Board of Education Meeting of March 15, 2022

001good evening and welcome to the west hartford public schools board of education this is our regular board of ed meeting on this tuesday march the 15th at seven o'clock charlotte may you please call the roll dr chang present mr goldman dr harris here ms nazarella present miss poland here dr steinberg here dr thomas farquharson here student representative andrew maglio president student representative avery woods weber here thank you and andrew may you lead us in the pledge of allegiance and to the republic of jesus one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right we do not have a revision to the agenda order and now is our time for public communication and this is where we're able to hear from you your your thoughts your your views uh and we certainly appreciate

002hearing them and we also appreciate for them to be shared in a respectful way each individual has three minutes to share and we have 21 minutes per subject matter and as you are sharing charlotte will hold up a card to let you know when you are down to one minute you will see a yellow card with that and when your time has expired you will see a red card and we ask that you please wrap up what you're saying and respectfully take your seat so we have some names that are signed up here and i will begin with addie lorden and for all of those coming to the podium please share your name and your address good evening my name is addie lorden and i live at 561 park road i have just presented mr

003moore with a freedom of information request regarding assessments i've always relied on conferences rather than the report cards to assess how my children are doing in school but this year i took a closer look at it and i noticed there's an extraordinary amount of space dedicated to social emotional learning and social justice yet this is taught under social studies in a sub-subject under civics with geography yet civics is not mentioned social studies is on the back page and while i have no problem with the actual subject being taught and all the books related the verbage that is going into the report cards is very different to what's on the actual web page the web page is very convoluted very down the rabbit hole so to speak and very very confusing for most people there's a

004lot of words like willingness collaboration which sounds great except it leads to our children need to be compliant that is the message with this word these words that comes across there seems to be no autonomy anymore no free thought no different differing opinion not even as mr moore you quote good people can disagree and i agree with that and i know you know i do but the words come across more of an institutional learning to people especially who do not have english as their first language i do and i still find it very very convoluted the in-view aptitude test nobody can tell me why we use this anymore it hasn't been used in years for quest so i'm asking for the information as when i ask questions i don't get the answers so i'm asking

005it in a foia and i'm asking mr duarte to make sure that our new superintendent is elected unbiased and not behind closed doors with the elite few thank you [Applause] all right thank you before calling on the next person i neglected to share that for all of those were giving public comment we are attentively listening however we as a board have a policy where we do not respond real time but please do know that we are attentively listening next on the list we have anita hi my name is anita kellyan and i live at 48 west normandy drive um april is a very special month for those of us who remember the armenian genocide and i grew up as a granddaughter of an armenian genocide survivor with my best friends being grandchildren of holocaust survivors

006so april is a very sensitive uh month for us what we saw in our grandparents was a lot of courage today i saw a huge amount of courage and the courage i saw was with my son and his friend and all of you did receive my letter that there is a principal who is going out of her way to bad mouth my son to make the other child speak against my son yet today after school my son's walking and that friend of his was walking side by side last night i spoke with that mother and she said i don't know why i'm getting these phone calls these are unnecessary i ask you now to look into this to be very clear the principal writes we continue to have concerns over this repeated behavior which has

007been shared with you in the past in instances of repeated unkind behavior we have a responsibility to address the concern with students this is a false statement i would like all teachers who are involved to be brought in and to be questioned and you might want to ask all of his prior teachers because they have always enjoyed him and they have said he is a very respectful child under no circumstances should any principle attempt to intimidate a parent who is attempting to advocate for a school district and for excellence in education by going after that that parent's child that is crossing a boundary that should never be allowed in any any democratic and free society thank you [Applause] thank you next we have brooke daly hello everyone i'm brooke daley and i live at 65

008wardwell road here in west hartford i have two children in our school system rose who's at cedric middle school and my son finn who is a third grader at wilcott elementary he has a disability he has down syndrome and autism and i'm just here to briefly talk about how excited we are that the school district will be celebrating once again world down syndrome day at the end of this week and i just want to thank um melissa caballero for her partnership and support undying support over the last couple years and i just want to say that i can't emphasize enough how important these days are to parents with children with disabilities and i think there's some people of the mindset that maybe we don't need these and i wish that we didn't with it being

0092022 but there's still much work to be done there's a lot of education that still needs to be done acceptance awareness it's just really important for an inclusive setting and i know that west hartford is very forward-thinking with being inclusive and i think by having these days not only does it encourage that but it goes right in line with our equity and diversity goals because part of diversity is disability and i think that needs to be emphasized and i would like to see those particular children involved more so in the equity and diversity efforts um and so with that said uh my ask of you today is i would like to put forth a recommendation that for down syndrome awareness day and autism awareness day that maybe these could possibly put on the permanent school

010calendar so that they're celebrated every year and so parents like myself and other parents don't need to year after year come up and and ask if we can celebrate these again so that would kindly be my ask to the board thank you very much for your time thank you and next we have don ennis in the distance i'm going to take this off it's okay good evening i am dawn ennis uh 47 sequin road 18 years there full disclosure i am speaking tonight as a citizen and as a parent of a hall high school sophomore with two hall high graduates currently attending college i am not here as the co-chair of the west hartford human rights commission not as a member of the west hartford democratic town committee not as a member of west hartford

011pride or as a congregant of congregation beth israel although i am proud of all those affiliations i will also disclose that i am a university of hartford professor a journalist and host of a show here on whci called rise up with dawn so i'm in a unique position to report on what happens here as well as experience it as a parent as a journalist and as a teacher of hall graduates i'm also the widow of a west hartford public schools teacher who of blessed member with all that in mind i rise to commend this board its leadership especially superintendent tom moore as well as assistant superintendent dr andrew morrow i especially commend you for listening to every voice raised in support of and against the changes in our high school mascot and team names even

012when it got contentious and got mean y'all made the right call i commend you for keeping our children and our educators and support staff safe throughout the pandemic you are to be credited with saving lives and being sensible about mask wearing i commend you for for recognizing that what we've all been through these last two years has had a social and emotional impact on our community especially our children recognizing that our curriculum must accommodate this impact and respond to it to prepare our children to be better citizens for recognizing that our children are growing up in a much different world than what we grew up in sometimes it's a more difficult world but also it's a better world that allows them to be who they are and live authentic lives something i never had growing

013up you all of you even those of you who voted no you provided that for my children who are happy well adjusted i think brilliant and for those of you who are watching what's going on in florida let me just say they are very proud to be gay and lgbt that's not an ideology that's not a political position that's just who they are and who i am and i thank you thank you are there any other visitors that would like to make a comment and the other comments all right hearing none we will continue on and move to unfinished business and we do have some unfinished business that is the proposed calendar for the 2023-20 school year this is our second reading and the recommendation is that the board of education review as a second

014and final reading the proposed calendar for the 2023-2024 school year passing it off to tom moore okay as we um as we know not a lot of um difficulties in this calendar for a couple years down the line and um you know we already had the first reading with it so um haven't heard an outcry human cry against it yet so here we go thank you with that teammates any comments concerns with what has been proposed again we reviewed this initially and there were a couple of questions that were asked and they were promptly answered so since the first reading any other comments or adjustments yes claire um has there ever been a consideration of adding esy start date to the calendar um because they move depending on snow days we haven't done that before

015because it's not always locked in so that's the reason why we haven't added specifically and if it should move because the snow days is it reduced or extended um we tr we make it the same amount and we just extend it later into august we try to give we've you know we've ended up having a lot of conversations with families about what works best we do an everyday model now we do it where it's not necessarily every day so there's more opportunities for long weekends and breaks um so we want to make sure those families have a time for a break and um typically that's at the end of august but sometimes if we end way very early with no snow days there can be a break on both ends of it other questions comments

016jason um i'm just wondering what is the process by which we would go about um identifying a particular day in the calendar such as world autism day or world down syndrome day i think the truth is that that's the issue is confusion for families because every day listed here is a day off of school and so others are listed on the calendar of the local school i see we can do that but the the issue of listing it here is that those are days off those are days yup got it other questions all right well let us receive a motion again to accept the second and final reading of the proposed calendar for the 2023-2024 school year so moved is there a second second all right any discussion all those in favor say aye aye

017aye aye any oppose any extensions the eyes have it all right now let us move on to new business and we have the ratification of the west hartford federation of educational secretaries the recommendation is that the board of education ratify the negotiated agreement between the west hartford federation of educational secretaries and the board of education for the period of july 1 2022 through july 30th 2026 and we have dr murrow with us mr duarte and miss hewitt with us so passing it off to you please all right good evening everyone before you for approval is a ratified agreement between the board of education and our federation of educational secretaries this is a group of 52 administrative professionals around the district and within town hall the secretaries ratified this agreement a few weeks ago so the

018contract that you are voting on this evening is a four-year contract and i'll go through a couple of the details and then we can certainly answer any questions so first of all a wage increase of two point five percent for two thousand twenty two twenty three two point four percent for two thousand twenty three twenty four two and a quarter for two thousand twenty four twenty five and two and a half for two thousand twenty five twenty six looking at the insurance category we have increased the employee premium costs in 2022 23 and 2023 24 to 20 then in 2024 25 it will increase to 20.25 percent and in 2025-26 it will increase to 20 and a half in addition we've increased the employee's pension contribution to 5.75 5.75 i'm sorry for the first two

019years of the contract and six percent for the last two years of the contract we also have a few minor changes that i would like to highlight first we added language to the longevity category to ensure a common practice of honoring the years of continuous service that employee has working for the board should they move over into this bargaining unit and the other is a provision that allows members that leave the employment of the board and immediately retire under the town pension plan to participate in the board offer dental plan in which they were participating in immediately prior to their retirement and if someone does elect to participate in this program it would be at a hundred percent cost to the employee um so that summarizes the agreement we have i did want to take

020a moment to just publicly thank all of our secretaries for the work that they do day in and day out supporting all of the various stakeholders i can tell you wholeheartedly that as an organization we could not do the work that we do without their continued support and their commitment to all of our families and students so at this time we would be happy to answer any questions that the board has on this agreement thank you thank you questions what is jess what's first ethan i have a few questions so why don't you go ahead yeah thank you um i'm wondering how this contract um compares with prior contracts that we've we've made with the um the federation of educational secretaries so i think that it's very comparable um you know i know we had

021some good talks between us and them and i think that both sides feel this was a very fair deal and certainly recognizes the work that they're doing but again if you look at the longitudinal piece i think it's very much on par ethan uh okay pause this i assume it's part of the uh budget that we're looking at it is captured there yes so just because this is all new to me context um the insurance what was it before i'm just trying to get a feel for it from a percentage standpoint yeah the percentage had been 20 and it's increasing over this term up to 20.5 okay but but if i was to do if it was to look at it today it's a 20 correct okay all right and i apologize but longevity works

022for the board in a position i'm not could you question sure that has to do with folks that may be working in a different bargaining unit and so you know they could be uh a para or whatever it would be and they're applying for for a secretary job and their promotion type correct so rather than have them lose all that longevity got it okay so just anything in this is it just the education system in the town of west hartford west hartford so what's hartford education which hearthstone educational system yes not the town but okay that's what i was just trying to understand um then there was one other ad and retirement was was it 5.75 prior it has been at 5.75 and it increases over the term of this contract to six percent okay

