February 2, 2022 SLCS Board Meeting

001three your life and then if any if everybody could please stand to say the pledge 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 and just um just some notes for some for some clarification because i know a lot of you and you might have well some of you have been here before but not lately so um they're they're uh this is essentially an opportunity for the public to which to witness the board conducting district business it's not a time for discussion with the board so you guys get to view the process that we're having um and see what we're doing as a board there is a portion of the meeting for public

002comments um and you can voice your opinions during that portion but as we're discussing business um you shouldn't chime in or raise your hand or anything like that because we will not call on you so and that's just process that's not uh any other thing going on there um there are some resolutions where all the data is included in the agenda so if you'd like a copy of that the agenda is over by the door uh any uh any resolution that requires more than what's in the agenda the information is over there as well um and then of course if you guys want to talk to any of us outside of the meeting please do and then our email addresses if you'd like to comment that way or contact us that way they're online and

003you can you can get us there as well okay so on that note um if i can get a motion to accept the agenda second nancy nancy all in favor or excuse me discussion um i'm pushing forward does anybody have any questions or i don't think they'd like to pull off the agenda or okay perfect all in favor aye any opposed okay consent agenda uh just for clarification uh for you guys the consent agenda are uh things that we typically do and so it's a way for us to move the forward the meeting forward quickly the consent agenda for everybody appeared to goes from three where it says consent agenda includes the minutes the personnel and then on the next page it includes all of that page and all of the next stage down to

004number four so all those items are in the consent agenda so can i get a motion for the consent agenda jones joe nancy as a second um all in favor of the consent agenda so now we are down to our virtual presentation um we are having a presentation from a goose control company uh because the uh because of the boost issue everybody knows there's this issue so hopefully you guys can see and can you hear us i can okay well welcome to the meeting tonight you're here with the saranac lake board of education and anne runs the three acres boost control and we have invited her to talk a little bit about her company who she works for i mean who are her clients and about how this might work should she take on sarah

005blake so welcome to the meeting thank you so much can i really hear me okay yes good okay my name is ann mazer and i am the owner and operator of green acres boost control i have been doing goose as we say in the industry since 2006 when i worked for a company on long island that serviced the north shore um of long island and parts of westchester county um so that was where i got my first experience in the field we did work for a couple of the gentlemen the gentleman's company's clients or school districts so um i've done cruise control for schools um in a limited capacity between 2006 and 2008 and then in 2008 i started my own business here in the thousand islands and my major client is the state of

006new york so i primarily i am an independent contractor but my my big anchor client is the state of new york i work in 13 state parks i'm on and along the saint lawrence river we work from seconds harbor to messina so it's quite a range um and the lay of the land is pretty unique here um obviously there are a thousand there's actually almost 2 000 islands so there's a ton of fresh water and a lot of open space for these geese to just go forth and multiply and that's exactly what they're doing if you can picture all the islands the islands are actually pristine nesting habitat for the geese to make their nests and to hatch their babies in april and to raise them in may june and july throughout the summer um

007but the islands are super unique because they you know just because of the geography they there's very little predation on the nests um and these i don't know how much you know about the geese but they mate for life and they live to be somewhere between 15 and 18 years old so they keep going back to the same place where they may last every single year and re-nesting and catching more and bringing their families with them so the problem here has really been exploding and since even since i started in 2008 and the reason i started was because the state was having a lot of problems opening the public beaches because they test the water quality every week and obviously with a high concentration of birds there was a high concentration of droppings which was

008changing the nutrient level of the water and making it impossible for them to pass the water quality test that they did every week so the state had tried multiple different things to keep the geese away all sorts of lights lasers noise makers remote controlled boats cut out you know wood or 3d cutouts of dogs that were supposed to sort of scare and mature these gates um all sorts of you know i guess and all their efforts turned off the same results as just the geese were more persistent um they're they were coming back in droves they were you know turning into these groving gangs of birds that they just could not keep away no matter what they tried so [Music] um this will be my 14th year working up here um i have six people

009that work with me and eight border collies we use border collies primarily although i have used some labs and i have used some other dogs in the past um and so basically we divide and conquer this sort of territory we all go to different places we take turns um go into the different parks because really the goal is to surprise and scare the geese and make them feel like where they're hanging out and where they're congregating in large numbers is not safe for them so there's never any it's really just the dogs using their peer pressure sort of in their body language to really keep the geese moving and make them feel unsafe so that they don't want to keep coming back they don't want to use their energy or waste their energy to keep

010coming back to these places where they're not welcome or where they're not allowed to sit and hang out so the way the program works is we make multiple visits to each site every day and every site is unique so even though i primarily work along the st lawrence river some parks have huge expansive grassy fields um and other parks really just have like a boat launch where the eastern walking up so it really depends on the delay of the land and the features this with the landscaping and the land features that are out there so sometimes we'll make two or three visits for two or three weeks and that will be enough to teach the geese that they aren't welcome and that they aren't going to be allowed just to sit and hang out and

011make a big mess it really is a training program the geese are really smart and i don't think a lot of times people give them that credit because they're so messy but they do have a very strong sense they have a strong memory but they also really have a really strong sense of attachment so they but and i guess the other component is that they're also kind of if i can say this very affectionately fat and lazy and they don't want to waste their energy to fly away i mean it's a big bird this is a 15 pound bird that we're talking about um it's not like dinner's a crow or a song bird that can just you know easily fly water away these birds use a lot of energy to take off and a

012lot of energy to land so the more that they're pestered and they feel frustration about being constantly moved around they're going to eventually give up and they're going to find something that's more attractive and that's welcoming where they're not bothered as much so it's basically a training program in the first few weeks to teach these birds that they're not welcome on the places where they're being chased from and we can't really tell them where to go we can only tell them where not to go so usually one of the questions i get is oh well aren't they just going to go right next door or are they just going to come right back um and that's what we don't really know until we start to get out there and start doing it but the goal

013is to make as many visits as we can in the first three to four weeks so that the geese know that if they come in the morning they're going to get chased in the morning and if they come in the evening they're going to get chased in the evening and eventually they learn that they would rather be somewhere where they could be more comfortable so the number of visits is intense in the beginning and then usually tapers depending on the activity of the geese some of it is seasonal activity as well like they will be very attached to the property where they have made their nests but if you can deter them before nesting season and they find a newer better nesting location then the next year they won't be quite as attached to that

014property but there are certain times of the year where they are a bit more sticky and a bit more persistent which requires it just requires constant adjustment on the part of our team to know you know to be making the regular constant visits and to be doing everything that we can to keep the pressure on them no matter if it's a sunday at 9 a.m or thursday at 3 p.m we need to be [Music] if the geese are there we need to make sure that we're there within the within you know 15 or 20 minutes afterwards so if they do get a chance to land we have a chance to really give them a chase before they make a big mess so that's a little bit about sort of where i came from where i've

015been and how it works i'm sure you have questions and there's a whole bunch more i can tell you but i know you don't want to sit here all night so i'm happy to answer your questions and explain more details as you'd like um in the beginning how frequently are you coming are you coming every day definitely every day and two three you know sometimes more than that a day it really just depends it's super hard to tell um [Music] you know how quickly they're gonna give up or how persistent they're going to be i know you have that water body on site so i feel like they're they will use that as their retreat initial retreat spot but we'll be able to get them out of the water too um and that's really the

016key is that you can't let them sit anywhere on the property or directly adjacent to the property because as soon as you leave they're just going to come right back so our goal is always to clear them as far away as possible keeping in mind that we don't have permission to go on your neighbor's property to chase them off but we do want to get them i mean i'm not saying we want them to live in lake flower either but if they do end up going to lake flower there's not a lot that we can do about it because unless we have permission to be you know using the dogs for goose control over there well then we kind of have to leave them there so all of that remains to sort of be decided

017like where they go um and how long it takes them to come back but usually at least two or three visits every day for sure for the first month at least and when do those visits typically start for a season you mean time of day or time of months months i'm just thinking around the seasonal sports that we have like where that fits into when we use the fields oh that's a great question in my experience they really are most active in the morning and in the evening um so they want to wake up and they want to move around and they want to get their grass they want to be able to raise um so first thing in the morning is always a time that we to hit them um or sorry to deter

018them so definitely around sunrise um and then it would just be sort of we have to monitor and usually for the first three or four weeks we sort of just hang out there i mean it's not like we'd be on property on site all day every day but we would be close enough that we could be checking like every other hour to see if they they had returned um the nice thing about it is if you're using the field and they've been chased away in the morning they're not going to come out there and land while you're while kids are recreating on the field or while the fields i'm inclined to think that they would probably leave the property well enough alone until everybody was gone for the day and then they would try to

019come back in so definitely morning and evening are sort of the two main focus times but we would have to keep an eye on it to see if they were trying to come back in the you know middle of the afternoon or whatnot aurora was your question about like time of year as well yeah but i was going to see if one of you guys asked it i don't know anything about the season of bees yeah so when when did the season when does the season typically begin when they come and start in the area no i'm sorry could you read the question when does the season usually begin like when do they start coming onto property like is it march april february well not february it's too cold well around here oddly enough they

020stay through the winter because there's such opportunists they find the parts of the river that remain on frozen and then they hang out there they float in the water and they melt the snow to get the grasses underneath um so they're here year-round but i would say i mean i don't know what you folks see because you're you know you're really boots on the ground i'm guessing they come and try to nest there or they try to come there before nesting season starts so i'm guessing april they make their nests here like the third between the third week in april and the second week of may um but you know it's not like they all do it at the same time um so throughout those sort of three weeks pretty much all the nests are

021down and then they said so you don't really see a lot of activity until the babies hatch i mean do you know have they hatched babies there before yes yes yes i mean it's i'm not just you know this i'm not just telling you a story about them going back to the same place and making us every year it's really what they do so they know they're safe there they know that's where they've done it for years before so i think the goal on your site would be to start the project and really try to keep them out of there before they can last because once they nest they're kind of you're kind of stuck with them um you know they're very territorial um we do population control here so when i find a nest

022i want the mom to sit on the nest because i want to do population control on the eggs um so we our strategy is to sort of say okay well you have to live with these two geese sitting on this mask one sitting in one garden because we add all the eggs that they're sitting on and you're not gonna get you're gonna have to put up with these two but you're not gonna get eight to ten babies that pop out of that vest um so we let the two set let the eggs not hatch destroy the nest you know get rid of the rotten eggs and the any um you know pieces of the nest and then we shoot the pair away so it prevents future population but it does mean that the two are

023stuck there so the other strategy is just try to get the two not to nest there and put enough pressure and chase on the way enough that they don't make enough there it's a little bit harder here because i'm not i don't want to be out in my boat patrolling the islands in april when it's you know barely not freezing but your site would be a little bit different um because it's not you know you're on land and it would be fairly i'm guessing they nest in the marsh right or what do you call that thing that water body um okay yeah do you know here [Music] sorry what was that do you know if it's one pair of nesters or multiple pairs dozens oh dozens okay yeah so i mean i think the best

024strategy would be to try to get them out of there and then they just make their mask somewhere else i mean you're on the rest that it's like at your neighbor's house or you know somewhere else but we'll give them your name and number i mean ideally we don't want to be your neighbors because then the babies just like catch and walk across you know walk right over there and hang out there anyways which makes it the babies are a little bit hard because they can't fly and they can't run and they can't really get away that good so it's hard if you have the babies to really get them especially in your place like here where i live like we can like troll behind them in a boat and they can float down the

025river and we can leave them in like you know a wild area where they're safe but you don't really have that option so if you had babies hatched there it would make it definitely well more fun for the dogs a lot harder of a project to you know to handle so ideally they wouldn't make a nest or catch babies on property and if you were to start in april then that would be possible i mean and because they don't know no goose is making a nest in march or even the first half of april i mean you'll probably still have snow in april investing so a lot of it depends on the snow um and we have high water here which you don't have because you're not waterfront but there are some natural factors but

026i'm telling you this based on what i've seen but we have to remember that this is mother nature and not everything fits into a tiny little perfect box i have a couple questions and one was how many years do you anticipate you know you chase them away this year but they're still going to try to come back next year will it does it taper off over some period of time that's also a great question well so when i worked in westchester and southern new york state there wasn't as much snow and there wasn't as much extreme winter weather so people wanted east gone every month of the year so we were pressuring them every day 365 days for a whole calorie year and that works really well but since i moved up here and everything

027closes in october nobody wants to pay and most of the geese goes south so we really give them six months off to do kind of whatever they want and they do i mean i go visit the parks in the winter and they're all over the place so i think it would if you were to do your calendar year you know maybe after a few years they would really get the picture but if you're gonna we're gonna you know sort of let them be there in the summer or i'm not actually you know we have to talk about what the strategy would be like um but if you were to sort of take the pressure off for some certain months and they were to get comfortable again then it would make it a lot harder to

028sort of you kind of have to retrain them again when you show up again so it really depends on the type of program that's implemented but i would say i mean it's not just it's not going to just take one year or one season or one round of the contract and they're going to be gone forever i and i don't also want to say that it's a bottomless pit and you have to do this for the rest of eternity but it remain you know a lot will be seen and told once we start doing the work so it's really hard to say okay and then my other question was you know you're based in in thousand islands and messina this is a ways from there do you have somebody that's somewhat local or you know

029that it is in such a drive yeah it would be too far for me to obviously come every day um so i have thought about developing another region over there and looking looking to start to see if they're what you know what the need was and what the demand was um and i have some systems in place to start a new region i do have my best friend lives in saranac lake actually both of her kids are students in the district and um i'm in contact with a retired principal who actually wants to who lives in cranberry lake who wants to sort of have a job on the side and she has an australian shepherd and we've been in contact with this control so i'm getting the wheels turning just to launch a new region

030over there which because somebody has to be there every day again we wouldn't be driving from here um it would be locally so you know i would use local sources resources to help actually roll out the project okay thanks if you have to build this area and we decided to move forward with the contract would you be up and ready for next year i mean that's two months of or this year sorry 2022 um that was my main the main question that i wanted to take away the answer to from this conversation is is this something that you're thinking about for 2022 or is this more like a 2023 idea no this would be 2022 okay um yes i mean i would we have to move fast um and i would have to know i

