001sense and in some cases it's students it's parents it's people that have a different lens and what i would have as an assistant superintendent we add that language in when we can do that we then share the code with our instructional leadership team we get feedback from them we also then share it with our what's called a policy committee which is composed of our administration but also of our board of ed trustees and then tonight is a our public hearing of the board which was a public hearing of the code which is what i'm doing right now and then also it's kind of the approval of the first reading by the full board of ed trustees so that's all that's hap that's all it's happening tonight so this is the code that was on the
002website and it's board of ed policy 5300 and again too much for me to go through the whole thing what i wanted to show was just as you looked at this and hopefully you've had a chance to look at this you'll see there's different some of the changes that were made some of the changes are made in blue that's from the new york state school board association which kind of is the framework of a lot of our policies they have their own entire code of conduct um through the years we've been adding their language into it again recommended by our legal counsel the tax that's in red were changes that were recommended by our committee members and all the changes again all this was vetted through legal counsel and was approved by our legal counsel
003so you'll see that again i won't go over the whole thing we don't have time but there were some changes and some updates in our definitions i'm just scrolling relatively quickly there's a component in here talks about the dignity for all students act disciplinary consequences procedures and referrals you'll see a piece in here about pbis which is one of our social emotional kind of behavior components that we've been implementing at our elementary schools in our middle school and it kind of just as an overview of it hold on just let me um this gets into and talks about appropriate remedial measures which may include but are not limited to so this gets into the restitution and restorative practices you'll notice that's something new the last few years we've been looking at some of our practices
004and trying to put more of the restorative practices in the code so you'll see quite a bit of that language in there i think i got about two minutes left so one more time any other questions on the code of conduct all right with that i'm going to want to thank amy for her help with pbis but we're going to close our public hearing then on the code of conduct thank you very much everyone thank you everyone um can i get a roll call president amica here vice president brugerman trustee borman here trustee ellis here trustee elethorpe trustee culligan trustee crackler here trustee latakia here trustee whitetowicz here student representative anthis and student representative mandira here thank you please join me by standing for the pledge thank you can i get a motion to accept
005this evening's agenda natalia and connie is there any discussion all in favor all right that's unanimous thank you dr patton good evening and welcome everyone uh we just completed our annual tenure reception uh so i'm very proud to announce uh that we have 35 members of our district team between teaching assistants faculty association members as well as several district and building level administrators who are on the agenda tonight to receive their tenure which is a very significant milestone in professional educators careers so as i said in the library during the reception uh first of all congratulations to all those individuals who will be recognized by the board of education tonight again i want to thank all of our our mentors who've done an incredible job uh supporting our new teachers and administrators have as they
006were welcomed into the district i want to thank the board of education again for their support of our tenure review process which is very it's a very comprehensive process and a lot of feedback from all the building administrators who spent a lot of time uh through teacher observation and evaluation and we just have a dedicated uh crew tonight of 35 professionals who've worked very hard to earn the honor of receiving tenure this evening so congratulations to all those folks to all the family members who are joining us tonight in their honor so how about a round of applause for all of our tenure recipients and also on the agenda tonight you're going to see several pages that are district interview committees and i want to thank all of our teachers support staff members and building
007administrators uh again you'll see on the the tail end when we recruit folks to bring them into the district and they go through our mentoring program uh the end result obviously is the is the 10-year appointments uh but the beginning of the process is obviously uh bringing in the best and the brightest that we can here to saratoga springs to work with our children in the district so there are many individuals that are on the agenda tonight that are going to be recommended for their probationary appointments that will be joining us officially in the school district come september so we are very much looking forward to welcoming uh all these individuals some of them are welcoming back to the district uh who had previously worked uh for the district um and also many of individuals
008that are joining us for the first time and we're looking forward to our new teacher orientation uh that takes place the third week of august so i believe at least two of the individuals and please raise your hand if i may have missed you but alexis lucci is with us here tonight there's alexis give a wave alexis uh has done an incredible job helping us at our middle school serving a leave position and she will be our first ever full-time computer science teacher at the high school so we are building a computer science pathway uh as a new pathway uh for graduation and alexis comes to us from siena college uh highly recommended she's a physics teacher by trade but also has a tremendous amount of knowledge and background experience in computer science uh so
009we are very excited to uh welcome lexi to the school district so congratulations lexi and i also want to welcome mary ellen anis and as i mentioned sometimes we are welcoming back a few of our our teachers and so mary ellen uh is returning to the district uh she'll be teaching at greenfield elementary school uh and uh mary ellen uh had talked taught at both lake avenue and greenfield before taking a leave of absence to raise her beautiful children and so we are very excited to welcome mary ellen back to a teaching position at greenfield uh and again she'll be returning and starting with us uh back up in september so welcome back mary ellen any other any other new appointments i'm going to hold off when mrs whitley i know mrs whitley is here
010but i'm going to save her for i'm going to save her for later because i know she's sticking around so anybody else that's here with us that's a newly appointed colleague okay as i mentioned earlier to all of our tenure recipients um you are on the agenda you are more than welcome to stay but i know many of you have very busy schedules and you have families with you tonight uh to celebrate hopefully to go out and get something to eat so any of our tenure recipients or new folks that are here to be recognized um again the board later on in the business agenda will be approving uh your tenure recognition as well as your appointments uh so again you're more than welcome to stay but this would be the appropriate time that you
011can take off before we get into the uh the business end of the agenda so congratulations again and thanks for being here with us tonight all right so exciting to recognize our excellent faculty and staff on this brings us to our first public comment period on behalf the board i extend our thanks to all in attendance tonight we appreciate you taking the time to be with us and value your time and are grateful you are here to enable an efficient environment for the board to accomplish the district's business the first public comment period is limited to 30 minutes total and the second comment period is um open has no time limit ground rules for public comments include speakers and audience members conducting themselves in a respectful manner please join us as role models for our
012students on civil discourse and constructive dialogue and in return we commit to actively listen and consider what you have to say with open minds we do not allow comments about specific individual employees students or trustees and ask that you be succinct and try not to repeat previous speakers in order to allow more people the opportunity to address the board we now open the first public comment period each speaker gets three minutes and before you address the board please clearly state your name and address first up is deidra chuck row this is a little tall for me can you every all right listen i can't help it it's genetic um so i'm here for a very my name is deidra chuckrow i'm a resident of saratoga springs and my son is a senior my youngest as
013a senior both of my children attended kindergarten through 12th grade both wonderful human beings and part of that credit goes to saratoga spring school district so i had the pleasure monday night of attending the saratoga springs sports awards banquet my son was recognized with an award for his wrestling career and while i was sitting through the awards ceremony i realized that there are a group of students that attend all of saratoga spring schools but a lot at the high school who never get recognized for their athletic accomplishments and those are the students who compete for the saratoga rowing association 50 of those kids participated and as scholastic athletes meaning they rode on behalf of the high school and won spots at the national championship a couple of weeks ago these kids are phenomenal they work
014so hard they practice 10 to 12 months out of the year they practice six days a week for a minimum of two and a half hours they are great citizens they are great students they are wonderful athletes but because they row for a club there's never an acknowledgement of them at the school level they're not eligible for the double varsity awards my son who would have been considered a double varsity athlete was a wrestler and a rower i'm not asking that you consider them for that but i would wish that they would be acknowledged we had a second place silver medal finish in the national championships for our girls eight which is outstanding we had a third place finish for our boys freshman quad which was outstanding and almost all of the boats that made
015it to nationals that meant they had to come in in the top three at the state championship made it beyond their first time trials which at a national level rowing level is amazing and i just want them to get a little bit of kudos for all of the incredible work they do as both athletes and students thank you thank you next up is mark crockett see if this fits me we have not started your three minutes oh good evening first of all congratulations to the board members who won their election um hey congratulations i have a foil request which is in and it's three and a half months old and just uh i did tickle that today and send them email requests and just a reminder i'd like to talk about security you know with
016the evolity events that just happened i think that's kind of been brought back up in most people's minds again you know i understand about three years ago we that was very much on our minds and we had some discussion about that i understand also i don't know for a fact but i understand that we had an independent security review maybe two three four years ago something like that maybe around that time i'd like to make some recommendations here today for the board to consider along with the administration and uh and maybe maybe some community members so i have a couple of comments a couple of recommendations and then maybe some final thought quickly there's an app a safe school hotline app and i'm aware of that it's for reporting for students or anybody and i'm
017wondering if we promote that or are are promoting its use i would like to propose that the board worked together with the administration to launch a i hate to use the word committee an independent and thorough review of school security at all campuses so i'm asking the board to see if they could work together and do that the group should include i believe staff admin police parents and board members things to examine just as a start these are just from the top of my mind i believe there should be sros full time at every campus i know we went through this three years ago i think we need to revisit that fencing and outer security barriers including door security for admittance and exit security cameras and connectivity to who and where what kind of situation
018we have there procedures for admittance to the school recently i went on a tour with uh dr patton invited me in and i said i liked what i saw it was pretty cool but we i think we should review that at all the uh all the schools what are the procedures for admittance to the school procedures for intrusion so what do we do when there is an intrusion including notification of the police teachers parents etc police and fire access to the buildings in classrooms what's that like are the police and the fire able to get in i understand there's some lock boxes with some keys are we sure that we have that on every campus our school blueprints immediately available to responders adequacy of the current security monitors sros to protect the students and the
019staff training of staff students students sros and police in how to respond in an emergency including a shooter are all staff all staff sensitized to being aware of telltale signs of potential or pending misbehavior does the staff have a unified view on how to proceed and how to report things that don't seem right do they feel free to report things or is there pressure to be quiet so i propose the board come together and maybe put together a group of people to re-examine this in the light of what happened i think it's very easy to forget about this sort of thing and to think that it will never happen here i'm sure the people in uvalde thought it would never happen there i think i suggest that we think it's going to happen here i'm
