April 26, 2022 RTSD School Board Business Meeting

001good evening everyone we'd like to begin the meeting with the pledge to a pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all and again good evening it's so nice to see so many people here joining us tonight i'd like to turn over the meeting to our superintendent dr batchelor for uh first i'm going to report on executive session forgive me the board met in executive session on the following dates and discussed the following april 5th 2022 personnel in legal matters april 26 2022 personnel and legal matters and we move now into our report from students welcome sammy and sophie good evening everyone i hope you all enjoyed your spring break

002and had the chance to relax a bit the next two months can be pretty hectic for our rhs students with sports dances and ap exams so i think everyone was grateful for a week to unwind before jumping into one of the busiest times of the year in order to fundraise for spring events such as junior prom the junior student council sold candy grams during lunches the week before break while clubs often sell candy grams to celebrate specific holidays the juniors simply decided to have their candy gram celebrating spring plus who wouldn't want the chance to send or receive some chocolate any time of the year candy grams also gave students the opportunity to send a little note along with the candy and both the candy and the note were packaged into small colorful bags to

003be administered to students in their home rooms the money raised the money raised from this fundraiser will especially help the juniors fund decorations for their sky high cloud 9 theme prom students were able to vote in schoology in a schoology poll to decide on this theme choosing sky high over options such as candy land in the four seasons decorations will likely include a lot of blue and white streamers balloons and maybe even some creatively made cotton ball clouds the dance will take place in the rhs auditorium lobby on saturday april 30th now to jump back in time a bit one of my favorite events of this entire month was the rhs library book fair from april 4th to april 8th the library had tables of fantastic books that students could choose from to purchase and

004even better each day of the week the library held a special activity students could participate in to enter a raffle and possibly win a free book on monday students could write a review of their favorite book and slip it into that book for others to read on tuesday students could take a picture with their favorite book and send it to mrs wetzel who would then post it on the library instagram wednesday brought a mini golf course set up in the library while just one hole but a hole in one meant you could get your raffle ticket for the day i especially loved thursday's activity where students could send mrs wetzel a set of emojis intended to represent the title of a book these emojis were posted on the rhs library instagram and students could try

005to guess the different meanings for example a student may have sent a cat emoji followed by a hat emoji to represent cat in the hat although most of the books were more recent reads for the students one of the last on the last day of the book fair students could participate in the classic raffle activity of guessing the amount of candy in a jar overall the week brought lots of fun to the rhs library on a different note when the clock struck 12 on the morning of april 18th the lives of over a hundred seniors took a dramatic turn over the past week and for the next few they must watch their backs in every area except work in school avoiding their assailant in the famous games senior assassin the first round will end tomorrow

006and those surviving will advance to the second round with a new target for those of you unfamiliar with the game each student who selects to play is assigned a random target whom who they must shoot with their water gun before their round ends students take the game very seriously leaving their houses extra early to camp out in their target's yard before school waiting outside on dark rainy nights to catch their target coming home from sports and club crashing promposals and implementing a variety of other schemes to catch their target by surprise all school grounds and work are safe for students along with inside of businesses as seniors would not want to cause any disruptions each player paid ten dollars to join the game so the winner will get nearly two thousand dollars the person with

007the most kills will receive one hundred dollars and the person who got the first kill received fifteen students look forward to seeing who the last one standing will be finally this week marked the beginning of kindness week at rhs in the main hall of the school a row of mirrors propped against the wall displays signs with encouraging slogans like be the change you want to see both the teachers and the students participated in making a video with everyone wearing orange shirts to show their support of being kind on thursday the school will hold an all-school assembly where members of the student ambassador club and student council will share anecdotes to show that no one is alone each day this week is also a special spirit day to celebrate kindness monday students wore their best pajamas

008today was jersey or team's birthday and many more fun theme days are to come thank you and i will now pass it on to sophie um good evening everyone as we head into the fourth marking period at radnor students have been preoccupied with classes clubs sports and many other events throughout april including spring break all of radner's sports teams have been hard at work practicing and playing as the season reaches its midpoint over the break the boys baseball team took a long awaited trip to florida to play against teams across the nation besides playing baseball the boys were also able to spend their time having fun in the sun in orlando which was great for their team bonding the boys won 12-2 against canadaigua academy and ultimately had a great time playing other teams as

009well the team also recently hosted a new wayne pizza fundraiser last week where proceeds went to the team after all who doesn't love delicious pizza and benefiting the baseball team adding on to that the girls softball team has been hard at work throughout april after a tough loss to springfield delco a few weeks ago the girls pulled out of the next game with a win against strathaven 9-8 the team has two more games this week left against lower marion and upper darby the boys tennis team has also been in on a winning streak throughout the month of april both the jv and varsity teams have defeated almost all of their opponents 7-0 in most of their matches however their matches against last week against lower marion and harrington ruin their streak but their record is

