote kids that were in our remote program um 48 were female 53 were male there's three different math classes you can go

049to uh 40 so in algebra seven um five females 45 went to algebra seven six males lens all the students received between 79 and 900 on checkpoint progress and all students um took s back tests which are our state mandated tests we take in may and they all receive the level four there's four levels level 14 the highest um so they did do that as well but i must say our wonderful math teacher um kelly grace wanted me to make sure to say that we don't just look at those two things to place kids like we look at really organization work ethic and that kind of thing is very important um the second the second class kids can go to pre-algebra and there's a majority of kids 11 females 10 males about 52 percent of

050our sixth grade class are 55 percent of our sixth grade class went into the algebra uh most of those students scored in the 56th to 79th two students stored scored higher congress in the 79th percentile uh of all these students that took the test two of them scored or ten percent which i can't remember what that is there are level two uh fifty-five percent score level three thirty-five percent for the level four and finally in a uh math seven the two the two females get placed into math seven and four males and out of all that um they're all scored below 56 percent on the track my progress and all those students took the s back fifty fifty percent or half of those scored a level one um thirty three percent for level two and

051i think one person's four levels so that was kind of a data breakdown with gender but then also kind of matching where they get placed to track my progress and test back um with some variability in there and that was just the data so i can take any questions thank you very soon yeah i i don't know um i'm looking at the iep and 504 data and the difference between map and ela i don't know do you is there a correlation between why the kids have a 504 or an iep is that they're struggling in ela and they're doing okay in math or is there a way to tell like could that be the explanation for what happened there is that the area that these kids are struggling in correlates with the area that they

052that most of them didn't worsen yeah i don't think we can say that the kids have 504 so i don't think we can we could look at the overall like math overall grew more than ela and so maybe that also has an impact on students that need more support i would guess that would be my hypothesis thank you another questions so that i mean there was some pretty strong growth for that math group i mean that's the one that stands out in this crap right and i guess the question would be was there some uh teaching approach or methodology that was used for that group that could be applicable to the other groups that might help them as well too like it seems that that growth is extraordinary and i wonder if it had to

053do with the method or the instruction that would also then apply to all of the other groups as well can you say other groups you mean other groups are just ela no other groups meaning um you know those folks that are the kids that are on ieps or just the general student body i think that's a good thing to consider i don't know the answer to that but um i think it's they're definitely looking at the math curriculum this year and so they will also be looking when they're looking at that how does that program help us differentiate give us resources to reach all students i'm hoping hoping sound and just one more i know you said that the numbers were too small for looking at um students of different ethnicities um but i would

054i would wonder and i don't need an answer now i don't think this needs to be made in public um but i would hope that you all are looking at who gets placed in that max seven because i can say in the year that my son my older son was placed in there it was very heavily skewed towards um non-white students i think that's that's that's a good benefit for looking into this data to like examine that and then miss grace and myself we talked about a little bit and she was really excited to look at it too and that may have been an anomaly like [Music] yeah so i just you just name it if you can project that's trying to sort with your exam street knowledge so um i was really concerned when

055i saw some statistics relating to the rest of the world and how the united states ranks with the rest of the world and i i can't tell you any degree of certainty here i i really don't know how this ties into what we're doing here but the thing that concerned me was seeing that the united states was at the bottom when it came to math of the 35 industrial states that were that were full this was for uh k through through high school so i just i would um i would love to see the curriculum allow for as great advanced as is possible for those students that are either capable or interested or want to do this so i just because we live in a very competitive world we want to prepare our students our

056clinic to to the best that we can so that they can be competitive with what's going on in the rest of the world there's a question from christina on the morning christina you should be able to talk now good evening i'm christina aquila and i live on new boston road in norwich i just wanted to make sure that i understood the remote student data that you're presenting greg are you saying that the remote students showed a drop over the school year in math and then also over the summer so it was three percent and an additional three percent um not quite so there was a drop over in percent growth that doesn't mean that the standard score went down that's important to note but i compared fall of 20 with sorry follow 21 with follows

057what is it 21. sorry follow 20 with fallout 21. so i just compared the two falls and not the end of last year does that make sense uh kind of um i guess my question is since you say they are the high achieving kids wouldn't you expect them to at least maintain and not show a drop during the year and then and then a drop over the summer too for the i understand there's normally a summer drop but you saying that they are normally the high achieving kids would you not expect them to kind of be at a baseline at least i guess you would expect them to grow or at least we would want them to grow we wouldn't want that to drop that's a that's not a good thing just like the you

