Board of Education Public Meeting | Live Stream | February 10, 2022

001good 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 virtual meeting i am joined tonight in person by the entire board hassana manawi damaris mann sridhar chitter ellen krejci tabitha wilson and vicki smith are all with with me here today um we have a couple people here from the public and if you are in park here in person and plan to speak in public please comment tonight please make sure you have signed in with ms bowie at the end of the table this meeting is being live streamed and the instructions to view our meetings are available tonight at albanyschools.org forward slash b-o-e we will show the relevant slides and documents in the virtual

002meeting screen as well as of course here in the screens in this room you can also access them via albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you need to be able to control the slides yourself those of you joining us in person tonight know that we are taking precautions consistent with those required for schools by both the new york state department of health and the cdc we do always use this large room for our meetings which has generally allowed us to have as many people attend as want we do have an overflow room and we can use that if necessary with that introduction we invite those of you who choose to join us as we stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance in addition to saying the pledge of allegiance we always focus our meeting

003by 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 before we move on to the superintendent's report i did want to mention that starting at our next meeting we do anticipate being able to be open for virtual public comments so you should all be anyone who wants to speak in public comment but not physically come to this space should take a look at the addressing the board page at albanyschools.org forward slash boe the instructions will be going up there sometime in the next couple of days as to how you register for a virtual public comment so we're very excited to have that finally up and

004running it's been something the board has been looking forward to for some time we really believe in public comment and want people to feel free to share their thoughts with us without the inconvenience of having to physically come to this space and with that exciting news i will now ask the superintendent if she has a report for us absolutely thank you so very much madam president members of the board as we celebrate black history month throughout february we are confronted not with only the rich complex and often stark historic perspective of the african-american experience in the united states but also the buoyancy of this year's theme which is black health and wellness this theme is well timed as the covet 19 public health crisis continues to challenge all of us both in america and around

005the world however as with many persistent social issues in our country such as poverty unemployment underemployment the pandemic has hit hardest communities of color in our community we are fortunate to have a wide range of partners whose efforts and expertise support our health and well-being whitney m young jr health center is one of those partners named for the quietly powerful civil rights leader of the 1950s and 60s whitney young health provides access to the consistent health quality health care without regard to income this includes the school-based health centers at albany high school giffen memorial elementary school phillip j schuyler achievement academy and sheridan preparatory academy our partnership with whitney young also includes the moba health unit whitney on wheels and the seal a smile dental program in collaboration with the health capital district initiative during

006black history month and all year long we are glad to celebrate the significant contributions of both whitney young the man and the health care organization in our community that bears his name and carries forward his legacy of empowerment opportunity and opportunity for the african-american community this week is also national school counselors week a time where we recognize and celebrate the tremendous work of our school counselors that they do for our students and families each day school counselors are best known for providing academic guidance to students but they do so much more they are a vital part of the social emotional support team at our schools they promote access and equity they advise inform direct and comfort hundreds of students helping them plan and set goals for life after graduation school counselors are cheerleaders and advocates

007connecting students with supports and services that they need to succeed at all grade levels please take time to thank and appreciate a school counselor for all they do to positively impact the lives of the young people they serve i would also like to congratulate albany high school science teacher kristen bonds for her selection as a new york state master teacher she is one of 230 new master teachers from around the state that governor kathy hokel announced last week the prestigious four-year master teacher program recognizes high-performing teachers of stem subjects master teachers are selected for their ongoing work in stem education and their commitment to deepen their knowledge about the area of study their students and their teaching strategies as a master teacher bonds will engage in peer mentoring and intensive content oriented professional development throughout

008the year work closely with new teachers to foster a supportive environment for the next generation of stem teachers attend regional meetings at the university at albany and participate in and lead several professional development sessions and receive a fifteen thousand dollar annual stipend bond selection now gives the district six teachers currently participating in the master teachers program she joins brent katie jeffrey chu ashley finke ellen i'm sorry eileen regan and shannon stevenson albany high math teacher aaron erickson also is a master teacher who completed the program previously i would also like to congratulate william s hackett middle school social worker ava holt and albany high family consumer science teacher kimberly de hart for their recognition this month in channel 13's top teacher program they are among 13 educators selected this year out of more than 400

009nominations from the capital region this is an outstanding recognition for excellent work for these two educators for the work that they do to support our students academic and social and emotional growth congratulations are also in order as well for albany high senior elon klingerman for his victory last weekend in the 110 pound weight class at the section 2 class a wrestling tournament klingerman is albany high's first class a wrestling champion since sean berman who won the 96 pound weight class in 2011. klingerman will be back on the mat this weekend at the section 2 tournament competing for a chance to represent the section and albany high at the state tournament good luck this weekend and good luck to all of our student athletes who are competing in sectionals this month this is a very busy

010time of year pieces of art created by albany high students are on display this month at the 2022 art in three dimension show the student artists are sophomore lala i'm sorry leila nunn dowdell and i'm not saying that right senior lydia greene sophomore catherine myers and senior sydney spienberg who has two pieces selected our students were supported by albany high art teachers theorels releasa and ashley johns the pieces on display are among 79 selected from 221 submitted for the juried exhibition organized each year by the capital area art supervisors the show runs through the end of the month at mohonasen high school in rotterdam a reminder that all of our schools will be closed for presidents day and winter recess during the week of february 21st all of our schools and offices will be closed

011monday february 21st our district offices at academy park will be open for the rest of the week and offices at harriet gibbons student service center will be closed the full week i hope everyone has a safe and relaxing break it is now my pleasure to introduce principal kendra chairs francis to share information about the great things happening this year at phillip j schuyler achievement academy providing us the opportunity to speak to you today about a place that's very near and dear to our heart philip j styler achievement academy i want to share with you our school vision and mission and our core values phillip j schuyler achievement academy equips all our scholars with the academic and social emotional knowledge and awareness needed to make good choices advocate for themselves in their community and to transform

012the world we seek to accomplish this vision um through our mission which is as a community school to create a positive and culturally responsive child-centered learning environment that sets high expectations for achievement and success all of our staff families and community partners work together to provide opportunities that empower students to be agents of change our core values is that we are that we believe in equity for all we have high expectations for everyone we strive for excellence and we believe in the innate ability of everyone to achieve their goals as for our demographics schuyler achievement academy has 277 students enrolled in grades free kindergarten through grade five which is a slight decrease very small decrease from last year we are considered too deep in that we have two sections at each grade level there are

01314 general education classrooms and two self-contained special education classrooms one serves students in kindergarten and the other students in grades four and five our demographics have not shifted much since i visited you last year about 47 of our percent of our population are african american 12 percent percent are asian 10 are multi-racial six percent are white and 25 are hispanic some additional demographic information that i wanted to share is that 20 of our students are considered else um 10 are students with disabilities and 84 of our students are considered economically disadvantaged our step focus um is pretty similar to what we've had in the past we um have gone a little bit deeper this year and that our focus number one is on planning and delivering equitable instruction in ela for all students and we

014accomplish this by providing a focus on supporting our teachers with planning and delivering instruction that is aligned to the standards and new this year we've gone deeper with a focus on our tier one supports which is that we are working to provide support for all students in phonics based on their level so in addition to focusing on comprehension we're also focusing on building those phonics skills for our students so that they can access the text on their own in terms of mathematics we're focusing on delivering a deeper understanding of the next generation standards and mathematical practices and also using the bridges intervention curriculum that's new this year our teachers have received some professional development in that and we've used that alongside our math intervention is to provide supports for students who have experience on finished

015learning um due to our recent uh closure due to covet and the last area of focus is reducing chronic absenteeism and that also leads us to what ms jones oliver is going to share with us today one of our challenges thank you ms jones oliver system principal at ska one of the challenges as the principal said is chronic absenteeism and so what we've done is use a variety of things under communication outreach we reach out to parents by phone or home visit when students are not in school and we praise parents when they come to school it's been about our home school coordinator mr everett community schools coordinator conduct home visits quite frequently when needed so i use robo calls to encourage attendance in school daily for one week prior to and one week following

016a day off or vacation we have the following interventions that we've used we've generated a list of chronically absent students based on data on power bi and school tool monthly meetings with our attendance officer and we create attendance plans for those students the team attendance team also review the data of chronically absent students to monitor the impact of the interventions and make necessary adjustments to support increased attendance for our chronically absent students some of the incentives incentives for students and parents are we have mail certificates home for students who have a good attendance shout outs during our morning meetings and we praise parents for ensuring their students are in school and some of the things that we do in leveraging resources to address barriers we recognize covert is a barrier tutors and transportation as well

017and some of our successes saw has a newly formed student leadership team that we're so proud of inquiry and innovation lab we are extremely proud of and we are now in the throes of a school renaming we have formed a committee to include kendrick chairs francis our principal marilyn jones oliver and me the assistant principal and the following barbara smith brandon everett michael poindexter tanya venable laura albarte daniel camarada barry walston tammy coleman and we even have a fifth grade class representative anthony parker mary liz stewart and tracy spawner and of course michelle bridgewater you can visit our school renaming link at albanyschools.org rename we're asking for suggestions on february 14th and we have some flyers thank you all right so we would like to close our presentation by having our student leadership team share

018with you some things that are special about skyler and also what why they decided to take the leap and become leaders in our building hello my name is kwame and here's what i like about skylar team nicaragua county it's called the ready room the reason why i like the writing room is because it can help you feel a lot up or high and to calm all those emotions down like for example if you get sad you can come to the ready room and get help from miss from the four teachers that are in here and it's also called the support office if you don't like your name ready bro so and this is what i like about the reading room peace the reason i joined the student leadership team was so that i could be

019a part of things that will help our school something that's coming up that can be very helpful so our score is we need a name that better fits the mission of our school something i love about something i love about the school is that it provides different places that can help kids be successful that has a band as an orchestra has an art room so many things that can help kids find what they actually want to do [Music] hi i'm annabei and i'm the president of the student leadership team and schuyler achievement academy i ran in the election because i felt that it was going to be exciting it was going to be cool and it was actually a really great event and i enjoyed it a lot and now since i am president i

020feel that i'm able to help students younger than me to help them succeed in school even more like when students are having a bad day now i feel like i can help them even more by giving them like a little pep talk than i could do before um i like what i like is about skylar treatment academy is um that we we have teachers to help us and we also have people supporting us and the reason why i joined the um scalar team government leadership team is because i because i wanted to help people and people that needed help [Music] hi my name is azira and i like the school because it makes us protected and safe the reason i became a student leadership because so i could be a leader and be an example

021for younger students hi my name is mahogany and i'm and i'm a member of the student leadership team and i joined because they were um i'm gonna change the name of the school and the school is named after a person that did bad things and he was a slave owner and he owned about 15 or 14 slaves and i also joined because i wanted to be a role model for the kids and the students and i wanted to show them that they have a voice and they can do anything [Music] thank you mr spencer and ms jones oliver we appreciate you being here and um sharing all of the great things that are happening at your school so thank you so very much thank you well while we don't normally do questions or anything after

022these reports we do want to really appreciate you for taking advantage of the school renaming policy that was developed by michael poindexter we are so excited to see you guys take ownership of finding the right name for your school and and it sounds like you have a wonderful committee developed and we're really looking forward to to watching you go through that new process so thank you so much for taking advantage of that thank you at this time we'll move through with our district update and our district update of course we start with our vision mission and goals to make sure that everything that we're doing is in alignment with our vision mission and goals tonight our topics are really about coping 19. so we have three subcategories cases testing and vaccines much of this information

023you've seen before the numbers are just changing uh when we started uh we're looking to date as of 2 8 22 we have total confirmed cases 1317 959 are students 235 faculty 123 staff members through february we think it's important to note that we were at an about eight cases was our daily average this is the second highest monthly average since our pandemic began in january we had 877 total cases which put us at about a 23.28.3 daily average back in december we were at 6.2 november 4.7 daily average october 5.1 daily average and september was the lowest at 2.9 we continue to encourage our families to make sure that they're prepared with backup plans as you see the notices that come out each day you're seeing the numbers start to taper down which we

024are very happy about that direction we do want to caution our families because we do have when we have winter break coming up and we want to make sure that we are still following the protocols for coving so that we can keep those numbers down for testing we have employees reported status thus far we're at 69.6 percent of those who have provided proof of vaccination we are down to 30 percent of those who are who have not submitted proof of vaccination we continue with our weekly testing of those employees we have time slots available but they do have to register first one thing to note is that even though employees may be vaccinated if they are choosing to get tested on a regular basis they are able to do so so we're not just testing

025those who do not have proof of vaccination we're testing employees who also have proof of vaccination should they so choose also with testing we have distributed nearly 31 000 test kits since december 31st and so we are very happy about that our weekly shipments continue to come in from the state department and we push those out to our schools we know that with winter break coming up we would like to make sure that each student has a test kit to go home with and we will be sending out guidance because we would like for them to test before they come back just to make sure that everyone is safe we have the five-day quarantine protocols that are listed there we have had that presented several times so i won't read through that but we have

026our five-day quarantine protocols and also our test to stay and reporting requirements that are listed the other piece uh with regard to testing we still have in-person testing for employees and students each weekday at albany high school and at harriet givens the times are listed there pre-registration is required just follow the link and register we also want to remind people that you're not to eat or drink anything 30 minutes before testing no gum mints cough lozenges etc the 30 minutes before taking the test vaccine vaccine information we urge everyone five and older who's able and eligible to get a vaccine our next uh vaccination clinic is on thursday february 17th at phillips schuyler from 4 30 to 7 pm also the county health department has immunization clinics the cross gates mall has 10 vaccination sites

027is one of ten vaccination sites statewide for children five to eleven so you could go to cross gates mall as well and then if you need to find any other locations please go to vaccine vaccines.gov or you can call the number on the screen at this time are there any questions with regard to our district update i just had a quick question about the clover testing at the high school and it's if students have pre-registered with the website can they just walk in if they want a dust or do you need to have a parent with you or parent permission first they do have to go in and um typically if we need the parent based on you know where they are with the nurses if they need the parent they can do it verbally

028over the phone parent does not have to be present thank you board member smith thank you and maybe i should uh this has to do with the future should i wait on that question let's see if there's other questions about what's already happened thank you for making that distinction anybody else with a question about what we have right now i had one quick question which i have lost the threat of which is um are we providing test kits now i know we did proactive test kit provision to anyone who wanted them for quite some time but the test kits that we have in hand now we're using primarily for students who have been exposed or tested positive is that right that is correct but believe me we we have plenty of test kits so we

029will be prepared for next week to send students home with test kids that sounds fantastic thank you very much board member smith thank you and superintendent i know you and other superintendents and the governor there was a meeting um just a question and i know there are lots of things we don't know answers to but um after say the break uh will do you imagine that this will be optional mask do you have any insight into what the governor's plans might be and also testing how do we does that continue so at our meeting the superintendent's meeting with governor hulkel we were informed that we are staying the course right now until um we get through i think i believe that she said until march so it will be after break we do have you

