SSCSD BOE Meeting 11/9/2021

001thank you can you hear me better now here join me for the pledge thank you can i please give a from september 20th first regular nissan board of education previously distributed connie first john ii is there any discussion all in favor thank you can i now be the motion to accept this evening's agenda natalia first amanda said is there any discussion all on paper thank you that's unique as well that brings us to our first public comment period on behalf of the board i'd like to extend our thanks to all in attendance tonight we appreciate you taking your time to be with us value your time and are grateful you're here board of education meetings in new york state our board meetings held in public so we can conduct the business of the district with

002transparency i provide a maximum amount of information to our community this means there is no dialogue between the board and public during our meetings however we do provide two public comment periods during which speakers may address the board to share information and opinions and we are eager to hear your voices and opinions if your statement does require follow-up the appropriate person will be in touch 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 while the second comma period has no timeline ground rules for public comments include speakers and audience members conducting themselves in a respectful manner please join us as role models for our students on civil discourse and constructive dialogue and in return we commit to actively listening and

003consider what we 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 is allotted three minutes and again the time period is limited to 30 minutes total before you address the board please clearly state your name and address you ready so i have two general comments that i'm here for tonight the first is the policy for the winter sports about testing only unvaccinated students it's discrimination but i'm not even going to get into that right now what i'm here for is i don't understand why the school's not following the policy of the

004cdc and the department of health the only reason i know that my daughter tested positive on october 8th my son tested positive on october 19th the department of health said we will not retest your letter and they sent her to school while she was in direct contact with my son living in the same house when i called the department of health to follow up on the question they told me that your daughter is technically vaccinated for a minimum of 90 days meaning she will test positive for 90 days because she tested positive with symptoms it would pass less for the school to test her but we are not the school so the school has its own policy i'm fine my question is she has unvaccinated i know he will test her because of her in

005this community and she will test positive what is going to happen the school's already sent her back to school whatever someone has tested positive the other one address is the policy of 1420. it just came to my attention a couple days ago from a friend of mine and i'm not clear on the policy as i'm reading it's the curriculum and the material in the classroom right now a lot of parents in this district are afraid to speak up because they are afraid of retaliation against their children at all [Music] and they're very polite and they speak with facts the policy states that to me you don't want parents addressing anything that's related to um next speaker is ramon dominus the district policy states will wear their masks inside school buildings in our district so i

006guess i'm expanding on her comment as of last week in saratoga county 47 of the people who tested positive for horizonte were vaccinated with that in mind if my sons are going to do indoor sport why what is said it would be required for them to be tested with me this is a redundant question as you can see but they are the vaccinated people who are just as much of a risk for society because they can still get going and pass they will be required to be tested so i am in the last meeting and one of the comments that i was about emphasis from it was they need in high you guys are strong on having an equal environment in an inclusive environment and that is this point is just something that doesn't make

007sense thank you on our final comment comes from our district for 40 years i have some grandchildren coming through division street school right now i just want to say that i'm going to say some things that you may not agree with i don't know each and every one of you i'm not attacking you my concerns are really with the system that the teachers are forced to be part of if you walk from the state level down okay so i i appreciate the teachers from the board people who give your time so don't take things personally just just listen maybe um i've been trying to understand over the last month or so that the tenants of the at the state level and at the school district level of diversity equity including trying to understand that why

008it's there what its foundational principles are and i've only got three minutes so i can't really touch on a lot of that but big picture i think we're trying to develop a framework for how to treat each other and interact and you know in the bible it says basically love each other as god loves us and as you love yourself it's pretty simple but the stuff that the district is creating and the state is created is like 20 30 40 pages and sometimes it seems to me to be crazy we might also take a look at some of the tiles that are out there i've noticed in the tiles here's one caring is helping others when they get hurt caring is being kind to you sounds pretty simple didn't take 40 pages caring children in

009acronym caring honest imaginative learning dependent rewarding enthusiastic non-judgmental about that i am responsible for my actions i reach for my best i will try to lead but it can be hard follow your heart build your own path i think the children regardless now here's one one major thing the assumptions built into this policy at the state level and in the school district level are that with law enforcement in this country are systemically racist that is racist that would be like me saying you are racist groups are not racist individuals may be racist and there are racist police officers there are rhesus people probably in this world but to demean our law enforcement and to teach our children that is wrong and it's evil and it's going to lead to division and it's going to lead

010to them not having respect for police officers it's going to hurt them the other thing is that just this whole thing of teaching children to make assumptions about people and their character based on their skin color for god's sakes that's evil how can you think that's anything but evil books in the library people have read about it are totally inappropriate some would be considered pornographic and yet we're concerned about practices where have we gotten this is building a system to divide us and teach us to hate each other if black children or children of color think that they are oppressed by white children one nice question not not foreign please wear your mask appropriately over your mouth and nose that closes our first public comment period um and moves us on to reports and recommendations

011do we have any board committee reports dean thanks angie i checked in with john and dave both and wasn't uh much to report this week we'll see most of it in front of us later on with bill and morty those guys it's going to narrow it down to like 30 seconds or something uh the one thing that i did want to point out to the district was something that came in front of the property committee it's in our packet of materials it's a resolution from the city council uh naming the major skill over east side wreck in honor of william james and erie iii the only reason i want to point this out is is in our current policies the district has you know a template in place of how we would name things in

012honor of individuals and this may seem as though it's not um it doesn't coincide with the current policy that's because it was done many many years ago it was done in 2011 uh when he passed away the year prior and so the city council had just lost lost sight of it and we discussed it at our last policy committee meeting and felt that based on the fact that they already had ceremony there's already a plaque installed over the field and the family you know supports it and the recreation the children's youth organizations that are over there supported as well we felt that it was uh right for us to take it back to the city and just ask them to put it in true resolution fashion so that's why you saw that front of you

013this evening so anybody has any questions just let me know thanks dean any other reports or questions for dean and time thanks okay so geyser road on november 13th is world kindness day so geyser road has been working to put some extra kindness into the community this week and they also have a parent-teacher conferences at the end of this month dorothy nolan has been working with the american reading company and a coach has come to the school today they're also looking forward to their pbis redemption day where they will celebrate with prizes and raffles they'll also have their turkey trout run in preparation for the thanksgiving holiday break kindergarten and first grades are learning about zoology and they had a snake man presentation recently where they were able to interact with critters and reptiles and

014caroline street is celebrating veterans day this week the principal and music teacher is saying patriotic songs during lunch they're also wearing red white and blue on wednesday for veterans and on friday the fifth graders will be celebrating with their pasta dinner take out fundraiser over at maple lab middle school the first annual trunk retreat took place on saturday october 30th where over 22 trunkers volunteered and 22 traitors attended local businesses like druthers saratoga golf course strike zone stewards donated gift cards to the winners of the events in total the school raised seven hundred dollars oh i'm sorry twenty seven uh thousand dollars to benefit future scholarships for maple lab field trips um for future events that people have on november 8th the school is supporting lung cancer awareness and it's going to be a white

015out so all student staff and faculty will wear white and on november 23rd um students and staff will wear their favorite jerseys um switching over to the high school the drama club will hold its production of radio girls on november 12 and 13 at seven o'clock in the auditorium so please come out and support them and our unified program is participating in the polar plunge in lake george on november 13th donations can be made to support the unified program and lastly the student council is holding a food drive from november 1st to the 15th the collection box is in the main lobby in the high school [Music] we have two changes in our agenda tonight one one will take place later at the normal time but this is a special one we're going to pull

016item b 1a out and vote on it right now and therefore i move that the board approved the equipment of julianne barnes to tenure can i get a second until any discussion all in favor that is unanimous thank you so i know julian's here with her family uh so we want to provide them the opportunity to go out and settle them uh obviously tenure is a significant milestone in all educators professional careers and certain welcome great julianne she's a special education teacher at dorothea elementary school and so uh traditionally you know throughout the course of the year we do have some staff members that are off cycle uh that get tenured in the middle of the school year and so that's julianne's case so vote just congratulations uh for the wonderful job that you supporting

017all students especially students at dorothy nolan uh so you should be very proud of all your accomplishments how many family members do you have with you um accomplishments before we get into presentations so hopefully you get out and you can celebrate so so congratulations elementary school for hosting the board of education tonight i want to thank our members of our student support services team at 6 30 board had a presentation with our social workers and psychologists and they just do an awesome job providing support services to all students and this is reflective of the work that's done here at guys road elementary school but really across all uh all the schools in our school district so i know miss whitley had a family commitment tonight and wasn't able to be here but there are several

018members of the guys right staff that are with us tonight so uh so thank you very much for hosting the board uh tonight and again uh kudos to the student support services team for a wonderful presentation uh before the board meeting so just a few right conditions uh and we'll uh obviously turn over to mr mcpartlin here in a few minutes but uh we are wrapping up the fall sports season so i want to congratulate all of our student athletes uh thank our coaches thank our parents all of our spectators for their support throughout the fall season we were extremely fortunate that we are able to continue all of our extracurricular programming throughout the fall season our coaches and student athletes just did an incredible job uh following protocols uh keeping each other healthy and

019safe and you know having the opportunity to compete within this urban council onto sectional play uh and we do have a few teams that are still going to be competing at the at the state level so we want to miss out we wish our girls cross country and our cross-country team uh live as they head into uh the state level and federal uh federation level competition so uh congratulations again uh and you'll hear a little bit from mr portland in a few minutes um about again the wonderful job that everybody did this fall and uh we'll turn things over next monday on the 15th to begin our fourth our winter sports seasons so uh but it's great to have so many kids involved in all the extra critical activities here across the district next update

020is just on vaccination clinics as you know the cdc approved last week uh the next eligible group of students ages five to eleven um so we have a very strong partnership with the saratoga county department of health uh and school districts across new york state uh have been tasked with assisting with the public health effort and making vaccinations available to students and families who choose uh to vaccinate and so uh this coming saturday we're hosting our it's actually i think our sixth clinic that we've got as a district uh so saturday november 13th and again on saturday december 4th we we posted uh last thursday afternoon and i think it filled in like seven minutes um so there obviously is a high demand uh in in listening to um you know our partners doctors friends

021office again they're appreciated the fact that the school district can offer the service and we've got a lot of folks who are volunteering uh to assist with the clinic and then dr all the physicians and physicians and his staff uh volunteered their entire saturday uh to come and and make this possible for our students and families i do want to address mrs king's comment she is correct there is a 30-day exemption for the testimony requirement for any individual who's tested positive for coco so any of the students or staff members because we are testing our staff regularly now on a weekly basis but any individual who has confirmed positive case they are exempt from testing for for 90 days or three months and at the end of that three-month window is when we would resume

022testing for those individuals so i did i did want to make sure to clarify that she was accurate in her comments so that would be a procedure that again will be implemented in the winter sports seasons um so again for our unvaccinated or students who again were tested test recently positive there is that exemption for three months i just want to recognize all of our teachers last tuesday was our first superintendent's conference day of the regular school year we opened up the school year with two days back-to-back after labor day and i think the timing of this past tuesday fell on a perfect date i had an opportunity to get out and interact with the teachers across the district i think they really appreciated the time to work with their colleagues within their professional learning

023teams to review curriculum and pacing guides and not only to kind of debrief on how the first few weeks of school went but to plan ahead for the coming weeks as we get into the busy holiday season so but there was a tremendous amount of collaboration taking place across the district where teachers don't always have the opportunity to be working in grade level teams or getting all our student support service providers together all in one location at the same time there was some real creative activities going on mr sanders in the back the middle school did a great team building session that i had the opportunity to participate and join in on those are important things i think for our staff to have the opportunity to uh to interact with one another in social settings

