June 17, 2021 School Board Meeting

001and karen selman and we've got some zoomers on as well wonderful uh kim vindler can wave to the there we go we can see kim that's the bottom of the of the screen there um and we also have ones in susan farr susan wave to to the group thank you for zooming in zoomers joining those rumors who are here so thank you all for joining us joining us this evening will we be able to get a picture that includes our our friends who are zooming in well done [Applause] my friends um thanks to all these folks for their long time service very much appreciated many of these folks have been in the district since i since i can remember so thanks again before we go to public comment i i just have a brief statement

002i'd like to read in addition to the variety of areas of academic learning students in the school district of haverford township learn about respect responsibility and citizenship we as elected officials and participating community members have a responsibility to model the behaviors our students strive to develop as we engage in our meeting this evening let us be mindful that we serve as role models of the citizens we hope our students will become as communicated on our website and board agenda documents the long-standing practice for public comment at our meetings requires residents who have a statement to read at the meeting email the following information to our board secretary kathy schwartz name address phone number and topic before 3 pm on the date of the meeting we will continue this practice moving forward the purpose of public

003comment is to provide the board with an opportunity to hear from the public about issues that the board will be voting on that evening or in the future hearing public comments enables individual board members to make informed decisions when they vote on items on the agenda individual board members cannot speak on behalf of the board or the district without the consent of the rest of the board the best practice is to refer questioners to the appropriate department within the district superintendent curriculum special ed hr for example for a reply i'd also just like to restate our mission statement the mission of the school district of haverford township is to educate and inspire a community of lifelong learners who become well-rounded global citizens and i also would like to reiterate that the board and the administration

004is committed to ensuring that every child feels welcome and ready to learn we have 10 people signed up to speak this evening want to call your name you could go to the microphone tell us your name and address you'll have three minutes when when the three minutes are up i will give you a heads up and ask you to finish up first speaker is todd hall good evening my name is todd hall 535 country club lane a week ago i received the haverford happenings email newsletter from the district the lead story was the link on um was a link to equity leadership teams the body of the email mentioned many of the stories that could be found by clicking the link but not the equity leadership team story this was puzzling because it was the

005lead story it seemed odd that it was important enough to be the lead story but not enough to be mentioned in the body of the email to encourage people to read the link why is there a concern of bringing this plan of action to everyone's attention before clicking the link so i read the story about equity leadership teams you advise that the teams examine student data and opportunity indicators and value culture diversity and cultural awareness are these two separate activities are one what are the opportunity indicators if this is one activity then i believe we need some more information will diversity be valued by creating different metrics and standards for different groups of students i sure hope not i would be puzzled why you would want to do something that divides students into groups why

006can't we value diversity and have unity in standards and requirements for our children every child has a choice in the decisions they make each day that determine their academic success and speaking of academics this was another example of the school district straying from the mission of academics which was my concern that i brought to the board's attention through my recent letter to each of you and have not received a response to date i bring this concern up again it's puzzling that the mission statement of the pennsylvania department of education in this school district falls under their jurisdiction is to ensure that every learner has access to a world-class education system that academically prepares children and adults to succeed as productive citizens please note the word academic i barely see any mention of academics and the

007highlighted goals on the school district website or the lead story newsletters why does the district highlight on its website the basis program which has origins and community members asking how the needs of transgender students were being met why is there a program with its origin origins in response to the questions of a select group of community members as opposed to following the mission of the pennsylvania department of education the needs of these children are the same as the needs of all children to receive a quality academic education everyone's entitled to their own opinions and world views but i respectfully ask that the focus of the school district be on academic education thank you our next speaker is colin mccrosson my name is colin mccrosson i'm a resident of the township i live at 600 george's

008lane i want to speak tonight in support of the basis program and try to dispel some of the numerous inaccurate misleading and baseless claims made about the program first of all the program's not new it's been around since 2016-2017 it's a policy designed to make the district more inclusive it's helping students and staff but it's been turned into a scapegoat by white people in this township who are victimizing themselves and complaining they're trying to silence anyone who says otherwise they don't want to talk or learn about sexism racism or homophobia and they blame bases for their problems basically white people in the township are using basis as a catch-all term to describe anything that has to do with talking about race or racism they claim that talking about racism is racist and they make false

009equivalencies about the program saying for example since the introduction of basis average test scores on things like the s.a.t have not risen and that there's been more incidents of bullying there's zero correlation or caused between any of those things it's taking something that started in 2017 then looking at data from a completely unrelated topic and then making a general claim that has no evidence to it this is a logical false and it's an invalid argument form it's like saying basis was created in and since then the school bus drivers have been driving behind schedule therefore basis is making our kids late to school not an actual argument here are some examples of what the basis program has actually accomplished the program has enabled the creation of the following racial literacy workshops and lgbtq competency trainings

010for teachers trainings for administrators and teachers and staff at the children's hospital of pennsylvania for students with gets and a field trip that high school students took to the smithsonian museum of african american history and culture how are these bad things so if you're against basis you're against a trip to the smithsonian museum of african american history and culture that was enabled by basis that's a bad thing really going to that museum opponents of basis also claim inaccurately that the district is teaching critical race theory which is a complicated body of legal thought developed in the 1970s and 80s by legal scholars this is also a lie critical race theory is taught in law schools not in kindergarten classrooms there's not a school in the united states that's teaching critical race theory to any class

011k through 12. what these people want to do is conflate talking about racism and america's racist history with critical race theory so if a teacher for example is talking about a part of america's racist history i.e slavery the chinese exclusion act the segregation of the military these white people claim that that's teaching critical race theory which it's not it's teaching about facts and history that they don't want to address or discuss these people want to censor the truth sanitize history and stifle the education of children in our community i continue to urge the district to continue the basis program thank you our next speaker is monet riley good evening everyone my name is monet riley and i'm at 400 glendale road i want to take a minute to thank dr rushi in the district for

012formula recognizing juneteenth in the summer update email that went out yesterday as the email mentioned juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the united states short for june 19th it was the day the last enslaved people were freed more than two and a half years after president lincoln's emancipation proclamation today president biden officially signed the bill making juneteenth a federal holiday as exciting as this moment is we cannot forget those we cannot forget there are those who wish for their students to not know america's true history i was not taught about juneteenth in school were you we celebrate plenty of other cultural holidays in school each with our own historical significance our students deserve being better educated with a more well-rounded inclusive narrative and should be with anyone once for their child i hope the

013district continues continues their effort to celebrate and recognize the marginalized communities in haverford in their history and that those efforts lead to increased interest from educators of color to want to be a part of our school community hopefully knowing that they would be welcomed and their culture celebrated i'm also excited to see how the district celebrates next year thank you and happy pride month thank you next speaker is elena wisely good evening my name is elena wisely i live at 612 william road in havertown i would like to thank you for your service to our children gratitude of course that's assuming that our your service is to our children and not to a political agenda or any type of donations that may be gifted to you let me remind you of your oath to serve

014this community and that oath does not allow you to plead the fifth many emails remain unanswered and when we ask questions we deserve answers and we want transparency i appreciate that you reconsider the elimination of leveling however i am concerned that this will be reintroduced silently as many other things have this year such as an assembly in cooper town where there was a book read a parent's request for this video was denied and the book that was read was an innocent children's book however in the appendix it discusses 1619 1619 is filled with falsehoods and it is being snuck into curriculums across school districts throughout the country do you intend to implement teachings from 1619 project into our schools i feel that some decisions are not always in the best interest of our children our

015critically thinking children have said that they have been shunned ridiculed picked on by educators penalized with lower grades for not having the same belief systems that you wish to impose upon them in the name of equity this is in fact the opposite of inclusivity and it is the opposite of the intent of the position that you hold it proves political nature of the policies that you are implementing in schools ripping away free thinking and putting their education last the board's political nature is also evident in the speech given during the commencement of our 2021 graduates the health and well-being should be the most important should also be the most important thing which is why children should have access to mental health care however our tax funding is being used to adopt programs such as casill

016and sage wellness both of which self-proclaim proclaim to focus on implicit biases which is more damaging to their social and emotional well-being a twelve-year-old student recently threatened violence on our children we should be screening for depression not implicit biases stop wasting valuable time and resources on theories while critical needs are not met we need emergency medications such as epipens in our schools and that's great that we have that but the request to the board for narcan has not been approved perhaps you were not aware that we have students with opioid addictions or the significant number of deaths related to overdose in youth in 2019 4 700 young adults between the ages of 15 and 24 died of an opioid overdose unfortunately i was unable to find death rates from teens from anaphylaxis deaths in recent

017years however in 2014 it was under 100. we need narcan in our school to stress the importance of why now because we have an open border where fentanyl is being seized at the highest rate ever 95 pounds has been seized by dps in 2021 as of may that is enough to kill 21 million people and it's an 800 percent increase from previous years we need narcan in our schools i'm very concerned about the fentanyl-related deaths that will be skyrocketing during the upcoming year by this dangerous synthetic illicit substance making its way up north let me end by saying these are our children and we will not be intimidated nor will we let the board's decisions about our children be influenced by outside groups thank you the next speaker is samantha hand samantha hand 9 fairfield

018road despite how angry i am i'm going to try and word this to be as respectful and possible in the hopes that you board members will hear me out i've lived in habertown my whole life i attended public schools here and i bought a house to raise my family here specifically for the schools flash forward to now and i feel extreme unease the thought of sending my children to school here i can't say if i'm for against basis because there's been such a lack of transparency from the district to even know that what i do know is that some of the things that come out of this district have been wildly inappropriate you can say it's not political all you want but the fact of the matter is it is when you pass an anti-racist

019resolution city brahmax kennedy is one of your sources that is political when you show a video to middle school students saying that the suburbs are insufferably white that is political when you show an anti-police video to fifth graders elementary school students that is not only political but also disgusting there are many students in the district whose parents are police officers how do you think they've felt seen that video or a police family is just no longer welcome in harvard schools i don't know if this is from basis or from teachers being allowed to supplement with material that isn't part of the curriculum whatever it is we need to put an end to it right now i would never ask for conservative values to be taught in school i realized that would be wrong when it's

