001richmond hi there i'm bob conrad i'm the defense director of the richmond memorial library and i'm told that many of the trustees are new and so i thought by way of introducing myself and the school district's relationship to its public library it might take a little bit longer than you're used to during my brief updates so this uh i'll introduce myself i'm originally from the town of irondequoit in the rochester suburbs i went to parochial school for the first parts of my life and then public school for only five years but they were the best and most valuable five years of my education school teachers are my heroes and then i went off to college in the chicago area i studied ready to film i did not ever work in any of those industries i
002worked a lot of retail book stores coffee shops record stores and i turned that into a library career after getting my master's in library science i did 10 years with chicago public i was a branch manager for seven and when looking to sort of move beyond branch manager i had to look beyond the chicago area and i looked back to western new york and i'm very happy to have landed in batavia it's been a great community with a very well used little public library actually a lot of people don't realize it's one of the biggest and busiest between rochester and buffalo i think our only pier is probably the lockport library and it was that way before i got here and i hope to leave it in good shape when i eventually and it's time
003for me to go so that's my background now i'd like to present a school trustee's guide to the richmond memorial library since the richmond's charter in 1960 was granted we've been a school district type public library now that is not a school library it's a school district type in new york there are four different ways that a public library can be chartered and what most people i think in the erie county monroe county would be familiar with is their municipal type it's a division of a county or of a town or in the city but new york also allows school district types which are not a division of the school district it's an independent board but the service area the tax base is coterminous with the school district and the school district levies the library's
004tax so what else can i say about that by statute we share a common treasurer and prior to 1960 because the richmond library has been around since what 1889 so prior to 1960 i'm not really sure what legal mechanism we were operating under but i will say that actually i'll get to that in a moment um wow i'm barreling through this pretty quickly i'm like halfway through page one yeah so we also operate out of buildings and grounds that are owned by you the batavia city school district now that is not required by by law and i would point again to lockport as an example the school district type library where their building has been owned variously by the district or by the library board itself it's passed back and forth like a football depending
005on what the current need is in their situations but our buildings and grounds have been owned by you the school district since before our current charter or before yours because it was actually um the 1889 gift of mary richmond to the union free school district anyone here remember the union free school district a little before your time i suppose so anyway consequently in addition to sharing a treasurer we share a facilities manager and currently mr mr degraff and consequently the library gets included the library's capital needs get included in the district's capital projects on our side the richmond library has been able to reimburse the school district for its capital expenditures using new york state library construction grants and we get 50 to 75 percent of your outlays returned from state grants that the state
006baseline is 50 but um for economically distressed areas we can get up to 75 and all of the nioga system qualifies to be considered economically distressed so let's see i need to briefly tell you about our facilities i need to uh i don't need to have anyone on the spot but have you been to your wonderful public library in the city of potato some of you if you if you're relatively new to the community you may not have been thousands of times some of you grew up in the children's room uh some of you may remember the old children's room okay well i'll tell you that our facilities consist of that beautiful 1889 building the architect was james gould cutler he is also known as the founder of the cutler mail shoot company if you
007go into any skyscraper in north america you're probably going to see an otis elevator and a cutler mail chute and he also became the mayor of rochester the architectural style is richardsonian romanesque and if you look up henry hobson richardson you'll see a lot of libraries that look exactly like ours that's because cutler kind of did a copy and paste of richardson's more groundbreaking a cookie cutter yes that's a good one we have almost a twin brother library down in jamestown the prendergrast also in the richardson romanesque style but we alone are the public library elected to the medina sandstone hall of fame so congratulations to batavia okay and if you've been there then you know that it's got the beautiful grand reading room woodwork fireplace at park plus the 1979 edition i'm told that
008addition came about during the jimmy carter administration during the gas crisis it was an economic stimulus and i'm told that the school district's business office manager mr suroka at the time had one of these shovel ready plans for an expansion of the library and that building is less beloved than the beautiful 1889 building but come on it had that rust orange burnt sienna carpet back in the day but no we've got nice low indoor outdoor uh dole no the whole name of a big company a big petrochemical company that makes carpets it starts dupont that's the one thank you tammy yeah we've got some nice dupont glue on the back carpet um anyway that brutalist style is not as beloved i think to many but it is 20 000 feet of our most usable space
