001this is very large yes [Music] okay [Music] yes [Music] thank you [Music] right [Music] these are [Music] so britney is just going to have this out do i get to take mine with me do i get to take my stream i sign with me when i go you sure thank you are we officially yes all right you're good to go if we can reconvene our meeting to open session the board has been in executive session since um six o'clock uh well hold on i'm gonna take that back um the board was in executive session from six o'clock to 6 30 to discuss two legal matters and a confidential personnel matter and then from 6 30 to 7 we had our 2022 tenured faculty reception um if we could all stand for the pledge of allegiance
002i 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 and justice for all we could have introductions wendy sampson meredith moriarty willow bear jonathan fishbein dave hurst christine beck holly dallinbaugh and jody monroe uh first up on the agenda is the approval of minutes it is recommended that the board of education approve the minutes from the may 18 2022 regular board meeting any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries three are meeting reports and next is our superintendent's report sure thank you just for all of the new people in the room this is our first meeting in this room we're not normally this unorganized so i just want to put that out there so
003um i do think it's important to mention the school shooting that took place in uvalde texas last week i cannot imagine the grief the community is struggling with i have received numerous emails from parents asking about our safety plans and also offering suggestions and concerns i want to reassure the community that we do have our district safety plans and teams as well as the building plans in place these are updated annually we'll be following up on these plans and working with the local police to address ways that we may better improve our plans uh taking into consideration what parents have asked us to consider we do realize the importance of our safety measures and we'll do all that we can to make our schools as safe as possible if parents are concerned about their how
004their children are handling their feelings we did provide some resources for families but we also have counselors in all of our builder buildings that students can uh speak with i also wanted to congratulate our boys tennis team who is headed to states um i think next weekend is that correct chris next week 10th i thought yeah next weekend so we want to wish them the best of luck in the tournament and next we'd like to recognize our tenure candidates so do you want to do a motion or do you want to yeah why don't we do the motion first um our tenured faculty are farther down on our agenda but let's move them up um i have a motion to move item 6a up on the agenda to right now [Music] it is recommended that
005the board of education approve the following professional personnel action items one through twelve any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions promotion carries and we have certificates for all of you so we are going to dave are you going to announce them do you have the list there and then yeah let's go here they look like they're in alphabetical order while you're getting that set up i just want to say so as teachers are recommended for tenure throughout the year were presented by your school principal and given sort of a background of who you are and what they've witnessed in the classroom and why such an important addition to the district and it's one of our i'll speak for myself it's one of my favorite parts of coming to board meetings and getting
006sort of a glimpse into what goes on on a daily basis into the buildings that we don't normally get to see so it was really exciting to meet everybody who i've already heard about but to put a face with it and congratulations to everybody all right i bought time you're all set um first up we have liz carlton who is a counselor here at the high school [Applause] next we have a mick domell who is a phys ed teacher at slanderlands [Applause] jessica gallo who is a speech language pathologist at eagle elementary [Applause] marissa hock an ela teacher at the middle school [Applause] lisa hertz who is a social worker at the middle school kristen jordan an elementary teacher at eagle elementary [Applause] ali kosik who is a music teacher at the middle school and
007ellesmere [Applause] brianna coogler is a facts teacher at our middle school sorella paluso a social worker at eagle [Applause] joanna perrino a teacher at glenmont elementary brian spina a math teacher here at the high school matt urban teacher eagle elementary jess van warmer a social worker at the middle school [Applause] david wagula a teacher at glenmont elementary [Applause] and nicole winklereck a math teacher at the middle school [Applause] i would just say congratulations to all you guys we're so excited to have you tenured and with us do you need to do like a little bit of size order there some forwards on that [Music] there we go all here right go okay i think i've got it congratulations [Applause] yes we want to make sure you don't have to stay yeah it's okay you are
008welcome thank you i told you alone hey okay all right and next i'd like to introduce dr leticia ellis williams she we had the pleasure of her being with us all day today and she's being recommended as our new chief diversity equity and inclusion officer and i know her appointment is later on in the agenda but she has many family members here who have a little bit of a trek to go back home tonight so we thought we would uh give you a little uh lead time to get headed out so um i don't know if you want to move that yeah let's do this the same thing that we did for our our tenured faculty um if uh the motion to move item six b on the agenda up to [Music] this point [Music]