023thank you other questions gail um i just have a question on the health insurance at retirement it's not actually on your i don't believe it's on your document here but i'm just curious how that works since you mentioned the dental when if somebody retires how do are we what happens are they responsible for their own health insurance or we is the town helping out with that sure do you have that answer yeah i'm trying to find the percentage in here sorry i mean if you can just give me a general idea that yeah so the board shall pay 100 of the premium for cost individual memberships on page seven of the actual contract if you have it there and we can get that over to you too do we have it no we don't okay

024i'm sorry that's okay we can get that to you no that's fine so so could you who's paying 100 so the board shall pay 100 of the premium costs for individual membership plan after retirement correct so what that means though is if you have family coverage the employee has to pay for the difference in that and certainly for the dental insurance the employee pays for 100 and is that continuous until a certain point or is that go on forever at 65 it's connected to the medicare medicare okay thank you other questions just one process question this is first time i've seen one of these is it possible this was ratified or i believe or completed on january 31st maybe it wasn't ratified then it would be it would have been helpful to have seen it

025before this because this week unfortunately i was looking at the budget book and then all of a sudden just ask questions ahead of time so once again there's a process on this and the union once once it's gone ahead and ratified it we then go ahead and put it onto the onto the agenda okay and this was simply the first board meeting between now and then that wasn't dominated by the budget no i understand i'm just saying if we could have seen it prior to getting the book on my doorstep on friday so thanks yes that's all right yeah yes so i just want to clarify one point on the health insurance what is considered how long does an employee have to work in order to get 100 coverage at retirement so meaning if someone

026works for five years are we giving them 100 or is there a certain amount of time so they have to retire under a normal retirement which um has both years of service provisions as well as age provisions originally that was 25 years of service and at least 55 but over time those have been extended to both an older age and longer years of service in order to get coverage so it's really based on date of hire but we do have a schedule that details that if you're interested but if you um do not retire you know under a normal retirement you're not eligible for health insurance other questions thank you for the information and before we go just please don't apologize when you're taking the time to look up information for us we appreciate it

027that is certainly my pleasure so with the formalities of the matter we certainly want to formally vote on this and again the recommendation is that the board of education ratify the negotiated agreement between the west hartford federation of educational secretaries and the board of education for the period of july 1 2022 through july 30th 2026 do we have a motion so moved is it seconded seconded jason discussion all those in favor say aye hi hi any oppose any abstentions the eyes have it thank you thank the three of you thank you do we have any other new business yeah i'd like to make a motion [Applause] um i'd like to propose to the board that we have an open forum um prior to the end of the school year to discuss the sel curriculum particularly

028the parts that revolve around the gender part of the curriculum for the parents and the community to actively voice their questions and concerns um as we all know we've had a can i say something else okay as we all know we've had a lot of people asking about this we've had a lot of letters we've had a lot of people speaking and i think that it would be helpful if we could have sort of a open kind of transparent process where we allow parents and the community to come and discuss their concerns ask questions to the people in the administration that probably know the most about this and can answer those questions i think that would help a lot to allay some of the concerns that people have okay so thank you so i'm going

029to ask if you can restate it thank you for explaining the rationale behind it if you can reset it as a motion and then we'll look for a second so what you originally read you can read that again okay so i'd like to propose that we have an open forum prior to the end of the school year to discuss the sel curriculum uh with the parents and communities to actively allow them to ask their questions and voice their concerns directly to the school administration is there a second oh second discussion deb thank you just a few questions regarding the proposed forum do you envision um i imagine you envision having a panel of experts to share some sort of information about the curriculum can you talk a little bit about how you envision that panel

030to be composed sure thanks dub um i think the you know we could start out with the people who know the most about the curriculum which is you know i would assume that tom would know who those people are who would maybe give an overview of uh part of the reason that you know we've brought that curriculum into the school system um the basis for it and that you know would be maybe the first part of the forum and then it would allow i think parents and community members to then ask their questions maybe voice concerns have a more of a back and forth i think what's happened is that there is you know i know that there was an attempt made to sort of um publicize that curriculum or to have some involvement of

031parents and community but i for some reason it seemed to have gotten lost a lot among a lot of people that didn't really feel that they were aware of what was going on and were sort of blindsided by what happened so okay thank you and uh a follow-up through the chair if that's okay um so do you also envision that there might be for example a moderator who could facilitate this forum to maybe collect questions on index cards or do you envision like people coming up to a microphone i'm just trying to get us a visualization of how this forum would be different than the presentations we've already had so far on this curriculum so are you talking about the presentations to the board yeah i mean i think there's a difference between you know

032the seven of us sitting up here and and having a presentation then you know allowing people from the community to come up and ask their questions and sort of feel like they're being heard i mean this is controversial material um and i think that you know parents have some concerns about it and i think the best way to potentially alleviate some of that is to have a direct communication because as you know like when someone comes up here and gives us a presentation that the community isn't really i mean they're listening but they're not really involved and um another follow-up how do how do you envision this to be different than the many many community sessions that have already been had across this community from employees of the west hartford public school system to various

033community groups regarding this curriculum and other curricula that we've established so i i think that again you know i think there's some kind of a mismatch between those things that have happened and parents feeling like they have not really had a chance to discuss this to digest it to ask their questions i know that you know i've been told multiple times that there were some sessions that happened but for some reason a lot of people seem to not know about those we're not invited to those we're not participants in those and i think that if this was widely publicized and you know again i assume tom would know how to do that better than you know i'm gonna know how to do it but i think if the community is made aware in a public

034way that this form would take place and it would be done obviously in a respectful way maybe the way to do it is to have you know questions handled given you know people submit their questions beforehand so that it's it's done in that way as opposed to people potentially you know just raising their hand i think it would go a long way to help uh sort of allow people to feel more comfortable with what's going on in the school i just have one final question i'm sure my colleagues around the table do as well i understand that you've expressed concern around this topic and we've heard from some people who have come forward with support as well as some concern and questions around this topic but there are other topics that we might equally choose

035to have a forum around some people think that the teaching of evolution is controversial some people think that the way we focus on certain books in english classes is controversial so i'm wondering why this topic and are we setting some sort of a precedent not necessarily a bad one but how would we choose if we did this topic in the next few months how would we choose additional topics just trying to get a sense of what your vision for this might be yeah thank you um you know i haven't heard anybody come up to the podium and you know talk about not teaching evolution and i have not seen anybody send a letter uh saying that they didn't want to you know have their student be taught evolution we have seen many many people come

036up here and complain about this or have concerns about it we've seen many people write letters um i you know i i can tell you that at least once a week i have a parent come up to me and you know ask me about this curriculum and truthfully i mean i'm the first to say i don't understand it myself entirely because you know i just not that versed in it so yeah i agree that you know obviously we can't you know have every single topic have a forum but i do think that if we think about it we've had a lot of people you know write into us and speak about this and i do think it warrants you know maybe some special consideration given the amount of people that have you know i think

037need to sort of feel more comfortable with it but i do understand what you're saying other comment yes sorry um i just wanted to follow up and i don't have the answer and i'm sure tom or maybe part of his team i know that there was a lot of concern and emails and public commentary following the initial presentation um but from my from my understanding and from my the emails that i'm receiving this is no longer real i haven't gotten an email on this topic in i don't know when the last presentation was but i would say after a week or a week and a half following the presentation i have not received any concerning emails and i didn't know if maybe i wasn't informed but i didn't know if it's still a hot topic

038yeah to go back when we first did the presentation because they exist into last year and this has been a multi-year process not noon we've talked about these things and rolled them out but the um the idea of the controversy as we recall really came from national review article quoting the three people that commented um and then there was nothing after that and then that spurred another group and many of them frankly not parents and letters and threats and otherwise from different parts of the country but in terms of any parents that had concerns they met with principals or with their teachers or i can tell you mr baicenas rosina haskins met individually there were opportunities held with various community groups also and then we put all the information on the website that's out there

039that people were asking for so we have not had over the past two months at groundswell for this three months at all i haven't gotten an email about it in weeks maybe months thank you can i just make one more comment um ari i just wanted to make one comment in relation to what you said i think just the fact that we're not necessarily getting emails is not necessarily mean that people are comfortable and satisfied with you know what happened i i do think that um they may feel that the board you know maybe just doesn't really respond to what their concerns are but i i don't think that it's gone away just because you know we're not getting a ton of emails maybe people feel like you know i write all these emails and

040nothing happened so what's the point but anybody that has writes an email to one of us gets a call back or a meeting so any parent so as far as they don't get anything back they do all right yeah that wasn't i wasn't implying that nobody gets back to them i'm just saying that i i do do get people asking all the time about it other comments questions claire um so so through my 24 years of teaching i have taught social emotional learning and many of the non-educators and those listening right now have not benefited from being in a morning circle from learning an environment that promotes acceptance and tolerance the kids today have a different education than what i had my daughter would not be included in my classroom if she were back when

041i went to school there's a whole different kind of generation that is growing up right now they expect kids in wheelchairs to be included on field trips they expect kids that have different colors to be blended into their community they are much more tolerant i do think that there is some education needed but i think it has to do with the people who have not experienced being tolerant and don't know a kid who has two moms and don't have a kid sitting next to them that's transgender when you have that experience when you know those people when you see the smile on their face when they finally are their authentic self you see that by doing everything we can to make sure that they're not deep in depression that they don't consider suicide that their

042peers in the classroom accept them for who they are so i'm glad we've narrowed down the piece of social emotional learning that bothers people because if you go to the website it is so broad and it is done daily and it's helping our kids get through this pandemic it's helping our kids build good relationships it's helping teachers have relationships with children and teachers relationships with families but any one of those families could be grandparents could be two dads could be two moms could be a transgender person they're all different kinds of people that's not the environment i went to school in that is the environment our kids are going to school in and so a forum that might educate the adults that don't understand someone spending some time listening to a parent who struggles with

043their daughter that is bored a boy and now wants to be a girl and has transgendered and now they're trying to understand and make peace within their church about this change that just totally rocked their world and they find a way and they get counseling they get help and the school supports them so there's so many places we can get educated and there's so many ways that we can take social emotional learning and make it be about inclusion and about diversity and acceptance if it's uncomfortable it's understandable because it's not what we were taught but it is what our kids need to be taught and i understand people are objecting and luckily they're being responded to with let us help you understand the curriculum the curriculum is researched it's being implemented by professionals who study

044education it's being you know it's not a willy-nilly thing that they added in it it blends off of our diversity inclusion it's about anti-racism there's a lot of things about it if anyone is concerned about social emotional learning go on the website print it out i did today there's pages and pages and if our kids grow up based on these values we're lucky and i really think that people need to learn more i would be very open to a forum that would educate people about all the different kinds of families the different kinds of identities i think that's really important but to hear from a bunch of people about why they're not comfortable they can call the schools they can get appointments they can learn about the education they can be given literature but a

