Long Beach School District BOE meeting 9/14/2021

001did somebody please turn that light off on the projector thank you i just want to welcome everybody to the meeting this evening just the only announcement i have to make is uh i joined mrs verona mr pinto on a tour of the buildings last week before the beginning of school and we sort of met with each principal and custodian and went through the buildings and did our best to make sure that they were ready for the students the following later in the week and we certainly have speaking for myself i was definitely pleased with the cleanliness and just had some concerns about one of the playgrounds that we relayed to the principal and to the um appropriate people i want to thank principals for their hospitality and giving us the time to do that and

002to engage with them about buildings any concerns they had with structure or processes within the building but it's always productive so at this point i'd like to turn the meeting over to the superintendent thank you dr ryan um tonight dr romanelli will be summarizing the committee work of the district for the past year um i turn it over to dr rominelli's presentation okay [Music] by the time open up so we're looking at minutes here okay all right so while we uh projected we have the projector warming up we're actually cooling off and then starting up we have batteries being replaced on the microphone but i will get started and just kind of hop in when we get them uh so as dr gallagher mentioned um we'll be doing a report tonight on the summary of

003our district committees from last year uh even though it was a challenging school year we really did make a lot of progress on our district committees we were able to actually host the district many meetings by zoo they were all from four to five in the afternoon and we had some of our best participation that we've had uh in previous years thanks so much appreciate that all right so we have the microphone projector will be up next um so we had uh a couple different committees uh from last year which we had as our uh upper thank you a couple different committees are you reporting on um equity curriculum sel mr devito is here to talk about the health and safety committee as well and dr kylie renton will be talking about technology as well

004kind of round off the presentation thank you uh first committee that we were going to report on was our equity committee we did some really great work last year i was definitely proud of the fact that we had some of our best participation from community organizations as well uh we have participation from long beach latino circulo mlk center the city housing authority long beach aware all collaborating to talk about you know equity across our school district we're really proud of that all that participation so when we started this committee you know typically our work will be on the first meeting to talk about setting goals and uh we identified three specific areas that we wanted to focus on for equity committee this year ensuring a cultural responsible curriculum programs that promote equity some that we

005already have in our building so as we might want to bring to our buildings and also building community partnerships and ensuring that all voices are heard as part of the culturally responsive curriculum scorecard we actually used uh something from nyu steinhardt as a tool that we were able to take a look at some of our different curriculum that we used across the district we focused on social studies and ela in late elementary and early middle grades so fifth and sixth grade associates in the la and we took a look at a couple of different areas um including character tallies uh representation social justice teaching materials i'll give you a sample of what one of those charts looked like that we used uh teachers took a look at their classroom libraries uh they took a look

006at different teacher materials that we use in our in our classrooms if i could point you to maybe number five as an example characters with disabilities are represented teachers look through their classroom libraries to see you know if they were satisfied or not with characters with disabilities being in the classroom libraries and if that was an area that was lacking it kind of indicated that it might be something that i need to purchase some materials for uh as you can see uh these are just some of the books uh dr rudis and the ela department did some great work identifying some books we can bring into our classrooms at the elementary level and you can see on the right here the lifelong practices of readers and writers and you can notice actually that in the

007next generation learning standards the second bullet in the lifelong practices of readers mentions reading often and widely from a wide range of global and diverse texts and also the standard at the bottom that you see students should be able to assess how to a point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of text drawing on a wide range of global and diverse texts the texts that we've brought into the classroom are not to replace other texts they're to complement what we already have in our classroom libraries and also to provide diverse literature for our students across the board uh we also pd was one goal that we identified in our initiative this year so that we wanted to talk about within our classrooms um we feel that this is just one example what

008we'll be doing next year for professional development this coming school year navigating challenging conversations at school and we we really have a talented group of teachers in our in our school district this training will be specifically for our socialized teachers and talking about how we really want to have nonpartisan issue centered discussions in our classrooms and how we can do that as educators to facilitate those within our classrooms uh we want our students to be able to this is really one of the most important topics that we can teach our students at this current time is that school needs to be a place where we have conversations like this we just need to do it in a way that's respectful i think teachers can serve as a facilitator civil discourse our curriculum committee um i'm

009going to kind of go through this a little quicker than the others just because we have had a presentation already on the profile of a graduate this is for those that haven't seen it our visual representation that was created by uh graduating senior last year jasmine soriano we showed we read a book as a district what school could be hosted a community film screening of most likely to succeed we gave a survey to our community to our staff to our students about the most important traits that we felt our long beach graduates should have to prepare them for for life you know that we don't we don't necessarily know the jobs that will be around in 15 years but we do know the skills knowledge habits attitudes that our students will need to be successful

010and this was a visual representation of that the work of the committee this year was really to kind of dig deeper into this take a look at defining each of those profiles and taking a look at how this looks in our classroom in different levels three came through two three through five six through eight and nine through 12. so we did this for each of the ten and created a guide that can be found on our website if you take a look uh just in the curriculum instruction uh the curriculum resources tab on profile graduate you can take a look at the full documents to take a look at that more in depth also our social emotional learning committee we had three different subcommittees here as well as many people know we have rolled out

011a k-12 seo program called choose love and that's it that's something that we focus on implementing in this uh district committee as well we talked a lot about uh how to get that enrolled out at the elementary level which we have now actually a curriculum map and we have all four different units that we're rolling out throughout the year uh pacing guide has been created we're rolling that out in our middle school health and phys ed classes last year and we're focusing this year in our high school classes as well we were able in the elementary and secondary seo groups to administer surveys to our students in the secondary group we gave all sorts of different questions ranging all the way from the most basic needs of i have enough access to food is what

012we gave an example up there and you can notice that a number of students uh answered you know the all the way on the left was never and all the way on the right was always we had some students that said never rarely sometimes and we actually asked students if they wanted a pbs staff member to check in with them we had over 100 students indicate yes that they would like to have a you know meeting with us with the pbs staff member all uh ejected right away so we were able to have some really important interventions as well we also use the survey results to identify major themes that we wanted to work on last year our biggest guiding question was how can our students feel a sense of connection to their school and

013we saw this in the survey results we wanted to provide more opportunities for connection we really focus on these three bullets here that you know students are more likely to succeed when they feel connected to school we want to create an environment of all of our buildings where we have high academic expectations positive adult student relationships and we provide an area where there's physical and emotional safety so the committee set up to do some work with this our middle school actually did some great work here the entire staff the middle school put up uh some charts for each every single student in the school they took three different areas uh said do i know this student just by their name do i know my name and face i could identify them do i know about

014their academic progress and do i know a personal story or connection with this student and then went through and took a look and reflected afterwards to see you know are there any students uh that we need to make connections with that we're missing this was actually really interesting last year just because of the the hybrid model and some suits completely remote that the when you wouldn't necessarily know the name face piece you know at the middle level or high school we have many students with cameras off during remote construction sometimes so it was it was tough and we identified the students we really wanted to make more personal connections with we also took a look at some writing opportunities um transition was a big area that we wanted to focus on because we had students

015that were now last year in a new building but had not necessarily even been there in person you know students new to the middle school in sixth grade that were remote or hybrid and we wanted to focus on helping our students transition this quote up here was really important and kind of what guided our work says adversity is common short-lived and due to external temporary causes rather than personal inadequacies what we did in the ela department and again dr anis it's great work organizing this with the teachers was we had students in eighth grade right about a time where they experienced adversity and overcame it and we shared that with our sixth graders they were able to read and reflect on that same thing with our seniors in high school we're able to do that

016with our ninth grade students as well and you can see that that's that's the big piece is that you know especially in a year like with coven you know this was an external piece that was causing some issues for students that was not reflective of a personal inadequacy of theirs on the elementary level these were some examples of what we did based on that same sort of idea this on the left was the circle of control within the circle is what you can control things like who i hang out with my words and things out of your control the weather uh coronavirus with one student listed here uh the kindness ninjas were the club we launched last year actually they created this kindness calendar which challenged you to have 30 acts of kindness within 30

