001can yay perfect hi mr pelino hello superintendent how are you i'm doing well so good to see you you happy new year happy new year all right mr baker i think we are ready when you are ready good evening everyone my name is ann savage and i am the president of the city school district of albany board of education on behalf of the board i welcome you to our meeting this meeting is being live streamed and the instructions to view the meeting are available at albanyschools.org forward slash boe which is also where you will find instructions to connect to our meetings if you'd like to share those with anyone else we're going to show the relevant slides in the virtual meeting screen but you can also access them at that same link if you prefer
002to get to access to the powerpoints directly so you can control the slides yourself we are only meeting virtual tonight as our school district is in a virtual only mode because of the extraordinarily high coveted numbers in our city and region so we will not be meeting in person until we are back in school if you attend board meetings often you know that this is the time we normally invite you to say the pledge of allegiance with us if you choose with all that has happened in our country over the last 24 to 48 hours it seems sensible to pause for a moment and reflect before we say that pledge in particular i want to thank the superintendent for her thoughtful and heartfelt remarks that she shared with the district today about both the horrific
003actions in washington and the milestone elections in georgia i also want to add on behalf of the board that we so appreciate all of the work that our staff our faculty and our administrators are doing to help our students process this very tumultuous period the support you are giving to our children is so helpful to us as families as we work to process this difficult time along those lines i want to specifically thank fifth the fifth grade at schuyler achievement academy and miss abate who have provided a very special way for us to review the pledge tonight we are going to say the pledge but first we're going to get some information about the pledge from a group of fifth grade students at schuyler so those of you who choose to say the pledge you
004will get the cue about when it's time to say the pledge in the middle of the video it comes about two-thirds of the way through so with that if we can start our wonderful student video i would appreciate it [Music] a pledge is a promise like i promise to be a good citizen allegis means to be faithful or loyal flag represent our country a republic is a democracy where we elect people to represent us we come from many countries and we speak many languages we have different ideas well we are one for me is allah we can't be divided liberty means freedom the strength means awareness [Music] all people all colors all ages men and women to the flag of the united states of america and to the republicans so thank you again to mrs
005zabate for providing that and to all of our other teachers staff and administrators for all of the work they are doing with our students 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 and thank you so very much president savage and members of the board i would like to thank the many teachers and staff who have responded with the well-thought-out activities to facilitate student voice through an equity and social justice lens while examining the series of events regarding the presidential
006election the election results in georgia and the process of confirming the votes of the electoral college our instructional and support staff have been able to make real-world connections to the content areas through the content areas and in the social and emotional aspects of these of these teachable moments many of us watched the events that unfolded in our nation's capital on wednesday with shock with anger sadness and even disappointment and while there were those who felt that these actions of storming the us capital were justified we have to look at the impact of these events and what they've had and will have on our nation and our democracy as educators we have a responsibility to seek out the teachable moments and ensure that these moments are contextualized in ways that connect to the experiences of our
007students and our families as new york senator charles schumer stated last night after order was restored at the capitol it was a day that will live on in infamy with these unconscionable acts etched in our memories we move forward in hope that january 6 2021 will also be remembered as a day that our painfully divided nation saw how we strive to educate our students about respect for each other civic responsibilities and the importance of equity and social justice in our everyday lives we must ensure that moving forward our actions represent the america the democracy in which we believe and in which we want to live we also move forward remembering that wednesday was a day of historical significance it was a day that georgia a state with a long and troubled history of intolerance and
008division sent its first african-american representative and first jewish representative to the united states senate a truly historic and symbolic moment for all georgians as well as all americans as american citizens we must aspire to be the positive change in the models of democracy that we want to see in this world these are the lessons we must strive to teach in spite of deep and often complex ideologies that too often and too easily divide us we are a nation that must and will continue to move beyond our troubled history toward a more inclusive and welcoming tomorrow we must work together to make this the true legacy of real democracy this must be the inheritance that we strive to leave for our children a nation of all the people by all the people and for all the
009people and for us here in albany we know that together we are stronger and we are better because we are all in for albany this is the message that i shared this morning with our faculty and staff and with our community and as we move forward through these upcoming months as we look back through all that we have been through through covet 19 as well as through our election time and and bringing about many of the social injustices that we have seen it just begs the question how do we make that positive difference in the lives of our children and be very genuine and sincere when we say what we believe that we are here for our children first and foremost we have to be honest in our communications we have to be forthright in
010our actions because our children model what they see us do and it is extremely important that we keep that at the forefront of our decisions this week we started our week in a distance learning model and as we near the end of this week i want to express my thanks to our students our families faculty and staff for their flexibility and dedication that allowed our district to respond to the holiday surge in covet 19 for our covet 19 cases the health and safety of everyone in our school community is top priority so is the academic growth and the success of every student we want all of our students to be back in school and when i say all not in a hybrid model not in some type of one group coming one group not coming
011at the end of the day we know that being in school first and foremost is best for our students there is nothing that takes the place of in-person learning for our students there's nothing that takes the place of a quality instructor and support staff member in our buildings working on behalf of our children and so we have to balance these critical priorities during this pandemic it has and will continue to be a challenge however we are up for that challenge and i'm very appreciative of all the efforts of everyone who's made the effort and allowed us to persevere we are prepared to resume our in-person learning model on monday we are also prepared if the need arises that if we are in a a zone a micro cluster zone we are prepared to do that
012testing we are also looking to start voluntary testing beginning monday as well and we are putting plans in place should all of those things come into fruition however we must remain cognizant of our data and should something happen over the next few days that warrants us extending our distance learning model then we would need to make sure that we are prepared to do that as well and so at this time we will need to analyze our data and make sure that our data supports our decisions knowing that we may have to have several safeguards in place in order to meet those needs so i ask that our community please stay tuned for upcoming information with regard to what will happen next week i would like to remind everyone that all district schools and offices will
013be closed on monday january 18th in observance of the martin luther king jr holiday it is now my pleasure to welcome william s hackett middle school principal michael polino to our meeting to tell us about the great things that are happening at hackett middle school thank you speakers it's always a great pleasure to have the opportunity to uh to speak to the board and talk about all the wonderful things that are going on at hackett middle school hopefully i do the presentation right so i apologize if mr baker's running it we can go to the next slide or do i have permission for the next slide thank you um so similar to the district um we have created our own school mission and the mission of hacking middle school is to celebrate the strength of
014our diversity and foster a learning community based upon mutual respect and supportive relationships to achieve our full potential as leaders learners and citizens at hackard middle school one of the things that we are extremely extremely proud of is our pbis committee and so our pbis committee created their own mission statement our pbis mission is we celebrate the strength of our diversity and fostering commitment hope that's not the right one i put the wrong one there so i apologize while the same two are there so i will get that to everybody that's we we have a different mission statement for pbis so i do apologize um but our goals this year uh similar to everybody else have changed um due to the structure of school and so our goals this year are to provide all teachers
015with the resources materials and professional development that they need to ensure that all of our students participating in the virtual world are receiving rigorous and relevant instruction we want to make sure that we are utilizing all of our resources and our student support committees to ensure the academic and social emotional needs of our students and our families are being met so at hackey middle school i think one of the things that makes us such a truly unique building is that we have certain non-negotiables that are believed to be supported by all of our faculty and our staff one of them is we dot every eye and we cross every t we want to make sure that we take every moment that we can to ensure that the needs of all of our students and our
016families are being supported and being implemented um in our building although some people would say that there's one building principle or one assistant principal what makes our building truly special is the idea that if you're in the building regardless of your role and you're going to lead that have confidence to lead to work in action middle school you have to abide you have to embody the third bullet and you have to be a champion for all students i think that goes with our district mission we want to make sure that the rights and the needs and uh any any personal goals that our kids have are being supported and if that means that we have to have a a difficult conversation and we're going to have a difficult conversation because we want to support all
017of our students um and one of my favorite ones that we we always talk about and i got to have to say our building embodies this tremendously is a lot of our kids come to school with a lot of needs and we may be the first people to tell them that we love them so if nobody told our kids today that they're loved uh then please be the first one to do that and i can't see for whatever reason mr baker and i apologize the last one my my bar for muting and everything is blocking the last bullets i can't read the last bullet i apologize so okay we're okay so at hackett middle school um what makes us special is is many things we're very proud of the diversity of our culture we believe
018over the years in the support of the board of education and the money that we received from the district in our grants that we have put in place the correct academic and behavioral intervention programs uh to support our students we have a highly qualified and dedicated faculty and staff and i'll show that in a slide coming up one of the things that makes us special right now is the work that we're doing with our teachers and i include our instructional supervisors in that process um to provide virtual instruction for our kids but one of the things that we've done recently and i want to thank um mr mckenna for her help and support and we have added a virtual on-site program to support the needs of our enl's fed students in seventh and eighth grade
019um these students uh come in with our sixth grade students and they are now provided with direct instruction in the verb in an on-site virtual world and we feel that that part is having a great success for our enl inspect students obviously what makes special is our full service department and our social workers and our outside agencies that work tirelessly to support our kids uh come to a winter concert that we that we have and i missed it this year because of the pandemic and you'll find out that we have an outstanding music program offering band orchestra and chorus but probably the most important thing that makes hackett special is the unwavering belief in our students and our school and our family and our community commitment to making sure that the needs of our students
020are being taken care of so when i talk about um what makes us special um and what makes our local this year in our t-search is hashtag hack it strong um i'm sure many people will wear that on december 10th we have a student in our building an 8th grade student who is dealing with a very serious medical condition has diabetes in the need of kidney transplants and so our pta in our community the albany police department the fire department the mayor's office and the district office came together to make our students wish of lighting up albany come true she wanted to be the person to like the christmas tree in the park this year but because it wasn't available it's something that we took on as a pta and so we uh put a
021tree at school um albany powell put a limousine together and she was the first person to go through lights in the park the albany police department fire departments came to school and what was great is and we made sure we maintained social distancing because we had about 200 of our families uh there to provide her with uh lighting her goal of lighting a christmas tree it was her birthday the next day so we got to sing her happy birthday and we were able to make one of our own students dreams of celebrating christmas this year come true and i think it speaks volumes for what the family culture is at hackett and why hackett is such a strong and well thought of school not only in the district i think but outside of the district
022as well so this year at hackie we have a combination of on-site and virtual students and so i'm going to try to move through this the best i can hackett middle school presently has 654 students in grades six to eight that does include some of our sixth grade feeder elementary school students from post eagle point and giffen um and so uh what we have right now is we have in grade six we have 76 students attending school on site every day um in grade seven we have 16 students and in grade eight we have 19 students and i put the asterisk in the corner because what that pretty much makes up is it includes our students who participate uh not only in our regular ed classes but in our self-contained special ed classes as well
023as our enl intervention program that is discussed on the virtual side we have 80 students in 6th grade 218 students in grade 7 and 245 students and again we have some of our students in our sped program who elected to be virtual and so that number includes both our on-site and virtual students so this year we have changed our set focus to make sure that we can meet the needs of both our on-site and our virtual students and so one of the shifts that we made this year uh in particular comes to our weekly common planning time meeting and that is to put a focus on student and teacher needs relative to engagement and instructional delivery obviously with a lot of kids being home our primary focus is making sure our students are coming to
024their virtual classes every day and they're participating and engaging in the lessons in terms of teacher walkthroughs we're going to continue with teacher walkthroughs this year however they're going to be a little bit different focus we will review our teachers google classrooms as well as begin the process of going in and looking at both synchronous and asynchronous instruction our goal is to work with our teachers to continue to improve their practice and our goal of starting our circles of inquiry uh will begin this month um one of the things again that i want to thank uh miss mckenna for her leadership as well as the instructional supervisors is that we continue to provide our students with the necessary professional development that they need to support our practices around student engagement culturally responsive education especially student
