20210223 Dresden School Board Meeting

001does this happen okay you're good to get started whatever you want are we good to go yes can you guys hear me i suddenly can't hear anybody you're a little quieter now can someone say something just so i can see if my headphones working sorry can you hear me we can sing to you sorry guys i'm not sure what happened there um okay so let's go ahead and call the meeting to order and uh the first order of business is a donation from the jack and dorothy burn foundation i think this is actually uh officially a hearing right so we're we're opening the hearing to accept the donation from the jack and dorothy uh byrne foundation would anyone like to speak to that donation can speak to it if you'd like great thank you again

002can you hear me oh i'm sorry i wasn't enough that's fine um so this is uh a donation of fifteen thousand dollars for our march intensive that's now taking place in may um this is a recurrent it's been a recurring donation and this is used for the expenses for a project uh for uh for march intensive so um yeah respectfully ask that you approve the donation done thanks um i think i recall from from last or from previous years um does do the do these costs go to um helping to offset the cost for maybe scholarships and programming yes okay thank you just wanted to make sure that was clear thank you all right and if there are no further questions on this you see none okay i will take a motion then to yes

003john move to approve the donation with gratitude from the jack and dorothy byrne foundation in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars for the 2021 hhs may intensive excellent yes thank you very much and is there a second kelly hersey thank you um and we'll do a roll call vote on this starting with john yes uh then neil yes um camden yes kelly oh i can't hear you i can see that you're saying yes but i can't hear you all of a sudden maybe ours is feeds having trouble because i have that problem too all right i'll come back to you kelly in a second ben keaney yes marcella iblassy yes kim minius dan rockmore yes uh and mcconnell yes kelly do you want to try one more time now you're on mute no we still

004can't hear you but i see that you're yes so we will we will count you in in the affirmative there okay um and we'll see if we can figure out the tech issues you might want to log out and log back in kelly sometimes that solves it um all right thank you everyone that will close the hearing portion and we'll move on to agenda review as you can see in the agenda i did want to add under um business requiring discussion uh just uh the resolution uh for dan rockmore who will not be running again for school board um so this is his final meeting uh i believe he had to be with his son tonight um so he's not here this evening but we still would like to officially thank him for all of

005his many years of service um if the board is okay with that okay with it and i see him there oh is he here now dan oh i'm so sorry i strive to be an invisible board member are you okay with me adding the resolution dan sure i appreciate it thank you that's sweet all right excellent uh is there anything else that board members need to add or rearrange seeing nothing all right we will move right on ahead into public comment um and so i did just want to point out as it says in the agenda um we are going to be limiting comment to two minutes and the reason for that is that these dresden board mem board meetings with 12 members and two schools and lots of business as as many of you

006who follow these meetings know tend to go on despite my best efforts for many hours so um we are going to limit public comment to two minutes um so at this point i will open it up for uh any public comment dan okay so see dan's hand i will move you over dan go ahead dan hi there can you guys hear me yeah oh great so uh so thank you for the opportunity to speak i just wanted to reiterate some of the things that i said at the last uh actually not the last president meeting but at the hanover school board meeting and i want to address some of the equity diversity and inclusion initiatives um that are currently underway at uh at sau 70. and while i think they're well intentioned and we all

007want our kids in a school free of discrimination and bias the emphasis and execution of these need to be two things age and community appropriate and number two uh with proper oversight and community input and if those things don't happen and the objectives are not clearly stated or are politically motivated uh that's going to be a problem so i've requested uh documents and have received received some with respect to what the edi trainings are comprised of the documents were sent to me there they were locked i cannot share them with any other members of the community and i think it's really important that this be as transparent for the community um as uh as is possible so i would respectfully request that those documents be provided in an unlocked fashion so that they can be

008shared with community members number one number two i'd like to get all the documents for the edi trainings that are envisioned for the rest of the year so they only go through february so please consider this a formal request for for the remainder of the year um let me just give you an example of the exchange uh that occurred with our new associate principal at brs uh she sent in and some of you this is repetitive so i appreciate you bearing with me she sent an introduction in raising sunshine to the community at the end of january in which she discussed uh equity initiatives and the need to have quote unquote difficult conversations and the need to teach for quote-unquote social transformation at the race school in response i asked her exactly what she meant

009and we've been going back and forth the email and i asked that she clearly defined equity and what does it mean for the race school and unfortunately i have not been able to get a response that is uh that is definable from her which leads me to believe that she either can't define it or it hasn't been formally defined for the race school or she doesn't want to and you know in either case that's not a good thing right trying to define what these initiatives are dan i'm saying it's a fair question to ask and a straight answer should be given and that's not what's happening here i'm sorry kelly go ahead no that's okay i was going to say um we're at the two minutes um so if you could kind of wrap up

010with that i don't know if you finished with what you wanted to say um i did also just want to point out that this is the dresden meeting not the hanover meeting so um typically we wouldn't be discussing uh the race school um in this meeting that's a hanover meeting well i i appreciate that kelly but the these issues in the equity committee that was set up with apparently subcommittees that report to it uh are influencing all the schools within dresden so while i give you specific examples regarding ray this is a you know an issue that is affecting all of the schools and the transparency should exist for all of the community community members for all the schools and everything um that is happening so i've got additional comments to make i want to

011be respectful of everybody's time so what i'll do is i will send what i've got uh to superintendent badams excuse me because i don't have any of your contact information and hopefully he can distribute it to you that would be wonderful and i believe if there are things that um uh i can talk with um superintendent adams about what happens with that in terms of entering into meeting minutes or not i'm not sure what the legalities are on that so i will check on that okay okay thank you very much thank you dan um and thank you again for your investment in um in the education uh taking place in this district um miriam richards i see your hand is raised so i will move you over can you hear me now we can yes

012thank you okay i am very unfamiliar with uh this all this zoom stuff so bear with me uh i attended the policy uh meeting uh committee meeting uh this afternoon i at full disclosure i am uh daniel's mother and i have grandchildren in the school and i have taught for many years that's been my professional life actually taught on the college level for a very long time and uh i have to speak as a concerned citizen of this community and certainly for my grandchildren the the the talk this afternoon the discussion this afternoon um seemed to not address the elephant in the room and i i believe the elephant in the room for this entire district not just for the race school but for the entire upper valley is that there is a sea change

013in this country and you all know what i'm talking about because you've been witness to it unless you've been asleep these last miserable eight months and the terms race racism wokeness white supremacy equality diversity inclusion cancel culture and above all the conflation of equality with equity are the new terms these are all the new buzzwords and especially the new thing is critical race theory and i believe that there is a new authoritative reductionist assertion of us of systemic guilt by virtue of the color of your skin pervading our culture and i am very disturbed by it i i believe a culture of fears is is what we're confronting now a cancel culture witness the principle in windsor if you have a different opinion or so much as use the wrong words you have no moral

014legitimacy and you're in danger of losing your job and your livelihood so when when we talk about what's going on in the schools in the upper valley i think it's important that we as parents and grandparents and citizens even if you don't have children in the school because you care about what's going on in this country we need to know what's going on in the classroom and how all of this is going to affect curriculum how children are being treated and how is civics going to be taught what literature is going to be taught how i i i know it's very difficult to know these things but when i taught i had syllabuses and they were handed out at the beginning of every term and my students knew exactly what books were going to be

015required and what other things are going to be required and what the purpose of the course was so i have not been able to access this information district-wide as my son just said it's it was proprietary and i couldn't see it so sorry mrs richards i i know it sounds like you're wrapping up but it's one i'm done i'm done so i would like i would like transparency and i would like to have an open discussion in the community at large about these very serious issues that we are all witnessing taking place in this country and now of course in the upper valley because i know there have been courses at hanover high school that are extremely disturbing to me so that's that's my those are my comments thank you very much for listening to