017days and also there was a coping strategies march madness style bracket that we launched at the elementary level students were able to participate in and vote on different coping strategies throughout the weeks as well as i mentioned before we also worked on our choose love implementation choose love is focused on courage gratitude forgiveness and compassion and action there's a unit for each of those in each of our grade levels and all sorts of different activities that can be rolled out ms golden chaired this our elementary guys counselor chaired this committee and its excellent work rolling up an elementary level as well as i mentioned we rolled it out uh mr epstein was great with getting this rolled out of the physical education and health department at the middle school last year and we'll be launching

018at the high school this year as well all right so i'll turn the microphone over to dr kelly rendon who's going to give the report on our technology committee thank you very much dr rominelli um i would say every year i'm very proud of the work that we do in the technology committee but especially last year with so much going on with remote and hybrid instruction i think what was going on in the technology committee was uh almost extra important especially because we have representatives from all the different buildings coming together sharing ideas learning about new things that are going on new initiatives changes regarding the technology and bringing those back to their buildings and acting as representatives and heralds for us so for example we brought in some new products in response to remote

019instruction cami nearpod seesaw classlink and we had little overviews of each of these at different meetings we had a committee discussion of accessibility to and filtering of online music platforms and using district devices to access things that some people might find either controversial or you know grade level appropriate versus inappropriate and it was a great discussion and we came up with empowering the students to make those decisions about what's appropriate for in school when using school devices etc and uh implemented some decisions based on that uh google made a i can only describe it as a ton of changes in response to remote construction and we used one of the district committee meetings to go over what some of those upcoming changes were and a little bit of the timeline because they were announcing changes

020that were one week out all the way up to two years away so setting expectations for when teachers would be able to see those in their classrooms uh one of the big things that we did at the end of last year was changing all of the student passwords from a rather insecure password method to a much more secure one where every student had what i'll refer to as an unguessable password it was a giant undertaking but we used the district technology committee as uh if you've ever heard of the term a pre-mortem where you try to figure out where things are going to go wrong before you implement something and that discussion was really really vital to the success of changing all of the passwords and when that happened in mid-june it went off very

021very well last year's focus district-wide county-wide countrywide was on cyber security in schools and these conversations came up at the district technology committee quite frequently and talking about how we're addressing some of these and where some gaps are that we need to address we have brainstormed some parent academy topics for this year and those will be announced fairly shortly they're going to be virtual so hopefully we will get a good showing both at the elementary and the secondary level so stay tuned for that uh that schedule and then finally prior to kobas we had started working on a scope and sequence a scope and sequence document that would take students from pre-k all the way through 12th grade building on technology-based skills and we hit the brakes on that a little bit when the pandemic

022came along because everybody was already stressed and overworked and now is a great time to get back to that and it actually pairs very well with the profile of the graduate and talking about the pending of skills there so we look forward to um almost merging those two concepts mr david thank you i'm going to talk a little bit about the health and safety committee this past year we were very busy um giving a lot of input in terms of the program 19 safety protocols there was a lot of questions issues that came up in the building whether it had to deal with cleaning or how to deal with masks would have to do with quarantining or contact tracing so we were pretty busy this past year um something that the health and safety committee

023does on an ongoing basis is it oversees capital projects and we report on what's happening so that's something we have our first meeting next month we'll be talking about the ongoing capital projects what's most noticeable as you come into this complex is what we're doing with our our traffic safety improvement that project specifically was an outgrow of conversations that we had in the health and safety committee and i know the committee is really proud of where we are with this project because it took a lot of work and involving a lot of different government entities whether it was the county the town the school board of course we're grateful for the school board and funding it and you see his finally coming to fruition and part of the one of the main questions that we

024get just from the community is like what's happening and what are we doing here just right now we're making it safer and that's the primary objective of this whole traffic project is to make it safe for coming into this conflict that's where we're going to be using the light that's at the golf course right now so that when you enter you enter at the light and that scary turn across traffic whenever you come into the complex where you leave it and you're heading east will be avoided we'll still be able to go west by the turn uh another thing is we're going to be keeping cars out of the bus lane here at the middle school in atletico big improvement because there are a lot of concerns about safety with kids crossing drop-offs and the

025buses so that's an improvement here we're also getting more parking spaces and the actual entrance is going to be a little bit more of a snake-like entrance coming in which should slow down the cars instead of cars feeding in and out of this complex it'll be safer so it was um that is a product of the health and safety committee i'm almost there we'll be starting to work on the golf course in november and timing the work we've been doing this summer with the work on the golf course that's just an example nothing goes through all of the uh projects that we've been doing you can look on the website during the capital safety excuse me capital projects and we've been doing updates on pretty much a weekly basis that's also on the website something

026else that's not so much the health and safety committee what we call the district safety team it's related it's by state legislation is preparing the district safety plan and also the building safety plans the emergency plan so that's the work that the district safety team does in collaboration with the actual building committees and the buildings themselves and then somewhat of an offshoot of the health and safety committee but it's something that we do in terms of the district safety team with the safety plans and that's just a quick recap on the health and safety committee doctor overnight all right thank you so much mr devito and thank you dr kylie rendon uh just some follow-up steps for next year that we're looking as we look towards the future a few changes are technology and curriculum

027committees are actually going to be merging uh when we started off our technology committee you know we were looking at incorporating different technology across the district like our once one initiative where we launched our chromebooks um having wi-fi in all of our buildings things like that what is really uh as dr kelly rendon outlined been apparent is that technology is a part of curriculum and instruction they're intertwined now and those are pieces that we'll be focusing on together so the curriculum and technology committee will be merging together as one committee also our sel committee is going to become the mental health and wellness committee this was a lot of the work that we did and a lot of the goals that people set for next year within that committee and as you can see uh

028for equity we're going to be focusing on the topic of community schools community schools really just in a nutshell are schools that are the hub of the community you know that schools that kind of offer different services for families like uh medical services dental things like that at the different buildings uh you know some schools may have a place to do laundry things like that but all different ideas for the for the school to be the hub of the community and we're we're going to be continuing to develop the resource map for all of our local community organizations that have participated that we can put out to our families as a guide curriculum we talked about going further into the profile of the graduate and looking at programs we can bring to our schools to

029support that sel a focus on mentorship advisory programs nutrition health and wellness and looking further into that which is hence the reason we renamed our committee uh technology again bringing those teaching tools into the curriculum looking at if there are relevant supplies out there we need to bring in so we can provide our students with meaningful learning experiences and finally health and safety will continue to work on all the great work that mr devito outlined in his presentation as well so at this time you can take any questions or comments from the board and just a plug that if you are interested in joining district committees you can uh shoot me an email and i'm happy to send you the sign up link people remember thank you so much um for the presentation um a

030few of my questions just to clarify the this stage here with the survey yes so this was given to you how old were the kids those students were in middle school in high school that was my second year so my question is for younger children um elementary age or if we're going to continue assuming that you will in some way how um are those children able to access these questions and answer them if they can't read or so uh ms bernardino arden our elementary social worker actually worked with the committee to create a survey for the elementary level that was more age-appropriate so we're going to work with the committee to see if we need to tweak that to administer it out to students this year but that that question example was one for secondary

031but we do have one taylor for elementary as well good and my only other comment was um you just closed out with a not available in any way possible so i would look forward to seeing ways that we can continue to get more and more community members involved so that that really stood out for me but it was really good presentation so thank you great thank you i have a couple questions first thank you so much dr roman alley dr cali london mr devito for your presentation tonight and i want to thank everybody who served on all of the committees last year i know it was a lot of work a lot of days during and that's what we thought about thought through these questions it was actually more of just a year it was

032more like two years so i really love the pathway that we're actually heading in and just to echo what this being said i'm very i'm very thrilled to see that we are involving our community more and more in our communities so they can see we can that we have a true partnership with them i only have about one other question excuse me i get my glasses with a culture responsive curriculum scorecard um is this is this something that we will give out to parents on open school night so the committee actually took a look um we identified a specific area of fifth and sixth grade social as an ela within the classroom um the ela classrooms took a look at the character representation uh they took a look at also the um and social studies

033classrooms circle you have the social justice aspect and they both have a look at the teacher materials as well so a lot of it was geared towards the materials that we use within our classrooms uh the teacher perspective there but that was some follow-up work on this conway that we identify as a committee that we want to bring in student perspective parent perspective and take a look at kind of furthering our work in that way okay great thank you and my other question actually wasn't a question i just also wanted to say first i'm glad that the parent academies are going to be virtual because we did get a lot more participation that way and i'm very thankful about how our middle school complex mr devito is all under construction and it's finally on our

