Hanover School Board 20210915

001okay at this time i'm going to call the hanover school board meeting to order at 7 15. gender review does anyone have anything they need to add or remove from our agenda tonight then they don't need to have a non-published before appointing new members no we've been informed that appointments of elected officials have to be done in public so the interviewing and the liberation and the voting is done in public but that's a good question so does anyone have anything to add to the agenda now okay uh at this point actually quick question sorry um would this be the meeting where we reselect the new approvers on the financial side of things we could under my section okay so at this point uh we're going to move on to public comments i'll give you three

002minutes to make any comments for items that are on the agenda i respectfully request that members of the public state their name and address before commenting on agenda items does anyone here in person have a comment does anyone on the zoom call have a comment if you do please raise your hand and i'll i'll turn your microphone so typically we open it up to the public uh we sometimes allow for items to have a discussion or questions from the public um depending on what the item is because i tried to look for the event that was fine i'm assuming right correct right so i i'd like to see the processes uh so the way the regulations in our policy is the school board members will interview the the candidates we will then ask them to

003make comments and ask questions and then we vote if there's not an opportunity for the public to to ask questions with the candidates yes i'd like to speak okay is there a microphone is here if you if you want to stand you can if you want it yeah just so that people at home can hear um and uh state your name and uh what town you're from and this is um last time this was being recorded i was here five years ago when there was the principal search so i shared with this standard either one whatever you're comfortable with and it's uh ca tv is uh broadcasting broadcasting it and then we're also on zoom for people at home okay so my name is joe anderson and for team barrett road hannover and so what

004i'd like to hear from the candidates is i'd like to hear about how we're going to improve the academics of the school the school in my opinion is very underperforming us and many other people have spent a lot of money setting up his private school both the elementary as well as uh the middle and senior uh you know once again i i don't look at metrics of the metrics of the liquor school but you can use them to support what you would with what you're thinking uh i saw a graduation rate that was anywhere between 92 and 94 we're doing this extremely well and i would love to be disabused if that's wrong and correct in a town like this where we have a relatively low um percentage of people that are economically disadvantaged when

005i compare those now i don't want to compare new hampshire because my kids are not willing to compete with humanity they're going to compete all over this country okay and i feel so strongly about this and so do a lot of other people that i'm sending my kids to private school now i look at the numbers and i say to myself okay these are numbers right could they be skewed i do statistics so that's something that could be but i look at the experience now being in hanover time and it's really quite frightening in my mind the civics the first civics used a very i'm not even going to say a very vile pop culture reference um to demonstrate a principle it was really amazing and i'm not going to criticize that principle in that

006teacher i think the teacher thing i heard that a lot of senior teams left okay and um and so i think that that's more of an emblematic i think that the the teachers are victims i i would never where i would talk to them face to face like a person should but that plus the fact that they spent the first few weeks talking about the handle in civics where the crossroads 7th grader is learning more than the ninth grader okay where uh we talk about safe spaces right and so if somebody wants to talk about the free market in the positive light being shouted down by two librarians dragging other students in to talk about how that student is wrong and then when that student appropriate questioned points out how a student should be debating

007the teacher the teacher then brings other people and other kids in to this conversation and talks about how that's okay and then the student to her credit says you know i i think i have more time um says to her credit says to the teacher this is inappropriate well why is it over broke is it because there's a power imbalance here so once again i don't think that that's a um that in itself is not i wouldn't want to have those librarians punished about i'm going to talk to them but it's emblematic of a district that is sick and it needs to be reformed i was here five years ago for the principal search don't want to relitigate that but the school board basically said you know you're right you lost your trust i don't

008think it really got back i think everybody here works very hard not including anybody here and i just wonder how much of the academics we're really focusing on um and so yeah so your three minutes are up so i have questions for you are you talking academics at the race school or local well okay i mean we can control the race for middle school because i spend the money i mean i don't really make a lot i my federal salary if i send whatever i have to crossroads crossroads was amazing we can do the same here but why do teachers control like what happened to that principle i'm just using for example the principal that was hired after uh mr cotter she was ran out of school and and from what i heard the teachers

009ran around i couldn't wrong please tell me please give me the story and once again the last question i have for you is it you know once again please disabuse me of anything that's false the last question i have why do i have a curriculum does anyone plan for curriculum the principal uh candidate that was um talking about having a curriculum was um voted down and it wasn't clear why that was okay so so those are my points i really want to hear about academics i want to hear how our kids are going to compete i want to hear how this is going to happen and i want to know that what we experience in 9th grade may be anonymous i don't think that they are ok and once again i'll give you specifics not

010to get people into trouble that's not because i don't blame them i blame the top i blame uh you mr baptist okay and you're on them okay we're not gonna allow discouragement no i'm not i mean he just made it this thursday march so well if he answers my email back from june i'd be happy to talk to him face to face thank you are there any other comments from the public anyone on zoom i see no one with raised hands so this one we're going to move on to my name is carolyn anderson i am the wife of joe um we have three children who go to the school district are part of the school district that have been going to different schools and just to echo the need for a curriculum specialist and

011i'm asking you guys please um having my daughter in the high school right now i've gone to many of the teachers there to have discussions with them and they've told me that you know part of their you know there has been um that a lot of teachers have left and there's there are some holes that they're trying to fill um and that they are looking for direction uh the social studies teachers believe that specifically um the english teacher um you know has been getting frustrated with my daughter because of the wealth of knowledge that she got from crossroads there are so many teachers there if you guys need to talk to people about like you know how to form a good curriculum um you know i just think there needs to be a vision um

012you know and i can tell you the english teacher actually has a nickname for my daughter she calls her crossroads because she always knows the answer and she's helping to teach the other kids too and i i get upset by it because every kid should have like that experience and he's telling me that a lot of the kids in the class are jealous of hurting they don't deserve to be jealous they should have that same experience and we confronted this a couple of years ago and nothing has changed or anything i think it's gotten worse i think our focus is so much on certain marginalized groups when in actuality we are marginalizing our intellect here and we're focused so much on other things than actually making these kids like throwing facts at them again in

013social studies they're surveying like 3 000 years go into the depths of things a little bit more and don't spend three weeks on the um student handbook and have the kids write an essay on that give them something that's really going to empower them and give them a future um but anyways yes we are here because we want to hear what the board is going to do to help push our curriculum way above average because we are a very special group we are very high achieving um parents who all have the same desires for the kids thank you thank you very much mr johnson can you be there to defend my 14 year old when she talks about the free market since we're talking about non-human people i'd love for you to be there she

014would like to be there thank you um at this point we're going to move on to the principles report good evening everyone it's been a while since it's all been together in person it's great to see so many faces here in person for this meeting tonight thank you all for being here i really appreciate that i'm going to roll through my updates and then at the end i would be happy to take any questions from the board i'll start with an enrollment update for this evening we currently have 497 students enrolled registered here at the race school which is up from last month's report where i named 492 students so we have gained some students in our school community in kindergarten we went from 83 students to 84 students in first grade from 80 to

01581 in second grade from 73 to 76 in third grade from 76 to 77 in fourth grade from 86 to 85 and fifth grade it stayed at 94 students i did want to highlight that we still had several open positions here at the race school we're looking for interventionists folks to work one-on-one with some of our students throughout the course of the school day we're looking for a 0.4 part-time spanish teacher someone to work at one of our local child care centers for two days a week and you may have seen my postings in the listserv i would encourage you to pass along the word to anybody that you may feel is in position here at the race school we're welcoming new team members rick can you hear us everyone has been muted including lauren

016thanks kim we're working on it when you just unmuted yourself lauren we could hear you just so you know all right everyone all right thank you i'm not sure what you've heard or in here so i'm going to start with open positions again quickly uh interventionists one-on-ones a 0.4 part-time spanish position someone to work at one of our local child care centers for two days a week in the morning and just highlighting that i will put this in the listserv every so often for folks to be able to have links to apply and we encourage applications from interested people in our community um several folks asked about the theme for this year since we had a uniting theme of ray galaxy last year but we don't have the same level of theme this year we

017are thinking about putting our best foot forward and those of you who are here this evening inside the school you may notice that there are flip-flops around the building to symbolize putting our best foot forward this year for our community goal i would like to highlight some of the things that we're doing this year here at the race school as i spoke about in our last meeting i highlighted some training that occurred over the summer for our educational assistants as well as our classroom teachers and other certified staff here at the race school around responsive classrooms core beliefs in order to be successful in and out of school students need to learn a set of social and emotional competencies cooperation assertiveness responsibility empathy and self-control as well as a set of academic competencies an academic

018mindset perseverance learning strategies and other academic behaviors therefore this year as a school we're uniting around this teachers administrators educational assistants and building level coordinators will teach practice reinforce and demonstrate responsive classroom routines in the areas of engaging academics designing and delivering high quality rigorous and engaging instructions positive community creating a safe predictable joyful inclusive classroom where all students have a sense of belonging and significance developmentally responsive teaching responding to students individual cultural and developmental learning needs and strengths as well as effective management creating a calm orderly environment that promotes autonomy and allows students to focus on learning right now the associate principal nan parsons and i are collecting data we've visited classrooms together to calibrate our of collection and in the following weeks we will continue to do so the next step will be

019to begin our coaching of our faculty who will be divided between us we will engage in coaching cycles with each faculty member throughout the course of the year this is really exciting work for us in the area of curriculum as robin will likely detail in her report we had a wonderful afternoon with our colleagues at the marion cross school today the primary goals of this time were to make collegial connections with our colleagues in our sister elementary school across the river with an eye toward future collaboration in curriculum to hear about the short-term and long-term curriculum goals and to hear from a couple marion cross school and race school grade level teams about their curriculum writing process it was a wonderful opportunity today to rekindle the relationship between our two elementary schools in sau 70.