016me bearing with me thank you very much um and i i uh let's see are there any other members of the public who wanted to speak okay um i know that our administration has been in conversations um at the very schools and also at the um sau uh and i know that those conversations will continue um so thank you for um for being here and for participating and um i i know that the conversation will continue beyond this meeting so if there are no other members of the public to address the board i will move us on into reports and we will start with our hhs council representative casey is casey here yes i'm here hi it's green so um i want to give my report today mostly about what the marauder ad-hoc committee that

017was created um before break has been doing um over these past um couple of weeks so our the adaha committee was created with the idea that a motion would be brought back to council about um the marauder on the first meeting in march so that's going to be march 11th i believe um and so we have not finished up the committee work yet but so far um we have the six different subcommittees that have been working um the history committee which has been in contact with professors from ucla middlebury and dartmouth and also interviewing mr murphy about the overarching history of the mascot the community outreach committee has been working on writing articles for both the valley news and broadside about this issue as well as trying to figure out the best ways to work

018with the larger community and alumni around the marauder um the dsbn bylaws committee has been trying to figure out the process for how how the mascot would go about being changed and kind of what bodies does it need to pass through in order to do that and then the alternate alternative design committee has been um has created a survey that's gone up to students about different options and preferences regarding a new mascot um so trying to figure out what um what students want to see if they want to see color change um kind of things like that and then there's a staff committee that was created recently um that's working with um faculty um to figure out a way to um have them show support um for council's work and also share their opinions um

019with the broader council body and then there's lastly a financial committee that has been looking at different questions around how much money and when certain changes can be made for example turf gym floor uniforms things like that and also compiling all of that data in one place so we can bring it back to council um and that that that's what most of the committees have been doing but the plan for the um the committee as a whole um is that in a report of all of the work um so a record of everything that that has been done will be created um with the motion at the end um and the motion will be to remove the map the marauder as a mascot and that will be brought to council in that march meeting as

020an advisory motion because it's not a handbook change or a bylaw change and then um after if that is passed through the council body um there will be a second motion that will be added on um that will talk about changing the mascot to a new mascot so that is just a general overview of what's been happening um i'd be happy to answer questions or if there's anything um that any board members would like certain committees to look into further um we'd be happy to hear about that now just because we do still have um around two weeks of committee work left so it'd be great to know if there's something that we should address um while we still have time so thank you are there any members of the board i see that we

021do have a question in the public are there any members of the board that have a question for casey and i know she was specifically interested uh she and the rest of the council were specifically interested in knowing if um there were things that board members felt um they should be looking at or felt that board members would like to know about as this progresses into some of the final stages of their really i think well-designed committee work kim thanks casey um yeah i totally agree all those um subcommittees sound great i think um i'm on the dresden budget committee chair and so i obviously am concerned about the financial aspect particularly um you know because i we haven't at this point heard a dollar amount um for for that aspect and of course we

022um we'll actually be voting on our budget for next year and about a week so you know i just i i guess one caution timing um for when things can change and then also how much are we talking about as far as kind of rebranding um and so that's just i i'd like to i'd feel more comfortable if the motion if if the board heard that before the council considered making a motion thank you yeah and i know that one of the things um just um in a couple of conversations i've had with casey i know one of the things that they are considering is um that that some of these changes may happen over time uh that it you know it um wouldn't necessarily be all in one in one go um and that

023you know there's the naming piece of it and then there's the the logo um piece of it that that might be considered separately so i know they're looking at all of those possibilities uh tom yeah uh thanks for the presentation casey i and i'm sorry if you've mentioned this already but are there places where we can see some of the uh reporting out of the committee work and do you mean like what the committees have been doing each week in terms of or what the recommendations are are coming from each of those committees um so what um the plan is currently we do have each committee meets once a week and then we meet together on fridays as like where all the heads kind of report out on what they've been doing we've have minutes

024for that um those minutes aren't per se public um they're kept by the two heads of the committee um but the plan for kind of the in march we will have written up like a full report of everything that everything that's happened so then um that can be looked back as a record um especially when these financial aspects do come into the budget there'll be a record of kind of why this is happening um and what work led to it so i don't know i think that answers your question no that that does so there will be a summary report out from each of the committees basically that'll be condensed into one larger report after that march 11th meeting okay great thank you john thank you uh thanks casey great job um i'm going to

025kind of piggyback on kim a little bit with the and this necessarily isn't a question more of a comment for everyone to kind of recognize moving forward um i'm actually going to make a comment on budget which is shocking to me too um but um recognizing that um currently in my work with the athletics advisory committee no uniforms are are a part of the budget process from what i've been told so i think recognizing that moving forward trying to figure out where um rebranding every uniform for every team is going to come from um specifically thinking about sports that don't have a strong booster club compared to some that do uh making sure that we're we're making equitable decisions across the board for each each athletics team so again i was able to type budget

026and athletics together because that's what i know thanks john jamie yeah and if you haven't gotten the one big figure that you know that also goes along with that the marauder head that was laid on the brand new turf field cost fourteen thousand dollars to put on so keep that in mind tim i'll just say that um as part of the athletic advisory committee and we're meeting on thursday we are examining the opportunity um for outside sources of funding and it occurs to me that there might be i mean i don't know one way or the other but there might be outside sources of funding for a mascot change that that could be something that could be pursued in the future so especially if it's going to be you know sort of rather than piecemeal

027people might want the idea of let's go ahead and do it all at once and we might be able to reach out to certain groups who might want to do that so just to keep that as an under advisement all right um dan let me go ahead and move you over we can hear you dan great thanks so two questions uh casey thank you for your presentation so i'm a class of 1991 and i want to know whether or not you've pulled any of the alumni in any great numbers as to whether or not they would be supportive of this change because as you can probably guess you know a lot of us when we graduate from hanover high school we don't stay here we go out throughout the world and the marauder in the

028color maroon actually does have meaning um well beyond when you graduate from hanover high school i i just had a 30th reunion zoom call and having heard that this was happening this was actually just a few nights ago i brought this up to the group and i can't share with you what the reaction was there were about 40 of us from the class of 1991 on this call i can't share with you what the reactions were for many of them because uh they'd be bleeped out with respect to the fact that a change is being contemplated so i i can tell you that the class of 1991 would strongly object to a change and if you haven't pulled the alumni i think you should and i'd also be curious to know if you've pulled current

029students in what they think so thank you very much hi yes so i can't speak directly towards how far in the process they are because this is not personally my committee um but the last time i heard the community outreach committee report out they were um planning a survey to send out to alumni um the big issue with that is trying to get a good population of alumni because when you do a survey like that the people who are most passionate about the issue are the ones who are going to answer the survey most likely and so originally they were thinking about reaching out um on facebook pages um and trying to figure out a way to get um a good sample of the alumni population as a whole and not have it be swayed

030one way or the other um and then on to the student um the student polling process yes there was a survey sent out originally so very early on in the process when this had only been talked about a couple of times and that it was in the fall um and at least right now we we looked at those results but um based on where the conversation was at a lot of the student body didn't actually understand where the concern was coming from and the reason why um people were objecting to the marauder and so um we haven't done one like since that first original survey so um i think that's going to be part of the process but um at the same time a lot of students and faculty and um other members on council