058know some of the ela stores for our iep and cloud four students those are things that we hope to see a lot better in this coming spring absolutely so is there a current plan for how to get there by spring we are one main thing we're doing is we have an intervention block this year so students that need a particular part of math or ela or work on writing or something it's not aligned to the test necessarily but it's aligned to the standards and the common core standards that kids if they need some sort of help they're going to be in small groups between like 40 minutes and 55 minutes a day except for wednesdays so four days a week in which they're getting some intervention so we think that's our current plan and that's

059also for goods that are excelling like stuart brought up that might get a little extra enrichment time as well okay so if remote families um need additional support in math and they would be receiving it during that wind block is that correct yeah if we were noticing or parents reach out to us last year our math didn't go so well we we could definitely we have time built in to the schedule to work with kids and small groups of kids on particular skills excellent thank you so much thanks chris [Music] uh other questions if not i'll say thank you thanks for going out tonight and i appreciate your time thanks for digging back into the game of course too and uh and just a reminder for anyone's watching that is posted to that box if

060you want to look at that so thanks very with that let's move down our agenda tonight and uh launch the business crime discussion the first item up is the budget updates and uh we do have jamie teague online [Music] so i am here with you can you hear me i can hear you okay um we have met uh two times so far this year and i did based on the earlier conversation just repost if people refresh and go back out to their board docs after the meeting i've reposted the budget calendar for everyone so they can go back and review with the updates we did have to um re-schedule the meeting that was initially set for today i believe it was today or yesterday actually and as you mentioned that's been moved to november 10th

061at noon and then we also have another one upcoming on november 17th at 11 30 a.m where we'll hopefully get to the final version that we'll be presenting to the school board and hopefully the public who are interested on wednesday december 8th so that's an update on the date so we have met twice we met once in august again in september we set some guidelines uh we just pulled the budget down in its entirety together with all of the different um groups meaning you know the folks at the school level the folks in the facilities area the folks handling the uh salaries and benefits projections which we were waiting for some updated information in that realm as well um for insurance projections which we've got and we're working on updating those so the administration um

062is just seeing the final version now and we'll be meeting again probably monday or tuesday next week before the meeting with the budget committee to go over some potential changes we're a little bit above where the board would like us to be based on the quick model projection but as everybody knows those are done in august where we push forward the budget from the prior year and often there are reasons why it may come in differently so we'll be discussing those as an administration team prior to the meeting next wednesday so it's well underway as you know we had meet budget meetings for dresden which does impact this one when we look at this as a norwich budget committee we look at it without the dresden assessment so that we look at it purely on

063a marian cross basis we then bring together the information from the dresden meeting hopefully it'll be settled with an early projection at dresden uh keeping in mind for the folks in norwich that the formula for the sharing of the dresden costs will change this year as the hanover students in sixth grade are now going to be included as dresden students so that's going to change our formula uh for sharing the cost of dresden it will flow have more heavily to the hanover school district um so so that'll be you know a factor that you will see as we start putting the two different um pieces back together um so that's my quick update on the budget uh committee um where we're at and where the administration at is built in building it there's been quite

064a few changes this year and we'll be excited to bring them out to you and i'm sure sean and greg and his whole team are excited to share it when we get to that point thank you very much jamie uh any questions at this point and someone on the team they put together a really nice spreadsheet they went kind of line by line with an explanation of the white things in their eye which is that board number was super helpful rather than just looking at a number b and that percent [Music] so it might just be it was just helpful to have that color because it literally had a column this kind of a reason it actually would also be helpful that the reason for the decrease is you have to do every single one

065but at least like the big ones yeah we can look at doing something similar garrett we can pull that together uh jessica's very adept and she also helps um you know sean with the budget building so we can do um you know an overview like that i think an overview i know she wanted every single line which may not be necessary the one thing that she didn't do actually was didn't do the decreases so it was only the increases but often times the group it's nice to know too what we're cutting as well so it just made it really efficient because you could just read it all and you knew exactly what was going on actually in this case every single one all right thank you thank you again and with that i'll move down

066our agenda items here i have to call this because i should have [Music] here tonight and we'll talk to some of our facilities uh updates uh at uh item 5d this is we'll skip right over 5b and get into the policies yes just before we ask a question about the status of safety whether there's ever been a study done for school safety and starting sort of protecting students against the chartered titan event um last year we were 241 together one of the two years keeping the time with us and went to a full back shooter training and did anybody ever do a physical attack actually they did have to and chief frank was part of that that had to be reported to the state and if this goes back about two and a half years

067ago maybe more there was quite a bit of concern because prior to that that particular study we had processes and procedures with regard to letting students in the front door that's what prompted the controlled access was that study so uh there was a very different process in the new hampshire side of the sau uh that the department of homeland security has formal inspections they they went to our buildings with tony and principals here it was a little less formal but still the police chief and i want to say fire participated in that as well and they looked at everything from how we do drills to access to the building and that sort of thing made recommendations which reacted great sure thanks and sean all right with that we'll move on to our policy discussion we

