001good evening everyone welcome to the city school district of albany board of education public meeting on behalf of the board i welcome you i realized in the past that i haven't made sure that people know who's here with me tonight and i think that's something we should do generally because not everybody listening from home recognizes people's faces and voices so i am joined tonight by vicki smith the vice president of the board tabitha wilson the secretary of the board board members alan kreichie sudhar chittor damaris mann and hasan al-manui on the staff side we have superintendent adams deputy superintendent for business affairs kimberly roaring our legal counsel paul aloy and all important board clerk tanya bowie who makes sure that everything actually happens here so i wanted to make sure everyone who who their voices
002they would be hearing tonight this meeting is being live streamed the instructions to view the meeting are available at albanyschools.org forward slash boe if you need to share those with anyone that is also where you can find the relevant documents both on that website and also we will show them on the virtual meeting screen those of you who are joining us tonight in person know that we are meeting with the necessary social distancing in place every person present had their temperature checked on their way into the building and filled out our standard coveted screener we are all seated well over six feet apart and everyone is and will continue to be wearing a mask unless they need to remove it to be heard clearly while speaking because of the limits posed by social distancing i
003encourage members of the public to carefully consider whether you can intend virtually rather than in person although again we have plenty of seats here at the lovely albany school of humanities so if you would like to join us in person there is plenty of room for you with that introduction we invite those of you who choose to join us as we stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance [Music] in addition to saying the pledge of allegiance we always focus our meeting by restating the mission of the city school district of albany which is to work in partnership with our diverse community to engage every learner in a robust educational program designed to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success superintendent adams do you have a report for us yes i do thank
004you so very much madam president members of the board i so appreciate the opportunity to be able to share with you some of the exciting things that are happening here we have engaged in the equity work and embedding social justice in our curriculum recently the curriculum instruction and professional development division shared a presentation with the naacp highlighting that very equity work at this time our curriculum instruction and professional development division will share the highlights of our actualizing equity work at the high school level we have with us this evening mrs jennifer houlihan ela instructional supervisor and mr michael elliott social studies and world languages instructional supervisor under the leadership of mrs karen bechdel the director of curriculum instruction and professional development so with that we are ready for them to take it away we're just
005waiting for the that we provided and mike elliott will be delivering presentations thank you karen next slide please as always we'll begin with our district vision mission and goals um as mrs adams and ms bechdel said we recently had the opportunity to share this presentation with the local chapter of the naacp and we were so honored to partner with our diverse community and share this work with them next slide please good evening everyone mrs hoolandhan and i will present to you how educational equity culturally responsive education and student voice are woven into teachers practices in ela and in social studies next slide please [Music] so if you turn your attention to the image on the right um we this year have really tried to emphasize a shift in thinking with our staff and that cre
006is not one more thing added to our plates but rather that that it is the plate and so within the humanities at the secondary level that means ensuring that our tech selection is diverse we want our students to see their likeness in the world to meet characters and historical figures who share their love of culture their pursuit of their dreams and and also experience their joy and we also want to strategically select text that allows us to lend voice to underrepresented perspectives in history and literature while filling in gaps left by the consciously omitted voices in whitewashed history in literature we want to approach our curriculum and content from an anti-racist lens where we seek opportunities to disrupt the narrative by strategically pairing texts examining text through critical race theory and the 1619 project's a
007really great example of that so if cre is the plate then student voice educational equity and social justice are the menu if you look at the bullets underneath each of those items you'll see how each of those focus areas are incorporated into instruction so i'm just going to provide one quick example of a way that i would work with my teachers at the secondary level to disrupt a particular text the concept of disrupting text is you know something we're really trying to push our growing edge in doing this year and one text that comes to mind that really provides us an opportunity to do that is to kill a mockingbird so um on the left you'll notice that you know to kill a mockingbird it's a canonized novel um meaning that it is commonly taught
008in high schools across the country and it's you know considered a progressive text um for its time period it was set in maycomb alabama during the great depression it is the story of atticus finch who is a white lawyer defending tom robinson who is a black man accused of attacking a white woman and is told through the lens of his daughter's scout um across time atticus has been characterized as a hero he's characterized as moral and humane and compassionate kind thoughtful intelligent courageous one way that i ask teachers um to think about text in this way is to think about some of the concepts on the right and so um is this a white savior narrative what can we say about the white silence that exists in the text the concept of the inadequacy of
009color blindness which is a running theme throughout the work how white voices are prioritized in the text the idea of assuming good intentions are enough and you know having this concept of a self-appointed white ally and the notion of weaponized whiteness um and who is a male is the character who makes the accusation and sort of that the power of white woman's tears which we can draw connections to contemporary events from this past summer from the incident in central park next slide please thank you miss houlihan so this is an example what you're looking at is an example of an excerpt taken from the 1619 project and it demonstrates how we're using it in u.s and american history classes as well as we are using this also in government and economics classes this ex this
010particular example expands what we've traditionally been taught and have learned about the declaration of independence it disrupts the white narrative and interpretation of the declaration of independence by adding in the underrepresented perspective of african americans the questions require students to analyze the document and identify how they fit into it students can see themselves as relevant through the lens of history we've adopted and enhanced much of the work done by the pulitzer center to complement the 1619 project and we're seeking future opportunities to work alongside of the pulitzer center to develop lessons aligned to the 1619 project in our shared uh english and social studies classes the american experience and world experience next slide please so of course like many schools we really were intentional about not wanting to miss this moment um in our current
011history you know as our children and we are all primary sources while we're living history and so these are just some recent examples of student work that um were done in either ela classes or history classes on the left you will see a response from an ela class where one of our 10th grade students responded to the poem from the inauguration by amanda gorman and then i believe mike is going to discuss the work on the right so on the right there is a poem written by camille blackwell clark and it's in response to the events that happened on january 6th and it's a good example of student voice and uh we figure that there's no better way to show student voice than to hear it so i am going to turn it over to
012camille to read her poetry which is amazing hi um good evening i'm camille blackwell and i wrote the poem titled the steps on august 28th guns for the steps no one could come through but on the day where arms were drawn the police seemingly withdrew a beautiful march met with madness just standing on those steps but on january 6 the capital fell and the riot filled the wreck yelling cheering jumping feeling good i bet this isn't fair they had nothing to fight for blm is a movement that so many have died for one sixth is not a protest it's it was just a petty fight no one can change the election storming our capital wasn't right america has spoken biden all the way hopefully down the line those steps will see the day the day
013our movement is really heard just like in 1963 the day we marched on washington with the naacp we will make it to those steps and maybe even beyond until then the movement will continue i know it won't be long end thank you camille that was quite powerful and amazing um next slide please um so in closing and again thank you camille that was beautiful um we wanted to just offer up um one of our favorite quotes um that mr elliot and i share by michelle obama and that we believe encapsulates the heart of our vision for this work in secondary humanities at the secondary level thank you so much for having us tonight thank you so very much mr mr elliott miss houlihan and of course camille it is always a pleasure to have you
014with us uh remember i do remember when we met and you were part of the opening ceremonies uh with regard to what equity means to us and i value your participation then and it is so good to see that you are continuing in that vein with us perfection is becoming a habit for albany high school bowling team delon dean a junior at albany high school rolled a perfect game in the falcons win over niska yuna in january it's the third time in five years that an albany high bowler has rolled a 300 in the suburban council competition and the fifth time overall in that period of time current falcon michael mcneil threw 12 strikes in a row against shenandoah in january of 2019 and former falcon jaleel young also did it in december of 2016
015against cva prior to that it had been a decade since an albany high bowler had a perfect game two other current and past falcon bowlers also ruled 300s during off-season competition senior jedrick or awesome i'm sorry i may be mispronouncing that for awesome in march 2019 and the class of 2020 eliza are awesome in january of 2018. i would like to congratulate delon and his exceptional talent this is his first season as a member of the falcon bowling team and throwing a perfect game in competition for the school is an outstanding moment that he will always cherish please give him a round of applause congratulations as well to all of our bowlers who have achieved perfection in recent years this is a tribute to their talent and hard work as well as the leadership of
016albany high's bowling coach alicia earlson i also would be remiss if i did not let you know that this has been a great week for our bowlers as well albany high notched wins over shen on tuesday and bethlehem on wednesday great job falcons a reminder that applications for our annual magnet lottery are due next wednesday february 17th applications are also available for our annual four-year-old pre-kindergarten lottery pre-k applications are due march 12th and both lotteries are scheduled for march 17. you can find both applications and much more information about all of these outstanding options at albanyschools.org all of our schools will be closed next week for winter recess our district offices will also be closed monday due to the observance of presidents day i hope everyone has a restful and safe recess please continue to
017observe all covet 19 protocols in your daily lives while we are in recess the number of confirmed cases in the district has started to decrease in the last week or two following the surge we experienced over the holiday break i ask that we all continue to do our part to maintain healthy and safe learning environments so that we may maintain in-person instructional models when we return from winter break it is now my pleasure to welcome stephen and harriet myers middle school principal william rivers phil rivers to tell us about the great things that are happening with his first year at this school mr rivers hi there goody good evening thank you superintendent adams thank you board for having me tonight we'll start uh we'll wait for the presentation to slide up and i just want
018to say that is that better okay i will as we're waiting for the presentation to um load i just want to say thanks again for having me tonight and we are excited um to share some amazing things as we move forward this evening we can jump to the first slide which is the city school district of albany's guiding principles and then we can jump right to the next slide to talk about the myers mission and vision our mission our mission is to develop and support successful academic achievement while fostering respect responsibility and self-empowerment our vision is that we know that together with the dedicated staff family involvement and community partnerships we can and will provide a culturally diverse learning environment that enables all students to reach their fullest potential each and every day the myers
019community strives to foster respect and responsibility while cultivating a culturally rich environment where students are safe and feel safe to express who they are on the next slide i'll introduce my leadership team so there's myself and i really do a lot of the academic oversight and overall accountability for our program teresa dallian my amazing assistant principal really supports our social emotional programming and oversight and accountability there joe burke our home school coordinator manages our attendance platforms and our technology distribution and conducts many home visits he has done over 150 home visits so far this school year and mr isaac cancer our senior monitor oversees our safety and he also participates in home visits and he's gone above and beyond as well to make sure that we're reaching all of our families you can see in
020the next slide here what our demographics are for our program and within our building and on the following slide we'll jump into just a summary of where we are with our sub plan so with regard to ela and math we're really committed to walk throughs and providing instructional feedback um with a new focus on virtual learning for students and giving that feedback to teachers as we are all looking to grow in that area we whether or not we have the 638 state testing this school year we are confident in that we have additional measures in place to monitor whether or not students are growing in reading and math and we regularly triangulate and look at that data to make chronic absenteeism we'll jump into on the next slide but i do want to mention that
021disproportionality although we'll achieve our goal without a doubt in decreasing referrals and suspensions for all subgroups of students it has allowed us to look a little bit deeper into academic disproportionality with regard to grades and then lastly our survey indicator we have preliminary data from going through many survey before the dtsde to um confidently say that we will meet our goals there as well we have a 20 slated increase for students and 46 percent increase from families um stating that student behavior does not interfere with instruction we jump to the next slide we will look at the challenges and next steps that we're facing and so this slide really speaks to quarter one pass rates for students and breaks it down by subgroup of students so we had an overall quarter one pass rate of
02269 percent and that does include incompletes that were issued and then at the end of quarter two and completes our resolve so that number did increase to 73 percent overall in resolving the incomplete and the additional work that our staff did and our students did around that as you can see as you look down the individual subgroups you can see the subgroups that performed below the average of all students our economically disadvantaged students our multiracial students our black and african american students and our students with disabilities so that's a piece of although it's not a disproportionality goal with regard to behavior it is something that we are cognizant cognizant of and something that we know that we need to do a deep dive into to move forward on the next slide we'll look at chronic
023absenteeism and chronic absenteeism at the time that this was created was eight or more absences and so you can see that we had a 36 percent chronic absenteeism rate and the subgroups on the right hand side break it down as far as which subgroups have a higher rate than the average of the building again looking at the outcomes we can see that there are racialized outcomes based on the sub-group breakdown so now that we've identified and know about that what are we doing about it so um ultimately what jen and frank presented is the foundation for everything we do and all the work that we do with regard to combating racialized outcomes and doing what is best for all students all the time and so that is the fabric of what we are working with
024teachers uh in growing in and then the other areas that we are as a building diving into is the root cause analysis and that's the ability to identify the individual needs that each of our families have in providing supports uh aligned to those needs so that might be technology support might be social emotional support it might be additional services and so on and so forth we do that through our liaison teachers our liaison teachers have a number of students on their caseload and they are the regular outreach for our families to help us identify those needs and try to close that gap uh the second piece we're looking at is we have an attendance challenge so we want to acknowledge and put plans in place to reward uh students for showing up and coming to
025class and so we just rolled out our attendance challenge and we do have a weekly feedback from teachers where teachers are allowed and are encouraged to recommend students who have shown improvement that given week and then we also pull most improved um for from month to month so that we can acknowledge students that are improving the most over time a third thing that we are looking at is systematic asynchronous audits so we know that if students are indeed passing their classes teachers should be going back and updating their attendance to reflect that if they're doing their work asynchronously but there needs to be some monitoring with that to ensure that that's happening and so we found that by doing a deep dive there we're able to identify some students that may have been missed and
026update their attendance to reflect that um parallel to that is an earned back proposal essentially where students are able to attend tutoring after school and on saturdays with our teachers and if they complete their work asynchronously or in tutoring their attendance can also be updated to reflect that and then finally we've just started to investigate piloting apex credit recovery which has been very successful across the district at the high school and in alternative programming so we are looking at that for some of our students that still are not responding to our current interventions so that brings us to some of our successes we just rolled out our tutoring program about three weeks ago so this is two weeks worth of data so our first two weeks breaks down in that first column average daily attendance
027so we have general homework help where any student from any grade can log on after school from three to four and then we have essentially a referral system for tutoring where students are reporting to tutoring based on the referral process and we do the family outreach and so on to get kiddos engaged and logged in and then we also have an opportunity on saturdays for math for students that are looking at moving from already you know um proficient to highly proficient or exceeding proficiency um and so that's kind of where we stand we've got average daily attendance kids across the board but we have 30 unique english language learners and 61 unique sixth through eighth grade students that are attending those sessions and i just want to thank our enl teachers for their programming and
028our after-school tutors for all of the work that they're doing beyond the workday to support our kiddos and so here's some feedback from four of our students on the next slide hi my name is whenever i'm confused or need help on any assignments i go to homework help i also realize that attorney classes that my teachers do is really helpful because my grades or scores and assignments has been going up i am glad that my teachers made the tutoring classes i am also grateful that i have great teachers also attending homework club has got me busy doing assignments and finishing them up i could be on my phone playing with my siblings or just do something else the homework club has got me on my a games i guess i understand when it's doing i
029think the homework club is a big opportunity for a student hi this is why i like the after school program because they help me with everything i need and every time i'm stuck with a problem they help me out and they always make me laugh when i'm sad i'm mia rogers i'm in sixth grade and i attend myers middle school today i'm here to talk about homework help i attend homework or tutoring because it's a great way for me to stay on top of my work and ask questions i think others should as well because it's a great way to ask about your grades and communicate with your teachers homework is also a great way for students to acknowledge the help and resources that they have around them i think homework help is a great
030thing to help students succeed this school year i give it a shot and i think you should too i attended after school health to figure out what i need to do to pass the quarter and it has helped me organize organize myself at it has helped me make sure i get my work done it has helped me finish my work that is not done hi my name is miss barr i attend homework help or tutoring classes because i like to meet on top of my grades so there's four kiddos that are uh regular participants in our after-school tutoring program and we're looking hopefully to get more um and we are paying for that through the school improvement uh grant and our title one funds and then the last slide i just wanted to end and
031uh continue the work that um miss bechdel frank and jen hulian were speaking about is student voice in black history and so we are partnering with the tony clement center with their black history project from last school year which was rooted in identifying black history of albany and also providing opportunities for student voice by writing their own pieces of work or creating their own poetry and so we've asked our middle school students to look at that work from last school year and to reflect on that work and identify a piece of work that makes them feel connected to black history of albany new york and they are writing letters to those authors and the principal at tcce mr burnsley and myself we'll be working to connect our students who are writing to the tony clement
032students to get them together on a google me and have some discourse about their work and that concludes my presentation thank you so very much mr rivers it's always exciting to hear so thank you this does conclude the superintendent's report and i just want to thank our technology department for having us all set up and ready to go tonight and thank you to miss joanne johnson who is from our maintenance and operations team so thank you all so very much and that concludes the superintendent's report excellent before we move on i just want to thank on behalf of the board ms houlihan mr elliott and mr rivers for being here tonight unfortunately we don't have time to ask questions after the superintendent's report this is an ongoing frustration for board members because we would love
