MSD Regular School Board Meeting May 19, 2022 Part 1

001just at this time we will call to order the committee meeting for may 19th 2022 at 6 p.m dr oberg thank you madam president good evening to members of the board administration families that are here tonight those maybe are in line with us as well as our students here tonight uh first presentation is going to be something that i was just telling them over there i was taking some credit for last week we had an opportunity to display uh this uh surprise not surprise award-winning first grade team from ms healey's class in fourth grade at claysville uh they're here tonight to explain to us what they did how to relate to steam and so i'd like to introduce emma sealy yeah broken real quick um first of all mrs earley has done just a remarkable

002job um this year with um with our stem teams and i do want to introduce these um ladies and gentlemen came in first place at the intermediate unit competition for the regional competition out of all of the fourth and fifth graders in iu1 so they came in first place which is a really big accomplishment so i just want to introduce our members levi hornbeck and i also want to um thank the parents for all of your support um in in this endeavor because i know you you worked hard as well in our country [Music] um [Music] the the strong lightweight scale construction is heather for bridge standings there are way sensors that will increase or decrease the production amount of heating is pretty there i mean seriously how cool is this temporary time saving room

003we will solve the unnecessary need for miles of time consuming reforms created energy efficient power response for the workers including the savings gotta love it as you can see replace this third one raises an efficient feeling environmental friendly detour nature please let us however they had this bridge floating they figured out the amount of balloons needed and the weight of their structure and it floated the day of the crowd very nice good job [Music] may i ask for a this picture i will move pictures okay next on the committee report tonight we are going to be reporting out our future a comprehensive plan uh to this point we've been talking to you a lot through the process that started about midway last year and tonight we're going to have a presentation that we hope will

004lead to its official adoption a month from now so with that we're i'm going to be joined by some administrators that were part of this that would go to the podium for the audience i have it right behind you there so i have the honor of doing a little bit of the overview of the process those involved for administrators teachers the steering committee itself so just just again an overview so uh the plan that we have in place is every three years in the district there are multiple facets to this plan some of those we've already spoken about but again we're going to give you an overview tonight tonight as i look at it is really a celebration of where we are as a district where we want to go so that will include presentations

005on a vision on our mission and we have four priority challenges that have come out of the work that's involved in this uh we actually have a deadline that is as you can see not until november things have been pushed back due to covid we would ask the board to consider this it'll be there for public consumption for the next month and then in june we're going to ask the board to officially adopt this as part of the plan we have improved and working on our act 48 which is our professional development for our professionals an induction process that includes new teachers that that are onboarded as well as existing features how we can improve that of course we have been looking at the ways in which we teach learn assess and then finally there

006uh you'll see some of the presentations we've already made miss chris reicheck made our specification plan presentation we of course had our school counselors here for a guidance plan and we have a group of administrators teachers and families involved in our family engagement plan i can't say enough about this next group as i've mentioned to the board before but it's really important for everyone to understand this in addition to all the responsibilities that a normal year takes into account as a building administrator as a responsible person for your department uh we were still in the middle of covet i know it kind of seems interesting to talk about that now things seem to have calmed down but beginning this year and really right up until christmas break uh that was still a time-consuming focus of

007this group and yet we found time to come together to work on this so i just want to point out again the individuals that are in here mr mike wilson a lot of you can't see but we know the director of transportation technology dr dan gautrin our director of curriculum instruction and then our billing principles mr bonus mr wealth ms miss wolf and chris i didn't forget you i just went past you there for just a moment uh but special education this was the core team uh when we came together uh from time to time we built a calendar that reflects our time together and how we wanted to see this process move and each of these individuals tonight will have a part to play in making a presentation on us in addition to that

008we also created a steering committee as part of our requirements that sphere actually met this past week we had our final presentation uh to steer on the 17th and the one final piece that we are working on is a shared value what we believe is important to reflect our community here at mcguffy and so that was a work on the 17th um but all along the way uh we we have found and really have and i i again i'll speak for the team but that committee that group of individuals that represents parents businesses community members and of course our teachers and staff here had a big part to play in the final outcome of the plan itself so i'm going to talk quickly about the three stakeholder groups that you see there again i will

009not read all the names but i want to recognize this at this this time this is made up of our teachers sports staff paraprofessionals and i think we probably could have doubled this but honestly but this is so important moving forward that we are not just sharing this information but collaborating in all aspects and this was a great for me a great first start into a major project where we had a collaboration of teachers in this and you can see the names representing every building representing all the different grade levels and again just i'm almost out loss for words to just tell you the the the parts they played each had a small part to play and they may feel that way but when you see the plan itself you'll see that the major impact

010that they had the next group of courses are community representatives we went out and sometimes we solicited it sometimes folks came to us and said they want to be a part of it i like the fact that it was a combination of the two uh these are local business leaders folks that some of them don't even have kids in the district and they wanted to be a part of it and then the last group is made up of additional administrators again i'll make mention of them mr healey a sybac christobar mr leisure a board member and then we also had consulting from jenny lent and ron gallagher from iu1 so with that i'm going to pass it on i believe at this point we're going to have mr chet welk and mr matt wolfe talk

011about our vision and mission so so i'll be talking about the vision and the mission myself mr welcome but vision and the mission really set the tone gives us purpose and moves us forward as a district and i think that's really important uh just how we set up and and how what direction we really want to go and a couple of things that we want to focus on is the vision and we will ensure all students reach their greatest potential and i think a vision you don't want to get too wordy you want to be specific and you want to be driven by our vision and i think that really sums it up as what we really want uh our graduates to our teachers and us as district members to really look at and and

012have a clear focus so then that moves us to the to the mission and so our mission is it's it reads better today than yesterday mcguffey will teach and one thing that we really wanted to do is we use teach as an acronym to really uh focus on different components that we wanted to address in our within our district and so as we broke apart teach we looked at we wanted to be together excellent excellence achievement community and hope and that is the basis of the framework that we wanted to move forward within our district vision and mission i'm going to pass it off to mr welkin he's going to break each one of those acronyms apart thank you mr wolfe like mr wolf was saying your mission and vision statement is what you want

013to be known for in the business world some of the most prominent businesses you kind of know the mission and vision behind those companies so with teach we want this to be for all stakeholders we want parents we want students k-12 teachers administration community members business leaders to know what teach stands for so the t is together and to kind of define together some common bullet points when we say together we want people to think of collaborative common goals teamwork building relationships and unified when we think of excellence excellence is hard to define but there are some bullet points that the group came up with obviously pursue your best hard work commitment and it's a journey to to get to excellence achievement uh achievement is something that you're gonna do um whether you're in kindergarten

014or whether you're a teacher uh near retirement we want you a continual process of achieving your goals uh recognition we wanna celebrate celebrate anyone throughout the district that achieves a goal goal-oriented and a result of effort this is a big one for us we know i personally know mcguffy how strong the community is when we say community it's a cohesive community there's a lot of tradition here a lot of partnerships we want to build trust among the community among all of our stakeholders and we want this partnership to be mutually beneficial for all stakeholders uh the last one courtesy of uh dr gottfriend he's a champion of this give him a shout out hope a hope is something that we want all of our stakeholders to have agencies pathways social support and resilience and i'm

015passing it to mr bennis thank you uh mr fleck has that step stem night down there or steam night i think down in claysville so she's going down there and um i'll present the next section um my section really deals with sort of what came out of the our team going through the process basically what we conducted was a needs assessment as an organization okay you put you go through the plan it has different spaces it has to fill uh in terms of decisions it draws in data and basically after answering a lot of the questions and having the discussions that drive those um you're left with basically the things you do well and the things you struggle at for the things that are going to be challenging so it makes you it's a needs

016assessment it makes you sort of reflect it makes you sort of look forward um out of that obviously doctor refers to these as the four pillars these are our focus areas everything that we do as an organization as a school district is going to come down somewhere somehow within these classifications and i think they're pretty self-evident obviously the instruction part our main focus and mission throughout this community revolves around the education of the next generation climate culture which is hugely important in terms of the students enjoying going to school and enjoying the enjoying the engagement and all the experiences that they'll have but also as a workplace a type of culture that we uh sort of uh embellish in the type of culture that we sort of uh proliferate each year um obviously another one