031guess from your end with a pretty good grief degree of certainty how interested or you know how able you were really to make it happen yeah i'd like i wanted to get that information from you tonight and to find to see you know how much it would take to really get it rolling one question um so are there things um that if we went forward and you were here doing this like you said you wouldn't be here every day every year um and eventually we would want to eventually we'd hope to move the geese off and keep them away um i'm assuming there's strategies that you could share with us of things that we could like absent you all here once you've come and done your thing like right we're pushing them away and we

032want to kind of scaffold away from us being here to you guys kind of helping with this is there strategies that we could be doing here to continue to deter them as opposed to just assuming they're never going to come back and then maybe they do it's about things we could do to keep this problem from this this didn't happen overnight i mean this was decades building and knocking into that cycle again well one thing that we do and ways i ask for community support around here is to really enlist to get everybody sort of informed as to what's going on um and then also to implement a no feeding policy but i'm guessing you already have that it's not really like the type of location where you would have people like standing on the

033water's edge and throwing cheetos out to them um so i'm guessing that really wouldn't be wouldn't come into play um you know there are some private property owners when they want to take matters in their own hands or sort of supplement the services that we provide use um rice makers this little thing called the birdbanger but as i started thinking about using that on school property i thought well this could be a real showstopper i mean somebody hears an explosion on school property or sees this like tiny little thing that looks like it gone i mean it's not but it's it shoots off a little firework that explodes um so that is an option that i use sometimes like if circumstance circumstances require or make it impossible for me to get somewhere where i can't

034get these out of i do have a noisemaker that i use um so that's one of the tools um i'll have to think about that a little more and sort of we have to see you know we started to see how the geese behaved and if there maybe there could be you know some remote control devices or something you know i know you guys have a sweeper that can help pick up the droppings that would be definitely helpful you know maybe the geese only come in like one or two days and you don't really need the dogs to chase the light because they're leaving on their own you can sweep the droppings up on your own um so yeah there might be some things you could do but i think just because of the layout

035of your property it's going to be exactly your school you're kind of limited in some of the you know lights lasers and noise makers thank you what have you have you done a school property before or a place where um your dogs encounter children or people i haven't since i started my own business green acres this people but when i worked for the gentleman's company is called esau he had contracts with the pelham school district um the east chester school district and honestly it happened so quick and the hours are so sort of opposite to when kids would be there that there was really never and so he had those contracts and i serviced the contracts i was one for showing up every day with a dog i forgot we also had bedford school districts

036which school district was which is in um westchester um and so yeah we never really encountered people because we were there at the times when people weren't there and our goal is to kind of be not that we're trying to be sneaky but we want to get the job done and get out of there so we're not in the way so we're not i mean it is really cool to watch the dogs chase the bees but we also know that the primary like your primary objective is to be teaching the kids and to be having school so we try to be kind of under the radar that being said all the cars are fully marked um and the dogs wear well here they wear life jackets um but we wear um we have a uniform

037that we wear so we're clearly marked so that if we ever were seeing it's not like oh my gosh there's a girl in the tie-dye running around the school field with her dog um it's very you know it's and it's not some people think too like oh you just let your dog like run around it's not a circus it's very controlled um it's the dogs are handled professionally they're trained professionally so it's not you know some people think like it's a real wild news chase but it's highly controlled and um very specialized your property does anybody else have any questions do we at what point do we have a proposal you know financial arrangement is that to come you know that's the next step um looking at diane i'm worried about who i should look

038at so i promised ann about 20 minutes tonight okay because i knew there would be questions and um i think ann could have talked to us for hours and i'd come up just a little introduction and then we'll see what the questions are from the board and take it in that direction but i think at this point one more question sorry at this point aurora has another question i know i was trying to let everybody else have a turn just in case um have you ever had any issues where one of the dogs have injured an individual that they've encountered or any any issues where you were liable for injuries no but i do carry because of working for the state the maximum i forget if it's three million dollars insurance but i'm fully insured

039but no there's never been any accidents with any dogs or people or vehicles or property none okay that was my last question okay so i think we'll let anne go and then we'll have a conversation about whether or not you'd like to move forward i've taken notes i noticed lots of other people's notes i think we can give her um the dates where we're all experts in the room as when the geeks arrive and when they go and if you'd like me to then make contact we could talk about a proposal that okay for everybody here yeah and does that work for you that does and if you think of any questions in the meantime you i'm happy if you one person has my email address or you all have it and if you need

040to email or call you can reach out at any time i'm kind of i mean it's the off season now so i'm getting excited thinking about these so this is really great and i'm happy to meet with you again or talk to you again as needed thank you very much thank you welcome thank you for inviting me so discussion i've actually seen these bands of hers when i went camping at coles creek which is on the saint laurence i've gone there every year for the last several years in june and they were there three or four times a day they'd come through they spotted any geese the dogs got out shoot them away back in the van but the presence was very obvious and she's correct they were well marked and you know took one

041word you know you take notes with a sign on it so we've tried all the gadgets i think uh you know we gotta go in this direction and see and she's gonna say she's gonna be here a couple times a day that's what we need yeah that was nice to hear uh that they are that dedicated in the beginning so that it really has an impact in those first few weeks um so i think it would be good to know uh i'm sure vern knows when they arrive and maybe when they depart april through october just so that we're good it varies like she said with the weather if we get in early spring yeah they're here in april uh it's usually from what i remember they are here hot and heavy in may and

042june and they leave just about the time of graduation and they're pretty much gone all summer until exactly the week before we come back for sports uh in august so we would really be doing april through october but maybe not in the summer no i think you'd have to keep them a week it's not something you want to stop doing well they would just come less in the summer yeah they're they wouldn't the geese are still here during the summer just not not in droves like they are okay so it's not anything you would want to see no i agree i just i thought that's what vern said they were they went somewhere wouldn't be so else i have a rant just a random question maybe somebody can clarify this so if we had this

043issue with paul smith's and um we have ecological restoration scientists who restored a lot of the shoreline and and that has prevented a lot of the geese from actually making landfall is is i having not not done not knowing that down there has that been looked at if people looked at like an ecological solution to that to planting not really ecological but we did try fencing around the pond short fencing well we also did try to we left the grass between the roadway and the pond we left that long let that grow but it didn't work for very long yeah they just skip over it i'll i'll talk to craig moliski who's the ecological restoration person and see what they did but it might be that we need to do some sort of combination right

044that could be the long term yeah like a long-term ecological solution that keep that makes this place less attractive for them ecologically well they're going to go down they're going to go to you know downtown saranac lake for sure either that or ampersand bay across the across the road yeah we will uh send them to jeremy as a parting gift is she going to give us a proposal that is how that's going to work i think diane would need to go to her with our details and then we would have to request it before she does it right are you sending me to do that i think we need to do it i mean we've talked from many meetings about this it's the three dates i mean what's going on i was a kid here

045and she's got contracts from new york state i mean she's obviously reputable she knows what she's doing she's not going to want to do it i mean she admits it's going to be a multi-year process so she's going to be here heavy in the beginning getting them and keep pushing them out i think we do want to ask her about you know we have multiple fields where they are and streets on those fields where residential homes that are they're just going to hop over there and something about like if they just hop over to a neighbor's yard for a while they're hanging out are you going to cross that street if the neighbor it's okay like so if i have a house on canaris ad and all the goose hop onto my property i'm gonna

046be like listen i don't like this so that clearly that oh that homer's not gonna be happy so then how she handles that with she's pushed him off she's done her job pushing off our property but they're still very close if that homeowner is okay with her coming onto their property can she extend a little bit further to keep pushing them so i think that's a nuanced issue um we need to think about i think we shouldn't go there because um our nearest neighbor is the village so if they want if they want to push them off their property then then they could pay for maybe a fight back and forth so we need to get it first you know generally when you see them move they move from lake flower up to our fields

047petrova particularly out by the pond and from there they move to lower saranac so that's kind of their corridor i don't ever recall them when they get shoot away ever just jump into the neighbors now they didn't used to be over schroeder's now they're over there so i think it's kind of this flight back here my guess is when it's all said and done they're going to be one or two places down at the park by uh like flower or on the lower lake because that's kind of their history of when you know we've shoot them off the thing is we just couldn't do it constantly i mean she's right there tough we would run football practices the water boys chased down and they just put her away i mean he didn't hear it from

048me but throwing footballs on him to get him to go they wouldn't leave and we would hold a full football practice with a hundred kids out there running all over they're two hours eating grass so they're stubborn yeah so we may need to ask her if that happens again this year and they're coming back from certain times when our players are here what's your process with the dogs and the players on the field like will she still bring her dogs or does she just what did she do i think she would work around that that's part of what she talked about how she would clear them before practice but i can ask about that she knew when our practices began she could adjust to start the schedule yeah she can accommodate that and that would

049be really nice also the dogs are going to chase them to where they fly off whereas kids are just chasing them and they just run over you know like waddle over it's a little different well yeah my concern is if they know dogs aren't coming during practice then they land possibly so they could develop that habit so she may have to actually turn you may have to have dogs and kids on the field at the same time and what's the process for that or dogs right before kids somehow managing that because last thing we want to do is have a kid get injured by one of these dogs or you know some type of conflict are there any other i know when we've talked about all kinds of ideas are there any other juice control

050you know companies that are besides her that's in the north country i mean i i didn't remember that all that came up there's just like the best one we had a previous bid from her isn't that how we have our information so i don't know that we've done any new searches to see who's in the area um i i'm not i don't necessarily think we need to but if we feel like that would be doing due diligence then we could i she seems great and she seems like she knows what she's doing and she has a lot of success and a lot of experience on would i would think if there was someone here doing it we would have seen somebody doing it um but we can definitely i mean google's free we can definitely

051look at google and see this in here but i've never seen anyone in this area out chasing juice off with their dogs that have been clearly marketed yeah maybe somewhere like lake champlain area that's gonna be they're gonna have just as much problems will ask about that because we had dogs at paul smith years ago before i was there so i will i will i'll run some emails i think it would be good to do due diligence i agree she sounded great i did like that she was willing to set up something so quickly here if we wanted to and that she was useful but i can't imagine how much it would cost if she was sending somebody from wherever so that just means they could close five okay so i think for marching orders

052like they have and then also we can do some searches to see if we can find any other cruise control businesses similar to this one in the area sure i think um okay so any other comments on that if not we will go ahead and move on to the public comments section of our meeting and um and just again for you guys information we welcome your input and we'd love to hear from you on school related matters uh but there are some rules that we like to follow um first of all when you're addressing the board and your fellow community members please state your name and your affiliations so that we know who we're speaking to also please conduct yourself appropriately obscene language and libelous statements threats of violence statements advocating racial religious or other

053forms of prejudice are not tolerated and third do not name individuals within the district this includes student or staff even if they are your own students please do not name them individually um as a board we will listen to your comments and we will incorporate them into our discussion and into our decisions we do not uh respond to you in the sense that we're going to have an open dialogue with you if there are clarifying questions that we need to ask we will but we won't have a conversation back and forth but again if you'd like to have that conversation please feel free to seek one of us out outside of the meeting or shoot us an email or even call us and that would be great we can have that back and forth with

054you okay um on that note is there anybody who would like to address us for public comments is the podium working yeah i also taught it with saranac lake for 22 years so i have a big booming voice um so um i'm passing out some teacher um so what i'm handing out i have one there you go so uh what i'm handing out is a bill that is up before discussion in the state legislature and um you still need me to go to the microphone whatever you prefer okay i don't think you can hear me so anyway um you'll see on the front page excuse me for a second what i i'm sorry yeah if it's picking us up it'll pick her up she's got a good voice okay okay thank you you're fine um

055so you'll see on the front uh um pamphlet here the bills that are before the legislature are uh stated here as the senate bill and the assembly bill and this is called the new york health act the reason why i'm coming to you is that um this is for universal care coverage but it would say there's not enough known uh to the public it comes up and we have to know about it if we're interested it would save the district about eight million dollars in uh health premiums and um so it covers from they say from birth to death it covers everything uh it's uh the pamphlet will show you this will answer a few questions the pamphlet will lay out some things but basically it is uh based on the ability to pay and

056that schedule is in the form here i mean in the pamphlet um it uh uh so it would take uh everybody pays what they can pay so the and of the employers would pay from between uh 80 to 100 percent but it's a lot cheaper because everyone's sharing the bill it's it is universal healthcare coverage single-payer so um it still allows you to go to your own doctor um it um i have a few people here who are there's a group of us working on it working with the campaign for new york health on this um but uh almost every other country has this in some form or another that's uh a universal health care or single payer or however they define it um and i think you're you're probably aware that some states have

057tried this already uh california is about ready to pass theirs um it's uh we're set up well in new york to do it we have uh we have resources and this will tell you how how we're going to pay for it and all of that i'm sure there's a ton of questions but i only have three minutes so i'm hoping that you will consider this and put it on the agenda for next week all we need from the district is yes this is something we are definitely interested in and we will sign up there's a letter that we're that all the people that are you know want this are signing so that's all we're looking for now it's before the legislature they will vote on it in june and uh but they need to see

058that people are interested um also talking to a board we would if you are interested if this this would work for you you would uh we would hope that you would go to the state board of educators um boards of education and say look this is something we're interested we need to push as a state that sort of thing um so that's what we're asking um to learn about it and to hopefully support it um it's a new way of thinking for sure so just a clarifying question for you so are you are you um suggesting that this would replace the insurance that we provide our staff yes so uh yeah and the municipalities would save 80 to 90 percent so when people talk about taxes increasing that we would all be paying for this

059after a certain amount of income you know you can see it on the chart and that's what uh you know there we have all that with us but um the municipalities would be saving you know because that's they do medicare and all of that they would not have that anymore everybody would be paying so um you know and and what we would call a tax is really like an insurance premium so that would be their new premium yeah um if you don't mind i'll go next because i'm here with sue so you can go ahead and introduce yourself certainly i'm trevor soucy i'm a resident here in the district what i've got for you folks first off well thank you for serving the community um we're volunteers just like yourself and we're just trying to

