BCSD Board of Education Meeting: March 22nd, 2021

001i'd like to call the meeting to order please i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty the next item on the agenda is public to be heard which we have done and then the next item will be presentations genesee county business education alliance this karen winters well you could always tell by the eyes right uh so my name is karen winters i'm the director of the genesee uh genesee county business education lines we call it the pa for short just by a show of hands how many of you have heard of or heard of or are familiar with our organization okay um so my purpose to present here today which by the way thank you to

002all all of you for allowing me the chance to talk to you about the organization three reasons uh why i hope to accomplish here today first of all to teach you a little bit about the types of programs that the bea is providing to tv students uh in pre-copa time how our organization has adjusted to coven and continue to provide career exploration services to students throughout this whole pandemic and then also what pending partnerships will vea be able to support batavia uh with grant applications that are currently out there um please by all means if you guys have questions as i'm presenting you don't feel free to ask okay all right so uh the business education alliance the purpose of our organization is to foster the partnership between the business community and the school so

003we provide a lot of programs to educate students about future career opportunities but more specifically teaching kids about the careers that are in their backyards i always like to joke and say that you know we have so many opportunities it's a great community to live in but it's not like we're getting many outsiders who would re-live locate to genesee county so it all becomes uh how can we retain the population that we already have here so that the next generation will remain in this community rather than moving far away and this is especially important if you think of workforce development and growing the economic situation in our community we need to retain and educate a better workforce tomorrow we are funded through a mixture of sources so batavia does pay into the eea services through

004the boces coaster so it is a state-funded opportunity because we are a shared service the tv is actually getting the ea services for a fraction of the cost at the bottom of your screen there you see 7 500 that's the annual fee prior to state funding of what costs the tv to have pea services and i want to just let the board know how ahead of time this is actually the rate that will remain for the 2021 2022 school year because of the you know situation not really understanding what state funding will be coming next year so everything will remain as such we do get funding from the business community some grant funding as well as from the county as well our programs are very diverse and as you can see from the list here

005a lot of our programs are done in person we're probably most well known for our career our summer career exploration programs this summer with coven we are happy to announce that we will be offering at least three camps this summer of that being our culinary camps and also camp hard hat we're hoping to bring our full summer camp lineup which amounts to about four or five different camps every summer for the kids to kind of dabble become acclimated with the cte programs that are out there hopefully in summer 2022. we also offer a lot of career day events such as our health care career day at gcc anybody familiar with glow with your hands or have heard of that event that we launched in 2019 if you haven't this is a brand new event that

006bringing all of the glow region schools to the genesee county fairgrounds where the students actually get a chance to participate in some hands-on demonstrations like agriculture careers advanced manufacturing food production skilled trades so it's a massive event that we ran a couple years ago unfortunately we had to um cancel last year's event because of copen but we did launch a virtual site which i will show you guys a little bit of information on as well we organized career exploration field trips i've organized manufacturing day tours for retainers uh schools uh classroom career speakers if um like elena um yup so i've organized some career presentations for her class as well junior achievement is a program that we run and manage in our elementary schools and we also do job shadows internships and mock interviews as

007well so a whole plethora of different ways to do career exploration specifically in batavia what the bea is supported of course in both jackson and kennedy intermediate schools we have been very popular with junior achievement which is a program that teaches kids about financial literacy entrepreneurship and work readiness we also helped carissa stancy the teacher at jk um lead a very great exploratory project with the jk business fair the students fourth grade students came up with a business idea of how they would revamp the mtk mart building what business they they would put into there they had the right of a business proposal the bea actually recruited um local professionals and people who are entrepreneurs to come in and mentor the students on their projects before the business fair so that way the kids came

008into the business fair with a little bit more of a polished up presentation on the middle and high school side we do more of the you know the job fairs the career presentations um the career day events i want to highlight specifically the tava high school's intro to education elective class i worked with bert howell with allowing his high school students to go into matavia elementary schools to teach first and second graders their junior achievement program so it's basically giving the kids the curriculum that's guided supported with the classroom teacher in the room but they always get like a student teaching experience and i would train the high school students how to implement those programs so just doing more of the um you know experiential learning with students in all grade levels um and in

009covent times things have had to change actually the packet that you guys have details how the bea has adjusted our programs so when we're not doing programs in person um how have we adjusted in the virtual remote format so primarily with batavia um you know junior achievement i will be um actually delivering all of the grade two junior achievement programs uh to your second grade students this spring 100 remotely and actually it will be on their remote learning day so as not to interrupt the time when the kids are actually in the classroom with their teacher so we've been able to coordinate that we do have a series of company and career videos so if a teacher wanted to talk you know have the students look at a video about what a vat technician does

010they have the chance to show students a local video featuring a career presenter on that um yes that's an which is yeah that's a baby yes it's it's not above it but i did make sure in the video i had her say what animal she was holding just in case there were questions like that so so yes um and that is diane delio from attic of that so she she works with some exotic animals you could say probably any animal you wouldn't really yeah it's a pterodactyl yeah they came back from extinction well it was not my first guess yeah yeah this it was super cute in the video it was definitely a highlight there um so virtual career presentations we can't have people in the classroom but we can certainly dial them in remotely

011and just support whatever the teachers are teaching um connecting kids with the relevance of what they're learning in school and how it translates into the real world and then um the other sheet that is in your packet there um for hosting a senior job fair at the batavia cte campus so this is going to be our first in-person event that we've had in over a year but it will be outdoors at the cte campus um it's it's something that will give high school seniors who aren't thinking the college pathway to actually go and talk with local businesses who are looking to hire right now uh just speaking off the cuff i know liberty pumps they gave me um over 50 summer seasonal jobs entry-level positions that they're trying to get filled and that's a great

012position for high school students to take advantage of if it develops into a larger career there are opportunities if they're looking just for summer employment there's an opportunity there so a great new thing to bring to the team is students who aren't exactly on that college career pathway and your flyer says what specific companies are listed there as well um i want to just bring your attention to something that we created so i know i mentioned to you the the glow with your hands event so because that event got cancelled we couldn't have the kids working welding equipment driving uh heavy equipment like they would at the live event but students parents as well can look into over 34 different careers that are in these four major career pathways this is our region's you know

013top jobs that we want kids to consider and become knowledgeable of so for an example if students were interested in being a vet technician we have an entire page devoted to just vet technician careers alone and what's nice about this is localized this is not buffalo area this is not rochester this is glow region so um we teach kids a little bit about what does this career do the earnings for new york state and career pathway so if students wanted to take a road map and figure out okay i'm in 8th grade now i want to be a vet technician how do i get there we tell them what classes they need to take that could be offered in the home school district what clubs extracurricular activities they can get involved with local ghosties program

014volunteer opportunities and of course local colleges and training that they can look to you know get their associates or bachelor's degree after high school then as a parent i don't know about you but the where can i work side the section is very reassuring because your kid always comes home and says you know they want to be some abstract career you can look and see all the local jobs that hire for that position so it gives you a little bit more of a comfort knowing okay my kid's studying something that actually might translate into a job so that is a very nice thing and then to make it you know i know kids are very visual nowadays we have local career interview videos so diane delio from adequate vet she talks about what it's like

015to be a back tech and she went to the gcc program so this is every um every career 34 careers it's very structured very similarly we've had some struggles getting the word out to the community that this exists we did send information to schools and to teachers that frequently use the bea but just as a board as a parent if you wouldn't mind passing along that this website exists please use it you know feel free to do so as well um i i spoke a little bit about this but that's the senior job fair some of the other companies we have seven companies um coming to hire students for uh summer time permanent occupations as well do you ever have any fall out this to like students in the classroom might take ten minutes and

016they should tell them that this is because they do that at gcc they're at you know every opportunity that's um assuming gcc could possibly have they bring somebody in and kind of lead the kids yeah we don't have this is here for you and that's the struggle like just speaking with my colleagues who are at the cte center i have an electromechanical technician instructor who just introduced this new program and it's the future of what electrician jobs will be especially in companies and his ability to get the word out to ninth and tenth graders is so hard especially during copenhagen because um they can't go on the 10th grade cte tour that they normally would the tours are shut down so getting the word out to students is very challenging and sometimes i feel like

017i have to do the back door approach because if i can get in front of parents and have parents buy into some of the careers that we're trying to pitch and let them know these are good paying jobs sometimes kids will listen to their parents um i know classroom time and blackboard space is very limited especially during the school year i've sent out information to our schools and our teachers about all the opportunities that i'm able to provide them it's more of a matter of teachers finding the ability to fit me into their schedule or the you you know sometime next week can you give this person 10 minutes yeah and i think yeah because they're all at the same time it's out there every time i think the one thing to notice that nicole