033to hear even more details about the work that you're doing everything was very inspirational and and really exciting and i can see miss smith is like practically sitting on her hands trying to prevent herself from asking a question but unfortunately we don't have time tonight another day we will do that mrs adams i think we're going to go directly into the district update for this year yes we are ready for our district update and we'll let the slide cut the slides come up i'll go ahead and just start with as you know we always look at our vision mission and goals and it's always important that we remember that we are looking for those equitable opportunities to provide for all of our students and i think that's the piece that i always focus on when
034we talk about our vision our mission and our goals and making sure that our decisions are aligning with the vision mission and goals tonight our discussion topics we have quite a few because there have been quite a few district updates um of course we're looking at the advocacy of equitable funding we'll talk a little bit about that our technology update we have information with regard to our athletics department we held a special board meeting tuesday night and we were able to look at high-risk sports so i have a few more details with regard to that our curriculum instruction and professional development website is now up and we want to share that with you preparing for phase three so we'll take a look back at phase two and some information and then what does phase three
035look like our covet 19 update and then of course miss roaring will share the spotlight with our budget update for the current school year and i will remind you that later on in the in the board meeting we have a budget update but that is looking at the 21 22 school year so we're separating it out so that we can keep track of what's happening right now in our budget but also what are we looking at as we move forward making your voices heard we have talked about equitable funding and looking at that through various districts where there are districts that are not at risk districts districts that have higher needs and what does that mean in terms of funding we are very hopeful and optimistic with the recent information from the governor's the governor's
036report with regard to what the budget may look like and that districts will receive their state aid allocations however we're still proceeding forward very cautiously because we want to ensure that what we do is sustainable and so we'll talk a little bit about that but we are asking for support with from our community if you will go to albanyschools.org advocacy we have sample letters and email and contact informations so that our public can absolutely assist us with making sure that we have our voices heard our technology update um we are so very excited um that we have received the final shipment of our chromebooks so let's give a huge round of applause because we are so very happy about that thank you mr baker we appreciate all that you've done your leadership in your department
037for seeing that through and then of course all the other components that we have done throughout the year to ensure that we have the chromebooks we have the connectivity we have hot spots for our families that need them as well as for our homeless shelters and so we do want to say thank you very much the next piece is we have a grant opportunity that we are so very excited about no kid hungry meal delivery program we launched this meal delivery program for our elementary and middle school distance learners last week it is funded through a grant the grant is 48 000 and there are 576 students enrolled through our registration survey in january each of these deliveries includes a week's supply of food for each student our deliveries are on tuesdays wednesdays and fridays
038we do partner with first student to make those deliveries and the friday delivery also includes backpacks for students for the weekend with our feed and read program on the side there's a quote from one of our parents and i'll just read that hi ascd i wanted to say thank you we received the first delivery of lunches today for my son and it is so much appreciated i worked during the day i worked during the day to pick up during the pickup times so we rarely could pick up food after the summer ended we are very happy to see delivery become an option for our families thank you so very much so that was from one of our parents as i stated earlier the athletics department we know that we have been given permission for high-risk
039sports and part of that was we needed to have board approval and on tuesday evening thank you so very much for approving our high-risk sports these are the sports that we are looking at doing um we also talked about that we also identified wrestling as a higher risk sport and the district has made the decision not to offer wrestling this year and also there are other conditions that we have posted with regard to parents understanding about no spectators but the games will be live streamed and so i want to thank mrs karen bechtel and also our athletic director ashley chapel they've done an outstanding job in working with the guidelines from doh as well as from the suburban council to make sure that we are meeting the requirements so that our students can participate in
040the athletic activities at this time mrs bechdel if you are ready we would like to share out our district website uh the curriculum section and so mrs bechdel yes uh thank you superintendent board of education i'm actually going to take over and share my screen because of what i'm doing here today is going to take you for a tour on the curriculum pages on the website so let me do that now okay not sure why i'm not seeing it here okay oh dear i do this every day you might not know that from why on how i'm struggling but here we go i found it um you should at this point be able to see the district webpage and if i could get a verbal that that's what you see yes we can wonderful thank
041you so much so i wanted to start by telling you that this has been a goal for some time is to get the curriculum pages really current and solid on the web page and with the development and implementation of the new website the timing was really perfect this in this past year so in a partnership with the communications department and my own department with the instructional supervisors we work to create academic pages that are standardized attractive and accessible to our families and community as well as staff and my primary partner for this endeavor was mr jake plank who is our chief website designer and who also asked me to send his regards to the board of education tonight so i wanted to start there so on the district home page when you go to the
042academics tab then you come to this landing page for four curriculum and you have four we have four categories but before i go there i did want to point out to the board of education that we have the google classroom and distance learning section here and this is a support page for families it includes sort of an overview of google classroom as well as parts of the tech tool kit which is provided by google for education and these are a series of short videos there's an entire toolkit playlist and a junior toolkit playlist we put the three most important here front and center then our resources these are print resources that google education provides for parents and then how to sign into clever which is really primarily used at the elementary level and our elementary
043programs and finally if all of these resources can't help you we have a message here at the bottom of how to get in touch with the tech help desk for families so that they can get the help that they need to maneuver through so that is one feature of this i'm going to go back here to my home page and we are going to take a quick stop in early childhood you'll see the page design has um what it is and then a contact so our own director melissa hastie is here director of early childhood and then we get a glimpse of what is actually happening in the pre-k classroom so this is pre-k four and we have a description of all these four areas that we are focused on in pre-k let's take a
044look at cognition and we can see what our littlest students are supposed to be learning so we're able to rote count to 20 for math and make some predictions and identify types of weather and seasons so parents can have a sense of what their children are learning the page ends with keeping your child engaged at home with engagement strategies for parents as um as they help their children so that's our pre-k we're going to go back to our home academics page and then we are going to move on to the elementary page this two set up similarly we have our six grades but i wanted to point out to the board the four um extra pieces down here on the bottom so we have special education enl and refugee services after school programming and magnet
045programs and that these links will bring you to these specific areas i wanted to show you special education so we have a really robust special education page and with lots of information for families about the process and how how it works and i really commend elaine greisler for this work but i do want to point out that this is available under the departments tab so you see it here but we've linked it to our academic pages as well so families can access that information from both the academic pages and then also through the department pages gives people more opportunities to get where they need to go we'll go in take a quick look at grade three we see all our content areas here's math now we know that um in in third grade math that
046we have to multiply and divide within a hundred um we know that we want to reason with shapes and we give our parents some ideas about how to help their support their students then we provide them with third grade specific engagement strategies related to the the standards so that's our elementary page i'm going to go back here to my landing page and we are off to middle school and i thought i would highlight in middle school again you see the three grade levels see all this uh standardization in the curriculum pages we have the special education enl and refugee services after school programming but on this page we've added an honors and accelerated classes page to give our families information about how that process works and let us move to grade seven actually i want
047to go back here to this just sort of show you how you can get to these places in different ways and let's take a look at um seventh grade science where we are examining the periodic table we're learning about energy transformations and we're engaging in the study of cells it gives our families a sense of what students are learning here and that is middle school and now let's get to um high school now the high school page is really our old print course book and set up more efficiently and and more accessible you can see that we've got these three categories of the course offerings programs and the graduation requirements we're going to take a peek at each of these areas and we'll start with the course offerings um right here and we have our
048courses course titles all here i'm going to go to english language arts here's um mrs houlihan our secondary english and reading instructional supervisor and i went here on purpose because when we had the old print book jake would was would try so hard to keep those course descriptions down to a reasonable amount and a reasonable reasonable length and sort of norm them across the book and um of course you know how english teachers are having been one i can pick on us um so you'll see for english 10 we have a little bit of a book for our course description and when we first started doing this work on the website jake and i were sort of intending to try to streamline and then we were like we don't need to it's digital we can
049have this much it's really fine um and then if you go back just for a sort of a contrast if you look at math and go to algebra you have a little shorter um description which is very typical of those two content areas so i just sort of wanted to point that out i also wanted to point out this drop box down here at the bottom so you might be in math but then you want to go back to art or music or something and this drop box brings you to a list of all the courses you can access any of them there you can also access the courses here alongside the right or you can even go back to your home page and the course offerings and and access through there i wanted to
050take a quick stop at technology because i wanted to show you something specific so here is the technology page of all these uh the tech courses and then we have list project lead the way and i want you to know that we have this link here to visit our project lead the way page i just want you to keep that picture in mind there's our lovely superintendent so you'll you'll remember and i'm going to come back out of here to our home base and we're going to go to programs here's programs all our our special programs are ap ib the smart scholars jrotc cte and here's project lead the way and we can get to it this way and then again you see the technology group along with our superintendent i know um another thing
051that's really wonderful about this is we were working on some data the other day we were trying to determine how many smart scholars kids had accessed project lead the way courses i was working with trish wolf in um mr baker's office and she says karen what what are the courses and i said oh let me go right here to the website and within two seconds we were here we see the five courses that we're looking for that she can now put in her um cross with her student information system to discover which kids were in those courses so it was just really much easier than to oh where's that course book it's buried here under my desk and um and very handy in that way so we have one other place to look at then
052i'll finish up and that is the um graduation requirements page um we really wanted to streamline this this page and make it as straightforward as possible for parents the the diploma the the various diplomas that students can achieve these days can get very very complex and in the old course book we had a lot of grids and it was it was um not very tidy so what we decided to do was give this view of the credit breakdown every student needs to get these 22 credits in order to graduate from high school this is sort of your at a glance yes this is baseline what i need but i also want to know what i have to do to get a regent's diploma with advanced designation or regents diploma what does that mean what does
053a local diploma mean and then we have a link it's here it's here so we're we're sending folks here so that they can get this fuller uh explanation because some people really want they want to dig deeper they want to know exactly what their their child has to do and then here people can poke around in different spaces but there is this very tidy little chart that outlines all of these different diplomas and what students have to achieve in order to get that particular diploma and the beauty of all of this let me come back out of here and back to my home page um the beauty of this is that uh you have um the ability to number one change content at at will um we have had examples where we get that pre-course
054book and then immediately something has changed and and we have that course book for that entire year the links to sed will update automatically or if they change we can update them in the moment and uh there's a lot of flexibility with having the the course book here in this format i think that just about concludes my presentation i just wanted to end by thanking jake for all the hard work that he put in the instructional supervisors for providing all of the content and all of the help and support on albany high school admin with the high school book the high school pages i should say and everything came out so beautifully and i'm proud of it and happy to share it with the board thank you so very much mrs bechtel we are so
055very excited as i know this has been a labor of love and just that sheer access to the information in a way that makes it easy for not just our students but also our families we are always very excited to see how we can always make it better to make sure that we are providing that equitable access to that information so next we have preparing for phase three we've worked through the school year to provide an expanded in-person opportunities for our secondary students while making sure that we adhere to the strict health and safety protocols and so going back to phase two which took us through the second and the third quarters we looked at several programs and each of those programs came and shared with the board what we were looking at just a
056few updated numbers at the high school level with regard to career and technical education we have about 30 to 50 students each month that are accessing that program because of the hands-on nature of the students that are enrolled in cosmetology as well as health sciences and the barbering program making sure that those students have that hands-on touch looking at our music and art we have in the month of january 71 students participated in music computer labs we have 303 students who are accessing those computer labs as we are reaching out to students so that they have an opportunity to come and get you know assistance in a particular content area or they have an opportunity to come and work on a computer to get their assignments done our science labs which we just started last
057week as you know we implemented the on-site science labs at the high school as part of our overall phase two expansion within that this planning has occurred under the leadership of amanda powers and the district second which is the district's secondary supervisor for science technology and middle school facts once we started to see the decline in the covet 19 cases which we had a surge during december and january in albany county and our district we were able to plan for the in-person labs that continued to maintain and maintain the adherence to the protocols so we were slated to start our science labs in november and due to the surges in the positive cases we needed for that to level out and so now that those have leveled out we of course have implemented our science
058program to date albany high has had three days of labs and accommodated three groups of ap environmental science students one group of suny anatomy and physiology students we rescheduled two additional labs one in ap environmental science and one in ap biology due to circumstances related to weather in covet 19. following this is a breakdown of the numbers of students offered in-person opportunities to date and the numbers that we have participating we have 91 students offered in-person science labs 42 students indicated that they were comfortable attending in-person labs 38 students attended the four initial science labs and an additional 20 students have indicated that they may be ready for on-site labs later on in the spring and so we are taking that under consideration at this time we have the following additional on-site lab opportunities scheduled
059to begin very soon we have ap physics ib physics regents chemistry regents earth science regents living environment and regents physics and so as we continue through this process we will be re-evaluating in preparation in preparation for the fourth quarter but those courses are up and running and then we also have targeted targeted support for our students based on if they are seeing that they're having challenges in a particular content area as we look at phase three for the fourth quarter expanded in-person opportunities for 7th through 12th grade modified hybrid instruction model and there are several considerations that we have to look at grouping of students based on the scheduling because some students may be able to move as cohorts some may not one or several days a week based on the academic social and emotional
060needs of students because we want to make sure that we are addressing the that some students have expressed feelings of isolation through the computer um and those kinds of things so we want to be able to wrap in those wraparound services for our students and then of course scheduling and staffing may require some teacher changes within that as students are coming back there may be some schedule changes so considerations in our planning for phase three secondary principles are turning in plans to miss mckenna tomorrow they've been working on these plans over time and we have some considerations as we look at some of the plans that are coming forward number one hands down is coveted 19. we still have social distancing we have to make sure that we maintain that those guidelines have not been
061changed and so we need to make sure that we follow those safety precautions which right away lets us know that we're going to have to look at the numbers of students that are on campus at any one time the building capacity making sure that we are in alignment we have some classrooms that based on social distancing 10 students can safely fit in a classroom but then in other classrooms it may be 12 it may be 15. and so that's going to change those numbers a little bit we faced that at the very beginning of the year when we were looking at our plans in the beginning so we know where that is and so we know where those challenges may be so we'll be working through that budget and state aid developments some information is
062consistent but there's information that is changing along the way with regard to the funding of this current year and i have to emphasize that what we're talking about is this current year right now and i know miss roaring has the second half of this presentation and will share that information with you staffing and scheduling again looking at what types of courses what types of cohorts can come back based on the courses that the students are enrolled in we have accommodations for faculty and staff due to covent those accommodations have been approved and so we need to make sure that with our faculty and staff that we are honoring those accommodations so those are going to be limitations that we have been looking at um over the past few months we've been looking at how those
063limitations with faculty and staff impact the program that we can deliver and bringing students back that also means that we may have positions that we need to re-hire and bring those positions back in doing that we are looking at models that provide some sustainability so that in the event that we do receive our funding we can absolutely absorb those positions so we are not in a position where we are experiencing layoffs yet again we are in a phase now should everything be as optimistic as we are should all of those things fall into place we are in a perfect position to strategically rebuild and bring back our programs better and stronger and i think that's really important to note that we cannot flip a switch and have 9 000 students back in our buildings no
064matter how much we want that to happen we're not going to be able to do that because there are so many things that we have to look at and the number one piece is covet 19 and social distancing uh that limits our space availability uh we also know that there are some parents and guardians that have expressed that they want their children to come back to school we also have parents and guardians who state that they are a little uncomfortable with that and would there be a virtual option and at this juncture yes we would still maintain that virtual option because we know that there needs to be a choice transportation looking at the the just the sheer piece of turning on the suit and swiper cards to make sure that we have those buses
065which we do we just want to make sure there's always that connection that has to happen the communication with cdta of course the communication with first student that we've always maintained making sure that we have enough lead time to make sure that our students would have access to that transportation looking ahead to 21 22 we are looking at in-person and virtual models and again that is going to be based on what happens as our covid 19 infection rate increases or decreases it we may be in a position where if everything you know if we have the 70 percent of our population vaccinated if the numbers are very low we may be in a situation where everything is as normal as possible where we are returning all of our students to school and wearing masks i
066mean there are so many possibilities that we can to think about for the fall and those are things that we are looking at so there'll be several models that we work on um with our committees with regard to we know what it looks like if we're all in school because we've done that we know what it looks like if there's a virtual option and an in-school option we have that at our elementary level and then we have to work through circumstances are different from last year when we had our plans and our committees together looking at a hybrid model circumstances are different now our staffing is different now our needs are different there are so many things that we know now that we didn't know before and that's part of that committee work that has