060get the information out to folks so what i've got for you here is a spreadsheet we computed the savings that the district will have so i just want to explain that to you i'll try not to be too redundant instead of premiums people will pay a higher tax rate and that's based on this proposal here on the top left and it's based on income so folks who are making you know for example fifty thousand to seventy five thousand dollars a year i will pay anywhere from excuse me to pay three thousand four hundred fifty dollars in tax for their health care premium the district would pay 80 to 100 of that and so what we've done is we've computed the salaries of all the employees for the district and we've compared that against the 2020

0612021 budget so the numbers are there for the medical insurance seven thousand six hundred ninety two dollars under the rod berg proposal if the district paid the eighty percent per per employee that would be 946 million and you have the savings there on the bottom which would be nine million roughly nine million dollars so um i just want to bring that to your attention i hope that you consider having us back in two weeks thank you can i ask you a clarifying question so the these numbers under the total pay is what someone's their salary and then under the rod berg the redwoods and rod burns that's what they're contributing now to insurance but that's what they would contribute based on their salaries that's what they would contribute under the tax proposal and that's that's

062they meaning total for that individual the school would district would pay 80 as a as the employer and the individual would pay 20 of it but then we need really need to compare it to what we're paying now yes and that's what that's what we're doing at the top at the top and the green or or no i guess above in the upper right yeah um yep and that came from the budget for that that school year um seven million dollars so um we compared that to what the the school would pay under the proposal so we added up all of these numbers um and then yeah you can see there we can we have subtracted and we ended up with a savings of 9 million dollars so and this is includes dental and eyeglasses

063yes and no co-pays as well right no co-pays thank you under this build new york state will be the single pair of setting prices which is where the savings comes in right is that correct can i speak for this as well and you are i am sheer filler um i also live in the district and um i'm also in the um new uh north country naked group who's trying to promote the new york health um so shir i'm sorry go ahead can you speak up just a little bit absolutely i'm having a hard time hearing you i'll come closer so um the one thing that i wanted to say is that one of the issues that um comes up is that unions tend to not want this because they think they already have spent a

064lot of time negotiating for really good health insurance and they don't want to give that up i am in a union we have spent a lot of time negotiating for really good health insurance but we still have ridiculous co-pays we don't get dental unless they pay extract we don't get vision this is cheaper and better and we don't have to spend our time as union members negotiating for health insurance we can be negotiating for higher salaries instead so because the district or whatever the employer is would be saving money so it's just you know there's this uh mental shift that has to happen between paying premiums and paying this tax people are like oh we don't want to raise taxes but it's a tax that's really a health insurance premium in that sense and it's

065a much lower premium than what we're paying now i know like my family plan costs close to twenty thousand dollars a year luckily i don't have to pay most of that but the college could make a hell of a lot more money they didn't have to pay that for me and for all my fellow employees so that's the part that i just wanted to add in because i know the reason we wanted to talk to the school district is because obviously you're a union shop two unions have and um you know union members are the ones who really you know have some mental resistance to this but if they realize that they're going to be saving money and getting much better coverage that i think it's i have a question are you are you the

066same group going to the unions and speaking to the unions you know the school district unions and seeing what so the campaign for new york has uh spoken to the state you know nicer and uh some large unions already but we felt of this group felt rather than start at the union we'd start with the people who are paying the most for the insurance and because people think it'll raise taxes but if you're not paying 9 million then that's one tax part of the tax we don't have to pay are there any other people that would like to speak i'm a little bit odd i would not normally speak to the board during public comment however um on the board agenda this evening you are oh sorry i'm trish mcguire i'm the middle school principal

067but i'm actually here on behalf of my students this evening um my students submitted a petition to the board of ed that's on the agenda for the board of education to discuss later this evening and two of my students who are unable to have transportation to be here this evening asked me to read their letters at public comments so um i am here on behalf of them so here we go so instead of trish mcguire i am now avery chamberlain who is a seventh grader at the middle school and avery writes i avery chamberlain i'm writing a letter to you about the hat policy i personally think the students should be allowed to wear hats for multiple reasons first off it's winter and because of covid we have the windows open making it cold inside

068and being able to wear hats would be a reasonable option in the winter i have heard that a reason students are not allowed to wear hats inside the building is because of the fact that they may have earbuds in and be unable to hear important announcements but if hats were allowed teachers would be allowed to ask and see if students have earbuds in and if that was the case they would lose their half privileges making it so that kids who truly want to wear hats would be able to i hope that you will take my ideas into consideration and that students will be able to wear hats inside the building sincerely avery chamberlain the other student asked me to read for them is james breity jimmy's petition is the petition that you received that was

069sent to the board for the policy committee to review but jimmy did ask me to read his petition out loud this evening so he said dear mrs fox on the board of education i am writing this letter as the voice for all people signed it down below since me and my classmates first arrived at this school there has been a rule about hats this rule states that hats and hoods are not allowed inside the school building i and so many others agree that a cat is just a piece of clothing no different than shoes or a sweatshirt in the end a hat is just one more thing that makes us students diverse it shows character about us obviously i agree that it can be distracting but if someone comes in with a baseball cap what's

070the big deal i have been told that a hat is disrespectful to the american flag yes they should be taken off for the pledge but otherwise how is it disrespectful it's like saying that you need a fruit or vegetable yet they put a compost bucket right at the exit of the lunch line it would be way easier to just let us have hats there is no big deal also considering that some kids have special permission to wear a hat if it is so disrespectful disrespectful to the flag and the school then why is there special permission for certain people thank you for your time i hope the board might consider our claim hats are just an article of clothing sincerely the students of saranac lake middle school and his petition you can see it made

071its way quite a lot around the building um has been signed by about 50 of our students so um thank you for listening and uh do you have a student council in the middle school we do have a student council yes so you know i read this over the first thing i thought is in terms of how something like this might go is that these students that want this should work with their school representatives which is the student council to come up with a proposal rather than just we're just gonna do yes or no make a proposal that's been run through the legislative body and then that comes to us i think that's a wonderful suggestion but i'm only here for public comment i would also say i would direct them to look at some

072of the uh stated laws because this is clearly addressed uh uh what can and cannot be done according to statehead law um and they may be surprised what they say so mark not to correct you but we're not supposed to have dialogue but this is on the agenda will you will you be staying so that we can as we discuss this on the agenda you could answer some questions i had not planned on it but i could do that if you'd like um if you would like we could if everybody is okay with it we could move that discussion up to right after public honor would there be any objection to do that would that be okay since it is on the agenda we can have that discussion sure and okay to make that change

073public okay so are there any additional public comments you sure last chance all right so we'll go ahead and move along with our meeting so if i can get a motion um to move uh item b under new business up to um right after public comment uh sorry 8b uh that would be great and it says music no it's 18. it was not the one so i just flipped that so that okay so what you have and it's quite obvious whenever there's anything that is a little off okay so um we'll go ahead and do that if we can discuss the position of ours regarding the wearing so we can open it up for discussion or questions um does anybody want to go first i think so i'd like to hear you maybe there's a

074state law or something about it well what i was saying is we have student councils in the middle school high school and i would like any of these issues addressed with them so they can actually do what their function is which is to represent the students in the school so i would like these students to meet with their student council reps and for sure church and go through uh what it takes to put both them together and then bring that formally as a presentation from the student council to address the needs that these students are asking for and i said as kind of a hint and part of the process they may want to dig into new york state at law because this very topic's addressed several different ways and if they dig into that

075book um that will help them formulate what they're actually asking for is that student council have like a liaison or a representative that's a staff member or something so that they can advise them okay good because i think that would be an excellent experience for them to kind of understand how to wrestle with some of that stuff well that would be i mean that's the lesson in government yeah let's not jump the steps let's you have a representative body let's work with them use that um and learn how things go what works what doesn't work craft your argument um the petition certainly could be part of that uh presentation and you know i have to honestly say i dealt with this as being a student so i'm pretty sure i know what the law said

076so well i think that's uh i i applaud them for bringing it forward and doing that petition but i think um as you said uh we've kind of jumped several runs to come to the board and so if we can point them back to someone who can help that them through that process with the student council at the at the building um then they can work through that process and and such like that the policy that we did here at the high school where the students got together and revamped the policy um they could go through that same process and present the board after it's gone through the building level what i would envision seeing is a presentation what the current policy says um either the district policy and or what the building code of

077conduct says about it and then what their proposal is or what the change would look like so then what we'd be actually voting on is do we vote for this change and that's that is what we did with the guest code so that's what i'd like to empower the student government uh in these issues because a lot of times they don't really take on any role other than you know you get selected on the stupid castle this is some meaningful stuff that they can be a part of i'm just gonna ask you know last year or was it two years ago that we you know the dress code came up we did change things to allow for hacks in the hallways correct just in the hallways only but not in the classroom at the high

078school and that was that was my next question so that's only at the high school so the middle school still has no hats anywhere well what is that trish what's the policy with wintertime enhanced because i thought they could have what's the hat policy currently we the current half so at the time that the high school uh proposed the change in the dress code they approached the middle school and redistributed the proposed changes to our student body and our student body agreed that they agreed with the changes and accepted them as their own so the same dress code that i just saw your the paper in your hand has the little body picture on it that is the same dress clip that is in the middle school student handbook that is in the high school

079student so they're currently the same and my students feel a little bit like they may have been not had a voice in that but they are allowed to wear hats and haul and not in basically we do instructional versus non-instructional instructional spaces including the library and physical education classes no hats hats are allowed in the hallways and other non-instructional spaces like the cafeteria we got lacs last year because of covid with many windows open the kids started wearing their hats especially the ones that were seated near an open window and so part of the the um part of the power struggle at this point in the middle school is that we've asked them to return to that policy after a year of blacks enforcement due to the number of open windows last year yeah so

080typically in the wintertime you still don't know what happens correct it's just because of our which i wish i had all that on tonight yeah human popsicles in classrooms that we allowed to have hats on who were close to doors so so if i could request maybe you send copies to the board of what you find for current ed regulations on this so we're not approving something that may be contrary to uh you know what the state has already said you can do when it comes back to you i'm going to send this back a nice note back nice assistant through the initiative in a positive way and they just actually had elections at the middle school for their student council have you voted yet are you having seven or eight or nine periods of

081study hall we have not the presidential candidate who won has not yet been able to have periods one through nine of resets which was his uh his uh [Laughter] a great opportunity for the students to sort of see how this works so i'll i'll speak with i'll send them a nice note and i think that was very nice of aurora just acknowledging the work that they did and bringing it here in the right way send them back through their newly formed student government and i'll work with trish and the advisor to give them some information on stated law so they have that right at the beginning with the student council do you have the opportunity to um invite these two individuals in to help with that process so the beauty of student council is that

082it belongs to the students and so i would hope knowing that these two students participated in this that they would include those fascinations so there's nothing preventing them from not at all but okay good but diane what i was asking is would you send us the applicable state and rules on this because they're writing that yeah they're gonna drop this down we used to get a book about this thing yeah so you got it you know we have a little background on what we're looking at when we have to decide whether to grant what they ask for well i think that's definitely the bottom line we can't do something we can't do but i'd also would want to know and i don't know if the students would want to look into this what their teachers

083think about if if it did change and all of a sudden now kids are are wearing hoods and and you know visors and you can't see their eyes they can't see like how would the teachers feel about working with students that are that may be more covered up where you can't see whether they're even awake right you know i as somebody who teaches students who wears hat wear hats every day that's good i mean it but again it depends on your relationship with the students right you have the relationship with the students you get different things out of them i've taught in both environments that i've noticed no difference honestly the masks are more distracting because it's hard to see facial expressions would think there would also need to be some sort of um inclusion

084of disciplinary not disciplinary but can't be inappropriate can't be obscene can't have drug poor meaning things like that they're also incorporated into policy well when they bring it because that may not be what comes back to us um but that that piece needs to be in there because there needs to be some sort of action that a teacher can take because the teacher's one's going to see it and then if the students agree to that then that will make the teacher's job whatever it is that diane sends us is a board that mark is referring to that should be i think shared with trish who can share it with the students because they need to know what they're up against too you know i mean i don't want to set them up on a fool's

085errand where they say here's our great proposal then we go well you know it's regulation so you can't do it so if it's possible on the regs they should know what their rights say so they can address those and that's a great exercise for them in government of persuasive essays and all that fun stuff um i think we should be very transparent with them and send the message that we're willing to listen and see what you got and i agree someone who's taught in k-12 and teachers in college i don't see much of a difference in how kids behave or they don't they don't tend to abuse it because they know it's a privilege privileged aquarium and they need to be taken away and so i think that let's see what they say and go

086forward but they should definitely know what the regs are that we're going to know about too what's the reference to special permission they're talking about hat days so sometimes we'll have a friday celebratory cafe or halloween they wear hats that are appropriate to the costume okay and then we have some students that wear head coverings for religious purposes or medical reasons okay so those are the exceptions there yes i believe so i would yeah insinuating from my conversations with the student that throughout the position that's what i believe he's referring to perfect i think i just want to mention for all the hundreds of students that are viewing this from afar tonight there's some adults that could take notes from affecting positive change respectfully so if you could please pass that along as well that

087this is a really positive way to affect change without causing major disruption during stressful times this is to me this is like this is good stuff because this is modeling what i think we could all just be reminded of so thank you for helping them trish well and the fact that they took the initiative to do it on their own and um yeah i mean those were very well written statements absolutely yeah um and so i assumed that they put some effort into those that they just didn't you know and so it was very very well written very presented um or presented well and uh so yeah kudos for that and let's get them on the right path so that if we are able to make a change um you know then maybe we can

088so i think next steps on that would be stated restrictions to us and trish and then trish will help or excuse me share them with student council and then student council will take it from there wonderful hopefully we'll see you back once that process is played out i hope thank you i said with a hat on um please invite the students to come too i love students in these meetings they don't realize how much power they have sometimes i did we had we sent out a little student buy to get an invitation to tonight's meeting i was hoping to need a school bus well you know maybe if we know that's happening we need to accommodate during earlier start time or something or meeting the auditorium or definitely in the auditorium at the middle school

