001All right. Good evening and thank you for joining us for the November 18th board of education meeting. If everyone could start and join me with a pledge to 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. >> All right. and we will start this evening with the report of the superintendent, Dr. Murray. >> Thank you. Good evening and welcome to tonight's board of education meeting. I'd like to begin with a brief update on the new additions at Midland and Osborne schools. While work has continued delay, the project has faced several unforeseen challenges that have extended the timeline. The modular units built off site were delayed in delivery, and when they did
002arrive, they did not meet our standards. Our facilities team conducted a full review and identified issues that required immediate correction, including firewalls not built to code, plumbing connections that needed reinstallation, missing structural supports for roof components and ADA compliance concerns and bathrooms. All remediation work has now been completed and all associated costs are being covered by the project contractors. We expect the roof to be installed in in the coming weeks, which will allow interior work to progress more efficiently. We will share a more detailed timeline once the that milestone has been reached. And thank you to the community for your patience as we work to ensure the finished space meets all safety and quality expectations. Last week, the Ryan Middle School production of Alice in Wonderland was a great success. Congratulations to the entire cast
003and crew for delivering such a fun and lively performance. We are proud of their creativity, teamwork, and dedication. This has been an outstanding week for our student athletes. Varsity football captured the section 1 championship on Friday evening. Congratulations to the team and coaches on this tremendous accomplishment. Boys varsity soccer won their state semi-final matchup against Glenn's Falls on Saturday, although they were defeated by East Aurora two-0 in Sunday's state final. The team had an exceptional season and remarkable postseason run. Varsity girls soccer brought home a state title this weekend, defeating Shelmont 5-0 in the state semi-final and Aquinus 4-0 in the state final to become the Class A state champions. This is an extraordinary achievement and we look forward to honoring all players with the Rye recognition of excellence at our next board of education
004meeting on December 2nd. We're also proud to share that three Rye swimmers are headed heading to the state championships this Thursday. We'll be holding a sendoff celebration for them at 8:00 a.m. in the high school gym. And we wish them the very best as they represent Ry at the state level. And that concludes my report for this evening. All right. Excitement all around in our arts and our athletics and our academics. Great news. All right. Uh so now we will not have a presentation and discussion. We will rather move on to our open topics forum for the hearing of the public. So what will happen is the board of education will separate into small groups which will help to facilitate open discussion of topics on the minds of any of our audience members. Each group
005will record each sorry each group will keep a record of topics of discussion, comments, suggestions and questions as well as a list of requests for information. After 30 minutes of group discussion, the board members will return to the table to review for the whole audience and for each other what was discussed in each of the groups. The board will then provide a wrap-up and review of how followup if any is required will be taken such as requests for information or requests for the board to in or uh the board to ask the administration rather to investigate a particular item or topic. So at this time board members, we'll take our pens and our papers and we'll go out into the audience and we will return in 30 minutes. All right. Thank you everybody. We just
006uh are coming back from our open topics. Um a great conversation was had I assume at both tables and I can certainly speak for our table. I think we had great uh conversation. So I'll start Mrs. Bole if you could go ahead and give us a summary of your table conversation. >> Sure. So, um, we had a parent, uh, who actually has children in the elementary, middle, and nope, just the elementary and the high school, right? Yes. So, but but, uh, twins who were in who were in nth grade. So, um, and, uh, not not really, um, any anything other than really curious about what Open Topics was and how it worked and wanted to hear what other people had to say when she got here. Um so we had a lovely conversation about uh
007you know the varying programs at the district um in elementary how things have changed over time um having counselors available at the elementary level um we talked about some of the last few presentations we've done here at the board meetings about IB that we have one coming up about our fiscal or not fiscal >> facilities um so it was it was really just a nice get to know you kind of conversation That's lovely. Yes. See, one of the great benefits about coming out from behind the table. >> Absolutely. >> It's all good people. Wonderful. All right. Great. Well, we also had very lovely conversation. Um, and so we I would say there were topics uh three different things that we talked about. One was uh about the ranking of the school districts in or the
