Bethlehem Central School District Board of Education 6/16/2021

001[Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] yup i can hear you can you hear me okay can you hear me now one two three four five six all right am i good to jump off [Music] um [Music] um one two 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 34 35 46 47 48 39 50. 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60. 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70. [Music] easiest 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. [Music] uh all right we have everybody can reconvene our meeting to open session the board

002has been in executive session since six o'clock to discuss the superintendent evaluation and confidential employment matter if we could all stand for the pledge of allegiance 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 and justice for all we have introductions dave hurst chris meyer willow bear jody monroe holly dellenbaugh meredith jonathan fishbein wendy sampson and judy kehoe and christine beck is not able to be here tonight first on the agenda um is approval of minutes it is recommended that the board of education approve the minutes from the june 2nd regular board meeting second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that carries uh and next is our superintendent's report thank you so i have

003a couple of uh student announcements on june 2nd a group of high school computer science students participated in the annual siena college high school programming contest there were 16 bc students and one team of four came out a top of head they came ahead came in first of 30 other teams across the state to win first place in the online competition i'd like to congratulate albie snyder nicholas uh rodosovich eric justil and charlie hee the team won by competing completing sorry five problems the most completed by any team in a record three hours and 16 minutes so i'm not really sure how that all works but it sounds great to me so congratulations to those students and the other 16 all the 16 students who participated i'd also like to congratulate our capital region mastermind

004champions ben goldberg caitlyn chung adam cohn david burin and ben eisenbraun won the capital region masterminds championships by winning five games in a row against many other excellent teams the regional champion was held virtual and they moved on to the state championship and i don't know if anyone knows if they won or not it was yesterday uh but i guess we'll find that out and bethlehem has won the new york state masterminds championship seven times since 2006 and it's coached by paul o'reilly a teacher at the high school so congratulations to those students as well i also want to address some emails we have received about whether or not we are teaching critical race theory in our schools i do think it's important to clarify that critical race theory is not a curriculum there appears

005to be a widespread misunderstanding and misuse of the term what it means and how it relates to k-12 instruction critical race theory is an academic concept that was introduced by a group of legal scholars in the 1970s the core idea is that racism is a social construct and that's not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but also something embedded in legal systems and policies recently the term critical race theory is being misinterpreted as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts in schools which i believe has led to some confusion critical race theory is not a synonym for cultural relevant teaching something we strive to practice in our schools this teaching approach seeks to affirm students ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous one of its aims is to help students identify

006discuss and think critically about the causes of social inequality in our own life bc does support culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for all students in our schools we teach history in a part of teaching history is addressing how individuals and groups have been discriminated against both in the united states and the world this includes discrimination based upon race gender religion religion cultural sexual orientation etc this is a part of teaching history and is what we will continue to do finally i'd like to wrap up by thanking our teachers staff students and families for all their support flexibility and dedication as we navigated what was certainly one of the most challenging years if not not the most challenging year that any of us can remember or will remember

007when we began the year none of us knew how we were going to navigate this year and we had some bumps in the road but here we are at the end of june and beginning our plans for next year we could not have had as much success without the joint efforts of everyone so thanks everyone for a good year and finally my last comment is thank you to chris meyer his last board meeting with us it's been a pleasure having you on the board and we will miss you and if you get bored at all over the summer or next fall feel free to join us for a meeting in person hopefully so that's my report thanks any questions for jody next up is the board report first off i wanted to congratulate the cast

008and crew of macbeth i had the opportunity to see it in person but it is available to watch now through on youtube and i particularly wanted to commend ms edgar for finding a way to really be inclusive with the students that wanted to be part of it even including students that were virtual and not able to be in the building to perform and rehearse but it is a great show and if you haven't had a chance to look at it i encourage you to check it out i also wanted to thank all of our elementary staff for working to put together the spirit slash field day today that took place at all the different elementary schools i know it was different from pre-covered times but it was well received and really made the kids very

009happy and i you know also recognizing that we have i guess one week to go as of today um wanted to echo what jody said and thank our students and families and our teachers for all of their hard work this year and also our administrative team particularly you jody for really keeping everything on track and keeping our schools open this year it was a absolutely enormous job and we really appreciate it thank you and you already thanked chris so i don't even have to do that again um oh do it again i'll do it again i feel like we should applaud [Applause] anyway thank you we have really valued your your thoughts um and your sense of humor and uh both will be missed well i just want to say thank thank you to both

010of you and thank you to everybody i i loved my three years doing this like i i sometimes you could make the assumption well he's leaving after three years he must have hated it well no i love it it's just i have two little kids that i want to go to all their baseball games and i want to be there for all those things and i never ever want to over commit myself and promise something to someone that i can't follow through on so i know there'll be a point when my boys are teenagers and they have no desire to be around their father and at that point i think that i i definitely want to get back into public service but for the time being you know this is the decision but i i

011love this this was this was great i i enjoyed working with all of you um and i just thank you for this great experience thanks um [Music] the policy committee did meet um just before we had our meeting tonight and we took a look largely at the annual the policies that need to be reviewed on an annual basis um which will show up at our organizational meeting and then i knew there was also an audit committee meeting um jonathan if you are willing to say a couple words about that yeah we uh we went through um the we had a discussion of the um of the commencement of the new audit haven't decided exactly what we're going to audit but there were some ideas across around we also renewed we we signed the the the

012agreement for the new uh the new order with with questar was jody it's marvin that we did it's marvin mark with the new contract with marvin because the contract was up we did a bid process and we decided to stay with marvin again they've done an excellent job for the district so we decided to stay with them there's also um on the agenda tonight we're accepting the the board hopefully will accept the internal auditor annual risk assessment report uh we also had a brief discussion of the con the concussion management uh audit and the um um the other one i think that was it would which i chris right con the concussion management that was that was the attendance what the attendance one the the we did the um or was that no the attendance

013right the attendance uh audit because we were looking at attendance and um you know how that was being tracked so that also um that also is is on the uh agenda for tonight correct great thanks did anybody have anything else that they wanted to add um i have one thing um this goes back to the discussion we had on on the artificial turf i last weekend was at a attended a funeral and stayed over with one of my former skating students and her family and she was had a basket of laundry and i saw these little black teeny pellets in it and i can pass these around these this is crumb rubber this is the crumb rubber that is what is the filler for the artificial turf i was told that she gets anywhere from

014a half cup to a cup every time her kid plays her son is a senior and plays soccer on artificial fields the the stuff does get into the uh dryer and the washer mechanism and i don't know to what extent it causes problems i do know that they have somebody come in every three months to vacuum out the dryer the washer make sure that you know it's not causing internal problems those are very small particles now and this was after it had gone through the washer in the dryer there's still particles falling out of the clothes so i i'm just saying thinking it's just another thing that we need to consider is this something we really want to be doing i really haven't come down on a side i don't know is the risk worth

015the reward i i don't know but i'm concerned i also have pictures which i'm happy to share of her son's leg which i mean yes he's playing high level soccer but the injuries are you know are a lot and and i'm the open scar areas the crumb rubber gets into it they have to pick it out um and i know that you know dave in the hallway when i showed it to him he said to me that you know he's played on it and it's safer than than grass so i don't know where to come down on this but i think this is one more thing that we at least should find out a little bit more about thanks jonathan holly i just wanted to mention that we had the last um the end of

016the year meeting for the parent advisory group for the special ed program it's not a board committee but i do sit on that committee as a parent and we went over sort of lessons learned from this year and regrouped about what priorities we might want to look at for last year so just wanted to read out a little bit the the general topics that came up last night were the the new reading program for the fall which everyone's very excited about which will roll out for special ed and rti level three and so we had a lot of discussion about that and talked about wanting to regroup with parents sometime through next school year to sort of get some feedback about how that's working with students but that was very well received we talked about

017wanting a night where we could learn more about executive functioning and how to address behavioral issues and other concerns that come up with kids who have limitations on executive functioning we talked about mainstream and inclusion and how we could continue work to better that in the district there were concerns raised about transparency and communication with families both through the cse process but also with the district in general the the number one um example that was raised was the extended school year for the summer being shortened and parents not having sort of a heads up about that so we talked through some of those issues we talked about having some more post-graduate pathway presentations for next year where maybe we would bring back students who have graduated and gone on to a variety of different programs

018or vocations and there was a lot of concerns and you know it's the end of the year so this is on everybody's mind but there are a lot of concerns raised about um k-5 students having to switch buildings because of program needs for co-taught or skills programs and i know that that comes up at the end of every year and it's an ongoing issue i personally sat with kathy for two hours a couple weeks ago and looked at where all of the programs were and all the k5 buildings to sort of think about how we could reduce the need for students to switch around halfway through school i know that students adjust because that's what kids do but it does create a lot of emotion for a lot of families and a lot of students

019and a lot of sort of trauma and then having to graduate from an elementary school where you don't really know that many people your parents don't know any of the other parents it's it's just not ideal so there was a lot of concerns raised about that so that i presume that will be an ongoing discussion into next year as well thanks willow anybody else uh next on our agenda are our i'll say presentations this evening um first up is uh our potential facilities improvement project um overview of capital needs by judy and greg nolte and drew jones good evening again oh that's loud um so this is the fifth presentation on the potential facilities project hmm you're unauthorized i know why britney is too much like hal from 2001 from me [Laughter] now she's our