017of our goals is strengthening our ties to the community we don't want to be you know a school in a hill or or someplace that has made a brick and mortar you want to have those strong ties to your community and and we have we're fortunate enough to have a lot of those but there's always room to grow and expand those opportunities and the last one pursuant excellence nobody wants to be mediocre nobody wants mediocre service for this for the students who attend our schools or the people who work here so um pursuing that and that that's never ending and that means in academics that means in athletics that means in the arts that means in family and social engagement it means in everything and next slide oh i have the slide thing dan i

018thought you had this you gave it away yeah all right and i understand that so when we ended it asked a lot of questions asked us to identify things once again and putting the data what are we good at and what are some of the things that we need to work on and it came down to to basically four areas um our attendance now i know that you know attendance for this year attendance for last year attendance for the 1920 school year those are all compounded by different factors but still even prior to that we saw trends and attendance that concerned us and obviously in order to maximize the benefit for students at school they have to be at school so why is attendance a problem uh particularly at the secondary level or you know

019starts to emerge as it goes as to students get older and it comes down to what's the causations of those things and what can we do to improve student attendance because we can't deliver things unless the students are here so break the barriers for why students are missing school work with parents to understand the importance of being in school and how um sort of one thing becomes self-reliant on the other the second uh so that's a district goal to focus on on that attendance the second one i'll just go down is to retain experience and quality staff education's right now going through a lot of attrition people are leaving with many years of experience sometimes with full years of experience sometimes they have an education degree they don't even go into education and and schools

020great tough workplaces you know i was in uh i had to go and get some blood work the other day and i was talking to the healthcare workers and sharing like oh you're in schools and it's just like healthcare and schools have had really hard times through these periods um but and i can see how that can leave some professionals sort of disenchanted with with what they got into is this what i what what i wanted to do how am i treated as an individual in this organization how am i prioritized do people listen to me do i have a voice those types of things so that all goes into the qualitative factor of your workplace so one thing that we know is we need to make sure that we are a good workplace and

021we understand and give voice to those people who need it and who want to be part of the decision-making process okay so holding on to to who we have and it and it can be tough and there will be challenges i think everybody's you guys have spoken about the teacher shortage in certain areas you're already seeing i have a conversation with another minister like he's afraid he's going to lose like a spanish teacher or a family consumer science teacher they're just not out there they're not out there like they were the next one i'll go back up here to the top obviously one of the one of the main goals is to foster achievement you you look at that language and says foster vision of high expectations and success for families educators this is about

022student achievement how are you looking at data how are you using the tools that you have in terms of technology curriculum other resources teaching and instruction to improve student academic performance and what are all the factors that are founded there so that's that's a challenge that's a never-ending challenge for every school district but um taking a look at some of our achievement data at certain levels there's there are some struggles and those compound as kids go through that system you have gaps so understanding that and making academic achievement a focus in reality uh once more is pivotal and the last one i think this one is is one that is is a no-brainer building in that good partnership with the community with businesses obviously a lot of focus is on careers and that ties directly

023into the business community all of our education partners whether they be western area whether they be penn commercial whether they be the iu whoever it was all of our partners sort of building those collaborative relationships with them in making us accessible once again reaching out a lot and that's i think schools are better at that than that are getting better than that um as they go through and technology has really allowed schools to sort of you know talk to the people at range because they want to do a presentation today the washington county conservation district was in our ffa program talking about the rain barrel project that they are done and what the roles of the how those affect the buffalo watershed and they they fed the kids lunch but they also had a closing

024activity and that's good to bring those people from the from groups like that into here the students work with range to build those rain barrels and mrs cambrosi and mr leisure have done a great job fostering our relationship with some of our corporate partners here in using the ffa and voagas as that outreach tool we do that very well but we need to do that at every level and we need to find always those people that are willing to support a lot of times they're waiting to be asked so so um build upon those resources so those are our four criteria and four focus areas moving forward as part of the strategic plan right each one has its own significance i think success needs to occur in all of them in order for us for

025the plan to actually be successful so what are we going to do in each of these all right so each one of these is broken down into a series of three steps like a three year process i'm at that one so we have developed some targets in terms of three year targets in terms of each of these first one in attendance we are going to obviously the first year get the data what are you seeing in terms of trends what does the data tell you you know the la last year's data is really scared because we were hybrid okay the previous year's data is obviously secured because we were we had closed down and the kids were going remote so going back you know if you go back to 1819 data is that really where

026you want to sort of it can tell you something but it's probably old and not really as significant as what's going to be ahead of you so collect that data be accurate with you and let that data start to tell you the picture and do that analysis piece and find out some of those underlying reasons why students may not want to come to school and what do we look like in terms of data so year one's about a compilation of basically uh building a data analysis plan of where your attendance is and setting a goal so we we did set a percentage goal of five percent in comparison to 21 22. i'll tell you this our attendance here is usually very good um our average daily rate is a lot of times in in excess

027of 90 percent but we do have a certain percentage of our students who are chronically absent so you're talking about hey five percent that doesn't really sound like a lot well if you're already at like 75 percent five percent is a lot to gain now if you were at 40 then then something bigger would make more sense um so also uh in the in the next year uh yeah in year one start to build on our policies and start to look at some of the ways in which we and we'll probably be bringing back attendance policies to you for your review based on research based knowledge about the effects of this on student attendance the effects of the pandemic what schools can do to do that that research is out there and we can apply

028that to the context of our community identify the factors and then year three increase by five percent so a simple process collect the data see where you're at build upon your challenges and move forward the next one obviously in year one we want to start to uh tear down the doors here and tear down the walls to the community and increase our community partnership so that's a mouthful works increasing community partnership what does that mean well i think we need to be centers and we already know that our school district and a lot of our facilities are the hub of this community and a lot of things occur here whether it be relay for life or or sporting events or hosting the claysville revitalization committee whatever it is we are the we are the hub

029in once again identifying and inviting those partners in on a more regular chance taking their feedback and building a plan to increase the number of community-based events through all contexts uh with our business and community partners all right so once again looking for opportunities and setting events up to carry out that mission student achievement is the next one obviously the first year involves the analysis of data i think this year we'll have relatively consistent summative performance data based on student standardized tests at the end of the year so that will be a good way for us to find out where we're at in some ways but we also have to implement that next year with formative data which means benchmarking and knowing that progress not waiting until the end of year test but knowing along

030the way and using that data to drive instructional practices curriculum development and all those other factors building a culture of data analysis with our staff in building their skills in terms of data analysis and then um year two it says uh robot robust curricular offerings to pennsylvania course standards for for math and ela as you know um we this year we're involved in sort of reformulating mathematics k to k to 12 in our school district which is hugely past due and and mr dr gaucho and dr uh oberg and administrative team i think have put it in the faculty have put a lot of effort into that so i'm very pleased with that next year's focus is both math and ela then the year after that becomes math ela and science so it's building that

031continual pattern of curriculum development based on that data that you're now collecting on an ongoing process in order to drive the decisions that need to be made for student achievement and then setting targets that are robust and in line with the targets that that our students can be successful in the last one um keep great staff i think once again this a lot of this is all that qualitative things that you do in terms of a workplace in terms of giving people voice if people don't feel they're they're given a voice in decisions then you know those decisions are somebody else so my investment in carrying out some of those practices become maybe less than if i was actually on the committee or somebody actually took my input so working in tandem looking for ways

032to celebrate teacher success paraprofessional success having those days to set aside to to meet with your teachers and let them make instructional decisions which i think we are we're doing a much better job at than we have done in the past um but so listening their input making them part of that i was very happy to know that you know the math department is now at the at the head of making mathematics decisions where it should have been all along right they were they no nobody here is certified in mathematics they are so they have a voice but that voice was not taken into consideration previously and it is now and they know they're part of that process so that's once again getting that buy-in and doing those ongoing needs assessments with them doing surveys

033with our staff to let us know what are the strengths what are the weaknesses what we need to improve on what your feedback on on big curricular things and on small culture or climate things okay and making sure that you're you you actually if you say you're going to take the feedback you actually use that feedback so those are the four pillars once again the four focus areas these are the four targeted areas of improvement that we set aside these are the three targets tied to each of them and the process in which we will basically attack the problem so that's my part of it and you want to go all right um so first thing i want to say is just how much just enjoyment it has been to be a part of this