030know the appeal that the decisions need to be made through the courts and she is watching the numbers she's looking at what the infection rates are and all of those things she's using the data and the science to make that decision and what she informed us was that she would be looking roughly around march in order to make that decision as you know we have followed the guidance of our health care professionals since the beginning of the pandemic we are not looking to veer away from that and so we await that guidance and then we will adjust accordingly based on the guidance and i'm just going to chime in that that meeting also included the new york state school boards association the big five the principals association the pta number of other speakers it was

031one meeting and the governor was quite clear no change in masks in schools until break after that as the superintendent said she's going to watch multiple factors people really wanted to get her to say when this number turns up then you can take your masks off and she was very clear that she was not going to do that that she wanted to have the ability to look at the picture holistically um so that was good but we have also had some communication from our legislative leaders sort of asking for our uh thoughts on it and we have stress that i think every organization we participate with has stressed the need for certainty and clarity and the desire to have public health professionals make public health decisions and so i hope that that is being heard

032at the highest levels and that we will not be in a position where individual districts will be being asked to make public health decisions for which we really do not have the right set of staff to make those decisions so we are advocating for that every single day okay anything else on covid19 district update if not thank you very much and i think that brings us then to the part of our meeting we call public comment um we do have two written comments tonight but no in-person or voicemail comments we do welcome input from the community about the decisions we are making we have a long-standing policy in which we set aside up to 30 minutes of each meeting to hear from district residents parents students and other members of our community if there are

033more comments than can be accommodated in 30 minutes our policy gives us the opportunity to extend the length of the public comment period or to establish a second public comment period later in the meeting or at a different time we do accept comments in writing and by voicemail all of that is on albanyschools.org forward slash boe the addressing the board pages where you want to go to figure out how that all works and there's a form there that allows you to submit a comment in writing which is how the two comments that we have in front of us came in today we do ask all commenters to keep in mind that information about individual students and specific district staff can't be shared not only is that a violation of their privacy but every student and

034every district staff member deserves the due process they are entitled to and to know the concerns about them will not be aired in public for that reason if somebody resubmits a written comment the board member who reads their comment passes over or substitutes alternative words if individual names are mentioned and we also do try to eliminate those names whenever they pop up in a voicemail we also encourage all of our community members to realize that the board is not the place to start when you have a concern about something in the district we ask that you start first with the relevant staff members such as the teacher or principal if you find a concern is not addressed adequately you can appeal that up to the person's supervisor up the chain of command if necessary to

035the superintendent although usually it can get solved before that decisions made by the superintendent may be appealed to the board we received two written comments which will be read aloud now by board member el-min yahweh if the author is listening and notes that we have pronounced their name improperly we very much apologize and would appreciate you're taking a moment to contact us to let us know how we should have pronounced it remember thank you madam president i am going to take my mask off because it's just going to be easier okay so the first letter comes from nell brady it states i am writing to express my concerns about the speed at which the feeder realignment plan is being implemented and the fact that most of the scenarios presented at the albany theatre realignment committee

036meeting tuesday night have new scotland elementary students attending north albany middle school my husband and i were aware that the feeder realignment discussions were happening but it wasn't until last night last week that we learned that the plan would be implemented next school year we think this change is far too abrupt the students in this district need more time to adjust and to get familiar with their new school before next year it was also alarming to learn that the feeder realignment plan might mean that new scotland students would attend north albany middle school north albany is too far for new scotland elementary families to require first year middle school students to ride the dis this distance transfer and walk is neither practical nor beneficial for their adjustment it might not be the furthest distance within

037all the scenarios but it is probably the longest drive there is no easy route this would no doubt limit involvement in school activities and feelings of connection to the school there must be a scenario that will work better for all families we appreciate that we appreciate that this is a very difficult decision and that the committee has clearly done a tremendous amount of work so far there are many interests and factors to weigh i am grateful to the committee members who are invested in the success of our students however the decisions made on tuesday to narrow down the scenarios to eight were being made too quickly and based on the opinions of a small group of people given this is such an impactful decision this phase of the project should take more time and careful

038consideration we ask the board to consider the following delaying implementation of the feeder realignment plan to allow families to prepare and for the district to ensure they've selected the best scenario and to plan accordingly looking very closely at new scotland elementary school to north albany uh scenarios to understand why those options were put forward and how they could best serve the district listening to the new scotland elementary school families as well as families in other parts of the district and incorporate that feedback into the decision-making process thank you for all that you do for albany students my next letter comes from kimberly fortune and i'm going to do my best with this has no periods [Music] you guys are not doing enough regarding albany city school district you guys as the board are failing miserably

039you're not caring it's you're not adequately wanting to teach these children the people you're hiring are a joke albany city school district children are suffering the most you guys closed the school for um two weeks but other schools in the city were open what since did that make you're hiring people that don't give a damn you've got teachers left and right that it's not coming to work because i don't know what you guys are dropping the ball and you're a mockery yeah are hurting these babies in the education and you're not caring at all it's disgusting and something has to be done you're not adequately cleaning these schools and taking virtu uh virtual and putting it in the forefront when these children need better than virtual education it's bad enough the children the child don't

040want to teach the black and brown babies in the inner city schools which we all know what the word in the city means the hood ghetto and you're not caring at all i don't treat children like this in loudounville colony i know this is not considered albany county but so what yeah doing the capital districts children dirty and you all don't care and the reason why is because the albany city school district children are filled with nothing but black and brown babies and you all never wanted to educate them and that's the last of the letters even when they're here to hear we do appreciate hearing from our public and we appreciate all the public comments in general we find comments valuable especially when they have specific suggestions or thoughts about decisions we're making our

041contact information for both public comment and for routine correspondence is at albanyschools.org forward slash b o e we now move on to the part of our meeting we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters for the district including 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 this 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'll now entertain a motion to adopt the routine consented agenda motioned by board member smith second second by board member el mignawi are there

042any set-asides board member man items 31 32 and 33 can you just give me the name so we make sure that we're an alignment on what we're just setting aside northern reserves into two parsons okay anything else that needs to be set aside seeing none all in favor of adopting the routine of consent agenda less those three items that is unanimous board member man can we take those three together i'd like to entertain a motion for adopting those three contracts motion by board member tour second by board member krejci any discussion remember man let go all right i'm just going to abstain because i work for the organization thank you very much all in favor of adopting those three contracts that is unanimous less board member man who abstains thank you very much that is

043the end of routine consent um there was a little bit of feedback there but i think that that went away good and now we're going to move on to a very brief policy agenda uh dr chitor thank you madam president board as a member last time we had a discussion or we introduced policy 4772 which is graduation ceremonies there are any questions on that if not we have a motion to adopt motion by board member smith second by uh board member wilson that's unanimous thank you very much i'm just double checking my agenda um that is the end of the action agenda we always try and structure our meetings with actions first that way we get folks who want to only listen to the actions can do that we can still take an action we

044are not prohibited from taking an action after this fact and we sometimes have done that but in general we do not plan nor does our agenda include an action item for tonight beyond the ones that we've already taken instead we're going to move on to the discussion portion of our agenda which begins with the feeder alignment committee about which we already received some public comment important um board member superintendent you so very much madam president members of the board uh this presentation will be a joint presentation and so we're going to i will start and then we will have madam president present a portion of this meeting and then i will conclude i wanted to first acknowledge our vision mission and gold statement as always it has been our guiding our guiding principles as we

045have done this work with the feeder alignment committee our agenda tonight we'll look at the committee overview we'll review some of the items just to make sure that we bring everything back full circle the enrollment pattern considerations enrollment model metrics the additional considerations that came about we'll look at where we started we'll look at where we're where we are now scenario analysis community engagement and our community survey and next steps the purpose of the committee was to engage committee members and district personnel in a partnership to develop criteria to make recommendations for an equitable feeder pattern for all students transitioning from elementary school to middle school and this work began last summer with one representative from each school five members carried the work forward through the fall we did develop an ad hoc committee of

046three board members that have joined us in december along with university and albany statistician dr ken robin the parents are listed there dorian salat uh william lemon daniel katz talia harrell and marina marco o'malley we are very pleased with the work that they have done and i do have to give accolades to this committee because part of doing the work of a committee is actually doing the work so that you understand what it is that the district goes through as well as how decisions are made and then being able to still represent the community that you are coming forward with some of the concerns but also understanding the bigger picture of what the goals are for the entire district and and where what we look to do in order to accomplish that equity among our

047three middle schools our board members president savage dr shater and secretary dr shatur and member hassan al-manyaway i thank you so very much for your support in this work and working with our committee president savage thank you you have brought your expertise of excel spreadsheets to a whole new level and we want to say thank you um taking the work that was done from our committee with all the work that they were able to do and then take it to the next level and then we would be remiss if we did not thank dr robin for his uh special unique talents of being a statistician to help us look at a quantitative way with to develop scenarios and look at what's in the best interest of our students and then let us have that discussion

048of those very qualitative measures that still impact that decision and so what we are sharing tonight is really a balance of both the qualitative and the quantitative measures that we have gone that we have analyzed synthesized and now we're ready to share that information out so that the board can have that discussion about what it is that we want for our middle school students and so at the very beginning the goal was that we would have three middle schools roughly the same size we know that there may be some variation but roughly the same size all three middle schools would have students who have similar resources so that way we can disburse resources in an equitable manner to meet the needs of the students continue to feed elementary schools to middle schools to allow students

049with relationships to continue what types of preferences might we be looking at to ensure that continuity and also support our families so we created a model that predicted enrollment and student resources that that need needs at every possible level we also from the likely candidates used our knowledge and understanding to identify the best options and there were two main components enrollment and student need so the timeline would be to implement the new feeder pattern for the 22-23 school year for sixth grade only meaning our fifth graders would be the ones that were impacted first adding a new sixth grade cohort each year until the pattern was fully implemented by the 24-25 school year and students currently in grades 6 through 7th will remain in place until moving on to high school enrollment pattern considerations balancing

050the total enrollment for each building and then looking at the resources as i just spoke about and the needs of our students both academically looking at attendance discipline etc to make sure that we could balance out that distribution of resources one of our metrics with regard to equity is looking at that equitable distribution of our resources and so that's very important that we look at those other factors that impact a school the number of school changes from the current feeder pattern and we started looking at just school changes and that morphed into looking at individual students and how many individual students would be changed and then transportation factors were considered distance at first we looked at the distance of the school from the middle school and then as we started looking at scatter plots where

051students live we realized that it was really more important to look at where students live with regard to their distance to and from the middle school so all of those things were considered and then additional factors that were considered in projecting enrollment looking at the current grades three through five not just the fifth graders expanding that view to third through fifth grade a large number of new students entering the district in sixth grade we average about 84 new students over three years and so we wanted to make sure that we were able to analyze that data returning and new entrant self-contained special education students looking at the assignment of those programs based on the needs of our students six self-contained classrooms at each middle school where possible that would be something that we would be

052looking at doing the continuous enrollment of students from elementary to middle being able to predict how many students we keep from elementary to middle school within our district and so we looked at 81 percent 81.8 uh yes 81.8 percent of our non-self-contained students transitioned to the district middle schools and this is the data from 2018 2019 um 2018-19 and the 1920. we used grades five through six in grades six through seven based on that transition to school [Music] about eighty four point eight percent of our self-contained students stay with us and so we felt that that was very important to look at the other component that we looked at was the fact that we have started small with dual language and looking at the fact that that is going to grow over time and so

053this is the first year of the dual expansion and so we'll see it double in size one grade level at a time as we proceed from year to year and so we did feel that the feeder pattern would allow or should allow balanced enrollment both now and in the future so with that brief introduction i'm going to turn the time over to president savage uh to discuss some of the enrollment pattern considerations a little bit deeper with some of those considerations that came about our enrollment model metrics and then looking at some additional considerations that impacted our scenarios thank you very much my role in this has been primarily to be the excel jockey i have not put my own knowledge in here this was all based on the information and statistics provided by dr

054ken robin and by the influence of the committee who really focused on helped us focus on the priority elements so as the superintendent just explained we considered a number of factors in trying to project enrollment the basic concept was to look at every possible scenario and project enrollment for that scenario and try and find scenarios that would meet our goal of having three balanced middle schools there are a lot of tiny words and a lot of tiny numbers on this slide you do not need to understand or read all of them they are the exact same information that the superintendent just gave to you from the prior slide but it just gives you a sense of the complexity for each school we predicted how many fifth graders would be returning based on our existing grade

055three through five we took an average of those three years and and using a retention rate we know not all of our students who are in fifth grade reappear in our middle schools right some of them go to charter schools some of them go to private school some of them move things happen to people so we took that retention rate and we factored that in in addition we found and this was one of the pieces of analysis that i think several of us on the committee found surprising when we did that analysis to find out how many kids came back we discovered oh well yes that not all of them come back but in fact there's a whole bunch of new kids not just a few but a whole bunch on average 84 sixth graders

056each year right that's and we only have roughly 600 kids per grade so we thought okay well how are we going to account for that we know that our policy is to feed our new entrants to middle school based on their home address wherever they would have gone to elementary school so that's how that second row of numbers distributes and that's why there's zeros in this in the certain columns those are the magnet programs because we don't feed any new entrants based on a magnet enrollment obviously that's all based on a home neighborhood school enrollment the next line down where it says total enrollment fed by feeder pattern that's just the sum of those two numbers that's fairly straightforward the bottom the next one underneath it has one blue item that is our dual doubling

057right right now if you take what our grade three through five and apply the retention you would get 16. someday once we finally get there it will double but it is going to be quite a few years and as you all know um board colleagues planning for enrollment in albany year by year is an adventure let alone four or five or six years from now so that is those are the numbers that we use to define the enrollment of the middle school by neighborhood in addition we anticipate self-contained students as the superintendent said will be fed into six classrooms per middle school and that the staff will align those middle schools as much as possible to not separate our self-contained students from their general ed neighborhood school colleagues because we'd like to whenever possible maintain

058those relationships um but that they would balance those themselves we also looked historically at how many new entrants we get that are self-contained that's that small 11 number so that is based on historically how many new entrants are self-contained in addition we know that generally we send about 45 students from the middle school to tcce for the alternative program there to the tony clement center for education and so that gives us our 1605 students in each middle school uh i mean in the packet myers and north albany 535 on average if they were all perfectly aligned 535 students per middle school below that you're going to see your tcce number and your aic number those are our predicted numbers for our total predicted enrollment of 1741. that's versus our current enrollment of 1836 all right