009okay it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approve the following uh separated professional personnel action item number one for the appointment of the chief diversity equity and inclusion officer any discussion all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries would you like to say a few words latisha you are you did say today you said you're a talker so you do we you should use the microphone though only because we um we do live we do stream the meetings okay and so that way if anyone's listening they can well i just want to thank the board of education um miss monroe and the committee and the panels that interview me for this wonderful opportunity to join bethlehem central school district i'm really excited about this work and i'm eager to
010roll my sleeves up my email is effectively working today my start date is july 1. feel free to schedule a conversation or a meeting with me july 1. [Laughter] and again i thank you and i look forward to this work and thank you to those who came to introduce themselves and i want to thank my family and my colleagues were coming up from long island today my mom my aunt nissi my linda my husband dr williams mark pettison tasha tim my brother nick i thank you so much i have an amazing village and they definitely showed up for me today so thank you [Applause] i'll just say welcome we're very excited to have you here and like we said before you do not need to stay and thank you to her family for coming up
011and supporting her that's amazing thank you bye time [Laughter] um that does conclude superintendent's report for tonight okay anybody have any questions for jody um moving on to our board report um first i just wanted to note i know there's a number of concerts that are happening at the middle school and the high school over the next couple of weeks if anybody is interested in attending them but does not have the relevant information let me know i'm happy to get it for you also on june 10th 11th and 12th here at the high school the vj catch group is performing right here in d122 they're going to be doing midsummer night's dream and i hear it's going to be a good production so if anyone feels like a little shakespeare in the middle of june
012come check it out i don't have i don't know anything about tickets or anything yet but i assume we will hear about that sometime in the next next week it's in this room right it's yup they're gonna they're doing it in here that's my understanding it's gonna be strange because any time i ever saw it it was not air conditioned in june it will be a treat indeed indeed and that is that's all i have i don't know if anyone has anything else they wanted to add i do apparently um over the weekend bethlehem hosted the state tournament for ultimate frisbee and i would like to say that a good time was had by all our players played well and i was here sunday for the more you know non-rainy day of festivities and it
013was hot and beautiful and um and they played very very well so yay bc altima anybody else i just wanted to say we all attended both the forums over here attended the awards ceremony for the seniors and some of some of the juniors and it was nice to see all of our students being recognized for their hard work over their four years and so that was a good event that's i attended um last night ellesmere had its um choir and orchestra and band concerts at the middle school and we were told that it was the first concert in the middle school since 2020 and it was just really wonderful to see all the kids back performing together and having a great time so i wanted to thank everybody who helped put together all the concerts
014and the only other thing i wanted to say willow thank you for saying that to all of the newly 10-year teachers that was very nice it's nice to see i was telling dave it's nice to see like i've had kids three kids graduate and just to see the teachers that are replacing the ones that retired it's nice and having the opportunity to learn more about them like willow said and to see you know what's coming in it's really makes me happy to see that we're replacing some of the great teachers we had with new ones so um like meredith i was able to go to the fourth and fifth grade band and choir performances for both hammock rail and for glenmont last week and cried uncontrollably through both of them i think well for a
015number of reasons but it was it was just so nice to be back in the school building which for most parents is the first time we've set foot in there in quite some time and to see what our kids are working on and to meet their teachers in person and it was really nice and there's all kinds of end of the year events sort of back to normal which is incredible um and i guess i wondered whether we've had any issues with any of that or we've just slid very comfortably back into more of a return to normal i assume if if we were having concerns we would have heard about them and it's it's really really really exciting to see some of that happening it feels really good yeah i haven't heard any i
016think it's a little for some parents it's a little odd because they haven't been in but i think generally once they're in and there's their kids are performing or they're in an activity the book fairs and all of that they're just thrilled right to actually be with their you know kids and their teachers and i think i've heard nothing but positives you could feel the parents sort of remembering how to interact with one another the way our kids probably did like a year and a half ago right sort of awkwardly sitting around like remembering how to interact without masks very funny uh next are our student reports but i think we have someone here from the student center she feels very alone i know this is i was like oh it's a full house and