010still quite impressive as they continue to prepare for the central league and piaa tournaments later this year the girls track and field team has also been busy with meets every week this month a couple of weeks ago they had their meet against springfield the team succeeded by earning multiple medals including zoe margulies earning a second in the 1600 meter run with a time of five minutes and 29 seconds and neva menon earning fifth place in the 300 meter hurdles with a time of 53.88 seconds the boys also had their meet against upper darby recently they had four first place medals which is very impressive just last week both teams also competed in the shippensburg riddick invitational some star players included sophia hill who plays first in pole vaulting and jimmy kurtz who plays first in

011the 3200 meter run this thursday both the boys and the girls will travel to penn for the annual penn relays which is one of the highlights of the season the boys lacrosse team worked their tails off during spring break the boys played three games over the break and all resulted in victories one game even got to a nail biter proceeding into a double overtime against new canon a school that traveled about two and a half hours to play there the goal scored by will kaplan occurred 40 seconds into the second overtime leading to radnor's win the girls are also on a winning streak during the month of april as they emerged victorious almost every game this season in their lacrosse season just last week the team beat springfield delco and 9-7 in a close match-up

012norlax still has a long way to go but so far their season is a success in late march radnor's model united nations took their field final trip of the year to new york city for the national high school model un event the team left school on wednesday march 23 and stayed in the hilton new york the majority of the students represented china with some representing brazil and mexico some of the topics covered in committees range from protecting arctic biodiversity to combating western african terrorism the team was also lucky enough to participate in one seminar with pen america a non-profit that promotes freedom of speech in schools outside of the committee everyone enjoyed exploring the big apple at the end of the weekend radmon emerged with an award of excellence and eight individual delegation awards the

013club now looks forward to hosting their tryouts at the end of the year for the freshmen who will be rising sophomores next year throughout the past month the annenberg science symposium club has been preparing for their presentation which occurs tomorrow night the club is focused on finding a topic in science that is important to them and then creating a powerpoint to present to the judges and explain their topic the event is planned by mainline health who encourages students who are interested in science to pursue their passion the topic for this year is immunotherapies which includes slides on treatments like immunosuppressants the ethics behind the treatments and even a creative demonstrative portion the club will compete tomorrow against at episcopal academy another event that happened in early april was the sophomore semi-formal after countless hours of

014decorating planning and prepping the sophomore students did the sophomore student council did a wonderful job for the theme beyond the stars the dance star the dance started around 7 30 and included dancing snacks and even cornhole outside this was the sophomore's first dance as last year the freshman semi was canceled and before that the 8th grade dance overall it seems like everyone enjoyed their time finally on april 6th the high school orchestra had their annual spring concert in the auditorium they performed multiple songs and honored national orchestra members audrey kneeland on the flute and elena chang on cello their performance actually accounted for their midterm grain as well as orchestra is a class in the high school the music was phenomenal according to those who went and brought many community members together with that i

015hope you all have a great rest of your night and thank you so much thank you sami and sophie it's simply amazing how much activity is going on in our high school and that doesn't even count the day in and day out academics and they say the months coming are the busiest yet of the year so i can't even budget more time for may and june based on how much you had to cover this month thank you very much and now i'll turn the meeting over to our superintendent for his report dr batchelor good evening it's good to see everyone i know we have many students here joining us for uh recognition so i promise we'll get to those recognitions soon shortly after my report uh sophie and sammy thank you for the report i

016grew up 10 minutes from new canaan connecticut and my parents still live up there just in new york so i was very pleased with that win over new cane and that was a big deal for me um so first with the superintendent's report tonight for the board and community i just want to share we we continue uh each month to track our dashboard uh we share every sunday uh our coveted positive cases as i shared with the community we did see an uptick in cases right before spring break unfortunately we have continued in the last week to see another increase in those cases and that brings me to one of the topics we have on the agenda for tonight is to talk about our health and safety plan is on our agenda this evening for

017later in the meeting so we are making changes to our health and safety plan so if you recall when we decided as a district to move away from requiring masking we set a threshold of two and a half percent uh of cases in a particular building would then require us to require masking for two weeks again if we would hit that threshold and that threshold as we discussed at the time is a little bit confusing and extremely arbitrary we created that threshold of two and a half percent because the state about a year and a half ago set a threshold of five percent at when a district should consider whether or not they would need to close but that was in the midst of the pandemic about a year and a half ago that threshold

018was set so we set a threshold of two and a half percent as we were removing mass at a time prior to the cdc and others changing their guidance we set that threshold also based on in-school transmission so that threshold was based on actual cases in our buildings so if a student was coveted positive on a saturday or sunday morning they did not count towards the threshold a student didn't come into our building on on monday and they were you know found out they were positive later monday afternoon but they never set foot in the building they didn't count towards that two and a half percent uh and that's the state's regulations too and when we were looking at in-school transmission so that's why they didn't count but our dashboard shows every case we know

019about and that was a decision we made a year and a half two years ago so anytime a parent calls our nurse and says their child is home with covet or staff member we put that on the dashboard even though that might not be evidence of in-school transmission or might not be a case that's actually walking the halls of our building the reason we did that was we didn't want to ever be accused of hiding cases so any case we know about and now parents can share that there was their child was home tested and they're positive they go on our dashboard that you saw in the earlier slide before break we came very close to the two and a half percent uh especially in one of our buildings so before break we did have