020additionally we're doing work on our mission vision and values last week our staff including educational assistants joined together to begin the important work of recalibrating our mission vision and values free pandemic the networks committee which is an advisory committee to the administration began this work at a very micro level with one representative from each school team working to examine our currently stated mission vision and values and discussing where we've been where we are and who we want to be at the race school after putting this work on pause for covid we are now joining back together and expanding the conversation to all staff it will broaden us even more to our stakeholder groups including the community families the school board and our students this is time-consuming and thought-provoking foundational work but will ultimately lead to

021a shared understanding of why we do what we do and what we stand for this understanding will help guide our decision making across all areas of our work at the last meeting i let you know that i did not have comparative results from the state around our statewide assessment system data i received an email from the new hampshire department of education that stated at this time only state level users can access the sas statewide assessment system statewide scores when i'm able to share the full data picture including the comparative data i will do so and finally a quick reflection on the start of school i will share that the start of school has been one that has been challenging and exciting but for different reasons from last year on one hand as i've just articulated

022we have some important and exciting work that we are already engaging in less than three weeks into the school year continuous improvement is mentally and emotionally challenging and additionally there is a sense of mourning of what we thought the beginning of this school year would look like when we parted ways for the summer we all believed that improving science and health measures including vaccinations could lead to a more normal kind of opening while some restrictions have been eased based on local data and recommendations we find ourselves very much in a similar place as where we ended last year at the end of last year we celebrated making it through an entire school year without any major disruptions in person learning with a remote option we still celebrate our return to school and in-person learning for

023all of our students this year but we find ourselves teaching talking meeting and working behind masks our quote unquote normal routines are still disrupted by the need for physical distancing and mask wearing and teaching from behind a mask is challenging however we celebrate our continued success perseverance resilience and we will await the day when students can see us hear us and interact with us without a physical barrier between us this year will continue to require flexibility understanding and support for all of the additional coded layers that school staff and our community must contend with on a daily basis we know that everybody especially the community is working extraordinarily hard that being said i share my monthly gratitude with the community for your support and understanding during this continued challenge time challenging time i share my

024gratitude for each and every member of the graceful team as well who show up each day for our students smiling with their eyes and when love with love in their hearts for the students that they care so deeply about we will all continue to keep our eyes towards a more normal future while working day to day for you all our students our families thank you thank you um situation i'm sorry further on in the meeting [Music] i'm curious about the the renovations to the entryway sets um i know that was talked about last year and i thought that was being done this summer and i just wanted to see if it was an update on that welcome to my section i thought so thank you any other questions thank you lauren we're moving on to

025uh budget guidelines jamie is that you or kim um i think kim was gonna have anyone point us because she is remote and i have to admit that i was just on the dresden school looking out further because i'm here do you have to speak louder i don't think people at home i'm usually told i'm too loud wow hi everybody welcome back so posted on board docs for you to review uh was the hanover equipped model version two done on august 17th which was reviewed with the budget committee at a kickoff meeting uh we did discuss this at the last meeting that we held when we looked at the draft of the guidelines that had been discussed by the principal and the budget committee members along with chair hartman who's chair of the budget committee

026and myself the superintendent if you take a look at the quick model that's projected based on the ratification of the budget for and then we roll forward what we know to be true and any changes that we may have uh garnered since it was built back in december and ratified in january of 2021 um and the biggest change obviously with this this year is that we needed to carve out the sixth grade tuition so we did all of that and we came out with a projected early potential increase of year-over-year budget of 3.28 now at our meeting we discussed that that percentage will most likely come in a bit lower due to the fact that the salaries and benefits that are being shown here are done based on the 2021 projected budget in the 2122

027census we've had a lot of turnover as has been mentioned throughout this meeting and all of our other meetings so that's just a quick um overview of the quick model and you know where we were and what we looked at also posted for your review is the hanover draft budget guidelines which we discussed at our um last meeting uh and they're up for review and uh ratification by vote tonight the guidelines we use when we're building all the different sections of the budget to try to stay within a certain range and so all of the different pieces here have not changed and at the end of all of this the hanover budget committee is recommending that we stay within a guideline um we think it's 3.25 or less and we have the or less because

028as we start to build the budget uh we will recognize some of the savings probably from the personnel term so i don't know if there's any um exact questions or if chair hartman of the budget committee would like to add anything thanks jamie and and i am indeed um i have a sore throat so i appreciate jamie taking the lead on that um and that's also why i'm joining remotely tonight um so i think um if you look at the second page of the guidelines the only thing that i would add is that the um the quick model or the kind of excel spreadsheet that you see in the first document the reason why we do a quick model um just as a refresher because there's some folks in the room um who are newer

029um you know we do that just to kind of see what a status quo is what are some of those known knowns that we know are going to occur and that we really probably don't have any um real discretion over um things in a typical year would kind of be what our union contract percent based increases would be et cetera or if what we know is going to happen with either um health insurance or retirement things like that so we know kind of what our baseline status quo is um one thing that jamie i don't think mentioned um but i do want to add is that um the budget committee also looked in addition to status quo kind of what are some of the early identified strategic initiatives that we would like to consider when

030thinking about what a budget cap or corridor would be and so those are outlined in summary and of course this isn't the only things um and but just to give you a flavor of that discussion there are three bullet points um that we discussed one is um and actually as i heard um with lauren explaining our enrollment there every number i feel like i keep hearing the number ticks higher and higher so as we see increases in our enrollment you know do we need to think about a 28th teacher or not so i think it's a question and we typically look at enrollment as a budget committee um after october so just to give you a sense of that the second kind of either strategic initiative or something different from status quo um would be

031additional reading and writing specialists and if there are any questions on that i'm sure lauren can elaborate and then the third is um and actually i heard this in our public comment so hopefully this is some welcome news but as we've continued to look as curriculum development we definitely want to include some improvements in curriculum development and actually in our budget committee there was a discussion about the partnership with marion cross to improve the math curriculum program in particular um but you know there that is just kind of to give you a flavor of maybe what things might be coming in the budget um but as we know with time things change right so um i just wanted to make sure folks were aware of those initiatives thanks thank you kim hope you feel better

032and just to follow up um good point kim sorry i look at these so much i forget to explain what is you know new and maybe outside of uh what we would normally have included so i'll just remind everybody that with the salary and benefit lines specifically the salary lines here we are in negotiations with two of our unions the teachers union and the support staff union and so in the quick model we did project into it costs of steps that are available based on an updated census that dollar amount will not be built into the budget because in the state of new hampshire any negotiated contracts have to be voted separately from the main budget so those dollar amounts will actually be carved out and we put on their own warrant we've included it

033here for reference so that will give us an idea of what we might be looking at to the settlement being ratified [Music] yes it's a related question probably by the budget lauren if the 28th teacher is hired for next year do we have the physical space here to account for that that's always the question if that is a priority that we do necessary by enrollment we will make it work yes i'm just wondering what space you imagine so we do have we have many classrooms in the school and some of those classrooms are used for things that aren't just classes in a traditional sense so we do have spaces that we could potentially repurpose which would mean dislocating some other program inside the school to a different area but that would be something that i

034would be working with my staff around to make sure that we could accommodate all of those needs and i'll note that with the strategic planning group kicking off this discussion came up about facilities and it'll be something that we're going to be looking at over the next couple of years because of all the space potential constraints that we'll face any other comments or questions okay moving on to the custodial and maintenance update so this may be where ben gets his questions answered um [Music] so there's a few things to discuss tonight uh with regards to custodial maintenance um with regards to the projects um we ratified putting the redesign of the entryway space back into this year's budget the 21-22 budget so we did put monies back in in order to accomplish that with all

035the other projects that we were embarking on at all the different locations we were not shovel ready to embark on that one in this summer and get it completed okay so it hasn't gone by the wayside we need to re-meet with the initial architect who came in and met with lauren and her staff about the redesign um we also thought because of the amount of projects that were going on that in the cost increase of all materials and some of the materials that are hard to come by that it might be more prudent to wait until spring to put that out so so it hasn't gone away the money's still in the budget we need to re-meet with the architect uh with everything going on this summer in order to get ready to reopen the

036schools um we could not fit in this summer [Music] yeah maybe parts of it then could be like some of the prep work but perhaps structural pieces of what they're envisioning it would be best to do um right after we closed school and june you know whatever that date was to kick it off on that date i would envision it would probably take just based on the designs that i saw probably at least a month yeah if it's next summer would that cause problems with all the after school summer i think we could work through that just because there are so many entrances to this school the way in the manner in which it was designed that we would be able to work around quick follow-up just because um i remember these discussions were all