089so okay perfect so then if um if everybody's done with that topic we'll go ahead and move on to cindy with financial reports she did there is documentation in the drive and then she also included it in our folders yes your budget status report is in there as well as the budgetary transfer report um the next second page of my notes showed you the transfer report was fairly short and there were no transfers over ten thousand dollars um anyone have any questions on those it does not sound like it so um for the budget transfer report can i get a motion for resolution number one before 2021 uh to approve the current transfer report as presented nancy nancy who would like a second a second okay perfect so all in favor aye any and just

090a reminder that the weekly warrants are in the google drive as well um the financial report i'm just going to skip through a little bit already for the warrants can you actually um like previously you have broken it out by a year oh it's the same school year that's the one you know july yeah yes pending through this last day was january 17th and then senior counselor from the business office lisa simon's last day was the 28th and after doing some research on some different options i think that i found that the best avenue would be to try to go fill the vacancies using the boces um the franklin essex hoses shared business office service i'm very familiar with the service i used to be a shared business office manager we had the service in

091the district in the past for a while with payroll and it didn't work the reason it didn't work is because our employee that that worked for the district worked out of malone and we needed the body in the building we needed someone greeting our people we didn't want to have to have our people calling alone to get answers to questions that the whole connectivity with our employees was missing so after some soul searching we decided to bring it back in the district things have changed now you can have the employed in our building all hundred percent of the time another great thing is our employees right now are seven and a half hour employees per day these people would be eight hours a day so we're getting some extra hours you know in a week

092which is a great a great thing um and boces we received 36 percent aid on both these expenditures right now for salaries is capped at 30 000. um so any anything any salary that's paid above 30 000 you wouldn't get eight on but there is legislation right now and for me it actually looks like it's more hopeful than it has been in the past it's been same thing for since 1995 or something so it's about time it did change so but for now even with the way it is we would still see a savings a little more on the accounts payable side than the payroll side but it would still be a savings um also with the accounts payable person we have the tax collector's physician and the records management officer position tied to that

093they've done that since monica was here and the board had proved that boces can absorb those and also pay that person the stipend through bouncies once again we would save our 36 percent aid on that as well um so i i've also seen it would be a lot of um support for this person on the boces level they will have a lot of training they will have a backup person for the payroll so like we're never left stuck without someone um they will train actually it'll buggy up once they learn the system well enough in the train and not just our district they will actually work with another district and process their payroll um they have monthly meetings uh so i think it's just a great networking that they have as well so we would

094have the same individual in-house majority of the time that's the exception of when they're out we would have the secondary person right has done work and been crosstrained in our building yes cindy what's the commitment for our term on this year by year it's year by year it's part of the you know in january we're actually starting the service fest now our plan is to have both immediately hire somebody get on board with this to fill out the best this year and you know next year you're right the last partnership did not go well i was the first one to say that i'm encouraged that they'll be here physically and i'm also encouraged that we're not locked into a long-term deal if it shows that it's not going to work out we can move to

095a different bottom but it's got to go better than before because oh yes that was a nightmare for everybody involved yes so when do we sign up for um the next year's worth of services we're working on that now we'll have an actual final commitment in march probably okay well they they change their ways we still have to say request everything that we wanted now it's request any changes that you want so it's simplified the process a little bit but our final commitments are usually very end of march and how soon if we go ahead and move forward this costume could they get someone in they have someone that could start monday where the accounts payable their own clerk has been a hard one that when we're they're looking for a payroll clerk because that

096person has had to have experience in the payroll world so that that and we're not settling so it was just taking longer but they are bringing people in every week at least twice we had three people here last week we had two people over here on monday we ran the payroll so they're already you know learning what our process is i've given them also the cheat sheets to you know how this is how our budget coding is and so they've been very helpful we would have to recruit like we would have the same challenge right and they're advertising numerous places and different types of media cindy would this first term be uh 12 months or would it be a shortened term because it's based on the school year it would get us to june and

097then next year okay so so that's to me that's even better because we've got a little bit of a trial run here we're not we're not locked in for 12 months we're locked into the end of the school year really up front i would say it's the 12 months plus to get to the end of the year okay because otherwise it's not they're it's not worth they're going to hire someone right two people to add to their payroll then it will be a long term okay yes so we would be we would be in it for at least a year at least yes please nothing makes things go crazier than payroll in the states unless it's the bus garage not sure i've learned a lot in the last few months i just wondered about the

098edible part so this is because it's through boces it's aidable but it wouldn't be aidable if it was we directly hired somebody correct so that's what allows us to offer a higher or that we will be offering it would be higher at a higher rate than we can pay them right and so hopefully we won't have turn around like we're seeing right now right and also another thing um our employees right now in the business office are csea members and he crunches the numbers and helps me with the junior negotiations but my cse members yeah so this would pull them out of the union and they wouldn't be part of that negotiation process seems like a good idea and then we also wouldn't have the you know we would also save the expense if we're

099not paying their taxes right and if there's long term and they're retired they wouldn't be paying their retirement yeah their health insurance on retirement or whatever does anyone have any other questions i don't think you're going to move on okay so if not if i can get a motion for resolution number 105 approving filling this vacant administrated a position and the senior account clerk position um through franklin essex health and boces shared business officers um effective immediately justin in favor aye any opposed perfect thank you guys and just a reminder that those two stipends that i was talking about tax collector and the records management officer once that we have this person officially hired in starting work i'll come back to the board and ask that you appoint them into those positions that should be

100at the next meeting hopefully um budget development on the back sheet did you want to go over the health insurance sure um the franklin essex hamilton uh boces consortium met today the joint governing board and i want on the board um there's employee representatives and there's um the district representatives on the board and we reviewed the insurance premiums for next year looked at the budget and they've settled on a six percent increase on premiums it's that's a lot more than it used it has been in the past right yes what happened is it's been very low the last few years like one percent one percent two percent um there's also been a surge there was like a year with coven that people weren't doing elective surgeries and stuff that pushed things cost of things up

101more um and so it was either do it now and this was it was better actually collected we all felt it was better while there's still grant money and some money that can be shifted to keep it steady now and not have big jumps down the road because i mean if you're looking at the increase of 375 000 yeah and as you'll see with our stadium that's not quite enough to cover that so about development budget development so the state new york state released their executive budget on january 18th uh most you can see the information right out online if you were to google it you could see what the executive state run looks like what it's the first goal of the budget so there's a lot of changes between using the executive budget and

102the legislative budget that comes out at the end of march or like last year was like april 8th late last year um but last year with the executive budget it was all over the place they had some very creative ideas of what they're going to do with start they were going to do um they had pandemic adjustments and so this year was a very pretty clone compared to last year this year but what happens if you were to just look at that it looks like you know they're giving us 3.15 increase on our state that's that top part of the chart that's really not in in our world if we really want to compare our apples to what's going on we'd have to look at what our true budget really is right now and then

103compare that to what they're saying they'll give us and so when you look at that really the only increase that we would get is 102 and part of the reason that the budget is different than with executives his legislative budget last year is different than the executive fund so they're comparing executive to executive in our budget was based more on the legislative which had more money in it so our budget was higher that's why there's not as much difference it's a little crazy to understand sometimes if that's that's what's going on a lot of times legislative you will see a little more of an increase in the station historically this will be done but but this year was the closing of the gap for those that were not fully funded there is the foundation aid

104for schools that were not fully funded there's a lot of money that has been put into the education budget there's talk on the street should not expect the typical swing between the governor's proposal and the legislative final numbers because they've already put into the exactly right before we had to they fought for every guy and now it's already been according to the state aid formula we are over funded so the whole harmless was the three percent from last year's executive proposal to this year's which is why i put the little three percent in the very top row that's how they that's where the three percent shows but it's a little shifting of hands because everybody knows the actual budget we were given was not the budget that was proposed in january so using the budget

105that was proposed in january says look at we got you know three percent but the truth is it isn't the actual budget the legislature approved in april and so the shift is really one person and does anybody have any questions on that yeah so what's the issue with the upk so why is it um that we have it above in the executive budget but then we do not get it down below so in the state aid runs when they release them they include upk in there and we do get that you can pay money but in our world you do not budget upk in the general fund it's budgeted in a special a grants fund okay so i removed it because we don't budget it there it'll still take place we'll still receive that money

106but it's but it's in a different fund so we do we do actually receive that so so when we're looking at the the percentage down below of the we're getting a true change of 102 000 we are actually getting the 245 000 in addition to but not it but yes but what she's comparing is that she does not put it in the district budget for 21.22 oh i know but i'm saying we're up here we're getting 296. right the difference is 296. that money is not going away we just account for it elsewhere right like we do actually get we do yeah but the difference is still that hundred and two thousand so you know what i mean because yeah in the special aid world last year especially grant fund that was budgeted there and

107it's budgeted again next year and that number normally doesn't change it's the first year that it changed because there was a federal component to it it's always been and they gave us an extra 108 000 this past year so it is a little more 245 000 now but there's no change in it for next year exactly so what about this the top line the basic formula age and general aids public takes this costly um why is such the big difference from what they're stating the 214 and then what we actually see the 99 so if you were to look at the legislative budget run from last year that one came out april 8th it had the seven million two hundred fifty thousand so that's what we budgeted not seven million one thirty six up above

108okay so that's why there's not as much difference okay let's see that now so it's not that we are actually getting the 7.3 it's just our budget last year was higher correct based on the register any chance that'll go this year based on that okay we're not thinking it's going to go up as much but because i did it already that's all i have so any additional questions for cindy before we move on here's the old business [Music] if i can get a motion before we start discussing it resolution number 106 2021 with the cobia 19 mitigation plan joe second looks like zach and you wanna uh we did we did get a link to the mitigation plan but do you want to say a little bit about it sure so the we look at

109the mitigation plan when changes happen at the state level and we missed our last meeting we cancelled that so it's a little old news now but it was it was fresh news two weeks ago the quarantining and isolation times change from ten days to five we've also started receiving rapid tests for students to use at home so the plan has been adjusted for the new state requirements for that and our our current plan for use of the um the at home test so they're available we have a link out there always families can request they get sent home with kids we're also using them if you are close contact even if you're vaccinated if you're identified as a close contact but can continue to come to school we have a little letter we send you

110home a little letter to identify that your child was in close contact and we also sent home a rapid test kit so those are really the two big changes from our past plan so on the um excluding students from school and or extracurriculars uh if they test positive regardless of vaccination status they have to isolate for five days correct um and then we say on day six if the symptoms are significantly resolved that comes through the results and their fuels are free for 24 hours they can come back correct do we require a test at that point are they just able to come back they're able to come back so they don't have to go get tested now correct okay and that that's like other illnesses right for 24 hours that's just a typical [Music]

111looking like much better that's why we opened uh spectators just really interesting when we came back a week ago monday it was it was as if we landed at the bottom of the cliff and it was okay oh and our numbers have stayed pretty steady we still we still have a few every day but for a while we were having eight nine ten in high school alone on a daily basis for those first really almost three weeks after vacation and then it just bubbled right up so we're doing okay we thought we had we thought we could celebrate on friday it was the first time that we had no positive cases until one was announced later in the afternoon so we were so close but certainly getting much better the other thing uh not not

112in the mitigation plan but the other thing i shared with you just in your packets was really what we're seeing more and more that is talking about one-way masking as you know there was a lot of discussion over the um nasa decision some confusion for a while over that that decision everybody's in a state for masking but we're interested interestingly finding that the health department is stepping farther and farther and farther away from health department they're not contact tracing they're not doing a lot of the things that they were doing and yet it has all still stayed for schools to do all of that so we're in some ways becoming our own little community health department and we would like to step out of that we've become the lightning rod because we're being held to

113a position that other places are not held to and yet we constantly validate that what we're doing has kept us the rate below one percent of spread and the positive cases we're having are coming in from the outside they are not spread from in the district and so i think one of the things we're going to be looking at is how do we how do we balance different people's opinions as to how we move forward in a pandemic i think this conversation about one-way masking now that n95s and kn95s are available and their value and how you can wear them to protect yourself and the person next to you doesn't need to be wearing one you're still if you're fully vaccinated and boosted and wearing a mask you're you're heavily protected i i'm just looking

114at my crystal ball and i think that's where we're going to be going as as this moves forward and these mask mandates come up again and again and uh so i've been doing some some reading on that and it seems pretty legit and we have a ton of kn-95 masks for staff and we actually are researching can 95 masks for students because they're very hard to come by in a child size so we're not sure that we can find anything legit we actually have some that are coming at samples um but we want to we want families who feel the need to stay masked and their students to stay masked to be prepared it always seems we're chasing something the decision is made and then it takes us two weeks to catch up to the

115decision and so we're going to try to be a little ahead of the decision and see if we can have some things in place for families as we think some changes will be coming from so what's a little light reading what would that look like in regards to our spacing and our use of you know our statistics that we have available for the students to activities like for instance higher right are they so they have the space some of that is up to state ed yeah you know i don't get to make those decisions we follow the state regulations the department of health and scd supersede any decision that i or we would like to make we follow those guidelines so i can't i can't speak to that and that's why we feel like we

116ought to want to make sure we've got some things in place so when it comes we can we can activate what we're already planning rather than once again scrambling to try to catch up and then is the state do you know if the state end is going this direction who knows okay it's not just clarifying so we couldn't you know decide to do one-way masking like on our next no we cannot we have to wait till state gives the opening for something like that happen we just want to be sort of ready because we know at some point when we weren't wearing masks for eternity it will somehow transition away from it and so we just that's what you're asking just be prepared yeah i think it's good i did i i've become the saranac

117lake health department certified central school health department yeah with a lot of help from our nursing staff it's been amazing and we're just feeling like okay we've been sort of left on an island and we ought to start planning on our own as to what we think is coming and there's a lot it was actually if you get the you get the new york state school boards they do a daily update if you look at their daily update they had information in there on one way mapping today and i'm just that's that's coming over my desk and i just see that as the off ramp if you are concerned about yourself you have a way to protect yourself if you want to unmask you i just that's beginning to become the buzz phrase and i

118feel just felt like if you haven't read about it you should read about it and we'll tell you about how we might be prepared if that's what comes but that would be only if they were wearing n95s or kn 95 or victory yes i mean the changes are gonna changes are gonna happen one way or another i think it's nice if we have things and families decide they want to click advantage or use them they have they have the availability so i would just want to make sure however we develop this that we make sure it's equitable to all families so if the district is going to provide them or somehow supplement those who can't get them that it wasn't that's why we're already researching if there's anything available to us that's legit yeah and