059and i told you how i got there we took the grade three through five we took a retention figure we added in the newcomers historically and that's where we ended up so it's a little bit lower that doesn't surprise me we know our enrollment has um has been trending down although with what's happening in afghanistan and refugees coming in we may see that trending up again in albany it's always an adventure the good news is if we're really at 535 students at each school we have plenty of room to accommodate additional students because we know that sort of the 600 630 is it is a kind of the maximum we want if we're gonna have um two teams at each grade so that's how the enrollment piece worked then the next question is how did

060we look at the performance like we don't just care that the right number of students is in each scenario or is it in each school in a scenario but we also want the students to have a comparable level of need because that is something that we have identified as problematic in our current model is that we have a school that has a higher need ratio than we have in other schools so how are we going to get to that in that question and this was where dr robin really brought in his expertise and he recommended we use these four major categories academics attendance discipline and a thing called the risk score which i'm going to talk about in a little bit more detail in a minute academics very familiar information there nwea scores and new

061york state test scores he was very selective in which ones he used depending on whether he wanted to think about the impact of covid because we know kobe really played with some of those numbers so he was extremely thoughtful about that he also wanted to look at attendance both in in two ways one is overall intended and the second one is this question of chronically absent right because your overall attendance rate is one thing but if you have a whole lot of students you're you're doing the kind of checking calls like you're having um mrs jones oliver talked about today that's a huge amount of resources that you're expending on that so trying to balance that discipline obviously every referral every time a student needs to have a discipline referral that's a resource staff resources

062that are involved but there's also a question of how many students have referral right so the top number is total referral events the second one is how many students and all of these things along with the risk score were factored into a composite score the risk score is an average risk score developed by the district which i think has been very helpful and i'll let operational staff speak to this at some point people want to ask more about this but to help us identify children who might otherwise slip through the cracks you know they might be just sort of like a little marginal on a lot of things and they might not raise to the level of oh we better pay attention to this guy by putting them to get putting all this information in

063one place we can start paying attention oh we better pay a lot more attention to this particular child and they've used that risk score to my understanding in that way we use the risk score to try and balance the schools it has never been used that way before it is not a like you know well researched deep thing that has been used over and over again so dr uh robin encouraged us to be you know a little cautious about using it in this way and he only used it as a 15 at part of the composite score because it is not um a validated um number so for our returning students we combined these things as it says in this box on the right with academics being fifty percent attendance twenty percent disciplined fifteen percent

064and risk factor fifteen percent to create a single composite score for each of our elementary schools both neighborhood and magnet for new entrants of course we have a different problem right because our new entrants don't generally look like their neighborhood school colleagues right they they may live in let's say the eagle point area but they're coming into our district you know at sixth grade they're not the same as somebody who's been at eagle point for uh k5 so what dr robin decided to do for them is to take a district-wide average of how new entrant sixth graders perform versus how with regular you shouldn't call them regular so the existing sixth grade graders perform and he did find that district-wide on almost every category on every category they performed slightly worse and so he we

065use that percentage for each category to create what i'm going to call a typical new entrant and each of those little numbers that was represented for a new entrant was treated as a typical new entrant using that mathematical analysis of what a typical new entrant would be it is not a perfect science nothing in here is a perfect science but that was the best way we could think to deal with it um and and have it uh look at a um something that would have some meaning for us um i didn't read this note out but it's here for you i asked what's really in that risk score it's all the things you would expect right it's attendance it's if you ever got held back a year it's if you've got discipline issues if you've

066got an iep if you're enl if you've got um if you're noted as economically disadvantaged all the things are in here um in and they have some mechanism for assigning points and whatnot so that they can identify their kids who they want to pay special attention to okay so that brings us to the end of the lots and lots of words on the slide and brings us to slide 10 which is the additional considerations slide i want to stress this and i don't know if dr robin was able to be here tonight but he stresses with us so much don't assume there's precision just because there's data points everything we've done is at best a very good estimate but it's not you know none of us have a magic ball we can only look at

067what's happened in the past and hope it is predictive of the future they could be high they could be low we don't really know i also want to identify that there are a lot of scenarios here when you take it and you figure out you use your old combinatorics 12 schools going to three middle schools that's over half a million possible combinations most of them are ludicrous right because one of the possible combinations is that every single school goes to myers right obviously that's not balanced right so that 5 300 530 000 means a lot is a lot and many of them are totally ridiculous after we took the 530 and that this part is not in the slides i think that was just an oversight on my part i didn't ask ron to be

068sure that he conveyed this piece of it we looked at only scenarios that would allow the range of enrollment from the lowest school to the highest school to be no more than 35 okay and we did that twice we did it once with dual at its current size and then we did it a second time with dual at its larger size again i don't know how else you do it because we have to deal with a situation we've got right now which is dual is only generating 16 students a year but very soon in in real time right a few years from now when those kindergarten babies hit middle school we're going to be looking at 32 ish assuming the retention stays the same and nothing else happens and you know all the other things

069um but so that's how we did it when we did that we were able to identify that there's really only a few hundred about 320 scenarios that allow you to maintain that enrollment range in both um scenarios both uh single duel and double duel the other question um the next thing that we did and i'll just tell you how we got to this and i'm gonna go back to one more thing of those 318 it wasn't 320 it was 318. we took the 60 best ones based on the composite score all right so we took all of them we lay them in a row based on the composite score and we pick the top 60. if you're like a mathy person you might be going wow there's a lot of multiples of six happening here

070why are there so many multiples of six all these numbers are multiples of six that is because for every scenario every alignment of schools you can move that group of elementary schools to any middle school right so we could take our current alignment just imagine our very current element the one that we all are familiar with and we could just take all the students who currently go to myers and send them to hackett we take the hackett students and send them to north albany and we can send the north albany students and send them to myers right the enrollment the academic projection for that scenario will be identical to the current one right because you're just taking the groups and moving them from school to school and if you think about the way that plays

071out you end up with six identical scenarios and i've been calling that a set of science scenarios right and that is why the multiples of six happen all the time and one of the things that i know came up in one of the public comments and i've heard several times is why did the scenarios come out that new scotland elementary didn't have like a balanced number of times that it was at each school in the 60 it did because the 60 was 10 sets which means new scotland was evenly at north albany at hackett and at montessori and we can pull up sorry myers we can pull those 60 if you want to see them because we have all possible combinations there so what caused new scotland to not be sort of equally balanced it

072wasn't this cut that got us to 60. it was the next cut does that does that make sense okay now i got to figure out where i am on the slides per tony's like where is she on the slides um let's see i'm still on slide 10. from that list of 60 the committee then narrowed down the list of potential scenarios to eight and i remember when i first got on the board feeling very frustrated the data wasn't coming to me with more time and i remember someone saying to me it's happening in real time you can't be frustrated that we're not getting things earlier because we didn't have them earlier and when i tell you this is happening in real time this is happening in real time dr robin and i have been crunching

073data like crazy for two weeks trying to get these numbers down we finally got the scenarios to the committee yesterday at four o'clock they yesterday yeah today's on thursday they met at 6 30 so this is all happening precisely in real time what's that tuesday sorry tuesday we normally meet on wednesday but there was an art show that i had to go to at manhattan last night which was fabulous by the way um so we met on tuesday thank you i thought i missed today but so tuesday is when when that went down so that committee got the scenarios at four o'clock on tuesday and by tuesday at nine you know we had tried to narrow down to a reasonable set of eight based on some other criteria and now uh we can talk about

074the criteria but before i do that i just want to re reinforce this point number at the very bottom of slide 10. dr robin who is a phd in this area says you can say with confidence that all 60 of these and especially the eight are among the very best options you have once you put in place that 35 enrollment cap 35 range they're the best they are way better than what you've got now what he doesn't feel comfortable saying is that the one that was at the top of the list is definitely better than the second one down which is definitely better than the third one down right it's just there's not that much confidence in these numbers that you can use that tight sequencing you can say for sure that number one is

075better than number 500 but one and eight they're so good they're all good you should not get caught up in thinking about which one is quote unquote better for equity reasons that have to do with these internal items there are equity issues that are different right that have to do with transportation and how much how long you're on the bus and those kinds of things there you can think about equity for each scenario but within this in building the number of students who are at risk is going to be pretty comparable in each and every one of these scenarios that we've got in front of us [Music] okay before we actually look at scenarios and i know i just like talk and talk and talk does anybody have questions about the process the committee thought

076really hard and asked lots of questions that's how we got all these questions about like refugees the self-contained and all that dr robin and i didn't think about all that on our own that was like iteratively working with the committee who would say but wait what about with the refugees should i i just want to point out that when we when the committee got the list of 60 and was in this process of nailing it down to eight this was all blinded nobody knew what school were being involved it was just numbers so when i sent the spreadsheet that's on this slide 11 you see on slide 11 you've got all these pretty colors and then you've got the list of schools when the committee first saw they didn't have the school names they only

077had the scenario ids and the numbers board member wilson thank you and i'm not certain if it's more so a process question but i believe it is um do we have any understanding of um for example we i understand during the presentation you mentioned that rather than the school that you attend the students home address was prioritized however there are varying zip codes which have differing levels of housing stability so we're using a snapshot and when and if the family moves do they now attend or go to a different school for example versus using the home school which is of course within a catchment area anyway um that determining your your middle school is the question so the the answer is we looked at so there's two questions one is an operational question what happens

078to that individual child right and the second question is like how does that affect the model um how it impacts the individual child i'm going to leave for the superintendent to get somebody else who's better than i i think i know but i don't want to mess it up but in terms of how it impacts the enrollment we looked at grades three through five for that so it was you know we looked at everybody who's currently at say eagle point um and looked at all those home addresses so you you're correct that if tomorrow it could be a slightly different set right for these transportation numbers it might be a little different um because there is a lot of transiency in our name in our neighborhoods um so you know one possible improvement to the

079model could be to go back farther um but he's at some point is is that better is that good projection for the future because things are changing so much is what's current i think dr robin jan generally wanted to look mostly at fifth graders thinking that's the most stable almost predicted because it's the one we know the most about um do you want somebody to answer the question about what happens to an individual child when they um if they if their family moves within the district or out of district mid-year it depends on what's going on you know because different families have different situations but in theory with regard to our regulation a child can finish out the semester or finish out the quarter depending on when it is they can finish out the year

080so those are handled on an individual basis and alignment with the regulation board member smith thank you so it might be a little early for this question but i think it's a process one too and it's uh not only did the one of the commenters public commenters say something about the timing or the questioning the speed at which we're moving but then i also took from what you've said about when committee members receive certain information so it has me sort of and then now you're saying that they're down you know pretty much eight scenarios i'm trying to get a sense of time um is there some can you just i want to understand whether the committee thinks they've had sufficient time to look at everything are they confident in these i know you know from

08160 down to eight um do they need more time what what's what is all of what's the impact of this issue of we didn't get things at a certain time plus some people thinking we're moving too fast i just want to understand that piece i don't know what committee members we have on i know that there was a couple that we're planning to join virtually i don't know if they want to speak to that oh i see dan katz just popped in um i don't know who else is here that could speak to their reaction about that mr pax i think i don't know if he's muted or if he's like super muted that there i see uh folks looking at him trying to get him unneeded this bell is also miserable there too mr

082l can you unmute can you is it pause that possible or type in the chat there we go yes we can i finally was able to make it on with all my technology issues i am here so i think the question people wanted to ask or remember smithfield to ask is whether um you know given the short timeframe that you had to experience the scenarios whether that felt like enough time to think to think through all the nuances or whether it did not i feel like for me i can't speak obviously for any other committee member it i think we've had enough sufficient time to get to the point that we're at now um what i relayed um by email because of my technology issue that our meeting on tuesday is that i still am

083looking forward to hearing what community and families have to say which would then allow us even more time to look at these eight scenarios and not necessarily go completely backwards to the other 60 but is there anything else we need to consider so i i do feel like we've had at least enough time to get to where we are now knowing we'll have a little bit more time to be able to look at the bigger picture as we get more information thank you that was helpful i want to do two things before we look to another committee member one is i thought maybe superintendent adams if you'd be willing we could just skip ahead to talk about the community process piece now and then come back is that okay with you because i think that's

084the question that um miss herrell was bringing up which is like she was in she's interested in having more opportunities to hear more from families so if it's okay um um ms bowie can you please pass the scenarios to the community process slides i can i ask the question before the campaign oh sure so sorry i apologize um it kind of just in lieu of vicki's question but is a tad bit different i'm just wondering for the contingency that wants to delay which i respect or they some people for example potentially may not even be aware and feel like wait this is too soon next year i didn't know what is to be gained from a delay i'm wondering also because or can we speak to that because if we have the real estate we

085have like does a delay make it so that we're delaying the decision we make in the question and i don't know if that's a process question either totally hear you i want to hold on to that question until we get through what miss rel was talking about because i think that that's a big question right the whole board i think really wants to talk about that and really think it through but first let's get through the community process so that people understand what what the superintendent's plan is to collect that information um and then we'll come back to a couple of other things okay go ahead ms bowie and miss so one of the things that we have talked extensively about with regard to getting more community input i'm going to refresh everyone's memory that

086we did do a survey in the beginning and we said even then that we would be going back out because we knew that certain communities were not highly represented and so we wanted to get through this process and that's part of what would we be sharing out with our community and so looking at this second phase having people look at the criteria prioritize the criteria prioritize the criteria in terms of of the scenarios that we have etc and and making sure that we are hearing the voices of our community and we've stated that all along we started that at the very beginning we talked about having the forums with the community uh we just needed to get to a point to be able to say what is it that we're sharing with our community and

087we are at that point now and so if you look at the screen we have on monday the 14th from 6 30 to 7 30. these are our virtual meetings uh tuesday and we're looking at arbor hill sheridan prep and schuyler tuesday the 15th 6 30 to 7 30 ash new scotland and pine hills wednesday the 16th 6 30 to 7 30 eagle point dual language montessori and then thursday the 17th 6 30 to 7 30 delaware given and toast albany international center parents and guardians may participate in the in the forum that's most convenient you can visit the school's page your schools page at albanyschools.org and link to watch the meeting for your school we will also have our feedback form available so that we can take questions during the meeting and so those

088are the virtual community meetings if you go to the next slide then we do have two at this time that doesn't mean that we won't have more but at this time we have two in-person meetings scheduled for february 28th at arbor hill from 6 30 to 7 30 and then tuesday march 1st from 6 30 to 7 30 at giffen memorial uh that gets us through getting up to the break and then right when we come back and it still gives us time to have additional in-person or virtual meetings but we wanted to make sure that we had those available the surveys will be shared at the at the end of the meeting and then we'll have it available so that anyone can fill out the survey when they uh so choose but we will

089definitely have it so that if people are filling out the survey and they have questions that they can do it and ask questions so that we can be there to facilitate that so i appreciate you guys letting me take that out of order order i just think it's important contextual information that um the board is not planning tonight to discuss which of these scenarios we like like that's not what we're here to do tonight because we want to hear from the community before we have any reaction to any of the eight scenarios i also want to remind everyone which i think everyone knows but just to be sure all committee recommendations are always purely recommendations to the board right the board holds the ultimate authority by means of having been elected and so if one