037last spring and winter um and i'm looking at it was the carpet replaced yeah it looks awfully good okay good thank you haven't been in here yeah that was one of our projects all brand new carpet and little treads and everything in this room which was a project to get done as well and they all all of the vendors this summer were just but we had some really um tenuous conversations with some of them thank you i'm not sure what's permissible in terms of what happens when you make a big renovation like that but is there a way perhaps to um in that renovation create some sort of like flexible space that could potentially be used for a classroom if it's needed probably not in that location and where that's going to occur because it's

038the entry it's the entryway um but if we run into a need such as that i think there are other options that we have that we could accommodate even if it was something that had to happen quickly but but with building more space that's a really it's a very involved permitting process because you know you're dealing with there are standards for new hampshire for you know for building space for students more than i do i'm nodding yeah and um you know and plus all the permitting because you're dealing with fire marshall's office right and you're dealing with the doe and you're dealing there's so there's a lot to it i think once we start to look at the enrollments as we're starting to build the budget if we have a realization that we think this

039is going to be something long term that's going to necessitate some kind of additional space like that that probably by december or january we should embark on that discussion so that we can see what all of our options are both short term and long term um but yeah it's uh that's it's a process to get permitting and approvals and all of that done um you know and then figuring out what the best space is perhaps coming off of this building right because of the design i think was changed a couple of times excuse me okay um custodial so rick did i get a yes i could only see jamie um okay so so two questions um so i guess one comment one thing that i did not add because we have been discussing this in

040the sau and the sau budget gets assessed in um both in dresden and in hanover as part of the sau assessment and it might actually appear in the hanover budget in itself but we've been talking about and we talked about in dresden um a district-wide building and grounds um audit and to kind of understand where our needs as particularly in dresden as a large debt is retiring in a couple of years we want to be ready to make those kind of large dollar capital investments where we need to um potentially there are areas where we have deferred maintenance um and so um we wanted to make sure that we are kind of ahead of the game before that retirement actually rolls off so um we're in you know kind of i know james it's something

041jamie's looking into and to figure out what budget it's in but um at some point it would kind of roll in either if it's through the sau assessment or actually in the hanover um budget itself if it's just kind of for the race school building um and then the other ques and more of a question and maybe jamie or lauren can kind of help me on the history of this because this is definitely before my time but i understand that you know we aren't at total capacity max enrollment that the race school has ever been i believe enrollment has been higher in the past and so i think um you know i maybe just if that if we can confirm that that's the case and if it is the case you know i think that

042kind of maybe gives us um another sense of how we can kind of interpret the our existing facilities so i don't have the number stuck in my head i think we've been as high as 5 30 5 35 maybe um and it was quite some time ago prior to me but i do believe at that point in time kim we had um um i hate to use the word trailers but we had um external pods right uh that were brought in to accommodate um the the larger class sizes and i don't know what grades were being accommodated in the pods because it was quite some time ago i'm thinking eight years ago at least no more than that really how long ago 20. i think my daughter was in the second grade in the trailer

043oh my god maybe the third long time ago and maybe that's the reason why we have the richmond middle school with sixth graders so okay thank you yeah and kim i will pull up that data i'm trying to find it in my drive and not doing so very quickly because i will find that data and we can talk about it in the future as well the data is reported in the dresden hanover budget annual report that goes out in the back it shows all the historical numbers i think of the class sizes across most of the hannah we're dressed in schools then lauren remind me what are we at now for nine months for 94. we are the definition of acceptable class sizes and shrinking gradually out there which is a policy yeah we changed

044the policy a couple years ago based on the grades of different max class sizes right so like fewer students okay so let's tell you moving right along custodial uh has been a challenge um for at least a year here and at other locations we have been running crews with missing ftes at the dresden high school i think for three years at least and we've been running at richmond middle school's been complete we've been running here mostly complete uh up until a couple of transfer transfers were made due to various reasons so we thought we were going to be okay to open school and then had a had a transfer that was necessary and also had somebody resigned right like on august 31st um so tony and i uh had been discussing with a few of

045some of the local um folks who do that type of work and we have used them like a year or two ago when we were running short in norwich um on the other side so we talked to a few of them and everybody in the upper valley it seems is having terrible difficulties hiring in certain types of job troops including custodial maintenance hvac i mean bus driving drive regular driving pretty much you know waitressing everything okay um and we're experiencing that as well so in speaking to the superintendent because we then had an emergency need um we went back out to some of the companies and found one that could accommodate us beginning september 20th with an outsourcing of the evening cleaning duties here at the race school the daytime custodian will remain in place

046and he has been here the longest amount of time i believe 15 16 years so we feel that this is the best course of action at this point in time for us to be able to have continuing operations that are settled and we are bringing this information to you for two reasons one it's an emergency and we really think it's the right thing to do the second reason is because of the potential length of the contract um we have the contract written through december 31st okay because it's a brand new uh contract it does have a monthly renewal clause that we can back out of if we're not if it's not going okay um so it has a potential cost of more than a hundred thousand dollars and in our purchasing policy um we are

047to make known to the school board when we enter into any contracts about that number the face value of the contract as stated is below that but if we continue this for the whole entire year it will go above that okay the good news however is that it will be below what the initial budgeted cost was for all of the ftes that we had um now to the workers none of our present workers will lose their job they will be kept whole we are transferring them we have two remaining workers here we will be transferring both of them to the dresden school district of the same exact hours shift rate of pay benefits everything they have here the only thing that will change is the location of where they report to work and what that

048allows us to do is to make both of the crews at the hanover high school and northern middle school hold again it also helps to cut down on when you have a very small crew if people have you know um family needs or have to be out or what have you uh it's hard for us to be able to send somebody from somewhere else when we're shorthanded to cover so by using an outsourced vendor if there's any um need for coverage on nights then they will kill that need and we won't be left short which is what has been happening historically everywhere for quite some time so um so that's what's going on in the pastoral room uh maintenance room is fine we're we are full capacity there they've been very very busy getting the

049schools uh in line to start and open i think we had a pretty good opening um the crew here at the ray school has been stepping up and working a lot of extra hours as they have at the end of high school and getting the job done but it's not a complete job that we would normally do if we had a full compliment so that's my update on custodial maintenance operations for two months so a couple questions one i don't see this in the required action so we [Music] the acp personnel are not going to be here when the children are here is that correct correct but they still have to follow all state and federal guidelines for new hampshire law and that is with it that is a part of the function that is

050that's what i was looking for in like the cleaning products and everything they use are going to be yes they're vetted by us uh and in compliance with everything that we do and do we need the reason i'm asking about when they're here do they need background checks yes yes all of that do you think that they have to be checked exactly the same as any other actual district employee will be yeah that's in new hampshire [Music] so will the district be still attempting to hire people with the start date of january or are we should we stop a higher effort we haven't decided that at this point in time um i think we'll need to look at what the environment looks like and how well it's going with them um so this has been

051something that's been ongoing for like years with custodial health you know rotating through um so i don't know the answer to that then tonight and i think it will be probably taken up in the strategic planning looking at you know opportunities to outsource for cost savings without impacting current employees right so and we are keeping our our day custodian who is also considered lead customer who will be you know working with their lead in order to have a seamless operation so we're not giving up on all of our you know presence [Music] unsure territory we i don't think we've ever had an interview with two open positions for school board members uh we lost britney james in august she uh took a job uh or moved to washington dc we were sad to see her

052go and then a few weeks ago i was notified that kelly mcconnell who served in our school boards for six and a half years has taken a long-term uh substitute teaching job with uh high school and because of uh regulations and policy she hasn't stepped down from the board and i just wanted to thank her for her six and a half years of service but we're glad you're staying around and teaching in the high school so the the way the state of new hampshire requires uh nominations to be vetted for uh elected positions such as school boards is we have to do it completely in the public so um each member or each nominee will bring them up just in the order that they're listed here in my board box they'll have up to two

053minutes to make any opening remarks and then i'll turn it over to the school board to ask questions for up to three minutes and then we'll bring the next candidate up at the end of this section we'll move into business requiring action we'll move through all the expenditure approvals etc and then we'll have school board members nominate a candidate for one of the positions we will then open it up for discussion and then we will take a vote until we have two members still in those two positions um i'll just mention because we have to do this in public um uh matters which is discussed in public would likely affect adversely the reputation of any person shall not be discussed however because we are required to do this in public i just asked everyone to

054be mindful of comments or any potential uh reputational issues so at this point anyone have any questions another clarifying one so at the end you know we'll have five cats choosing two is it which two people do we want or is it you agree with person a yes we'll have a board member move a candidate we'll then have discussion then we'll just do a normal vote if we don't get a majority vote we move on for uh another motion and then i know we have four people we have [Music] so we have five candidates olivia joris uh deb nelson kevin kennedy uh tim lennox thank you and stuart gray great okay so that's the order we're going to go in and then just randomly have to get put into the board back so olivia would

055love to all right do i start the screen do look at you look at us all right well hello my name is olivia first and foremost thank you all of you and all of you for your service over this pandemic i sincerely have to say i'm completely floored by the fact that my kids were in school all of us but more to me why i'm here well my interest is that i have two kids here at the right school and i'm particularly interested in the realm of diversity and inclusion myself i'm a lavina grew up in chile live here in the us quite honestly comparing my education that i received in chile to what i see here i'm just in awe i think this is spectacular there's always room for improvement and this is why