020a public school that's supposed to serve everyone so why is it okay for liberal values to be taught these values along with any theories or agendas have no place in our schools your job is to educate not to indoctrinate you should be teaching students to think critically not to think just like you i truly don't wish to be involved with any of this it's frankly annoying that i do i wish i could just trust this school district that i'm paying taxes to and go about my business but unfortunately any trust i had has been broken over the past year also i hear a lot about you saying that you're big advocates for public education but i've got to tell you your actions are turning a lot of people away from public education that never would

021have been against it to begin with thank you next speaker is sarah faye hello i live at 47 waverly road havertown my public comment is about the masking policy at haverford i want to thank you for updating the policy to make mass optional for students and staff beginning on june 28th i know that many parents including myself have been emailing and calling asking for an update to the mask policy i think going forward it would help if you could include in your communication via the newsletter which agency you are following a lot of frustration came from parents thinking that you were following chester county health department and then finding out you would switch to the pennsylvania health department for anyone interested the cdc looks at the entire nation pa health department looks at the entire

022state and chester county health looks at chester county and delaware county since we don't have a health department in delaware county chester county is reacting to the most local health information and data and most local school districts are following chester county health department last week cases in haverford were only six per hundred thousand which is very low besides haverford school district other districts across our country and the state have updated their masking policy in reaction to the low case numbers and the end of the end of the math mandate by the governor haverford school district is not the first district to make masking optional most districts have updated their policies to make mass optional in the last couple of weeks i think there has also been this idea that mass growing for children has no

023detrimental effects sadly i don't believe that to be true children of all ages are struggling with depression children of all ages make friends at school and it's a large part of social development this year kids couldn't see if someone was smiling they couldn't get close to talk to each other they didn't play sports together they didn't act in place together they really didn't have much of an opportunity to socialize at all i know the teachers and staff went above and beyond this year to try and give kids a great year despite the pandemic so this is in no way meant to criticize anyone our teachers have been really amazing i'm just bringing up the lack of socialization because it does lead to depression in children there has also been learning laws due to math especially

024in terms of speech and reading for younger students and it's not just younger students kids of all ages have struggled academically this year wearing a moist cloth over your face all day isn't necessarily a healthy choice after i made my last public comment about mask wearing i had parents reach out to me telling me about their children that have asthma and were struggling to breathe in the heat with the mass on other parents told me their kids were very anxious and didn't want to go to school if they had to wear the mask many mainstream pediatricians have been speaking out about children's developing immune systems and the effect that mask wearing has had anyone with a young child knows that children pick up coals and stomach bugs constantly it's part of developing an immune system

025you have to be exposed to viruses and bacteria for your immune system to develop properly it's been nice the kids have been getting haven't been getting sick for the past 15 months but long term this will most likely affect their immune systems we won't know for decades all the effects and it will probably have a lot to do with the age of your child the age your child was during the pandemic again younger children will be more infected mass may reduce transmission of coronavirus and by how much is very highly debated now it is false to say that there is no detrimental effect to children when you place mass on their faces for hours a day for months on end our immune systems are the most powerful thing we have to protect our health much

026more powerful than any drug or vaccine the pharmaceutical companies can come out with as parents it's our job to protect our children's immune systems and i will continue to advocate for policies that do so the mass policy at haverford means that maths are optional for both students and staff haverford is not banning mask wearing just making it optional i think it's an important point to remember some people are not comfortable yet without the mask or feel that the benefit of the mask is greater than any risk and that is okay i hope we can all be respectful of other people's choices no matter if they differ from our own we know there'll be more variants and we know that the news will keep us updated on all the variants while saying things like doctors aren't

027sure and this new variant has the potential to be more deadly than ever i just want everyone to always take a deep breath and really look at the data here in haverford not the latest story for readings on the tv i have spoken to several doctors and she's just could i ask you to please finish up okay um as a nation we need to learn to live again and bring back normalcy for kids if we don't we're going to have a pandemic far worse than kovat a pandemic of depression suicide and drug use in young people the decisions you make today can have real effects for decades on our children i hope that going forward we can have more of a dialogue i'll just finish up by saying i want to thank you again for

028the update and mass masking policy i think you made the right choice for our kids and that choice was based on real data here and have referred showing that it's safe for students and staff to remove their mass if they choose to thank you for your time thank you our next speaker is helene conroy smith good evening my name is helene conroy smith i live at 32 east westwood park drive havertown the reason for my speech tonight is that i went back and have been reviewing information as there's been a lot of board meetings and discussions and a lot of unanswered questions february 18th there was some data discussed about suspensions and it was talking about suspensions of people of color and haverford has suspended approximately a little more than eight percent of students which

029is below the national average however what was not explained is how that data is conducted and so when we report things to safe schools each item is one account so one child can have eight suspensions and each suspension is one item so every time that that happens it is one incident so let's look at really what the data is and tease it out and let's talk about it are we providing those children that are repeat offenders the opportunity for learning what are we doing as a school district to help these students with the behavioral problems because special ed students need support my child in 2018 and three of her friends were involved in an incident by the same person that person according to the school district neil evans at the time who was the recorder

030of incidences said that he reached out to the state and the state report needed to be changed to include three incidences under the safe schools report i just checked that i have information i have an email and i checked the report just to kind of go back and refresh my mind and that those incidences were not changed so we're still at one incident so i think my message here tonight is let's really talk about this let's tease out really what's happening in our schools let's answer the parents let's respond to the taxpayers let's look at all of our programs and make sure they're addressing our children's needs our children here in havertown thank you our next speaker is sarah mccafferty she zooming in why hmm hello hi it's here okay my name's sarah mccackerty i

031live at 645 hazelwood road and i just wanted to speak tonight to thank the district for sending out information about the upcoming holiday juneteenth and educating parents and students about this important national holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved people juneteenth is an important milestone in our ever-evolving nation towards a more just and free country and i'm grateful that the district is recognizing it i also wanted to speak tonight to thank board president larry feinberg and vice president for duke weideman for their advocacy on equitable state funding and i want to encourage the public and other school board members to continue this advocacy and participate in a day of action on june 21st to support fair funding in public education in pennsylvania many people don't realize that pennsylvania is actually the most inequitable of any state

032in the nation for education funding and this disparity exists in a large part because when the fair funding formula in pennsylvania was created in 2016 there was a stipulation that only new funding sources would go through the fairfax formula so currently only nine percent of state funding for education goes through the fair funding formula and that leaves many school districts short changed including half of herd so if havoc if all state funding went through uh the fair funding formula then having heard would stand to gain about 3.38 million dollars which is a lot of money and there's a lot that the district could do with that so i hope that people will consider either calling their state senators amanda cappaletti or state reps mike isabelle and greg vicali or to let them know that they

033support their funding in education or participate in the march which is starting at 12 p.m at samuel baumford's elementary school located on winfield ave in philadelphia and it's going towards marion elementary school located at uh on bowman avenue in marion in marion so thanks thank you our next speaker is sharon meade i'm sharon mead uh 2420 avon road ardmore now work half for township um i recently i was reading on the school district site about basis and what i learned was that a lot has been student-driven effort and in the end i support basis and here are some reasons these are things that happened students build community and student involvement at the election time um with awareness going from 56 percent to 90 percent in a student engagement students got to go on trips one

034in particular to washington dc to see acclaimed people in sports music art that they had not known of before or at least were more aware of them students go got to go to watch new films to them and have de-briefing sessions afterwards and free-flowing discussions students got to eat new cuisine 150 plus people in attendance giant being the biggest donor this is an amazing community involvement students got to see their own dance middle school dance team perform and play new games which built community awareness increased community awareness students got to be part of u of penn and area schools they came together to discuss issues in their own schools and to share how they are trying to solve them their discussions through discussions a poetry poetry slam and it engenders students to feel to belong

035to their own schools to hear to have this sense of empowerment and all sorts of avenues for expressions of their own selves and feelings students encourage teachers to open up about their backgrounds and this bil rapport and trust students created can kindness campaigns to build tolerance empathy inclusivity all students coming to school were greeted and encouraged to smile feedback was so strong that many students wanted to know how to be part of such a campaign and to know how to continue it there were fishbowl discussions with inner and outer circles where one circle listened the other circle talked teachers were in the background listening students felt the feedback was students felt supported and that they had allies and another result was that teachers got to know their own their students better students talked about being

036in school five to seven days sometimes up to 12 hours a day and they had this need for discussions on mental health they wanted these discussions and there were upwards to 72 students participating they said it helped to avoid ignorance to gain more awareness of other classmates um just some positive things i wanted to say about basis and i think that's just um yeah good stuff thank you thank you our last speaker rebecca failing she zoom are you ready yeah okay um thank you for taking my comment i'm sorry i couldn't be here in person my name is rebecca thalin and i live at 2535 rosemont avenue in ardmore my children attend chestnut wald and the middle school i would like to thank the school district's board principals and teachers for implementing the basis program

037and that stands for belonging and sociocultural indignities in our schools i feel that the parents if more parents at our schools would take the time to listen to the description of basis from the previous meetings or to read the information as we've been discussing from the district website and also to read the april 2018 diversity inclusion report with so many heartbreaking stories from our own students about the racism that they've entered endured at school then we could move on from this back and forth about the school's use of basis it provides a framework for professional development to for teachers and opportunities for our students to ensure that all identities are supported these include gender sexual orientation family structure social class disability nationality race political affiliation religion ethnicity it's ongoing and if the goals could be

038achieved in one conversation or even in one school year then we wouldn't have to talk about this repeatedly presenting a false choice between academics and socio social emotional learning and between this program and lower school taxes is misleading we're returning to the racism that some of our children are living and in response to previous public comments there is a methodology of teaching anti-racism to students and to their teachers and support staff but it's more complicated than expecting all district parents to simply teach at home be nice don't call each other names or to not see race anti-racism is not about cancelling some people and lifting others up it's education and actively opposing racism rather than smoothing it over and covering it up i don't think any of us on any side of the issue really

039believe that any teachers have said to their students that all police are bad people the colonization slavery civil rights movement the wins and losses when white supremacy is challenged in current events you can't accurately teach these without showing the present day results of institutional racism as well as sexism and homophobia and all of the other ways in which identities are dishonored and people are held back or even attacked even killed our students are critical thinkers but if their teachers are not equipped to help them navigate their unconscious and journalized biases they won't be as successful in the more diverse world behind beyond haverford high school as they could be other independent schools and school districts are investing in this kind of work using basis or other programs and i don't think this is the time