068do have two policies that are each stored back there one either before this is the second read regarding uh gdp stat conduct the second is the first time this is in here for special education this is uh policy is required it discusses our commitment to special education uh that's right there to review it it is a policy that's uh um given to us by that we're regular fire policy [Music] uh [Music] um [Music] effort that went into making sure this was vermont specific because this was really gendered about a change in law in new hampshire that that surrounded the adoption of a code of ethics and a code of conduct for educators in that state so it's it's it was modified pretty significantly to comply with the laws any more questions again it's just okay

069not seeing any we'll move down our agenda to the facilities update um tony's here with us in person jamie's online did you decide who's going to be able to put up delivery oh he's going to start jamie um well yeah i'll speak first about that that old safety agenda item we're gonna that should be more of a physical plant um report which we'll do next month right now because there are some there are some checklists and inspections that go along with that it's called safety was more to deal with the school environment quality completing and all that kind of stuff so we'll report on that next one the uh the facility report will involve the septic um i think that's what we we spoke about last month at this point i think last month we

070reported that we were waiting for a report from one of our consultants about the president's school district's property on route 5. if that was you know viable options to possibly build a leachfield out there for marion law school and we did receive a published report on monday of this week which was about the first of november we did get a chance to review that so that's just another step forward so what that report gave us was that currently over the course of many years there's three sites three potential sites that on that property that was owned by the dresden school district for a leech field one of them is capable of uh taking the wastewater from aaron cross the other two will not meet the gallon the amount needed to support marion cross but they

071could be used for on-site facilities at the present department so that we do know um and we'll probably post those i don't think they've been posted to board docs yet but i think they will be short it came in after the meeting was posted so they didn't get posted back up and then after discussing that jamie and i and tom the next steps will be we ask one of our engineers now to look at that information and give us a um our options of design knowing that we have a property that's available for leashing but we don't know if the value we have to then we'll have to meet with the dresden school district to see if they're willing to even entertain this process but we do know there's some land there we will uh

072work towards some designs on each field and then we will bring that all to you folks at the december evening i don't know if they'll be designs but they'll be conceptual costs for all of the different options that we might be able to look at um the other thing if you could update them tony on the trails yeah i will yeah well there's two two trail items that we're looking at one is a very small trail out here in the back off the that parking lot that will connect us to the nature area and the norwich development review board has approved our application for that for now that was going to be all volunteerly uh constructed so now it's just an hour of pulling those volunteers together and the resources for that to get that

073done hopefully if the weather stays this way and people are lined up to do that we could get that done here before winter hits the next thing we're working on is the uh trying to bring the right players together to do a larger trail that's on all on the nature area's property so it's not not no school district property it will be the bounds property but we will be the ones applying for that application and review of that trail so our next steps for that is to again pull some trail designers together yeah get that get that design laid out so we can if we can do that then bring something for possibly spring or late spring construction if funding is available or however that works out [Music] that that'll touch all the the uh

074areas out there for the different grade levels so that's the one that was we thought might be done before the school year started that was the one people were hoping so i'm sorry the time frame now on that is going up to the spring because well we don't we don't have a design but possibly a summer thing we don't have a design we don't have funding and it's it's not a problem so there's a few moving parts still in that control but we will have a trail that will access the horse i don't know how many grades that get us out there i think it's the ones that are most important among the youngest kids all right any other questions for uh yes um so i really appreciate the fact that we're going to have

075volunteers do this approve the trail but i'm wondering um is that being coordinated by you does that mean like who who's going to be the yeah okay i just have to check with the folks who started that volunteer group and then i will take the lead on that process okay thank you for your questions it's a small one but is this for 80 and that just still i'm sorry matt buck carpenter street is this uh the compliant concern is it for ada compliance or aba compliance this was there's a district there's a distinct difference between the two and it will be a b and d that's how the government fails okay thanks all right yes clarifying question when the short trail is constructed will the classroom will all the classes be able to return to

076the woods or is it going to be so the great thing about this group of parents that are showing this short period is that we're going to be able to modify what curriculum happens for some of our grades because we didn't say that we have access to [Music] all right other questions stuart my favorite topic and name stuart richards thank you ellen street so i'm looking at the letter dated june 7th to jd and the final paragraph reads as follows all in all the results of the preliminary soil and real hydrogeologic evaluation of areas one and two indicate substantial wastewater disposal capacity and certainly enough to handle marion cross wastewater flows which i believe are less than 4000 pp days and that i'm puzzled by what we've said just a few minutes ago in that

