001two would everyone please rise and pledge the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay could we please have roll call certainly mr abdallah absent mr azar here mr fleming is absent mrs henderson here mrs karam here mr bodensky here mr robson here and mrs tierney's absent mr acker i'm here and and just to clarify uh mr abdullah had a death in his family i believe mr fleming's out of town and mrs tierney has a uh quite a number of guests right now so everyone's tied up everyone's busy this summer i have a motion to approve the agenda so move second on the motion roll call please mr azar yes
002mrs henderson yes mrs karam yes mr madinsky yes mr robeson yes mr acker yes seven yes uh sorry six yes okay uh dr safer you're on okay i do not have an uh what i would call an official presentation where i'm uh uh putting together a presentation uh behind me and talking everybody through certainly we'll be back at that when september comes and we are in full swing however i wanted to take a moment to speak about some feedback i've received and some conversations i've had in the community from some of our community members who have wondered about how we may utilize some of the funds that will be available to us visa via grant that we've we've certainly read a lot about in the paper for abington heights it's approximately 150 000 for school
003safety and another 150 000 for mental health and so i've got quite a few questions on that so at this point what i'd like to talk to you about is how we have had some discussions with our administrators local law enforcement agencies mental health agencies about how we may think about utilizing these funds from the the safety aspect i've received a lot of feedback and we are in ongoing conversations but at minimum what we're working on now is one improving our communications not only within our buildings but across our buildings which means that that's going to mean new radios repeaters making sure that there are no dead spots in any of our buildings that we provide as many of our staff that are supervising our students whether that's in the cafeteria or out in the
004playground or with our principals or some of our lead teachers with radios so that we can communicate communication is kind of that first line of defense and we have to make sure that our students are safe and covered another area that we are looking at and looking to implement is a visitor and volunteer management system which you see in many schools across the country and certainly within the county where visitors come in and and you have to put an id uh into a a scanner and then you have an id with your picture on it so everybody knows that and when you when you put this id in it also goes through a database so we can make sure that we're not getting anybody that is in any of the databases that are registered for
005example like the sexual offender database this is a very quick way an efficient way to make sure that we are monitoring who's in our building and we're making sure that we are keeping those folks safe that are also monitoring who's coming into our building we also have numerous volunteers uh and contractors so this is another uh way that we can more effectively manage who's coming into uh our our buildings and then finally when we think about that school safety we are put some quotes out and we are taking a look at video surveillance so that's one thing that we have to ensure that we have eyes all around our buildings and within our buildings so as a for example over the fourth we had some vandalism at newton ransom and we did not have a
006camera in place that if we did we would have been able to provide local law enforcement with the information that they needed and that's something that we can certainly take advantage of on the on the mental health side we already have a very robust program here what i would say a a k-12 not only people services student services program where we have social workers we have counselors we work with outside agencies uh very well so at least some of our initial thoughts or we'll be able to utilize some of these funds to pay for an existing counselor or social worker that way um we are working with local law enforcement the fbi working on um [Music] active shooter drills i'm not going to say a whole lot about that now that's in the planning but
007it is a multi-organizational effort and we understand that this is really going to take us a year we're going to work with all staff we're going to work with all students to make sure that we are all up to date and up to speed on what our procedures and processes are within the district so that's something that um we will be looking at i've had the questioner dr schaefer again are we going to get some uh database for mental health or or or sel and my answer is no um i'm looking at how we may utilize those funds to already bolster the resources that we use to work with our kids on a daily basis like our social workers or our school counselors and uh we'll have more on that but i just wanted to
008provide that update because that is something that i've been getting questions on and i want to make sure that that that we can speak to that that's all i have thank you very much the next part of our meeting would be for public comment normally we ask you to fill out a card uh with uh your name and so on but i think we have three people here uh mr sheehan is a regular um i'm not sure you at this point mr sheen you even have to sign in so please i have to sign in no no no no i said it i'm not sure you have to we do ask for for staying to about three minutes so of course we do ask you to stay to about three minutes in your discussions okay
009my name is tom sheehan i live in waverly and you just mentioned a three-minute timing practice that we have you know if you've got a room full of people and halfway want to get up here and talk i certainly understand you know you got to put some controls on you can't you can't have half a room of people talking all night but i mean there's three of us here i'm making sure the other two even want to talk so if you could you know bend a little on this three-minute rule i'd appreciate it we certainly do uh bend a little bit as it is and and what we try to do is be consistent across all of our meetings i recognize we only have three people talking well i understand but sometimes and what we