025voice as well as educational equity and then lastly we're going to continue to conduct our benchmark and common assessments so that we can collect data and form our instructional practices to make sure that we are meeting the interventional needs of our students so obviously we've had some challenges in terms of the pandemic and what it's placed on us one of the things that we've continued to have to do is rethink our approach to how we schedule classes this year as i mentioned we have students both consulting in the virtual world it's forced us to look at our instructional practices to make sure that we continue to maintain high rigor and high relevant instruction to our students while also making sure all students both our on-site and virtual students are participating and engaging and so some
026of the steps that we've taken to address that concern we've developed the master schedule that's provided both on-site and virtual learning for our students we've as i mentioned before we figured our planning time meetings to discuss and address the concerns relative to meeting the needs of our virtual students we've created uh and it started with the start of the second second quarter our content curriculum days and that's one day a week each of our content areas english math science social studies and foreign language our students do not go to those classes uh on one day and we took information from our parents that said students we're just having too much time in front of the computer but what's nice about that is our teachers are still teaching on those days through office hours and providing
027the necessary reinforcement and re-teaching that our students need um one of the things that i'm proud of and we're continuing to grow it every day is this on-site virtual classroom that we've created at hacc we have four of them we have two enl classes in seventh grade one in eighth grade and then we have two co-teach special ed classes again one in seventh grade in eighth grade where students come in they're either in the library or computer lab they are continuing to receive virtual instruction but the nice part is they're in the building and they're either spend your enl teachers behind them to provide immediate support and reinforcement you've had a lot of success with that today and again we have continued to look at the needs of our professional development and again the instructional
028supervisors have done a wonderful job providing various uh instructional programs things that you're here now like meerpad padlet and puzzle quizlet and class class kick so what are the successes at hackett middle school again we continue even in the virtual world to implement our tier two and our tier three academic supports in ela and math across all grade levels um even in this vertical world we're continuing with our building-wide pbis program finding ways to give incentives and rewards to our students for participating every day and giving their best efforts um we have a development of our content data team meetings we're still meeting two days a week to support our teachers in their delivery of their curricular programs we're still again conducting our assessments and using data to drive our approach especially in our subcommittee
029with our mtss committees and our student support teams and we continue at hacking which is probably the most important thing to commit to a family culture family is a word that we do not use loosely in our building hackett is truly a family environment and it's something that we pride ourselves on every day what are some of the results i said many years ago when i started at hackett we used to average about 150 160 kids making honor roll for the first quarter and last year we had the most kids make honor roll we had about 333 kids this year in the hybrid structure that we're in we topped it again and we had 339 students make honorable for the first quarter which i think is a testament to our students our families and to
030our teachers and then lastly hackett middle school is still a school in good standing which anybody who's been part of a hockey middle school knows the journey we went through from persistently struggling to persistently failing identifications and so we take great pride in that hack of middle school remains a school in good standing for the 2021 school year that is my presentation for tonight so if there's any questions i'd be more than glad to answer so thank you mr pellino typically we don't do questions at this time it's just an opportunity for you to share all the great things that are happening and so we appreciate that and madam president that concludes the superintendent's report and i will move on to the district update if we are ready okay absolutely thanks mr palino we really
031appreciate your being with us tonight and i'm sorry we don't have time for questions because we would um i'm sure we could easily use you to answer all of our detailed questions about hackit thank you for the opportunity again so we will start with our district update and this update is going to have a few additions to it uh we are going to start sharing out um the in us in the second part of this presentation about where we are with regard to our budget and the impact that impact of covet 19 on our current school year's budget but as we start we look at our vision mission and goals and we want to make sure that decisions that we are making aligns with that we are always looking to provide the equitable opportunities for
032our students and we're going to talk a little bit about that in our technology component because we know that that digital divide has been there and we have been working feverishly to close that digital divide our mission ensuring that we are providing a robust educational program and we know that with covet 19 the impact of our different learning models and instructional models has had an impact on that and we'll touch base on that and first and foremost with our goals student achievement also the delivery of quality instruction building our leadership capacity empowering families and partnering with our diverse community tonight's topics we are going to discuss the advocacy and just continue to provide that information to our community as we advocate for equitable funding of education looking at our digital learning day and just some
033of the information that we have very high level information about our digital learning day looking at the covet 19 reporting data an update on technology and then the 2021 fiscal update when you make your voice heard this is an area that we have been advocating with our community please go to our website albanyschools.org advocacy there are resources to help you craft a message sample letters that you may use emails and contact information for our state and federal officials so that we can express how important it is to have equitable funding within our schools on our distance learning day we did just experience not a whole lot of challenges we have received the reports anecdotally that there was a pretty smooth transition there were some people who had some issues logging on but those were resolved
034we were able to get into classrooms on both of those days and these were not observations these were just visits to make sure that things were operating smoothly at the elementary level because it is one classroom all day our administrators were able to go in in the morning and the afternoon and then at the secondary level we looked at visiting classrooms popping in each period and so it doesn't mean that every single classroom was visited it just means that based on the identified classrooms at the secondary level administrators were able to pop in at the beginning of each period but again i want to clarify that that doesn't mean that every single classroom received a visit it meant that every administrator was popping into classes just to check and see if things were going smoothly
035our technology update on the 29th of december we received 1360 chromebooks and this is the first shipment of our 5200 computers that we did order with our smart schools funding the process for distribution of those chromebooks started really this week with getting our staff acquainted with what they needed to do and then mr baker and his division they are absolutely amazing with everything that they have been able to do and everything that's on their plate because organizing that distribution of the computers is not their sole job they all have other responsibilities that they are completing along with doing this and so we will be decentralizing that process to the schools over the next few days and we will be working to distribute the 1360 chromebooks that we have recently received and just to remind you
036we did reallocate a thousand of our devices uh the existing laptops to convert them so that they could be used excuse me in the in person as well as i'm sorry in the virtual environment as chromebooks you heard from mr polino the fact that computer lab time is made is being made available for our students and we are doing that at the high school and the middle school level we have direct outreach to our families to determine the need of the support and we couldn't do this work without our community partnerships and the donations that were direct to our families we have acknowledged them previously but i just want to say through their support we started with about 1700 students that were sharing computers a little bit more than 1700 but they were sharing computers
037and through the roughly 280 donations that we have received we were able to reduce that number of sharing down to about 1500 and with this recent delivery that we have received we are down to less than 150 students that may still be sharing and so we are still prioritizing by numbers of students in the home that are sharing and we are looking to close that digital divide even more and so i want to applaud all of the efforts of our technology division and everything that they have done to make all of this possible and then the support at the school level with our administrators and support staff being able to reach out directly to our families to ensure that we are getting those devices where they belong we also have the t-mobile hot spots we
038received 600 devices earlier in the year we have we are participating in the project 10 million it's an additional 500 hot spots and i will add that that is at no cost to the district we were approved for 1 000 but because we want to make sure that we are using them in the most efficient manner we're starting with 500 and then as we need more we will be able to procure more and then michael collington who is from the center of educational innovation he donated hot spots directly to o'neill middle school to assist with connectivity there so a little bit of background just kind of some overarching information looking at our household count and our student count and you can see that 53 of our students have a district device 20 of our students
039are still sharing and that number has reduced due to the donations as well as the recent um acquisition of the 1360 chromebooks we have about 27 of our students that are using a personal device uh and so that gives you enough that gives you the opportunity to see where we stand big picture with our chromebook distribution digging a little bit deeper looking at the socioeconomic status based on how our students are identified as economically disadvantaged or economically or not economically disadvantaged you can see that with regard to the one-to-one distribution of computers with regard to our economically disadvantaged students and the non-economically disadvantaged students you can see that 39 of the students who are are economically disadvantaged are receiving the one-to-one device you can also see that as a total of our economically disadvantaged students
04062 percent of the students are using a school device or they have they are taken care of with that technology the non-economically disadvantaged students we're looking at a total of 37.8 students with regard to the distribution and so that gives you an idea of where we stand there when we look at our distribution by race because we know that equity really does impact our students in two main areas which is why we're showing this data socioeconomics and race and so the first pie chart that you see at the top looks at the total number of students and our ethnic breakdown within our district 81 of our district is comprised of students of color and so we have to be very cognizant of that the number of students that are using a district device 86 percent
041of our students of color are using a district device and we have it broken down so that you can see the different ethnicities when you look at a shared district device or a shared device 79 of our students of color are sharing a device and then of a personal device 72 percent of the students have a personal device and i pulled out just that information because again we know that equity and looking at equity in our school district we have to take a very close look at the racial distribution of how we are providing resources for our students as well as looking at the socioeconomic status of our students and as we delve a little bit deeper into socioeconomic status this graph really helps you see how the overlay or see the overlay of ethnicity
042with regard to economically disadvantaged and not economically disadvantaged looking at that distribution and i'm going to summarize and hit some of the high points because i think it's important to note that this slide really does show us how we are actualizing equity in what we are doing just with one example right now our chromebook distribution and the instructional practices here so we have roughly 65 percent of our african-american students who have a one-to-one device and that is with the in the economically disadvantaged category 19 sharing and 16 with a personal device our hispanic students 64 have a district device one-to-one with a district device 20 are sharing and 17 have their own device or they are using a personal device you can see the numbers at the bottom that what as to what those percentages
043would equal so that you can see how our students of color really are the highest numbers of students where they are using the district devices when you look at the non or not economically disadvantaged students you can see that 46 percent of our african-american students have a district device 15 are sharing and 39 have a personal device and our hispanic students 44 have a district device 4 i'm sorry 17 percent of sharing and 39 have a personal device our next slide takes a look very closely at our k-6 overall enrollment so that you can see what that looks like we have 4 341 students in our case 6 overall enrollment and you can see the breakdown the first pie chart is just the ethnic breakdown the second pie chart shows our students with disabilities and
044our students not with disabilities and then we break it down a little bit further we are looking at our case six model in-person students we have 2292 and again you're looking at the basic ethnic breakdown for the k-6 in person and the students with disabilities and the students without disabilities i think this is extremely important to note within our k-6 in person the number and percentage of students with a district device uh so of our in-person learning model at the k-6 level 40 percent of our students have a district device 25 percent are sharing a device and 33 have a personal device also in the instructional model delving a little bit deeper we wanted to take that equity to another level and look at the general education and special education and when you look at
045the number of general education and special education students that have a district device who are sharing a device and who have personal devices you can see where those numbers are and our students with in special education that 56 percent of our students who are in special education have a district device and 18 percent are sharing and 24 have a personal device our next look is at our k-6 virtual instructional model we have 2049 students in the k-6 virtual instructional model you can see the ethnic breakdown and also the students with disabilities and the students non-students with disabilities in the case 6 virtual instructional model you can see the breakdown by ethnicity as well as you can see the grand total of 59 of our students in the k-6 virtual model have a district device 17
046percent are sharing and 23 percent have a personal device the access again looking at the virtual instructional model for k-6 and and looking at that equity piece a little bit deeper with the general education and special education students you can see that 70 percent of our special education students have a district device 10 percent are sharing and 19 have a personal device and so as we keep delving deeper and making sure that we are really implementing the practices of equity and what that means in terms of our district this is just one example we've taken a little bit of time to provide you with quite a bit of information but we will continue to distill this information and monitor this information because as we receive our computers from the smart schools grant we are going
047to continue to look at that distribution in an equitable manner the next piece of information that we want to update the board on is the covet 19 status and as of today we have total confirmed cases of 134 and this is from the beginning of the school year until now total cases involving on-site individuals 66 total cases involving off-site individuals 68. i think what is important to note when we look at decisions that are being made with regard to whether we are in person or whether we are in a distance learning model these numbers are extremely important in november we were averaging 1.3 new cases per day the first 22 days of december we averaged 2.4 new cases per day and from december 23rd to december 31st we averaged 3.7 new cases per day we