031have spoken about how being part of this process and having the conversations about the marauder really have impacted um their opinion of it and not being present for those conversations um can really cause you to have a very different opinion on this issue because you haven't heard other perspectives as much as you have when you are in the room um and so that's why definitely educating the student body about this and creating this cultural change is a really big part of what we're trying to do um with this committee um and getting this out to the greater student body because we want this to come as something that um that is coming from the students rather than being imposed on students so i hope that answers your question as best as i can thanks casey

032all right any other questions for casey at this point um i see so i'm gonna let um mrs richards speak um yes go ahead i'm on muting so i have a very quick question how did this uh conversation begin who initiated this change i'm i'm showing my ignorance uh about it um i i believe it initiated in in council but um casey please feel free to elaborate um yes so this actually has been brought up um a couple times over my um my four years on council it never has been brought up to the point where it's been a conversation in terms of just like an agenda item um until this fall it was brought um to our attention most significantly last spring um towards the end of the school year and um the reason

033why is the marauder um stands for raping and pillaging and so um it in itself is not a positive term um and there's been a lot of research on kind of the roots of the marauder as a word um and what it means behind it and um a lot of victims of sexual assault um are uncomfortable with having something represent them that's the marauder that stands for that um and so that's kind of originally why i was brought to our attention um and i don't want to go too into detail on kind of all the different viewpoints that have been expressed but um that's the concern that is has been shared around it and i i know that um when the uh when the council brings this forward as a as their fully um developed

034report um after march 11th i think we'll we'll all get more details i know casey the plan is to come back to the board at that point and share greater details right yes so the plan is at during the march meeting we will have the full um in detail written report and also we'll have the full presentation um and we'll have given that the second week in march um so with the dresden score meeting being the third week of march um we'll have the co-chairs of the committee here and we can give them more in detail present presentation about um how all of the committee work wrapped up and also about kind of the initial um reactions in council okay super um i don't want this to become a back and forth for casey here

035she is reporting out from council if you have a question i see there's still two hands raised if you have a question for her to take back to council i'll go ahead and allow you to talk but i do want to limit you know the back and forth for casey here dan go ahead if you have a question thanks you said that you you had the results for the survey but you didn't answer my question so what were those results at the beginning in terms of student correct interest in any alumni results so what were the actual numbers in case you may not have those ready i don't know casey do you have those ready for you i do not have those um i could try to pull up the we have like pie charts

036on our presentation from probably september or october um but at least the alumni surveys haven't i don't have access to them um and i think a lot of them are still working on creating the survey part of it so i will not have results for you on on alumni yet um in terms of the student i would have to go dig through and find those right now um but overall a lot of the students were indifferent to having the mascot um change just because they didn't really know why it was coming about it wasn't people weren't told why they were being given this survey um that's the that's the general gist of it um but i see principal boyle has his hand up so well i can just speak anecdotally which um mr richards did

037about the class of 91 uh anecdotally as a member of the graduating class of 85 there are a number of people i think we're going to be split down the middle on this one i think that's sort of where it comes from talking to a number of my friends uh and classmates some are indifferent especially now um as one of my friends said there's a lot there's a lot of stuff going on in the world so if people feel strongly about it then we should probably go in that direction um but it seems like it's not uh all one way or the other thanks tim um so i think i'm gonna move us forward here knowing that um council will be coming back to flesh out everything that they have dis discovered um and uh

038all of the work that they have put into this i know again anecdotally in my own house that there has been an evolution in thinking throughout this process as well um speaking about my own son who is a high school student so um i think this has been an ongoing process um and i think we all look forward to hearing what you guys have to share out after your march 11th deadline so thank you casey for that report did you have anything else to share with us from council um no that's mostly what we've been writing you have um a couple of emotions coming in terms of a referendum um of students as a as a method of voting um subdial by law change and then also the um the freshman off campus motion which

039usually happens around this time of year um but it'll be great to see that this week so perennial a perennial favorite at the high school right yes thank you casey and all the members of council for all of your hard work um i'll move on then to the hhs principles report principal logan thank you and thank casey for your work with this and the entire subcommittee uh i can tell you that i i think this is a pretty comprehensive process that they're going through and i'm looking forward to seeing the final report so thank you casey and the entire um subcommittee um well we've had a smooth transition to from the return to school over with the break um and speaking with the nurses we're dealing with several concussed students from various activities that took

040place over vacation um non-school related activities at that um tomorrow's an early release day um staff will be working on the s.a.t training um that's going to be administered next wednesday on march 3rd it's totally digital this year so there's a whole um training process involved with that with our proctors and i can't thank andrea johnstone and martha campbell for everything they're doing on coordinating this piece there'll be four additional early release days throughout the year march 17th march 31st april 21st and may 26th they're all wednesdays um and we're working out the details with that um as we're going along um with march intensive shifting to may um the march 15 teachers workshop day um will now be a regular school day for hanover high school students and staff i'll be letting them know

041i'll be sending an update um to students and and parents on that this week um this day was typically used to prepare for the march intensive um the workshop day will be rescheduled to may 17th um and that's the monday prior to the to the march intensive taking place in may this year may 18th through 21st um and the voting will be taking place at hanover high school on march 2nd in the gym and i want to thank the buildings and ground crew for everything they're doing to coordinate that event and jamie for all her work on that um the scheduling update uh we're we're in full swing right now um march 1st our parent portal will open for students to complete the course registration process uh march 12th the portal closes the 17th the

042department scheduling discussions will start taking place about the number of sections um on march 17 to 26 6 the admin will be meeting with the coordinators on april 1st we'll hopefully have tentative teacher assignments and then uh martha and andrea and most likely julie will be involved in building the master schedule um month we talked a little bit about blog entries and discipline and and social emotional pieces and julie stevenson's here to talk a little bit about some of the the data that she has on that so julie without further ado i just knew that people had questions last time and so i'm probably most intimately involved with our recording system of our what we're doing with students but just wanted to say um i think you have on what um jim gave you what

043we had by semester and as you noticed attendance is more of a struggle in terms of what we're dealing and it's not attendance from quarantining and things like that um we have with remote students attendance is a little bit more of a struggle on remote wednesdays sometimes there's a little bit more of a struggle and then on um i wouldn't say a lot of classes necessarily being missed but more if we have some attendance conversations that's surrounding like a study hall or an advisory um even though i think those by and large are going really really well um and the the piece that we're dealing a lot more with or not more with but the highest percentage is with academic dishonesty and aup violations acceptable use policy violations but the good news since the semester

044has turned in my view which might be odd to think of and say we've had 55 more interactions in the last four weeks in terms of talking with students and dealing with discipline and our poor taste and bad judgment is percentage-wise heading up which actually makes me feel a little bit better because it feels like things might be getting to be a little bit more normal i was starting to worry that we're just dealing with the slog of attendance and not with the normal bumping into teenagers that we do which i think can be really healthy and really great conversations can happen from that bumping into each other and we're bumping into them a little bit more in that area versus computer violations and cheating incidents and things like that just more sort of i

045should have thought of that a little bit more conversation so that percentage has headed up a little bit since second semester which makes it feel like we're back in high school again so um and we have great students and it's really wonderful to have those conversations with them so i think people had questions i think last time and jim you had wanted me to come just because there were a few questions that maybe you weren't able to answer and so i'm here to answer any questions surrounding those situations and there may be none go ahead julie thanks hi um i think maybe i was one of those people with questions last time i was just kind of curious i mean i know what the uh i think all across the country with remote learning in