040in our history to lag behind or put our heads in the sand so i commend the district for its continuation of the basis program thank you thank you is there anybody else that did not sign up that would like to speak in public session my name is sherry quinteros i don't know if you really care about where i live because last meeting i don't know we had outsiders pushing their agenda over here right we're not talking about last meeting we need your name and address okay 707 now let's run wrote havertown thank you just making that clear a lot of people are watching there may not be here right now but they are watching we are sick and tired of what's happening sick and tired we are a military family i've been living here for

041four years i cannot believe what you guys are doing you guys are starting this not our kids our kids are fine our kids are not racist our kids like each other they handle each other well everything is fine people coming here talking about suspension who suspends the kids the principles not us not other parents bring it up to the principles if they think it's unfair it's not unfair sometimes kids act out and we already heard how the method it's being used so just to make something clear okay personally i am sick and tired i've been talking to lawyers friends of ours from military times we are gonna go and we're gonna start suing the school district i've had it up to here i want to see why you guys are pushing this agenda they will

042investigate who are you guys friends with are you taking any favors is this a political movement what is going on we will find out might not be today might not be tomorrow but me i just got here i am building an army i will get all of you out of here instead you better start making the right decisions do what's right for our kids i've been four years here quietly quietly just observing and now i've had it up to here you're messing with my kids they're just now starting high school you're not gonna push all that stuff on me you're gonna ask me and the other parents for permission okay you're gonna teach my children math science english core subjects everything else we will teach them at home not you okay giving three minutes to

043speak where are we who the hell are we what you're gonna tell us when we can speak for how long i see a lot of change coming like i said it might not be right now but we're not going anywhere okay there were little whispers bigger voices you will soon hear a lot of noise thank you for your time do the right decision thank you [Applause] next item on our agenda is board liaison report finance richard um the liaisons met on tuesday to talk about the chartwells contract chartwells is our food services manager they've been serving the district since early 2021 under a contract that ends at the end of this month we are being asked to renew the contract for the upcoming school year noting that there may be additional renewals after that it's

044intended to be a long-term partnership with chartwells as our food services manager um the contract in its form is subject to significant oversight and regulation from the state and it's in a pennsylvania department of education format the board members all have a copy of the contract that's on tonight's agenda the contract provides the district with a 71 thousand dollar guaranteed profit uh this assumes that the um district's breakfast and lunch program in the next year operations excuse me a minute could somebody please close the doors please so that it can't hear people talking in the hallway that's okay and so it assumes that we return our lunch or meal program to the kind of pre-pandemic service what chartwells provides the district is a director of dining services and a chef our district continues to employ

045all other food services staff chartwells budgets a slight increase in our food sales going forward compared to the 2018-19 the last full year and expects that they will benefit our district with their improved marketing menu options efficiencies and purchasing power there are still some decisions to be made about our food program next year including our participation in some of the federal government food services that does not affect this contract and we will be able to make those decisions in coordination with chartwells and getting input from their national experience working with districts across the country but at this time the the renewal contract is on the agenda for tonight thanks bridget next item on our agenda superintendent's remarks dr rishi thank you mr feinberg uh as was mentioned earlier there has been communication sent home on

046the last day or so to two families as we wrap up the close of the school year and we've highlighted some of the projects that we're going to be working on this summer with sharing the results of that of that work with you as time goes on uh but we wish congratulations to those who have participated in moving up ceremonies or graduations at all of our schools across the district and i'm sure all families are looking forward to welcoming their children to what hopefully will be more of a traditional type of summer accustomed to and not like what we had experienced last year i do want to clarify that the aircraft that was flying over the middle school last night with the banner congratulating the students was not something that was organized or paid for

047by by the district so that was a not quite sure what the source of that was but we believe it was appreciated by those students who were participating in their clap out that was that was being held i have some sad news to report uh our uh softball team playing their game as as we were meeting and unfortunately they are not state champions but they are champions in in our hearts it was a wonderful send-off for the team yesterday as they headed to state college we were joined by members of the community students the students from the middle school were out in front as the bus went by on darby road cheering them on to participate in their their state state championship a few words that i had pre prepared um after our last yet

048last board meeting we we've had you know some questions about equity and how we are defining equity and i just offer it tonight um you know just to share as possible clarity and providing a definition that our mark remarks that were prepared so it's not in direct response to any comments at any individual pennsylvania department of education defines as every student having access to the educational resources and rigor they need at the right moment in their education across gender ethnicity language disability religion sexual orientation gender identity family background and or family income that's a quote from and that's how we in the district have been approaching the work and the resources that are provided by the pennsylvania department of education serve as a framework classrooms are we perfect have everything down to a perfect system

049no we don't this is work that we are looking to you know looking to improve what we do know is that in order to do well in school children must feel involved feel included they must feel safe in the school we're sure they feel that way at home they must feel that way in our schools as well they shouldn't face fear for any reason they shouldn't face any kind of discrimination or harassment because of who they are because of what they look like or or any other reason our work is rooted in enabling all of our students experience a true feeling of belonging we want our kids to that they are seen that value so what does that work look like it encourages our students to recognize that everyone has a perspective and everyone has

050a view and to simply respect that it doesn't mean that we're trying to teach students that they must agree with everyone's perspective simply that it's important to consider that someone else does have a perspective and the context that's around that we're teaching them that every student is valuable and deserving of respect no matter what we are not trying to have students think a certain way and we certainly don't want students to feel guilty for who they are who they are we don't want them to feel responsible for they have no control over it's this is not about labels it's about being human and our collective as educators we know that our schools are an extension of our society and while we would like to say that our schools are completely free from all bullying or

051racism or sexism we know that that's that's not true every day however we're going to do everything that we can to create a more accepting more inclusive environment where these become things of the past and where all students feel accepted valued safe and we invite our community that needs to leave the building can someone please address unfortunate that they have to have an argument just outside our door thank you they can go outside and argue you need a discussion whatever you want to call it but it's not the appropriate place for their discussion that level thank you ari next item on our agenda is a construction update ken matthews from cb development ken good evening everyone great to see you in person after all this time things continue to go well i'll start with linwood

052pretty much got the building cleaned up moving started the libraries moved in this week the art room moved in and with school ending next week we move out of the existing building and it should be around two weeks july 6 the old building will start coming down and then we build a new parking lot two months from now it has to be done so there's a lot to do in the next eight weeks but overall things are moving along well cafeteria expansion is getting close to being completed so things are in good shape this evening we have no change orders for linwood but if there were any questions about progress or where we are how's the weather holding out so far so good let's hope uh it stays that way um you know that rain

053the other day didn't help a few things at the high school but we're going to have to deal with that as it comes and if at linwood because we do have a lot of backfilling to do we cannot wait and deal with wet soil and issues so we're going to have to bring in select fill a structural fill if we need to but we'll do you know we'll deal with that as it comes it's going to be a day-to-day decision but that's our biggest biggest risk to finish right now but we won't we cannot wait we'll make that decision very quickly i'm sorry change order yes there's there's a little bit of allowance money left not much but that would be and it just depends on the volume of soil we have a unit price

054that would be used so it's you know x amount of yards times x amount of dollars so it's a very simple math to do but that would be yes we're still good though on on our table yes uh yes we have enough enough funds left to deal with uh any soil that we have to pay for over the summer yes can i know that um folks driving up lawrence road or students when they were in school at linwood got a front row seat to seeing the new building go up um there might be people in the community interested in seeing the old building come down can you tell us when that might be and like what to expect in that process uh so it really so that we move out there's a little bit of

055abatement left to do in the building and then really the building won't start coming down to that tuesday july 6th now they have they have to pull the building apart because they recycle everything so there's going to be big machines pulling the aluminum windows out pulling the brick apart separating it any concrete can remain and be crushed up and be used to backfill so it should be a two-ish week time period where it's only a one-story building i mean it's really not a big building and we need to get it out of the way quickly to start backfilling because that whole area where the school is gets cut down and that soil gets pushed in to fill up against the new building explosions not great right but um maybe some big no we are not

056blowing the building i said is it going to be like yeah they had a wonderful ceremony for the time capsule it's good to hear about all the recycling of materials and repurposing that you're able to do yes most of it gets recycled i mean every piece of copper i mean they take the inside out first and then they start on the outside so a lot of recycling which is great any other questions from the board then for the high school sorry uh same same timeline you can see the building is taking its shape it's pretty much watertight at this point uh drywall is going up within a week or so they'll be painting so again with only eight weeks left that's really it's really the fit out portion of it at this point the brick

057facade on the outside should be done in about two to three weeks as well and then we'll finish up the parking lot and go from there so things are on track all the materials knock on wood are coming when they're supposed to casework will go in so that will everything's on track at this point there's no issues to speak we do have some change orders a handful of change orders this evening for the high school if anybody had any questions about them or the progress of the project yeah there was a very odd spot i don't know what it was the way the ground was temporarily graded there was a it was literally a sinkhole that was probably four by four where all the water just washed out and we think it was just poor

058backfilling around a pipe that was there we dug it all up we didn't find any issues and backfilled it and so far it's been just a very odd strange sometimes uh you know if you all notice around inlets you'll see little sinkholes i have it in my neighborhood it's very hard to backfill perfectly against it so and then with the ridiculous rains we get anymore that doesn't help but we'll continue to monitor it and make sure there's no issue there it's in a grass area so it's not a paved area or anything like that i saw another of the change orders was a further enhancement to a room to just expand its science lab capabilities and to be able to do more kinds of experiments yes yeah it was a unistrut structure to hang pendulums

059and everything for the physics teachers to in front of their tape their teachers table along the windows any other questions from the board i wish the weather will continue thank you thank you have a nice night next item on our agenda is an enrollment update from montgomery and associates good evening and thank you for giving us the opportunity to do this enrollment and demographic study for the school district um with me is tim lamber tim lambert is with the absolute technology inc he handles most of the technology and the student placement and gis system and i think tim and i agree with this project it had anomalies that vary from studies we've done in the past certainly the impact of the virus on the enrollment projections as well as the increase in student population without