020page next slide all right so um as you are aware our team has uh basically pared down this five five-year facilities plan uh to about 36 million dollars worth of various projects we've had four previous meetings where we've familiarized the board and community with the highest and largest projects we've talked about synthetic turf we've highlighted five components from each each of the buildings and provided various information to the board and community tonight we're going to be providing some more information that you requested last meeting and as as always we have drew jones our district architect on standby if i can't answer a question so reiterating from previous presentation um bethlehem's aid ratio consistently hovers around 70 percent uh the most important fact uh is that this is a budget neutral uh proposal uh the debt

021service is fully offset by the building aid due to the significant amount and use of our capital reserve so this is basically uh good news and i understand judy that you have additional more news for the board yes so related to capital projects the capital project that we just completed we're financing 27 million dollars and we sold those notes today and we got an interest rate and that interest cost of 0.168 percent for a one-year note which is wonderful there were six companies who bid on that debt so it was a very competitive range and that's great news for the district because you can it doesn't cost you very much on this 27 million dollar note for one year it's going to be about 45 000 only in interest so good news good time to

022borrow um so tonight i'm going to be talking about additional information that you want to hear from the stakeholder group meetings that we've been holding for the past couple weeks we talked a little bit about the middle school tennis court refurbishment and the scope and the cost that you may want to consider roof comparisons um and then synthetic turf uh the film material comparison and our recommendations on that so um back one please so we have 10 stakeholder groups uh that we've had various meetings on so far they consist of various administrators supervisors teachers support staff and coaches the goal is to solicit input and information to refine the project scope and the design approach we want to assure that the end product of what we end up building is is exactly what the users

023want and need so at previous meetings i've talked about the feedback that we received from uh the synthetic turf group uh the middle school auditorium group the middle school lmc group you can go to the next slide but recently we met again with the the facts group and they basically are looking for a number of things they want to improve the classroom and the kitchen space to provide state-of-the-art teaching area and learning environment if you've been to both of those uh fax rooms at the uh the middle school they're in rough shape with the increased use of microwaves and hot plates we're continuously blowing circuits and and trying to update the service there so one of the items that they would like is basically sufficient utilities for all of this new equipment right now we

024have a lot of kids in specific kitchens too much for them to actually learn so we would actually create one shared kitchen that will have about seven students student stations and then a teaching demonstration station we actually have one here at the high school uh with a little camera over it and this way all of the staff all the students can see uh what the teachers are working on and then we would have instead of uh the rooms being downstairs and upstairs uh we would have proximal classrooms here so that that meeting was just held on june 9th a june 1 meeting was held for the technology rooms they're looking for flexible spaces to allow the upper curriculum to be taught to the younger students they use words like multi-use collaborative inspiring they're also looking

025for quite a bit of technology in these rooms next at slanglands for the basement classrooms well they wanted to basically change the perception of these rooms instead of basically being the basement classrooms more of like a fine arts uh uh area um we would move the otp room upstairs and basically better utilize those uh four rooms that are downstairs um they want to make it fresh and on par with the other classes in the school by adding basically new ceilings and and basically upgrading the the finishes there so that meeting was held on june 1. uh both glenmont and hammer girl have what we call pit areas uh these are like the sunken areas as you walk into school they're over to the right they're in the 91 wing there and basically they're they're kind

026of focal points in the schools and have multiple purposes they've been used for one-on-one speech eight assignments otpt the thousand book club tutoring uh meeting place for student enrichment uh it's just been each school had various uses for that space but um they wanted to keep the pit concept but basically just kind of update it improve some of the storage and caseworks that is around it maybe include some technology um acoustics it's in that open area so uh and sometimes students pass by so it's a little difficult to teach if you are one-on-one and change carpet to resilient flooring just because the carpet set there is basically 1991 so so that was the concept for the pits um we had two kitchen matings one hammer grill they indicated that they that the the flow and

027the functionality of the line uh is is good um but they're basically looking to improve the ventilation of course new uh appliances over the years we've done various changes to the floor and there's some drain issues so we would basically correct that and of course upgrade the finishes if you've seen a glenmont kitchen that's what we did on the last project and it's pretty nice similar goals for the slingerlands kitchen but there we are looking to design a better flow for the serving line in the tray return and then the other thing that was part of this was also improvements to the cafeteria looking for acoustics ventilation floor and and upgrade the finishes in the cafeteria as well they like it or they would like it cheery inviting and safe transportation they suggested that they

028were looking for four administrative offices to meet the current needs there's an existing conference room and file storage they were looking to upgrade and improve upon that right now if you go there it's it's hard to know where to go if i if i'm a visitor so they want to create a welcoming public entrance and reception area uh we recently completed a an in-house project where we moved uh one of their admins up front to be to basically kind of help karem out there and basically receive anybody that might be coming signage we would replace the four separate hvac systems with one high efficiency system and basically improve access to the area so that is in a nutshell very quick recap of all the group stakeholder feedback that we've received in the past couple weeks

029that we've had so the board meeting basically that the board wanted the team to review and report on middle school tennis courts reconstruction um i believe this was either a low it might have been a medium priority on the five-year plan um and basically there is a bank of six lockers uh six lockers uh six tennis sports here and two two here as well sorry yeah um according to the athletic director in the next two to three years the suburban council section two is leaning towards offering a modified level of girls and boys tennis okay and presently right now there are times that jv tennis both practices and have and have their matches there and of course fizzed uses the area as well so we looked at this and you know we would suggest at

030this point a full depth reconstruction of the courts of both sets of ports and that would include new coating new striping new fencing the nets the posts and of course appropriate grading and drainage and basically we came up with a cost of about 869 000 for this uh for this part of the proposal there was also a desire to consider a pavilion at the high school specifically at the stadium the pavilion there you can kind of see it uh right here this is that stone lot right next to the uh the new bleachers this is van dyke right here that's not the scale but it's the general idea but the pavilion could be used for an eating picnic area during events it could host year in celebrations college signing ceremonies the outstanding seniors award it

031would enhance and we could host outdoor education classes we're seeing more and more classes come outside it could serve as some protection and shelter in light to moderate weather it could be a meeting place for physical education attendance during the track and field unit when they're out here quite a bit and of course it would be an additional community resource there but we would be looking at maybe a 24 by 60 pavilion on concrete pad and we estimated that the overall cost would be about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars all right at the last uh board meeting we discussed the possibility of green roofs that led to some questions about uh black-colored roofs versus white-colored roofs which is basically epdm versus tpo roofs okay the bond project has existing tpo roofs that are out

032of warranty and that are beyond their useful life that are being replaced or proposed to be replaced at the high school middle school ellesmere and hammergrill all right so most of the district's roofs are already epdm um over the past couple projects uh that i've been involved with we've actually replaced the old tpo roofs uh with epdm because of some shrinkage and some seam issues that we've been having with the tpo the black epdm roofs actually aid in snow melting and draining water away this alleviates the weight on the roof during the winter times and also mitigates potential leaks with these with this proposal all the new roofs would have appropriate thickness of insulation which will help reduce any thermal gain into the building as far as warranty goes epdm typically comes with a 30

033year warranty where tpo roofs typically have less and we've seen anywhere from 15 to 25. so the project team does recommend epdm roofs for this project all right as well at the last board meeting we had some conversations about non-petroleum synthetic turf field options okay in the industry there is no turf system that is petroleum free okay the the grass part of it uh the backing uh the shock pad are only made with petroleum-based products okay there are however non-petroleum options for the turf or those those those small little pebbles that are spread throughout the grass that give you the cushion and and traction so we talked about these options back in the 19th and i'm going to touch upon them and again now so non-petroleum fill material all right one is envirofill all right

034this is an acrylic coated sand particle uh you heard from our architect and design consultant that this material was recently used at a school in western new york and they're not overly happy with it it's not as uh absorbent to shock for the athletes and it's more abrasive than the standard crumb ruther crumb rubber the school actually does plan on changing this material brock fill is actually wood particles engineered wood particles and this is a relatively new product without much use or testing yet our designers we've had conversations on this and they are not comfortable with recommending its use because they don't know how long it's going to last or how it's going to perform over time and i don't think that the district would be uh best served by being kind of one of

035the first ones on using this product so still stay here the cork fill um i mentioned uh is not suitable for this northeast region uh i it's i was told that it has a tendency to float in rain all right um so there are two options for petroleum-based fill material all right epdm basically is a virgin material that is made that is not that is not made from recycled recycled tires okay it is a newly manufactured material from petroleum products um sbr also known as crumb rubber that's the most common um and it's most widely used in synthetic fields and and this is at all levels even at the collegiate level as well as the pro level uh the cost is about five bucks a square foot uh and this is actually what has been

036recommended by our design team to use on this project so why are they recommending the crumb rubber uh well one it's it's most cost effective um it's the most widely used and commonly used uh it's time tested since there's not a petroleum petroleum-free synthetic turf system you know i guess why would we consider a non-petroleum product for just this fill material just this chrome rubber material so um the epdm is a newly manufactured project as i mentioned uh from petroleum sources if if as a district if we're if we're looking for maybe a greener approach for this aspect of the project then the crumb rubber is actually the way to go because it's a recycled product okay from the tires which would normally just go into a landfill so it's it's possible that this fill