024and again the collaboration that took place last week was uh was very well done and uh and appreciate all the efforts that went to organization for that day um we do have a local education workshop uh we hosted a workshop about two weeks ago on our district's diversity equity inclusion efforts next monday which is november 15th now we're going to be hosting another real workshop this is on the budget development process so this can be held over in rooms 221 223 the administration building from 6 to 7 30 so those meetings are open to the public we do not stream those meetings but the public is welcome to attend if you're interested in learning more about our budget development process and i just also want to make one more plot uh that all of our

025board of education policies as the board knows we've been working for last several years aligning our policies with the new york state school boards association's renewal process and just uh yesterday we were excited that we were able to have the link live to have all of our core policies available online that was the goal of ours when we started this renewal process so now again any community member staff member who's interested in looking up any of the policies that used to be binders in offices are now obviously available online uh it's a link that goes actually off-site to the new york state school boards association but we regularly are updating our board policies so that process will continue it really never ends we're continuously renewing policies so we've got a few more to go on

026our first go around and then there'll be quarterly updates that every time we update any more policy that will be reflected on what's available for everybody to see online so again thank the policy committee thank you board of education for your support this is obviously it's a pretty intensive process that we've gone through and having the goal of getting those policies up online i know something that we've all been very much looking forward to so we do have uh three presentations tonight um so i'm excited that the board of education i did last spring had made the request to have the opportunity to learn more about our k-12 music program uh so we have several of our teachers here with us tonight as well as janet steinle who's our director of k-12 humanities so i'd

027like to turn it over to folks in the music department to provide a k-12 renewal and program update from our music department good evening everyone can you hear me okay okay i'm jen steinle i'm the director of elementary instruction in k12 humanities and tonight i have the pleasure to introduce some members of our k-12 music staff as mike mentioned back in the spring there was a request from the board to see some information about the k-12 music program prior to the end of the school year which is typically when we talk about renewals but because there's so much information coming in june to all of you with robbery rules it makes some sense to talk about it now additionally there's some really exciting news that they'll share along the way about their programming about the

028success of particular students and upcoming concert seasons so i'm going to have each of them just introduce themselves but first i want to recognize that there are several members of our music department here as our cheering squad if you're in the army's so we're really excited that they're here to support our group and to support our work k-12 i just wanted to start um by thanking the board for inviting us here to present and showcase about our music curriculum tonight and also yes thank you to all the music teachers who came to this presentation to support us i know many are all men as well um so i am eric i'm the music department chair six through twelve and um i also teach high school women's and uh the elementary fans at lake aven and

029thank you i'm a little nervous my name is megan o'sullivan and i am the late avenue general music and world teacher uh i'm jared you've seen me recently on some presentations um i teach german music chorus and a little bit of orchestra at greenfield elementary school and i'd also like to add that um i'm a student of the district and specifically the program so i had also bring to the table that sort of lived the experience of this music program which i'm honored to you know be a teacher we wanted to start off our presentation with a video and the intention was to give the board a much needed window to how our k-12 music program is implementing the saratoga pathways vision and to showing you that even under covered restrictions you'll still find that

030all of our music teachers are working hard to keep music alive in each of our schools so we hope that you enjoy so [Applause] so thank you okay i'm gonna jump into our um student data information i'll start off with elementary um some parts of the presentation that you'll notice along the bottoms again we're also sort of powering these and you'll see the golden ones which are emphasized on the particular slides you'll see actually all of them have at least two now most of them have at least two but not more so you'll see this one um equity of opportunity and personalization are bolded um and we'll also know the details of our pictures um again we just want you to feel connected to our program and experience the varieties of ways that music is

031uh pervasive in our schools so on the top left we have a picture from john music and at the bottom we have a collaborative concert stream concert with elementary and high school students and you'll see some dinos conducting so that's always fun and that that was a pre-proved picture um so let's see everybody's notes for um elementary data is that our elementary teachers see 100 of the student body so it's very powerful that you know i know every single student in my school um you know i see them on a daily basis so that's um you know just the power and the joy of teaching elementary music um and um you know having those interactions with every single body in the school uh we also have uh elementary uh insurance music orchestra starts in fourth

032grade uh continues in fifth grade and band is offered in fifth grade so when you actually see of the fourth and fifth grade population we see a little bit over half of the students would like to take those classes as well eric if you want to talk about secondary information as pathways for our students increase as they go through the grade levels you can see how that affects the numbers in our program our numbers are still very comparable to other suburban council schools um we're still we're very proud at our high school level that we have we have 19 of the total high school population participating in our music program so that's about one in five students um one thing that i wanted to point out though about this slide if you're really looking at

033the numbers for example with high school you can see that a total of students participate in our program but then if you look at the breakdown between um you know the general music course offerings and the performing ensembles 82 plus 306 does not equal three uh 362 students and that's because there's a lot of um students who are doubling in courses so there might be a couple of students who are in chorus and van over um [Music] this slide is showing everyone the pathway from elementary school music to hopefully students making it all the way through their senior year in high school our program starts off in kindergarten and first grade where all students receive 40 minutes of general music education one time per week this year both lake avenue and dorothy nolan are beginning

034a pilot with the american reading company where we are taking on the music and the theater component and seeing how we can see the children additional minutes and be collaborating with our classroom teachers in that way in the second grade chorus begins and that would be an additional minute time block that the students are meeting and in the nonprofit year that would be the entire say second grade or third grade class coming together for that 40 minute meeting but currently in covid either rehearsals are being outside or they're settling through on a rotation then in third grade recorders begin and the students they love them i know for some parents at home and receive some when does it start um in fourth grade is when then we add the additional elective and orchestra and fifth

035grade the additional elective of band and then throughout particularly second through fifth grade we offer before and after school enrichment music programs and each teacher that is participating in that they really tailor it to so 100 of our population uh participate in music we're taking these courses in k through uh six um there is a new york state requirement saying that students do need to participate in these of course k through six so that does carry into our middle school uh our sixth graders particip participate in at least one of uh general music band course or orchestra um the new york state requirement in seventh and eighth grade though between those two years there has to be one music course i know we've talked with our counseling office and i know that seventh grade scheduling

036is very complex so that happens in our district in eighth grade our eighth graders take one of the fire music of course and that could be general music band chorus or orchestra um for our seventh graders they they are able to take ann morris or orchestra our chorus is an option for students on the general music track who took general music in sixth grade and want to continue in music in seventh grade i do want to make it clear course is a very specialized skill set and it requires specialized teacher instruction and rehearsal but it's not mechanical so so it is a part of our values the human voice which makes it a little bit more universal and accessible for our students so that is an option um especially if students do not have prior

037and some of the experience they can start to participate in ensembles um a lot of our middle school teachers choose to differentiate their instruction even further above and beyond what they need to do a requirement to do in their classrooms you can see all of the clubs that are listed on the side of the slide and we will get more into the expert curriculars as we go through our presentation um as we work into the high school uh new york city requires one fine arts credit across all four years so some of our pathways for that i know there's a lot of acronyms on the slide m-i-o-l is music in our lives and that is our general music course offering and the general music sequence goes to uh midi studio midi stands for musical instrument

038digital interface and it's a music technology course and then music university is a theory course that is college accredited through ualbany and then there's also ap music theory and then you have our ensembles that we offer band course and orchestra unlike middle school where they're based on grade level for example there's a sixth grade band or a seventh grade and eighth grade band in high school it's more based on nismo performance level so our concert groups may be performing at like a nismo level four and it goes through fiscal level five when the level six is the highest level nismus stands for new york state school music association [Music] association in new york city that really defines a lot of our curriculum for us um and then our chorus is also you know once again

039it's the human voice and it's more accessible for our students it's less mechanical our concert choir is a universal ensemble that all of our students can participate i'll add to your alphabet soup you have your very thick glossary going of acronyms the most important one for you to take away is gm general music and the pictures on this slide top left is music and movement on that one set from dorothy nolan and as you can probably guess bottom left is the four leaders singing each year at graduation um next i'll talk very briefly about lessons lessons occur in the entirety of the toronto museum program and that high school course um the actually before i go the pictures here top left is a strings lesson small group lesson in green field and bottom left is

040a small group lesson of percussion at maple one um so the front of our program is the in-school lessons and the reason we do in school lessons is um as many families know we are trying to emulate the private lesson experience that people pay often top dollar for that's common practice around the world for more advanced music study so especially learning the piano for example is one where you'll pay a private teacher and you can prepare a lesson for a half hour maybe 45 minutes um in the public school system they're in a small group so you might think of this as being equivalent to a tier three reading or map ais where they're seeing a teacher for targeted instruction in a small group in music um you'll see that we group our lessons we

041have the flexibility to use our professional judgment to group students by whatever will be most meaningful to them in their learning so this might be by instrument or voice fight um you know sopranos and alcohols versus maybe tenors and basses on different instruments we'll have certain strain instruments together certain instruments together grades and age and ability level um and the students in the relation to the teacher course though we see about over five lessons you might see an average of 20 to 30 students and again that's generally roughly equivalent to the aas instruction that you might hear from you know reading around teachers um some popular instruments right seven violins may be in one group together it's a very popular instrument you might have two tubas in a group not too many students thanks to

042carry around a huge so you might have two in a group um and we i think as i already mentioned at the beginning we had a collaborative process with our peers um and this was from one of our teachers they really wanted to impart the rationale lessons in lessons students learn much more than just the mechanics of making sound they learn to be both technical and expressive at the same time in lessons they learn skills of organization self-discipline perseverance leadership and also how to be a team player after lessons this forwards us right to concert sort of the showing of our work and lessons and what we do so after three concert seasons of coven we are finally getting back into the swing of things we're getting a little closer to normal our winter concert

043season is occurring at the high school and at the middle school level uh k-6 students just recently were able to get vaccinated so for elementary concerts we're still waiting to hear more from our district about student safety i'll i'll be the picture talker because i put a lot of them together again collaboratively but i selected them from our shared files top left is a pre-copied uh course concert at maple level she was one of our retired faculty members uh mrs bailey so again obviously very large group but that's you know sort of the dream that's the pinnacle of what uh you know my concept should be especially for choir top right is um high school forest rehearsal um in the ta as you might recognize middle is a band rehearsal you'll notice um it's hopefully

044really good here the bell cover that's the white cover that's our sort of ppe um for you know masking of our instruments and then the bottom is actually my um outdoor chorus rehearsal um choruses right now at the elementary school are generally rotating obviously for precautions but um i have a lot of space and you know the right equipment to be able to have rehearsals outside so that's um something i'm choosing to do and you see just it looks very different than you know the normal rehearsals based out but we you know making the best of what we have um and our next slide is talking about all the extracurriculars so pictures here our top left picture is our high school fiddle club and they have done several trips to ireland at this point and

045when we're able to do field trips again hopefully at some point soon we'll be going to scotland the center picture represents our practice-a-thon was that which was actually an activity that was created through covid we knew as a music department a really big part of our curriculum was to have students working towards a goal as a team and also connecting with our families and our community through our practice of bond we raised eight thousand dollars and we wanted to give that to our community especially to businesses that support the arts so we gave um that's a big check for four thousand dollars given to spat we also gave a check to the franklin community center uh something really cool about the practice-a-thon is that um that was an activity that was developed through coven but

046it was so successful we want to continue that through this year in future years we also participate in many festivals and field trips our staff is highly involved in our professional community a lot of festivals actually take place here a lot of school districts come to our district to participate in these festivals in march every year we have a misma solo festival um and we also do ariel ball state area allstate is like 50 neighboring school districts all come to saratoga it's the top players from all of those districts they play for a weekend together and then perform a concert at the end of the weekend and sometimes we also we also host nisma majors which is a not a solo festival but an ensemble festival where medals are given out and in different school