060any large new housing developments um ask the questions of that have to be answered uh tim and you'll see it as we progress through the slides had produced a custom database system that delves into those kind of questions you might have received your packet over the weekend that had the slides we just arranged a couple of the top slides primarily for better flow this is the project team again i'm bill montgomery i'm a principal with montgomery educational consultants i have 40 some years in education i was a teacher i was a building administrator and my final position was a executive director of a planning office tim has 25 years experience in education he is as was mentioned a geographic information system specialist and also considered an expert in enrollment projections along with us on our

061team we have dave parker who is your pupil service coordinator he was our project manager and our point person along with gary moyer gary moyer is your sis manager uh he handled the district data he got us the information through dave to us in a quickly and accurate fashion that allowed us to do the project quite uh simply and succinctly we also had nicole battiselli the director of pupil services as well as the superintendent dr roushi each of those reviewed our drafts they gave us advice and helped us move along through the project the agenda we already went through the introductions the project overview i'll be doing and the demographics and demographics is quite important because that's kind of like a linchpin for the enrollment projections and then tim will come up and do the

062procedures and methodology uh i know there were some questions regarding uh the whole enrollment process and you did receive a brief on that so we can discuss that as long as you'll see the results the enrollment projections and then we have plenty of time for questions we always traditionally we add the mission statement it kind of gives us a reminder and that we're doing an educational study and and and works as a guide as we walk through the project and you will see how some of your information does tie back to that the project overview this is the reason for the project uh some cases it was pretty uh succinct and clearly expressed that the district is showing continual enrollment growth over the past five years the district can plan for future capacity needs and

063in order to do that the project goal was to develop a demographic and enrollment study demographics as mentioned the demographic piece is certainly critical uh it is as prior the linchpin if the demographics are good and they're reviewed and they come out correctly the enrollment projections should flow nicely also um you have a couple of what we would consider hypothesis here that we wanted to we needed to review and see if what we're reading here is absolutely uh the correct back in 2019 niche.com they do a survey uh had picked haverford township as one of the most desirable places to live in pennsylvania they stated the charming neighborhoods access to transportation to the city good restaurants parks playgrounds and specifically the quality of the school district now this survey was in 19 but assumingly it

064was done probably sooner or earlier 1718 when you started to see that enrollment bubble going up and then you have this hypothesis going for you albertford township this year was picked the 21st best high school in the state and the reasons being the a ap course offerings the college readiness the graduation rate and then of course your student teacher ratio this is one of the ins what i mentioned before about this inspires the community of lifelong learners this ties back to that now we get it specifically into the homes and listings this information i gathered here came from your township manager's offices through the zoning office and through the head of zoning as well as local realtors one realtor is the second generation in haverford the other one is the four generation real it's real

065estate in haverford um presently over the last this is four years you have 781 average homes are being sold sales activity obviously started this activity started before the virus it also seems to be continuing during the virus it has not slowed down um the listings have kind of you could say have gone down but that's primarily because they're being sold so quickly so when it goes from after a listing and i'll give you exact numbers it would go to pending it would go to under contract before it actually goes to settlement the realtors again are seeing the home sales at historical records they're seeing the active listings at historical lows these numbers you see at the bottom 116 present listings 56 under contract 60 active sales that was may 4. as of last week i

066spoke to them and this is through the mls there were 262 homes by the end of may 262 that have settled there is 165 sales either pending or under contract that's a total of 427 that should be sold somewhere by the end of june the middle of july so they're on back on target to that 781 number for this coming school year or year when you had a previous demographic study made back in like 1415 there was a mention in there that no home sale any year reached 500. it was lower than that it was like 480. so you see you almost have 300 homes each year that are being sold that's and then the question will be and you'll see that when tim comes up is who's buying them and who's moving in and

067who's moving out the future home expectations it looks like the listings will remain low but again that's active listings sales will remain brisk prices are steadily increasing and i'm just hearing this evening from people that they're still going up quite nicely the realtors are observing younger buyers this is something again this is a hypothesis that we need to discover if that's true and then as we know there's no land for development the only new construction that's going on right now is if they tear down a larger home and build two homes on a lot or mostly it's just tear down a home and rebuild it that's considered new construction these next two slides this one's very interesting um and this really helped to do the basis of the enrollment projections the yellow lines you see

068on the bigger broader yellow lines that's the school boundaries if you look at cooper town you see the large yellow line coopertown you'll see those little communities because haverford township is a community of civic organizations civic associations and we were able to get capture 17 of them and their boundaries are pretty good the boundaries that are listed there that tim had been able to find are pretty accurate the school boundaries are totally accurate some of these are 17 some of the ones you read there they're on there twice if they're in the dark i'll get to that some of them were on there twice not necessarily the dark um some like if you know a little one called adele or one called all gates they're within the bigger picture so even there might be more

069than the 17 but these are the primary ones that actually have an active civil association and boundaries uh back to that color chart that's we'll indicate on the next slide right there i want to turn a little bit on this if you look at the bottom lines there if you look to the far right to start with and you see south ardmore they've gone up 28 percent number of years before the for their enrollment most of all the ones in the blue have gone up many have gone up in double digits looking at the bottom line for the last six years only a few are in the red and they are minor rates like minus two percent minus one percent um this this this was able to take then because there's no new housing developments

070going on the growth isn't coming from one specific area like they're building a 200 home housing development over a period of six years we have a formula we know how long it would take those houses to sell how long it would take people to move in and and the process of where they would be within each grade what we found here in haverford is all these communities that we had looked at before they're all growing basically they're all growing so the whole township is growing it's not just one specific area although you do have some schools that are starting to see some pretty good capacity up at the chestnut wall as well as chatham um tim will he'll be keying in on south ardmore again on that fire right and the growth impact of what

071you're seeing at chestnut wall the next slide is the process discovery and planning this is where tim will come up and be able to discuss any information that's needed in that area and then at the end we'll take questions or if you have any specific questions right now regarding the demographic piece i'd be pleased to answer it question wait till the end reported this time was there anything in the demographic data that surprised you you said that some things in our district weren't like comparable to what other studies you've done our were there things in this data that jump out at you could answer that thank okay um if you don't mind i'll actually answer that in the next couple slides because it's that actually forms the basis of the next slide so what we

072have to look at is literally every school district is not a one size fits all i know whenever anyone talked about enrollment projections they think of these things like a cohort survival method you know let's look at a trend and how many kids were here last year and and next year you know for example if there's 100 kids in first grade and 100 kids in second grade the following year and if that's consistent that's a trend model but what we have to look at is why is something trending so just as bill as mr montgomery mentioned you know you have new residential developments and we've seen like you know public housing could make a big difference schools opening closing charter schools you know national uh natural disasters i mean look in new orleans or something

073like that there's any number of reasons why enrollment should be going or could be going up or could be going down so our first thing that we want to do is look at the district get an understanding of it and why is your enrollment doing what it's doing so initially i'm going to look through these like five items here to try to narrow down what we should be focusing on because what we focus on is how we're actually going to start measuring and evaluating the school district there's no reason to look at new residential development models if you don't have any new residential developments so uh the first thing we do is and you this was actually built to move back and forth but i'll kind of use this as a overview and then go

074into the details uh specifically later so to answer your question what is the reason for this and we'll get into it in more detail but there's this is like i'm not going to get into specifics of the analysis because that's the next section right now we're kind of looking at what we did to identify how best to measure the school district and create models that'll work specifically to you so we want to find the reason that you're growing then we look at okay based on the how the reason you're growing let's look at different theories to see how that works and if if you ever think of like measuring something you kind of use that theory and you use it for old data and see if it predicts something you already know so there's the

075kind of models that we generate because we don't want to just create something and say this is going to work we want to prove that it worked if we were to look at the past and if it predicted the future correctly then we look at what data do we need in order to fulfill that theory you know as i mentioned before if you're talking a new residential development you need to know how many you know homes there are going to be how many bedrooms and this and i'll obviously get into it but in this um district it was more how many homes are being sold how many um and the people coming in how many have kids how many have kids five years after they move in how many have kids 10 years or i'm

076sorry how many kids come into the school district 5 or 10 years from now and that was actually what we found is probably going to be the most accurate for here because that's where we're seeing the growth and then also building the plan using that data and then we also have to factor in other considerations the pandemic specific neighborhoods i mean you can see whole neighborhoods flip you know when you know let's just say you know perfect perfect world new development gets moved in 18 years later everyone moves out and a new crop of people move in because they're now empty nesters and once your friends start moving out you move out and once the neighborhood becomes kind of like more younger the older people are like wait maybe i should move and then it's

077you know so you almost see these cycles these neighborhood cycles where they go up and down and that's what we also want to look at and that's one of the reasons mr montgomery mentioned neighborhoods because it's important that we look at neighborhoods because they'll each have a distinctiveness about them where some people hold on to their homes a little longer and then some do not so number one if we go through the reasons and if we look at what your trend has been in the past for many years all the way back to 2007 through 2015 they're averaging around 51 extra students a year so you're continually growing and then you see in 2016 boom you're now looking at 167 kids moving in or adding to the school district by year that's a significant jump

078in just one year moving into that higher number and we're like okay why is this happening if you looked at the high burst the liberals are stable there's no new construction so the conclusion there is well either more students who live here are choosing this school district as opposed to private parochial charter school or students are moving into the area so they were the two um basically conclusions we can come come through with this so what we have to do there is say okay let's look at how we that's our reasoning now we look at our theory how are we going to deal with this so in kindergarten if you think of a i think i mentioned earlier if you go grade to grade great that's called grade ratios great progression theory you go 100

079students 100 students but how do you do kindergarten well kindergarten is usually a direct relation to how many kids are born five years earlier and then first grade is how many kids were born six years earlier and you have to factor in is it a full-time kindergarten half-time kindergarten so there you know in that in that sense when you have a half-time kindergarten you'll actually get more accuracy going from kindergarten to first grade because a lot of people may choose to use a different service if they want full-time kindergarten and you only offer half so the idea here is let's look at the kindergarten and the big thing that i want to the last two lines here is really how we based on the results how do we move forward because if if a lot

080of people are moving in and they're not being born here that's slightly different than a direct relationship between the number of kids who are born and the number of kids who show up if a large percentage of your kids are moving in who were not in that born number that makes sense so you know you could have a hundred kids being born and five years later 100 kids show up but half of them might have been kids who were not actually in that born number because they moved in and that's can be significant so we needed to show we needed to know how many kids were that were showing up at the school district that were part that were born here and how many moved in so that was if you don't have that accurate