034process with with everybody on this team uh both the guys presenting tonight the steering committee members that dr oberg mentioned and and just in talking with people across the the district throughout the staff throughout the community um and and i'm i'm optimistic and hopeful and and hopefully as you all are seeing this tonight that we've really come up with something that we think is going to be tangible and and able for us to to understand and drive forward with a concrete plan of like hey this is this is what we're doing this is where we're going and when we started out the process it was okay this is something that needs to be done and like many things that it had an initial deadline that i think was march 30th and so we said okay

035we got to really you know be aggressive through the fall and winter to to be ready for that and then pretty quickly it got extended to you know the summer months we said okay well we still want to keep an aggressive timeline because wouldn't it be great to go into the new school year with with an idea of where we're headed and of course the deadline got extended again but we you know we just really dedicated to that process and it at some point along the way it shifted from something that needed to be done to something that really became a just an exciting thing to be a part of in a thing that um you know things decisions started to to line up to where hey this matches with this this fits with where

036we want to go um and so of course everyone has shared about the mission the vision uh talk talked about the the priority target and challenge areas and those are the pieces of the the plan itself when we talk about what is the future ready plan and a lot of this and that's why if some of the wording on those target challenge areas if you're like why is it 17 words and then attendance was just one word um some of that is product of the the portal system that we mr bonus talked about answering the questions and putting all of that in it was taking the language from that portal and then working through the portal to generate um you know the plan that has to be submitted to the portal which is some of

037the the wording and the language but then using that portal and that process to come up with a really great document a really great thing for our district at least you know that's that's where we all see it but in addition to that actual base plan so the future ready plan itself is the mission the goals the shared values the things like that there are additional required supporting reports that we have to complete um that are not the actual future id plan but they're required parts of of achieving what that plan hopes to achieve and so we're going to talk about three of those i'm going to talk about this first one and then mrs richards going to talk about act 48 professional development and also about induction and so one of the required components

038for submission is what is our curriculum development process what are we doing to ensure that our curriculum is refreshed and vibrant and reflective of um of our students needs of of our you know our own culture our own abilities um a lot of the things with the you know making making learning more engaging and participatory the things that we've practiced up here with the learning routines right moving from students sitting and receiving information passively to students actively being engaged in learning and wanting to participate talking about you know what students should be learning and demonstrating and mastering at different grade levels and different points in the in the continuum and how are we measuring how do we know if in third grade when they're introduced to fractions are they getting it and how do we

039know if by fifth grade when they should have mastered fractions because they're going to start multiplying fractions right how do we know if they're prepared for that or or an ela right how do we know if in k-2 they've developed the ski the skills to to go from learning to read to reading to learn and so that is kind of the goal with our entire curricular process and of course i could uh spend a lot a lot of time just on this topic but i have one slide in probably about three minutes so i will do my best to stick to that everyone knows how brief i love to be so um we the the short of it we are establishing what's going to be a six year curriculum cycle where every content area will

040get an intentional review at least once in the six year process and of course um this this year is actually year one of that cycle and of course it's been a focus on mathematics and our math team has done a wonderful job with that and of course later tonight there will be a an item on the agenda for your consideration and you heard mr simpson present about that topic there are a number of other team members there that really just it's been a great year working with them and um we actually had a meeting with them yesterday for the for half the day and then they're back together again next week to start talking about the implementation professional development and things like that um of what we want to do mathematically moving forward and so

041that's that's been the big focus for year one of the cycle um and then the next big focus moving forward is going to be ela and that team actually met for the first time last week and had a just a wonderful full day meeting kind of just discussion it was just where are we at what do we want to do what does ela want to become some conversations about the science of reading and what that means and looks like and how can we become versed in best practices for for our kids to become um wonderful writers and readers and and communicators and so um each year in that process there will be the first four years are the big core areas right because after next year we would then really move to an intensive focus

042on science and then an intensive focus on social studies but also within each of those years through the six years all of your elective content areas all of your supporting um subject areas are also getting attention so your health and phys ed your agriculture your your um computers business technology foreign languages all of those are at some point in that six year rotation getting a direct and intentional review and focus it also is about an ongoing improvement of our assessment offerings looking at how are we measuring student progress from an assessment standpoint um how are we knowing not just right did you get an a b c d um or a below passing mark but what does that mean when i say you know you gotta be on your report card what are you able

043to do in each subject area what are you able what are you able to represent from a skill standpoint um as opposed to just a letter that like what were we actually studying during that period of time when you know if you got this letter it's because you either demonstrated or were not able to demonstrate these skill sets and so we're looking to to really have our assessments match up with what we're instructing and that way we can use those assessments then to to target um like a like a coach mic right in basketball if you know after the game the coach may look at the the statistics from the game and say we shot 20 from the foul line so you know what we need to work on our foul shooting or you know

044what we uh we had 25 turnovers and so that's going to be a focus of the the practice coming up right it's it's not the same but but it's a a working analogy of of how that works um the next piece the third piece of that is like you've seen us start to do with with some of the math stuff initially right getting um curriculum information standards resources um things available online for for public facing so that a parent would be able to to see here's what my kid is learning at this at this grade level here's the scope and sequence that's happening throughout the year and and that is a a really large project to undertake it's a project i'm super excited about and i've learned so much about using the website and continually

045had to bother mr wilson with questions or things and actually um at one point recently the people from the website company um had to send us a custom script to be able to do what we wanted because i kept saying to him i want this on this side of the column and this on this side but this column is too small and can we make it bigger and the company helped us out right but so it's it's it's something i'm really enjoying and jumping head first into and i was i was pumped because i'm bringing your child to work day my son came with me and um i was you know i was in for a challenge because we saw mr wilson and his son was here we just got to drive on a van

046run and then we ran into um to coach brothers from the high school and his son was with him he said he was excited to get to come with his dad and do be in pe class and i thought well i sure hope my son likes looking at academic standards and scope and sequence but then he did and he was really cause he's in first grade and he was really excited for me to talk to him about can you this is what you should be able to do by the end of first grade can you do this and he's like what will i need to do in second grade and so we like he ended up thankfully because i was like i'm otherwise i'm going to go home and like be like well you have

047the third coolest job out of people that we talked to today um but but anyway it's you know a little little humor um but that goes with the last bullet of that which is you know aligning our instruction to what we're assessing to what students should be doing at each grade level and demonstrating um looking at how much time we're spending on each topic on each concept and and also aligning it to how people learn right are we connecting it to their prior knowledge are we addressing misconceptions if we find out that a student has a misconception about a certain concept or topic um are we making them think about the process of learning you know why do you think this is the answer or why did you come to this conclusion i mean the

048last one that are we making learning something social where they're participating in and responding and so um that's just a little bit um probably a little bit more than i needed to say on curriculum development but i will hand it to mrs reicheck and she's gonna talk about the last two areas thank you thank you this is definitely one of the parts of the plan that is required pde says you have to do a professional development part but as dr oberg said before we started with a mindset like let's get this done and then we really fell in love with the process and when you make a priority challenge to retain staff then you better make a priority to invest in them as well and so we have a very active act 48 committee it's

049been fun um we're planning the june 3rd in service and this committee met a few weeks ago and they're really driving exactly what that day looks like um because you can imagine one teachers educators i'll put myself in our educators make the worst students any any in-service always and then the last day of school right and so we better have their opinions and help planning that day if it's going to be meaningful so it's great that we have a committee that can help with that we know that when we're studying what education looks like for students we also know that there's good research out there that shows what is beneficial to the adult learner and part of that is differentiating a first year teacher versus a teacher that's been here 25 years they have different

050needs when it comes to training so we have organized our trainings our professional development in these pathways we will always have to pay attention to the federal state and local mandates we have to do mandated reporter training we have to offer suicide awareness first aid cpr but then we also want to make sure that we're hitting the individual needs of our teachers to help retain them and invest in them and then lastly part of the plan is to create an induction model and this was kind of fun to see come together contractually with our teachers with mea they have a three-day induction year one two day uh year two and so we said we wanna better organize this on the first day of everybody in the district there's some mandated things you need to know