047districts and ensembles are recognized so another thing that i want to mention is this year conference allstate is one of the greatest honors for a high school student who is participating in a music program we have a student this year maxwell novik who is a senior and uh even despite all the odds with coleman 19 he made it into a mixed chorus based on his exceptional score at misma solo festival he scored a 100 on the highest level level six and he will be participating in the conference all-state uh festival in rochester in um in the beginning of december so that's very exciting we're very proud of maxwell and um festivals that we participate in suburban council all county all of these festivals require either an audition or a high level solo festival or a

048teacher recommendation and the fact that our students are are being selected to perform in these ensembles means that we are competing at a level that is comparable to other suburban council schools we also we also have field trips that our students go on like disney and williamsburg where they perform and they're recognized for their performance and they get to ride on roller coasters have a good time that's same for six flags new england and then also every year we um except for very cool but obviously we take our students to a new york city broadway field trip next to that is the high school's middle class and the next row is the snapshot of the lake avenue classroom concert next to that is a regular general classroom for dorothy nolan and on the bottom that

049is a collaboration with high school middle school fiddle clubs and the greenfield orchestra club as part of the instrumental petting zoo that takes place during the opening years that's way to get the children excited about joining the instrumental all grade programs so why is music still relevant to our students and our community at large there's actually so many everyone here this went down obviously it's why the other music families feel very passionate about it the first um we're not the only ones the friends of music they are a parent around booster group which is equivalent to the sports of sports booster itself and they have really been wonderful at luthier monumental helping us close the gaps financially to make sure all students can attend the festival by covering the registration fees and even providing class

050address for students we also have um oh i wanted to question a quote from our very esteemed high school band teacher assembly in 28 years of teaching i have never heard of anyone saying i regret learning a musical question i do however often hear the regrets of adults who quit studying music in there and i'd have to say the same as a singing specialist i also hear that too or stories from colleagues now that i worked with that really brings me a great thoughts brought them through school music here is a strong part of the history of saratoga springs including year-round performances at cafe lina and summer staples of the dallas festival new york city ballet and the philadelphia orchestra but by providing continued consistent musical learning starting at dinner time and i think that's

051really important that that connection is made because where does the audience come from right and it's important we really really are supporting those venues a specific example of course i'm personally very proud of this is the classroom concert program which is featured in this year we've piloted this just the june and july prior to coleman and then division street took over the pilot and unfortunately that was the most common dude so here we go this is made up of all second graders first graders and fourth graders at lake county as well as in the center for the fifth grade orchestra and uh was here she was in here with roblox for her students at the time we were i was contacted by lynn at the saratoga community uh chamber players to see if i would

052do this project for them and i said okay we'll give it a shot and basically should put me in contact with kelly facebook who is a professional composer from new york city and said the two of you were together and he wrote a musical and it was based on the little peninsula planet of nature and the students with me we developed the story over the course of many months wrote it he came a few times and visited took the children's musical ideas recorded them went home wrote the music there's a link to the premiere and it wasn't that important [Music] but it was truly incredible then he invited members of saratoga chamber players to come they actually played with this great registrar and accompanying the standards and personally i feel like this is like the

053epitome of collaboration for writing things or learning from literature working with professional musicians and it's something i'm just really very proud of and i'm excited to see what happens at division street and i do hope this partnership can continue so as you can see relevant um think tomorrow and just our students it is more than just fun there's a lot going on here and we're really proud to be here before you today so how we're implementing diversity equity and inclusion in the music program so we have some examples here last year of perry termings with the northern hill music teacher introduced um prep and arts and education to the idea of partnering with crafters and having the virtual performance of black violins in our schools and the kids that loved it and then also be

054able to we are working very hard all the time to tailor our cultural music experiences and resources to reflect the actual cultures represented in our school populations where we have always been teaching both on cultural music we're now taking it to the next level you know what is meaningful when students smell classrooms and i can tell you firsthand um from this picture right here students get so much joy from sharing about their cultures and language and to see in my students when we talk about the wall of diwali um i celebrated that at home or they would say oh we're celebrating that right now it really just makes them feel awesome they get to talk to us all about it you're all becoming your mother secondly our cultural responsible response working to continue respecting the

055authenticity of cultural music continued professionalism to learn what we don't know yet while we're using the music of others with permission and i think that's a delicate area [Music] standard it's a very overview we have four um artistic processes these are the new york state learning standards for the arts they're uniform across all the arts disciplines including visual art media library all that and the four artistic processes are separated into the 11 anchor standards that you see at the right or actually not we could stop talking an hour about these um and but what i'm going to um we're going to just see sort of this visual better explain sort of how creating responding performing and connecting are you know enriched and almost one in the same they're essential to creating the student music experience

056um most of us live most if not all of these standards on a daily basis so unlike um in a math classroom where a standard might be learning specific skills about fractions we're constantly integrating and you know hitting all or most or all of these on a daily basis um and they're also designed to be overarching their general but they drill down to be very specific they're meant to be overlarging to apply to any grade or style of classroom of music we saw all the pathways from kindergarten drum music to the high school technology class these standards apply to any and all of them the picture on this slide um our faculty together on a superintendent's conference day uh this was november of 2019 so it was pre-moved but all of us are working together

057every teacher every plt group is working on our curriculum removal cycle right now and we just finished addressing the question where are we now and we did that through using our district's curriculum renewal tool and now that we've uh in each plt have kind of figured out the answers to those questions we're now getting to the next step of the process where we're addressing where we're going and how do we get there some common goals that we've found throughout this process is our goal of increasing recruitment and retention efforts to promote the growth of our program our elementary numbers are bouncing back they're resurging after a tough uh covered year last year so we're hoping to see that increase to go through the grade levels and then we're also realizing where we are in regards

058to district to diversity equity and inclusion and where we can go with that and how we can improve the last main thing we wanted to leave you with um is uh this wonderful picture from mrs jackson is in the audience this is your student um i believe and from berlin and um a door like you you see relating um the connection of you know ela and syllables to music you'll notice at the bottom again this is about that with mrs harrison i love my music teacher so adamantly people on the back so i will read it to you quickly um and i'll just read it for you it says this is why i teach music not because i expect you to major in music not because i expect you to play or sing all your

059life not so you can relax not so you can have fun but so you will be human so you will recognize beauty so you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world so you will have something to cling to so you will have more love more compassion more gentleness more good in short or like we'd like to add with um we mentioned you know we have lots of uh links you can find more stuff um any questions from the lord thank you so that was wonderful thank you for that presentation so before we came in here tonight we had a student support services presentation and my colleague john rickerman has said one of our biggest issues right now is mental health and in the room and it definitely calmed all of us down so

060i think no one can debate especially with covet that music was a savings grace for some people so with that i have new questions because we are teaching and exposing our kids to music and one of them is about general music um i noticed that there's no general music and you said that general music was super important so i'm asking this question um what is the effect of not having general music in seventh grade and then my second my other question is about like wind instruments because my my personal kids play with instruments and i'm just wondering if playing for 70 minutes of like resting their face muscles like is that something like how has the schedule change in the upper levels change the student music experience this is hey do you want to start

061sincere all right myself i'll start with um the second question yes so um at our middle school i know that we're um we're working block scheduling right now we have a new schedule this year we are hopeful um you know our time and space committee is working through scheduling details and i know there's a constant review of how things are going in each department for our department specifically 70 minutes is long um for our less experienced middle school players um so i know that their their face muscles um you know are still developing with their instruments um so we are hopeful and our time and space committee does know what we would like to see in the future with possible skinnies so that has been recommended so right now they're at 70 minute blocks for

062example a skinny would be instead of seeing kids for 70 minutes every on a four day rotation they would see students for maybe 35 minutes on a two-day rotation so there would be more repetition because a lot of our ensembles in our curriculum is based on repetition it's very similar to being an athlete you know if you do 10 push-ups on on one day of the week it's not going to make a big difference but if you do 10 push-ups every day or every other day then you'll start to see a difference so so we're hopeful to work with our time and space committee to keep on reviewing that in our curriculum and your first question connie i think was related to the seventh grade in particular right so they get one credit between their

063seventh and eighth grade year so they gain their credit in eighth grade the seventh grade schedule and scott and speak more specifically about what other courses are offered there were a lot of courses that were offered in the seventh grade and the seventh graders in particular needed more flexibility in their schedules which is why we give the credits like it does i'm just wondering if it's something that is foundational for some kids that maybe don't have an instrument and don't want to sing like to have a continuous program for that learning about other cultures and things like that and it's something that we can continue to talk about through the renewal process this the renewal process itself gives us an opportunity to continue the dialogue not that you would in any way your plt while

064you're in the renewal process you really look at where everything lands and this is our first year trying it um not to say that you know our partner might come back once we want an adjustment later it might and then as like like erica was saying if the skinnies change in the future too that becomes part of the conversation thank you very much i'll just add to that at elementary i teach a lot of just practice habits so i think those might be sort of more important than ever to be able to continue or you know have that continuity at home which i hope my students will be practicing every day anyway but you know it's even more important that they're practicing at home um yeah i want to echo connie said i think that

065music is such a part of our culture and it is so essential um i also will continue asking any questions um and i was also so glad to hear the mention of the pilot programs because this morning we had the presentation on the new vla curriculum i was excited to see how there would be interaction between the different subjects um so two of my questions the first is i guess when each of you describes what your job is you're describing many jobs um so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that works with specialties um so what the importance of teacher specialty is and how it impacts he already how it impacts our students um especially when i hear and i see so many different instruments how um specialties

066are definitely at least for us a huge priority um because um basically a teacher who has a professional level of experience you know that college experience in a particular type of ensemble that would be fantastic orchestra has a more impactful you know a better impact on students that's someone who would not have that experience and we don't want to put students in a situation where they have some teachers who have the experience know the specialized skills and can demonstrate those skills and other teachers who have skills in other areas who cannot demonstrate that it's important for us to be motivating and inspiring our students we want to give them the best possible education and we believe that that comes from giving them the best who knows the specific skill area and it's unfortunate our certification

067is music k through 12 and some would say it's fortunate because it makes us flexible really there are so many intricacies in each discipline that need to be addressed and that is at all levels even our elementary school students need to be learning from a teacher who can really truly demonstrate the skills at a high level who can inspire them yeah i'll just speak to that um i know i have personally i have sort of more than one specialty i specifically took courses sort of in the band realm and the orchestra realm so you know i've chosen fortunate enough to have a wide variety of experiences again also developed here at territory um and i have to say like when teachers are assigned to teach their specialty there's that vibrancy there's that magic that occurs

068you know i can naturally pick up you know an instrument and and you know play with my eyes closed behind my back you know um so if um you know that's not the case a student or a teacher may not be as they're devoted and they're they put all their energy into it but their energy first to go into sort of mastering that instrument themselves you know what i mean um say for percussion you know if i were you know teaching a lot of percussion lessons before i dedicate myself to my students i want to improve myself it's almost actually to go back to like mental health you take care of yourself first and then you help others you know if a teacher were teaching something that wasn't familiar to them they would probably spend

069a lot of time um you know learning it themselves and and doing as much as they can and you know maybe not make them as available as soon as possible to their students um so that's sort of you know just why it's important like i said i suppose behind my back i could play certain instruments and others i would want to learn more on if that were teaching more regularly i was really thinking about this today and um i'm a vocalist and when you go to college as a music major you choose your track whether it's a vocal track or an instrumental track so as a vocalist the majority of my classes are all in vocal technique vocal lessons conducting with a very brief sprinkling if you take a few instruments the teacher's like yeah