077back in june unless it's changed back in june this letter indicates that there's plenty of wastewater capacity for marrying course on two different sites that's correct on two different sites so and i'm also wondering why why there hasn't been a cost evaluation on those two different sites between june and november well actually there should be a correction on that there's the two sites that are in that letter one of them is not capable of taking the load okay i'm sorry i i would pull up the other document because i don't know that there there were three that were referenced in the new document and i'm not sure that you have the document in front of you tony i do have the document yes and i i did mention there are three and that's the other

078correction back when the letter that's through it's referring right we only had looked at two they had not looked at the third one because the third site was from a prior um a prior engagement to be looked at i think it was from test pits that were earlier than this round of pits correct so the consultant we're working with saw this information and we wanted to include it they wanted to include it in this for more formal uh evaluation so so we have all options that we knew about all options on that property so there was actually an evaluation done back in 2003 of the dresden fields and there was interested in leachfield then that information was brought forward to our new data that we have so instead of the two sites that we just

079did over if we did it last spring we now have the historical data the third one that brings us up to three cents that are available for lead shields so stuart here's the reason why the confusion okay i believe and tony can correct me if i'm wrong because our discharge permit currently is higher than what our actual than what our current um discharge gallonage has been running because we've been you know putting into play um different types of water saving apparatus you know what i mean in the schools so that our discharge permit and please don't quote me because i don't have all my files here i i had a family emergency and i couldn't be there tonight um our discharge permit is for a higher gallonage than what we're currently probably running and so

080when tony says that he doesn't feel that area two currently would uh accommodate our gallonage it's the gallonage that is based on what the permitting was for uh so there's some confusion there's a little bit of confusion in that we we don't seem to be running at the capacity of what our permitting was for so that could be some of the confusion right tony uh that's true our apartment is for higher but i i do believe when i understand that site two is not a viable option from there across but it's at 2300 gallons right we're currently at our max at 2500 gallons okay i think that site will be viable as well and we're not that's a that's our load now if we're going to try to plan for the future of you know

081increasing the things here at marion cross refers maybe wastewater if we had more kitchen use let's say uh we'd want to design a system that could handle that i only the way i read this is really only one so that really is that's what we've asked for stuart to go back out and price the viable options that we had initially looked at um you know way back when we started the adventure here um you know which and one of those viable options is still going you know to the town of hanover right because they have they still have capacity that they would set aside for us alone so we we feel that it's prudent to price out all of those um so yes we've asked for that for the december i think our meetings december

082first although i think we have two in december so um that's what we're hoping to um get to okay very last question there's a very last question no well i think a lot is really straight now because the report is very detailed with down to the gallon inch uh down to the single gallon of which uh field can take which uh so i think that'll make things they will post it to vordex we'll also post it to that uh web page too i think the facilities portion of yesterday um is this quick yeah okay so for the other thing um are you aware of plans that the sau might have for area one that might conflict with the gallonage that is available there i am not but i'm also not the right person to be

083who would be the right person i think we could answer that by saying they don't the dresden school district does not have this information all right so hey i haven't seen the report b i'm not the chair of the sap board um c i think this probably needs to fall into the realm of strategic planning because i don't know that any of that works necessarily so um yeah i'm testing an assumption here which i'm assuming jamie and tony are on top of but i noticed that you said that one i think it was plot two um could be for on-site use um and i know that that's been talked about for the athletic facilities out there to have an on-site place and i am hoping and i'm assuming that that will be part of the

084discussion is like sharing costs and if we're getting somebody out there to do our stuff getting somebody out to be dressed and stuff at the same time and taking advantage of some economies of scale if at all [Music] all right [Music] uh stephanie go ahead with your question order it okay uh then we'll move on so next item on the agenda is uh we have moved into our business prior in action and we do have a consent agenda so if someone would like to offer a promotion to accept them in favor it's unanimous and with that we do have uh our next item there which is at the point the sba doesn't mean this is gone here now because tomorrow evening is the bsba annual business meeting when board members or each school board is

085uh able to send a representative to that meeting to vote on resolutions that come before the vspa for them to take [Music] business meeting also go to other portions of the two-day event and i do believe lisa is able to do that so um we're just looking yes and then i don't know if it makes sense that if we might want to appoint maybe garrett as the alternate in case lisa has technology issues or otherwise unable to vote we can then move forward garrett as the alternate report which is the annual uh yesterday meeting which is always the very advanced although i don't prefer uh attending it at late morning where they was put on an excellent conference this conference is still uh sure to be informative there's a couple of great guest speakers i