037the crumb rubber would actually come from an existing field um and and might have already been recycled and reused so the design team is is is recommending to the board that we go with the most common and widely used uh material being being the chrome rubber okay question yes um so with the the sbr versus the edpm i was doing a little bit of side research um and it i guess it used to be at least and this is why i'm just curious i don't drew if you have any um information about this that the sbr the crumb rubber coming from recycled tires because it was coming from recycled tires it contained higher lead levels and i think benzene and some other chemicals in the rubber so i'm wondering i mean i get that it's

038more cost effective than the edpm but does if you go with the edpm are you avoiding those issues of lead and chemicals that might come along with the chrome rubber that comes from recycled tires yeah so i believe so um andrew maybe you can expand upon this um yeah you would eliminate certain potential okay because the lead probably is coming from your your steel belts that is basically removed i think that there is a washing mechanism that happens in the development of crumb rubber um uh i drew do you have anything to add as far as uh sure um so the i can't stress this enough the crumb rubber that is going to be used on this field or anything hold on a second okay yes can we turn him up at all okay sorry

039one two one two three four how do i sound now better bye-bye okay i'll continue thank you for working with me um so i can't stress this enough the creme rubber that is used in new fields is the vast majority of it has been used on previous fields this is not tires that came off the road yesterday were ground up today and then used on your field the other important thing to know here is that it's not simply ground up tires and then that's the end of it they are treated they are cleaned and then they are used um so i think probably early on when this when this material was developed there might have been some follow-on carcinogens or effects that come with it but today when you buy creme rubber it's been used

040many times it's been cleaned many times and it doesn't have as much of a risk in that arena as say if we ground up the tires off of my car and and use them uncleaned on a field as far as epdm is concerned there might be less of a risk there but again epdm is a product that is made the same way that the rubber for your tires is made and it's brand new it's made in it's made and new in the world and in a certain sense one of the reasons we're suggesting chrome rubber is the fact that it's already been used many times either entire form or in full form and by its continued use and frankly use after the turf field that we're designing here is decommissioned it'll be taken offline washed

041again and then reused again we see it as the greener option between the two just from a recycling standpoint and a material standpoint so i think that there are very there's very little risk with creme rubber from a lead standpoint certainly and we think that it's the more ecologically uh appropriate response when we're dealing with a petroleum-based full material to reuse material that's been used before rather than create brand new epdm to create the fill so if we want more information here um i can take this back to our landscape architects again um if we've got specific questions um but this is where we are this is where we are now right now and the information i'm comfortable uh sharing was it just strictly led the potential of increased that was one and there are

042a couple i mean i think i can't remember the other one i feel like benzene sticks in my head for some reason but lead in particular i know um i understand that in california there was some litigation with respect to lead levels in turf fields at schools and i understand i think that it was that litigation was settled and the manufacturers were going to address the lead levels but i just want to make sure we have all the information and that the manufacturers that we might be looking at are are conscious of i don't know whether they're they test the crumb rubber in their um facilities to make sure that you know those kind of things are not present so i'm not and and we can probably follow up with this you have certain standards

043astm that certain materials maybe have to follow i'm not sure if there's an industry standard testing that crumb rubber has to pass and be tested for drew do you know i don't know off the top of my head but every material that goes into the into these turfs has been very thoroughly tested and we have basically material data sheets uh for every component i think the the one we can we can certainly get to the bottom of the chrome rubber issue um and understand its materiality a little bit better and you can bet your bottom dollar that there are extensive testing from these manufacturers on all the materials and we can follow up with that if you'd like that'd be great okay can i say something real quick though like i think that we should

044look into these things like it's our kids safety you know it's their health and well-being so we want to make sure that all these things are looked in and we should look at all the possibilities because we do want to get the best one i just i'm thinking about it in terms of the turf field and i'm thinking okay well what if we don't get it like what if what if we say no to this and we don't get it well then our kids are going to go to aphroms on a turf field because they can't play in our field because they're wet or we're going to pay albany high school like we did again this year for their football so we can play on their turf field and then we're going to go play

045all our away games against our section two opponents on their turf fields and then they're gonna sign these kids to go to college and they're gonna go to college and play on turf fields so it's just like i hear it and i i i want to have an open mind and i do have an open mind and if there is you know if it's the epdm if it's the the brockville whatever like i doesn't i i wouldn't i'm have no you know issue with any of those i would be more than willing to investigate all of them it's just that if we say no to this it's not going to stop kids from playing on turf field they're just going to go to another field that we don't own and pay them to use their

046turf field and so it's not really stopping the problem it's just costing us more money so they can continue to play i'd just like to echo that the concern you know is real but millions and millions of athletes play on turf fields every day every year and we could only locate one lawsuit it seems like if it was a really dangerous product people would not be allowing their children to plan i would not happen that's all i'm saying i will say this though to holly like i think you're right i think when they started this process i think they just kind of slapped it together and there probably were some hot messes when this all started so i believe it i believe that lawsuit but i also believe that you know corrections were made and

047i think that there's been improvements in the process because there probably were mistakes made you know if we were the first place in the country to get a turf field i'd be like oh crap you know this is tires like this could be really bad but i feel more comfortable knowing that there are more and more places using it and all these fields in the capital district are using it you know i once again you know it's my last meeting so i can kind of ha ha and walk away from all this but as speaking right now i would consider any of those absolutely i have an open mind just for the understanding that one way or the other the kids are going to be playing on a turf field whether it's our field or

048the field that we pay somebody else to use and i should clarify it i have no idea if there's not more than one i just that was just i just happened to be doing a little side research and found that information so i can't speak to the numbers and but and i also just want to clarify that i'm not i'm not against it um i just want to make sure we're doing our due diligence oh and i think that's great i think i think we should you know it's you know we i think one of the great things about this board is that we truly pride ourselves and we care about these students you know their their safety is is really important to all of us you know and so that's something we really should

049be proud of you know and continue to investigate this but you know at the end of the day you know this just me speaking just me you know i just really i really think that we need this as a district just you know to maintain our level of programming that we have and also as a great community resource and like everything um synthetic turf fields have evolved over the decades that they have been around you know they used to just be you know put on concrete and you know they didn't have this the shock and so so the design is has evolved uh and the products have evolved okay so um we'll get back to the board regarding any standards regarding testing standards that whatever we spec have to have to attain um i just

050had a a question um on a different topic you mentioned the technology classrooms um that was in the middle school is that correct correct could you just uh talk to us a little bit about what those are going to look like are they going to look like our high school computer technology classrooms or or are these are what you're speaking of a different type of classroom um dave yeah yeah so it's it's actually most similar to the learning spaces that we just created in the lmc here okay they're looking for really wide open um flexible spaces so that you could work it's essentially two classrooms um maybe three depending on how ended up the final design ends up being but it could be used as one big huge open space where teachers could work with

051classes simultaneously on projects or you could divide it up into smaller learning spaces um but it's yeah not not like your um traditional computer lab there would not be computers in there i mean our kids all have chromebooks yeah so you know the days of computer labs outside of very specialized needs like some of our art classes have to use macs for the artwork that they're doing um so it would not be like a traditional computer lab would be a much more open space more like a makerspace concept okay with flexible seating um again the ability to do small group work large com buying classes work we also see it as a place that we could use for doing professional development with teachers after school because it would be just um you know kind of

052think of d122 similar to that even just a nice big open flexible space that allows you know single class multiple class to to work on their different technology needs so if you think about like sixth grade most of the technology work is around um basic computing and then seventh and eighth grade get more into engineering and design principles so again we're the space where kids can work on projects work collaboratively um or when when need be structured more like a classroom so this would these would be classrooms that teachers would like reserve no so these are classrooms that are already being used by so it's um right now tom michalek and um jim farnan their technology rooms um are sort of limited in just the way that they're structured so it's really just a more

053um give them a more modern space okay yeah they wouldn't be like free to sign out throughout the day because the tech classes would be in there okay i guess that's what i wasn't quite understanding thank you okay so a quick reminder about timeline our next meeting is july 6th we'll have another public meeting to refine scope and costs the timeline has the board finalizing the scope and the costs on august 11th and then the public vote on the 28th of september and then as i've said before we've done a great job on the website there's lots of information on it that's being updated there was literature that was sent out to residents about the potential project that was asked about last time okay so as far as next steps um i'm not sure if

054we want to make a decision whether or not you want to include the middle school tennis courts in the referendum at this point can i say something about the tennis courts real quick i would just like i want to thank christine because it's christine who brought it up you want to give her credit where credit's due um the tennis courts are one of the things the few things that the public this has immediate access to you know the track and the tennis courts those are things that the community can just hop on and to have those you know and to redo those i think would be just a tremendous upgrade and it would be very very useful i think something that you know when the public goes where's my tax dollars go we'll say oh

055you hit the tennis court here you can use it and anybody can use it and particularly if there is going to be modified tennis you know and you're trying to have three levels of tennis playing at the same time we're going to need them so i would be a big advocate for that they're in pretty good shape too aren't they greg when you guys went and looked at them yeah there's some pretty substantial cracks uh in them if you remember i think the last bond project we cut away the woods uh because we would always have moss and we still have quite a bit of leaves blowing from those very large trees the set of two is even worse because they are so much closer uh to the woods there so yeah they're not in

056great shape does the fencing need to be replaced because like does it have to get taken out to resurface yeah okay yeah and we for many years we used to have tremendous vines growing up through um uh it's it's actually in pretty bad especially the field side it's real bad and just in regard to the stadium pavilion um if you've looked at that space it's kind of a by the track it's an it's just a cement block right now so i'm not really sure what the purpose of was there a purpose for that well that was our staging area for many many many bonds where you had construction trailers out there before that it used to be the area where for football games you know the the families that would bring their kids that weren't