067to happen what are the lessons that we've learned the things that we know okay we will not do that again and then what are the things that you know what this worked really well but now we're in a better space we can even improve on this and then those things that we did really well we want to make sure that we maintain those so in planning for 2122 there are many many unknowns and at this juncture we would like to be able to plan a quote traditional regular return model however we know that all of the list of concerns are still in place we don't know the impact of our community and our faculty and staff being vaccinated but we will see what guidelines come out with regard to that there are several other vaccine
068that are available some that are still waiting for approval there's vaccine that is scheduled and slated to be approved move moving forward to address children so we'll have to see how all of those things play a part as we move forward and so we will have the committees the work will begin this spring with regard to our elementary middle and high school committees and we will be looking at the instructional needs and options and then much like what we did last year once it gets down to the school level then we'll have an opportunity for schools to share out with their communities so that they can get input from those families our covet 19 update we have a total number of confirmed cases to date of 247. total cases for on-site individuals is 127 and
069then off-site individuals 120. as you can see looking at october and november we averaged 0.9 new cases per day december 2.9 cases per day january we had a huge spike with 4.4 new cases per day and now in february through february 10th we are seeing it level out and we're looking at about 2.3 cases per day we are continuing with the protocols and we are continuing with our cleaning and sanitization process ensuring that we are wearing our mask socially distance hand hygiene etc at this time i will turn it over to kimberly rohring our deputy superintendent of business and finance to talk about the fiscal impact for the 2021 school year thank you superintendent adams um this is a little bit different than what we've been sharing with you and we just wanted to try
070and find a way to better summarize that information so i'm back at the end of the summer we were advised that we may see 20 reductions in our aid and we have um the state began with holding 20 of most of our local aid most local aid payments which was applied to the following for albany our 2019-20 payment that was due in september our 2019-20 final grant payment 2021 initial grant payments including upk as well as 2021 charter school supplemental tuition aid and then noting at the bottom the cares grant application was originally part of the state aid scheduled payments and then it became an application process we have received approval of our application so now we commence looking at the total fiscal impact um in the chart we've tried to capture some of the
071amounts associated with that so our 2019-20 state aid so far it's 1.85 million we are not anticipating reimbursed unreimbursed transportation expenses pardon me at 463. our 2021 state aid is around a million dollars our 2021 grants is about 1.5 which puts us at 4.8 million we also had a deduct from the state's original proposed budget for 2021 of 2 million so we're at a total of 6.8 there has been impact in other revenue areas as well for the district this year we've had a reduction in our interest earnings that's been pretty substantial we have very restricted ways that we are allowed to invest our phones and the returns have been very very low much lower than we anticipated we've also had a reduction in our medicaid reimbursement for eligible student services the programming is different
072this year which has resulted in a reduction in revenue we've also received notification from the city treasurer that our pilot payments will be less than we originally anticipated by about 335 000 um and they are still working on our remaining payment that we can expect this year 567 000 so looking at our unplanned expenditures which are now up to 944k we have a grand total of around 8.3 million so our outlook and planning for 2122 we will absolutely continue to keep our eye on what's happening with our budget as funds are being released and provided to us we'll also keep the board abreast of when we receive information as far as if withholdings are being taken from other areas we know that there are different pots of money and so i think that we need
073to make sure that we're clear about which ones are fully funded and which ones may not be just so that you have a clear picture of how that funding is coming out we will absolutely continue to analyze that data and and those financial decisions that impact our instructional program are extremely important one of the things that we did really well in opening was a phased-in approach because we don't shock the system and then see how to react so we phase it in we make sure that we can absorb what is happening uh be it covet 19 be it the finances and so in doing that phased in approach it gives us an opportunity to implement we plan we implement then once we implement we see how well that's working we learn from that we make
074recommendations for the next step and then we add the next layer and so we did that uh really well in our opening and that's one of the things that was a takeaway from that that we will look to continue when we talk about what this means for us now right now our budgets are status quo but based on how we are strategically rebuilding we are looking at sustainability again we want to if we are bringing back and rehiring our employees we want them to stay with us so we want to make sure that we're building in that sustainability so that as we move to the budget for the 21 22 school year those positions and those people stay with us administrators looking to strategically rebuild with cohorts with students on campus for our third and
075fourth quarter marking periods those details will be forthcoming and as soon as those are um completed we will definitely make sure that we are notifying the board and that we are keeping parents informed um as always innovative instructional delivery programs and looking at the models for the 2122 school year we will have our elementary middle school and high school committees and we're not just looking at what's happening around us we are looking at what other districts are doing that's been successful not just locally but in our country we have we get several pieces of information from other districts that we can learn from and not to say that we would take exactly what is done in another district because they may not have the same complexities that we have but we can look at other
076models and see what's out there and then take from those good things that they're doing and build our own to meet the needs of our students and our clientele of course we student achievement and their growth and proficiency is extremely important we have seen a decline in some of the achievement of our students and as we get that information and start looking at how we close those gaps that's going to be extremely important and so we will be working through that as well and of course through classroom observations looking at our instructional models and the instructional requirements all of those things working together to provide the guidance and the parameters by which we need to operate those are the things that we're going to be looking at and that's what it means for us now
077and at this time i will open it up for questions from the board all right board colleagues that was an awful lot of information amazing presentation from mrs bechdel on the new curriculum structure built into there so it was a lot um as is our usual practice i'm going to ask you to prioritize your questions and ask your most important question first we are going to start very explicitly with one question for each board members so to make sure that all all board members have the chance to be heard and ask their questions if you have additional questions of course we might we'll go around if time remains i really am stressing this and wanting you to pay particular attention to this tonight we had amazing presentations but we are a tiny bit behind schedule
078as a result of that and we have a very full agenda the last item on the agenda is the 2122 budget which is a rather important item i would like to still be awake by the time we get to that that item so i ask you to keep that in mind we i want to make sure you all understand board members and community members why we do it that way we put the budget last because the presentations that precede the budget require people who are on staff to be here people who would who can otherwise go home and go to sleep and get up work and go to work the next morning if we put them last they're here with us late and they have to stay up late so we try and make our
079staff presentations early form is roaring is stuck with us all night anyway so she has to stick it out and so we try and put the staff presentations early the budget goes last the net result is we can be very tired by the time we get to that point so please keep that in mind as you decide whether your question is compelling enough to be asked tonight so with that i did take a look at this very um intense presentation from the superintendent and thank you very much for all of that detail i really appreciate it slides five through eight were on specific projects technology sports meal delivery and the excellent new curriculum area on the website thank you mrs bechdel i'm wondering if anybody has any compelling questions that they really feel they need
080to use board meeting time to ask on those or if we can move beyond those and if you have questions we can certainly put them in the communications tool and get get feedback but not during the meeting is that okay can we do that okay everybody's nodding generally all right then the slides nine and ten were really about moving forward and i know there's been a lot of questions um that board members have had and that community members have had about this about what's happening for the rest of this year and what's happening next year i'm thinking that it'll be much less confusing if we could talk about the rest of this year first and then talk about next year okay not the budget because of course we're going to do that with mrs rowing
081at the end but just these instructional pieces that the superintendent has raised so i'm looking for for understanding an agreement from my board colleagues that we will take this first round of questions will be about the reopening plans for third and fourth quarter of this year only limiting the conversation to that okay on that topic who would like to ask the first question board member cratey hi thank you so much for your presentation it was really detailed and i know i learned a lot of things that i didn't know i just wanted more clarification about the plans to bring middle school students in seventh and eighth grade on site i wanted clarification about whether the plans will be uniform across the three middle schools i wanted to know whether art music and science would be
082incorporated as well as core subjects and last i wanted to know if every seventh and eighth grader regardless of their academic performance will be invited back to in-person learning during the school year if they want it so i'll start with a few of the questions and then i'll ask miss mckenna if she can chime in uh with a few more details so i would say about a month ago maybe a little bit longer than that miss mckenna did charge the middle level the secondary principles with looking at what does it look like to bring our students back and at that time we did not have the information that we have with the budget and so we were definitely looking at without expanding the budget what would that be and so that's when we uh i'll
083go even further back that goes back to phase two where we started looking at bringing in small groups looking at students that may be struggling looking at our tier two tier three students and looking at that and so once we were able to handle that and i would say handle that meaning kids coming on campus and understanding protocols and procedures et cetera then what would be the next step and where could we expand and so that was when she started working with them to look at what those plans might be and so those plans are due to her tomorrow and i will ask that if she has any uh anything to add with regard to what are some of the things that we're seeing that may be taking place because again they are submitting them
084tomorrow so miss mckenna good evening everyone and yes yes [Music] um summarize that nicely for for our students who are currently in the virtual environment we will also be looking at quarter four to see if we can bring students back in person depending on the number of students who opt to come back in person uh will depend on the number of days that we can actually bring them back because we have to look at staffing and make some determinations based on the staffing level that that we need in order to bring students back in a hybrid model or um in an all-person um model so we're still working through those so there's not a plan that i'm going to be able to share with you tonight we can share with you what some of the
085possibilities may be and that's what we're talking about can i just a quick follow-up ms mckinney you talked about wanting depending on how many students are going to come in um so does that mean there'll be a survey being done at some point so that we'll know how many parents want to take advantage of that yes um i will be working on a two to a three two to three question survey that will go out shortly after uh the winter break for families to um complete so we'll have the data in order to make informed decisions for quarter four on site and the survey will go to all students who are in all secondary students who are currently 100 virtual to get a sense of what their thoughts are about their preference yes and you'll
086use that to determine how many days or what other time frame is possible for us to accommodate the parents preference is that correct did i understand that correctly okay uh sorry i jumped the gun there i just wanted to follow up board member katie did you feel like that's pretty much enough sufficient answer for your question i just wanted to clarify for miss mckenna she said if we would be able to offer a hybrid option to all middle schoolers who wanted it but then you said something about which number of days a week does that mean we're still not 100 positive that we'll be able to offer the hybrid model to all middle schoolers that want the in-person hybrid no that's not what i'm saying at all it depends on the number of families who
087opt to have their child attend in person um will determine the number of days that we actually bring students back uh if we have fewer students we may be able to bring them back um for you know more than a day or two but if we have 600 families who are saying we want to send our child back in person we may need to limit it to two days for seventh grade two days for eighth grade so it really depends on the number of families who are opting um for an in-person um model and and that could even mean one day because it just depends on the number right so one of the things that i keep in mind all the time in this conversation is this physical limitation of the classrooms right like this
088is this is the big big crux of the issue is while we're just still doing 16 six foot social distancing there's only so many physical bodies that fit in the classroom no matter what our dreams and intentions and goals are about getting students in okay are you good board member critique uh board member wilson i saw him before are you still interested in being next i actually had a question about a different set of slides but i did i think you've somewhat clarified that you're going to have a plan with a configuration numerous configurations of ideas so that was that was clarified but my questions have another slide other questions about what's going on third and fourth quarter dr it's more common i know that in other parts of the country like in massachusetts for
089example there are some districts that are going through a three-foot distancing model that is not recommended by cdc yet so if something like that gets recommended of course like you know we will be able to bring more students in because you can fit more people in the same building just want to put that on as a comment correct those guidelines in massachusetts have not come this way yet we have our our department of health has not approved that uh should they approve that then um i think about graduation where in a matter of two days we had six different graduation plans uh but as guidance comes out then we will adjust to what the guidance would be thank you the constant evolution of the guidance is the theme of 2020 and now 2021. anyone else
090with a question on moving forward throughout this year okay i do know that there's been a fair amount of confusion in the community and i think it's really just this timing thing right that the the secondary team has been really working prior to us having clarity that we were going to have our budget and we figuring out how we could handle that but now that we have had optimistic language out of the department of budget i want to be really clear we still don't have cash in our hot little hands but we do have optimistic language and what appears to be fairly clear statements from the department of budget that we will ultimately get our aid um i will save my question on that till we get through to the next set of slides um
091but so anybody else on this topic of third and fourth quarter okay so we'll have a survey then we'll see where we are that's basically what we're at but the intention is to offer in-person option for every child who wants it if we can possibly do it okay any questions about that same sort of topic on slides nine and ten about next year or do you guys want to hold off and talk about next year as part of our whole budget conversation about next year what's that tabitha board member wilson suggests that we hold off and talk about next year as part of the next year budget i think that's okay we'll just drift into the instructional part when we need to is that okay okay deputy superintendent roaring is also nodding at me so
092i think that we'll take that as a yes and then slides 11 and 12 we've seen a million times these were the covered numbers and protocols i'm going to assume that we don't have any questions on those and then lastly slides 13 and on was a slightly new way of looking at the fiscal impact and so board member wilson did you have a question there very similar to what you framed is that you know we have a perception that the budget and the perception that our funding has been restored i think was the terminology and how do we reconcile that understanding that we are receiving our money in phases and we're still subject to the look back period and i know that there are other districts doing other things such as maybe they have the
093same high needs population as us but they're bringing staff back and you more so illustrated where we have to of course think about not only is it a one-shot in terms of money but how sustainable it is to bring staff back and not have a um revolving door so to speak where there could be layoffs again so i'll start and then i'll hand it over to miss roaring one of the things that we have to look at that's different with some of our other districts is the dependency on state aid i mean that's that's just the first and foremost fact those districts that are most dependent on state aid there are different decisions that have to be made with regard to our budget some programming that we have may be very different from other districts
094so the the nuances of a blanket statement it's here's my analogy it's much like when we receive information from the governor's office and everyone's watching the press release and a statement is made that this is what's going to happen absolutely that's what's going to happen however after that there's guidance documents that address some of the nuances that are in the details of that overarching statement the overarching statement absolutely will happen but then there are categorical funds that you have to look at there's expense based aid that you have to look at you look at your state aid you look at your foundation aid and so all of these things work together to make that overarching statement happen and so i that is the same thing that happens with districts we all receive the overarching information
095now we have to take that information and align it with what is happening within our district and our dependency on state aid what are our expense-based aids and how does that work in in concert to help get us to that bigger picture and so those are the things that we have to look at as districts that may make one of our neighboring districts have a different decision as well as you have to look at your instructional priorities we have several programs that many of our colleagues many of my colleagues do not have and so if we're going to prioritize restructuring certain programs to bring back in their fullest form because we value those programs that's going to be a different decision than a district that may not have a program like for example aic if
096they don't have an albany international center or a center that we do in the way in which we know works best then their decisions are going to be very different than ours we have our tcce program that is a program that we believe in so how are we going to look to restructure that and perhaps bring that back that's a decision that our district would have to make that another district might not and so for the that's the instructional part of those decisions and now i'm going to turn it over to miss roaring to talk about some of the financial impacts so my will probably be pretty brief here because i think it's going to be a little bit more telling as we get into my presentation later on and we're looking at what that
097revenue projection is for next year we want to be really thoughtful about how we're strategically rebuilding and making sure that we are doing something that's sustainable because most importantly we want that stability for our district and for our families board members so on slide 14 where you talk about the 4.8 million you're not including the almost close to a million dollars that we spent on ppe and supplies and all of those things right because there was some concern about uh it would either be 75 percent then maybe if it was the fema it would be a different percentage but there was some money that we were not getting 100 required or did we so that number now actually appears on the next slide so it's in that total overall um we have a kind of
098an update from fema the guidance has changed so that the items um that are ultimately approved are going to come in at 100 now instead of 75 however we are still trying to navigate this very complex approval process um and and hoping um that we'll get enough so that we don't but we anticipate actually going back through the appeal process honestly on that to see what we can ultimately get and the 463 000 in transportation because that's the cdta contract right is any negotiation with them to try and if you didn't use the service with cdta so that as expenses that were paid last year um so that that just really is our foregone aid thank you i actually want to ask a follow-up on that because i had some questions along those same lines
099the this is also inside 14 the 4.8 the 4 463 i understand is probably money we we're never going to get reimbursed by anyone ever that money is truly gone um i'm wondering i think the rest of these items on here are more if the department of budgets positive language that they have shared with us to date comes actually to be true like i'm making that as an assumption to begin with if that is true are the other items on here all included in what they have announced as they are going to make us whole for past withholdings so i think there is some question about how we're going to address the 2021 grant piece of the table here but yes they have indicated that they would make us hold on to withholdings so that's
100how they're going to go about dealing with the grant piece is what's the question so the ones the 2019 2020 state aid the 1.85 million we feel pretty confident that if dob lives up to what they have said they will do that we will get those funds the two grant this the 2021 20 20 21 state aid also falls in that category we think we're going to get that the 20 20 21 grants the 1.5 is the is the question mark still about whether those grant funds are going to be reimbursed okay that's very helpful for me i if i can just put it into that really quickly um a good portion of that number is associated with our upk grant that we were told back in august we needed to redesign our program to