045forum just to say i'm not comfortable i don't like this i understand why they weren't brought up that way but our kids are our kids are seeing kids in their authentic self they're seeing families that are accepted i have conferences with two dads i have conferences with two moms i have transgender kids that i interact with every day in elementary schools in all schools and they all deserve to feel safe other questions comments avery okay so just a clarifying point um again to your vision of this forum it's my understanding from attending these meetings that many of the parents who came were concerned about the elementary school programming and that when we when the presentation was brought forward there's programming that's comprehensive through k-12 and so my question is it holds a little along the

046lines of we discussed in those meetings and we discussed in those meetings and in following presentations how there was opportunities for parents to see the list of books for elementary schools and they were supposed to be sending out flyers including this information um and i just i would like some clarity about how we would narrow this down so that if there is communication issues so that in the future we have those systems in place for the elementary school-aged parents is that is that clear no i'm not exactly sure what you're asking yeah okay i just my question is how my question is with this forum do you how do you see this resolving future issues with communication between the school and the parents well i think that you know this was the first year that

047this particular curriculum went into the elementary school and for whatever reason i i think a lot of parents as i stated before were sort of blindsided by it they weren't aware of what was going on and and they were concerned about the teaching of that particular curriculum so at this point i think it would be helpful to allow people to have an exchange almost to a certain degree what claire is saying is that people you know maybe can get more education can get more information can't ask the people who are running this curriculum or who are in charge of it what their questions are i mean going forward if you're asking about you know a different issue i mean i guess that would have remained to be seen what the issue is and and maybe

048we do need to communicate when we put a new part of a curriculum and better not that we not that i'm not saying that there wasn't an attempt to make to a communicate but for some reason the communication was missed by a lot of people and you know and it further to what claire is saying i think that it's it could be a educational opportunity for people to learn more and understand more right now there seems to be a lot of discontent among a lot of people and i think as a community and as a board we want to try to be inclusive and try to be you know understanding i mean we obviously all don't think the same way and you know i think it's important that we we can have a dialogue and

049i i'm not i think it also makes a lot more work for the administration when they have to meet with each parent individually principals have to meet with each parent individually i mean that's a lot of extra work but i think this is a better way to potentially and you know if you do it in a forum i think all the questions are asked openly and all the questions are answered openly other questions oh yes get your hands yes yeah i don't have a question of a comment i i think transparency and open communication is extremely important and frankly one of my disappointments with the team mascot discussion was that there was a minimal sharing of emails and communication with the community we got to see all the emails but i think it would have

050been very you know one of the comments was from people who wanted to change the name as they wanted to heal the town i think it would have done more for healing if everybody could have seen everybody's emails everybody's communication instead of assuming that there's you know just like they knew their point of view they didn't know the other point of view and i think that's just important to do i don't think this issue has gone away because i it's minimal but there's still people contacting steve peel people feeling that they didn't get listened to and i think for the town it would be good just to have both sides explain their concerns explain their issues not one side's right one side's wrong but listen and then the educators can respond to why they're doing

051what they're doing it's just better communication and transparency that's just my opinion other comments jason yeah thank you um yeah so uh gail you and i were a part of a teaching demonstration on the gender literacy curriculum and i'm wondering you said that you still don't understand what's being taught and so i'm wondering if you can articulate a bit more about what is left unclear to you and if if that wasn't sufficient what would what more could needs in your mind would need to be done to to to create those learning outcomes well thanks jason um so that was you know something that me and you did with two other people and part of my concern and i did voice it at the time is that you know it's great for me and you and

052we had a great discussion i thought you know it wasn't back and forth but the community is not involved in that they're not hearing it they're not listening to it they don't know what's going on in that room with me and you and i think what i'm trying to say here is that i think the community needs to be more involved in maybe that type of a scenario probably obviously the form would be a little bit of a different uh setup than what me and you had um i also think that you know if you talk about the sel curriculum its entirety i mean it's it's very large it's very broad and i don't think it's easily you know understandable in an hour and a half i think that you know it you need more

053time but that's not exactly what i'm advocating for the community i think in a community forum people get to you know voice their concerns try to learn understand why this is you know being done i mean why we why we're teaching this so i don't think so to answer your question directly it's not really about what i understood at that meeting i think i'm advocating that the community gets to understand this better could i respond yeah uh thank you um i asked because in a way i mean you know part of i think the the the purpose of you know a kind of um you know uh learning demonstration demonstration like that is so that when we do get questions that we have those kinds of experiences to draw from to share you know what

054what is what is a lesson like you know um that you're able to see the the different texts that were used and um you know modeled reading and um and the kind of guided discussion that happens um so i just find it you know like a little confusing that there's you've had this experience but then it's not getting relayed to to to the community uh people that you're talking to um so you know in my mind i think okay you know there are a number of venues already that exist for folks too to ask questions they can come to board of ed meetings um they can ask questions they can at any point in time get in touch with the district and i'm familiar with a couple cases in which uh parents had uh reached

055out and um and had similar kind of teaching demonstrations and walked away from those feeling you know uh feeling supportive of the work and and finding that being a really constructive experience um and so you know i think were a public forum to be taking place i don't know that it would have that same kind of personal impact you know um and so you know i think the the approach thus far of of having those kinds of consultations i think has you know generated a lot of of you know good outcomes uh both for the schools and for for for the parents um you know they're just thinking through too about like there's a number of avenues available for us to to develop our knowledge about this so i know you mentioned your confusion about

056it but is there have you done additional research since our since our our teaching demonstration or reading yeah but i also want to say jason if if you could imagine that the discussion that we had and obviously nobody here is privy to that except for me and you um imagine now if that had been done for the community and the community was able to engage in that type of a discussion that i thought was very informative very back and forth lots of learning i think you know on maybe everyone's part imagine how that might you know impact the community's understanding of this as opposed to us just kind of me and you doing it and then me sort of talking to people i don't think that's an effective way to explain this or to discuss

057this or to be transparent with the community i think that if we want to be kind of open and transparent then why would we not want to engage with the community you say people come up here and speak to us and yeah that is true but we as a board don't respond to them and you know i know lorna does respond to those emails but it's not the same as a kind of a the kind of thing that me and you had in that room which was a real back and forth yeah because i i do agree you know there's um uh well this is the public forum um you know these are really issues of the of the district of the administration this is the curriculum and teaching and we really handle policy and

058and so you know i i definitely support the community education that claire was talking about um and you know i do think that you know what what is being done in the district is informed by state statutes their social emotional learning is part of teacher training it's a part of you know a number of issues from um lowering suspensions and expulsions addressing youth violence in in the schools absenteeism uh bullying and dating violence and this is all language from statutes right about you know how why why this is important um and as well as you know helping out with mental and emotional health um so you know and actually yesterday at the um at the bugbee pto meeting we had principal grouse who was describing disparities in um in disciplining and racial disparities and disciplining

059outcomes at the school and how important sel was for that and and so you know i see i see these as um as all you know essential dimensions of 21st century education right um and so the the outcome of such a forum yeah what would you imagine to be the you know like what would you define as like a successful forum conversation well i think that a forum where people can get you know accurate information they and the more people at that forum then everybody's getting that information it's not just you know like me talking to somebody um we're learning or we're hearing from the people who are obviously the people who run this program who know the most about it and i would expect that there would be some ability to communicate back and

060forth which doesn't happen when someone comes to our podium and i think that the people that know the most would be able to explain or even do something similar that you know that happened in the room with me and you so that parents have an understanding of how the lesson is taught what is done what their children you know what is what their children are are learning and i'm not really talking about the sel curriculum as a whole i am more focusing on what we all got many many emails about and what people come up here and spoke about many many times and people continue to at least talk to me about it sure so yeah i mean i don't know what would really you know i really don't see what the downside of a

061public forum would be i don't see a huge downside yeah would would you be um would you be willing to mend your your um your motion maybe wait what way oh to include the things you just mentioned uh like i'm sorry the expert panel the inclusion of the administration um the teaching demonstration uh those elements that you just spoke about that wasn't in your original motion okay so i'm sorry the teaching demonstration and i'm sorry what else the expert panel okay yeah um i would probably not have a problem with that as long as i as there's going to be a back and forth that people can ask questions and it's not going to be you know like when they come up here that we're just listening and and we don't respond directly to the

062person and they understand we can't do that in this forum but in that forum i think that you know would be really important for people to communicate with that panel of people there's it's a fair exchange it's not like think of your lecture why was it called what was it called and i i don't want to i don't think it should be about the entire sel curriculum that's a huge thing i think it should be about what we all got as many many letters and concerns yeah i'm sorry cool sorry yes can you just actually say what it is because you're talking about the all these letters and all we got concerns about we need to specify what exactly in the curriculum people object to and what this forum will be about because the curriculum

063as you said is very broad from what i gather there's some titles that people don't like and um i let's not talk and you know be be specific what is it that you want the forum on so i think that the forum should be about the the gender part of the sel curriculum that was introduced this year i believe and primarily for the elementary school children because that is what i believe we got the most amount of letters and comments about was the gender part of the sel curriculum in the elementary school uh claire and then dad so not about a child having two gay parents and be able to say that in class or a book about gay parents i think whatever i i don't well you're just saying it's transgender no i'm saying

064talking about the gender curriculum that was introduced into the elementary school this year whatever that includes okay so i i think if we had some experts that could help people understand the gender i don't know about west hartford employees being you know put up on a panel to have to give the scientific research behind why this is critical to teach kids tolerance so these books sorry these books are about acceptance and tolerance and i don't see the other side so of that i understand but there are people who do see a different side and i think that as a responsive community i think that we we engage each other and we talk about things and we try to learn from each other i mean i don't think that all of us on this panel we

065don't all think exactly the same way either so i think that being able to discuss and learn and educate and i do think that the people in our administration are qualified to to talk about this and certainly they could you know i think they're qualified so i think that but the curriculum is about tolerance and acceptance and anti-racism and anti-bias so what's the other side of acceptance you know yeah i i don't think this is like it's not one side or the other it's not like you're saying you i mean it's just a sharing of here's what the curriculum is here's why we have it i'm sure the educators who put it in can well speak to that but nobody's saying that you should be intolerant or you you're doing hate i i think it's

066just you're taking one extreme all we're trying to do or all is to to have people be part of the communication and part of the conversation as opposed to saying here's what it is take it or leave it and i think unfortunately that wasn't intended but that's what came across at the beginning that was my perception and i think the more people communicate the more they talk hopefully the better everybody walks away at least having a better understanding of their thoughts but it certainly isn't a matter of saying you can't do this or this is wrong that's not what i believe anybody has said and i believe in this community i think all parents want all the kids to be well you know have a good education have opportunities i don't think anybody's looking to

067harm anybody it's just let's communicate let's talk i'll share opinions and ideas and why there should be a rationale of why things are where they are so sorry to me to jump in that's all right deb and then ari a question to tom actually um could you make an estimate of how many meetings you or any members of your team may have had with community members during the development of this curriculum and then after the curriculum was put into place including school-based meetings with teachers with principals and people that went through that process sure doesn't i mean more than that really how about um community members community members got to be double digits okay thank you i just think it's important to know that that work has um been done and those forums were open