051where the bathroom is how to work the copier what our safety and security policies are but then we um said we want to better organize sometimes when right now our induction program works really well when staff start in august but all of you at this table know how often does that happen so we've created some modules that basically are going to run in module a and a module b um and then so once you're here two years you'll got both of them but we'll offer each one each year why so that's been fun to watch come together is we were talking about this in the admin meeting and um mr mckee was like wait a second that's great you're doing that for the teachers we should be doing that across the district and so i'm

052really excited it seems like we're going to start organizing a really robust onboarding program um across for all uh faculty and staff um just use this not the computer and lastly we said that uh we were very excited about parents on our strategic planning committee lots of reasons why obviously but i thought this was really an exciting one mrs melissa robbiannick um put this together for us as we know the mission statement that we're proposing tonight is around that concept of teach and then in each of our buildings we know that pbis programs are kind of centered around some themes so claysville we have our stars at joe walker they soar and the middle school focuses on pride so we just thought that was really a fun way to tie in that climate and culture

053and spirit of mcguffey so all of these words today tonight to say our goal is to teach our future stars the sword with pride and as dr uber always tells us in his one calls go highlanders thank you so with that i will open it up to any questions and as you're thinking about them again i want to thank this group another round of applause for not just the admin team here i think every presenter uh the teaching staff that was a big part of this our community partners they were a big part of this so again this is a reflection of that collaboration which i'm also very excited about i do have a question um give me just a second sorry i was taking you know i understand this is more for mr for

054dr gotren understanding that reading is part of english language arts when we are looking at the ela curriculum development that will cover the title one reading program as well yes it will and we have actually reading specialists from each building represented okay thank you other than that it's a great presentation thank you great job before we go on to the next presentation and i promise it will be brief um there was one person i forgot to mention who's sitting at the table with us tonight and i'm excited to have uh with us tonight uh just a little bit about uh missing woman she said that as part of her agreement uh ms deb ringerman is our new business administrator but she said she wants to stay um in the background for at least one more

055session and not to have a name plate for her out front center so we'll make sure for the next session that we have that for you so again welcome to mrs engelman my presentation uh the next presentation is on flexible instruction here at mcguffy as we're waiting for that ql we for really the last four years we're one of the first districts in the state to undergo flexible instructional day we were a pilot school district uh and that continued on from the 2010 2018 school year through the last three years so what we'll do tonight is talk a little bit about what fit is um how it's changed and the ways in which we're going to approach that and the goal would be for the board to adopt our flexible instruction for the next three

056years so the first thing is uh again it was approved in 2019 2020 school year we were part of that pilot group in the year before that now all schools across the commonwealth have the ability uh and here's why and we learned this lesson i think every every district in the commonwealth did that during covet that we have to provide our students the ability to learn uh both in class but also virtually when that calls for and what most districts did as well as we did in that 2019-20 school year was we went one-to-one so we could offer our students the ability to learn from home as we had the hybrid model going into the next school year so pd followed suit and said that you have up to five days a year to use

057a flexible instructional day and i'll talk about what that is in a moment and that day will count as an actual school day so that's that is something new their parameters their reasons for why you can have a fit or flexible instructional day pretty much covers again it's almost uh if you look at the application now it's almost for any kind of uh event whether you like inclement weather something happens to your building there's a state of emergency which by the way it felt like this past year we we experienced a lot of those as a district in september we had flooding uh we lost power the next month in this building so we had to cancel and that was too right off the bat without having any type of snow or inclement weather that

058way and of course we know the last event we had here in march was a ice storm that created two of our communities they had to have emergency days they actually decoration days so we did not have fit days we did not have remote learning days we actually had to cancel on those days but this gives you pretty much any anything on the side as far as what could occur uh to use for your fit days so what's changed since the time this was first instituted to today um the first is remote learning days so last year uh when i would sign off bill highlanders every time that we would have a remote learning day it was due to this idea of what's called remote learning last year in years past we created what's called

059flexible instructional days that account for the reasons why we use a remote learning day we did not use fed in the past because of this basic reason this is number two rationale as we created this in the pilot year continuing on for the last three years our fit days were only to be used if we had a cold weather day which as we know did not occur we have plenty of snow but we had no cold weather so when i would call a day where we would be in remote learning virtual learning it was due to this first one remote learning that goes away at the end of the school year there will no longer be allowed remote loading days from the states it will have to be a fit day now the rash now

060in the past is a little bit different in the past the rationale was that the school had to direct the state how they were going to use that day and as i said in the past it was only for cold weather emergencies that was the only way we could call fit day now as i said the rationale they've created that rational force everyone's going to follow it it's pretty much anything that could occur under the sun that would allow for it also what's changed for many districts of course for mcguffy being one of them is that we are a one-to-one district meaning that every student in the r through 12 has a chromebook they have the potential and we'll talk about this in just a minute they have the potential to access learning online in

061the past when i say hybrid our hybrid model was one where teachers and staff could come on site again because it was due to cold weather if i'm going to use a fitbit if the district is going to call for a fit day it will be to the fact that the conditions are such that would be too dangerous for students staff anyone to be on the road and in that case then we would either have one or two options either calling for a flexible instructional day or using again as we planned in our school calendar one of three days that would be a makeup day so our hybrid model this year is going to be a remote learning day that will allow for students to both take part in education synchronously and asynchronously synchronous meaning

062that they can use their computer again we'll talk about this in a moment having internet connectivity which we know is an issue will have that ability to actually meet with a teacher online real time as well as asynchronous where they're assigned work that would be offline and we'll talk about that what stays the same so again this year with the plan there are allowed in every school that applies for this the pde there are five fit days per school year for us to use up to five uh it is renewed for every three for three years so we're gonna renew a process and what also stays the same is that we again through the process of the pandemic through covid uh our teachers got very very proficient if not advanced proficient i would say with

063google classrooms the google classroom will be our way to work our platform for students engaging our staff through the curriculum options they would have for that day and our notification system again using our blackboard one call using all the local media both tv and radio as well as of course the banners on our website and social media twitter those kind of accounts that's what stays the same work to be done so here we are talking about the next three years and again when we talk about a flexible instructional day typically it's going to be weather related typically it's going to be during our aware months however we do have work to be done on this plan the first is access access meaning broadband access as we know and i actually want to give everyone a

064shout out that took part in the washington county uh in it survey that just recently happened of the 10 municipalities in washington county that showed a need broadband need for for internet access six of the top ten came from mcguffey so that was a strong showing by our community and a strong support bar community to to push that so we have a lot of work to be done there whether it comes to uh remote access using our remote access looking at ways in which we can have students work offline even knowing going into a day where there is a weather emergency that is predicted has happened with our march two days we took in march if we can know prior to the fact that a weather event is going to happen we can have our

065students take all the information from the teachers through google classroom and it'll be worked offline once they have it once they leave here it'll all be on their chromebook offline they can work on it on that that part of it consistency one of the things that we know we get better at even though our teachers do a wonderful job is making sure that what we provide to our kindergarten students first grade students it may have to be different than we provide to our third fourth grade students and certainly it's gonna be different than we provide to our middle school in high school so over the course of the summer like with a lot of these things we talk about what that looks like how when we provide a fit day instruction is happening to the

066best of our ability that's our goal if i can't provide that then it's gonna be hard for me to call fit day right because we all know that this day is given to us and what the students experience in this day in our school they can't give back same ultimate fit day and that's my challenge as your superintendent to make sure that when it comes to those days and i'm offering this and we're offering this as a school that we're doing our very best to make sure that providing your child was the very best we can provide through that online experience taking attendance is another issue again depending on whether or not you're an elementary student you're a student that's not not able to access that particular time we are responsible as a district when

067we hold a fit day to make sure that we're also taking attendance and students they're attending and finally the collaboration part and i think you're going to see that words just so often it's exciting again because of what we just did with the future and comprehensive plan but that collaboration piece is we have work that has to be done with our staff we have to make sure that they are part of the planning process when it comes to what does that virtual day look like right we and we have to have an mou which will be presented to the board here in a few months we have a discussion starting with them on monday with our union representatives so that'll be the first step so those are things those are the areas that work needs

068to be done and just the last thing i'll say to you is um from our perspective this past year not only did we go over the number of days that we had for remote learning and i i i you know it was it was difficult and uh you know you can ask mike because mike and i are on the phone together we're looking at road conditions in a district that's two or eight square miles uh west philly can look different than buffalo township literally i mean you can have them reporting to us while the roads are pretty much clear on 18 but uh in the hollows the snow is blowing over top of it and every time mike will tell you i was like come on can we just do it two hours just get