018here has absolutely definitely yeah and it's been such an unusual year like i kind of feel like um uh just being antsy from being at my desk the entire time i'm normally in buildings yes all the time and at least at the very least getting other community members to go in and i set that schedule up for them so that they're representing their industry so yeah that's been challenging but you know what we're still here and i that's what i have been doing just making the rounds to school boards is if you have questions about what services are we paying for what are we getting for our money we are reworking things to fit into whatever capabilities we already continue to support and i i look forward to one more return but i know we

019all feel that way as well so yeah and then real quick i just want to um say that there's two uh pending partnerships that the pea will certainly align to i'm sure you guys have heard about the my brother's keeper initiative as well as the community school initiative we fit that niche of career exploration while my organization is so focused solely on the students who are in k-12 that's not to say that the bea can't work with our colleagues in workforce developments make sure that we reach the parents of these students that's what makes it a community initiative so one of the things that we've talked about for the community school initiative is twice a year maybe we have an open gym night where the students can come and have some activities to do in

020the gym while the parents attend on you know resume writing workshops or we have a job fair like we are having for the high school seniors for all those manufacturing jobs they're looking to get lined up so i see many opportunities where the bea can kind of fit a niche when it comes to career exploration and just making this a great uh situation for all families economically so that in a nutshell is the bea i just wanted to see if there are any questions or concerns do you get many internships or mentorships available so um it depends on i hate to say it i think the workplace is becoming more accommodating of having students at least intern but there's some hesitancy there too because oh why in addition i'm doing all my work i have

021to mentor a student and i don't know how that's going to be i found that for the students who are in a cte program it's easier for me to match them off to an internship than a student who's just in high school i would say that the bea with our home school district would do more job shadows if anything were to grow up from those jobs that shadow experiences i would be all for developing that i just feel like business is slow to get into that mindset that we need to do more apprenticeships you know it's it's basic um preparation for those kids they need to start something we just thank you thank you so you can much she jumped at the opportunity to be in person get out of her office exactly exactly thank

022you very much budget update okay return to page 33 we're going to compare january of 2021 to january 2020. overall revenues are down 49 000 compared to last year at this point in time you can see in this report on the far right there's a lot of red items those are negatives compared to last year so our revenues are down and you'll see some of the expenses too where there's a lot of red but first item is the real property tax items we've recorded this in the past months this is our pilots we had an increase uh budget wise of 248 000 these are businesses that get a tax break for the first 10 years usually his first two years at zero percent then 20 for the next two and so on and after 10

023years uh they've come 100 on the tax roll and then that assists with keeping the tax levy down if the businesses stay in the district but for the first 10 years they're billed as revenue not part of the taxes the next one next two are really use of money and property there's general funding reserves interest rates are really uh are down significantly and that's the same in both of them but under general fund our leases are down also significantly and leases for robert moore's here in particular we've lost a few of our leases during the year compared to last year when we robert morris is probably 70 percent of all businesses are leaving or have left the robert morris miscellaneous we've reported on this previously again this is really two items we get e-rate reimbursement

024we did a special project on access points where we received about 96 almost 97 000 in e-rate funding and then our boces refund from last year was up about 130 140 000 compared to the past and at the end of the year focuses always has to zero out their books when hopefully hit last year obviously they didn't have as many expenditures and so our refund was up a little bit in the area of state aid we're down almost 400 000 or 5.19 and that's in a couple items we have about a hundred and two thousand dollars less in medicaid billing at this point in time we also have about eight hundred thousand dollars that is federal funding for the federal repairs act that in the past would have been part of general fund funding and

025we would be getting that throughout the year but as part of the budget last year we were giving about eight hundred thousand and that's active going to grant so we just got approval uh to get those spending uh and submit claims so that's falling a little bit behind because it's not part of the normal traditional general fund state aid also trs the trs teachers retirement system employee employer contribution rate is down compared to a year ago and if you recall new york state makes a payment on behalf of the district directly to the teachers retirement system so if the rate is down you know it's less money that they have to pay out in terms of state aid we record the transactions but it doesn't come directly to the district so it's kind of an

026indirect payment on behalf of the district and then debt service a year ago we had a bond anticipation note mature and we went out for a bond into another bond anticipation on the 2020 capital project and part of the uh bid results was a premium that service where they pre-paid 34 000 we didn't have that this year so there's no revenue at this point in time on the expense side we're down 637 000 compared to last year 2.76 percent payroll's down about 587 000 same amount of pays so if you recall last year when we finally adopted the budget we were down 30 some positions this is obviously a reflection of that we have the payroll savings but our boces is up um 451 000 we have one extra payment this this time through january

027compared to last year in january the uh transportation is a decrease of 000 and that's a result of us being in person and not needing as much transportation services compared to last year through january or just less kids riding so less buses at this point in time employee benefits even though health insurance went up two percent again our staffing went down and employee contributions went up slightly so you see a net uh 214 000 savings in our health insurance at this point in time and debt service on the expense side is our bond principal interest payments just like you would have your mortgage payment we had some debt fall off for it's declining and so we have 337 000 less and that payments at this through january i'll be happy to answer any questions on

028the clerks report through january before i go into the budget okay budget this will be later on for discussion or under new business but since i'm up here this is on page 134 of your packet and the only change at this point in time is we've had 11 staff changes either 10 retirements and one in one person that is resigning and at this point in time the district is proposing until we do more review to replace these positions so that shows a savings of 443 000 our overall uh reduction in expense is uh to get to the tax cap is 667 000. so to get to the tax cap we still need 223 000 at this point in time if we go past the tax cap and bought it at zero it's 84 000 on

029top of that 600 or 223 so decisions will have to be made within the next before the next board meeting which is april 12th when the board will be asked to adopt the budget so we'll be reviewing these 11 positions other expense items and trying to finalize where we want to be or what we where the board wants us to be if we're at zero we'll have to get around three hundred thousand dollars more if we go to the tax cap we need to get about two hundred and twenty three thousand more does that mean the four 4.7 million no that does not include that um there's a couple that just came out recently and we don't have all the details on this this does include the december allocation which is almost 2.4 million so

030we don't have a whole lot of detail on what chuck schumer has put out there hopefully it's a well we're just not sure exactly the usage of it yeah what i will say what we'll bring back to the board will be a balanced budget for the recommendation and where the board will need to decide is if we stay zero or if we go off on the point but we're pretty confident we're going to be able to get the 220 with with no impact to staffing um again and that's even with us uh looking at the 11 potentially bringing back those positions so you know i want to be clear we had a rough year last year but i think it was a reset here um and the eight has helped us but i think the

031real decision for the board will be when we get done with this and we bring this to eight for 12. it'll be a balanced budget is whether or not we go out for the 84 or do we stay zero you know obviously that's a decision i think we need to make for the community but we'll bring you that recommendation and we'll balance it to cover the difference we aren't planning on that money uh just to let you know because one of the things that is also being proposed is an increase in our reserve fund so we would like to take that money and really try to start nesting for what we believe will be a tougher year next year and try to get ahead of uh things next year so that we can put some

032more money in our reserve lines and our advocate and our typically put four percent there's a proposal to be able to put eight percent you know we can put eight percent away that will help us for the next year and you're allowed to do that well it's uh one of the proposals in the budget from the house in the senate it's one of the one house items that they're currently both agreeing on so if they vote that in as they do this budget process we want to put some of those dollars there we want to be real careful on you know adding all kinds of stuff hey we've got four million dollars because we don't believe until we believe it's a one and done type of thing and there's gonna be some strings attached to

033it we just don't know what those strings are but one that we do know is that 20 of it potentially has to be used for learning loss and so we'll have to think about extended daily summer programming so you definitely will have some strings attached to it but we're pretty confident again i know last year was tough but i think that put us in the position that we're in this year to potentially go back out again at zero and then have to just find 300 that we think we're going to be able to find whether it's not replacing some of that 11 positions or uh in other areas in our budget so we will be bringing back that neighborhood so i hope that helps you a little bit um your biggest decision is going to

034be do we go out or do we not go out so that that i think in summary will be the toughest yeah yeah and just uh also another point is uh projection for tax cap next year i talked about this during the budget process it is a five-year projection that shows a tax increase next year only 17 000 so you should you know keep that in mind is you know we plan because you know our salary increases alone are significantly above 17 000 or so yeah so putting that money reserved allows us to start to uh obviously fulfill our contract obligations for all marketing units our health care costs and then our operating costs you know things like that so and the last thing i'd like to bring up there was also a question at

035the last budget meeting about what exemptions we have this is on page 135-142 of your packet and again this will be under new business later on but question was what exemptions do we have and so every year what what you see here is there's a two page summary and then a five-page detail and the two-page summary is really taking each one of our municipalities on the five-page detail and combine them into one report so you have tom batavia thomas stafford and city of batavia those are five-page detail report this summer report combines them all so one thing i wanted to point out the very top here of the summary report is one million two or one billion two hundred ninety four uh million dollars that's the total assessed value of properties before any of these