020sorry that's time one more thing please i believe that we should think it's going to happen here and if it was going to happen the next 90 days what could we get done time thank you thank you carmela freeze wow he's tall carmela freya's 21 oak street when i was 15 years old i smoked meth for the first time it was in a dance studio my classmate had the keys to it was the best feeling i ever had i stayed addicted to meth for many years after that the high school i went to tried their best to turn a blind eye to the train wreck that i was occasionally i would get in trouble for unrelated things allowing them a quick access to search my belongings and my locker but i was too smart for
021that eventually my actions led me to juvie and expelled me from the school i was at i was so young in and out of jail my mom believed that i could get better but she never left it up to chance i was sent to an alternative school this school held a high regard for accountability getting credits for graduation was on a personalized scale i looked at it as a competition and excelled there academically even though i was getting closer to graduation i was still in and out of juvie my time was consumed with getting high and figuring out how to pass drug tests and hide my addiction now that you know that i am not a pearl clutching out of touch mother i want you to know how deeply it saddens me knowing that there
022are kids in our schools struggling the way that i struggled we cannot ignore them looking back i was angry i was angry at the school who never stopped believing i could excel angry at my mom for calling the police on me time and time again angry at the police for arresting me and driving me to juvie more times than i can count and angry that i was angry what i didn't realize that each one of these people saved my life no they weren't my friends they weren't trying to be that's not what a child like me needed kids need structure they need discipline and they need accountability as a child i needed those consequences they kept me from being dead somewhere just the other day i heard from a father of a senior who describes
023hard illegal drug use in the locker room i don't think that she was lying and i don't think he was either he explained that his daughter had has witnessed kids using in the locker rooms and in the bathrooms and i thought to myself these kids needs need help i feel like i've been hearing a lot a general consensus that this catch and release program instead of accountability and consequence is having an extreme negative effect on school culture if it wasn't for me hitting my rock bottom when i was 15 16 17 and 18 i don't think i would be standing here to talk to you today so i want you to consider when you're talking to these kids instead of hey let's put you in a program and talk to people sometimes having police intervene
024and having these kids go to jail is the best thing that can happen to them thank you and next up is charlie samuels hi my name is charlie samuels i live in saratoga springs and uh i'm a father of of a nine-year-old in the school district and uh first of all i just want to thank everybody who won that's wonderful uh won the election and uh i look forward to getting to know every one of you i do want to address the guns in schools and shootings and stuff my son is nine years old as i mentioned and just as a coincidence last night he mentioned something to me that i really didn't want to talk about my wife and i had put off asking him about texas and buffalo and um we probably shouldn't
025have but uh anyway he was about to go to bed and that's when we have really good talks and he said daddy i got to ask you something he said how can somebody who feels really bad or their family died or they have no friends anymore they're lonely how can they just go out and get a gun and go do something with it right away and you know that's a tough question to ask to answer and uh i did my best but i really was concentrating on saying on him on trying to get him to think about something else because it was bedtime and i didn't want him to have bad dreams um it's a tough thing to do obviously um but that's his point and it's very uh on you know raw and honest
026my point is he's probably right and that problem is a national problem it's not really a local problem okay and uh i hope that people respect that because it's about our country not our schools thank you [Applause] and that closes our first public comment period i'm sorry i i collected it at the beginning we'll go grab it that's okay is anyone else on there nope just early you're up darling okay uh my name is dory stanley and i am a longtime resident of this school district in fact i had four graduates out of this school district i want i live at one and a half meadow lane saratoga springs while i applaud and commend the accomplishments of your tenured staff it was just really nice to hear that it saddened me that there were no
027diversity among those who had received tenure and i want to acknowledge it and i noticed it and but i do want to say that i know we can do better and we have um i want to read a letter uh my daughter uh ebony stanley she's dr ebony stanley jolly now but she was a senior here and before she left she presented before the board of education and i found a letter that came from um dr john mcfadden to her and this was dated march 2nd 1993 and it said dear ebony i i am in response to your communication directed to mrs rollinson member of the saratoga springs school district board of education she has asked that i review your letter materials and provide a response to your requests and interests first let me thank
028you for preparing and presenting your short and long-term visions during our board of education community forum um on january 21st 1993 we were very pleased with the quality and quantity of the materials uh that you presented so with that being said uh and they also asked that she share how they could uh increase their cultural arts district etc so what she presented was she said she had graduated with no diversity at all in seeing administrators teachers or um any you know body that or any history in her curriculum now that was in 1993 she graduated in 1994. so i am proud to hear that this district is going to be presenting uh diversity equity inclusion um you know program and they're going to present it to us i'm sorry and that to me is an
029accomplishment and i want to thank them thank you for doing that thank you so much [Applause] now that ends our public comment period and you're not the first person i did have done that to i did it to mr crockett as well okay um let's see uh that brings us to our board reports does anybody have a committee report all right tonight on the agenda we have two policies for first reading so the first is the code of contact we just had a public hearing on that um so please review that and contact me if you have anything we also have a policy on acceptable use this has to do with um technology use and making sure especially as we expand our one-to-one program that there is an acceptable use and standards in place for
030the use of technology within our schools thanks does anybody have any questions on those two for natalia actually i will ask my question which is that i did have a board member send me some um corrections that are just typos within the policy and i want to make sure that i can send those just to dave is that correct mike yep and i believe dave at the end of the public comment hearing uh did where's dave i think maybe he had to run out to the i program okay i think dave mentioned during the community hearing if anybody has any questions or feedback to direct them toward to him and then we can make any modifications the policy before it's presented for first read and these are just typos it's not a change in the
031substance yep that feedback would be great i just i had a question i just want to clarify uh so if we have any additions or or suggestions we're emailing natalia and then we're talking about the next policy meeting are we gonna discuss it again or this is our first for are you talking about the student code of conduct correct student code of conduct yeah um we can but the policy committee brought it here for first read so the whole board has whoops can give us feedback at this point so i guess that's what i want to i'm asking we're giving feedback here at the table or we're emailing natalia because i think she just said contact her okay yes thank you thanks all right thanks natalie uh this is for the i will call it
032the evaluation committee because it's not about the superintendent evaluation today it's about um the board self-evaluation uh tomorrow we will all get um from the same boe saratoga email address you'll all get the self-evaluation form for our body and it looks much the same as in structure as the one we just did for uh dr patton again template provided by nisba place for numeric responses and comments um if you could have those back by monday june 20th at 5 00 p.m that would be great we'll discuss those this summer we're not going to we're not going to get a discussion in before the end of the before the end of june but uh as we start our new year we'll we'll discuss the results of those as part of a summer workshop thanks are there
033any questions about that i just want to comment that this is a unique um opportunity we have as a board because it's the first time in a very very long time that we have the full board returning um and so this could be a really good opportunity for us to not only give our feedback which is anonymous and for us to then workshop and talk about how to come together and have a really productive year next year because we will all be continuing on and can grow together so i look forward to working on that process with next year's board leadership any other board reports okay almost the last one student reports okay so at lake ave wednesday was field day at gavin park where the students had tug of war and other fun events
034and mr zanetti is still tallying points for the students at dorothy nolan student council raised 17 no 1776 dollars for ukraine kindergarten screening was last week kona ice will be at the last pbis celebration on friday um the american reading company reps will visit k through 2 and that happened today and tomorrow and flag day will be june 14 celebration which is next tuesday and then lastly at division street field day is coming up field trips concerts and cultural arts celebrations will be occurring for end-of-year activities yeah switching over to the uh maple lav maplefest was a huge success uh the students had a lot of fun and i had a very busy day of bouncy houses field games carnival games and kona ice and just much more like a dunk tank and staff getting
035their face painted just living life and having fun enjoying school over at the high school there was the science symposium uh in late may featuring the excellent work and projects of students from the science research project uh junior prom was very fun and successful uh congrats to the advisors and students of the jv and varsity academics team who competed in chicago uh congrats to our baseball and softball teams who were both crowned section two champs academic awards and athletes uh and athletic awards were held last week and this week congrats to all the recipients and uh this week was senior week uh leading up to the heavily anticipated senior gala tomorrow night and that will be very fun and that concludes the student report so i would like to take this opportunity both abigail and
036lucas are planning on being with us for their last meeting on the 21st but i know how seniors get the week of graduation so while we have them both here with us tonight um i think on behalf of the entire board we want to recognize both abigail and lucas for just incredible job that both of you have done as student representatives on our board of education this year i remember when we met the first week of school and i sat down to kind of explain what the role of the student representative is on the board and they've been elected by their peers to serve on the board of education i just wanted to kind of give them a little bit of a preview of you know what the role and the responsibility and the time
037commitment and the late nights and both abigail and lucas have just done an incredible job you know it's been a pleasure to work with both of them i think the board always appreciates hearing student voice and student perspective and i said to them you're going to be in for an incredible leadership and learning experience serving on a public school board of education and hearing having the opportunity to hear from our community the debate the discussion you know all of the the conversation that takes place uh related to budget and operations of the school district but ultimately you know what do we do in the best interest of all of our kids and uh we're in a unique position not many school districts have full-time serving members of the board of education having student representatives and
038so for us to have two seniors each year who really are dedicated to their service on the board of education is something that you should be very proud of you know having this uh to put on your resume as you head off to college uh and abigail and lucas are i truly are wonderful representatives of our entire student body uh very well-rounded you know are involved in everything that the high school and and again as a school district that we have to offer uh abigail will be heading off to dartmouth college in the fall and lucas will be going to the university of vermont and again we know they're going to be doing incredible things in their future and we hope that you stay in touch that you come back and you share your experiences
039and you provide us with feedback about how as a board leadership team we can continue to improve but again i want to use this opportunity to thank you both for the outstanding job that you've done this year serving on the board of education okay it's my turn to thank you as well as you know i always introduce you as the most fun part of the night um it's been such a pleasure having you sit at the table with us this year i could never do that at your age i swear so um having you here and just seeing um all the work that you did and the ex what a great experience so we appreciate you so much and the board of education contributed to um a small token of our appreciation to wish you