009so it's a really smart investment from magnus amina our grounds also include that old carriage house that was the richmond mansion's carriage house back in the day just like the library was built on their old orchard grounds the richard richmond mansion became the children's home before it was eventually torn down turned into what is now st joe's parking lot that we get to use that you get to plow there's some kind of arrangement there that seems to be working out for all so i said all of that story so i can tell you this story and this story is i wanted to know you to know that our current capital needs are actually very few uh the before i got here was very good at incorporating previous directors plans into their capital projects and um
010i won't go over all of the ones that have been done in the last seven years since i've been here what i will say is that we do have a few needs and right now i think the biggest one should be pretty simple to address in the near future that's that the children's rooms bathrooms uh are also from 1979 so it's possible that the kids grandparents may have written on the walls in the current children's room bathrooms um i'll say that in the next my next capital plans i hope to build some small meeting spaces i get a lot of phone calls from we're a regional destination library and a lot of people are looking for small private meeting rooms or study groups that they can reserve and we have a big public meeting room
011which we sometimes allow but the demand for smaller meeting rooms is still there librarians offices would be nice and open up some unused spaces so we'll see those in my next capital requests uh when that time comes and then long-range needs not your thinking caps because long range that parking lot being owned by a neighbor is really a liability the church diocese where i'm from a lot of the small community churches are gone the parochial school that i went to as a kid is now senior housing so imagine though if saint joe's is in the buffalo diocese which of course has declared bankruptcy and is facing multi-million dollar loss of payouts just imagine if they were to start selling off parking lots and somebody built a 7-eleven where right now we rely uh heavily on
012a parking lot so keep that in mind as a long-term need and also keep in mind just think ambitiously you guys do a lot of work as school district trustees you're not used to thinking about the library's needs and why should you there's enough work to do as a school board trustee but think of yourself at least as a library facility trustee because my own school my own library trustees they can think as ambitiously as they want but it's not going to do anything because it is the district building we're almost like renters that pay you no rent or otherwise really friendly tenants and i said if i if you guys were still awake at this point in the meeting i would um talk about some points of overlap i just wanted to say that
013we've been working hard to help make your community school initiative um get it launched we've got a library staff member participating in the advisory council and well there's a memo of understanding that i'm sure mr siller will share if you'd like to see and we've also been supporting the my brother's keeper grant finally three early childhood literacy initiatives that we're behind because you guys get them at school age that's what you are a school but we get them from birth until long after they're dead they exist in our microfilm in some form or another so dolly parton's imagination library we're funding for any resident of our zip code i wish it was the school district i will say that everyone in the county is now funded by one funding agency or another what this program
014is is one free book age appropriate per month for the first five years of a child's life uh we get them for something like two dollars a book and um by age appropriate i do mean that they get board books i call them the chewable books they get shapes and colors during those first years and by the time they're five years old they're reading you know full word picture books so to start a kid off with 60 books you would need to speak to your preschool teachers and your own really childhood literacy initiative instructors to teach you what an impact that has on the lifelong learning outcomes another one that we have that actually is it targets low-income families we call it the grow program and they're boxes they're like milk crates of books that
015we visit and restock regularly with donated previously owned gently used books and the way that it targets low income is where we put foxes we have them at dss we have them at family court we have them at the social security office we have them in laundromats and we have them in some housing complexes so anyone can help themselves if you happen to be passing through but we're targeting lower income families and i'll also say we sort of secretly not so secretly if you know uh the little free library movement which is little boxes of books that people build under front lawns wherever we know of one in our service area we also stop those with kids books so it's not just you know angry political diatribes and those when you find them and then