036exemptions okay so what you see on the left is this comes from uh tennessee county the exemption code the name of the exemption this is the statutory authority where in the law it requires us where it authorizes us this is number of properties that get that exemption this is the total assessed value of those properties and this 1.24 is 16 million divided by 1 294. so that's how you read this report okay so the first the first few sections here really are municipalities uh all the way up to this first line now i have the regional otb corporation uh highlighted they fall under this but there's a pilot agreement where we can build them on pilots and so it's it's kind of weird but the recording of it is is this way this next uh

037municipal industrial development those are our pilots it's 7.17 of our total assessed value i only highlighted a few uh a few years ago probably about six or seven years ago we did the alt uh veterans exemption so um that only comes up to about 1.6 or but there's a lot of properties or individuals that get that exemption so either i highlighted the ones that there was a greater number of properties or the values just to kind of highlight and then the last page of this summary that i have highlighted here is our total number of star properties either the basic star or the enhanced star for our senior citizens so that's just really a summary of our exemptions and every year we're required to put this on our website as part of our tech our

038budget documents be happy to answer any questions on this sure okay and then before uh we're going to mr solo's yeah just so you know we have uh two individuals online with us uh justin and his colleague uh from uh epc there online so they'll be as we get to this portion of the agenda they may have some questions so just be mindful of there are two people on the call before we get to there we wanted to talk about the capital project so you should all have this kind of proposal i'm gonna let scott take you through this uh i need a direction from the board i'm out of hold of this uh pete's sister he sits on the villains and grounds committee so he probably is the most another board member with this

039conversation but i really want you to take a look and give us a recommendation every year we do we do two things one we have a capital holiday project which is usually a hundred thousand dollar project that we do it has to be on one campus i always get that part mixed up but it has to be on one campus one project then we have what's called the uh the spend down project that we're proposing uh that was part of the vision 2020 when the you guys went out for the bid for the vote we got an approval to spend so much money there's about three million that was that we asked to borrow and to go for that we still have as potentially unused dollars so we're giving some proposals that we could use

040this would not require us to go back out to a vote because we already got the vote the the other option could be you saying don't do anything then we wouldn't borrow the money and then we would just give it back we don't think that's a smart thing to do since we got the approval already from the community and we just want to bring some suggestions so scott you want to take them through yep and one one other thing uh technically you haven't up until 10 years so up until 2027 to spend that extra three million dollars if the project doesn't happen now okay we don't have to spend it this year we don't have tonight right you say none of these look good but if we decide to spend it this year because we

041borrow the money in august of we're required to make a decision on that within three years so that's really what this question is do we do a project for under three million dollars and use that money now or do we not borrow that money and with permanent financing and hold on to that three million dollars potentially for the next six years million dollars technically you have 3.3 million in addition to that that you put piggyback on top of that so using it now kind of chips away at the building condition if the board decides that's the way you'd like to go and we've identified through the building condition project a number of items that you'll see here this is just a summary of each campus what the total would be potentially proposed this is again

042an estimate at this point in time originally uh on the 19th when we met it was about 3.8 million dollars we whittled it down to the 2 million 653 at this point in time because we have to be under the three million dollars anyway so so on the first page is the jackson primary and high school projects these were all the projects that were either initially identified as part of the 3.8 million dollars you could see the ones that are crossed off the at jackson gym restroom and roof replacement restoration those were crossed off in terms of priorities at this point in time and then we had sight a year ago just over a year ago the board discussed the possibility of adding parking to jackson site so we thought this would be a potential

043time to bring this up again now there was two options a year ago we were talking about potentially purchasing the land across the street right next to max pies there was a apartment complex or apartment building that burned down about five six years ago so it's just vacant land right now so that's that was in the original proposal which was about six hundred thousand dollars if we were to put a parking lot buy that property and put apartment there during our meeting on friday we talked about a second proposal for a parking lot if the board wants to pursue this and this is putting it in the back of jackson on property we already own if the board wants to do a parking lot and if we want to purchase the property across the street

044we would first need to and if we want to do it on may 18 a lot has to happen within the next week where legally we'd have to come back and have negotiated contracts the public has to vote bottom line so we have to get everything legally done within approximately a week we already have tentative information based on last year updated numbers we would just have to finalize that but we would have to amend uh what's going to be approved tonight and img under new business are noticed in public so the public is aware of what's going on and we're going to purchase the property for x hours i assume that the reason why this was discussed in money was asked for last year by the voters that there were complaints about carving is that

045why that was discussed yes the piece of property that's across the street from jackson how many parking spaces can that accommodate they the draft shows 50 but it's about half the property the back half of it wasn't being proposed for uh development at this point in time so that's closer to the river and things like that so that we felt comfortable with 50 parking spots okay and now this other proposal on the site that's the property belongs to the district already how many parking spots are you looking to that will fit in there until we're guessing at this point because we don't don't have you know architect drawings officials between 20 and 30 is the estimate that our campus our construction manager and is that will that accommodate all of those extra parking spaces that

046we will leave right now we have 83 parking spots yes and about 85 employees that work for us so it would cover all our employees yes and then have a little extra for visitors and then the whole front of jackson could be support visitors only the one thing that kind of started all this is uh some of the neighbors were complaining that the parking lot in front of their property was terrible they couldn't rightfully so we were parking on uh there's a little incline there people were parking there just it just was a mess and it's really a safety issue and so that's why the board was considering your options that's really that's is yeah we haven't gotten that far with it this all just kind of came up from the last week danny but

047the other part of it was when parents and grandparents were coming for programs that was an issue so it's not just the the pickup it's but it's also during the day when there's programs this was something that uh when i got here january this is already kind of an ongoing issue that you guys were talking about you know my recommendation was to use our existing property and trying to maximize that and then build some systems and procedures with the principal there get some signage maybe that says parent-only parking you know things like that that we can use in the front of the building that currently doesn't exist and really think about what systems and processes we have for parent pickup if there's a function you know making sure that the staff parking is back maybe

048they get assigned parking you know i mean we have to think about uh what are the systems we're going to put in place to support the expanded use i was not in favor of being real clear i was not in favor of a lot across the street because it's across the street so for me like your parents walking across you with little kids potentially cars traffic and i don't know what happens then it's a property that's not connected to any of our builders we would have to manage your own and there's a little concern for the flood zone behind it so that was just a little bit of concern so i really asked the campus people to start thinking about that plus we own this bakery and it's not a good building to stay up

049so one of the things that we had talked about was taking the bakery down creating some nice green space for that community maybe with some benches so people would sit and kind of maybe enjoy it and then you would have our parking air and then that way and even talk to maybe potentially the city if we use this as a second exit or entrance lot in terms of two points of bigress maybe not they may not agree that but you know we thought this would be the most cost effective still give us some more parking spots and then again for me the issues across the street you still need personnel you got to think about lights cameras security card keepers cars there's breaks in it's not really connected to our system um so we wanted

050input from you guys if you feel like this is still a priority should we still go this route obviously with covet a lot of this has kind of gone away but we're going to hopefully be back to normal next year and have everyone come in and drop kids off and pick them up and potentially have events so we just wanted to input from the board as to how to pursue well if we're talking about 80 85 employees and we're short free for just the employees and you're looking to use our own property then can that parking lot accommodate what parents or grandparents come to program it should be i mean if our if we free up some of the closer parking or parents only let's say it's 10 10 or 12 spots and then move

051those to 20 to 30 in the back and then yeah we should be able to accommodate i mean they could still have to walk around or we have to when we have an event open up and have it staffed appropriately and the difference is about 350 000 we use our own uh land right now it's about 350 less than the other option and we get rid of a building that's not included the building's on there yeah so that's that's the first one on your site so if you use that bakery space so kind of you know after after we discussed the potential project we'll really need decision on the parking modus deal first of all project and then second on the part of our job right now in front when there's a drop off i'm

052assuming too that there's already teachers partnering up there and now then we'll have next space but so the issue is there's like a probably 10 to 12 uh parking spot that they park right in front of the immediate school so what we'll have to do is work with the staff and just kind of inform them that we're going to be parent parking only resonate or community department and then encourage another parking back and again different systems different approaches but there's nothing that i can see that we don't designate parking spots get people tagged so you don't lose an employee car there's a community car you know that way we could have an idea a better sense of engaging him well there didn't seem to be any issues when john kennedy had to put the bus

053a little bit behind the school and the teachers had to park in a different spot i mean right now it just hasn't been controlled right so part of our work is going to be to tammy's point setting up some processes and then when we know we have an event we'll just have to communicate to know where to park here maybe even put some cones out doesn't need some spots to be karen parking for that event and just kind of coordinates numbers i mean i think our staff will be fine i mean think about it you want to park close and make an easier walk or you're always going to choose close right if you can and it's open we coordinate that with an event or just between the hours of 8 a.m to 9 30