119then it becomes the if it's just the choice of the family whether the child wears it then you know the child has do we have to then police the child to wear it because the family wanted them to like right now everybody's gotta wear it but when it becomes voluntary then it's it could be challenging sooner or later it's going to become voluntary but volunteering for the family but voting for the child yeah i think it's time to get ahead of that it's just it's coming yes it's already arrived yes look at the there's plenty of states in this country than there are yes down there i mean denmark uk australia let it rip they're going for it so not saying we should do that i'm just saying like very quickly i think this is

120really wise to plan ahead and see what's available because yeah you've been saying at every meeting this is going to end and these are going to come off and like what's going on for kids but people want to wear them so this artifact is good because it says if you can do if you want to wear one forever so this is this is blowing in the wind this week in two weeks that i see you again maybe blowing in a different direction but i think we should be paying attention to that uh just i have a student who's stuck in australia right now because australia did in my opinion what we should have done which is a flexible plan depending depending on spread where if you have a lot of spread then you go to

121increase mitigation when you don't have spread you decrease your mitigation you've never really done that and uh and i think this conversation i agree my wife who's the pediatrician like argues i think correctly that at some point the variants are like cloth masks we're just not doing much for variants anymore but the new variant is much more transmissible she's of the mind that like we need to offer him from masses as well so the medical community is talking about this but but not in the context of massive community spread right when you still have community spread there are things that you have to try to do to mitigate that community spread this conversation becomes way easier in my opinion if we have low community rates the north country is still one of the highest in

122the state we still have some of the lowest vaccination rates we still have some of what's called health responses a lot of it is driven by poverty some of it is driven by politics i i just i find it's frustrating that the community gets frustrated with us i find that frustrating school should be the last to close first to open and and we have we never seem to learn that lesson so it's uh it's maddening i think it also you know something that also needs to be considered and that people are considering with taking off the masks is you know the ability of our health care system to handle sure whatever cases are going to be present on that once that happens right because that's when when it becomes an issue is when our health

123care system can't handle the people who need help in the hospitals um if this gets to the point where it's more like a flu there's not as many people going to the hospital and it makes it easier to decide to take off the map or to lower that whatever preventative measures you're facing yeah i agree and i think that's probably just a good reminder that we should touch face with darcy on some nice things just about the medical implications of our decisions so we're not making so every time i make a change is involved she's our medical director so any time there's a change to the mitigation plan oh it always goes always it's been a while so if um do you have any more questions on that regarding that it's not all in favor

124i have any approach okay the topic that i believe everybody is here for um i don't know should i think we should discuss it first because we do have a lot of people what if we don't get to that point the resolution point right you could table it so um but we can discuss it and then if we want a resolution we can then take a motion should i just do your motion and then we don't if we don't close it tonight we just table it for tonight bring it back to the next stage okay so if i can get a resolution or excuse me a motion for resolution number 107 to appoint someone to the vacant board of education you see tonight um who would like to make that motion so we're going to

125discuss it so justin and mark and then we'll go ahead and open it for discussion i think the plan because we asked for lots of interest and we actually got it which is awesome so the plan uh for each of us tonight was to introduce a few people um so that everyone could give a synopsis of the letters that we read so that the board would or excuse me not the board but but everybody in the public would be aware of who um who was interested in the position and a little bit about that person so we all have received uh the different letters and the documents that people submitted for this and we've all been able to review that but we'd like to just do a little synopsis so the public knows who went

126ahead and was interested it might be good to put a face to the names so if you're here maybe if you could just raise your hand when we talk about you so we know who you are um that would be great um nobody's gonna get penalized if they're not here but um so i'm gonna go first i am going to introduce tracy santa gates so is she here tonight so tracy santagate uh submitted the letter of interest to us and um she has quite a background um basically uh she mentioned that she would be a positive asset to the board because of her background and experiences she was the director of the san antonio youth center um in the beginning when it was started in 83. she has been a substitute teacher for both the

127middle school and high school she was an academic youth advisor for the mountain lake academy i am not familiar with that one but she had put in presidency of camelot she was an advent teacher at paul smith's as well she believes that those experiences have helped her to develop a philosophy working with the youth to help them reach their full potential by hard work teamwork and community support her she has quite a bit of education and did homeschool her two sons she did work with the school district uh in that regard with the santa fe school district so she has that familiarity with that process she also is an independent business owner involving construction and property management and then her final statement was just i understand the importance of maintenance schedules budgets and finance maintaining

128government standards policies um develop policy developments implementation uh as well as creating creation of vision and goals that reflect the complex needs of both our students their families faculty administration and all of the supporting community members that's a little snippet about tracy santagate and so if we can we'll just go ahead and move along and let's just start mark um do you want to introduce the two that you have absolutely so first person i got is clyde baker's anywhere yet clyde uh i didn't realize you met we're on the board that long but he was here 11 years and two of those as a president and one of the things clyde says is that he's here as a temporary villain he would not run for permanent cities looking to help us with his experience get

129through to june um you know i thought about this a long long time today when i was going through these and my initial reaction was we wanted to get somebody that would kind of test the waters but then when i saw the volume of people i said to joe before the meeting i'm concerned that if we select someone out of this group that somehow they may give them an advantage in an election by making them a temporary selection and so the nice thing about clyde's uh situation is that would not happen i never anticipated we get nine applicants for this i'm happy we did so it's something to think about that whoever we nominate here if they are going to run you know that is a little bit of a head start on the other

130people so i don't know what we want to go but we should think about that because i read all these letters over several times and they're good got a lot of good candidates and whoever is not selected i hope they do run all these people and then the second person is aaron benny laura is there in here i don't know aaron but uh her current role is a new york lake champlain coordinator she works with public and private organizations universities non-profits uh local and state governments international level and that's a veritech enhance the water quality unlike champlain she also notes that she's worked with the youth and outreach initiative and with communities as well and related with his work she's led multiple teams comprised of stakeholders from a variety of federal and state agencies county

131staff and environmental groups which is perfect since we're in two counties in 52 towns so um she also notes while leading teams initiatives and partnerships throughout her career she's learned valuable leadership negotiation budget management team management skills that'll be beneficial as a potential board member so she's got about two more pages of uh resume information um so very uh well-rounded sounds like she's got uh some good qualities that would uh be is so um thank you mark and we will discuss everybody once we're done introducing them joe do you want to go ahead and introduce nick uh yeah uh nancy was on the list next he wants me to go first oh got it i'm on the end just ignore your list um so i had nick um and i think and i just closed

132his letters let me get back to that i'm sorry um is nick here nick is a parent in the district um wrote a relatively short letter of interest um which is fine the uh he's a local business owner with his wife in lake placid where i was just googling them they have a company called white barn design they do design builds it's like um said i know we're living in divisive times and challenges lay on the horizon wanting to help um help out he said that running his business has taught him a great deal about interacting with the public other team members government entities i know that this is a short term appointment would be happy to step up um thank you joe so we will go ahead and take your pick which one do

133you want to do first justin i'll go with norman corbin norman here uh so norman um has been living in the area for 14 years he has a son who's in seventh grade and i had to read this whole time to make sure that mr samuel i believe some norman is identifying as somebody who's blind and spoke to um raising his son and seeing how his son has helped him you know navigate his daily life with his blindness and then what's kind of his son he spoke about how his son kind of models for his peers um being more inclusive of others with differences and so much a lot about civic engagement social justice and inclusion um i had a lot of local community relationships with some attackers i don't know what they are dss

134i don't know what dss is department of social security there you go ssa ny application rehab um several others in front of assets and clinton counties a lot of administrative experience with budgets and payroll and just really spoke to uh kind of inspired by the focus on diversity equity inclusion we have going on so good background and definitely interested and doing it for the long term it seems like and then i had paul herman's paul here so paul um is a retired lawyer who practiced family court um in the past also been a saranac lake village justice a trustee and an attorney so a lot of administrative austrians on boards didn't have the longest letter but again just a little bit of background growing up in public schools his mother was in public school and

135his this is priority for the district if you're on the board would be keeping pupils and teachers safe and healthy and has many boards which he's currently afflicted with the adronic health ethics committee the federal credit union supervisory audit committee harristown board of assessments rotary club many more committees so he's on gosh it looks like 12 to 15 different committees right now in the area pretty busy but definition two good candidates thank you justin so zach you've got scott and tori yes uh scott mckim scott here uh scott offered a cover letter and a very robust uh resume um just a few highlights here passionate about quality public education that has a student and results based approach background engaging with youth and uh not just outdoor guide leading canoe backpack trips but also a middle

136school teacher for seven years in alaska and vermont um so does hail from looks like majority of time spent in alaska has a ms in education made the dean's list got lots of awards for all kinds of good stuff been very involved in the communities not only here in saranac lake but also looks like vermont and alaska as well and definitely motivated in terms of developing his professionalism just a laundry list here really good stuff looks like also very uh confident with grants looks like you've been a part of garnering grant money and goes on to just looks like a kayak construction class instructor boat building class so it seems like a pretty um renaissance kind of kind of guy and then we got tori thurston uh tori offered a great letter um shared that

137this has been on on her mind for the last few years she says my desire to become a board member comes down to three salient points so if you'll entertain me uh the first one is i am who i am because of my education and i consider that education is a never-ending process the second we have no right to opine or complain unless we're willing to do anything about it and three is a parent of a daughter who is dyslexic and dysgraphic uh i've learned at first hand the importance of being actively involved in our children's education she's a local born and raised in the tri-lakes went off to massachusetts maine and maryland is back focused on kinesiology and goes on a little bit more to brag about the great stuff that her daughter is

138doing and uh just talking about some of her experience in terms of um working with uh special ed and and creating opportunities to grow um her daughter and her capabilities seem like a great candidate support here thank you okay and lastly nancy well i would speak for megan wright who believes right over there maine is a saranac lake native and has three children attending school and uh she was moved to to run for the board because of all the pandemic issues that are going on really was moved to step up and serve uh in that role uh she was already planning to run for the board seat in the spring so this would be you know to get a head start i suppose she currently serves on the saranac lake fish and game club board

139and as a trustee and ministry pianist and missionary at the saranac lake baptist church okay um both positions uh that i just mentioned are voluntary and non-profit and megan feels that this has given her experience and knowledge to help acclimate into the position of you know on the board of ed she's received a bs in psychology with a cognate in addiction and recovery through liberty university i don't know what a cognate is but i it sounds important and uh maybe has some knowledge in education special ed school budgets and education law that could be really useful so yes another strong candidate perfect so if we can um go ahead and open it up for discussion on these nine individuals who have expressed uh their interest in filling this seat um you know mark i was

140the opposite of you until you made that statement i was thinking um we would want to put in someone who wanted to serve or who wanted to be elected to the board that was my original thank you too but then you're right that would be sort of an unfair advantage with the email note uh people who would be candidates so when we go to elections uh i'm a little off on who was up for election was jeff up for lecture this time as well so do we just ask somebody else another question and come back to definitely i could get that jeff was just got elected last year and dropped off quite quickly this was jeff do we have four seats up or do we have three seats well there's never four well there is

141a year that there's three though because we're missing someone hang on just a minute i can answer that for you nice tom burpin um you have three sheets like oh you have the this uh jeremy c army ended this june i think it's mark farmer you're seeing interaction that's two seats and then zachary was appointed to just seat which is up in 23 i think right but he asked face election we have three seats okay so this would have been a two seat before so we have an extraordinary and what happens is the lowest well the third highest boat getter will get the remainder of that turn yeah they'll get in immediately as opposed to waiting until the organization will meet but they'll be up for election again in a year whatever the end of

142the tournament oh wait no the highest vote fitter or the highest no the highest two people will take the seats the full return the third highest will get the partial turn left over from zachary if it's zachary he'll finish up and someone else don't finish whatever it is i think it's a year and a half okay so then we would be back on the normal correct then your cycle is back normal election cycle okay i would just add something i felt the same way that that marked it i mean originally i didn't think we'd have so much interest either and and i think it's it's wonderful and i hope a lot of those people will continue to run in may but i think we not only um shouldn't you know pick someone to give them

143a heads head start over somebody else or a leg up if that we have the obligation not to do that because then it would be us making the decision who we think is the best candidate over others i mean when there are so many good candidates that clyde is the only person who said he intends not to run and i know he's true about that he loves saying he would never be on the board again nobody else said well well well aren't we here now you know i think honestly when i came to this my thought was you know we would be desperate one or two people because it's been difficult to get people to to run for the board and in that case the the pitch of try it out you might see if

144you like it or not was a pretty good pitch um as turns out to attract a lot of candidates um the other thing that that cuts my mind i'll speak for myself my first at least year here i was trying to figure out what was going on and i worked here for a long time with a lot of board meetings so this person's only going to be um in the short term it may be beneficial to have the experience that clyde brings and that you know he doesn't have to learn the ropes he's been here you'll have to get up to speed on some of the current topics but none of the philosophy and the way of doing business will be new to it you know i kind of pretty much sat here and just

145stared at stuff until i could figure out what was what and so he would be productive from the jump and that's not to say these other people would not be productive but it takes a while to learn the process and i hope everybody on this list runs so to voters because when you read through all the resumes the applications um i don't think would go wrong with any of them so i hope that they all run and uh at that point then the community can pick what they feel is the best candidate and i didn't feel that way two days ago until i started really looking at these and see the numbers that kept coming in and it forced me to kind of look at it differently not everybody on the list might might not

146want to run because they wanted to try it out and dip their toes in uh first and that's you know that's that's unfortunate for in that case but uh i still think it would not be wise for us to select who we think we want to be on that as only you know however we'd be six people on from the district deciding uh you know almost giving a big chance of who who might get elected next time yeah i don't have a problem with um i mean we've done this in the past where we've assigned somebody to the board um i don't have an issue with that piece because we are voted in and we do or should represent the public so our opinion counts in that regard but i wouldn't want to give someone