040well along your way so i'm going to bring those over to you try following that now dr pat all right i'm going to go just a little bit out of order i know lucas is working on firing up the the technology uh so my third comment tonight was on the congratulations of our administration faculty members so we again had the opportunity to do that earlier on in the meeting uh again to recognize all those folks who have earned the professional recognition of their ten year appointments tonight um lucas hit on a variety of the things that i was going to be talking about and so i'll just go through some of the highlights of the planning for the end of school year uh quickly but we've hosted several events uh to recognize not only our
041students uh but also uh i just want to thank the staff uh and also our families uh throughout the district uh who've been participating in a variety of activities um one of the things that we always look forward to every year is our kindergarten screening so that's our first opportunity to welcome our youngest students into the district so last thursday june 2nd i want to thank all of our elementary staffs we coordinate an effort to have kindergarten screening take place all in one day utilizing all six schools at the same time uh so thank you to all of our kindergarten teachers all our student support service staff our principals our nurses uh everybody who did just an incredible job welcoming our our newest students to the school district and we're really excited to see our
042kindergartners joining us in september lucas mentioned both the high school academic and high school athletic awards i want to congratulate all this year's recipients but also thank the community members family members our local colleges and university who provide the financial support uh for the scholarship opportunities and the awards uh that are are given to our students each year without that financial support and family support obviously many of those awards could not be possible and i know they're greatly appreciated by our students and again to have some financial assistance heading off to college pay for books all those things are greatly appreciated we touched on maple fist fest and the high school spring fest so michelle and scott i think scott's cra but both of them put a ton of time into coordinating both of those
043programs with the high school middle school staff great way to end the school year we had beautiful weather last friday for both of those events having a senior myself i know how excited the seniors are for our first ever senior gala we've never done a senior gala before it's always been a combined junior senior prom uh so we did our junior prom a few weeks ago on friday night at pres universal preservation hall uh we'll have an opportunity to celebrate our seniors so i know the senior advisors the senior class has been working really hard and they are very excited for the gala tomorrow night also a wonderful tradition in saratoga springs is our senior give back day so next wednesday june 15th when you take 500 students in the senior class and you disperse
044them out into the community uh it truly is incredible how much work can get done in just a for a few short hours so so we are looking forward to a good weather day on next wednesday and i know the students are very excited to go out and give back to the community that obviously has supported them throughout their academic careers we do have a few recognition events coming up at the end of school year tonight we was our 10-year recognition at our next board meeting on june 21st is our retiree recognition so this is for all staff members who have graduated uh who have graduated they have graduated but retired um retired since last june from the last time that we did our retire recognition so throughout the school year at every meeting we
045do have folks that again retire so we're gonna have a big retired recognition event on tuesday june 21st at 6 30. there are moving up ceremonies in all of our elementary schools as well as maple lab coming up in the next few weeks the graduation walk through where all of our seniors go back to their elementary schools and cap and gowns is going to take place on wednesday june 22nd and then everything culminates on friday morning june 24th for our celebration of the class of 2022 at a graduation ceremony uh which is just a again it's a community-wide event having smack open and available again to us is just awesome so we look forward to celebrating the class of 2022 at their graduation ceremony at nine o'clock on friday june 24th next i'd like to
046turn it over to maura manny maura deserves just an incredible amount of congratulations uh for her efforts one of the things the board of education in our conversation at the end of last year one of the goals the board had set uh was a full redesign of our district website uh and to take on a task like that maura has just done an incredible job uh facilitating uh the redesign of our district website we know that is the go-to for our community members as to where parents students community members get access to information so maura took on that task it's taken pretty much the entire year based on feedback from our teachers and our and our district administrators and surveys uh from the community about what we could do to redesign the website and we
047were very proud last week to launch the new district website um so again wanted to give more just a few minutes to show some highlights but most importantly thank her for her leadership in facilitating the redesign mora okay so knowing that our district website needed a refresh we partnered with capital region boces last spring to do an audit of our current website review our website analytics for statistics and site use and do a school community survey to get feedback about what people liked about our old website and what people really couldn't find or how they were using it so based on that information we created a website development plan with capital region boces that plan contained a true plan on how our website architecture would be laid out in the new website and how the
048navigation would change what we didn't want to do is just have a brand new refresh design and move all the old content right over into the new design this really gave us an opportunity to change the way our site was laid out and reorganize some of our content to make it easier to find and you know where it should logically you know be placed now we also reviewed best practices since the last website i think it was eight years ago just before i came a lot's changed in the website world and we wanted to include some of those new best practices so i'm not going to go through everything on the website but i did want to highlight that this website was designed with website accessibility in mind what that really means is it's easily
049used by anyone with a disability or a different a different need to access our website for example our site is website accessibility accessible so that it can be accessed by a screen reader it's more easily to use for someone who's visually impaired and takes into account many best practices for website accessibility this site was designed for us it's not a template website like some platforms it was really created for our school district i don't know if you want to scroll down a little bit lucas it's also mobile responsive that means that the website page changes based on the device you have first our old website only was sized to a website screen so if you were to open up on your phone a tablet a large computer it adjusts to the size and tweaks the
050content accordingly knowing that about 50 percent of our traffic is coming from mobile devices that was really important for this website for people to easily access it does anybody have any questions about the website great thanks again when we survey our parents and community members and ask them where they go to for their information again the district website is always one of the highest areas uh within our communication system so uh thank you again to maura for all the incredible work that she's done throughout the year uh having our website redesigned i do have one more update uh that i do wanna share with the board um regarding our l program um for the last several years we've been partnering uh with auburn uh which is the regional bilingual educational network um and stacy moulton
051uh our new director of pupil services uh helps uh oversee our nl program and works very closely with our building principals as well as our enl staff and historically in the district as we've started to welcome uh students who english is a second language to them where english is not the primary language spoken at home majority if not all of our elementary students in grades k through 5 currently attend division street elementary school and that's our primary enl site and a goal of ours over the last several years as we've seen growth in our enl population is to broaden and expand our e l program to other elementary schools within the district and you know on behalf of of stacy's leadership of working with our enl teachers we're very proud to announce that with this
052incoming kindergarten class we're going to be expanding our e l to three elementary schools next year so caroline street geyser road elementary school as well as division street uh we'll all be uh hosting our incoming kindergarten ell students next year so i i just want to pass off to stacey she can just probably just give a quick quick update um but again thank you to stacy uh for all the work that she did working with our staff and uh we're just really excited about uh the expansion of our enl program next year all right really not a ton more to say um really just it's about equity having our students be able to go to school in their home community play with their friends at school and after school so really it's exciting for our
053students and our families to really not only our enl students but the other students in the schools as well so just really excited about that opportunity so again thank you to stacey thank you to enl teachers so through the kindergarten screening process uh as families come in and um their children are eligible for enl services uh again now we're expanding uh the opportunity to um each of those kids to be able to attend the neighborhood elementary school closer to where their home is so again we are very excited about expanding that opportunity and again furthering our uh district equity efforts so that's that's it for my uh superintendent report uh so at this time i'm very excited um to welcome we have many members of our district diversity equity inclusion committee uh these individuals have
054been working extremely hard some of them for the past two years this is the second year that we've had a district diversity equity and inclusion committee we have over 40 stakeholders from all across the school district our students are represented our support staff our teachers building level ministers board of education members as well as community members uh have dedicated uh not only their time but their efforts this important work equity of opportunity has been a core belief of ours here in saratoga springs for many many years and is rooted within our pathways vision so many of you see at the start of all of our board presentations our pathway vision statement and that first core belief of equity of opportunity and helping all students overcome barriers to equity all learners which is our students our
055adults as well as our community members will have the support that they need to achieve not only academically but socially within our schools we also have been working really hard to champion efforts to foster and facilitate growth in becoming a much more culturally responsive school community with looking for and providing opportunities for respect for everybody within our school community another one of the goals that the board of education has had for the last several years is helping promote access and opportunity for all of our students and with that creating a self a safe and welcoming environment where everyone is valued and mutual respect is the norm and the expectation in all of our schools so two years ago uh our district board of education um under their direction um created a policy and as well
056as a regulation uh and asked that we the district form a district ei committee uh that would be aligned uh with the work of the district as well as in alignment with the new york state education department cultural responsive framework so it's my pleasure tonight that you're going to be hearing from several members of our district dei uh committee and each of the subcommittee representatives um so again it's it's uh my great appreciation for the work that they've done uh and so as each of the individuals come up to present tonight uh they'll introduce himself themselves and talk about the group that they represent within our school community so i'll turn it over to our dei team good evening hi again i'm deandra chukro and i'm with hi i'm rebecca lynch and we're two of
057the parent representatives on the dive the diversity equity and inclusion committee we're really excited that we're finishing up our second year as dr patton said having been established by the district in the fall of 2020 the equity inclusion and diversity in education regulation was unanimously adopted by you this school board in may of 2021 is that correct terrific and that requires this group to report out annually and so this is our first official report out and we're really happy to report on the work that this committee which is all volunteer regardless if we're teachers parents staff members community members and most importantly our students um have given a tremendous amount of time and have done so much work and we're just so excited to present all of this to you so what you see in
058front of you was designed by one of our subcommittees you're going to hear more about it and i don't want to steal their thunder but it's such a wonderful welcome sign that was designed the poster was just one of the many projects that all of the the subcommittees participated in in helping to produce and what's so amazing about this is it represents 26 languages spoken within our district alone can i forget something okay thanks so this uh graphic comes from the new york state education department's culturally responsive sustaining education framework this framework was created by nyset and released in 2019 and what we are doing as a district equity and inclusion committee it aligns with the state framework so this framework is designed to assist teachers in creating student-centered learning environments it includes the principles