054no parking for staff so that parents can pick up kids and drop off and then after that they can be open and then you got to move your car by but yeah our thing was you know uh i had it had come out of the board's idea my understanding was was the lot across the street that come out of the previous board members that were on the board that explored that as an option right now we've had some change so we wanted just to make sure then there was a question on green space open green space i couldn't find anything on limitations there is limitations on like if we were to put up a new elementary building it's got to be a minimum of three acres and for every 100 students another acre nothing on

055specific green space i did i was thinking that jackson is a grandfather i think in grant yeah because they they're on 3.2 acres and then the bakery is almost point three acres and it didn't exist originally because cardinals yeah that was three or four years ago and then there's a couple other projects too just to be mindful of that are listed there you know under the we try to prioritize things from the bcs so i want to be real clear the middle school has a backup generator they currently don't have so if something were to go wrong there we would be in pretty big trouble we've been lucky same thing with um i believe it's the uh all three guys all three buildings yeah yeah so john kennedy middle school and jackson that's one of

056the things that we propose it's a fairly large ticket item um but we thought it was good used to get ahead of it's something that our school's gonna need and what's worse is that let's say it were to happen that we didn't use this money we would have to find the money out of either our repair reserve or something else in our current budget so we put those items in here looking at our building condition server that we just had sei do for us a five five-year thing prioritizing this jason looking at it with our partners at campus so we've tried to prioritize these things and try to do something on every campus whatever was a high level but to us the backup generators were really important because you know we have a storm power

057goes out you know you can use all your food in the cafeteria all kinds of stuff so those practices those things they did this huge chart and we took those and we prioritized them and then we tried to add in there the parking challenge as well because you know so we also added at the high school you may notice a loading dock with canopy uh curly right now for any trucks to get in it's got an angle it's not very busy so we would expand the loading dock so the trucks can actually back up normally and not be at an angle and not worry about then we would probably cars our dumpsters to be a little bit more practical in terms of them getting picked up and people being able to throw garbage in it

058right now that design is kind of a little bit anticipated so we put that in there as well complete redo with a canopy over it okay so any questions dialogue you're good with us going with it we just need to know what you and it could come up it could happen yeah actually we're hoping to get through it and we can start this project but right now we are currently operating those buildings with no real background it's good contingency so your proposal to us is that if we accept this we're using twenty six hundred fifty three thousand dollars as part of vision 2020 yes yeah and the other thing too is that this this work we need to be done by august of 2022 yes we have three years from august 6th of 2019 to

059complete the project so and it's your feeling that by it's better for the district to use this money now than to keep it for the future well these are all items that were identified in building conditions everybody agreed or across the street that would be a separate meeting separate notice we have to buy that thank you thanks scott uh before i go to my updates um i want to invite uh miss kathy scott want to give a special recognition tonight you can join me up here so uh it's kathy scott on behalf of the board of education and the batavia city school district we want to present you with a certificate of recognition for your commitment to our district uh you've made a difference and an impact over your 25 years of dedicated service a

060valuable contribution to the staff and the students i'm just going to read a couple remarks if you know that um i know you're excited to start your new chapter pretend uh mrs scott scott's going to be retiring on april 6th so she's got a little bit more time with us but one thing that she shared with me that i thought was important to share with the board and also our community viewing that she started her career almost here as a result of the batavia city school district 25 years ago she started to work with boces because of the request of the district at the time to create a program that would establish purposeful and consistent connection between the district and the batavia community she had taken her professional background and applied it to this work

061and she's changed with the times from uh traditional newsletters to now being a social media expert now with all her posts so if you ever see anything on facebook 99 of that stuff is mrs scott she schedules it she coordinates and she thinks of the wording to save uh to make it people just typically send her a picture and say can you put this up and then she's got to like pull strings out of it and so um she uh is going out with class as she has been a dedicated servant again we've only got a couple weeks left with her here uh we're gonna um not sure what we're gonna do next moving forward so we don't even know if anybody can or will try to replace you but we do want to thank

062you for your service and everything you've done for us and uh i don't know if anybody wants to say anything i know many of you know kathy a lot longer than i have but we wanted to take a moment just to recognize it okay stay here [Applause] can you take a picture [Music] one two three i don't know if that's a good sign that i'm starting to forget it so justin i know you guys are hanging out it's gonna be a little bit longer okay you should see us so good evening board members uh i'm just going to provide my update and again thank you for taking a moment to recognize kathy scott she is obviously committed a very long time to this district 25 years i'm only that old not just kid so uh

063it'll be a big difference and we're not really sure what that's going to look like moving forward in terms of public relations um so we will definitely update you on what we decide um with that work so tonight i'm going to provide kind of four kind of key items an update to you you should have a copy of my packet in front of you to follow along i also projected here on the front first thing we talked about is just some athletic accomplishments i think it's always important to recognize our kids the tremendous work that they're doing not only in the classroom but also on the field whether it's with music whether it's participating in extracurricular activities and in this case it's athletics dr corey is going to provide you just a quick update on

064some new york state assessment information some changes that we have uh i also want to share with you a little bit of our botavia equity journey that we started an initiative led by one of our principals um which we're really excited um it's going real well we've got some really cool feedback from staff and then i want to give you a spring update for reopen batavia strong so first but not least obviously is our our athletic highlights it's always hard to recognize kids uh when i talk to our director of athletics mike he's like oh this is always hard i want to make sure everyone's included and so you know where he's going to do something more expansive more intentional to celebrate the kids but what i didn't want to do is these accomplishments to

065get lost with time we had a great run in some of our seasons that we just had and so some of these names you'll recognize because some of these are your children which is pretty cool yeah it's uh uh kenzie riego her name is mckenzie rico but uh they call her kenzie and she made uh first team her uh bryn wormley uh for basketball uh player of the year was awesome uh kenzie riego they're both actually going to college together so it'll be an interesting right they're going from the same school no no okay let's go to geneseo one's going uh fisher okay well they may play each other so that'll be an interesting piece uh our monroe county coy i never know the acronym stand for was coach of the year is marty so

066he was also the girls coach of the year so if you think about this it's pretty cool the number of not only players but uh even our coach was recognized and you gotta understand that team started out like oh and four and then went on an amazing run uh to get where they were championship game uh right down to the almost very end uh ronald mcdonald game both uh kenzie rigo and brynn are gonna be playing there and then we had two thousand point scorers so uh they're i believe they're best friends but they they pretty much did everything together this year this season uh in terms of our boys great run by our boys undefeated obviously came a little bit short right at that last championship game but we're extremely proud of them again

067with this kovid one of the things that i've really become more aware of is the gratitude to be more grateful for these opportunities and i know our student athletes including our student ex official here we'll tell you how important this was to their schooling experiences to be able to compete again so we had zach galbarto stone siberlin our both first team we had a second team alex hale and he's already one week later was out on the football field this past weekend so talk about no breaks player of the year was zac gilbarto as well so that was pretty cool coach of the year was buddy grassy and then ronald mcdonald game zach will be playing in the round of donald and we have some other additional accomplishments our track we have a great program

068here coach burke runs a really great program uh we had some first lead all team jesse reinhardt jamara and richardson fabian vasquez jacob long lucas that should be harder i believe maybe it's creator noah burke aiden anderson austin fernandez rebecca i'm going to mess up the last name gavin i'm not even going to try the last name emma raddick radka uh sectional champion rebecca gavin jesse reinhardt jamarian and noah burke so those individuals won their section of championship in their individual event we came a little short as a team um typically our team does really well when it comes to sections as a team but they're a young team which is a very young team uh in wrestling you're gonna see uh division two first team casper stewart second team nick lamkin sectional champion casper

069stewart nick lamp can also win a section of title we have two 100 winners in terms of the total number of uh matches casper and cayden marucci john's baby boy right and then uh our first team all county which we just found out kate and me first team which was really big again moving on to our swimming we already know the excellence that cooper uh achieved this year but we want to recognize the first team tyler cooper and another cooper cooper fix matthew and harrison were all first team uh which is really big and then obviously our swimmer of the year was cooper mathis and he was also a sectional champion out of the group so again congratulations and he's representing his his his college gear already clarkson he's getting cardio yeah on our girls

070swimming team we had uh two young ladies uh first team sophie and maddie and then on our ice hockey which we just got as well we had one of our players second team uh chase uh and a top scholar athlete as well as sean pies and then for sportsmanship our team was recognized as a team that received sportsmanship so again don't want to lose sight of the accomplishments that our kids make not only in the classroom but also competitively as well so i'm going to transition this over real quick uh dr corey just uh some information here you can share about testing so this year is very different for accountability from new york state ad you may have heard that they applied to have waivers again last year and were denied everybody thought biden was