147an unfair advantage and that's where that's where i'm bitcoin is giving some i mean yes it's great to dip your toe in and then decide you want to do it but that would would give you an unfair advantage over these other individuals who also want to run um it'd be a different scenario if you're talking to one or two people and for me to sit here and look at all these resumes and draw conclusions just based on that is not the same as people that have an opportunity to campaign and share in depth what they're about with the with the voting public well and it's been great because i mean like as i'm reading through the the letters of interest and the resumes and the different things that were submitted um support letters and everything

148else i'm like wow this person would be great at community schools maybe we can pass their stuff along or maybe this person should be a teacher here's an orchestra or you know i mean they all have really good things that that they're struck that they can contribute but i i like again i wouldn't want to give someone an unfair advantage so if with the exception of client if all eight people ran that would be one of the deepest election pools in recent times at least we're gonna have to have writing votes for something great it's really great people are paying attention to schools it's great i love it it's a problem to have yeah it's a great problem to have i mean i i i was i was thinking we weren't even going to get

149one or two people interested so if we go this route which i was in the same boat in a couple days i mean when i first read it clyde i was like well jesus didn't want to do it but then i read a little closer i was like oh okay so i see i see the point and then we mark what you said so i think it would be important if we're going that route and for the reasons we're stating which i think they're logical to direct outreach to every candidate and explain that decision because we can't assume they're all watching it or knowing they're saying this is why we chose the person we did and in no way reflects negatively on any of your credentials it's just that this was the voltage you've ever

150had so we encourage you and i think i i had two people on this list by one name call me and ask questions about what's likely on the board and some do and they both were intrigued because it was a chance of difference though let's see right and i think the encouragement there is just come sit on a couple board meetings or just watch it on youtube you know you've gotta you can see it's pretty much it's all in the open so i think a letter explaining why we made a decision we did if we go this route and explaining how we encourage them to dip their toe if they want to learn more um i think would be the right thing to do because everyone spent a lot of time sending us their materials

151and thinking about it so i think that's the important thing to do so we get a huge turnout for people running it's great it's only folks want to join and i think the before probably a decade ago made that kind of stable when they reduced the terms of five years to three years so that if you wanted to try it out uh you know it didn't go awkward one term move on and in five years a long commitment than anything and so i think they recognize that and one of the reasons they reduced the term is to try to encourage people hey three years is not bad and to try to try this out it's long enough but not too long i do think that communication is important because you know we did offer the

152concept that this is kind of an opportunity to try and run it i mean it was referenced in one of the letters even you know saying is this a good fit so i think the context is very important the other thing is you know i think it's also important to recognize you know megan's here tonight with 25 letters of recommendation i think that's substantial in a short period of time so i think that's commendable um clyde i think you you basically you're giving us an opportunity to get a known entity and that's hard i think to say no to for immediate quick response kind of thing right at least that's my perspective i think from my perspective too is if anyone's here or anyone's on this list and watching tonight i think part of what

153my experience was personally was i did try my best to show up and and that that was taken into consideration so i think you're a very uh equitable board in the sense of being able to recognize that so i would encourage anybody on this list to to show up and to you know whether they're voted in or not tonight that i don't think i think it's showing up is just as important right so that would be my hope as well is that we start seeing some more activity even engagement with the community um so that it's it's it's an opportunity for for what we've been i think looking for for quite a while and i did think about i mean that was one of the things i thought about was the um the community support

154or or the letters that that megan got in behalf of her interests um but then i started thinking you know we didn't ask for that so it may not it was great that it was great that they were submitted and that she already has that support i mean i don't i don't think she's going to have a problem getting those signatures for right the next school run bit but but i didn't want that to count against someone else who we didn't say sure submit letters of support sure um so that was one of the reasons i did not i kind of discounted those letters they were good they were informative but i didn't want to hold that against anybody else but at the same time it would be hard to pick um knowing that they

155all want to continue on it would it is hard to pick which one you give that advantage to yeah and i think that's where it's it's nice to have clyde in the mix because we do have someone who could pick up very quickly and it's a short time because this person uh stops in may you know as soon as we have the election oh the election or june june immediately the people who have left early they take those seats immediately the person with the highest votes they wait till the organizational meeting okay so the so they would essentially be they would be leaving or their term would be up the night of the election right oh wow you really are yeah so it's it's a very short it's a very short window i guess quick

156clarification this is technical so i know so we approved in our uh consent agenda that we accepted jake granville's recognition from coaching unified basketball i want to make sure he didn't do that because of the rule of he can't have a spouse who's on the board he did that for other reasons okay that is not a rule i thought you couldn't be on the board to get a spouse in the district [Laughter] remove that from the record okay funny i think you have a good point mark if it was one or two and mr baker his name wasn't one of those two it might be a different conversation but um yeah so um how it sounds like it sounds like i'm not making a judging call here but it sounds like clyde is the front

157runner so for this vote should we just go whether we accept clyde as the nomination or sure because people can vote your vote down and if we don't have a majority then we keep that we should keep going you could talk about a second choice so the resolution for clarity is i will read it okay so um we already had a motion put forward for resolution of number 108 but it would be uh resolution number 108 2021 appointing client baker to the position of the board of it or excuse [Laughter] seven appointing clyde baker to the vacant board of education seat until may 17 2022. um so do we need to do a roll call yeah so let's do a roll call mark yes joe yes i'm a yes yes justin yes zach yes okay

158so um so we will go ahead and do that and diane will reach out to clyde to see if he's willing to serve say well and then i know his number i think he would be sworn in at the next correct meeting when fred is back oh is he back that soon he should be back for the baby will write you the all the candidates on the list so i could put something together um but just in in case uh i'm not expressing the views of the board completely i will send it to you guys uh and then if you could uh either tell me that i'm way off base or uh or you know tell me to include something else let me know and then i'm guessing i'm gonna give that to diane to

159send out because fred's not yeah i'll send another friend's behalf yeah yes so normally fred would send it out yeah but um diane will send it out since perfectly i just heard some really good things to put in that letter so unless someone else wants to write it no no you can do it here i am leaving on saturday to utah and zach is giving me a look it's only because i know how well it's going to be written before you head out to youtube well that's why so if anyone else would like to write it and then have us approve it that would be fine but i can um i can put it together um either while i'm on the plane or before i leave i'm happy if you're busy and i'm not busy

160i'm going to be sitting in the airport for 13 hours but then if someone couldn't take it from when i send it to you uh and take lead on it from that regard um that would be great when are you how about our new brace second my only thought is i'm wondering if we should be faster in our turnaround time i think it's fine do you want me to do it tonight you guys can all lay in tomorrow i heard some volunteering going on next year it wasn't you want to do it tonight assuming we're out here before 11 o'clock tonight so if you can email it to the group and diane and then we can uh suggest changes or a privilege to go out and then diane will send it out to these people

161do you have an email for all of you for all of you i don't email you i believe they were all emailed if not i'll make sure somewhere in that letter we should include the information about how to run for the board just what the process is do we know is is our process this year being impacted by public so yeah so that would be good to include in there just how many open seats and what processes brandon's got a package of almonds i don't know i think i know where it is because i've worked in this office when the time comes i think you're saying that i'll take care of this i think i know where his packets are he keeps them ready to go um and you know for anybody watching thank you

162thank you for all of the interest in this position and um we hope that you all run for a seat on the board and uh if not please come join us for our board meetings or grab one of us and let us know your opinions on what's going on that would be great it's nice to have choices it really is i could not believe that that we got nine people interested when we have been beating the bushes for board members over the past few years so that is really really amazing it speaks to the community and how willing we are to step up um okay so we will move along to new business uh the first item on new business is the 2022-2023 school district calendar um this is just a first reading uh until

163we put it to vote for the next meeting um i believe there weren't any changes did you want to say anything else really nothing i brought it to you earlier this year earlier than usual because of the possible impact of the world university game we're just gonna roll ahead it looks like it mostly will impact like i said what it is doing is some boces odd configurations because boces uh has tupper lake with their split vacation us for their two-week vacation and now like placid is pulling some extra days to actually not have school during that week in january of the world university games so there's no way for that not to impact boces boces hasn't had a conversation about what that will look like but we're going to just go ahead with our as

164our calendar as we first proposed it so i'll put that out it goes to the union for their perusal i'm going to send it to ellen yawzi even though she's been retired for years because she always counts my days to make sure this calendar actually works excellent at it it will come back for approval at the next meeting um will it be will that be posted online for the public to see anywhere in the board of education it's in is it not in the folder right now i believe it's in the folder right now um that's in the calendar invite has all of this material if it's not there it's only because i screwed it up i i thought i'd put it there i have not checked there's not much hat about this it's a

165tight year some years we have a few a few dates we can play with this this year just doesn't work that way our neighbors are coming back before labor day i hate to do that because we lose a lot of kids it's important that everybody comes on the first day when we do it before labor day a lot of families take that last week off kids are in the door so it's like a double starting day and so it's a tight that there's just not a lot of a wiggle room because we're going to start on september 6th we'll bring staff back the first and the second but start with students right after labor night so not a lot to talk about in this one are you anticipating any disruptions to the student body and

166or faculty and staff that week of the university game we're going to have to write it out a little bit i i we're hoping that we'll have some opportunity to participate and take our kids on field trips and some opportunities for that um the information kind of comes in this direction in drips and grabs they work on it i care a little bit about it so i know they're planning and moving forward but i don't know that they have anything yet concrete to come this way but are we anticipating any broader disruptions to the community traffic light classifier right and could lead here to that we're housing most a lot of the athletes at paul smith we're starting like three weeks late so there's gonna be a lot of flow we know that just wondering

167hard to know what that looks like but there was no room in our schedule because of the because we already had to pull the um 22nd of december which is a thursday this original plan was that thursday and friday off the 22nd 23rd we try as an fdh boces to have a pretty similar calendar so that we have overlapping services it's not all over the board so the initial plan was to have that thursday and i might be lying to you yes to have on thursday and friday the 22nd to 23rd i've already had to pull the 22nd in order to do the winter carnival day so there's really no other time in this schedule there's no extra floating days that i could hook up to january like we actually we did a couple years

168ago we had a couple extra days at the january break or the february break there's just no extra time in this calendar it's too tight we can't start students um before september 1st and we can't end our year after the ratings day in june and the ratings day in june is pushed back it's it's kind of early this year and that there's a full week of june after raiding day so 23rd is the rating that tightens up that end of the window there's just it just is what it is so well we probably have some disruption joe yeah we're gonna just work our way around that as it gets closer and we see what we've got but there's no way to take that off snow i do know i hear it every morning not every

169morning i'm asleep most mornings um okay so if we are done with that we did move the petition to the top so next would be the nomination and appointment of the board of education vice president so um if we could just have a resolution so that we can discuss it so resolution for 108 for um filling that position as the vice president would someone like to make that motion nancy uh can i have a second joe so typically we nominate someone um we did ask for interest on this as well and um and i was thinking remark anyway so i'm glad that we got his email so i would like to nominate mark farmer would anybody else uh be interested or like to nominate anybody a second on that aurora oh no we already did

170a second but your nominations were acting on this but we could have multiple nominations i thought we took the nominations first and then did the second on the different do we need to nominate each one in a second for each person first okay thank god you're here college so i would like to nominate here can we get a second so uh justin would be our second beautiful are there any other nominations for vice president okay so um the floor is closed so we'll yeah we'll go ahead and close that and then if i and then we can just take a vote so if i can get a vote for resolution number 108 appointing mark to the position of board of education vice president for the remainder of this school year do you want a roll

171call um and yes we'll do it real quick um so i'll start from this side nancy yes zach yes justin yes yes joe yes and mark tobstein [Laughter] since you'll be running the meeting next week or not next week in two weeks but i will be watching but since we can't speak through youtube i will be muted um isn't it i'm sorry i don't i don't maybe i'm speaking out of turn but i thought it was the newly appointed vice president's job to bring cookies to the next board meeting i'll bank them up if you want to try it man it'll be a dangerous thing [Laughter] [Music] zach i brought snacks for tonight because i knew it was gonna be a long meeting so if anybody would like to content approval so if i can

172get a motion for resolution number 109 2021 nancy a second i'm saying um and so if we have discussion on that um chris jasmine is here okay talk about that because as i just mentioned this has been a fluid process so i think chris is here i just have a script to share with y'all and i know it's your discussion but if you have any questions i'm happy to answer them or tell you a bit more about it can you give us a little background sure i know i think nancy knows it but it'd be good for others to know what this is and how it's being financed yep certainly so so to begin with my name is chris gogling i'm the parent of two students at petrova and a teacher here in the building

173um i'm a member of the diversity equity and inclusion committee and my goodness i'm so sorry my alarm is going off so [Music] last spring we held a listening session with students of color um and their families and families of alums and alums just to hear more about their experiences as students in the district and um i attended and just took notes um and uh to me muldowney organized it and um and it was it was very eye-opening in terms of what these students experienced here at the school and we ended up with pages and pages of notes and one of the things that we struggled with as a committee is is how to get others to understand the importance of the work that is happening and one of the things that came across is

174that we might do a video highlighting these these experiences as students and we decided to go through and pull some some of the quotes out um and we're going to be working with kirk sullivan who's done promotional work before he's a fantastic filmmaker locally we're applying for grant funding to help support that so what we're looking for tonight is um just to give you an idea of what it would look like uh it would be filmed in the in the school buildings but no students would be featured it's just um sort of the buildings themselves and classrooms um and we just wanted to make sure it was okay before we move forward summit reasoning joe that's fine chris i think it's a great idea i think using our building is a good idea i supported

175100 and just so you know kirk sullivan he's a graduate of this school as well that's cool spent uh about a decade out in california working out there and returned home because this is where he wanted to be but he's still in filmmaking if you remember the athletic department i was just going to say i think the thinking is to produce an artifact that can be used with various audiences just to say like look like here's the lived experience of students and families in our district like we have an issue like how do we how do we change as a district so that we make sure everybody is included and that we're valuing voices so that's clearly if you go back to fernie's speech that's that was an issue and so i think i think

176this could be really useful just as a way to start conversations with different groups well i think that you know when we when when we first talked about doing some a video like this what was really important was the message that it would portray because it could portray or or not portray but it could tell many will leave many messages you know with the viewer and so that was something that was we felt very important that the board you know was very comfortable with the message that that comes out and um what what do you envision as the production time when would this be completed um soon that's that's why we're here um because kirk is going to get very busy in the near future so uh we wanted to be able to shoot the