046particular there's a been a huge uptick in uh academic honesty violations yeah um and i wonder if uh i'm just curious i mean are you seeing these in a quote-unquote digital form or is this like the usual uh well actually i don't know what usual is when i was in school it was you know wrapping up writing something on your hand but that isn't the thing and then and then the other question is sort of of the same flavor which is i just kind of wonder um about the interaction piece and maybe this is a philosophical question i i mean do you think it's do you think it's about students becoming aware again of what it is to interact physically as opposed to virtually or is it boredom um and uh impatience uh with um

047you know with the with with it with distancing after such a long time i'm just curious i'm sure i'm sure there's no way to answer that but just your impression so i think that in terms of academic dishonesty we're seeing it a little bit different a lot you know we're seeing a lot more in foreign language which we haven't seen in the past in terms of using electronic means to to help you do your work in terms of translators and things like that um so that that's been different from the past like we used to see a lot more english social studies research paper type of things and we're seeing a lot more there and then in terms of like computer science and math and using problem sets found online so there's a little bit

048more of looking for resources online to help do work it seems more digital so in that realm we're seeing less in the um social studies area and english area in terms of the interacting with each other we i would say except for a couple can we have zero issues with kids in terms of protocols right like in terms of bumping into right taking off mass sales so our students are amazing um they've been amazing we thought we would be an issue and it hasn't been and the few who it is an issue with nurse natty sits them down and that's just about enough right and they get the talk from nurse natty and it just doesn't happen again um in terms of the other piece it's just more sort of the normal and maybe you

049could say boredom but not around protocol right there's i think a little more interacting starting to happen outside of school besides home and sports and and maybe that lends to some of the poor taste and badge judgment and things like that um but but definitely not surrounding you know getting tired of of protocol and stuff we haven't seen us fraying around the edges there which i just think is completely impressive in terms of our student body body recognizing the gravity of the situation we're in and rising to the occasion for the community given that they're not the ones that necessarily will be directly impacted physically people they love will so i think they get that and they're rising to the occasion impressively kelly can i just make one response very quickly so just um i

050it's interesting about the language stuff and i wonder uh if it's tied at all to the fact that i think um among the most hard hit disciplines um in the high school last year were the languages you know kids weren't uh they just weren't talking as much um and uh there was just a lot there was just less interaction and i know that we had a concern coming back in the fall about preparedness you know wasn't honors whatever going to be an honor something where was was was french three really going to start at the level of french three and so this i mean you may be witnessing some kind of recalibration honestly um that you know might go away as students come back and they've been talking but it's uh it might be some

051after effect of that um the math stuff is happening everywhere uh i'd be happy to talk to the department about what you know people are trying to do i can tell you that for example we don't give credit for homework anymore i mean i mean students can turn it in but it's not graded because it's kind of meaningless because who wants to go troubleshoot a hundred problem sets when i mean honestly half of them are you know i mean so there's some credit given for the act of doing the homework which we believe has value but we don't grade stuff like that so you have to be a little so you do have to be a little bit more judicious about what you grade knowing that the resource is out there and quite honestly the

052resource having the resource there might be useful so anyway it's a it it's it's subtle and i'd be happy to to contribute so thanks and i would think dan just in terms of i supervise the language department and i would say they feel like they've lost ground they lost ground last year and and then the um long periods have also caused that too and so i think they're really happy also next year i think the majority of what they've chosen except for upper levels or this i don't want to i think we're going to stop calling them skinnies and fats or whatever but like the short period right short and long so they're going to choose the law the shorts yes i think they feel like we'll help them get a little bit more back

053on but i think they feel like there's if they were to show me their notebook from last year and this year and how far they've gotten they would tell you they've lost ground yeah all right thanks and darn that google translate it is getting better and better all the time i can tell you that from my world so um i tell my students just stay away from google translate entirely because it is a slippery slippery slope uh anyone else have questions for julie at this point all right um julie can you just tell us again in terms of what happens with this data this is internal data right this does not get reported out as such there are certain things that have to be reported to the state is that correct yeah so our state

054you know we do the state report for safety and um that we heart we have pretty much zero percent on almost everything because they ask about really huge things that were that we're lucky enough not to have to deal with on a daily basis um so we you know we started keeping these records for us because like i could not be there maybe tomorrow and then someone who's in my position might need to know oh we've talked to that person three times and right so but it's only for really us um and it doesn't get reported out and it doesn't get reported out for the kids but it also doesn't get reported out to the state but this the school board had asked me a few years back in that october reporting time to the

055safety report to give them some other information and so we started to to try to pull percentages here it it's interesting though you know in the equity conversation when we were talking about it though is i can look and see through the records like it's nice to have records you know are there certain trends in terms of who's ending up in certain in these categories and what does that tell us and and how could we society or as a school maybe change something that might change behavior for a group of students or help support them so it's nice to have we didn't really have it before um and so it's just been really nice to to have just for us to be able to think because i don't remember and and what i tell students

056often is when they're walking through the hall i don't see them with a sign flashing like whatever the thing was that they've done it's you know tattooed on their forehead i can't even remember it i see them i'm happy to see them and sometimes they're in my office again and i don't remember that we had a conversation before so it's nice for me to have records to look back and and see that great thank you all right thanks julie so moving on i i know last last month uh i wasn't able to in report out on academic indicators um because our grades hadn't rolled over so martha campbell i can't thank her enough for everything she's done with this i don't know if we've moved her over into this forum and open up the database

057that that we shared with you and she's going to report out on the academic indicators hi everybody this is martha uh i do not have the ability to share my screen josh um so kelly or josh if you could make martha i just promoted you martha you should be good now very good thank you very much um alrighty so i'm going to make this very quick because it can get a little i can get a little wordy cooking is not one of my weaknesses alrighty so i am sharing right now a screen that i built for jim so i need to get rid of my zoom screen here this is a dashboard i like to play around with data a lot we have a lot of it in power school it's power school alone is

058over separate tables that are interconnected and there's a lot of information there that i think could be helpful to the board and administrators when making decisions or trying to communicate public information and i think sometimes it would could be nice to have this at your disposal so he asked me for a snapshot of academic indicators basically to answer the question how are kids doing you know there's obviously this is a big concern right now because we're returning from kind of a missed semester or an interrupted education from the spring and we report outgrades at the high school by term so semester one semester two in a year we do do quarter grades but they are weighted entirely differently across all of our academic subjects so they can't really be compared at the quarter level so

059we we do we can do some comparisons at the semester level so i threw together this dashboard we don't have a lot of tools at the high school for for analytics but this is an interactive dashboard it is public i also have one for the log entries that julie was discussing that and for attendance that were shown last week and i'll throw the links to those in the chat before i leave and then if anybody ever wants to come back and look at these or thinks of another way that maybe this data could be used for board decisions or just communication or just want to add to it the nice thing about these little tiny dashboards is that they will refresh with new data so you don't have to recreate it every time there's a

060new reporting term that has gone by so what i did here was i pulled together the two types of data that we have access to for kind of large groups of students and that is their grades that are stored and also sat scores so those are two of probably the most common ways that we would look at an academic indicator there aren't actually a lot of other academic indicators that we track for all students there's classroom level but as a whole school those are sort of the two big ones that we have access to so in this chart here um you see all of our grades and they're broken down you know in order of grade a a minus bb plus and what i did was i broke it down by year um initially it

061will look very quickly like the current 2019 and 20. there's a drop so for a substantial drop from say a's and such but that's not actually what it is if you think about it we did not report out grades in the spring last spring so in 2020 the 2019-2020 school year semester two was reported as credit no credit so you can't compare those to like a's and b's so they're not even on this chart so there's half the number of grades reported out and then of course this semester we only have so far semester one we don't have semester two so if you want to you can sort of choose that and say all right so instead of that i just want to compare semester ones of course then it updates it and you can