056i want to be part of this community um when it comes down to diversity inclusion these are some perhaps more private matters but the reality is that if i don't speak up on it i will be impacting the lives of other children who perhaps are going through the same map i have a child who is transgender at the race school and has been completely supported and i want to continue to pave the road and help pave the road for transgender non-conforming children as they go through our school system furthermore i'm in the process my husband and i are in the process of adopting a child from burundi and quite honestly we know how much race can be a topic of conversation and i want to be part of that conversation a minute ago now those

057are my own personal very selfish reasons why i want to be part of this community because i think that i can contribute to that but furthermore i think why i can actually be useful to you here in the committee is because my expertise is in compensation setting salaries negotiations and helping with budgets and all the side of the union conversations and negotiations while i don't do that anymore i actually run a company called salary coaching for women where we help women all over the world get paid what they deserve i used to work as a senior compensation analyst at dartmouth in which i actually overstock seiu union negotiations etc all sorts of salaries which i know is a topic of conversation that can really be of service and use to the board thank you very

058much so at this point uh many of us that number of committees that we all sit on and because of kelly and whitney stepping down we're going to be expecting the candidates who get selected to fill in those spots so um it's not just one meeting a month which i think everyone was a little shocked when we all joined the board so uh what group are your children um my son she wasn't second grade and my daughter is in fourth grade and my incoming child will be probably next year the following year is going to be somewhere in the race between kindergarten it's exciting and so you mentioned your personal reasons for um really thinking about diversity equity inclusion and i just wondered if you want a chance to talk a little bit more about

059um you know how you see those relating to the job of the school board right so what do you think the role is before in terms of diversity i think that the role of the board and really truly where i would like to help is to just generate further awareness i quite sincerely think that the board is doing a phenomenal job on all months but i've told lauren many times i still can't believe we're the school is open in the middle of the time that met but i think that you only have so many hours in the day right in so many committees that you're already part of i think that where i can help and this is actually something that i've already been doing um is bringing information information and just bringing in awareness

060like for example before my son started kindergarten so lou he knew he was transgender at three years old and since then he's been a boy so i am fortunate that i have a team of staff members that helped me out and what we did we went on a saga why not saga but like we surveyed 700 elementary schools across the country to understand what it is that schools are doing when it comes down to bathrooms and figuring out like okay if you identify as a boy what are you doing when it comes down to bathrooms and restaurants and such because that's a problem that my child is falling to face so i think i'm very good at getting creative when it comes down to facilitating answers and not just going with an opinion that says

061we should be doing this and make a grand statement about it it's like okay what is the information what is everybody else doing that resolves the problems that work yeah i'm just letting you know five minutes left so thank you very much good evening i'm jeff nelson and as you can tell maybe by my voice i have almost 30 years plus experience as a teacher and i am now retired which means that i can actually do the job that i was elected to do when my youngest child was an infant and that was to serve on the hanover dresden school board and at that point we were hiring a principal a superintendent it was a little overwhelming and i was working full-time but i do know how many different board meetings there are in this

062job but the reason that in addition to the letter that i've sent rick which i assume we shared with all of you sorry um is i think there are three qualities that i can bring to the board and one of them is that 30 plus years of teaching experience many of them at the honors and ap level dealing with subjects that have most recently been deemed by the state of new hampshire to be really damaging to children and i can quite honestly testify that none of those children i taught were damaged and i think that that is an experience i could bring to the board i think also yes not just on you one minute oh okay the second thing is my age and i think that nobody else on the board is as old

063as i am and with that age i think comes experience and knowledge of the community of what's happened in the past like you know oh i know you had trailers out there 25 years ago and i think that that's beneficial to a school board because i believe kelly may have been the person with the most longevity on the board and so i think some history is of value and the third thing that i think i bring to the board is that i am connected to the community i've lived here a long time i've been invested in the community and i think people value my opinion and perspective thank you at this point i'd like to open up the questions and i forgot to look at the zoom window so kim and kelly if you have

064questions please let us know so what direction would you like to see the board focus on or areas we should focus on over the next couple of years well i do know the curriculum has long been an issue i know that you have a new assistant superintendent who is going to be working on that specific area i know that the previous director of curriculum came from the school where i was teaching i know that curriculum is sticky and messy and gross and i was involved with it every year that i taught and so i think i can be helpful with that aren't you going to ask me how old my children are you told us but i don't have any children at gray at the richmond school or the high school so i have no

065personal bias i have no acts to grind i have no immediate concern but i do have two children who went k through 12 in the dresden school system can't overdress okay so you sort of alluded to like divisive concepts legislation so i guess i was just wondering um do you see a way for you to bring your expertise about curriculum into conversations around diversity equity inclusion oh i would love to have that conversation i i don't presume that i know everything about everything because i don't but i do think that there are times in every conversation and certainly the ones about racism and social justice and diversity and inclusion sometimes it helps to have someone say i did this and i don't think you need to be quite so alarmed and you know when you're

066older and you're tall and you can be heard sometimes people you know believe you and sometimes they don't i i know that yeah rick you kind of stole one of my other questions but i guess i'll ask maybe the opposite um deb what do you think the board is doing well or the district is doing well well i think the district has always done a really wonderful job of preparing students for the future and that is in terms of graduating well-rounded students graduating students who are invested politically invested in matters of social justice i think that the ray school in particular and the richmond school in particular give children a chance to try things that they haven't necessarily done at home and to be successful with them i think that the schools have prepared a

067lot of students very very well to go on to strong second um not secondary careers but whatever i don't know if that makes sense thank you five minutes as well okay thank you so much thank you i know a few of you people already i don't know everybody i'm kevin kanu i live in aetna live in hanover for about 11 years now i'm retired from the military i'm also retired from crowd starts to retire so when i retired about five years ago i'm after certain public service in different various ways i spent a lot of time volunteering i spent some time on a couple national committees on engineering risk for infrastructure and climate change issues and then i have a son in second grade in grade school so when he started school i started volunteering

068more locally volunteered as a blue parent for the last two years in the school library i helped out with lecturing and science classes in the middle school related climate issues and i'm a local college admissions rep and that helped out in the high school with the guidance department with um various admissions issues for a couple different schools in 2020 the summer 2020 when everything was shut down with coverage and everybody started watching the school board meetings i think you maxed on your zoom leadership um a few parents asked me if i was interested in running a few parents from my son's class and i didn't know what the opportunities were at that time but i thought more public service locally was something that i was interested in and that i have the time to do

069my particular interests here are related to infrastructure curriculum special education needs and things of that nature and the letter i sent to the board is one that i sent as a letter of introduction to parents at the grace school when i ran for the school board last spring so it's really tailored towards as an introduction to other parents who didn't know yeah that's [Music] would you like to see the board focus over the next couple of years as a board member so um two of the interests i expressed in the letter when i was running for the board that came up in tonight's discussion for curriculum that lauren mentioned she mentioned that initially in a well that i heard in a june 2020 school board meeting when things were shut down with covet and recognitions

070on how curriculum issues could be improved to help um standardize things more across within each grade but across each classroom within the race pool um my other primary interest would be on infrastructure and facilities um because my background i used to manage a 1.3 billion year infrastructure program western united states just kind of reading through your um your letter you talked about um other areas of interest in supporting special needs can you expand on that a little bit uh supporting special education so i have a nephew who's autistic i have friends in hanover whose kids are autistic and when i was running for the board i got emails from two different parents kids who have uh are special needs kids saying that they had interest in what the opportunities were in the school they had

071some concerns about it i don't have a special needs kid here so i don't actually know how things are wrong with that right now um i've looked a little up it's hard to find specific information on that but i'd be interested in helping with that um what do you think the direction should be for the diversity so i don't know what the committee's actually doing because their meetings are at four o'clock in the afternoon which is during the work day and a lot of people don't have the opportunity to view them and i haven't had the opportunity to view a single i did self-nominate for that with my nomination when after the deadline because i don't know how to get the nomination to the appropriate person when i submitted a letter of interest for that

072i said one of the areas i thought should be considered is also economic diversity my son's best friend is a person of color here in town he has limited opportunity to participate in certain things just because of economic considerations i i think that's something that we could do a better job with including and recognizing that not everybody is included and some people do feel left out of different things within this classroom and other extracurricular activities because [Music] we got about 30 seconds left oh okay um so you um so kevin i you know we saw that you uh ran on the ballot last year and i believe is the only candidate that we're looking at that did that can you kind of explain to us your [Music] your experience through that process and kind of

073what you've learned um you know from now until then in your interest thanks so my experience in that process wasn't actually very favorable i'm just running was fine um i i'm not a facebook person there were i found out while the day before the election and the day of the election that there were some posts about me by two specific people who i won't name because rick's asked not to name names um stating i had certain political positions these are people i've never met before i'd never heard their names before and they never asked me about what my positions were on different things the positions that they stated for me were incorrect those were not my positions and um i received 127 fairly negative emails because of that that day the night before the day

074of the election and i responded to every single one of those emails explaining what my positions were on the things that i was asking about so it wasn't really a great experience thank you kevin [Music] spoke public school with a mask on you getting used to it yeah so hello thank you for uh letting me speak to you guys tonight my name is tim monach i'm a hanover resident uh fairly new president um as i stated in my letter of interest um my main reason my main interest in serving on the ward is that my oldest daughter just started here uh at the race school in kindergarten and she'll soon be followed by my son um so broadly speaking i want to be more involved in my kids education and in the community that i'm