068to many many members of the community and if they um didn't attend then and then explanatory meetings afterwards including explanatory meetings after this became an issue in december and january appreciation uh second question for you um what do you think the capacity would be of your team to help pull together a forum like this this spring um maybe after the budget is done obviously um i guess we would be looking at maybe the month of may or something you're asking a lot in a um you know it's a it's a busy time i never put i i don't ever say anything other than my team will respond we'll do things we'll do things well um but that's a meeting that would need security we've seen what have happened at these forums across the country they're

069not really forms about inform me their informs but let me tell you why you're wrong so i mean that's just that's what happens place after place when you have this kind of form it's not we'd need police we need security and everything else as we've seen from the threats that we've received all right um so just kind of trying to process everybody's comments um i guess for me in terms of looking at a forum um part of the forum that you're proposing has already been done here in the board room presenting the curriculum presenting the rationale presenting the breakdown then in terms of being responsive to the public i also actually truly believe um even if i wasn't involved in those conversations that they were had and that our administrative team whatever concerns were brought

070to them i can't speak to the ones that weren't brought to them because people may not feel comfortable and i respect that but the ones that were brought to them were addressed um and to some extent from what they're saying to me were resolved um i guess my thought is if we need more education i don't think it necessarily needs to be about the curriculum the issue is gender identity lgbtq plus issues and i think that can never be a bad thing but i don't think a public forum where our admin team and our curriculum specialists and our teachers go on the defensive to explain or to um you know i i just don't want to put them up in front and just have like a firing squad at them either and that does feel

071like that's what things have recently become i think if we want to have some sort of town-wide education presentation forum you know i work at the iol we have an entire lgbtq young adult dr laura saunders was the first to create um a track for lgbtq she's on the news all the time if you ever watch the news she does all the snippets for iol dr derek fenwick is also another expert in the field i mean i think if we want to do something like that for the community to support and to educate on these issues and and with that level of understanding i think then the curriculum makes more sense because i i do feel like we've already explained the curriculum issues have been addressed if there's a need to educate in these issues

072then that's a very different thing than let's rehash our curriculum and put it up against you know public scrutiny to some extent in fairness um the idea of bringing in experts we had a group of parents through the edi that at one of our schools wanted to bring in outside experts which they did last spring to explain to parents about this is what some families are going through this is what the language that's used in otherwise and we were that principle was actually attacked for that and then we had letters about how dare you do that and misconceptions i was that it was invited to kids which it wasn't it was parents and it was a parent-generated group not a school-generated group so we have brought in experts to have those conversations before we get

073attacked for that too yeah the only thing i could say is and i'm surprised that i mean you had the experiences i think one of the things that's disheartening to me in this conversation is we need to treat parents with respect i just and do you have the experience i'm not going to question it let me make something clear ethan i don't think that there's anybody on my team that's ever treated parents with a lack of respect lack of interest what you need to understand and what the board needs to understand is that you're elected for this these decisions are made by a board of education if we want to have parent forums for all of these decisions then we should revisit the town charter and disband the board of education and have parent votes

074on things because that's a different way to run things but this curriculum is your responsibility and the administration's responsibility i was not referring to the administration or the educators before referring to the board and that i think the board should trust the parents and to treat the parents and just like i would expect to hear from you i would expect to hear from others that's just me so sorry if i misstated that but it was an administration it was us avery i would like to circle back to a point that i believe miss nessarella touched upon earlier in these conversations especially with the public forum my concern is that members of the lgbtq plus community parents faculty students um need to be protected in these conversations and these conversations need to happen in a way

075that is safe for them and for their loved ones so in going and educating the people who who are asking for this education we need to ensure that it doesn't become just sharing opinions some of which may be harmful to the lgbtq plus community um and i think that this board has a responsibility to protect people in our district from that very vulnerable community so i just ask that you keep that in mind thank you avery yes thank you thank you all of you and and so and thank you for bringing this up and the thoughts that i have with the motion and just with this subject in general i've been trying to think back of a timeline of events for the past i would say year and a half two years and i'm going

076to try to recall them and if i misspeak please give me nonverbal communication i don't know that was that was off and so i believe it was um it was either in 2020 or 2021 where let me just say this we always knew this was something that was important to address and to respond to um effectively in terms of our social emotional learning in terms of all of the entities that make up social emotional learning in particular our gender identity and so i do believe the process of coming up with the curriculum was very progressive and very inclusive i do i believe that our executive team had several several several community meetings with members from the community that represented the school staff teachers and parents as well and from those various meetings taking place over

077the summer then a curriculum was was put together and it was presented and we know that here at the board i believe it was september of 2021 and october of 2021 that's where um a presentation was formally made to the board on the curriculum and it was shortly thereafter that things started to um upward there was certainly the emails you're referring to we certainly had many many many many many many many emails between like november and december flood of emails and then in december i believe it was our december 8th meeting we had a presentation from dr haskins and mr ivacinis explaining more about the curriculum and the reason for wanting to explain it was because of the concerns and the questions that the community raised like what is this how did this happen and

078so we know that they shared with us the curriculum the intent behind it and also the resources that were used to make up their curriculum and again the purpose for that presentation was in response to the flood of questions and concerns um and and uh discontent with what was happening that was around december and then teammates please correct me if i'm wrong from december a few emails here and there but then they started to trickle down uh and we may have had one or two follow-up from original emails that were sent but but no new ones and with it now being the middle of march have not received any new emails um in regard to the social emotional learning in fact what i do recall and and i'm so proud of our executive team for

079doing this with all of those comments that were made or emails that were received and those who followed up directly with the executive team wanting to learn more express their concerns because of emails they wrote they were followed up with not only with an email but also with meetings and also with sharing of the information i also do believe that with some concerns that were raised of certain books that were used there was a re-review of the books on the list but it was done with a different set of eyes and they i believe there were other teammates to look at the list who who may not have had original affiliation with it who are able to give a different perspective of ah you know maybe yeah i could see why that one may have

080be of concern or maybe that one may be an issue and there was an attentive reaction to that several books were no longer used or shared because of responding to the concerns that were raised i do believe that even in following up with several parents from the community who originally raised concerns that now in revisiting them their concerns are no longer pressing their disciplines are no longer there if anything they expressed a heightened sense of awareness and appreciation for the attentiveness that the executive team made in response to their concerns i'm saying all of this because i want to be clear that efforts to be transparent have been there all along now in addition to the communication with the parents and the public the information is on the website as well and all questions that

081have been raised have been responded to so again the effort to be transparent has always been there and so with where we are now in terms of the motion that's raised and how it's stated the the wording in terms of allowing for persons to voice their concerns i i think we have to be clear on the difference between a public comment uh versus the open forum of form is where there is a level of mutual learning and engage and sharing of ideas but from what i gather we have uh there are some individuals who at the end of the day they just don't support this and we respect that people can agree to disagree but to have a form where persons can state they don't like it that's different than having an opportunity for people

082to learn more now i appreciate that there is the support of wanting to learn more and engage in the conversation discussion and we have many means for that to happen we certainly certainly know that parents first and foremost can always talk to their teachers to learn more can also talk to the supervisors in their school could also meet with the principals there are many means of having more of that personable exchange of information which you made reference to which i appreciate they're having a more intimate exchange is a beneficial one and that certainly can happen with parents and caregivers with their respective schools uh to be able to have those opportunities and so i get i just think it's important for us to recognize what is being put forth as a proposal which is to

083allow for persons to voice their concerns and disapproval um of of the curriculum and as has been shared the curriculum is one that we support it is one that supports our policy we certainly know that our policy not only supports this but we've seen the benefits of it being put into practice reference was made to a recent pto meeting where they talked about how the gains of these since the imp uh since the seo learning has been put into place when you compare efforts that were in place prior to to now a heightened sense of awareness um and so with all of that i think that we need to just be mindful of what is being put forth as a proposal and when it comes to voting on the motion that is what we have

084to take into consideration the motion as has been shared but it is one that is proposing a form for persons to voice their concerns over the curriculum and that would be what would be put forth for the vote any other comments questions all right so i'll ask one more time any other comments questions sure dead so so is that your intent i i just want to make sure i understand the intent of the motion is it is it your intent that people can come voice their concerns or is it your intent that people can ask questions that might be more objective in nature i think that you know we're talking about a fairly large amount of people here i i don't think that you know i i'd be it'd be actually be interesting to me

085if we were able to put this together how many people would come um so i think that there's a lot of people in the community that have questions about this have you know i guess concerns about it and i think that all of that could be done at a forum where you know there's a back and forth of information am i i'm not sure i'm answering your question no i'm sorry so so and so the question is do you envision that this is a forum where people would come to a microphone and say essentially i support this curriculum or i oppose this curriculum or do you envision that it will be an actual exchange of questions and answers that is more objective like how many other school districts in the country are utilizing something like

086this or how many students in our school district do you think might be impacted or might identify with the tolerance issues that are being discussed as part of this curriculum like is it more question answer or is it more because i do worry i do worry that we're just setting up another version of like public comment where people just come up they say i hate this or i really like this like i don't think i don't see a point except that in public comment we're not really we don't really we're not gonna no one's gonna answer in a forum either if a person just comes up and says i hate this idea there's no answer to that you know i think a better way to maybe do that is to have people submit their questions

087beforehand and then have them sort of read at the forum and answered by the panel that's there jason i think that's called an email except that an email is is between two people i this would allow people to hear different questions and have different answers i mean i i think it would work i mean my opinion was it would work better if there was questions presented beforehand people were able to give in their questions and then the panel you know went through the answers to those questions to the audience i mean i'm not looking for a forum where people come up and say oh this is just horrible i hate this i mean that's not really productive but i think a question forum where people have thought about a question submitted it and then its

088answer to the public i think is is useful avery i'm asking for some clarification it's been mentioned a few times that you were hoping for this forum to be a back and forth and now there's just it's been mentioned a few times that ideally this forum would be a back and forth one person says something the person responds back and there's a conversation like the one that we're having right now and now there's discussion of a more highly moderated forum where the questions are submitted beforehand the panel answers them and there isn't direct contact can you clarify which would be utilized well obviously i think that if you can have a real back and forth i think that's obviously preferable because i think there's a better exchange of information but it is possible that maybe

089doing it in a way where the questions are submitted beforehand and there's an answer to the question might be a more uh amenable in in this particular situation but i mean i think those are things that can be worked worked through what is the best what is the best way to do this may i suggest before you um ethan speak and someone else had their hand raised just one is to consider um possibly after we hear the additional comments possibly tabling this um i'm just looking at the time we have young people here we certainly want to hear from from them and want to give due diligence in in this upper in this motion so i may suggest that after we hear the other comments that we um table but yeah i heard ethan and

