001foreign that concludes this evening's hearing thank you good evening everyone my name is ann savage and i'm the president of the city school district of albany board of education on behalf of the board i welcome you to our meeting i am joined tonight in person around this table by board clerk tanya bowie board member hasan al-manawi board member damaris man who stepped out for a moment board member shatur who is our secretary to the board vice president vicki smith board member tabitha wilson board member ellen creachy at the end superintendent of schools kawita adams interim deputy superintendent of business affairs the longest title um john jagilski is with us tonight as is our council paul alloy so thank you all for being here in person we have many many members of the district staff and
002the superintendent's cabinet here with us virtually as well this meeting is being live streamed and the instructions to view the meeting are available at albanyschools.org forward slash boe for this meeting in all future meetings we will show all the relevant slides and documents here in on these large screens they also will come up in the virtual meeting those are also available at albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you'd like to reach the slides yourself you will also notice that we as always in our school district are following the recommended covert precautions which at this time require do not require masks but we encourage those who choose to mask to wear them as they see fit fit if you are here tonight to speak in public comment you need to see ms bowie and sign up that
003is how you get on the list for public comment and if you are not here for public comment we welcome you anyway with that introduction we invite those of you who choose to join with us as we stand for the pledge of allegiance in addition to the pledge of allegiance we always focus our meeting by restating the mission of the city school district of albany which is to work in partnership with our diverse community to engage every learner in a robust educational program designed to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success superintendent adams do you have a report for us absolutely good evening and thank you madam president members of the board june is pride month when we celebrate and honor uh this is a time when we celebrate and honor our nation's lgbq
004community lbc i'm sorry lgbtq community and commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 stonewall uprising in new york city this month our school district in partnership with the albany public school teachers association and the albany school gay straight alliance will recognize the many accomplishments and contributions made by the lgbtq people throughout history we also will have information and age-appropriate discussions about gender identity and inclusivity throughout the month a significant number of lgbtq people have changed and are changing history in their fields sally ride alan turing james baldwin leonardo da vinci alicia garva langston hughes and albany's own barbara smith the list goes on and on we celebrate and honor their work and their lives we would like to highlight a couple of upcoming activities in which our district will celebrate pride month next thursday we will
005join apsta in co-sponsoring an lgbtqa plus book tasting pd from 4 to 6 pm on sunday june 12th our district will take part in the capital pride parade in washington park i'm looking forward to joining the absta members and students from albany high's gsa and many others to celebrate this event we also will be sharing additional information and resources for our employees and families including a video that our albany high gsa students have created with suggestions for teachers on building gender inclusive classrooms as a follow-up to the information that we have shared regarding the albany high school girls track and field team at our may 19th meeting we have continued to investigate and review all aspects of this matter over the past two weeks district and school administrators have hailed have held multiple meetings with
006student athletes this included a may 23rd meeting in which team members provided their input regarding changes that they would recommend for our student and athletic codes of conduct related to student attire that input was included in the student code of conduct review meeting that we held last evening we did not have attendees at the stakeholder meeting last night but we will share the feedback that we receive from the student athletes with the policy committee for its upcoming review on june 15th following that policy committee meeting we will schedule another meeting with the members of the girls track team to receive their additional feedback from that point the process will continue and include a review and discussion of the proposed student code of conduct by the full board at our july 7th meeting we anticipate approval
007of the 2223 student code of conduct at the board's july 21st meeting we will continue to get feedback along the way and we encourage the voices of our stakeholders to be heard and valued our district defines actualizes and is in the process of operationalizing equity in our processes and procedures we strongly support the rights of our students to advocate for what they believe in and to advocate for meaningful change this is the process that we encourage we even assist our students in making their voices heard and ensuring that they are valued we maintain these best practices through the instructional process and in our committee work knowing that everyone does not have all of the information in this matter is a challenge based on the various perspectives we may all have shaped and formed our own
008opinions like all school districts we are bound by ferpa which is the family educational rights of privacy act and personnel and employee confidentiality our review continues to move forward in the three categories of student behavior dress code and the administrative process as we have stated since this matter occurred all athletic suspensions from the one event were related to inappropriate student conduct and not the dress code violation consequences were aligned with the student code of conduct the students have requested a review of the suspension letters and this review is being conducted through my office as noted a few moments ago our administrators have engaged members of the girls track and field team in multiple discussions about changes that they would recommend to the student and athletic codes of conduct again the recommendations will be shared and
009reviewed in alignment with our policy committee review process the process concerns have been have been brought to our attention in several parent meetings specifically related to equity among teams and the notification process we have discussed the behavioral concerns with parents and we have held individual parent meetings on request to discuss their specific concerns should we need to address personnel matters we will do so through our human resources process it has been reported in our investigation that there is a perception that our track and field coaches have somehow behaved inappropriately or in an inappropriate manner based on our investigation there is no evidence of any kind that supports that any of our coaches were inappropriate toward any of our student athletes and that line of discussion is misinformed and unfounded in response to the recent symbols
010of hate that our school district has addressed with the confederate flag at albany high and anti-semitic symbols at district offices we met with representatives from the anti-defamation league last week to discuss ways to expand the no place for hate program in our district albany high school is already certified as a no place for hate school stephen and harriet myers middle school are taking the steps to earn that certification our plan for next school year is to work with our building leaders to expand no place for hate certification to all of our schools in addition to complementing our district-wide efforts to operationalize equity the no place for hate program aligns with our goals of cultivating student leadership student voice uniting our student our school community around principles and values we teach and engaging students faculty and
011staff in active learning it is an exceptional program that is right for all of our schools in our district and right for our times we are looking forward to working together with the adl and this informat this important effort in the months ahead i would like to send a shout out to several of our district athletic teams and student athletes on their successes during the spring season albany high tennis standout misami suriso seresawa sorry is completely is competing in the state tournament following his third place finish in section two masami was number was the number one seed in the sectionals and advanced to the semifinals for a second year in a row please he suffered through three a three set loss in the semis but rebounded with a resounding straight set win in the consolation
012final to earn his spot at states the state tournament got underway today at the usta billie jean king national tennis center in flushing the tournament continues through saturday and we wish masami the best of luck in his matches our modified baseball team also had an exceptional season including a 10 game winning streak in the suburban council this terrific achievement of our student athletes and testament of their dedication teamwork and competitive spirit i would like to congratulate coach john mcknight and the team student athletes on their achievements albany high's unified oh thank you albany high's unified basketball team also won its division championship earlier this week with a 43-38 win over shenandoah the falcons advanced to the final with the win over south glen falls last week congratulations to coach joe burke and our student athletes
013on bringing home the title i would also oh thank you i also note with pride that our unified teams win makes us three for three this school year in basketball playoff games against shin i'll have to make sure that i talk to dr robinson about that a few reminders for our families as we look ahead to the final weeks of school the american heart association heart walk is sunday june 5th the last day of classes for albany high and tony clement center of education is tuesday june 14th region exams will be given june 15th through 23rd all of our st all of our schools and offices will be closed monday june 20th in observance of juneteenth juneteenth is also known as freedom day juneteenth is the oldest nationally observed commemoration of the ending of slavery
014in the united states this celebration honors the day of june 1865 when the union army general gordon granger landed in galveston texas with the news that the civil war had ended and that all slaves were free at that time texas was the last state in the confederacy where institutional slavery still existed excuse me this is the first year that our district has observed juneteenth as an official holiday following president biden's designation last year of juneteenth as a federal holiday throughout our district our teachers will be leading lessons on the historical significance of juneteenth and a wide range of related topics we're also looking forward to working with our local media to share these important conversations and activities with our community the last day of school for all elementary and middle school students will be a
015full day of instruction on thursday june 23rd moving up ceremonies for eighth graders at our three middle schools will be held on friday june 24th eighth graders at albany international center will participate in their moving up ceremony on thursday june 23rd graduation for the albany high class of will be held sunday june 26th and this is very important because we've had to have a location change as you know we were supposed to be at the armory but the armory does not have air conditioning and so we will be at the palace theater beginning at noon we will have more information about albany high's graduation in tonight's district update for more information about the last days of school including information about our elementary moving up ceremonies please visit your school's web page at albanyschools.org i would
016like to now welcome major david erickson from the albany high jrotc program to the microphone albany high has had three students selected to participate in the prestigious boys state program this summer this is a great honor for our students and our high school also it is the only one in the region to have three students selected this year so i would like to turn the program over to major ericsson to tell us more about the boys state program and introduce us to our students who will be participating this summer thank you for having me thank you for having us here tonight uh miss adams on the board um what i'm going to do is tell her about boys state i'm going to let the boys over here introduce themselves they do in jrotc is do
017some public speaking and i'll introduce mrs farley who's one of the gold star moms so boys state is a program sponsored by the american legion what they do is they send about a thousand boys off to morrisville state university for a week and they learn how government is supposed to work maybe not how it works but how it's supposed to work i like to tell the boys all the time and they divide them into two parties the orange and the purples for whatever reason they elect everything from the dog catcher up to the governor and one of the highlights for albany high was three years ago we had five boys go that year and uh two of them best friends and one went to the orange party when went to the purple party and they
018were both nominated to be the governor for their party so opening high had they had the governor that year and what i liked it i think bottom line boys state what it teaches when emanuel tay came back i said emmanuel you're going to go someplace in life because the two of you came back as friends that's the most important thing they ran a pretty good campaign they really didn't know much about politics before they went i said emmanuel you got all the people from down state to vote for you you get all the people from upstate to vote for you we know there's some differences there and you're the african-american immigrant kid from liberia so that's what boys state teaches how it's supposed to work um it's a great program and i'm really happy to
019see i proud to say that albany high is once again like mrs adams said more than any other public school in albany county which is a great thing i also should state that it's not a jrotc thing it's open to every student in the school and i go to the guidance office they help me get names it's kind of funny a lot of times the same names that i have picked they give me the same name but we're working to get even more students next year um other thing i'd like to just say is this is possible because the north albany american legion post sponsors us and they pay the boys pay nothing for this and matter of fact i shouldn't tell you guys this now but north dolby usually gives you a little bit
020of spending when you're down there um so they pay the whole bill they only support two kids so what happens is other groups and community always come forward and this year the gold star mothers came forward and they paid for another student and the marine corps league has offered to pay the tri-county council vietnam-era veterans a lot of veterans and civic groups bring more students they use a carbon force so without further ado what i want to do is i want the three students here to know some sales and tell me a little bit about themselves and then i'm going to ask mrs farley to talk about the gold star mobs real quick and explain that so i'll start with the kevin cam because uh kevin's one of our three uh candidates to be our
021new cadet colonel for next year so this is a great uh interview process for them kevin go ahead uh hello my name is kevin kam i go to albany high school i only know one language english and sorry um so the reason why i joined jrotc was because i saw that they helped uh a lot in the community i also like the uniforms and i just seemed like a good program to you know stay in um and then why i stayed um mainly it's community it's like a full family and like you meet a lot of cool people get to go on nice trips and meet people from like different places and then i guess plans after high school uh i plan to go into nursing those are good those questions whenever they go in
022public i always make them tell what school they're from i think it's very important because they think from another school all the time i'm getting tired of that um and then uh who they are so that that's why kevin's answering those questions go ahead uh good afternoon my name is xavier smith i go to albany high um i'm from albany new york i know i wanted to have languages um why i joined was to work on my confidence public speaking and overall confidence and the reason i stayed was because like kevin said just the community is just amazing um in my plans after high school i'm gonna go into college for three years um i'm gonna join the rotc for the college of choosing um major i'm gonna do a double major in bioengineering and
023business science hi my name is chris dad and i'm from albany high and i speak korean that's another language i speak why i joined your otc is because my friends actually got me to go to see i also have a sister you want me to join why state is because the community and all the programs like raiders and pt i like those programs my plans after high school is i plan to take a take a gap year and go into the real world to see what i like ms farley you can just yes thank you very much for uh having me here tonight just a little background i'm an american gold star mother a gold star mother is a mother who lost a child while serving in the military my son staff sergeant derek john
024farley was killed in afghanistan and that started my journey here the camaraderie the experience with being with other mothers is like no other experience our mission our mission is to continue to support our military and to allow our american folks not to lose the fact and remember all of the losses and sacrifices of the families with that we've gained some really amazing relationships with this young group of jrots that they're our future we've supported many years currently with this jrotc program we've sent girls also to their program very important they learn civic messages as he said this is really an amazing experience many kids never go away from their homes so it's a great experience to jump start for college if they choose to go away it's very nice and then they come back and
025they share that knowledge so it's very important that we take care of these young they have come to our convention danced with our elder moms the moms love to be with the young we feed them as moms do and these relationships are priceless thank you so and i first had any question for the boys here or mrs farley we honestly have so many questions that we couldn't possibly ask them all given their limited time but we really appreciate your being here i know dr tour marched with you on monday and i was there as well i know the superintendent was there and maybe some others hiding in the crowd it was wonderful to see you represent albany high so well at that parade so we appreciate you and we appreciate your remarks and all you've
026done um gold star mom's at heartbreaking so just proposing i just want to really thank all of you i truly mean that it's great to support you guys give the board gifts the community gives and i really think jrtc is something that doesn't just belong open high school to the city of auburn anything you need from us please let us know just thanks once again thank you thank you so very much uh major if you all will stay we will take a moment to take photos with the board please you so i just want to throw one more plug in if you'd like next thursday night the ninth is our awards night slash motion up we got about 30 different outside activities groups coming in and plus we get to promote the kids if you
027can make it you're more than welcome to be there and all you have to do is you should show up give me your name and i plug your name in to give out awards all you do is smile so i get a smile no no one complained to anything oh yeah it's a set it's at six o'clock at the logan american legion post which is a foreign road here in the corner here all right and if you get there just like just make sure i know you're there so i can i'll just put your name in yeah because with the high school we're not doing yet because the order trying to publish but hopefully that should be back by nobody back in next year so thank you once again i i got to stop this
028mrs adams got a time running she knows i talk too much thank you so much major always appreciate it and congratulations again young man we are so very proud of you it is my pleasure now to introduce thomas o'brien academy of science and technology principal sophia noel to tell us about the great things happening at her school this year and also introduce her team good evening school board good evening superintendent adam thank you for having us here today my name is sophia newell and i'm the building principal of toast alongside me i have my assistant principal vegan double standalone and i also have my community side coordinator kayla townsend and so we just want to say thank you for allowing us the opportunity to highlight our school today so as you see just introduced ourselves
029right and so so the next slide is um the district um mission and business statement and we're not going to go into great detail because we all know that everyone knows the measures and vision statement of the district but i just want to share with you that our michigan vision statement for toast definitely aligned with the district mission initial treatment community school that provides equitable educational opportunities and cultivates nurturing relationships within a safe environment for all students to be successful and our mission statement is to educate our school community through learning strategies that reinforce curiosity discovery observation problem solving inquiry and creativity across the discipline that tells us we have the privilege to serve 281 students grades pre-k to five we have one pre-k classroom we are too deep in grades kindergarten through fourth grade