090of these eight upon further reflection after community feedback we go oh well this scenario is practically perfect but what if we did this other variation on it that would be permitted by our process right we are the elected authorities and that is what that is within our realm we do want to honor the work of the committee it would be really troubling to me if we were to select a scenario that was completely at odds with things that the committee had said but i don't think that would happen because i think that the process has been so you know sort of planned throughout the thing that at least when you get to the 60 and then the eight you can see what happened and we can we can talk about that so i just wanted

091to keep that as part of people's understanding so again i don't want to talk about which scenario you like but i do think it's important to talk about what other criteria you might need what information you might need now we heard from ms harrell i didn't know if there was any other committee members that wanted to speak to that point of whether it felt like they had sufficient information and time um i don't want to put anybody on the spot but if people have things to say i wanted to give them the opportunity to speak um i don't think that there there's never enough time right we could spend i mean this is such a complex topic and we could talk about it for years so on the one hand no it would be lovely

092to spend more time really really just like immersing ourselves in this data but kids are only kids and for a period of time and we have to move the process forward and i think the conversation that i hear you saying is going to happen later on in this meeting is important about um about when this when is this new pattern that we all decide on collectively as a community when it's implemented i also think it's important to separate out the amount of time the committee has to think about scenarios from the amount of time the community has to give input and that's the part the piece um the element of this process that we're entering now and is it really its own separate question is do we have enough time to do that because that's

093obviously really important to all of us thanks dorian um this a lot does anyone else any other committee members damn were you able to figure out how to get unmuted is that a thing you can do did you want to speak he says if you want to put any comments in the chat we can also see them there if you're struggling to get unmuted that's also an option um okay so i'm going to take while he's thinking about what's going in the chat if we can go back to the scenarios i just want to walk people through the spreadsheet and then we can talk about what information we might need that we don't have or how we might want to interpret this information so this incredibly colorful spreadsheet gives you the information that is like

094a consolidated summary of what the committee looked at i'm just going to talk you through how it works the very top row is light blue you see that top row is light blue um everybody if it's hard to read also on the agenda just in board docs you can actually get to the pdf so you can make it bigger if you if you need to the top row is the current feeder pattern so that should look very very familiar to you right north albany arbor hills sheridan prep and schuyler achievement academy myers is montessori ash pine hills giffin hackett is new scotland toast eagle point delaware community school and dual i do want to point out that dr robin was able to subtract the dual data from the old dcs history so whenever we say

095dcs we mean dcs less dual right so dcs is its own thing dual is its own thing the next two columns tell you how many changes this particular scenario results in needless to say the current feeder pattern results in no changes in schools and no changes for students but as you look underneath that you'll see the number of school changes and the number of fifth graders who would go to a different middle school than they currently think that they would go to based on the current better feeder pattern does that make sense okay the colors range from green to yellow or actually if you were looking at all 60 they'd go from green to red with um one change there were no one changes i think the fewest was four right four being bright green

096and twelve being red because they'd be put all the versions of the set right the set has six there's six with ceramics on a set some of the sets had a version that resulted in 12 school changes like literally every single school having to change those would have been colored red so you're only seeing ones that are sort of pale yellow pale green because those were the ones that rode to rose to the top the next two columns are your enrollment columns enrollment range single dual and enrollment range double dual range means you take the biggest school and you subtract the small school and that gives you the range in school sizes our current range based on the predicted model this isn't the range of the current actual students this is based on the predicted

097model is 200 for single dual and then 248 for double dual because ultimately google's going to generate 16 more child children a year three times three grades that's your 48 right so that's why that those two numbers are different and that's what you see going down again darker green means narrower range which is good right a lot the darker yellow there aren't that many yellowish ones because we only selected narrow things um is is less good the blue bars just count students it's just another way if you're not good at color you can see the the width of the bar represents the number of students in the range the next column is your composite range the composite again is that crazy math that took the academics the attendance the discipline data and the risk data

098and merged it all into one big number and you can see that there is a variety from i think we've got 1.99 0.92 down to 1.92 here compared to the current which is 4.34 so you can see again smaller numbers better because it means the range is narrower which was the objective was to have equitable schools more similar levels of risk and um more civil similar levels of resource need per student so they're all way better than the um current you'll notice that the 1.92 looks a little bit weird because it's like yellow and all the other ones are green that is the committee trying to find scenarios that that seemed appealing that did not send new scotland elementary to north albany because the committee was fully aware when they looked at this because as

099dr tour said when they saw the spreadsheet first it was blind they did not know what school was in what elementary in middle school and so they made a selection and i think their first cut was a few number of changes like seven or under changes and then they looked at these columns way on the right that have to do with transportation trying to reduce our long walkers because we know that that's just really unfortunate when we had these kids walking a long way and they came up with i think 12 or 15 that they thought they could tolerate and then we looked at the school names so they didn't know what schools that was just what the data led to it was like oh wow like only three out of like the 12 or

100the 15 had new scotland not going to north albany now i haven't had the time since tuesday to dig into why that is i think it's because this the community was looking for few numbers of changes right and new scotland is a huge school it has an overwhelmingly positive um score in terms of its academics so once you um if you don't move new scotland out of hackett you have to do a whole lot of other things to try and counterbalance it that's my gut about why it happened that way but i don't really know and i can figure that out because it was definitely striking but that's why that 1.92 is is so different than the others because the committee went wait this is crazy we have to look at scenarios that new scotland

101would continue and again remember what dr robin said he said you can't worry too much about like these are the top 60 out of 320 to begin with so the 192 looks low but it's it's not it's not something you should be get overly concerned about okay so that's the composite range column now we've got two sets of transportation data these are general ed students by home address the transportation department found the mileage for each and every existing grade three through five students this is not like hypothetical ranges these are actual students in the actual elementary schools right now and measured how far their commute would be from their home address again you tabitha your point about transiency is well taken it's just their current home address to each of the middle schools and then

102we defined it and divided it into three categories closer than a mile to school a mile to a mile and a half and a mile and a half and up and those three categories are based on our real busing situation right we know that we right now in the city of albany only have busing for children who live more than a mile and a half from school otherwise you have to get yourself to school somehow you can buy your own bus pass your parents can drop you you can walk something but we cannot provide bus in less than one and a half miles we as a board have considered that multiple times we can consider that again i remind you that every time we've looked at that it's been a roughly three to five million

103dollar price tag which is roughly a three to five percent property tax increase right on top of what other property tax increase we would need just to provide the program so it's a very very considerable expense um and so i'm not saying we can't do that i'm just saying that's that's why historically we have not done it and so that's why we went with one and a half and over and then i think we just decided less than one felt like you know walk through middle school a mile is not an outrageous walk for a middle schooler um and then the difference was the one to one and a half which we in our minds have been calling the long walk zone right these are kids who are not eligible for busing and they don't

104live really comfortably close now you know a mile and a half is not a terrible walk from school um you know when it's not raining snowing slushing horrible but it's it's not great um and so we totaled those up and we did it twice the orange column is all students and the pink column is economically disadvantaged students because we're always trying to look at things with an equity lens and trying to make sure that we were being cognizant of the disparate income impact of transportation challenge on families with means and families without means and so that i think brings me to the end of how the spreadsheet was constructed and so what i'm hoping that you all can do is is to talk a little bit about like what are the kind of factors you

105think committee community is going to share or want to know about to help the district think about data that they might need to provide for us to make a better decision i know that one of the factors is transportation is that what you wanted to talk about now so i did ask the superintendent already this morning and i and she said that she could um ask someone to do this to create a map of each scenario which students um in scenario 25828a that's the top one which if you mapped all those students where they actually lived so that we could get a sense because the transportation is very complicated right because it's not just how far they live which is all we've got in these columns it's where are the bus routes what would a

106tripper bus look like all of those things we cannot do from this data but perhaps we could from a scatter plot and the committee already looked at that one of the first things they looked at was maps with little dots on them for each elementary school as they tried to figure this out so that that data exists it just needs to be built back in um so that's the kind of question that we like what else might you want to know dr store i see your finger on the microphone i just wanted to point out that these 60 scenarios that we started with are all better than what we have right now okay so that composite score that you see for what is current 4.3 something every one of the 60 was better than what

107we have hey ms bowie could you pull up the actual document instead of the um powerpoint for me because that actually has that information on it you know and so when you're looking at when ann was talking about you know we had scenarios that were 12 changes even those 12 changes we're better than what we have right now we try to make minimize all of those factors the other thing i think i don't know if and you mentioned it is that one of the cutoffs that we had was we made that composite score two and less so that got rid of a whole bunch of through 60s scenarios that's right the top these 60 were the top i ranked them by composite score and i took the top 12 atop 12 sets 60 scenarios no

10810 sets 60 scenarios which gives us was the 1.99 cutoff but if you look at the document that the suit that board clerk is pulling up which is really tiny um but you can make it larger on your screen and this is just on the agenda everybody can see this it says all much better on the on the enrollment range and on the composite range they're all much better all of the 60 were much better right and then these eight were pulled almost entirely from the top half of the 60 the exceptions being those ones that got added in because they were hunting for new scotland options and the only thing that was a little surprising when i went and looked these at these is that most of them do have more long lockers than

109what we have now there are not many scenarios that result in fewer long walkers which is not a surprise because we know that north albany is not convenient um so that is uh that is a big challenge there are a few two that are um fewer long walkers and there's i think one that's almost comparable but mostly they're they're not as good on that category which is disappointing that was not something i used to cut the initial 60. so um do you want to talk a little bit more about transportation i mean i i i think it's important for us to get that in data which uh which i'm sure we'll get soon in terms of what is it what are the current routes now and what new route we would need for any of

110these eight scenarios to make the decision especially in light of how long would it take right because people might prefer to have a neighborhood school like a walking it might take let's say it might take you 45 minutes to walk to one of the middle schools and it might you might find that the bus takes you an hour and a half and parents should and you know would prefer that maybe okay you know become rain or snow or whatever i'd rather have my child walk for 45 minutes than to be in the bug but those are personal choices but having that information out there would be useful for people as we're doing these forums to make those kind of choices for themselves and let and inform us as to hey we prefer this instead of

111that and that might change some of these assumptions that we're making um where we're trying to decrease the number of walkers but maybe the number of walkers may not change because people are choosing dual um especially in in lieu of the current covert situation where we can't find drivers that's you know cdt or for a student or you know other districts are suffering too we you know we're hoping that cdt will have roots and we see that you have drivers we don't know we're assuming that they go but if a bus is delayed or the student misses the bus then they have to take some other means of transportation not a tripper bus that goes directly from that pickup spot to the school but their own way and that might involve two you know two

112connections and that is something to think about but while we think about that we should also look at the current situations where students do come in from the other part of town to myers and so you know some of these issues exist even today and but we need to have that information that your parents can make the choice board members uh thanks thanks for bringing that up doctor i think it's important she can do that i think it's important to know from a transportation perspective you know how many drivers and how many routes would be required for each of these options to know which is most affordable and which is most feasible given a driver shortage your question about tripper buses did bring up something and i'm curious to confirm when we run trip or

113buses now we don't set it up so any sixth grader that's eligible for busing has to like make connections is that correct no that's not correct is there there are plenty of trooper kids who need to make a connection um particularly if you live like way out western avenue the trip or buses only go out as far as brevatore i think so the only way for you to get on to school is either drive walk or walk up to the bus like the number 10 take the number 10 down and try and catch the tripper because where myers is and i only know this because i have had children at myers where myers is the only bus that goes there is the 106 which does not like go anyplace useful if you live up on

114our western so those kids either carpool or a few of them have tried to take the number 10 into town then take the tripper bus from from where it starts over to myers but like think about this you're 12 years old you have to make a transfer that only runs once a day like it's very very very difficult so it's most families choose to find some other solution um but this is you know this is true currently and it's going to be true um you know in the new world order too again we can attempt to increase our transportation budget to mitigate for that because that it would not be illegal for us to spend money on right it is illegal for us to spend transportation money to bus children who live less than one

115and a half um but it is not against the law it may be budgetarily challenging for us to increase the roots for kids who live out farther but that that's something we could certainly ask the superintendent to do some analysis and figure out what the budget implications would be of improving that that's it's helpful to know because so many of the bus routes in albany are east west and so much of what we're considering is moving kids north and south and i think that in part has people concerned just because there are fewer reliable bus routes that go that way do want to clarify that though what ann said is correct however when you're when you're on a trip or bus there are no connections the trip or bus goes it runs the route and

116goes directly to school it doesn't though we don't have connections built into the tripper routes there probably are children well there definitely are children in the city who who take a connector bus to get to where the tripper bus is convenient for them to get on it but the trippers themselves do not have connections built into the routes thank you other thoughts i know you know we've asked for the scatter plots now we're looking for more information about transportation and transportation budgetary constraints and what we could do to mitigate some of this keeping in mind what dr chatur said which is even all the money in the world does not resolve our problem if we do not have drivers right we're already facing that i think many of you know that the bethlehem board is

117seriously considering or may have already passed an increase in their walk zone to match hours at 1.5 um they used to be smaller what their old one was but they have they have gone to 1.5 because they simply don't have enough drivers and we know the lack of drivers is impacting us right now so we hope that that will mitigate over time but there's no um there's no guarantee um you know we may just be in a new world order in terms of bus drivers i don't know who else anybody want to speak to ms wilson i'm almost leaning towards the new world order of bus drivers because um knowing that there are 20 50 goals for us to like reduce our carbon footprint as a society and you know just thinking about just the

118carbon footprint of like traversing the city and knowing that in albany actually having this many buses is a new phenomenon there was actually a part of town um in the south end that did not have a bus line that during that long strip all the way down to south pearl for a historically long time so understanding people's concerns and also um understanding that there was something that went viral the other day about people shocked with moving from new york city where students are on like two subway trains and then here in you know upstate we drop our students right to the door so it's like there is a dichotomy there to understand and i do want to hear the wisdom from the community about and you know any insights they have because there may be

119someone out there who has something that we can like you know pull in that we can consider as also but that is something i wanted to interject is that yes um transportation is that equity issue of course and there's also the inclement weather there is the attendance aspect i don't know if there's a correlation between distance and attendance but that's something to consider also we know there's a correlation between leather and attendance for sure right one you know we're very aware that that's an impact so interesting miss smith yeah i'm just back on dr chatura's uh uh comments around uh you know maybe some parents were neighborhood schools i guess i'm concerned about that focus because that you don't really have middle schools that are neighborhood schools i mean it's not a thing is that