081you're going to have very skewed numbers and then the the second is the grade progression theory so that's where you look at the individual movement of students from grade to grade and the one thing i want to make point out here is the pandemic made obviously some students choose you know maybe a different school a private school cyber school or something like that we we definitely want to take that into account because if you just use different models and you take this last year which had a significant difference then we're not using apples and apples so we wanted to look at what was the impact of the pandemic on specifically this school district on this school year and account for that so they are the things we needed to address so how do we do

082that partial information to be honest dave and gary were great they gave they got us they worked with this at the county and got us all kinds of great partial information if you want to know what a parcel is it's the piece of land that your your house sits on and it has what they call pin id a parcel id and that's actually specific to a map and says okay when you you can actually go into your tax website and see what your parcel ideas then they have what they call folio id so you have your map here but then you have a folio ideas all the information about that home who owns it how much it was sold for what you pay taxes the history of sales and all that information about that and

083usually it's a one-to-one relationship but not always you know one folio id might be associated with one pin id but if you think about it there might be like a condo that's you know based on a geographic area but have multiple uh a condo area but then have multiple condos in there you actually have multiple folios associated with that one parcel i hope i'm not losing anyone here so it was important that we associate because ultimately we're going to associate a student with one of those folios so if i know the student i know where they live and i associated with with the folio id i now know what year they moved in there so i can say specifically this student has lived here for two years they're in kindergarten i know they were not

084part of the live birth number because they only lived there for two years so that now that cl things are moving coming back around to how this is addressing our theory and how we're going to measure things and then we had to do some manipulation so if you had multiple some parcels had multiple addresses so we had to deal with that and stuff like that but ultimately we got almost every student associated with somewhere on the map and that partial information and the the information about that parcel and the folio students we actually went back to the slash eight school year plotted them all got them all associated with parcels this becomes the basis of everything because we roll them up and that's how many that's what we consider your enrollment for every year so

085every year the state requires that every district submit their students to the state and october one is always the uh standard everything you see from state numbers is usually from the october first number so we did the same thing we use the october one number because it's the cleanest data that the district has they spend months making sure it's accurate then we also looked at the enrollment catchments made sure they were perfect so if a kid lived you know in this address we knew it precisely what his elementary school was because we did analysis that way neighborhoods mr montgomery mentioned we defined them and we also showed the numbers earlier of the number of kids by year who lived in each um neighborhood by births we actually adjust the live burst because the way they

086come is by calendar year calendar year is not how registration works so we adjust the live birth number so it matches the registration of the school district so we're talking the same number of kids that were born in a certain year would show up in this kindergarten year so there's a one-to-one relationship and then a number of other data items for spatial is for mapping and stuff like that so for example i know bill showed some dish neighborhoods and what we're going up and down but here's you can see some school districts i'm sorry elementary schools you can see all the students plot it um and you have very tight lines meaning you when a kid lives somewhere you put them there there's not there's not a lot of kids going outside of their school

087district and usually that for the most part and and and they've corrected me if i'm wrong but it might be like a special ed need or something like that um but that just gives you an example of us plotting things so and then the last two are the considerations such as the pandemic which we'll get into and then the neighborhood itself and looking at the neighborhoods in their cycles and then flipping you know you know the empty nesters to the young family so now we're gonna get into the actual data so all that was just prep work it was like how are we going to do this and make sure that we're doing it in such a way that is relevant to the school district so if we look at live births you can see

088there's actually only a 10 difference i think the average was somewhere i can't remember what the actual average is but you can see the lines was like 623 or something like that and but it's relatively consistent one thing we do need to account for is i don't know if you saw the news but there's historically low live bursts last year and uh this year because of the pandemic you would think people being stuck at home they might go higher but no we're actually seeing a much lower live birth rate but remember a lot of and we'll see the actual numbers later not all your kindergarten kids are coming from live birth a lot of them are coming in from sales of homes where they're coming in with families so this gives you the exact numbers

089that we're talking about so you see enrolled kindergarten students that purple on the far left it says number of the percentage of kids not in the live birth numbers and the percentage of kids in the live birth numbers and remember how is how i identify that is i have every student i know how long they lived in that house and i know what year they're a kindergarten student so i know if they were there less than five years they were not part of that live birth number and you can see at the at the bottom that the percentage of kids not in line births i can't it was like 36 percent and then in the last couple years it jumped to 44 what that means is more kids are coming into your kindergarten that were

090not part of your live birth again reinforcing the idea that or the the fact that more kids are moving into the kids moving into the district are coming with school-aged children i just ask a quick sorry yes absolutely in in that not in a live birth can you account for people who move within the district um you know like who may have had a child when they lived at one residence and then just moved within the district yes and no so yeah we actually did do that so we i've ran a tool that went through the entire i can't even remember how many students there were but all the the students back to 2007. and it actually says okay every it goes down it actually cycles through and it says okay is this kid was

091this where was this kid the year prior and if it was the same school and same address it actually notes that and then it if a kid actually leaves the district and comes back it notes that too that the kid left the district because sometimes you'll see a kid leave for a couple years maybe the middle school years or something and then come back for high school all of that's actually factored in okay good thanks um and we have all you know we have that throughout the entire system because just the more data and the more information you know about the district the more it's easy it's easier to make sure that your projections make sense and then you can see the first grade uh on the right-hand side so what this shows is kind

092of like that one-to-one comparison if you were born in a specific year and you show up five years later so the bourne is the blue that's your live birth number the purple at the bottom is your kindergarten so five years later those exact kids in blue if you look straight down the chart that would be that kindergarten cohort that would be showing up and then the yellow is the first grade and in most cases it's almost like they're almost parallel but you can see how the um yellow and purple is kind of going up and that's again showing that there's kids coming in that aren't specific to the live births but in most districts that we work with you'll actually see those lines like almost look exactly the same so this this looks a little

093complicated but let me try to explain this and we're looking at a specific neighborhood south ardmore here and in a couple slides i'll actually show the averages for the entire district so what this is showing is if you look on the far left side by year how many homes were being purchased all right and then it says okay of the homes being purchased how many of them have school-aged children in them that are attending the haverford haverford township right and then if so you look there it'll say 92 and 7 is the first there so that's eight percent of the homes purchased had school-age children when they purchased the home so they came in they might have had a fifth grader you know or and a second grade or something like that and then year

094two is of those same 92 homes how many had kids so now you're looking at some kids who might have been four years old the second year they're at that in that same location they now have a kindergarten student that comes in right so now that home now becomes a home with a school-aged children and if you keep going across all the way to year 14 you can see how obviously families are growing right they you know and almost all these will be kids coming into kindergarten because they're being born or they were already between ages 0 and 4 when they were when they moved in and you can see around 9 or 10 years out you'll see the peak of the number of kids you're getting from those homes being sold in that year

095so you can expect for any home being sold 10 years later you're going to get the maximum return from that home all the way up to 26 of those homes have kids that has school-aged kids in them that attend the school district i have for township there could be more kids that choose private pro tr cyber or charter but that's how many are coming here and then the bottom numbers is the number of k or the ratio of kids per home so you know it'd be like 1.5 kids in 10 years or 1.6 these numbers are a little more dramatic when you see them across the entire district but the one thing i do want to note there's a big black line right above 2016-17 if you look at the percentages going down you'll see

096five six nine what a you when you see that that line it be right before 2016-17 you see the number jump up remember how i said you went from like 51 kids a year to 167 average you can that's the same year you see that where the jump up of number of families moving in are number of homes being purchased with families and you'll see a little later exactly what those numbers are across the district what year was that that was 2016-17 is where the big jump is one year after dr hershey got here that must be the draw um this just kind of showed you by parcel uh the homes being purchased the darker green shows the ones that were purchased with students already in them on the first year and the lighter green

097or the other ones that were being purchased at the same time it looks like a lot but it's it's not as percentage-wise it's not as many of the homes that are there it's just that they're they're kind of um obvious when you look at them and then this is the inverse the number of homes being sold and the number of homes that had students in them when they were being sold so we look at both directions not just let's only count the kids who are coming in we also need to count the kids leaving so this is district-wide now if you look here at the 16-17 you'll see you know when 14 12 14 then all of a sudden 18 16 18. but so you took a jump there again but if you look when

098you scroll to the right and you start looking at where you're going to get the maximum return of students year five of 16 17 is already at 26 percent meaning they're they're the families that are moving in are you know they're actually greater concentration of kids than there were in the past so not only are you getting more kids you're getting a greater concentration of how many how many um homes are coming in with kids so and you can see at the bottom that you're looking at upwards to like 1.9 per home that has student age school-aged children so same as we saw earlier with the neighborhoods we look at you know what home purchases are happening by elementary catchment and you can see the percentages there and the number of students uh the number

099of bot the number of purchases the number with the students and the number of students that represent so like right now it's easy for me to see cooper town uh this last year had 156 homes purchased 19 of them had kids the first year of and there was 33 kids in those 19 homes gives you so this is kind of give you a much better understanding of how in depth we go with how all that parcel data helps us track what's happening with all these schools and neighborhoods this right here i mentioned before about grade progression and a lot of times people just look at you know that hundred going to a hundred they don't realize that that hundred you could have lost twenty kids and gain twenty hit and that's how you still have

100a hundred the reason for this is to account for the pandemic right so that first column after the school year shows the kindergarten the number of kidney card kindergarten kids that dropped out after kindergarten and then the next line is the number of first graders that show up so if you go down there you'll see okay 24 35 22 23 then you see that 38 for 1920 meaning 38 kids chose not to show up the following year meaning the beginning of this year with the pandemic and that is to us a you know not a sign that that says that's probably because of the pandemic and that's why it's in yellow so let's just look at something really obvious at the first grade drop you know 16 28 38 so like minimum 10 more kids

101chose to not show up after first grade and they went somewhere else and you can see again in the new kids for the 12th i'm sorry second grade 38 40 36 17. so you can see right there that not only are you can see how many kids are choosing not to show did chose not to show up most likely because of the pandemic and choosing alternative educational options uh because of you know instead of hybrid learning maybe it was full-time learning or maybe they decided to go full cyber or something like that so the reason for this is we want to account for this in the projections to bring that those kids back because you have such a worthwhile school district we expect them not to stay out we expect them to come back once