030and we're three deep in fifth grade we have four self-contained classrooms three of them being 812ed classrooms and one being a 1511ld classroom our student population we have 13 percent of our population are students with disabilities 69 of our population is economically disadvantaged and 12 of our population are elm learners our ethnic backgrounds are 44 of our student population are black 13 are hispanic 10 percent are white 22 are asian and 11 percent for multiple regions next slide is going to focus on our set focus and highlights and ela tilts is focusing on guiding students through the reading complex text and responding to text dependent questions and math ptosis focusing on learning standards and math teaching practices specifically establish goals and implementing tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving through math language routines such as
031three read and also we moving towards an led model as well for attendance our goal is to have fewer than 14.8 students chronically absent over the past few months we have been able to lower the percentage of our chronically absent students the challenges that we just wanted to go over are number one finding substitutes and really difficult to find adequate sub coverage for our teachers and then number two since we are at magnet school transportation tends to be a challenge even though it it produces our vast diversity um but it can lead to attendance barriers because except students from all of them so at this time we would like to share some of our successes this year and one of our success is the growth in regards to our community school partners and i'll have
032my community school coordinated talk about that at this time as a community school we are thankful to our community partners for the programs and services that they have provided to our students and their families during the school day as well as after school to program highlights include our work with trinity alliance and rpi rpi engineering ambassadors conducted an after-school engineering club and trinity alliance provided on-site free tax filing assistance for our families another success this year was our morning announcements morning announcement videos are shown daily to the school our fifth grade students wrote the scripts and acted as morning anchors our anchors made a video for this presentation which we would like to show you now we also would like to shout out aaron harrell our home school coordinator and kim reynolds our music teacher
033who have been like co-producers of this project and so i just would like to highlight them as well [Music] good evening board members my name is ambrose and i'm in miss trainic's fifth grade class here at toast we've interrupted your meeting tonight to bring you a special report so that you can learn how awesome toast is hey cassidy what do you think they should know thanks ambrose hi everyone my name is cassie and this is shupes class here at toast the first thing you should know about toast is that we are a steam school it's like stem but we know how important the arts are to some of our steam projects this year were guests the mixture protect the ping-pong and the water cycle roll hey tong what do you think everybody should know about
034toast good evening everyone i'm tongue and i'm in mrs richards's fifth grade class here at toes we have a lot of community partners we work with radix in the garden have the dec conservation club and the rpi engineering ambassadors for family and 15 love my favorite community partner is the boys and girls club i have so much fun with them after school hey daniel what was your favorite thing we did this year hello my name is daniel and i'm in mrs richards class i think my favorite thing was our time with the microsoft employees we met once virtually and then we had a chance to have someone come to talk to us in person they talked to us about different careers options of microsoft and let us ask questions that we had we were very
035lucky that mr weil set that up for us or maybe it was the vr field trips mr rail took us to the moon mars jupiter and then we went all around the world guys what about the bots in music class we work together to compose a song and then use coding to make that player composition oh yeah even the kindergarteners had a chance to use the dash in the xylophones we got to use the ozobots and coding club too um i think we're forgetting something we are yeah the biggest thing we did this year it's getting through the school year no the announcements how could we forget that we wrote the scripts we learned about holidays and our words today we also told some really terrible jokes and we researched so many different places in
036the world for where in the world is ms reynolds we learned about microphones and green screens and how to edit an audio and we work with our public speaking slow and clear well that's all we have time for tonight thanks for joining us we hope you enjoyed our special report if you'd like to learn more about us please come and visit and don't forget make today so awesome not yesterday is jealous [Music] thank you so much what an inspiring video and thank you for all the great work that you do for our students at toast we really appreciate you thank you so that concludes our superintendent's report and i will move right into our district update and tonight as we always start with our vision mission and goals so that we are making sure that
037all of our decisions are founded in aspiring to meet our vision using our mission statement to ensure that we are working in partnership with our diverse community and engaging our students in robust educational programs so that we can achieve our goals tonight's topics through our discussion discussion topics through our district update we'll just give you an update about covet 19. we'll talk about our textbook loan program and kind of give you an update as to where we are right now with that um our middle school theater enrollment planning updates and then the high school graduation information and i'll be sharing this presentation with miss mckenna and also mr yogalski to answer any questions as uh as appropriate so covet update we have we are up to 1908 positive cases being reported um 1354 students 359
038faculty and 195 staff in may our average daily rate for positives is 12.9 and second most new cases in a month during the pandemic so it's very important that we understand and know that while we experienced low numbers um in late february and march that the numbers have been increasing in april and now in may and these are the same things that we're seeing across the county and so we just want to make sure that we keep people aware of covet is still here we need to still take our appropriate precautions we encourage our families to make sure that they're prepared with backup plans in the event that we need to transition to distance learning as we move forward the exposure piece these are our current protocols they are usually these are the same protocols
039that we've had for several months so i will not read them to you but i think it's still important to know that when a person tests positive and there is someone who is identified to be exposed that we are no longer quarantining we still make sure that families are notified that children have been that their child has been exposed and we still have enough test kits that we can send home test kits with the child to our families bless you our vaccine information this is we keep this current with the websites that are available so that our families can schedule vaccines for their children if you've been watching the news you know that in the upcoming weeks there will be a vaccine for six months through four years old and so we will keep you
040posted as a board with regard to that information and how it impacts us here in in albany and how it impacts us especially with our pre-k program textbook loan program we know that this was an area that we have been challenged with and we have looked to streamline that process and you can see the laws that require all school district boards to purchase and loan textbooks in an equitable manner to all pupils residing in school in the school district who are attending kindergarten through 12th grade and this is for any public or non-public school and so we know that parents are responsible for requesting the loan of textbooks we coordinate with our non-public schools our privates and charters we do coordinate with them with regard to how this process will work if you look at
041our district participation there's just a few numbers for you so that you can see what we're looking at private schools in albany we have 13 schools that we would supply books to that would be 688 students private schools outside of albany 33 with 307 students our charter schools eight charter schools for twenty two hundred and three students for a total of three thousand one hundred and ninety eight students the process is that the books are loaned in august and september the books are typically returned june and july what we have now we have dates that we have established our return book site is arbor hill elementary school one arbor drive and the following dates are when we will be getting the return books on monday june 27th from 8 to noon tuesday june 28th from
042noon to 4 and then wednesday july 6 from 8 till noon this is all that we have right now but we will be working with our public our non-publics and privates um with in sharing out more information and details about this process so that we can make sure that we have a much smoother process this year and so these are the dates our middle school theater enrollment planning i will turn it over to miss mckenna to cover the last slides of the middle school theater enrollment and the high school graduation information ms mckinnon great thank you superintendent adams uh good evening everyone our middle school uh theater enrollment planning is well on on its way we are just wrapping up um with our middle school leaders and school counselors visiting our elementary schools we have
043one more school to go next to visit next week and then all fifth grade classrooms at our elementary schools will have met their um upcoming principal and school counselor uh for next year um we just released our open enrollment form on june uh first it's on our website and we also have paper copies of that open enrollment form in each one of our elementary and middle schools june 15th we will have a middle school information night for all families at each one of our middle schools where they will learn about their new middle school in august we have lots going on i will be reviewing on a regular basis throughout the summer the open enrollment applications as well as middle school enrollment in grades six through eight and then making decisions based on the number
044of slots available um at each grade level and um determine whether or not we have um availability for um families to enroll based on the open enrollment application process during the weeks of august 15th or the 22nd depending on the middle school summer transition camps will be offered for any new in student to the building in grades six through um eight and again depending on the building it will either be a three-day um transition camp or a five-day transition camp and then finally during august uh we will offer a parent information night for all families and we're in the process of identifying the transition camp dates and the parent information night uh in the week of august 22nd and the transition camp really is dependent on staffing so we gave them some flexibility on those
045two weeks in september the first two days september 1st and 2nd are for student orientation days september 1st we will have all um sixth graders in uh the building for orientation and then on uh september 2nd we will welcome our seventh and eighth graders uh for orientation our albany high graduation lots of planning um has gone into this and we're finalizing our plans lawn signs are available as we have done the last several years and students can pick up their lawn sign in their academy principal's office through june 14th during the last period of their school day i say last period of their school day because some students have early release we also work with cdta ron and mr direct to get our celebratory posters up um for the cdta shelters in 20 locations around
046the city so be on the lookout for those as you're driving through the city our honor cord distribution our seniors can pick those up uh the week of june 6 which is monday um from the advisor or the administrator in charge of of that specific club honor society or group cap gown and ticket distribution will um be on monday june 13th during period nine um and this will be a mandatory meeting for all of our seniors um i do want to make a note that each graduating senior will receive three tickets for the palace we do have to limit the number of guests that each graduate is allowed senior field day is coming up in a couple of weeks uh tuesday june 14th for the last two periods of the day our last day of
047classes is june 14th followed by the regents exams um june 15th through the 23rd so we have a busy busy month um coming up uh graduation day is sunday june 26th we will hold our graduation ceremony at the palace theatre on clinton avenue um the graduation ceremony will begin at noon and all graduates should arrive no later than 11 15 so we can get them lined up and ready for um for graduation we will offer shuttle buses this year we do know that uh parking is a challenge in the palace theater uh vicinity and so we will have um shuttle buses running from seven of our schools to the palace and then returning uh to each of those schools uh following the ceremony um just a little bit of information on those shuttle buses each
048bus uh will um leave the school properly at eleven o'clock graduates and guests um were asking uh to arrive at by 10 45 so we can leave promptly at 11 a.m each bus will return again to that same uh location after the ceremony and then we are are asking for rsvps uh so we do need uh families to sign up um if they're planning on riding a shuttle bus and you can see that link right there on the presentation superintendent adams thank you so very much miss mckenna at this time we'll open it up for questions from the board the board colleagues as is our usual practice i ask you to try and prioritize your questions ask your most important one first we can always go around a second time but we try and give
049everybody the chance to ask their first question before we move on to the second round there are four topics on the agenda tonight kovid 19 textbook loans middle school theater enrollment planning and uh graduation and end-of-year activities at albany high does anybody have any questions on the club 19 updates i think that material is often two questions one from ms wilson and then miss creation go ahead thank you for your presentation um i was reading that there was of course um a sub-variant of a micron that did cause an explosion of cases across new york state and although i'm sure that it's like trending down as i was reading i did read also that the recently vaccinated and boosted we're not subject to the same um is that something that we have as well as
050a rule like we're not they're not subject to the same rules our protocols for school districts are the same they've not been uh changed by state ed or the department of health board member i just wanted to comment that i actually learned recently that the federal government is offering people another eight covid tests if they sign up online so that might be a nice thing to add to next update so people know they can get more tests but also if a parent or somebody associated with the school wanted a cover desk would they be able to get one from the school yes because we have numerous we are we're still receiving our deliveries of cova test but we can also in addition to updating for our next board meeting we can just push that information
051out you know as a web story that this is also available if you want to get more tests you can order them online they're free but also at our schools would be great to let people know how they can get tests since we since that's one thing we development board member smith thank you superintendent um just had a question um i had a a text uh earlier this week actually from a couple people asking about um whether they're still availability of supplies and are like sanitizer and also the extent to which schools were still being cleaned in the same uh with the same intensity and in the same fashion that we've we're still implementing our same protocols those have not changed if you recall when we did our maintenance and operation update uh the materials
052that are required for covid we are continuing to use those same materials so we've not changed that if hand sanitizer is needed if parents would like hand sanitizer through our community outreach with kathy edmondson and our communications division we have numerous bottles of hand sanitizer that if they would like to they can contact our communications division and we're happy to provide them with hand sanitizing thank you moving on to textbooks dr just another psa if you're above 50 or anybody anybody above 50 is eligible for the second booster and it doesn't have to be the same shot that you took before you can mix and match and if you are eligible it is advisable to get it because it does improve your immunity against these new i'm sorry i thought you were moving in textbooks
053so anybody else on code okay now textbooks mismatch the superintendent just another question i had schools uh non-public schools private schools etc can also request uh technology from the district is that correct and do we have generally a lot of requests for technology from those schools i would defer to mr baker but i'm not aware of numerous cases where it's the technology the textbooks is our largest connection typically um the dispersions of technology to our non-public or charter schools are arranged through services as part of a group with the business office there are rarely uh and to my knowledge since i've been here in this position for five years ever any direct requests made of my office for any type of end user infrastructural technology middle school theater enrollment planning from board members wilson thank
054you i was just curious about the modes of communication we were using to advise families about the open enrollment forms being available on the middle school information nights miss mckenna did you want to address that please i can and then i would ask mr lesko to add anything that i may have missed we are using our typical uh communication channels um that we use for all other communication uh facebook school messenger and um i think those are really our two two primary methods of communication and we can certainly look at doing robo calls um to get to get the word out as well but it's really facebook our district website and um school messenger thank you i only asked because i know there was some expressed um public interest in open enrollment i imagine those
055who are interested are watching and waiting but just curious about the level that we permeated thank you i have a question which is um can you talk a little bit about the process for folks who are not fifth grade students within the district we noticed as we were doing the feeder effort that that we have a significant number of new enrollees at sixth grade um is that something they just you know go to central registration or is they are they eligible for these sorts of um transition camps can you just talk about our new enrollees yeah so any new student um to the district is eligible to participate in any of our activities this summer as long as they're registered for the 22-23 school year so any student for example i'll use the summer transition
056camp for new incoming students if they are registered we will be reaching out and sending information so they can sign up for that summer transition camp for example so families should definitely reach out to the district as early as they can rather than waiting till say september 1st to let us know that they plan to correct yes anyone else i have a second question but i'll defer to somebody else i just wanted to make sure i understood that the absence of information about shadowing is that there's you're not planning to do shadowing this year we are not planning on doing shadowing this year okay thank you very much and then the fourth topic was the end of your activities at albany high any questions on that ms wilson thank you um i understand it's a
057new location so um there's three tickets and unlimited seating and i know that when we had it the last time we had a graduation it was at albany high and non-ticketed parties lined up along the fence are we directing people to just not show up to the palace because they won't be admitted i'm just curious about overflow or any extra non-ticketed parties yeah if they do not have a ticket they will not be allowed to enter the palace however um as we've done each year we will be live streaming uh the graduation ceremony so uh those who do not have a ticket will be able to um view the the graduation um via live stream uh so i just had a question and it's going forward what are our thoughts on graduation location and um
058ceremony type for 2023 what can we do to lock down a location that's got more than three tickets per graduate and make sure that it's an appropriate place for students to graduate so we're already in the process of working with mvp because usually we do these a year in advance and so and again you have to recall that this is um this is due to covid with regard to larger venues and things like that and we were anticipating being able to do the outdoor event but from the input of our students they wanted to really do something where all of them could graduate at the same time and so in recognizing that that was when we went to the armory but then we found out that they did not have air conditioning and as our
059temperatures are rising that would not be very comfortable and so we were very appreciative of being able to partner with the palace so that we could have all of our students graduating at the same time and that does limit the number of guests that we could have but again we're doing the live streaming but in preparation for next year we've already started working with mvp arena so that we can make sure that we at least have our date set with them so that we could have the larger venue and not have to worry about the number of tickets that people would have but also we have to remember we're still in covet and so should anything change about large gatherings we'd have to be flexible with that but at this time we're really planning on