070good enough and move you on so myself taking a job even though i would only be looking for local music education jobs because that's truly what i'm qualified in um but as an instrumental track teacher you have to take those of your instruments at a very high level in order to think level up it's an extremely high level that you have to be able to play each of the woods and brass instruments before they'll allow you to graduate and that's what makes our instrumental teachers so qualified they will be teaching a band lesson because i had made seven weeks on each instrument 25 years ago even though we are k-12 we know when we graduate what positions to apply for in the best interest of our students in the school thank you um my other

071question so um i originally brought a request for this presentation um following um noticing that we had two years where we had busy teachers retired and then we eliminated those positions for attrition and so i'm just wondering what is the impact of that on the program i know that we've had a lot of presentations or presentations but a lot of information presented on what to expect and what has been the actual impact of that again i think the biggest impact would be on the middle school i know that we do know we do not have um 7th grade general music anymore and that was a part of that [Music] but like we said before with the new york state requirements the requirement is for one course for seventh grade um in eighth grade between those

072two grade levels there will be one course so in uh the idea with that cup was that we would preserve you know that um that fte that full-time equivalent of teaching position but what ended up happening is eighth grade because those those seventh grade students still have to have a general music credit um they were finding that the sections in eighth grade are starting to bloom a little bit more than in the past so in the past you would see typically around 8 to 11 sections of general music in 8th grade now we're seeing about 14 sections of general music in 8th grade so because of that ballooning and because we need to cover those sections sixth grade now see i wrote a couple notes all right um let's see so well because of the

073ballooning in eighth grade basically we had to we had to make some adjustments to our sixth grade curriculum typically in the past we've had sixth graders who could do both general music and instrumental they had to participate in general music now um they get to choose between those words [Music] i'll just kind of add from um hopefully you know sort of pulling you there's a positive way of traveling like not all traveling is is bad you know so um you know if it's i say you know if it's pulled tighter there'd be more traveling to still cover and still offer as many things um but there are some traveling that's good like especially at our elementary schools like there's a you know um person for a day and they teach those specific lessons you know

074he's sort of just spoke about the specialties and there's you know a day of band and you know they stay at one school the whole day so it's kind of a good traveling for them to you know have different orchestras at different schools so um i don't that relates but it's you know it's a fine balance of putting people in the right place and having um you know having the right people there as well and i think another aspect is the teaching load that comes like through the absorption of physicians and you know every single music probably as every teacher in this district is extremely hard working but our schedules are becoming fuller and fuller or i think you know at the max amount and with um some course loads of students are just well

075above the five months well i think we have one teacher that is teaching 584 students this year and um where the average is usually around 400 for a general museum teacher but anyway i question as i make it throughout each day as i'm teaching you know my earlier classes i have the energy and i'm ready to go and those students are getting such a wonderful experience but as the day progresses and you get into your you know 240th minute of teaching for the day maybe i'm going to go four classes in a row or some of my colleagues um that those last couple of classes are just not getting the same teacher and in that way it's not a teacher complaining why i'm tired it's you know for my students getting the same benefit as

076when you know a teacher is refreshed and just keeping that in mind as we're moving positions around is the energy making sure we're just providing all of our students with the same experience thank you you for the presentation and thank you for all you do you know a lot of us encounter concerts and shows and we feel so much joy we're there and apparently a ton of work goes into all that and thanks for thinking on your feet and answering our hard questions too um one of the things that i find sitting up here is how incredibly complicated curriculum work is and it takes a long time and it takes a lot of expertise and it takes um extensive investigation into the details of the work trying to be aligned with the state requirements trying

077to make choices about what's good so i'm i'm really glad when we have experts on the ground driving that and um you know we we trust you um i'm curious i also want to comment on the seventh grade general music uh i'm curious i'm glad you're around the state that's good that's a good thing that consequences if you don't do that um do other districts around us have seventh grade uh general music and i hope you'll advocate strongly natalie said something last year that really stuck with me about the value of music that isn't competitive elite high pressure and we all we hope there's always room for our most ambitious talented students to grow but we also hope there's room for as you said you know and so i think you made such a strong

078place for general music and and um so i'm very eager to hear how that ongoing consideration unfolds right now is um you know one teacher is specialized in that sort of mini it's the you know sort of technology so that's you know the offering that that staff member is you know it's his specialty he teaches it so um you know whoever is given the opportunity to make a course you know you can tell right we're so invested we will make it what you know we need to and that's actually i'll go back to the club that's why we have so many clubs to meet those you know varied interests um was ukuleles but you know there's like you know there's so many avenues to reset so that's very important thank you for the suburban council

079question we are we're fulfilling our new york state requirements and i know that before and we are comparable to other suburban council schools with our general music requirements so again i just want to thank erica and derek and megan for the presentation i know you put a lot of time and effort in getting feedback from your colleagues and we are so excited to be entering back into concert season and having the opportunity to perform again so so thank you for the outstanding job you continue to do and thank you to all of your colleagues who came out to support this money and uh for the presentation thank you all right so next up for our annual update program update to the board of education parkway who's our director of education health and athletics as well

080as kelsey allen who's our department head for grades 1612 for health and physical education i'm going to be providing the board with their annual update on our physical education health good athletics program happy to be here um yeah as dr said we have our sister's wife department head here for health education and physical education so happy to have her here she's going to jump into some of the changes related to physical education so i it's been almost exactly a year today from when i present on athletics and just reflecting back in the last time i presented because i had to go through my notes there's been so much that's occurred from last year to now around this time last year we were just past a halfway point with our fall score season which went into

081our winter one season then winner two and then fall two and then spring and then now we're starting to wind down our fall sports seasons right now and but not everybody's finished as dr patton shared earlier we're really excited our girls cross country team uh had another tremendous showing at the section two races this past weekend finishing one through six and then we had a eighth place finish for their thirtieth section two title uh so just continue to demonstrate uh just high level performance um and then on the boys side we're really excited that we had two two boys breast country owners that qualified to compete at states this upcoming weekend um mason tarot rico and ryan bush ryan bush also finished first overall at the section two race which was great uh tremendous performance

082uh by both teams there so we're really excited and then we have uh two swimmers qualified for uh the state meet as well we have rachel lowe and maddie rachel love who's a three-time section two champ in the 200 and 500 freestyle and she's actually going to be signing this week the national letter of intent to attend texas a m so a lot of positives this fall but uh i can't believe how much has occurred over the last 12 months just with athletics so continue on that and i always like to show this slide i i'm very proud of the fact that saratoga springs continues to lead when it comes to opportunity for our students to be involved with our athletic programs as you can see across the suburban council we have the most sport

083offerings which is great and to add to that i'm really excited about the fact that through all these culture challenges uh i i really feel very strongly that saratoga has done the best job of maintaining uh sport levels so you know we in a non-profit year we already provide the most offerings but i can tell you with my colleagues across the league the challenges that have come with it there's been some other districts have experienced some attrition um just the the inability to maybe retain kids because challenges within their own respective districts and we've been able to maintain every level every sport team that we would offer in a in a traditional year i'm really excited about that and that's what they tested into our board of education our district administration your support continued support

084with athletics [Music] during these challenging times continuing to lead forward through these challenges and i think it's it's because you recognize the value that comes with our students being involved with our athletic programs so thank you for that you know we we're anticipating this year which has been much more predictability in comparison to last year again we're not completely done with our first season but it's been it's been much easier to kind of work through the beginning of this year and prepare for some things we know we're still dealing with some cool challenges but last year it just seemed like everything everything was just so much day-to-day but i think the coaches i think the parents and our athletes are excited about some of the predictability that has come already with this year and we've

085had um this fall over 500 games and we're anticipating getting back to our 1100 1200 games that we would typically have in a season and that's not even included in our postseason events so i feel like we're off to a very strong start and excited to continue with that so moving along just jumping into our student participation you know as i mentioned earlier retaining all of our levels in our teams it has been great we know last year that modified was directly impacted by uh not being able to move forward with our traditional modified offerings but we made the most of a difficult situation and doing the best we can to offer some intramural offerings for our sixth seventh and eighth grade students um but kohler has impacted some of our overall numbers but i

086do feel that already this fall we are trending back to where our typical fall registration numbers would look like i can tell you right now as we're we're still getting our winner registration is occurring those numbers are looking very promising right now which i'm really excited about um so again even as we're dealing with some challenges it feels like we're still done you know we're still showing as a community as a district that there's high interest within our athletic programs uh i have our federal placement process our numbers up here that's been a topic of conversation uh in previous board meetings so uh i can tell you the winner tends to be a higher number of students where he competed and i can tell you that the vast majority and i can tell you the

087exact percent is very willing to guess that easily over 90 percent of our students that get evp are in programs we just don't have modified levels you know we're very fortunate that we offer things like alpine ski and nordic ski and some of these unique sports that you don't see in all section two schools and there's just not an opportunity for them to complete the modified level because other schools don't have those same programs or might not have the same amount of interest to offer at the moment level so we do extend some opportunities for seventh and eighth graders to go through the athletic placement process because you know we want to start bringing them in the fold we want to get them involved with those programs especially if they're demonstrating an interest in those

088in those sports the the winter season is very very it's it's a tough season for our our seventh and eighth grade students you know the fall is probably the most robust season that we have with the most sport offerings so it's great to see our middle school kids involved and then to go in the winter where earlier our traditional modified seasons are basketball wrestling and swimming um you know so hopefully as a league we can continue to work towards how do we generate more interest at those levels so we can have more offerings but that's currently where we are so we're excited that if we can't get some seventh and eighth graders attached to some of our sport programs even before they get to the high school we think it's a great opportunity for them

089so jumping into some uh academic accolades so we uh again last year even with all the challenges you know for our students whether they're in the classroom outside the classroom either as a hybrid student or a virtual student we again qualified as a as a school of excellence which means that 90 of our varsity teams uh reached the designation of scholar athlete team which is which is great but we are you know we are we're striving for school distinction which is 100 of our varsity teams reaching that scholar after the status so we continue to work closely with the coaches and and try to streamline ways to check in on our students especially all over the season to see how they're doing within the classes uh checking on their academic progress and you know i

090it's it's been it's been great to see our coaches really i can quickly understand you know the role that they play in our student athletes lives um that the relationship that they have with their student athlete gives them that space to have those hard conversations about hey you know what's going on in class well you know we know that maybe some grades are slipping a little bit where you might need some extra help is that things related to time management um so we take our ride in our athletic department about holding the kids accountable um but really just showing support that hey we want you to be a part of the program you know how can we work on some strategies to make sure that not only we're successful after school practice and within our

091competitions but also during the day within the classroom as well so we are aiming for 100 sky rafting teams this year uh hoping to reach that school of distinction status um you know but we are we're really excited about the fact that the majority of our student athletes i think demonstrate that that mental toughness is required to both you know work hard in the classroom and then after school work hard out on the fields or in the different arenas computer so just starting with some public related updates again much like all the changes that occur over the last couple months we're so you know feeling some of the changes that are coming with pogon and we just continue to adapt and adjust and i couldn't be more proud of our student athletes and how they

092just take everything in stride and i think i shared this last year and this was probably a quote that will always stick with me when i think about covid and being involved in high school athletics we had a jb girl soccer player saying hey this is just what we have to do to play and it was the perfect it summed up the attitude that we've all had to embrace and i really think that you know that that that statement um really sums up the attitude by pretty much all of our student athletes i think they are just embracing what comes with you know with what's required for them to be on a team with their teammates and working hard and being able to compete um this this year this fall was great in that our