071going to come in and just let anything happen and the reality is that's not true what they have done is really changed it a little bit so that i i think their intent is to help provide information to not only the state in terms of what is this learning loss but to us so for the three through eight testing it is going to take place and there are two different sessions the first one is required and it's a one day no more than 60 minutes is what they're estimating for time and it's all multiple choice and those will be sent into the state and that they're going to send us back a report that they're they're calling it a diagnostic report um multiple choice is kind of like multiple deaths at times i'll be honest

072and it hasn't been our area of focus that really helps us to know what's going on session two is the writing it's me writing chose thinking you can tell where the kids are making you know exactly what's happening and sometimes they write i don't know and that's even helpful when we look at multiple choice reports you can clean a little bit but i'll be honest as teachers we sometimes take those and we debate is it this or is it that so i'm kind of relieved that we that's all we have to turn in and we'll take the report and we'll learn from it but the writing is changing the game not only are they giving us some things that we don't have to turn in but we can use it internally so for the first

073time ever we can choose when we give it and we will just because i think it's important to send some of that information on to next year's teachers we're going to have fifth graders who will have to sit for the tests next year who have not had any experience with that and i can just tell you that 405 has been our tricky transition and for them to have not ever taken that test i just would rather what i'm asking teachers to do is to talk to the kids about it so they know we're going to do it they know that it's for us to help us learn and they know that their next year's teacher is going to see those actual test booklets so it's it's changing the game for us and that i hope

074that it really helps us to become proactive in understanding where our kids are at i don't want to look at it in terms of what is their deficits but rather what is their potential you know a piece of writing can tell us so much and what what other things if if you're going to use this as part of your diagnostic what other things are you doing to determine where the students we have a ton of data see that is just really one data point which we look at so starting in kindergarten every grade level has what i call a forward spreadsheet we come to consensus on what data points we're going to collect for the whole year teachers know that up front so the littlest ones we are collecting a lot of data points around

075the foundation skills around where the reading level is we not only want to know where it is we want to know it over time so we collect i want the teachers and they have all year i've been reporting where are you instructing kids and reading all you every month and that tells us a whole lot are they growing at a normal pace we have a an assessment calendar that tells us where they should be going so it that really helps to inform a whole lot it's helped to determine who needs extra supports what kind of supports we've really looked at virtual learners what's happening there that help to pick who comes in and when they come in for some of the extra support that we've offered on fridays in particular at almost every school so

076you're anticipating excuse me so you're anticipating that you're going to be able to determine with the year that we've had a better idea of where our students are because of all these things that you put in place since the beginning of the year our cohort spreadsheets have been with us since i started i mean it's honestly something and but it was something that we came together and said all right let's be reasonable what can we do with this crazy year and it has been the craziest year ever and the teachers all are very faithful in adding the data points at each school to that the high school added some new things because of no regents last year they didn't want to just live for a test that might be or might not be so they

077added in benchmarks at the end of every 10 weeks every teacher puts in what kids did on that benchmark and that's a collaboration of everything that they've done so not only do they have unit exams but they now have these benchmarks that tell us that they hold that information so we i you know i'm confident that the data points that we have really help us to know what we can do to inform instruction and i can give you a more thorough update on exactly what kind of things we collect but tonight we just wanted to let you know specifically about the state assessments like it has uh often it has more emphasis in the district then it really should i mean for us i it's important i want parents to know that we look at

078it carefully but it's not the only thing we look at it's one thing but for us it's a lot of accountability so you know the math camp that we started two years ago in the summer we never got to did that work but teachers told me all year long that kids were just very different that had gone to camp they were willing to take risks they were into math more than they ever had before and you know honestly there was some sadness that we couldn't have had assessment to see did it do what we thought it would do we're intending to go back this summer and have some of those things in place but we're going to look at some of the data points that help guide us with that was also different those high

079school regions you know there are five required regions exams normally to graduate you have to pass all five last year when they waived them anybody that was supposed to sit for that example was kind of given a free pass they were given credit whether you know um just here it is and for some kids it was truly a game changer kids that might not have ever really passed the exams or all of a sudden given credit well we they canceled regents in january and we weren't sure what they would do the feds kind of like the three through eight testing said we have to do something so what they've said is we have to take four exams but it's kind of like we have to send the information on to the feds but what they're

080doing is that's not going to hold kids back from graduating so it's no longer a graduation requirement but they still have to sit for the exam you know we can't wait for the state to tell us what to do here those have to be internal decisions i have to have really close relationships with the principals and the teachers to know our kids moving where we want them to go and and i feel that we have a really strong assistant for that all of the principles embrace using these cohort spreadsheets teachers while they might not like that we're looking they know that it's valuable and it helps us have some really tough conversations especially when we see somebody stalling and not making the progress we want them to make and those cohort spreadsheets that you're talking

081about have a direct result is assessing whether a child should attend summer school we're anticipating that we're going to offer more seats than we've ever offered before only because we want to keep going with it now you're going to hear about our realty plan we have an opportunity 10 weeks until it's the 10 best weeks of our year it can really help us to empower kids to work their tails off we're going to try to leverage and let them know because i'll be on we've had especially at the middle school middle school is the year where uh they don't really need a babysitter a lot of parents are working and trusting that their kids are doing what they should do and while some kids it's really they've embraced it there are something you can imagine

082happened right and we're trying to get a handle on where they're at and what we can do you know we don't want to retain anybody that there's no research that says that works right but kids need to know you can't just do nothing or you know what i mean so yeah so uh that court we'll be coming back to the board so we'll make sure that all that stuff uh the other thing is that the state did ask all the school districts to submit uh assessment information basically what have we been doing to assess so dr corey did leave that effort again collected whatever school was doing reported that to the state because the state is still trying to push the federal government to at least allow some waivers because there's some growing uh concerns

083with our parents like how can you assess anybody and they haven't had a true traditional everyday in-person experience and then it's again every community is different some communities have some communities have not so i wanted to quickly share just uh uh mr brian sutton one of our principals that uh john kennedy uh came with his idea to the group knowing that our board board had passed a resolution on diversity equity and inclusion and so he he created along with all of our team members contributed to kind of a 10-day equity journey um and so basically today i think they did a batavia then and now comparison um basically they went back like 25 years what was batavia like that how is it like now what are the change in demographics poverty rates home ownership which

084was a really big thing the home ownership shifted so every day we do a different kind of equity-based conversation it's all voluntary for staff every day an email goes out it says today's this is the theme this is the content and so just really proud that that's kind of organically grown within the district and something we look to get better at obviously change our theme this also is something that is spreading in other communities in other districts so again we were really proud uh i know russian adderall was one of the communities that did it first i think it's challenge doing something uh similar uh and obviously we're doing one as well so i just wanted to highlight that uh and and show some appreciation so um probably the most important part of tonight's conversation

085is uh spring update for reopen batavia strong um and i do want to preface this with a couple things uh march 13th 2020 was our last day of regular traditional normal school we left on a friday and that weekend we we made an announcement and basically we never reopened that fully and a lot has happened in basically uh a year uh you know today we are march 22nd 2021 uh we know more now than we have in the beginning around the virus we have a vaccine out now um and so i thought it was really important to bring um what i think the board has rightfully been asking me to do uh to bring a plan to to get us back and so i do want to preface this with some i think that our

086important sailing points for any of our parents or community members that are watching online this is all grounded on factual either claims statements by various elected officials but also you'll see some data in here that will drive some of the decision making why i feel along with the board that it's time for us uh to take some significant steps to get us back to school the way we the way we used to do it so what i want to highlight here is that president-elect biden when he was then president-elect said that one of his key uh tenants would be his uh if he were elected was to reopen schools by may and so uh i believe we're in position to do that to do that to reopen by a man he also said it would

087be a national priority to get our kids back into school for in person and to keep them in school and that if congress provided the money for it then we would make sure that it happens and obviously you're senator schumer probably a week or two talk about this additional money coming to make sure we're doing that and i think again by the end of his 100 days which uh my plan that i'm proposing tonight for the board to approve uh would do that would do it within the first hundred days and i also wanted to point out that he's been able to meet his target of 100 million vaccines in 58 days not a hundred days so to me that is a clear sign that we're heading in the right direction so my hope is

088that by another 58 days we're at 200 million and there's only 330 million people that live in the united states so the goal is that we'll be in a better spot i also want to highlight uh our governor uh governor cuomo in a press conference on february 19th he made some pretty salient points and he basically said that he wanted schools to be reopened for five days and he didn't understand why we weren't really reopened right now and he encouraged local governments to be aggressive on in-class teaching especially if uh there's a low community or a low spread in the community there's no no infection spike but again these are some of his exact quotes that i included here from his press conference on february 19th to me more reason more validation while we need