060getting back to mvp arena that sounds great thank you any other questions for the superintendent on that district update otherwise i think we will move on to public comment so this is the time we set aside to hear from members of the public the board always welcomes input from the community about the decisions we are making if you've come tonight to speak in public comment and you're not sure if you're signed up please see miss bowie over there behind the two screens and we should let you sign up and we will call people in the order in which they are signed up per our long-standing policy the board sets aside up to 30 minutes of each meeting to hear from our district residents parents students and other members of our community [Music] if there are
061more comments that can be accommodated in 30 minutes which is not likely tonight we may choose to extend the length of public comment period or alternatively to establish a second public comment period later in the meeting for our relatively new public comment policy uh developed over kovid we also accept comments in writing by virtual live participation and by voicemail comments that are not in person must be made at least six hours prior to the meeting to give us time to collect and verify them as needed written comments are limited to 400 words and voicemail comments to three minutes just as in person are all comments must include the commenter's name and place of residence we do not accept anonymous comments if you would like to submit a voicemail or written comment or sign up for
062an uh virtual comment in the future you need to do that at the addressing the board page at albanyschools.org forward slash b-o-e that will give you all the information you need to know about how to do that and this is really important for any of you guys who are here to speak in person tonight so i want to make sure everybody's paying attention to this important piece of information we ask all commenters to keep in mind that information about individual students and specific district staff members cannot be shared in public comment not only is that a violation of everyone's privacy but students and staff members deserve to know that concerns about them will not be aired in public we also ask that you keep in mind that public comment is not the best place to
063first alert the district of concerns we ask that you share concerns first with relevant staff such as the teacher or principal if you feel the concern is not addressed adequately you may appeal to that person's supervisor up the chain of command and if necessary to the superintendent decisions made by the superintendent may be appealed to the board finally we ask you to note that the board's policy is not to respond during the public comment period if you need a response please contact us by email phone or postal mail our contact information is available at slash boe and the president that's me will respond on behalf of the board we did not receive any written or voicemail comments tonight we do have some people signed up for in-person comment please let me know if i mispronounce
064your name we try really hard to get people's names right and we appreciate it when we are corrected when i recognize you you'll come to one of these microphones it doesn't matter each one of the same please state your name and city of residence statements are restricted to a maximum of three minutes dr chatur is the board secretary he will give you a one-minute notice and then a 10-second notice and then i'll let you know if your time is expired it's a good idea to look up at him occasionally to see those notices so you won't be surprised at the end of your three minutes with that um statement i'm going to ask that the first person come i have aria baines choose a microphone any microphone and just start by saying your name and
065your city of residence and then you have up to three minutes okay okay you guys can hear me um hi my name is uriah baines i'm from albany new york i currently go to albany high school um i run track on the opening high girls track team and um 13 of us have been suspended for wearing sports bras i feel like that's unfair we've asked for suspenses to be reviewed and it's been almost almost a month and like a week or a week and a half you know so it's been like three weeks and you know we've asked for it to be reviewed we feel as though we're being ignored when it comes to the situation our ad um there's been i'm going to be really specific we're not going to talk about anybody by
066name or by position okay if you you can talk about the district you can talk about staff people but like i said before you can't talk about anybody by name and you can't talk about anybody by position that tells us who they are okay because we wouldn't do that for you and we wouldn't let you do that for anybody else okay well staff has suspended three days or um they claimed that it was for actions taken at the lacrosse game we've asked for the language to be reviewed and we've been ignored so we're kind of here to see because we're at a standstill we would like for those fences to be even taken off and for somebody to be held responsible for the actions taken may 12 22. are you is that what you wanted
067to say is there more i think that's okay thank you for being here so you're the next person who is on the list i found the glasses on alexis orango did i say that right oh i'm sorry go ahead alexis and then i missed mr martinelli you were signed up first so go ahead that was completely administrative or on my part i apologize so one of you guys one take one microphone and one take the other how about that and then we'll go for that good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board uh dr adams mr yalski my name is dan martinelli and my wife and i have two students currently attending the albany high school and i'm here to advocate for my daughter and members of the albany girls track team who received an
068athletic suspension the turbulence surrounding this continually growing issue is about athletic wear student voice civil protest in title ix for those for those listening title nine uh protects students from discrimination based on gender gender and educational program particularly those programs they receive federal funds as albany does it's all sort of masked around a smoke screen of inappropriate language which i believe did not happen certainly for my daughter i'm encouraging the board to investigate ask questions this of course is my formal request of a board appeal i'll ask the same questions when we get to that appeal it's my intention that this is not a gotcha and i have uh followed your chain of command and i have asked the same questions of your administration which parents have the right to do of course to contest
069the suspension this incident occurred on thursday may 12th i received the suspension letter it was hand delivered saturday the 14th please consult your council um on the end law uh concerning that timing uh the consequences were presented to me via phone on friday and then they changed i was not notified of that change my daughter told me when she came home she went to a meeting a three-day suspension was changed to one i'm curious as to why if two central office administrators had to address an issue on wednesday the 11th the day before as stated in the suspension letter administrators reiterated and i quote the code of conduct why were parents not contacted by the way my daughter was not warned she didn't talk to those administrators she was running following the direction of her
070coaches it was on this day that some of the girls were told by the administration that male coaches they have male coaches so they can't practice in athletic wear this statement to the kids in front of coaches demonized the coaches without cause that did harm and all my kids have had those coaches i trust them implicitly what if i told you that there were students who received suspension letters who were not even present that day please ask that in the suspension letter states my daughter was insubordinate when she refused to file the rule set forth and enforced by me the previous day your daughter used inappropriate and disrespectful language uh directed at me when asked to leave the practice i'm going to need some specifics here and i did not get them from administration on
071the 12th administration went to the boys team and directed them to take uh to put their shirts on and they did and then they they went to the girls and they did not get the same chance title 9 violation that's your time thank you so much for being here thank you and again i ask you take that suspension away please look into it alexis when you run we try and clean them in between so that's why we go back all right say your name say what city you live in and then you have up to three minutes okay um my name is alexis hoperango i'm a senior at albany high school and i live in albany okay um thank you for your time and allowing me to speak here today tomorrow will mark three weeks
072from when we received a sanction because of the way it was perceived we reacted and interacted with a staff member less than 24 hours earlier however three weeks later and there still has been no acknowledgement no attempt and no acceptance or willingness from the district to understand the impact of the actions that were done by the district those actions belittled shamed and imprinted scarlet letters on our records that no one from the district has made any mention or acknowledgement to try to correct if the district felt we needed to be sanctioned for the way we interacted with staff and were able to act within 24 hours i ask that the district reflect on their own actions and mistakes and to act swiftly as they did to sanction us to make adjustments to their own errors
073with within their policies albany high has taught us a lot of good lessons one of which is not to be silent when you feel or you or someone else has been wronged that is why we as a team united against this policy and are committed to continue to work advocate and be good trouble to get this resolved thank you again for your time and thank you for being here and last we have sasha roeder sasha take this microphone because it's been cleaned okay that one right there yep you got it so you just start by saying your name that you live in and then you have up to three minutes watch over here for the timeline okay um my name is sasha roeder legally alexandra gabrielle um i live in albany new york and i
074go to albany high school um i am here for the same reason as my as my fellow teammates um i urge the district to investigate more so the reasoning for our suspension um initially the cause that that came to us through those letters that you have heard about um was that it was due to the encounter that occurred between the district and my teammates at the lacrosse encounter however this is exam exemplary not true um because i was not present at this encounter and i was also suspended and so the root of this problem does fall within us having the audacity to wear activewear on a hot day um at the end of the season when previously when this has occurred it was never brought up to us and this is also the time of
075the season that sectionals happen and that the most important invitationals occur and states and and all that type of end of the year excitement um so the reasoning behind why some of our brightest athletes could not attend one of these very promising invitationals i would really like you all to investigate um thank you so much and thank you very much for being here that brings us to the end of public comment we really do appreciate when people take the time and um and take the time and prepare to come here and speak with us again our contact information for both public comment and for routine correspondence is at albanyschools.org forward slash doe we now are going to move on to the part of our meeting we call routine consent during the portion of the meeting
076during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district these include items like contracts field trips personnel matters and the like each board member reviews each item carefully but we vote on them as a group with no discussion that allows us to use our meeting time more efficiently nonetheless each board member has the option to set aside any routine consent item in order to require a separate discussion and a separate vote on that item with that introduction i now entertain a motion to adopt the routine consent agenda motion by board member man second by board member smith are there any set asides i see a set aside from mr el minawi and one from ms wilson mr el minawi can i set aside number 16 epi mechanically can i set aside item
07711 and 12. can you give me the names too just so i make sure i have the right ones field trip albany high school mbk and jrltc so uh sorry all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda less numbers 11 and 12 the field trips and number 16 bpi all in favor that is unanimous thank you very much and now let's do them in the order they were spoken can i get a motion to adopt the bpi contract motion by dr chatur second by board member wilson is there any discussion remember i'm an ali thank you i just wanted to first say that i'm in favor of this addendum to increase contract amount to bpi um and that is because i want to ensure that funding is not an issue when it comes to
078ensuring that district facilities specifically the hvac and the plumbing are well maintained and operational um for our students and staff so that is why i'm voting in favor of this um even though i voted against it any further discussion all in favor that is unanimous and now um ms wilson can we take those two together can i entertain a motion to adopt items 11 and 12 the two field trips motioned by ms wilson second by board member krejci is there any discussion board member wilson the very brief discussion i have is that i do intend to vote to approve these field trips i just ask that we have lots of picture and video we would like to celebrate these field trips um any further discussion all in favor of items 11 and 12 that is
079unanimous thank you very much and that brings us to the end of the action portion of the agenda we do not anticipate taking any additional actions tonight while we could take an additional action and it has happened before in general we try not to take actions after the end of the action agenda that brings us to the beginning of the discussion agenda and the first item is the year-end fund balance transfer we do not have a formal presentation you have received the information i will turn it over to mr yakowski to discuss our year-end fund balance and the transfers that we're recommending with the help of two outstanding ladies in the business office we undertook the effort to produce a projection knowing that we still have a month's worth of activity in some of the
080active months and as a result of that we we projected that there would be a a balance a projected balance comparing the revenues to the expenditures of nine million dollars now we believe that the wisest thing to do with these dollars are to set them aside into reserves specifically two reserves that we've identified one has to do with retirement contributions specifically for teacher retirement systems and the other is the capital reserve and the capital reserves really important to us when you consider all the capital projects we have going the amount of time these are taking and to add to it the rate of inflation that's occurring uh affecting much of this so we're better off if we take the balance of that and put that into the capital reserve and that's our recommendation any questions
081and i remind you this is the discussion agenda we have a chance to think about this more over two weeks but if anybody has any preliminary um questions that they would ask like to ask the mpd superintendent um i guess i would like to first of all just acknowledge that my understanding is that pretty much every school district is seeing this kind of situation where they have um funds left at the end of the year because this has been such an unusual year both in terms of funding availability and in terms of the challenge in delivering staffing program that that every school district is facing so um i appreciate your being on top of this in advance and thinking about it um well in advance so that sometimes in the past we've had to have
082like a discussion action all at once kind of thing so it's really great to have it in advance so i appreciate that and don't don't hesitate to call me and ask any questions to now and when the next meeting is board member thank you for that breakdown and i was just curious um being that it's nine million remaining and we've allocated that like distributed that between two reserves is there any sort of implications for it being perceived as a fiscal stress that we've used them both fully and as reserves in that capacity or for example just like if we did not use the full 9 million but left some for flex or some kind of like is that some kind of implication well we we will always have about four percent of your current budget
083uh set aside so that that that doesn't touch that at all we'll have that we're just gonna take the excess that we have here and put it away for another day and again i can't emphasize enough the the business around the capital projects we want to make sure we're able to finish that high school as an example absolutely and in the way we intended it to be i agree thank you i also wanted to appreciate the level of detail on some of the year-end spending which i appreciate the breakdown there i knew that the um the folks at the who have been without a library for the last couple of weeks we'll be looking forward to having their full library compliment back and i'm thrilled to see that we have those funds available as well
084as the increase to athletics which is is wonderful do we have a specific idea of the athletics the purpose of those funds at this point or is this just a planned increase that coordination will be done with our athletic director and our business officials will take care of that but there are different line items for each area and then it will be distributed within those athletic uh department lines but if i understand correctly these are items that will be purchased with dollars this year's budget which is something yeah we've seen that happen before and it's something i think we all have to keep in mind as we look at budgets from year to year the budget um you know sometimes the pre-buying allows the budget the following year to look lower but it's not because
085they have less spending it's just something pretty bought materials that we can not every school district does kind of manage uh the way we're doing here because we could have just rushed through all those items instead we said let's see how we're doing and it won't hurt us in some of these cases to buy it later so it does benefit the future so not every district does it that way and i think the way in which the district's been doing it here and identifying those things monitoring them and then at the right time they make the final decision all right any additional discussion or conversation otherwise we will plan to vote on this in two weeks i guess the only question i have i'm sorry i had one more little question um the draft resolution
086says basically any adjustments you're just going to make once you have the final figures which seems very reasonable yeah that's totally reasonable um but i'm assuming that that's within some realm of reality of closeness right we're not talking about suddenly you're going to decide to donate or to reserve 500 000 instead of 9 million i've been here for the whole year it'd be solid as a ride yeah yeah but i i'm relying on some other people that are really good in that business i understand okay so thank you very much anybody else otherwise we'll move on to the next discussion item which is curriculum and instruction division update so good evening again and um we are so excited because there's um a couple of presentations tonight that you're going to see that um really are
087the heart and soul of the delivery of that quality instruction looking at the goal of delivery of quality instruction at the core of that it is the curriculum that we use it's the professional development that goes along from all different levels administrative support staff as well as our faculty and and ensuring that that professional development aligns with the curriculum and that delivery of quality instruction and we also have our presentation that will be a highlight within that division uh afterwards we will hear from pe and health and receive an update with regard to that particular department because as you have noted there's been an increase in the funding that is going back to try and help restore as we get back to our competitive levels and increasing the programs that we're offering we are also
088looking at increasing the funding to support that and so at this juncture for the next two items i'm going to turn it over to our assistant prince our assistant principal our assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction and professional development mrs karen bechtel thank you superintendent adams i'm happy to be here to give this presentation to the board of education and i will begin with no uh further ado um this again is the division update for curriculum instruction and professional development we always begin with our guiding principles and then i'll move into the goals of my division which is really centered on instructional supervision curriculum development and implementation and professional development those are our three large buckets that we have here that i'm going to talk about further as i go through um the presentation the uh
089this is my department staff my first three columns are really the eight uh content supervisors that cover all content um in the district the only thing that's not represented here is cte i certainly work with andrea marquez clark on the cte program we partner with her as she runs that content area in addition athletics falls under my purview as well as mentoring and professional development with jen justice and lisa dinardo my admin assistant who um i can't uh speak highly enough about she's a great asset to our department our structures um consist of in leadership the check-in meetings which i think you heard quite a bit about this from miss mckenna and dr wilson turner so those check-in meetings really provide coaching direction guidance um i meet one or one or two times a month