059of diversity equity and inclusion and it helps prepare students for rigor and independent learning and develop students abilities to connect across lines of difference the framework's grounded in four main principles welcoming and affirming environment high expectations and rigorous instruction which prepares the community for rigor and independent learning inclusive curriculum and assessment which provides opportunities to learn about perspectives beyond one's own scope among others and ongoing professional learning um which recognizes that teaching and learning is an adaptive process that needs constant re-examination the subcommittees that we have on the diversity equity and inclusion committee address all of these four facets with and the subcommittees that you'll be hearing from tonight are the welcoming and affirming environment curriculum instruction and professional learning family engagement and communications hiring and retention policy and progress monitoring of which deidra and
060i are part of the steering committee and then we have two student committees one for the middle school and one for the high school what is really great about all of these subcommittees and the framework is that all of the stakeholders in our community are represented on them and the committees address each part of those stakeholders as well oh there it is thank you so the work that we are doing as a committee is based off of the equity inclusivity and diversity and education regulation which is a mouthful so section b of that regulation talks about disrupting and eliminating systemic inequities this is a lot of words on the page you all have a copy of the presentation or received in advance and it all comes directly from the regulation what we wanted to show
061here is that each item from this section is divided up and aligned with a subcommittee so each subcommittee has different areas of the regulation that fall under them so disrupting and eliminating systemic inequities is so that each and every student has a right to an equitable educational experience and a sense of belonging at school the next section where the items from the regulation are put under each subcommittee is ensuring systemic equity to ensure that equity is implemented systemically by developing the individual and organizational knowledge attitudes skills and practices to create culturally responsive learning and working environments that expect and support success for each and every student section d using data and metrics so that one is fairly self-explanatory section e implement an equity lens and the purpose is to be intentionally inclusive as the district
062makes decisions and it focuses on equity in both the process and outcomes and section f is monitoring and review uh that section falls under the policy and progress monitoring committee which is what tasked us with uh creating and presenting this information to the board tonight so first we're going to hear from the welcoming and affirming subcommittee and i'd like to invite up the representatives from that subcommittee we have reyna hughes and megan demaio to speak about what they have been doing oh and tierra swann i'm sorry hi everyone my name is tiara swann and i'm a student part of the district equity inclusion committee um i'm a part of the welking welcoming and affirming and i would like to bring light to why students we have created an ally program and why it's important um
063students i've talked to a lot of students peers they've been saying how it's hard to really come to school without any no way to talk to an adult about what's going on or if they're having discrimination issues or homophobic issues anything like that so we've been trying to create a program to make students feel like staff cares about their opinion and what they do so the ally program is probably the best thing that has come from this committee and i think it's a really good way to show students that we are trying our best to make sure everyone is included and recognized thank you hi i'm reina hughes i'm a third grade teacher at dorothy nolan our welcoming and affirming committee is working on establishing an ally training program which tara had just spoken about
064it would be a systemic change starting in high school and eventually moving k-12 focusing on supporting all students our action plans moving forward will be to finalize what it means to be an ally as well as the responsibilities of an ally educating allies on intersectionality and what demonstrating intentional positive and conscious efforts as an allies looks in the school environment and we are hoping to build this structure for the 2022-2023 school year so far it has been a collaborative effort with the student group student voices at the high school and munis from generation ready as well as looking to other districts with similar systems in place and the overarching goal of this project is to make sure all students feel heard and supported i'll pass it to megan to talk about the survey okay so
065one important part of making improvements is understanding where you are and especially coming back after the pandemic we assumed that there were a lot of needs um which anecdotally people were describing and i'm the parent of a first grader and it does seem like it was challenging being home for two years so last year we administered a survey it was multiple choice took about 15 minutes and we did it one version for k for elementary but it was actually only given to third through fifth and then another version that was given to sixth through twelfth graders and it asked some basic demographic questions as well as questions like the elementary version said things like do students and teachers help me when i need it do you feel comfortable and welcomed at school do students tease
066each other those are just some example questions some examples from the high school one are do you have a trusted staff member you can talk to does someone notice when you're absent are students treated the same regardless of whether their parents are rich or poor are students teased based on the basis of ethnicity sexual orientation etc so those are the kind of questions and so we did that survey and it was a great first go-round but the response rate was pretty low 17 percent for elementary school and 15 for middle and high school combined and that's just not good enough to give a good picture so we decided to redo it this year with keeping all the questions the same to make comparison easy and adding a box so that the students could share their
067own like open-ended responses besides just multiple choice responses and that's going to be administered on monday in the high school and upcoming in the middle and elementary older elementary and um there's going to be a video to prep that and that's going to be made by some of the high school students to kind of emphasize why it's important to gather this information and so we're hoping for a much better response rate this year than we had in previous years thank you next we'd like to call up lisa cutting to talk about the curriculum instruction and professional learning committee thank you good evening everyone i'm speaking on behalf of our subcommittee members some of our board members as well as some of the teachers who could not be here tonight so while i am the sole
068person speaking for the subcommittee i do represent all of the members of that so the curriculum instruction and professional learning subcommittee um really looked at some of the things that have already been mentioned numerous times but but are very important in terms of making sure that we are working to value recognize and provide a sense of belonging for all of our students regardless of what we may see on the outside and reminding ourselves that diversity is a very complex piece there are a lot of pieces of one's identity so may not be visible on the surface but there are a lot of those pieces so in looking at curriculum instruction and professional learning this subcommittee looked at some of the key policies relating to instruction and instructional materials that being curriculum and pedagogy and those
069are the things that guide our work here for what happens in the classroom so identifying some of those you may be wondering what some of those policies are so just a couple of them are our materials selection for library our material selection and textbook etc processes for approval um for classroom um processes for storing materials and challenging materials etc so those are just an example of some of the we we focused on uh four or five policies um we reviewed the policies and are still in the process of that um through the equity lens um and you heard that mentioned in the welcoming and affirming environment uh and previous to that in the introduction and again it's meant to try and create that sense of belonging and the value that everyone brings to the table
070and that we are richer together and the third piece that we are focusing on is then how do we provide resources and time for professional learning to support our teachers and our administrators in helping create that environment and those materials for our students and so while it is not simply the task of this subcommittee to provide the professional learning this is where work with other committees such as the professional learning committee and work with the building levels comes in so it's a very it's very broad but very important and the folks on the subcommittee have taken this work very seriously continue to do so and to then spread the information to the teachers so that everyone can continue this important work thank you next is maura manny to speak about the family engagement and communication
071subcommittee so our committee focused on two goals this year creating a more visibly welcoming environment for all of our families and raising awareness about diversity equity inclusion efforts and what they really are so our our first goal we really started by talking about best practices around inclusive signage when we looked at our vestibules and through our schools we thought we needed to revisit you know what are best practices when signage is is hung up in our schools that ultimately led us to the creation of the everyone is welcome at our school's poster um we wanted a bright poster that would be a common poster at the entrance of all of our school buildings it includes imagery to represent the handshake represents welcome and the 26 languages included on the poster are the 26 first languages
072spoken by families within our district so we wanted to have a common poster that would be at the entrance of all of our schools to give families that first initial feel of feeling welcome in our buildings our second goal was to raise awareness about this work we we want to set a positive tone for this work and show people what this work really is and create a common understanding that this work is benefiting all of our students um we would we're going to be sending an end of the year message out to sort of highlight some of the things you hear tonight and we also worked to coordinate and plan a video to showcase diversity equity inclusion which i'd like to play for you right now kind to one another accepting welcomes new people different
073types of people everyone should feel safe and welcome at school because it makes school better i feel safe and comfortable with my friends it's been wonderful work to create these welcoming environments where all students have the opportunity to be successful and to equity thrive committee because i want everyone to have a positive environment in school and enjoy their experience within our school district diversity equity and inclusion is important for our schools because we're a growing school district and there's people coming from different backgrounds and ethnicities and i feel like it just festers food everyone makes a safer environment i'm involved in unified sports and best buddies i like being a part of a team and meeting new people and getting the crowd to whoop it up i'm more confident now because i have a great
074group of people i hang out with all students in our district come to us with unique needs our faculty and staff work really hard across the district to create these safe spaces for students best buddies have been in our district for quite some time and it has been just the most fantastic opportunity for our students both our gender students and our special education students we get together we collaborate we really promote this sense of true friendship building skills we've done a great job of meeting needs and working collaboratively but there's still so much work to be done and that's going to be a collaboration between our school buildings between our community that we live in and that's really everyone coming together being involved and continuing to drive this work forward [Music] so we want everyone
075in our school district to feel the way meg feels about unified basketball and have that true sense of belonging and really the goal of this video was to show that that's what this work is it's about creating a sense of belonging for every student in our district and we need our families and community to be supportive partners and engaged with us in that work i just have to turn this around so we're now going to hear from our hiring and retention committee so we have lynne mcgee and michelle whit thank you so much good evening everyone i'm michelle whitley and this is lynne mcgee social worker at greenfield school and we are representing the hiring and retention committee this evening and our committee has been together consistently is that better i was going to say
076i'm naturally very loud so our committee has done a tremendous amount of work and we're here this evening to share some highlights of that with you good evening so we're going to start with our first goal for the year was to increase recruitment outreach so one of the things we wanted to do was kind of broaden our efforts to other areas in new york state and one of the things we did was we engaged downstate colleges and universities with education programs such as cuny schools like medgar evers queens college and york college uh we also um there was more we did virtual job fairs so hr attended uh numerous virtual job fairs last year including the new york state teacher of color job fair the other thing we focused on was diversity on recruitment and