057watching the games they're over there and they're just throwing the football around uh there used to be concession right but why was there concrete poured there or it's just stone right now it's just stone stone so there wasn't a plan to yeah we put drainage in there so okay it's just stone and you know len key is calling pc at the leg director as uh you know he he would like to see that develop because he could see uh basically the list that i provided you are items that he suggested that he would like to see under that uh pavilion so what would um sorry what would each of these add to the cost and individually what would the cost to add each one of these into the project all right so the middle school

058pavilion we estimated at 150 000 high school high school pavilion thank you um and the middle school tennis courts was eight 69. 8.69 okay and the amphitheater so the amphitheater um um we that was a medium priority that we didn't spend a lot of time looking at we don't think that the vision of the middle school principles fits with what goes in front of that lmc so that would have to take a little more work initially it was estimated at 76 000 but knowing that they may be looking forward for a performance are they going to need electric uh we we don't that scope is really undefined at this point it was just a you know another outdoor open seating area that they were looking for um and we can look at that more if

059that's something you want us to do judy what would um i mean right now let's say it's uh a hundred thousand you're looking at about uh 1.12 million added to the to this what would that do as far as uh how much we would have to uh either is there more money out of the uh one of the restricted funds that we can use or do we have to bond it how does that work well we would get the authorization for the total project amount and then we would show the funding offsets which would be largely coming from the two separate capital reserves that we have set up when i do my presentation third presentation tonight looking at the uses of the federal monies we can also use some of those monies as an offset

060and i think using those monies which is new for our discussions tonight i think will keep us right on track with this budget neutral target that we're looking for so once we have these numbers i'll get you a more refined estimate but off the top of my head i think we're still budget neutral if we're looking at at staying budget neutral i think now is the time to jump on especially if we're getting interest rates like what judy was just able to do today so i'd be all four looking seriously at all three of these editions okay so what i would recommend is that um let us meet with the principles um with whatever stakeholder group find out exactly what they are looking for see if it's feasible where they were looking for it to

061be uh and then come up with a plan and report back to you and and uh what the scope would be and uh what the potential cost would be and i'm talking about the amphitheater on that as far as the um as far as the uh tennis courts and the high school pavilion that you pretty much have mapped out we've already done that yes okay all right not that i will be here at the next meeting but like it could be it could be you know you know i couldn't have a free wacky wednesday um to see pictures of the pavilion to see like what you're thinking of it being i think might be useful because it's like are we saying it's gonna be like the middle school pavilion is that the assumption um i

062actually showed one um yeah we can provide a picture of what we're thinking we talked about pavilions at each of the elementary schools and i think i gave an example in in one of the presentations um but i can show another one just so the group knows we had referred to those as shade structures so it's basically the concrete pad with the metal roof so we should hold on these two decisions at this point um i think we can i mean i think everyone is does anyone want any more information on those two pieces or are we good with that um no we didn't have a discussion of the amphitheater we would like that i think um but the tennis courts i think we're fine with and you know just a little more on the

063stadium pavilion what it's going to look like what the uses are um things like that the amphitheater came up when the stakeholder group was meeting about the lmc and there wasn't much discussion about it it's a question about how much use would it actually get is it look what would it look like in the front of the building like that you know they already have an outdoor stage and an outdoor pavilion i mean we live in the northeast how much outdoor use are you really getting unless they're you know maybe climate change we'll have more use of it but but we could get it it would it would never rain on a performance now so that doesn't happen so i wouldn't have to worry about that certainly not torrentially okay is is there other information

064board may want at the next meeting at this point okay i'm good all right good thank you thanks craig um i guess next is our food service update hi everybody good evening so as i do annually i'm going to give you an update on what's happened last year in food service department world um a lot has happened our covet has been really it has created a lot of change for the way that we do what we do we have had to feed students in a lot of different models that we're not accustomed to and we've had to adapt to that um usda which is the program we run under they allowed us to serve free meals to all students so that was the first big thing that changed how we were going to do what

065we needed to do so we were serving on-site meals to students once the school year started and k5 i worked with all of the level principals to see what they needed and each level needed something a little bit different so our services bent to meet those challenges at the elementary school level we did a pre-order system with the meals delivered and served in the classrooms so obviously during a normal time our students would come down to the cafeteria and eat in the cafeteria go through the serving line [Music] they we had to we have teachers fill out a google sheet in the morning so we created a google sheet teachers filled that out students typically had three two to three choices and then our kitchen would use that google sheet which would be organized by

066either the class classroom and grade to pack a cart that would then go to the classrooms with the meals that were ordered for each classroom so it was an involved process and it involved a lot of accuracy from all the levels so uh yeah so k5 that was what we did we're hopeful to in the fall be getting back to seeing the kids in the cafeteria again and serving them online that was definitely a challenge for our staff so and then at the middle school level grades six through eight we did a pre-order system as well so our our menu that we posted online had links on it to google forms and the students would fill those forms out our middle school cook manager would then take the information from the forms and use that

067to deter determine what meals needed to go to what locations at what meal times because at the middle school kids were eating in the library the gym and the cafeteria so they were split thankfully they were going by their home their home rooms so we could organize them a little bit by that to get meals but obviously you can imagine that was tricky to get meals where they needed to go for students because you're dividing that grade into into three and then you're trying to make sure you get the right amount of each option when there's two to three options to each space and the gym and the library were on the second floor and they had to use a cart to take the elevator up to get the meals up there so that created

068a lot of challenges however my staff did a great job rising to the challenge at the middle school level but again we are very looking forward to seeing the kids back in the cafeteria again and coming through the line we've talked about for fall even if they have we have to split them up and have them eat in different locations that they might still be able to come online and get their food and then go to the location because one of the biggest challenges was if we if the count say we didn't get the right count coming in students didn't fill out the form something happened we always tried to put more food on the carts however sometimes we'd missed the mark and then you know a radio call had to come and then food

069had to go up on the elevator again so it was there were some times where it was tricky doing the middle school service but like i said we really made it through with not very many hiccups majorly and then on-site for 9-12 so high school students were all hybrids so we only had around half of them every day so we thought we could distance them as you'll notice on the floor we have patterns for the students to come through the lines we had set up a grab and go station by the lower gym where students could pick up we also had to consider students that didn't have a lunch period that might want a place to eat lunch whether they were bringing it from home or getting it from us so we created with the

070admin here some desk eating areas in the hallway and they could pre-order and do we would have it ready for them with their name on it their entire meal that they could just pick up and go and eat and then make it to their next class once they finished eating so just a few examples of how we had to adapt and our staff had to adapt to different service models this is just on site during all of this so next slide so then off site we had remote student meal service usda has had offered a lot of waivers where parents can pick up meals flexibilities to meal pattern allowing us to put together bulk meal packs which gets into what we did somewhat with our remote meal service in the summer feeding program that we

071did the spring after covid became part of life we were delivering and offering pick up when the school year came we thought that pickup might pose a problem from the location where we could run this big of a program which was the high school in this parking lot here we were worried about traffic back up so discussed it with administration worked with the transportation department to do a delivery only option for our hybrid and fully remote students who are learning at home to get meals so we worked out a thursday friday distribution hybrid meal packs went out on thursdays and remote five day or four day if there was a four day week friday those went out on the buses we had a sign up so when we were doing the meal packs the way

072they looked and i have a few pictures of what they looked like um like the the remote meal pack which was for five days would have bulk items like a half gallon of milk a quart of juice we would try to do individual items some of them would be frozen and have prep instructions on them we had we got these labels that were very nice that said bc food service on them and we could put whatever we needed to on there so if we needed to make something have a nutrition information on it or preparation instructions we could do that sort of on the fly as needed um can you go back one okay so with um because sign up or quarterly students could decide whether they wanted to be from remote hybrid come back

073to school we were checking that off because we needed to verify whether we didn't need we made sure we weren't double dipping on if a kid was coming to school and if they that was something we wanted to make sure that we were tracking so we did also send out if there were any families that went to fully remote they could add on to the program [Music] when we did a hybrid partial week bag my staff had to keep track of that so which a or b student got two and three days of meals and we had a system for how to make sure that that went to the right student got to the right address um and then we also provided meals during the school closures that happened so when school was shut down

074we would provide grab-and-go meals a breakfast and a lunch to every student that would come and pick up from the high school if say just one elementary school was closed we would make sure that they knew that that was available here for them if families were quarantined we would pivot very quickly to try to get them the information that they could get on our delivery meal service and we did get a lot of people who came in and out so it was constantly managing that list of who needed to get meals at home and um not but i think the uh this remote piece was done by two full-time and one part-time person and i helped them i was on hands hands-on with them a lot just because it was a new thing for us

075and i just can't say enough about the work that they did and how much of an effort this was and really the amazing job that i feel like this this was for us this year so um the so this is one example of what we sent for the five day bag frozen you know we were sending out as much fresh product as we could managed to do but as you can see things we're packing this all in one bag that is being delivered to their doorstep so it's it's really an amazing amount of food um so next slide is another example this was one we sent out i think um last week so and we made um the almond breeze and there reminds me we did a lot of diet specific packed bags and meals