090with a each supervisor we have some standing agenda items we also have the monthly secondary core instructional supervisor meeting and the elementary one as well and that's where i work with my colleagues dr wilson turner and lori mckenna as we intersect between management of schools and management of content cni staff provide instructional and content leadership in so many different contexts we are at all the principal meetings um we do walk throughs we and we'll i'll talk more about that um we manage the instructional coaching department um so the supervisors then in turn meet with those ela and math supervisors or the coaches i mean i'm sorry and then the instructional coaches also support cpt as well as the instructional supervisors supporting cpt i had the pleasure this year actually of running a 12-hour pd series
091which ended yesterday um in the art of coaching with our 10 new um instructional coaches and tech coaches this year we they were invited because their work in terms of adult learning theory is very much the same common planning time the elementary and secondary supervisors participate in that elementary it's more about that um supporting the coaches we have a large number of coaches at the elementary level and at the secondary level the supervisors push into that as well where we do benchmark analysis using our e-doctrina system the walk-through feedback cycle which you've heard quite a bit about um the supervisors work collaboratively with our building leaders they do conduct paired walkthroughs which is a learning experience for anyone who participates in that it's a wonderful opportunity to talk about instruction and next steps uh we
092do this regularly and frequently as this is our work in our department and we pay attention to the seps uh we are really looking about um the fidelity of curriculum implementation um professional development efforts that we have made and the content we provide feedback in a coaching manner so that we can all grow in our practice the walk-throughs um not as many as pre-covered but we we are certainly had more this year than in the past when i pulled this chart we were at 7 31 for the district and i point out that the cni staff um have uh done almost half of those but i want to remind the board that this is our work our content and instruction work we're not managing buildings in our office we are managing uh content and curriculum
093so this is our work to be sure to get into uh classrooms and monitor that that major job that we have you um are aware by now because i've talked about this several times uh the five-year cycle of review we're actually closing in at the end of um a second five-year cycle which indicates that we've really systemized our curriculum review process this year fine arts and social studies is in year one and those presentations will take place i believe in august and next year on deck is math world language and reading we also are always doing ongoing adjustments blended learning is something a new initiative really leveraged from the pandemic um it was there we were always trying to do it but i call it the one of the silver linings is that it's it
094propelled us um and i do actually think it's um a huge uh change that we're going to see as a result of these two years so we did a lot of implementation of digital resources you've heard people speak of near podcami our google suite of course um and then we have the tech coaches i work closely with kent and um to support the integrated technology in the in-person academic environment we also have some new standards to get ready to implement in computer science and so we're doing some of that beginning work about how that will look in our district i believe we're slated for 23 24 for very initial um implementation uh we have done quite a bit of work around social justice integration into the curriculum especially in our humanities curriculum where it's a
095natural fit but it's explicit we're doing it targeted we're doing it explicitly we're planning for um for this and we are making sure that the students that we serve are represented in the content and the text that we use so we have research units we talk about student voice all the time we have the literature circles at middle school where kids are doing independent book projects there's student choice there um and we are sure to give kids uh opportunities with social justice themes we've spoken about the 1619 project being embedded in the u.s history curriculum and the culminating project um in the civics class took place this year in anticipation of the new seal of civic readiness which is coming uh next year it's being uh that that's year one for the seal of civic
096readiness readiness but staff had been working on this project with a culminary culminating project at the end of this grade 12 class really for several years um and we have partnered with the naacp they've really been so helpful and with that with us i always submit a year-end curriculum report our curriculum is grounded in the standards um and in this report i give a summary i just tell you this to remind you that came in october to reflect the uh 2021 school year and then at the end of the summer because we do so much curriculum work in the summer i like to do that report in the fall to wrap up the work that had has been completed um we've enhanced our curriculum to include technology integration i want to can't go any further
097without talking about the seal of bi-literacy we had the pleasure of hearing five present four presentations we had the other presentation was last year but there are five seniors who will receive the seal this year and um this website you can click on it and see what a robust page we have on our new website the curriculum report and this look this really reflects secondary six through twelve they really use the rubicon atlas system you can see that we have the most hits um four views with our four core areas which makes the most sense that's the most students are in there and uh the most teachers really as departments um so it's an active system that teachers use to help them in their work professional development um we are getting ready to create a
098new professional development plan we have four goals these goals have very much stayed the same these overarching goals we added the tech integration goal a few years ago but content standards data informed instruction social emotional learning that is what we do um and so all of our activities and and uh the the kinds of plans that we make for pd fall under these large these big categories we have our pd days most of um our offerings were virtual we did have some in person it just sort of depended upon the content this year big focus on ruler implementation and also adult social emotional learning i also linked the may 17th pd schedule here if you wanted to take a peek at that it's a complex process but we're linked to mlp so people can keep
099track of their pd and in it and it works out great uh conferences we we normally have more than this but um this is way more than 2021 so we're up to 200 conferences and just this spring we have we actually sent our first large group just this past weekend we really wanted to wait till the very end of the school year because we are having some issues with staffing so we committed to the summer um and so we have quite a bit of activity going on this summer we've done we always conduct a lot of surveys um there's a lot to look at here but i think one of the highlights is in april of this year when we did our pd our new pd plan survey because we survey staff before we create
100the plan um we have an added dimension we always focus on our teaching staff appsta and they have um given us those their top three things the content student engagement grade level planning but we also gave a targeted survey to tas we had 80 or 89 respondents and they identified classroom management social emotional learning student engagement as priorities for them and our clerical staff we also wanted to make see what their needs were and they talked about school tool excel payroll and purchasing and and we did address the payroll purchasing at our most recent pd day on may the 17th i just wanted to revisit i won't bring this back again but um this is the google suite the three main things the google classroom google docs google drive people have this they they have
101google suite under their belt um and it is um it's just a part of how we do business so that's good news and for teachers these are a few of our large tools that we have and and again depending because some people would be using these more than others but we have pretty good results there about people's comfort level with the digital tools but i really wanted to highlight this because i think we've made a shift and i want to thank mr baker for helping me even get here um because we kept thinking about google suite and the tools and not about what integrated tech really means and so with the advent of the tech coaches and though the tech coaches actually doing the work of instructional coaches except with how to integrate technology um
102but what so what we did in the pd survey is we really tried to uh word it so that we could help teachers understand this is not about having computers in the room or kids on the computers it's how teachers are using computers and digital tools to integrate into instruction there blended learning is not computers taking the place of teachers it's about teachers using the technology to help instruction so we asked this question in this particular way and um the top three things that people said they wanted help with in using um uh instructional tech is to help to incorporate student voice in increase student engagement you see a theme there and provide choice and activities so we shifted how that that conversation is um moving and we also surveyed the tas um they too
103have a pretty good comfort level with the google classroom google docs google drive so um that was that was good we have some work to do here but we feel um that that this is uh this is a good uh sign and then oh actually let me go back one or no i'll stay here i should have on board with me today um jen justice are you there jen i am excellent um jennifer justice is the mentor coordinator and also my right-hand person for all things professional development she's going to walk through these next couple of slides good evening everyone so a little bit about the mentor program in the city school district of albany uh this came out of a 2003 state ed regulation that is requires all new teachers after 2004 to receive
104one year of mentoring in order to move on to their professional certification the district has been really i think forward thinking in that we were we we give mentoring to every new teacher every new apps to member in the district and i think that that is something that other districts don't do but we recognize the need for new people transitioning in what a large district it is and all the nuances and so every person in apsta gets a new a mentor every new person regardless of the number of years experience that you have and they come in um and they have this partner that walks them through their first year that i think is really what makes us special it helps teachers and other staff members go through the appr process it coaches them it
105gives them just an ally in the district and we we try very hard to match people up with someone in their building and if not then someone that's doing the exact job in fact i onboarded a new nurse today so we're we're working very hard at this making sure everybody is covered did i miss anything karen no i think i think you did a great job jen let's move to the next slide which has your data can you see that jen i can't but maybe there's a delay um i know what it is though so this slide will show you the number of mentees and mentors in the district and you can see that last year obviously there weren't very many um because of there weren't a lot of new teachers this year we are
106at roughly 157 and again that covers all the apps to members so we have nurses we have social workers school psychologists all of those people have someone that they can go to immediately for help typically it's in their building but not always um again if we have a single social worker in a building we would match them up with a social worker in another building but they're reachable by phone and they can always reach me so you can see what the numbers are it's you know new programs obviously with aic and the dual language program moving and those kinds of things in north albany that's going to add new teachers and other um non-classroom professionals that require mentoring the numbers are pretty staggering how much staff we have that are new yeah we are at
107pre pre-co victim numbers okay so i think jen were you going to start this and i was going to finish teacher certification pathways this is something else our office supports and jen will speak to this for a minute so pardon me uh i'm really proud of the work that we have done in the areas as you know there's a teacher shortage in new york state and actually across the country and we are trying very hard and and i have to say matt and karen um different ways to get people in starting with we just got this grant um and actually the albany public school teachers association got this grant from nyset and it's called the talent grant this is take a look at teaching and this is going to start two middle school clubs and
108kate johnson and rohan graham will be the club managers for the two middle school clubs it's to get kids interested in teaching as you know this has been you know teaching is not what it once was some of the programs in the area have closed and we really need to generate interest and we want to bring in kids that are our kids and have them come back and teach with us so we're starting that in the middle school um and that is a small grant but we're definitely hoping that it it grows another grant that we have in the district is called teachers of tomorrow this is going to be um it was applied for may but i believe it's a renewal and it's designed to recruit and retain teachers in high needs schools but
109in hard to fill areas so you know facts technology in some cases music theater those kinds of jobs again a lot of the local programs like saint rose they're not filling those positions like we once had in our backyard and so we need a way to entice people to come and work for us and this is one of those things they get an extra stipend for staying with us for a number of years and the last thing that i'll talk about and karen will add to this which i think is really near and dear to my heart because i was a ta in the district when i started is there are quite a few teaching assistants that work in the district that are looking to be certified teachers and it is a really individualized process
110of how you do this and state ed as you know they're understaffed and they also there isn't someone you can call and ask how to do this so uh this is something that you know karen said sure go and do this and we surveyed teaching assistants and we right now have 24 people who are really interested in doing this and they're in various stages of doing it some have started classes some haven't um and it's a it's a real process and they really need someone and we have a partner in boces ken ziegler has been really helpful with us and niceit has helped us and i'm learning a lot and um matt has been very good about connecting me and giving us time and i was able to run a pd on may 17th for
111tas uh with ken ziegler and so i think that this is something where we can bring in teachers that are people who already work for us and that's what we're looking to do from promoting within it's a win for the kids it's a win for the ta and it's a win for us nice job i think you said it all um but i i do want to give a shout out to you jen because she knows so much about certification and people ask and um we're we're able to use jen as a resource on this and i know that uh matt and human resources um um appreciate uh the work that she does in this regard and and i guess that's just a reflection of how my office intersects with the other division so i'm
112intersecting with um mr baker and the office of data and technology of course i'm very intersecting with cecily and laurie and then even with human resources with the student teaching with the teacher certification pathways with the professional development so we we get around in the cni um so this is i think my final slide um about other responsibilities or initiatives that we have in our department we do the student we manage the student teaching program we've only had 55 placements this year that is lower um but we do work with a lot of different colleges we've even have some online programs that we are beginning to work with uh we do this the stem programming and this is really in the purview of amanda powers and uh sarah mcgraw the stemanistas camp the science fair
113which i will have something in the update next week the freight farm the space station the radic center we do so much something new we did this year was the financial literacy series for grades five and twelve um this was with our partners at sefq and it was greeted very well by very positively by the teachers in grade five and in grade 12 and we are going to do this again to support our students um financial literacy we implement grants uh smart scholars and then the title four we have a new partnership um with ef educational tours which we just started and in an effort to look to open up travel again to students because we believe this is important and along with promoting travel we want to make sure that we give as many
114kids as possible access to this and that we're not just saying that this is a parent responsibility but how can we even as a district organization do the fundraising to ensure that more kids can participate in that and of course the board knows i do the district calendar um and then new it to me is well actually last couple years is athletics and i didn't talk about athletics in this presentation because i believe right after me um uh director chapel will be here get to give us a comprehensive presentation on athletics on health and pe and here's some references for our work and our questions and i think i'm going to come out of this because i can't see anybody right now there you go well thank you so much for a wonderful presentation i
115love the enthusiasm it's always exciting to hear from people who are excited about their work particularly i noted how excited you were to talk about technology and how teachers can use technology and how it really centers teachers because that is what we do here and we really believe that teachers are the source of our strength and the power of the district so we really appreciate everything you said tonight about how how all that you do connects to teaching and learning in the classroom so i will not gather on here because we always want to try and maintain our normal process of one question at a time i see board member smith is excited to to speak so we'll do board mayor smith on board member wilson and then we'll see who's next great thank you
116um ms bechtel thank you so much and and all of your your staff uh colleagues as well um let me first just uh add on to that that um since i have been on the board i really and i'm not saying that it wasn't there before but the growth in the pd and particularly your presentation of what is involved in the pd has just grown tremendously um and i remember thinking last at last meeting um that you know we were discussing some pd and i didn't want to leave uh and i unfortunately did i didn't want to leave that conversation without commending this district for the amount the volume the level and the focus of the professional development that's offered here it is just bar none if you ask me um and so i just
117uh just want to commend you for that that it's it's again i i feel and i sense something very different uh from when i first came on the board and would hear you speak and talk to to where you have become today um i've always known that you've enjoyed pd but like i really like see that all over your face in your language and and it's reflected uh obviously in uh in the product the outputs that you've got here so i just wanted to commend you and and staff for that and um including uh miss justice also for her component of it um i think as well out of that has come like so many initiatives uh in your area and your bailiwick of curriculum and instruction and i'm excited about every piece of it
118truthfully and i wanted to make note in particular of the ef tours i was having a conversation last evening with one of our staff people who's very involved in this and has handled uh or managed the costa rica trips yes um and so uh and i apologize because i know i'm not supposed to mention names um but i had a great conversation with with our staff person and um and one of the things that i was saying to him that i was really moved by i was fortunate to be able to uh to support my child's travel since 12th grade where she was involved in the people to people program at the time i think that is no longer the name they may have merged with ef or some other uh entity but i mean
119to have to see my child like thrive and experience those trips abroad and she thinks nothing of it you know whereas vicky like i was all set to go abroad in college and i backed out because i hadn't hadn't been you know i mean i just hadn't been you know and i was afraid and so i said my child's doing it even if she does it without me and sure enough she was able to travel and spend time in eight different countries uh before before the tenth grade and it just was incredible for her i've also had the um experience where um i've worked with schools that provide these travel experiences and there are so many kids and i know this is true in albany they haven't left like a four to five to six
120square block of their neighborhood ever um and uh for many reasons you know but i am so thankful and grateful that we are able we've always been able to provide some of that but now i think it feels like there's a real effort thoughtful effort to ensure that every single child has that opportunity not just once but perhaps multiplying right and i can't wait for that to really take off because i had a young man in syracuse who i met and he was in the 10th grade when i met him he started at this particular school when he was in seventh grade had never been outside of his neighborhood was suddenly in turkey austria germany the uk and boy did he have a lot to share with me and his it changed his life and