062see a little bit better comparison so for those who are wondering like how have her grades sort of changed you know does this semester being after an interrupted semester you know our kids doing better or worse there is some data here that you can look at i also put off to the side here non-credit bearing grades over on the side because we have those as well but they don't really fit in with the numerical scores so you can see there's a little bit of curve here again i'm not going to do the analysis on this i just wanted to show you what is available quickly looking at sats if you wanted to look at how our kids are doing the sat is now the new hampshire uh standardized test and that has been evolving over

063the past three years this year will be the first year that we will be giving it in the spring also the first year for all juniors digitally so it looks a little bit different but i did pull some data from college board previously students had the option of taking it in the fall or the spring so you'll notice that the numbers by semester you kind of have to add them together to get sort of a full cohort of students but if you look across these charts we have school state and then all data which is sort of national but it's not they don't call it national because there are people outside the us taking the sat you can see where our students compare on meeting benchmarks in english and language and this screen math is

064over here and then combined you can see that as a school hanover high school outperforms both the state and um sort of those nationwide numbers i you know i'm not writing any statistics on here mr rockmore but uh you can just kind of look for trends if you want to so that was that we can break this down if we want to by looking at the different terms as well and looking at our sats so this is a this is what the college board produces in their sort of annual summary they actually break it down by students who took the test in a given year one of the ways they look at that so these are our score scores for hanover high school for all the students who took it in 2019 compared with all

065the students who took it in 2020 which would include the students that took it in the spring of um while we were remote so that was a kind of a different way of doing things so you can see our numbers are on here as well the averages for 2019 uh are about 10.59 so kind of in this band here and they were uh down just a tad in 2020 to 10.50 so again this band here and then the last one one question that i i often get when people look at this um chart back here which looks very different maybe from other schools right we have a lot of a's um there's no kind of bell curve here that we might ex that might be expected or might be seen in in other institutions so

066they say well what does that mean for hanover like what does that look like so just as a point of comparison i had the same question again i'm not going to draw any definitive conclusions here because these are not that precise numbers but i went ahead and i broke down the um the bands for like our sat scores as well as our grades and sort of broke them into the same number of bands on histogram just to kind of give an idea of what the how different the curves were again it's not really comparing apples and oranges the sample sizes are not the same but for the class of 2020 this is kind of what we we looked at for um their their grades for just the class of 2020 while they were at hanover

067high school and then compared with all the sat scores that they all the sats that they took again with the national average being here so it's the kind of thing where this information is available jim asked me just to kind of give a snapshot of what some of the data that we collected this is this is just it and that's all it is so i i will share the links to the at this dashboard that you can kind of click and move around on and again it doesn't take long to do this at all this is something that students could do in a class this is something that you know um a lot of us that work in the administration could pull together pretty quickly if you ever had questions or wanted to use this

068information for other points down the line that's a lot of data are there questions for martha um at this point jay not a question just uh appreciation martha thanks so much for that that uh great work that's really an interesting data um and having done that kind of work in the past i'm curious about doing some year-to-year comparisons as well it's really important to have the right question right you have to know how you want to answer that question so you know which data to pull but we have so much of it and i really do think that in the future it could be used to answer questions and also maybe to guide decisions should they need to be done i don't have access to the chat so i can't paste those links in there

069but i will um send those on to jim and he can share those they have the links from the last board meeting and also in this course in the update no problem thank you martha um just quickly uh the committee on programmer procedure i presented that last month about how a subcommittee was formed to review it um it's comprised of seven um staff members a lot of discussion going on um and it's it's it's centers around this decision-making process at hanover high school and the transparency of discussions uh there's been a really really good uh conversation um in looking at everything you know it's come to our attention that the board policy uh board policy may need to be amended in section c with the committee on instruction the committee on instruction was changed prior

070to jim logan getting there to the committee on program and procedure i don't know where we're going to go with the cpp or the coi but uh there's i think there's going to be some movement um with that as we as we go through the school year um that that's the big question at the high school you know who who gets to decide you know what decisions go to the staff what decisions go to the coordinators what decisions go to cpp what decisions does admin make um and it's it's really interesting uh next month we're going to open it up we're going to have a conversation with the staff um and if the if the truth was no i i don't think the staff would be able to delineate what each committee does so we're

071working on that as we go through the school year and then lastly just the athletic not just the athletic the athletic update um from meegan i can't thank her enough for all she's doing right now with athletics it's it's a lot of work maintaining uh the protocols and working with the students and the coaches um the winter sports have wrapped up um we're in the playoffs she's putting she's updated you on where we're at with that we have some state championships that she's recognized here um she's working with the covet task force typically she's at that every week discussing athletics um the spring sports start on march 29th and it's basically going to run the same way as our as our fall in our winter sports and the new weight room is up and running

072um it's a beautiful facility and i i can't thank all the donair donors enough for everything that they've done um and the athletic trainer is getting very involved in the process so that's my update i'll be happy to answer any questions thanks jen um other questions for jim at this point all righty thank you so much thank you and we will move on to the middle school tim thank you uh we wanted to start off our richmond school update by thanking the pto and our students and emma cottage for arranging the february 12th which was the last day before break we had a teacher appreciation day where we had a lot of students wearing either red or white or pink i had to search long and hard to find something that was red that i

073could wear to appreciate our teachers so we got cookies and then we had over a hundred students write us messages which we scrolled through the tv set in the front lobby which were fun because they did run the gamut from i'm gonna have to i apologize for my accent on this but uh one of the students wrote um i got some mega swag teachers this year yo so i'm not quite sure what that means but it was fun um and we had a number of other students who offered sort of heartfelt thanks for everything the teachers have done which i would uh definitely back up uh we're starting sort of the big push right now which is six weeks until april vacation which is sort of the longest stretch and we are i think fingers

074crossed starting to look towards next year which a lot of us have sort of avoided up until this point but we don't know what next year is going to look like but we know that it's coming and the students are going to have to advance from grades going forward so the high school counselors met with all our 8th graders a couple weeks before break we got together and got all of the students their placement for math and world languages and science and gave those out right before break students had the opportunity to appeal if they felt like their projection into a class wasn't as high they would like it to be so they're all set to take test placement tests at the high school tomorrow during their remote wednesdays to sort of give everybody an

075opportunity to move into the high school confident and um really happy about what their placement is going to be we're trying to change this process from sort of a one-time this is where you're going into much more of a dialogue in terms of what are you going to be doing with your whole high school career does it make sense to try to do three varsity sports and four honors classes your first year maybe for some students maybe not for other students so these are all kinds of discussions that we're trying to move forward with um our seventh grade parents are meeting with the counselors all seventh grade parents meet with counselors starting next week just as sort of a check-in we find seventh grade spring is really where a lot of middle school students sort

076of turn the corner from the last little vestiges of elementary school students they were when they got here uh and moving towards the full-blown high school students they'll be when they leave and that that change can be a little jarring especially since it seems to come when the grass comes out all at once so uh we're sort of trying to prepare for that and make sure that all the students are ready to go we have set up meetings with our sixth grade students from marion cross and our fifth grade students from the race school that last week in march um just trying to start the talk of transition to a new school um and we're trying to work through our pto to have a lot more talk between parents um to sort of ease everybody's

077nervousness as that transition goes one of our casualties this year for covid was the renaissance festival which is a huge thing every year we didn't get to see dr battams rush out and buy a bunch of grapefruit to put in the trebuchet to fire at forts which we did last year but we did manage to have our eighth graders put together a number of different ways that they were understanding romeo and juliet this year so we had we the one of my favorites was they had a video of difficult couples romeo and juliet it was sort of a jerry springer type show about that which was uh hilarious people are being really really creative about it we have a full not full scale obviously but a scale model of the globe theater which is serving