077summit resources so several of our committee members had attended seminars on this topic so that we could get a better understanding on how we can implement that in our district and we've also looked at our the new york state education teacher diversity data where we were able to review the data for our district as well as other schools throughout the state and then finally we wanted to talk about we wanted to represent diversity to attract diversity so we've been focusing on being able to highlight the diversity that we have in our school in our school district while acknowledging that there's still more work to be done so we've talked with the communications committee about updating our current recruitment video on brochures in order to highlight the diversity that we do have and how to use
078social media to support those efforts the second goal we had was to review hiring processes and enhance onboarding so one of the things we've done is we've updated the hiring plan and shared changes with the leadership council based on the feedback and conversation from the group and we've also reviewed interview questions and protocols for the selecting committee participants thank you and as we continue to look at our protocols for committees and interviews all of the feedback from the team has been really critical in improving our process and one of the things that our hr department did was created and utilized a bias training video for all interview committee participants and this really helps us instead of having the mindset our notion that this person fits into our culture during the interview process thus hiring a
079staff that looks and thinks the same the training really allows us all as a hiring committee to understand their own bias and allows for deeper conversations about candidate qualifications and the ability to impact the district dr brewer has come to all of our committees to talk about that and participants have viewed this video and i think that's really impacted the conversations that we have at the table in addition we are looking at our onboarding process and really what happens when a candidate walks through the door until they become an employee and we want and you know you've heard the word welcoming and affirming a lot this evening but that's our goal to have all new employees feel that they're met from the second that they come in in an environment at hr to payroll when
080they're meeting bargaining unit leaders to they meet their co-workers and we're working to identify or remove any barriers that may be in place that we can make sure that the process for them is smooth and that they feel welcomed and valued and lastly uh our work has really evolved into looking at employee retention as we go from the process of hiring and we've hired candidates and how do we retain those candidates we've attended multiple um professional development sessions and conversations with districts in the area and across the states to talk about this very topic and when we think about employee retention we started talking more and learning more about employee resource groups interchangeably that can be called affinity spaces and we started researching and networking with local districts and really looking at how this works
081in corporate businesses and how to transfer that to schools and the goal of employee resource groups is to help staff feel supported once they're hired so they're specifically geared toward populations that are considered marginalized to provide support for retention of diversity in our schools and our intent is to provide opportunities for employees to connect and create relationships to enhance retention outcomes so all individuals feel safe and valued and welcomed in the district during our recruitment and hiring practices we're really looking at the diversity within our schools and looking at the strengths of candidates and making those matches and it's a very intentional process and the feedback from the committee has been extremely valuable in the process and we are committed to continuing this work and now we'd like to call up amy totino to speak
082about the student subcommittee at the middle school so i feel extremely fortunate that i got to get together a great group of students and work with them on our subcommittee and the first thing that we did was i shared the new york state dei framework and the students all decided that they thought a welcoming and affirming environment would be the way they would focus because it made the most sense to them and that's what we're always talking about at maple is being respectful being kind and they thought that was the way to go so uh much better than me saying any of this i would like you to hear the voices of just a few of our student members right now hello i am here with two of our sixth grade dei members rhema and
083maya please tell us your thoughts about our dei meanings hi i'm mike dei is a place where everyone feels included and being included is really important in the meeting even though you might not talk you feel as though your idea is still shared and put across there are all different people and all different ideas that are in the meeting but are still heard when i first got called down to the meeting i was nervous about what to say being judged but now i feel as though i connected with people and can just say what i want to without being judged it makes me happy and welcome just to be here hi i'm reina dai is all about equality and we talk about that a lot by including people of different genders sexual orientations races ethnicities
084and religions and making sure everyone's voice is heard we find ways and make ways to include everyone and make sure everyone feels welcome from safe hearing the dei groups help people feel sure of their place here and make all people no matter their looks personality or orientation feel that they belong in our middle school community now i'm here with two of our eighth grade dpi members silas and pharma please tell us your thoughts about our dei means hi science here i i genuinely enjoy the meeting um being around such a supportive and nice people people like to talk to because they'll be expanding and they feel much more welcome to school uh i feel like in media we have the ability to change things and make the middle school and our entire school district significantly
085better hi the dei meetings are helping students and staff like being more respectful and accepting of each other and personally as a student i think that these meetings are very important for everyone like to move on because uh like there's been a lot of issues between students and staff and now i'm here with sarah one of the seventh grade members of our dbi group so he is i feel honored that i get to share my views with others that face similar problems i love that at the dei pub all of us listen to each other and emphasize with one another what saddens me is that i have to look forward to talking to understanding peers because this shouldn't be a privilege or a special occurrence this should be every single day from the moment we
086step into this building to when we open the doors to our familiar homes we are the only ones that can make change and we need to do better we have to do better we must do better and move together not as individuals but as a community our goal for dei is to achieve the goal of change and teach others the importance of them this can be the beginning to something amazing and one day let kindness equality and honesty bring from the north to the south from the east to the west [Applause] they're amazing i it is the pleasure of my week when i get to work with them so um i do it is um i do have to comment i said to carmine you know they're going to ask what you mean by conflict
087between staff and students and he goes well i just mean the teachers keep telling us we need to be more respectful so that's what that meant i had to clarify um it was they're really a fantastic group we meet a couple times a month they would like to meet more we're doing our best to squeeze that in and our eighth graders plan on presenting to our staff on superintendents day on the 23rd and they're very excited about it thank you and now we have some high school students uh kayla sophia and safiya to speak about their subcommittee hello everyone my name is sophia anserut i'm currently in my junior year here at saratoga springs high school and i'm here tonight alongside my two peers to share the progress of our student subcommittee of the diversity
088equity and inclusion committee we only began our work together at the start of the second semester of this school year with the intention of amplifying student voices within the high school and we're so excited to share the progress we've made and our goals for the future currently we're working with the welcoming and affirming environment committee on an ally program with the purpose of creating support systems for students when other resources like guidance counselors and social workers are not available a lot of our time has been spent creating a definition for the role of an ally because it's important for students to understand the intentions of the new and developing resource we determined that a crucial component of an ally is the ability for the ally to advocate for their students well-being we also talked about
089ways we can create this program to be student friendly and as student representatives we feel strongly that we can ensure we can include the needs of the student body and the creation of this program the ally program is still a little bit of a work in progress but we have future plans to address critical aspects of the program uh for example what kind of individual in our school community would be an ally and what would their responsibilities be as well as the necessary training to become an ally we also discussed involving our high school's national coalition building association our ncbi club for allied training purposes as they have valued experience and creating peer-led workshops my peers and i are proud of the work we've done and we're hopeful that this ally program will make a
090positive impact on saratoga student body thank you [Applause] hello i'm kayla gatt i'm a freshman here at the high school another goal of ours is to increase communication between students parents staff and administration we've noticed that many students lack trust and comfort with administrators and there's a few like negative connotations and feelings surrounding them within the student body this has seemed to create kind of a divide between the students and the administration i'm a part of a club called ncbi and earlier this year before the student dei committee had been formed we had a lot of very similar goals that we were trying to accomplish so what we did was we set up meetings with students from our club administrators and a few teachers and we used these meetings to discuss different issues we had
091been observing in the school and um like what had already been in response and what we could have done or what we could do to help better the school in the future um before we had done these meetings i had never really spoken to any of the administrators and i really didn't know much about them and upon actually speaking to them and having conversations it really opened my eyes to the fact that the connotations surrounding them has created kind of a false narrative in reality they're a really hard-working group of people and they're just trying to help in any way that they can and even if not every single thing that is done works perfectly or exactly the way they want it to there's still a lot of thought and time that goes into it
092and i really just wish that those intentions and efforts were better communicated to students i think a really good example of a communication issue is the schedule change that happened about halfway through the year and when it changed students and parents were quite angry about it they felt it was inconvenient and they didn't understand why it was changed and i'll admit i was a little bit angry too and so i decided to speak to the wonderful miss donald over here um and she explained to me that it was just more efficient and the teachers liked it better and that though it was a slightly inconvenient shift it would help the flow of the year in the long run knowing why made me feel a lot better about the whole thing and it really helped me
093to get a much better understanding of the situation and i was a lot more open to the new schedule change because i knew the purpose of it and i feel this kind of thing happens a lot and much of the anger and that students and parents hold comes from a place of confusion things like this are misunderstood and people get upset from a student perspective we do sometimes feel like we're left out of the loop and i've i know that parents and teachers feel that way sometimes too and um if people just were communicated to a little bit better um just like about the reasons for actions and what not being taken by administration we feel that there would be a really positive impact and even just taking a few minutes to have teachers give
094some extra reasoning before administering administering surveys and things like that and or just like sending out emails with a little bit extra information exactly why i'm so sorry why different changes are being made and um you know those are just some examples but there are many ways that you can get that kind of information across in general um better connections between students administration and just getting to the point where students are comfortable talking to them and ideally reporting unsafe situations in the school would be extremely helpful in kickstarting more widespread changes and really get our foot in the door with other issues we want to tackle thank you [Applause] i think you're doing good is that good evening everyone my name is sophia bashir i'm a junior here at the high school and i've been
095on the diversity equity inclusion committee for about two years as a member of the student voices subcommittee it's a goal of ours to create a lasting positive change through solution-based problem solving we have a lot of meetings and we have been working hard at brainstorming new ideas we want to create solutions that will outlast our high school careers and create an inclusive environment for all students of all different backgrounds and identities these solutions would include educating students and staff working on punitive and supportive actions taken towards students who are struggling in getting students involved in the school community within our school community there are continuous issues surrounding equity diversion and inclusion amongst the student body with these ongoing issues it has been hard for students to feel included and safe within the school environment aside