048are continuing to follow all of the guidelines with regard to covet 19 and the protocols and precautions we still encourage everyone to please wear a mask clean and sanitize wash your hands social distance making sure that we are practicing safe and safe hygiene and following the guidelines from the department of health at this time i will turn it over to miss roaring because we are going to share this presentation this week and in the future with regard to the fiscal impact of covet 19 and miss roaring is our deputy superintendent for business and finance thank you superintendent adam adams back on october august 20th science new york state division of budget issued a budget update which is based on june 30th right after new productions superintendent i'm just going to interrupt you for one second
049um we are experiencing a pretty bad echo you're you're we're hearing you twice about a half a second delayed i'm wondering if you have two devices going and maybe one could be muted i do not have two devices going are you still getting the echo now you sound much better wonderful thank you okay uh june 30th was the end of the state's second look back period afforded in the 2021 budget without federal action or relief this day began with holding 20 percent of most of our local aid payment and the division of budget advised that all our portion of these withholdings would become permanent depending on the size and timing of any funding that did become available for the city school district of albany 20 reduction in foundation aid would be about 16.5 million and
050looking at our total state aid would be about 23.2 million dollars as a result of the notification of the state's intent to withhold twenty percent of our eighth the district made a painfully a fiscally responsible decision in september to reduce our 2021 budget by 15 million dollars which eliminated 215.6 positions some of the other factors that we have to consider school districts are limited to four percent of our budget and unallocated fund balance this gives us a smaller unrestricted reserve than some other municipalities we had limited flexibility our unallocated fund balance for the 2019-20 fiscal year with 4.8 million dollars and we committed 50 of that for the 2021 fiscal year budget school districts can hold restricted reserves however most of those reserves are unable to be used for operating expenditures a recent law for
051this year allows us to borrow from our restricted reserves but we must pay that back within five years with interest an overview of the 2021 fiscal year we received our september and october 8 payments in total or in full which totaled just under 21 million or 17.6 of our total anticipated aid of 118.6 million dollars in november the state was held approximately seven hundred thousand dollars from our anticipated eight payments but did advise on how we could access those funds later on as part of our care tech funding our supplemental charter school tuition payment has been reduced by twenty percent which is a little over three hundred and two thousand dollars through december we've received 35.3 million of our anticipated 108 118 118.6 million for 2021 which is a little bit less than 30 percent
052of our total state aid but again we anticipate receiving 66 of that aid between march and september of 2021 an update on our unplanned expenditures related to copen 19 right now they are a little under 941 000. these expenditures are associated with providing ppe to our faculty staff and students cleaning supplies and equipment for our maintenance department and ensuring that we have sufficient disinfecting items to maintain the health and safety of everyone on campus the district incurred a little over 917 thousand 000 in transportation expenditures during our period of remote operation in the 2019-20 school year we have not received any state reimbursement to date for that the governor did announce that we would be reimbursed for expenditures associated with food delivery to our students during that period of time our transportation aid reimbursement is
053usually 79 of our actual expenditures the district has applied for fema relief funding as well as part of that so the 331 thousand dollars that we spent with first student we are seeking 75 reimbursement from fema 4. looking at our total impact to date with health state aid and unplanned dispensaries total 4.35 million the 2019 state aid was held right now is just under 2 million our unreimbursed transportation expenditures for our cdta contract are a little over four hundred and sixty three thousand the two thousand twenty twenty one state aid impact so far is seven hundred thousand dollars withheld in november and then the reduction in our supplemental charter tuition aid up over three hundred and two thousand dollars most recently uh in addition to our unplanned expenditures of just under 941 thousand dollars that
054totaled 4.35 million and deducted from the state's original proposed budget back in january of 2020 for the 2021 fiscal year we were reduced to 2 million for a total of 6.35 million in fiscal impact to the district so when we look at our outlook and planning for the 2021 school year i'm sorry the 21 22 school year we recognize that the economic impact of this pandemic we are going to see ramifications for years to come we are looking very carefully at what that means for us in the future but it is still very uncertain because we do not have certainty right now because we are in that third look back period from the governor's office as we know that he has clearly stated that he is waiting to see what happens from the federal funding
055and how does that trickle down to the state funding and then to local governments and so we are definitely keeping our eyes on that and so we will continue to analyze that data and as the financial decisions are made at other levels meaning the federal level and the state level we will actually be looking we will absolutely be looking at how that impacts the decisions that have to be made for us here what does this mean for us now we are looking at school budgets being status quo we are looking at what does it mean in terms of instructional models there may be some modifications that we need to make as we tweak along the way we've already looked at how do we bring kids back without increasing staff because we know that that would
056be an additional cost that we are really trying to make sure that we are mindful of because if we are able to bring people back and strategically put in place how to rebuild we are absolutely looking at that and i know many people want to say well what does strategic rebuilding mean if we were to receive all of the funds that are owed to us we still have to look at other considerations and what are those other considerations we have to look at what happens to our instructional model requirements are we still looking at social distancing are we still looking at the usage of our spaces how we organize and deliver instruction will it be virtual will it be in person all of those are questions that we still have to answer that align with
057our funding we want nothing more than to have our students back completely in person and to have our teachers and support staff back in their positions that is something that we strive for however there are different requirements that we have to look at and make sure that we can actually accommodate bringing people back as well as our students coming back to a learning environment that that is conducive for them to be successful and so with this board of education i open it up for any questions that you may have miss roaring is available i as well as other cabinet members are available to respond to any questions that you may have board colleagues as we've done in the past i'm going to propose that we try and work our way through the presentation um in
058sort of a sequential way so the first they were the superintendent kindly provided a little agenda at the beginning there's a an update on digital learning day we can take questions on that first then on uh i think actually this is flipped from the agenda i think next in the slides is the technology where there was some considerable information about technology and technology distribution then about the covid numbers and where we really are in terms of the health public health situation for our district and then finally and probably the longest i'm guessing part of the conversation would be the 2021 fiscal update and its ramifications for future out years so i'm going to start as we always do i'm going to encourage people to ask one question at a time making sure that everybody else
059gets a chance to ask a question before you ask your second one and i'm going to ask who has any questions on that very first topic which was the update on the digital learning day ms wilson is that your question on that no that was not a question does anybody have any questions on that i don't see any hands raised so thank you superintendent adams for that i just wanted to take a moment to note on the digital learning day that this is one of the things that we were able to accomplish because of the strategic choice that the administration made to ensure that we had one chromebook per household rather than focusing solely on our virtual students is it made that that was possible to do otherwise we would have had people with literally
060no tech in their house is that is that right yes okay and i apologize for my camera being off there that was a mistake just left it off by accident there okay secondly uh there was a number of slides on tech and the distribution of tech from the district who has a question on that category ms wilson hello um happy new year so my question is i understand actually in the hacker presentation this came up also that we have um virtual learning centers or the availability of uh for people to do virtual learning at our location if they are in middle school or high school and i was curious if that's an i believe we indicated that's an appointment based model and is there any understanding of a deeper or wider demand or need for
061that at this time i'm going to ask if ms mckenna has anything to add on that topic um good evening and so yes we do have the um in-person support structure in place for our virtual learners who meet the criteria of needing such support we are currently looking at ways to expand that but there are a couple of different um considerations um that we need to look into one is the staffing of those locations where we have a computer set up in lab situations in order to um bring additional students in and then the second piece is the staffing piece to ensure that we have student supervision in those spaces and also ensuring the social distancing can can be supervised as well vicky you had a question board member smith yes thank you i thank
062you miss mckinnon i was going to follow up on miss wilson's question uh so this the the models might mean uh if i'm understanding strike is it niskayuna that's doing something like this where they might have they have support in the classroom but the teacher may be i think that's a colony oh colony are you are you talking about that those types of models no okay the motto the model that we're talking about it's a lab setting where students can come in for extra support the model that you're speaking of is where there is a teacher who teaches remotely and then students are in a classroom and there is a support staff member that monitors the the students if you think back to one of the things that we changed when we were rolling out
063our i read i ready component with the issue with screen time that was one of the issues that we faced as a district where parents were a little apprehensive about not having the teacher physically present there with the students and wondering how that would work and so i'm not saying that that's not something that we can't do but right now we have to look at our staffing models we have to look at um the feasibility of that and and making sure that if that is something that we would be able to accomplish down the line i'm not sure in our setting with our schedule if that would be something beneficial or not but we would definitely have to close some of the gaps that we experienced already with just a a small model like that
064got it thank you and i do understand uh now better and i i i appreciate also that it seems to me what you're saying is you're going to be kind of following maybe what colony and others are doing um because i think i i don't want to say that i'm going to be following that because if it proves that it is not beneficial for us we won't do that we won't right they had a small taste of what that model looks like and and we've it was not the most efficient model for our students right so we had to revise that now that we are in a different setting what does that look like because we also have to look at staffing considerations we have to look at how what the schedule is for our
065students so i i think it's it's not as cut and dry as because one district is doing something kind of like my overall explanation with why districts do something that's different you can take something and modify it for your own district but many times you can't just pick something up and pop it in another district because there are unique circumstances that impact your students in your own district that other districts may not have absolutely i i certainly am not pushing i was just curious as to how all that was working and i do recall like that with the eye ready that our parents had those concerns and and i didn't know whether or not the as you say the situation the pandemic now and the remoteness that we've gone to changes any of that you
066know uh makes that a better opportunity or not you know so thank you no problem okay appreciate it uh board member cratey i apologize it takes me a while to unmute my question was about the technology and it was the numbers about who has access to technology are those numbers before or after the 1300 laptops we received at the end of december hear you superintendent you're on mute i apologize for that um if i'm not mistaken mr baker you can correct me those numbers are prior to the 1300 computers oh thank you correct yes we're hoping to get those out as soon as tomorrow should be the first day of distribution from buildings that's excellent news thank you so much and answered my question so that was good i was going to ask when we
067were going to get those out that's great news uh anyone else have a question or comment on the district technology distribution slides if not we will move on with thanks for demonstrating the equity distribution there i really appreciated seeing the quantitative data that backs up our always intention uh for following our equity policy the next step was uh our coven numbers the actual public health impacts on our students um does anybody have a questions uh a question on those slides or that side i think it was only one slide okay then i think we're going to move on i'm sorry i went too fast dr oh no ms wilson board member wilson i see your hand dr tretor can go first okay my question was going to be uh when we talked about uh the
068rapid test right the binances that are going to be available for testing the students and then today in times union there was some report about boces contracting with the uh with you all possibly contracting with you already for the saliva test are we considering to do that as well the difference that we're and we have been in contact with boces with regard to that there is a cost for the pool testing and tell us like one seven dollars the other one's 20 bucks and so who's gonna be is it on us or is the county supporting us we would have to pay for those tests as it stands right now we would have to pay for those tests the rapid tests that we have have been designated for micro cluster zones we're looking to see
069if we can use a few of those when we come back next week as we look to facilitate some voluntary testing so we are still trying to see what's going to happen with that because if something happens with a boces agreement where we would be able to use the pool testing we may be able to use that but from what i understand when we do pool testing at the university you don't get the results this time same day or next day so there's a lag when you get the results back in the interest of the students that's something to think about too correct thank you board member wilson thank you um a question that's covered 19 related is understood i've seen recent reports that um school tends to be one of the lowest trajectories for
070transmission i don't know the further science behind that especially in the lower grades but yet we still of course took the extra precaution out of abundance of caution to close school um at this time so was there more recommendations about the concept of closing school was to like allow any incubation periods to expire or was there more context than that so for us it goes back to the information that we have shared out i have to look at staffing too if i have a significant number of staff that are impacted and and will be out and i cannot cover those positions with substitutes etc that is an impact the actual number of students that may be impacted that's another consideration when we look at how we see that increase from 1.3 cases per day to