017then everyone disappeared um i don't know which one's worse i'm sorry that i haven't been here in so long i became super busy with the track but um i'm the student senate president this is probably my last meeting um it's been lovely to speak in front of you all this year um a few updates from student senate we ran the blood drive with the red cross last week which went very well we were overwhelmed with high school and staff members who signed up which was very nice we actually ended up having to turn away uh students because the red cross was understaffed but we met our goal and we provided 40 pints of blood i believe which was really nice we were the high school participant in the canstruction which is where students brought in
018canned goods and a senior for her senior art portfolio actually created an art piece out of the canned goods i believe it's says bc and i think that's being displayed in the library if i'm correct if you want to check it out on your way out um junior prom happened uh which went well and senior ball is this week uh which is exciting and i believe that is it oh and our elections for next year are happening sign ups were this week and we will send out the uh voting form hopefully at the beginning of next week and that is all is there any questions okay thank you so much it's been a pleasure thank you for um your service on the student senate and for coming to keep us informed and where are you
019off to in the fall i'm going to see you boulder in colorado [Laughter] next up is our presentation and tonight our presentation is a follow-up on the bell time discussion okay so much of this presentation you've seen before it's just a recap to the information presented and um we had a request if we could get feedback from students so dave domel dave hirst and i went to the senior classes because that's a group of students who were actually here when the committee convened to look at bell times they were actually remembered it so basically what i shared with them i pretty much did the presentation that i shared with the board and that there's two models that we could consider moving forward and basically model a is what we have now model b is reversing
020the start times for the middle school in the high school and and gave them this information and then the next slide we shared what the period schedule would look like in model a so again similar to what we have now currently and then model b showing that the middle school the time they would need to arrive and what that night because they have a nine period day versus the eighth period day and what the after school time would look like um the next slide so um in the student uh presentation i shared with them some of the concerns that we had talked about with both of the models and obviously the goal was trying to get the high school back to the 8 o'clock start time i also talked about the middle school piece where
021students would have to wait for the late bus because of the middle school ending that early so they would have to wait at the middle school for about an hour and then be transferred to the high school uh so i i provided that those kind of bullet points and basically you can see these are the advantages and disadvantages with the start time this is related to model a and you can see some specific comments that the students had we did get to all the senior classes so this is a pretty good representation of what summarizes their their thoughts on this it was kind of interesting because the seniors were very concerned about how this would impact the middle school students they felt that that after school time was a big problem they talked about how
022with high school kids uh they're more flexible they're not reliant on their parents as much to get to and from different places so you know obviously in model a this is pretty much the current schedule there's no impact on the student athletes or cte students they do have a little bit more after school time and the one thing and you'll see on the next slide even even losing 10 minutes or so at the after school time for the high school kids was seen as detrimental uh for them so we go to the next slide you can see that they outline more disadvantages they did address the middle school students you know that they also would lose sleep over this but that really wasn't their primary concern they really had a hard time with thinking about
023middle school kids have getting out so early which i think willow you had brought up about the concern about especially sixth graders being done that soon and not really having much to do after school they also talked about a lot of them who are seniors had middle school siblings who they often would go and pick up or bring things to so they really felt that the after school time was a big problem for the middle school students and having to wait that long to actually get home because if you're if you um do kind of the pragmatics on that with middle school not leaving for 3 45 and then coming to the high school for a transfer bus they're technically done at 2 15 in the afternoon and some of them would not get home
024till 5 o'clock if they're taking the late bus so that was a big concern they also did have significant concerns about even losing 10 minutes on the after school time for a couple reasons that's generally a time when students make up exams if they're absent and so not having 40 closer to 45 minutes would be problematic in making up exams there were quite a few kids who talked about that's kind of their down time if they're participating either in an after-school sport where they have time before their sport might start to have something to eat or relax or get some homework done the general consensus i would say was that by pushing the high school back you're essentially pushing back the after school activities or some of them who work wouldn't be able to work
025till later and they felt like you're then pushing all of their their other things later which in turn will end up staying up later or not getting as much done until a later time they wouldn't be home for dinner until later they wouldn't have those things they're also identified the athletes who have to travel to some of not so much for practices but for games they would not have access to the after school time and then the cte students who we have you know i think i shared about 40 to 45 students in high school who participate in cte those students would have to come in at the 7 30 time in order to actually get to cte for the morning session so um in general the what the outcome was in the conversations with