069down to school but ultimately i'm going to say this again this is one of my philosophies if i ever have ever gonna err you know in making a call remember going to make a call where maybe not every family has the ability to to access again part of my charge is make sure that when you have access to this it's gonna be the best of the flat if i'm ever gonna air it's gonna be the undecided safety and that's what that's every decision i made this year and every decision i'll make moving forward is always on what's best for our kids what's best for our families what's best for our staff so again tonight for your consideration that would be to adopt fit for the next three years uh using five per year any questions

070i just want to be first of all thank you that was a good presentation second of all um just so that we're all kind of on the same page what i'm hearing is what we're being asked as a board to consider tonight is approving the use of fid for the next three years but you are still working with your administration as a district on addressing those areas that you discussed yes we we're here in you know summer's approaching but we're thinking winner but two different areas so just want to make sure the community understands that as well that we're we're not there's nobody sitting here saying oh yes we've got all the answers to how we're going to fix these five areas um but it's more of a first we approve it and then we're

071looking at how are we going to improve in those areas and and one thing i will also say is uh there's a lot also that that there's a communication aspect that's a publisher spending just a little bit more time on in the past of course many of our families many of our staff even they know fit to be something different than it's going to be going to be so part of our responsibility too is to communicate and as we start to move through this the first step would be of course for the board to approve it and if they do then we'll start placing things on the website to keep you up to date on where we are with that in the past and listening to what you had to say some fit days a

072student could come to school in the past it was a hybrid model uh it was due only if we had cold weather where staff and students would come on site this moving forward is 100 remote thank you and the understanding being that for whatever reason it's not safe for anybody to travel correct yeah the water's out of the building so you can't have people here and that kind of stuff yeah okay thank you thank you okay this time we are going to end committee meeting and we will reconvene for the regular board meeting at 701 let's say 7 10. that sounds good for those of you that are in attendance online i'm going to pause the meeting see how we go again it's a great time to get ready for trinity [Music] i can't believe

073[Music] at this time we will call the regular monthly board meeting for may 19 2022 uh to order at 7 12 p.m roll call please mr haines mr hardin miss jackson present mr kern here mr laser here this live heart here mr ross here miss jingle here mr venata thank you hey would you please join us for the pledge i plan to allegiance of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we already did the recognition for this stem design team we did that in committee so next we have middle school students of the month for them for uh may 2022. good evening everyone so i'm proud to announce our middle school students of the month for may this

074award is vote voted on by our middle school teachers and the award is awarded to students who excel in the classroom and out of the classroom and represent our school district with great pride we had two eighth grade students selected for student of the month our first student we're going to recognize is olivia for manic so olivia is the daughter of thomas and stephanie for manic her favorite class is ela and she it's her favorite because she's good at it uh her favorite teacher is mrs sismick and that's because her class is fun olivia's activities include marching band and junior auxiliary for the legion in claysville and advice that she would give to other students to be successful is do not be lazy about your work and turn it in on time and i believe

075that is great advice once again olivia next eighth grade student is wyatt grandin wyatt is the son of william and heather grandin his favorite class is spanish class and he says it's very fun but calm at the same time and his favorite teacher is his spanish teacher mrs bowman and again saying that she is a fun teacher and does fun activities wyatt's hobbies include riding quads and listening to music and advice that he would give students to be successful would be to do your work and pay attention in class thank you and congratulations next we will have the high school student council representative [Music] good evening my name is macy whipkey and i'm the student council rep first i have a sports update 16 student athletes qualified for the wpial championships and the following athletes

076all meddled hope bundash danica white jocelyn dames brynn claire dylan stewart elijah dale kirkland chipoletti and andrew brownlee senior clara barr repeated as the wipio hurdle champion for the second consecutive year this baseball team finished in second place in their section and lost in a narrow playoff game in the whitfield playoffs to deer lakes 1-0 with the young team coming back they should be strong for the foreseeable future the softball team completed their season with two consecutive wins and for the young team no seniors the future looks bright for softball the boys tennis team completed a very competitive season with many seniors returning the mcguffey high school prom was held last saturday with the grand march and a dance at crete farms in claysville 250 students attended and it was a great end of year

077event haley barker and kirkland chipoleti were crowned as this year's queen and king advanced placement exams and the nocti exams were administered over the last two weeks with keystone exams taking place this week the national honor society is sponsoring a volleyball tournament tomorrow after school over a dozen faculty participated in the take your child to work day on april 28th and it was great to see all of the kids at the high school the abandoned chorus returned from a successful trip to florida with the marching band performing at the magic kingdom and the chorus at hollywood studios they would like to thank the school board for their continued support and mr harold mrs goss mrs g ho mrs legler mrs ely and mr bonus for their patience and endurance baccalaureate is set for thursday evening

078june 2nd at 7 00 in the auditorium and awards day will be held on wednesday morning june 1st the band concert was held last night and the middle school high school chorus concert is on monday may 23rd at 6 30. the ffa banquet is scheduled for may 31st at six o'clock at the west alexander fairgrounds six senior athletes and their families participated in our annual sports signing breakfast with their families jocelyn dams will be attending mary wood university clara barra will be attending niagara university macy webkey will be attending west liberty university austin hall will be attending st vincent university logan seibert will be attending laroche university and elijah jones will be attending washington and jefferson college the band banquet is scheduled on may 24th at six o'clock at claysville park western area held their

079graduation ceremonies over the last three nights on their campus next i will pass it on to nate romistan who is going to give an esports update but before i graduate i would like to personally thank all of the school board members for being so welcoming throughout the past two years and i would also like to thank mr bonus for being there to help everyone when needed and always listening to the students when they present him with concerns or ideas he always allowed the students to have a voice to the student body it does not go unnoticed and is greatly appreciated thank you again thank you hello my name is nathan ramistan i'm a sophomore here at mcguffy high school and i'm also the ambassador of the mcguffy esports program that we have so far here

080we've had multiple tournaments so far but our most recent has been the mcguffey esports invitational this tournament was held on thursday april 28th where mcguffy high school and middle school kids could both participate in a esports-like environment competition we had seven teams from the middle school two teams from the high school make nine teams total each with four participants it was very easy for the students to be able to sign up for the tournament all they had to do was look at flyers that were hung around the school and go on google classroom and complete a google form that flyered all the information for them this tournament was a massive success the teams it looked like everybody had a lot of fun at it we had a lot of competition going back and forth and

081we actually had a final showdown between high school and middle school for the championship the high school did obviously come out on top it was team rain that won it with a blowout score team rain each member did win a 25 game stop gift card but i don't think it was important about the team that won i think it was important that everybody had fun at this tournament finally i want to talk about the steps moving forward with mcguffy esports moving forward we want to be able to get equipment here at mcguffy for the students to be able to use for our past tournaments students and faculty members have been bringing in equipment this limits the amount of tournaments we're able to play in and the amount of practice that we're able to do because

082it's really hard to get six to eight students and faculty members to all communicate to bring their stuff in at the same exact time by getting our own equipment we can have solitary stuff here that we can use every day to practice play in more tournaments and kind of do whatever we really need to do with them along with that though comes a room we need to have an area where the esports team can call theirs kind of like the weight room the football field stuff like that we need to have our own area to store this equipment and participate in some students and myself have been working with mr bonus mr healy mr welk mr cyvek mr wilson dr gotran and dr oberg to try to find the right place to do this so

083far the library seems like it has a lot of the right materials and space to be able to pull this off especially the library classroom with this room we'll need obviously the basic equipment that you would need for esports and it's really not hard to get and finally really where we want to go is expand what we are playing in this so far we've only been playing one game and that's called rocket league it's soccer but with cars it's a lot of fun to play i'm going to be honest and that's all we've been playing and we've only been participating in tournaments sponsored by the iu1 the great thing and the thing i love most about esports is you can play anything with anybody at any time from anywhere and i think the big thing

084we could do is work with other companies or tournament or anybody who's hosting stuff whether it's region-wide statewide or nationwide we can play any games with anyone at any time expanding this game will also bring in more students some students might not be into the soccer car games or certain games that were so far providing but if we can expand more games more tournaments more students will come in it looks like we have a great supporting cast with the middle school seven middle school teams really shocked me and i think that shows a lot about the future we have here at mcguffy with this program that's all i really have for you guys today thank you for let me take your time do you have any questions yes what type of equipment do you need