089to take some significant steps he also stated that the new york state department of health has also stated as well that they have they have now updated the guidance on the six foot social distances they're currently reviewing the cdc recommendation but they didn't point that there was language already currently that provided leeway for districts and he called the extent of reopening a local decision and obviously you guys are all locally elected board education members and again i think this is a different conversation now a year later versus probably two or three months into the pandemic so the question uh that many people say why now why an increase in learning and i want to point some of these key bullets that i think are important there's a lot of growing research and a lot of

090guidance to continue to emphasize the need for our kids to be in school obviously there's this learning loss conversation but also we want to accelerate learning if we can there are kids who are probably not as engaged as they would be if they were in front of their amazing teacher in the building we also know there's some impact to socialization our kids not being able to communicate with their teachers with each other and also emotional supports the mental health of being able to see your classmates every day versus today i'm in person tomorrow i'm on a computer screen again we have a student here if you probably add some authentic voice to that it's not always as engaging when i got to just wake up be home and just log in versus and again some

091of our kids like that which is fine and but majority of our kids want to be with their colleagues classmates in their in their school buildings and i think the other thing is it adds some consistency and daily structure to their day i often get emails from either parents or board members asking what can we do more to support kids i think being back in the building is the best way to support them access to counselors access to social worker access to teachers and i think you know access to their friends i also think another reason why we need to be having this conversation is we're playing high-risk sports we're playing football we did wrestling we did basketball sports didn't have some contact we did them fairly well we didn't have anything major occur we

092had one situation with a hockey team that was more community related and they weren't even necessarily batavia students but that was part of the the impact but other than that all of our swimmers did fine all of our student athletes did not have anything we didn't have to shut down and not compete again knock on wood that continues heading into this season but we're playing football our plan will be consistent with a recent cdc report and also the new york state department of health most recent guidance in july that came out we have many parents and community members and even staff who have requested greater in person for either students that they're working with that they're struggling maybe reaching just not working for them the virtual or the hybrid option i also want to emphasize

093that in this plan full virtual remains in place for current parents and students so if you are uncomfortable no one's forcing you back we are honoring the commitments that everybody's made we're not asking parents to do anything else different if you're 100 remote you're going to stay remote but if your parents signed up for in-person hybrid we're going to expand that offering to five days of in-person we also and i think this is probably one of the more important points is our teachers have been burning the candle on both ends they have been working hard managing two groups i commend them for their efforts but i think it's time to get them back to doing what they do best what they've been all trained to do and that's worked with kids in front of them

094and so they won't have to manage a group of kids online and a group of kids in front of them they can give the kids in front of them 100 of the attention that they deserve they can start to focus on the content and the standards they need to cover again focusing at the end of the year and trying to finish the year strong i always think that data is important you always can hear politicians and our governor say look at the valves look at the valves let the valves guide our decision making well some of this data i think is important for us to know finger lakes which is the region that we are grouped with in genesee county uh this was as of yesterday so i did not pull this today uh 1.8

095percent was the seven day average we haven't been that low for quite some time in terms of the number of new infections genesee counties a little bit higher but i will say just like any math problem the lower your denominator and the higher number of testing is going to show an infection rate we're not testing as much as we used to or people are not getting ass tested as often as we were when we originally started but we're at 2.9 um seven day average i want to go a little bit deeper with this and look at total cases in the area 920 and i got this right from jennison county department of health's website 400 of those two cases have been in non-county public regulated residential facilities so i want to point that out is

096that that's pretty significant that these cases are occurring in kind of controlled environments not so much out there only 518 have been kind of general community so that's pretty significant we have about i think there's like 50 000 residents in genesis county as a whole so that's pretty significant active cases there's only 83 current active cases in genesee county that's the lowest we've been since november so if you see the governor that we're following a similar trend here in the region so we haven't had that low number of cases since november again more reason why i think it's time to start talking about reopening fully cdc came out with some updated guidance this is right from their website in terms of what that means they now believe that it is safe to be three feet

097apart for elementary in particular they make a strong emphasis on elementary they have some transmission zones that they've identified i would tell you it's really tough to kind of understand that data because the entire country is pretty much still in a red zone according to their transmission rates but obviously many of these communities have opened up i'll point out the states like indiana illinois florida they have opened up more fully georgia has opened up more fully but they do believe for us that the three feet is acceptable middle and high school they also say three feet is acceptable but if there is happen to be a high transmission rate in the schools then you should try to go to six foot or cohort your case like we did in our hybrid body barriers was clearly

098specified in their latest recommendations that they don't they remove the recommendation of the use of a barrier between students i know some districts went out and spent some money to buy barriers cdc has now removed that as a mitigating strategy again new york state doh has not adopted these yet but the cdc is has and the new york state doh is reviewing these to potentially adopt them as well testing they also recommend that students be tested maybe once a week we did testing here if you remember we did the rapid test that's something that we could explore again if the board feels that's something that we should put in place that's part of it i don't necessarily recommend it unless we see a spike for some reasons in the data to grow if you have

099questions please obviously there's some time at the end but if you uh want to ask as we go through i also want to point out staff vaccination i want to thank our genesee county department of health uh the director paul pettitt worked with us as a district and i want to provide some data points here which again feed the reason why i feel it's okay for us to start moving in this direction because one of the things that everyone says is it'll be safer to reopen if you vaccinate staff because they're in uh age groups that are more vulnerable to the kova 19 virus and so i want to point out here that 50 of our staff of all of our staff will be fully vaccinated by april 10th well that means both shots will

100have been administered they would have had a 14-day window to have that meet so 50 of our staff will be fully vaccinated by april 10th and i also want to point out that 100 of our staff was offered the opportunity to become vaccinated we could not ask teachers or staff members for that information so we only know the this 50 just comes from people that we took care of our percentage could be higher i believe it is you know a little higher um because people went on their own to get it some people wanted to travel before then and you know went to the johnson johnson maybe live in rochester went there maybe the buffalo went there so this is a very conservative number i wanted to be more accurate and i thank trisha for

101really putting this together and she was kind of her and brittany were the gateway to the vaccines so we would they would call people down as they won the lotto kind of try to have a little fun with it um you know but i will just say that um real important here to emphasize that everyone who wanted one could have had one in our district the other thing i wanted to point out is some local data here for genesee county that i think is important to point out uh just specific data about how many people who have a complete vaccine so seven thousand five hundred in the area uh about fourteen thousand people have at least one twenty four percent of the population in jenison county have at least one of the doses uh which

102i think is one out of every four people in the county and again total counter population is about 57 000. i could not find batavia specific information but i did find county information and that number is growing every day as they have more and more vaccines today the governor just announced that 50 and up will be eligible starting tomorrow um so that's really big social distancing again is one of the big things that continues to come up here's a picture of a classroom um you know in the original guidance i want to point out that cdc also had pointed out that you do six feet apart when feasible and so again we're going to still work to that standard i want to be clear here for anybody watching us where we can do six feet

103we will do six feet regardless of the guidance uh cdc's guidance changing the new york state department of health obviously they're still looking at it but where we can't we feel that we can do it safely if it's at four feet you know five feet but no less than three feet we're going to work to that standard and again they did look at research i wanted to point out that the world health organization which is another organization that looks at this information and puts out guidance from school districts put out that one meter is acceptable and then american academy of pediatrics have also said in their research and studies because they understand the impact on kids to space desk three feet apart and ideally six feet apart so we're going to work to that standard

104i wanted to also point out because transportation is another thing that comes out it was one of our barriers initially we were very conservative and we wanted to make sure we put every mitigating strategy we could so we kept kids spaced apart but this language comes right from the new york state department of health's guidance to schools around recommended practices and it says here clearly that school districts must the students must wear acceptable face coverings at all times on the bus and then the recommendation is that you should maintain appropriate social distancing so we're going to really maximize on should and we're going to move to from every other seat to no more than two to a seat with fully masked and again we may not need to put two to a c but we

105do need to provide transportation to our families and in order for them for that not to be a barrier we're going to be able to do two masks the buses will still be disinfected as they have been um one thing i want to encourage our families to because everyone's at a different comfort level if you can bring your child to school bring them to school many parents do this anyway at all the levels uh it will help us not have to put two to a seat but we feel comfortable that we can put to the seat to ensure that we can bring our two cords back together safely again we will have each vehicle still be cleaned daily uh what we're doing obviously our common areas the seats get cleaned um in the morning and