177video and i would just zoom in the next month or so um so that then he could edit it at his convenience in in his scale of work this is really small it may be huge for us but um yeah we're trying to make it happen sooner rather than i would love if uh this could be shown to our staff on opening day when they meet together and then again uh with our student bodies when they have their first meeting of the year i think that would be a great way to start off next year with this it's not going to take very long to show up i don't think we need a lot of commentary other than i want to present this to you this is a district stand and put it up there

178for staff and students would like to see well and it's even more than that because it it really gives the why why is the district undertaking these efforts you know to be more inclusive because this is what this is what people have to say you know who've been in the district you know who had experiences that were maybe not as as glowing as as as we would hope they are and um so that's why we want to you know making these efforts to to be more inclusive in schools there are inherently lots of committees and sometimes committees are very effective sometimes they aren't a lot of committees start and then they kind of just drift away but the dei committee has gone strong and is getting stronger as it goes and it's an example of

179how committee should work and how they should be able to affect change i think it's a model for you know subsequent committees to look and say because you know among staff i've been on 20 committees you know but this is this has got real teeth to it and it's encouraging so um so i'm really torn uh because i want to applaud you for all your efforts and i uh definitely like the overview and the idea but i i gotta say when i read the text i'm not getting the message that you guys are discussing right now um i i'm having a hard time with the text because in the way it reads to me this is my opinion um and other people may feel differently but the way it reads to me is people's experiences

180in the beginning which i think are great because it showcases what people have been confronted with in our district um regardless if it was a student or teacher or whoever had that experience but then it switches this is where i have a problem at the empty locker locker room it kind of switches to how do we fix our teachers which i don't agree with because if this is something we need to fix in the community i don't know that it's right to start pointing out that we need to fix our teachers i think the focus should be fixing the environment in the school which includes the students and the teachers but if you look at all the comments from empty locker room down it talks about the adults the teachers how do we teach them

181to to help what they don't understand which is not we know we have teachers in our district who do understand um the situation and so it's it for me it was good right up until that point and then the message got lost so i kind of i liked the beginning and i liked the statement at the end i liked that how do we make everyone feel inclusive every day and i liked the end card but to me the other ones were like uh we're taking a jab at our teachers which i don't feel is the problem in our district um i think the problem is not exclusive to teachers i think the problem is for all of us students teachers staff all of us yeah we actually discussed this about like the different groups and

182i think it's like it's a good point and i see what you're saying now in a way that i i don't think i certainly didn't want to read it the first time i think you know you could have a product that is tailored towards a particular group and the struggle is like making it general enough but also specific enough that people can hook into it to do work to see themselves in it but we we had a long conversation with this exact thing the other day well i think even it looks like i mean those were quotes these are what what people had to say who who who were in this listening session yeah but that's not that's not if you're trying to portray the experiences the first ones are portraying experiences the last ones

183are opinions on what we can do to to fix the issues and that is that's someone's personal opinion but i can't imagine that all of the quotes if your intention is to say here is the problem and here is what we need to fix that's fine um and we can go there if that's the message that you want to give however the fix is not focused on the teachers and these opinions i mean i can't imagine that all of the opinions or quotes that you received were in regards to what the teachers have to do i would hope that there were some quotes on what we can do as a community what we can do for the students what we can do for the teacher at every level because it's not just our teachers and

184help yes i'm sure there are some teachers that need help but some of our teachers are really good at it and then there are some teachers or some students that are good at it and there are some who aren't um and really we we get to a point where we're focusing on we need to teach our adults and not institute change within the community and within our walls yeah i mean i mean that's that's that's how i read the text and if i saw if i just saw this without without having this opportunity to give you input i would i honestly would think you were taking a hit at the teachers starting from the empty locker room down and i don't think that's the message we want to portray and i don't think we want

185to um like change any of the quotes right we want to honor those so i think your point aurora um are there other quotes that offer the same message but are are inclusive right i mean if you could ease it like i just looking at the one the empty locker room right um you can't fix children what goes on all the time a quick edit to be inclusive here would be hopefully we can help each other learn what to do to help right the environment i mean it's it's really it's not the call but i understand that i'm not suggesting you want to change the course i'm just saying i understand what aurora is saying in terms of it could be more universal in the sense of we a collective league because it pains me

186to say this but some of the issues were brought up specifically said that some of the teachers were um helping in these situations i don't think this is the forum to do something i don't disagree that but what i'm saying is some of the things that we're hearing is there have been staff that have not been sensitive to these issues true so whether that should go here now it's a different question the quote is authentic to what we've been hearing in some certain situations well another oh go ahead well i was just going to say that to your point i mean this should also include the support staff and any anyone else right that the community that i think we're referencing um and i think you know towards the end that that was going to

187be my suggestion on the end card there was it says thank you for your understanding and support it's like how do we draw the viewer in to be part of the part of the change right so that to me that's i think that's the message we're trying to to do is like these are the experiences we're highlighting this we're taking it serious and how do we do something different together seems like an inclusive message that's important and the the only other thing i was thinking about was i think mark to your point in terms of like if there's some staff that are struggling with this if we're gonna put this out there we better have a plan or i guess again um the administration has to have a plan to address that stuff too because

188they're going to be watching they're going to be looking for it and they're going to be expecting something to happen so i personally that's worth taking into consideration i read it um not the way you did what it said to me i thought amelia of some of the specifics that we talked about the past when you said that i went and looked at i guess you know i didn't have some inside knowledge about some of these situations i certainly would read that as all teachers and i don't think that's the message i want to portray i think the best one to portray is it doesn't really matter who who is um participate or not participated we want to make it clear what is acceptable what is not acceptable and how we're going to correct any

189of those issues um that quote is not indicative some of the deficiencies some people may have as opposed to all staff and so it's a problem when you bring that up i reread that i say you know if i just read this blindly i see what you're saying and certainly we don't want to alienate our staff in something like this we want them to be part of the solution we don't want to fight with them well and if you want to i mean the if there is um a quote because the the first ones are true experiences right uh you say students and parents spoken honestly about their experiences as minorities in the school district you switch from experiences to their opinions on how we fix this and if and and um when you switch

190there are you actually condoning what they are saying on how we fix this do you agree as a district do we agree that we can't do anything about the children i would hope we don't agree that and that we just need to help our teachers understand what to do to help i mean really as a district i thought the dei committee we're trying to infuse change at the bottom we're trying to infuse change at all levels so that people feel safe and and included um not just saying that our teachers need to learn how to handle it okay and so if there's a quote that says they had a certain experience with the teachers then i mean that would be something to that you could consider putting in there someone's actual experience but not their

191opinion on how to fix it unless that opinion aligns with the opinion of how the district intends to fix it and i think this whole initiative is to help fix these things for everyone yeah including our students so thank you we agree yeah i mean it seems like that that that one that one quote we can't fix children what goes on all the time that really i mean i agree with you it is more it's someone's opinion it's not necessarily their experience and and what we're trying to do is is is highlight people's experiences as minorities in the saranac lake school district and so whereas that's so so maybe that's just troublesome on the next one we have great educators here but everybody including children needs more education i mean that's still an opinion too

192like yeah that's that's a state that's not an experience that's a that's an opinion on what you do to fix it so if i would i would think that the true grab like these first when i first started reading these texts when i first started reading the beginning i was like oh my gosh you know that was a grab somebody's experience on what happened to them that was a grab but then when it switched to um this is what we need to do to fix it i i got lost i got lost in the message so the big reason and i just from my own profession and being involved in the reason that dei initiatives fail is because they finger wet and that's what i see happening in a lot of the stuff you're talking

193about a lot of finger wagging and i don't the question becomes for me like if you watch a short video or dei video is it a video that you come away from feeling good about this is why dei is important or do you walk away from it depressed about this negative stuff and these are actual lived experiences they deserve to be told i totally agree but franny made her video over well over a year over a year ago like we this is anybody watching this video isn't gonna go oh i never agree this was going on like everybody in the district knows this and if they say they don't or they say there isn't a problem then they're you're not going to change their minds with a couple more quotes so i think dei stuff

194is successful when you highlight why dei initiatives and why diversity is good as opposed to finger wagging and negative negative negative um i think so i love the idea of a video and i think this is really close i just think that a real ominous dark kind of you know these quotes beyond the first couple i think it's just it just very much feels like we're again telling people you're the problem you got to change and there are some people who need to can everybody can learn more 100 agree but i've just seen ddi stuff fail too often when people you start lecturing people they don't open up you don't change hearts and minds they're lecturing people and i think you want to highlight the positives of why dei is important um i think if

195frankie's video had never happened or if you know i just think that there's nobody out there who doesn't who's gonna see this video that probably hasn't heard granny's story and so are we just saying more of the same or are we giving people a new message of this happened this committee's been working their butts off to address it made up of teachers and board members and community members and students and this is this is a short glimpse of how we go forward you know why it's good so i'm sure it may be in the quotes when students were talking about this stuff um their experience is maybe this quote they're going to address kind of why this why this is good i've had conversations with folks in the community about why they believe this stuff

196you guys are doing the committee is so important and i just think more sugar as opposed to vinegar so what it so here's a suggestion i'm gonna throw out just taking into consideration what you just said i think what you guys were trying to accomplish here and a possible just a possible suggestion um you could you could focus the slides you could focus big and go little so you're starting with the school then you would do the auditorium then you could do the the hallway the classroom the desk or in the locker room system or somewhere but go big to little and say their experiences and then when you reverse it which is like what it looks like you're doing on the other side is reversing it when you come back out maybe offer some

197positive solutions of what the dei committee wants to do to fix the issue you know so you start with their experiences but when you come back out you're saying you know this is what we need to do this is how we make this good and then end with the um your end card that you have here you know and you could even start it with um your first slide on the way out could actually start with the one that says how do we make everyone feel inclusive every day and then the next points out would be what are your dei initiatives that are going to accomplish that so you you real people in to let them know the experiences and then you say this is what we need to do to fix it and hopefully

198they can grab onto one of those things of how we fix it and get involved problems and solutions not just problems i just want to say i admire and appreciate the courage that it takes to do this stuff because this is hard stuff so i and and the feedback is you know just been in situations where my stuff gets holes blown in it is it's not easy so i i commend you and i i ask you stay tenacious and determined and and and passionate because this is important stuff oh yeah no it's very very grateful it's messaging and messaging is very hard well and then you're you're asking for feedback and and everything just just make sure that you don't get dissuaded by anything because this is this is awesome this is really good stuff

199it takes a lot of courage uh and i you know even as a school to be able to to talk about this stuff i know you guys are cut that fast because the first time i mean my best friend growing up was like no i'll tell you i'll tell them to you know but no i think that i saw i i i seconded that with zach saying yeah this is not meant to be critical at all it's just i think this is great it's just i want ultimately this is going to come from you as i mean the school board yes but really it'll fall in the dei committee when you put this we put this out and so i wouldn't hate to see your message get lost because of a little few tweaks that

200i think alex aurora said a lot of in and out and then putting those solutions forward i think is the way to do it so all the stuff you talked about because this is really going to become this is really going to become the face of ude i don't think no it's the face of the board it's kind of is a board committee i know but people are going to say this is what you guys have been doing okay and this is the direction that you're taking and then in turn obviously we're taking that same direction but this is what's gone into it and and you guys and and i i do think you guys have put a lot of hard work into it and and i applaud you for putting it together and it

201may simply be the context of you being so close to it that you may not have you may not have seen those because you guys know the background behind these quotes um i was not at any of those sessions and i i'm reading this blindly yeah and also one and we haven't we haven't done the dei update but like there's a whole bunch of subcommittees who are working on different components of solutions and i think foregrounding that stuff makes a lot of sense especially because we have a really robust policy now that was passed again and you're right it's that's nowhere in there right so it gives people like what do they hold on to it's not that it's not there to kind of hold on to you going forward to say like oh yeah

202i think one of the things that that is a is just a cultural issue is you have a lot of people and chris you i mean you guys have done a lot of work around teacher professional development some of that stuff but there's still a large chunk of people who are like ambivalent about it or just kind of like well i don't i don't i don't do that right and then there's people who are there's a very small minority that's just already possible to it and i think that's a different kind of response so i think what we're trying to do is invite more people into the work because there's a lot of work to be done and like we're only scratching the surface on the committee and i think that's so it's very much

203like what we need to do is communicate an invitation into the work that's already going which is what i think i hear you say yes and i would put that i would i would put you could put that statement because you're ending on a question someone's thinking how do we make everyone feel inclusive every day yeah we'll give them some weights give them some ways to do that and i would make those statements action statements not just we're on this committee but hey here's what you can do and make them an action verb to pull people in you know in you know invite uh respect um you know those action words in those statements um thank you so much for for all the feedback this is really helpful and i think our vision is super

204helpful was to to just use the quotes from the listening sessions but i think you're right that that rather than just leaning on what they viewed as possible solutions we should instead bring in the initiatives that the dui committee has taken um i think that's that's a much stronger message to get across um so we'll make some tweaks and then it shows movement yeah which is happening it's actually more accurate that's true it's it's actually more active i've taken some notes as everybody's been talking but i know right where you are chris it's your baby and everybody's ripped it apart but i i think that they really made made some good suggestions and i uh things i'd never thought about because i've seen this pass over my desk too and i love what aurora i

205never paid attention to what the camera was doing and i really love the idea of starting big and coming small and then starting small and going big with your and i was just thinking about how if we if we went to uh lots of uh students make like we might have to change this around a little bit so we start big and end up small with your quotes but if the question if it then was to something um like how do we make everyone feel inclusive or this isn't who we want to be or we're making changes or you know we're something then you could actually start at a desk and the first goal of dei is respecting differences you know so kind of an individual differences and then move to the classroom we talk

206about being windows you know offering opportunities for students and to see others we could do a window in the classroom we could then move to the locker room which is larger which would be a mirror do students see themselves reflected in what we offer and then to the auditorium about having are we having critical conversations learning to have critical conversations i just think those sort of hit on what dei is talking about and that was off the top of my head i'm sure that it's much more but that's what i got out of the conversation was to walk away from give a reason for doing it and then walk away with what is our action plan and and bring that in and i think that was that was good work on the committee and built