034way and you can actually see the final picture coming to fruition so thank you anybody else one thing real quick thank you for the presentation gentlemen um so just to reiterate the fact i know that miss pace and miss conway brought up the fact that this helps us get in touch the district attempts with the parents a little bit more uh these committees so we work a lot in education but these committees help form the organizational culture of the district and we can't form what we want our district to look like without the work of the committee so to urge the parents to really get involved you know the pta is very important get involved with that but these committees are real working groups of how we can actually shift what we want to see

035in school to actually happening in school so if we can pull that together um and the transition of the of the committees uh moving forward i mean every time you get something new you have to pivot a little and i think we're taking some nice pivots in in working to really bring solutions to the district to help suit the kids down the community so thanks again thank you may i go now please um thank you gentlemen for your presentation i i think that this might have been one of those nights where we needed more than 20 minutes because our committees have been doing a really lot of work and you know like other trustees have said i want to thank all of the people that volunteer their time to be honest it is it i

036don't want to discourage anybody from being on it because it's very rewarding but people are really dedicating a lot of their time and their ideas and their and all volunteer to to really bring this education thing together for our kids so um so i want to thank all the participants and in the last few years we've had just such an increase in the number of parents wanting to be on our committees which is really nice because when i first started doing this that wasn't the case and it's much you know once when we can get um all of all of our stakeholders in at the same table working for the same goal or coming together to work with the same goal i think for a lot better um so i oh and i do want

037to thank again i want to thank mr kramer for fixing the microphone yes thank you okay so i have a couple of questions and i was on the equity committee last year so um and i noticed that on our on our agenda tonight we are approving a um an agreement with the delphi university to send 15 of our teachers to something called a cultural diversity to get a culturally different cultural diversity certificate so um so i guess i am wondering and i thought that this might be a good place to bring it up i'm wondering oh do we know anything about that do we have information about what's involved in it and if so can you just give me a general idea of what that program that we're approving tonight it's sure absolutely i think

038it's actually a great place to bring it up you know we included one example of professional development about facilitating conversations in the classroom but that's just another piece of it um you know we we have a uh district and school improvement plan uh for the middle school we actually the state has taken a look at some of our achievement growth in certain student groups uh we had been given uh the task at the elementary and middle level to take a look at certain student groups and the growth that they exhibit on the new york state math and ela exams because we haven't had an opportunity to demonstrate that growth within the past two years or so with the state test being cancelled we still have not gotten off the list of being a school target

039school or target district and needing to improve growth in our student groups the positive piece of that though we are hoping to get off once we have the um the new york state test again uh the positive piece of that though is we do get some grant money uh so we have something called the school improvement grant that we're able to utilize for specific purposes one of them is professional development in the area of culturally responsive teaching uh so this program specifically uh we put it out to what is called the adelphi diversity certificate program uh we're able to completely grant funded uh when we put it out to our teachers last year we had about uh 60 people respond which was a great response we're sending 15 people this year approved to adelphi it's

040gonna be virtual so they can attend from from the district after school it's eight three-hour sessions the sessions are based around different topics anywhere ranging from topics like racism [Music] microaggressions uh there's topics on safe zone for lgbtq students there's gender bias there is the americans with disabilities act and being inclusive within our school buildings and then there's a capstone project at the end where the teachers can reflect uh and see you know where in their own practice are there areas that they want to make improvements uh or where are areas where they're getting it right and i was just impressed with the amount of teachers that were looking at that we're looking at really as a reflective opportunity to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all of our students um the culturally

041responsive teaching piece you know there is a lot of research that shows that if we are connecting to all of our students in within the classroom and it's a place they feel comfortable and we're really getting to know them as people and their families and traditions and things like that uh that the academic growth comes with that uh so that's really the motivation to get uh behind the program we've had some administrators that have participated in the program already last year uh that has successful results um adelphi has been great um about just saying that they would tailor the program to what we need so we're hoping that after the first go around we can kind of debrief and see uh see how everything went how is how um specifically how is this going to

042benefit the district is this is this a personal growth thing or is this a teaching tool like i'm not exactly clear on where we're at with that so the um the makeup of the group is all uh teachers and counselors we have 15 people as we said so it's two from each elementary school three from the middle school and four high school uh so your representation from each building the idea is that we're taking a look at our own teaching practices and the way that we relate to students and families and seeing um you know for instance i'll give the example of the uh the safe zone training right for uh our lgbtq students there may be after doing the training some areas that teachers may see that they haven't uh been we have been

043as inclusive in our buildings or areas where we have done really well or areas we may want to make improvements or maybe not at all um the great thing about higher education you know is that it's this isn't necessarily like uh it's that they're they're teaching the material to the teachers and then they're teaching it to students it's not that at all it's really a reflection on our own practice and an opportunity to converse about those topics with colleagues so those 15 teachers will be having those conversations amongst one another um you know maybe agreeing with some points that they hear and maybe not agreeing with some points that they hear from their professors thank you i i i want um i didn't want to just let this go by on a presentation on the

044equity committee and and that's an item on the agenda because it's important that you know i think that we recognize that our district has her years now before it became buzzwords and before we got into all of this um well i don't know what the word is for it but we've been working on equity in our district and i think well um without without any polarization without any any falling into buzzwords and losing the the meat of what we're trying to do here so i i wanted to recognize that um okay uh and and with respect to this close-up washington dc can you give us an example of what kind of pd like content-wise what kind of pga that is absolutely so that is um the focus there is that they're gonna take it's for

045our social studies teachers uh at the secondary level we're gonna be piloting with that group um and they're gonna be taking a look at things like current events and issues that come into the news that our students come into the classroom wanting to discuss we do not want to tell our students when they come to the classroom wanting to talk about something in socialist classroom we're not talking about that as too controversial the topic or that type of thing we do want to be able to facilitate a nonpartisan discussion within the classroom um and have a way that students can teach students that civil discourse you know i know that anybody who's looking at social media right now knows that you know there's there's not so much that civil discourse that goes on a lot

046of times we want our students to be able to participate in that kind of conversation within the classroom great thank you i also just want to comment this isn't a question that you know the work that the curriculum committee did with the profile the graduate over a two year period was so good i i you know i look at those qualities that that we've decided as a district and as a board that we want our graduates to have and and how to develop those from pre-k all the way on up through the time of graduation was amazing work as was i was on the and i also think that the um breaking up the committees into subcommittees has helped to keep it a little more focused and to get a little some more not a

047little more work done and i was on the secondary seo committee i was so impressed because i had up until last year i felt like we our secondary kids were kind of on the short end of the stick when it came to seo work you know we were doing all this stuff in the elementary schools and we didn't but but you know our staff had amazing ideas some of which were able to implement some of which you talked about working on this year so i i love the committees i think that anybody who has the time where they're interested knew it should really should really get involved um just um and i just want to confirm you said that the sel committee is now going to be the mental health and wellness committee so we're

048not going to have a wellness we used to have a wellness committee and fcm now we're just going to have one committee correct both of them okay um i love the fact that that dr connie mentioned is going to go back to the scope and sequence discussions because that's that was a that's so critical and it's been so lacking since my kids middle school like we didn't talk about it nowadays but it's been really lacking and i'm so thrilled that you're going back to that um and that's it thank you dr illinois i just have a follow-up question to what was asking is um if we can go back to the 15 teachers attending uh i guess what you would consider professional development correct so my question is i want to make sure i understand

049and expand a little bit on the values so once they attend these sessions and programs and learn it sounds like there was an overwhelming response that 60 teachers were interested are these 15 teachers then charged with coming back to share amongst you what they've learned and then i'm under the assumption that nothing will be implemented in the classroom that they learn without approval right absolutely so the plan is that after these eight three hour sessions which will take place uh beginning october so as we get into the new uh calendar year i'll be meeting with a group of 15. we'll be talking about you know um if there's anything that they want to bring back to uh faculty at let's say faculty meetings or grade-level meetings or department meetings we'll talk together about whether we