0712.4 cases a day to 3.7 cases a day those things are in place looking at how many people who are returning from quarantine versus how many people are exiting because of quarantine um all of those things play a part in the decision and then looking at what is the impact within the overall community so all of those pieces are really things that are considered with regard to whether individual districts are saying that they need to have a distance learning model or if they are staying in school and for each individual district it's very different because if we were in a district where let's say over that two week period we may have seen only five positive cases then this decision could have been very different as well as the staffing impact how many adults do
072i have that may be impacted versus not so that we can cover classes with substitutes etc can i just ask a follow-up question on that i mean i i really appreciate the um your attempt to be nimble right in this in this situation where we're really dealing with data that's changing all the time um nonetheless it's very difficult especially on our families with young children to plan do you have a sense of when you'll be able to make a determination as to next week well i would like to hope that it would not happen over the weekend i would definitely like to be able to make a decision by tomorrow i will look at the data we'll talk about it i'll review it with cabinet we'll see where we stand we'll talk with our medical
073director we'll look at where we are and then hopefully we can have a decision by tomorrow because i know that the weekend is really hard for our families yeah and i'm sure you are on this but i know that at least i know in many cases elementary students came home with paper for a week which means they don't have the paper that is correct so that's that's going to be a challenge board member creation i see your hand thanks i just wanted to ask a question and my question is about the slide regarding the albany county health department guidance with the contact tracing in the quarantine and that was are we working with the county health department uh just with contact tracing regarding our covet positive cases are are we sharing the data from our
074screening uh forms with the county health department how is that work how is the date how is the screening form data uh being used and is that going is that working well are we coordinating the use of that data i think that's a very good question because i know that there are we we've gone through this with faculty and staff and i know that we've had some instances with families not clearly understanding that especially in the memo that went out with regard to whether they are virtual especially during this distance learning time whether you are typically an in-person student or a virtual student that we've asked everyone to complete that screener and so here are the things that happen and i'll i'll answer the question in terms of an example so i can be a
075virtual student and i may be symptomatic and i go my parents take me and i go and get tested and i am positive but that doesn't mean necessarily that there's no impact with someone who may be in person we have students in the same home who are virtual and who are in person depending on the age and depending on where they are and so if those things happen let's say that one of the students is positive then it doesn't matter whether they're virtual or in person we still have to do the contact tracing because that could be an impact on the in-person learner when they come to school and so the department of health has asked us to complete those surveys regardless of the setting that we're in we do try as much as we
076can especially with the virtual learners to follow up uh sometimes those numbers uh we we can't manage that but that that doesn't mean that we're not asking our families to assist us with that so that in the event of the contact tracing we can be more accurate with that information because our director our medical director and our school nurses are participating in assisting with that contact tracing because as you've heard on the news it is a very large task that doh has in trying to do the contact tracing for all of the cases that they are seeing and so we are doing that in an effort so that we can be supportive and that we can help to make sure that we are doing our part to help notify people who may be contacts of
077contacts or who may be positive etc so that we can keep our kids as safe as possible so i'm hearing i'm trying i'm just trying to hear what you're saying that we're not sharing that data from the screening forms uh with the county health department but we're doing we're using that data to prepare if someone might become positive in the future we're just it is the best way that i can explain it is the same way that we've said it all the time it is for contact tracing if people are completing that we know that this person was positive or not positive or had symptoms we can assist with that contact tracing with regard to the doh the information is not in a file that we hand over to doh if that is the question
078that doesn't happen we use that to assist with contact tracing so that we can help keep our kids safe so that we know um you know how does this impact another student how does it impact our learning environment okay because i think people were asking if if they were to say that their student had a symptom and they're a virtual student they were asking i think they were asking what action would be taken would they be would the student be um would the student not be allowed to participate in virtual learning no it would not keep them from participating in virtual learning so so then if if someone were to fail the screener who participates in virtual learn learning what's going to happen is that someone from the school is going to contact that family
079and suggest that they get tested is that right that's correct okay thank you thank you for clarifying that i appreciate that board member man remember man you're muted or now your mute symbol's off but we cannot hear you we got nothing um no nope and now you're gone again do you want to send me a text with your question and i can ask it for you go ahead and do that and i will ask it as soon as i get the text anyone else on our relationship with the department of health the fact that they want us to do this virtual screening all of this stuff anything else people have on that if that's board member man's question we'll just come back to it but meanwhile while i wait for the text let's move on
080to talk about money and i'm going to propose that we look at these slides in chunks we can always kind of go back and forth as we need to but slides 20 through 22 were really slides that are things that we have seen before this is sort of the history of how we got here right this is what brought us to this point and what we did in reaction to the difficult um news out of the department of budget does anyone have a question on slides 20 through 22 but wait pause because i have board member man's question hold on a second where did that just go uh are you finding that medical providers are giving different information from what they are recommending regarding testing so are you finding i'm not quite sure i understand
081the question i'm just reading i think i do i think i understand the question is really is it about um different departments of health like in saratoga in schenectady and albany as superintendents in the capital region there are times when there has been some unique difference in some of the information that the dohs have been providing us we have talked about some of those differences and usually by the time we needle down to what those differences are it has to do with a unique circumstance and so um i think they have been extremely helpful they are extremely busy when you think of how many districts we have and how many people are making phone calls and each superintendent trying to get clarification on information they have been absolutely our albany county department of health has
082been outstanding to work alongside dr whalen's office is phenomenal and i think that when we have received information as superintendents where a superintendent in another district has received some different information and they're in a different county we see that it has to do with some of the unique differences so overall i think the information and the recommendations are consistent i think the differences come when there are unique or anomalies that happen within a particular school or particular district okay back to money board member creature i see your hand is up so we're on slides 20-22 how we got here to this point my question was on slide 23 so i'm going to wait oh you i don't know that anybody else has a question on 20 to 22 so you can be first in the
083next chunk which is slides 23-26 which i'm calling the actual fiscal impact like what has really happened to us as a result of the things we thought were going to happen what has really happened go ahead ellen but now sadly you are muted okay so i'm going to start with my most important question so you guys can go around and my first question is about the charter school tuition payments i see on slide 23 that our supplemental charter school tuition payment has been reduced by 20 now it sounds it looks like we're talking about our revenues so my question would be that's the transition aid so the amount of money the state is giving us for charter school payments has gone down by 20 have we ever gotten an official word from the state on
084whether we can reduce our payments of tuition to charter schools or is that still not i've been definitively answered we have not received that information to my knowledge uh miss roaring if you have received any recent information would you please share that with us i have not superintended adams we have not heard that we are permitted to reduce our payments to charter schools so we are continuing to make those those payments every two months in full can i ask a little follow up on that having just to do with the department of budget um in general we haven't gotten any information from the department of budget about any of the things that might happen in the future is that correct that we the only i believe still today the only formal or even informal communication
085we've had for with that from them was the we're going to start taking 20 and now we're seeing that they're not taking 20 of everything but they are taking 20 of some things but we have are we getting any kind of formal or informal correspondence from them about what their plan is going forward all right we have not received any formal communication on what we can anticipate going forward having just finished the third look back period on december 31st we are cautiously optimistic that we will receive some information in the next few weeks as to what their intent may be as they look at the end of their fiscal year on march 31st and also putting forward their 20 21 22 budget okay thank you that's what i assumed i know with 66 of our
086aid coming not yet um it's you know very dis difficult to plan with that big unknown out there anyone else have a questions on pages 23 to 26 the sort of like what is the real fiscal impact um ellen go ahead my question was and reference was asking more in reference to a times union article that mentioned something about uh funds that we received that we weren't expecting to receive and my question was i'm assuming that that refers only to we didn't get our aid cut yet rather than there's no new state unexpected funds that we received this year that that didn't exist before last year right it's just a question of over the summer we thought we might be getting 20 cotton aid and so far we haven't yet sorry thank you mutant stradar
087is that me ellen muted or mrs adams muted or miss roaring muted mrs adams was talking okay thank you sorry i was afraid you didn't hear me um i can share that we have not received any new unanticipated state aid that's what i thought i just figured i would ask because that was interesting news and i figured that we would know if we had thank you and following up on this sort of like what we are getting and what we're not getting i know people have high hopes based on the actions of the federal government that maybe this means good news for us have we got any clarity on how and whether that federal funds are going to flow down to districts i know um when the federal money came last year they actually withdrew
088one dollar of state money for every dollar federal money so it didn't actually amount to any money for us which is of course i know a concern of ours but do we have any information about yet about how that federal money is going to impact us at the district level we do not have anything definitive yet in terms of what the guidance may be around that how exactly it will come to us or what the amount may be great so this seems like we are continuing to fly essentially blind on what is going to happen to us financially that makes it very exciting dr chatur on on that note i just also wanted to add that in terms of the public advocacy the people should write about the state supplementing the funds in case the
089federal funds come through and not substituting them which is what they did last time because last time for every dollar we got they took away a dollar so it was a net zero to us board member creator your hand is still up is that another question or is that just a residual hand that's a residual hand so i'm going to sometimes it lowers by itself and sometimes it does not actually not by itself it's just i secretly can lower people's hands which i do when i'm confident that it is a residual hand but i wasn't sure in this time so you're the one doing that wow cool because i'm the secret handle i can also mute people i cannot sadly unmute them um so that is a problem but um okay anything else on slides
09020 to 23. i see somebody's getting your hand up here who is that whoever it is that was mr lesko i believe mr lesko that was me i just wanted to note that the the governor's scheduled his state of the state address for monday so while that's not his budget address we may indeed start to get some information about where we're at and where we will be for the rest of this fiscal year beginning monday next week okay thank you that is very helpful information board member el manawi um i actually also have a question regarding transportation uh for meal delivery from march to june i know that miss roaring said that we were going to be requesting funds back from fema and that up to 75 could be reimbursed do we um do we
091know if we've already have we already sent in that application is it like kind of a given that we will get it and do we know if we're going to put that money back into like the transportation fund or is it going to just go back to [Music] delivery first so we did submit our fema application for reimbursement back at the end of september um our application is continuing to pend with them for approval uh whatever they approve we would receive 75 reimbursement on and that would come into the district as other federal aid tv is for general purposes got it thank you i wanted to um just draw one more piece of attention one once more attention to this concept of look back period i was asked today by somebody who's not on the
092board don't we always get our state aid in the spring so aren't you always sort of uncertain whether you're going to get it till the money is actually in your pocket and i think that person just had not really brought this whole thing circle together that the reason this year is different than any other year is these look back periods which were built into the budget that was adopted at the state level into the state budget which is essentially a law that allows the governor and the department of budget to reduce and cut aid to i don't know remember all the ramifications but certainly to us based on revenue concerns or expense concerns at the state level and so this year is different than any other year because we do truly have uncertainty about how
093much state aid we are going to get in a way that we rare we normally don't except in i'm sure some sort of economic crisis um the the budget would have to be amended in the middle of the year so that is what makes this year so different um and so if anybody asks you that i had to kind of think that through with that person to see why this year was different than any other year so any other questions on sort of where we are now so in summary they're not taking 20 of everything but they are taking 20 of some things and it's costing us actual cash dollar money to the tune of about 3 million dollars at this point plus the expenses that are on the slide so it's this is not
094a like theoretical construct that they might take money they actually have withheld money from 20 1920 and from this year as recently as this week so it's um disconcerting actually that it happened again because one might have thought we were done if that had not just happened again this week so i'm i'm i'm personally further concerned than i was a week ago about where we stand now okay so then we're gonna move on to looking forward which is slide 27 which i know is really the first of many many slides and many many conversations we're going to have about going forward this is sort of the opening salvo of the budget conversation does and budget conversation for 21 22. does anyone have any questions or comments or thoughts about this information on this slide or
095anything related to going forward i guess i want to ask if if my assumption about sort of what the underlying message here is i'm in reading this and reviewing this information and knowing what my own oh wait somebody else has a question ms board member wilson yes is that you you want to go first thank you so much it's actually just sort of amorphous right now because of course this is a forecast and we don't have any concrete details but i was just more so curious that we live in an age now where information comes out and naturally we have to digest it where we indicate here we're going to make analysis and whatnot but you know information comes out less just say a bulletin or a live update or something what should we what