008school district rather in the US News and World Report and the varying and the changing nature of that ranking and what really goes into that ranking and where we um fall related to our peer groups. And so we talked about really how much of a black box that can be and there are unknown variables and we are not uh privy to those variables at the time of the rankings or post ranking. And so certainly the commitment here in the district uh we talked about our data presentation that we just had at our last meeting where really what we're working on is is using our own data to ensure that we're seeing continued growth in our students at all grade levels in all varying subjects and really digging in to ensure that where we're not seeing
009progress, we can make progress. And so using our data to help drive and inform our instruction going forward. Then we had a conversation um that I would kind of put in the bucket of um for Mr. Bushing about our counseling department and talking about helping to support students to make sure that they can get into Ivy League schools or whatever the most challenging schools uh they are pursuing. And so we talked about um a lot about the board and the administration's work over the last few years related to finding the right fit for kids and making sure that our counselors are supporting our students in their course selection and in their um self-reflection to make sure that where they're looking to apply and where they're looking to go forward to advance their lives are really
010going to meet their overall goals in life. Um, and so we also talked about uh the parent asked about exit surveys with our high school grads and I said I know that's something that has been talked about for a few years now and now having Mr. Bushing here actually um is a great another opportunity to engage in that conversation. So I did encourage this parent to go ahead and to reach out to Mr. Bushing and for the global audience to just remember that Mr. Mr. Ving is trying is and has put out that he is looking to have entry interviews with parents and with students and so he is happy uh to have those meetings and so people should go ahead and email him if they would like to get 45 minutes to an hour
011of time with with Seth and um having had one myself, it was a great opportunity to talk about counseling across the gamut because we are so fortunate to have counselors K to 12. And so while we typically will think first of our 9 to12 learners, we actually have counseling and and support our kids K to 12 in that area. And into the counseling department, we also talked about the idea of furthering advanced science and math courses and making sure that our students are able to take the advanced and most rigorous courses that meet their needs. And so examples of physics C um that certainly was I was unaware of even a physics C course. If anybody talked about my science curriculums and courses, they would understand why that was foreign to me. Uh we talked
012about AP computer science and we also talked about additional challenging um advanced math classes. So again, uh we had that conversation about making sure that we're that our students feel um informed enough and and self- advocates to talk to their counselors about the their hopes and uh postgraduation uh plans and what it is that the school district can do to help support our learners to make sure that they're being that they're able to engage in learning activities and courses that meet their needs. Um so again, we talked about sharing that with the counselors. We had a great conversation about our IB and our AP courses and our um um academy, but we reiterated and I will say it for the for the general audience again, we will continue to maintain a full complement of AP
013courses in addition to our IB diploma program courses. One does not um overtake the other. one will not supplant or take the place of both of those compliments of courses because they are different skills and they're for different types of learners and they offer different content right the idea that you could take an IB business management course that's not available in an AP world for us at this time so it's great to have those opportunities so I just want to make sure we say that again we can't seem to say it enough because we want to make sure everybody hears it uh so those were the topics that we talked about Right. Okay. So, always really appreciate our community members coming out for our opponent topics forum. It's not always easy to get out of
014your house and to make it here. And so, we really do appreciate it. And there will be another opportunity for open topics if now you seem really interested in in what it was. Please come join us. I believe it's in March. >> Like it is. >> Yeah. We all seem to feel like it's March. I usually do a little highlight at the end of what's coming next. So we'll know for sure if you tune in in February. All right. So with that being said, let's move forward to our consent agenda. Can I please have a motion to approve this evening's consent agenda? Sean Cloff for a seconded by Valerie Lapam. Let's take a look at tonight's Consent agenda general consent agenda fiscal consent agenda. Professional appointments. Consent agenda. Classified appointments. Consent agenda. Pupil personnel services
015and special education. All right. Seeing no questions, uh, all those in favor of this evening's consent agenda, that is five to nothing with two absences. So, on tonight's consent agenda, we have a myriad of personnel and fiscal actions tonight, which really just go to highlight that the operations of our school district are happening constantly while the instruction for our students never stops. So, we are constantly spinning plates. The administration is spinning plates all the time and really doing great work on behalf of our students. So with that, we now have communications to and from the board technology committee. All right, Miss Cloffer, what you got for us? Okay, so the technology committee had their first meeting on November 6th. Um, and basically there were several new committee members. Um, so Dr. Sassoon just discussed um