026the kids was basically if you can get back to a two-tier system we fully support the eight o'clock time but other than that they felt that the cons did not make sense for all the you know the advantages did not outweigh the disadvantages right now with the current uh driver shortage okay so can you remind me though jody ignore the the middle school piece just just the high school start and end for model b how different was it than what we did it's the year we pushed the title in order to get the 45-minute turnaround time we were starting the high school closer to eight this puts it closer to 8 15 so in order to still end by the end of the teacher work day it it shortens the after school period that 255
027by 10 minutes so part of that is the transportation piece to get the turnaround time we also shortened the period length right so that we could end and still have 45 minutes at the end of the day but with the new regulations for 990 hours we would not be able to do that i gotcha yeah some of those some of those concerns are things that we've heard when we made the decision to move high school and we decided the benefit outweighed some of those concerns so those aren't new as is well the the af the after school time is just because of the hour requirement but yet that wasn't part of our discussion then but okay thanks yeah so where to i don't personally see that with the three-tier bus system that it's feasible to
028move the high school to the later start time thank you for doing this extra work i know this was something we asked of you to do and i wanted to thank the high school students for it seems like they gave you a lot of very useful feedback and i think it says um a lot about our students that they thought more about middle schoolers and the impact of their whole family i mean that really speaks a lot to their character i'm someone who's really in support of starting high school later but it does not seem possible to me um with what we have to do with the bush driver shortage at this point these you know seeing seeing these impacts the pros and cons i you know i agree with what the high schoolers are
029saying is that you know obviously it's a huge thing for them to be able to to have an extra half hour 45 minutes to sleep in the morning but if we are losing so much including the time that they need to relax in in the afternoon healthy eating the fact that cte students wouldn't be able to appropriately go to their programs high school athletes would have to choose between you know getting to their sports on time or you know sometimes missing the end of classes i mean it just doesn't seem like it's possible unfortunately this year i think that the downsides for the middle school really for me push it over the edge i was always in support of moving the high school time and still would be and i think if we could focus
030on getting back to the the two-tiered system instead of switching everything around for what might just be one year just doesn't judy can you remind us how many more drivers we need to get back to a two-tier system if you if you know 15 to 20. i think it's 15 20. yeah because with the time um i think when we were doing now that was somewhat before um we did some rerouting and looked at some efficiencies but in general i think we needed about 75 drivers to be able to run it a two-tier system and we're down to under 60 currently i'm sorry please go ahead was there some more work happening to get more reliable data about walking distance and how changing ridership in a real way might reduce so yeah one we were
031actually talking the other day about one of the areas maybe we should spend a little more time focusing on is the high school ridership because you know we tried to get people to commit yes i want transportation and that really didn't go well and we didn't get good information people just signed up just in case they ever needed the busing but i think that that is potentially an area at the high school level because we have less kids riding in general at the high school level and over the course of this year you can especially in the spring you see a decline in kids riding so maybe there's some efficiencies we can garnish in looking at high school runs specifically and look at that a little bit differently which maybe could free up some capacity
032for other levels but i still think we would need a good number of more drivers in order to you know really go but that's definitely an area we can look at or eligibility we kind of pause that because it did the bell time in eligibility did work together in some ways so but we can certainly revisit that maybe looking that in terms of high school ridership and eligibility that might be an area to focus on for the coming year and see if we can come up with some creative solutions yeah i don't it just doesn't seem like we're gonna magically hire 15 new people at a time so it's going to have to be right a multi-piece solution right i think it would be good for the board to i think make a positive statement
033that we are looking to go back to an early start time it's something that we worked hard to get to uh it's not something that we're going to be able to get back to quickly but i think the board has an obligation to the community given all the work that the community members did that the board members did to see that through and it's a long-term it's a long-term situation it's not something we'll get to right away but when you're talking about efficiencies at the high school and ridership aren't there certain aren't we required to provide transportation to is it everyone that wants it or is it everyone that that attends well everyone who's eligible so anyone who's eligible we are required and that's where it gets tricky because that's what we were trying to