096what is our sort of um notice to the public that they should wait for anything you know in between board meetings or at the board meeting you know because i think what essentially happens is that we find things out minutes and minutes and until people understand how it overlays what's really going on with us we want them to you know receive the information but we want of course them to have our understanding of it as well so i'm going to first ask can everybody hear me yes okay thank you one of the things that we're doing is it's a combination of both there's some information that we will need to contextualize and present at board meetings there's some information that we will be able to distribute through our community notifications and it really depends on
097that information and so we are committed to ensuring that based on using all of our social media tools our website and getting the information out to families we absolutely will continue to do that but we also have to make sure that for example with the budget piece we're going to always show the history of how we got to where we are because at any given moment someone may tune in that may not know that and so we want to make sure that that piece is always there so that then things aren't taken in isolation and can be misrepresented you can mislead people with misinformation you can twist information when you take it out of context and so we want to make sure that that full picture is there for our community and for our parents
098so that they understand that history and how it relates to the decisions that are being made now and so there are some things that will be done at board meetings and then we'll have the follow-up information to that but there are also things that we will push out as we receive that information we're trying to get information out to families weekly as things are coming up and and depending on what that information is that's how we're going to share it just so that we can make sure that our families are kept up to date with the most current and most accurate information that we can absolutely provide to them board member match tour i wanted to talk about you know the statement that says but it's a status quo um i mean i i interpreted
099that as to assume that okay it's going to be similar to what we planned last year but we're coming up with a statement which statement was that what does it mean for us now i just had a quo yeah but it really isn't right it's actually even more complex than that because typically now is when we start thinking about the next year's budget and we have a plan a plan b plan c and sort of congeal towards it here we have all of that plus no no idea about what the funding situation is going to be more than what we ever did before and on top of that there is the is covered going to be there is not going to be there are we in a virtual situation so i mean it's going to
100be very complicated trying to set this year's budget so more information we can get from other people and get people involved i know that you were talking about a budgetary budget advisory group to help would help people understand the whole process in a way where um it's not out of the blue for anyone because this is not this is not pulling a number out of thin air absolutely absolutely board member smith thank you i think uh on the heels of miss wilson's question and and dr i i know that we had a uh or that rather superintendent and uh president savage uh were at a presentation with cana um and i i was just uh and i'm sorry i couldn't make that one but i was just wondering whether there were uh questions that were
101raised there that are giving us some food for thought uh as we move forward with preparing and communicating with the public about the budget president savage did you want to address that from the community standpoint it was i would just add that it was a good it was a good conversation there were excellent questions there were a number of folks who have relatively good knowledge of the district uh former employees current employees who were there um and and i thought that the questions they asked were good um some very specific about for example uh the um what will happen next with our tony clement center and our albany international center that level of detail which i thought was a pretty you know specific and detailed question and also some more general questions about our budget
102so i think that we um over the last couple of years have done um some good work building bridges with the common council and with the neighborhood associations so i think that they feel fairly confident that we're going to share the information in a timely way with them and that they know how to reach us if they have a question um superintendent adams did you want to add anything i i thought that the questions were very well thought out and i do appreciate the fact that they had questions about the instructional model and what are we doing for our students in terms of the aic and tcce as president savage mentioned trying to understand what would it look like if that model were to go back to its original model or what might happen if
103it has to go in a different model we don't know that yet we know that we're operating as a school within a school model now and that we've looked at how to do teleservices for kids and things like that but it really does depend on the funding structure and what happens as to how we can bring that program back and to what context it's going to be in but i truly appreciated the instructional questions uh with regard to what's happening with our students instructionally board member el mignoli um i actually had a question going back a little bit um on the screener regarding the screener and the doh um thank you for your answer i do have a i know a lot of families are concerned regarding the timing of the screener and when it
104is supposedly to be turned in supposed to be turned in and i'm wondering if um there's any flexibility with that i mean i know it was at 8 am that they're supposed to turn it in by can can will we be uh can i just is there any flexibility on this superintendent you can tell me if i'm right or wrong i think the superintendent said that for virtual students there's no instructional impact to filling out the form so therefore there's no instructional impact for a virtual student to filling it out late right fill it out at 7 30 fill it out at eight fill it out at 8 30 pull it out at nine fill it out when you get to it it's appreciated by the county department of health that asked us to do
105it but it's not you know it's not going to have an impact on your student attending school for our in-person students at my understanding and i superintendent maybe you can specify this a little more detail is that they really do want those done before the child enters the school building so that sets the time for it um as the the goal time for it is that is that a pretty good summary superintendent adams very good summary very good summary listening years i was actually asking specifically for the virtual students because i think a lot of parents seem to think that they have to turn it in before like 7 30 a.m or something like that right they could they can take their time on it as long as they're getting it in yeah i think
106as a parent who's got one of each i think part of the confusion is that the same form is being used for virtual and in-person students so it's a little bit confusing the way the information flows so i think that there's some cleanup we could certainly do on that piece of how the information flows are you speaking about the piece that says now your child can safely enter school that if i'm virtual i'm not like safely entering school um there's that and there's also that the voicemail messages do say we ask you to get this done by 7 30 but that's really pertinent because the school day starts at eight for our in-person kids and so it is a little it's a little disorienting for those of us who who have a child who's not
107um unfortunately able to access in-person education right now we can look at how to clean up that message terrific that would be i think that would simplify um thank you okay back to money because the son you took us out of our groove back to the groove back to the money groove and then we can come back on other things if we need to absolutely um anybody else have a comment or a question i feel like there was a hand raised did i get everybody on the money i just wanted to summarize my emotional reaction to looking at this which is we anticipate that there's going to be an economic impact for at least a couple of years right i don't think anyone who's watching what's happening at the federal level or at the state
108level thinks that there's not going to be some sort of economic recession we hope that will be mitigated by strong support at the federal level right we that's what we're all hopeful especially given um you know the results in georgia that will change the the outcome at the senate we can hope that that means that there will be continued federal support but there's no guarantees there i started paying attention to the board back in the 2007-2008 fiscal crisis and that was not a good time right there was constant reductions in the amount of state aid and the amount of program that we were able to offer because as you guys know many of our expenses are contractual right we've we've committed to our employees a certain contractual increase every year and that that doesn't go
109away just because we have less money so we also know that our reserves are really really thin we do not have a lot a deep bench of reserves and so i really i feel everything that the superintendent said at the beginning about how much we want our kids in school we want them in school right we want them in school we know that that's in the best interest of our children the vast majority of our children with some exceptions and let's remember the superintendent has talked to us several times about some students who are who are performing better um in the virtual environment than in person but for the most part kids do better when they're in school and yet we're faced with this really difficult situation of needing to build up at least not
110to detract from our reserves we need to deal with the fact that we don't have a guarantee that we're going to get the 66 percent that we were supposed to get between march and june and so i guess superintendent and adamson deputy superintendent roaring i'm wondering if you if you can give us any insight because i know what families want i know what they want because it's what i want i want to hear we are going to be back in school on the day right that's what we want and if we can't have that we want to hear here's the steps it's going to take to get us back to school right those are the things that we want because we want to feel like we're making progress in that direction and i'm wondering if
111you could just summarize a little bit more or give us a little bit more sense of like we know you said you want to get kids in school how like what is it going to take for us to get our kids in school is there any realistic possibility of us getting kids in school when might that happen anything you can do to help us shed light on that and i know you can't say kids are going back to school and such and such a day like i realize that but whatever you can say would really be appreciated i think the first thing to start with is understanding that full complexity of a worldwide pandemic and we've talked about it this entire year we've talked about it from march of 2020 till now and this is
112looking at how the pandemic impacts every single aspect of our lives every aspect has been impacted by copit19 and so again with the instructional models and what we're looking at much of that is constrained by the requirements of copin 19 and so until we as a society as a country get a handle on the spread of the via the virus they're going to be these protocols that are put in place the protocols determine how many students we can have in a building how many people we can have in a particular space it determines that social distancing it determines the requirements that we need for cleaning and sanitizing it determines a lot of the challenges that we are facing that we are absolutely working through every single day and then you couple that with the funding
113concerns economically our governor has already stated that there is a 15 billion dollar hole in the budget he has stated that time and time again he's also stated that if there are reductions and i shouldn't say that he has stated the division of budget has put out information that if there are reductions that have to happen they are going to consider the needs of schools first and so that lends itself to what we ask our community to advocate for that equitable funding looking at districts like ours that have high needs uh that really need that assistance to look at how we just don't make a blanket statement that every district will follow that but that we look at the needs of the district and that there's some type of metric or some type of scale
114that we use with regard to that assistance and so i would say that what will we need in order to make those decisions we need to have a distinct handle on the virus on the on covet 19 so that people are comfortable coming back into a public setting we also need to look at what are those requirements of those settings we need to look at the funding component and making sure that we have equitable funding knowing that even if we did which we did receive the 100 of our funding in september and october there are still other pots of money that impact us economically as a school district financially as a school district that there are small pieces that have been taken throughout that really add up to significant reductions overall and so we can't
115just say that there's one answer to it there are multiple answers that have to happen in order for us to resume coming to school in a model that would be pre-covered 19. it's helpful i think what i'm hearing you say is that we know it's safe or has been safe enough for our elementary students and faculty to be in school right we know that covet does not completely prohibit us from being in school we know that the budgetary constraint was is very very real and that we had a plan to get our secondary kids in school that was constrained by budget rather than covet right so if the covet thing would be resolved so large numbers of children of teachers vaccinated so that we would know that our teachers could come to school or some
116other way of ensuring that that we had public health safety then we might not have to worry about the budget quite as much because we could have normal-sized classes for example at school or if we felt that the budget was predictable and we understood how much money we were going to get then we would have a better handle on how to mitigate the covet thing right so that we could have these unusually small class sizes and maybe do a you know a ta in a classroom plus a teacher because we do have teachers who are medical accommodation which is another thing that we have to work her out so if we have a ta in a classroom and a teacher who's teaching virtually well that class just cost us twice as much money to run
117almost because we have two different staff members right so we could do those kinds of things if we understood how much money we had but it's like the worst of both or could we expand our virtual program our virtual instructional model um so that we could offer more virtual classes that may be an option i'm not saying that it is i'm just saying as we're talking about different things that might happen that's a possibility as well so there are numerous numerous possibilities that can happen yeah board member smith yeah no i i really appreciate the the the conversation that uh that you're having here and um i think uh president savage i just don't know i mean i think um it feels so very complicated that for me what i try to do and i
118try to communicate with folks who call me is we just have to kind of take this one day at a time one step at a time um because you know and and because of what you're also saying assumes that we're our society will behave better right we will put it wear our mask we will wash our hands more frequently we will social distance and all of those things and right now that's a problem for us that's that's preventing some of us some some most of our community from getting back to a little bit of you know some of what we're accustomed to but i have a feeling and i think i might have even said this unknowingly in the spring when we were first out i think we're talking a while yet before and i
119didn't know anything back then but it just feels to me when you say the word pandemic we're talking about a long time before we even get back to what we might you know think of as fairly normal and and it's going to be very slow i even i'm looking at i'm i have been home now it'll be a year you know come february they're not planning to send us back into my building until april right and even then i may not get back for another few months depending on on everything and also what you're saying superintendent is absolutely correct every uh every aspect of our society every agency every entity is impacted so we're still going to have an end let's let's be clear our families our families our children less income rental issues you