120am i correct about that i mean like north albany is not really a neighborhood school do you mean i'm just i'm just it's the use of the term i guess did you mean to say middle schools or neighborhood schools okay can you just repeat what you were saying i i wish i remember exactly what he said yeah well i can't review it why in the meeting right so what i was saying is right now people have bought a house based on some school elementary what have you and assume that they're going to go to school a b c or d right and that school a b or c depending on what distance from they either have a bus or they don't have a bus and here the assumption we're making is that if you don't

121have a bus maybe you're dropping your kid or you're paying for you must pass yourself or to your pocket or your kids are walking we want to reduce the number of people who are walking between one and one point four nine miles that's what the assumption is but it could so well be that now you get a bus because you're going to instead of going to school a you're going to school b right but that walk was 45 minutes because it's closer to my neighborhood i can't really i mean i'm getting a bus now to school b and that bus route bus ride is taking me twice the amount of time so now even though i could have walked or dropped my kid i am in a position where i have to drive longer or

122not be in a position to walk but if i miss that trip or bust have to take two city buses to get to school b that is people's choices right people might be okay with it people will not be okay with it and they may so while we are trying to reduce the walk people might prefer the walk to a you're saying you think that there are some people and again we're asking for community input who would rather be at 1.49 then at 1.51 right i mean hack it is a hack it is in a is in a position where it's like centrally located lots of bus routes lots of but myers is on one end not albany is in the other so somebody is going to be affected anyways and again all of these

123things that came up it was it was amazing that you know we did not have any names and it was a data that and our assumptions that we thought that these would be important pulled up these things so any of these are better than what we have right now and the community input is what would actually influence what choices should we be looking at what you know what what we think is important may not be important to the community we don't know that on that point you're talking i was going to if it's okay i guess and i think this is sort of the same kind of thing you're saying is that um i think every family is going to face the i wish my middle school were closer challenge right i can't think of

124any family that's going to say i wish my my school was a way farther away right because every family is going to be challenged by having to figure out that transportation if their kid misses the trip that misses the trip or bus or whatever and i'm always sensitive to the fact that there's a i wish i were a social scientist so i could speak to it but there's a an effect of being in a certain community and you feel that community and you don't necessarily feel the community that you don't see and that's i'm really we really i feel need to steal ourselves against that because this can't be like a vote about who is who's the loudest like that because ev i can't imagine and i shouldn't try and imagine other people's scenarios everybody

125has to make their own decisions but if we only hear from and that's why i really appreciate the superintendent's extreme commitment to doing these focus groups and i know the principals are going to be out there saying please come to the focus groups parents because we need to hear your voices because we need to hear from everyone um and we know that that we don't we often hear from the same um the same schools parents representing the same schools over and over again uh board member crete did you have something on that point i guess i had something on that point and just the point about uh the people talking about it's too soon and it's too fast because i understand that we don't have a very long time frame in terms of having the

126focus groups and making a decision but in terms of the comments well it's too soon to get used to the idea of my kid going to a different middle school than the one they expected to go to well we've been discussing for five years we're going to put together a theater committee and we're going to uh equalize or i should say we we're going to change our feeder pattern to bring about greater equity so no one who's no one whose kids are in elementary school now should have counted on or could have banked on yes my kid's going to go to the same middle school that they've always been to it's not something that somebody should have i will only say in fairness to the community that we did originally think the construction was going

127to take longer so when we originally had the bond referendum to pay for north albany we thought that it was going to take an extra year and we were not going to be until 2324 right so this is a year earlier which is a good thing because it meant the construction was less expensive and it meant that we were able to mitigate what has when we spent practically the entire time i've been on the board we have spent trying to get to a place where we had equitable middle schools with three grades in them right like this the fact that we had some of our sixth graders and some fifth grade um elementary schools was was really creating problems in our district um that we can talk about some other time but it's taken a

128long time to get there but it is it is a true thing that when we first announced and and and got the voters to um support the north albany program it was supposed to be 23-24 but well it's good that we're going to be able to solve the problem earlier but um but it is a surprise i see board member albany who has not spoken as much and then board member wilson if that's okay with you guys i just want to make two comments two points regarding one time and then two uh the 60 options eight options so first of all the time aspect for me i really do hope that we get these focus groups so we get more community input in the next few weeks because that will really um is there is

129there an echo okay um so i i really want to see that and it will absolutely weigh on my mind in terms of how we go [Music] but regardless i do want to put my my vote of confidence in this process in that um the data we are crunching is going to i mean the results these eight options are all more equitable than what we've got going right now and as far as um what we think as a community and uh what we do as a community we i want everyone to rest assured that these options are in fact like we'll lay out better outcomes for our schools and our students and that is something that i do believe the time aspect it's unfortunate that we don't have as much time as we'd like and

130i really do think we need to work fast um in order to get the word out so i assume that the principals will have those focus group dates tomorrow to try and drive some attendance that's what we worked with to get them set up so they're going to be advertising them so that we can and we're also working with our community schools coordinators so i i mean we have them scheduled we're doing the work so i would think that we are absolutely taking it seriously as we have from the very beginning of the process and saying that we would be engaging our community so um yeah sounds like we're headed out i would hope that that's clear let's see i i know board member wilson was supposed to be next but miss smith can you

131hold can you yell for her it's a very brief i promise i'm sure you guys can and i want to um for one i guess to hassan says something similar that i wanted to address but i also wanted to state that i know board member creature is basically saying that um you know we're definitely not rushing and we don't mean to blindside folks but i don't think um and i don't think you're saying that people who don't know or unawares are negligent there's like um and i think miss pharrell spoke to that so i'll let her come off from me also to say it herself but i think there's studies around poverty in the brain and you just simply don't have the capacity to process things that are happening even if you knew for the

132five years so it's sort of like it's no it doesn't permeate every community the same so and i don't think you're saying that but you know you know what i mean but i just wanted to make sure that it landed on everybody that's not what you meant because there are people who won't know things people there are people who don't know things about our government about our local government that they just don't know and it's not something you're doing deliberately and i don't think you meant that no that's not what i meant it was more that i was saying do you need more than six months to prep your kids about what middle school they're going to i mean people are getting into colleges now that have you know less time to figure out how

133to pack up their stuff and move across the country so i don't know that you need more than six months to figure out do you do that sort of um orientation no but i think sometimes if it's going to impact you and you don't have a car or you know or if you have multiple students so it's i i'm that's why i said i have sensitivity to the people who i feel like why don't we wait and that's why i wanted to know more about the potential for waiting but that's why i also entertain the part about if we wait are we not just rolling up the same decision because we have only this we have a certain capacity that we're at and we only have we have the buildings we have so it's not

134like the different conflict that we've arrived at the best statistical configurations and the superintendent ensured the process was transparent and very inclusive and and also um we weren't rushing so i i appreciate what you understood i didn't mean to i didn't need to sound insensitive to parents it's because i know when you know when things change it is difficult and especially now with some new things going on it is traumatic to have things change unexpectedly thanks i appreciate that and i don't think you meant that i just didn't want it to be a thing where it sounded that way so all right yeah thank you both because that's i was kind of had an ouch there as my myself i think we should never be people should know even if it was something we told

135them yesterday let's just continue to get the word out and on that note what i was going to say is i personally superintendent i i would be happy to be out of school after school or in the morning greeting parents and students doing handing out a flyer if need be i know you've got pretty much all of that in place but if there's something that i can personally do to interact with families to make sure they have the word out i want to do that okay so um i will make that time okay thank you i wanted to point out two other criteria that have come board member man i'm sorry just trying to formulate my comment um a part of me worries that we're moving very quickly and uh you know and i do

136like the way um ms wilson praised it right um it's like this dilemma doing you know but um i just kind of wanted to put that out there i mean that's a um that's a big concern of mine with the whole process which is a very very very beautiful and transparent process i love the way all this went down fact we use data but uh but i worry about the pace that we're moving so and so it's just a statement and you know look to be back from the community i see gentlemen gentlemen here first doctor chittor then board member el monrawi then ms smith so you know we raised this question about why do we need to move so fast for the upcoming year why not wait another year while we are doing comedy

137and i personally asked that question because i was wondering too should we wait should we push this decision to next year and correct me from wrong super news you explain to us that what is the the current situation that is is inequitable it's wrong right and we want to fix those and not fast enough to kick the can down the road at the same time we have three schools we have north albany which is about 400 kids or so and lots of space now the construction will be done and we have hackett which is bursting the same follow the lives so there's inequity in even in those things where the kids are going to have to admire have a different form of inactivity they are not getting the attention that they could get if we

138were equally distributed the resources also can be accurately distributed so one of the things that that i want to point out that we're looking at equity right not equal but equity so if north albany is the third middle school and people are worried that you know it's a new school that's not what the equity process is going to do if more resources are needed if more triple buses are needed to get kids from point a to point b if they're in that school that's what we've done but this whole process i think has been i mean it's been very unbiased and and that's what i like about it and if the if the cards so far that your child happened you thought was going to school here now goes to school b but it makes

139sense for the district and your student as part of this district i think it's a good thing maybe we want all our kids to be good [Music] thanks dr tour um actually i just wanted to comment just on that um that we really uh for this plan to succeed we're gonna need the community buy-in um and i do worry that if we don't get community buy-in that the plan um will end up having unintended consequences and that um the projections or forecasts would be skewed because of counter actions by our community so um it's it's very complex um however if we don't have community buy-in i don't think regardless of how good our plan is it may not succeed that's my concern and one more thing uh can vicki go because she's nominated board members

140go get doctors i'll come after you i just want to remind people that 10 years ago 11 years ago hackett was not in a good place right when my child was in an elementary school and he was going to go to hackett my wife and i had the same conversation are we doing the right thing it was a failing school it was under receivership and things are like night and day now right so given the right resources and the right systems working within things can be fixed and that's what we are trying to do so um i just wanted to come back to can we if we've got a uh the district superintendent and the principal they have a plan for the forums i'm not sure where we would go right now on this discussion

141of do we are we needing too quickly are we not let's get to next week where we do have the input and just keep kind of evaluating as as we're moving along um and that's why i'm saying you know if the superintendent if we need extra hands you know because i want to see our teachers in the classroom our community engage with people doing what they need to do but if like i can help free up some time and you know lend a hand to hand out flyers and talk to folks to say we really need your input then i want to do that so i i want to i'd like to move away if we can from that discussion the other thing that i'm not sure of which is i think whenever president is

142where you started is what other issues do we think the community uh has in mind i'm going to say i can't speak for that i want to hear that and i don't want to pretend that i know something that i don't know so another reason to let's get the forums underway began to get feedback i want to bring us back to the question which i started with which was what other information what might we need from the district because they need we they need to be working on that at the same time as the forums um and the two pieces that have come up repeatedly which i know the superintendent knows there's nothing nothing surprising here but i just want to remind you all is um siblings right and i know that that data was

143constructed once and we're going to reconstruct it superintendent i talked about this this morning it's not a lot of kids right it's only sixth graders who have a current fifth grade or fourth grade sibling and seventh graders who have a current fifth grade sibling right those are those would be the two groups of people that would be impacted and so we we do need to know how many individual children would be impacted by each scenario i don't think we should use it to define not by each scenario in general how many siblings there would be because i don't think we can use it to pick a scenario but we might use it to decide that we are going to provide a sibling preference opportunity um during this transition period right i don't know if we

144can do that it would depend on the large you know the quantity of people because it could really skew our um metrics we'll just have to see what that looks like and i also wanted to remind people that there is an open enrollment process ms mckenna has spoken about multiple times she can certainly do that again that exists at the middle school level um and so that is also for students who want to request an open enrollment to a different middle school in general in our you know most recent lived experience it has been more theoretical than practical because our schools have been several schools have been um over capacity so you could ask to go to hack it but there's not more way to hack it right so but in this scenario there would

145presumably be more flexibility but not infinite flexibility right once classes are full we need to balance our students among schools so the siblings and open enrollment um and then the other piece i just wanted to um just remind people which i think dr chittor mentioned about is that you know north albany is still under construction the project is not done so we i hear i hear people talking about like are we going to fast should we go too slow like how how should we do this do people need more time to prepare hopefully the project is going to come in on time right that would be a that is the one other thing that's completely outside our control um as far as i know the construction is is relatively on schedule i know facilities committee

146has been watching it carefully but you know stuff happens in the construction world so i just think that's something that we should should keep our our mental energy on as well so we also have heard a couple of a couple of other things that i had community members say to me which again i don't know this will come out of the forms this is just things that actually committee members have said to me is um should we try and make north albany as best as possible right if you if we're going to have three equal schools should we try and make north albany best among equals so that if people so people have no doubt because i do think part of this is um what i call the lack of imagination for people i think

147when people look at these scenarios their process is going to be first to look at their elementary school where's my elementary school oh it's at north albany well i can't send my kid to north albany it's going to take them a minute to realize that going to north albany like let's just suppose my kid currently goes to um duel and i'm i'm looking at the top scenario i would be also going to north albany with the new scotland families right so it takes like that's two steps first step is where's my school going second step is who else will be there with me third step is what's the school that i'm leaving gonna look like right because that it's not really the same because i'm not at hackett anymore but neither is new scotland so

148it's just like a totally different school so i think people need a little time to process that and i also think that um this community member said or this committee member said to me maybe we ought to make it really clear that of the three the one at north albany is you know a tiny smidge better because these are ranges right the fact that that that composite says 1.4 means that there's a range between the lowest and the highest school of 1.4 and so looking for ranges where north albany's at the top of the range i'm not saying we should do that i'm just saying that's what somebody told me and then also i do want to um share that i have heard from committee member about the you know the very serious challenges that

149um you know transition challenge chances are nothing but the big transition that duel has been through in the last year and that we'd be looking for a second big transition for them so that i thought was that's a slightly different to me than what i think every single school is going to say which is i don't want to change i want to stay where i am i like my school i like my teachers i think that's going to be the general theme but i do think that it's fair to say that um you know dual's been through a very big transition this year so i think i'm not saying we have to take into account i just think it's it is a different categorically different thing than just i like my school and i want

150to stay there so those were my other things that are not about fast or slow remember uh just about the sibling um matters so i think what you were referring to might be different than what i'm thinking and i just want to just casually mention that as something that was brought to me by a community member is that if one of their children is in elementary school and it's in one end of the city and uh they planned for their lives to be on this end of the city and that they would take their child to the middle school right next to that elementary school so that their commute and their drop-off would be cohesive now they're basically splitting up which um i think it might be a little bit different than the sibling uh

151matter that you were talking yeah that is different and i do understand it sort of like the toast hack it um kind of scenario because they're so so close got it okay i hear you that's an interesting another interesting take on it anyone else have things like that that they want to raise otherwise i think we are pretty close to done done are we done um and then we will come back a week from tonight are we going to be able to meet a week from tonight or will we have to wait till the next because we did have a special superintendent i will talk offline we do have on the calendar a special meeting for feeder for february 17th um but if we don't have anything new to discuss because we need to collect