086think they're both and tomorrow there are a number of good sessions following the uh on friday morning one of which is on the radio study which i plan to attend and uh there are a couple of others too that um on key topics that are going to take place uh afternoon prior to an update on the waiting study update on school facilities update on school and governments i'm better than that so once again thank you lisa for mentioning kelly's departure she was a great colleague for many years on the board and i want to thank her for all of them she contributed to a number of committees [Music] and you were taking on a lot of big issues over the course of the past year so thanks so much to uh kelly for her many

087years of service to the lord we will probably occasionally call them advice and as always i'd just like to extend my thanks to jay robin sean over administration and to our teaching staff and that who's here tonight thank you for all that you're doing to get us through these uh challenging times with that genie online thank you we second grade three sections with 42 students one more registered today next week third grade that's three sections of between [Music] to highlight conferences so our staff have hoped tirelessly to get report cards ready and are doing conferences this week we'll probably follow the next team so that they can make sure that everyone is able to pretend we did decide to do zoom conferences or outside conferences so i know some teachers have set up assuming the

088competition recording but it's chilly and hopefully it's a warm afternoon [Music] it was nice to be able to go outside this year [Music] library to check out the bears on display the third grade again with lindsay's health and our amazing third grade team the dioramas and i wanted to note that we had our first pbis celebration like pbis um taken off this year one of the things that we hired new staff that we were sure to do was hire people who had some background and it's been nice on our leadership team to have that combination of existing staff we've got some extra keys and some new staff we filled our aquarium first time and we're about halfway full again after about two weeks that's great news the other thing that didn't make my report i

089wanted to give a shout out to team the last week foreign i'll tell you again the sixth graders voted on what we would have and make sure we had an inclusive swing but our experience was sharing for the kids here that's a regular swings for the front and we are going to meet questions are you still continuing to struggle with staffing please stephanie has done i don't need to say this teaching staff at school we hired we were able to [Music] from here that have burned yes is it the responsibility of each school to raise the money for the playgrounds so electricity school and hamburg school district for school board [Music] do you know if the way schools playground was put into their budget [Music] skipped over assistant superintendent robert steiner for a second month

090in there too so thank you for being here and uh so that's been the most exciting news recently for us and i've been in contact with public health trying to get them to set up a clinic for us here at mary across school they're booked out into past thanksgiving christmas i think they're looking at larger districts right now but she is working with some private organizations and so that would be an opportunity but in the meantime been working with department as well and they are offering a clinic through lebanon high school and that's going to be november 13th we don't know the times or any of the other information yet but once we have that we'll send it out and then have to sign up online and then in the meantime go through private organizations

091local pharmacies things like that so that's really exciting also exciting is that we have completed our fourth week of surveillance testing and still have had not known what i always say to say this but i'm not having any positive cases every saturday look at my email and fortunately not um we've not had positive cases from that so that's been really wonderful and i think that we are up to closely through library of students in advance that will be messed up they're doing a great job with that the um i've also been working i think i talked about this before on the new evaluation system platform it's called breathline it's part of the absence management system it's an additional timeline and so i've been working over the past few months just trying to get forms loaded

092and work with the company and i worked on this from you know from the perspective of being principal but i've never done the background work for it but it's a totally different thing so that's been really interesting for me um and i think we're getting to a really good place now and fortunately thankfully i'm going to say a big thanks to sean again he's been really helpful in this process and he was my guinea pig for the past week and a half just going through and you know trying it out and looking at the forms and so he's been incredibly helpful in that process and so i think he will be the first to use it because we have all the charlotte danielson forms in the program now and um so that's exciting it's been

093a few months in the works and so now we'll be able to move into the professional development piece another positive thing and tomorrow i'll be working with third grade teachers from mary cross school we do have substitutes for those teachers tomorrow so that's wonderful so that'll be um my second opportunity i'm gonna be able to work with first grade in the fifth grade and then on monday i've asked people to submit their top two choices based on we gave them a lot of feedback from ed reports we've given different teachers at various grade levels kids we've given them online access i've been in touch with the state of new hampshire about with their curriculum person and she's provided us with schools in vermont and new hampshire for music programs and many people have graciously given

094us feedback about their use of the programs and tv that accompanies them so that's been really helpful so i've asked people to come back with their top two generic went down to send that 25 monday morning and then we'll meet monday afternoon and i think our next step depending on how it goes if everyone loves you know the same programs it'll be so easy but you can be fine by progress then we're working with representatives to come and present and i may ask some other people in the communities we'll see how that goes but hopefully we'll have an answer soon and that's my report for today thank you very much any are questions doing anything with the test estate program good luck test to stay program we haven't done anything with it yet but um