102restrictions are lifted so this just kind of gives you an example of how we did that analysis to look at how many kids may be coming back this here now we're getting near the end is the actual district level projections and the way you have to look at this is kind of look at the upper left to the bottom right because that's how the kids progress through you know each year they go up a grade so you're kind of like looking at these these kind of rows that go down and you'll see a big jump next year and that big jump is kind of significant because of the pandemic so if you were to just look at the last four years where it went 6100 6400 6500 if you ignore this current year it would

103kind of keep flowing in that row in that kind of trend model going to that 67 we're showing because of the pandemic that number this year is lower so if you were just using like um you know easy spreadsheet you know percentage weighted averages or something like that you would you would think that the number would be lower but we're accounting for those students coming back after leaving for the the pandemic and then we also show we're going well there's also that drop um in 2005 2006 due to the low birth rates um that are happening now low birth rates happening now is going to affect you five years from now but remember not a hundred not your kindergarten is not 100 from your live birth it's also from the kids moving in so that's

104where mr montgomery's analysis with the demographics was very important this this gives you a graphical representation of those numbers where if you look at the blue and you were to just kind of ignore that last blue line you just kind of move kept going up you can see how it would it would kind of like continue that curve um we wanted to just show you know one of the schools um you know and how they progress moving up it's the same exact theory where you kind of look diagonally and the way you think of it is you know if you're there they had a lot of lower number grades you know you went from 100 101 went out and it's being replaced by higher number values that's why you'll see like some significant differences it's

105um but then you see this one like um anomaly for the 2018-19 of 65 that 65 kids how they went through so this kind of gives you an idea for the for one school and how that's affected so it's going to go up and then start going back down as the live births you know kind of stabilize and that one anomaly goes out and this is a graphical representation of that and then lastly the projections for next year i had mentioned the actual number this is it by school um and then you know the totals and what would happen what we expect for next year assuming the large percentage of those kids who chose to go elsewhere come back and i believe that's my part the um the custom database system that i had mentioned

106earlier was the system that tim had produced that was able to give you that information that from the realtors and those pin numbers and taking those developments and kind of asking and answering the question of being able to recognize that millennials if you want to use that are moving in and empty nesters if that's the term you want are moving out but as tim had mentioned there are people moving out with children as well as people moving in it's all not just one way but the live births and i think tim touched on it quickly a number of years ago you were bringing in about 71 71 72 of every kid was born was showing up for kindergarten and made a little higher for first grade now you're in the low 80s now over 83

10784 are now showing up so you have a greater percentage of live birth students showing up along with a percentage of people moving in at different grade levels and when i had said earlier one of the differences when you have a housing development it's somewhat easier to follow them because it's going to take a year to break the ground it's going to take a year to build the buildings it's going to take extra years to sell and not everybody's coming in with children but with this whole township just about every area getting impacted with move-in which some people would say that's a good thing compared to the other route you're starting to see what's an issue where eventually you might have capacity issues uh questions yeah i think um the capacity question or is something

108that the board will have to look at i know we just graduated 471 students and we're just getting used to talking about classes of 500 the chart that shows the district level projections gets us up to classes of almost 600 kids in before 2030 so that's going to be something for us to take into account i did have a question about another phenomenon that's going on in our district with the building of the new linwood um we've built chestnut wald and manoa and those are communities that have seen growth after those new buildings and the establishment of those school communities um do you have any sense of what the impact of a new linwood would have for the demographics of that yeah tim tim always brings that up surprised he missed it he forgot it

109when you build a new school we always call it like the shiny penny and that somebody family might want that shiny penny and when you're in lynnwood and you see that big beautiful school and you're going up linwood road you know and and you're paying maybe for private and parochial and we didn't get in on that either but those numbers are slightly dropping and i'm not going into where they're going to go but their numbers from what i understand at the parochial schools other than the one out in by cooper town our hold is holding its own the others are dropping so you could get a few of them back but yes but when you build lynnwood i feel tim certainly feels you're going to get students coming in there that have not been accounted

110for my other question of one sent our one area of volatility for our district is um rental properties so um i know there's a few like over near linwood there's quite a few apartment complexes and things like that um how do you factor that that wouldn't be so yes we actually did factor that in as well although that was not as done in depth it was more like a spot analysis so we took some of the larger apartment complexes we looked at the students who lived there over time and then looked at and looked at how they progressed over time because there's a lot of transiency as well in apartments so you might where neighborhoods grow and the kids kids go through the grades and then they they you know they graduate out and then

111maybe a new you know it's kind of like this like i mentioned earlier a big cycle apartments have a different model so really what we're looking at is let's look at the apartments let's look at how many units let's look at how many students are coming from there and whether it's consistent and then we factor that in as well but we only looked at really some of the larger ones and then we would see i and i think there i mean yeah anytime you add a new factor into the analysis you're adding error so if if you if you don't know how that that apartment factor gets weighted into everything else you can over exaggerate its impact or under under um under guess it i guess um so we have to be very careful with

112that so we did do a department analysis the one thing i will admit that we didn't go into great detail about and it's more because of the data is i believe there was some homes or something that are being rented out and we can't really identify that because it's still being identified as owned by someone so you know we don't necessarily know which ones are being rented out by you know individuals as opposed to that's why we kind of stick to the larger complexes and then we do that analysis as well for the apartments yes for me the big takeaways of this report and thank you for doing such an exhausting work that's very necessary to help the district do a couple of very important things to manage the district the takeaways for me i've

113said it before and i'll say it again great place to live and we have high quality schools and our schools are interested in finding ways to continue to get better and reinvent themselves the district i know needs this type of uh analysis to do like i said two things that i know of and maybe there are others can you please help us one is planned space two is planned personnel what else can we use as if are you asking us for our administration because we can we can tell you a lot of things that districts have used them for but administration might have different specifics or so that's you can say how other districts have used it that's certainly fine i mean in the sense that we have you know new schools closing schools yeah

114redistricting we've literally done that probably the word everyone was trying to to bring it back from something you don't want to hear you look at the least uh movement that's going to create a problem within the district so you you have to first go in and determine the exact capacity of every school we asked for that just for our own knowledge because we're not doing that would be the next step we're not doing that capacity study at this point to determine how many students actually can go into a classroom many of you are probably familiar with what was called plan con and the way that the architects got money from the state was maybe to exaggerate how many students could actually go into a school so it behooves the administration first to say this is

115how many students we want per classroom and then tim or myself and another crew we have we go in and i i don't know any better way than just go in measure that classroom length and with 25 kids can go in this room 27 kids can go in that room and come up with a number then you give us an optimum number we want no more than 25 in a classroom and then we can say this is the maximum this is your optimum for this room and then total up for that school um right space planning gary and i walked chestnut wall we were under the impression from the architect's record that they had a smaller number of enrollment capacity than they had students significantly smaller we went in there i expected to see kids

116are going to be sitting on the radiators are going to be sitting in the cafeteria they're going to be in the hallways it wasn't the case even with the pandemic but they still by that time it was like in april they still started getting a good number of students back so the first thing we said is that capacity number is not correct that the architect at that time gave so they need to be reviewed then you need to sit down to determine the capacity of the schools and and then make a plan from there if it's going to be switching boundaries you do again you do the least amount of boundary changes it could be a couple portables in some of the school yards it as long as it doesn't affect the ancillary rooms you

117know your gym your auditorium your cafeteria you can't add classes without knowing the space you need there you have but one school that has some less enrollment but most of the others are at capacity i i like to have said i promise the superintendent she'll be okay in september i still feel that way okay the following september you're going to have a need if these numbers go up that kind of number which we expect and people are still moving in and it again it just the visual from the from the realtors they can't tell you exactly you know legally like these are seniors moving out and kids moving in but they can tell you that there are the young they're younger coming in and going out and that seems to be the case but i

118hope i answered that correctly that there is a process and we try to do it from the least problematic and work down to the you know like i may build a new school or add an addition that would be that would take that takes developing to get to that point that just doesn't get shot from the hip other questions from the board given the volunteer volatility of our numbers how often is it recommended that we conduct demographic studies questions or like how often should you do them yes how often is this data how long is this data good for when should we play i i i think five tim can bear me out here because he really what five years you're going to get good accurate number we and we do 10 years 10 years

119it starts getting soft any demographer will tell you that five years will give you a strong number the last time you had one here was like 15 so we're going about that five six years but however remember that company did the study right after the housing bubble so that i don't know how far back they went and maybe they didn't kind of like glean out what this housing bubble did and if they used the housing bubble and pushed it forward you were going to get those low numbers it was more recent than 14 2017. yeah more recent so four five years yeah so okay let me let me just play lawyer here for a second the pandemic and the home sales really have the most drastic well pandemic obviously more recently but the home sales

120have a drastic um impact on your enrollment so if you see home sales start drying up or accelerating that's when you need to start looking at it again to see how that how that affects your enrollment because it could just be hey you know retire you know a new retirement community or something came in and that's why there's more home sales or something like that um the pandemic i think we adequately accounted for that but if you know god forbid there's another strand or something like that that requires more restrictions then you're gonna you know that might affect these projections as well but other than that it's really your need for a new demographic study would probably be directly related to how your housing sales are if they stay consistent we're good follow-up um on

121um larson's question i think you may have touched upon it the were the were the objections from the last study compared to the actual numbers that that we've had over time that they have we i we did not i mean i did we actually didn't the report we had didn't go down to the level of it just gave like the district level numbers so i couldn't we couldn't we didn't really want to do an analysis with their stuff because i don't want to i don't want to say anything they did as bad because i don't know precisely what they did so i'm not going to say it's better good um they did probably obviously the best that they could with the data that they were given or that was available at the time you know

122obviously that didn't they didn't think they were going to plan for a pandemic as well um but we we never really got the data that went down to that level so we never did that other questions from the board i have a quick question um on that slide with the um district-wide purchases and the students the ones with the pyramid of colors i'm looking at i couldn't tell who was talking sorry i'm sorry yeah it's me um i just have a question like when we look at 2016 and 17 and then we look at 2017 and 18 is the assumption that those increasing percentages will continue to increase or that they will eventually flat the one with the um the district-wide purchases yeah the next one so like when we look at 2016-17 it's at