076um everything from gluten-free to dairy-free to multiple needs we were meeting them to the best of our abilities for those that needed it oh and just we did put a survey out mid-year we wanted to see what families were thinking about the meal packs was there anything they wanted us to change what did they like what did they not like and just a couple of things one of the comments was that that this keeps their child connected to the school community makes them feel like they're still in school it's a huge benefit they were very grateful for the service we had families that mailed us cards i had a couple of families send me pictures of the students eating the lunch at home during their day it was just the gratitude that was expressed for

077the service we provided was was great um and this was our menu um i just put it in here that you could see so we put this out and then of course hybrid and hybrid students would get a a two or three day version of this um yeah but that's what that is and just a reminder that this service was free for everyone and every meal brought reimbursement in for our program so normally i give a bit of information on each school level and how we're doing in comparison to the prior year this year as far as sales and meal counts go well this year was so different that i just wanted to sort of express our focus was more on the meals because that was where the reimbursement went our high school came back

078on to the school lunch program before fall of last year for those of you that don't know we had been off the program for a number of years so that we could serve a wider variety of foods to students the usda guidelines as far as nutrition regulations for a la carte or snack offerings outside of the meal are fairly stringent and they're we we needed to we were off the program in order to provide that wider variety of options but with with this situation we knew we were going to be serving mainly meals so we pivoted and switched to getting back on to the usda program at the high school which is currently we are we we are and will continue to be in next school year as well so meals were free for all

079students including high school students and high school meals were reimbursed we got reimbursement for so our remote program served over 50 000 breakfast and lunch meals delivered during the school year on-site 9-12 high school we had 5000 breakfasts and 20 000 lunches middle school three thousand breakfasts and twenty one thousand lunches and on site for elementary fourteen thousand breakfasts and a hundred and thirteen thousand lunches which is more than you know a quarter of a million meals that we served this school year so with all of the closures considered and different things that's that's a huge number i really feel like our program and our staff did so much work this year and a lot of them are tired which is why we're doing a summer program this year but we're giving them a little

080two week gap to get some break in before we start that because they've put in so much effort and it's it's been to provide a really great service to students and families so summer feeding last year i talked a little bit about i'm going to talk about this year's so i just wanted to compare for you guys and give you the comparison we did a pick up or delivery option delivery was only upon request if it was needed it was a five-day meal bag for everyone last summer and we had bulk and individual items in there so like this summer similarly service was to any child 18 and under they don't have to be enrolled in bethlehem school district it's a national program which so we can offer it to any student or any child

08118 and under last summer we served a lot of students that were pre-k that was there were more of them than i thought there would be and it was we also sent meals to schools out and then students that were doing daycare at ymca for like first responders children at the time we also distributed and worked with the backpack program so with our meals last summer backpacks went out to families that were on backpack program and our participation last year was almost 14 000 breakfasts and lunches served it was around 300 students a day coming through our door and we had i think i think it was a two-hour window that they were coming through so that it was always very fast paced [Music] and the program last year operated efficiently at a slightly better

082than break even with the reimbursement versus what we had to staff and food to run the program so that was our menu for last summer that we sent out to our families so we had a six-week cycle menu so we did everything twice um again like whole uh like milk they got the half gallon and a quart of orange juice and as much as we could we tried to make things that were easy for them to prepare at home or didn't need preparation so this summer we're going to do summer feeding again this is probably the last summer that we'll be eligible to do summer feeding normally we don't meet the income criteria the threshold of free and reduced percent to qualify to run a summer feeding program however i do think it's a great

083service that we can provide and offer while we are eligible to do so this summer we're going to do a little bit of a different service we're going to do daily meal service pick up from the high school between around the lunch hour so 11 to 1. we're going to start july 12th and end the week before first week of september we're going to give them lunch that's ready to eat and then a shelf stable breakfast that will go with them and they can consume the next morning i think the decision to move to this was just because we have the ability to do this i know know that i think families i've had a feedback that a lot of families want this type of service some still want the bulk pack but that's a

084big staffing thing to do all at once versus biting off a little bit each day and offering a daily daily pick up also we aren't going to provide transportation it's going to be a pickup only service i mean there may be an exception and we may look at that but if someone really is in a need situation we might be able to figure that out but for the most part we're looking for families to pick up and again service is free to anyone 18 and under and they don't have to be enrolled in bc and we're looking for a break even again this year that's our goal we did we put a survey out to see how many families might be interested and how often they would come and we're estimating between 225 and 250

085students a day and we're still partnering with schools out this summer so we're going to provide meals for their summer program students i always give a slide just updating you on the free and reduced rates they stay fairly consistent around 12 percent yeah there's i will keep you posted on that if you have any questions about that program this year because meals were free for all students we didn't receive as many paper applications however more often than not these days we're getting our information about students who do need meal support directly from new york state from other programs so so looking to this coming school year hoping to get back into the cafeteria and have students online being able to serve them and we had to make a lot of menu changes when we were

086serving things in the classroom and in the library and moving food around so looking to get back into being able to provide more options for students um keeping it safe and sanitary so making sure that we're keeping up with all of our processes that we normally would do i mean we were in food service the hand washing people before it became you know everybody needed to wash hands so we we knew we were doing that but sanitizing things and keeping up with our cleaning schedules and making sure that we're maintaining all of those processes correctly we'll look at menu and service model considerations so with meals being free again this coming year we are thinking we will have an increase in our meal counts if some of the restrictions are lifted and we can serve

087more students say they can form a line and be a little bit closer than six feet to one another we will be able to bring back some of our a la carte options at the middle and high school levels especially so that may change what we need to be buying how much staff we need to be having on and how many lines we need to be operating for example looking at the middle school if we are going to expand there at all we are going to need another lunch line another cashier another point of sale to get all the kids through in time to have them also have time to eat so we're looking at all of those things going into the fall another pinch point is just our transit we bring food into the

088high school which is our which supports and sends food out to all the elementary schools so we're seeing some pinch points that could happen if our meal counts go up any higher that we will be we will be needing to send more food out than we have space to we will be needing to have more food in the elementary kitchen then there's space cold frozen and dry to keep that so we're looking at all those things as it gets closer and we'll keep monitoring them in the fall to make adjustments during the school year as needed um so all of the pre-ordering that we did um all the pre-ordering that we did this year with the forums i mean it was google forms was new to me and i've learned a ton about it through

089this year i think that it could be a useful tool for our department in many ways so we're looking at how we can keep that going whether it is to provide staff with meals at different levels to do like high school students who don't have a lunch period to be able to keep a grab-and-go meal option ready for them because one of the things we've gotten feedback from is that to wait online is is too long for them to make it to so they usually are bringing their own from home and eating between classes or bringing back cash payments that was one of the things we have drop boxes and we asked families encourage them strongly not to bring cash but we'll be bringing that back we have keypad use for students to get on

090their access their accounts or their meal accounts where they have money if they need to pay for lunch now meals are free again next year so the use of that probably won't be necessary there as necessary yet until a free meal would be going away for all students and we're i'm keeping a close eye on that to see what happens at the federal level with usda there's a lot of push for free meals for all students to stay in k-12 but nothing concrete has happened yet but i'm keeping a close eye on it yeah so looking at you know we may look at something that would be touchless in the future for getting onto student meal account to accessing their accounts though as well you can do like an id scan but then they have

091to carry around a card there's but there's other solutions and then next year bringing back some a la carte items we're still going to want to try to push the meal because that's where we get the reimbursement um hoping that we'll be serving more meals more volume of meals we're going to continue at the younger grades with doing normally we do participate in a program usda has called offer versus serve so students can opt out of some of the parts of the lunch tray they still have to take a vegetable or a fruit as part of their lunch but they can opt out of one or the other and they can take you know only one or two of the other items so we have um this year just been completely serving them everything that's

092on the menu because it is the fastest way to get them through the line get them through service so we're going to keep that definitely at the younger levels and look at keeping it at the older level simply because it is most expedient however it may result in more waste which is the goal of offer versus serve to limit that waste so students might not take what they might not eat so just want you to be aware of that in case you hear that you know we're we are serving them everything that's on the tray now there's benefits to that i mean students at the elementary level i think you know i have a three-year-old myself i think having the food on there and the exposure and seeing it for some students even if they

093don't eat it at that moment is a good healthy thing um you know wait balancing out the waste of them throwing it away but maybe eating it by the time they're you know in third grade or something they start to be getting used to that so so that is oh and then also getting back to some of our um our uh environmentally friendly goals that we had gotten so unfortunately we had to switch to for expediency and cleanliness we switched to a paper tray and a wrapped utensil kit this school year but hoping to get back to some of our initiatives where we were using hard trays and reusable flatware and other other items that we were doing that were you know we had gotten rid of bottled water at our high school but we

094had to kind of bring it back to some level um but hoping to keep that those goals to catch back up and then to keep pushing that forward in our department so usually there's something on meal prices as i've said free meals continue for the next school year the high school is going to remain on the school lunch and breakfast program and as we bring all of our items back i'll look at a la carte pricing we just we do a group bid with the south colony and guilderland schools we just opened that bid a couple of weeks ago and are reviewing and awarding our vendors for this coming school year you know procurement is an issue it's going to continue to be an issue for an example just this past couple of weeks it's

095been hard to find the utensil kits the paper trays i've had to get subs for many of our food items like it it's going to continue to be an issue in the fall and it's going to probably raise prices so be keeping a really close eye on everything that's coming in what it's costing us can we get something a little bit less expensive without sacrificing quality of the meals that we serve how can we keep the tray costs down with keeping that quality that we that our students expect us to have on the tray and our families expect so will be a challenge um go ahead also our breakfast counts i did want to say are increasing so we have some elementary schools normally serving less than 10 students breakfast because we don't have a