016how the committee works together and the purpose um the first thing we did um and she told us how we have to rewrite the technology plan every 5 years and the current plan is expiring this year. So the group as a whole reviewed the focus goals that were in last year's or the last 5 years, the plan for the last 5 years um just to see if everyone thought they were still valid, appropriate, if we want to tweak them, make changes or come up with new ones. So the bulk of the meeting was spent reviewing those goals. Um the current goals were related um there's three. they were related to the infrastructure, the active learning environments um that we achieved at the middle school and high school and the digital equity survey which is how
017we make sure that everyone in our community has access to the technology that they need for their education. Um so we pretty much decided we always need an infrastructure goal. Um so that will get tweaked and um the active learning envir environments we've already um set them up in the middle school and the high school with the eyabs. Uh so now it's more a matter of maintaining them was the consensus. We need to um sustain them and maybe shift focus to some professional development. So the faculty are ensuring that they're using the spaces properly and getting our students in there as much as they can. And um the digital equity survey also will most likely remain in place as that's a really helpful tool that we use um to assess that everyone has access to
018the technology they need. Um and then the next meeting we will continue to work on the three goals of the new plan and also review some of the AI guidelines that were developed last year by the committee. So that's what happened at that meeting. >> All right. Great. Thank you. Uh policy meeting which was actually today. >> Yes. So um we were able to have a policy meeting today. We didn't have any resulting uh policies to bring forward for tonight, but we had a great discussion about we're really in the midst of doing a lot of review of our policies from several years back. Um, we are now in the late 2010s to early 2011 2012, which is great. We've we're moving right along. Um, so what's wonderful is we're having an opportunity to look
019at some of these um some of the policies and see where we can um consolidate where where it makes most sense so that we don't have individual policies talking about individual matters. uh but we can sort of sort of look to how we can bring things together in a consolidated way so that they are encompassing what we need but not creating a lot of um policies to have to wade through in order to find the information that you're interested in. So that's some of the things that we're seeing. We're also seeing some where we are able to no we don't need them any longer or they don't um they don't meet the needs of what we're what we're doing. So those some of those will be um coming forward at the next meeting. Um they
020were kind of in in a bunch of different areas from instruction to to fiscal matters to uh governance. So there'll be a few different ones we'll talk about next time. >> Excellent. Thank you. Uh any other communications to and from the board? I believe there was a traffic and safety. >> Yep. Um Thursday, this past Thursday, November 13th, the traffic and pedestrian safety committee met. Um, there were two items that came up in relation to the school district uh that I can highlight for you guys. One community member came forward with concerns about the sidewalk in front of Osborne School along Boston Post Road. Uh, the asphalt is crumbling and um, the parent is actually one of the coaches for the Girls on the Run program that operates out of Osborne and I guess they've
021had some turned ankles on the sidewalk with the girls running along that route. Um, so she was inquiring as to how we can go about having that fixed. Um, and I did actually hear back already from Rob Giglano, our facilities director, who said he can definitely do some patches quickly and easily and we'll look forward into longer term things that can um be done down the road, but can fix it up for now for sure. Hopefully uh before it gets too cold. And um another issue with Midland pickup um that I guess has been been in discussion for a few weeks now. The circle at Midland opens at 2:45 for cars to pull in to start picking students up at the end of the school day. And then once the circle is full, obviously no
022one else can pull in until the traffic starts moving once school is released and cars start exiting. So traffic is building up behind the circle and then any cars who want to continue straight um northbound on Midland have to go on to go into oncoming traffic to get around the cars that are waiting. Um so that was discussed um and Kelsey Johnson who is on the committee and um has been talking to Mr. Boland about that problem. He actually sent an email out this week to parents asking them to please not queue up there and wait there and allow pass traffic to pass um in any way that they can. So hopefully that will help move things along. Okay, great. Thank you. Uh okay, so our next meeting is going to be on December 2nd
023and it will be a facilities update which is always exciting. Always good stuff happening here in our facilities department. Um this evening we will be adjourning back into executive session and we will not be coming out. So at this point can I have a motion please to go into executive session? Sean Cler seconded by Cali Ericson. Uh all those in favor that's 5 nothing. We will see you on December 2nd for a facilities update. Thank you.