016finally books for babies is our final third prong early childhood literacy initiative that we're launching and it targets babies as you can imagine specifically those born at unmc which of course is most of our residents but also beyond and the reason we're relaunching that it was actually an endeavor of a sorority or a fraternal organization of retired school teachers were doing so but we decided to take it on partly because we see that our enrollment in imagination library we're getting parents to enroll their kids right around two and a half or three years old they're missing the first year and a half or two years two and a half i need a math early map intervention program they're missing the first two and a half years of the program so if we can get them
017to start showing picture books to their infants at newborn and instructions on how to enroll that may help raise enrollment so that's my steal i'll take questions or not and if not then in about a year i'll have more fun stories to tell thank you for your time thank you so much uh before president we can just make an exception and have the public to be heard to go first i can present after if that's okay with the board just to honor his time um good evening board president board members and superintendent my name is david switzel and i reside here in the city batavia on summit street and i'm here tonight to talk about regulation 8140r which was recently enacted i believe on january 25th of this year and after reading this to be
018honest with you i was rather appalled at what i was reading in this that the board has adopted his policy and i did a little research on what i think is the reason for this regulation being being promoted throughout school districts in the state and i think it boils down to what is defined as critical race theory and critical race theory is the view that law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself is a socially constructive concept and that's taken from the encyclopedia britannica more accurately and i think more truthfully is critical race theory is an ongoing effort to reimagine the united states as a nation not of individuals and local communities united under common purposes but as one driven by identity groups based on sexual preference race national origin or gender
019and each one of these has a specific claim on some type of victimization it's apollo of all the ways identity politics is used as a tool to sow hatred among people where there should be potential for friendship critical race theory is one of the greatest offenders person of goodwill should know that judging people based on their physical characteristics is cruel and wrong everybody should understand that this is not the nature of critical race theory however rather this insidious ideology is being used to promote estrangement rather than friendship and hostility rather than good will all based on the pretense that society isn't incubated for systemic racism indeed the tactics used by proponents of critical race theory share many parallels with tactics used by oppressors throughout human history as with all forms of politics and intersexuality critical
020race theory stokes divisions between people where few or none existed before it's all about relational aggression it's all about predatory alienation with a little bit of virtual signaling thrown in the whole idea is to sow chaos where there was peace or at least progress its purpose is to disrupt and destroy any sense of community attachment the whole idea is to sow chaos where there was peace and today's critical race theory advocates call for a form of race consciousness that breeds in themselves the same sort of blind hate that they claim to oppose ironically they're like a photographic negative a mirror image of the segregationists of the jim crow days it seems more and more we as a community are being assaulted with many forms of consciousness and isms intended to soul hostilities and lawlessness such
021as immigrant status gender identity sexual identity and so on as a community we are being overwhelmed saddest of all is how critical race theory exploits the tragedy of racial divisions in this country so rather than serve as a bomb for healing critical race theory has always proven to be poisonous to liberty true community and common humanity it is unfortunate that the batavia city school district has signed on to such a hateful and divisive policy that distracts educators and students away from rigorous learning content and instead teaches ideas that undermine the value of individual liberty and america's founding ideals further embedding the false concept of systemic racism in the public conscious these distractions come at a time when state and school officials should require more civic related instruction in school and they should be addressing the
022wide learning gaps in poor subjects like reading math and science all subjects that need more attention not less attention in closing i would ask the board is this present precedent the kind of hateful rhetoric that we want influencing our community or most importantly our children thank you for listening tonight thank you so uh i'm gonna transition over to superintendent's update uh want to first start out with um an important recognition uh officer david speaking to come up to the podium so we wanted to take a moment tonight to uh recognize officer davis uh we put together a little certificate of recognition from the board and i just wanted to publicly uh thank officer davis he has uh put in over 20 years i don't want to say 30 because i think he's close but i
023know he's not i don't want to give a number uh to this community to the city of batavia he's been the only school resource officer that i have known as the superintendent he's been extremely responsive supportive of our children of our families and of our parents he he definitely doesn't believe in like a start and end time he just he just does whatever it takes for the kids and for the staff members and so you know we're uh sad to see you go in the next you know 30 days or so i think he's got 29 days because it's a 31 day month so he's got he only can only work so much before he goes into april he's count yeah yeah well because we know i'm used to saying hey where's officer dave's but