121his life trajectory so i just wanted to take those few minutes to say i am so grateful for that pete everything that we are doing and are offering our youngsters i am so very proud of i know that what my child experienced has made a difference in her life but i could also see that the more we're doing this and taking it to the next level is phenomenal and i thank all of you for that piece of work thank you mr smith i'd like to add just a little comment to that uh one of the things that we're looking at doing with ef tour ef educational tours is aligning it with our curriculum so that it becomes an enhancement to the subject matter and and what that does is it if you think about some
122of the things that we've talked about over the years making the learning that happens in the classroom meaningful to the everyday life how do i connect the learning that i get in the school to the world beyond and ef educational tours is a way of doing that because not only are they founded or shall i say grounded within the content it's also within that overall theme so for example there are themes that address health wellness physical education and and there's curricula that goes along with that so that we can tie that into what we do one of the other things and and miss bechtel is very modest about this but there is a um an opportunity for our teachers that we are looking at to go to panama which has a stem component so that
123they can learn get that information but then learn how that can become something for our students to participate in and how do we then enhance a very strong and robust stem program to incorporate these educational tours outside of albany with regard to that we already understand foreign languages there's a culinary component and so we think about how can we do like tours in foreign countries with chefs and things like that to help enhance what our culinary students are experiencing and so this connection um while we're starting small the vision is that it will connect in each of our content areas each of our themes so that we can get to the point that every single student in our district will have the opportunity along with how we build in those resources to facilitate getting our
124students to experience albany and beyond thank you very much i know this sounds thematic from one of the first things that you handled when you first got here i recall and there was a lot of conversation about overnight field trips and making sure that they were curricular and um open to all so i'm really excited to see it coming to fruition board member wilson um plus one to everything um board member smith and superintendent stated and i just have like a holistic overview about the entire presentation not so much a question so forgive me for the love fest but i always feel um philosophical when you do these presentations i now the word that comes to mind is like symphony and i think curriculum is like the sheet music you know and i love that
125the subtitle of the area concerning coaching and mentoring was called leadership development because as much as we are aligning the curriculum to and mentoring and coaching to align to our mission and vision and goals um most people can think of impactful teachers that they've had in their life or someone who left an impression and i think that comes from not only passion but pouring into our colleagues that are teachers and i do remember um as you mentioned the pd i agree with vicki it's becoming more and more insightful into what the goals of the pd are and how it works and as you describe them weddings i do have personal experience um with the five-year cycle of review so i think it sheds light for people who don't understand well where does our curriculum come
126from well we're constantly reviewing it and we're focusing and you know there's the there's a cycle and there is a process and i appreciate that you highlighted that um the other area that jumped out to me was social justice and the curriculum and i thank you for just calling it going straight to it and calling it that um especially because we talk about cultural relevant education what's more relevant than that and i know that there's dynamics in our country that are pendulum swinging in another direction and i'm just happy and proud that we're doing that and lastly of course the pipeline of teachers i think is amazing and that we have like a very directed um for one we're going so deep into the middle school for one and then um elementary even for that
127matter but for one and then also the fact that it's like we're taking the initiative as people have identified that you know not only as i mentioned teachers are very impactful we have students for so long and we just want people to understand the benefits of the profession and also generate a pipeline of teachers from our ranks within our school district or in our community so thank you thank you good member to tour and then board member creation i want to say this was amazing when i first came on the board you and i had had many discussions about curriculum and what which what we would like to see you know what the community needs this and that it's amazing it's amazing now i'm going to call you the enabler of enablers because your device
128your division is enabling teachers to teach better enabling students to learn better working with all of these different units and trying to make the whole educational process better it's also enabling the community and the parents you can go on the website here's the different programs this is what's in the curriculum here are offerings all that information which seemed to be and you know it's locked in fort knox now is available right it's it's much more easier to get that i have a question i go on the page oh it's there that that decreases the level of anxiety for a parent or a community member and everybody else can see what we have you know whatever anybody says about us you look at those offerings nobody can beat this it shows i mean all the all
129the hard work that your division and the district staff have put in it shows our students are thriving i mean today there was the news article about the students going to all the graduating seniors going to all the universities look at this i mean it's like your chest is pounding with joy so yeah awesome job thank you i i have to say dr that my team is so good the people that work in my division they are so you know we like to call ourselves a lot of nerdy uh nerdy academics [Laughter] we we so love the content and um and so i have very very strong content people in my department and so i i have to say that i'm i'm on the shoulders of my my folks so thank you board member gracie
130you know i'm i'm also i think that was was it ms wilson that said she's also joining the love fest that's really i also more commenting than questioning and it's as somebody that was a part of the curriculum committee in the past just seeing how this process has evolved from an area where there were gaps or areas where the curriculum wasn't well developed and needed you know like let's fill the mis gaps and what's missing to uh being able to even have mastered having curriculum having well-developed curricula in each subject and having that five-year cycle to ensure that it keeps going on and curricula is continually updated because obviously you know science changes uh history keeps happening except people keep writing books so you can't just stick with what you have that's what what was
131the right curriculum 10 years ago isn't right now so it's wonderful i love especially looking at your presentation tonight the focus on interdisciplinary issues and also as ms wilson mentioned that focus on social justice and i love that social justice is threaded throughout the work not just as a social studies thing or ela but things like you know the financial literacy or steministas or um you know like the flying classroom that social justice representation and equity are something that's done throughout the curriculum and i really love that i also love and miss justice's presentation how we're working to develop teachers from from within both as encouraging future careers in our in our students which is great given the demographics of the workforce right now and also from our tas because it seems like a recipe
132for success if you have a ta who already is familiar with the school they already know it's a place they want to work they just need they already have the relationship with the kids they just need that that one piece of the credential and those stre and also the knowledge of those instructional strategies that we can help them acquire through the professional development i love the way it's come together and i love the focus on the technology and instruction it seems like the teachers also benefit from you understanding how to educate not just that it's not just the students that are the audience but also uh the teachers as well so thanks thanks for such a really well really well balanced and thought out presentation on what you're doing thank you very much we we
133we do have areas that were we still need to continue to work on um though we the the t that helping the tas um that is really good work and uh but the pd jen and i are determined to have it perfect one day um so i hope we achieve our goal uh but yeah there's there's always work to be done but thank you very much board member man i'm not going to be too long i want to just really echo ms bechtel everything that um my board colleagues have uh shared i really love the teacher certification pathways it just makes sense and uh you know as tracy said it seems like a recipe for success i mean it is truly a recipe for um success and when i look at the different initiatives that
134we're offering and then and look at what our neighboring districts are offering it doesn't even come close um and it doesn't even come close and so so thank you for all your hard work thank you having an in-house person who's really knowledgeable about certification and who's accessible in gen justice who's not done it's not living in hr but living in my office is awesome because that's an obstacle sometimes thinking about sed and how to manage those um those areas and having jen on hand she walks people writers as soon as they come she goes she sets up a meeting and talks through what they need to do in order to get there so thank you very much for noting how important that is board member el mignoli so you know something is extremely thorough when
135there are references at the very bottom so thank you um i want to just touch on one thing uh i'm seeing better graphs more often and i love it it's i look at graphs at work so it just tells so many it tells a story with like an image and i really appreciate that and i'm not going to go on because my colleagues have said everything so thank you thank you so i do actually have a question which i will ask but first i just want to echo what everyone has said every most people who've been listening to board meetings for last couple years know that it's been a real signature um issue for me to have a a really strong grow your own program starting as young as we possibly can straight through and
136then i think it's critical critical to our success as a district because i don't think we succeed by drawing people from the outside here i succeed i think we succeed by building up albany's community and that is why i thought so hard to make sure that 9240 has the language in it that it does which says that we will prioritize hiring for people who have were educated by city school district of albany or live in our city and things that you and miss justice spoke about really speak to that exact thing where we're trying to develop a full cycle to make sure that our kids become our teachers and get those really terrific jobs that i know there are very few very few pension driven jobs left in this country and teaching jobs do give
137you a level of financial security that is hard to it is hard to come by in many other professions so i hope our kids are thinking real hard about their future and the joy that comes from teaching and to be able to get the combination of joy and financial security is not always easy but my question is twofold there's two questions all right ask one question which is the most important the most important is a smaller one you noted that there would be two middle school clubs and i don't need to have an answer to this right now but i would love it if somebody would put some thought into what it would take for us to have three middle school clubs since we have three middle schools and see if that's something that could
138be done right out the gate rather than building from two to three we have three middle schools and i'd love to see all three of them have access to this um middle school teaching club so feel free to not answer the question and just think about it i'm happy to answer it um because we have we have thought about it we didn't we didn't go ahead with the third middle school quite yet because we weren't sure of staffing and we really want to get this rolling as quickly as we can in the fall and it was an appsta led initiative and so we we just took a step back i i know rohan i know kate and i went to them personally to ask them if they would do this because i i was thinking
139of point people in the building and and so that is that was an absolute decision to wait for the third middle school and we absolutely would like it to be in every single one all right well i'm gonna i'm gonna put the question aside and hope that that further thought reflection might allow a possibility um i don't know if there's some other way that the district can support but um you know to have it to have it out the gate with three would be wonderful but my second question it truly is a question i know we've and this i think may not fall under you and i apologize if i'm asking the wrong person and if you want to put it to another place i'm always interested in what we're doing to improve the quality
140of our substitutes i know people who have substituted for this district for years and i know that we have at least back the last time i saw data one out of every 10 days or 10 basically absence rate among teachers right so that means one out of every 10 days a student is having a sub so can you talk a little bit about what we're doing to increase the quality of our substitutes so this is some this is an area that um matt petra and my areas you know sort of overlap but jen and i have had many discussions about um establishing that baseline pd for a sub and you know and we've had some ideas and i'm sorry i'm that i'm saying that their ideas but we have certainly uh spend time on it
141we have online modules that we could give access to but we also wondered you know is it possible to before a sub comes in is is there a day of training is there so we we have been we've been wrestling with these things but um haven't quite got to it yet i understand and i just i think it's something that we should continue to think about because while there is a lot of turnover in subs there also are subs who serve us for multiple years and you know those people are they're with our kids and they're with our kids a lot many kids over many years and i would love to to support them so that the kids get the best out of them so um thank you again for your really enthusiastic and wonderful
142presentation i didn't mean my questions at all to come out as critiques or or push maybe a little pushes because you know if you if the board doesn't push who will right you know we really want you to do um more than you probably actually can do does anybody have any further discussion otherwise thank you very much miss justice and ms bechdel we really appreciate you being here with us tonight and i think we'll stay with you karen as we move on to the next discussion item yes i will stay here and give the floor to superintendent adams at this time we are so very excited i believe athletic director ashley chapel is on the call and i will turn the presentation over to miss chapel so that she can explain all of the wonderful
143things that are happening in our athletics department so miss chapel good evening uh can you guys uh see my screen we see your screen it's very peaceful i can't see it this is uh this is interesting so we're gonna go with it um tonight i have my partner john gallarney who is the instructional supervisor of health physical education and athletics so this will be a presentation on all three departments and so we'll start with uh the health and phys ed first so uh miss chapel what we're seeing is a very beautiful and very peaceful island is there a slideshow that we're meant to see ah so i knew there was something thank you so much that that looks i mean i did like the island but this is more what they're expecting to see this
144is what i thought you were seeing i thought you liked the colors and stuff so that's why i was like oh all right i do like the colors they are awesome but now we have it too thanks so much yep we're ready all right good evening and and thank you to the board of education the superintendent adams for the opportunity to be able to present um and to be able to talk about pistol education health and athletics here in our district quick program overview our staffing has a director instructional supervisor athletic trainer and a secretary our pe staff we have 16 elementary eleven middle and nine high school and then we have six middle school and high school health teachers and our goals of our program are to provide learning experiences that really teach students
145to be physically active in ways that will increase their physical confidence self-esteem support a healthy and physically active lifestyle it's about producing students that will be lifelong physically active and healthy um and hopefully we we provide those learning experiences that are diverse enough where our students find something that they enjoy and learn from and continue to do well beyond school i can't click the next slide but if you can thank you um so i'm going to jump into our elementary health in middle school and for health at the elementary level on a couple of the key points would be our kyb program which is know your body program that program is under review in need of update and we have decided to task our health teachers as well as using some of our resources from
146healthy smart and some other resources as well as kyb structurally to be able to create a new program that can be used in our elementary schools new materials that are culturally responsive that are representative of the audience of our students and that are current and also relevant to our world so definitely some updates with mental health components as well as we're doing that that process and have been a year but in the month of july the health program is at the elementary level is broken forward with multiple lessons per unit all right actually we've lost your screen okay there we go throughout the school year and then at the middle school level the health department um well the health department at the middle school level and the heist can you go back one there we
147go um heads professional development development through mental health association from your state which is manny's as well as good heart wilcox which is comprehend comprehensive health skills this was a curriculum resource so we were able to get to our middle school teach and this is an online program where they can grab resources and print out and use those within their classes as well plan to provide a science-based age-appropriate sexual health unit in our middle school classes we can go to the next slide once again our high school staff also has a professional development through manny's and the mental health unit in high school has done a great job in coordinating with resources within our building and outside of our building for our students and making sure that they understand how to access those resources and
148utilize those resources especially during that unit we do a hands-on only vr and also we have planned parenthood that provides that age-appropriate sexual health unit for high school classes next slide [Music] please thank you okay this is those grants over the last couple years we had a four thousand dollar grant for physical education from capcom we also had a health teacher receive a grant from the albany fund for education for stress management resources and we had a pe teacher receive a grant from the albany fund for education for slacklining that's what the picture is of a student using the slacklining and then we a pa teacher who won a grant from the capital zone um for a ford uh through for a troop ball sack and it's kind of what that picture is there at
149chupa ball is kind of like a handy ball and then there's a rebounder and very similar to handball and some other sports but the kids have to catch it off the rebound next slide please thank you so now physical education at the k-5 level are under the positives as we look at virtual within fiscal education a lot of people will think negative there were some positives number one our pe staff became acclimated to district technology services at a faster rate than they had before they had the opportunity to use house during school education classes and really had that opportunity to plan together and work collaboratively collaboratively weekly to work on her instruction during the painting and we even explored a way to have a pe virtual field deck in the spring of 2020. and now
150as we come back in person all the elementors in-person field experience in 2021 as well as this year in 2022 our teachers have district ipad to support their instruction and continue to use the technology that they've been accessing for this period of time and then this year we also had the opportunity from teachers and guest speakers returning for the publication individual student teachers or even sage college methods classes developing new teachers that might even be subs for us down the road or even hired as teachers in our district we had citylax guest presentation lacrosse and then we had the powell citywide track meet uh this point which is after a short break from the pandemic at the high school level the middle school and high school levels once again that the virtual positives for staff
151definitely our staff became more acclimated to the district and technology services and one program that we have within our middle school and high school for physical education news and technology is our platform program the platform is certified strength and conditioning coaches design strength training programs that information with our pe teachers and our coaches we can tailor those programs specifically students that can be used at home it could be used in the weight room and definitely in your pe classes or under sports games students have individual accounts where they can go into the account and actually record their scores and and chart their improvement through the process and really focus on health and fitness goals and reaching those goals in person fiscal education we had the american red cross and first responder training for all pe