085um simple things like xboxes controllers to go with those um probably headsets and the library has things like a whiteboard already and simple stuff like that already here at the school but i think xboxes and playstations the how many uh to be honest i really don't know me and mr healey would have to sit down and talk about that more and i can get it back to you at some point first of all thank you for coming um that was an absolutely wonderful presentation it was well put together and you were very well spoken so thank you thank you and secondly uh that would kind of to go to dovetail off of what mr leisure was asking i would request that you put together some kind of a wish list for equipment with um um

086and numbers um and then maybe we could start from there and then you could make that available yeah absolutely i can get to work on that okay thank you any other questions thank you this time we will um take public participation public comments on agenda items this is agenda items under president we have three president in the audience tonight uh call mr justin coppola and it is seven minutes right yeah right i'm justin coppola from south franklin it's good to see you all um yeah that that young kid did a fantastic i was like my goodness that's amazing so uh as for agenda items uh the first one that stuck out to me prior to this meeting was uh the pennsylvania school board association membership renewal considering uh not going back to the public comment

087that i had about one of the policies that was brought forward to highland school district i'm sure you all remember my public comment about that when it dealt with equity and uh their definition of what you know equity is when used with gender and uh at least it kind of move to remind people about that the pennsylvania school board association said when it came to equity that under gender is uh identified as male or female part male part female or neither male nor female that's coming from the pennsylvania school board association and that was a drafted policy by them so before i'm sure that that type of policy would not be welcomed at all at mcguffy i mean it's the future generation and uh being a more conservative school district i would imagine that it

088would not be in the best interest of the kiddos here and it would not be very good for um the growth of their mind so um at least whenever it comes to that uh i did have an opportunity to talk to a sitting school board member at butler area school district and i asked him at least whenever it came to uh the pennsylvania school board association as renewing your membership you can actually have it tailored to what you guys like approve so you don't actually have to take everything of what they offer i'm not really a fan of their legal advice i think it's terrible i'm not really a fan of their the majority of their policies not saying all of them i'm just saying the majority of them not really a fan and i

089would say at least for a lot of the people here i'm sure they would agree with me on that um i think would be best to tailor it towards uh i think it provides some insurances if i'm correct with that i think that would drop the cost of what's presented here tonight uh save the district uh immense amount of money because at least for what i heard from the administration they're doing a fantastic job i i would actually trust them a lot more than some of the things that come from the pennsylvania school board association so i i think we should probably have a little bit more sovereignty here we have a lot of powerful leaders and i like a lot of what they have to say and i like the direction of their vision

090for for the lack of vision you know it it leads to destruction but at least for their vision i think it leads to prosperity so um i would think that maybe you guys could table it talk about it a little bit more maybe tailor it to something that would be more accommodating to mcguffey school district and uh the other thing uh from the agenda of what i heard was uh with fib uh at least as like the legalities of it um i remember when it was 14 days to flatten the curve i i see like five days i see epidemic on it and i did have an opportunity to talk to zoni about it and it seems that you guys you know by the legal advice of andrew and price um just considering mr lucas

091didn't know the difference between a mandate and a law just wasn't sure at least by the legal interpretation of the parameters of that if if it gave the pencil the department of education any authority to add or to move towards or to kind of make it something that it's not i hope you guys can understand the direction and like what i'm asking here do you understand at least whenever it came to how they handled it back with the pennsylvania department of health and education do you see a little bit of similarities with that with the language of the epidemic on there just to kind of have a little bit of a guard if nobody mind so i'll respond to that first of all just to be clear this is five days per year that's it

092it's not like five days then five days then five days it's five days per year second of all we're not giving the department of ed any authority over anything in fact it gives the authority to the individual district the district is the one who determines when a fit would be used and for what purposes um and so if anything it takes more power away from the department of ed and it leaves it to the district as to what is best for the district so with that i believe i've misspoken there at all um and the as far as epidemic i get everybody's a little cove weary right we understand but at the same time we do have to allow language we don't know what's coming down the road we could end up with any kind

093of an epidemic and that that not necessarily covert related you know um i can remember times in this country's existence where we had polio epidemic we had chickenpox epidemic we don't know um so you do have to allow in the language some flexibility again for this particular item for our district personnel to make decisions that are best for our district and it's five days a year that's it would i be able to like kind of respond to that for i mean i still have a little bit i know i know it's okay at least whenever it came to who's uh who would have the authority of implementing that would it be the board or would it be just a superintendent i don't know if uh i'm not sure i met met you yet day-to-day operations

094falls under the superintendent so he would have the full authority to dictate that again you're talking about he makes that decision now when it comes to do we have a two-hour delay do we have a closing do we have a fit that falls to the superintendent that because that is day-to-day operations so that wouldn't be able to be skewed at all with outlet the board would have to vote if anything would change from what it is right now yeah i would say correct me if i'm wrong but i would say that if it seems as if there's a problem with the superintendent's use of any of those days that would become a board issue for the superintendent um but to answer your question it is day-to-day operation decision meaning that it would be i think

095i think i understand so any you guys would only be able to amend what is presented here if you did pass it through is that correct like you would only have the authority dr oberg would not have the authority to change anything of what stated you guys would have to amend this is that is that correct for this yeah for that if you voted when he uses as to when the superintendent any superintendent in our case dr uber when he decides to use a fed yeah that would be under his discretion okay what it is how the district as a whole is going to use it falls under this uh particular um policy policy um and once the board votes on that policy that's the policy for if someone to act outside of the policy

096becomes a different matter which then you you guys would have to amend any changes from that five days would have to be come to us i appreciate it thank you for your time thank you thank thank you vicky jordan hello everyone victoria jordan buffalo township i'm just going to beat you up a little bit over some financial things on the agenda because i know what's coming next month and i think most everybody else does too so i'd like to start with just my thoughts on the fit days which dr oberg already knows my concern is for the students who do not have internet access and also my concern is if you're going to do those days please structure it where the teachers are actually instructing and not just assigning and checking out and i trust

097that you're going to do that and i loved your presentation okay moving on number uh h on the agenda number 10. and it's about coral camp and it says there's a 15 charge i was just curious as that being paid by the district or by the students it's h number 10. the students the students okay thank you um i believe that's correct i'm sorry i thought i had these in order but for some reason i skipped one uh h4 grant um it is accepting a donor's chosen grant for classroom supplies which is great i love that i'm just curious about the various books what are those books have they been reviewed and approved by the board all right moving on to k moving stuff around okay okay number one cheerleading coach position um i already

098said it you know you raised her taxes twice during a pandemic and i'm sure that's going to happen again but what this fails to tell you on the agenda is what the cost of a c-level cheerleading coach is and is this a wise way to spend money moving on to k5 this is a little more in depth and really isn't about money so forgive me um is there a list of requirements for parents to review regarding the performance evaluations for teachers and social workers not individuals just as a whole what you look at when you're doing these performance evaluations and then k-5 number seven which was that attachment um it stated consults with stakeholders to facilitate understanding of factors in a student's home education agency and community that affect their educational experience can anybody tell

099me who the stakeholders are i'm sorry that was okay it was it was in it was in the attraction yes it was sorry guys um okay so where am i moving on to uh l1 athletic training services approve a two-year plan with novacare at a cost of eight thousand dollars i'm just curious what kind of training services do the athletics receive for our eight thousand dollars uh l3 is an agreement with the caring mission home care lp and it's about approving a contract which provides for a health office assistant and special education related services so my question is is this a position that's already filled within the district and if not what is the cost associated with it uh and what will change with this contract and what exactly does this person do i'm a

100little confused by l3 moving on to l4 software maintenance agreement 18 what exactly do we get for this expense is it just maintenance or is it the entire financial program and have we looked at other programs that might not be so expensive l6 psba membership are we required to be a part of psba the cost is 13 525 dollars what is the importance of being part of this state-run organization that mess let us all throughout the pandemic and then l-13 sorry guys i was pretty thorough with the agenda this month l13 was just a question on class again it's about transportation transportation contract with what appears to be for one student i'm assuming special needs or something like that but again it doesn't say what the cost is associated with that so i'm not sure