090then jason yes i think he had clear too my my hope is in the discussion there would be we would understand what is in discussion why i thought some of that there were changes made based upon people's comments i will tell you this goes back to end of year i would happen to be talking to a friend of mine who i grew up with and it was a totally different point of view and we had a discussion and i thought it was productive i heard why he thought certain things should be in and hear why i had certain things and i thought it was a good discussion and my wife tells me i was wrong all the time but but it was it was he has a totally different perspective based upon even though we

091grew up together his background in my background so and i would hope that this would be the same thing thank you um claire and then jason um so if it was uh three years ago i attended a panel put together at connard and in the panel was a transgender student there were students with gay parents biracial students students of project choice these students all shared their perspective we learned a lot from them and i really feel that we need to learn from the current generation our kid governor for the state of connecticut was a fifth grader who ran on a lgbt platform and part of her platform was to look out for the kids who are kicked out of their homes and who are in foster care because they're not accepted for who they are

092and i'm very concerned about a forum where people who find this subject very uncomfortable what they might say in a public forum and as avery said the harm that that could do i think there's a lot of learning that needs to be done but i'm i'm proud that our kids are following some of the state mandates the town mandates as far as the vision and the mission and i i don't see the harm in the curriculum i'm sorry that some do but i think part of why they see the harm is they haven't done the research they haven't listened to testimonials by actual people they don't you know watching you can't take that lesson that you observed and put it in a forum and get the same thing out of it you might be able

093to record that lesson that you and jason attended and have someone view that exchange but that exchange doesn't work in a large group it will never get that sense of what it's like to be in a classroom reading a book to the classrooms having a kid share something about their family and feeling accepted and failing apart no one's being convinced to change who they are they're just being convinced that they're okay and that they're welcome and they're accepted so i i the forum of a i don't like and why do you do this is is a whole different thing than a forum where you might learn more and i don't know how many people who object would come with an open mind to be educated well i jason had one and then you can respond

094face jason yeah thank you um so it seems to me that the we have existing communication protocols to handle any of the concerns that are out there um i i'm gonna vote no and i would move that that we do not table this discussion i would move that that we vote now on on the motion um i just clear and just relating to what you said i guess you know i feel that i want to give the parents in this town and the community more credit that they can come to something like this and they can discuss it i mean i i i don't think that most parents are going to come and be belligerent and you know start saying things that are obviously very hurtful and inappropriate i think that parents really want what's

095best for their kids and i think that they want to understand what their kids are learning and i think that it would be such a unbelievable situation if we could have you know a discussion where we don't feel like we have to shut out people because they they might not say you know what we think they should say i'd like to give people credit that they can that they can have an exchange of information and in whatever way we would if we go ahead with this to to do it even if it's submitting questions beforehand and allowing everybody to listen to those answers um but yeah i think that people people i know at least even if they don't agree with it they're they're respectful people i don't think that they're going to come and

096say things that are you know but but have they been turned down to come and talk and learn more has anybody been told no we won't meet with you no i don't think they have but i think that a lot of the uh education or the forms that went on before was just sort of a lot of people you know i think i've already said like i think a lot of people were sort of didn't know anything about those and i i also one other thing i do want to say is i know people are saying here well we haven't gotten any emails in a long time i could tell you that i don't think that this that this such that this um issue is really gone i just because it's been quiet on email

097for a while i really don't feel like that's what i'm hearing in the community and i think that's what ethan said as well i don't think it's really totally gone but so thank you i with where we are and hearing a colleague suggest that we go ahead with the vote with the motion as it was are you raising your hand okay ari yes i guess i'm wondering if if the concern or the need for a public discourse is being requested but it's really specific to the gender identity curriculum and it's in its even further more specific with regard to elementary i'm wondering if there's any opportunities um if if the sense is that this was not publicized or parents were not aware of this despite the numerous examples that we've been provided with here that

098it was i'm wondering if we could do some sort of another round through the elementary schools of some sort of whether it be through a pto meeting some sort of public um you know ability to hear parents voices but not in this this venue i don't know if that's something that could be done you know i do know that in pto meetings that you know sometimes tom will join a pto meeting if there's something to be discussed or like i'm wondering if we could if we could have that discussion on a smaller scale given that it's such a specific topic and it seems to be really specific to the elementary school curriculum so not a town-wide type of venue for many reasons but if there's a way to to open those lines of communication within

099the elementary schools well i think we see that at pto meetings last night from what i hear at the bugbee meeting where parents will bring it up and that question's answered so that's another form where certainly parents that have questions the principal's always at those meetings to talk about it and um so that's actively going on as we speak but i'm just wondering if like i know that there was a meeting that i forget which school but they they kind of put out a flower flyer and said hey board of ed's here this time come on join us i'm just wondering if they're because let's all be honest um pto attendance isn't you know the best so to just say oh yeah we we discussed it in this pto meeting without any kind of tonight's

100pto or next month's pto meeting will be this we will address this those parents who have you know interest concern want to learn more this would be your opportunity i don't know if that's something that the only issue with it ari is ptos we don't control those are individual parent organizations so for us to say you will do this is a little bit i mean i'm sure they'd take suggestions and go through but that's the difficulty with that kind of interface who'd be better off saying the school would have something or the principal would but again we're getting into the time of year that's you know a lot of things going on and as spring sports begin also i i hear you and i appreciate one moment you think i just wanted to do just

101a moment i appreciate what you're saying i think what you're you may not be realizing it but you're highlighting um the difference between governance and management and governance as we know is our role as board of ed members but management is the more day-to-day aspect of it which would be within the purview of the school so yes very good point that you raised with that yes ethan i apologize because i know you wanted to end this just to follow up to ari's point it was the peach because i was there last night it was just the board of the pto primarily it wasn't a special let's do this and i think if you could do something like that so it may make sense to do your hold to get something better i i think if

102you do small groups maybe that's more effective let's do this let us vote on the motion as it reads as it is as it is said and as we know we can always have another motion to be proposed but in regard to the motion as it was originally um said and we've it was seconded and we had our discussion so now voting on the motion that was originally proposed all of those in favor say aye aye those opposed nay right abstentions i wasn't a i just couldn't get my that's all right that's right um the motion uh fails but thank you all so much for the robust discussion and uh certainly we can it could be proposed again in a different way that acknowledges the suggestions that were raised but so appreciate the time put

103up put into this all right and with that we now will move on to staff communication and reports and we will hear now our superintendent's report yeah in the interest of time and getting our students a chance to get up there i'm going to be quick we hosted the branch division for the national shakespeare competition for the first time that west hartford was the host of this competition that um 40 000 students nationwide take part in um and west hartford students took first and second place um august kittleson of hall was the runner-up declan smith of connor was the winner of the branch division and we'll move on to the national competition in april and this is really cool because it involves shakespeare we have to read first and then analyze and then perform and

104recite shakespeare monologues and sonnets so you get one cold and you have to go through it in the original language and go so it's a very cool thing for us to have the um two people involved and good luck to um good luck to declan as he gets involved the there's a lot of really cool prizes but there's an international competition that i think the top two get to go to in um stratford on avon i believe so um very cool um the um you have this flyer at your place this is something west hartford does and paul vicenzov's oversees it and we've been doing this probably closing in a decade now um where and we're one of the only communities that do this and it's in it's in partnership with our american legion where

105we um meet with and recognize those students from any west hartford schools including our private schools that are um that are making the commitment to the military upon graduation and um it's a great night with a dinner um you're all invited and um truly inspiring evening to see um these kids which i know many of you know from having been there and then lastly i do want to mention um the niche rankings once again west hartford was graded as the best place to live in connecticut with a major reason given being our public schools and point out that west hartford gets an a-plus ranking and uh west hartford's the only place in connecticut with two high schools that are both given a plus rankings for those schools so i've heard over the past year some

106people say this isn't what it was or that some people are dissatisfied with things but the fact is real estate tells a different story as do rankings like this that show that our schools are still the most highly thought of schools in the state of connecticut as do our responses now as kids are applying to colleges and the recognition that our public schools get so it's important for us to take some credit for that rating so thank you thank you all right any questions comments teammates all right thank you so much for that we now will move on to our staff reports and board discussions the mastery experience we look forward to having mr vicinis miss mckernan and we have two students with us as well three three students with us as well all right

107please do come forward thank you all so much and passing it over to you thank you very much and good evening and um apologize take two seconds to queue this up uh very very excited to be able to present this uh report to you this evening as soon as i remember how to make it work um on the master experience this is a this is a an update report regarding um one of the one of the key elements in our new graduation requirements that were passed by the state of connecticut that we've adopted and really wanted to talk to you it's probably one of the most exciting pieces and one of the one of the kind of biggest changes for the high school experience for our students and i don't want to talk very long

108because the folks to my left and my right are really going to steal the show in terms of being able to share some of their experiences so just just to provide you some basic background public act 17-20 outline new graduation requirements for all schools across the state of connecticut where they where they essentially change some of the credit distribution uh requirements which are typically very course specific and and we maintain many of those course specific requirements like you have to have a credit within u.s history and you have to have four credits of english and so on and so forth but uh the big story is that they reframed those into two large buckets of humanities and stem they increased the requirements for health and physical education and then they included the capstone here a

109mastery experience credit and really understanding the difference between what a mastery experience credit is versus these other credit systems historically credits were based on seat time and so you had to sit for a certain number of weeks in order for it to qualify as a full year credit or half your credit or quarter your credit and you had to have so many in this bucket and we retained 24 of those so 24 of the credits that that we require technically speaking are still very closely associated with courses that you will take time sitting sitting in a class learning the content having those authentic experiences but the one mastery credit in green this is not seat time driven this is an application of skills and a demonstration of dispositions elements within our vision of the graduate

110that we are hoping is a learning outcome for all students through a comprehensive pre-k-12 curriculum really being assessed here in the senior year for any student and it's very personalized i wanna i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this over very quickly because i wanna credit anne mccurrin our director of secondary education who has really been a driving force with the vision with the creativity in and around how we can make the mastery experience a personalized learning experience for our students something that's really going to engage them and inspire them and be thoughtful in terms of their career and and post high school interests things they may be studying college things they may be working on as they enter the workforce so i'm going to turn this over to you and talk a little bit more about

111personalized learning and continue with the presentation thank you so much thank you so much paul yep i'm very excited to be in front of you tonight with these great students and so many others across our district who are doing some really amazing um personal projects and you know engaging students through genuine and challenging learning opportunities is is a key goal that we have in tea time and and beyond and um when schools offer students an opportunity to investigate the topics that they're really interested in i think it has the potential to capture students heart and mind and spirit in a way that is harder when it's when it's more directed so um the the core of the way the program was built was to give the most student choice possible students can design their projects

112um with the greatest latitude that they see we also have a lot of structures in place to help the students who might need more support but we are very aware of that i'll talk more about that later in the program but uh right now i think the key the key thing for you i hope to take away is that our students have this great opportunity to go where they want to go and demonstrate their learning so i'm going to move forward with this and bring us back to the vision of the graduate for for a moment and the vision of the graduate certainly is it articulates our school districts and our communities hopes and dreams for our students and these are the what i would say cross-cutting skills that life skills that we hope all