024we know that he's had a little bit of an influence in the transition because the officer that we'll be gaining studied under him and was trained by him so we're really excited to to have her uh join us as well but tonight tonight's about you officer davis and we wanted just to give you the opportunity if you wanted to say anything to the board uh members um this is a an investment that the board made a year ago 2019 i think was the first year that actually had a school resource officer with the city of batavia and i think we had mr lawrence here for a short amount of time and officer davis has been mainly our person so i just wanted to say thank you on behalf of the board and everyone here in
025the district and just present you with a little certificate of recognition and if you want to say anything feel free or if any of the board want to see anything sure i'll talk briefly first we'll keep you here all the way this was unexpected for me this wasn't the original plan it's a good thing i don't want you to think it's a bad thing some of you i've already spoke to the hardest decision of me retiring was leading the school and that weighed on me very heavily it still weighs on me very heavily today the students staff the board amazing if i was on the road it wouldn't have been a question to retire like working with all of you folks in all your buildings and everything has been absolutely outstanding one thing i've done
026throughout my whole life is try to reach children try to reach kids from being a scout leader in alexander for years to even at the beginning of my career i did a lot with juveniles when i worked in the southern tier getting back to some of them roots was outstanding and amazing for me and i'm gonna miss you guys and i'm gonna miss being here officer stevens is coming in my place i will have her for eight weeks to help train her even further with the school so i'm looking forward to that but please know that you have a great community here and i've served it for just over 20 something 20 somebody and it's been a pleasure so thank you can you get a big picture officer davis before we move on with the
027rest of the agenda we're going gonna have you stand here and the board arms can go around so we can take a quick picture thanks i'm trying to get this giant hop in my head absolutely i'm just gonna take selfies the whole let time put you in the middle nick's our camera guy here all right we got a yes sir yes make sure everybody smiles thank you nick thank you awesome davis thank you that's right and uh just the uh rest of my updates just a verbal update just uh kind of quick comprehensive just wanted to update the board did send the communication out to our families early this morning uh just kind of welcoming them into the women's history month obviously a big important uh month for us in this community many women that
028we stand on their shoulders and foundation and even our board members here lay the foundation set an example for many of our young ladies in our district uh but we did just remind the community on our 100 masking for when we're in school for less than six feet and the goal here is to not quarantine large numbers of kids and staff members the guidance says basically if you have your mask on regardless of your distance and the other person has your match down as long as you're not less than six feet you're you're not going to get quarantined before uh people would get quarantined if they were 20 feet away as long as they're in the same classroom so we want to make sure that that's clear for our parents this isn't meant to be
029punitive it's meant to limit the number of kids that get quarantined and limit the number of teachers that get quarantined if there happens to be a positive the the great thing is that uh our cases are down in the region i think we have 30 cases uh over the weekend which is great because it's a it's uh that includes saturday sunday so it's much lower than we've been our positivity rate is in the single digits i think it's like two percent a little bit above two percent which is great i also want to update everyone on the testing the new york state did apply for a waiver we were denied so i want to make sure that just people understand what that means we're going to still have to give the test to our in-person
030students only so you know if the student is not remote they will not be required to come in because they're 100 remote they won't need to come in to get tested the test will not count towards accountability on the school won't determine if a school is good or bad it'll be used more for a diagnostic type of informative reason same thing with our regions they will only be required for students who are in person and the new york state education department board of regents they're meeting this month to potentially decouple that with graduation requirements that's not something that we would do so potentially they won't even impact graduation so what that means is a kid will still be required to take their english exam graduate or their math or their science but they won't determine
031graduation so they'll still take it but it won't prohibit the kid from graduating if for some reason they got the level of 65 so just want to make sure you're clear if a student's in person they're going to be administered the exam but it will not necessarily determine graduation so obviously we know the year that we put students through in fact today is day 365 of when the first case was discovered in new york so today we've been it's one year and just uh march 13th would be a year for us was friday when we made the announcement to go fully remote so we're almost a year as well as a school of district yeah i wish it wasn't the other good news i want to share is uh trisha finnegan and brittany whitcop have