050think that uh it's important for another cohort of 15 to attend possibly next year or if we think that just turnkey at the building level is good enough you know there may be some sessions that are more meaningful to our educators than others so that's why we have such a wide range from elementary to uh to high school we have a diverse group of people as well um so it's we're looking forward to the discussion from it okay thank you so much absolutely okay uh once again i'd just like to thank all the uh principals here dr romano dr kelly runner and mrs devito uh i just have four comments first in terms of the um the equity i'm so uh happy to see the disability part of that equation for too long it was

051just gender race ses disability wasn't part of the diversity of the equity equation so i'm so happy to see that not only practice but in terms of the curricular materials in line with that you know this is an awful lot of work in terms of the body of work and it's only a six and a half hour school day so i'm concerned that there's no compromise in terms of instruction in terms of classics and looking for books that speak diversity and seek all these other themes of convention last year at the public meeting i mentioned in 10th grader who had gone uh we've gone through 12 years of school here and hadn't had any kind of work in shakespeare or any kind of introduction to shakespeare so i'm hoping that this is going to be

052balanced with sound pedagogical curriculum in terms of classics in terms of that so i'll leave that to your and your ponies i also want to let people know that uh thanking those people teachers administrators parents i also want to thank the board of ed for giving up their time to serve on these committees i think that's very important in terms of just the conduit in terms of just informing each other each of us in terms of what's going on in the district so i thank you for volunteering to serve on least two of the committees this year because your participation is vital mr devito beside the traffic configuration i want to thank you for patching the hole in the ceiling that had been here for time immemorial and i also want to point out the

053back of the building in terms of the tennis courts and those kinds of improvements that have been made in capital projects i think those have been certainly necessary and that's it for me so once again thank you for your presentation and uh i hope it's a good year in terms of the committee's report and just if you haven't been here this might be your first meeting mr general protocol is to please come to the mic give your name and address and um generally there's a three-minute time limit so if you could sort of apologize for remarks and that's nice very faithful thank you christina kramer um just a couple of things from about community tonight so i i was wondering uh what kind of uh equitable situations needed addressing i agree with uh whoever was

054speaking before in that i thought we were doing a great job as far as equity so i'm finding it difficult that we need additional training and that 30 000 is a lot of money and i can think of a lot of other places that money could be spent so i'm not entirely sure why we believe that um i am also wondering if we are going to be receiving a list of the new textbooks that are going to be encouraged reading and uh as you just mentioned i'm just curious as to which folks will be replaced and removed in in you know instead of reading some of these classes i also want to thank you for the microphone we haven't been able to hear or see and now we can hear and see and i was

055back there and i can see that it's nice and clear on the screen just mentioning that and um just wondering how the 15 teachers that are going to the equity training um were chosen as opposed you know they were 60 so i'm just wondering how they were chosen um i'm also very very concerned that this sounds a lot like crt training and i want to make it clear that if there is ever a situation where they're teaching the students that there are oppressors and oppressed people i would be very strongly against that um and i don't understand why our tax dollars have to go to teachers personal growth um if they want personal growth they can do that on their own time i i feel very strong we should be using our money towards other

056things like article 78 uh which is not on the agenda but i'll bring that up later so um thank you i'm andrew wolf from 241 east huawei so i'd like to speak a bit about the equity program that was mentioned especially with regard to that uh adelphi equity program that you'd be sending some teachers to so much of what i heard about that program seemed quite offensive to me so the whole idea is teaching about microaggressions and safe spaces uh this to me really sounds like uh the sort of thing that really makes children into snowflakes uh this sounds to me like left wing indoctrination uh the sort of indoctrination which i heard about that uh to me sounds like the sort of thing that creates division and intolerance intolerance for those with more traditional

057or conservative viewpoints this just seems like the sort of thing that i read about uh in the media about uh you know children who are growing up to be self-hating americans or ones who feel guilty for being more white i just don't see how this is uh appropriate or necessary or how this improves ours thank you so i i would actually like to respond to both of you first of all this is not today with personal growth it's good in professional practice it is not taxpayer money it was funded by a brand and under no circumstances in this district will be teaching anything that makes children feel ashamed of who they are or that they feel that they're you know there are professors and those who are oppressed as mrs ron has said we have

058been doing after we work and have had an equity committee in this district for over five years it is worked so that we can make sure that every single child in our district feels included and can reach the goals that they have themselves we all come with a set of our own experiences and backgrounds and we don't necessarily understand the experiences and backgrounds of other people that's what this training specialist designed to do to help teachers to understand so that they can better reach their students we are about inclusion inclusivity and children healing values for who they are in this district and while this is this year a controversial topic that's been politicized this is work that's been very important to our district as we really seek to make sure that long beach is a

059model where people do feel valued and included and together if i could just add on to that dr gallagher i just wanted to share i have served on the equity committee as a community member and this has been a program that has been around for as long as i can remember so some of the members that are here tonight may not be familiar with that i would ask you to familiarize yourselves with that and even maybe consider serving on the committees yourself i think what you'll find is that there was a comment of replacing textbooks in my experience that is not the goal the goal is to expand um and as dr gallagher said this is for professional development it's only going to make our teachers better um so i just i feel it's important

060that if you're interested in that um then you should serve and then you'll see for yourself good evening my first time here current amy i live in west end of alabama um firstly i want to say thank you um tonight was very informative i fully support your increasingly training and development as as a adult i am just learning about microaggressions and training in my career and i'm sure that that will set our children up for success in the future as well any workshops that we can also participate with our children um i'd love to look into that further later on i think that that would be very helpful um i just wanted to add that in that's not what i'm here for um but i think that any workshop with a parent and their children

061i think would help develop both um as those conversations are very uncomfortable as i've done those trainings myself in my 40s microaggressions are something that happened every single day that you don't realize are happening and until you do the trainings you learn what they really are and they open up conversations that can be extremely uncomfortable so i think workshops would be really beneficial if we can look at them for the future sorry i'm here for health and safety there was a i can't bring with this list um there's a situation um i appreciate your plan of action for the health and safety for this area as i heard we discussed there was a situation with my daughter this morning for transportation that i wanted to bring to the forefront um she was left on the

062corner uh there was no room for her on the bus i have called transportation and the middle school to discuss the water um she is told that she is too big and either she was to get off the bus or three other children would have to her sister was taken on the bus she's a twin and she was left in the matter of health and safety there seems to be which i wanted to come here tonight to discuss a disconnect between transportation and schools and i really wanted to address that not in a negative light i understand that kovid is presenting a very difficult time for everyone as well understand where we have not the same resources as we used to but my daughter is 12 years old i am a single mother that was

063at work and it was to my belief that she was at school two mothers that i do not know helped plan down a different bus for my daughter to get to school and i'm very appreciative for them and i will be finding a way to reach out to who these mothers were but i did want to take this platform to discuss that situation i think that it is very important that yes traffic and safety and crossing guards these are important matters but when your children are being picked up from the bus and we're using smaller buses in the west end and the west end is the furthest from this location how would my daughter have gone to school today which was this morning and i don't want to be negative in this platform but i

064want to be very open and transparent that we are barely one week into school um there was an issue with the bus not even coming for them last week i did call transportation today um and the answer that i received i will not be sharing on this platform i will email off of this platform i want to be respectful and i want um an answer and a proactive way to address the situation further but i did want to bring it to parents attention i am not the only parent it happened to a young boy today and the father came to pick him up i was at work so as far as health and safety i just want to put it out there can we please figure out a plan for busing larger buses to go

065and um if we do have to leave for another round of students to be picked up we can't just leave one at a bus there has to be a group there has to be some sort of situation in place that's all okay thank you thank you thank you for sharing this remark that i apologize first of all what you just told me i heard about at about 3 30 today 30 from one of the parents here who is here involving i am horrified by that story and i got your name from a board member tonight and we'll follow up with you first thing this morning and please know that the test can be taken to the connection okay i just want to just make sure that the microphone is cleaned up my name is sean