095i've been looking into it and i talked to sean and first jane about it mainly because we've been doing surveillance testing we haven't had any positive cases so we really haven't had a need for it yet but it's definitely something that we have been looking into yeah yeah it was my understanding that that would be that would give us an ability i would guess for those students and staff that if they're feeling sick yeah uh they wouldn't necessarily need to stay at home [Music] they were supposed to give us actually more guidance but we haven't done i know there's been a cold circulating mcs for weeks and months at this point um and kids have been missing a couple days of school at a time as they get it and get tested so it might

096really be a good thing to pursue if you can get a test at school did you do that yeah i did um it's a question and an appreciation one thank you so much for the flu clinic at the high school um it was really helpful just to have that for kids that play sports in particular and it so my question is um can we do that at marion cross like have a flu shot clinic or are the children too young for that to work like does it work at the high school just because it's an older population do you have one here you know for adults yeah usually we have adults yeah i just i'm just asking in an attempt to keep things from spreading like folds and the flu and um it was really

097helpful to have a clinic at the high school um to get jabbed in about 10 seconds and move on so i'm certainly talking about it i don't want to create more work but it just i realize that it does but it also might in the long run create less work right with your substitutes let me ask one more question about the testing how long is it going to continue do you know what we have funding for i don't i ate it right now it's indefinitely and i was simply curious as a parent our test results if they're positive automatically emailed to someone position of authority they actually the state notifies the school if we have positive cases so we are we are in london and that's generally the case even if we have a positive

098case in the school that is not persevering and assessing the state and notified the school and they will determine those contacts and those thank you [Music] i had a question about the math curriculum that you were talking about and then you said people are coming on monday and i just as a teacher here i'm really curious about what the road path is for what the recommendations monday are going to bring and kind of when more people will be involved in this process and it's a big consideration yes i'd like to know more about that two so on monday we will hopefully have narrowed down to two or one for a branch and then if we don't we'll look further at you know the programs that can technically narrow it down to and after that we'll

099look at what kinds of professional development we can acquire because it's different you know depending on materials is this committee making a recommendation to the faculty or the principal for consideration or is that's a question i have talked about is that this is a recommendation well it's a recommendation that you'll then [Music] so we're this committee is actually looking at math programs along with all the curriculum marketing music programs for teaching across math yes and the grade school so we have teachers from both schools that have been working with me from a wide variety of grade levels so they will come back with their recommendations with committee members and then we'll bring that forward as casually as optional program for both schools so then we would have a day through six programs going into middle

100school and some other programs in line with one of the nice things is that what has happened out of this is that some of the programs are aligning with what's happening in middle school with sixth grade math at the high school with algebra so we will see a continuum page group as well which is you know one of our goals from each grade level from the grade school and we got teachers from second third and [Music] sixth from mary's hospital and the principals are on the committee and we have the new math specialist for our festivals we had a math committee that teachers and i asked that method can you talk amongst yourselves and decide who wants to be on the police school the back immediate teacher so that was so and i think most

101teachers have brought it back from the great bubble teams because i love the feedback from teachers has been from the team even though they're not any other questions thank you very much and then i also have to just repeat the thanks for uh for kelly hersey kelly was the first person that i met staying over at the norwich and she picked me up i think around seven in the morning to bring me over to the multi community here and although [Music] association child really appreciate the work that she did with committee work and then taking on the chair of the sau board um i also want to recognize i know i've heard the word stress today [Music] during courses today um really want to just add my thanks to the others that have been already

102offered tonight to the marion cross administration and the teachers and support staff it's um it is november and this is one of the longest continuous stretches in the school year and i recall last year seeing people that were absolutely fatigued by this point in the year and i'm sure it's as sean mentioned i think a couple meetings ago in some ways this year's heart we all anticipated that things would be back to normal sure sure um what i think is dangerous though is the stress like the stress that our entire system is under can become normalized people just get used to it in a way but it's still there and it's still doing all the bad things that stress does um and [Music] my gratitude towards gratitude will really do a little to relieve that

103stress we need i think we're at a point now again where we need to be thinking about what can we do for our staff to um to help them and to uh ease some of that burden and to figure out ways that we can keep each other healthy um the the the context that we're working under right now is is this it's deceptive you know it does seem in some cases a little more normal but in many cases it's um it is like i said much harder i will say thank you though because it is amazing that our staff continues to do the work that they're doing not just with the sort of the cloud of code but also the really difficult challenges that we've had staffing-wise since the beginning of the school year the

104lack of that assistance has been something that people have felt terribly and uh and that's across the and every building it's actually across the country we have shortages in lots of different sectors but certainly in the education sector and people continue to do an outstanding job there have been a couple things mentioned tonight that kind of stuck out and kind of reminded me of things that i was going to be addressing my report tonight one of which was uh strategic planning keeps coming up as sort of this um this hope that we have out there sort of organized and makes sense of all things that are going on in the district right now and it seems to be there's some curse that prevents us from actually getting to that planet and the most recent uh