152staff in the middle schools in high school and we'll continue to do those updates and keep our staff certified ipads for all physical education staff high school is currently in that replacement phase and we had eighty teachers and one health teacher attend the new york state eighth conference and hopefully we're back in that process again as those conferences begin to open up those opportunities for our staff to continue to grow and also our high school fiscal physical education staff was trained by albany individual rock climbing for the new rockwell addition to our annex gym that was a great training we did at the beginning of the year and getting the opportunity to come into classes and see them using that space and some of the the talent that our kids have in those classes and
153how they worked very hard with it was a great experience this year thank you also um for k-12 physical education um new york state has created some new uh physical education standards these have been in process it it is something that will be fully implemented in the 2023-2024 school year school year um but dr clancy seymour who's the past president of new york state edford and is also a professor at canisius college provided some standards training that our staff was able to receive and to really help us with understanding the new six anchor standards and how they really aligned to the national standards in comparison to the preview standards we had we also had a presentation and some pd on gender neutrality which we had jeff honeywell our district attorney as well as jen o'malley
154wheeler from the pride center last and definitely not least enrichment we're always looking for opportunities to extend that school day and extend the experiences when we talk about business is an integral part this is something where we've been working through our committee and have our mission and had some pilot opportunities and are looking to continue to expand it and as you can see we ran a futsal program at eon which is is really like an indoor soccer program for those that don't i don't know um i had 60 participants across the district that traveled on friday to eon we had a girls soccer program that was meeting about 87 students at delaware we had youth wrestling on saturday mornings at albany high school that had 50 students and then we had volleyball on tuesdays and
155thursdays at hackett they had 41 students and these are students that were in the range of grades three to eight uh depending on the program some upcoming programs that were you probably have seen some some information go out about we have a flag football program within our middle schools we have a girls basketball program um that will be running on weekends and we have a boy's basketball group and that's upcoming as well as we continue to work on these intramurals and provide more opportunities for our students some next steps at the health for health will be the elementary curriculum update and training for elementary teachers that teach the health curriculum as we our health teachers don't go down into that space mental health updates to the curriculum and professional development and then to vertically align
156that elementary middle high school health and always continuing to improve that process as we look at the high school it's that ipad or technology replacement so you notice that the older ipads are not going to be just you know out they're going to be used for athletics and use for stats so they're continuing to be used as we do update we want to continue to look at elementary pe technology upgrades an example be trying to get the same resources that are in classrooms within physical education spaces so that way our pe teachers can use that district technology in the same way they had throughout the pandemic continuing to align to the new new york state learning standards and then continuing process with the intramural planning and new programs so i'm not sure if you guys
157want to um you know stop here and any we'll take any questions about health and phys ed or we can continue on and do athletics i actually love that idea i kind of missed the segway between health and phys ed i was actually in my mind planning to do health and then phys ed so i really appreciate your slowing us down so that we can do that so i would recommend that we start actually with any questions folks have on health in particular and then we'll move on into um phys ed if that's okay so um let's uh as always one question at a time board member craichie has her hand up go ahead on i just wanted to thank you for the excellent presentation and this is going to be perhaps patting ourselves on
158the back a little bit but i'm so proud of us as the district isn't as a community that we've had this partnership with planned parenthood for so long and that our community is supportive of it we're just so lucky thinking of it in that sense and thinking of the prior presentation with the 1619 uh project used in our curriculum i'm so proud of our community for supporting these types of excellent programs i do want to know i would really encourage i know that the know your body curriculum ever since i joined the board seven years ago and was part of the wellness community uh people were saying that that was a little bit out of date and wasn't really in touch with our elementary school students so whenever we can get to something that's more
159current and more meeting them where they are in this generation that would be fantastic anyone else with a comment or question on um health i saw that you're teaching cpr in grades nine through twelve which is great i wish that we could do something even within middle schools because there are certain aspects of cpr that it's good for the younger kids to know things like the heimlich manure which is another thing not severely but because there are situations where the kids might be alone and they could protect themselves and save themselves in those situations or with their younger siblings you know what have you so if anything you can do to you know videos or even if it's not hands-on training i understand there's logistics involved in that that information will be useful for the
160middle school students yes thank you remember me um doctor i actually uh i want a second just said it also for um in an older eighth grader or someone going into ninth grade makes them um uh employable as a babysitter okay if they are uh cpr trained um but i i would i would like to say that um this is a great presentation and uh you had me at rockwall edition that is how cool is that um um so that's that's uh absolutely uh fabulous um to see all the wonderful things that are that are occurring thank you anyone else on health then i will just echo just briefly because i can't not say it to what uh board member crazy said about our support for the planned parenthood initiative i know that that has
161been ongoing in the district as long as i can remember and i really think it's essential and critical in our community that we keep that going and i really appreciate the commitment i know there was some reshuffling of the way that was done in middle school but i know that it's still being offered both at middle school and high school as it says in the slides and i think in our community and i think in every community it really that's when it has to be done high school is really too late it needs to happen in middle school and then in high school in an age-appropriate way and like like board member crazy said i'm super proud of us that that continues for our students um are we ready to move on to visit all
162right anyone with a comment or question on pe besides the fact that we love the rock wall and would like to do the rock wall someday it'll be like a board team development initiative uh dr thank you again for all the improvements that you've had over the years in both health as well as pe um it's amazing all the different programs that are offered now uh when i just saw the thing about the basketball camp and you know it we have to the more opportunities these kids have to burn their energies and learn the foundational skills in these sports when they grow up and go into the high school they become more competitive they can spend more time in enhancing the level of skill that is required to compete rather than spend their time learning
163the fundamentals at that level and then you know then it becomes frustrating when you don't when you don't reach that comparative level the other thing that i would like to see is uh your division to work with teachers or whatever you know whether it's a lunch program to to bring people from the outside within careers like kinesiology sports medicine so even the kids who are interested in stem see their association with pe and the kids who are pe athletes also see that stem is useful and that's something that is something close to what they do anyways uh you might make some connections there and help them decide on their careers that's just like a common thing thanks anyone else on pe board member crazy i realized i forgot to mention this um but in my
164personal life when i'm not on the board i've been lucky enough to be able to take some adult classes with 15 love tennis and i remembered that the director approached me and said yes you're on the school board do you have connections with such and such elementary school or whatever because we'd really like to get in more elementary schools so they run a fantastic program and they're really looking to get into more albany schools they just don't know the people to talk to to make that happen so they would really love to talk to you i will add to that ellen um our coach anthony omorogbon our tent boys and girls tennis coach he does have a great relationship with uh 15 love and it is in some of our schools um and that's like
165an easy partnership that we've always actually had with them um it's you know the biggest problem is the pandemic like that we we're just letting folks in to the district and into our schools and stuff but that will be a part of our plan especially now that myers tennis courts are open we have two sets of tennis courts so we can actually really expose kids and also in the suburban council we've talked about doing what we call an extramurals friendship league which would allow kids in grades six through eight to participate learn tennis and then be able to compete in a more friendly way against other students so um that is something it's hard for us to capture everything until things people bring it up but we do do a lot of great things i
166have a lot of great partnerships um and do our best to get it around everywhere that's great yeah i remember that they were in uh dcs when my son was there and it was a good experience with kids and thanks so that's a nice segue to the thing i want to celebrate most well several things that i love about this presentation but in particular i want to celebrate the intramural aspect of it um as a person who was not did not consider myself athletic until the end of my college experience this is my personal story that i did not believe that i was athletic because i had not had very good exposure to athletic athletics even in school and certainly not at home and then my life changed and now i realize i'm actually competent
167athletically i actually thought it was me but it was just lack of exposure so seeing intramurals which would have been a possibility for me when i was a kid in a way that varsity sports was just not a possibility for me as a kid i think is just wonderful and we have so so many students and only a few of them are ultimately going to play varsity on any given sport so having more intramurals is both a feeder to varsity and a joy of athleticism in and of its own right um so i really appreciate your commitment to that and then i also just wanted i'll make this one real quick to recognize and give you the recognition of the the bringing in the pride center to talk about gender gender issues in gender neutrality
168i think it's a really critical thing i'm really happy to hear that you have done that um because it's it's really important in our you know in albany um to make sure that we're having those conversations because there's tons of kids in in our school who are non-binary and or define themselves in some unique way and so i appreciate you taking the initiative to do that anyone else on pe before we move on to athletics seeing none we turn the floor back over to you miss chapel okay thank you so the next step uh we're gonna talk about is the athletics program um and what i decided to do was uh take what we did in 2016 and kind of show where we were and where where we are and where we're going um so
169just real basic we're the third largest uh school in section two so we're the third out of 94 schools um shenandoah is first uh schenectady is second we offer a variety of uh sports for boys and girls and many times we do uh we do have some co-ed teams if it allows which in uh in athletics it's called mixed competition and then we also have um which is i think we're one of the um forget the term right now but basically we allow our students who are non-binary or gender conforming to also participate in athletics with with no issues because our district does respect the choices that our students want to make and it goes very well with how we are able to be inclusive in physical education and i will add that since the
170pandemic we've been able to add unified bowling which now we have two unified teams bowling and basketball and if you didn't know we have we have two years of that so we're definitely providing more access and opportunities to all students and not just to some so participation has the average participation has slightly increased over the years um the winter is obviously affected uh from the pandemic that was that was huge not to be able to offer as many sports and and opportunities to students uh and that included modified because and with modified basketball for boys and girls we have three middle school teams so six total um and then three teams at the high school which would be 12 teams total in the district um so those numbers definitely have dropped as well as not
171having wrestling and trying to build that back up you know that one year off definitely hurt us but we have had an increase in participation in spring sports i would definitely say our track team um for modified and uh varsity has increased significantly uh and i also think you know that was kind of one of the you know it was the pandemic was a bad thing but it also kind of pushed kids to actually want to get out and do something like you lose something and you don't ever want to lose that again so we definitely have more kids participating uh in the spring sports which is a great problem to have our mod baseball team had 50 kids come out for the team who would have thought that we would have that many kids
172for one baseball team so definitely the numbers are increasing and then we have our breakdown which it's it's pretty it's going to be almost 50 50. um based on what the results that we have um so our performance is um overall from 2016 to now we have a 30 basically a 32 overall winning percentage and in our league we're at a 30 what i'd like to draw your attention to is the breakdown by season so from back on 2016 that's when kathy presented on the sports we were in the big ten so we had a 52 league winning percentage in a fall 60 in the winter 48 in the spring once we entered suburban council which is in 2016 we dropped to a 44 overall winning percentage and a 30 league winning percentage so we
173are in the toughest league in section two um and as you can see even with like we do have a lot of individual success and some teams but as a program we have we have a lot of work to do even in the winter we're at a 42 percent league winning and in the spring we're at a 14 um winning rate where again we were closer to um 50 or more back when we were in the big ten so we weren't dominating but we were competing our budget uh this is our budget over time and it's just the coaches and other expenses it does not include sports supervision which is another big portion of our budget but as you can see um where we are where we're going and hopefully continue to do as we
174build our program and kind of show you some of the things that we have accomplished and some of the things that we want to do um in the need for additional resources even if it's not in these big buckets but i like equipment um and when i say equipment i mean the finance word equipment and not sporty equipment i don't know if you guys get confused with that like i do so um again in 2016 these are the uh 11 things that uh miss kathy ryan identified as goals in areas of improvements for us um as of today you know a few of these goals um have been achieved but we still have um a ways to go and making sure that you know we increase our coaching stipends as you'll see and as you
175saw in even john's presentation we're doing a lot more intramurals more often we have more kids participating and so that also means we need more adults supervising and coaching as well as instructing our kids and also our kids are going further they are especially with these individual sports and some of our team sports they could use more instruction and more instruction is what's going to also help us to um compete in the suburban council and like that's the league level is numero uno and then we're going out to sectionals and states and regionals but it's not just going to happen by chance it's going to come from quality instruction that i do believe our coaches can definitely provide and they do more than any of us could ever imagine because they understand uh what we
176what we need to do to get done uh the biggest need is in in and if you have kids that participate in these sports is baseball and softball fields we need our our baseball team has not had a place to practice our varsity baseball team has out of space to practice in years they practice in a gym so that is something that we really are are working on because at the end of the day you you can't have expectations of success if we're not even provided the basic um facilities to even be able to practice but they did get a baton cage so we do have a baton cage that has been used as soon as it was available and it continues to be used we outfitted the weight room at north albany so the
177pandemic has really allowed us to do some things differently so we were able to move weight room equipment from a brook in and get it in a bigger facility for more access for teens so we're not all trying to pile into the albany highway room the pool is online now that happened at the beginning of this year for both boys and girls swimming and for modified we got the new tennis courts and then the buyers courts uh just opened last month so we do have some more opportunities but the the biggest need and it has been for a while now is um district baseball and softball fields and of course you know we do need our tutors and academic coordinators uh because with our with much success comes greater opportunities and so we do have
178kids that have the potential to be recruited probably more than ever i just got word from my football coach who um heavily follows his kids around that one of our student athletes uh just qualified for states and was only a sophomore in track so we we have kids doing awesome things and we want to make sure that um they don't have any barriers to why they can't continue their education for free at the next level sorry so in just two years we were able to accomplish a whole lot um i i live by the um term if there's a will there's a way we figure out a way to make it happen um no doesn't exist to me it's we'll figure it out at some point so these are many of the things that we
179were able to do with uh especially once we were able to kind of get back to some normal spending and support spending at the end of the year so the majority of the sports were able to get things that they needed um the five million sled i don't even all right you should see the one we had but we got a brand new five-man sled for football for tackling we have pitching machines for baseball and softball throwing machine for baseball uh a ball machine for tennis like just imagine having those brand new tennis courts and you're like bouncing one ball at a time to uh each each student where you have this machine that's going to shoot them out to them the volleyball now has a hitting machine all versus varsity programs got brand new
180uniforms either this year or last year modified programs with the exception of three have brand new uniforms actually we just got our girls lacrosse uniforms in today we got baseball baseball has really nice uniforms and softballs are on his on its way um every varsity sport that requires warm-ups they all were able to get warm-ups we got department book bags for the students when i say department that means that the kids use them for the season they give them back so that we have them if you when you go to other schools you see how all their kids are uniform they have the same uniform same jacket same sneakers and many of times their parents are affording that where we're we're trying to provide that that similar type of experience it won't be the same
181but it'll be similar um and then we also got baseball and softball uh specific bags we've been doing a really good job of trying to brand ourselves and and get um the school spirit up you know we talk about albany proud albany um strong and so we have to face mass and everybody wants what we have and that's what we want we want to we want to know that people want to be a part of our program other accomplishments um which would be um our indoor in-district and out of district opportunity so inside the district eight of our varsity programs have been running intramurals and workouts since january 2021 that's when we were like officially able to start workouts we couldn't participate in high-risk sports we were able to start workouts and the coaches jumped
182on it they followed every single covered regulation we needed to have in place to to maintain safety uh we did a summer youth flag football last summer um a varsity football team did a team camp for for middle and high school kids that's the first time we've held our own um and as john mentioned we did do uh the wrestling we've done girls soccer and as i told you we started the unified bowling team that came out of the pandemic we couldn't do basketball so bowling was the next safest sport to do and we were able to do that out of district um we were able to get our kids signed up for different camps in the summer it's very important for us to like maintain that camaraderie and provide them with opportunities um so