066castouch west market street uh first of all i want to acknowledge especially dr gallagher the email that you sent out uh before school and after the last board meeting like this i thought didn't speak to the reality that you listened that's great to what we had to say but you made changes over you had things planned that were already going forward they did soften the glow of asking our kids to masks in school i'm not here to speak to you about masks at school today i'm here to talk to you about the mental health and wellness committee that i'm going to be on the first meeting for it is october 21st and i use my high school wrestling skills to get my daughter off of me when i dropped her off at school on monday

067you know on monday morning she was fabulous everybody who was there was amazing and helping me with my daughter who had aggressive anxiety about going to school on whatever day and now that's monday tuesday um she continues every night to tell us that she doesn't want to go because she's afraid just to wear a mask wise safe there what i'm asking is what we can do to get the mental health and wellness committee to meet sooner than 20 of the time into the school year so that we can start to potentially come up with things that we can do for our kids now instead of being reactive for them twenty percent into the year so that's because i did get your email i apologize that i did not get back to you with an answer

068on that by the way i agree with you and we will discuss moving that community data but it's day four at school and you know we're trying to put out some transportation fires and get things going but i didn't really need to meet this winner and we'll try to schedule them thank you i'm james mangles i resided 517 west b street i'm hoping that this adversity will bring us some unity and i'm looking forward to finding out about the committee you guys talking about be happy to get involved um as far as the diverse the diversity program maybe you guys could request the syllabus uh expanding on the course content and that would maybe alleviate some of the confusion but um there was some mention of a tent for outdoor educating or something maybe you

069could expand on that a little bit i'm just kind of curious like how that's going to work how long you actually expect it to last into the year is it going to be enclosed heated stuff like that it looks like we're still going ahead with sports wrestling football and um during recess at the middle school the kids are confined to a small little courtyard since the beginning of the pandemic i was wondering if there was more of a recessed area for them to get the diagonal and it can't really social distance in that little um also when it's raining or snowing or it's really cold the kids aren't loud outside they're still sitting in the hallways no seeing and the ventilation system you mentioned the last meeting you said it was up to standards what

070exactly did we do to bring it up to standards or enhance it i know the ventilation thing was a very hot topic for a while that was making it air safe or whatever and uh i guess we'll stop with that for now so in terms of the tents each building has a tent a couple of tents that they can use for shelter i know some of the buildings already have been conducting classes outside or eating outside and they didn't even need to set up the tent because the weather was so nice and they just were able to do it outside without any kind of cover but each building does have a couple of um 20 by 20 tents that we purchased last year we're going to be purchasing some more of them just so they

071have again more of it and um we're still pursuing more of a party pen type of thing um we're having a little bit of time sourcing it right now but we want that in addition to the tests that we have already it can't be something that's heated or enclosed that it defeats the purpose of having it outside and just having some sort of an alternative to being inside um so that's where we are with some sort of a canopy or a tent but i know because i've been checking in with the buildings and with facilities departments that they have been going outside and really taking advantage of outdoor space in terms of the ventilation what we said when we said that they're up to standard is that we were able to upgrade any place where

072we have any type of an hvac system to make sure i think the highest grade that's available for an institution like ours meaning a school is merge 13. so there are different levels of the filters and all of our buildings have the merv 13 level of filters in them the those with the two having to do with facilities i don't know dr gallery you want to address that which is the outside areas of the middle school we as you can see are under quite a bit of construction but we hope that that will be completed by the end of september we'll be able to expand some of those other areas as well in addition to putting up a tent in another area so we'll we want to check this metaphor um good evening uh dr

073gallagher i'd like to thank you as well for the follow-up email after the list uh for me i thought it was very professional and i appreciate it um i don't know enough about the sel program uh in order in order for me to make too many comments on it i just have a couple of questions uh one question i have is is there any kind of grading system involved in this program so as far as rollout of the program we actually did a baseline with students at the beginning of the year last year just about the different areas for instance if an area had to do with courage or something along those lines and that was the unit uh students could kind of do a self-reflection of the beginning and end of the unit to

074see if they'd grow in areas that were covered in the unit uh this gold in our elementary guidance council also reached out to the teachers just to get feedback on the units if there's anything that needs to be tweaked then if they felt that services were effective or need to be improved so we're still in in the rollout process but we're definitely looking to make sure that it's impactful and that we but students aren't being graded necessarily on their performance you know in the program okay so then the other question i have is thank you very much for your response the other question i have is is when there is a news event that you'd like to bring up into the classroom uh if one of the children um says something that's out of line

075i'm assuming that the teacher is going to be the one who determines whether or not that comments out of line or not all right that's part of the um the purpose of the professional development you know we have many teachers already who are doing that successfully um teachers in the district are true professionals in navigating conversations like this we also never want there to be um you know one uh specific viewpoint on a side of a story necessarily so if there's if there's something that comes up i know you use the term out of line but you know we don't we're not necessarily having opposing viewpoints we're not necessarily out of line we're just we're trying to focus when students have different views and how they can have a productive conversation you know to understand

076each other okay okay and how how many hours is the uh is the training for um for the teachers who are going to talk to adulthood it's uh eight three hour sessions uh so it's once a week for three hours from four to seven after school okay so is does that mean that the teachers are going to have very little say in in the questions that are asked or are they only going to bring up the topics that are going to be discussed so the topics are are predetermined um however there's we've been assured that there's plenty of discussion you know and interactivity within the courses so that's how we think it's gonna be most meaningful okay so the last point that i that i'd like to bring up is that there are a lot

077of hot topics um you know within this country now so you know it might be difficult for you to give you an example but if the if the question about kneeling or standing for the american flag would have come up like can you give me an example on how the teacher would go about what would go about answering that question or so what i can tell you um you know they're you're absolutely right there are a number of issues you know they come up with in the classroom um about those times you know the teacher um doesn't take a stance on what is the is the correct you know way to feel about about a topic what the teacher does is facilitates you know conversation among students who may feel differently about the issue and

078really teaching what civil discourse is that's that's the main idea of the conversations um that's also part of the idea of the professional development you know if we we just feel strongly that you know if these conversations can be had in supervised setting with professionals you know we trust our teachers to have these conversations um in their classrooms uh and you know where where can they be so we do think it's important you know i know someone brought up the topic of critical race theory before you know that's not something that's in the new york state standards and not something like we teach the new york state standards however if the topic of race comes up in the classroom we want our teachers to be equipped to have those conversations within the classroom uh you

079know in a respectful way and teach our students to be respectful when they converse with one another as well and i react to that as well you know the bottom line is controversial topics you know you can hear different points of view but your decision is based on what your family focuses on and it goes back to parents so you know if your parents go one way and you'll you need to listen to your parents but we can have discussions about life you can feel difficult well absolutely i completely agree with that i was just um i'm just i got like i said i have to look into it furthermore i'm not going to make comments on something that i really know nothing about but that was one of my concerns when i heard about

080the program is if a a hot topic does come up like standing or kneeling for the american flag i just want to make sure that the teacher um that the teacher isn't going to just basically ignore the student not so much ignorance and choice awards but maybe show more um yes maybe show more preference to the child who is talking about kneeling for the american flag as you know yeah i can assure you that sign that we'll we'll make sure that we know that all of our students can be treated equally i can tell you that you know our teachers are professionals you know they follow code ethics as well and look to create a nonpartisan classroom so thank you [Music] i uh sorry i was late for the party i was coaching uh bulldog

081football here tonight uh just give me a name sure tim crane 361 he's broadway uh with regard to the civil discourse i mean plain and simple how are you gonna avoid and uh handle bullying outside the classroom if somebody has a certain stance on one thing whether it be conservative or kneeling for the play with these hot button topics yeah you can control it in the classroom with a teacher professional and so on and so on but now you get outside and you're on the playground or you're at wherever or with uh social uh social media bullying because you have a certain belief i mean how in the world are you gonna control that that's that's impossible impossible can't do it in the classroom probably not a big deal outside the classroom can you know

082so how are you gonna handle that that's the problem please before you answer the question would you just give all your concerns before selecting of a particular uh topic that's being discussed you know i i mean when i was in school we you know this type of stuff wasn't necessarily uh such a big deal now you know it's it it's everything right everyone's talking about these things so i i doesn't make sense to me so i'd love to hear a response thank you yeah i'm happy to respond to that um you know i agree with you uh in the fact that it is impossible to prevent um you know fall out in every situation uh we know that there's a structure in place in the classroom where the teachers can facilitate those conversations um i