105pickup that we've experienced is that we've had half of our board share turnover and we just now have killed our all of our vacancies and we just now have uh appointed chairs so that we can get that steering committee which is the four chairs some administrative staff has a teacher volunteers who've now stepped forward it's time to get that standard committee back together ryan's working to get a complete schedule of meetings over the course of the rest of the year and with the uh one of the outstanding pieces that he'd be gone and set aside was was working on us i guess in strategic planning but we're looking at it as a portrait of a graduate or actual portrait of a learner and this was something that at the last in-person vs va vsa conference

106we had there was a lot of attention paid to that number of districts we're doing that work and robin has reached out to patel which is the group that did the presentations for us at vsda and and we have found a way that we can actually tap into their expertise to finish that work to get that vision done involve a community and move forward with that and all that to say that the hard work that we have ahead of us and maybe more nuts and bold stuff is really pulling together um all of this work is kind of underway but really needs sort of a larger direction structure it's almost like we're building the we're building the building but now we're going to try to create the foundation underneath it the work that robin was

107just detailing is a classic example and we know we can't we can't put off organic curriculum until the strategic plan is done so we're sort of doing it and then anticipating that the strategic planning work was sort of melded with all the other things that are standing in front of us for work undone we have curriculum work to do but we also have all of our debt rolling off within the next couple of years which is going to enable us to make investments in our buildings to actually take on facilities and we can't take on facilities work without having a good sense for what we want in the future for our program because those facilities should match our intentions around education so that's why the strategic planning work is so important and uh and i

108really look forward to jumping into it and now that we have all of our folks appointed we can do that um the equity question that christina raised talking about the schools on the other side of the river that's it's an interesting point and and we've been focused on equity from a rather different sense more of a dei sort of sort of a concept but that doesn't it shouldn't exclude that kind of questioning our programs and our resources distributed accurately and just however you understand i know the sae was brought in to that conversation the sap doesn't generate any revenue so really it is this budgeting process that we're all involved in right now that sort of determines what resources we're going to have and how to distribute it we certainly have our our state in

109that as sau administration but the sau is essentially a cost in all of your budgets and it doesn't generate its own revenue so so we we certainly have a role to play in helping to ensure that those sorts of things are aligned and fair but it is the work we do together in our individual boards it determines what those resources are just so let's clear on that but that is something i think we really should be mindful of and something that we need to consider strategic planning is is that equity and um you know unfortunately the growing differences in the ways that new hampshire and vermont at the state level fund their schools this is going to play a role in that it's going to it's going to provide a pretty significant challenge especially as

110you move forward and things continue to change and ensuring that we can provide equity resources on both sides so that's something else that we need to consider and work together with every problem but it's a problem i'm sure so um with that that's that's uh that's my report i know this we won't meet again as a board until um until after the thanksgiving holiday that is i'm hoping sort of an opportunity for everyone to to take stock and to to recharge and again to try to they acknowledge recognize that stress that we've been working under and hopefully do something to alleviate it and people will have uh certainly earned a really really uh important break at that point that's hard work thanks so much i think jamie's up next if she's still on a zoom

111and there are some documents uh she was posted to the box reports yeah i'm still with you um i don't have a big written overview uh just because of what jay mentioned and all of what's been going on uh everywhere across the school districts and the sau it's also it would be very early to do a written breakdown with only one month into school this is a true first quarter report we've received about 55 percent of our revenues as of 9 30 which is normal often we receive the last five percent after the close of the fiscal year because we're waiting for reimbursements for special education expenditures and things like that those usually come in after the fact but they're recognized within the year um the audit report should be done shortly so that i

112can vet the dollar amount of what was actually carried over our expenditures right now they appear to be very well encumbered uh we're sitting with just under six percent of the budget remaining that hasn't been encumbered and we encumber for most of the lines for the entire fiscal year um the federal funds right now we're recognizing 179 just over 179 000 that includes sr1 and sr2 but we've not recognized sr3 yet as we've not decided as a team how to spend that um and it doesn't sunset with this fiscal year um there are some we're not showing a lot of expenditures in our grant funds which at at 9 30 which is not unusual because it's still early many of our grant fund monies are used as salary offsets in the general fund budget so

113you may recognize some lines that look like they're overspent in general fund and that's because we've not done the credits back from the grants so as of the next round of me as of the next meeting in december we will do a deep dive and come and do start doing a projection of fiscal year end because that number is uh relevant as we start you know as we start to finalize the 2223 budget um [Music] so so that's it i've posted the reports i'd say if you have any questions on line items there's an overview report and an expanded one on the general fund um and if you have any questions just email me i'm happy to answer them and i'll share all the answers with the group as a whole thank you very much