106then after that run they clean them in between runs so our buses service uh high school buses service jackson so in between they clean once they're done at the high school before they go to jackson they have to clean the buses face masks will be worn we have seating charts so we'll be able to mitigate if there is an issue every kid has a seat everybody knows where they sit if there's a kid who is for some reason positive we'll be able to know who was within a six feet window and quarantine those kids meals one of the things that we will change as part of this reopening update and uh changes is that we'll go down to one community feeding site uh our numbers don't really show that as many families are going to

107jackson kennedy is kind of our major hub so we're going to keep feeding it out of kennedy and you can see now we currently feed currently right now we feed 8 a.m to noon on these two campuses we'll be updating that as part of our reopening update we also are going to make sure that during meals kids stay six feet apart so that is one of the things that will be a little bit of a challenge for us but we're confident we're gonna be able to use uh multiple spaces to keep kids succeed apart uh can't necessarily all just eat in the classroom we're gonna have to maximize our our lunchrooms maybe library spaces maybe the gymnasium during those favors we may have to create another lunch at the high school they may need a

108third lunch so that we can keep kids apart because we want them to have their mascot we want them to eat and not have to do that so i say that to really point out that we still recognize the best practice around six feet of social distancing especially when someone's unmasked this is an example of two of our classrooms currently at john kennedy uh so i think mr sun for these pictures this is going on right now this is this was today these pictures were taken today so i just want to show you that our kids and our staff are working with our kids 100 percent real close so you can see here we got a teacher working with a kid in the same barrier sitting there working one-on-one with them our teachers have been

109working with our kids because they'll do whatever it takes to get our kids to succeed and that sometimes that meant some one-on-one attention but they've always done it safely with masking washing their hands in between hand sanitizers and you can see here teacher is about six feet apart from the kids that's recommended in the guidance we want to recommend that best practice uh again um oops many of our teachers uh again are vaccinated so hopefully they'll feel more comfortable but what we don't want to do is disregard some of our best practices that have kept our transmission rate low but you can see our kids this is what it's going to look like okay so we did a couple classrooms some teachers have been a little courageous and have done that but do you see

110about three feet in between those kids okay one thing i want to emphasize here is teachers right now we're 100 mass we've made that announcement a little bit back uh and teachers will either designate a time for kid to take a mass break uh or maybe not in some cases kids are fine they don't need mass brakes they don't ask for mass rigs they don't need them they're perfectly fine um but just know that teachers will guide that with kids uh key considerations that i want to make sure i'm pointing out as part of the spring update and my proposal to reopen fully is that there will no longer be a hybrid model so if the board approves tonight to move this direction we will no longer have a hybrid model for the district we

111will either be fully remote so we will honor all the families who feel that they're still unsafe they have underlying conditions maybe they don't have the vaccine yet at home or this is working for them fully remote we won't honor that but we will have all the in-person hybrid students now go to full five days a week in person learning so those will be our two models elementary teachers there will be no more asynchronous teaching lessons in particular really the high school as well no live streaming enough classes it'll be just whoever shows up they get taught there will be no more of the half the ball game at home again our goal is always going to still be six feet social distancing we believe we can do this in the majority of our classrooms

112with some creativity with some removing of some bookshelves and some other things that are going to be going on um it's a little harder in some of our high school classes because they go a little bit 25 26 kids in the section they'll be a little bit tighter but we do believe we can get this done for example jackson we're going to be pretty close to get this done in most of the rooms probably except three classrooms it'll be a little bit less than six feet uh again 100 masking in place schools may have to reassign students in in-person classes so i want to be mindful of that some classrooms may have 26 here they may have 18 we may have to move a kid or two to try to honor as much spacing as

113possible so that may may occur mainly at the secondary level not so much of the elementary and then reminder for parents uh on this in terms of key considerations still want to honor the fact that your child doesn't feel well keep them all because what we don't want is kids to come in with any symptoms so here's a timeline that i'm proposing to the board tonight and i want to kind of go through it so i've done a little bit of work here beforehand march 12th i did meet with two of our uni leaders of our two of our largest bargaining units in terms of the impact for instruction i met with our batavia teachers association and our um our clerical association our teachers teachers aide mrs jacobs and mr warren i met with them

114to discuss this proposal they had some great ideas some great suggestions they have been phenomenal partners in this work in terms of making sure we do what we can obviously for them it's safety they want to protect their uh their their peers their colleagues we get it 100 um so that happened on the 12th tonight is the 22nd we're meeting the night on the board what i'm proposing if this is approved tonight is that we'll start to move furniture immediately where we can start actually tomorrow but no later than during spring break take a lot of that time over the break which is the 29th through the april 2nd start moving our furniture we have a couple storage units we got to empty get the extra desk out things of that nature we're going to

115be having some virtual meetings with staff where i'll be meeting with the staff with the principals to go over any concerns they may have any questions um you know really work through them because this is a you know a big change we've been doing this and you do get into a routine um and so now we're asking them with them to go back to what we used to do we want to hear what other concerns and they may have some ideas that we didn't think about to do this well so we might also hear that as well transportation all parents will receive new transportation because they'll have probably new times potentially new bus numbers their kids will still get busy parents don't need to do anything we're just going to merge our list so mr

116rozanski is working with our transportation uh sda company on working on that and so we want to mail that out so we have a tentative timeline the parents will get that by the 9th no later than april 9th they'll get their new busing information so they don't really have to do anything unless they add a change of address adding more buses nope we believe we can do this with our current allocation because in a sense what we did was had half the group on one day half the groupon next now we're just going to combine them but it will create new bus pickups and drop off so we believe we'll be able to uh and again again a little title here it should be 50 or more of the staff will be vaccinated by april

11710. so again that's part of our timeline here so i'll correct that and i'll get you guys an updated one so that's part of our our thought process here uh and again april 15 to the 16th uh we want to propose or i'm proposing that we do two days of virtual this is a thursday and a friday so for kids it's really just impacting an in-person thursday and we do have some kids that come in on friday some of our specialized instruction groups some of our enl students some of our students there we have been kind of targeting for some more additional in person proposing two virtual days allow teachers to be fully set for in-person learning on monday this will give them time in their space to get any materials ready they'll provide lessons

118that day but they'll be more asynchronous so there'll be maybe some assignments they may check in kids with five to ten minutes in the morning take attendance and then let kids kind of work on their own those two days uh but the reason why we want those days is just to give us uh some uninterrupted teacher time to be ready to go because our teachers are still teaching in hybrid while we're working on the other things like furniture transportation so i'm proposing that we would have two virtual days on the 15th and the 16th and then would have all building furniture done and set up all configurations cafeterias by the april 12th and then our first day back would be april 19th which would be the first day of the fourth market period which would

119give us the opportunity to have 10 full weeks of full in-person learning for probably 80 of our school district and for us to really ramp up finish the year strong my hope is that guidance for new york state catches up to cdc guidance so this gives us a little bit of buffer to be uh to allow that as well but we need time to plan prepare and communicate to our parents um and then again we would only be offering full in person and full 100 remote until june and that goal here is that kids would have the best experience they have they just may have a mascot but the goal is everybody's back by then we hope to have clear guidance on prom clear guidance on graduation you know and if things go as well

120maybe we'll be at 200 people vaccinated and 200 million people vaccinated and so hopefully things continue to ease up so i do want to be clear on potential barriers uh trying to be as transparent as possible the only way this is stopped is if the school district myself a superintendent or the board were directed by either the department of health or some other the government uh the governor uh the genesee county that we have some kind of corridor that stops us from moving in this direction and obviously that'll stop us but right now we're working within all of the guidance and or i want to also be clear here there's some kind of sign of infection rate or some kind of larger community spread um that will stop us then we'll have to reset go

121back to remote for a little bit and bring back our hybrid model that we had to get there so i want to be clear that if we have any of these things i did promise our teachers or mark mr warren ms jacobs that we will continue to protect our staff and students if we see a large number of cases i also want to point out here the reason why april 19th is uh an ideal date is that when we come back from break it gives us almost like a 14-day window period when we know people are going to probably congregate over spring break today was a beautiful day you saw a lot of people outside and so we know things are going to happen we know small gatherings are going to potentially happen and as

122people get vaccinated some of those gatherings may occur so the two weeks out gives us a little bit of buffer to see if the data really changes before that but the goal again is we'll go hybrid right up into that 15 to 60 with the goal to reopen on the 19th the monday so anybody who's watching us online if there's any questions comments concerns if you support this concept please let us know you can go to our let's talk right on our district page www.csd.org right on the very top is let's talk when you click on it there's this little window that comes up and there's one that says reopening plans you click on that and a comment gets submitted to myself and other members of our team to either address concerns follow up on

123anything that we may be missing and with that i will open up to any questions to the board please talk with uh mr warren have you talked to him since then has he talked to any of the teachers there was some concern that just wanted to make sure the teachers were given enough time to make sure that they they were ready to you know yeah yeah so i think the biggest thing um with this that's a great question so the reason why we're literally almost one month we're gonna have one calendar for calls from the 22nd which is tonight to the april 19 to address the terms roll it out or you know i'm assuming the media is going to appear that we're going to reopen fully so i'm sure all kinds of feedback would