075into some what they do uh schools are where communities come together where family relationships are built where young people are socialized and where they enter the larger world schools are our greatest commitment we have to this idea of the public good to the greater good these are a pretty challenging times as i wear a mask and talk on zoom and this is especially true for uh children especially young children people that teach them and make sure they're safe and in a comforting environment um the pandemic has made things that are unique and special about our community um challenging and i think that the school board more so than the state legislators also the select boards are the most important entity to address a lot of these challenges um i want to contribute my experience and

076insight into coalition building working with various stakeholders at times often conflicting stakeholders resolving conflict solving problems building relationships across various differences i've experienced labor relations civic engagement community organizing of the overall goal of improving public services [Music] and i want to serve on the board uh to support those who teach and uh parents and teachers and my time is up uh so thank you for letting me speak briefly and hopefully thank you so again i'll send questions uh what would you like to see the board focus on the boards focus on over the next couple of years well i think i mean the quick answer for a couple years is sort of a broadcom assessment uh what what have we gone through what are we going to go through in future pandemics evaluating what went

077right where proof is going to be made i think two of the topics i would have come here to talk about or to answer your question that i've also been brought up in this meeting um revolve around curriculum development and uh turnover um and having a qualified workforce um i think both those issues there's a need for more community engagement um community engagement can be uh tense it can be contentious and that's that's good uh it's public school it's a public school district um so sort of mapping out what you know uh learning from covet and preparing for the next challenges and then specifically with curriculum development and determination um what do you what do you think the direction of eisenhower should be in the future so to be honest i don't have a strong

078grasp of where it is right now um but i know it's a it's an important topic in general but also like many things sometimes a contentious topic so sort of temperature check might be what i think uh maybe that's already happened or maybe it's happening um but figure out uh the various stakeholders if you will parents of course teachers students especially high school students and then a larger community taxpayers and what is their interests and potential involvement potential opinions on this kind of topic and what does it mean it's kind of a broad term um so i obviously have some learning to do on what that term means and what it means that broadly at a public school and specifically a public school and a public school district excuse me like we have here in

079norwich um i think this first time we met so um is this the first meeting you've attended during the pandemic i was a participant in a couple participant observer in a couple of years [Music] a couple different um worker and business coalition boards the one that i was most involved in uh was the new orleans worker resource center i believe was what we called it for what it was called shortly after hurricane katrina so it was um assessing uh workforce development needs in the wake of that it would rebuild the area and it was um it was quite contentious quite difficult but also as you may know after katrina a lot of confusion it was more of a clarifying you know people coming together to figure out what's going on thank you tim last but

080not least uh stuart i'll follow tim's lead sit down hi everybody my name is we've been in the hannover area about four years moved up here from washington dc area i've been in patent law for about 20 years now which seems like forever i have a particular focus in biotech medical places and with that i think i bring the table with technocrat ability my focus and what i make memory of the board is the ability to help interpret potential legislation that may affect the ei committee not necessarily advocating or becoming a activist for a certain cause but allowing the board and the schools to properly identify the hot button issues the state legislatures put in so we can properly uh fall under the stay on the good side of the secretary of education i think

081that's the biggest hot button issue coming up for our school system as well as school systems around hampshire and the rest of the country i think we could be a early mover in satisfying those who are pushing certain agendas and those that want to limit certain agendas and find that medium everybody happy and at least on the right side of the ball um beyond that one of the reasons why i like hannover we moved up here the first experience i had with the race school and that's my personal bias we've got three kids here fifth grade second grade in kindergarten was with uh miss ambroid uh when i met with her and we talked about our experiences back in virginia together she's a but it was such a welcoming experience for myself and my oldest

082daughter that i knew the community involvement in hanover and especially the race school was so welcoming i just want to make sure that it's a continued opportunity for all thank you at this point i'll open up the questions and i'll start with my normal question where do you see we the board should be focusing over the next couple years well i'm going to repeat what everyone else has said curriculum um my focus is science curriculum invent convention better shift entrepreneurial making money so i think the board has an opportunity to continue curriculum in a science and a translation from bench research to either products or health care or whatever you're into i think it's an important opportunity that the board could tap into with the resources inhabited the uh the ability for parents to be

083involved which are pretty high up uh high achieving cancer a lot of those fields needed pulled in as well and facilities marcelo um you mentioned you use the word activism to sort of describe uh one of the pitfalls that might you know fall before the thing yeah let me talk a little bit more about that and how you imagine this direction like i said i'm non-active so i respect those that push whatever generally they have a personal uh affection for but i think whatever people put forth needs to be properly molded and applicable to both society and legislation so those who want to push one side or the other and somewhat indifferent but i think being practical and pragmatic about how any idea gets implemented is very important yeah so what committees would you be

084most interested or think you'd be most helpful serving uh well i have a lot of experience in reading boring federal regulations and interpreting statutes i think any lawyer might know that if you have played in the patent world at all you understand how dry some of that can be i can do that budget i can do budget stuff one area that i really like i've been reading on the agendas recently is facilities i ran track back in the day and i have some experience with track facilities and athletic facilities so i'm very interested in that as well thank you same question i had before um again nice to meet you well we see each other in the crosstalk charlie can you talk about your experience with this board you know whether again recognizing that we've

085been on these screens for the last year and change very little experience let me be honest with you i attended via zoom a few the board members board meetings last year because i was interested a little birdie once told me when i first showed interest in the school board this person gently said give it some time give it some time it's a big commitment um and so i i i stood back for a while um but now with this what i call a trial period of an appointment i think it's a much easier bite for someone to get into it thank you so i want to thank all the people that have uh volunteered to serve on this board it's a it's uh very impressive that we had five nominees we actually had six but

086one person had to step down because of a new job that you had to take so i truly appreciate your civic mindedness and uh i hope that even if you're not nominated or not selected they can still consider running for the board we have elections coming up so and i'm sure there'll be some openings uh this next year so thank you so we're going to move on to business requiring action uh so we're going to do uh motion by consent but before i do that i would like to give kelly a panel a few minutes she wanted to say some departing awards before she becomes a teacher thanks rick two minutes right um so i excuse me you guys have my letter of resignation so um you can read it i actually decided not to

087come tonight because i was afraid i might cry it is definitely bittersweet um i am excited to take on this role and to work with the kids and i just i love teaching french so i you know that was an opportunity that i i couldn't turn down um and i'm excited to get to do that but i'm also just so proud of the work that we have all done over the last six and a half years and i've listed all of the administrators that we've hired and i'm not even sure i got the count right i think i lost counted at about 11. um the pandemic that we have navigated the policies that we've uh dusted off and revised thank you ben especially for that um so and the budget work kim always a huge

088thank you and jamie um so i'm just so proud of everything that you all are doing um and i'm sorry to step down so abruptly uh that was not never my intention um so and i just wanted to you know i have three kids in this or two kids now in the schools three kids who've gone through the schools and um they are just thriving they are flourishing and they have gotten so much out of the programming that you all are providing and my oldest has gone on to a private school for basketball i like to call that out because that is exactly why he's gone there he has d1 aspirations and so we made that choice but um he is just soaring pardon the pun but soaring in terms of his academics um and

089you know he feels so prepared for this new world that he's headed into he is curious he's an independent learner he has learned to manage his time um and he just feels so well prepared for this these next steps and going to school with people from all over the country and all over the world so i think for me that's been a real proof of the quality of what we as a district have provided to him so um and to all to all of our kids there's work to do certainly but um i just i feel really proud and grateful to have been part of where we've been able to get um so far and i really look forward to the wonderful work that you guys are going to keep doing with the strategic plan

090and i definitely plan to be involved so if you need me you know pull me in so thank you guys thank you very much kelly we're going to miss having you on the board i am now the longest serving hannover school board member um congratulations rick uh thank you for my crowning achievement um any comments for kelly kelly i think at some point we'd all like to get together at what used to be um salt hill pub whatever it's called now for uh for a little celebration so we'll set that up later okay um so at this point we have expenditures minutes non-public minutes the budget guidelines which we discussed earlier in kelly's uh resignation letter and would someone like to make a motion making sense john vote to approve items by consent for the

091second then all those actually gets people on zoom so we'll do it this way uh ben bikini yes john yes [Laughter] [Music] okay so appointment of new board members and again this is kind of new territory for us because we've got two positions to fill so what we're going to do is someone will move to nominate an individual this will be the position to replace brittany joyce uh for a one-year school board position until the march elections we'll then have a discussion if there is any discussion and then i'll just take a vote if that person receives a majority uh we will then move on to the second position does that make sense okay so do i have anyone who would like to move for uh one of the candidates we heard from today i

092can move in everyone has a moment um [Music] so i would have had a suggestion prior but um it seemed a little um odd to vote on each one of them individually because you have like what if three of them what are you going to do put them in a hat and draw one no that's that's the the problem with this public uh requirement is it makes it difficult what is if you put each one of the person's names down and then if each one of the board members individually rank them from one to five and then one person takes all of those numbers and then puts them together they say that is the best way to go okay and that way it shakes out on who rises to the top two spots we can