010try to ask is to make sure people have their thoughts together and and so on when they talk i have my thoughts together but you're three minutes to really make the point all right the last time i stepped at his microphone uh it was to speak about and to make you aware of a news item i came across that the federal government was was about to uh create a requirement for uh i guess you call it uh sexual gender identity and sexual orientation in schools and requiring that schools that that get funding for lunches create this standard within the schools well at the time i wasn't sure i thought this was crazy and i wasn't sure it was going to actually occur but now we have 22 states attorneys general who have filed a suit
011so i guess it is true and according to this uh statement here the third paragraph here in the first line the states complained that a federal non-discrimination rule set to take effect august 15th i don't know if you heard anything about it 22 states are suing president joe biden's administration for threatening to zap school meal program funding unless the states comply with new rules surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation in schools down to the fourth paragraph the bite administration sweeping rhetoric teach normal practices such as sex separated bathrooms and athletics is quote unquote discriminatory even though the department of justice and the department of education treated those as legal non-discriminatory practices as recently as last year the suit says a fact sheet about the proposed policy cited examples of discriminatory acts as interpreted by bureaucrats
012there's that key word bureaucrats the united states of america is no longer a constitutional republic for a bureaucratic ideology the executive branch with all of its agencies and departments has taken the three parts of government legislative executive and judicial unto itself and they now issue rules which have the effect of laws which is according to our constitution only be supposed to be produced by legislators and here we have executive departments creating rules like confetti down there in washington and this is one of them i mean this is just talk about hair brain this is ridiculous uh preventing a transgender high school girl that is a biological male i'm using a girl's restroom and preventing a transgender high school girl a biological male from trying out for girls cheerleading team the lawsuit refers to and i
013asked previously if in abigail nice school districts if boys were using girls bathrooms or locker rooms or showers and i was told no they're not i hope that's the truth on the second page at the bottom of the bottom paragraph is a list of the 22 states that are a part of this suit it imposes and on the next page of the third paragraph it imposes new and unlawful regulatory measures on state agencies and operators receiving federal financial assistance from the u.s department agriculture and the inevitable result is regulatory chaos that would threaten the effective provision of essential nutritional services some of our most vulnerable citizens last page first paragraph the last few lines the contribution controversial changes did not go through congress this is not a law this is a rule issued by an
014executive agency instead federal agencies created them under an executive order that the president issued in january 2021 requiring policies that would fight discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation i'm asking and i would like an answer at some point when this if this happens when this happens august 15th what does the abbington heights school district intend to do what do you intend to do do you have more more to say are you i don't okay i'm waiting to see i'm waiting for some kind of a response this is what i can what i can tell you mr sheehan um i think almost a year ago there was a a supreme court case some have described it as landmark and and the supreme court at that time found that gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination
015violations are covered under title ix so this is something that that happened over a year ago around a year ago and schools had to respond to that and i can uh tell you um that we have had to my understanding and i and i will double check with you um what i would consider to be a unisex bathroom so if somebody wanted to use a private bathroom they could and that would be available for everyone regarding the snap funds i haven't heard anything or seen anything that would result in funds being taken away from us when i read about the supreme court case i am not seeing or hearing any cases where we are discriminating against any children based on their sexual orientation or identity or staff these agencies these executive agencies you know the
016the expression is uh if if the definition doesn't fit your agenda change the definition well the definition of of sexual orientation has changed title ix says yes understandably boys are boys girls or girls but but within the past year at least this this definition of title ix sexual identification has changed to include people who decide biological males who decide they want to be females and ostensibly although i've never heard of it biological females would decide they want to be males uh that's not what you know the reference you're making to that supreme court ruling is was under the old title line definition of what male and female is but these agencies are changing the definition so i'm saying these agencies bureaucratic agencies unelected unnamed unfaced people or sitting down there in washington or wherever they
017are writing rules writing laws and you people are following along you're doing what they're telling you to do for god's sake stand up stop this nonsense anybody with an ounce of sense can look at what's going on and say this is not right it isn't and if it's just for the money forget the money you know i'll volunteer i'll volunteer to teach for nothing just forget the money okay anyone else please come forward hi good evening my name is tara houlihan um i was just wondering do you have a paper agenda for tonight okay oh that's my bad i i thought they were actually i've got them laying on the table down there i forgot to get okay um so my one concern was that last night i i know you're supposed to post the