101live within something less than so that is what we have done this year yeah so that maybe not be money that we ultimately see i understand but it also was money we reduced our expenditures on and so it's it's a you know it's a i hate to say this it's a wash financially it's a terrible tragedy for the children who didn't get served but it is a wash financially it's not a direct financial impact to our personal our district bottom line okay thank you very much anyone else have questions on the financial aspects or anything really anything else on these slides that we have not talked about that um that you would like to we will have a chance to revisit some of this as we go into the budget conversation but i didn't i
102don't want anybody to feel railroaded even though i am pressing on time doctor tutor slide 15. can you stress give more explanation on the pilot like this that the city is going to withhold now the part of the pilot money and so we had estimated about 7.2 million dollars for pilots based on the information that was provided to us last year from the city treasurer um as it turns out this year what they are anticipating they will actually collect for the school district is 6.9 so that is that 335 000 difference typically they would make their payment to us in january in totality but they are working through collection on some of these so they have made a substantial payment to us of around 6.3 million dollars but that balance is going to come to
103us at some later date that 567 okay but we will be getting it yes anyone else with the last question on this topic before we move on all right thank you guys very much i appreciate your constraining your ever present curiosity on to the only the most critical items tonight i really appreciate it okay that brings us now to public comment miss carol thank you for your patience um if you wouldn't mind approaching the microphone while i read our statement we will move right along the board always welcomes input from the community about the decisions we are making according to our long-standing policy the board sets aside up to 30 minutes of each meeting to hear from district residents parents students and other members of our community if there are more comments than can be
104accommodated in 30 minutes we may choose to extend the length of public comment or alternatively we may establish a second public comment period later in the meeting per our brand new well not so new anymore but covid related new public comment policy we also accept comments in writing and by voicemail comments that are not in person must be made at least six hours prior to the meeting to give us time to collect organize and verify them as needed i know this seems insane but we have had people spoofing other people in public comments already that they've put their comment in under somebody else's name or under a fake name so we do need that time in order to make sure that the public comments really represent the people that are named in the public comment
105written comments must be limited to 400 words and voicemail comments to three minutes all comments must include the commenter's name and place of residence if you are interested in submitting a voicemail or written comment for a future meeting we encourage you to please review the addressing the board information at albanyschools.org forward slash boe which will tell you everything you wanted to know about public comment and more we ask all commenters to keep in mind that information about individual students and specific district staff cannot be shared not only is that a violation of privacy but every single student and every single staff member deserves to know that concerns about them will not be aired in public for that reason when we read some comments tonight because we do have some written comments if there are specific
106names they will be passed over or substituted by board members we ask you to keep in mind also the public comment is not the best place to first alert the district to a specific concern you have and that you instead share your concerns first with relevant staff such as the teacher or principal if you feel your concern is not addressed adequately you may appeal that to the person supervisor up the chain of command if necessary to the superintendent decisions made by the superintendent may be appealed to the board we will begin with in-person public comments when i recognize you please state your name and city of residence statements are restricted to a maximum of three minutes ms wilson who is out of practice since we haven't had a lot of public comment in person recently
107we'll give you a one minute notice and a ten second notice and i will notify you if your time has expired it's always a good idea to look up occasionally to see if those notices are coming so you won't be surprised at the end of your three minutes also please note that the board's policy is not to respond during the public comment period if you need a response please contact us by email phone or postal mail our contact information is right there at albanyschools.org forward slash boe i promise i will respond on behalf of the board finally please let me know if i mispronounce your name or if any board member who's reading a letter mispronounces a name we really try hard to get people's names right we treat it as a sign of respect
108to do that and we appreciate it when we are corrected we have one person here for in-person public comment and i present to you kate carroll hello my name is kate carroll and i live in the city of albany i have three children in the school district a fifth grader a ninth grader and a twelfth grader my fifth grader goes to ash and has been in person all year a few bumps but has been handled very well and my 9th and 12th grader are not in person and before i came tonight i had different things planned to say but i do hear that people are trying to get the children in school and i would just like to advocate that my 12th grader is missing all these classes she's been dying to take forever and
109the teachers are doing a wonderful job but it's not the same and i know you know that and thank you for responding to my email um and my ninth grader his culture of albany high school is from my living room and i just hope you all know how important it is to get all students back in they're doing fine they have benefited from athletics and thank you again for having athletics because it's their only tie to this community and this is a community we want to be a part of so please share plans like you did tonight and continue to give us information about what you're planning because being in the dark and not knowing how to plan for your children is a terrible terrible feeling and august when we got that information it was
110like we're being gutted and we don't really want to be in that situation again and i know i i probably speak for a lot of people you know we just want our kids in school we want it to be safe and i understand that there are constraints and that not everybody is going to want that option but there are a number of us who want that option so i hope to hear more plans about bringing the children back to school and please be transparent in those plans so we're not in the dark and scared about what the future holds because i want my children here i made the choice 20 years ago to have my children here and i i want them to benefit from albany schools thank you thank you very much and thank
111you for your patience as we are a little behind schedule we do have two comments left by voicemail um so this is a relatively new experience for us the voicemail thing we've only been doing for a few months so mr baker when you're ready we will listen to our two voicemail comments as i look back on the last three and a half years i've spent at albany high school what comes to mind isn't the phenomenal education i have received or the wonderful staff has met it's the little things in classrooms and hallways that make our school stand out today thursday february 4th i was lucky enough to spend three consecutive hours at albany high engaged in in-classroom education two of those hours were in mr bizzaro's ap environmental science lab and one hour within a
112band lesson sitting in a classroom for the first time since march of last year i was overwhelmed with emotions yes a part of it was the joy of seeing a teacher teaching in front of a classroom full of students again but more importantly it was the ability to work collaboratively with my peers it was the ability to crack a joke to my friend just out of earshot of my teacher it was the walking through the halls to the bathroom and waving to my other teachers in their own classroom i didn't know whether to laugh smile or cry honestly i did look a little bit at all i spent the almost 14 years i have been a student in this district singing all the new phrases i love this school i love the staff and i
113love everyone in the building but it has been so hard to remain the smiley optimistic albany fan that i have been when all the upper grades have been stuck at home with no end in sight reading that there's no plan in place for any sort of in-person learning beyond cte classes music lessons and science labs depresses me it is not fair to the albany falcons at meyers hackett edmond o'neill or north albany it is not fair to students who are expected to sit for ap ib or regents final exams and band gyms students who are going to be graded against their peers in districts that are prioritizing the education middle high heights and high schoolers as well as elementary schoolers it is not fair to any of us who are watching our peers in suburban
114districts go into their school livings on a regular basis when we are at home but five school days a week i urge the superintendent and the board of education to prioritize their students in 7th through 12th grades again these students education is not any more or less valuable than the younger grades i hope that the district reconsiders their plans is expressed in the superintendent's february 4th letter sarah bearden albany high school class of 2021. i am writing to the board to address my concerns about our grades 7 through 12 students returning to in-person school this school year i was totally caught off guard and shocked last night at our middle school pta meeting where it was indicated by the principal that the general education population other than perhaps students who are struggling and might be
115brought in for extra help would not be returning to in-person school in any way fourth quarter that it couldn't be done with the master's schedule as it is etc the reason this seems so alarming to me is because it sounded like a complete contradiction to what the superintendent communicated in the updated plan that she released just last week most notably she stated for students in grades 7 through 12 the fourth marking period will include a modified hybrid instructional model as a parent of an eighth grade student who is desperate to go back to in person school in any capacity yet does not fall under the category of struggling academically these conflicting messages are extremely difficult to navigate it is unclear to many of us parents as to where the disconnect lives does the superintendent slash
116board know the issue with the master schedule what's the reason it wasn't set up to accommodate a hybrid schedule to begin with as that was the original plan for school right up until his board meeting in september and most importantly where do we go from here to get the kids back in school fourth quarter as stated by ms adams it was also noted last night that the survey to parents asking what model they want for their children hasn't gone out since the first quarter and that would need to be a first step why hasn't this gone out also perhaps there are district administrators that can help address the master scheduling issue so that the responsibility does not fall solely in the school slash principal's lab i understand that this whole thing is a logistical nightmare
117and cannot imagine having to figure out that puzzle with that being said it seems there are enough highly paid district administrators who could all put their heads together to come up with something that works for slash includes all students desperate times call for desperate measures so this might entail stepping outside their typical duties but can't be done is no longer an option if this was last march april may or june i can see maybe not being able to figure it out but we are coming up on one year one year that these kids haven't been able to attend school and i just know we can do better we have to please let us know what we as parents can do to support this effort i'm sure we can all agree that the children of albany
118deserve and our district should be able to provide what nearly every other school district in the region is providing at least some kind of hybrid option this school year as well as at the very least a complete hybrid model for the 2021-2022 school year but we cannot continue with this wait-and-see approach the plans have to be set in motion now thank you sarah diefendorf eagle point pta treasurer and parent of third fifth and eighth grade students in the albany city school district my city of residence is albany and my phone number is 518. so um we're going to move on now to written comments we do have nine of them we have three board members each are going to read three i do want to just recognize that one of the challenges about our new
119policy which allows people to submit comments in advance is that they don't have as miss carol had the opportunity to hear some information and reflect on their remarks so i want to remind everyone that both the voicemails and the letters that we're going to read now were submitted before this information and that is a new and interesting aspect to taking these um comments without people having to be physically present so it's just something i'm reflecting on myself mr el manawi you have three letters to read my first letter is from sarah and bill whalen it states we are writing with regard to the recent district news regarding the fourth quarter of 2021 and the anticipated options for next school year one year into online learning and there hasn't been a check-in with families to say
120hey how is your student doing what kind of things would you like to see change are you okay no csda everything is not okay at home parents are working kids are alone money is tight family members are dying here is our request to you csda and ask kids to turn their cameras on use a filter in the background if there are privacy concerns give them bonus points if they do it we understand that some people are worried about screenshots from other students but let's be honest that happens in a normal school year as well or tell them not to do it at least at the least have the conversation ask the teachers to get creative and foster more group verbal dialogue and projects please don't continue this check a box meet a curriculum requirement etc
121model please put extra effort in making this year memorable and not so much of a wash that these kids fall into a depression and suffer for years to come please send out a survey to the entire district to find out how many students want to stay remote or attend in person please send it in multiple languages please don't rely on social media to announce news please use the results to plan your fourth quarter model and then do it again this summer for preparation for the fall please talk to us about the budget and what was allotted in january as announced in the state of the state please provide a timeline for when the district can spend that money and how they will spend that money please be specific to the positions that were eliminated during
122fall 2020. please be transparent with the planning efforts that are ongoing for next school year please send weekly updates with meeting notes and status to families via snn please do better please inspire please go the extra step for these children we know you're a district with challenges that span the spectrum but we also know that you care about these children and we know that you want them to flourish please help them flourish my next letter states dear members of the albany school board like many i was relieved to see communication from the district this past week we had been told that the district had committed two quarters of virtual learning for grade 7 through 12 for budgetary reasons i was eagerly awaiting the future plans for in-person learning now that the budget issue is resolved
123i appreciate the communication from miss adams particularly the second follow-up email another with additional detail is needed is the staff working to ensure every child will have an opportunity to choose a hybrid model in the fourth quarter if they wish not clear will the hybrid model offered in the fourth quarter be one that will improve educational standards not clear is the staff immersed in creating a master schedule for fourth quarter not clear i believe that the administration and board of our csda care deeply about children in this district however i feel there may be a disconnect virtual learning is not an ideal or acceptable long-term education plan if children can attend in person safely children are being under-educated with increasing rates of depression and anxiety suburban schools in the area have been hybrid all year
124with low rates of transmission and other urban districts in new york state are returning to a hybrid model additionally teachers are being vaccinated this third quarter a albany high school kids attending lab feels inadequate most have gone in yet and yet and many will go in perhaps one or two times the entire quarter is this optimal i hope that the fourth quarter hybrid rollout will be substantive compared to the lab rollout the kids deserve it it is difficult to understand how there is not regular music labs and cte happening in person in third quarter in light of the district approving high risk covet contact sports these challenges are an opportunity to be visionary bold and to think outside the box consider alternatives like outdoor classrooms alternative children every other day considering consolidating in-person and virtual
125classes to optimize spacing in numbers etc transparency and frequent communication is key perhaps csda could implement a friday update every week apprising our community of detailed future plans we are in a crisis a pandemic as well as an educational one we can all be collaborators communication is an excellent way to begin how can i help thank you gina madden csda parent my last letter states it's from mike kendall and it states i write to express disappointment in the district's update object february 4th through the fifth specifically the messaging that students in grades 7 through 12 will remain in distance learning throughout the third marking period and possibly into the 2021-2022 school year is unacceptable this information should be retracted and replaced with the administration's detailed plan to return students to the classroom now not next
126quarter and certainly not next year in some part-time model sadly most albany students have been denied a basic education since last march this is no one's fault and the community appropriately supported the district's uh pivot to manage the covid impacts through june compounding this challenge the governor's office provided inadequate and contradictory information regarding amount of available state funding during the development of the 2020-2021 budget and again when the district was struggling with reopening safely in september this muddled information and threats of withholding of funding disproportionately impacted students in urban districts such as albany today however the impacts of those multiple crisis have changed and it's imperative that the that the district adapt and provide equitable in-class room instruction to all students today while the funding crisis is not over it has waned as both state
127and federal reimbursement have been restored future funding is not guaranteed but the situation compares to the past springs when the school budget was formed with incomplete information regarding expected state revenues similarly while the pandemic is still here vaccinations are wild widely available to teachers and district staff safety is of paramount importance but science has repeatedly proven that virus transmission in schools is exceptionally low significantly below the general population indeed indeed the ability to successfully safely conduct in-person instruction is demonstrated daily in neighboring districts where students attend class in person every day there is no justifiable reason students in albany do not deserve that same equal opportunity unfortunately remote learning cannot provide the same benefits and outcomes as in-person attendance students lose multiple incalcula incalculable opportunities and supports that are unavailable while staring at a screen
128alone all week continuing this remote only model compounds the harm done to our community and students and perpetuates inequalities these students and their families already face instead the district must provide a detailed reopening plan that includes some in-person instruction option now for all students expanding to a robust multi-day fourth quarter and full-time availability in 2021-2022 we have the opportunity and necessity to achieve these targets and that's the last letter okay so i have three letters here the first is written by brian vigiani and it states the following i would first like to thank the board of education and administration for their approval tuesday night of high risk inter interscholastic high school sports extracurricular activities are an important part of students development and i'm glad that those sports that can safely be played will be and
129hope that can extend to additional activities in the near future as well i also thank the athletic department particularly athletic director ashley chappelle for their dedication and hard work in making sports seasons happen as well as the district's continuing work with albany county to ensure that all interested athletes can try out to participate and be cleared to play with safety as the absolute top priority in the face of the global covid19 pandemic i would like to urge the school district to continue its work towards instituting an option for students in grades seven to twelve to attend live full-day in-person learning for a minimum of two days per week as soon as feasible this academic year while also offering an equitable robust online environment for those students that choose to utilize this option i would further
130hope that plans for the modified hybrid instructional model and or phase 3 would be explained further in plain language to parents regarding the possible allowance of on-campus learning for grades 7 to 12. would this option be available to all students whose families choose to partake in this cohort and for what percentage of the school day would targeted support and instruction occur does this mean a full day of education or only one class period or something in between a full day offered safely has many benefits including limiting the disruption of midday transportation issues while the school day continues the switch since last march to all remote learning has worked for many students but has not adequately worked for for many others despite the valiant efforts of our dedicated frontline teachers i urge the school district to
131soon offer an in-person learning option for all 7-12 students for all students in grades 7-12 interested as soon as safely possible in this academic year in a manner equitable to those of its neighboring school districts i thank the board of ed and the district and high school administration for their dedication and continuing hard work in this most challenging of academic years and in continuing to plan for the 2021 to 22 school year brian gianni parent of an albany high school student okay my next letter is from a community member named colleen lemon she's the eagle point pta president she states as follows as a parent of a fifth grader in an albany public school i am writing to express my concerns after reading superintendent adams mid-year report and hearing from fellow parents with middle school
132aged children i have concerns that there is not enough being done to develop a solid plan to establish in the very least a hybrid model for our current middle schoolers as well as the next academic year we can all agree that the children of albany deserve and our district should be able to provide what nearly every other school district in the region is providing at least some kind of hybrid option this school year as well as at the very least a complete hybrid model for the 2021-22 school year i recognize and appreciate that the school district has been trying to address so many challenges but i encourage you to start planning now for next year and keep us informed we cannot continue with this wait and see approach as of now i'm not even sure