183got girls and boys basketball as well as and i'm sorry it's uh not listed but girls lacrosse they all went to ualbany camps last summer or had the opportunity to send at least five students because my goal is to provide opportunities to everyone but unfortunately you know due to funding we can't send every single kid in the program but we can start to kind of share that wealth but then we also have other clinics that football is able to go to where they participate in seven on seven leagues which is only going to make them stronger the more opportunities they have to play and learn is going to help grow that program they go to a combine where the kids can be evaluated on their speed and agility and their skills and get looks from
184college coaches and stuff and then it's called the big uglies but it's a lineman challenge camp again for um more of our other position players in football so we continue to to provide these opportunities i know this weekend football's participating in another 7 on 7 league in boys basketball later on this month is participating in elite camp with ualbany coach coach killings and i bet you thought the accomplishments were gonna end it seems like we filled up every single day uh in the two years with something uh we have a lot of great technology improvements so we use final forms with you know we've talked about a couple of times but final forms is probably the best thing we could have ever invested in it allows for parents to sign their kids up for sports
185more easily it opens up the lines of communication between the nurses coaches the parents many of our coaches communicate through final form so that they can send program information out it allows us to track attendance and it gives us the data that you know typically this board is looking for we can pull it from um final forms and i'll show you in the next slide just how beautiful the graphics are thinking about uh what mr amiway said in terms of looking at beautiful graphs um we've also got uh the huddle athletic package and what they did is it provided every single sport that they offer the the or we offer that as a team sport the opportunity to not only film our game but we can share the film it makes highlights for the students
186so with a click of a button they type their name in and boom here's your highlight from all the games that you that they participated in it provides stats and it allows it allows the kids and the coaches to send film to college coaches so it has really helped to level the playing field for again opportunities for our student athletes to be able to have something similar and actually this provides them the same opportunity as our suburban counterparts uh we just recently got go gipper if you notice some of our graphics have changed become very standardized but it's amazing because it allows us to get more information out quickly so with gogipper you know we can send out cool graphics with uh cancellations and everything else so um that's it that was an awesome grab
187and then john already spoke about platform and that's the next thing we're trying to do uh with our brand new weight room that we'll be getting at the high school um is to be able to provide our students with instructions so when they're in phys ed they can do their workouts that their coaches want them to focus on or what their phys teacher wants to focus on and keep track of that um one of the biggest thing i'm very proud of is that we live streamed uh in the pandemic at least one home game of every competition we figured it out we're out at tennis match you get five minutes on this court five minutes on that court we've done swimming we even did bowling um and that that was a huge accomplishment for us
188to figure out um without having some of the things that we put in place it's amazing what you can do with an ipad in a hotspot and then other technology improvements is we we do our scheduling for our sports supervisors on microsoft so we really took advantage of uh the microsoft suite that we have in the district um and then we digitized a lot of our handbooks and reports and stuff because i think that's important is efficiency having to type retype and retype and everything just doesn't allow for efficiency and for us to really get the job done this is just a quick glance of what the screen looks like on final form so it can tell me how many students are compliant um how many forms are unsigned whether it's by parents or students
189it also gives us a breakdown of pc my little mouse gives you a breakdown of athletic participation so it keeps track of kids who are playing more than two sports that gives us our numbers our medical reports and i don't know if you see here but we've only had final forms for two years we've sent out 44 000 emails notifications um well those are notifications so it kind of automatically does it so no longer do parents have to remember that their kids physical expiring this is gonna tell them it's gonna tell them 30 days 60 days you have five days um and we've only actually because this system is so great we literally only had 40 support tickets for final forms which is absolutely amazing that just shows how more accessible it is uh to
190our families and our students and then this tells us how many kids um new athletes have signed up or updated information so it's actually really great we do keep attendance uh for our sports that was something big especially in covid so we could contact trace um we didn't use the covet screening because that was a little invasive we had our own internal method in the district but some tried and then we also have all of our documents and stuff and we're starting to use it because again final forms have so much that it can offer um we've started to put inventory in there um so that we can keep track of uniforms and stuff because we don't we don't have that ability to purchase new uniforms every year and we don't need to if we
191take care of them we can keep up on the three-year cycle that we're on right now this is just a quick snapshot of uh the intramurals data that that that we offered so you can kind of see it by sport and i'm sure you guys have a packet um we had an average of 13 to 14 kids participating but like a sport like volleyball they had tons of kids like we literally had to separate them because there were so many um sixth graders participating in intramurals and that you know sparked to us like hey it might be too late to do a freshman team but that is definitely something we need to do for the 23-24 school year because we already have two modified teams so we're gonna definitely need um a fourth a third
192squad at the high school and with the new construction we did build in so that there's three volleyball courts uh because that the sport is really taking off and our coaches do an awesome job uh with those with those uh students um and then of course we as you can see these are all the sports that have participated in intramurals um and there are some who do intramurals and don't get paid for it they just they just do it just give them the gym and they make it happen so um some of those are not accounted for either but that's something again new that we are going to be able to track on final forms as kids can sign up information is there so i just wanted to highlight just so we don't forget the
193amazing things that have happened thus far we're still not finished uh because we do still have track going on in tennis um but we have anna flanders with her state and sectional championship we have girls basketball with their second sectional championship under uh coach decky lawson we have elon klingerman who was a class a champion and finished fifth in section two at 110 weight class um and again these i just want to point out this is only for the two years that i've been in leadership i did not include all of our success i want i like to capture the two years because it it's just it's so important to talk about what we were able to do and how much we can do as we continue to get more support boys soccer won their
194second grade divisional championship boys basketball won their first ever great divisional championship since we joined the league that was huge um and then tennis uh boys tennis has clinched themselves a great division championship as well and we have masami participating uh in states now individual successes um i think most notable is neil being able to participate in states and finishing 21st in the entire state which is awesome um isaiah austin getting co-mvp he also scored over a thousand points and he doesn't know it but he broke a lot of school records so it's time for us to get those banners up um so that people can see the the talent that we truly do have in the district in the history of success that we have in the city school district of albany and athletics
195uh another big thing dilon bowl the perfect game uh and this is dilon is a basketball player but he doesn't know he's a bowler and he was able to play uh four sports last year because of the extra season so because basketball and bowling didn't coincide he gets he starts bowling and just ah you know here's a perfect game not a problem and then goes on and plays basketball um so we we have so many multi-talented kids that hopefully we are going to allow them to play two sports in the future um anna's another one who you know we'd love for her to be able to cheer and do um and do uh swimming at the same time which i do want to point out she did uh calls a ruckus in section two when
196she swam with the boys last year um you know it's tough to come in second or first and uh and people want to actually support you um so that was an awesome opportunity for her um and then we got we got our freshman like azira gates who uh was named a sectional all-star like that was huge she's in ninth grade so you can only imagine what the future is going to look like and you got shania edmonds who's a junior who also is breaking barriers and we have alex dola who plays stock who plays ice hockey um he also does baseball but he leads the section in uh goal saved for ice hockey liv nevo has set a school record um for boys and girls in in terms of the number of goals scored in
197a season and as we know we've been struggling with lacrosse in terms of the results but we do have kids getting success and so like matt trippeny he leads uh boys lacrosse and goals saved in one game he's at 21. um and i didn't want to go through all the all-star teams and stuff with the daily gazette times union suburban council because we'd be here forever but i did want to highlight um these the kids listed here and in the successes again that we were able to have in two years despite all the challenges one sec sorry so opportunities for improvement as i discussed earlier we acquire in a high school regulation based on a softball field um it's the only sport without a home on or near district property uh ideally be great if
198we utilize breverwick you know develop that partnership with the city of albany uh to turn that into a quality baseball softball field um an assistant athletic director and again we're being very specific and to say an assistant athletic director because granted we're able to do what we're doing but just imagine if we had more hands on deck to help support our programs and get out and support our kids and get those pictures out and celebrate him on social media i'm sure um at least dr chitor he reads the comments when they're like what about modified what about jv and it's like hey i'm one person i can't get to every single sport every single day so uh having an assistant athletic director would not only just provide um more opportunities to highlight our student athletes
199but it would also give our coaches uh an opportunity to for us to really start to hone in on the things that we're trying to do each individual program as we build our program all together um the athletic program an increase in coaching stipends well deserved um and i understand you know obviously the budget's the budget but for future reference um definitely increasing coaching stipends and increasing the number of coaches um per team uh that's that's also important you know if think about would you want 50 middle school kids as a coach you know we want to keep them all but we you know we do need to make sure it's manageable and again the more coaches we have the more opportunities we open up and the better instruction and individualized instructions kids can get
200um because we're going to lower that ratio uh full times groundskeeper is is is a need and something that kathy identified as well um we have a lot of you know it's kind of weird because we say we we don't have enough green space but when it comes to mowing lawns and stuff we have plenty uh between the athletic fields and the school buildings um and you know or we could just put turf everywhere and that would solve our grounds problem so i'm full support of that turf over at eon uh and then we have drainage issues down uh in our bowl field and our youth soccer field and the back of hackett again if you just want to throw turf there that works you know throw that in our next capital project um but
201if not in the meantime those facilities do need better drainage um because it becomes a safety hazard uh when when you're talking about the mud the the puddles the divots and stuff that are in there and due to the lack of green space that the district has for sports um we have to do a lot of sharing and we're playing we're practicing under the lights like we have we have a lot of in the fall we have three soccer teams at the high school level two football teams two girls soccer teams and just imagine we have it between the hours of like three and eight or not three and eight four and eight because of the late start um that's a lot to to try to get in and again if we want quality instruction
202and opportunities for our kids we have to provide them those facilities and abilities and again we do what we can what we got but definitely an investment into our green spaces that provide athletic and phys ed opportunities because i don't know if you know but i don't play in the dirt and neither do most of our kids especially if we have our great sneakers on um we don't want to get a muddy but we will play on the turf because all you do is wipe the pebbles off but we don't do much ruin your sneakers so um that is the end of my presentation i will take any questions that you guys have thank you very much athletic director chapel we really appreciate your enthusiasm for our kids and for the work that you're doing
203um and in particular all of the guidance you've been giving to try and increase the quality of instruction and make make athletics as educational and successful as it can be so we really appreciate all of your work um board colleagues who is first question board member wilson thank you for your presentation um it just as i was listening i was thinking about the aspect of health and athletics being very much a function of social emotional learning as you described as it sort of played out in the presentation also it's um heartening to see the growth in athletics and i think that's also very much a function of a healthy school system it's one aspect of it we have many components we have music we have arts and of course we have athletics so that's positive
204i just had questions on the opportunities for improvement one is sort of well they're both ideas actually i know that the baseball softball fields is something that um was brought to our attention and we are investigating on the facilities and i do know i stumbled across that the nfl actually supports um communities and schools with football fields i'm just curious if there's something in that arena perhaps you know something along those lines and grants or something for baseball soft football fields and the other question about the drainage issue and not that i know a lot about drainage but um i do know that some communities implement things called rain gardens which aid in the soaking up and distribution of water into the cycle and again not my wheelhouse but i'm just curious if that's something
205we can look into that'll help us yeah that's not really my uh area of expertise anyway either um but yeah i'm not sure again just thinking of the words rain and gardens and athletic fields uh not sure if a garden would fit in that area but uh it is a definite need uh we do look for grants anytime that um eileen lefler oh that's what's not in the slides oh yeah we got grants we won grants remember we got the ten thousand dollars from the uh new york giants and so you know when it came to football helmets versus maybe fixing the field drainage we had to go with what was needed and it was the 55 football helmets that we needed to replace um so yeah uh we do look for grants and stuff
206but that unfortunately with with this kind of uh in in our area it's it's gonna take more than like a grant like it's it's a huge investment uh my goal is to uh and i've been i've talked to the superintendent about it i just met with jonathan jones with parks and rec um is finding a partnership that benefits all of us they just got a new um person in their department he replaced justin atlas he had he's a baseball minded guy which is awesome because hopefully we can revitalize again in a partnership between us the county and the city we can you know put our resources together we can have a quality baseball practice facility the goal is to get it closer to albany high school and the reason for that is as you may
207all know transportation um and again someone like dr chitor even um i can't and you have high school students right yeah you guys get my emails like hey we had two buses today we did what we can we made it work um it was not pretty but we made it work so the closer our facilities are the easier it is for our kids to be able to get there for practices and we don't have to sacrifice like hey we have games today so you can't practice because we can't provide transportation and this is a nationwide problem um but it hit us very hard this year um and so it's important for us to try to find facilities or uh repurpose our facilities so that all kids have to do is walk out the door and
208go to their practice and we don't have to worry about you know walk into games or walking to practices and stuff like that every presentation is just amazing more and more um the more you give us the more i'm going to keep asking so but me too it's all good um you know all these successes i don't think would be possible without the support from our community partners like pal you know they run the basketball program in the elementary schools and that gets those kids interested in albany youth soccer albany soccer club i mean our our team last last year was great right the year before was awesome so this is all because of these kids who come up from those lower levels um the just run program we just had a meet yesterday that's
209another great program that gets these kids interested in running in track and we all know that the rising rates of obesity and all of those things how important just moving about is so important and then introducing these kids to these healthy habits through these sports all in favor me running i don't know but you know neil running i'm all for it the problem with the uh baseball not having a field that that is a serious traveler i'm glad that the city is talking with us we're trying to explore options meanwhile i don't know some of these things might take longer than necessary me i mean you talked about acquisition of different technologies having considered acquiring technology for baseball pitching or hitting you know like the rhapsody system or something it's not horribly expensive it's not
210it's expensive for in a small group but not too expensive and that would give you the ability to look at your pitching and practice your pitching and healing skills in the room i mean they do it at frozen ropes or or let's see all-star academy um so that might be something that we could you know as a stop cap even in winter when you can even if you had a green field it's been loaded with snow in the northeast so you could practice those things in a confined space um the track i mean having an fat system would be great i mean that would give kids even more experience to the real invitational level um and then we talked you talked about using the ipads you can be at every place but maybe we can
211recruit some of the parents or more importantly you could include the students right we have a falcon desk newspaper and we have students who want to get into journalism hey what better opportunity go to a meet and do coverage learn about publishing an article about it or something there are creative ways in which i think we can solve some of these things but you know kudos for all the achievements i'll stop thank you um i will i will tell you that yes we would like an fat timing system we would love to have that you know radar gun and the analysis but we know what that means that means we need money we need more financial uh money because we that's that's a necessity that's a not a necessity that's a want and so we
212have to like right now we need a baseball field we can do all the practice of pitching and batting in doors that we want but without practicing in a space that you are going to participate on like that's like our basketball team playing in the grass and then you know we're gonna go out on a court and win a championship it's probably not gonna happen because you can't practice dribbling on grass um so we we have and that was part of the outside opportunities prior to the pandemic we did pitching lessons for softball that's something that we're hoping to start up again with the siena coach so the next step and this is something i actually had the opportunity to talk to the varsity baseball players about is you guys do a lot of fundraising
213let's start putting that money into opportunities and that's when they told me about the whole all-star thing but it's something you have to do in the winter because they have their programs in the in the um summer so if there's anything that you learned about me is i don't believe in waiting we're gonna make it happen um one way or another we're going to make it happen because our kids have no more time to wait um as as we take our time they are graduating and and so yeah it's great to be able to have that impact in the future um i'm a millennial they're like what gen z or something we like things like this we don't it's like all right how are we gonna make that happen and so um those are some