120know housing issues all sorts of things so we're still going to even as a school district probably be doing a lot of things to make sure our families are fed partner with folks to make sure that folks are clothed in housing so i can't imagine you know i i really appreciate your question but i i can't my mind goes i can't even really see you know the light really um and so that's why i'm saying i think we have to kind of take this as we go and and but i do think your questions are important to think about because we have to plan nonetheless so um wow anyway i'm sorry i'm just kind of running on now but uh very interesting conversation yeah board member wilson did you want to chime in plus we
121want to see zariah on the big screen so there's that my only contribution was what two board members smith was just saying is that is the summary is sort of like the pandemic and its fallout yes i know and it's you know i i really feel for our our parents and our family members who were looking at the suburban schools saying they are in person the elementary kids are in person how come we can't be in person and it's you know it is a very complex situation and unfortunately people always prefer to have a simple answer and sadly in this case the overlapping and the overlapping nature of the situation is that there isn't a simple answer yeah president savage but even with the suburbans they it seems to me many of them are in
122and out you know i'm not that one doesn't make me happy either like i'm ready to go one week and then nope now i can't i got to come out for another few weeks you know so i don't know no good answer here that there's no good answer and i don't think the grass is greener anywhere so okay does anybody have any questions from the superintendent's update we've obviously gone on at length here as we seem to do with this section because these these operational questions are so critical to the success of our district does anyone have anything they want to talk about here or shall we move on all right i think we are ready to move on and that brings us to the part of our agenda for public comment this is the
123time we set aside to hear from members of the public tonight we have no public comment we do accept comment by voicemail by digital through a form on our website and of course in person all of the contact information for that those different ways that you can reach out to us is at albanyschools.org forward slash boe you can also find our email addresses there where we will certainly respond if we get an email from you and that brings us now to um the routine consent part of our agenda so this is the part of the agenda where we adopt routine matters like contracts and in the good old days field trips and personnel matters we all i know look at each of these very carefully and consider them carefully but we vote on them as
124a group so that we can be efficient with our meeting time so with that and if we want to we can always call one out to be set aside for a specific vote and discussion on that item with that introduction can i get a motion to adopt a routine consent agenda motion by board member smith second by dr chatur are there any set-asides seeing none all in favor of adopting the routine consent agenda in its entirety i think that is unanimous thank you all very much that was like the most efficient routine consent ever and that brings us now um on to a discussion of the on the policy uh the policy section of our agenda which is actually action today right right thank you madam president members of the board i'll keep this short
125because we really have two policies that we talked about last week 45 26 and 45 26.1 the first one talks about the computer network and acceptable use the other ones about internet for safety uh these were changes that were minimal uh the the first one the second one was minimal because you changed the titles and modified separated the regulations from the policy the first one we changed it in keeping with acd guidelines regarding the new ferpa and privacy protection information so i don't anticipate any questions but if there's any questions uh please speak up if not uh these are two items you'll be acting on today these are the only two policies that you'll be acting on and discussing today or acting on today because the ones we had a policy meeting yesterday and was
126too short to bring the other ones to this meeting so next week we'll have a next meeting we'll have a bunch of policies to discuss there are no questions we have a motion to adopt 45 26 and 45 26.1 the smith send over here a second second by board members okay all in favor that is unanimous excellent thank you all very much um i am noting something about the agenda that i wish i had done differently when we were in agenda setting which is that the priority activities update is primarily the superintendent but the security update involves a staff member and we always like to make our staff members earlier in the agenda so that they can leave the meeting superintendent doesn't get to leave sadly for her she's stuck with us for the night
127so i would like to entertain a motion to amend the agenda to reverse items i and j motion by board member wilson second by board member smith all in favor of amending the agenda that i think is unanimous yes unanimous and we will therefore continue with the discussion of security and then we'll we'll backpedal to the other topic afterwards superintendent adams do you want to introduce us absolutely at this time we have mrs bechtel who will talk to us about some of the recent updates from her committee meeting with the school calendar so mrs bechtel good evening board of education and superintendent um i'm happy tonight to bring you an update on the calendar the committee met this week um i am actually feeling really super comfortable about this calendar uh and um am very
128pleased to bring you the information this is our committee this is who our committee consists of as i said we met early in december and then again um here just this week i like to always whenever i bring the calendar to the board floor i really like to talk about the constraints around our calendar to help people understand the complexity of developing it we must schedule 187 days uh three of those days are are the snow days that are included we must schedule our two teacher pd days by apps to contract um we have four superintendent conference days that are allowed by sed they count as student attendance days we schedule 16 days off as per the apsu contract and 13 of those days are prescribed this year we are required to add juneteenth um
129which is is actually on june 19th but june 20th 2022 is the observed day that's a monday um we of course must be in session for state testing and scoring days and we always consider our boces calendar for days off and those long breaks so the calendar committee really had an early december a very extensive conversation about religious holidays and then when i brought um the draft calendar to the board the board had some um really interesting comments and input into our calendar development so when we came back again to look at it we really thought about how we want our calendar to be a reflection of our diverse community and we want to look at those um religious holidays and be respectable to uh our our families and our community so we talked about
130uh rosh hashanah yom kippur good friday in eid i'm going to talk about and and the next slide what we resolved around those days the second bullet here is the emergency days um and really those we've talked a lot about the distance learning days the superintendent mentioned that early earlier in the board meeting tonight and we will continue to look and see how that goes so far it seems to be going very well we are going to continue however to have the emergency days in our calendar uh just because it's wise to do that we don't want to just say all of a sudden we are going to switch them totally to virtual and then we don't have to schedule those dates we are going to keep our emergency days in the calendar we um
131if you can go back one please on the slide so we have always wrapped those days around the memorial day weekend and so we continue to keep those two on may 27th and may 31st but we had a lengthy discussion around the may 17th um uh board budget vote or i'm sorry yes tuesday may 17th and we for a while had planted the third of those emergency days if they if they become unused the day before the budget boat the budget vote um but we had a discussion about that and how number one if we're not in school that we lose that preparation day for the budget vote that happens in all of our schools and it is also the third week of the ap and ib testing it is the makeup week it's not
132the regularly scheduled week but we are still allowed to test so really um we planted that day before the budget vote for continuity of instruction however when we took into consideration those other things we came up with a creative solution and moved that to april 15th and now the last slide and i'll talk about those uh different days so our recommendation for the board of education is to have the first day of school on tuesday um august 31st for convocation and and then the following day september 1st for our teacher pd day students would come in on thursday september 2nd our calendar is pretty well aligned with the uh the boces calendar which is good and then that brings us to those discretionary days that we do have um to look at so we definitely
133um have yom kippur as a high holiday for our jewish population and that will continue to remain a holiday we um committed to eid as a holiday i heard the the voice of the the board and i heard the voice of our committee and i heard the voice of others talking about how we need to be um have a calendar that is representative of our community so we are able to have that day off as a holiday so then that left um the good friday which of course this year we are not taking good friday it's um uh as a part of the um spring break and so we are we've setting that uh that to this year so we talked about that and that was why what we decided to do was put that
134um unused snow day on that friday before spring break and so it may chance that we will have that day off if we do not use the um holiday or the um emergency days and and we may not but we did plant it on that day thinking that that was um uh uh that was a good idea as well and then we really spent quite a bit of time talking about rosh hashanah um a day that we've long had off in this district and so what we thought is that we would plant that uh final pd day on september 7th and while that will be great for our families our students our teachers those teachers of the jewish faith will have to take a day but we are we do ultimately have a calendar um
135that is responsive uh to our diverse community and so i feel really good about bringing the draft calendar to the board tonight i have one other note that i wanted to make is that i i would not recommend that we adopt our calendar in two weeks i'd like to wait until we have the capital region boces calendar approved but i i think that we have a calendar that um that we've long sought and that is it i'll take any questions thank you very much as you know i have the utmost respect for the work of the calendar committee and the head spinning complexity they're in so i appreciate it always board member man i think you had a question let's see how your audio is working out all right sort of it's kind of 50
13650. why don't you try try and get it out i don't know i'm sorry we really can't hear you well enough if you're further away from the screen we seem to hear you better go ahead keep going no i'm sorry damaris it's just not good enough can you um send me a text or signal or something and then we'll go from there meanwhile board member el mignoli i wanted to thank you miss mcdoll and the calendar committee for uh introducing narit holiday i know i speak for a lot of the muslim families in the district that they really really really feel appreciative and welcomed by that decision and i understand that it's not necessarily something that will go on in perpetuity but just the the idea that we could maybe rotate a holiday inn from
137different faiths every year um i think it's i think it's great and i think it's actually a learning opportunity for our students and our families so thank you so much welcome board member to tour you know this has been a long time coming we've been trying to get this thing to happen it's fine it's great to see that it's finally happening and it goes along with their equity policy right we're trying to be equitable across all our diverse cultural uh you know religious groups uh the only request i would have in addition to the kudos for the e is the renaming of the columbus day holiday you know let's reflect it to indigenous people there i mean if for any contractual reason that we just mean we have to call it columbus day then let's
138call it columbus day slash or indigenous people day parentheses columbus day or something like that so there you know if that has to be done okay we'll take that and look at it as we uh pull the final version of the calendar together terrific thank you thank you board member smith yes thank you again kudos uh to the committee and miss bechdel thank you so much um i i do i really applaud this i i had a question and it has to do with the naming um i i know that we say eid for short but i it is more formal than that is that correct it's alpha tour right something i believe i've got that right someone can correct me and i i think that what i want to suggest unless if it's okay
139or even if it were okay with the community that celebrates and owns that that holiday i feel as if it should be written out uh formally on our calendar or whenever we speak uh about eid um and likewise uh you know if we do say in indigenous people's day i wanna make sure that that is something that's generally okay with the community in which which with whom we're trying to support right um and i'm not sure that that community would be happy with you know celebrating it slash columbus day i'm not sure we would be happy with that um but how do we balance those things because we also don't want to have one community that celebrates something for a particular reason against another community so i'm just trying to you know maybe others somebody
140might say oh you're just trying to be politically correct well yes i am and i want but i also want to be inclusive and comfortable and i want us to you know to to continue to get things right um and not make mistakes okay thank you thank you um miss smith i i will indeed um add the full holiday name for um e there are two separate days and they do have two separate names um and so we'll make sure that on our really prettied up version that communications will pull together that that will be in there and also along the lines of communications i know that i have proposed this before and i think that there was interest in this that the um that this year because the calendar is strikingly different than it
141has been in the past that it that it include when it's first released a cover letter from the superintendent um or from the border whoever however you want it to be done explaining um first and most important um how one takes advantages of a religious holiday as an excused absence that people really need to understand that because especially um for folks who if we in fact take good friday as an instructional day right we might end up with folks who feel that they need that day off um so i'd like to make sure that we explain that in the cover and then also speak to the intention and goal to rotate the the holidays going forward um because i don't want um folks to feel that that it's going that that as as board member
142el mignoli said we cannot guarantee that we're going to be able to take both eads and we can't and we're not in any way suggesting that we would never again take rosh hashanah right it just things are going to be different um as we do our best to try and honor all of our community and i think um that just needs to be conveyed in a little more with a little more um exactitude than it we normally do because normally the calendar is the calendar but um from our perspective from your perspective it took you know blood sweat and tears to get there but from the outside world it's just like okay whatever rosh hashanah you know so any anything we can do to explain and convey um i think will really help to people
143understand um why their things are changing and i like the i like that idea and i like even just a little bit of the celebratory nature of of having this uh calendar um the way that it is that is uh so responsive to our community all right anyone else have a question vicky i think that's a residual hand right okay anyone else with a comment or question if not we will act on this as soon as boces does right so we will put this in um and hopefully that will be soon because we've been working hard to try and get our calendar announced earlier each year because it is it is helpful for families who are trying to get their their summer plans organized right and i'll check regularly and get that get that out
144terrific thank you so much mrs bechdel and to all of the your colleagues on the calendar committee we really appreciate it and now on to security i'll turn the time over to lori mckenna so that she can introduce our security director mr vincent thomas good evening everyone excuse me i'm not going to take up much time i'm going to introduce mr vincent thompson director of safe schools and violence prevention for our school district and he will take you through the safe schools and violence prevention program review and then give you an opportunity to ask questions mr thompson thank you lori and superintendent good evening everybody thumbs up can you hear me okay very good quick overview of what we'll talk about tonight we'll look at our staffing our raptor visitor management system our response protocol