133if my current fifth grader will be placed in the middle school building next year due to space restrictions and i am concerned that i won't find out until late august we know social distancing will still be in place next year so decide where students will be placed and design at least a hybrid model now if buildings are not big enough consider using trailers or school grounds and please inform parents about the plan as early as you can on a positive note we are in this together and we need to work together to face these challenges please let us know what we as parents can do to support the district with this effort ptas can be engaged as sounding boards for creative ideas and encouraged to help advocate for more federal and state dollars to support
134our local our public schools collectively we can be resilient and offer better educational outcomes for our students thank you for your time and your continued commitment to our children colleen lemon equal point pta president okay our third letter comes from community member marshall miller annie they state the following dear board of education members and superintendent adams i just want to give a shout out to virtual learning i commend the district for exploring all options for all grades and i'm sure you'll hear a variety of opinions and experiences and i fully respect those i want to add my voice as a parent whose kids are having a positive time in virtual school i have a third grader and a seventh grader my third graders teachers are doing an excellent job i know you're not allowed to
135say names but they definitely deserve to be recognized it's been also really great to see all the ways in which the middle school teachers have engaged that group virtually covid is a scary disease and with the new variants some of which seem to be more transmissible among children the story is still unfolding i appreciate all the district has done to keep everyone safe and to offer a really robust virtual learning program i'm glad the district plans to continue to support this effort the same way it always has with dedicated virtual teachers until the pandemic is fully over and it's safe for everyone to go back to school thank you for all that you do so my first letter today is from erin tobin like many parents i look forward to reading superintendent adams letters regarding
136the school district's plans to return students back into the classroom this spring and fall as districts across the state continue to bring students back into the classroom i eagerly anticipated learning more about our albany district's plans especially now that they feared new york state budget cuts never came to fruition teachers that are at the front of the line for code vaccinations and schools have not been shown to be vectors for coed transmission upon reading the superintendent's february 5th letter i was heartened to read students in grades 7 through 12 the fourth marking period will include a modified hybrid instruction model students will be scheduled in in small groups for in-person education instruction one or several days a week based on their schedule and their needs details on this however sparse and the last week i've
137learned second hand from other school leadership that only seventh and eighth grade students at risk of summer school will be in person during the remainder of the school year no in-person science labs no in-person music lessons albany high school has thankfully begun science labs and music lessons details on what the fourth quarter looks like are non-existent but the rumors are not positive what i said in the schools the hidden implica implications that we just don't know about next year sticks with us all fostering distrust and anger among the district community especially because the state said they will not implement the budget cuts the district plan for last fall the district's late august decision to go fully remote for grades 7 through 12 was solely based on anticipated new york state budget cuts which never happened
138they have a hybrid instruction plan from the summer and a constitutional obligation to provide a sound education every student should have the opportunity to spend part of their week inside the school building in front of their teachers engaging with classmates in these hard times instead of creating joy the district seems to be striving towards the opposite stripping joy from its students taking away the best parts of their days jokes between friends a hall monitor checking in personal connection with the teacher teachers are doing an extraordinary job in incredibly challenging circumstances the students need to be back in the classroom school leadership has to make that happen there are no more excuses left the next letter comes to us from sam shepard i would like to amend my original public statement which i wrote in response
139to supreme adam's mid-year update of thursday february 4th i expressed my incredible incredibility at the suggestion that the 21 20 21 22 school year may be remote for certain students some of whom have not been in the school building in almost a year in particular i was just made to see superman adams referred to the district taking a multi-year approach to strategically building instructional framework while two or three years for an administrator is not much time for children that be more than half the time they spend in middle and high school delays in delivering quality education exactly toll on children they pay for a lifetime our children in grades 7 through 12 see their peers in other districts attending school and actual school buildings if they can do it all three can too i appreciate
140i appreciated the superintendent second communication on friday february 5th saying there will be opportunities for small group instruction one or more days a week i implore you to do better to have plans for as much in-person instructional time for all students not just special populations or grades thank you for your volunteer services members of the board of education our last letter comes to us from amanda hagsen dear albany school district just because some parents can work from home due to covert doesn't mean we can just switch back and forth whenever required because of snow days or weather whenever a virtual learning day is announced i have to take leave from my job in order to care for my three elementary age children ages four and six and facilitate the clicks and attention on the computer
141for virtual learning i've had to provide last-minute notice to my employers cancel meetings and other negative impacts on my workday i feel that closing due to cold temperatures and today because a few inches of snow in albany was not the correct decision we also pay for aftercare at the school and so far in january have lost a few hundred dollars because we still have to pay for after scare after care and the school goes virtual eight or more days in january times three kids times cost per child per day for after care you're fortunate and i appreciate all the hard work that has gone into keeping our schools open i know there are others in much worse situations than us but it does have an impact which i wanted to share thank you [Music] thank
142you all for reading and that brings us to the end of public comment we appreciate always all public comments we find hearing from community members incredibly valuable and i repeat that our contact information for public comment and for routine correspondence as well is available to you at albanyschools.org forward slash boe that now brings us to the part of our meeting that we call routine consent during this portion of the meeting we approve routine matters from the district these include items like contracts in good times field trips personnel matters and the like each board member reviews each and every item very carefully but we vote on them as a group with no discussion that allows us to use our meeting time more efficiently nonetheless each board member has the option to set aside any routine consent
143item in order to require a separate discussion and vote on that item with that introduction i will now entertain a motion to adopt the routine consent agenda motion by ms smith seconded by dr touter are there any set-asides seeing none all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda in its entirety that is unanimous and that now brings us to the policy you know i'm sorry i forgot there's the board goals action we will make this very quick we talked about this last time we've had a retreat anybody who wants to read our board goals they are on on the agenda and i would entertain a motion to adopt the lord goals that we as we have discussed them motioned by board member almanawi second by board member wilson all in favor board member man
144did you get a vote that is unanimous and now we go on to the policy uh dr if you don't mind i'm going to take this too just to try and keep us moving we have in front of us six policies we talked about these two weeks ago we did not receive any additional public comment does anyone have any other comments on these does everyone feel comfortable that we could vote on these as a group i will entertain a motion to adopt the six policies that are in front of us motioned by ms smith second by dr chatur all in favor of adopting these policies as amended that is unanimous and that brings us to the first discussion item which is the uh pupil personnel services come on down as you all know we generally
145will not take another action tonight we try to front load our agendas with all the actions at the beginning stranger things have happened than us taking an action we weren't playing we're not planning on but we do not plan to take any further formal actions tonight we will have a discussion on ppp on pps and a discussion on our grants efforts and then of course the all-important 2021 budget update on revenue welcome superintendent adam thank you so very much madam superintendent members of the board tonight we have our student support services department with our pupil personnel services department within that sounds kind of strange to have two departments right um but thank you so very much i will turn it over to ms mckenna as ms mckenna is the assistant superintendent over secondary instruction and
146she supervises people personnel so miss mckenna good evening board member superintendent adams and members of the community i would like to introduce our people personnel services team dr kanzone ball director of people personnel services mike panetta assistant director for pps and carla mcdowell assistant director for student support services and she supports both special education and pps in her role as assistant director i'm excited to have them present to you and share the great work that they have been doing um last year and then again um moving forward into the 2021 school year update so with that said i'd like to turn it over to uh dr canzoni ball and the team for their presentation tonight thank you good evening members of the board miss adams and cabinet thanks for allowing us to present this evening
147but before we begin i'd like to say a special thank you to megan warren who isn't with us this evening but made this presentation possible through her behind-the-scenes effort so thanks megan we appreciate that as you're aware people personnel services or pps embodies the preventative model the department supports all aspects of social emotional learning or sel as we refer to it safe schools and violence prevention school health and behavioral health services and our most at-risk youth our team works closely with departments throughout the district related service providers and community agencies to assess and meet the needs of both students and staff so at this time i'll turn it over to carla for a little pps walk through when you entered the building tonight you were met by a school nurse who asked to take your
148temperature and fill out a copic screener in the background was a director of safe schools and violence prevention to ensure that this public meeting has a point of contact for any needs that might arise you may not know that starting at 2 am this morning staff and students were reminded to fill out their daily cobit screener for any possible symptoms or exposure if someone fails that screener the school nurse or the district health coordinator contacts and develops a plan for each individual impacted this is now part of our new normal in the past year the increase of community violence sent shock waves throughout our system as well as the hearts of school personnel because we know that our children and families are impacted administration security staff and the court liaison work to ensure that we
149have information and a plan for students including the use of clinical support teams pps team members are entrusted to develop and implement student-specific plans for when tragedy strikes and to uphold our district's sense of community duty and safety the pps department continues to strive for innovative solutions to new or unexpected issues when they arise our staff has been instrumental in strengthening communication and the sharing of resources with students and families during these challenging times in the presentation tonight we hope to convey our strengths and challenges but you have already experienced the work of our department maybe without even being aware of it next slide tonight we'll provide an update on 2019 2020 goals strengths and challenges areas of focus in the current school year future areas of focus in the 2122 school year and proposed
150work for future years it is important to note pps lost over 100 faculty and support staff members at the end of september as we rebuild and recover we are committed to providing the same high quality level of service to our students and families we have witnessed a tremendous amount of resilience in a face of adversity that has impacted us on a personal and professional level our program summary highlights over 30 areas we support each day now for an update on our work last year the mtss secondary rollout provided identification of new ways to intervene and support the whole child as well as track the effectiveness of interventions building level mtss teams were realigned due to reduction in staffing current systems are monitored and fine-tuned through professional learning communities the comprehensive school counseling and guidance plan
151outlines our social emotional learning counseling and college and career readiness programming throughout the district through the creation of this plan we identified gaps and created solutions as a result the district social emotional learning committee was formed to evaluate current social emotional programming and recommend new curriculum [Music] much of our work supports vulnerable populations of students who are disproportionately impacted by inequity prior to the closure our district presented best practices around chronic absenteeism at the college of st rose little did we know the new challenges waiting for us a week later with nationwide school closures behavior specialists offered professional development to all middle level schools around interventions and progress monitoring to tier 2 3 students to ensure consistency and fidelity of reporting we continue to implement the assurance of discontinuance letter agreement by holding monthly disproportionately
152equity meetings and focusing on a preventative approach in some ways a remote learning environment removed barriers which was the case for professional development approximately 800 staff members engaged in trauma-informed resilience-focused school six-hour course this virtual platform presented an opportunity for pps to offer over 25 choices of professional development with topics ranging from crisis intervention restorative practices supporting healthy relationships suicide prevention asthma management and teaching tolerance to name a few we embarked on a complete overhaul of how we welcome visitors and respond to crisis situations throughout the district by purchasing raptor systems and strengthening our district and building emergency response plans during the school closure new compliance rules and regulations were also created to ensure flexibility with service provision in-person related services turned into virtual related service sessions which resulted in new methods of billing at
153times the virtual model enhanced our ability to communicate with one another and promote a cultural of resource sharing the pps department with the support of cabin implemented an information line that was available the last three weeks of the school year to assist families who had questions or needs to be addressed our student support team members adapt the rules and responsibilities to the constantly changing needs of students team members assisted with meal delivery chromebook distribution and maintain connections with families the focus on the most vulnerable populations included reaching and connecting with students protected under the mckinney-vento act a virtual implementation of positive behavior and supports was created with the modification of the three b's be safe be respectful and be responsible a multi-level team was formed to create a framework framework focusing on social emotional learning
154implementation for in-person and virtual learning we also began a partnership with the national educators for restorative practices and trained classroom teachers and how to build community through the use of professional development and around relational practices due to legislation such as raise the age we continue to seek programming options for court involved youth as student interventions and supports are delivered through a community model the challenges we face are not that different from previous years and our actions are carefully considered fortunately cabinet and the board are supportive with providing new programs and funding for the challenges listed on this slide the work and disproportionality continued with a sense of urgency to address and eliminate disparities in each facet of the district providing a safe environment and support for teachers and staff to address top classroom behaviors and
155replace them with positive behaviors and restorative practices is our top priority prior to march unfortunately weapons confiscation outpaced historical trends this pattern was similar to the uptick in violence we saw in the community students reported that they carried weapons to school out of fear for personal safety while traveling to and from our buildings the needs of the most at-risk students remained in the forefront as we implemented services through the mckinney-vento challenge grant the family and student support team program and as we partnered with service provider agencies to enhance wraparound services and for students and families in need largely impacted by ongoing covit 19 concerns we continue to focus on an array of services leading to healthy bodies and minds we created an efficient method of ppe inventory and distribution cova testing and tracking we are
156expanding current partnerships and exploring new ones in order to bring high quality teletherapy and other human services to our school community we are collaborating with human resources to promote self-care for employees and have been seen as a leader in the area of suicide prevention and risk assessment a model which was modified for the virtual learning environment the district social learning a social emotional learning committee recommended ruler from yale university as the sel curriculum for the high school planning for this is currently underway for college and career readiness new programming will roll out in the fall of 2021 utilizing naviance college and career readiness we are shifting towards a restorative mindset in buildings to serve in a proactive manner and continue to highlight best practice with regard to trauma-informed care at pbis coach meetings we are
157monitoring efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism implement pbis with fidelity and improve our model of crisis response with the loss of funding for the grant supporting connecting youth in transition we have redefined the family and student support team program to better support the needs of 10 to 12 middle level families we continue to search for additional funding to provide a sustainable level of service our partnership with apd and other community agencies such as snug is stronger than ever although we lost the school resource officer due to the fiscal crisis our school resource officers are growing positive relationships with our students and families through outstanding programs such as do the right thing which recognizes everyday heroes in our students sros support pbis through holiday gift exchanges and other activities they also specialize in supporting refugee and immigrant
158families throughout the district collectively our sro program can be viewed as a model for collaboration with regard to mentoring coaching and parent university support fiscally we offer continued quality assurance related to medicaid we've strengthened our program by requiring related service providers to enter social notes for all students receiving services regardless of medicaid eligibility we monitor session notes on a monthly basis and conduct internal audits regularly so the areas listed are a mixture of continued focus as well as new items related to our changing environment we continue to grow our work in social emotional learning which encompasses curriculum programmatic coordination pbis as well as equity and services with the use of data from current initiatives such as preventative strategies mtss and code of conduct we will monitor progress and make adjustments as needed safety is essential
159and the district-wide school safety team meets to address all matters related to crisis response and threat assessment we continue to work on the standardization of professional development in all areas we strive for a high level of customer service and all we do moving forward we're committed to the provision of equitable services to students staff and families thank you for supporting our work and now at this time we can field any questions you might have thanks to all of you and the staff that i know is not with you for pulling this all together i have to recognize that if you have 30 programs and there's seven of us and i try and encourage people to ask only one question we won't even be able to ask one question about each of the things that you
160do that is how much is happening inside that one presentation so board colleagues start thinking now what's my number one most important question and what's your backup question in case somebody else gets to your question and then you have a backup but we will really try and stick to one per um i saw miss smith hand first and then miss wilson and then we'll go from there go ahead thank you um first of all i i really do thank you for the reports uh looking at the background data and the review your review um just excellent at all as always i appreciate that uh one of the things that you have continued to do now is to display some of the unique instances you know in terms of the data i do thank you very
161much for that um i this is uh i mean i i agree that it seems to me that we your the challenges that that are faced now we've always faced but i i want to acknowledge that some of those things have increased they it's the volume is has increased the number of vulnerable youngsters who are homeless et cetera have increased and so i for one uh have not only worried about uh those youngsters and all youngsters but also our staff so i first of all want to thank all of you for the work that you do work that we don't always see and experience as board members but i know that goes on and i really really want to uh give kudos for the sort of self-care um initiatives because it's so important i mean
162as all as you hear everyone saying uh they're they're tired of being stuck inside uh there and like you not only are teachers and other people doing this at home sometimes but you know your youngsters are um you know are having the same emotional challenges that we are if not you know worse in many cases so again just kudos for that um i really only had uh one question because i feel like you've just answered all my questions but um you know with the background documentation and i do want to just say i appreciate that you the challenges are very clear to me but also your responses and your strategies to address those things are very clear in the documentation so i do want to appreciate uh say that um i'm disappointed that there continues
163to be the disproportionality in referrals but again you know we're it's we're working towards reducing that it can you can see that trend and i think the work that you're doing pd and cre all that is just fantastic um and uh and there's some other notable things but i i will stop there i had uh i think one really quick question and i know this data comes up perhaps not on this year but you know next excuse me next year um the weapons thing you know again that's a lot of reflection of what happens what's going on in community um and something that you're working closely with partners to try to address but i wondered with the k6 in school are we seeing some of those problems continued i mean are we having to still