096set time for breakfast at elementary they're just coming in sort of before or after a first period class to get breakfast now they those counts are getting from 10 or less to now over 50 at some of our elementary schools so that's another area we're going to have to look at but also very good that students are taking advantage of the free breakfast at that level so this is the financial part looking at our revenues and expenditures and then lastly what we're looking at for next year's budget so as you can see lots of changes so kind of just go line items so if you look at lunch and breakfast those are sales for meals so actual 6 30 19 would be the last quote unquote normal year so that's what we would expect 6

09730 20 would be where we had a shortened year with coven and meals became free and then projected at june 30th this year at zero because we all meals were free we didn't sell any um we didn't have to take in local dollars from students or families for that um a la carte yeah for a second because don't some students i know my student still depletes his school box because he goes back for other stuff so there's not much other stuff right now but there's a little bit so so what does i don't know what my kid's doing this so at elementary school all they can get is a 50 cent milk or a dollar bottle of water um at middle school it's the same and at high school there are a few more options

098but not many willow it's usually the bottle of water that got us yeah yeah he doesn't even drink water but it's really the only thing i mean it's honestly it's almost every day it's like a dollar fifty dollar fifty dollar fifty on his account i don't know all right i'll talk about it separately oh i'll call you tomorrow um hey i guess they just like to spend huh well that's my kid [Laughter] so a la carte sales down to we don't have as many offerings because we don't have as much we're not able to have kids as close online there's less time there's less kids actually on site to have to purchase a la carte so that's gone down and staff sales you know a little bit down but they're still holding okay um so

099sales are obviously a lot less now if you look at what the state and federal line is reimbursement so that's reimbursement coming from usda in the state of new york for meals we served so obviously you can see that went from a quarter of a million to over a million dollars so that is really what saved us and even though so usda food received is another benefit that usda provides for our programs we can get food that is called if you've heard the term brown box we can get food that's coming directly from a contract from usda that's the most efficient way to use the money that you're getting you can also divert it to a company that will turn it into turn cheese take that cheese and make a pizza and take the cost

100of the cheese away for you so that's why this number is a little lower because we did some of those other things like diverting there were two other programs one is a local foods program so we were able to divert to capital roots and then they brought us apples from indian ladder and that was using federal funds outside of our program that were given to us then the other thing that we did this year we started for the first time using a department of defense produce contract so we had so that money isn't in here either because it went to them and then we effect in effect got produced from them but we didn't have to spend money um out of our budget to get that produce in we've been using that for the past

101probably three to four months to get our produce and the produce from um has been lovely so it's been a great great program to be a part of catering obviously you know less um and then this year less and then the transfer so the frpl or purple was before the high school got onto the usda program the school general fund was picking up a cost of still providing a free or reduced meal at the high school for students that qualified okay so the general fund part of this is what the general fund picked up to make our account whole at the end of the school year so last school year because of the closure and our obviously an inability to make a ton of a lot of the sales we would have if the schools

102had been open in the spring we needed some funds to make our account whole so it wasn't 300 000 but that was what was transferred and next slide maybe clear so these were the this is the expenditure side um the only so we spent less in food products for many of the reasons i talked about with the usda foods different programs that we could use the money that they give us to and then supplies is much higher we the paper trays the sport kits the extra gloves the extra cleaning supplies a lot of things that we had to purchase a lot more volume on all of the we used different kinds of trades the remote meals all of the packaging that had to go into running that program definitely made our supply budget need to

103be our supply costs higher um and the equipment line i well i'll get to that a little bit so next slide please so in summary of looking at what's projected for the end of this year compared to priors um so last year uh because of the closure in the spring from march to the end of the school year we ended up with a net loss of 217 657 um from the prior slide that's just a com combination of the 1893 that was for funding us for providing free and reduced high school meals and the 300 000 that was brought to the general fund now 300 000 was brought to cover the 200 um we estimated a 210 000 last year loss it ended up being 217 and change and the extra funds um the 101

104235 was for uh expenses we projected we might have to do some of these different meal costs like we had to buy 10 extra transit meal transit carts we had to buy extra sheet pans so that those we could set trays on the carts things that would allow us to provide the service we knew we were going to need to provide in the fall this year we're projecting a loss of 149 357. the the balance we had from the last year's general fund transfer covered some of that and we're looking at a 48 122 dollar projected loss this year for the food service program yeah and that actually is better than we had projected when we were doing the general fund budget we were projecting closer to 200 maybe 300 000. yep so that is

105improvement yeah we've we were definitely expecting more than that and so that's a really good outcome on that um and we do have the agenda item tonight yeah authorizes a maximum of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be transferred from the general fund into the food service fund to help offset that loss and i will say too that um so the 48 000 a good chunk of that is we had to at the end of the year purchase a replacement oven so hammer grill had a failed oven because hammer grill's kitchen is going to be is going to be renewed in the bond we're taking an oven from the high school and moving it and getting a newer oven for our high school kitchen so a good chunk of that is is to cover

106the cost of that oven replace emergency oven replacement okay so looking at the budget for next year that we're hoping you guys will recommend or approve um we are hoping you know we don't know all of what will happen next year we have a lot of ideas of how next year will go possibilities again i am meeting with all of the administrators of all the different buildings and levels to see how we can make meal service happen in the upcoming school year keeping students safe while providing them access to our meal program so we're hoping to get a lot more a la carte out there especially at the high school level so that is we're going to be working very hard to figure out how we can run our program so that we make that

107available to students especially if they're if they're all back on site next fall adult sales we're hoping we'll get back to our normal levels our state and federal funding because free meals will continue next school year we're projecting it will be even more we're projecting a meal sale increase because the high school was on the program we are now those meal counts from our high school are increasing the amount of food usda food money that we get so we're actually going to can get more of that money more of the ability to get those food products for essentially no cost out of our budget um and so we won't were yeah looking at the possibility of what we will need this school year hoping to have a break even next year and i just wanted

108to say too that before covet hit we did have three years of break even or better status where we were growing a little bit of a fund balance for our program to use to maybe expand and upgrade some equipment and those things but we did get pretty much wiped out with the loss of sales due to school closures so and expenditures um you know equipment it's much higher this year just because we did have to replace that oven and buy some equipment at the start of the school year so we're hoping we won't have as much of those costs uh food products we are hope you know hoping to have a bigger budget for food because we're selling more and yeah again just hoping for a break even hoping to use more i mean supplies

109we're keeping the same i don't know if we'll be able to use less but we will try to use more of our renewable trades and flatware as we as we are able to do that with staffing and time oh yeah any questions yeah could i pick um first like what you guys have done the last 15 months is like nothing short of a miracle no really just being honest you know you guys are you guys are heroes and i don't mean that in any facetious way i mean it like you know you think well like 18 19 months ago we're sitting here okay we're gonna redo our cafeteria and we should really be focusing on a la carte and all these things and then everything just blew up you know and what was fascinating was

110that you were the face of our district for a period of time i mean you were the people that that people saw you know because the schools were closed from march you know so june last year that is the truth we were i think judy bless her was coming to the building because she felt bad that we were coming to the building you know like we were here i mean who's the person i didn't not come to this building like i didn't not come yeah like who's the person that you see the most to me what it was you guys you know and i did um a couple things i would say one thing it'll be curious to see how this plays out over the years to come because of the free food it has

111introduced i think a whole new group of kids to the cafeteria that would not have bought so i'll be curious to track the data over this year's free again but the following year once if we see that we start having to pay again how that affects it and the other thing is that a question about the the three going up to 300 thousand dollars in the a la carte this year from 34 this year like i hope we do that but like just do we have a plan just in case it doesn't because that's just like it's it would be a huge gap to fill that's the only thing well what i'll say is the thing with a la carte is you're gonna if you don't sell it you don't have to buy it so

112the gap won't be all that huge and if we're not selling as much a la carte it opens the door for selling more meals so the hope is that if we're not able to serve a la carte we'll just put all of our chips into serving more meals and get it but that makes sense so if you're not selling yellow cart you don't have to buy the product so it's not like okay i got it okay definitely would sell more meals you get more reimbursement so you know if you're if we're focusing all on meals the reimbursement does cover the cost of that and we can flex to what we're you know i i it's a balancing act you know you don't wanna you don't wanna lower your cost so much for what you're putting

113on the tray that it's not good you wanna make sure that you're giving students access to fresh and good product you know we're at the middle school um students want more vegetarian options for the last few years they've been asking for that families and students and so we've been looking at it and we've been putting some things out there we put um a morningstar farms veggie nugget on the menu just this month i um chicken is hard to get right now so i said you know what we're gonna try veggie nuggets my kids like those they're delicious they they told me about them they like yeah they're delicious so thank you i just wanted to also thank you for all the work that you've done this past year plus thank you my crew is to

114thank as well um the summer 2021 uh program that you were discussing i know a lot of families are thinking um you know i'm not financially strapped i don't i feel like if i take a free meal i'm taking it from someone who deserves it more or i'm taking advantage of the school so what do you say to those families and is there an actual benefit to the school if you get these meals yeah great question um we addressed this in the survey we sent out the information that we sent out to all the families asking if they would give us information of whether they participate and how often so the it's a reimbursement program so if you participate you're bringing reimbursement money into the pro our school so the more people that participate the