145some collaborative programs we have with do the right thing to reach and connect in our security meetings and then we'll look at our standardized training and we'll move on you can see our numbers here that we're currently working with as you well know we were substantially impacted by the budget cuts as every other area of the district was we are managing our best and getting done what we need to get done with this staffing it is certainly a far cry from where we were even when i just started with you in the springtime but this is where we are now and we are making it work as you well know we have moved forward with our implementation of the raptor visitor emergency management system that is in effect in all our school buildings we do
146not have regular visitors coming into the school however we are using it for traveling district staff and anyone else that arrives in the buildings that wouldn't normally be there and as with any new system we encountered a few minor hiccups many of which were uh perhaps user-induced uh technical errors uh sometimes but we have overcome most of them and many people are well familiar with the system now and it is working well it does allow us to use the contact tracing a little bit better if we need to if we need to assist the department of health with that at all but it also has a very robust and growing drill and emergency management system where we are able to use that to plan and schedule our drills track and report those and emergency management
147not just for the drills but for real-time events and i just learned within the last 24 hours that they are expanding greatly that emergency management portion and we will be getting that as part of our subscription at no additional cost so that is excellent for us i just received that information like i said yesterday and documentation of some of that today i don't even have all of it yet but that'll be an excellent step moving forward for us as you can see this is our standard response protocol these flyers and posters hang in many areas of all of our buildings to outline our standard response to a various number of incidents we of course have as we all discussed before the shelter in place hold in place evacuate lock out and lock down i know
148a lot of people hear the term lockdown and think that's the be all and end all of solving problems and it is a far cry from that but this protocol here with these five options allows us the flexibility to adapt to whatever the environment may be whatever the situation may be and make the correct decision for the problem in front of us and this is a reminder for everybody each time they see this board that it is up to them to make the correct decision to solve the problem in front of them to handle that emergency first to improve their situation so that they can then start to improve the situation for those around them we must take again personal responsibility for our own safety and make that action work for us and solve our
149problem and then we can work on improving the situation for those around us and of course expanding that to the rest of our school community one of the programs we collaborate with the albany police department is do the right thing we had a nice press conference release on this on 10-5 and we have a internal committee where we select winners from the number of nominations that are processed with the assistance of officer chris english and the rest of the sros and the first round winners were selected in october of course with some of the restrictions on groups and contacts we weren't able to make it as as big a celebration as we perhaps would have hoped but they were able to deliver the prizes which again range from gift certificates and t-shirts to tablets for
150those selected uh for certain certain acts and circumstances and those were delivered and we've gone through several other rounds of nominations and they are working on delivering the programs and the prizes to the rest of the children that were selected there is a link on the albany police department webpage on how to submit somebody for that and i believe we're in the process of uh trying to get that link onto our page too perhaps that's already happened i'd have to check on that but anyone can go to the city of albany webpage find the apd webpage and then there's a link over on the right hand side for do the right thing where they can nominate a student for any of their good actions another program we collaborate with the albany police department is to
151reach and connect track this is a couple of officers and a couple of non-sworn personnel from albany police department that works to target at-risk youth that might be headed down the wrong path of course this program is not designed for children that are heavily service involved or in need of heavy service involvement this is our this is aimed at children who are just on the fringe and perhaps just starting to uh seek bad behaviors and we want to redirect with the assistance of the police department or other support services we conducted a training with apd for administrators in december they produced a video that we will have available for professional development for the rest of our staff as a matter of fact we have another one coming up next week where we will work with
152the district social workers on educating them on this uh platform and this opportunity and again the referrals uh are to prevent kids from entering the juvenile justice system it it is with the albany police department in a non-punitive fashion it is a mentoring and supportive program to keep them out of the just juvenile justice system as much as possible our weekly safety and security meetings i had one this morning i hold that every week that we're in school and that we have work to do it is our senior security staff some pps personnel albany police department snug alban county probation i again i worked with snog and probation in my previous role so these are familiar partners and we have a good dialogue about the circumstances given the status of where we are with not
153a lot of kids in school fortunately we don't have a whole lot of problems to talk about on these meetings this year as as we have before as i've attended them again in my previous role but this is a good good method just for all of us to keep in touch keep up to date make sure we're all on the same page because that's really what's key it doesn't matter the facilities we have in front of us we need to be on the same page to make sure everybody takes the right steps to ensure the safety of everybody in every direction we do standardize our training we did officers offer some standardized training to the hall monitors and the rest of our staff at the beginning of the school year again the multi-hazard school safety
154training the building level emergency response plans we work with the schools and apd again to coordinate those and these other messages to make sure that we are again all on the same page everybody gets the consistent message the same training we have this as a recorded resource now for some of it so that we can ensure that anyone coming into the system new or when we need to refresh gets the same message and we have the option option of course to update it at any point in time but it maximizes our time to get the efficient message message out and make sure that everybody is on the same page and we are working in the same direction for the same goal and that's it in a nutshell i like to keep it brief well we
155appreciate your succinctness board colleagues and thank you mr thompson welcome we i know you're still relatively new for the district and we appreciate you having a man having someone with your expertise here leading this department it is very much appreciated even though i know you're getting sort of a gentle entrance into uh security in the c school district of albany we know you're there some things but maybe not for others but thank you board member smith okay there we go thank you mr thompson i i wanted to just say that i had gone back to listen to the presentation uh that you did was that oh my gosh was it just in december was it early december anyway anyway i went back to listen um and i um i wanted to ask you some follow-up
156questions just to get clarity on the raptor system um and i think we went over this but i somehow didn't get it but i want to make sure i do when a visitor comes in they're showing a a government id some some form of id yes and then we're running that through our system to check for any um criminal behavior um but each time like let's say that visitor comes back again or they continue do they show that id again or what information stays in raptor um you like do they show that id again and uh is it still linked to the system every each time to the id like or is there information that is stored about that individual i can certainly address that okay thank you the first time you come in the
157easiest of course is a driver's license or a non-driver id that gets scanned and really all that's scanned the scanner uses the barcode on the back of the license to pull the picture the name and the date of birth that's it that's all we hold on to that's kept in our system so that the next time you come into the building you do not need to produce that id you can simply tell the person at the visitor entrance point or whoever has is operating the raptor system your name they enter into the system it comes up with the picture so that they can confirm it to you and then print out your visitor badge so it is a necessarily a one-time deal to present that id and we only store again like i say the
158name date of birth and picture we can take that picture manually depending on the form of id that is presented whether or not it complies with the scanner requirements and just to be clear it does not perform any criminal background check it will check against our custom database and the national sex offender registry but there is no criminal background check conducted thank you thank you for that clarity okay can i ask one quick follow-up on that because i know that vicki you said the words government id but in fact it's a you had a long list in the snn that came out of many many many forms of id but one of the things that i noticed was the like the sort of get out of jail free card one at the bottom which was
159and pretty much anything else you've got that's got your birth date on it and i was reflecting on the fact that really the only thing i carry with me is my driver's license that has my birth date on it no no what my credit cards don't have my driver's license on them um so i was wondering do we have a pretty high number of non-drivers in our district because it's such a pedestrian friendly um city what happens if you just don't have any id that has your birth date on it what happens well one of the uh opportunities we have right now with this um situation we're in where we don't have visitors come into the building certainly people have time to procure a document that has their birthday a birth certificate would suffice most
160certainly we don't retain that we don't take an image of that we simply confirm it uh through the front desk personnel and make sure that you are who you say you are entering the building that's the circumstance where we use our equipment to take somebody's picture again we don't scan the birth certificate or anything of that nature so that's certainly the opportunity we have again because they only need to produce a document one time at the very first occurrence and it is an extraordinarily rare circumstance where an individual does not have any document at all that has their birthday that would be very unusual and would certainly probably raise other questions but what we can do as well too once we slowly start to ease back into attending school in person or having people in
161the buildings is if people are concerned they can come in again we'll have to work through this with the superintendent and the rest of the board uh cabinet but they could come in and say hey is this piece of id good enough and if it is we enter them in the system and it's done they don't ever have to do it again okay just if i can add and without trying to go through a detailed list of everything that is acceptable even now we work with families with regard to the forms of id that they use when they have to check their kids out when they come and pick them up that's not going to change just because we have a raptor system now we're going to still look at multiple ways which is what
162mr thompson has explained and i think families need to understand we will still look at the multiple ways just as we do now with how do we verify um who this person is and i know that there's sensitivity to that but i'm going to take a very firm stance and say i have more sensitivity around the fact if someone comes and gets a child that they're not supposed to get versus being flexible about the different forms of id to verify who this person is and that they are the appropriate person to pick up a child and and you have to understand that is exactly the stance that we are coming from uh because that is one of the reasons why we are flexible with regard to that but the flip side of that is that
163we release a child to someone that we are not supposed to and and and that is far more dangerous for a child than for us to work with multiple forms of identification to ensure that the person who is picking up a child is that person totally understood i'm just trying to understand how it works uh that's all but i totally agree and understand um so if somebody has a question about id for now because the email did go out right so people know this is hit coming their way even though we're not actively using it except for these in this limited way who's their point of contact for asking questions about ids and and how they get verified and all that stuff is that you mr thompson or is it somebody else the media went
164out uh the media blast that went out did instruct them to contact pps and i fielded the very few calls that we did get on that okay terrific um let's see i see dr chatur you have your hand up i apologize if we're out of order i wasn't paying attention to whose hand went up when so with regards to the id i mean uh when kids start coming back to school at least the ones who are in person right now can a parent who's dropping their kid off get them their themselves registered at that time and slowly get get themselves into a database i will say from a functional standpoint we are ready to do that from a procedural standpoint as far as letting these adults into the building i would defer to the superintendent
165on that because later on i can get just given where we are with covid i think that as we start to look at how we are coming back uh provided those guidelines are um different at that particular time then absolutely we would have a plan in place to accommodate that because it doesn't have to be exactly when you're dropping off your child but right now we have to be very concerned with the frequency of people coming into the building but absolutely we would have a plan in place to be able to accommodate and for new parents new parents are registering their kids it could be done with central registration too right but that's when you're going to be dropping off all these documents anyways that could be a possibility that would be wonderful uh board
166member manawi that was actually what i was gonna um there is control time that we parents to sign up for this whether i mean whether it's a you know the registration at the beginning of the unique kind of once we start having events again maybe we can have a system where we can parents up uh quickly at certain events so that was just a suggestion and again uh this one time uh introduction with the id of course it's not every school year it's one time um so i know i had a question about something that was not raptor related are we done with raptor does anybody have any other raptor questions i apologize for our emphasis on this you know how people are when something is new they need more information about it but um
167so i wanted to ask you you mentioned some of our supportive programs and you didn't mention one i was familiar with and i wonder if it has a new name or it's been done differently which is was always called handle with care is that still an active um relationship that we have with the apd i'm sorry you're absolutely right i thought that was the presentation apparently i forgot that part yes handle with care is active and still very robust matter of fact i think you just approved the uh mlu a meeting or two ago yes that is still in in effect and we do get that notification from albany police department every school day and just remind me um about how that works because i always get a little confused about is it it's children
168who are involved or nearby something traumatic that happens not necessarily a justice involved child right correct no it is not necessarily a justice involved child rarely a justice involved child these would be children that are victim of or witness to a traumatic event where the police department responded to and there anyone that any of those children would be listed on a police report or identified at the scene of some sort of incident that may have been traumatic to them their name and date of birth is delivered from the police department to the school with no other information on the incident and it just simply says handle with care pps handles that information receives that we all receive that information and then we distribute it back out to the appropriate administrators and teachers for that child