152the rest of the forum feedback then so you and i'll talk offline and we'll make a plan okay a plan will be forthcoming after we think about that a little bit thank you guys for this really informative discussion and i appreciate you letting me like eat most of the air time and and talk a lot but i hope that you all felt that you got to say what you thought you needed to say yeah exactly all right so that brings us to the end of the feeder alignment conversation and miraculously we're still ahead of schedule and our next discussion item is going to be the grants and program development division update superintendent thank you so very much madam president members of the board at this time we have our division update from our grants and

153program development division and mrs eileen lefler is on the screen and ready to share her division update so thank you so very much mrs lefla good evening i'm happy to be here to provide the update for the grants division you're all familiar with this slide the grants division supports the district vision mission and goals the specific guiding principles for the grants division include the following we seek and apply for public and private funding to support the educational emotional and social needs of our students program design and decisions to pursue grants are aligned with district priorities and data driven identified needs we look to coordinate funding sources to maximize the use of funds and on a daily basis the grants office provides technical assistance to all buildings that have programs funded through grants as well as

154the non-publics that receive equitable shares of our title grants the district receives both competitive and allocational grants allocational grants are those grants from new york state education department that all districts receive based on a particular formula for any given grant we must follow all the grant requirements for program design narrative and allowable budget expenditures and submit within the given due date and timeline in order to receive the funding competitive grants are just that we compete with other applicants for available funding depending on how well your application scores in the context of other applications submitted determines whether or not we are awarded the funds this slide depicts the new competitive and allocational grants received for this school year so we've received the extended school day violence prevention grant that serves hackett montessori and north albany middle

155school we received a local government records management grant that's to help to organize all of our archived files for our graduates and all of our new registrants we received the learning technology grant and we've also received the usda freight farm grant which will provide a freight farm hydroponic farm container farm at the high school and as you're all very well aware of the new allocational grants for this year are the covet relief fundings the cyrissa and arp which are the acronyms for what you see up there also for this school year we have recurring grants reoccurring competitive grants are those that are funded annually over multiple years recurring allocational grants are those that we receive an allocation for annually and must submit a new application in order to receive them and this slide depicts the

156recurring grants we have for this school year we're in our final year of the 21st century community learning schools grant we have one more year of the empire state after school program grant this is the final year for the my brother's keeper challenge grant that we've had for a few years the mckinney-vento homeless grant also ends this year and the my brother's keeper fellows grant and smart scholars and this year as well allocational grants that we receive each year are the consolidated application that consists of all of our title grants idea 6 and 11 and 619 support our special ed programs and then our school improvement grants for those schools who are identified we have a basic grant and then this year we have an enhanced grant that is for our tsi schools and a

157targeted support grant for csi schools it provides them additional funding on top of their basic school improvement grants universal pre-k and perkins which supports our cte programs so the next um few slides are going to be some details about our new allocational funding the coveted relief funds the cyrissa and art funds and i'll start with cyrissa this is one of the one-time covet relief funds that the school district received this year cyrissa or the coronavirus response relief supplemental appropriations grant was the first round of this funding you'll see there it's 14 million plus dollars it expires september 30th 2023 which means we those funds are all available through that time period you'll see the allowable use of funds i like the term when they say it's a wide range of activities to address diverse needs

158arising from or exacerbated by covid but then there's lots and lots of documentation with all of the sub areas that fall within that for the allowable use of funds but i've included here just you know the second bullet which kind of encapsulates most of those we're really looking at focusing on responding to students social emotional mental health and academic and academic needs um the um the district use of funds focused on the following areas educational technology mental health services and support supplemental after school programs addressing learning loss and staff necessary to maintain the operation and continuity of services this provides some cyrissa budget details so the budget submitted for the cyrissa grant was submitted with the intent of utilizing the full 14 million dollars in the 21 22 school year and so you'll see this

159chart where the blue line represents what was budgeted in the particular category and the on my screen is red ish um the encumbered and expense to date encumbered meaning we've entered into a purchase order for those services um expensed means we've entered into it and we've had the service and have paid and you can see here that predominant amount of those funds have gone for salaries and the associated benefits the arp grants this is the american rescue plan funds it was the next round of funding we received we had a base allocation and three state reserve allocations you can see here what the arp base grant amount was and then each of the three state reserve grants all these grants expire september 30th 2024. i think most of you are familiar with the fact that

160the arp was developed based on community and stakeholder input the um budget was developed and the plan was developed following the required process for the community and stakeholder input it was done through a survey you can see here the number of responses and who participated in those surveys and through that process the district highlighted our art planning process and the opportunity for that public input and we will regularly and we are regularly monitoring that um and we'll continue to use cert um surveys to gain input um as we go along with implementing the grant because we know that um these are proposed plans in a lot of situations and things change and so there's always opportunities to revisit that getting increased input and make amendments this is just some more information about the art grants

161um the priorities that were identified through that stakeholder process you can see here where the social emotional mental health supports educational technology safety and security the hvac systems and accelerated learning and academic support the grant program and budget were developed over the course of the grant period so it's essentially three years so we have an internal three-year budget to follow for the total amount of those funds and i'll be giving you some more information about that in the next couple of slides so this is the art budget details for the entire grant period 2021 through 2024 so you'll see down there um at the bottom of the slide color coded this year is the blue and then you'll see the following two years in the reddish oranges color and green again you'll see that a

162predominant amount of funds are for professional salaries not at support salaries there are associated benefits and purchased services and that makes sense because those things provide the services to the students you see a higher amount devoted to purchase services in the 2021-22 school year because that is where the hvac services are budgeted at a cost of about 6.2 million dollars the professional salaries go up over the next two years as you can see compared to 2122 as we budgeted for a predominant amount of the salaries in the cyrissa grant for 2122 they'll move to the arp grant in the following year this just depicts the activity to date with what was budgeted and what's been expensed and encumbered to date for the 21-22 school year this slide gives you some information for all the grants

163we receive so this is um indicative of all of our competitive and allocational grants including the cyrissa and arp and it's broken out by the budget categories which gives information about opportunities for students and again you can see our trend is focused on salaries and benefits and purchase services as these are the areas that provide direct services to students this is just another slide that gives an overall picture of the total amount of grants from last year to this year and you can see that there's a significant increase in the budgeted for 2122 and that is due largely to the arpan cyrissa grants the unexpended funds in 2021 totals about 5.6 million dollars that's that difference between those two amounts there at the end year 2021 of that 2.3 million is available for us to

164budget and use in the 2122 school year this is for grants that allow carryover of unused funds for the next year the balance of that is not available in carryover and these funds the funds on expended in these grants were unused largely due to covet impacting program implementation carryover was allowed for grants for some grants that don't normally allow it due to cove it into this into last school year so we had an increased amount of funds in the 2021 school year as well unfortunately though with some of the covid challenges program was still impacted and funds were not used to the extent that we thought that they would be priorities for the 21-22 school year are to continue to coordinate funding sources to maximize the use of funds to continue to collaborate with all

165the divisions in schools to prioritize and seek funding for programs that cannot be accommodated by the general fund and we conduct ongoing searches for grant opportunities aligned to needs and priorities and ensuring we have tight internal controls for fiscal oversight of all grants for auditing purposes the final slide for this evening give some information about the funding forecast to date we just submitted the refugee school impact grant and that is pending that will support the aic and dual program we applied for the the next round of the 21st century community learning schools grant as i mentioned earlier um that round ends this year that's the same for the mckinney-vento homeless grant the first round that we received will be ending this year and we'll be um applying for the next round we're still it's still

166pending release from state ed and there'll be another upk expansion grant coming out hopefully um this summer and that concludes my presentation and um i look forward to any questions that you may have thank you very much mrs leffler we very very very much appreciate your work we know how much of a difference it makes to our students to have these additional funds beyond what we can afford with our property tax and state ag budget we really appreciate all the work you and your team do to make sure these funds keep coming and that they're reported on properly which i know is a not inconsequential task so thank thank you board colleagues um does anyone have a question and my apologies folks um if you notice my camera is off i'm having some sort of

167teams hates me moment but perhaps teams will get over me and be willing to let me back in a minute meanwhile questions board member smith thank you ms leffler and this probably is a question that i should have asked during the current piece but it might relate to the grants um uh superintendent do you do you think there's a possibility that we will be able to uh have field trips be re uh you know instituted uh in the spring as we are able to get more outdoors and uh does the some of these grant funds that we're carrying over allow for us to or support those kinds of things so i'm sorry that's okay our field trips are uh based on where we can go with the covid protocols where we can go we will

168go we have allowed field trips um that we really do examine what are the cova protocols that are in place we also look at requirements that are needed so i'll use one example with our jrotc program we've granted several field trips because it is a requirement for them to maintain their ability to have the jrotc at the high school and so when there are things like that that are prerequisites or conditional absolutely we try to make those arrangements and make sure that the covert protocols are in place we've done local field trips and we've done those on a case-by-case situation again looking at the covet protocols for our students ms leffler with regard to whether they are permitted in grants i will turn that over to you yes certainly um field trips are are permitted

169in the grants um and we have written them into the grants i know the my brother's keeper challenge grant has them written in um 21st century has them written in and you know if they're not written in at the outset and we want to add them in after because we've identified some that would support the program as it's approved um we're able to amend and do that as well that's great and that's really where i was trying to get to like i'm trying to be a little more optimistic about down the road and so i do appreciate that and i i was aware that we were doing some field trips but i'm sort of thinking wow what could that look like once we sort of get into a different realm so thank you both other

170questions for miss leftover please vessel thank you for your presentation and this may be strictly um theoretical but i was curious about like our investment and i know again as kovit so it's not normal but our investment in traveling conferences i just assume results in professional development rate for our teachers and staff and thus we get to embed that in the district versus sometimes i see we may use a community partner which i love and they might have like a proprietary or you know individual um what's the word like a service that they're giving us right but we pay them to do it and do you think there's a contrast between and maybe it just so so happens that it's this we want to utilize the provider or they may provide something that is truly

171unique or do you think there's a contrast in sending our folks to more conferences to like basically develop more of those skills and thus we have it distributed through the district or is that like just really abstract and not true so i'm just curious about that um well i just want to make sure i understand your question are you asking whether or not um we prefer to send folks to a way to a traveling conference somewhere and then bring that into the strategy yeah like if it's a strategy on our behalf um i don't you know i think there are some some professional development topics that lend themselves better for for each of the scenarios you've um talked about and and yes i i think depending on that um the offices that coordinate the professional

172development look to that and i think it's um topic specific right so um you know having the provider come in that um has proprietary and specializes in a particular area that comes into the district for certain things um certainly is a is a better way to go when we do that um and there are some conferences that it just is better to send them to the institute i'm going to give an example the um the standards institute that folks attend um that definitely is one that i would say that folks would say that the teams that go to that really benefit from that more greatly given the way it's run and the topic thank you for that insight thank you board member thank you miss lover um i had a technical or logistical question regarding

173um basically slide seven and ten their uh graphs pertaining to cyrissa budget details and then the arp i just quick question about the employee benefits and i'm just wondering so when you're looking at seven um or slide seven it shows that um what we are encumbered is very low i mean like comparatively um same with just the same with the uh arp funds i can answer that for you um so uh the system by which we um expense or or or show the expense for employee benefits is done on a quarterly basis and when i pulled this information for this report that's quarter one in quarter two and in some situations um for some of the for some of the salaries that have been moved over that um the benefits haven't been taken yet so

174um you know that would that will increase at the end be depicted that way so and i can certainly um if you're interested in that at a at a later time as we move uh move closer to taking quarters three and quarters four can include that in an update so that you can see those expenditures i was i was thinking that was the case i just wanted thanks i have a quick question a very detailed one which um has to do with the the on the slide and i'm sorry my self-inflicted um connectivity issue problem here is preventing me from coming to the side so i can't tell you what slide number but there was the one slide that you called out there was a very very high number that was the hvac services and

175i just was surprised that they were called hvac services um i'm wondering yes interestingly enough but i i did too so um what's actually in there we had put um when we originally applied for the grant those were placed into equipment supplies um and stated actually kicked it back to us because it's kind of a complex process in terms of there's some of it that is contractual in um in the installation piece and so um when i reached out to um ms roaring to get the more details about what the breakout is were for how much percentage an amount for supplies and equipment and amount for the contractual piece for the services for installation and provided that breakdown just stated they um preferred it to be in contractual as a purchase service and he resubmitted

176it that way i understand so that's really an uh an artifact of the way the submission went but actually what's in that services line is actually in some portion of it is is physical objects absolutely yep yep that makes way more sense because that's a lot of services i need your right rear choice if that's how it's going to roll uh miss smith thank you i i wanted to ask um if you are seeing especially uh sort of the traditional grants i know they're reacting to covid but more importantly are you seeing grants that are speaking more to uh diversity equity and inclusion are they using that kind of language and uh or metrics uh as well in reporting and this this may not be something that's actually happening i'm just trying to figure out

177like what trends we're going to see and and whether you know some of the things that we are doing in that area of equity and so forth are are supported through some of our you know traditional grants um and you may have other new you might be seeing new opportunities out there i had no idea but just wanted to inquire on that front we have definitely seen in the more recent um applications that have come out that they're using that language and they're using that language um in this way they're using it um for you to um identify and demonstrate that in the needs section and also in how you're going to address that need then in your programmatic areas so they've started to use that language and and and require that just like they

178have traditionally used it for economically disadvantaged um and um you know different subgroups if you will so it sounds so would you again like don't want to get too far off in the weeds here so the new language but is it really different than how you would have you know put information in there in other words i'm trying to see how deep this looks not deep yet it's really just starting to emerge i think okay thank you very much for patience on that one so my my last question if anybody has any others um i it is not infrequent for me to get a uh comment from a community member oh there's this great grant you should apply for and i say well we have a whole team of people who do that um and

179i am right a whole team too well it's team that's not me um so what i normally do is is suggest that they speak to the principal for if it's a smaller grant or to the grants office if it's something that's more substantial and i just wanted to validate with you that that because i think that is something we talked about some many years ago and now it's blurry on me so i just want to make sure that's your your preferred approach yeah that's correct and um and the building principles and other folks in the district know that if um they have an opportunity for a smaller grant we're there to help support them to provide information do a read or an edit or help with any writing but also we just request and they

180know to let the grants office know because then we can help navigate receipt of those funds because um that's an important piece because if if we don't help them navigate that the funds can come in in a way that um can be tricky for us to accept and use terrific well i appreciate that reminder because i think that you know people are always looking to find ways they can help help the district and i i know that you watch all the things and you probably know about every single grant that we could potentially be interested in but i'm going to keep sending people to you who think they know that's fine i'm pretty sure i don't know about every single one of them but many of them that are important to us so anyone else