115more money comes into our program there's no like there's no maximum amount of people that can participate and by you participating there's nobody that's not getting access to it so it's it is free for all who want to take advantage and the more who participate the better product we can provide because the more money we have to do our work it is it is yep i just have one question um when or where did you learn to spin straw into gold because you really have done a magnificent job of taking what could have been an absolute disaster and turning it into really a wonderful face for the for the school for the community and you and your team deserve all the kudos you get i appreciate those words those are i and i i agree

116about my staff they've had to change and it's funny in a normal like in normal year normal time they don't like change but coven somehow helped them like if there's a silver lining it's that you know my staff learned that they could adapt so and they did a great job doing it so i i and i feel that they saw their impact on students and families you know they got to see it firsthand so it was really you know and one of the things just a comment from last summer is that the staff were writing little messages on bags and coming up with really cute things the one time i was in the back and they were doing all this cute stuff the kids and families i mean it was such a terrible time just

117looked um so forward to getting those meals because of the staff's efforts they really just put a lot of extra into it so they did yeah that's awesome great tone at the top thank you alisa and yes service with a smile and and great food still coming out of that kitchen despite we serve we really do serve really good food for school food service like i am not being i am not i will attend trying not to to my own horn but we do a really nice job in the in the mornings before school right outside my house is where all of the neighborhood kids congregate to to play basketball and stuff before they all have to go get on the bus or whatever and this morning i overheard what's for lunch today cheesy croissants

118and all all the kids i'm talking like 12 different kids i'll go yes it's a it's a big winner this year and i loved seeing the veggie the plant-based meal and the smoothie tomorrow i think i just encourage more creative inclusion like that i think i'm really excited about the smoothie i hope it goes well first time is always tough yeah all right thank you thank you alisa thank you all right next up plan for use of federal funds judy so this could be the briefest presentation you have ever heard me do i have about six slides just to give you an overview of what we're looking at um just when you thought you couldn't take any more educational acronyms we have two more for you arp which is the american rescue plan one component

119of the federal monies and then esser and this is actually up to sr3 now is the elementary and secondary school emergency relief so these are all the federal programs that have made ample resources available to all schools and as you know we have goals that we want to accomplish and it's a whole lot easier to do when we have resources coming into us in terms of the funding so um these numbers are what has been awarded to the district for those two separate grants as of this date now last week they announced that the allocations were changing and there might be even more money coming to the district so we will update you when we get those new totals but um in the um coronavirus response and relief appropriations act which came out in december

120of 2020 we have almost 4.2 million dollars allocated to the district that has to be used over a three-year period ending september of 2023 and for the arp funding which was most recently approved in march gives us almost 1.9 million dollars that has to be used by september of 2024. so we do have to submit an application for this we originally had a date of june 15th and we filed for an extension to go to july 15th knowing the timing of the board meeting tonight obviously wanting to present the plan before we submitted it and then simultaneously they ended up extending the deadline so anyway it is officially june 30th but we do have until july 15th in order to submit that plan and the other thing to keep in mind is this does not

121run with the district's fiscal year which is a june 30th fiscal year these run along with our title grants the federal other federal monies that we have so they are generally ending on an august 31st date starting with september 1st so the if you go to the next slide please the monies that we have have to be allocated into different purposes and nine hundred and thirty three thousand dollars of it needs to address learning loss so this is a plan that dave and jody are putting together to help deal with primarily it'll be in the form of either after school programs or summer school enrichment activities so it's going we're not going to be able to spend the bulk of that in this summer because there's really not enough time to put that together but

122we'll end up spending the rest of that in the out years on the grant the remaining almost 5.1 million dollars is to help us with those extra costs that we've been incurring in the covet environment and to help cover its eligible funding includes things for your ppe your extra cleaning and sanitizing supplies and then any other activities it's a very broad category to maintain your operations and continuity of services so they are giving you quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how you spend down this money they do want to have you focusing these resources helping students who need extra support and the good thing about bethlehem is that as you've seen as we've built up our budget we have provided these resources for our students as part of the budget that we just

123adopted so [Music] the risk if you start putting these monies into salaries and other things like that is we talk about this fiscal cliff so what happens if you bring on extra staff and put extra resources in there when this money runs out then you're looking at either a loss of services and or a loss of staffing so as we were developing this plan knowing that we provided resources within the actual budget we were trying to focus on one-time costs that would benefit us would help us advance our programs but wouldn't leave us feeling this loss of funds when the money was gone so as you'll see from the plan one of the things that we did and we just talked about this with greg's presentation on the capital project is there are some elements

124within the proposed bond that are eligible for use of this federal money so some of the elements particularly for the ventilation systems or for working on expanding either the way we structure the indoor classrooms and or the outdoor classroom spaces which are those shade structures or outdoor pavilions we can use some of this federal money to offset those costs so it'll still be part of the bond but it will be the funding source of the federal dollars that we can use for those purposes okay if you go to the next slide so what we identified as great options for this funding um of course the very first one is the allocation for the learning loss which is about the 933 000 the when the plan gets submitted it's going to be covered for this full

125three-year period so these allocations between the years are likely to change but we just wanted to give you an idea of how we would try to break out the spending between the different fiscal years so in addition to identifying the learning loss plan we also have increased the outdoor classroom spaces in the current bond proposal that greg had presented we have five outdoor classroom spaces included within that we thought it would be great if we could offer that at all of the building so we've bumped that up to seven classroom spaces and that's around nine hundred and thirty thousand dollars additionally we talked about the canopy structure this has been on the desired list of things to have that would benefit the high school program which would be right outside these windows here where we

126do have some picnic tables set up for the students but part of the difficulty is the sun really beats down on that area in the afternoon so it would be able to get much more use if we are able to put up a canopy shade structure in that side area as well so that can be used for the meal program you could have classes and meetings out there as well it just becomes more usable when you have the overhead protection then and that's a hundred and eighty three thousand the next three items are all ventilation projects that are included within the bond work so that's close to a million dollars and ventilation is very much a part of what we've been talking about with our covid planning air circulation the filters and just exchanging the

127air on a more regular basis so updating those systems checks the box in terms of the eligibility and gives us a funding source to help lower the amount that we would have to bond for that work and then also included in the bond greg i just touched on this tonight are the pit areas within hammer grill and glenmont and because that is essentially a flexible instructional space that also qualifies for funding under the arp and esser monies so that is a hundred and fourteen thousand the remaining funds we've talked in every budget cycle i think for at least the last three years about how old the classroom furniture is in the district and how wonderful it would be if we could update that we had discussions with the architects and with the stakeholder groups trying

128to identify what is the best structure for a flexible classroom and the of course with kovid what we found is you have to have everybody spaced apart you're all facing up front well that works for kovid but what we want to be able to do is also use that furniture so that we can push it together into more collaborative spaces as well so we've identified through these classroom of the futures you know what works best for the instructional environment so we would like to use about 2.7 million of that funding to help get those equipment items in the classrooms taken care of and that will of course free up future resources for us in the budget so that is roughly the plan where we think it would make most sense to spend down on those

129monies and the only thing that we might change relative to the capital project is the addition i mentioned of two additional outdoor classroom spaces so we might want to add that into the bond as well just to keep things uniform in terms of all of them in the budget or in the bond as opposed to only five out of the seven okay judy um the the classroom furniture didn't we have a line i know i think we had a line last year in the budget for classroom furniture and i think that same line was there this year and we had reduced it originally the board had asked us to put in 75 000 and when we were trying to dial back on our expenditures we had lowered that to 50 000. okay and this is

130in addition to the 50 or does it replace in addition to that so we could probably use that 50 000 for other things um we have this resource yes well it's just it's just crazy how much it costs to get new furniture for a single room i mean it's five figures for a single room so you know you think that money is going to buy like eight million shares it's not it's it's you know it's a lot of money but once you see you know how fast it goes it's gonna be it's awesome i'm so excited that we're doing it but that number has to be that big if it's gonna be a significant impact for the district right those 40 year old broncos have served as well but you know and the other thing

131is is why this is a great option for the plan is because sed will only give you building aid the very first time you buy furniture so as we're doing these replacements it's not eligible for building aid so again a perfect use of these monies that help get us to uniform furniture for the classrooms and that based on the few classrooms that we've been able to do just through the operating budget are just so wonderful in the classrooms the teachers love them the students love them and it has that necessary flexibility and it's been durable it's been holding up very well so that is the proposed plan so we do need to post this on our website for public review and public comment and then um we'll submit the plan and once it is approved

132we have to go through the very similar process for submitting the grant applications and cost details that we would for any of our other federal grants and um if what we're envisioning now changes we have the ability to update it with the modification down the road if anything else presents itself judy where did you guys come up with the 20 that's required that's the federal requirement that's the number that they okay yeah um when you post it online can we also post wherever the requirements are for how the money is spent i think that would be helpful for people to be able to that's the only um well there's categories so right these categories yeah and they keep updating that guidance and that was also along with the increase in funding the guidance was coming

133too so it's been a big effort i think for the state to come up with that guidance as well just because of how quickly it arrived so yeah and this is happening in every service sector there's federal dollars that are being given that nobody knows how to spend and when you think you have a great idea there's some reason you can't use it for that great idea so i just think being able to to look at those side by side for people who are interested in it would be helpful to understand why decisions were made it might even be a good idea if we provide a link to the stated website with the guidance that way when it gets updated it'll still be current and that then it'll change but no one never knows [Laughter]