113of our graduates walk away from we've had a presentation on the board before but i know we have new members as well so take you give you a moment to take a look at them and also talk a little bit through them the uh the what we call the dispositions in the blue these are these lifelong uh very uh mature characteristics we hope all of our graduates have honor and integrity respect for yourself as well as for others that you follow your own learning path that you find what's most important to you and and you you pursue that and then also to stay determined to to advocate for yourself too speak for yourself to have some level of knowing that you make a difference in your life as well as others um in the in

114the orangey green colors are more of the somewhat cross-cutting academic skills they're not specific to any one area but they are important skills for working um working with others and being um finding success in in your endeavors so um if we move forward well i must i want to stop for one second our students don't master whatever particular project that they're pursuing what they're working on is to practice and master these skills through a project so i wanted to be clear on what they are mastering or what they they set out to so they all do their individual pathways projects research um service whatever it may be whatever they choose but in the end they all reflect on this and their growth towards this thank you so what do they do and um the students

115all write proposals and what i really like about this it's really morphed a little bit with the innovation of the department supervisors the students write proposals and when the proposals are read by the teachers they're not just you hand the proposal to your teacher and your teacher reads it they are actually read by a committee almost college-like in a way the committee of teachers will read your proposal and either approve it provide feedback and give you time for revision or say it's not quite there yet try again next year or next semester because there is i'll talk about the timing of when you can complete this but what's really neat about that process is students one department said i'm going to we're going to write a letter to the students after they've been approved so

116they get a letter like from the department saying a committee of teachers have read your proposal and we find it meets these and it's like kind of elevates the game a little bit i find it pretty interesting the students can then start their project once they get their approval and they are to maintain a journal about their challenges their successes or maybe their hiccups along the way and at the end they also evaluate themselves against the vision of the graduate so that's that's what they do they do four steps to complete this the project being the biggest piece but um they do other things how do they do it they can do it in three major ways right now they can take a qualifying class now to help you understand this and there is a

117link in i think your agenda uh i'm sorry your board report almost every one of our electives is a qualifying class and the reason we did it that way was we thought if you're already electing to take a course you must have an interest and it's not required so perhaps this is where your passion is maybe it's a maybe it's a hobby but maybe it's a career maybe it's a college major we're not sure so many of the kids will look at those elective courses they've taken and said i think i can complete it here and you're going to hear from the students today who did that some children have opportunities to do things outside of school and we want to credit that too there's so many amazing things that are happening beyond the school

118walls and we have a pathway now for external um credit to be awarded for this one credit and for students who might need more support or say wow you know time management executive functioning project management that's a challenge for me uh maybe even identifying my passion might i could use some support with that because i'd love to say everyone knows their passion by 15 years old but sometimes maybe not maybe you need a little help and direction so we have some supports both through an emmy seminar class and uh in the during the school year that will be introduced next year and a really exciting summer program that i'll just give you a brief overview of but we were approached by the fire department they run a um community emergency response team and uh they

119used to have uh they have a teen version so imagine in a crisis situation a pandemic sorry that never happens a hurricane and there's doubt there's things that are down um in some communities you know flooding some terrible things happen you have a role in some of those especially if they're trained so our summer school program will offer training to our youth in a 20-hour program to actually get the teen certification to join our cert team in town and they're doing some really exciting things um uh this summer and uh they'll be having many different uh community speakers in and one of the most interesting is in in crisis sometimes pets are left behind so they're going to bring an animal control officer in and explain the psychology of helping i don't know helping animals

120in a crisis i guess so paul and i are looking at all the opportunities and we're like wow that's kind of cool they're going to be doing some using the saint bridget school which will be a community center and do some light search and rescue around the building they're going to learn how to use the training fire extinguishers so that's just another opportunity so kids who go through a 20-hour program like that and get certified why wouldn't that count as an experience so that's just one of the three pathways they have we introduced this in their first semester freshman year through the freshman seminar program if you're not familiar with that that's the guidance counselors go to the freshman students study halls once per week and give them a great deal of information on high

121school gpa college ap ece courses and they include an a real in-depth explanation of the mastery experience credit and how they can attain that by the second semester students are applying for the credit and putting in proposals and we recommend they do it by the first semester of their senior year just so it's not that hanging out there in the end of course there may be some instances where it is and that would be allowable but um that's our preferred timeline for the children to complete the project um in terms of uh progress to date so we were delayed by that rare pandemic that happened then we were supposed to lift an entirely new untested credit in the middle of in the beginning of 2020 2021 school year but if you remember we were remote

122and half every other week the students were in so we could not lift this credit last year so we waited till second semester and we actually had 101 students complete that credit last semester in the first semester this year 84 more students completed it and right now we have 519 proposals and i think the growth is one is one it's that word is getting out there two the juniors are you know these guys are all juniors they are going to be seniors next year it's a credit the timeline is beginning to become real and um i've read a lot of these proposals with the teachers and they are fascinating the wide range of things students are interested in and i think in your board report i shared many examples at least one from each department

123but i think the highlight of the show is i want to uh these three students we have and one of our students couldn't make it so i'll explain his when these these students are done um that's our next slide right okay so um i would like to turn it over to my friend kayla and kayla is you take the stage hello my name is kayla rosninsky i am a junior at connard high school and for my mastery experience project i wrote produced and published my own original song onto spotify music has always been an important aspect of my life ever since i was young and this project gave me that opportunity to take something that i love outside of the classroom um doing something inside the classroom with direct instruction is totally different than you

124taking control of it for yourself and actually having that experience as being independent and taking control of something that you love for the visions of the graduate there were so many things i had to take in place as an integrity making sure that my lyrics my my backing tracks everything was my own not taking from anything else collaboration with um tunecore which is the um website that i use in order to get my song coordinated and given to spotify so that they could approve it there was much back and forth there um perseverance really as a student who does sports was in musicals as many clubs as homework my life gets pretty busy at times and having that ability to persevere and push through and then also do something that i love at the same

125time was something that was really important to me it gave me opportunity to take something that's out of the classroom and then focus on what i like and having that opportunity to focus on something that i like maybe for future careers or at least as a hobby because music will always be a part of my life but at least to have that experience with something that's really important to me and i think it's really important to other students who who don't really know what they want to do and have that kind of support system where hey it's okay to not know what you want to do here are some things that you should try out and if you like this pursue it and have that support system to pursue it and give you that freedom

126to be independent which is something that you know you're going to have to learn to be once you grow older and to have that kind of experience here in high school where you have that support and then learn to be independent to do something that you love i think was a really cool experience so thank you kayla um i i read about her saying like we have to have the student come we have to because i i just can't imagine what it's like to put your entire own song together i think that's just amazing thank you for sharing um i wanted to um one of our young men couldn't be with us tonight evan but i wanted to share a little bit because his name is up there and his his project was great he

127is the president of the black student alliance at hall high school and he is very passionate about structural racism so he uh through his um through one of his classes he decided to do his own research uh book research literal review research and incorporate uh interviews and a series of people he interviewed at hall and put a presentation together for his class and he tells me and i wish i could be here to tell you um that it was really important to him is his role as a leader of the the club it's personally meaningful to him as a young black man and he um he said he he loved it um i wish i could explain more he couldn't make it tonight but in speaking with him about coming tonight uh he was he

128was very excited and um he he felt that it was an outlet for him to do even more and also to somewhat get credit for the great things kids do they do run clubs they do do great things outside so now you have the opportunity to use that and get a high school credit that's required so with that i'm going to go turn it over to another young man when i read this proposal i thought wow i am i i could never stand i can't hold a candle to these children so i'm gonna introduce connor uh hey there so my name is connor i'm currently a junior at connerd and uh for my master experience i actually did an intro level it certification so it's called the comptia plus and it's basically just i mean

129i said it it's an intro level uh certification for it jobs and personally i'm interested in the field of computer science i'm probably going to go to college for that so it felt really relevant to what i want to do with my life or at least as i see it now and miss coracelli presented me with the opportunity last year sophomore year i was taking cryptography and cyber security and she showed it to me and one of my friends and it's an amazing thing because it's something that i would never even think about doing if this wasn't through this program because it seems like something so far out of my reach but once you actually start working towards it once you actually start doing the review looking at the videos taking notes doing all the

130things that you need to do for it you realize that it's not actually that unobtainable and once you start going for it you can actually get to it so i managed to pass the exam so now i've got that under my belt which is actually really nice because in the future it's a nice stepping stone for if i ever if i ever want to go into a field like this and it just kind of allows me to have a more well-rounded uh choice of options in the future great um could you just mention whatever skills you felt on the vision of the graduate that you had to focus on the most good yeah that this was an outside credential yeah so i think it was definitely harder because this was during the online section of

131last year so i i'm fairly sure i did it first semester at least it was in between that transition period between when we were fully online and going all in person so there wasn't as much collaboration but we still did have meetings me and my friend who were actually doing it we both talked about like what we were reviewing what we were looking at what we needed to know for the test there's obviously a lot of integrity involved you're taking a literal certification exam you can't really be cheating on that um and there's just a lot of different aspects obviously perseverance you've got a lot of different stuff especially i'm captain of the esports team over at connerd i do a lot of different things and so having all of that under my belt there's

132a lot of different things that need to go into actually completing this alongside doing all of the other school work thank you connor and you know to understand that he has a he has an industry recognized credential he can use on his resume for a job and be a cyber security person i think that's pretty amazing when i heard about uh connor and his friend who were doing this and i read your journals by the way and and your reflections on time management and how there's periods of time you had to take you know take some time off because you had to focus on your exams or something else but and your perseverance to stay with it because uh it was many hours of study from what i remember yeah and so i just want

133to congratulate you as well thank you thank you for sharing and i met this young lady really through this is lucy and i met her through her department supervisors in math saying you gotta listen to this this uh mastery experience project that lucy did so i read through it and um i was encouraged by the math department supervisor to meet her so i went over to hall the other day and i met lucy and invited her tonight so lucy can you introduce yourself and talk about your product hi my name is lucy i'm a junior at hall high school and i wrote an essay for my master experience i took ap computer science this is the first computer science class i've ever taken and i started it this year and around the same time my

134mom sent me this article and it was a study out of cornell and these researchers put a series of x-ray images in front of artificial intelligence and through those x-ray images artificial intelligence could determine those patients race and then researchers put those same x-ray images into in front of human radiologists and human radiologists couldn't and so they did this huge study out of cornell they tested all these possible reasons ai could determine race image quality disease label data age sex they tested anything you think you would test they tested it and they came out the other side inconclusive so for my master experience i looked into the study i did some research into the history of medical racism in america and i looked into the possible implications and then i put it into an essay

135i think what i related to most for the vision of the graduate was curiosity i've written a lot of essays for a lot of classes but i've never really gotten to choose what i write about so with this opportunity i could choose what i want to write about i'm really interested in it and so it was more fun than other essays i've had to write i remember when on the department supervisor um miss salvani theater told me about this she said the child did it on a.i radiology and racism and i was i was like why what is that and then when i met lucy and she explained it to me i was i was really blown away and you know we have some programming like this in our seat work classes like ap research