093do that live yeah i just don't know if that's considered open in public so jay are you there if we make the list problems i i do know there's a prohibition against secret ballot are you allowed to just have a private discussion and then vote publicly no yeah um so i'll read you the past so that's what we initially were thinking so we could have an open discussion but uh um a vacancy of an elected or appointed public office is an appointment and is not the hiring of a public employee interviews and deliberation on filling a vacancy in an elected official therefore must occur in public session it's a case law lambert versus belmat county 2007. but it doesn't say put the lists on board it doesn't say you can't list the five names behind

094you and each one of you give one of them a number from one to five and then we move after that and then if you have a tie you shout it out [Music] does that sound right to you um i guess you you could um as long as it's as long as it's open robert's rules of order uh robert's rules of order is pretty strict in in terms of nominating uh and it's typically done the way you said rick it's uh it's typically the nominations come from the the board and each nomination is taken individually and um i mean that would put it on each board member to vote you know vote their conscience for each each of the candidates so um but i don't see any prohibition it's really not specific it doesn't tell

095you a specific way to vote it just uh it just prohibits uh a uh secret ballot private yeah kelly yes kelly mcconnell member of the public um right i think so i think technically um if if say for example john were to make a motion that um i don't know pick a random name um uh be still elected as a new board member um some you don't need a second um for that and then each board member would vote i think that's the the traditional way to do it i don't know that you can't do the ranking but i think that would be um and so people supported that candidate then you have one done and if if there's not a majority then you'd wait for other emotions just go down through the list okay

096i think that probably makes the most sense [Music] so only if someone made a motion for that person though so you're not going to go down all five necessarily unless you you until you so you would go until you filled those two seats right now i have four people who want to make a motion so i don't know how like you're in the chair you pick yeah it's true okay so [Music] so sure let's go back we're gonna we're gonna just do what we discussed uh and is the you know probably the clearest way to keep us from not getting in trouble is have someone move to nominate an individual and then we'll take a vote and then we'll move to the if that person doesn't get uh three or more votes then we move

097on for another nomination so at this point would someone like to move to nominate a candidate to fill for ejoyce's spot they married you so we're making a motion to move a candidate correct i just want to make sure i followed yes okay um i move to nominate deborah bacon nelson to serve sorry i lost my um as the new hanover school board member replacing brittany joyce for one school board position until the march 20 march 22 elections okay we don't need a second or discussion we just take the vote no second is required okay so at this point uh moving on voting on kim's move motion all those in favor of them nelson serving on the board so we're not allowed to discuss at all can we discuss i don't think there's any any

098prohibition against discussion as long as you follow the the guidelines that you gave at the beginning of the meeting about people's reputations yep thank you so do you yeah i think having a discussion that someone wants to point out is that speaking only for myself i have no knowledge of the background the video these five exceptional candidates that are inventing them in person to my knowledge i just want to make that clear and that would be very very rewarding to make a similar statement or not sure i know a couple people from town strong um or strong feelings towards anyone in particular all right so i do not know uh stuart or kevin thanks to the ebook i do know olivia dev and tim um i have answered questions about my experiences on the board

099i am friends with dev as well we work together in various capacities um [Music] i guess i don't really know anybody if that's what we're doing i have met in conversation and i've answered questions after deliberative sessions related to the school board so i know that those who have attended but um nope welcome and thank you for your interest so and this is uh rick johnson i met kevin several times my son applied to west point i think that's the first time we chatted just getting that coordinated and i think last fall or two falls ago we chatted again about west point and then um one of our friend's daughters was at the naval academy we talked about that and i ran into kevin at the balloon festival up in coast mills this weekend so

100and i've met deb several times i actually was chatting with her in the corner at uh centerra yesterday and uh protests are supporting uh mandates so and we've had a couple calls on the democratic party but that's all i haven't met them personally and i do not know any of the other candidates so any other discussion on the uh motion so at this point i'm going to go around uh asking up or down or yay or may for the motion for that nelson so [Music] you're saying yay i couldn't really hear what the what were the ben said no john said no marcelo said yes yes and it's up to you i guess i'll say yay yes hartman yes i said no because i'm having a hard time with you today so uh so ken

101uh yes and johnson yes so uh that is a majority for uh deborah nelson serve on the board and now we will move on to [Music] does she get to vote on the next person no that's a good question actually that's a really good question she okay so we're gonna move on to the second motion uh appointment uh to fill kelly mcdonald's seat for a one-year board position until the march 2022 elections then we're in discussion so i'm gonna go around uh i'm gonna start with canvas time jim hartman no with regret yes and we do not have a majority of it do anything for two months oh yeah oh that's right he went first so uh johnson no would regret them as the new hampshire school board member replacing paul mcconnell for a one-year

102school board position to the march 2022 elections any discussion yes ben yes johnson yes so i think we have our two positions filled congratulations dad and kevin and as i said this is this is a really weird situation tonight uh and it's very tough doing this in public it's uh i'm really uncomfortable and i truly appreciate everyone who took the time to in the effort to put their names in and i really hope you will consider running in the election coming up in march so thank you very much okay so the next position is to sign committees uh to the new board members i'm going to hold off on that because i'm sure you're all remembering yeah so what we're going to do is we have a excel spreadsheet i will remove kelly and britney's

103positions you i'll send it to you you can take a look let me know if you can fill one of the empty positions that would be great if you're really desirous of taking a position that's already been killed by another one let me know and we can see if we can uh figure out a way to move people around um i can tell you right now just based on kelly and brittany leaving we have a need for dresden evaluation committee central staff development committee policy committee and the liaison to the new hampshire school board association which is actually a very important role brittany carried that for a couple months before she sat down and then i know uh brittany served as the secretary for the dresden school board and the secretary for the sau school

104board kelly served as one of the chairs of this dresden school board so we're going to be probably moving people around over the next couple school board meetings as we nominate new chairs and other positions so so i will send you both emails with the spreadsheet just let me know what you would like to do so report the chair um our next school board meeting for hanover's scheduled for wednesday october 13th jamie do we anticipate any need for i know where the budget's going on and stuff we don't anticipate a special meeting i may anticipate a very quick special meeting prior to the breadwinning uh based on a conversation regarding transportation that we're gonna do okay so that so before the dresden meeting in september so we'll just convene for five ten minutes before um

105so right now we're very busy in the budget process ken is doing a great job leading that i've been involved with negotiations for the teachers union and the support uh staff uh union negotiations that'll be one of the positions i would like someone to take over uh because i'm flat out with that in the strategic plan so i'll also include that on this committee um and that's all i have to report uh committee reports does any of the committee chairs have anything at this point okay uh superintendents report jay thanks rick i've spared everyone the video tonight i'm not feeling very well um i i have a couple things i'd like to say uh first off i really really really want to thank kelly mcconnell for her years of service not just her service as

106a school board member but the fact that she chaired since i've been here essentially chaired hanover now and then dresden and um the superintendent and the board chair worked very closely together developing agendas dealing with the issues of the day that happen to arise throughout the year and kelly's been a great partner and kelly i really miss working with you um i've been really really fortunate to have a great board i've told the board before i can't believe the hours you put in and the amount of work you do and and the just the set of knowledge and skills that you each bring and um it's it's not like any board i've ever worked with before and uh i guess uh following on that i i'm really impressed that we had five candidates stepped forward

107that's more than i think we've ever had for an election um so to have that kind of interest and to have people who care that much about about the community schools is is really impressive depressive and it's also um it's also encouraging we have a lot of work ahead of us uh we we really have re-rededicated ourselves to a strategic plan [Music] to some of the comments made early in the meeting by one by two of the speakers we are engaged in in serious curriculum work at this point we do have robin who's doing amazing work as recently as today to achieve that and that along with the work that we'll be doing in facilities as we think about what we need from our schools over the course of the next several decades it's just

108an exciting time so um so i want to thank all five candidates and and well especially welcome our newest deb and kevin i'm looking forward to working with you and uh would invite you to uh contact my office i'd love to meet with you just to kind of share uh share whatever information that you might need from me but also to kind of give you a little a little more information about what it's like to work not on one board but three um and kind of bring you up to speed on the initiatives that are currently underway um so um you can certainly reach out contact ryan in my office and we'll we'll hopefully be able to plan a meeting soon and other than that um i i just love the start we're off to

109as lauren mentioned it's not exactly how we how we pictured it but everyone as they did all last year are doing a wonderful job adapting and we'll look forward to an improvement in the pandemic and we will continue to keep each other safe so thank you all okay well i'm so happy to hear people talking about curriculum tonight and i'm happy to report that now that the summer has passed and i have time to actually get prepared to start working on the curriculum and try to leave some copic behind us then today we had our first joint high school mary cross school meeting about curriculum so this afternoon we met from two schools together at mary across and we reviewed i went through the curriculum google drive that you put together for each school and

110each grade level in each subject area it's going to be a common area for us to be able to house curriculum for the district we reviewed the templates that we're using we have our unit template we have a library planning template and a lot of that work is thanks to lauren and her team of grace school and to the um the middle school and other schools that have been using groupon atlas previously a lot of that information has been combined you can put it to the the long-range planning room and being a rubric so we talked about that as you know we had some summer curriculum work that took place so we had presentations from two married cross teachers who talked about the work that they did started from scratch this summer working on some