164address the weapons issue um you know i i saw what was going on you know all last year before we went into covid but just wondered if there's been a change and clearly it seems just tell me if i'm correct you're able to address more of these things um with those youngsters in class and also uh you know that are virtual so was the question are we seeing that that same trend right now this year yeah we're really not seeing any of the typical um the high volume of suspensions in school or out of school we're not really seeing um little to any uh weapons confiscated um this year okay um and that the cyber bullying kinds of things are is that continuing in the in the trend uh um it's really hard to compare
165the data because it's such a unique shoe here which is why we didn't do a lot of data slides for you this evening sure um but we continue because there's so much virtual learning and online um continue to promote and uh share out resources for staff and families about cyber terri thank you and i apologize i'm moving into this year but i i just i thought you did a very nice job here and um and i'm just delighted at the self-care piece uh that you're doing and also continuing that work that hard hard work with community to try to address the issues that really emanate there that find their way into our schools so thank you thank you miss wilson thank you for your presentation that was excellent and thank you for your work that
166you do and i do want to highlight that ms mcdowell pointed to that your work is invisible to some extent but you impact all of us so much and the fabric in every way that you weave through so thank you for that and it is true that we deliver instruction as a district but the social emotional thing is the wraparound and the part that is important if a child hasn't had their basic needs met then it's hard to you know address other things so thank you i had a question about along with my colleague vice president smith was getting to with the disproportionality whether it be in terms of what is the shift do you think or the trend to shift from a concept of i don't want to call it punitive but what did
167where does the change need to take place in your view just from the trends and i know this has been a different school year but just the way things are trending yeah so i'll take that yeah a lot of the focus that we've been looking trying to move forward is changing mindsets of people and old-fashioned days like it's like you had to get your punishment and consequences first off but trying changing mindsets for people to really build relationships with individuals to understand where they're coming from and sometimes trauma and understanding what that is how it manifests itself in the classroom sometimes it looks like you know misbehavior when in fact it's trauma so being trauma-informed using restorative approaches we think that's the approach to take which is why we've been doing a lot of work
168with the national education first sort of practices which is specific pd around or sort of they call it relational practices specific for teachers inside the classroom and that's the most important relationship you want to want to look at is the teacher and the student and how they can build communities inside those classrooms we feel if we can get there and change that we'll start to see some more changes down the road board member tutor so i want to piggyback on what uh vicky was saying with the weapons that's what stood out to me is looking excellent report with excellent background data the weapons is not an issue with the k-6 it is more towards the the higher grades the 7 through 12 who are not in school now if i remember correctly there was the
169raise the age issue that was there right before covert that was leading to a lot more of these incidences being noticed is there something that the government relations team should still be advocating with legislature to modify to make sure we fix that because code will be gone students will come back to school but if this legislature still exists this legislation still exists some of those issues which could be mitigated would be there unnecessarily and we could be working on those as well your work just got harder how can we make it a little bit easier for you one of the areas that i think we should really advocate for is an increase in supports community supports county agency supports because we really need partnerships the schools certainly we always do our part the best that
170we can we try to provide the services we can but without partners in the community whether it be through department social services probation department office of child and family services these partnerships are essential and what is happening in the city and county level cannot be ignored we're you know i will share we are concerned we don't know what the next fiscal year will provide and what our partners will be going through as well so certainly i think um we need a foundation and a partnership or we will be left trying to struggle like we feel like we are struggling sometimes trying to put all the pieces together just to add to that piece and we highlighted it in here about our strong partnership with apd i mean programs that have been brought to us through
171these partnerships like do the right thing and know you've seen that we had over a hundred dominations last month for the high school alone that's pointing out the everyday heroes in our students so you know those are students who if you see something say something something's not right they're reporting it they're just they're helping out in the community they're helping their siblings with homework they're doing the right thing they're coming to school they're helping the elderly and i think we need to promote the good kids that we have throughout our district you know everyone is doing their best so i think you know that partnership piece is just so important to really catch that and really capture it and advertise it board member man i just want to piggyback on what dr tour was put
172out there when we talk about partnerships and collaboration i mean i know apd has do the right thing in that partnership but are you finding that other partnerships with other agencies in the community are simply not working okay are they not there no no um we're just i think you were just talking about strengthening them um so we you know have partners uh in snug we have partners all throughout the the community parsons we're expanding our partnerships there you know it's just a tough year for everybody um resources are scarce but you know we feel that we're really pulling together and in fact we're expanding a lot of the services that we're offering um for instance tele teletherapy which i had mentioned so um we've we've worked with parsons to open spots to even more
173students um in our behavioral health clinic model um via teletherapy so we're really excited about that okay thank you board member roman ali i also want to thank you for your presentation um i i just want to know um on your topic of violence and weapons that i just want to know what we are doing to prepare for the incoming group of hybrid 7 through 12 students because we've had about a year of low incidence and a year of crazy things happening in our country and i can imagine when the students come back they're going to be really excited and very active and i just want us to start thinking future tense because it's coming up very soon we're going to start having students coming back in how are we going to ease them back
174into the process and prevent incidents where we're finding weapons and how are we going to comfort them and make sure that we are there for them so that they don't have to bring those weapons in to protect themselves and i on that on that topic i was just reading that um funding for safe routes to school was changed um into a different stream but i just i'm trying to get you guys in the mindset that we're going to have like i want to say a horde of students but a tidal wave of students coming back in and we're going to have these issues that we're going to have to deal with so i can take that that question um we're currently working with the student support staff team in our building leadership to determine this
175level of staffing that we need to um request to superintendent adams to ensure that our students um receive the social emotional support that they need when they return for the fourth quarter so that will all be a part of our plan um which will be shared with superintendent adams and then the board of education excellent i like that that's exactly what i was getting to the level of staffing how are we going to determine that so i appreciate that i just uh i think board member creator did you have a question on this topic or no um in the interest of time i'm not going to ask a question but i did want to thank you for the presentation it was informative and it's great to see the work you're doing i really appreciate it
176especially after the presentation mr panetta your comments about building that relationship between student and teacher thanks so my question uh first i want to add to the the kudos around the the quality of the data in the presentation and the um uh just the the depth of all of the information that you provide us i know that most folks who aren't on the board just see the slides but you know we most of us make time most all of us make time to read the material 99 of the time we do our very best but um one of the things i particularly like about the work that i see here is how reflective it is and how acknowledging that um you know life's not perfect but there's room for improvement in all always and one
177of the areas i wanted to follow up on um was you had indicated a need to investigate root causes of significant reduction in documentation for preventative strategies and i'm wondering if i know that this report's been in our hands for quite a while and i'm wondering if you made any progress in trying to figure out what was going on with that because i i wish we had more time because i'd really love to talk a lot more about restorative practices because i really feel like that's another thing that was reflective in here is that we believe so strongly in it but we're not really seeing it implemented in the middle and high schools the way we want it to be fully um and so anything you have to share on that would be very much
178appreciated so i think prevention is a key word that everyone keeps mentioning here tonight and the preventative strategies there are about 15 research-based strategies that we've trained the entire district on and that work was led by our behavior specialist department um previously so we've we've shifted gears a little bit and we're repackaging some more training materials and we're actually highlighting best practice for preventative strategies we're asking we meet monthly with social workers we meet monthly several times throughout the year with our pbis coaches and we're highlighting we're asking them to share the work of teachers who are implementing preventative strategies in effective ways and then we're sharing them out which is really catching on we think because then other schools and other teachers might want to try it so it's just revisiting that work reminding
179people you know close proximity um the five to one uh ratio of praise to a correction um and then you know again back to the the relational practices and the restorative work in a preventative model rather than a reactive circle type situation in response to an event you can also add i can also add that we realize that our data collection tools tool safe schools new york has a whole section where it needs to go into by the reporter to check off what preventative strategy was utilized and so we came to the realization that we probably need to circle back provide that training to folks that this is where you put that in and we also realize that elementary and secondary use two different data collection systems so we need to make sure that we're
180doing the same things on both sides thank you very much i appreciate it so we've all had one question we are behind schedule miss smith you are the one who specifically requested that we try to keep on top of your store you're absolutely right do you need this question if you must you must okay um i i did want to just note around the um um that we are we have a letter with the oag to continue monitoring and is there a length of time or we're just gonna or is there a data point uh that you're trying to reach when we'll be able to say okay we don't need to do that anymore just wanted to double check on that with you well we believe in the work um and although we successfully hit
181all 99 indicators in our preventative preventative plan we are continuing to implement as if we were under the assurance of discontinuance and following through with new and other uh research-based and evidence-based um strategies in the letter agreement so um we are continuing that work so you're saying you would this we would be continuing that regardless that this letter is just acknowledging that you're continuing and had planned to continue great thank you for the foreseeable future all right thank you very much thank you for your presentation tonight we really appreciate all the work that you do please share that with the folks back at the office thank you that brings us to our next discussion item tonight which is our discussion about grants and program development division update mrs adams did you want to kick us
182out yes thank you so very much we have our director of grants and program development division mrs eileen leffler and she'll be prevent presenting virtually and there she is hello good evening everyone thank you for the opportunity to be here this evening to update you on the grants department wait for um the presentation to start we are pulling it up right now thank you thank you excellent again i just want to thank you again for the opportunity to be able to provide the annual update for the grants department um the grants department mission is to support the district guiding principles vision mission and goals the fundamental purpose of the department is to seek funding for grants that enhance the educational emotional and social needs of the city school district of albany students in alignment with
183prioritized needs the funding sources include competitive grants through federal state and foundational entities and also our governmental entitlements which are primarily our idea grants and our title grants one of our main functions is to oversee the management and implementation of all of our active grants we have to follow strict compliance guidelines through the education department general administrative regulations and the uniform grant guidance this is important with respect to grant audits and ensuring that we have no findings when applying for grants we seek to coordinate funding and programs to maximize the efficiency and the use of funds and this has been actually a very important highlight during covid to be able to maximize the flexibilities that a lot of our funding sources have provided us during coven this slide depicts the grants metrics you kind of
184give a three-year span plus the current year so that you can see a comparison of what's budgeted and what's expensed each year as you can see in the 2021 school year our budgeted funds are a bit more than the other years one of the reasons for that is again due to covid a common theme in tonight's meeting right that's because a lot of the programs were suspended when we went remote in march obviously a lot of the programs couldn't be implemented so a lot of the grants not a lot of them but many of them afforded us extensions into this year so those funding levels are represented in that budgeted piece the bar underneath shows the expense to date i just want to point out that in the year the expensed level to the budgeted
185level that some of those funds will be carryover funds so we'll actually be seeing as the year goes on that budgeted amount in 2021 go up we're working on those carryover amendments now this slide is just a more of a breakout of that budgeted figure you saw on the slide previously it um breaks it out by the different budget categories that make up that total amount and show how we are providing opportunities for students as you can see the purchase services and the professional salaries are our largest amounts both last year and this year and that's primarily because we do a lot with extended day programs after school programs which are compensation for salaries we have project directors that are part of grants um other staffing that are part of the grants that provide direct
186services to students and then the purchase services as um all of those contracts that you see come forward that are primarily vendors that provide direct services to our students and in addition to professional development a lot of the professional development on some of the practices that you heard in the previous presentation from people personnel for an example the priorities for this school year continue to be consistent with each year we continue to explore innovative grant opportunities and partnerships to improve the delivery of instruction and build leadership capacity we collaborate across all the divisions and the buildings in the district to make sure that we are on track in the grants office with what the priorities and the funding needs are that cannot be accommodated by the general fund and we seek and secure funding opportunities
187that will benefit the students in this new blended learning environment post pre and post covet not pre-co pre-code but post coveted learning environment we continue to do a proactive program development through concept papers so that we are ready for grants when they are announced or also so we can seek out funding opportunities from private funders and on a weekly basis i communicate out grant opportunities with our buildings their smaller grant opportunities that they might be able to look to enhance things at their own building and our office can provide support with that the funding forecast is a slide that i put in each year um this one is a little bit more bleak than other years because uh the grants arena is also affected by um you know available funding out there to announce grants
188or fund different grant opportunities so we were really excited to see that recently the 2021 through 2026 extended day school violence prevention program grant was announced and we are actually in the midst of putting a program plan together for that grant so that's promising that some grants are being announced earlier in the presentations tonight mrs adams uh gave some details about the no kid hungry grant that was awarded um we were awarded just shy of eight 800 dollars of what we had um requested we got the forty eight thousand dollars um the team has been incredible lisa thinking binder and food service our home monitors who are helping for delivery michelle bridgewater who our school improvement director who is helping to support the implementation of that grant as well transportation communications office ron lesko it's
189been an incredible team to work with to and we've had a really good time i think coming together and seeing what we can accomplish in a short amount of time to reach that many students with food the usda farm to school grant was submitted and that is to support a long-standing initiative that we've been trying to get off the ground with freight farm and we are hoping that we are awarded that um so that's a pending grant and that freight farm for those of you who may not know is um for the hydroponics and it would be primarily um focused at the high school level and embedded in their curriculum amanda powers the supervisor for stem was instrumental in helping put that together as well um so that just brings us to our carryover extension
190grants i spoke about those earlier and then these are some um grants that we have carryover funds there's more than what we normally have typically it's just our title grants but this year because of covid they're allowing our unused funds in the school improvement grant which supports six of our schools our identified csi and tsi schools so that's a very good thing because of when covet hit there were a lot of things that got suspended with that grant that it's welcoming to have that additional funds going into this school year mckinney vento homeless same thing they allowed carry over it's not a typical thing that they would allow to have happen so that's going to help support our homeless families to a greater extent in this school year 21st century is another grant that they
191never allow carryover for and they have this year as well so that's a welcome addition to supporting those programs the community schools grant for skylar and persistently struggling schools grant for hackett um are grants that date back to 2017 actually and uh they just keep extending those grants for us so that's not due to covet i think it's just because those funds are still there and available and they want those schools to continue to be able to access them other grants that were allowed to extend not carry over so much are the my brother's keeper challenge grants and then that just brings us back worked backwards for you there on the list um brings us back to the top of the list our title grants which we have carry over funds for and we're working
192on all of those amendments right now for the title grants and the school improvement grant and the mckinney-vento the other ones have been submitted already and then i would welcome um any questions board qualities any questions board member cratey i i just wondered if you could just go over again um briefly the difference between the carryover and the extension grants sure so each grant you get on an annual basis has a beginning and an end date um and some grants allow you to carry forward or roll over unused funds from that year when after it ends other grants do not so when i say extension grants that means that the grant didn't end and they allowed the grant period to go beyond what its original end date would be so for instance a lot of
193them would have been an end date of june 30th or august 31st um of 2020 but they allowed them to extend through april for example the my brothers um keeper grants the hackett and the schuyler community schools grant they've been ju we haven't done any final expenditure reports for those grants because they have never ended um they just keep saying you can extend the use of them so we just keep the grant open in its current state with its current coding system and we um submit amendments for any changes that have how they want to use those funds so either way you can use the money from the grant after the grant's original ending date it's just the paperwork requirements that are different between the two categories so the extension grants don't have the end
194date you just continue to use that same funding available and you put in amendments to adjust how you want to spend the funds for them for the state or feds to approve carryover the grants have ended you put a final expenditure report in for that year's allocation in those funds they provide the payments for them and then they that then um puts forth what the unused funds were for um that previous year and then they say you can carry those over so with those grants you get a new allocation for the year and then the carryover funds you bring in and add to that so it's you add the carryover is adding to the current year's allocation okay thank you for the explanation i really appreciate that ms wilson thank you for your presentation and
195thank you for your work also that you do it's a pivotal to supporting the things that we do in the district and i get to celebrate here at the no kid hungry grant which we learned about earlier in the present superintendents report my question is do we have opportunities to apply for grants that for programs that we want or initiatives that we want to expand um one that comes to mind is like a grow your own program do do they have any supportive grants for those type of activities certainly there are grants that come out for those kinds of things that would be i would say that that kind of program would be more of one that we'd want to do a concept papers around and maybe look to some foundational or private funding for
196i feel like this is a question i should know the answer to but you never learn anything if you don't ask a stupid question on the the slide where you gave us the data chart every year we're budgeting more than we're expensing i think what you just explained about carryover and extension means that you're taking some of that budget and putting it in the next year it doesn't mean that we're leaving money on the table by budgeting for money and then not expending it does it so it's a mix so um and i did explain it but so what you want to do is um think about it that unexpensed funds that that total amount is going to be a mix of grants that ended that don't allow carryover and we did we we probably