101how you vote on things without the costs associated with them and then yeah i would just say to to that sometimes that information is available to the board but it's not public until after work so okay it will become public once the board makes a decision okay so it's not that we're voting on that without that information it's just that that information isn't public at this time okay fair enough um and then the only thing i else i want to ask is um when will policies be put in place outlining any disciplinary action for anyone filing violating crt or the 1619 project within our school the resolution is do not allow it in mcguffey but it carries no weight if there's no disciplinary consequences i will speak to that because that is my fault i

102meant to ask to have that put on the agenda for this evening and i just forgot um but i will ask that it be placed on the agenda for next month because it is a public topic public topic not a an executive session so we will talk we'll put it on there okay thank you for your time everyone thank you last person in person president it's monique fry good evening monique from morris township um i've reviewed the interactive student edition ebook for reveal math accelerated volume one i have found some concerns not very many i was really surprised and happy actually one concern is a problem found on page 178 of the ebook and it looks like it says page 226 i'm thinking possibly it's a snippet of the actual textbook problem but the problem

103reads the table shows the average weight of two endangered mammals how much more does the brown bear weigh than the panther i thought well i didn't know brown bears were endangered so i actually looked it up to see um i find it interesting um i wanted to point out that the inaccurate statement of brown bears being endangered um they're not and i found that as a concern which some may not think that's much of a concern but considering the world we live in i think as little confusion as possible is best this problem leads me to believe that there's possibly a lot more inaccurate information littered throughout the curriculum and that may not be the case however without being able to review the complete textbook i don't believe you or anyone else has an honest

104perspective of what this curriculum contains as far as being able to review the animations provided they kind of just provide the snippets of them in this sample of problems you can't view the actual animations if you can that's great but i was unable to and um i don't like that i would like to be able to review that as well um also throughout the curriculum it has um go online you can go online to do another practice problem my concern with that is when i mentioned last month about second step which um i'll get to that on my non-agenda item because just to clarify but in the second step curriculum that i was reviewing um i found that there were links throughout the lessons that were leading you to somewhere else that definitely were not

105appropriate i certainly wouldn't want my child access to so my concern with the math is where are those links taking my child if they decide to go online and do this practice problem um we the parents as well as the school board directors and the director of curriculum instruction should be able to access and view any and all material that will be put in front of our students i know some of you think i might cherry pick however the state of florida rejected reveal math for grades k through five math grade four accelerated and grade eight for pre-algebra due to the participation in teaching critical race theory i think it's important to heed the warnings we have from others about this company's participation in infiltrating its curriculum with critical race theory that leads me to

106a non-agenda item that i'll speak about later regarding h4 on the agenda there is a grant listed the items to be received for the classroom on this short list there is various books listed along with what vicky had mentioned what are those books and um do they have to go through any form of vetting before they're placed into the classroom in front of our students um we are in a time in america that parents are expecting more from those who represent their communities needs the mcguffin community wants more checks and balance with books and curriculum and i've spoken with many who want this the same as i do um my next agenda item is l6 the psba um they have misled mcguffy throughout the entire pandemic causing me to believe that they have always been

107misleading and always will be misleading is mcguffey required to even be a member of the psba and if not why do we need to spend tax dollars to be part of this and that is all i have for my agenda items so thank you thank you that concludes in person mr wilson mr wilson anybody um at this point there are no members online okay i need a motion to approve the minutes of the april 21st 2022 school board meeting as submitted any discussion all those in favor proposed abstentions motion carries i need a motion to approve the general front fund schedule of bills from april 21st 2002 to may 19 2002 checks number check number seven five five nine six to check number seven five seven five four in the amount of eight hundred and

108eighteen thousand five hundred and seventy nine dollars and eighty two cents is submitted any discussion all those in favor aye opposed objections or abstentions sorry i need a motion to approve motion carries sorry my mother will yell at me if i don't know um i need um motions to approve the food service schedule pills dated may 19 2022 check number seven six four five to check number seven six four seven and the amount of fifty six thousand nine hundred and ninety eight dollars and sixteen cents system any discussion all those in favor proposed extensions motion carries i need a motion to approve the treasurer's report for the month of april 2022 as submitted second any discussion all those in favor aye opposed abstentions motion carries yes for the next one it was my error i

109neglected to tell laura that it's actually the gop 2021. so i need a motion to approve the gob series 2021 bill dated may 19 2022 check number 21001 to check number 21002 and the amount of 162.13 as submitted so move second discussion all those in favor aye opposed abstentions motion carries and we need a motion to approve mcguffey school district's flexible instruction day proposal for submission to the pennsylvania department of education any discussion i'll just simply say believe that we have answered to the concerns of the community on that anyone else have anything to add okay all those in favor opposed extensions motion carries i need a motion to approve the core and supplemental resources for math is presented for adoption for grades k through 8 algebra 1 algebra 2 geometry business mathematics and ap

110calculus so moved second any discussion does this include the reveal now i will say to that um mrs fry um and for others who have concern i don't know if you follow a lot of the educational publishing information but actually since florida had really rejected so many of them a lot of them have gone back to redo a lot of their materials and i'm not saying that there won't be problems i'm saying it is hard to look at any material k through 12 and find every little thing that might be a problem until we use it um and any curriculum quite frankly is as good or bad as the person who is teaching it um and there is some level of responsibility of the parents too as well for you to be able to stay

111on top of what your child is doing i appreciate your concerns um i want you to know i appreciate the fact that anybody took the time to look through them i think that's great um it's nice it's exciting for me i get excited as an educator when like parents become excited about curriculum so i do appreciate that and if you ever do if parents ever do have a concern about any curriculum they should contact the teacher and then if they don't get results there the building principle if no results there then dr gottrin and if no results there i mean there is kind of a protocol a hierarchy there um but open communication is by and far the best means that we have to protect our children in anything that's my two bits i would

112just like to add please as parents do study with your children look at what they're looking at because that's where we fall through when we give them the book and then they're off somewhere in the room we don't know what they're doing so i i we really have to be on top of it because if there is something and we've missed it we won't know it until it could be too late so thank you [Laughter] i think we also appreciate the effort of putting our best people on this to select make these selections they really put the time and effort in so yeah that's a great thing yes thank you thank you these books was available for review for a month they were and i will i just want to take a moment on that

113note too um really i said this to dr gottfried individually and to dr oberg but i can't tell you how much i appreciate the fact that you did make them the way that you made it available to the public you created the banner on the on the home page and then you had all of the separate information you had the questionnaire form that they was just i that was absolutely amazing um and in the time that i've been involved with the school board i've never seen that before so i really i i thank you for that um going way over the extra mile for that thank you thank you anyone else we have a um first and a second so all those in favor um objections extensions motion carries any motion to approve the application

114for homebound instruction for student f grade 8 for medical reasons all those in favor objections abstentions motion carry i need a motion to accept the donor's choice grant for three doodler starter kit uh six 3d printing pens at a value of 452 dollars and five cents for joe walker elementary per mcafee school district per policy number 702 gifts grants and donations any questions or comments discussion all those in favor opposed extensions motion carries i need a motion to accept the donor's choice grant for classroom supplies per mcafee school district policy number 702 gifts grants and donations worth 588.55 so second okay i would like to know as well as the parents what the books are is there a list of them is there and i don't know does the policy and i apologize for i

115don't know this off the top of my head um does it delineate um is there a review for books and how is that done so typically uh through durham's choice or actually any type of purchase that's driven through the principal in the building again relying on our professionals in the classroom the teachers themselves they're making the choice of what they believe is best for their students i can certainly get a list from this i think it would be beneficial to have the list and then if i have a question i can call the principal and say what is this book about or i had a question about this one if that's possible i think that would be helpful mrs shingle are you thinking um a list of the books prior to making a decision like

116to casting a vote that would be nice could we table it till next time you can make that motion i make motion to table until next time so well so so i mean i'll just i'll just speak to actually because again this is policy 702 gifts grants and donations i mean ultimately it's under the privy of my day-to-day so when those things are brought before you you approve it but we make the decisions that are and how that money is going to be used so like for example the 3d pencils that you just approved yeah that was a decision made by that teacher in the classroom how to use that money you've given us that ability to decide how to use that you're just proving whether or not we accept that donation for the items