018agenda within 24 hours and what happens is when it's not like last night at 8 30 myself and some friends we were trying to look at it to review it and it wasn't there until this morning as far as i could tell and i'm just wondering can it's just very hard as a mom trying to do everything to go take the time to read the agenda if i only have a few hours to do it so i i was able to somewhat read it and the one concern i just had some question was on the contract that you are going to vote on tonight the edmonton contract for six thousand four hundred dollars what could you tell me a little bit about that what that is sure it is it is our cyber solution so
019we have uh a few families um i would tell you that we probably have under five students uh that take advantage of that so they want to engage in a cyber education for the most part i think we've had more students coming back over the last two years and that would be in contrast to hey abington heights you don't have a solution so we're going to go to a cyber charter school and we feel as if we can put something together and in some cases we work with families where they may be coming in for a couple courses and then taking some uh cyber for a variety of reasons okay and edmentum uh is a contractor that we worked with last year and they are [Music] at a price point that that that makes sense
020in contrast to some that are very expensive and offer programming that is not as quality okay because there is no curriculum but i'm assuming if you were a parent and thinking of doing it you would get the curriculum and be able to review it we get to see it yes in fact we can even a tailor that correct okay yeah okay thank you that was my only comment i appreciate it thank you very much is there anyone else okay in that case let's move on to the action and discussion items personnel report yep mr accurate asks the board consider for approval the personnel report numbers one two three and four so moved second on the motion uh dr shaffer just a couple quick questions the appointments certified appointments those are all replacements are they new
021positions those are uh replacements those are we have some staff members that are out either for the entire year part of a year and we're just working to get someone in for them okay and then uh edr positions i notice they're all involved with the website building and can you just talk a little bit about uh their role as a building manager or the website leader and and how that process is going to happen please sure during the course of this year we put a survey out and we talked to our families about what they what they wanted from us and what came out loud and clear was a more transparent and consistent communication and specifically when we drilled down we started to talk a little bit about the website and how difficult it is
022to navigate we went through a little an evaluation period and you'll probably recall our technology committee uh committing to a new website which actually saved us money because it has a messenger service within it that we'll be utilizing in instead of remind and what we'll be doing is putting out more clear and consistent and what i would call intuitive uh points for uh receiving information during the course of this evaluation what we found is we just really didn't have a solid structure to manage the information manage the information coming from within the schools to post onto the website managing the information on the website either to remove revise in some way shape or form so what we did is we talked with our our teachers and some of our members of the technology committee and
023we we decided that what we needed to do was have a central person in charge of that responsible for that that helped with our professional development make sure that that person was well versed in everything that was going on in all the different sites within that website and then secondly what we wanted to do was have a building manager so that information from that school could go to the manager that person could vet it against the procedures that we have in place so we don't want to put up information that's erroneous we don't want to put up information that's not timely so we we put this together we put some edr's out there and that's how we landed on this perfect thank you very much any other comments or questions roll call please mrs henderson
024yes mrs karam yes mr madinsky yes mr robeson yes mr azar yes mr acker yes six yes and i i will take a moment too i i mentioned this at the last board meeting and and it's worth it again because i know that um we have a a consistent group of folks that that come here and tara i tell you that um in a few months one of the one of the uh software packages platforms that is gonna be put onto the website will be board docs and we're gonna have to do a little bit of professional learning on our half but what that'll mean to our our families and our students and our teachers is that they can more easily access all of our board reports contracts board policies there's also a really nice
025search engine within that so if you're looking for something specific you don't have to go through three years of board agendas trying to find say a name of a contract or person you'll be able to search that so it's it's fairly intuitive and that goes to what i mentioned before we need to be uh forthright we need to be transparent we need to provide that information quickly i just ask that you i'm i'm asking people to change a lot of things so i just you know we know that we need to get up to speed with the website and then up to speed with board docs and what follows that is our revision of policies which will probably take two years because those policies will go through our policy committee and these are the types
026of things that we need to get we need to get caught up on that said mr ackerad asked that the board consider a motion to approve the contract between abington heights school district and ed mendenham as contained in item one so moved second on the motion roll call please mrs karam yes mr madinsky yes mr robeson yes mr azar yes mrs henderson yes mr eckert yes six yes mr ackerad asked the board consider a motion to approve the following abington heights student handbooks the elementary and item two middle school three in high school four so moved second on the motion roll call please mr bodensky yes mr robeson yes mr azar yes mrs henderson yes mrs karam yes mr acker yes six yes next item on our agenda is informational i don't believe we have
027any committee reports so i'd ask is there any new business all business we have another again session for public comment being no further public comment i would ask for a motion to adjourn some move second second very good thank you all thank you you