083can tell you you know just from my own personal experience as a school administrator and district administrator that you know those things do happen exactly what you're describing where conversations take place in the classroom you know there's some and there could be some some fallout outside of the classroom as well and i think that what that is reflective is of is the is the real world and i think that you know we have staff in our buildings that are support staff building administrators uh social workers psychologists guidance counselors um who if they're if there is an issue that we that we see that has escalated in any way that's that's what we do we support and we facilitate conversations amongst kids i see i see you shaking your head like not not accepting that response

084but i will say that you know i've been i've seen in this district myself you know uh as a principal of middle school here you know when a certain president wins an election and people come in with the shirt on or whatever and things like that like that's that's part of life you know and or or or there's a certain um you know topic that comes up in the classroom people differ on they may have differing opinions but we are able to work with students to respectfully what are you going to say to the child that's getting beat up by six kids at sorry we're not going to have any discipline between once you're at the microphone okay anybody else [Music] hi jen flattery one east broadway um i have just a clarification on the

085adelphi certificate i know that both of you mentioned tonight in grant the agenda says allocating the money so if you could just explain what this grant is is it just a professional development grant that this money is or is this money that could be used for our children specifically so this is the school improvement grant and as we mentioned before it's related to academic achievement on state testing for specific student groups so we're required as a district in schools that are identified to write an improvement plan that a full school committee meets on it involves parents students staff to develop an improvement plan a piece of that is professional development that's not the entire funding that goes towards it you know but we do allocate some of the funding in that area but it is

086fully grant funded i know someone brought up taxpayer dollars before we're utilizing this funding based on the school programs august 23rd 2011 executive session a regular meeting august 24th 2021 they have a motion they have a second thank you any discussion space um i would just like to thank everyone who is now leading us for retirement thank you so much for your service serving our students and i would like to welcome everyone who is joining us any other discussion hey mrs space yeah yes i hope no one jay g [Music] uh the discussion i'd like to ask the board to consider items five through seven all our adoption of policies you'll note that the first two um we've waived the first two readings that's because the change is a minor procedural change the name of

087a person who reports any discussion yes it should be five through eight shouldn't it yes i agree i i i have some things with respect to um i don't have any any problem at all with the changes i i see that we're waving the reading of these two policies because they're just little word changing that doesn't change the content of the policy but with respect to number six public use of school facilities um when i was rereading the policy i was remembering that there have been some changes to it a number of years ago um which are not reflected in the policies substantive things that were not reflected in the policies um so i got a copy of the use it was about um charging fees to use our premises for non-local and and for-profit

088commercial enterprises that wanted to use our property so i got a copy of the use of schools form which says that keys are charged in accordance with policy but there's nothing in the policy i'm wondering a am i making this up in my head or b do we insert certain circumstances charge fees and if so then we just need to clean this i would ask that the policy committee take a look at this policy and clean it up either make it a procedure and and leave it out of the policy and change your use of school form or put in the policy and accordance with the use of schools form also um if if we are in fact charging fees i would ask dr gallagher that as part of our weekly update you send us

089some kind of information on what kind of things we're charging and how much we've collected in that regard so this is where we do trust fees um anytime we use our quest but we i i do agree with you i think because it's not it's not if we need additional security we need a custodian it says if any additional costs are incurred you'll be responsible for that but it also says a security guard will be present for your the time that you're using our premises and you will pay that price so i'm wondering if our all the groups that are using our premises are in fact paying them and again if that's if that's not what the board wants that's that's not the issue but that's what our form says so my understanding is yeah

090but i can send home more information to the board on that this week i would i would recommend that you approve the policy change tonight because it's just a procedural change that where that permission starts and then i think you should any other discussion so we're going to go with the recommendation of the superintendent yes i'm going to ask the words about who's item accepted was withdrawn and then on number 15 as amended it's just an attractive date it says 2021 instead of 202. that's the wrestling clan this is amy i have a motion do you have a second second any discussion um i just have a question for the custom wall graphic where are we going to put the graphic so those were all for our food service lines um some of the improvements

091they did last year to make the food look more attractive and you know put bulldog signs science and food certifying stuff you know improvements so we're also still planning to use some students joining us as well to help more appeal yeah if you visit high school you can see that in the cafeteria and in many public spaces they have the idea they're incredible i just want to ask a question concerning number nine in terms of the teachers will they be receiving credits beyond in terms of study professional development and so how many credits will they be given for this training they will be receiving credits uh from the university as well yes how much time is that 15 hours it's uh 24 hours in person and then there's uh some time on their own as

092well any other discussion just want to thank uh legislator for senator quincy for donating the backpacks to our kids we're trying to do a lot of those backpack programs throughout the summer and it's been a challenging year so i just want to thank them mrs conway also her participation in the backpack donations um what are we gonna okay so i get it we put out a bid for a bigger tent and um and we only get one first response and then they rescind their bid so we can't possibly look forward to this but what are we gonna do we we um we have um made it made a commitment that we are going to get our children out of the buildings as much and as often as possible so it seems to me um that

093we need to have more chance so what's our plan to get more tests even though this bid did not work sure so we can purchase other tents or tarps canopies from a current municipal contract uh what we were hoping to do with the bid that we released was to get a larger tent similar to what we have but not quite as large similar to what we had for the moving up ceremonies but we are going to be moving forward getting additional sense like i said each school building has a few already but we're going to get more through this municipal contract that we can purchase off it was just a question of type of canopy tent so instead of having let's say five or six you know smaller canopies we can go with three and

094one so it's just that type of thing okay so and when will that happen though because we're already now in the middle of september so i you know there's a limited time frame right so just in talking with the building level staff whether it's the principals or the facilities that they've all said that they're are holding instruction or having students outside so the fact that they may not have six canopies but they have three it's not impeding their ability to be outside you know what it does though is it gives them a little bit of cover for the sun you know and things of that sort but they're still going outside i know but [Music] the board made it clear that that as part of our reopening that we we wanted to make sure that

095those kids are outside every day rain or shine at some point we're going to have temperature issues to deal with where we're not going to be able to use the outside so while we have that opportunity i just feel like we need to take advantage of it everybody's absolutely right but so far i haven't heard anybody say that they can't do something because they don't have a campaign all right but i think he's point you know we've had except for the first day of school nice weather so i you know if we have to drive over home people ourselves um i don't think that's necessary i think the facilities department can just get the stuff off the existing which may happen in the spring which we should think about before the springtime whether it gets

096here if we're going to do it but but if we do it now by the time the bid is returnable and we i mean it's time-wise it's not it doesn't seem like it's going to work for the fall season it may work for the spring season but we'll keep that in mind my other question um is on the use of schools applications have all of the organizations um using our facilities been advised of our policy in terms of social distancing and mass are they all complying with that yeah great thank you any other discussion please this is pace number nine denise ford about the status of the red light cameras on the buses yes they did this with rona and she told me that the contract is now with the county controller so they expect

097it to be approved very soon that she promised that she would let me know the minute it was excellent could you keep us all of course not just us up here but yeah thank you anybody else i just have a quick comment from dr gallagher would you be able to be able to post more pictures of how our children are learning outdoors on the district website absolutely and i would just also like to say to all those who are commenting we do listen to you and we do appreciate all of your thoughts and comments if you go back and we think about them and we research them very carefully i just want you to know that even though you think you're not being heard you are so thank you very much for coming and keep

098coming and letting us know what you think thank you anybody else sure so i have actually two comments um one is on transportation um listening to that parents story from earlier today it's obviously i'm confident that the team will get get on top of that um but there's been other issues as the parents i've been experiencing and i can only imagine other district parents students have been experiencing uh with transportation primarily on latenesses and inconsistency with the busing uh and then feedback communication knowing where our kids are so transportation is like the main point of contact we have every day with the district as parents beginning today at the end of the day and safety and that's when our kids are moving parts in and out of the district so to hear that kids are