111language arts curriculum and then we also had a presentation from our fourth grade team from grade school who have presented their line range plan and all the work that they've already put into that over the past few years so it was just so exciting people were enthusiastic and we begin our release date next thursday we'll have our first release date with the first grade team from both schools we'll be meeting together and um and getting that work underway there's already work that's been done really good work and so i'm looking forward to this being not an easy process and it will not be done in a year i've been saying people this a long range plan it's going to take us three to five years to get to a really big point in the curriculum

112right now we're documenting what's happening and then we'll move on to k through 12 vertical and horizontal deficiencies things like that like when the curriculum changes like are you making towards any change that are needed any needed changes in other words proficiency sports so i will ask you if you have questions or concerns please write to robin in an email or stop set up a meeting we're not going to have a discussion about curriculum at a school board meeting tonight emails are not always answered um so yes you were starting at coding so how are we still in know kind of wait and see with masks and everything else no we are fully maths and we will represent well that's what i meant but i thought they were initially going to make a decision yes

113we had our meeting and we are continuing with math definitely [Music] it's remained high all throughout the state so it's still concerning and hospitalizations have been increasing in different areas so we're continuing to watch it closely we will have another meeting in two weeks and um so we'll just keep seeing what's going on in the schools we're like i said that earlier in the summer we will continue to just monitor the situation and we'll make changes on the as mean basis and we'll meet you know quickly if we need to make any changes and then this note here talks about substitute tests is that something you were going to why address tonight impossible substitute class will be discussed yes okay so we are incurring some cost for substitutes for the curriculum release days but i'm

114there also have been issues as you all know front debt substitutes and the adequate amount of substitutes so one of the things that i've been working at with the high school is to um try to think about some creative ways that we might not need to substitute for the days so some of the release days that they already have we're trying to schedule some time during those days so hopefully about a year ago the board was asked to be substitute put ourselves in the subject teachers list is with kelly mcconnell leaving does that like should we take ourselves off or that i think kelly is a long-term sub i think if you're just a part-time or it's like a one-off yeah i think that's fine right but if you become a long-term sub you're actually

115a school employee maybe that was their plan so at this point i'm going to turn it over to our business administration yay okay so in the um time is pissing by here um as you can see many of the transportation i'm just letting them know feel free to send me an email yes please thank you so we've been having employee shortages in many different realms we spoke about custodial realm earlier tonight there's also been employee shortages in the food service realm even with some of our vendors at two of our schools at preschool there was the sheets here that i believe they're hiring they shouldn't shut up this week yes there's also shortages at the high school with employees we thought we were going to have to we were going to be short at the

116richmond middle school as well uh which is our own self-thought um but that worked out at the very like the day before we um thank god that the chef there are best friends um so um i can come help you okay i do have backgrounds so we are working through those i have had meetings with cafe services um and they are in the process of hiring to fill the positions that we have transportation so transportation this year last year was a rubik's cube from heck and it was never ending nightmare every single day that we were open so after covered year with transportation we thought oh it's going to be so much easier the next year out we're not going to have to do you know student tracing and checking temperatures and having bus monitors

117and checking our kids well we are an amazing place to be and a ton of people moved in i think all the houses in hanover that sold sold fans and so everybody knows we've had a banner year of folks requesting uh transportation services which on the one hand is amazing because that means our buses it makes it difficult when you come in with the same amount of roots that you had pre-painted based on ridership then and you realize in the middle of august after you receive more than 700 plus requests for transportation services that oh my god um i don't think we're going to have enough assets to pick up all the students and that's exactly what happened right around august 17th as i was going through all of the early requests off of a

118survey that i haven't sent out from my office and then we did the info snap email whereby we asked people to sign their students up to matriculate the schools and it also asks about transportation and those came in even higher than my initial survey so we got very creative with trying to accommodate many different needs we had one section and location of hanover where i had 93 students to try to fit on a bus that holds a you can put maximum and see which we never knew um so we not only only put 52 of us unless they're really little little rules we might put three in a smart couple of seats but i really don't like to either um so we started the year with our full complement of the amount of buses that

119we would have normally needed in any of the other three years i was here based on the ridership to add to that there is a national shortage of drivers okay it hasn't got much to do with the level of pay i don't care you know you could pay him thirty dollars an hour and i don't know that we can still find more people we can try however for those people who don't know we don't own our own drivers they're outsourced we don't own our own buses they're outsourced i don't have a full-time transportation manager in-house that's me um so it's been a challenge it's been an absolute if i was to be completely honest nightmare and challenge at the same time we got it done right before school's open we got all the students to

120school i think i don't think we lost anybody might lost somebody up going home on the second day but we found them um and as we rolled into the school year the requests just kept coming and coming and coming we are aggressively and actively looking for more drivers because we have assets in the way of bus vehicles that we could utilize and the specific problem is in the morning because we are having two sometimes three depending on the volume as it you know ebbs and flows with activities after school um getting all of our kids to school on time by 8 am and by the way all of our schools start at the exact same time that's a little challenging with one set of buses okay we've been able to make it work um but

121this year it's tough so h10 which is the lime corridor and all of the roads off of the line corridor is running historically five to seven minutes late every day um we did flip that bus route to see if it would help and instead of dropping race school students second because it obviously comes by richmond middle school so we dropped there first instead of going around the roundabout and over to ray school to drop and then come back out and go down to the top of high school we said let's try dropping at the high school first because then you can someone and and then you can somewhat you know boogie down the back way or cross over off [Music] so we've tried that and i think he's stored at over the last few days

122we did a week ago and the race to school students are now pulling in yeah five to seven minutes late so knowing all of this um we went back and looked at age 10 and i was speaking predominantly about each term but i think it's you know i have shared with the school board just for the parents who have emailed me about it i shared with the school board all of your emails and concerns questions thoughts but i've not shared your emails with the public because of your students information i have shared with the school board however some information about what the route looked like what the updated information email was i sent out to families on the 12th of september what the route i would like the route to look like or we would

123on 9 20 which is not popular and i understand why i apologize i wish i had a driving license i go drive a bus um which document is the h10 effective 9 20 one yeah so what that does because here's the situation right we have probably my fault because i like to accommodate people we have since i got here expanded more personalized service whereby if we have time and we're going by we'll try to allow a stop as close to the home as possible especially when they're young students okay because by law and people hate to hear this but i'm sorry it's the truth and i'm not trying to be slick or difficult we don't have to support high school students and you don't have to transport anybody within two miles of school district from

124a school okay um which brings in another question for the board because i need guidance um we have a whole room that almost every single rider on it is within two miles to a school they're probably walking won't be a popular idea brought it up four years ago um but that would give us another lesson driver right but you know i i don't really want to go there but i understand what i'm parents saying well look there's a whole route that's within and he and they're right you know so i'm perplexed i'm at a point where i'm stressed and i'm frustrated and i'm doing the best not i us we all of us right down to the school level we're all doing the very best we can with the accents we have based on the

125volume that's been asked of us so i get that the poor folks on not being dry don't want to come all the way down that big huge hill that's why we expanded that route up our view three years ago i get that before people on carriage lane along with lindy don't want to go a mile all the way down to the bottom of that other hill okay because a mile if a kid's got a walk is a long walk um the only other option that we may have is to start the route 10 to 15 minutes earlier and that means the poor little kindergartner who needs to get on first because he lives on the right side of line road driving towards the line is going to be on a bus for a long time

126for kenya you know and to me that didn't seem like the right decision to make so the reason i said that maybe we should have a meeting on the 28th prior to the dresden board meeting is this there are a couple of ideas that we may be able to embark on after going back and forth today i need to hear back from the tag on one of them [Music] um and and and as unpopular as the thought will be perhaps this board and new members who are coming on board need some time to digest all of this and look at it and ask more questions and let us make i i need guidance from the school board to make a decision by the meeting on the 28th that we could roll out perhaps on october

1274th that being said it will mean if i can't gain five to seven minutes somewhere on that route that the little guys coming off of that that area are gonna lead to the race for five to seven minutes late every day depending on traffic in hanover depending on how many students arriving depending on you know who knows what number of things might occur because you have a lot of variables right there it is um the other route that we're going to look at is h1 because it is coming in right at the wire depending on how many riders are on board but i really think that one might improve when the when the bridge reel okay the bridge is closed on camera center road they're renewing so h1 is having to go out of their

128way to come down to parade ground which should be able to resume back to age four that has plenty of time when it's coming into the schools so where are we with the dartmouth college yeah i've not heard that from them and quite frankly and honestly i've not had time to reach out yeah yeah i'm like so the levers that we can pull to solve this is change the start and end dates for the schools changes start times right uh well start time for the schools stagger them so we're not having them all at eight o'clock that would be wonderful i don't know that that's feasible right now but yep um [Music] more buses yeah but then the limiting factor there's drivers [Music] um [Music] is there any advanced transit option no how about smaller

129vans like we talked about a couple years ago i still need drivers yeah we have and even with our listen even with our special education needs in the district we have one boss we've got actually we've been very very um we think out of the box trust me okay because in order to accommodate special education this year we normally used to be able to do it with one of our smaller buses and we're actually utilizing a norwich bus to move a hammer over student in order to accommodate because there are no available people to hire even for private transport is there the other option is to be a little more in adherence to the minimums that we have to do for state law so the two miles in high school which i know is very