078as a game board for something called verona oppoly so students are getting really really creative and i think enjoying the opportunity to do some things that are a little bit different our seventh grade students took part in their annual amputation project so as the beginning of their civil war project they talk about anatomy of the knee uh and then they amputate part of the knee from a chicken bone uh mr lepine helps with that uh and then they also swab everything is there and then grow all of the bacteria that uh got involved in the wound so they can see that amputating a a leg during the civil war was not something that was just like okay well now we're done and the science part of this has been really fun we have a number

079of students who are taking huge advantage of their extra study hall time um to sort of come forward and say hey we're really interested in doing this and our teachers have been running with it so we had student-led frog dissections that were going on we've had lots of student-led discussions of the mars rover if you ever want to feel like you don't know what's going on in the world talk to a sixth grader who has been reading everything about the mars rover because i had a discussion uh the other day in the parking lot i had no idea what he was talking about but he was really excited so i was really excited um our sixth grade classes watched the super bowl i don't know how many people saw the ads about the duracell ultra

080which is supposed to give you more power for your radio controlled car so they took that and created an experiment tested it and discovered that yes duracell is not lying that the ultra actually does give you a faster radio control car so i just like again uh our students are amazing our teachers are great and that they're letting people run with stuff it's one of the great advantages of middle school is that you can take something that comes up the monday after the super bowl and continue to run with it as teachers we sort of continue to look at the curriculum that we have evaluating through a lot of different lenses trying to make sure that all of our students are met where they are and that we can move them forward and get them

081ready for the high school we've had lots of discussions about how the curriculum fits into what's going on in the world how it fits into individualization to making sure that we give each student a chance to show what they know as opposed to just trying to fit into a really narrow idea of what academics is and that's basically it we're really excited sort of as we move forward fingers crossed again we're at the covid meeting today we were talking about the fact that we've done a really really good job but we're not going to say anything for the next month or so hoping that we can sort of continue on this path and get to the spring and keep everybody in school and learning and doing everything they need to do so that's where we

082are i wish i could say come visit but we'll try to post more stuff online so people can visit virtually thanks tim other questions for tim all right seeing none thank you both principals for those very thorough updates and it's always exciting since none of us can be in the building this year to hear what is going on in those in those walls so thank you guys um with that we will move on then to business requiring discussion and so that i don't forget i'm going to kick off with the resolution uh in honor of dan rockmore uh and that again i think is still available in the agenda review so if i don't think it's going to move down so if you want to follow along at home it's in the agenda review is

083as an attachment so i'll just read this for dan resolution of the dresden school board and i apologize i know we need to add the rest of the dresden names down below whereas one person can make a difference through service to one's community gibson is excited to say to speak in your honor as well sorry i appreciate the dog yes he wholeheartedly agrees uh moving along so whereas one person can make a difference through service to one's community and whereas dan rockmore served as a member in good standing of the hanover sau 70 and dresden school boards for more than six years serving from 2014 to 2021 and whereas dan rockmore served on numerous committees during his terms of office including central staff development committee hanover budget committee and education committee and whereas don dan

084rockmore has also served as a member of the hanover and sau boards and whereas dan rockmore has been a tireless advocate and spokesperson for curriculum evaluation and enrichment school safety and long-term strategic planning and whereas dan rockmore's unwavering principled stand on numerous topics has served as an example for all board members and whereas dresden and hanover schools not only maintained but also in many respects improved upon their quality during dan rockmore's years of service as a board member in hanover and dresden we the under undersigned extend our heartfelt gratitude and deep appreciation for the difference dan rockmore has made in the lives of students in hanover new hampshire and norwich vermont during his years of service and for many years to come so thank you dan very much and of course if you'd like to

085say anything yes we are grateful for your service and we know that you will continue to be involved as you just volunteered to do tonight so um but please if you want to say anything we would we would welcome it um well for my hannover board uh colleagues this is uh this is you've already heard this statement but i'm allowed to plagiarize myself i couldn't i couldn't say it twice um so but i do want to say thank you and so briefly i joined the school board because i have this belief one that probably many of you share that education especially public education is one of the pillars of a just society a belief that learning to wrestle with all kinds of ideas and information is an important part of making your way in the

086world and building a moral compass the reverend dr martin luther king famously said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice and i believe that education is among the forces that move the ark in that direction so many thanks to all of you and all the folks that i served with earlier for the good work you do in this regard and all best wishes and the continued and ongoing efforts to bring a great education to our children it surely will pay dividends to the world even beyond the upper valley so thanks everyone thank you dan and yes one more time i know i just got another message we will get all of the board member names um on the dresden resolution so apologies for that uh glitch on that all

087right uh moving along to our policy uh update for this evening so this is a second reading of policy j-i-c-f-a on hazing ben anything to add at this point i don't think there were any amendments made on the first reading i'm just in fy this was a requirement we have several policies related to bullying and similar activities but we needed to have a distinct specific one to hazing so this does that most the language came from the other associations but we admitted some minor things happy to take questions great thanks any question any questions for ben on this i know it's not the first time we've seen it so i think we probably good yep rick yeah was it ben was in this the one where we added in additional reporting requirements for staff that

088become aware so before it said law enforcement we've added in school administration yes that was added yep thank you for noticing that rick we did add that it's near the bottom of the first the first page all right thanks for putting that out any other questions on this one okay and i believe that we are approving this um later this evening by consent so all right um the only other item for discussion is final preparations for the annual meeting and i apologize i don't have the warrant articles right in front of me but i think we're all set um i know jamie has been um kind of helping to jamie and josh as well so thank you to both of you helping um board members to make sure that we're all um up to speed

089on the warrant articles that we're presenting um and kim has worked tirelessly to prepare budget budget presentations and sixth grade tuition presentations so um a special thank you to kim for all of her hard work on uh pulling a lot of pieces together we very much appreciate that um are there any other things that we need to discuss prior to that meeting which will be on thursday yeah tom presents yesterday yeah i don't know if uh jay wanted to clarify or i will we um i was gonna reach out to norwich board members too we're trying to get uh um word as to whether or not norwich board members can go to the meeting um norwich residents cannot there will be an option for zoom to do so um but jay i probably should have

090let you take that no that's okay tom um yeah our norwich folks unfortunately uh we've been told that they would be required to quarantine um and so which would make it worthwhile right right they really want to come they can come they just have to quarantine for 10 days after right it's it's it's so tricky for us um all through this entire pandemic the this the fact that we are such a river crossing community um really throws a monkey wrench in a lot of the things that we do um really if you go by the strict requirements of the vermont protocols we shouldn't i say we i'm sitting in vermont right now i should not be shopping in new hampshire um i'm not going to say i am and i'm not saying i'm not but

091i'm not supposed to um it's it's really challenging and we're looking for a final read on whether or not board members can be at that meeting in person and i hope to have that information for you by tomorrow morning and maybe jamie has it right now no i don't but um we are going to do final preparations uh tomorrow morning with maintenance and i know josh is also meeting with the folks at the high school along with the catv folks tomorrow around noon to do a run through to make sure everything's all set up i know it's weird and it's it's too bad that new hampshire has some really weird laws where you have to have you know an element of in-person meeting for district meetings for those folks who you know don't have access