093outdoor sports our student athletes were able to be unmasked which was really exciting it was great to welcome our spectators back i heard from a number of people that you know our homecoming football game this year was the biggest crowd that they've seen since they've been here and that's coming from a number of veteran teachers that have been in the district for a long time i can only um really compare it to well it was only my second true homecoming um but it was it was tremendous it was a huge crowd it was really exciting so to have those people to have our community connected whether it's football or any of our other sporting events this is great to have our community members back and supporting our student athletes and you know not having to

094tell grandma and grandpa that they can't come to a sporting event because we can only give out two spectator badges so um i did not miss giving out two thousand spectator badges this fall so that was really exciting and you know so it's great for our student sessions back our spectators um obviously we're transitioning into the winner we know some of the restrictions that we still have with with our indoor sports uh you know our outdoor student athletes are going to be able to you know enjoy competing without the mass it's an expectation obviously by our district but also across the league that you know our indoor athletes are going to be competing with masson and you know they had to survive that last year so i think they're prepared they're mentally ready you know

095they're wearing masks in school as we all know and again just like that tv soccer player said you know it's just what we have to do to play and we're going to take it instructions so we are looking to roll out some some testing protocols for our unba unvaccinated student athletes that are competing in high-risk sports which would be basketball wrestling gymnastics and cheerleading so right now we're going through the registration process we start next monday at the freshman deviant varsity levels that we start november 29th at the modified level so it's going to take a little bit of time to get our rosters iron valve um we're going to be requesting that the families provide for us proof of vaccination that will make things much easier for our nurses um and then as we

096see what kind of numbers we're working with and start working towards our specific protocols and roll out um you know for for the testing you know what we don't want to do is uh you know turn it into such a tour for our students obviously we've got to make sure we have the staffing available to assist with those protocols well we want to streamline it as best as possible so that the students feel like hey this is not a major interference um you know uh while i'm competing or involved or involved as a student athlete so there's more to come but there's been conversations with our school medical provider dr serenza uh we're having conversations with our new nurse supervisor and i'm saying our high school middle school nurses so you know as of right

097now everyone's on board but we're a little bit of a holding pattern as we continue to see how our numbers unfold through registration so i'm now going to turn it over to kelsey allen and she's going to share with you uh some of the changes that we've made starting this year in other relation to physical education thank you nick again my name is kelsey allen and i'm going to talk to you about the physical education alexis of high schools specifically just a little background before i get started in the details of these four is that we are in year three of our k-12 health and pe renewal cycle we started in the fall of 2019 and at the end of year one um we obviously were interrupted by the pandemic in year two as well

098but we kept working we worked through that all and we're in year three which is implementation um and at high school we see our biggest changes in that renewal and that is with our elective process that was done in-house this september so despite all the obstacles in the last three years we were able to do something that we've been talking about since i started teaching over eight years ago in the district so on the screen you see the four main electives that we worked on and implemented and i'll discuss two others as well um a few other things is that we had students in grades 10 through 12 choose from lots this year one of our goals was student personalization and choice so we empowered our students to be able to pick what they wanted

099to take in high school for their pe requirement freshmen and some sophomores have their own class called intro to pe and this just introduces their students to the wide variety of activities that i'll speak about in a few minutes um so that they can make an informed choice once they get to grades 10 through 12. and that focus really was our goal with the connections and relationships that our freshmen make at the high school when they transition from make lab and it provides a really nice safe learning environment for our freshmen another big change is that we're co-ed i'm sorry that we are going from single gender to co-ed and one of our goals there was just to continue promoting inclusivity in our pe classes and lastly although we went from a two-day rotation of

10040 minutes to a four-day rotation at 76 minutes which means we don't see our students as frequently as we're used to but we use them for longer which in the future will hopefully allow us to go into our community and access more things than graham students off campus so to get more detail this is one of course that i teach adventure education is new this year and you can see the activities included on the left but the big focus of our adventure ed is the community building we do a lot of cooperative initiatives trust building that makes our students prepared as a group for our high ropes challenge course you can see the pictures um we have some indoor elements at the high school in the auxiliary gym that we're actually planning right now in

101our class and um they also get to be exposed to snowshoeing hiking orienteering and geocaching and archery so some of those out there you'll notice there's some big price tags associated with the equipment for this course but through um a lot of funding from high school and some new grants were able to get snowshoes last year even with the supply chain issues um geocaching were able to usually go get some gps devices and then archery was given to us by the dbc recruit with free training so this is one of the new courses next up are lifestyle activities um again the activities are listed in the left but this is really a course that promotes the name the lifetime approach to activities so um students in this class will be exposed to wide variety so

102that after graduation and throughout the rest of their lives hopefully well through retirement they can participate in these activities and develop a proficiency in the level um needed to perform them so you see pickleballs on there that's still the nation the last few years um very exciting kids love that and then this girls will notice that's something that we have to access at the state park soon um and bowling another one that we typically go to the streets so next up strength and conditioning um this course is for all students and it is an individualized fitness program that covers all the topics on the left including nutrition and injury prevention and this is not just for athletes although it does benefit our athletics program this is for all students and it is in our current

103weight room which hopefully at some point we will be using our new facilities after construction in three years team sports this is what you probably think of for a typical pe curriculum so this is still included um just has more options for leadership and other engagement in this course so your typical activities listed football soccer very traditional but we also have just that level of leadership and we want to focus on kids taking on roles as coach or referee so for future employment possible and i spoke about this a little earlier the intro to peas for our freshmen um and this really just focuses on exposing them to all the activities that we can offer so that once they get into 10th grade they can choose something that really interests them and will do something

104that they like to do and lastly have to bring up we require our beloved unified class this is something that has been in our program bed for three years now but it is technically still an elective we have about 60 students enrolled in this class and it continues to grow this is a class where we pair students with and without intellectual disabilities together in the discussion machine setting and they basically work together to develop leadership skills and to promote inclusivity throughout the school this course also was one of the reasons why we were dubbed a unified champion school um last year and they have the floor plunge on saturday if anybody wants to go lake george you can go there on time um i think i hit all the electives and i just wanted to

105note that moving forward um we are familiarizing ourselves with the new new year's epe standards that were rolled out a few years ago and the implementation phase for those are 20 23 so this all is happening perfectly kind of simultaneously together so we're working through our implementation of the new curriculum high school in addition to applying those standards and then we'll be back for our next cycle in 2025 so we're looking forward to that i'm very proud of the things we've accomplished and what we can offer to our students and we're doing something right just just the comments uh things related to p just going back to unified uh we had an opportunity at this year's homecoming football game to recognize and unveil our unified champion championship banner so it was you know there's been

106a lot of behind-the-scenes work on getting us to that status and i'll tell you there's not many schools across the country that reach us at us so we were notified by the special olympics last year and obviously with all the challenges that were coming out we didn't really have that that that event where we were able to recognize the staff and the students that were involved with all that work and give them their due recognition so we were able to roll out during our hong kong football game again with that really really big crowd and it was it was an awesome awesome halftime ceremony uh we had our the associate director from new york city public high school athletic association their representatives in special olympics uh even lisa cutting spoke at the ceremony i was

107really special and most importantly the students that are involved had an opportunity to share how they've been impacted by unified and they just really did a tremendous job it was awesome it was it was really really exciting and um i can tell you popular unified pe class and it's just a lot of really good stuff that's going on so you know i know that's that's sort of staying because we have the right staff members like kelsey kylie bellinger and a number of other staff members here that are really passionate about the work that that ties back to unify um so you know of course we want to maintain that status but i know that it's uh you know the banner is just a bonus it's just a nice thing um and it's really just a

108result of the work that is going on on a regular basis uh with so many of our staff members so which is really exciting i also want to give a special shout out to one of our elementary pe teachers jakes and eddie uh recently heard back from uh from shape which is the national association for physical education he's been he's been asked to present at the national pe conference down in new orleans in april uh on his on the late app bike rodeo which is really exciting and jake is leading the charge on expanding the bike rodeo across the district so we're looking to get more staff members more more students involved and you know not just the league students so we're really excited for jake that he's going to be out there representing our

109district he's um at a really really neat big conference uh that's always well attended uh so you know we always want to encourage our staff members to be out there and leading in charge and sharing some of the neat things that we're doing here so it's been exciting to watch him uh just continue to grow his network so you know he'll do a great job in april uh down in new orleans so just leading to health education and again i know it wasn't that long ago uh from our curriculum renewal presentation where we kind of reported back on pe and health fed we welcome gen mead to maple lab she's our newest addition to our health ed team she's at her middle school with allison hobbs really excited to have her she brings tremendous experience

110she's also presenting at the state health and pe conference which is actually a couple weeks she's doing three presentations uh it's about seven hours of presenting she again brings a ton of knowledge that ties back to health education her experiences well-versed in skills-based health education which is where our health education courses are moving to so she's been just tremendous she's been a great asset but again out there presenting to the health ed network and just really leading the charge on some of the things that we're doing here at saratoga so our november 2nd conference day was was great it was a very productive day for i felt like both our pe and health staff because we're spent so far across the district and trying to get our large groups together over the course of the

111year can be challenging at times and you know we feel like as we're trending towards a more normal time and more predictable times we're able to schedule out and we are still in a curriculum renewal process obviously with pe who's already going through uh some of their immediate changes but health education you know getting back to planning out how we want to round out our curriculum process and one of the big things that we've been wanting to roll out is the youth risk behavior surveillance system which is really collecting data uh from all of our school our students 7 through 12 on health related items we really feel like that's going to help drive our health education construction so we already be piloting at the seventh grade level uh getting students to complete this health

112or health survey it takes about 15 to 20 minutes it's something that they can do you know right on their devices so we plan to roll that out this year we've been working with the maple lab administration high school administration on finding the time to do that because we want to get as many students to complete that survey so that we have a large sample size so we really get a better understanding of the decisions and the choices that our students are making and how we can tailor our health education instruction to really meet their needs so we're looking forward to that and to see what it's going to come back and again continuing our shift from content-driven curriculum to skills for the curriculum is uh it does it just makes sense the skills that

113you need and you need to practice that you need to acquire to make good choices as a healthy person those aren't going to change but we know content related to health fed is constantly changing it seems like on a daily basis so we're uh we're excited about our work in those areas uh just reported back our sarasota afghanistan team so having the students back in the building i'm really excited about that we've had about three sessions with our our student-athlete leaders uh we're ranging from about 38 to 50 student athletes that show up at about 7 15 in the morning we get together we talk about all things leadership which is great we are we're looking to expand this this program and getting more coaches involved to participate in just development of leadership we've spent

114a lot of time thinking about how can we serve our teammates as i'm sure you can all understand in athletics when we talk about leadership and we have student athletes that are asked to be captains by their coaches but sometimes they don't there's not enough attention to what does that mean what does it mean to be a captain of a team and a leader of a team so it's it's we meet on a bi-weekly basis wednesday mornings and honestly it's probably one of the best ways for me to start my days when i have that group there and we're excited to continue to grow that and um you know it's been it's been great so far we tried to do it last year virtually and it kind of fizzled out it was just tough it

115was tough to get everybody on the same schedule but to to get 40 nine through 12th grade students there in the morning about 45 minutes before they need to be in school is uh is pretty exciting so we're going to continue to grow that thing as much as possible so next steps we are starting so right now we're going through some of our end of the season meetings with our varsity our fall varsity coaches uh we're also in the process of scheduling our exit interviews with senior student-athletes which i've shared in the past we're looking to give our senior student athletes and report back in their experiences as a student athlete and about their respective programs so we think that's going to be really beneficial on some of the feedback that we're going to get

116to help me be better informed on how i can help try to lead the athletic department and you know just consider some of the things that they're feeling or experiencing so we can uh just continue to raise a bar for four athletics obviously continue to grow the salt group we have everyone's invited and that's what i've tasked our salt group so far with is part of leadership is getting other people on the bus so you need to connect with your teammates and try to get them here obviously the biggest challenge is you know that hour is transportation you know not everyone not all of our student have to describe they might not have the means to get there um you know so that's going to continue to be a hurdle is how we get more