207off the work that you've all been doing and i think you said like with that that just made me think of it when you just said that last thing of are we having those critical conversations so if you wanted to spin that to action you say have those critical conversations and um you could actually pose that question you know if you want to use the one how do we make everyone feel inclusive every day or how do we you know how do we affect change that sort of thing you could have in between the you get down to the little and then you have a slide that poses the question and then your answers come out so the the slide that poses the question doesn't have the school as a background but then all the

208answers coming out does um but that would be that's katie chilton to talk about so it was from really the conversation and that's and that's why i was saying that's why in the beginning i said i'm torn because i know you guys have put in a lot of work into this and i know your hearts are in this and um you know i know to us it's only this long but i know you guys have probably put hours and hours into this and you're much closer to the situations that they're talking about um you know and and the quotes then than i am no i mean this is this is exactly why we we did it this way so that the board could because you know when you get your noses in it you lose

209track of what that meant you know what people are gonna hear so so that's one reason to come to the floor but also like i said before this is the dei committee is a board committee so it's very much the message that we we as the whole board want to set for the whole for the whole district so i think it's really helpful i hope it's recorded so there's this is not a really good idea i know if you're like and and to me is listening so um you know because that's a great and doing media met is really i like that is not my place in the world and uh it's there's a fine art to getting across great you know of it really working and then you can really mess up very easily

210so well i think if you um this has been a school project but hopefully when you put this out here when you put this out there hopefully it's on some sort of social media platform that we can all share it and so the people that are most of the people that will be reading it will be blind readers yeah they don't necessarily know of the situations they're not close to what happened and you may you may have people in saranac lake who do know what happened but i guarantee this is not going to just stay in saranac lake and so what message do you want to put out there to the people who are blind to the situation here and how are they reading the text because you want it to go bigger than just

211from these walls which is actually i'm i'm glad that this was in your i don't know if you've had a chance to read this it's directly related to this right which is like did you all get a chance to read this i did not so it's about a woman who who like did an analysis she's a i think a black woman is that right and and um looked where in the adirondacks did she feel safe living and did an analysis of all of the kind of like various hate crimes and things like that and saranac lake was she was the safest community in her analysis for diverse people so she moved here a lot well she hasn't moved here yet no but she or she is moving i mean tiny baby steps she said i

212could live around saranac lake which had more positive than negative events or east of saint riches falls which had no events in any category so like it's not i don't think we need to pat ourselves on the back too much but i i mean i asked fred to put this in here because i thought it it shows that the the the work that that you know we as the board are doing and it's noticed very quickly and people pay attention and they and it and it um you know it can make a difference to who who does feel safe to move here or comfortable and and so that which has larger implications for the vitality of the community right towns in the adirondacks are dying so is that something your community cares about bringing diverse

213youth peoples here i think i think what what the school district does or don't do in that space is really important so what for the um for this effort what what should we do next uh i think we'll go back and revise and then we'll see mrs fox's notes and we'll hopefully resubmit for the next meeting okay and that should be fine with the timeline good that's helpful thank you so much for the feedback thanks chris quickly is that something we could i mean you you do you need a resolution for it or can we prove it before the next meeting for them we've had this conversation and that this is really because it's a it is an important topic that the board needs to support that this is what we're putting together so um

214are there pieces you can start on yeah right yeah the question here isn't whether or not we would approve the video that's what i'm hearing right the board says they would approve the video so kurt wants to come in and do his filming and get it going but i think the board should approve the actual text yes right and if if kirk can do some of the filming which is what he has to do you know now while he's around and we can get empty school and everything that's one thing putting the words onto the video that can change the time really yeah and i think that's a that's a great solution if we could get the permission to go ahead with a video now and then finalize the script hopefully at the next meeting

215um or at least bring you a revised version all the text is post-production stuff yeah exactly it's not like someone's going to be holding up on board with all that so what if we change the resolution to approving the creation of a film for dei use want to put in there with final script to be approved pending approval of well because we don't we want you to move forward so we just need to give you something to move forward with we're not just filming so permission to film permission to film school facilities so approval we give conceptual so what about approving the filming of school facilities for use for de i use because that's what you guys are going to be doing right we need a motion to change the resolution uh i don't believe

216so because we've we've already do we have a motion to change the language i don't think because we haven't voted on it it's not anything that's in place so we're not changing a resolution we're changing what we're voting on we're changing what we're proposing as the resolution well your uh board clerk has done a terrible job i don't even have who made the motion or seconded this [Laughter] so what you want to do is make an amended resolution yes well we're going to amend the resolution language but yeah but it was never a resolution to start so i guess let's make it official so i make a motion to amend the language to resolution number 109 to read approving the filming of school district facilities for dei use can i have a second exactly okay

217so much seconds so then we'll have a vote on that so can i get a vote on resolution number 109 approving the filming of school district facilities for dei use all in favor all right i any opposed and this is a great idea and it has the potential to reach so many people yeah um especially since it's quick and shareable i'll get my notes too first um [Music] thanks chris thank you so much great job chris okay thank you as well so reports um diane has been doing a lot of writing i have only two quick things um legislative breakfast is tomorrow oh you have to make your own breakfast and uh zoom in but i didn't want you to forget about that in case you're interested in joining that and rick ritrocy is as

218you know our oaties uh representative and he did submit a uh update i usually read it but it's long and it's late so it isn't even lots of things happening at fph so take a look perfect um so for committees mark nothing at this time uh i have a quick one from melissa butler who just said that the professional development planning committee is up and running excellent representation across stakeholders they're working with state regulations it sounds we've been talking about some of the curriculum stuff on the ibi committee it sounds like they're going full speed ahead perfect i don't have an update the only thing i've talked to cindy about is the boces thing and so we approved that tonight um so we'll go on to justin trish brought up the hat stuff he says

219that and then she just wanted to help me share that the modified sports teams are in full swing the girls mod basketball got their first big one of the season they were happy about that modified boys did really well this year i had a good team culture and some of the modified hockey players are up on the varsity squad so that's awesome the modified basketball game the other night where they made that shot at the end am i correct the girls had their first win that's what chris said yeah okay thank you for listening the called a band with the restrictions because i got to go to the girls varsity tupper sl game on saturday that was awesome no i'm not good okay nothing at this time perfect okay well just that the the next

220dei committee meeting is on february 17th and we've as joe mentioned we've we've uh really established five different working groups uh there's one on curriculum review uh professional development data collection policy review and social infrastructure and each one of these working groups will you know work within the channels that the you know that we've already got happening in the district mean we already have uh director of curriculum review or curriculum and so the curriculum review committee the ei committee will work you know with the established um you know channels that already exist same with professional development policy review data collection we're discussing you know how we can collect data to reflect you know how the district is doing as far as um some of our dea efforts and so forth so there's a lot it's

221just getting going in that um and i think it's gonna be really positive uh there is a dei conference that is that fbh boces is putting on and what is it like february 10th or so i actually don't know it's an all-day thing and it sounds like we have several people from the committee who are stacked the staff members are already attending and um i think i might try to attend i think it's really great it's free and probably any i don't know if it's open to all board i'm not really sure um but it i think it'll be really good it's not free but we got you oh it's not free is it in person or is it online okay well it's not free but i didn't see the price so i just nothing

222for both there's a there's a lot of contracting i guess like one thing to know is just there's a lot going on in that space right now yeah at various locally all the all the education falseness is leading hard into it so there's i think the institutions are leaning into it and what's starting to happen now is you're starting to get like regional efforts that are forming so people are keep coming to us as the leader in this area which i think is we're seen as a leader in that so that's awful that's great i would just say that the adirondack foundation did award the grant to um the district for it's 1 500 and it will uh go towards uh the film creating of the film and and you know i don't know how

223much of that it will use it but that's that was kind of what it was apply uh um apply for and then i you know already mentioned about the article 43 and that was in the adorama explorer and then i would just the the presentations earlier or the comments earlier about the new york state health act is that something that we want to address as a board at the during the next meeting or how you know what what we can do as a district i mean you know obviously it's not something we can sign on to i mean we could we can't it's not it doesn't exist it's not uh it's not an option yet for us to just say oh well let's switch to the single player healthcare but do we want to take

224a role in um advocating in some way yeah i guess one of the questions i had during that was like what is the purview of the board for things like that i think they're just asking for our endorsement to sign a letter and i think if we're gonna as a if we as a board let's say we support this we gotta have it on our agenda so we can discuss it next time and go you know and if we're going to do that we should all read up on it more i mean we can add it to the agenda as a discussion item i would caution the way that they're going about it it sounds like they want an endorsement soon and i would feel very uncomfortable endorsing it without talking to our unions and

225with our staff members and being able to see i mean they have a little snippet that says what's covered but it's not that simple right yeah so it would be nice if there was information on on the actual idea of utilization because with a lot of those things there's a reduction of uh even though they say you're getting your choice back there is a reduction in choice and what you have control over being covered well so all right now but you shouldn't be this this has come up before we shouldn't be discussing it now with all our thoughts like that should be safe for next although you won't be here next no but we're having a just we're having a discussion based on your update but i would just say if they want and if

226the idea it sounded like the ask was to give them an endorsement quickly that we would support this and do this and i would say um we can talk about that but i don't believe we should be the only ones talking about that before it is made i think i think it was trevor one of you mentioned we'd appreciate it if we could like you know if you guys would discuss this next time so they did say something like that so yeah i think i think it's fine to put the agenda and we can then discuss it because it's not as yeah it's not as simple as they may have said but they're only sure about time but i think putting on discussing it is fine but yeah i think that's what yeah i agree

227so sue called and said oh i want to be on the internet and i had to tell her it doesn't work like that because we're already here [Music] that it would she should come to um public comment time and then the agenda is driven by the board anybody can suggest an item but the item actually comes through the board members to be put on the agenda so there has to be interest at the board level to put it on the agenda so that was her hope was to be on the agenda so that's why she came with a powerpoint and i said oh you get three minutes so that's how they they did a good job with their three minutes each i was like that was very clever but she would yeah she was she

228was hoping to come with more of a presentation i feel lost in the details here i actually feel overwhelmed and i think something that's a statewide initiative like this at some point we're going to see some release from uh nisba from some of these groups that'll be able to take a much broader uh chunk of this than i think we're able to do i'm in favor of uh of not rushing into this i mean before we i would support anything i would want cindy to do the analysis on these numbers to see if these in fact are accurate i would like to see what the state school boards are saying about this what the uh nice union's saying about it before i would even entertain any kind of uh endorsement either way yeah [Music] we

229um have her come and do i mean does everybody want her to do a powerpoint i don't think we need her to do a presentation like again if they could put an hour presentation together that's one group who is very clear they really want this to happen so that's very biased and they might we might i just don't think that that doesn't sound good because unless we're going by somebody else who doesn't want it to hear two sides if we're just inviting a group to tell us why that should happen no it's on the agenda so people are aware we're discussing it right but i mean i wouldn't invite her for a presentation she can sit here while we discuss it and we can all do our own homework and see what we learn and

230maybe continue a conversation for weeks she could submit it as just ice cream i spoke to her about that that if she would send me anything she wanted you to have that i would make sure that you had it she did share some things today yeah yeah um i i would it would be nice to know what nisbet has i mean they know about these things they they're supposed to be lobbying on our behalf and so you know they must they must have some opinions it sounds like it's very vague at this point this has been in the works for years every year it comes out but the details aren't there it's not as cut and dry as they make it sound because our staff negotiates a package and we have very good insurance so

231it's not as easy as everybody just saying oh i'm going to pay it uh she didn't call it a tax cameron what she called it oh i'm happy to pay this tax instead of what i'm paying as my premium share in the district and the language is really clear in the contract it has been for many generations that you cannot switch programs that decrease your benefit well that would be without choice that would be a court fight if this becomes correct so this is just not like oh we can just roll this out and it's going to roll up beautifully and what our staff will say i'll speak to the union president is that my package is worth this amount so if you're going to take my health insurance from over here i can't wait

232to see how my package will stay whole over here so i don't i don't think it's as easy as it's not easy to get out of the consortium either that's correct so we're also at a healthcare consortium that has how much money in reserve right yes so if this became long so i think this is this is the problem probably a conversation that she needs here yeah i wouldn't that's when i that's why i didn't want us to have that issue yeah oh that's only i think that would be good to continue the conversation knowing that we put we have it on the agenda we have direction everybody can do homework sure and then we can have this discussion and those are points that need to be brought up you know because we can't just

233the compensation package will have to stay whole which means we would make it up nobody could say oh i couldn't be happier to take a lesser health insurance well without the detail of what's actually in the package you can't do that comparison i'll also ask around this has been on the docket for years this has been floating around i'm not sure why they feel this year but and nothing i haven't heard anything the assumption that you're saying this money is not accurate because it's part of the total compensation correct so oh as opposed if she wants to share anything and everything she wants i think that's great if she wants to share it with us ahead of time and i think so and to just talk about the broader principle right the community is free

234to share things with us all the time right and then we are free to talk about them in a way that educates the community about the parameters the operating context of the school district which is complicated and governed by laws and all sorts of things so i think that's that's actually like it's real healthy there's a lot of like healthy democracy in this meeting tonight well in this show including the three and a half hours yeah and it shows the process because like we have the person with veterans yeah you talk about it because the person comes with this if she composes it on the agenda and that was something we actually had purview over the veterans class so it's just a little different if it's important for them then this is how you get

235it forward okay so i don't think we need executive sessions [Music] [Laughter] um you are aware that there was um some question about uh handling of a situation yes yes and i have redacted all the pertinent information that you can have but i have put in your drive some information i was able to redact names and other things that but it still makes sense sometimes we have to talk about it but it will make perfect sense to you as you read it that's in there now it's in there now just for your information i don't know perhaps they just couldn't come tonight okay so everybody's favorite part we would like i'll make a motion i know clyde's gonna take it back for me we would like this back just all in favor of the journey

236hi ready to pose hey you are all released i think zach is on it for us thank you you're welcome okay i will do the best