12326 like you mentioned after year five but is the assumption that then it will start on a downward curve or will continue to increase no i actually think that that will grow up i won't i don't think i don't think it i think it'll top out around 30 or something but i yeah and that's i guess that's my question is that why in every other year if it's tapped out at 26 or 20 and then it goes to 24 would 2016 and 17 be different or would it start to then decline no it's 10 years is if 10 years is usually your max so you're going to keep that should keep growing to hit until it hits 10 years okay i just don't think it's going to grow as fast i think it will go

124into into 30 or something the other thing i failed to mention is the numbers you see there is another tool we had to create in order to identify new ownership so the data we get is when you look at tax records you could have a record for a one dollar sale because someone got married and they just needed to change the name on the deed or someone got divorced or it's being handed down through the family there's any number of reasons why there might be different line items in that ownership table so we didn't want to say okay someone got married we're going to consider them a whole new user because some people might already have kids there and then we'd be resetting those kids as if they just moved in and we didn't want

125to do that because that would give us erroneous data so we actually put a tool in place that looked at criteria and said okay if and and the criteria i can go into really big detail but just for example like if it's sold i'm sorry if there's a line item within the first 10 years of that person owning the property and it's a one dollar sale and the last or the six digits or six letters and the last name are the same we're going to consider you the same you the same owner right because we know we know it's probably because they got married or they got a divorce or something else and we had to do this because you're talking literally like tens of thousands like 60 000 records you're not doing that manually

126you have to come up with business logic to go automatically go through that and then we do an analysis of whether that makes sense and because it's all automated we might change the criteria and then run it again so we built a number of tools in order to be able to address the need we had with the data we have so that's why those numbers right there is and we're being consistent by using the same formula so it's not like you know one year we use a different formula or something so bill might say oh we had 750 home sales and we're showing 7.72 and that's just because the formula might be a little off you know someone might have sold it to their kid for 300 000 when we're saying typically if you're selling

127it for more than 20 then it's not it's too it's to a new owner not the same owner any other questions from the board i have a question if you'd be kind enough could you bring up slide number 33 please that's sort of the full would would we have a slide like that for each school and this this one just this this is a sobering slide here my perspective on this i've been on the board for 22 years so when i came on the board they were the tail end of building the new high school there was there was a master plan went on to renovate this building well before we could renovate this building we had to build chestnut wall the kids left this building which in turn turned into an administrative center that

128was important because we needed all these offices used to be in the middle school we needed to space it we basically got at the middle school stone walls which are beautiful everything else on the inside and all the windows so you had a new high school which is now 25 years old new middle school new administration building we had a new school at chestnut wall but we went on to build a new school at manila and now we're finishing up linwood and i forgot what the movie was where he said if you build it they will come feel their dreams and you know with uh with you know we looked at our capacity issues and built manoa when we built go up we built them with what we thought was access prudent so i think

129we are you know we're looking at some uh interesting planning because i know not just a few years ago we looked at our projections for the high school and said hey we need 12 more classrooms and our construction guy gave his report this evening where those two 12 new classrooms will be online in september and once that part of that project's done upgrading the public spaces at that building more room for the for athletics more room for the music programs so it's you know with the uh people like to live here the the real estate values are off the charts houses are selling like hot cakes most of the stuff that i see people are selling their homes in a week or two getting above what they asked for i don't know how long that

130can continue the last big public space that we developed was the haverford state hospital site i think they're still finishing up some of the some of the work there but there really isn't any place to build houses anymore i lived through the last time we redistricted it did not make people happy i went to every one of those meetings in every one of those schools so that you know we have we're limited in the choices that that are available to us you know we can talk about portables i've used them in the past use them up to a point we can look at some level of redistricting if there's but i don't know the space any place even right now our building so we may need to start looking pretty hard at replacing the two

131you know cooper town and adam are at this point our smaller schools and other schools it's going to be interesting i i think when i look at that 2030 number of 7200 students thank you for this i mean you know you certainly you know at the beginning of the your presentation i was thinking boy they are really going into the weeds here but it was very helpful to see where these numbers came from and to see all the various factors that were taken into consideration thank you good work certainly nothing else that keeping me up at night about the whole district we're local we live i live in delaware county tim works in delaware county we're not going anywhere we'll continue to monitor your numbers we'll stay in touch with dave and gary see how

132the numbers pan out i do know that each month dave gives a report of the enrollments and i have noticed the last few months they've been ticking up you know each month they were picking up additional kids at the elementaries one or two here and there in different classes so some of those pandemic kids seem to be coming back and hopefully your numbers will will maintain back there and that pandemic projection doesn't um you know won't won't be affected the other thing that i mentioned and and i know this is our business manager's last meeting i just want to give him a shout out because our our bond rating was just improved which are very good may be very helpful to us name at the right time some serious construction going tell me you're going

133to make my last meeting the longest i think that's i think that's happening too any other questions or comments from the board dr rushi now you can see the very comprehensive name okay great well thank you thank you very much and now we can go from enrollment update into the world of fallacies can i request a quick five-minute brain break then maybe for after that give you two minutes here's one stand up turn around sit down that's my favorite one seventh stretch okay next item on the agenda is the second reading of policy 626 federal fiscal compliance and and attachments mr parker mr feinberg so exciting indeed we have for a second read policy 626 as you have announced federal fiscal compliance attachments there too 800.1 electronic cities there are no changes since the first

134read primarily because as a lot of leeway with federal fiscal compliance good regs in place actually uh posed upon our next business and all these documents so she knows what to expect already in place these regulations no changes to 626 and we are accelerating the process as we mentioned last test actually see later then we have a policy 800.1 electronic signatures directly likewise there's no there are no changes to that policy since the first read we on that that policy remains the same we're not recording on that tonight but we'll bring that up right any questions or comments from the board on either of these should we call antoinette on vacation and see thank you thank you mr porter next item on our agenda is a second look at the 2022-23 school so this is

135very similar to the last time we viewed this calendar at the last board meeting uh two changes you'll notice that we've identified the um finals days the half days at the high school thank you thank you uh in january the end of january i noticed the 27th needs to be in gray as well so i'll take care of that and then the last two days before the last day of school no other changes to this calendar questions comments from the board when do we vote on this we'll bring it forward for the next meeting which is actually three weeks okay thank you thank you next item on the agenda uh i'll i will accept a motion to approve all transfers and adjustments necessary to close the financials for the 2020-21 fiscal year second any discussion

136about what is involved in transfers during the year you do budget cover different account codes but at the end of the year because you're really not supposed to have a single line item on your final budget be overspent you know so we trans make transfers to also make all the closing adjustments that are necessary the cruel adjustments uh and it's just a formality here we're just saying give us the ability to close out does it tend to be more de minimis kind of things i know we regularly approve budget transfers um it's happening all through the year it's really not a lot of transfers at the every year a lot of the okay so i gotta move in a second on that correct all in favor any opposed motion carries thank you next i'll accept

137a motion to approve disbursements from the funds as listed removed in second any discussion all in favor i'll accept a motion to accept the recommendation of the project architect ecba and associates inc an owner's representative cb development services inc and authorize change orders totaling forty six thousand one hundred fifty dollars and sixty two cents as listed second any discussion all right they're all high school high school items all in favor aye any opposed motion cars i'll accept a motion to authorize special counsel for tax assessment appeals to resolve the following assessment appeals pending in the court of common pleas of delaware county under the following terms as listed second any discussion favor by opposed i'll accept the motion there i just was getting a slow refresh on the internet here so i'll accept a motion

138to approve the depositories for district funds as listed moved in second any discussion mrs liston td bank td bank santander investment trust through the state called plugit liquid asset if you have anything else to add normally if we do we might bring it like plug get in major pools all in short a lot of districts and townships mainly it's safety and liquidity and then yield safe with ear packs up with this it wasn't looking this good or this professional or this modern when you got here so i just want to say a huge thank you for bringing us into the uh out of the dark ages with regard to cash management but td bank's a good bank another good retail bank side paying our his laugh and look at our your investment account any other

139comments all in favor i'll accept a motion to improve to approve insurance coverage for the 2021-2022 school year as provided by arthur j gallagher and company the district's broker of record as listed in second any discussion or is this a standard uh there is some but not as low as part of it has to do with the pandemic putting on as much mileage we saved a great deal workers comp waiting on that is incredible right now so we want to keep going we only have really one claim going at this time so we are the safety committee that we have helps a great right now years ago that 751 000. that did go up ten thousand dollars which i guess is a bargain uh yeah for the public's benefit um people might assume that you

140know we have live general liability and property liability but the list includes crime blood coverage um public officials bonds sports and student accidents volunteer insurance crisis protection like it's a pretty comprehensive list of the ways that we're insured against any other comments or questions favor hi hi any opposed i'll accept a motion to approve the athletic trainer agreement with premier orthopedic and sports medicine associates limited to perform services in connection with the district's athletic program for a three-year term as listed moved in second any discussion all in favor hi any opposed motion carries i'll accept a motion to approve the food service management company fsmc renewal year cost reimbursable contract for a year beginning july 1st 2021 through june 30th lived in second any discussion i'll accept a motion to approve the reappointment of the

141listed trustees that the board of the delaware county community college for a six-year term starting july 1st 2021. moved in second any discussion because we are one of the sponsoring uh districts for the college that's what i thought i just wanted to mention good question and i was going to ask mr fleischer who is our liaison to the delaware county community college if you have any um sorry i have nothing to add because they've canceled the last several liaison meetings and information is now being transmitted mostly direct after the district now all right all in favor aye any opposed i'll accept the motion to accept the retirements and resignations as listed second any discussion just like to put in just a couple of words for those friends that i've worked with lizzie gallagher a second

142grade teacher at coopertown what i can say about lizzie is when she walks into the building the energy rises and if you know her you know that it's always fun to have lizzie in any kind of meeting or anything that you're doing and i congratulate her kim bindler i can't say how lucky we are to have had her at the high school i saw her at the graduation the other night and i said to her was it a hard year she said it was hard but it was worthwhile never telling me that she was so it was a hard year and i congratulate kim um as far as two of our custodians bobby allen i've known forever and ever since his father was the head custodian of coopertown and gary fiori is the head custodian

143at chestnut world and there is not a kinder more empathetic sweet man than gary fiore i always just loved working with him i don't know the other people but i would like to say that i also knew everybody that was here for their retirement award tonight and i feel so lucky to have been part of the of of of this school district and know these teachers know these administrators and work with them everybody on this list just makes me know more and more how good we are thanks larry thank you susan any other comments favor i'll accept a motion to approve the appointments as listed moved in second any discussion i was just going to note and i meant to raise this at a previous meeting too that some of these positions are for extended