117students involved uh state of course and 18 momentum with the curriculum remote processing for this year again i just feel like there's more there's going to be more predictability and i hope i'm not jinxing us by saying that repeatedly but uh to be able to plan the next steps for our curriculum process again the conference in november 2nd was very very beneficial to both our health head and our pe teams to really start to plan for the for this year and all the things that come with the curriculum renewal and then continue to prepare for the changes that are coming with the legacy project it's exciting to be a part of the legacy project meetings taking a look at some of the spaces that are going to impact athletics uh you know our our pe

118department as kelsey you know we are trying to increase more fitness as part of our of our dna with pe but also as i'm sure you can understand with athletics you know there's an expectation to work hard to develop yourself physically and we're very lucky being a community that's saturated with so many different areas that can go for student training but we know that not every student really has a means for that and even more importantly than that is you know when you think about trying to build the culture we want a space where you can walk in and you can see athletes across all programs regardless of gender and you know what what rate they're in and having an opportunity to train and receive high-level instruction you know so we're we're excited about what's

119coming with the legacy project and how that will uh contribute to those two areas both in pe um athletics and health education as well so so thank you and let go of any questions thank you so much i feel like all of the things that i liked about that just be repeating the presentation um i feel like there are just so many positive changes that we've seen in the last few years that you outlined and it just sounds like things are going in the right direction which is so great um i wanted to again highlight the real focus on accessibility and equity i think that those are just like really shining stars of this program i think that's wonderful um following what we talked about with the music program and then she talked about the

120changes in scheduling at the high school um how do the changes in scheduling at the middle school um how are those looking so i know that you mentioned like there are some causes of the high school being able to put the state apart through the strike zone um what about at the middle school yeah so i'm gonna pass out to kelsey and then i'll follow up yes so there are some of the scheduled change sorry so they have longer classes but it's every fourth day um on a rotator that's a little different than high school so again the frequency is not as high but it is a longer of time and the goal for the middle school is in the future to access normality resources right now we're not able to but i do think

121the positive from that is that the connection time is a little bit longer for our teachers to be with our students and really focus on those relationships that they weren't able to have as much last year and just continue to go on yeah last year just to piggyback off that last rep our maple out eats just felt that i think they're a little nervous going into a longer period of time with the kids and with the students and i think they felt that jesus wasn't as tough as we thought it was going to be uh there's there's always pros and cons right with a schedule change and if you talk to any teacher they will tell you that they would advocate for we want to see our kids every day for 16 minutes so just

122make that happen which we know that is very difficult and especially you know being at the high school and being a part of the conversations that's going to you know the time space committee there's a lot of moving parts in the district so you know we felt that and again you know also just talk about the high school stuff machines as well you know what was going to be provide our teachers and our students with the best opportunities is it going to be you know a lower frequency and more time or you know maintaining frequency with a short amount of time and we felt like the longer class period the teachers can take a deeper dive um and they can kind of segment out their lessons so that we can continue to push the fitness

123you know component um you know teaching fitness while you know and not just hoping that students get some fitness out of physical activity because you know good physical education instruction is not always just move there's times where you need to slow it down and stop and you know i can say right now if you walk into kelsey island's adventure activities course there's a lot of instruction and it's all really really good stuff but when you're thinking about belaying students and then being elevated off the ground and on high elements you want to make sure that instruction is not rushed and it's very clear for safety reasons so again we're still working through some of the pros and cons that come with the schedule change but i think that our pe teachers have really embraced it

124and you know doing the best thank you so just to piggyback off of natalia's question do you or maybe you don't know is having space repetition better like for the kids so that they have some exercise more frequently instead of once every four days how do your teachers feel about that yes it's better to have more frequency but just with what we can offer we're doing the best we can so like i said like nick said and i was talking about there's more time so we can focus on fitness and use that 76 minutes or a little bit short at the middle school to really work on the foundational functional fitness and then hope that they can practice it outside of pete but because we don't see them as much uh we do the rest

125of the campaign and they said we'd love to see them every day for an hour so along with that like i think one thing we all learn from kobit is that health and wellness is super important and your mental health does depend on some way on your physical health um and i love that you have a skills driven focus coming up with with that i think it's very important for for the kids to learn those skills so that we avoid comorbidity in the future and we don't necessarily repeat some of the trends that we've seen um one last question and it's on the health survey that is from a third party yeah so that is uh the yrbs has been around for i mean i i've been aware of it for at least over 15

126years back when i was working on my master's in health education so it's created by the cdc um so you can you can have a third party come in if you can find some of those that can come in and roll out the survey and collect the data and it's going to break down the data for you but they they have material and the really the support guidance on how to roll something out like that within your district i know i reached out to a few colleges two years ago trying to find anyone that wants to come in you know to oftentimes colleges want to use grad students to help participate in that and just collect that over that breakdown and it's it's much harder than i thought and i can tell you that there's

127there's not a ton of districts out there that rolled it out i can only name a few uh but i could do when i was still as a working as a health teacher and in my first district i came in just a couple years after they had rolled out the survey i could tell you was so beneficial as a health ed teacher where you have a limited amount of time and you know our students don't get health education every single year so you really want to try to tailor that instruction to meet your student population um and you know it really it was nice to know that what i was doing daily with our students was based on the feedback that we got from the students previous years the goal is to this year roll

128it out 7 through 12 and then each year again because it's so easy and now with pretty much all of our students equipped with some kind of device if it only takes 15 minutes and we can get that much data back to our led teachers and to dive into it and tailor the instruction you know we don't expect wholesale changes that we know the health of content um you know it's going to stay but how much time we need to spend on that we know that there's an area that our our students are doing a really good job or at least they're telling us they're making really good decisions doesn't mean we're not going to teach it but we might not spend two weeks with it again because we don't have unlimited time you know

129with those students so again that's probably one of the pilot at maple lab and there is parents who have the the option to opt out of that survey we give them that option but it's you know it is completely anonymous there's some students names aren't tied back to that all we're just we just want information we're just looking at data and again to support our emotions collecting the data on children do parents have the ability to act like i don't know what the nature of the survey is i just know based on the name of powerfully sensitive information like do parents can parents view it ahead of time absolutely so when we again we partner with our seventh graders at people lab and that information was shared out by our health head teachers share to

130the parents in advance of hey this is the survey these are the questions we haven't altered any of the questions we really don't want to get into that too much because you know potential humans right and so we had we had to have full parents that just you know asked that their student not participate with that and and that's fine we know that you know that's true that even the students that do participate in it are they going to be 100 honest and truthful at all times regardless of us telling us that hey now this is going to come back to you some students just you know they don't they don't want to take the risk um you know they don't they don't want to share maybe some things but again it's the first time

131doing this so it's going to be it's going to be a sleep learning curve based on what comes back what we do we think that it's important and yes reality is the health ed information that we work through it is sensitive stuff and you know i guess we got two choices we can not cover the sensitive self and then continue to maybe have concerns about some of the things that we're finding out about our students or we can dive in and take a proactive approach which i think is what we're doing by administering the survey and using our certified health ed teachers to be the leaders of providing instruction um on those sensitive topics because i know that there's a number of parents out there that probably don't feel confident in having conversations or engagement

132conversations with their sons and daughters about sensitive topic areas you know so we do you know we keep that door open for communication and we're not trying to pull any tricks and we want to be proactive in sharing the information in advance really try to communicate to the parents why we want to do this and why this is going to help us as a as a small but very strong health education thank you very much thanks for the presentation and i especially appreciate um your responsiveness and with um issues we've talked about before they're showing up in the presentation um app stands for athletic uh placement process yes um i appreciate the number and the good work on that front that i think you're doing you said that about ninety five nine first numbers are

133lower uh and i know i've been a little weird because but you said about 90 of those students that are pulled out from the middle school to play in high school are going to teams that don't exist in the middle school and i just want to encourage you to keep a healthy culture which we always said about the student athletes that are ready physically and emotionally and of the remaining 10 percent can get pulled up even though there are teams in middle school available i hope that they will you know pretty much all of the high impact players so that they're not losing playing time in middle school or um someone might have gotten that play so i think you're doing good work and i just want to say thank you but keep it up

134um i have a question you know i think that the vast majority of our coaches are so devoted and talented and i know a lot of kids are having profound transformative experiences and i'm grateful for that but i want to ask you about the small percentage of other folks who may not be up to the task and i think you've given us some clues in the presentation but how do you get information that helps you know when a team or a coach needs some intervention some feedback or they're just not ready for that work anymore in terms of helping kids grow develop and and be healthy yeah that's a great question and i wish i had a single answer for that i can tell you that me being the one person that observes the coaches

135all 150 of them um you know a sample size that i would feel comfortable with you know whether it's your practices through games being able to observe coaches just in their raw form with their team uh you know a observing one practice or a couple games or a couple practices especially the coach who's been around and been a veteran you know i i guess it's it's a challenge being spread across you know the district right we know that our high school is you know depending on what time of day it is it could be 10 to 15 minutes away from we know our golf teams are spread out at the state park their our swim team is at skidmore so it takes time and i can tell you that i know what coaches you know

136i was able to observe regularly in 2019 when i was brought on board um and you know there's there's a there's a list of coaches that i know that i'm going to spend more time with and now that i'm going into year three you know my sample size is growing uh i make it a point to get to you know as many contests as possible and make sure that i get to see each of our teams in action over the course of the year um but again because we have such a robust program it takes time and it takes time for me to make observations uh whether it's you know during practice or during a competition and that's why we have end of the season meetings and unfortunately i'm not able to have 150 in

137the season meetings just because time doesn't permit it but i know that there's additional in the season meetings with coaches that might not be worse than coaches if i have observed things that i feel like all right this will move you know i i can tell you john that that's a that's a an area that we talk about regularly across the league with fellow eds and you know what is the perfect situation how can we make sure that we are providing support for young coaches who need more guidance i think sometimes we we get young coaches in positions and they go into it thinking they got this all figured out because they've played the sport for a number of years and you quickly find out that coaching and playing is wildly different um you know

138finding the time to work with the veteran coach where you know they haven't maybe adapted with the times um and then you know finding the time to connect with the coaches when you feel like all right maybe it's especially the district right now in a different direction uh i guess the best way i can answer that john is yeah and you need to trust me that those conversations are happening and i am making the time to meet with the coaches that i think need more of my uh time and attention and then i know we have those high flying coaches where it's hey you tell me how i can continue to support you but i don't need to be attending your practices because i feel very confidently in what you're doing on a day-to-day basis

139and also the feedback that i'm getting too and i you know i get a lot of parent feedback uh which you know it all you know there's i got the most you know prove it um but you know that's what i think the the exit interviews with the seniors is going to help add to that i'm excited for that and you know i know that's a practice that's often used at the budget level and that's really where i got the idea of working with some of the suny athletic departments what do you guys do and um even even at that level where they have numerous associate um athletic directors they also struggle to feel like hey we got a great evaluation tool approaches because you know they have so many um so you know it's

140going to continue to take time i feel like i don't want to use poverty as excuse but i think it's kind of you know throwing some bumps in the road for everyone but i i feel i feel very confident in how accessible i am to the coaches and how visible i am because i do i think it's the most important work that i do is being there to observe our coaches and seeing them in action so those end of the season discussions are already taking place right now and it's probably you know my favorite part of my job because it's a time to sit down with the coach and go overseas and really just talk about our current state of our programs and how we can improve and talking about what does the actual things