136and ap seminar but what this program also does is allow it to be much wider open to students who either can't fit that class into their schedule or for or perhaps don't don't identify necessarily as they be although we always work on students identifying themselves as ap or ece but um i i was amazed at your project and very pleased that you did that so i just wanted to uh i know you might have questions of the students so i wanted to see if you guys did and then we'll finish our hi i don't know about you i'm humbled yes i'm just wondering um as part of the proposal do you ever have to explain or help kids scale down yes they have dreams and hopes and it's it's great it's like opening up a

137dream journal you know when you read some of these and sometimes it's they do have to help the kids scale down yes other questions yes andrew um when you had the graph of like or the chart of people how many people did it per semester is there uh like a time limit like can you only do it in one semester or is there al is if there's not a time limit is there like a recommended amount of time yes we recommend you try to do it in a semester because sometimes when things go so long you can just lose sight of it but if first for instance the way you get awarded the credit if you started first semester and for some reason life got in the way we just removed the class there's no

138failing it you just remove it and then you try again next semester if a child needed a year we could certainly accommodate that we have the course code so to speak to put in a year-long one or a semester one but we do think that the extended part of the year if you start and you have a whole year most children do do very well in the semester but we can accommodate that as well other questions comments yes jason and then claire yeah so first is comment then a question um wow uh thank you so much for sharing your uh your your projects and also the courage to pursue those uh those ideas and that work it's uh tremendous and speaking from personal experience you know i filled out my first uh human subjects application

139to do research and i had never done it before and i had to go through internal review board review and i never thought that i would ever have to do that as a historian i'm mostly studying people who've passed away so now i'm studying live people and there are procedures and i never thought i'd have and now that i've done an irb now i'm uh an application now i'm helping other people write theirs and i hope that this experience gives you that confidence to continue to do this work and to inspire other people uh it's fantastic um really excited to learn more about about your work and kayla can i find your your song by searching your name oh yes yeah okay write it down yeah yeah um so this is wonderful the question i

140had was um what does the uh the mastery experience look like for students with disabilities question and one we're monitoring all the time in fact i was in uh there's a there's a course that we have called cave it is a career and vocational education i've been in contact with the teacher who's working directly with his students who go out into the community working on their life skills and we are working with him to tailor the mastery experience for his students we've been in contact with the two high school special ed department supervisors mr um ted dillon and miss mrs stacy kellogg and we have specialized support for students um i also like to share that our arts department really flourishes in this like many kids like kayla just love music or visual arts and

141they're doing so many great projects and either creating their own music they're doing their own compositions they're writing 10 10 minute plays they're doing all kinds of things that's been one of the largest departments another world language because this yellow by literacy fits perfectly here um we have 180 students pursuing this field by literacy this semester i am in looking at someone to highlight and seal i realize that only seniors have already taken the test already so i was almost going to ask andrew to come because i found out that you took the cielo by literacy but uh the juniors don't take that that test until uh may i think so i couldn't bring any up but um but many of our departments you know you would you think almost 60 students this month let

142me say this semester want to pursue a master project in math everyone says they hate math but really paul would be the first one to do his mastery project tom and i would be doing history paul would be doing math um so many departments are really coming through the pe department has students who are following the trainers learning about training because they think they want to do that some are talking about volunteering with special olympics and and that kind of work um every department has found their way and um and uh so we have a special eye on our students who may need the most support i think that everyone's been the most worried about our kids who might need that so between the courses that we have the specialized conversations we're having with special

143ed and not every project will look the same that is that is perfectly okay and not every project might be quite as flashy as the next but if it fits you and it helps you to grow towards the vision of the graduate and it has some depth and it's some something that's going to be a challenge then then that can meet the requirements other questions i think ethan put your hand raised before i can't see your duck back there okay so claire and then ethan okay um i just want to say how wonderful this is and and how proud your families must be and you must be of yourself um in education we learn things in different classes but these projects help you see what we do in the real world when we mix all

144kinds of subjects together the also your story that you get to tell when you graduate college this is a unique thing that you'll be able to put out there for that career and it can you know even if it's not the field you go into it is an experience that you uniquely have um the with the number of students 516 now and i'm assuming it's probably going to grow um do the staff um have the ability have time that coaching and the support that is needed for students and and maybe even peer-to-peer coaching how is that working as far as allotting that time on top of their busy schedule i'll hit some of that question good thank you claire um so first we bake time right into the early wednesday release csi calendar curriculum staff

145improvement calendar uh so we have i believe it's two dedicated days in the fall and three in the spring um and what we try to do with the department base so so typically as students are doing uh their projects certainly if the project is happening through a qualifying course then there's a department associated with that it could be as you heard an arts class or a computer science class or a mathematics class or what have you so there's the ability of the teachers as ann alluded to during those csi wednesdays they'll have a joint review of proposals they'll have the opportunity to do joint review of the finished products and the reflections but as you kind of heard a lot of the work along the way is very much for the students to be working

146on to a degree independently they have the opportunity to ask questions and and things of that nature but it's not scaffolded in the same way that we think of a a project that we did in you know eighth grade where i had to turn the timeline in on this day and um i had that first check you know it's really intended to be uh and the importance of that it's a passion for the students so that they can have that perseverance they can have that intellectual curiosity we talked today we actually had a meeting as recently as this afternoon at one o'clock to review with departments what are our broad avenues what are some areas where we want to try to encourage greater participation and if we don't have a lot of participation in a

147particular area can we utilize staff to help kind of share that load you know we've had those conversations to ensure that we have the right structures in place to be able to support teachers in this work alongside you know most importantly supporting the kids um if i could ask each student to uh maybe i'll start with lucy lucy how much did you talk to your teacher during your project um i was the first student to do it through ap computer science a at my class um i did not communicate too much with jeffrey billing who is my teacher but i did communicate um quite often with the math department head so we would meet a lot um to talk about how i'm doing what's going on and if i need help the math supervisors or

148the department supervisors have done a very nice job of not only adding good ideas because this was a credit we could have structured a number of ways but our goal was to try to um emphasize student um personalized learning and independence to the extent that students can do that and um so the so lucy mentioned the math department supervisor and they have been very helpful at times connor can you talk about yours yeah so for mine ms corcelli who's the teacher of uh a lot of different computer science classes but specifically cryptography and cyber security at the time uh we would have like scheduled check-ins with her where if we needed help or if we needed anything then we could go to her and we could say this is what we're doing right now this

149is what we need help on or this is what we're good with and sometimes they would be as short as like three minutes of literally us just saying everything's going fine and sometimes there would be up to half an hour of us saying all right we need to work on this we need to do this and so it was pretty nice having like a nice check-in blocks just so that we could be able to actually keep a nice little timeline while doing it um so for me i mr uric my choir teacher he set out certain days where we'd be scheduled times for anyone who was doing the mastery experience if they wanted to talk for like 30 minutes or 15 minutes to sign up for a time slot and to talk for that and

150towards the beginning we communicated um here and there just to talk about which software i could use just the basics in like music foundation and then towards the end we got more independent just little check-ins like hey how are you doing on this are you going to meet your deadline um do you need any help with anything and that was pretty much it just to wrap up we are continually monitoring as we are as you can see the numbers are coming up so we're continually monitoring what supports we need that just this week we've named some so two people who work at our career center are taking on a portion of the coordination miss amy schaefer at hall high school as external uh mastery coordinator so she's going to be coordinating all outside mastery and

151she'll be a point of check-in for the kids if they just have questions or they come down and say i don't know what to do you know and she can help um we could also advertise through people through that like if we see a great volunteer organization that's looking for help she can start to post that at connard it's miss mrs megan cersemo in the career center so my message is we continually monitor and adjust because it's so new other questions comments ethan yes yeah two things and i think lucy just gave an example one how often do you have the course where there's like two subjects that interact like i think she said computer science and math does that happen often or is that unique see um it's a really good question i don't

152know that we we have ready numbers i think what's unique about uh the math and computer science and is that between the career and technical education ct which brian cohen's a department supervisor and between mathematics monique albany ethier and michelle graveline are department supervisors they share teaching responsibility uh among their teachers for the delivery of a lot of the computer science courses so and specifically apcsa apcsp i apologize i'm talking in acronyms advanced placement computer science principles and advanced placement computer science are are sometimes a shared teaching load based on which department has the has the available person so that connection i feel like in your case is probably very natural but i i certainly leave it um you know open to investigation if i were doing something and i were i were interested in

153for instance it was an essay and i as you mentioned and i wanted to engage with my english teacher to get some tips on non-fiction writing maybe i haven't done you know that in a and i haven't taken a lot of courses in that or something something to that degree where there might be an interdisciplinary connection okay i was wondering if it was too complicated but you just gave an example where you can do it second thing i had and this is just more comment this is just me i love the vision of the graduate i wish i saw them more when you guys do more of the academic because i think that there's some really good statements in there and i don't remember seeing it before so thank you i think you weren't on

154at the time we gave the major presentation but you'll be seeing and hearing more and more but um it's been a great grounding for this particular activity because in the beginning people were saying well how are we going to judge mastery of all these wide range of projects because you're not judging that you're judging their commitment to these skills and dispositions and um the kids have done really an amazing job yeah usually to me i've seen visions work when it's repeated and emphasized and i think there were some great concepts in there exactly and that's what we're continuing to work with the teachers have been great about um you know as they work with it i can see them bringing it into their other classes more and more like this assignment you're going to be

155working on this and you'll practice these skills in the vision of the graduate and um so that i i can't agree with you more okay thank you ari um i just had an observation um i'm just so impressed by this and i was here for the first presentation and i don't know if i missed it at that time um or wasn't paying attention and all i i don't know but i've been blown away by this presentation and um kind of the presentation as well as the students contributions and i just wanted to say i know that superintendent moore really speaks to um you know kind of how students who participate in ap classes that's a really good kind of measure of college performance and and preparation um i would argue that this mastery experience just

156the words that i listen to tonight and in the description it really mimics kind of the higher education style of learning and teaching i mean for example student driven self-directed following your passion curiosity finding something that's meaningful and then this idea of this individualized instruction really mimics kind of an academic advisor so i'm just really so impressed and i think in terms of preparing students kind of for what the next step is for those that choose that path i think you guys are doing an amazing job well thank you the the committee that put this together worried at the same time of balancing the amount of how wide this could be and independent it could be with management and we certainly could make it more narrow and easier to manage or wider and we'll figure

157out how to manage it and that we are in the i can happily report we're in it's wider we're managing it but we have to stay nimble because there are a lot and um and we will continue i think there's um i believe we can do it and based on the numbers i'm seeing i believe we can do it we just have to stay responsive other question of deb and then jason and then yes thank you i want to thank all of you for coming forward and the students particularly and comment um not just on your actual projects but on your presentation skills and it's clear that you have the confidence to talk about what you've learned and what you've put together so my question is we were lucky enough to hear from the three