144year and summer teaching and we had a longer list at a previous meeting and um i know being part of discussions with districts um across the state that that's been a challenging position to fill that those summer teaching positions after this unusual and taxing year um so appreciate that are stepping up to serve our students and and help them continue their learning over the summer when it's a year that everybody certainly deserves a more relaxing summer but appreciate their continued efforts i'd also like to mention that one of the physicians that we're approving this evening is for our new assistant business manager and i understand that kelly kaiser is with us this evening we got our new i'll accept a motion to approve the leave requests as lit second i'll accept a motion to approve

145the miscellaneous salary and hourly rates for the 2021-2022 school year and second any discussion favor motion carries i'll accept a motion to approve the pay scale for food service employees for the 2021-2020 school year 10 second any discussion all in favor opposed motion carries i'll accept the motion to approve the confidential secretary's compensation plan for the 2021-2022 school year and second i'll accept the motion to approve the administrative supervisory compensation and fringe benefits guide effective july 2021 through june 30th 2024 moved in second any discussion all in favor aye aye any opposed motion carries i'll accept a motion to approve the following educational contracts for students attending out of district esy placements for the summer of 2021. second any discussion all in favor aye opposed accept a motion to approve the following educational service contract

146for services provided to students and or staff with the district for the 2021-2022 school year moved in second any discussion in favor aye any opposed promotion carries i'll accept a motion to approve the agreements with kutztown university of pennsylvania and the amount of seventy seven thousand five hundred dollars use haverford township school district as a placement site for graduate students as literacy discussion are they must have placed their kids here are we paying them to place here and we're paying them i would imagine pay for this other types of employees we pay a lot more correct i asked miss saxa to talk about our literacy interns are able to learn while they are already trained to work with our students in the areas of literacy they're similar to a student teaching experience except they're already

147certified educators who are going back for their reading specialists and so they are able to work directly with students they pull small groups they do it all under the guidance vision of our reading specialist and it is enables us to see more students and to track their progress and then we're also as we said uh as dr rishi just said expanding where they were here now each of our elementaries have an intern for the next and it's in our budget and we are paying them it was that in a substitute shortage they could also fill in is that right it was a huge advantage you know they they still sign up for substitute jobs but they're already here they know our students they take our jobs first so the other two days they were working

148as substitutes which allowed them to still see kids in their group this actually it's a really interesting program that christian has used with a couple of their more local to their district but this covers uh some of their tuition costs for these credits so it's not going directly to them but they are benefiting yeah any other questions comment i'll accept a motion to approve the high school girls softball team approximately 22 students to attend the pr double a softball 6a state championship game on wednesday june 6th 16th through thursday june 17 2021 at the nittany lion softball park university park very proud second discussion going do you think the board is and we would call a special meeting you know if we if we needed to do that so it's in essence maybe we should

149say ratify it you know in some way but that's and they went up the night in the evening before because of the distance and they only qualified on tuesday or monday or tuesday right so it was a pretty recent development that this trip was happening like a little parade for them in town like they didn't win they still by the time they're coming back tonight i imagine family and friends will be there to you know to greet them but we as a board would certainly look to recognize them more realistically it will probably be in the fall and um i know that the high school does things like parade of champions and had one recently that preceded this but um this year it took place on the track and the science olympiad and different sports

150teams and students who excelled in one way or another were celebrated with a parade around the track so i would imagine the softball team would certainly included in such a celebration any other discussion i'll accept a motion to approve revisions to the calendar for the 2020 20 full year and can we just clarify this is just to kind of correct and and make it reflect what actually happened because this is the calendar for the school year that has just concluded yes so after the fact typically we'll identify certain in service days after 80 days for state reporting you know we had already identified the two days that we used for transition when students were coming there was a typo there where the student days need to be corrected and no surprise that we're extending the

151school year another surprises i don't think the children are coming back tomorrow uh all in favor accept the motion to approve school board policy 626 federal fiscal compliance and attachments 626.1 to 626.4 as discussed all in favor congratulations on finishing the school year today i hope everyone has a great summer hey attending the my first in-person graduation last week with um by other members of the board to celebrate our stuff everybody has a great summer vaccines dave kristen laura happy end of the year to everyone and have a wonderful summer oh no report susan i just i'll take a couple of minutes to congratulate everyone that was involved in helping to close the building of linwood elementary school i had the honor to go and i was there when we had a little ceremony and

152opened the old cornerstone um and it was just so much fun unfortunately it was all paper that was pretty much disintegrated but i think we learned a lesson so that in 50 years when you guys open the new one there'll be some things to look at i went to a couple of demonstrations that our good friend blue taylor put on with slide shows the kids loved them they brought in children from all ages teachers were able to bring the kids into the auditorium and the children just loved seeing what linwood was like in very old time that was a wonderful opportunity for all of us i would like to commend blue taylor who is sitting in the back row who has was started as a student at linwood way back many years ago and who

153has had a true love of the building itself and true understanding of how the building functions of all the people that are in the building and i just commend him for taking first being sad that it was going and then taking a hold of the fact that we were getting this glorious new building and we were going to say goodbye and we were going to say goodbye in a happy way because it had been such a wonderful building blue did send me and talked about the beautiful design of davis dunlap and carver they're the original architects well as a principal for 15 years i didn't think it was so beautiful bill i'm so sorry but okay i'm sure it was a great it was a great mid-century building i tease you by four the former

154principals i didn't know many of them i knew cynthia clayton who was there before me and i was very good friends with ed pratt who was also a beloved principal that most of us didn't know but he was here for many years bob landis i didn't know and dick skull and i didn't know but i think the most important part of this is on saturday when we had tours and i thought it was a great idea nobody really knew what the response would be taylor once again took up the mantle we had over 300 people come on tours and i can't tell you how many people have emailed me and called me and said can i go now when are we are you going to do it again it was a wonderful wonderful day um

155i uh sat in the lobby for a little while and talked to kids and and saw the slideshow that blue put together i i just commend all of you all of us but i especially commend dr ruschi mrs mcgill bree and everyone that had a part in helping to make sure that everyone knew that our beautiful building was going but that we had another beautiful building to go to in august so i thank everyone for that um did you dress in period i dress did not did not it was an opportunity i did not take it i had a poodle skirt couldn't find it was glad so thank you anyway thank you to everyone appreciate it thank you thank you thank you susan for your enthusiastic report bridget um i just wanted to say how

156fun it was to participate in graduation last week thank goodness the weather cooperated we really needed that win with the weather um and then i was in the neighborhood during the chest for the middle school clap out and saw the decorated cars and you could hear the cheering and then um i live near chestnut walled and i don't know what the kids were doing down there but it was like cheering all day and then hearing kids walk by after school being like i'm a second grader now like all the excitement was just adorable um so good luck to everybody for the summer and rest up and recharge replenish for um what we'll need in the fall bridgette i can let you know what was happening there today the children surprised mr d i hoped it

157was gonna hear about all the clap outs that occur at the other buildings as the graduating or moving up class they um the staff worked to get him outside and the children were all lined up for mr d and for gary gary's family was there so that was oh that's wonderful of excitement you could hear it from a couple blocks away and um yeah i went down when the seniors did the clap out at chestnut wall then mr d came out and so that was special this that moment um the clap out is when the seniors go back and visit and the kids line up and i think it's great for our younger students to be inspired by the seniors and for the students to get to see some of their first teachers in the

158district so um yeah legacy susan yeah lots of special events um that as a board member and as a parent it's always great to participate in um also great to participate in are the regular psba calls that that i i do and the topics were threat assessment and then educational foundations and there was an example from a local school district who had a great ed foundation and i'm sitting there going we've got one of those and are fortunate to have the haverford ed foundation and all their support i think we could have just as easily had them um give the give the talk on on the ways in which the community supports our ads programming and resources for our students i also participated in the delaware delaware county legislative council that's the 15 of the

159school districts get together and talk about pressing issues and we have some representatives from our local state senators and reps and topics included charter form charter reform tax credit and voucher bills that are running and a push to advocate for fair funding and to use the state's newfound significant budget surplus to help get more funds into public schools the board also had the opportunity to get one last pto visit in by zoom with linwood and had a nice chance to talk with them about activities on the board in the district and field some questions and we look forward to visiting their pto needing meeting next year hopefully in person in the brand new building and the board also did a workshop of facilitated workshop to help us think about ways in which we might be

160able to better organize and and work together going forward so stay tuned on some developments coming out of that as we think of how we're going forward thanks for all that extra time that you're putting in on all those things i just want to echo acknowledgement and thanks to blue taylor got great reports about the visits at linwood and thank you so much i want to give a shout out to lizzie gallagher she taught both of my kids a long time ago and and uh they loved her and she was fabulous i thought graduation was awesome really lucked out the weather had been threatening and turned into just a beautiful evening the class was charged up and and and was great so if there were some way to guarantee that the weather would always be

161good nice to be outside at the legislative level statewide over the next 10 days or so is when all the work gets done for the year harrisburg the budget by law is supposed to be passed by june 30th there's a few moving pieces up there certainly senate bill one which charter schools and tax credits moved out of the senate ed committee and was amended back in committee and they were planning to run it it was on the senate calendar yesterday but they didn't have the votes it's on the senate calendar for monday so we'll we'll see what happens it's not a there's there's not significant uh charter funding reform in this bill as a what they're calling a two percent coupon so uh we'll we'll keep working on that uh the other bill we're keeping

162an eye on is senate bill 733 which is the latest version of a school voucher bill that doesn't seem to have the kind of traction that one does in terms of the state budget things are there's not a lot of information flowing the best i heard so far today was that they're looking at a 300 million dollar possible increase in the basic education funding line which would be great but it's certainly not not a lock and they they weren't able to provide me with any estimates for special ed or career and tech so we'll just see what happens it is interesting that there's this huge budget surplus that see what happened the board met an executive session prior to tonight's meeting to review a personnel matter a pending employee grievance and a school safety and

163security report next regular public meeting is scheduled to be held july 8 2021 right here in this beautiful board conference room in the oakmont administration building and with that i'll accept a motion to adjourn thanks everybody