034do last year is you know if you're not if you're not generally taking the bus please let us know because then we can actually do our routes based on true ridership but we weren't very successful in trying to get people to commit because there were things i mean i heard comments well what if my kid is playing on a sports team and practice gets canceled that day i want them to be able to take the bus so those parents would just sign their kids up to yes i want to take the bus and they might have written it twice all year or never all year so that's one of the challenges because we can't just say no aren't those situations rare those situations would rarely come up right and they're not all going to come
035up at the same time so that everyone who's eligible is going to necessarily ride the bus right at the same time right so maybe if you looked at actual ridership yeah and did it you know designed it that way with a little extra right figure out how many extra you need and design it that way and i know karim did that this year in part due to necessity because we didn't have enough drivers where there were some routes that were consolidated and looking at who's scheduled to be on our buses and who's actually riding the buses um you know but it would be more helpful if people who it's only occasion i need this just please say i don't need it and then contact us if you find yourself in a situation that you need
036transportation especially the middle in high school because most days we do have a late bus option so the worst case scenario is you might have to wait around for the late bus but you will get you home um but and every child has to be seated on these buses yeah right so the other thing i wanted to see if we can't go to the start school later this coming year and it's going to be a wait and see as the bus shortage diminishes it was never supposed to be for this coming right it was it was supposed to be for the following year right i'm sorry can we this coming school year like get a little more detail so we can avoid if that does happen in the future unintended consequences so now we need
037more hours of academics to kind of get an idea when are the sports buses leaving how much time that actually really leaves for the after school help or making up tests because even if we can do this there are some other issues that have come up since we formed those committees correct that delays the day and we have a large number of students so maybe if we get an idea how many kids you know next year actually come in for after school health like maybe teachers can kind of keep track of that a little bit just to give us an idea of what that would mean we already know how many kids place sports by the sign ups but what times are the buses for sports actually leaving versus what we say so sometimes buses
038leave that all the kids get on the bus at 2 30 a half an hour before they're supposed to actually leave school and if it gets out later how's that going to impact that if they're still leaving early for the sports games and are they going to have enough time to play in the sunlight so there's a lot of things that have changed since those committees have occurred and we can use this time next year maybe to get some of that info and i would say in general especially this past year and i know this is true for other districts a lot of the sports the games and things were delayed to a later time because every district didn't have enough buses so you're doing your regular transportation at the end of the day you
039have to get the middle school and elementary kids home and athletics becomes is not is secondary to that so there were a lot of times that games got shifted later because of the lack of a bus or driver available so or we used some of the private transportation to get them there so but yeah we can absolutely have something to get an idea like are the matches having or games having trouble with daylight come fall and with the shift in the hours how much time does that really leave so we're saying 10 minutes but it really sounds like more like 20 or 30 in reality i don't know if it's that much but yeah we can track that yeah i also wanted to add you also in addition to studying ridership and walking changing the
040you know eligibility you should also look at you know what do the elementary school parents want i mean many districts have already moved their elementary school students to starting earlier and it's working in many other big suburban districts around us so i really think you might want to take a look at that because it really is more important to have the later start time for even if it's middle and high school even if we could get back to having 70 plus drivers to do the two the two-tier system it's really important to think about the needs of the older kids in general and you know the littler kids are up they're up they want to do this you know we you know that the parents probably i know some parents are would be looking forward
041to dropping their kids off on the way to work and and not having you know and just having to worry about school care so that that has been mentioned that's been mentioned a few times to me it's not up there so yeah but it but it has been mentioned in times and passing no so i i think there is a market for that and don't discount it don't say oh the teachers are not going to want to do it or nobody's going to want to do it because they haven't been asked right and you know it might not be as bad as you think it also there's is issues too that's what i'm saying though they haven't been asked they might it might not be they might not all balk at it they all might