169okay that's helpful thank you um i i think that that that just seems to me such a sensible and um humane thing to do and it's it's reassuring to me to know that that's happening for our kids absolutely it's a great program does anybody else have a question i have one other non-raptor question i'll ask but i don't want to dr chatur so my question was with regards to the standardized training where you talk about mental health and suicide prevention training have any of those training modules been updated in view of the pandemic and the isolation and all the things that have happened this year now both both in terms of dealing with the students as well as dealing with other staff because this has not been an easy year right i mean regardless of
170everything else that a person may be affected by the whole pandemic has just changed brought new problems you're correct that this has been a tough year for everybody and no doubt we do use the most current training available to us absolutely and we just received a number of updated trainings and links through our pps department to address the most current problems and certainly covet is always a topic in each of the trains that comes up so my other question was um well i know one of the points of overlap between the school district and the um and the apd is crossing guards and i'm wondering if that's part of your you have these routine safety meetings is that par is that is that where that information gets discussed about like where do we need to
171crossing guard and oh we're changing a school from a middle school to an elementary school so we need more crossing guards does that happen at that meeting or does that happen at a different place that's separate that's not part of our weekly meeting that is generally a discussion at the beginning of the school year or in august before school starts uh where the locations are identified and i work with the traffic safety division at albany police department to identify uh needs and as a matter of fact we just had another conversation this week given our remote status so that is an ongoing conversation open line of communication with the police department okay that's great um i i long for the day when we have um a really robust walk to school program and i'd love
172to see the you know the the concept of pedestrian safety be part of everything that we're doing because we really we have a lot of kids on foot because we can't afford to bust them and um you know it's i there's only one that i can remember since i've lived in albany of a really tragic accident and that was a charter school student not one of ours but it was it was truly a tragic um death i'm sure many of you recall that and i'm always i'm fearful almost every day honestly that we're going to have another one because there's just so many so many little feet on so many busy streets so appreciate your your thoughtfulness around the crossing guards absolutely thank you uh board colleagues i see two people with their hands up
173but i think they're residual hands so i'm going to move on unless you look at me and make eye contact no eye contact is being made and i'm going to take that as an indication that we are done and thank you mr thompson really thank you and all of the hall monitors and every and the assistant directors and everyone who works with you because we really value the service you provide for our students and understand how important it is so thank you you're welcome thank you for your time thank you very much mr thompson all right i think we are on to our last agenda item if i'm haven't lost something we're gonna move on to talking about the priority activities update that is correct thank you so very much madam president members of the
174board we are doing kind of a mid-year update about our district priorities we did provide those early on um our district priorities are aligned with our guiding principles our vision mission and our goals the first thing that you'll see is the organizational chart which looks at each of our divisions and the responsibilities some of the names have to be updated because we've not updated this as of yet but some of these have to be updated but these are the divisions which are led by cabinet members and then underneath the cabinet members you'll see the various departments that they are responsible for at the core of what we do in looking at our priorities the impact on is on our instructional framework because it is essentially the core of where everything supports our instructional framework and
175even within that instructional framework a key piece are those wrap around services the social emotional well-being of our students and then all of the other divisions that you see in those arrows exist to support our instructional framework and the social emotional well-being of our students when we look at our leadership and operational objectives starting back in 2017 with our retreat these were the things that we talked about doing and we have been on that trajectory of ensuring that we have a multi-year educational design so that we can compare our data year to year to see how we are progressing we look to do that by setting the vision with cabinet and the board retreats ensuring that the work is done through our our district priorities and then operationally measuring our success through the leadership dashboard
176one of the things that we have done to help improve our efficiencies within each of our divisions is the fact that we have looked at our procedural documents and we have updated our operating procedures manuals within various divisions and departments throughout the district our milestones we have actualized our equity policy and hopefully you were seeing evidence of that at each of our board meetings we absolutely call attention to it as our evidence of implementing and actualizing our equity policy our instructional walkthroughs you heard from mr pelino earlier tonight that we are continuing with our instructional walkthroughs so that we can look at our instructional practices and then provide meaningful feedback we have also examined our middle our elementary to middle school transition process looking at data-driven mechanisms so that we can evaluate the placement of
177our students where we are looking at student progress and student growth as one of the primary indicators or two of the primary indicators we've updated our middle school curriculum guide we have a rollout of our curriculum information and guides on our website the professional development opportunities especially in this covid um 19 pandemic we have looked at a number of different types of instructional practices to help improve our craft along the way and those practices that are supported with our support staff what are some of the things that they need to do in order to be able to support that instructional program be it wrap around services via direct services to our students looking at our programmatic options and so making sure that we're meeting our students where they are we spoke earlier about our homeless
178students and ensuring that we have technology for them in that environment if it is at the shelters or wherever they may be that we are reaching out to find out what they need we've talked about especially in the wake of where we are now as a country we started this process almost a year ago looking at the 1619 project how will our educational program and our curriculum changes respond to reflect society and our community which led to our social justice and equity lens and looking at the curriculum also ensuring that we are making sure that our students are aware of the whole truth um in circular materials making sure that and that should be in curriculum material curricular materials i'm so sorry in curricular materials uh that address equity social justice and anti-racist practices and
179procedures that we may see throughout our society and addressing them in a way that is meaningful for our students we utilize our homeschool coordinators our community school models and community school coordinators and our home monitors to provide a variety of outreach efforts to engage our students and to ensure that they are working through the challenge of be it virtual learning and person learning or even if they're wrap around services that they may need and then our code of conduct making sure that we're raising the awareness of the possible disproportionality we have done an excellent job of moving forward and we have met our targets and we are no longer under the assurance of discontinuance however we gleaned excellent practices through that and so we are continuing with those research-based practices to help us continue to
180reduce disproportionality in our disciplinary practices so as we look at the goals and priorities these slides you've seen before so i will not read those and go through those but what i'll focus on is the progress that we've made because that's the objective of this particular presentation so when we look at our progress toward increasing student achievement again you're going to see evidence not only academically but you'll see some of the high-level evidence of taking care of our children the trauma-informed care having guest speakers virtual assemblies etc we're looking at the my brother's keeper mentorship and guest speakers and academic support as you've heard with students coming on campus by appointment for tutoring and support that they may need with regard to our instructional supervisors and classroom lessons and activities you've had several presentations that
181support what we are doing in terms of our stem program looking at cte small group music lessons social justice standards embedded in the curriculum we did have an opportunity for our students to participate in the city forums where we pushed that out through our social studies uh classrooms looking at the policing and reinventing the policing within albany police department and so we have we have provided opportunities for our students to watch those via live stream and and be a part of those particular forms so that they have an idea and start to form their own opinions about what they think and feel about our society and how they can be vocal and channel their student voice in ways that are productive we also have looking at our facilities administration and capital projects we've talked about
182the five-year plan project with regard to equity across the district and looking at all of those capital projects that need to happen throughout the district at various buildings our demographic study we're looking at having more information with regard to that at our next board meeting and we are currently in the pros process of examining our enrollment policy and we should have that to the board well first to the policy committee and then to the board in the upcoming months when we look at the delivery of quality instruction these were our goals and then our progress toward those goals and priorities looking at our online support and resources and the website with the curriculum guides aligned with the various content areas we have instructional supervisors who are providing updates throughout with our teachers and with their
183coaches looking at our enhanced professional development we have maintained common planning time we have our mtss teams as well as our data teams two slides please when we look at our increased leadership capacity these are the goals and the priorities and i know that we have been working an ongoing effort of diversity within our workforce because we know how important it is for students to see people in position who look like them and so we want to make sure that we do have an effort in place to strengthen the workforce diversity our progress toward this goal we have had and then we can go to the next line virtual recruiting fairs we make sure hr is monitoring our mandatory trainings and we are conducting a book study this semester with our administrators unconscious bias in
184schools the roles and responsibilities of our equity teams at the building level this is a continuation of the cre work that we have been doing and the and an extension of our equity policy and then of course as we build capacity build our leadership capacity looking at how we are doing our classroom observations and walk through protocols so that we can provide that meaningful actionable feedback with our teachers and support staff as we empower our families to support the success of their children we are looking at these goals and priorities and i think one of the key things that we have here that is that is really one of the foundations of this is communication and so when you look at our progress toward empowering our families you're going to see on the next slide
185a lot of um pieces that relate to communication with our families that two-way communication and hopefully expanding that um with our families so that we are not just disseminating information but we are developing ways to get meaningful feedback from our families next slide please and so you'll see on this screen we are showing um the different surveys that we have done this year to get feedback from our families incorporating families on various committees and as well as at a district level looking at families participating or parents participating at the district level on various policies that are being reviewed and revised as we go through the year and then of course enhancing our with our digital platforms and communicating with our parents in numerous ways excuse me our last goal and priority with regard to partnering
186with our diverse community we always look at ways that we can encourage our students to engage in the cte pathway to look at our partnerships with local colleges and universities looking at our equity and social justice platform with evidence of anti-racist processes and procedures implemented throughout our district and that means analyzing our documents analyzing what we say we're going to do and ensuring that we have an equity and social justice lens when viewing that and then leveraging our community leader engagement to share out the district's message we do partner with um our common council we partner with the mayor's office to ensure that we are supplying them with information so that they have the information and they can support us in our endeavors and then we're working with our students for tutoring and internships on
187our next slide you will see specific evidence that supports that and again we're sharing out right now the qualitative measures that we are doing to support that and upcoming at the upcoming board retreat and cabinet retreat in february we will be looking at what are those quantitative measures that we will use to measure our effectiveness with each of these goals and priorities so at this time i'll open the door for questions board colleagues i know that we are all just sort of overwhelmed by the large fire hose of information that has been coming towards us um i think this is as i look at it and as i talk to people who raise questions with me in the district this is actually the hardest thing is to be able to talk about progress without implying
188that everything is perfect but to talk about the progress that we've made and to be able to tie the different items to of process progress together into threads that people can kind of conceptualize right like it's you know each of these little things is part of a larger thread and it's very hard to uh to figure out how to to to get it to to tell a story right to be a narrative about where the how the district is succeeding and where the district is succeeding and where we're still struggling um so uh does anyone have a form well formulated or even poorly formulated question or do we just need to sort of absorb this for a little bit and we are going to talk about these things as the superintendent just said at the
189next retreat which is scheduled for in february where we're going to be trying to nail down some of the indicators that we want to use to make to measure our own success um we all know there are certain indicators that are where the outside measures us from right we know we're where indicators like graduation rate and nwea rates and other sorts of student scores but we also know and we also know that the district has been using the leadership dashboard and using more qualitative numbers uh qualitative metrics to to show departmental successes and challenges um but we're looking to try and identify the key metrics for measuring our success that we can tell a better story about how we are doing so i'm mostly i'm mostly filibustering waiting for a hand to go up but
190if there is no hand we can also just let it sit and talk about it at the retreat and that is also an okay thing okay i think that's what we're going to do and i want you to understand superintendent it's not a lack of interest it's just such a huge amount i mean we could we could be here until tomorrow if we raised each individual point so how do we get this up at the board level in a way that we can be meaningful about it is is something that i think actually i would i would ask each of my board colleagues to take to keep these slides handy and really look at them a couple of times between now and february because we do need to come up with metrics and we're going
191to have that same overwhelming feeling um overwhelmed feeling if we look at them again in february like we need to to really sit with them a little bit um okay so that brings us now to board committee reports are there any committee reports tonight the policy made yesterday so like it's like you mentioned during the policy section all those will be coming to the board at the next board waiting for discussion anyone else with a committee report okay any items of other business anything for the good of the order all right i get to say the magic words then can i get a motion to adjourn the meeting dr chatur second and by board member smith all in favor and that is unanimous have a good night y'all i'll see you in the morning good
192night thank you good night good night