130popular is there an option of dropping the middle schoolers off of the race school and having them walk to the right to walk to the richmond school here is which would get them there on time because i had one parent ask permission for their fifth grader to do that i assume there's issues with sixth seventh and eighth graders well no this would be this would be it would be dropping the race school students coming in off of age 10 let them get off at richmond middle and walk across to ray school yeah you know you would need a monitor but no we had one parent who already called and asked that said could my fifth grader get off at which middle school and walk across the back and i said i mean technically i probably

131can't say no but it's going to start a it's gonna open the pandora's box then you know we're gonna have a fifth grader unattended walking down a path yeah i'm uncomfortable with that but yeah so um you tell us what you need from the board i need that if it's money let us know i need money that's the problem we need drivers so if i become a school buster can i still serve on the board uh yes because it's sta okay so yes you could and i need one more driver to fix age ten because i could do a half a route in the morning and i know the time to get home are unpopular i can't fix that i'm sorry there's 52 kids on board and they can't all be first and can all

132be less so again i think for the board you know again with their strategic planning is maybe you know we've always talked about starting later especially with the high school kids and maybe that and i don't know where we ever went with that committee but that would free you do a loop system then so you have less riders less stocks that's not yeah we're not gonna solve it in the next two weeks but we've got to solve this because i don't think it's gonna get better it will go back to where it's been which has always been kind of tight and kind of um long bus rides and everything else okay so the other thing that i heard might be coming is another route where people actually have a plan to bring forward which is

133happiest quantum plate once it comes and i don't remember the root number i have to look at it i think it's six okay any questions for jane ben rick rick i have a question yep hold on we just uh ben was asking a question my kids to not um the bus at the moment um precisely because i wanted to be less overwhelming on this issue your road didn't change because we turn around purely but it does make me worry because all those roads are so hilly no sidewalks i'd imagine would be a huge safety concern in the winter with visibility or anything like that so what exactly is the specific problem is that there's too many stops there's two still because of the hills it's too long you can't combine with other buses because it's

134kind of what's the like why is it that route that's so problematic part of the reason it's problematic is because there are so many stops because there are so many roads that are coming off of it right the other part is that uh because line road is a considered a state highway that's posted at 50 miles an hour you cannot have children crossing even with a parent so i can't even consolidate like the poor little guy who gets on at 111 at first thing in the morning first stop on the right if i could you know start further out it started and have all the kids on the right side over the left side or something and pick them up you know you would pick up some time right but i can't because we've gone

135over that with our attorney like three years ago four years ago it was an issue um so yeah and adjust the shared volume right yeah can the police do that because the police department has made people stop in front of those schools it doesn't allow doesn't allow cars to turn in the crowd and we can go down the road right but they can't at each person we have online roads for lime road stops i think there's third and five stocks going up one side coming back down the other and the other route that runs near that is h1 it runs uh it comes all the way over to pineal hill with the edge opinion where it's dogform h1 is full i mean we're full on h1 too and that starts with dairy lane at like

13610-7 um it's okay actually i think there's a member of the public too with her hand raised yeah i was gonna ask jennifer if she could is this a specific about uh issue with your bus ride it is i i don't know if this is the right time to have a conversation or you want to save it to another meeting yeah if you could uh if you have a question or concern about a specific stop on a bus route or the rack please uh let the sau staff know well all right no it's not a it's not a it's not a question about a specific stop i mean jamie and i have been in conversation for a long time i just felt like it was important to some point when you feel like it's the

137right time uh hear from the public and understand the perspective of you know the impact this is having the safety concerns that we all have um questions about you know sort of spreading the inconvenience as opposed to consolidating it in our route and i also wanted to just clarify a couple of things at least in my memory um i'm not going to allow the public to comment on this i will note right now that uh jamie does share the emails regarding concerns about the bus routes with the school board so we're well aware of uh the parents concerns and also the the issues that we're dealing with and i would say i i would propose that we may want to consider having a public meeting about this in the future to discuss and you know

138we we've talked about dartmouth college helping us do some whole bunch of modeling uh that hasn't gone anywhere but i i i think it may be worthwhile because this this the five years i've been on this board this has been an issue all five years so we need to figure out uh you know and i think having the public maybe have an opportunity to talk um but i'm not trying to cut you off jennifer i'm just tonight we're trying to just understand the problem uh and as i said we are well aware of the concerns that the parents have had about distances steepness of roads crossing the highways all that so thank you kim so i totally agree with everything that that you said and frankly that probably yeah that everyone has said so far

139um i i just um wanting to make sure can we fix a little bit of the problem right now i mean how troubling is it just to move the times up five minutes if or seven minutes if that's on average just so they're maybe a couple minutes late versus ten i don't know i is that outrageous i don't know talking about just this one route well i'm hearing h10 a lot so with being five to seven minutes late and i i'm just i just wanna maybe fix a little bit and then we can talk about maybe if it just concerns me if i don't want to keep doing something that's not working i guess well i don't think this is really a school board decision well it is in that the unwritten parameters are we

140don't like to start roots before seven o'clock well that's an unwritten credit it's not it's not school board policy right so it says in our policy that the school board has to be has to be discussed with the school board in order to change to make sweeping changes to a week so if if you guys give me a heading on that i can go ahead and move this seven minutes earlier then i'll put that out for september 20th and leave all the stops the way they are until we can come back together with perhaps you know a more powerful claim now have you received comments from parents have has this been floated out there are parents concerned about an extra five or seven minutes i don't know i mean i did put it out in

141my email yes yeah so if you want to select the difference between 15 minutes and go seven and see what it if it incurs it i'm happy to try it i mean i would be just just as a and i'm happy to say that this is a short-term stop gap just to try to make the kids arrive on time and then that might not be the end-all solution and and and if if there's major pushback then there's major pushback and we can talk about it but i just i don't want to give you no direction and say we'll talk about it later if it's a problem right now sorry so yeah i also know that the policy itself has nothing i've ever looked at since and i'm happy to move this into the next false

142meeting so it was looked at in october 20th i think it says uh well it was last updated may [Music] we used on it somewhere okay so good that's yeah then we i think we need to as a district yeah the first one of the year which i think will be something different so back to ken's suggestion are we good with trying a seven minute earlier for h10 to see if that alleviates some of the concern and it's not a permanent change until we actually [Music] get some data and hear from their parents about any potential concerns it is but it's a balancing act it's you know you know safety getting to school on time or being a little longer on the bus and i know it's not ideal but you know it's kind of

143a bunch of things we got away so we want to suggest give jamie a thumbs up and try it for to at least redress the meeting where you may have another solution i'm very concerned or anything like that starting oh no not at all the drivers can start any time so how would you notify the parents i'm going to notice them tomorrow morning about the discussion from tonight okay email that's how they're doing changing the time so we'll go back and we'll re-run the route and re-post it with the email we send out saying you know this is what the interim change is going to be not the stops until until you discuss it on the 28th please send all of your thoughts comments questions concerns you know to to somebody okay so the right

144will be as it still was today yes well yes other than i'm still going to consolidate out emily lane okay and pete's because those are such small little those are all dead ends and they're very small and they're short and they have and they have older children on them is your handlers so i would i would restore mountain view carriage lane lindy and longwood and those are the ones that the parents have mentioned those are the ones i've heard from [Music] so i will send it tomorrow tell them that instead of the consolidations on this road this road um this is what we're going to try to see what it looks like right in the interim while if i can if i can hear back from the town and pineal hill which is very steep

145going out if they'll allow us to a pineal hill i think i'm gonna i may be able to between that and changes on um the right side coming down on the short roads we might be able to pick up that amount of minutes okay yeah now he'll designate not in a school [Music] um yeah and i just i just wanted to thank jamie for all of her work on this i know it is tremendously difficult and our population changes and um the school bus routes kind of have to be flexible every year no matter what so um this kind of leads to are we staffed properly this is you know trying to orchestrate four schools uh not co-located in a huge track of land that we've got to cover that we may during the strategic

146planning look at getting a transportation coordinator that can handle this stuff okay thank you jb thank you guys okay so the next is we're moving into non-public um so we're gonna have a short discussion in non-public we're going to go to the art room we'll come back in here go back into public and vote on the personnel issues and then we'll end so if you want to stick around you're more than welcome to i assume it's not going to be a long discussion it doesn't look like there's a lot of hiring that's going to be done um if you don't stick around thank you again for coming tonight and i want to thank the candidates all of you truly appreciate it and uh hope you still are interested in serving so at this point do

147i have someone who wants to move us into nonprofit then move to enter the nonpublic section on their rsa 9183c personnel second yes john keane yes yes department yes do you want me to call someone's cell phone uh yeah you can call mine or or do the non-public link which one do you want me to do no i just call just call my cell phone on the messages just announce herself [Music] at this point we're going to return to public session and approve the new hires do i have someone to make the motion to approve the hiring of a first grade teacher and a one-year digital learning specialist [Music] and johnson yes okay if anyone has any ideas or items that they want included on next month's agenda please email them to me and our

148next meeting is scheduled for wednesday october 13th and at this point i'd like someone to make a motion to a chair john motion to adjourn the meeting at 9 51 p.m second and then i don't think we have to vote so um we are adjourned at 9 51. thank you kim good bye i'm sorry