124come but in terms of our teachers my understanding was mr warren did share with his executive uh committee of this plan and then also shared with them in their minutes um but again one of the requests that he had asked to be was to meet with staff and one thing that i told him why we wouldn't do is to meet with staff to hear any additional concerns questions um so that's what we'll be doing um and today all of the principles to communicate to their buildings that this conversation will be had tonight so that we can try to help people through um we know there's gonna be some people with some concerns we also know some people are getting really excited to just teach kids in front of them and not have to worry about

125logging in posting things online submitting things you know you know we asked them to shift and they did a great job uh we have a secret here in the room now i can tell you they've been working hard and i'm pretty sure they're probably looking forward to just focus on one modality of teaching uh but we'll work and we'll keep working through these issues so as we hear them we'll address them and we'll keep moving forward any other questions for board members great i'm happy too because i think this is what we're all used to cooper i know you're a student what do you think of this plan uh we hope we hope everyone should be excited there may be some uh tough conversations at home with parents and their kids with like i like

126hogwarts i like being homeless you know and that may change i mean really at the high school that's what mr custom said parents may have some tough battles at home getting some kids in because they they kind of like the some of the freedoms that came with with being home and not having to maybe get dressed and maybe wear some pajama pants you know party at the top or whatever the business on top part of the bottom saying is so those will be some conversations but we just think it's really important if we're opening up more things in our society and one of the things that really pushed me over the edge of why this needs to happen was when the governor said two people can fly on a plane and not have to quarantine

127afterwards i thought to myself why can't you kids be next to each other in class and really learn and give back and again you know maybe not popular opinion but i really had a tough time with people being able to travel domestically not having a quarantine anymore regardless of vaccination but yet our kids can give uh full access to the person and so you know with that tonight you'll be considering a board resolution that approves this plan and we'll be moving forward upon your approval the next item on the agenda is the gender alterations and we do have two under new business we'll be adding under pro level seven f energy performance improvement project and under h resolution to reopen the batavia city school to in-person learning home remote learning five days per week effective

128monday april 19 2021. i need a motion to accept the new uh agenda alterations so motion made by mrs bromley seconded by mrs ms murphy is there any discussion sing done yes um a motion to accept the consent items as written motion made by mr sister is there a second second second by mrs bowman is there any discussion yes yes yes next item on the agenda is new business and we'll take each of these pieces as listed a 20 21 22 board event schedule reorganizational meeting thursday the 1st of july 2021. i need a motion for this part of the new business so those are made is meetings there the board wants to move to the six thirty times it was just a um if you are more secure and more content with it to

129be at the time that it is we have to change this motion right this is just a proposal we typically would end up so if that's something the portable has to do is stay with a later time then this is the time to do it you can back to so the other thing is we can you can approve this and then let's say a couple meetings if it's not we can make a resolution change it and move it forward to change the date again we just tried to figure out something that would be not as conflicting or potentially even allow us right after you get our work come right in and not have to be as late you know for current programs just something to think about but the 6 30 is what the board

130would like to do now we can make that adjustment you can approve it pending a change of 6 30. you can re-update this she says um or whoever made the motions so you just need a new motion to if you're okay with the dates that are selected that's one thing for the second piece of the time motion to change the time so i need a second motion to change the starting time of the meetings from 5 30 no discussion okay all those in favor of this um change in schedule and time for the reorganizational meeting um yes and we'll go on to the next uh item under the business is the 2021 22 proposed school district calendar i need a motion to accept this uh for president on the back side i'm not sure himself

131so as long as it's not a big deal um i still need a motion to is there any discussion about the school district calendar seeing none do you call home yes next item is batavia city school district public employer health emergency plan made a motion to accept this motion probably is there a second is there any discussion just to give you guys some clarity this is a new requirement by the new york state department uh regarding pandemic planning so if we were to have another crisis this allows us to determine who's essential is not wanting to be broadened yes next item is insurance policy review request for proposal i need a motion to uh vote give mr prostate the ability to go out for a request for the proposal for insurance motion made by vincent

132is there a second by mrs baldwin is there any discussion sing none called vote yes yes next is the annual district election slash voter registration made a motion to accept all the items included in on this part of your business motion made by mr history is there a second second second button is murphy is there any discussions which is the energy performance improvement project you all have the the green bay yep the green packet um i need a motion to accept the energy performance improvement project 20-21 media room two separate items the first one is the secret type 2 under our general action so that is okay is that fresh stuff no just adding it to the agenda is there any discussion seeing them you can call them for that first party yes yes mrs

133brownlee yes and the second part of the project is approval of proposition number two energy performance improvements project state-aid enhancement i need a motion to accept this part of the motion made by mr's history is there a second second by mrs bowman is there any discussion seeing them yes g that's is yes notice a public hearing budget vote in election they need a motion to accept this notice mrs bromley is there a second second by mr rivo is there any discussion seeing them we are now on to age resolution to reopen schools i need a motion promotion made by mrs bowman is there a second second by mr regal is there any discussion no oh no you can call them vote yes yes yes yes then we will go to i budget 20 21 22

134preliminary budget these have to be there's no forward action i liked it better when each person talked about the thing that was in their wheelhouse that's how i that's all i was what i was thinking of was not to be gross but when my nephew was in the hospital and every morning they would do rounds it was just the head doctor and then it was all the specialties specialist doctors and i liked it like that you mean when we have a discussion you like it better if mr solar would answer what he knows about well yeah if it's a bunch of things scott talks about if it's an academic native thing molly talks about it only because number one i think i could talk about i think it gives everybody a community the opportunity to

135see what they're making the big bucks but it also i think it i it just i liked it better having that portrayed that way it wasn't anything aggressive or delightful no it was just i i just thought it was kind of before we kind of did it like rounds and so everybody got to kind of explain what they were doing in the whole process and i think the community saw that and saw everybody kind of working together and every board meeting i want scott to speak no no it's just if there's something going i mean i i just feel like and if we did it in the beginning of when you were here as well i just felt like each person being given the opportunity to express what they've been doing over the past couple

136of weeks so like mr brown is coming in for 12 months i mean i don't want people to come in when they don't have to work when they don't that is usually what we do through our reports or yeah i curriculum others it was kind of like rounds and it kind of let everybody kind of talk about what was going on great in their area and i didn't i guess i just caught on to it because i didn't know because of coped if we were doing things differently but i just so and so just so you understand next more meeting you'll have a separate job mikey brownie be reporting on athletics because he's coming so we you still do that so when ronnie presents on her academy she'll be i didn't know if it was

137something if it was a dynamic that was changing because of colvin and things were just kind of different or i think all that change is that i'm under reports of their own it occurred to me that i just liked the feeling of this kind of cooperative that everybody was talking like this is what i've been doing for the pet and it doesn't i mean it doesn't have to be for a long period of time but it just i think gives everybody kind of the opportunity to understand and be reminded because some things that i hear about are like administrators and what are they doing and things like that it reminds people that everybody these people are working and this is what they do so the the i don't think i've changed this since i've gotten

138every department every department or division comes and presents that yes designated board meeting so like paul came at one john kennedy jackson presented that one i'm talking about exactly what we did sean that we then it would just be anything that's a leniency he just wanted everything at the beginning okay all right at the end to the front but i want to make sure that the board wants a curriculum update every more game and we'll put that as an ongoing thing that bobby can present we typically only did it as if something's significant so like today she jumped in on the slide yeah well that was a i don't i guess it for me it was just about the again i just was reminded of like watching the rounds in the morning and i just

139kind of felt like to see the big guy the head doctor and then everybody else kind of reporting and saying this is what's going on sure um it just seems like a cohesive yeah everybody i mean it wasn't i honestly it was just like i don't i just had a thought and i don't want to forget it so i'm going to email alexander and tell her that i wanted to talk about this then you could just disregard that that's all i said to you about motions and when you can speak because [Music] um every weekend [Music] it was a thought that i had and i just thought i like okay i got it you got it okay okay um we've done all the new business we'll go on to reports and yes i have a

140report so um there was a concern that was brought to our attention from a parent at some point um regarding a policy about suicidal kids they were looking for a formal policy or operating procedure so that was broadcast so um given what i do i met with the counselor [Music] we proposed a statement to be added to the school safety plan um how to address students that come into the mental health crisis so um um i just want to give a big shout out to mr sun his staff and the students thursday that his school has had i thought it was awesome march madness is based on march madness and the kids are all having a bad competition in their head they have a bracket you i need a motion to go into executive session

141so we're supposed to meet with mrs brown accepted by mr sister is there any objection yes