096from the administration getting involved in aggressive behavior on school campus they need to take action upon discrimination of our students we want to work with administration in creating solutions to these problems we want to be able to express our concerns and have something be done about it we need we need to educate our students and staff to understand someone else's point of view by understanding others thoughts motives and emotions to acknowledge why they feel the way they do a person must make the effort to listen to others and it requires them to distance themselves from their own perspective this is hard to achieve without education and practice with open communication we can empathize with others and we can respond appropriately to the situation which is associated with social behavior greater empathy can lead to help
097more helpful behavior amongst students we simply want to create a better environment for all students to feel welcome and have a better experience at our schools this is not about politics this is basic human decency to treat each other fairly thank you [Applause] i really want to know whose idea it was to make me have to talk after them and as the one of the reasons that they asked me to to conclude this is because i am the parent of a senior and i will tell you i'm having a hard time keeping it together especially after hearing all of the kids speak our middle school kids our high school kids we can learn so much from them they are so bright they are so well spoken they are our future and if that's our future
098we're in good hands so if anything this committee has brought me so much joy in this i mean they're why we're here and the fact that they're such active participants guys don't even know like the senior ball tomorrow i'm going to be a mess i'm just warning you all right so our key goals in terms of the policy and progress and monitoring committee was to align which rebecca already talked to you about we really wanted to align the parts of the equity policy and regulation not just with the new york state framework but also amongst our committees which were as evidenced in the pages you have in your handout so that we did we match the equity regulations with our corresponding subcommittees and look at what our subcommittees are doing they did not stand still
099they just are charging forward so i think kudos for all this work that's been done in such a short period of time yes and there are obviously if you can see um from the early slides there's a lot of items under each subcommittee obviously we can't do all of them at the same time but it at least gives us a goal and a framework to move forward so we can start the next school year full speed ahead and really tackle some of these issues that the students are talking about very well said our ultimate responsibility was what we just did here tonight it was to corral which was a little like herding cats i have to say no actually not at all um was a wonderful group of people to work with was really remarkably
100easy to work with so someone who works professionally i know i don't look like it right now but i worked from home and i took advantage of that today i worked from home i mean um it was we were a pleasure for us to put this material together for you and i have to say even sitting on the committee for a year i learned a lot tonight and it was just it's just a joy i don't know how else to say it i can't believe i'm saying that volunteering for a school board committee is joyful but it absolutely was so we want to thank you for your attention we want to thank all of the members of the committee for all their hard work because you are outstanding and i guess we'll open for some
101questions good job guys and just to clarify it's not a board committee it's a district committee you're right i'm sorry that's okay listen oh does anybody have any questions connie um first i would just like to congratulate the committee on a wonderful presentation um it's pretty clear that there's just a tremendous amount of effort and time and resources i love the focus on kindness and equality i'm using your words fair treatment those are all things i think we can all get behind so congratulations on a job well done i do have a few questions and i'm not sure like who would answer them but back to the very first slide there was something about a survey and i'm wondering what the name of that survey is who developed the survey if it's a third party
102or if that was developed in house and um is that mandatory is it voluntary and like what setting is that given to the kids hello hello i'll press the plus button okay so i am a part of the welcoming and affirming committee and the survey that was administered last year was a smaller version a shorter version of a boces regional survey for school culture and climate so it was originally the basis of the survey was a third party assessment as a committee we chose i mean it was hundreds of questions we did not want to do that we wanted to get a pulse point of how our students felt so we selected about 15 or 20 of those questions and then we that we felt like would be good baseline information for us to measure
103as a district again grades 3 through 12 not k12 we revised some of the questions to make the language friendly for elementary and then more appropriate for secondary and then then we administer it administered it last year on a voluntary basis we sent it we were hybrid last year so we did send it electronically to middle school and high school students and we did get about 500 or so responses on a voluntary basis and then the teachers at the elementary level could choose if they wanted to administer that to their three four and fifth grade students this year with this survey we wanted to ask the same questions because we didn't get a large sample size as you heard from megan when she presented we are making it mandatory for us at the secondary level
104we're still to have that discussion at the elementary level because we do want to know how our students really feel about being welcome and valued at school and what they observe about how people treat each other in school so that it will provide us with information on our action steps moving forward thank you um can i add to that for you sure um the original survey that um sao mentioned was developed as connected to essa accountability and culture and climate and getting a metric for that that's what it was called i believe right culture and climate okay so that's where that connection came and i think i know the intent is is purely positive and to get feedback and to make things better i just was wondering if it was possible for the sake of
105transparency and to not have i'm like a no drama person and i feel like some people like that is it perhaps possible to let parents see that so that there's no skepticism no negative like there's no negative um i know there's nothing negative in those questions it's just a matter of before someone makes it an issue can we put that out there now i'm green okay um i i don't see um why that would be an issue and and i know the committee is working on getting some of that wording together but sure being proactive thank you and i just have one more question it was about the high school level and i i want to make sure i heard it correctly did someone say something about court systems c-o-u-r-t or did i mishear it
106was when guidance counselors and administrators were not available i am deaf in one ear so sometimes i don't hear things correctly i think that's referring to the ally program to have support support in addition yeah um i'm sorry so the um the purpose of the ally program that we are focusing on is uh creating support systems okay for students i heard court i am so sorry um okay and the training to become an ally can you can someone tell us the board more about that hi so um ncbi i don't know if many of you okay um i don't know if many of you know what ncbi is but um basically it is a national now international organization it's called national coalition building institute and basically uh what we do is we are a club
107and every october we get a training for student leaders and basically we are trained over the course of two days to lead workshops for our peers and those workshops are centered around things like prejudice reduction and education oh sorry yeah um so for the ally program we are hoping to um do it in a way that kind of goes along with the way we teach in ncbi and um you know we were so we were hoping to have them either sit in on our training in october or have ncbi leaders who are trained in october um help to train the people who sign up or who want to be allies does that help or is there anything else you want clarification on i guess i can go to ncbi and look it up right and
108i was also going to say that there's work that's going to be continuing over the summer with additional um planning and preparation for the ally program so it's still a work in progress but there will be more details thank you leanne donald uh is here and she's our ncbi advisor when i was a school counselor back in 1994 in boston spa we actually started ncbi with saratoga springs so the school districts have been partnering together for almost 25 years now so ncbi has been a great program for many districts in the area who've been participating i've heard i've heard of ncbi i just haven't heard of ally training specifically the ally program is an original thing from the um oh gosh the welcoming and affirming environment committee that is there they came up with that
109um they just brought the idea to the student subcommittee for um our you know input um but that is like it's from the welcoming and affirming environment committee um ncbi uh just a lot of the like standards and things that ncbi likes to teach i keep forgetting sorry a lot of the things that we try to teach in ncbi go along with what we want to do in the ally program but they're not connected through the organization or anything um yeah it's all just ideas it's just like things we're hoping to do basically any other questions comments i want to just tell uh these three students who are still here and tiara who's not that i'm so impressed with you um thank you so much for being here tonight and uh you looked less nervous
110than i did um my whole first year on school board so um kudos especially a freshman oh my gosh um honestly thank you so much for all of your hard work and your reports and look forward to seeing what else you bring all right again just want to echo president mecca's statement as a member of the district diversity equity inclusion committee and again with the support of our board of education to have our students and have all of our teachers and support staff and building level administrators district level administrators board trustees uh participation uh again we are making incredible progress obviously there's still a lot of important work ahead of us but again i want to thank everybody for not only the work on the presentation tonight this is kind of a culmination of our
111first two years worth of effort but to have students take such an active leader leadership role uh in our district initiatives uh again is telling how important this work is and the impact it has on our students overall so great job to the committee wonderful presentation and thank you very much for all your efforts throughout the year so i told our dei committee the same thing i said to our 10-year folks they've been out tonight and i know our students probably have some homework they still got to get done uh so again you're free to go and again thank you very much for for all of your support um we do have one more presentation uh and it's my pleasure uh to introduce bill mcmorty uh who's our principal from saratoga project management as well
112as john otterdank from mosaic associates who's our district architect uh and they're gonna be providing the board of education with an update on phases one two and three of our district-wide legacy project uh and upgrades uh that are planned to begin um that have actually already begun uh and what we have planned for uh the upcoming school years i'll turn over to bill and john thank you dr patton is that better oh that's a lot better all right so you know who i am so tonight we are going to give you an update on phases one two and three just as a brief overview the legacy project is actually an eight phase project it's going to encompass approximately eight years so these three projects or these three phases are really the first three phases but
113they encompass almost 50 percent of the entire project so it's really a tremendous amount of design effort and information that we're getting done in these first three phases it actually represents 48 point some percent of the entire project so over the past 18 months we have had i don't know a gazillion meetings with staff administrators everyone across the district to get us to this point this is a huge point in the project so for phases one two and three they are at a little bit of a different phase or a different point in timeline of the project phase one we bid and was actually awarded back in the fall we're actually completing work in that now we're going to go over some of the items we've completed in phase one phase two and three are
114really running parallel with each other we've completed the construction document phase which really that's the last stage of design and we've completed our last estimate so the next phase would be actually to bid that portion of the project in both phases two and three so phase two has three projects in it three schools one is greenfield one is dorothy nolan and work at the transportation building so that's part of phase two that will all be one bid that will be in the fall phase three is the first part of the high school so the high school will have two phases phase three is the first part of high school and phase seven will be the second part of the high school so a little bit about phase one so phase one really was about security