092to internet or tv or phone you know there are still folks who who don't have access so new hampshire requires you know that we have an element of actual in person so it is a little bit weird with covid regulations and all um but we are practicing social distancing uh with all the setup so yeah it would be great to know that so that you know obviously if there's seven as opposed to 12 there's more there's more space down there on the stage but um but either way we'll be prepared we've also posted the i believe the link was posted for the zoom meeting on the website this morning so folks want to look i also sent it out to the finance committee and the board members earlier tonight and again it will also be

093streamed on ca tv for those folks who don't have internet access thank you thanks everybody uh sorry let's get you over to the right place um any other questions about uh the annual meeting taking place thursday in the hanover auditorium um i will announce times again at the end but um just in case anyone will tune out between now and then um the hanover meeting will start at 5 00 p.m and the dresden meeting will start at 7 00 pm uh tom did you have something else done okay sorry no no problem all right moving on to business requiring action i will take a motion to approve by consent items b through f then to approve items b through f by consent and is there a second john thank you and i will tell you

094all yep kelly can i can i make some edits to the uh january 12th minutes yes please sorry um i may draw on jamie for help with one of them but there's reference uh in there to uh norwich's uh let me pull it up i'm sorry i didn't have it available right away there's a reference uh down in section three uh there was a swing in the adm allocation or which had more students in attendance than hanover i just wanted to reference it that's more of an increase in the percentage of students uh in van hanover and then later on there's reference to the technology warrant article and it's a back and forth actually you kelly had with jamie about uh when the payments would uh take place it might be easier if uh if

095i just send language i was talking with jamie about to karen i guess to get it into the into the minutes but it's basic jamie did you just want to say what um how that would be amended in terms of when the payments would start you're on mute though obviously i can't do two things at once um sure and i think the back and forth might have got just a little bit um technical in that if it goes through a bond sale um the bond bank if it's a summer sale then they require an interest-only payment within the same year that the bond sale occurs and it so a summer bond sale uh would trigger an interest payment in february of the year that you're in however we have been doing since i got here

096most of our financing through our local banking institutions for two reasons uh one you're not tied into somebody else's schedule on when you you know borrow and what your payment schedule is so it wouldn't trigger when you borrow locally or with you know regular banking institutions um instead of the bond banks you can really set your your own payment schedule right so and you can borrow at the right times for you meaning you can borrow in september or october which would then push your payments out into the next fiscal year also not going through a bond bank allows you to pay off your loan early if it's an option for you if you have a large surplus one year and you want to pay it off or you pay off some other large notes like

097we know it's going to happen in the next couple of years and then you want to pay off all the rest of the remaining debt so that the tax rate doesn't go off a cliff um you know you can do that by borrowing through conventional methods at the bank so so while it says it's possible it depends on the method of financing that you choose um and i would you know the interest rates at your local banks are usually as good as your bond banks or they have been historically um thanks jamie so what i'll do is uh if it's all right with the board i'll just send amendments to um to karen who i know is online right now so karen if you can hear me i'll send those out to you by email

098and uh and also like to thank karen because her minutes are fantastic and fantastically detailed but that's all i have thanks sorry thank you tom so in terms of vote should we pull that out of the vote or should can we accept the amendment based on um what was shared this evening yes i think so yes okay um so i who made that motion initially i think it was ben um do you accept that amendment yes okay um and i assume the second i can't even remember who it was john thank you and i will assume you accept that as well thank you okay so i'll take a roll call vote then starting with john yes uh and then neil yes tom camden yes ben amy yes kim art minion dan brock more yes kelly

099hersey yes marcella lassie yes rick johnson yes and mcconnell yes okay um moving on to i believe it's reports now apologies i'm stuck in minutes land here there we go uh committee reports are there any committees that need to report out for dresden at this point john um i know that mr logan provided an update on uh athletics from uh from the athletic department but i wanted to make everyone aware that we are meeting again this thursday at 8 15 am the agenda is on board docs as well as the zoom link but we'll be continuing our discussion surrounding facilities and fundraising and the future of athletics kind of all i got for an update great thank you john uh any other committee updates yeah kim sure this is from the hanover finance committee i

100don't think i have reported this yet but um the hanover finance committee did meet a couple weeks ago i think by now and took a form um while they are not technically the dresden finance committee they have been acting in abstentia as there has not been a norwich finance committee to join them to make a dresden so that caveat being said um they are in unanimous support of the dresden warrant articles and i'm happy to report that so um they will likely be in attendance at our deliberative session as well so they can elaborate on the committee's thoughts there um but i just wanted to share that thanks very much kim uh any other committee or liaison updates tonight all right i the um nhsba has been very active there are a lot of bills

101pertaining to education that are going through um the legislature at this point um there are two bills in particular um that i know um they have their eye on one is um uh the um sorry 130. i forgot that what are the letters before jamie blank in the hb yeah hb 130 um which is pertaining to school funding um and then there is the i think it's hb 544 that is pertaining to matters of equity and how it's being taught in schools and i will just remind board members and members of the public that those hearings are now available to the public through zoom um and so you can participate you can also log your opinion um and so i always occur encourage everyone to participate uh in whatever way they are able to participate

102so um you can certainly log your opinion on any of those relevant bills or any other bills going through one nice small silver lining of uh the pandemic i guess is is the increased ability to participate so and that is all i have from nhsba liaison uh anyone else going going okay moving on to uh report of the chair so i will just report that we have our annual meeting coming up in our deliberative session on thursday this week voting will be held on march 2nd in the school cafeteria school gym where did we end up the the gym the gym yeah yeah super so that will be um normal voting hours seven to seven on uh the second um i believe absentee ballots are already available or will be available are available now and

103have been yeah okay so absentee ballots are available um and we would love as always to have as much participation as possible in voting and um the next uh organizational meeting for the dresden board will be march 16th and that is all i have to report right now so moving on to superintendent battams thanks so much kelly um well i'll try to be brief given the the time this is a dresden record i think in recent history but i do think there's a few things that that um bear some discussion the first is that the more i keep hearing on the news that states and governors are pushing to restore in-person instruction in april uh the more i continue to be so proud of our system and everybody involved in it everybody our students parents

104families our administrators and teachers the school board and everybody who's who really worked together despite initial anxiety and fear even to make this work and it's it's a real tribute to our community and as we start to wade into what can be some some sort of divisive conversations um think it's important to remember that we do we do have that cohesive community and we do have so much in common that when we start to talk about things that are um somewhat polarizing we need to be able to do that respectfully and we need to be able to do that in forums that will allow for all voices to be heard and something to camp in our policy committee today in reference to discussions about our diversity equity and inclusion work um was a recommendation that

105kelly hersey made about having some sort of community forum um not and i i don't envision something where people would just be able to come to a mic or a podium because those can tend to be they can tend to be dominated by by one or fewer you know just a few voices that happen to be not afraid of public speaking and um if we do have such a meeting i really um urge us to consider some sort of a format like those advanced by the kettering foundation they have a series called hard talk where they start out with a general sort of um session for everyone to sort of set the stage and then they break up into sort of randomly assigned small groups to have moderated discussions and then come out with either

106burning questions or questions that people have in common or concerns that people have or things that they people have as a sort of a common ground that they emerge from each of these rooms come back synthesize the information and move forward as a community so i'm recommending that we take kelly's suggestion and and uh move with it the other uh part of that that i think is going to be important and will also be an opportunity for community conversation and input is the the restart of our strategic planning process so um this afternoon ron and i actually took the step of actually picking a date so we're looking at the third thursday in march which i believe is the 24th uh possibly 25th um for revisiting our portrait of a graduate work the sort of