181for miss leffler all right thank you very much we appreciate you and your team very small team um so thank you so much for everything you do thank you thank you for the opportunity have a good night last but not least tonight we are going to continue our discussion of the 2223 budget so deputy superintendent roaring presumably is out there somewhere yes i am okay good evening board of education i am pleased to provide you with our update on our budget development process this evening as always when we work through our budget development process we center all of our work through our vision mission and goals to make sure that that is at the floor of every decision and recommendation we make tonight we're going to review the near state comptroller's office fiscal stress for

182fiscal year 2021 update on our budget process as well as our modified rollover expense take a look at the governor's proposed budget and its implications for our revenue for 22-23 starting with the state comptroller's fiscal stress for fiscal year 2021 indicators that are included in our low liquidity operating deficits low fund balance and environmental factors albany city school district had an environmental score for 2021 of 31.7 points i think it's important to note that that's actually down five points from the previous year for our fiscal score in 2018-19 we had a designation of susceptible to fiscal stress but for fiscal years 2019-20 and 2021 we had no designation below you'll see a four-year trajectory of our fiscal score it peaked in 2018-19 which was correlated to the use of 15 million dollars in capital reserve

183for the north albany middle school and five-year plan capital project as well as not funding any reserves that year and having an unrestricted balance of less than two percent i'm pleased to note that we have been funding our reserves over the last two years and we have an unrestricted fund balance closer to four percent so we are down now to a score of 6.7 looking at our budget calendar we'll continue to provide updates over the next eight weeks or so while we develop the budget on march 24th there will be a virtual community budget presentation where we'll have the opportunity to receive input from the community in a very direct way before presenting the proposed budget on april 7th then on april 14th we are anticipating board adoption after that there will be a series

184of virtual community budget presentations our public hearing will be on may 5th and our vote will be may 17th this year we have looked at a couple of key terms as part of our budget development process our rollover budget is all current staffing and programs from the general fund carried forward for the next fiscal year along with our known contractual obligations this year we have a modified rollover budget which includes the role of our budget plus items that have been identified to be transferred from our one-time federal dollars into the general fund for 22-23 the modified rollover budget assumptions are that we are continuing with our existing programs and services all of our contractual obligations district operations and staffing and benefits under our collective marketing agreements the modified rule over budget includes all of the

185above plus absorption of identified programs and staffing funded with the one-time federal dollars the modified rule-over budget does not include funding and staffing requests submitted for 2223 adjusting any mandates that would require more resources or other items considered to be essential for programming health and safety the modified role of our budget includes renewing our hvac preventive maintenance contract as well as funding a pool maintenance contract for the five pools across the district at this time it still includes our summer school that it being returns the general fund but we are having ongoing conversations about potential other sources of funding for that it restores our extended day and night school program out of brooklyn to the 2019-20 pre-pandemic level as well as additional behavior specialists and nursing positions that have been added during 21-22 additional modified

186rollover budget inclusions to maintain current programs and operations are an increase for our software licenses to build in those previously funded by grants an increase in our technology hardware to support chromebook replacement schedule now that we are a one-to-one district as well as increasing funding for hall monitors and maintenance over time to support programming and facilities use lastly the modified rollover budget includes funding for identified programs and staff that were previously expensed in sarisa and arp dollars to be woven into the general fund including the albany international center and expansion of the dual language program tony clement center for education as well as various faculty support and administrative positions changes to our modified rollover budget since we last met as of february 10th we have had a reduction in our contribution rate for the employer

187in the ers system we have also made some adjustments in the positions including those that are absorbed from 110 federal dollars and we've had an increase in both expenses based on updated information that we have received our modified rollover expense budget as of february 10th stands at 287.58 million this is a different year-over-year of 17.3 million or 6.4 percent again the number above does not include any new funding or staffing requests submitted for 2223 additional items needed to address mandates or additional items considered essential for programming health and safety we have been notified of 40 retirements one in our administrators union 29 in our teachers union and 11 in our support union looking at governor hoga's proposed budget that she has released the state budget includes for k-12 education 2.1 billion increase in funding of

188that 1.6 billion is dedicated to fund foundation aid increases and 466 million for other programs we are in year two of the three-year path to fully fund foundation aid we are expecting to receive half of our remaining balance in 2223 and then the final piece in 23.24 the budget also includes or continues the community school set-aside is part of the foundation a total which is approximately 4.49 million it fully funds expense based aids such as transportation public and private excess cost building aid and both sea special services aid all of which albany receives continuation of categorical aids at the same per student allocation for textbooks software hardware and library materials the charter school tuition rate increase of 4.7 percent which is very close to what we anticipated it to be in our modified rollover budget

189and then there's a new program that's proposed funding at 100 million dollars over two years it would be matching funds for social emotional and academic supports for students the district will be required to match that with arp dollars we're waiting to see if this comes into the final budget that's approved by the legislature and then what the guidance is around that our revenue sources are in four buckets the first is our local revenue which is largely comprised of property taxes as well as consumer utility taxes and payments in lieu of taxes or pilots our state aid is comprised of star reimbursement foundation aid various categorical aids posted special services aid and instructional materials aids federal is comprised of medicaid assistance and e-rate and in our other category we have our interest earnings district billings appropriated

190fund balance and reserves and rebates and refunds largely associated with our health insurance at this time our 2223 revenue budget is projected to be 285.9 million dollars that is a year-over-year difference of 15.64 million revenue will continue to be reviewed and updated as additional information becomes available this number of 285.9 million does include continues of restricted reserves and appropriated fund balance of 3 million dollars and it assumes a flat property tax levy when we look at our revenue estimate by source we'll note that there's a small decrease in our local revenue largely attributable to decreased interest and penalties on our taxes we have a significant increase in state aid which is primarily attributed to foundation aid increases we have an increase of about 430 thousand dollars anticipated in federal aid associated with medicaid reimbursement and

191then a decrease in our other largely attributed to reduced uh tuition and rental billings again for a total of 285.9 million or an increased yearly year of 15.64 million when we take our initial revenue budget and compare that with our modified rollover expenses of february 10th we have a gap of 1.678 million we also want to touch on our debt service this evening debt services expense associated with capital construction projects on our schools and buildings it includes both costs for long-term borrowing which is our bonds or our short-term borrowing bans which is for our construction in progress projects that will be in construction during 22-23 include albany high phase four which we anticipate finishing by the end of that year we will commence construction of phase four north albany middle school and completion of the

192district's five-year plan debt service projections over the next several years this shows what we anticipate the debt service to be each year and then the next column is our estimated building aid for that year and the final column is the net local share or the difference between the two you'll see that we start to peak in 2526 and we have several years at a little over eight million dollars in difference so as we're looking at a new five-year plan for the district we're working very closely at how that debt service will cycle and when is the best time to bring it out without having a significant increase in our debt service expense which would impact our program as we continue our budget development process some of the variables that are in play are state aid

193which is typically finalized at the end of march with the legislative budget health insurance increases which are finalized later in march with additional data our tax cap which will be submitted by march 1st the tax levy which is adopted by the board when you adopt the budget in april uh we're still continuing to analyze the impact of the retirements we've learned of and any impact from copic 19 as we plan for 22-23 our next steps include finalizing the district's priority priorities incorporating new information as it becomes available continue reviewing our projections our estimates and our assumptions as well as responding to questions incorporating feedback that we receive from the board community our community budget committee and staff as well as continuing our lobbying efforts and i will take any questions you may have ford colleague

194i appreciate deputy superintendent roaring revisiting the material from the last meeting i had asked her to do that because i know uh while it was a review for us community members join into this process at any time and so i asked her to include those slides that show why the rollover budget is um such a substantial increase as we absorb those positions back from the saris and appr funds so you can certainly ask any questions about that although that was something we talked about at some length last time so does anybody have any questions about the rollover budget part of the presentation before we move on to the new material which had to do with the governor's proposed budget i can't comment about slide four go for it slide four so where it talks about

195environmental score and fiscal score i just want to point out to people that the environment score really is nothing in our control because it's a factor that involves like the poverty uh it involves the number of non-english speakers the turnover ratio and things like that which we have no control over really uh and so even though it may be bigger that's the nature of any urban school district the fiscal score is a measure of the fiscal stress and we're doing pretty good absolutely i like to say that it's yes we know right that's exactly what we say every time we go to lobby our folks that we lobby every single year and frequently throughout the years we're under extreme environmental stress that is the reality of our situation we have a lot of children who

196have a lot of needs that's what that score means so it is a really good score i think it's actually useful i just wish it wasn't in the same report as the fiscal score because it implies that there's they're somehow similar and they're such totally different things um uh anything else on the fiscal fiscal stress the piece before we move off of that all right ms wilson did you have a question oh no no that's fine anything else on rollover if not then anything on the governor's budget proposal i am still slow to open documents so i can't give you slide numbers i apologize 14. doctors board secretary tours feeding my lines 14. anything about the governor's proposed budget which is now up on the slide here um i think everyone when you see your

197legislators thank them right the fact is that fulfilling our foundation promise of foundation aid is a huge major improvement right it's a weird year because we have absorbed a lot of stuff from cyrissa and arp so we have expanded our services as we desperately need to to address the opportunities our students were denied because of the various challenges faced by covid and that's why our budget has like gone up so substantially but if if we did not have that increase in foundation aid this year we would have a very very serious problem so um so really when you see your folks um thank them write them letters um and you know our legislative priorities still exist we still think they think they're things that they should be doing um to make things even more equitable

198in the state but it but this proposal is is a much better than we have typically seen at this stage in the budget process also i know everyone knows generally when the state budget is adopted it never gets worse typically never say never but typically it gets better or at least not doesn't go down so we'll see um anything else people wanted to ask here how about i think next is debt service is the next category revenue sources which is really the overall revenue picture anybody on revenue otherwise i think we'll all move to debt should i do them out of border debt service here we go um i had one quick question about dead service that requires the slide with millions of numbers on it if you could move to that 21 thank you

199um i am just noticing i always when i look at this slide i notice the the um it's not the gross amount it's the change right so i see that next year our debt service is going to go down by 1.3 million dollars and we're certainly going to have 1.3 million dollars that we can spend on something else and then two years later it goes up by almost the same amount to 8.4 so in our fiscal planning if i were doing this for my own household i would put that 1.3 in a reserve fund knowing that i was going to need it to fill out my budget two years later is that a logical way to look at these numbers or am i you know oversimplifying no i think as you're looking at the net

200local share on the far right hand side that is actually a very accurate way of looking at it it's really important to watch the ebb and flow of that so that as we recognize some savings in one year we could either look to save it in a reserve fund and pull it in later or use it for some one-time expenditures that we may need to do that year so not necessarily commit to recurring expenditures with those dollars as you know they would be needed again in two years right so uh you know a year from now when we're having this conversation we will be having it with someone who is not you um and so you know we as a team i think need to kind of start putting that piece in our head that

201this 1.3 and i'm sure whoever um is filling deputy superintendent's roaring chair will also be able to guide us through this but that 1.3 million dollars if we add 1.3 million dollars worth of teachers we're going to be all good for like two years and then that third year we're going to be short 1.3 million dollars worth of staffing expenses and have to either raise taxes or somehow i don't know grab a bank or get a donation or something get money somewhere so just i just want to this these numbers because we've been so deeply invested in construction um are big and make big difference in our in our lives so um okay that was my question on debt does anybody else have questions on debt everybody gets this right like the way this this

202crazy thing works that the state pays us back a year after and that's why these numbers don't they don't stay the same so it's just like this reimbursement problem okay actually um mr rory can you can you remind us about you know remember there's something about the small cities debt ceiling that we face so as a small city we have a statutory debt limit that has a correlation to the city and that does restrict what we can do independently without a super majority vote which the district did receive for its north albany middle school project and five-year plan because we have exceeded our statutory debt limit at this time yeah we had that as a legislative party i think um nisbo some uh some some the business officials organization had that as a priority for

203a while to try and get that fixed um because there's no reason that we're different than everybody else just another thing we have to fight with okay um can you progress aside ms bowie so i can figure out what's going on because i'm still not able to see uh yes budget variables um so this is what this is sort of looking forward what else is going to happen um and how it's going to happen one question i had here is i know you were very clear at the beginning to say that this does not include any of the many things that have been put at in program reviews as additional supports that would be beneficial for our students but then i think on the next slide it says you know continue to prioritize district priorities

204which i finalize district priorities which i think means figure out what if anything else we can do in comparison to how much money we have right um because we don't have any new programming in here at all um any of the new supports that we know would be beneficial um and so do you have a sense of timing of when that when we be in a position to see are you going to wait to really try and finalize district ask until we know what the state adopted budget really looks like is that what we're expecting or how is that going to play forward so over the next couple of weeks we're going to be working very closely to bring to you by march 3rd a balanced budget and then our priority ads should additional revenue

205materialize either through an increase in the tax levy or additional state aid or wherever it may come from that's our target i understand march so march 3rd we should see a balanced budget and then after that we can address what happens next which of course will require april 1st to come and go before we're able to really understand what our real final situation is okay um other people have questions then i have one more because i'm the budget person i always have questions and i realize i should have asked miss leffler and i apologize i am still having a hard time visualizing what is left in the arp and cyrissa money this year we're bringing a whole ton of stuff back right we're saying we use cyrissa narp money to fund these things but we

206want to continue them so we're bringing them into the operational budget and so our budget went up like i don't know six million dollars of staffing i would like to know what else is in arp and cyrissa that that we would like to bring back so that i can visualize what the next two or three budgets are going to look like as we try and bring this back and so i think i probably should have asked ms lefleur that question and i didn't think of it when she was here um and i wonder what it would take for us to get some sort of at least overall understanding of that it doesn't have to be to the penny i'm just trying to understand like what's out there that's going to come back to us next

207year so that's part of the process of what we're doing um within the budget process when we explain how we go about looking at what are those priorities that we're going to roll into the general fund and being able to show those positions that's part of that process as miss rory said about having a balanced budget with what the executive proposal is so that we can clearly see here's where we are right now and then these are the positions that we are budgeting from or rolling over from arp into that general fund because again we're looking at stability and sustainability of what we know is working for our students and so we're in the process of reconciling that right now a portion of that work that ms lefler has to do that she is still

208working on is making sure that um because we're looking at those because you have to remember some of those positions may have been vacant so there are dollars that are still out there that weren't used there are some that were hired later than the actual start date so there's the calculation of that that has to be incorporated in there and so as they go through um so i'm visualizing so the report that we have online our arp report and that spreadsheet portion that shows how much was for salaries and for different categories well what we have that we have had to connect the dots with is there's a lump sum that you see for what we spent for salaries then we have the list of what were those actual positions and you have to remember