115some building infrastructure improvements and things that we wanted to hit the ground running with that didn't involve a tremendous amount of design time but that we could get a quick hit on for construction so some of the items that we've actually already completed the visitor management system was put in place the raptor system which was really a software upgrade we'd had pretty well good success with opening that up and it worked very well security cameras are scheduled to be installed in the fall now as everyone knows there are issues with security cameras because they call computer chips so we are getting dribs and drabs of the cameras we will put in what we can in the fall and we'll wait for the other ones to come online but there's also other work that precedes that
116during the summer along with cabling in order to run these cameras that we'll proceed this summer window film we had a number of windows around the district that had wire glass in them that was a no-no anymore for our glass around the district we've since put security film on that and that complies with sed code now and that's been done and complete in all our buildings i.t closets and really we're not renovating the clouds especially air conditioning those closets in order to keep our background infrastructure cool all our switches and routers and everything that will happen this summer while we're away and for two of our buildings at lake and the middle school we're replacing the boilers middle school has a pretty tremendous boiler room such a big facility we have run into some issues
117with deliveries in those schools in the middle school in particular the large we have two large boilers cast iron boilers that are going in in the middle school the plant broke that's a cast iron plant that makes the huge cast iron sections they're out of pennsylvania the whole line broke down we are not the only people being affected by this and caused a six delay six month delay at the factory and that's nationwide so for we came up with the alternate plan we're going to keep our current cast iron boiler in place along with a couple other supplemental new boilers and we will have appropriate heat for this winter but we will delay the completion of that middle school boiler room until next summer for that one those two cast iron boilers we're also replacing
118boilers at lake this year we just started demolition on those and we're waiting for the delivery of those boilers at lake and it's a week by week we're waiting for two parts in those boilers and each week we get an update but we've done as much demolition as we can in order to prepare for those boilers to come in the next week or two air conditioning on the third floor at lake in those classrooms the entire third floor like ave we'll have air conditioning we'll be moving all those rooms out this summer and installing air conditioning and unit ventilators in those rooms we have met with the staff on how to move and we have a good move plan in place it is a quick one friday at 3 30 we will begin moving all
119those rooms but by 11 o'clock we'll be ready to go on saturday morning to start work so we've hired a professional moving company they'll be in there for about five or six hours we're gonna move it in two phases we'll get half of the building done on the third floor the first night we'll come back a week later and we'll move the second half so we have uh met with the building twice actually and it's actually going very well with them and they understand what everybody's role is in that in that move bella i'm sorry will you hold the microphone a little bit yeah is that that thank you yeah sure um wireless networking cabling again over the summer we've been working with dave's team to work some of those kinks out but a lot
120of that work will be happening over the summer and into the fall master clocks at geyser and i think michelle is here yes you have a new clock system working very well and then we'll do the same at dorothy nolan over the summer so i am going to turn this over to john and he is going to go over the important part of the design thanks bill so a lot of this you've seen before we when we presented to you all last we have dorothy nolan for our project scope the big cafeteria renovation project including the kitchen addition and the total reconfiguration of the kitchen and serving line areas select bathroom select classroom renovations main entrance renovation and secure vestibule really changing the sequence of entrance to bring a consistency throughout each school in the
121district traffic improvements building improvements energy efficiencies roofing windows exterior envelope boilers stuff like that and limited auditorium upgrades each elementary school had an allotted amount to get a few things done within each of the auditorium do the clicker oh yes the bid dates so we are currently at the state education department we have architectural and engineering approval for both phases two and three we are waiting for the project manager sign off which takes a little longer than it should but so be it but that's okay right now because we are not anticipating the bid until the fall in order to give the contractors time this summer to do their work so in the fall when their summer work lets off they can pay attention and give us good numbers um with the work then starting
122next year and bill's going to talk a little more after we get through this on the sequence for these phases two and three next rendering of the new cafeteria scheme at dorothy nolan we will be installing a lot of acoustic panels and acoustic ceilings rubber flooring all new furniture a new seating arrangement that includes different types of seating different sizes of seating depending on who's comfortable sitting in large groups or who wants to sit with a teacher or just a couple friends so we are excited to introduce all of that into the cafeteria greenfield has a lot of the same bathroom and classroom renovation work going on their main entrance and secure vestibule will be reconfigured as well they have the significant traffic improvements with the acquired land out front and the all the bus
123loop and parent drop off loops will be separated to bring safety and ease of drop off and hopefully uh better traffic um in the mornings and the dismissals building improvements uh energy efficiency and again the auditorium upgrades this would be bid at the same time as dorothy nolan coming up this fall just a quick diagram this is not dorothy nolan nor greenfield this is actually caroline division street for the diagram but it does indicate how each school will have a secure vestibule so when a visitor comes during the day they will have to enter that orange area on the diagram and be credentialed before they are let in before they have any access to the interior of the building and by segregating this vestibule if someone's coming out they can't be inadvertently let in while
124this credentialing is going on so this will be a sequence that will be consistent uh within each of the schools by the time our project's done here we have a classroom a typical classroom uh rendering uh showing of the feature wall the teaching wall with the led monitor the cubbies which are now being brought into each of the classrooms we have storage above those cubbies writeable surfaces on as many places as we could find if we were to turn around this classroom we would have a floor-to-ceiling writable teaching wall providing a second teaching opportunity within that space all the case work along the window walls being renovated sinks are being kept where sinks are existing but no new sinks are being added also behind us if we as we look at this uh will be
125included a teacher's wars drove as well as book storage for all the elementary classrooms yes so we have gone through a series of the color selections at this point this is a rubber flooring and we have a lot of the saratoga blue there but the yellow was each school was given an odd three different options for a secondary accent color and a lot of them chose another blue and we'll see what the next series of uh schools will will choose but um there we go for the transportation the bus wash we are replacing the bus wash the third bus lift we did two a few years back and then we are putting all new led lighting uh in the garage bays as well and that will be bid in the fall and finally here at
126the high school we have the renovations to the dining hall and kitchen the fitness and the wellness center traffic improvements including the much awaited turn lane on to west avenue building improvements in energy efficiencies including a very large uh roofing up that's listed there too roofing replacement some auditorium upgrades a little more significant than the elementary schools and select bathroom renovations throughout rendering of what the dining hall will look like when it's completed as it switched from uh to more of a college collegiate level dining hall with different stations for the types of food rather than the serving line model we also here have many different types of seating from individual stools to group tables to large group tables to allow a lot of different choices and really echoing i think a lot of what
127the diversity equity inclusion presentation said earlier a lot of different variation to break up the large gym space to hopefully make it a lot more exciting and inviting space this is the auxiliary gym which will be the new fitness center there will be the wellness center which will come after which is the where the weight room is now um the one feature on the floor plan we see below that has been updated since uh we did this is the blue stripe uh down the middle um will be synthetic turf it's no longer going to be uh portable uh turf that would be taken out or uh brought in as as needed so i think we can get it in blue so it's going to still be that color um but that will be turf and
128we're looking forward to that and bill's going to talk about when all this will happen well we're not going to go into too much detail about this um you can't see any of it but at your table i gave you 11.5 by 17. we're not going to go over that whole thing it would take us way too long but this is actually the same schedule that we've been on you've had this handed out to you before back in september we've handed out this schedule so it hasn't changed i just gave you another copy but that will lay out the entire program and where we are and where things will happen different design phases different construction phases for the entire program so what we have been doing over the past month in june really is talking
129about moving forward and the construction phase of the project for phases two and three we've met with each of the buildings we're trying to make this schedule as condensed as we can with as little impact but there will be impacted each of the buildings we want to try to do as much work over the school year that we can so that we're trying to make this not a three summer project and making it a two summer project with work over the school year that does a couple things for us i think is increases our competition as we go to bid as you can imagine the escalation factors and the guess factor that contractors will have to put on this if you can do it over two years rather than three years if you had to
130guess what your escalation factor would be in three years it's hard to do especially in these times when it's just jumping up and down all over the place so we've worked hard to concentrate our work in areas and maybe take over a couple classrooms and work that over the school year rather than doing that in the summer time there are flooring projects that we might have done over the summer time that we're going to do over breaks instead so we're trying to work with each of the buildings to pick areas of scope that will not impact their instruction but they'll allow us to advance work over the school year so we're trying to take the really that three summer period and make it two summers in a school year i think that'll help us in
131the end so that's really where phase two and phase three are headed we've done building walk-throughs with all the principles in phases two and three to walk them through that with phasing diagrams and and have good responses and looks like we're headed in a good direction so for tonight where we are is in the construction document phase we have done our estimates and our estimates are within our budget so for both phase two and three our we would move into the bid really the bidding phase it won't be until the fall we still have big prep work to do part of that bid prep work will be to have a base bid which will be our really our base scope of work that we're looking to award that day but we'll also have ad alternates
132and they'll vary by school of items that maybe we can afford on bid day so there are things that have come up during the design that said well that would be a good thing to do wasn't actually part of the original scope and if we have money to do that we'll make that choice on bid day whether we have the budget in order to do that so each building will have two to four alternates we also structure that and pull some of the scope back in some of the buildings to make sure we can bid and award that because the premier thing to do when we get a bid is to award it and move forward and not have to go backwards and redesign and pull scope out so we're being proactive about that and
133pulling a little bit of some of that scope out and making it an ad alternate make sure we can't an award on bid day and move forward because as you can see with an eight phase project that creates a ripple effect on down the line if you can't award and move forward any questions on that we'll go over a lot more of what those alternates are when we get into the fall and on what the each one of those will be for each school but i just wanted to get you the concept of where we are today so our recommendation would be to move forward in both of these phases based on where we stand we are on schedule and we're within budget with all these projects and with our ad alternates so at the
134end of the agenda tonight you'll see two resolutions in the financial section one for phase two and one for phase three basically the same language as we used when we moved from the design development estimate into construction documents and we're just asking the board to move forward into the bid document phase questions okay thanks for your time that's it for presentations all right moving along um to our consent agenda do we have any modifications we do um the items to be modified are all under b personnel the first one is on page six and it's number five letter q kendra aston borski revised the effective date from september 1 2022 to july 1 2022. so that's under b personnel five teacher tenure appointments q effective date becomes july 1 2022. um on page nine under