134a good idea so but it's a resource and it's the most current resource so i think a link does make sense okay judy i just have a question about the classroom furniture i know you know chris was talking about how expensive it is and and obviously it is but 2.7 million does seem like a really large figure so i was wondering if we could get a little more information about what kind of furniture we're thinking of investing in how it's used what it looks like what makes it flexible and whether or not buying all this furniture at once means that 20 years from now we're going to have to expend another 2.7 million to replace everything all the same time because i know that's that's a concern that that's why we were doing 75 000

135at a time every year so that it was kind of rolling and if we have this huge expenditure of one thing all at once i'm concerned that it's all going to fall apart all at once we will look at that obviously we try to take care of it and we as you've seen with some of our other assets we do we assess their condition and then we try to stagger those replacements so that you're not looking at 2.7 million all in a single year so and we could provide even some pictures of some of the flexible furniture we've already purchased with the operating budget and also in the meetings we've had you know what some of the primary teachers want is different than intermediate teachers versus middle high school so it's a variety of furnishing

136and could potentially there's also you can purchase technology or equipment so we may find there's a need there over the i mean this is three years so absolutely i just don't want us to to purchase 2.7 million of the same thing yeah and then be stuck with this right cyclical uh huge replacement right yeah yeah great point thank you okay thanks judy thank you don't get used to that next one will be longer last but not least not least i we have a presentation on the bc plans for the k-12 wellness curriculum by dr davis yes so i'd like to yeah thank greg and elisa and judy for warming up the audience i promise to stick to within the hour framework that i've been given so jody you didn't give him an hour did you

137no you know me um so just to give you a little bit of background um so as you know we restructured our um athletic director position where len is now considered the director of athletics and wellness and in the hiring of a new k-12 physical education health and facts supervisor we're really taking a closer look at our wellness program as a whole i'm recognizing that we have areas of overlap and within that area we also recognize that you know we have gaps within the program as well so we met um as an administrative team about two weeks ago to take a sort of a a look at all of the components of our wellness program and this was just the first of what will end up being several meetings so i'm just going to kind

138of give you an idea of what it is that we talked about so you can see where it is that we're trying to go with this concept um so sort of our working draft is on that the purpose of the program is to empower students to balance physical social mental and emotional health by providing learning experiences leading to the development of resiliency confidence critical thinking goal setting time management and responsible decision making skills and we sort of determined that these attributes are accomplished through really eight different areas or programs within our schools right we have our physical education program health education social emotional learning library sciences our mardera program our core academic program family consumer sciences and then interscholastic athletics which obviously is more 712 but these are sort of all the components that loosely

139make up our wellness curriculum if you will so we wanted to take a look at how do each of these areas address wellness and um you know where are we again overlapping and where do we have some gaps so i'm just going to give you an idea of what we did we so we looked at all grades k through 12 and we looked at each of those eight areas so obviously for elementary you wouldn't have say facts or in classic athletics but we could look at all the other areas um so this is what we started with we basically broke up into groups some groups did k1 others 2 3 4 5 and so on and we identified all the things that we were either doing or things that we sort of have the ability

140to do within the programs that we have um so that we can start to see on what it is that we're offering versus what it is that we still need to offer i'm also recognizing that you know sometimes we're offering you know the same lessons in two or three different areas but if we're not using common language that becomes very confusing to kids all right so it's also recognizing that yes some you know messages do need to be repeated if we're talking about say cyber bullying yes it makes sense to talk about that in different you know avenues within the classroom throughout the day but if we're using different language in each of those classrooms that becomes confusing to kids um so you know our pe program um obviously you know traditional type um things

141that you would see within a third grade physical education program um health education we use the health smart curriculum um now we don't have time to get through all of these but these are all of the things that are accessible within the program so again i'm trying to prioritize which ones that we really need to cover um and making sure that the ones that we're covering here you know health education at the elementary level is handled by both the classroom teacher and really our counselors they do a lot of work especially with the social emotional health pieces so like bullying myths and facts reporting bullying you know that's handled within the classroom that's also handled again when we're working with our counselors and here's some more topics you get again it gets into some nutritional

142ideas which again our food services can obviously support that as you heard from alisa some of the the pressure cooker and where does pressure come from again that's where our counselors also offer support social emotional learning um again these are traditionally offered through our counseling center but you know again working with students on growth mindset diversity um sharing friends and so forth and again some of these areas overlap with our health curriculum and our pe curriculum um as well so you can see there's bullying again so sportsmanship obviously has overlaps with all sorts of areas library science um so one thing you know you might not recognize is that our librarians do um a lot of work with our students in digital citizenship um so we use the common sense media curriculum and again depending

143on grade level they get into these lessons a lot of it focuses on you know how to deal with online responsibilities how to you know get it gets into you know the idea of passwords with students online responsibilities so dealing with social media yeah so you know and identifying mechanisms to ensure that students are not only doing the right thing online for themselves but also you know working with peers to make sure they're doing the right thing um and just creating you know a good community so here's some other ideas um it gets back into the digital medium um you know again this sort of goes into some of what we do with our social studies too um in terms of being identical being able to identify um you know authentic materials that are true

144and haven't been altered um the same you know teaching children how you know photos and videos can be altered and that you know don't believe everything you see so this also ties into our dare program now right now we only um really deal with our dare program as fifth graders um but there's actually a k-12 there program so again in our discussions we just looked at um you know what are some options in third grade say that the dare program that our school resource officers could help us with and at you know the dare program you can see safety responsibility risk medicine substances and conflict management all of those items already appeared within either our health curriculum social emotional curriculum or the common sense media curriculum so we can you know leverage our school resource

145officers potentially to help with some of those lessons as well so these aren't all standalone programs in that the way that they overlap and then our core academics obviously i just put some social studies topics here but communities around the world global citizenship culture customs traditions language religion these are all things that you know kind of fall also within the diversity umbrella that lead to overall wellness and understanding of you know how to get along with one another um within the classroom within the community and within you know the greater world so that's you know we spent a whole day and that's really all we got through was just sort of trying to map out what it is that we currently do what are some things that we know are available but that we might

146not necessarily be doing yet and then our next step is to really dig deeper into each of these topics to make sure that we are hitting all of the crucial areas k-12 but there were also within each grade level you know appropriately addressing the items and making sure that when it's you know the important topics that are addressed by more than one person or more than one group that we're using common language um because you know when students get you know the same message but with different language it becomes very confusing to them and they feel like they're getting a different message but they're really not and they don't know how to act upon that a really easy example to give is at the high school we have the department of health pushing in to

147do lessons with kids and then we have unity house coming in to do lessons with kids and they both present essentially the same lesson but we found that the language that they're using is totally different and the kids thought it was two totally separate topics so just really making sure that um you know we're using common language this kind of goes back to what we're doing with rti for behavior too right we're ensuring that classroom teachers aids cafeteria all staff are using the same language so the students understand when their behaviors are being redirected why they're being redirected and what the appropriate response is um so again we're very very preliminary in terms of where we are with this but this is something that um we're going to be working on extensively over the next

148year to ensure that you know we do have a really cohesive and well articulated wellness program i just wanted to reiterate my previous request that we have a standalone agenda item at some point to talk about sros and the dare program sort of more in detail what are how it works i understand maybe there's a plan to use it differently and i know that there's a lot of community discussion and concern um that i think people would like to articulate to the district um so i i just would like again to see that as a separate item where the public knows that that's up for discussion anyone else have questions for dave possibly the benefit of going left yes thank you thanks dave next on the agenda is our recognition of submitted public comment um

149first we did have a number of comments that came in um from uh coaches and um and booster clubs in support of including a turf field in the in the bond proposal we had a question come in from bob hussar about attendance at the graduation at the tu center um i know that the guidance uh is changing daily um so i'd like to refer this comment to dave domell to respond to and then we had three comments that came in one from robert anna one from kate torre and one from sue ellen moose expressing interest in a universal pre-k program and looking for information about what's going on with respect to that so jody i didn't know if you could just quickly um just reiterate what we're doing sure um so we are in the

150process we've almost got the rfp done where our plan is to probably send that out um within the next week or so we would give it a good month there's quite a bit of requirements that people have to provide in the rfp back if they're interested um so that would take it to probably the i don't know mid to late probably july late july realistically by the with holiday week in summer so we would be probably if we get any rfps back we would be looking at them sometime late july early august but i know there's been questions will there be something in place for september and i've said highly unlikely you know we just found out as part of the end budget process that we received money providers weren't prepared for this nor were

151school districts so we'll see what happens we'll let people know when the rfp goes out though okay great thank you next number six action items a finance action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following finance action items 1 through 11. any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that carries b professional personnel action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following professional personnel action items one through thirty so moved second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions c support personnel action items it is recommended that the board of education approve the following support staff action items one through eight show move second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes d other action items it is recommended that the board

152of education approve the following action items one through three second any discussion all in favor any opposed any abstentions that passes item seven future meetings and events um friday june 25th at the times union center at 6 30 p.m is our commencement celebration for the class of 2021 um and on tuesday july 6th um at seven o'clock we have the board organizational meeting anticipating an executive session at six o'clock um beforehand seeing no need to go back into executive session could i have a motion to adjourn the meeting shall move second all in favor aye aye any opposed meeting adjourned thank you everybody you