099not 100 percent um i'm not gonna stay accounted for because they're definitely accounted for we're not losing kids but we're kidding there's been too many moving parts of where our kids are at the time where they're supposed to be if they're on the wrong bus so if they're not where they are where they're supposed to get it's a real challenge that we've been facing and i feel like we're not facing facing this and this isn't a new challenge this is something that we're hitting annually and i know the start of the school year always brings hiccups it's not completely on the district it's new students it's new parents new routes it's moving parts but i feel like we just need to do better for the parents and the students um and it's just i'm expressing

100frustration i'm expressing looking for feedback when parents are trying to figure out what their kids are doing and i know it's not completely on the district you know and i found myself we're kind of late we're submitting some paperwork um we don't always show up the bus stop on time we don't tell the district we're not coming in for the day so they're waiting for five minutes but too often are we waiting at the bus stop eight o'clock for an early start school starts day 20 and the bus is coming at 8 25. so when that happens the kids are missing out on instruction it's disrupting their whole day and then on the other end of it it's killing any after afternoon activities if they're coming home an hour late from school and if when

101there's working parents that creates chaos throughout the night so i just we need to do a little bit more um i know we're trying but how to bring it up so i i'll start again i appreciate your comments mr pinto and i i totally agree with you um it is a source of frustration to all of us um you know you know it is a problem all over long island we are faced with the personnel shortage and something that is very difficult to remedy i cannot drive a bus our teachers cannot drive um and there are no bus drivers out there one of our avengers is short 100 drivers which is unheard of now that being said i i think you're right i think we have to face up to the fact that we this

102shortage is going to continue for several years and we need to look at our business patterns and you know provide some different ways to you know i don't know if they live in our structures perhaps schedule time look at something that will relieve the stress in our systems the other problem very honestly is public relations and i think it's it's related to the first problem because the people in the office around having classes so you can so it's one person in the office just building a million phone calls and you know yes to a frustration point no excuse for that but i think you know that's all part of the same issue and we've been having conversations over the last few days about the intro structural changes that we put in place in that department

103so that we're not going to do this every year i think we all hoped that maybe the shortage would be relieved that somehow you know more people would want to take these jobs people for new careers and retirees but it seems to be getting much worse instead of better um so i again every year of my first two weeks the headaches transportation and i you know i resolve and people certainly finance to be better but it's going to take big changes yeah i just asked how the elementary new elementary schedules working out this year well i think the time itself is working out well and we've wanted our elementaries all to be on the same schedule because there are some great things we can do there in terms of sharing future development sharing staff but

104that may be one of the things that has to change we may have to go back to staggering our elementary schedules because that does reduce but this is more concerning the the food products that we're doing i know i speak of it often and i and i'm trying to really improve i don't know education i'm not gonna lie about that i'm not an educator but i know logistics a little bit and transportation is something i want to work on and food service health of our students is something that i'd love to work on too but we're improving the quality of the display of our food but we're not we're really i'm expecting more like when i saw this year's menus or came out its same menus as last year and i think we have an

105opportunity this year because we're getting completely subsidized federal funding for everyone to at least taste the food or participate but no one's going to want to taste something that's not advertising on the menu i want the kids to get excited to see the menu i want the parents to see that they get excited to see the menu and when we're doing tostitos which or some sort of taco salad then a hamburger the next day and then a meatball hero i mean those are just not at the elementary level no one is going to want to eat that i know we're working on it i'm just i'm hoping that we can work quicker on it um utilizing fruit as a fruit uh fruit juice is a food substitute it's just me still doesn't make sense i

106know we're still incorporating the sugary reduced sugary cereals um but the kids can't be sitting in class after eating those alternatives and i think more parents are allowing their kids to taste it and i think we're doing a little bit of a disservice so that's i know we're trying hard no kyle's working really hard the whole food services nutrition and mr devito is working hard but you know if we can start really and i'm willing to be a taster if you want so if we can agree then we're all in the thinking with that as well as you can join i know mr guido and swan were trying to start introducing that are healthy and that would appeal to students and they have plans to do more of that and i think my mention to

107the board was passed out to the public that mr swan and our district white social workers are collaborating this year on a district-wide nutrition campaign so that we can also start to train our students to want to eat healthy at home i shared with some people that when my daughter went to school in pre-k i would send her you know new mom first child healthy snacks carrots and apple juice and apple sauce and i got to call after about two weeks you know we know you're trying to be healthy but she's stealing the cheeseburgers next door now you know that's your frustration so we need to as a community we want to focus on helping and encourage our kids from all angles to really um look at those healthy choices and i know one has

108a great plan for this year i think the first couple of weeks are a little limited um if you want to jump in on that i know we kind of have to we don't necessarily have the ability to order new food for the first few weeks i think the innovations will be coming soon yeah that is true just to say that there was some shortages with chicken um and we had to do some many changes that were unexpected and that's why there were some meat issues in the world because the chicken didn't come there was some sourcing issues but that's not the way it's going to go for the rest of the month i'm sorry i just had to we have the greenhouse at the high school so i know that there was talk last

109year about the connection between farming and farm to tables so are we still looking into using the greenhouse as the possibility for that we want to take that system well we continue to look at how we can have a farm-to-table initiative there are some obstacles regarding food handling and some other things that i know mr swan and i are going to work through but whatever we can however we can have products or produce that we grow in-house we're going to try to use it but the state doesn't make it that easy for us anybody else i just want to add on to what mrs conway said in terms of parenthesis and i want to thank you when i particularly uh picked up a perk up when i heard that many of you were going to

110be volunteering for committees be nice to get that kind of representation on the district committees so we're grateful for that okay moving along comments um teacher's association i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry well questions and comments from the public anybody good evening robert mahey on long beach middle school seven times address please i look forward to your trip i'd like to speak regarding the mandated testing for the employees i understand that it is a new york state directive and i i'm having a tough time in school because we do have some that are vaccinated and some that are not and vaccinated people can still get infected and pass on clothing just like unvaccinated people and even though they're vaccinated the variant can still reach those people that are advancing you i wanted to know if

111the testing is going to be mandated to all employees whether you're a vaccinator or not is that your only question please ask them all at once okay and my next question is can we incorporate strengthening our community um because code is here for a while and it's been here and those are my concerns thank you the um the testing i don't believe legally you can mandate this thing for teachers but i've certainly said to anyone who inquired that anyone who's vaccinated is welcome to get tested um the second one okay for that i just don't know exactly what you mean by trying to immunity is there a particular program or encouraging people to vitamin d and yes because all i hear is um get the vaccination get the vaccination but there are other things that

112we can incorporate into our life and there are published studies there are i mean we're certainly willing to support that encourage that um if the union's leadership wants us to you know put out some kind of literature on that again i don't know that we can mandate that thank you anybody else without anything okay so the last two meetings that we were up here it was all about the whole masks no masks is that happening and the vote went through and it was because it was mandated by the governor and we all have to wear masks for the kids and practice social distancing and it's it was my understanding that some of you may or may not agree with these policies um and i so you know i don't know how to get things done

113all of this advocating for my kids thing is new for me i have never been doing this before in any other way so i'm just doing a lot of investigating and i've been to a couple of meetings with other school districts and they're talking about an article 78 and that is like um an action where the school joins in uh with a lawyer files a article 78 to the governor or against the governor where they have to uh speak up and you know uh stop the mandates because they're unconstitutional um and i don't know how it all works out but i know that there's a couple of other districts massapequa locust valley who are joining in on these uh lawsuits with this other lawyer his name is hamburger and i was wondering will would the

114school board consider getting into a class action to force the governor to stop the mandates and announce that the schools wouldn't lose funding if they don't follow the mandates if the community if you had support from the community and some parents i know i would and a lot of other parents that i know would get a petition together and get community support to ask you if you would join in something like an article 78 so that you as the school board would now have the power locally and then we can now ask you to make decisions for us instead of being mandated by the governor am i making sense okay because i'm not entirely sure so my i guess my direct question would be would the school board be interested in getting in some type

115of uh class action lawsuit to impose article 78 which is to stop the tyrannical mandates and if you want us to get petition signed something like that let me know and i can start organizing that that's all are you speaking for myself i'm not interested in pursuing that that's you but there are other people on your part mr president okay that's fine is that it is anybody else going to answer my question i mean everything is your wife has has studies that everybody almost everything amazing is my time up were you close but you gave us you wanted us to speak and i think something okay i i will um respond to what you were asking i personally don't know enough about article 78 or anything that you're referring to um to say yes or