197did in a lot of cases leave some money on the table and that's just because sometimes the grants get awarded late programs start off later it's a proposed budget so sometimes the salaries or the frequency and duration of the work or the contracted services that you bring in or less um and then some of the an expense that you see in that line are for grants that are allow carryover and then those will be brought into the next year i understand thank you i think you've explained this to me before i apologize for not receiving that anyone else have a question from his left leftler board member ellen manawi thank you for the presentation um i just actually had a question regarding uh that grant metrics page so i see that this year we've spent
198roughly 35 we've expensed roughly 35 um and whereas the previous years we've expensed when all said and done uh roughly 80 percent do you think we're going to get to that point this year do you think we're going to kind of meet that threshold of expensing roughly 80 percent of the the budgeted 31.6 we are pretty much we we stay pre if you if you notice by the amounts there we pretty much stay in that consistent range of what gets expensed and i think a lot of that has to do with the level of um carryover that that is available um i want to say that um you know i think we're on track for that my concern will be with the amount of carry-over and extension grants that we have and the amount of
199time and the fact that we're not fully back and we can't fully implement programs in the way they were intended that um you know i i it may be less that we spend i'm hoping that they um are flexible and allow continued extensions because we haven't moved out of this cognitive environment um people have been very creative and we've moved a lot of things to a virtual environment that's consistent with what we're doing with our instructional model thank you anyone else miss smith no she says no she said she asked her question before she's good all right friends i think we are done thank you so much miss lefter lefleur way i know how much important these funds are to the functioning of our district and how instrumental you are to ensuring that they happen
200so we really appreciate all the work that you do and but thank you for being with us tonight virtually thank you for the opportunity have a good night good night good night thank you good evening this is the moment we've all been waiting for so at this time i will introduce and turn it over to deputy superintendent kimberly rohring for our budget update for the 21-22 school year thank you thank you superintendent adams board of education i'm happy to provide our budget update to you this evening which will include our first look at next year's revenue estimate first i want to start by reminding everyone that we look to our vision mission and goals as the core of how we build our budget to make sure that we are continuing to remain in alignment with
201those and i've put together a little bit of an agenda for you this evening because we're going to cover several topics so we're going to touch on the state comptroller's fiscal report stress report for fiscal year ending june 30th 2020 we're also going to take a reminder of our budget process and roll over expense before we get into the governor's proposed budget and our initial revenue peak and we are going to end with debt service so the state comptroller issued his fiscal stress report for the fiscal year 2019-20 ending june 30th there are several indicators that come into the determination of whether or not you're in physical stress they include low lucodity operating deficits low fund balance and other environmental factors for the 2019-20 fiscal year 31 districts were identified in some level of stress
202this report also noticed some fiscal stress risks going forward for districts including the high covert 19 related expenditures significant withholdings from state aid existing fiscal stress in a district and then the remaining uncertainty that faces districts including the state's physical difficulties that are expected to extend and unforeseen costs associated with additional protections we may have to provide staff and faculty along with our students looking specifically at albany our environmental score for 2019-20 was 36.7 in 2018-19 the district received a designation of susceptible to fiscal stress in 2019-20 we have received no designation so looking at the chart here we wanted to just highlight those scores 2017-18 the district had a stress score of 23.3 in 2018-19 our stress score was up to 38.3 and for 2019-20 we are down to 21.7 it's important to note
203that in 2018-19 this included the use of 15 million dollars in our capital reserve associated with the may capital project proposition that the voters approved it also included a year where we expanded our budget and there was no refunding of our reserves and an unrestricted fund balance of less than two percent shifting gears to our budget process highlights uh the board will continue to receive updates over the next six weeks or so our community budget meetings are scheduled for the week of march 18th for march 8th pardon me the budget is proposed to come forward on april 1st with the board to adapt later that month our budget hearing will be may 6th and our vote is scheduled for may 18th a quick reminder on our rule over expense budget we looked at this in
204detail in the last meeting and you'll see that our 2122 rollover budget is projected to be down about 5 million dollars or 1.9 decrease from the current year it's important to remember that this does not include additional items needed to address mandates nor does it include additional items considered essential for programming health and safety we also wanted to share with you this evening the number of retirement notifications that we have received we have 15 from appsta pardon me 18. read that from here 18 from appstop and 5 from appszoo for a total of 23. the governor's proposed budget state budget includes spending cuts new revenues continue to use the fund balance and increase borrowing it also includes federal funds used to pay for operating expenses typically covered by the state's general fund it cuts state
205spending for local governments in state agency operations and expects an additional 6 billion in unrestricted federal relief and stimulus aid over the next two years looking more closely at the provisions for school districts it authorizes the division of budget once again to make across the board cuts if needed during the fiscal year it also continues to utilize federal funding to supplant state funding proposes a recurring local district funding adjustment reduction which in 2122 is proposed to be offset by a one-time allocation in additional federal stimulus funds which can be used through september 2023 so the district will have a decision to make as to whether or not we use the entirety of those funds in 2122 or if we spread them out from 2122 to 22-23 it will once again be a grant model with
206an application and guidance around how the funds can be used which is expected to be released after the governor's the state budget is approved once again proposed in the governor's budget is the consolidation or combination of certain expense-based aides into a single block grant titled services grant which also includes a 392.5 million dollar reduction to what that would have been if the formulas had run it's important to note that these will no longer be formula driven aid categories so while you may experience expense increases you would no longer receive revenue increases associated with those increases in expense there are 11 categories proposed and albany receives eight of those so it would impact our transportation aid boces special services charter school transition academic enhancement and the four instructional material aid categories hardware software library materials and
207text box looking at our revenue sources we've taken these and put them into four buckets our local revenue sources include property taxes a tax on consumer utilities and our pilot payment which we discussed briefly earlier our state aid our state category includes star reimbursement foundation aid categorical aids and boasting special services aid our federal category includes our medicaid assistance reimbursement e-rate and for the second year would include a pandemic aid our other category includes our interest earnings district billings appropriated fund balance and use of restricted reserves as well as rebates and refunds so looking at the 2122 revenue budget compared to the 2021 revenue budget it is a decrease of 1.3 million or roughly half a percent the revenue will continue to be reviewed and updated but i wanted to identify some assumptions that are
208used in this calculation it will continue to use restricted reserves and appropriate a fund balance at 3 million which is roughly equal to 2021. it plans to use one-half of the coven-19 supplemental stimulus fund it also assumes a flat property tax levy when we look at the revenue estimate by source comparing it from 2021 to 2122 you'll notice there's a decrease in our local funding category that is associated with the local district funding reduction or adjustment as well as the reduction in our pilot payments the state aid is increased and this is associated largely with the restoration of the reduction in foundation aid for 2021 associated with the pandemic federal aid also increases our crrsa funds are greater than our cares funds and our other category is down and that is associated with a reduction
209in interest earnings and rental fees comparing the initial revenue estimate to the rollover expense our revenue exceeds our anticipated expense at this point by 3.67 million dollars looking at our debt service this is expense associated with capital construction projects on district schools and buildings it includes the cost associated with long-term borrowing or our bonds for completed construction as well as short-term borrowing associated with our construction and progress during the 21-22 school year that should start uh we are going to have several projects under construction albany high phase three will be continuing throughout the entire year north albany middle school which construction is slated to start at the end of this school year and our five-year plan which includes extensive interior renovations at our hill giffen and renovations of toast as well looking at our debt
210service projections we took just a 10-year snapshot you'll see for 2122 it's estimated to be 19.3 million dollars in expense we are estimating building aid at 12.675 which has a net local share of 6.6 million if you look down several years around 2526 you'll see our debt service expense percolates up towards 22 million which leaves us with a local share of more than eight million dollars for several years before it begins to decrease again reminders about our continued budget variables include our state aid our health insurance increase will be refined and finalized at the end of march our tax cap will be filed prior to march 1st the levy set in april with the board's adoption of the budget beginning to look at the impact of the retirements that we are notified of as well
211as the continuing impact of copen 19. our next steps include incorporating new information as it becomes available continuing to review our projections and assumptions responding to questions and incorporating feedback from the board our community budget committee and staff as well as continuing our lobbying efforts i will gladly receive your questions [Music] okay bird colleagues there's a lot of information in here it is our first look at the revenue side we looked at the expense side in a little bit of detail not a lot of detail because there's still a lot more to come on that uh two weeks ago and so as always i find it helpful to kind of follow the presentation with our questions so we're not bumping around too much not that we can't jump around if you think of a question
212that comes to you and you really need to go back that's fine but i'd like to start with questions on the fiscal stress slides and also a just brief commentary to say how thrilled we are to no longer be defined as susceptible to fiscal stress and in fact our stress number is even lower than it was the year prior so it is noteworthy and noted and we thank you for your careful attention to making sure we do not overspend our finances to ensure that that was the case um i know i've shared with board colleagues there's a little tool that you can use to play with that and see what is driving that and i encourage even our community members to figure it out it's really you know there's just math board member crazy i
213see your hand besides three through five fiscal stress sure i just had a really quick question and i really appreciate the information you provided about how this is calculated and what our scores have been historically you said that our environmental score for last year was 36 36.7 and i get that that means our environmental score is a lot higher than our final score but i mean what does 36.7 mean in relation to other districts what what should i take away from that can i just contribute something before as you think about that the environmental score is determined on totally different factors than the fiscal score it's like on demographics teacher turnover i can't remember all of them but it's not actually a fiscal stress score it's like a totally different score but what i mean
214is isn't this isn't the environmental score one component of the fiscal system two different scores when you look at the spreadsheet that they give you to play with they're not actually tied oh okay i thought one was the component of the um that would actually be sort of logical but when i when you look at the math behind the thing they give you a spreadsheet that gives you the fiscal stress piece and you can adjust those and and they actually give you two columns to project i'm now suddenly doing deputy superintendent's job i'm sorry the other thing is um the environmental factors which are i can't remember there's 99 of them are out of our control deputy superintendent so a lot of the environmental factors are what you mentioned they look at our student population
215so our ell learners or special ed learners our poverty rate or teacher turnover things like that that really we don't influence um and that's how they determine what that environmental factor score is right i understand that that score is out of our control and it's based on and it's based on our demographics and our unique situation that but i was just curious about how if you knew how it compared to other districts okay thank you i think that you can actually get that though if you i'll send you the link you can you can pull everybody's scores um the other thing is aren't the uh the tax situation property taxes also included in that factor i believe that somehow weaves its way into your fiscal score okay so that would go into the fiscal stress
216okay i think it actually may be in the environmental side it has to be that's what a declining assessment in case your property values or something like that but because and the only reason i say that because that would help understand that why it's high you know also but anyway sorry um okay anybody else on fiscal stress the second page or the next page was slide six which was the budget calendar any additional questions on process budget calendar i would just ask um i see there are we're gonna have some community budget meetings march 8th through 11th i think you've always intended to do some of those virtually and some kind of at the school level if i recall correctly do i remember that the principles usually do something or is that not happening this
217year madam president members of the board typically those are not well attended and since we saw a lot of success with the virtual like town hall format we're looking more along those lines so that you know if there's the need for a moderator we might do that but we're looking at some of the things that really worked well last time last time fantastic i love virtual forums i think we will continue to get increased attendance through that that is great and that's going to come up quick after the break they'll be right on top of us okay the next set of slides is slide seven and eight which really have to do with what we talked about in more detail last time which is the rollover expenses i did want to slow down here just
218a little bit to see if anybody had any big picture questions about on the rollover expense side i i guess i want to just open this to be the part of the conversation where we reflect back to um the instructional model because i think this is really the only place it fits in the presentation and we kind of tabled it from before to here so i think the overall question is this rollover budget is based on what we've been doing right up through second quarter and the work that we're going to be doing in fourth quarter we anticipate will have an increased cost because we need increased staffing so while this is the rollover budget it's not it's not going to be a rollover like a normal rollover budget would be where it's just the
219rollover second quarter third quarter fourth quarter is all the same because our expenses are going to be going up over the next couple of months i'm wondering how you're going to like how how are we going to visualize that or are we just going to have to see how that goes so i would anticipate that as we refine what that looks like in the expenses associated with the various models then we would provide our rollover plus the update based on what that model looks like i understand so that's really important for everybody to visualize that when you get to the very last slide and it says there's three million dollars that's based on the rollover as of where we are right now but we know for sure our costs are exp are increasing even just
220to deliver the services we've promised to deliver already any other questions about the rollover budget the instructional model for 21 22 which i will restate for everyone in the community because i do know that there was some confusion based on the community feedback we got in the public comment the intention is to be hybrid if their social distancing is still required with the hope and daydream and prayer that full in person would be a possible scenario but that would depend on the pandemic outside of our control okay superintendent is nodding so we will uh we will accept that yes that is correct madam president all right anything else on the expense side then let's go on to slides 9 and 11 9 through 11 which is essentially trying to inter interpret the morass that is
221the executive budget which is quite complex this year thank you deputy superintendent roaring for your very effective attempt to explain that any questions about the governor's rollover budget board member wilson is that a hand or just a sigh of frustration i was still marinating i was trying to i'll come back to me sorry uh so i just i guess i want to just insert oh dr go ahead thank you i just want to clarify um in in his the division of budget said that they can still do this cuts throughout the year whenever they feel like it they'll have a look back there and say okay you're not getting this money right there's also this local funding adjustment where you can go and spend it and then we'll reimburse you based on the grant process
222somewhere down the road right how is that going to work because you have to spend the money now to get the services hopefully you're going to get the money in the grant process back but let's say things are going along and then they decide halfway down the process well we look back and we're deciding we're going to do a 20 cut that's going to change things and make it really difficult can you say that again i didn't fully understand your question so there's this look back period where they can go back and look and say okay now we're going to cut 20 percent there's also this grand process that they're going to merge everything and make into a grant process which the way i understand it the block grant is like you spend the money
223you do yourself you're talking about the federal sarissa money now right okay how are they how are they going to manage i mean how are we going to plan based on how they might manage this because on one hand you expect that you spent it you will get it back on the other hand they have the right to not give it back to you so the real the link that is attempted to be drawn between these two is strictly a financial one um and is part of the governor's proposal uh the legislature can take all or part or none of that proposal and we are very anxiously awaiting to see what they come forward with in march yes if the local funding adjustment is affected in the budget that is a recurring reduction so it
224resets the floor of support and that is a grave concern but we are optimistic that that would be seen as what the impact would be and that would not be accepted similar to what we've seen happen with the services aid proposal in the past where it comes forward and it's ultimately rejected by the legislature and those formula aids continue to run as they have the covet 19 surplus surplus stimulus funds are totally separate and apart from except it's tied now to a grant and it's going to look similar to what we have for the cares where we are nine no seven months into our fiscal year we've expended the funds and now we're finally getting approval for that grant so that is the biggest risk exposure for us is the delay and the approval of
225the grant which now allows the money to start to flow there's also this title one money or something that the feds want to give directly to the schools he is proposing that it should come to the state and then we'll be doled out by the state right so there's a risk factor associated with how that will function too and that i think that continues to align with what we've seen where it's the plants rather than supplements the state aid thank you i wanted to ask a little bit more about this sarissa money um and draw out for for everyone which i know we've talked about quite a bit among ourselves because we have had individual you know conversations about this that this the gov one of the things that i dislike strongly about the way
226the governor's budget is presented is that there's 13 million dollars of federal aid showing in our budget and when you just look at the state aid runs you're like woohoo this looks beautiful but then you determine when you actually read the document that those monies are expendable until 2020 in september of 2023 so they're really um it's a two years of money but the governor and his aide runs expressed it as if it were one year of money so i understand when you adjusted his um the aid runs to to create your forecast he uh that you took half you put half for next year and half for this year and you've beautifully expressed that that's a decision that has to be made as we're going forward so i appreciate all of that here's the
227things i don't understand are we going to get paid that whole 13 million dollars in this year so that we're gonna hold that money and how will that impact us with the four percent unallocated fund balance challenge that we um are faced with because of the somewhat crazy state law around that so we are not going to receive that 13.5 million dollars up front that would be a grant driven process so we would have to apply they have to be approved as we've seen this year there's extra layers of approval the division of budget must also determine when funds can be released so it is very unclear how that sequence of events would be and when we would actually receive all that money and some of that goes back to the decision as to whether
228or not we spend it all in one year or spread it out over two years but it is not an up front do and you may not know yet i understand we're still waiting for clarity and feel free to say still and determine it but is a reimbursement program the way many grants are where we were going to have to expend the money and then prove that we spent the money and then get reimbursed for it that is what we would anticipate that's a lot of money for cash flow challenges i mean that's a big chunk of money to suddenly have to be doing on a reimbursement basis instead of on a four before basis what's the opposite reimbursement okay that was helpful information for me um board member i also have a question regarding
229that um that federal money that we are going to be allocated over two years can we can we say okay we're going to put 60 for the first year and then only use 50 and then have that 10 be moved to the next year well we don't have all the guidelines yet about how these funds are going to be utilized accessed the complete picture of what that process is going to be we do know that the funds are able to be used over more than a two-year period actually that that's related to a question that i have as well which is um first of all i wanted to recognize the increase in our unallocated fund balance so while you've still projected 2.4 2.4 is now like a third of our unallocated fund balance as opposed