158of you about your projects can we think of a way where more community members might learn about the mastery experience projects that other students are putting together maybe a website that students could opt into to say here's my spotify song or here's my here's my play that i wrote or here's my essay yeah we were as the pandemic hit we were talking about expositions and it started at first with the um ap research projects that there's so much work that goes into them and then a committee sees them but we were talking about and actually uconn we had basically just agreed to partner with them with those going out these fit the exact same model where we could do this local kind of presentation where we have a few examples presented but you also have

159um the website you also have samples of student work to go out year by year and make it a true event that's part of the mastery project and there's a few that also lend themselves very well to question and answer sessions from experts and that's there's one piece in this that we need i shouldn't say we needs it comes across critically and i don't mean it that way it's it's that we want to partner with community experts too and that's one of those things that parents that working in some fields and we have people that want to be mentors in this research project and validators so it's not just a teacher working with them it is you know a firefighter it is a real cryptographer in that kind of piece there's a very uh key

160group who also needs ideas and that's our freshman um they come into the high school and we've talked about having some kind of an expo of maybe students like this could we could organize a day where they are where kids can visit different stations and because our freshmen might come and say i have no idea but if they talk to these guys i really believe they could get some great ideas and maybe even some mentorships out of it uh student student mentorships is could be helpful um so that's just one of our ideas we we are keeping in the back of our mind as as we get bigger with this project thank you jason and then claire yeah thank you um one thing that came to mind about um the capacity issue that you were

161talking about um as as more students begin to do this and it develops in different directions you know i'm wondering if there's also opportunity to you know to channel to channel teachers into other grants or other funding networks that allow them to say you know build the capacity to have you know field projects that for instance fund for teachers or the the west hartford foundation um generates you know uh can can provide the kind of seed funding to uh to build sort of you know nimble you know capacity building in some ways so just in thinking how how the district is sort of responding to the the different trends for that year and um it's it it seems like um you know and having the the teachers also being able to respond in constructive ways

162that advance their their capacity as as educators to uh wonder if that's been discussed or evaluated i don't think it's been discussed but it's a great idea and um we have talked to teachers about uh project based learning bringing project based learning right into the existing classes so some of it's right in your class you might be able to do your mastery experience because the entire class is doing a project and you have an independent part of that project so we've talked to them about that and that is beginning to take root but i love your idea about looking for grants for other ways to extend yeah i'm just going to piggyback on that as you were talking jason that's what was going through my mind was this could be really a game changer for

163some a catalyst for some i think we have we have some talent there but but it's at pockets of excellence but as this really matures and and teachers start to really see the opportunity for authentic learning experiences and they begin to integrate more of it directly into the classroom and we create a greater number of qualifying courses and or the experiences that exist when the qualifying course just become that much richer that's that's kind of what i was hearing as you were describing those were the gears that were turning clear yes um so i love the vision of the graduate um but what it creates is this rubric that doesn't have a measurement that someone's project has to measure up against someone else's it's it's a unique passion experience for them and i i hesitate

164to get too many projects out there because each child has a unique passion we're at different levels to compare myself against something you could do or to feel overwhelmed because that's something i could never do and so in keeping the door open and the the project vague you allow kids to reach mastery by the vision of the graduate rather than the project itself and so it's great to see samples and i would love to celebrate but it it would be those kids that want to show off and and share everybody but not ever expected that you have to be published or that you are ever shown you know 10 examples and then say which one are you going to do or what are you going to do for yourself that's similar to these people so

165just keep it vague rubrics that are vague let everybody master and i think if i could clear specifically for you as we go through this doesn't like anything else doesn't happen as a vacuum in high school and what we've done in our elementary and middle schools to prepare kids for this we talk about project learning i very deeply remember a butterfly project that a certain child did with their teacher years ago i i agree with you um these these these children have been pioneers and they have really had it as open as it possibly could be and they take in it and and i don't want to compare myself to them i don't know about you guys but i don't want to compare myself to these kind of kids because they can do really amazing

166things but um so we will be careful of where where support is needed where some guidance is needed but always i think we are guided by the idea that in each child there's something very special and we can help them to find that and we can help them to kind of direct them a little bit so we will keep that in mind other questions comments i i echo all that has been shared so very proud of you so very proud of how this has been put together and although it's described as the master experience what i just keep seeing is me which master experience but me just wait oh there's more just wait okay i'll hush i'll wait there we go yes yes yes yes excellent excellent and was going to ask kayla connor and

167lucy from all that you've experienced what would you say is one thing about me meaning you that has either been strengthened or you've become more aware of so i think for me personally i think that my master experience was really the first time that i've really had to like actually time manage because prior to sophomore year a lot of the time i'd be able to get my things done i'd have sports i'd get my stuff done but once i started actually doing this now i had to start blocking out times trying to figure out how i was going to get everything done and like mentioned before sometimes i would have to take a quick break from the mastery experience go back to my work so i think overall i've seen an improvement in my ability

168to actually be able to plan out my time and get everything done by the time i need it done um i think for me was just the creativity aspect of it all because being in a classroom setting like for choir you get a you get a sheet of music and you sing it but it's it's really cool to see how when you're taking out of that kind of setting for me it was just amazing to see like how creative i could get with my project how i could create something that just out of the blue like hey i like this snow better than this no i like this lyric better than this lyric and just the whole process of me creating something that's my own was just really cool for me and something that i

169gained from this i think for me it was mostly perseverance the study that i based my essay on was not a study that i could understand without extensive research sometimes it felt like every other word i had to look up and figure out what that phrase meant or that technology was so i think getting through that 40 page study and not giving up on that was probably what i had to learn how to do i couldn't be more pleased with their answers because you hear the vision of the graduate and that that that you know 40 page study where most of the words you're looking up that's amazing or time management such an important life skill and honestly curiosity is is what we want you know we want people to be curious so we we

170have this phrase we're going to start using it all begins with me to kind of encourage the younger kids to start thinking about it we'll use it in school a little bit we haven't introduced it yet but i think it's something that when the freshmen are thinking about oh i heard this thing what do i what is it um we can start using that and and getting them to and it also sends the right message that this is independence and that and that my future really is about me so i need to um i need to strengthen these skills that we see in the vision of the graduate so thank you so much thank you and i i bored i hope i'm not misrepresenting by saying we are so proud of each and every one

171of you lucy and connor and kayla my am i so proud of you and we certainly know we're going to see more of you in your current talents and future aspirations and i have to say i am tattling for people and i had the wonderful pleasure of going to a wonderful musical on friday at connor high school footloose i know we're going to hear more about that and i believe i'm staring right now at one of the oh i am yes yes yes i'm star struck because kayla wonderful job oh my oh my so you clearly are giving evidence to your talents excellent so so look forward to seeing more of you you connor and you lucy as well thank you so very much [Applause] all right and as we continue on we now will

172move on to routine matters approval of the minutes where we are approving the minutes of the regular board of education meeting from march the 1st 2022 seeking a motion that the board of education approved the minutes of this regular board of education meeting i moved to accept thank you is there a second second any discussion all of those in favor say aye aye all right the eyes have it great great moving right on to information and reports board members do we have any communications from other reports other boards updates all right other information discussions and now the exciting piece to hear from our student representatives let's hear from you beginning with you avery please so um at hall we just opened pops and jazz um which many people said after two years um so just

173some highlights we have had some performances sold out and we're selling out so if you haven't bought your tickets you should soon um so guest artists are including industry professionals who are singing and um playing their instruments with our coraliers celisti and concert jazz band um and in addition to those ensembles the jazz dancers and soloists and actors who wrote their own script have really been contributing to this show so we're seeing just a melding of all these different artistic communities at hall finally getting to work together which is great um hall's relay for life team is fundraising through a virtual cooking class on march 24th i think this is with a registered dietitian who's coming in and just you know teaching us more about fitness and for a good cause um sophie cutler is

174the first coca-cola scholar in hall's history she's been awarded for her leadership and her community impact and in sports jonathan york toby ruffo sam sandler sean mcdaniels placed second in the relay at the new balance internationals and they won all american honors um and swim won three school school records as the ciac class um class l swim trials um and looking forward to spring sports registration opens this week wonderful thank you avery andrew um right now conrad is hosting a spirit week mostly for um well school spirit generally but also we are uh in the midst of a number of very impressive athletic feats so just to talk about sports um the boys basketball right now is at enfield playing in the semi-finals of the state tournament against northwest catholic um that game is finishing

175up right now actually it started at seven so i guess we'll see what happened we lost unfortunately okay but it's still the furthest run contest made they still okay well they still got candy leave off the details they lost was enough [Laughter] still a very impressive season and i think i said actually at the last meeting that it's the the winning most uh season in conner boys basketball history so very successful also conor boyce hockey uh they're playing in the finals the state finals on thursday of this week at quinnipiac after winning last night in the semifinals at all of these events really so many students have come to support the teams um connor also had four or three students win um all-american honors at the new balance nationals uh indoor track and field event

176so a junior audrey kurkutis placed fourth in the girls high jump and then two seniors gavin and callum sherry placed first and second respectively in the boys two mile so definitely very successful boys and girls indoor track season by that measure as was noted previously connor is in the middle of putting on their spring musical footloose i'm going to see it this friday with a group of friends and everyone who's seen it has really just been raving about it i know i know multiple people who have seen it too or plan to see it even three times so people are definitely really enjoying it and something i learned actually um recently was that conor put on footloose uh 11 years ago in 2011 and the the four male leads from that show actually surprised uh

177the cast and came and saw it over the weekend so there's there's a photo floating around the internet of uh the four old male leads and the four new male leads if if you see that um an update on the school mascot situation it's been narrowed down to 10 names and that will be narrowed down to five hopefully by april one and then ultimately to where a focus group with myriad community members will ultimately decide the the new mascot name all right thank you so much andrew thank you avery and moving on to future business announcements of future meeting dates we next will meet on wednesday march the 23rd 2022 for our board of education public hearing at seven o'clock followed by the budget workshop number two here at the town hall in room 314

178and then on tuesday april the 5th 2022 we will have our regular board of education meeting where we'll have the adoption of the superintendent's 2022-2023 budget at seven o'clock here at the town hall in room 314. followed by that on tuesday april the 19th 2022 we will have our regular board of education meeting seven o'clock here at the town hall in room 314. do we have a request for future agenda items can i ask a question yes the uh budget workshop how does that work for just so i i think i've heard it yeah it's the exact same as the last one basically so it's just just like the last week i thought the community got a chance to there's a there's a public comment ahead of the the workshop oh so is that seven

179or is that earlier that's at seven o'clock and then immediately following any public comment we go into the workshop okay thank you any a request for our future agenda item all right do we have any visitors that would like to make a comment visitors all right and we do have an executive session and the purpose is for the discussion concerning a privileged attorney-client communications regarding the personnel search process for a new superintendent of schools so team we will convene in the back room there and once that is over we'll come back to gavel out well i was hoping we'd be done before 11. all right all right so thank you all so much for your time and attention and it is now time seeking a motion to adjourn motion moved second second all right we

180are adjourned at 10 46. you