117that are approved for my understanding is and somebody can correct me if i'm wrong it's not so much that we have a problem with giving approval to uh accept them the materials um or the amount of money for the various books our question is what are the various books um what are the content of them who reviews them um that kind of thing and again currently that would be the teacher in a classroom who's looking at this who's applied again the teachers apply for these grants so they and you'll see a few more on here that we've asked you to approve uh based on the needs of that teacher for their students in that classroom so they're they're making that decision based on what they believe is the best you know for their job so

118the teacher is the one that is making that decision i'm sure the principle the principles yeah the principles will sign off and ultimately but again it's correct the district's children your children that you are sharing with us as the district i and that's what i was just going to ask for clarification down for a second if there's a sec at the table but i want to be clear this vote is to accept the money correct that's correct this vote is not approving any particular book oh well then okay so really doesn't matter how we would vote the books are already here anyways i will say that that seems a bit putting the cart before the horse and maybe that's something we need to accept to think out of the future but regardless the vote is

119actually about accepting the money for to be used for books not on what particular books just so that we're all clear the most i can say at this point is that we don't have any motion from the board to be able to do that there was a motion for a table that did not receive the second so at this point we have a vote um that's ready uh on the floor unless anyone has any other questions or discussion from the board yeah so i well okay i'm gonna stop you for just a second because i i don't want to muddy the waters we've already been clear that the vote is about accepting the money to be used for the books that's what this vote is about as it comes to what specific books they are

120if you would maybe make that available to parents after that that before it goes to before it is available to students i think that would be a nice consideration but this vote is simply about accepting the money for and i don't think we should get into the philosophy of hey are you going to come to us with every book decide whether or not we're gonna accept them i think we have to put our trust in the people who put the grants and our principles that they're gonna make good selections if there's a parent out there who has a problem with a book that we have in our library and if they can bring it to our attention then we can act on it but this uh i would say any book that's coming into the

121district should be made available for parent perusal before it is made available to students that's my belief so this vote is to accept these books and the money and we don't know what the book is but you're going to put the list out i'm asking we we can do that yes but again this is this is about uh the teacher is going after money for their classroom and be using in a multiple uh you know various ways and i'll suggest to the board tonight um as you're considering this is this is something that we've done for a long time the teachers always again in your classrooms you've got to have some trust in the professionals that we've hired and i believe you do i'm not saying that you don't uh and they're making choices you

122know to again help their kids our kids i'm saying their kids but of course all our kids and we cannot bog down our system by trying to listen to x you know thousands and thousands of parents to come back to us to say yes you can have that book in here okay first of all our district is not dealing with thousands upon thousands of parents i i'm more concerned about the parents of our district not thousands upon thousands of parents from up everywhere else how many students do we have second of all all i said was i do think we do have an onus of responsibility of making anything any reading material available for parent perusal prior to making it available to students that's the only request that was made nobody said we want to

123hamstring the teachers or anything like that it was a reasonable request i don't think we can always give them the opportunity before that i'm going to tell you mr ross it's their children i think they have the right to and we should make that that is my two cents so in thank you but i can read it so i will just say again this is the um the vote is about accepting the money for these items so all those in favor say i have some more comments before we go to vote i think it's a shame that we just turned a very positive thing into a negative you have a teacher that went above and beyond their duties miss amber miller i don't personally know her but i'm telling you there's very few teachers who

124that write grants so that they can get money for their classrooms and from what i've seen on the agenda tonight we've had four of them and that's a rare thing and then we criticize what they're getting that's ridiculous i'm sorry that nobody criticized anything we were simply there were questions asked about what the books were that's not a criticism that is a question the criticism is that the teacher would be asking for something that's inappropriate for her classroom and that you want to review it that's not a criticism that is would you ask the people in the audience to be quiet okay i had asked for the list to be shown so i feel that i need to make this clear i absolutely trust the teachers to be making the best decision i myself am

125an educator and there are times that i've looked at a lot of things and i could miss something i'm just saying it's possible there could be a human error made i think we should be able to see them see the list if you're saying we need to vote on it now and then have the list shown and then if we have a i'm really okay with that as long as we can come back and say there's a problem with this book or that and we are living at a more difficult time and think about when you were in school 1984 was questioned now it's a classic so who knows where we're going to be but right now for today i think that the parents and all of us should be able to see what the

126list does include and that does not in any way reflect on the teacher or any choice the teacher has not made the trick this sure doesn't okay that's a matter of opinions it talks you're talking about transparency that's all this is and i would suggest if there's somebody who has a problem with presenting a list to parents then maybe we need to be very curious about what is on that list now having said that for the fourth time the vote is merely to accept the money we have already been told that they're going to make the list available to parents before they make the material available to students i would add to that perhaps we are not receiving money i'm speaking in the future when it comes to donations like this if we the donation

127could come with the list of books that would probably save us some time so having said all of that all of those in favor say aye before we do that we're not only voting on the money we're not we're voting to accept these storage units and books because we have them they're here we're not voting on any money to come so we can buy them these things are already in the district but if we don't if we don't approve the money the books don't stay is that correct that's correct it's that simple some money that's correct that's right that's that's correct okay that's the value of the items yes and if we don't approve it though the books don't be correct okay and we want to approve them she went to all this trouble we

128just would like to have the list available so again all those in favor aye aye aye opposed i'm opposed extensions i'm going to abstain motion carries i need a motion to accept the 1 000 donation from range resources to joe walker elementary for materials and technology for maker space area in accordance with mcguffey school district policy 702 grants gifts and donations so moved second mr wolfe is there any way you can present us a detailed list so we can review it before we vote on it i'm just kidding sit down i would just say to that kind of snide comment that you're talking about physical materials and technology you're not talking about content which are two very different things any other questions or comments all those in favor aye opposed thank you mr wolf thank

129you motion carries i need a motion to accept the donor's choice grant for classroom supplies per mcguffie school district policy number 702 gifts grants and donations an amount of 515.82 cents so moved second any questions well we are talking about books and novels are they going to be listed so we can see what they are again i would ask for the same consideration as the previous one with the administration would make sure that the list is provided to the parents for perusal prior to them being made available to the students i'm going to trust that they're going to get that yeah okay any other comments so again just like the last one correct if the books after they're perused and they don't feel like they're appropriate and they can have that discussion with the teacher

130they can throw them away then they can have that discussion with the teacher all those in favor opposed abstentions i'm gonna be staying on this one as the last one i need a motion to accept a dollar general summer literacy grant in the amount of three thousand dollars for mcguffey school district policy number 702 groups gifts grants and donations so moved second any questions or discussion all those in favor say aye [Music] yeah this is just a um we're just announcing this correct that's it yes so we are uh doctor superintendent dr andrew oberg announces that tenure and permanent professional employee status has been earned by ms melissa scavard as a result of three consecutive years of satisfactory teaching in the mcguffey school district and fulfillment of requirements has set forth in the pennsylvania school

131code so congratulations ms scubart yep need a mission on this two i need a motion to approve the list of candidates from the graduating class of 2022 for the purpose of awarding a high school diploma provided the requirements of the pennsylvania department of education and the mcguffey school district have been fully satisfied second any discussion questions madam president yes and do i have to abstain on that since my daughter is on the list no no i don't know there's no uh financial anything else all those in favor say aye all right opposed extensions motion carries madame president before we go forward i would like to say that you can hand her her diploma on graduation day we do do that any board member who would like to hand a diploma to anybody the superintendent and

132mr bones allow that to occur i appreciate it thank you i need a motion to approve mrs anna goss middle school and high school choral director to hold an optional summer chorus camp for students in current grades 6 through 11 from july 18th through the 20th 2022 at mcgaffey high middle school the cost of the camp will be 15 per student at the student's cost any questions or discussion this is the first time this has occurred isn't it i think it's a great thing i think it is i i cannot speak to if this was the first time mr bonus it's the first one i remember apparently okay thank you very good any other questions or discussion all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries do we have a native executive session

133yes ma'am president for what reasons contracts personnel contracts and personnel so at 8 09 pm we move to executive session for contracts and personnel all those in favor i need a motion for that one second all those in favor so we'll move at 809 still we're going to go in the executive session we'll close the session down you can log in using the same links yeah i just try to keep track