042say well there's there's an advantage in changing that i think that's true wendy and i think that that's true not just for our staff we talk about contractual matters but also for families right because whatever is their family works better for families is also some of the responses we got when we put out those different models you know if you happen to have elementary children but that early you know you have three young kids and you're trying to get them ready to be at school by 7 20. that may be not be as attractive as it might be for other students so there's definitely it depended on everyone's situation i think is right and that's hard too right it's hard to predict because you know you are talking probably at this point at least two
043years if not three years out right and that's going to change a lot sure catherine do you have something you yeah um i just you know i think that there are no perfect options here there is no silver bullet there's not going to be an option that serves every family that serves every sport and that serves every um every situation at which point we have to go back and we have to look at what are our priorities as as a district and then work on ranking our choices from there at this point our priority has to be getting children and students to school that's important and so if what is going to work best for um if what is going to work best and serve the most students and the most families is keep his
044model a then i can i can stand with the the rising consensus on that however i just want to echo others statements in saying that based on a priority is based on the district's priorities and based on the work that's been been done to align our start times with those priorities i look forward to getting back to a later start time when it's feasible i also look forward to continuing to try to figure out the transportation puzzle because this is this is um i know i know we're not unique we're not alone and um but it is boy what a what a puzzle to solve so continuing to explore some of what what are the root causes and how can we address getting getting additional people in the door that's an open question i think
045i think we've done great things this year is there more that's an open question um and then just you know working uh with transportation and figuring out what other efficiencies and whatnot can be made which everybody has spoken to tonight so that's that's that's fine and i look forward to those continuing conversations as we work to figure this out in really unprecedented times and my hat's off to the administration to transportation to everybody who has been making this not just making it work but really rising real high and going above and beyond to make sure that things work as well as they have nothing's perfect but this is this has been good so uh thank you for all of your work i'm putting these different options together i hold my nose and enjoy the consensus
046because i do want a start time that that starts later but i look forward to continuing that conversation when it's when it's more feasible yeah and i don't there's i don't think there's any objection on the part of the teachers you know the the board the administration that getting back to that time is great if we can do it so we'll certainly continue to look at whatever we can to see how quickly we can do that yeah and to jonathan's point i think that we can continue to do that actively yep um to see you know how we can get back to a two-tier system if that's what we need and just keep talking about it okay right and a second echo that the transportation department did pretty well considering all the issues other local
047districts have had in terms of last-minute cancellations of classes um that we've only had a few buses laid here and there and not had to cancel any routes or not had any you know any real serious you know issues with that we've been extremely lucky and yes definitely hats off to the transportation department for getting us through this year yeah they've done a great job so uh yes i will be sure to go and thank all of them individually yeah so all right thanks thank you next on our agenda is recognition of public comment on an agenda item we do not have anyone with us so i'm going to move on from that [Music] we've already handled item 6a and 6b next on the agenda is item 6a it is recommended by the superintendent the
048board of education approve the following finance action items 1 and 2. any discussion all in favor aye aye any opposed any abstentions that carries um d professional personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approved the following professional personnel action items through 22 second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that carries uh e support personnel action items it is recommended by the superintendent that the board of education approve the following support staff action items 1 and 2. any discussion all in any favor [Music] any abstentions that carries f other action items i'm um sure if it's still up there my understanding is we're going to um table item four until our next meeting okay um it is recommended by the superintendent at the board of education
049approve the following action items one through three show move any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that carries um seven recognition of public comment on the order oh yes we are sorry we need to put it on the table we need a motion um so i shall move terrific second all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that carries seven uh recognition of public comment on a future meetings and events tomorrow thursday june 2nd from 4 to 6 norman side is the 2021-2022 retirement reception um on monday june 6th at 5 30 here at the high school there's an audit committee meeting on monday june 13th at six o'clock there's a policy committee meeting and then our next regular board meeting is on wednesday june 15th at seven i'm anticipating executive session at
050six o'clock we do need to go back into executive session to discuss a personnel matter if i could have a motion to do so [Music] all in favor any opposed that carries a adjourning to executive sessions okay i gotta figure out a way to not sit in a fan oh i know this