114jamie and as always thanks for all your game with uh four budgets being crafted for negotiations so i know you're busy thank you thank you no tony's back only forget his backpack on his computer uh moving down our reports the last section of the committee reports i think we've talked a little bit about the budget committee as james mentioned earlier we'll be meeting we'll be meeting next week to discuss that um and then presenting out your december meeting negotiations with the support staff and we are supposed to have a meeting this coming week i don't think we've settled on a lot of days you know we have one of two days we will solidify that from the next day or two which is going to be and we'll be entering into our negotiations with the

115teaching association also likely uh we did meet on monday evening and are trying to now assemble the final report for the select board so that work is moving forward and we basically told that responsibilities meeting predictive sections of the report uh you know we'll see i'm not sure that the final report will be ready by like mid-december i think that might take a little while after that because our that's only the next meeting where we'll actually get together as the full committee to actually look at the draft final report so but other than that i think that we're we're pretty close to target and so the report is not is recommendations regarding advocacy and addressing things in that fashion i think you know the challenge being is that any idea that a single town is

116going to be able to solve the child care problem is is not realistic it needs to be a more if not regional a state level issue and if not state level than a federal level issue um there's certainly some things that are happening at the federal level that haven't played out that might have an impact on how things go here um so a lot of things up in the air um but i don't think that you're gonna be able to get any sort of appropriation being recommended in the town meeting or attending budget [Music] with that uh let's move on to our agenda we do not have the pre-executive session tonight i understand fired up so i'll stop there too good uh so with that we'll just move into our final section here uh any

117agenda topics for the next meeting uh yes um so i will admit something like questions of the candidates earlier this evening was also a mini survey can we get on the agenda for the next meeting just an overview of the waiting study and where things stand i i think that we probably have not done as good enough of the job as we can to let the folks in the community know just the potential impact if the waiting studies were to be implemented it's a big deal yes by by the december meeting and we might have it so there was a meeting of the task force that was scheduled for today that canceled so i believe that they're going to add another meeting but i think i'm not sure the timing on that the next meeting

118i think might have been scheduled for december 1st my point is i'm not sure if we're going to have a whole lot of additional information on things prior to the next norwich meeting but i can let everybody know where things stand at least this moment in time as to what they've considered and what their conversations are sidereel uh quote from our correct so they were they were still on target i think had the report for the recommendations by december 15th so it was supposed to be with the the recommendations that already come out of the tax one is a recommendation on how to implement the waiting study and the second was any proposed legislation that might be necessary to make that happen what happened most recently is there was a discussion in the task force

119about possibly changing that calculation of the weights and there was also discussion about pulling out the weight for english language learners and making that a categorical grant so those are two fairly dramatic changes to what the original weighting study included and i'm going to be very curious to see how things play out over these next few workbee meetings and i will say if you do have a chance to attend the vsda sessions on friday friday morning we will have one of the co-chairs of the uh of the task force with us to just let us you know they can tell us what they think is the current status of things and where things are headed and what might happen yeah sorry just so i'm perfectly clear um so the recommendations are december the legislative recommendations

120but with this the implementation of the wage study is there any way that it would affect our budget process like will we have to do a last minute adjustment for for this current budget process it would be more for the next yeah my gut says that's highly unlikely uh because what would need to happen was instead of you know proposed bill language need to go forward they would i mean that was my assumption as well knowing how the legislative session works that just didn't want to be caught off of it all is guard our budget is set yeah before they even uh before they even start their site so well if my confidence level is high i just want to let the board members remember that the budget was already set the year that the

121legislature decided to claw back the additional monies related to the health care program so it's not unprecedented [Music] next week is listed here december 8th but that's actually the second episode yeah because that's typically the psda board meetings are the second wednesday all right anyways that's what's posted here but uh i think it's not that big a deal [Music] uh all right that is the rationale and i think it will be somewhat helpful for the budget uh yeah hopefully that's not here are you okay it might be helpful to happen here let's uh i'll take a look at the side so we'll take a look at that we'll avoid that time frame at least through december 6 and then figure out whether or not i mean hey um i'm okay if you go later later

122yes okay well i just want to make sure you deconflict with any other [Music] yes yeah i can't go earlier with the budget information earlier than i can't go earlier than like dec and i have new people working with me this year so i was i wasn't going to suggest that don't worry we will definitely look at uh the atlanta thank you um but we'll figure that out uh not right now so with that i think we have reached the point where i would be happy to entertain a motion to lisa i have a motion to adjourn the meeting at 9 02 pm neal all those a favor thank you [Music] welcome thank you thank you and uh i assume you know how to find bye i am pretty sure you