209that when we did that from the beginning we used an average dollar amount well we now have actual salaries in those lines so there's part of that calculation that has to go as well and so we are in the process of reconciling all of that information and then prioritizing here are those things that we said we were going to roll into the general fund but now there may be some discrepancies with regard to oh this position ended up costing x this one costs y and we have 10 of them at y so now we may have to hold on to x for the next couple of years or for the next year initially when we looked at what the priorities those five priorities when we looked at those priorities and what we were allocating each

210year at the very beginning we did three years equally but then as you start to build in you realize that no we might need to do more in year one now we have true one-time funds here's the list of those so now those one-time funds roll off here are the positions that we're going to absorb in the general fund are we able to absorb all of what we thought we were right now if the answer is yes green check yay but if some of those positions let's say we had a more experienced person in one position least experience another a lesser experienced person and another one we have to now balance that out and see what we can truly absorb and then what might we have to continue in our for the next year and

211so those are the things that are happening that we are looking uh roughly the end of february beginning of march so that we could bring that forward because again some of that we might have to make some predictions about based on where we are within the budget but we do have a trajectory of especially with the arp and i'm visualizing our spreadsheet that we're using um here's what we said we were going to do year one here's what we said that we knew we would have to carry over for year two and year three um however some of that we may be able to absorb earlier and so that's why we're looking at balancing right now with the executive budget because then if we receive additional funds we have our priorities listed as to what

212we may be able to still carry over i understood a relatively large portion of that um and i just for me the issue is making sure i have a visual on i don't need to know down to the position level but at the at the large chunk like the big rock level because it in my mind it affects my appetite for a property tax increase this year knowing what we can and cannot cover in years two and three and four because i know that the implications of a zero versus a point five versus a one versus a one point five have compounding effects in future years um and i know that when i was very early on this board there was a great interest in having zero percent property tax increases and there were zero

213percent property tax increases and then and we paid consequences for the zero percent of property taxes um in later years because there was not the the compounding increase of those so having a sense of okay well we do expect the foundation aid chunk to go up again a lot next year right as they deliver the other half of foundation aid right we expect don't know expect that's what they've said they're going to they were going to do they fulfilled their promise this year i have to believe they're going to fulfill their promise next year how does that counter balance what remains of the services that we're still covering and how does that what does that mean to me as a person who's trying to represent this whole city that's very respectful of the fact that

214property taxes are very high here and we have in my seven years on the board really held the line on property taxes in a very real way so that we balance we no longer take half of more than half of our revenue from property taxes as we used to when i first got here we're now under that that's really important um but i just i that's what i need to know it's not that i need to know the level of detail but i do i need to have some semblance of understanding of where we're going on the on the out years and that's the process to try and get there and so it sounds good you're looking at march uh having that available um because we do know and recognize that impact and just like

215we did last year we're going to show what that impact is for we're going to continue with that we're going to show the impact of zero tax and what that looks like moving forward because that's part of our process that's good mrs wilson so there's some dialogue just sparked a thought in me that i increasingly see um rhetoric of folks like were transitioning out of the pandemic and i wonder if there's a need for us to for us and partners to establish a narrative that indeed we may be or not closing in on the the end of the pandemic but um there will be a need for like a coveted reconstruction plan because i mean we had some devastating losses and i don't think we can flip the switch and think that um we can

216be back to what was normal i don't think that's coming back but even if we could there's just not a uh there's not an infrastructure or you know that you know so i just have that thought process and maybe that's a legislative advocacy piece but i just want their as much as people have their coveted pandemic fatigue and want to return to normal i think we have to have the foresight to know that we need supports in that sense and money will be the bridge that will get us closer to something normal absolutely thank you so very much for that anyone else on things budget otherwise i think we're on to our last couple of things anyone with a committee report thank you miss rory thank you very much oh i apologize i should have

217thanked i'm ready to go home sorry um all right no committee we've seen no committee reports tonight oh you do have a committee partner not much i'm just gonna i was letting those other folks go first but um first i wanted to um uh remind uh committee members here and public that we do have a facilities committee meeting on tuesday february 15th at 5 45 and virtual so look out for that notification um and then the only other thing i have is really under other business uh if you would allow me to go there um so uh earlier today i had a conversation with uh deputy superintendent roaring and uh she has some information that she'd like to bring forward uh she and mr peckham from cs arch and it pertains to the gender neutral

218locker rooms and so i wanted to just turn it over to them and thank them for mr peckham in particular for getting back to us with some additional information uh that that we'll need to proceed so thank you thanks thank you ms smith mr peckham has joined us this evening uh we heard very clearly from the board that you wanted us to take a second look at what we were doing in terms of accommodating a gender neutral locker room space with the requested modifications to the dance studio and fitness center we have grappled with that as a project team and have ready to share out an update it is time sensitive so we asked if we could do it now uh prior to our next quarterly update at the end of march so mr peckham

219if you would be willing to share um i don't think i have the ability to share right now that must not be designated as an organizer or presenter there we go now i knew okay so um as we talked the last time we presented the board um the area of the general neutral locker room had been planned in the bid documents was um taken over proposed to be taken over for a dance studio and then relocating the cardio room so as you can see on on this plan we have the area the the dance studio that's shown here which is essentially the current um fitness center for the athletic and pe department and then we're building the weights and fitness center here and the cardio room which was what was going to be that was

220the area that was going to be the dance studio and this is the area that's currently the existing boiler room essentially so by relocating the dance studio and giving them more space by taking out the general neutral locker rooms we created another location in this location which was currently a couple small locker rooms that had been thought of as being used for officials but in talking with ashley chapel the officials only use that sometimes during basketball season so to commit dedicated space to that with a need for general neutral locker room does not necessarily provide the best use for the district so as requested by the board we looked at doing something more than just designating those existing rooms as potential general neutral locker rooms and restricting some of the use because we talked about

221them not being handicapped accessible and a couple other complications so i would just show this proposed plan in a larger format here and you can see what we've been able to accommodate here is all of the functions maybe not all the quantity that we had in the plan general neutral locker room um we've been able to create an entrance that's screened when you're when you're walking by the quarters or the doors open this wall will screen it so that you can't really see into the into the locker room which is always a goal in any locker rooms we do creates a handicapped accessible toilet room in this in the space we may modify this a little bit and not make it as enclosed room but make it more of a of a toilet stall potentially

222um just because of the issue with a toilet room and the lockability of the door that's uh always a concern and then we have three shower and changing stalls one ada handicapped accessible one and then two other shower and changing stall some lockers we're only showing the bank of three lockers right now but we have this whole wall we can extend the the number of lockers in this room and then a bench for for changing if they're not changing in the in the shower and changing areas um question was asked as far as what the how this compares to what we had planned before um before we had a total of five shower slash changing stalls four four um with one of them being handicapped accessible and this uh modified plan provides three with one

223of them being handicapped accessible provides the same lockers uh changing bench and toilet room that we would have in the previous plan so that kind of goes through the general neutral locker room where we are at a couple other questions that have been asked i'll go ahead and answer there was a question raised about the team room for both the boys locker room and the girls locker room and if those could be accessible from the corridor for students general neutral students so they didn't have to go through the whole locker room if they were part of the team and needed to get in there obviously they could be you could add another door in this location to get into the boys team room but obviously it would take away lockers and if you want to

224properly screen the door it takes away space in the locker room i don't know that it's too much of an issue if students could just come in these doors and then into the team locker room for the boys team locker room because it's not like you're going through the entire locker room you come in these doors these are the other main doors that are used for the locker room so it's not like the student would have to come in here and go all the way through the locker room they could come in this other door opposite where the general neutral locker room's going to be and just go in that door to the team room on the girls team room side you can do the same thing and have another door to the corridor but

225again it would take up space and lockers out of the team room and again there's a door directly from the corridor that's very close to the door to the team room so there'd be a very easy path there again without having to come all the way through the rest of the locker room if that if that's an acceptable solution or or mitigates the concern of that question while we're on the team rooms the question was asked um about the size of the team rooms and yes the boys team room was an existing space really set up for football originally and it's it really was dedicated for football for a while but now it's a more general team room so in that case the lockers in that team room are actually larger because they have to

226accommodate the football gear than the typical lockers are so the the boys team room um is about 345 square feet no 365 square feet and the girls team room is about 240 square feet because we're creating this out of this space here in this area where we have the team room this corridor and um three offices this is the um the athletic director's office area that's the space we had when we carved this out of what was the dance studio as it was originally constructed um back in 74. that was the this was the area that was the dance studio and i think the other question they've been forwarded to me was how we're proposing to procure the changes for this flipping of the dance studio in the cardio room and the general neutral locker

227rooms if we were going to do that all as one big change order which shouldn't be that big of a change we're actually because we're just moving space around or whether we do it as multiple change orders our recommendation is to do it all as one because it would get kind of confusing for the contractors to say if we did the changes for the general neutral locker room separately they're going to have to give us a credit in one change proposal for taking them out of the dance studio not knowing for sure whether the other change order is going to be accepted and then they're going to take some of the same materials and put them back in in the general neutral locker room area so we think it's better to just ask the contractors

228for one price to do all of the changes here and i believe that answers the questions that had been forwarded to me so i at this point time i'll leave it open for questions who's got questions for mr beckham how about ms wilson and scratchy thank you for your presentation and also um i i'm glad that we have the visual i think um that probably was the missing piece all along and i know it comes out of billable hours but that just gives us some foresight that before we start conceptualizing things um you can't have a visual aid so thank you um question so i know there was a discussion before about out of town or guest referees do they still have that space and i only asked because is that space accessible to more

229students in lieu of um going from five to three just curious um the space because because this was um let me just share another drawing and i can explain it a little better probably um so and this isn't quite as graphically interesting because these are the construction documents from phase three but this is what the general neutral locker room was going to plan to be a handicap accessible shower changing area four showers and then the toilet room so as i mentioned we still have the toilet room we still have the handicap accessible changing area shower and then we've reduced it from four to two on the non-handicapped accessible changing the other area that we talked about really the area that's becoming this new general neutral locker room was is here they're labeled men's officials and

230women's officials and that's the area that we're taking over so novia would not have that space the district would just have to determine whether visiting officials if they change even whether they'd use the pe offices or some other facility to be able to change okay i don't understand now so we made the swap totally out so i understand thank you i just had a very minor question and it was just when you were describing about how to before asking for an entrance to the boys team room that was outside the boys locker room is there a reason you can't move the door to the boys locker room just beyond the first door to the team room would that interfere with the plan to have from what i understood for you saying for the gender neutral

231locker room you wanted that from yeah so you're saying just move these doors back i thought about that the only the only thing is those doors are are already there so it would just be the cost of moving them um and whether whether the district felt that was worth the expense to do that oh yeah never mind i didn't realize there were anything if they're if they're doors that are just pieces of lines of graphite on paper then we should move them but if they're physical doors [Laughter] and i have the same question about the i said same question about the girls locker room team room doors but if those are already there i guess well the girls team room doors this door has been cut in i believe so and this door is um

232yeah this is an opening in the firewall that's been built so that door really can't move or or that door at this point in time thank you anyone else with questions remember thanks rich um just to stay on the girls team room is are those offices and is that team room like is already built out like are those partitions up or those walls up or is that just empty and like i asked because not to get too specific about this but the office 3131 why isn't it like further up like i understand like there's a doorway here but like there's like this little like space that condenses into like the the yeah i see what you're what you're saying is that we could we could essentially move it up to there right um you know

233i was over this i don't think that they've really started building any of this anything on the right hand side of this wall here because this is all part of open up more room for the um girls team room that's that's an interesting thought and i will take a look at that depending on if any of this has been started already we could just take and slide those three offices up about six or eight feet and add that space to the team room i had a similar question at the top of the diagram there's another weird jog where the hallway is skinny and fat and i couldn't figure out whether there was a reason that it couldn't be see to the left of 3154 the hallway is wide and then the hallway's narrow you see

234where it says storage 3154. right there i felt like that space could be enclosed for use for additional storage or something i have no idea what it would be used for it just seemed like a very very very large hallway that might might have utility someplace else but you're the architect and i'm happy to let you do your work i just been the same way hassan looked at it when huh what's that weird job i looked at that and went like oh what's that weird job yeah this is essentially space that got left over because this is the this is the wall the phase one edition this is the back wall of the original gymnasium and that wall jogged like that so that's why this quarter jogs there's not a reason other than a lot

235of times there's not a reason other than money that this couldn't be enclosed and create more storage um but it'd be accessible from the corridor because we got toilets here and this storage here unless you broke a door through there but you know if if it was felt that added benefit to the district and closed that it's something that couldn't have a conversation with the program staff i'm certainly not going to say whether it's needed or not i just know that in my experience there's never enough storage ever board member creation i just wanted to say there's never enough storage but there's also never enough room in the hallways because i know we've been experiencing complaints with people saying that some of the high school hallways are particularly crowded so maybe we want to kind

236of give people a little wiggle room if we can to have spread out a little bit especially if it's near to i don't know if people from would be coming through this way to see a sporting event but you know if there might be crowds of people moving around yeah this this for the gymnasiums up before so there wouldn't be crowds of people down here this is mainly just the athletes and pe down at this at this elevation so and uh thank you mr peckham and i just wanted to with even the suggestions that uh mr eldon yahweh uh proposed etc if we could just make sure we see what the cost difference is i mean it seems to be minor to move walls but um i'm not sure i just want to make sure

237we're not too tight there and equally if you're talking about doing something um up above in the storage area we just need to know what that means over the addition of the bathrooms and so forth go ahead and i just want to add that i would like to see the renderings and the ideas but also there is a benefit to negative space because of that inherent room to grow at a later time if necessary so that's just something to consider awesome all right well i think that we have um reached a point where people feel that the the needs have been addressed right so we can go forward and develop whatever do the change order whatever happens next and yes and so uh miss warren and thank you mr peckham very much and i appreciate

238you're hearing us and addressing those concerns um miss warren could you just speak again a little bit to what's next um i know we have a facilities meeting next week um but you what you're asking us to do tonight or you wanted us to have this information tonight so that you can move forward with the next steps could you just articulate those for us yes um so we wanted to share this out with the board this evening just to get the general sense as to whether or not the board felt that this met the um request and the need for our students going forward so that we could proceed mr packham's team would be responsible for creating changing conditions and providing some direction to the contractors of what we're looking to do so that they

239could prepare pricing and formal change order ultimately would arise as he noted there are there's already purchased work for a lot of these areas so we are not anticipating a large increase as a result of the changes that we're making but that is something that would have to be ferreted out and we would continue to update the facilities committee and should it warrant a significant adjustment in cost which we don't anticipate it would certainly return to the board for approval great thank you so much any other other business otherwise i'd like to entertain a motion to adjourn motion by miss smith second by dr chittor all in favor that is unanimous time seven and we will see you guys soon the superintendent and i will be back shortly about to confirm whether or not we

240need next week