135number seven teacher appointments e the britney fay entry please revise the name listed from ms farrell to read ms fay and then this one the next one is letter i it spans page 9 to page 10 but i believe the actual correction is on page 10 and we're just changing again a name revise the name from ms mcneil to ms cenida it's under colleen sunita's entry the uh seven i on page 10. so tony tony the one you're looking for is on page five oh fi is it also i yep uh yeah apologies page five letter i miss mcneil to ms sanita sorry about that no worries and the final one is on page 13. um under nice ed ta tenure appointments julie roberts please change the effective date from september 14 2022 to read
136november 2022. questions on any of those got him okay do i have a motion i move that we approve the cassand agenda or accept today's approve today's agenda with the modifications all right second everyone's trying to second i'm gonna say connie any discussion all right all in favor all right that's unanimous thank you i do just have a few uh recognitions uh for again there's about 10 pages of personnel so hillary's office has been extremely busy uh over the last month so i do want to start off michelle whitley is still uh here with us and uh when i take this opportunity to congratulate uh michelle she has done an incredible job serving as principal of kaiser road elementary school for the last four years and we are very excited to welcome michelle to a
137new position in a new role within the district serving as our director of k-12 humanities as well as elementary instruction and again she will continue to provide outstanding leadership at the district level now and in working closely with all of our elementary principals as well as our k-12 humanities teachers and our support staff and all of our administrators so um so we're really uh excited uh to have uh michelle move into this new role so we want to congratulate her and at the same time reassure that our geyser road community i know they're happy for michelle they hate to lose michelle um for this position um but we're already working on the process of um or again recruitment and then the hiring of the new elementary school principal at geyser road elementary school so congratulations
138to michelle what's up and then we do um we do have a few um retirements that i do want to recognize as well uh deb helwig is a kindergarten teacher at geyserwood elementary and so we want to thank deb for her service to the district and again the board has accepted her resignation tonight for the purposes of retirement effective june 30. so deb will be one of the many staff members that will be recognized at our next board meeting for her retirement i do want to welcome all of our new teachers and school counselors there's literally i think three or four pages of all new staff members that have just been approved by the board of education tonight for their uh probationary appointments uh and again we'll be welcoming them to the district uh officially
139during our new teacher orientation uh program in august uh and then we also have a few civil service retirements so margaret asman who is a teacher aide at maple avenue patricia rhodes is a monitor at the high school and then diane henderson who's a school bus assistant out in the transportation department uh again we want to thank all of them uh for their service to the district and with um sincere appreciation and regret uh that we accept their uh retirements um most of them are effective at the end of june and we do have diane through begin beginning of september 2022 so congratulations to all of our civil service folks who also will be retiring over the summer [Applause] okay that closes our business meeting um is there anyone who wishes to address the board
140for our second public comment period seeing none that closes our second comment period um do we have any agenda planning items dean thanks angie i'm sorry before we do that though um not before but just in so we haven't had a agenda planning item since we had confusion during the last agenda planning session and so i'm wondering if you all think it might be a good idea going forward and tonight starting just using emotion and second and all that so that we're not confused again i felt very bad about how um i handled that last time and got confused about things so if we use the motion and the vote i think maybe it'll be clear for all does that sound okay better yeah okay all right please continue thanks angie so um as you're
141all aware i brought up after the uh incident that happened in texas i really wanted to get out in front of conversing about security within our district i may or may not have gone about that the right way my apologies if i didn't but i think uh i would like to bring up tonight to um at least early on in the summer if we can look to have a workshop where we can sit down and we can discuss that with a lot of the stakeholders within the community dave is obviously an important part of that and mickey mark leffler some of the sros some of the teachers that might want to be involved as well i think would be a great opportunity for us to sit down as a board to really learn more about
142uh we learned some of it tonight from what bill talked about during various phases of the capital project and how we're addressing some of those safety concerns i know not all of you received it yet but the dirt committee has received the safety plan moving forward for first review for next year so that's great i've had an opportunity to see that in first read dave's group does a great job with that but i'd love for us to have that it doesn't have to be the full workshop i'd just love to dedicate some time for us to sit down and talk about that and be able to then report to the public some of the findings some of the steps that we're working on some more some more detail and clarity of what bill's group is
143working on as we're continuing to make sure that safety and security of our students faculty and staff is top of mind throughout the course of uh the summer most importantly right because no one is in the schools at that point in time and i think it's a great opportunity for us to take advantage of that time to talk through that so i'd love to see that um as as part of at least part of a workshop if it's not dedicated as a full workshop thank you yep um other thoughts i think i mean we we talked tonight about ensuring systemic equity i think ensuring systemic safety thus ensuring systemic learning are they're all in line with our goals so i i definitely support this i don't know if this is where i second or so
144i would second that other thoughts on that matter um i so i'm i'm not opposed i'm we had trouble last summer getting together even just to do our board governance workshops and so i'm hoping that we can balance that which is very important and with our need to come together as a governance unit for the new year because last year was the first time we never had a board retreat to get ready for the year until september and i think it handicapped us a little bit we didn't get to have one or two over the summer to really regroup and get on the same page and all those things so i would just ask that we balance that with being able to have at least two board governance workshops sorry retreats that would be a
145workshop these would be retreats um and so that's my only comment to that um erica i don't know if it's possible but if we already have our meetings for the summer um if they're not long and we don't have a lot of items would it make sense or would it be possible to add the workshop after just because it'll be hard to get everybody together with the vacation i'm sorry oh or even before yeah like just instead of trying to add two more dates to everyone's summer vacations just an idea great idea um and we'll gather dates soon from everybody um but yeah that's great july 28th is our business meeting in july july 28th okay thursday all right so um our um so we had a motion we had a second is there any
146other discussion on this okay so um yes john sorry um i'm in favor of this to have this workshop thanks for bringing up dean the uh i just keep it to members of the board and dirt team so we know if there's things being said or you know we don't want public to know everything obviously i mean i'm not trying to hide anything but yeah those those folks that i mentioned are all dirt members yeah yeah so we would have i know you said dave mickey community well teachers really is what i meant and there's teachers on that committee as well yeah good point thanks um okay so all in favor of trying to arrange this over the summer all right great that's unanimous thanks dean so just to clarify as i work with dave
147on putting some plans together would a target date of thursday july 28th prior to the business meeting be helpful because we know that's a date that we're already assembling okay so it'd just be a matter of pulling together as many members of the dirt team that we could for that night maybe to do uh 6 15 to 7 o'clock you know we can plan a a workshop conversation and then business meeting at seven something like that sex i feel like we a lot of times underestimate how much time we need okay i'm sorry could we do a six o'clock just because sometimes we underestimate i'd rather do you know i was even thinking like 5 30 to give ourselves like an hour or so of that good conversation and give everybody a break to go
148grab a drink and you know come back for the meeting or something like that at seven o'clock so okay no drinking before meeting no no this kind of [Laughter] or realistically maybe we can gather up some snacks or something like that you know i'd be happy to help facilitate doing something like that all right we'll work with uh dave and i will work together to pull as many of those folks together the earlier we give them the heads up the better chance and again we may not have everybody because it's summer schedules but we'll do the best we can and again we're talking about the board and dirt and so how we name that and um if it's a retreat or if it's an executive session prior that's going to be important to help because
149we do talk about things that should not be you know would compromise safety so let's just make sure we name it correctly that's my point okay great any other agenda planning items i was going to also um request and i talked to mike a little bit about this um to maybe to have a nicer come again it's free right them coming out to evaluate us nicer and i think it's probably a good time just to do that because we have these wonderful plans and we had so many easy to implement low-cost things we could implement last time and that then if we have used that as a community forum because that's how it did it last time then we're meeting both of those needs and so i'd like to suggest we ask our superintendent to
150arrange that as well i second that i like that opportunity angie um you know bill might know more than than us and certainly nicer would know you know i've learned over the last couple of weeks um you know grant monies that are available for certain school safety things that are out there with panic buttons and you know alarms and things like that that will be worth listening to them and advising us on if we qualify if there's monies for us to potentially go after and things like that so i think that's an awesome suggestion so that's my motion you seconded it is there any other thoughts or questions on that one no okay all right also all in favor of that one all right you knew man unanimous again thank you again we'll reach out
151to nicer just gonna get a sense of what their timing is um and again we planned that with them several weeks in advance and they made sure to have their specialists um spend time at each of the buildings to provide feedback so we'll have to reach out and just get a sense of timing and when we can get the work done any other agenda planning items okay board member comments natalia um i just want to really acknowledge our students especially lucas and abby congratulations it's been such an honor to sit with you for the year and to learn from you and i wish you the very very best um with what comes next it's so exciting um and also to thank all of the students that work with the dei um committee it's been incredible
152i've been on the committee for two years and learning from them has been just incredible i cannot say enough about how much i've learned not just about the day-to-day workings of the schools but also how middle school and high schoolers are thinking about the world and thinking about their school community and i just i'm so glad that we finally had the opportunity to have them come speak to the board as a whole um i hope that amanda and john will have the opportunity to watch this presentation quickly because i think it's really just so important to be hearing those student voices and i also know that there are students who are organizing for this weekend for march for our lives especially following the shooting in texas and i'm grateful for the work that they do
153in our community i know that a lot of people like to say that students are the future but i think that students are the present they are doing their work right now and i'm really really grateful for them thank you and while you were raising your hand student representative lucas was as well um just on on abby's behalf in mind i just wanted to sincerely thank you all for your welcomeness and kindness you know like this is a we're just so fortunate for this position and it gets you know a little scary at times being able to present and having just all these like upper-ups here but you guys really made it feel like we were all peers and equal on here and i just truly thank you all and just wish you all the
154best next year thank you other board comments connie i would just like to wish all the fathers a happy father's day since we won't see anybody in between now and the next meeting but we say that schools are the bedrock of our community but our families are too okay may i have a motion to go into executive session to discuss matters leading to the employment did you raise your hand no oh god okay to discuss matters leading to the employment of particular persons tony and natalia um all in favor all right thank you and please um let's kind of convene quickly because we have a yeah oh yeah take your time but