107vision step in in moving forward on the strategic plan there's already a lot of really good work being done and we're sort of having to go back and build the foundation under the house and a lot of a lot of the work that we're doing as a district and as an sau so um i'm excited about that work every time that robin and i get a few minutes to talk about curriculum it's it's just it's it's really kind of exciting when we start to talk about and speculate about what a lot of our current work um such as the work with diversity equity and inclusion um it there are very many instances where it comes down to concern about what the impact on curriculum might be and the truth of the matter is as we

108learned in our curriculum audit is that we've known for quite some time that we have a lot of work to do to document our curriculum to do any sort of an analysis on the curriculum requires a curriculum and while we have a working curriculum throughout each of our buildings um finding that curriculum in any sort of coherent document is is an elusive effort so i'm happy to say that robin has uh has been beginning that work over the course the last couple of weeks and it's really encouraging i think when i first got here there was some some concern that efforts to document the curriculum uh served as sort of limitations on teacher autonomy and i believe that our faculties passed that um the lessons that we learned in trying to convert from in-person instruction

109to remote instruction this past spring showed teachers the challenge inherent in having people doing different things from grade to grade class to class and even between different sections within the same grade level at elementary school so i think there's a very very real practical consideration that that really argues for having a a well-documented curriculum so um again so that work will begin in earnest toward the end of march and really looking forward to that that's something that's sort of one of those goals that i hold out there that i cannot retire until we have a fully documented curriculum um so that's that's uh very personal for me as well so i'm excited about that work i think that's going to be where we'll be able to have community conversations about what values we want to

110um embed in our curriculum as a community and uh those will be rich community rich uh opportunities for community input so um that's all i have for now um it's a pleasure to work with all of you uh the conversations we've been having lately in the policy committee are really deep and certainly deeper than when we were just coding policies and trying to figure out how to incorporate the ones that the law required uh or arguing for months about pets in school um we're into some pretty deep stuff now and it's it's uh they're actually enriching conversations so um so thank you thanks to all those of you who are doing that work and i look forward thank you jay are there questions for jay okay moving on then to our business administrators report good

111evening um i just wanted to talk a little bit about um what we're doing in maintenance right now i know there that everybody's come back from uh winter break um and as everybody knows we didn't wait uh for guidance from our states and we went out and we purchased hepa filtration units and placed them in every single room in all of our schools in order to be sure that we were filtering the air and keeping people you know as safe as possible in that respect so we've been running our units um full bore and we have we do have uh filters in stock to replace all of those as they're coming up on their hourly replacement cycle i know that was a concern the other day at one of my dresden schools and apparently one

112of our custodians may not have realized that we were already prepared and had them ready to roll out so we've been working on the roll out of the filter changes in all of our units as well as they're looking at the filter changes in our regular hvac ducting work as you remember earlier last fall the esser grants came out of the federal government and dresden's first allocation was 36 036 dollars based on title one uh funding breakdowns um most of that money i do believe we earmarked and are using four technology upgrades um then we went through the process our governor issued funding sources called spsrf and they initially did that on a per student amount which awarded dresden 176 thousand six hundred dollars we then went after the discretionary uh 10 million dollars that

113was still available we applied for 182 991 and we received 538 additional so there's still some monies that we've not been reimbursed and that was through december 30 and we're keeping track of all of those um because there's been a talk anyway about some additional funding that may become available for anything um that has not been covered in the way of you know this was for ppe expenditures at the different at the two dreads in schools um we also just got awarded the sr2 allocation amounts um dresden was awarded 75 452 that is a federal grant so it will have to follow federal guidelines whereas the spsrf grant while they want us to follow procurement guidelines which we do that's not a federal grant that was a state grant so we're going to be looking

114at and having discussions with the two um principles about the sr2 allocation and where that might be best utilized whether it's in looking at some expanded hvac upgrades or whether it would be better served to be used in the technology realm so that will pull in robin and superintendent badams to have that discussion um we are on target with a couple of our um different projects at the different schools this spring will be very very busy you'll be seeing us addressing some of our facility outside facility steps and walkways that are getting older and need to have some upgrades and or replacement done in the concrete and other aggregate areas we want to make sure it's safe we don't have any falls or anything like that due to that we're also going to be doing

115some tree trimming and some cutting back of shrubbery which is on our normal list of things to do there'll be painting projects going on we'll be still embarking on some of our security upgrades with our you know security systems um that have been budgeted for we had initially been holding off on some of those projects when earlier on when we don't know when we didn't know how much of our covid ppe expenditures were going to be reimbursed uh but we feel we're in a really good place right now and so tony director daigle of facilities and i met along with matt zwiers who's his assistant and went over all the different projects that we had initially budgeted for and we're going to be in embarking on um very shortly i think we've already started some

116of them over the winter break uh in our in our other two schools anyway um so it's been busy in maintenance transportation seems to knock on wood calm down a little bit um we're still moving the students around and being able to accommodate most everybody's needs um you know and kids were getting restless towards the break so it was good to give them you know a little time off as as were our bus monitors that's a really early time of the morning to get up to go ride on school buses um what other realm food service seems to be picking up a little bit it did lag behind this year um i think we're going to see some the sales won't be as brisk as they were in our past year until we hit covid

117so there might be some transfers of funding that will be necessary at the towards the end of the year we'll have those on our quarterlies for march um we'll also be bringing the audit for dresden was not completed they were still waiting on some information to come out of one of our schools with regards to student activities or or it could have been athletic funding um but they're wrapping that up i think they got everything they needed so we should be bringing those back out to you we'll do them all at once so we can bring our auditing firm in so i have questions um but everything seems to be fine so that's where we're at it's been busy we're ready for our voting and hopefully everybody's gotten all the information and i want to

118thank everybody on the school board and on the budget committees and kim all her hard work setting up all of the power points they look amazing and you know everybody's help on the brochures and all of the handbooks and everything that went out and have been posted i'm hoping we caught all the typos and little errors uh it's hard sometimes to realize there's a problem when you read it so many times so thank you everybody for all your hard work on that um and the folks at the sau office who are behind the scenes uh so that's it that's it for me thanks jamie any questions for jamie so i realized that we inadvertently left our uh assistant attendant off and i i apologize robin um we would we would love to hear um your

119latest updates from the coveted committee and any any other matters no problem we did have a covert committee meeting today and one of the issues that we discussed is the upcoming playoffs in basketball and hockey and one of the things that's happening around the state is most schools are allowing participants to come and observe so each student would be allowed to have two members come with them to the tournament and we did decide as a covid committee to allow that at hanover because we did not want kids to have to travel to other areas otherwise we talked about some good news the numbers of cases declining the number of deaths declining and we're continuing to look forward into the spring for the possibilities that are coming from that we will have discussions coming up probably

120around april about prom graduation some of the other big events the musical and um we're trying to figure out how we can make some of those events happen and i think those were basically most of our major discussions today great thank you robin um other questions for robin all right seeing none we do not have a need for non-public tonight if you have agenda topics for the next meeting please let me know it will be our reorganizational meeting so i think there will be quite a few things coming up we will have at least one new board member so that's always exciting um and i think with that i will take a motion to adjourn the meeting nobody wants to return to dan give it to me dan i'm sorry you're covered i don't know

121why i can't see you on my screen tonight sorry dan please move to adjourn dan rockmore's last school board meeting at 44 p.m it's like a mic drop right there something like that boom anyway thank you everybody is there a second rick thank you all right and going around john hunt yes neil o'dell yes tom dan didn't yes ben yes kim hurt mania jim rock more yes kelly or c yes garrett palmies marcella italia yes johnson yes and mcconnell yes thank you everybody we'll see you in person some of us anyway on thursday thank you good night thank you thanks dan