032worked really hard on our staff vaccinations we've worked with genesee county health department um after this wednesday we're going to be at about 92 staff members that we vaccinated and i think that's really huge and just really three weeks of vaccination so that's pretty that's pretty good and i give a lot of credit to uh mr paul petty director from genesee county health department who's worked with all the local districts to give us an allocation and so we receive an allocation that is proportional to our enrollment in the region so we get we get the most vaccines compared to this is where the one of the larger districts um so i think we will get almost through the full list uh in the next two iterations um so we'll be hopefully around 130 that we
033would have vaccinated i mean that's all we had signed up so we gave it optional to the staff members if they wanted to take it with us they could that was the option many of our staff members have done it on their own so you probably saw some legislation that we were required to report that we're no longer required to report that but our staff has graciously shared that information with our nursing staff so that we can kind of have an idea especially when you talk about quarantine if you have the vaccine you don't have the quarantine that helps with some of the other things so i want to make sure that and then the last piece which i think is probably the most significant in my letter today was reopening for five days there's
034nobody more than wants that than me because it's what our kids need it's what our staff needs our staff you know they're burning their candle to the very end in terms of hybrid teaching and managing both groups and so if the guidance changes and allows us and we believe that there's a conversation of it potentially changing we were going to work very diligently to turn around bring our kids back uh for you know five days in person and have that um and the reason why i wanted to bring this up is some neighboring districts are communicating that they're going to that and but we won't violate guidelines so i just want to make sure you know i don't know how they're doing it i haven't gone and investigated that but i will tell you from
035our standpoint if we could put more kids on the bus we would have already done it if we could have brought kids in five days more we would have already done it um and so if that changes please know that the team and i will be ready to turn around in a short amount of time to get our kids back and that concludes my thank you i know this year so that is the first time so uh cooper did win two sectional titles not just one two i don't know if you want to tell that story real quick that you told me but since eighth grade you could take your math yeah so since seventh [Music] since grade grade i've been top five ten times i think before this year and then i got second
036like four times it was less than a second every time so now this year i finally got something first place and his team the team would have went to states but they ended up canceling kind of states because of obviously the pandemic but our team would have went to states and he's got his cool hoodie that he won as a section of champion and he's also off to clarkson so that'll be our babies growing up thanks john for the reminder okay i have a motion for consent a second that came to me is there any discussion about any items out of consent yes okay did we decide what we're doing for mr patel i see it's on schedule c are we going to be doing that virtually and they're working on finalizing plans but this
037just basically pays yeah i just want to divert it up there yeah so the goal is if we can do it in a social different way i think they're going to try to do it in person and you know limit the number of attendees or and streaming on as well so there's a virtual component in person yes we should do a raffle the bigger challenge for us is the problem things that happen we're trying to figure out what that comes out so we believe that part of this new guidance is going to give schools guidance on prom as well and potentially follow like the wedding guides perfect thank you any other discussion saying something please mr yes yes yes next we go on to new business 2021 election nomination to the board genesee valley educational
038partnership yes i need a motion to accept this nomination to the board so motion made by mr cicery is there a second second second by police murphy is there any discussion no discussion okay every call the vote please yes yes yes yes the next item under new business is national center for education research and technology insert renewal i need a motion to accept this renewal come on motion made by ms murphy is there a second so protected by mr sissary is there any discussion seeing none would you call the vote please yes yes and the third item under new business is annual district election voter registration appointment of election inspectors i need a motion to accept the list of election inspectors mrs bromley is there any discussion saying done please yes and then we have
039reports we have no reports today you can share the audience okay this evening you want to do it sean i don't think i'm ready this evening uh the audit committee met and we reviewed the claims auditor findings and internal audit two reports the additional audit procedures that they did testing from last year and the risk assessment from this year and then we also reviewed the where we are as a budget for preliminary budget for 2021-22 and just a reminder our next budget meeting board of ed budget meeting is tomorrow night and it will be straight online thank you i need a motion to go into executive session please thank you all thank you congratulations again