230to last year when 2.4 was like a half of our unfil fund balance i'm going based on what the stress report said we had at the end of the prior year so so that's that's good right but one of the questions i have is that the at the end of the day when we're trying to figure out the final numbers for the budget we're going to have to decide in order to deliver the program we think our students need i'm assuming because it always is the student the program we want to deliver is going to be more expensive than the money we have that is the nature of the world so we're going to be faced with the choice of spend sarissa money spend a little more some money than we had originally planned to
231go into into our reserves more deeply or raise taxes more right those are going to be really the three choices that that we have in order or cut back on program like those that's that's really the the levers that we have to operate and i'm trying to understand in my mind whether there's a reason to spend sarissa money over spending reserve unallocated fund balance or whether like should we hang on to our unallocated fund balance and spend and allocate more sarissa money or does it not matter because those two are almost interchangeable in my mind in terms of how they impact the budget you can also say i really want to think about this and answer it later that's okay so we've had this discussion that's why we're kind of going back and forth um
232what that does is it so in the bigger picture it puts us where we want to be where we've talked about being in a space where we can look at the multi-year impact of the decisions that we're making and so that decision of what we do with one-shot money impacts how much we're going to be able to predict in the future what we would be able to cover not knowing what's going to happen it also can determine how much do we put in reserves we know that to reach that four percent within our reserves we're approximately four million um away from being at that maximum amount so now even bigger picture as we look to rebuild strategically as we look to bring back programs as we look at how we're going to use funding that
233is one-time money and keeping in mind we want sustainability how much do we then look to still put it in our reserves and so four million off the top i'm just gonna go on record and say despite a miracle that may not be a realistic option for us but could we go in somewhere a little lower is it five hundred thousand is it one million is it two million is it somewhere in there that might be the sweet spot that we say over the next three years in order to get to our four percent here's what we're we're going to go on this particular trajectory however that doesn't mean that if we're in a position where we need to use some of those resources we still won't be able to do that we would be
234able to it's just that we're dealing with how close we're going to get to the maximum amount and then now i'll turn it over to miss rory i think one other thing that we're very closely watching is whether or not that local funding adjustment is approved because if you look at the numbers that's 6.6 million and that's a recurring reduction and if we look at half of our source of money it's 6.7 so it essentially covers that gap for us for two years um so that's part of the reason why we're looking at that from that you know half one year and a half another year approach to provide that revenue stability but depending on what the legislature's responses to that proposal that would certainly influence what recommendations may come forward i know that we
235have at least one board member who only lived through one budget cycle right the crazy covered budget cycle and then remember man i think you had one budget before that two budgets before that right so this is the normal state of february is we're looking at the governor's budget we're waiting to see what the assembly and uh the senate do and that by sometime later in march april 1st we hope to have a much more clear perspective on what we can um expect to get in state aid this is this is normal so far right like unlike last year when things went haywire right around now so far we're normal um so we we should refrain from making any decisions about what we are going to need to do until we have that information i
236think is really the thing um can you can you talk a little bit about why star suddenly appeared on the governor's aid runs because i it's like twisting my mind trying to understand what it's doing there and how how to interpret that i mean it seems like they just put it there as a bookkeeping game because we don't that's not actual money that we get it's money that reduces the tax the impact of the tax levy on the taxpayers but we don't we don't we get the star money but only because because it reduces the tax levy now or the payment of the tax levy by taxpayers so any anything you would like to do to shed light on that i would appreciate i think there's a lot of speculation around that but we know
237that the governor has been pushing to convert the star program to a rebate program and not a tax credit program that way the state determines when that rebate comes to our taxpayers it doesn't appear on their tax bill so they would have to pay their tax bill in total and wait till some point in the year when the state would issue that rebate that has been a continued proposal of the governor and he did that again this year by um addressing that through the enhanced star program so i that's part of that equation we think we don't know the other piece is that there is language around maintenance of effort requirement of the state and he is looking to identify all areas of support the state provides to school districts which would include the star
238reimbursement and notably our star payment is getting lower and lower every year the amount of star it goes down by a significant amount which means our property taxpayers are picking up a larger percentage of their of the well some of that happens by the shift right so as a new homeowner you don't get the credit that's not an option for you when you move to the rebate so we'll see more of our tax revenue come directly from our taxpayers and they're on that rebate rather than the credits being on the bill and that's part of the reason why you're seeing that number shrank i see that's helpful it's mentally twisted in here anybody else have questions about how to interpret the governor's executive budget and um questions about that board member wilson i'm so sorry
239if i missed did we also go over the fact that there was a shift in the way services aid would be filled and allocated the way the is 80 is no longer going to be reimbursable can you just review that again please so if we go back to i'm not sure what that number is um we we do take a look at the services aid this year unlike in previous years it doesn't include a proposal to weave in building aid which is a very conspicuous absence it does take those 11 categories and rather than run them on a formula though some of them have been flat for years you would not necessarily receive that increase in revenue to offset your rising expenses so one of the ones frequently talked about that would impact albany is
240transportation ages our transportation contract increases every year or cost increase but we will not have that reimbursement adjustment and aid to keep up it is also unclear how services they will be treated going forward and whether or not there would be any sort of inflationary factor whether that would just be assumed to be flat and treated more like foundation aid where there's a determination each year how much money would be put towards that and then a very complex way of determining how much each district gets so i think the scary part is that the transportation cost will go up whether the services aid will go up will be at the discretion of the governor um and his his budget which is very very different than where we have always treated that reimbursable aid anyone else
241on questions about the governor's budget otherwise we'll move on to our budget which is slides 12-15 so questions on our budget slides 12 through 15. board member tutor so i want to understand more about the pilots so because all just because albany we've been building a lot of these apartment complexes and we've been approving all these or we've been notified that there are these pilots that the district is now part of some of those buildings have been constructed so those pilot payments should start coming in so should we anticipate that we would have an increased revenue from those pilots or so we have a curious situation in albany where we don't have a lot of the details of the individual pilot agreements so we do not know when they sunset so it complicates our ability
242to project that we also don't necessarily know when new ones will start so we rely very closely on our working relationship with the city treasurer's office to help estimate those numbers each year as we build our revenue budget so from him at this point we are going to assume what we anticipate receiving this year as our number for next year 6.9 million so here's a question if you're building an apartment complex of 100 apartments it would be reasonable to estimate that some of those apartments will have children who will be using services in our school districts right so which means you have additional students that you'll be expensing things to provide services to and we get told hey we've approached this pilot and this is happening shouldn't there be a little bit more discussion with
243the district so the way the idea law and the works and and this is something we can nisba has had a resolution on where at this point we get notified of that discussion and we are free to comment on that discussion but we do not have a formal opportunity to weigh in and that is the way the law works um if there is an isba proposal resolution for them and i think it passed although i'd have to review to advocate to have school board members or school districts have a formal seat at the table and a vote on the ida without that we are really outsiders having the opportunity to provide public comment to the ida which we could absolutely do i know that it's something that i have thought about quite a lot um
244and and this is this is a com this is a real conversation right we've never talked about this particularly before on the board floor i don't feel that i have or that we have the capacity to double check the ida's work they are supposed to be doing the analysis they call the butt for analysis which is they're only supposed to be granting these pilots if they are convinced that the project would not otherwise be built and we all know i think are all familiar with the fact that the um amount of property taxes that the pilot grants is always higher than the project then the the land that the property is on is getting right now so that the we're not getting less taxes we're getting more taxes just not as much more as if
245the project were not built right so the question then becomes do we as a school district have the this is my question from from my head do we have the capacity to evaluate whether the ida has made a good judgment about whether the pilot money is the but for that means the last thing that that they need to get that thing to build i personally don't think we have the capacity to do that to do it well and so therefore i prefer to allow the ida to make that recommendation just like i would be pretty frustrated if a common council member or a ida member or a zoning board member made a very vocal public comment about a decision we were making i would find that extremely frustrating because i don't believe that they have
246taken the time and it's not their job to do that work so that's my personal belief that doesn't mean it has to be everybody else is but that is what i believe about how the city school district of albany school board needs to interact with the ida we can however continue to see about nisba's resolution and trying to get a formal seat at the table where we would have that obligation then to expend district resources on figuring out how all these pilots work and making sure that they truly are appropriate necessary so that's my thought sorry for to be go on so long yeah i mean is it something that we should be looking at and understanding more about because at some point it does impact us right in two ways the money coming in
247as well as the kids in the district it definitely does it's just a capacity question really um from my perspective it's a capacity question do we have the capacity to to do a good job on evaluating that and actually that would be a good question what is our total do you know off the top of your head roughly the total pilot revenue 6.9 6.9 million dollars last year was around 7.2 okay so that's you know that's starting to add up to a meaningful amount well we'll keep having this conversation and you know it's just it's it's a lot to second to review all that having tried to do it there's a lot of background material that's provided by the developer and there's a lot of analysis there okay anything else on we are on our
248budget slides 12 through 15. anybody else have a question here um i just wondered when we might be able to forecast costs associated with in-person instruction so that's going to be very closely tied to the work that the instructional side is doing in terms of building their model and once we have that information then we'll begin to work on that what that cost associated is thank you so much dr sure can you remind me again when the city does its assessments and when that homestead versus non-homestead gets set too late for it to be influential in our budget decision making this is the constant challenge is that they don't make that decision until after we've adopted the vote budget and i think in fact after the voters have adopted the budget is when they finally
249because i think the the roles are completed in may pardon me my outer mask is slipping but i still have my inner mask that i think it's in may when they have to release the final assessment roles um or maybe the draft comes out may something around there they issue them late spring and again they have the appeals process after that so we usually get our information mid july or so on what that final assessment role is expected to look like so we never know what's going to happen with homestead and and non-homestead rates until it's too late to do anything about it we're too late to do much about it other questions about slides 12 to 15 on our budget okay we will wait and see what the assembly and senate come up with
250and we meanwhile we're going to move on to slide 16 through 18 which is our debt service conversation um debt service was a 1.5 million dollar cost driver when we saw the costs last time and so the deputy superintendent prepared this review of where we are debt service looking forward in our efforts to plan more than one year in advance but a multi-year planning process does anyone have questions about how this debt service whole thing works and what it means to us if it might be helpful go for it um the driver for our debt service increase in the 21-22 fiscal year is largely associated with the vast amount of construction that we're going to be undertaking so it is our short-term borrowing where we're seeing the increase we're actually seeing a slight decrease in
251our long-term borrowing one thing that i looked at when i saw this chart here is the um the incremental change in the net if it's only going up a little bit every year we can sort of absorb that with a very modest tax increase or a modest increase in our use of capital of reserves or some other way to to offset it there's this this year right here 2024 2025 and 20 25 26 where suddenly the net impact that's the far right column goes up by a substantial substantial amount it's like i can't do that math in my head but it's about 1.4 million 1.5 million dollars which when you hear 1.5 million dollars that's more than a percent tax increase right that's it's 1.2 million dollars is one percent tax increases so that's like
252more than one percent tax increase just to pay for the increase in the debt service makes me really really really uncomfortable to see that big jump out there now i know you're regularly talking to the financial advisors fiscal advisors the bond people to figure out if we can refinance and adjust but i did also want to ask if you've reviewed the construction schedule to see in particular if there's a way to adjust the construction schedule that would be sensible in order to smooth that it's just that that huge increase really is going to be whoever's on the board then that's going to be a very difficult um budget conversation and is it is it is that being driven in part because of the way north albany and albany high are kind of colliding and would
253it make more sense for north north albany to be i know we're already working actively on it but is there any hope is that does that would it even make financial sense what madam president one of the things that we have been looking at as we have been really working hard to make sure we stay on schedule is it and i can't say for sure i'm just in theory it may be six one way half a dozen the other because if you push out the project it may incur additional costs and then it ends up being almost the same or it could even be greater that i don't know but i know that we always run that risk i think it's a little bit complicated in this particular situation too because we did have the
254voter authorization almost two years ago so we are way down the road on the planning process we have our architects we have our construction manager everybody's on contract at this time so we would definitely extend our cost structure associated with that which means we have to reduce what we do because we have that maximum authorization from the voters that we cannot exceed so escalation would come into play with the actual construction costs as well as the incidental costs associated with the architect and the cm and other things that are part of that number so i i think there's definitely it's not an easy answer but we do meet every we move multiple times a year and revisit our current debt structure to see if there is an opportunity for savings to refinancing or things of
255that nature to kind of help smooth things out as well i understand and i i am very conservative generally and i hate to pay more interest than one needs to um so generally i'm a big fan of like let's not refinance unless we're ultimately spending less money but that right there like something's going to have to be done between now and when we get to that point or it's going to be really very unpleasant um budget year for whoever's at this table at that time board member almanawi i certainly don't understand this completely i understand some of it um and this might be a naive question but wouldn't it make sense to go from six to seven instead of from eight uh six to eight then to seven so one of the things with albany
256high was that we received approval for early aid on that project so we have been benefiting from state aid associated with that project in advance of when that would typically flow so it has adjusted how the aid flows through in in the project life cycle as compared to what the debt service structure is the other uh thing that comes with that is that the new renovations of albany high will be aided differently than the renovation of the existing structure which is where we sit now in phases three and phases four so um it's a very complicated determination of where we go we're very cautious about where when we need to move forward with phase four because we know we need our mca to reset to really be able to continue the project to its completion
257and that that last column is is math taking the debt service and subtracting the building aid that's how you get to that estimated net local share and so in order to change that because you're absolutely right that would be the logical thing to do right is to smooth that bump that's what i'm trying to do is smooth the bump the only way to smooth the bump is to either reduce the debt service the jump in the debt service or increase the building aid and those the only ways to do those are refinance the debt or change the construction schedule or get the state to pay us in a different time frame i don't know is that a thing i've never heard of that before so she says no that's not a thing that's a number
258that the governor watches very closely a number of years back they changed how they actually amortize the building aid so that it extended it over a longer period of time which did not as closely align with how everyone sat in terms of what their debt service was and that had some implications which resulted in many districts doing that refinancing all right so we're going to just you know pray for good bond rates and hope that we can refinance some debt in the next two two to three years to try and mitigate that that bump because it's bad uh board member creatine could i follow up with a quick question you said that we wouldn't be able to start something about we can't start phase four of the high school until we've reset our mca our
259mco to zero can you explain that really quickly if you have time so the maximum cost allowance is the driver for your building aid and it resets every five years so we need to get five years full five years through this project before we have another phase approved so that that rate that calculation resets to aid that final phase of the project thanks so much for making that clear yes that was quite a long conversation with the community when we were talking about how long it was going to take to build albany high and why um but there was that's why um anyone else with questions about debt service and how this is going to affect us in the next couple of years okay next uh last couple of slides are i'm calling them the
260wet's next slides the budget variables and the next steps these are the upcoming things things that we do not know yet but are we are moving towards any questions on those two slides i see no hands and i'm talking slowly in case anybody comes up with a question because we are at the very end anybody have anything else they need to go back on okay then i think we have survived our conversation on the revenue thank you very much deputy superintendent roaring for your excellent work on this it's been was really helpful to have those side-by-sides um really really helpful in perceiving what's happening and thank you also to your questions your responses to my questions in the communications tool i can't tell you how much that helped me really understand what was happening okay
261that brings us now to board committee reports do we have any board committee reports uh board member creighty we had a wellness committee meeting this wednesday and we discussed several changes to the policy in areas of both related to the pandemic also areas related to health services um also areas related to the physical environment uh we're going to add a section to the wellness policy about the physical environment of the buildings where people learn so i'm really excited about it i'm particularly excited that the new draft of the wellness policy's access to water paragraph will mention specifically that students will be allowed to bring clear water bottles with lids to school to be able to more safely safely and reliably access water that's it board member to tour the policy committee met last night we
262went through a bunch of board policies as well as the enrollment policy and these will be coming to you in march board member smith uh yes we uh the facilities committee that is will be meeting uh next tuesday at 5 30 it's the 16th and we do plan to have a virtual meeting at that time thank you and on behalf of the government relations committee me i know that mr lesko is working to set up another round of meetings with our legislators in combination with what we do with the big conference big five schools and as i mentioned to you all after our conversation at our board meeting two days ago because you know we should always have lots of meetings um that we are going the superintendent and i spoke yesterday morning about drafting
263a formal comment to the department of health for albany county about what what we can do to mitigate this this serious challenge we're facing helping our kids get cleared for sports so i look forward to seeing draft on that whenever you guys are ready we'll move that forward and um we've had some interesting bills coming up on charter schools um so we're watching those carefully um so i did talk to jennifer pyle this morning about the buffalo there's a buffalo a buffalo specific bill and i expressed how as a member of the big five plus three we would like to be in on that if that gets any legs um and she she seemed to um she seemed focused more on that the five percent bill that we've all seen before which would apply equally
264around the state to anyone who was oversaturated with charter students so i think that would be our our better uh our better horse but we're still watching that buffalo bill because it should not just be buffalo um and think that's it for government relations anyone else with a committee reporter or liaison report any other business for the good of the order can i get a motion to adjourn motion by miss smith second by board member creachy all in favor