141look like for the presentation um i've noticed uh working on schools that you can see a lot of students in gym classes that aren't participating i know it's much like a lot of percent teachers to get them to try to participate but no they're just not are the department talking more with the social workers and perhaps how to get those students more involved in like his class yeah that's a great question you're correct it is frustrating when we see kids sitting out especially when we only see them a few times a week but our goal again with the new octaves is that level of engagement hopefully increases because the students are choosing what they get to do so i'm saying in my classes already that the students signed up they won't be there they're interested

142in the content so that engagement level is increasing by my observation we're going to collect more data as we go through and look at our failure rates and see if this model is helping more kids pass pe um but as you just mentioned social workers counselors other teachers in our student support teams and our whole system that we have at the high school specifically visit teachers are a big part of that support for students so if we notice a kid we pride ourselves on our connections with our students so if something's wrong if they're sitting out or they're absent we you know call parents we talk to other teachers and try to find a way to reach those students um but you know that's just generally what we do and hopefully the electives again will

143just increase the engagement and john just said after that going back to our conference today we finished the day with a uh presentation with a landlord julio um who is a social worker aware so she works in the skype prison with inmates that might be having struggling with depression um and we so we had her there to present to our pe staff and we also had donald rhodes who was part of morgan's message she was a mother that lost her daughter to suicide and she has this organization that's really trying to spread awareness and designates things related to mental health especially student athletics and it was great because we had donna was in washington we were zooming in we had a lien there and we know that especially now we're still working through tough times

144related hovit you know we know that there's going to be an increase we're going to suspend an increase of mental health concerns for our students and so i know i definitely encourage our pe staff because he does as well take advantage of who you are in the building by and large our pe teachers are are well liked and well respected and they just work in an environment that opens more doors for check-ins and open communication and i think students are really primed for conversations with their pe teachers because there's movement involved you know uh there's an increase uh you know heart rate they're just they're they're excited they're alive they're moving um so that's something that we're we're trying to be mindful of right now not just the highest level but k-12 is we've got

145a lot of students that are coming off a really tough year last year depending on their situation whether they were hybrid virtual and the challenges that were going on at home so having those kids are back in the building is great um but a lot of these students too were they had more unstructured time than they probably have ever had in their life and you know let's make sure that we're being cognizant of having these daily checkings with kids and you know before we um just assume that a student is not going to be hmpe because of what we're doing there let's find out a little bit more about this student before we really confirm that it's the activity maybe it's all the things that are going on so let's find out and um you

146know i think again i think our pe teachers do a really good a really good job of connecting the students you see their interactions in the hallways of deciding the teaching environment so that is something that is on our radar you know we know in a really big district trying to connect with every single student uh can be a challenge but you know let's make sure that every day we come to school that with this mindful over the best we're gonna try to connect with as many kids as can just to make sure that they're in a good place great so thank you kelsey it was awesome to hear kelsey he said eight years it took to get to the point where we are today and i know there's been a tremendous amount of uh

147time and effort by the entire physical education and health staff uh through the uh the curriculum process and getting to the point where we have elective course offerings and the kids are given the choice to participate in which physical education activities definitely increases the student engagement participation and you know help address some of the you know the concerns that john insured so it's a great great job and please thank the entire department just quick note on that i started when anthony bell i was here and this is one of his legacies so awesome awesome great thank you very update from four much uh is our legacy project so bill ford is here from central project management uh he's going to give uh an important update on our uh our bid contracts for phase one as

148well as some budgeting and some comparisons in some budget matrix for all phases phase one through uh the uh estimating update the last presentation is supposed to show the design development drawings for our projects so we'll talk a little bit about the estimate and we understand that we're talking really about phases one through three just as a reminder we have eight phases in the legacy project so right now we're talking just about basis one through three that's approximately 48 of the project so in the last year since it was passed we've designed and we're into the really into the final phase of the design on 48 of the products we've been relatively busy over the last year update so moving from left to right again we're talking about phases one two three i just want

149to run through kind of a reminder what's in each phase so phase one really there's two sections of that there's a prime contract which we're actually going to award some current contracts tonight they're up for approval and then some purchasing agreements so the purchasing agreements are items that will be able to highlight the state contract items such as digital control for its various vac systems we're actually going through the buildings now i'm putting some window film on some of the buildings where we have water glass it's a plate blast so that's we're able to buy now contact so that's already in motion some of the other things and really the majority of this is really technology-based and it's our infrastructure for switches and for battery upgrades wiring wireless and we'll go through that motion right

150now and rectify those budgets and getting numbers that happens right now phase two is for noma green fields of transportation so those three projects are right to the phase two so the next column on the sheet is really the budget and the status of each of those projects so there's three design phases there's a schematic design which is first phase there's design development which is the second phase and then construction development through instruction so right now we're in either the design development phase or the second phase or the third phase on each one of these projects so we're pretty much well down the road in the columns next two towns are really are really relative to budget so in the columns we first started out with we did our estimates putting everything in that we

151felt that we wanted these problems and taking a look at the estimate and look at the number and see how that compares the budget sometimes that works you're about considerable so when we are involved in the project or above its budget what we do is create an ad ultimate so basically an ad ultimate is allows you to pull a piece of scope out of that phase or that project and set it aside to get a price on it so on midday you can see whether you can afford that or not so when you have plus the challenges and even if you don't it's a good idea to pull a couple pieces of stove out of there so that you can award the major portion of work and possibly awards at alternates or maybe even farther

152down the road should you do our change orders and budget you might be able to award that scope later so that's really a big strategy thing to do on midnight everybody with that so as you can see as we start to look at the phase ones with base three kind of the ups and downs in the project budget and we gave them two different percentages you can see in phase one we did very well and we're very well in the budget and that's what we'll be talking about tonight for contract order and the reason that's really significantly unpublished we have two things one we have very good competition in our bits and number two when we looked at the data clauses or air conditioning in our data closets across the history we had an assumption

153in progress that actually during the design phase i would say it found a much better alternative and a much cheaper way to do it so that significantly reduced the cost of that we're addressing at least seven 15 to data closets in our first phase and we'll be addressing more as we move through the program the easier ones we took first that have less invasive work and when we go through the renovations as we moved into uh phase two we have one of our schools that don't you know actually a little bit of budget so what we did is try to structure some alternates to bring that reduction down and as we look through this i'd like to be somewhere in the two to three percent range either above or below budget in order to kind

154of move the progress forward forward so those are kind of the targets we get so each of our schools for free field transportation within budget and for the high school we started above budget but we developed five or six ultimate degrees below one now we don't necessarily have to do all those companies one phase of estimating to do again when we get the final construction documents and we'll be able to pick and choose what alternatives we're going to use at that moment so this is really the first look at the estimates for our first three phases we'll have one more look before we go on phases i'm not going to go through all the alternates unless somebody has a question on those three or four yes is um so you can see the numbers actually

155increase as you go to the second down and reduce and take money out of the product you're taking that all from it out and put it aside from that okay so the last part for tonight is the contract award so that will be for contract one and it's for the prime contracts that would be the general construction plumbing mechanical and electrical we had good participation in general and plumbing with six bits for each in mechanical we had nine and in the electrical we had a we did postman interviews with each of the contractors both ourselves and jose we're there in the district to review the scopes of work and projects to make sure that they're recovered we'll also be boring ultimate number one for the middle school which is the removal of an underground oil

156tank just as a quick background on the department of environment conservation to put up guidelines and actually a requirement for those tanks that you are not using so rather than do that on an operating side and did it as an adult to see the price we would get we've got a very competitive price and we're going to do that and that's part of the award tonight so we'll be ordering the bass pit across that ultimate thank you to all our presenters for your yes there is one more modification this is um item b14i on page you'll see this is about the probationary appointment of downton marsh and we're going to remove a phrase the phrase pending fingerprints should be removed that's the final modification and therefore i move that we approve the consent agenda just

157for quick clarification on something like that that that just means he's already had it done not that we're removing that from a policy okay all in favor that closes our business meeting and brings us to our second public comment period do we have anyone wishing to address the board all before you start i just want to remind um that there's still a three minutes per speaker um and we do still ask i know most of you were here at the beginning but um that remember that we are not you are not allowed to make comments about specific individual employee students or trustees let me ask that you keep your masks on lawsuit thank you and uh again more profit uh i appreciate the presentation i was very informative and uh you know they're going on

158the athletic department our visit department i think he's doing a great job and in my high school we didn't have real sports and our high school we did go to class every day because that's our is big on that so we're discussing the frequency of that just for that so i appreciate that just to follow up on some thoughts on the law enforcement piece this thing that says they're systemically racist there's a narrative out there that maybe plays into that that says police are hunting for people of color and just just a couple of facts about that that police are six times more likely to be shot by a person of color than the reverse that's a fact and here's an interesting one only 27 of police officers ever discharged their weapons in the liability

159of their career so this thought that this is constant gun battle is just not out there and uh microphones the question i know you don't want to answer it but maybe up is the dei committee is that now fully selected yes it is okay thank you um and an observation related back to di i spoke about earlier the nation state and our district are so focused on bei while as a country we rank 25th in the world in math reading and from a presentation a couple of boards ago only six percent of the main library school students are at or above grade level approximately so it kind of begs a question why are we so focused on this diversity economy inclusion while only six percent of our students are at for about gradle and the

160question i'm gonna have is what would be our goal surely it's not 60 and why don't we have a committee of maybe teachers board members and parents to work on it just float that out there but i appreciate all your time in the arts thank you is there anyone else wishing to speak to the board so again michelle kim did you know that um again just some clarification at some point in time from one or all of the board members if the policy and possible buildings to please wear your masks inside i'm doing the best i can i apologize if you don't do it you can't do it at this point my question is are we asking parents to not address critical race theory at a board of education meeting and we're specifically asking them

161to only email the board members are we asking parents to keep their questions their issues their concerns quiet to themselves because according to that policy it states that any instructional material or curriculum that we are not in agreement with we should be emailing the board specifically and again i'm not targeting anyone i'm just going by the policy the superintendent which i will follow and they and he or she will get a community together the committee is going to be a board member a teacher a student i believe in a parent my question is what parent what student is it going to be the parent of a student who has a problem with the curriculum or a book or is it going to be a parent whose sides with the teacher in the curriculum or the

162book is debate going to be basically taken out of the question the reason i come to the board of education meetings is to express my concerns so you can hear my frustrations again i am coming on behalf of numerous community members who have children in this district from grades k to 12th grade they are afraid to speak out i'm not however a lot of times things are not getting addressed yes i am the voice of the community at least the killian leader agrees with what i'm asking but no one's getting to the bottom of this i have had numerous parents complain numerous emails about specific instructional material that has been implemented in what we call health class which is really a sex m class in the middle school we have had teachers talk about hatred

163cops cops are that we want to have gentlemen talk about that we talk about diverging equity and inclusion we know this is just another name for critical race theory i have offered [Music] you may not like the way i speak or some of my mannerisms but i'm allowed to argue in the academic community with my qualifications i've stated that numerous times and i still do not get a know response are the people on these committees who are the people making these decisions and why does it always seem to be one-sided and yes i know my time is up trials for 12 to 15 year olds 86 suffered an adverse reaction reactions ranging from headaches chills vomiting and diarrhea that is 86 how on earth can we just look at the early term data for these

164trials and know that children will factually experience none to mild symptoms from kelvin and then decide that the vaccine is worth the risk a name comes to mind i think of a young girl named mata de gray if you haven't heard of her pick up your pens and take note matty the grave was one out of 1137 in a child vaccine trial maddie is now paralyzed with adverse reactions occurring within 24 hours of vaccination your trust advisor negligently refuses to acknowledge her injuries in their studies and refuse to cover her mounting medical bills i will not put blind faith into companies who lie and hide truth companies who have made billions and are not held liable to personal injury this vaccine is fda unapproved for use in children and is now being pushed in schools