116no at this point i think um as a board of education or for me personally as a trustee i'm always open to listen to the public i would say if you want to go ahead and do anything that is completely up to you but at this point if you're asking me if i will support that or not i truly cannot give you an answer um but i can say that right now i stand by you know the decision that was made by the governor i do believe it's right currently for this moment in time i don't know what that's gonna look like in a week from now i don't know what that's gonna look like in a month from now um but i i will research this i'll look at it i am curious um

117i do have friends that are on the boards that you refer to i don't even talk to them um but i think there's a lot more to this conversation than just asking us yes or no at this point well i have to start somewhere and i'm just taking this bag and i find your information and just getting the next step and i appreciate you doing that and that's what advocacy is okay thank you i'd also like to respond to it i am we for the for the most part we as the board grappled with the decision of a mass mandate versus no mass mandate before the governor was the governor she just became the governor that day and two hours before the meeting she said you know you have to have a mass mandate so

118most of us had um thought had looked that this issue had listened here and had come through you know whatever um now and the basis for me for that decision was continuity of instruction it was keeping kids in school and and it had nothing really to do with vocal disorder it had to do with us having to comply with the cdc and stayed at and and stayed in at that point who say if you are three feet apart and mass you don't have to quarantine and you don't have to concentrate i wanted to keep kids in school so so that was really the basis all i'd have to say i do know about article 78 and i think it's ingenious because i'm not sure she has the power to do that but that's not my

119decision but but because i the basis of my decision was to keep kids in school as much as possible they've already it's already been crazy um so i would not be in support of absolutely of the life of joining the city of joining the article 78 what if you didn't have to make that choice but if it wasn't separation or quarantining nothing to do with with that she just said i'm i'm directing the health department to come you know to have this mass mandate and then they rely on the cdc so it's again [Music] i'm kind of gonna echo what my other fellows trustees said um but i really appreciate the fact that you came down and you're advocating i i think it's so important that all of our viewpoints are shared um when we

120did hear about the mass mandates the one thing that i thought about was to have the continuity of instruction last year we saw that the hybrid model was not a good model for our children um it wasn't a good model for the teachers or for the parents either so for continuity of instruction i would i would have his children in school mask the three feet apart and six feet um i don't know how things are going to change covey changes from day to day but i appreciate continuing the dialogue and i will research further into article 78 i have been following what massive paper and locus valley have been doing as well but i appreciate it i look forward to talking more about it in the future thank you we also research israel thank you

121thank you i just apologize absolutely for another commitment i apologize no offense to anyone have a great night thank you hi jen slattery one east broadway i just want to make an observation we are in this room for under two hours it is very comfortable in here i'm always hot and i'm actually a little chilly in here there's a lot of air conditioning our president of the school board has not worn his mask for almost the entirety of no that's not true i had it on i took it off because i can't read with my glasses we can look at the video but i have been watching for about 90 percent of this meeting you have not had that mask on sir this is two hours in a cool environment our kids are in this

122school for six seven hours it was 989 degrees on monday i just think that we need to be conscious of these mass breaks about going outside more i understand that this is not under your control but take a look around you and i bet people will look at that video every single one of you up there has taken breaks as you felt necessary sipping water taking the mask off for a few minutes i see a couple bottles of water in front of you i've watched all of you throughout this you don't have to get permission to get mass breaks our kids do i've heard from other people that some of the teachers that they have said that the second the kid stops eating the mask has to immediately go on maybe things can be a

123little bit relaxed if they are you know allowed to take them off for these times because again just look at how you're acting in this extremely cool air-conditioned environment which our schools are not okay thank you mr thank you um i just want to give my input as far as the last main dates i know that this was a very difficult you know conversation and decision but as far as the continuity of the education i 150 support this um and my friends parents my kids all of us we do support this as far as my children were fully virtual last year and returned back to school april 15th um hybrid wasn't working for them so i had made that decision in october to pull them out completely so that they can focus on one thing

124so it was either fully virtual or be in school full time so i know how challenging that is for the children's education um and really having to navigate through the days being different every single day so i do feel very strongly that continuity is extremely important where my girls were struggling they were not getting good grades and then ended the year with high honor roll and honor roll so they went from not passing and getting calls from the teacher to high honorable and honorable because they were able to really dive into their education and focus um as far as the mass mandate the uh input that i received from my daughters is they do take their mass down they are able to breed i work in a different field i managed in retail and we

125do have grand mass holding and customers come into now and you know it is a service it is a safety it is something that we do for ourselves and other people and it's not just for um you know it's not a matter of a mandate it's just a matter of a lifestyle and something that we do for our health right now at this time and i just wanted to kind of refocus on that um if we want a sense of normalcy it's just an accommodation that we have to do at this time just having my children do that last year i feel like it's something important to really discuss when you have kids that have had different levels of education on that continuity is it's a huge focus um and that's it i just wanted

126to kind of thank you thank you anybody else i'll be really quick my daughter also has glasses and also can't see when she wears a nest thank you uh i was just curious um we have uh legal counsel retained for the school monthly rate what is their standing on whether this is a law or not a law and we can get into that later we can talk about the article 78 but um yeah so we're going to work on finding out what the legal standing is on that and that would probably release the shackles of you guys having to feel like maybe you're beholden to the governor when you're actually maybe not and maybe there could be a little bit more wiggle room in how we approach the masks because every child parent is does

127it a little bit differently it's not a one size fits all for every kid or household um just run down a couple more things that i just picked up in my endless quest here um the mass wearing it's not legally or proven to be used for virus protection it states it on the label um children there's studies showing that children are becoming hypoxic from wearing masks i happen to be in the automotive industry i paint i do body work i wear a mask all day long sanding and protecting myself from dust but it's it's not without major distress from sweating and lack of oxygen so children's blood levels are showing major hypoxia there's also other studies that extrapolate on that saying that it causes further disease to develop faster namely cancer is one of them

128that they're studying so you just have to take it all in that the risk and benefit has to be weighed i know the continent continuity of education is very important i happen to have a benefit of having my son home he was failing very badly before and i was able to help him one-on-one and it kind of worked out great towards the end when he went back in april but um the risk versus reward i just hope that you have a little bit more of an open mind and maybe having the shackles at least a little bit will give you the benefit of thinking a little bit maybe further down the line that we may not be doing the best so i just i just want to be clear again with um kind of echoing

129what mr says um and i i like i i hope that it didn't first because the reason why i personally and this is the same thing voted for was in support of the mess was for continuity of instruction what facts mean is that with students wearing the math three feet of distance both students in math there is no need to quarantine right now there are cases in our district of students that have had covert and staff we have barely any students quarantined if we were where we were last year with the exact same situation we would have 50 or 60 or 70 students quarantined because of the not wearing that or [Music] even if we support or not support math the idea of the quarantining and the not need for quarantine is what's hinged on

130my personal decision and so although we are listening that's not going to change moving forward at this point unless the governor and the and the board of health changes that any other questions and comments from the public mr wolfe coming up and andrew will from 241 east broadway so i understand the importance of uh retaining continuity of construction um and that wearing masks allows you to obtain that however what if however wearing the mask to obtain continuity of construction is really about following the state's rules to allow you to gain continuity of instruction i don't think that you know the mass are really so effective that that's what's really making it that people don't need to get quantity you know they're going to get sick they're going to get sick anyhow they aren't going to

131get sick they weren't going to get sick so what are the consequences to the school district if they were to decide to not follow the mandates so do you lose funding um and this is you know assuming that perhaps the board could in the future come around to a different way of thinking that perhaps nests don't really help or that the negative consequences of wearing them outweigh the benefits if the board were to come around to this line of thinking uh what would the consequences be of going against the masculinity so essentially just a lot of things to be normal well i know that um i believe i'm not sure existed now i don't want to say initially planned to decide the mandate and they got a letter from the institute of education threatening not

132only monetary funds but that they would shut the district down and make conclusions do you believe that that would actually happen like would they really shut the district down don't know that to me sounds like a bluff you know could they really do what are they going to do with all the kids uh on behalf of mr epstein we're looking forward to a great school year thank you thank you everybody hey