214of the things that that uh we will definitely be putting in next year's budget to try to make happen um in the meantime while we figure out you know the whole facility situation for for baseball but i do like that idea because we know that uh the pictures in baseball and softball and the quarterback in and football is our bread and butter but if you don't have if you don't have the best there it makes it very hard to compete let alone win win games and one of the most competitive leagues around suburban council they're sending kids professionally out and i know that we could do the same with the same access and opportunities that they have board members uh miss chapel coach chapel listen i was a pleasure listening to you and and also
215your colleague there uh presenting so thank you very much uh and i had thoughts of uh of thinking uh imagining you on a sort of sports talk show um in particular um so maybe you know uh dr schuter talks about you know the the media the journalism aspect so perhaps coach chapel in your spare time you could create a show uh at the high school that your youngsters are involved in um but you know leave that to you uh but i wanted to two things one i also wanted to uh commend you on something and i know that this is something that um that um just a characteristic of you i wanted to say that sitting here listening to you talk about your students like i know you know these kids you know and i
216don't think i don't want to understate that i i mean that's what we all hope that our teachers are doing is getting to know their youngsters but i really appreciate not just hearing their names but as you were talking i'm like wow you know there's something i'm learning about this youngster um and what's perhaps what's driving him or her and you know i'm just just excited to hear uh you know how personal uh it is for you um but also at the same time uh building uh this you know this system for them um and then um i just again i i can't you know i don't have any ideas other than i was thinking about a couple things for the uh softball or baseball field you know i'm glad to hear that the city
217is uh that there's a great partnership with um you know the rec commissioner and perhaps um you know know whether we could do something with the field of dreams you know helping to participate in that function i started thinking about you know i hate the idea that we gave up living since so long ago but you know i think we still have some of that property right in the front of the building that is owned by the city well i know there's a lot of property in the back could we swap and maybe have a field in the back and there probably is parking i don't know i'm just imagining stuff like you miss chapel i think uh we just have to find a way yes it was we'll take some money but i think
218if we uh can find a way to um create an opportunity for more activity for our students as well as for community uh that's great so again just kudos then thank you so much for uh your presentation tonight no thank you uh vicky i appreciate it and and i will say um you know one day i was having a conversation with uh ron lesko and next thing you know he's out at every single park in the city he's like all right so i was over at breverwick and i was over at you know richfield and you know i looked at this and i was like wow like i appreciate that because i don't know much about you know fields i know what we need um but that that also helped to start that conversation with
219um with this nutstart because i have a great partnership with this with the city of jonathan jones and we still are doing lifeguarding and stuff like those we just make things happen and so know that even if it's not on the slides we're getting it done um so i do appreciate that and i'm i'm hoping that we can at least start with um bleecker they've they've really put some time and effort into leaker because again you know livingston is is cool but again how do we get the kids in that direction when most of the buses is coming from that way and going to the high school and so it's it's a logistical thing but if we can definitely start with um getting access to bleecker for practice and gains over at plumeri that's a
220good start yeah bleaker is perfect too so i mean you know yeah yeah no thank you thank you so much board member [Music] thanks miss chapel um just want to first commend you and your leadership and uh say that i'm extremely proud of our athletic department the coaches the students the athletes themselves i mean every day you see something new and great about whatever team it is as you said we have 100 almost 100 teams or something like that and you know i want to touch on something that my colleague board member wilson said about the social emotional benefits of sports um and just bear with me because it's a little personal story i wrestled and i did football and i did intramural basketball through like ninth grade and my father was okay with that
221as long as i was getting ace didn't get the a's that he wanted in ninth grade and um essentially i wasn't given the signature aka your dashboard to join those those sports and i'm telling you it i still haven't forgiven him i still haven't because it sent me on a different direction that was not good so without getting in too many details in about that it's so important so important we have to find a way that uh we can get our students that you know might be at risk involved in sports could it could help them long term um i also wanted to just give a shout out to coach priscelli uh the wrestling coach because you guys did a wrestling clinic and sammy my son and i i'm i was there with him but
222he enjoyed it thoroughly there's a lot of kids there that really enjoyed it so um again you guys are doing a great job just wanted to also say uh shout out to jonathan jones um i sit on a different board with him and i know his commitment to you to this city so whatever you need to do to make magic happen between you know department of rec and city and us please do so and thank you so much for again your leadership and all of uh the staff in the athletic department thank you board member man hello ms chappelle that was a wonderful wonderful presentation um i i want to talk a bit about your engagement skills um the way that you engage with young people is really second to none i remember sitting with
223you in a park at a community event and um and uh he said oh your last name such-and-such i know your daughter you know and you knew my kid you knew she swam and um and and you you really had this way of speaking with her and many of her um friends about well this is what you can do if you go to college and you should try this and you try that and i i've always really appreciated that to the point where uh i have a just turned 13 year old niece who now lives in albany and she's like six feet tall and said i she's 5 10 and said i like volleyball and i'm like i need to introduce you to you know so um and it's wonderful seeing the so when we
224talk about engagement it's wonderful to see the explosion of intramural sports and the participation that's happening at the sixth and seventh grade level and eighth grade level that's i mean it really is fantastic so um so thank you for your commitment to um our children um and thank you for just this wonderful presentation so i wouldn't be myself if i didn't tell you that we have a girls basketball clinic happening this saturday it's free at ash uh 9 a.m registration 9 30 start we have a guest basketball coach the women's coach at st rose whitney edwards please make sure your niece is there um because i just want you to know she's going to get recruited like height she gonna be volleyball basketball and lacrosse like that's that's just what we're doing like she has
225no choice so just get on board with us and we will lead her through um we we do accept kids of all heights because obviously i'm 5-1 and i played sports but those uh those five ten kids they don't they don't come by every day um so definitely please make sure she's uh at our camp and it doesn't matter if she doesn't like basketball or knows nothing about it we'll make that happen board member crazy um michelle thanks for your presentation i really appreciated the enthusiasm with which you presented both your accomplishments in the department and also uh the students accomplishments in the program it's really fantastic that the kids have so many opportunities here in the city and i appreciate the work we've gone through the work that we've gone to as a district
226to make those sports and opportunities available to all kids whether it's intramurals for kids whose skills may still be at the beginner level um to taking away any financial contribution on the part of the parents my son joined modified swimming last year perhaps the first person in my family in generations to participate in an athletic sport so i'm very i'm very proud of him but i was expecting to have i was like oh i gotta find my checkbook because i'm gonna have to write a check for your suit and nope he just came home with a brand new falcon suit no i had to pay for nothing i think i chipped in for the pizza at the end but that i was amazed that it's a bit and it makes me appreciate what we have
227here in albany that parents don't have that obstacle um it's really great and i appreciate the work you're going to to make more things available and i also kind of wonder what a sled is because at first i thought that i googled it i googled it during the meeting i googled it i googled it before the meeting because i was like are they expanding into luge but whatever whatever those guys do with it keep up the good work so we'll continue supporting you yeah it it's it's literally a sled has five pads on it that look like you've probably seen you know but you already kept or something and there's five you got your five defensive men and they're pushing up against it uh so that they learn to go in unisons um and you
228know you can't you can't tackle every single day in football it's not safe so but you can do it with a dummy is the term um so yeah uh again i'm i'm happy your son had a great experience i just want you to know he's gonna have to be a swimmer for life as rosie will not let him go anywhere else so i hope you're ready for a fun filled uh five years probably of swimming so i'm my only remark is to thank you on the communications and data side i really want to appreciate so much the implementation of final forms i cannot tell you every single season i have been involved in this district until final forms there was somebody complaining about something this one got lost and they got to practice they can
229predict it it's like it vanished it's gone like now whatever happens it's perfectly smooth and there's no more complaining about that particular thing so i really really appreciate it and to me it's really um it's an example of the kinds of things we're doing throughout the district where we're using technology to make things better and to reduce the friction so that the coaches can coach and that the teachers can teach rather than having to chase paperwork and that's what it's about and that's why those systemic important improvements are really about kids i know people think they're like dry and boring but they're about kids because they release the staff from doing these these high friction activities and allow them to do what they love to do and on that same note i noted your really
230data driven slides i really appreciated that and i look forward to seeing you know year by year comparisons as we see those win rates go up and all the other changes that i know that you're looking to do and i loved love love which i think was from that go go gibber is that what it's called notice that you've been promoting like here's the times for all of the games on facebook and like uh to me that's like a super great way to build school spirit because prior to that like you really had to look to find out what time is lacrosse if i wanted to go see the boys lacrosse game i'd have to like go hunt one down now it's like oh look here's when they're playing and i really think that was
231a really great very small but really helpful school spirit driving um change so thank you for all those data and communication thanks and yes and that i was going to say that reminds me um i have an intern who is helping she's a former student happy her name is hayley hart um she wanted to intern i said let's go so she's been she's been helping us out and she's she's learning so much and that's why again i hit home with that assistant athletic director because we can do so much more and what you probably noticed uh especially our spring parents is we actually were able to get out our cancellations in a variety of ways like you didn't have to guess at three o'clock if your kid was coming home going to practice if there's
232a game so definitely there are there are resources out there to help us be efficient but we still need uh another body or two to really get it going heard and understood ms smith i think i want the last word unless anybody else knew the last word uh so i'm i'm really just uh talking out loud and superintendent this may be for you and the district staff as a whole so what i feel like i've experienced tonight and probably in some ways wasn't quite making was but wasn't quite making connection but i'm going back to when you first arrived um i'm going back to the instructional framework went back to all of these pieces um with students at the center so everything that it was presented tonight um really just was a demonstration of that
233was evidence of how all of that how that framework is developing and evolving and i see it in the culture um in this chapel i know in part it's certainly you and and staff you know the coaches but there's this and miss bechdel all of it there's there's a shift there's a shift in things um this is not the same district that i started with when i put my kid through the school system when i joined the board etc and i just wanted to express a general and broad thank you and gratefulness to everyone in this system for this work i feel like we're and all i mean just the data the presentation i mean it's got all kind of floating and coming together so thank you for bearing with me while i sort of
234had a little aha moment which i do frequently but it was kind of like really nice to go gosh i could have had a v8 here you know um so thank you all very much all right and thank you so much we really appreciate appreciate it and now if i may yes just very quickly miss chapel please don't go anywhere just yet i wanted to just take a moment to as always um when we have our division updates um and taking the time to really see the work within our divisions and what you see in a little slice of the pie is one-eighth of the big picture because there are eight cabinet members that each supervise a tremendous amount of work within the divisions and and to break those down into eight slices during the
235year so that you can take a deeper dive into what it really takes to move our district forward at each level and it is intense work it is work that we love um when you talk about the enthusiasm that you've heard tonight from the specto from john gerardo and from miss chapel you hear the love that we have for the work that we do which makes it very different than clocking in and clocking out to a job and and i think that when i speak on behalf of all of our divisions and our cabinet members that supervision is not just supervision it is truly understanding what our students need i appreciate the comments about how miss chapel knows her students um i appreciate hearing all of that but most of all i appreciate what we
236don't say that i have to say and what you hear from all of our cabinet members as they come forward and speak on behalf of their divisions you hear that deep-seated love and commitment not to me not to you not to an ideal but to the people that are at the forefront of all of our decisions every single day it is the love and dedication that we have for the students in this district that you hear i absolutely want to say thank you for acknowledging you know over time the transition and seeing those positive things that we are doing to move our district forward but it doesn't happen alone it happens with as you hear me say these two hands being multiplied by the eight hands on cabinet and then all the hands of our
237administrators and our teachers and our support staff and our families and our students and also the board it's all of us working together on behalf of our students to make our district the very best district that it can be and so with that i say thank you tonight ms bechdel ms chapel the work that you do not only just in the curriculum and john of course i don't want to forget you because that that's another thing um i don't know if you guys remember when john was appointed it really wasn't that long ago and to see the work that has been able to happen um under his leadership of course with miss chapel and with ms bechtel helping to move that forward i remember when we first started talking about intramurals at the elementary level
238and now you're actually seeing that manifest and then you can see how that connects to the curriculum and the cross-curriculum connections that we have um and connecting those dots and so all of those things work together and i just want to thank um curriculum instruction and professional development and athletics and pe and health tonight for just an outstanding presentation we appreciate you we value the work that you do we know that our students are at the front and the forefront of every decision that is made and we just appreciate the work that you do and thank you to the board for recognizing all of the collective efforts that go into moving our district forward so thank you well that was a lovely lovely comment and i hate to bring us back to mundane matters but
239it's now time for committee reports anybody have to come here from board takes stepping us down miss savage do you mind if i just give a quick shout out absolutely not miss chapel the floor is yours you know i just got a shout out uh all the cabinet because i call and text all of them and they answer my principal colleagues i call and text them we need gym space can we use it they answer the call and it is because they understand that it's for the kids it's not for ashley chapel it's for the students and that's what's most important in with athletics we have to work with everyone so we appreciate all the support um whether it's physical or you know it's their job that we make these things happen for them uh
240no matter what so i do appreciate all the partnerships that we have uh in the district even if you don't want me calling you at nine o'clock at night i'm gonna call you anyway so thank you all for your support um i am happy you know to to have been able to provide this information and i'm excited to see what we can do uh you know continue to do in the coming year so thank you i know it's late thank you very much yeah actually if you called us at nine o'clock that would have been an hour ago so you know hey that that would have been easy all right now committee reports does anyone have a committee report policy is going to meet on 15th so nothing so yes and the facilities committee meets
241on the 7th and um now and miss wilson i do want to speak to you a little bit about that because i have an airport pickup and i might call on one of you to start things off um with our facilities director so thank you very much okay now i-45 seeing no other committee reports any other business anything for the good of the order ms smith um so madam president i'm sure i should have talked to you about this first but i wanted to uh we've been working together as the board on um getting our team operations manual together and so one piece of it that we did pull out specifically has to do with uh what we had formerly called or currently called the liaison role where the board has each member has an
242assigned school or two or three um that we are sort of responsible for you know keeping track of and we've wanted to take a different approach and i'm i'm happy to say uh superintendent that i'm ready to send you that piece it's just like a one-pager kind of thing but that piece is i think very important because what you're going to i think the takeaway from it is that we are in this business for all of our schools we're not simply advocates for this school or that school but for all of our schools and the but the real thing is is that our visits to school schools ought not to be something where you know everybody's sort of getting well here comes the board we're getting ready for them you know let me get a
243list of you know things i want them to consider but rather what we want to do is to go in almost in part like a little garbage but like a fly on the wall we have um you know policies that we deal with we have reports and um presentations that are given and what happens when we go in is we ought to be able to see that evidence just like we have heard tonight we can see we can feel we we know what we're doing for kids we're not there trying to like be the boss of anybody and so we have kind of reshaped that uh language um want to share that with you so that you and cabinet can voice your thoughts on it and then we will from there uh send it to
244policy to uh what do you call it uh execute concretize all of those good words so uh i wanted to just you know put that out it felt like a good time to make mention of that given something thank you thank you so very much we will absolutely look forward to that because i know that we have spent some time working with our administrators to get feedback from them in terms of what do you see as that board liaison role and we we were able to kind of shape that but you know again there's been some challenges with regard to that and i think that clarity will help and and i look forward to to doing that work okay anything else for the good of the order dr one quick shout out um next wednesday
245at the high school the students are organizing a blood drive so if people can please don't go there and donate because if they meet their goals that these donations help for providing scholarships for our students so it's it's gets a double impact right and you'll be helping somebody else do over there so thank you dr schuter isn't that appointment uh i can't i don't know if you can just walk in i know no it's but it's preferred apartments are preferred okay um there's a when i checked this morning there's a whole bunch available okay let's go to uh red cross inside look for albany high june great thank you okay any other other business seeing none entertaining a motion to adjourn motion by dr satour second by board member smith all in favor that is
246unanimous we are adjourned for two weeks see you too you