165and only has emergency use i will never feel comfortable giving her this until we have long-term safety data and how it could do i'm beginning to see a pattern where financial interests have become undeniable and has made trust hard to come by today i picked up my eight-year-old daughter from school asked her about her day and asked her what she learned she began to tell me that her teacher asked them how many were vaccinated and how many were planning to get vaccinated the teacher then put on his medical license cap and began coaching these kids not to be scared just to get it all they have to do is look away and it won't hurt to have her teacher not only force his agenda and give my child medical advice for something that isn't even

166fda approved i am angry and i'm disgusted on top of it he made sure to make sure that every child who wasn't already vaccinated feel alienated i hear a lot about segregation lately and this is just another form medical decisions are not for the teacher to talk to our children about these are important things reserved for parents and their pediatricians but you have your doors and you have walled off parents from their kids all for coping and i have had enough i demand some sort of a committee to be set up so we can have an open dialogue about the things that i'm seeing happening with my child at school i demand transparency and i ask that she put procedures in place to keep a check and balance on teachers from spouting uninformed medical advice

167to our children thank you one second all right um and please start with your name sure sure to make us ready so i too would like to address the board about my family's experience with teachers giving medical advice to my children last year while my children were on the zoo i heard day after day after day of one of my son's teachers telling them how brilliant this was and it was going to see everyone this vaccine was shot and i listened to that over and over and over i've actually emailed all the teachers last year telling them to stop giving my children medical advice unless they have a medical degree i think it's illegal for them to be giving my children medical advice when we finally went back to school in the spring same thing

168happened i heard it from my um there were children actually the day they went back to school was the day that they were able to get it for 16 and above so whatever whatever um and what i heard was children and teachers discussing in the classroom who was vaccinated who was not vaccinated they should get it they should do it for the community um i think this is highly inappropriate for any teacher i have an email i did email and i had a response from the assistant principal i emailed the teachers as well and then i also again just piggyback backing on the speaker up in front of me these are not approved so pfizer if you ask for the visor vaccination that is approved it's not offered in the us so we are people

169are pushing this on our children they're hearing it from class after class after class every day going back to school third day this year and my son jumps in the car and he goes yeah my teacher just was like going off on how we should have we should get the vaccinations and that the vaccination um whether they want it or not they're gonna eventually have to get it so i think that this is a problem i'm sorry you get to continue his arm went up for a little early sorry okay so i just think there's a real problem here um and i'll just leave you with this there are injuries there are deaths it's not being reported in mainstream media so i'd like to know if the board is going to be you know supporting

170this vaccination offering it at the school are you now putting together programs that will help the injured or possible deaths anyone else wishing to address the board just one comment what the lady before this lady said is true there should be an investigation into that teacher all right seeing no further people um wanting to address the board we'll close our holocaust period thank you um and that moves us into agenda planning we have a new agenda [Music] i wanted to get the motion for public discussion and clarification on the boe involvement with content of curriculum i'm making this motion unlike the great amount of confusion surrounding this issue i can't speak for everybody here i'm concerned and i have questions about what our roles and responsibilities are as board members and how we define this

171as a collective excuse me as a collective body um i know we're responsible for the budget and policy but there is educational education law language and says that we have a role in texts and other materials that are used within this curriculum so i just want to mention this part of the education law section 2503 that let's see we shall organize the general courses of study which shall be given in the schools and shall approve the content of such courses before they become operative they shall authorize and determine the textbooks to be used in the schools and i just want to also mention the onboard article that i emailed earlier without the board having quote-unquote boards also have discretion to designate which textbooks are to be used textbooks are defined in the education law as

172any book or book substitute with shallow fluid hardcover paperbacks workbooks or manuals in any horse square or other content-based instructional materials in an electric format which a pupil is required to use as a text or text substitute in a particular class or program so that is why i wanted to bring this up make a motion to have a public discussion and clarification on what our role and involvement is in that thank you um would you say public discussion i think you mean i'm asking you do you mean a discussion of the board yes like i just want to make sure exactly because i know there's a lot of confusion out there also in the public of what our role and responsibilities are and quite frankly i'm confused as well and there's a lot of gray

173area and i just think it would benefit everybody if we have that discussion so we kind of know what our parameters are what we should be involved in thanks thoughts yeah thanks for bringing that up erica and i guess my only comment was going to be what you actually just answered to john is that i think it if we choose to do it i think it's just as important for us to do it for the community as it is for us right because i think there uh you know i can speak personally before you get involved in the board of education you have this assumption of the role you're going to play or the or the this isn't the right word but the power that you may have when you sit at this table and

174you quickly realize that unfortunately that's not really the case and what i what i think erica is saying is if we've been educated over the course of time whether that's been one year two years five years for those of you that might have been here a little bit longer and still have an opportunity to learn each and every day each and every year each three months each and every meeting that we have so i think it's just as important for a discussion like that to happen so that the community truly understands what our role is as individuals and as a board collectively so i think that john's question to her and then your response to that that's that's the input that i was going to provide as well and i believe if i'm not mistaken

175i think that was uh tony unfortunately is not here but i believe that that was his feedback as well if i'm not mistaken i don't want to speak for him but i think that was some of his feedback as well um so i guess the our so our path forward is to see if there's a majority of folks wanting to put on the agenda and um i think part of our confusion as a board is that we never got to our second governance workshop because our summer was so crazy and so we didn't get oh we didn't get to have our second kind of policies procedures and how the board operates so that we were all kind of understanding so that's where some of our and we're also very unborn so um i don't know

176what tony was going to say tonight i know that he was reading that article as well um our board has always since i've been on it operated at more of a level than it talks about in this article where we stayed at the 2000 foot level and we listened to all the curriculum presentations like we heard two tonight on the music and the physical education and then last year we heard the ela presentation and that that's where we give our feedback and then we that's the level that we stay at as our board that's the way it has been where uh since i've been on board so if we're talking about wanting to have a just just have a discussion of where that where's about those responsibilities and roles is that what i'm hearing like

177in public or yes i like to see um just discuss that i know that's how we've been doing it and i think that's great that that's how it's been done or how it's another past but i'm just wondering if you know based on education law what i was reading if you are supposed to that being held more heavily or is it a decision that's a board decision with how involved we get and those are just questions like how do we arrive at where we are with that level of the 2000 level as you said how do we get there and do we have to be there or is that is that what's appropriate is it more appropriate for us to be a little bit more involved so those are just questions i have you know

178i'm confused so i just wanted to have that discussion and clarify everything okay is there any other discussion coming just a thought and i do i think it's when things go wrong when we get talked to and things are brought up where i think that confusion and when you read the law and then you read you know like we are working on having policies and biology we have foreign policy on we have more policy policy section yes yeah but i think it's when things go wrong and when people read articles and then we get talked to where we just sit here i just want to make sure it goes on the agenda correctly are we just having the conversation of where the where our level is and how our board is operating are we we

179are agreeing as a word today put on the agenda critically looking at where our level belongs so it's two different conversations in my opinion so are we going to re re-look at what level we want do we want to be assigning textbooks like it says a lot there are different ways of operating as a board so in the past we have not been we have not been in classrooms we have not looked at textbooks we have not done that we have curriculum directors we have department chairs we have all these people that we pay to do that job in our district but we get curriculum presentations like this and ask questions and that's where we give our input so if we're talking about clarifying things with clarity that's one thing and if we're asking about

180community examiner what our role is what do we want our role as a board that's a totally different gender item amanda just to add to your question perhaps so you can look specifically the board policies that relates to this is 4200 which references the school law so i would suggest giving what you just said that there's there are two conversations that means we have the first basic conversation is all of us familiarizing ourselves and discussing openly publicly these two governing pieces of law that we are ruled by that i think some of us may not have been very familiar with until recently and really dissect that and look at that together i know i wasn't familiar with them until i asked some questions a couple of months ago um they are also referenced in the

181fourth government training that because i knew i'm definitely through that um and then there is a second conversation which is what you were getting at about where are we in this sort of stratosphere involvement um we are in a totally new stage with covid and with the policy implementations going board um so i think there's two conversations that's my view i feel like there's sort of the not some goals let's look at these laws that you know find new or who you have to operate under and then maybe a second conversation to define that as a board and i might i might suggest and this does take away from it being as accessible but it seems more of a professional development and governance conversation that would be a workshop item more than a conversation at

182a business meeting but they're all open things yeah so i'm wondering if we wanted to do a workshop on that course for ourselves to first examine it and then discuss where we want to be as a board on this issue and again they're all open meetings but it gives it allows us to do that professional development first and then have a conversation in a workshop setting rather than doing it during a business meeting because it's different i always refer to erica since she was the one who brought it about what she thinks and honestly they think that would probably be beneficial to do it that way only because it is professional development and my only concern is we don't record those meetings and so i don't know how much of that information will get disseminated

183to the public i know we have an open meeting where we have met people but if it's not going to be online or recorded for them to watch after the fact for us to refer even to reference to them i don't think it reaches as many people and i think our goal is to try to alleviate concerns or questions from from our community and that's my only hesitation with that but if there's a way to possibly put it online or have it recorded so that people can look back at it um that would be an option too if that's something that we can't do i don't even anything else we can feel a little bit like we're in uncharted waters and i need to find some things out first but i in order to answer

184that question but i do think we can have our vote today and see if these people are interested and we can find out the specifics um later and how we can make that happen because i'm hearing like dual interests and then how do they overlap and how do we how do we develop these things that we're trying to do and do it well to the depth that we want to have the discussions does that make sense should we workshop and how that relates back to uh or needed so we're not creating any rules and we have that sure it's foreign allowed to be on a business meeting instead of a workshop um okay so i can do some homework to just make sure that it's we are doing it correctly um and getting i'm hearing

185transparency but then being able to workshop it as a like have someone come and talk to us about it about curriculum at least with the conversation about you know how do things work what does the law say and we'll trust angie to figure that out in in consultation and then we'll see how the conversation goes we'll go from there in terms of any formal action results from it does that seem reasonable so am i seeing five people support that notion okay all right thanks sometimes it takes a minute to figure out backward um any other agenda that happens all right that moves us on to board member comments connie i just want to thank you for your leadership lord when i got here i met a custodian and he was just so nice he has

186very good energy and i want to thank him wherever he is any other word comments amanda um i think there's only one music faculty member laughing go to their home but i just wanted to say um my backyard isn't music my undergraduate education with the music and for what it's worth um especially in these times the importance of music um and how much it has impacted my life in so many ways and i loved the part that we shared at the end um that quote but it isn't just about training a legal musician it's so much more especially during these incredibly trying times but i want to thank you because i feel like he brought so much humanity to this meeting i had tears in my eyes multiple times especially that opening seeing these children

187if you don't see them as much in school right now and to see them it's that music is a universal language and it will accomplish so much of the things that we are struggling with right now and i'm so appreciative i'll just add to that and say you know we just had a five-minute conversation about whether or not we want to move forward with curriculum conversation and i know that we as a board value the educational process you know as much as the community does right we all most of us all our children in the district have had or will have um tonight between starting off here at geyser with the social workers and learning about that staff here learning about the music program as well as pe and health arguably we learned about the

188three most important things that are provided for our children in the schools today based on covid and the other things that are going on around the world so i think you know yes it's been a long night it's shut just shy of 10 o'clock um but we're very fortunate not only us sitting here at the table but for those of you that were able to stay as well to learn about what i think are three of the most important aspects of the educational environment today anybody else all right um can i get a motion to adjourn amanda and connie all in favor thanks everyone