020at one of our elementary buildings the principal encouraged a particular class to mask just based on the numbers in that classroom and the next day all of our students that wasn't required but all the students did come in masked in that classroom the following day we actually encouraged the grade level we said we encourage you to mask didn't require it but based on the numbers of cases we're seeing in that particular grade level and most of our kids uh masked but again it's it's wasn't a requirement we're looking tonight to remove the requirement that we automatically go to masking when we hit two and a half percent and our reasons for that are multiple one when we created this arbitrary number the cdc hadn't come out with their new guidance we created this number to

021look at radnor specific data and then literally days later the cdc changed their guidance and said to the community and schools and a lot of districts then dropped their mass band mass mandate based on the cdc's change and it was multiple factors the cd cdc suggested we look at we should look at what is the community spread which we continue to be in low in our district in our county excuse me but in our area so look at community spread and also look at hospitalizations luckily hospitalizations in our region remain extremely low i meet often with health officials both locally both in the greater philadelphia region health officials have shared with me again that they are seeing very low incidence of people being hospitalized with covet in our area extremely low for children as high

022as maybe there was one case uh in in at chop um you know of recent weeks so we continue to see that the the virus is spreading but thankfully we also see and and from talking to our school nurses individually many of our nurses many of the doctors in the area that i've talked to have said that the kids who are having covet are less ill than some of the kids having the flu and common cold and there's a stomach bug going around by the way sorry if you you know been going around and it's going around in my kids district and our district as well and our kids who are home with the flu and stomach bug have actually been more ill than their kids that have been coveted positive so we think it's

023time to remove the required two percent uh you know to require masking we will still communicate in k to five when we know of a positive case me personally and i've been put in some pretty awkward positions and having i've joked with the community about being a meteorologist and then having to be an epidemiologist and we've been running a mini health department my personal ken bachelor's opinion and talking to health officials is there's going to be a time and we talked about this as a school board last week and i you know shared with the school board last week at our meeting there's going to be time that we're going to have to talk about why are we tracking this you know there's a time when i think we're going to be moving away from

024you know creating a dashboard because we don't create a dashboard for pertussis we don't create a dashboard for the flu we're not creating a dashboard for other communicable diseases and i think that is a discussion that our health community is starting to have we're going to continue to keep our dashboard right now to let our parents know what is happening we're going to continue when we have cases in a classroom k to five we will let everybody in that classroom know that there's a positive case or two how many in that classroom we have never notified middle school to high school just because the kids move around too much but you can look at the dashboard and we will continue to encourage masking when we feel like we need to encourage masking you know we

025want to keep our community safe but we also recognize that moving forward we are we are at a point where this is an individual decision now you know the decision to mask is an individual decision and we also know that masking works so if an individual does choose to mask they are protected when they choose to mask and there could be a lot of reasons why someone chooses to mask we could have a teacher who has a wedding coming up and they just don't want to take any chances we could have students who are masking because of what's going on at their home or how they feel or just what's been happening in their lives that week our kids have been very accepting and our staff have been very accepting that this is a personal

026choice and i've really admired how well our our students have handled this so on our agenda tonight is that we will be adjusting our health and safety plan the health and safety plan still gives the administration the superintendent authority to require masking if need be i would hope that we would never get to that point again but that is still in there if we do get to the point but moving forward we would no longer be hitting that hard and fast arbitrary threshold and requiring masking as we move forward so that will be on our agenda this evening for the board moving on shaping the future so completely changing gears this is pretty exciting we have endeavored to look at all of our buildings in the district and and we set up a feasibility study

027to look at the conditions of each one of our buildings so that we could set up a 10 to 20 year plan that would look at our facilities identify our needs both programmatic needs but also what do we need to keep our buildings at the quality that we expect to provide the best education that we can and in through that study what we found was that three of our buildings are in good to excellent condition and three of our buildings are in fair to poor condition we sent a mailer to everyone in the community not just our parents but everyone in the radnor community to come out to three evening events to learn more about that assessment it's all on our web page you can find information about it on our website you can find

028actually those presentations and then we had the opportunity last week to share with our board some recommendations no decision has been made but we began sharing some potential options for us either elementary and the district office are two of our buildings that are in the most need so we did start sharing last year publicly at a school board meeting last tuesday night here are some potential options do we want to just renovate either what does that look like in cost do we need to do an addition on it what does our future look like for our enrollment do we want to look at another option of building a new iphone since we have property there so we're starting to have those discussions we're going to be going back out in the next few weeks to

029our community we'll be advertising another meeting for a community come back and give us feedback again and then we'll be discussing in the next two months an administrative recommendation for how we move forward uh and identify what what actions should we be taking and it's going to be different for all of our buildings but as i said specifically we need to be looking very closely at ithan and the district office as we move forward so more information to come students that are here you guys were already aware right did you know we get to end the year three days early so it will be made official tonight it is on the agenda we didn't use any snow days now we talked about the idea that the virtual days we held are saved summer days and

030i know students and i'm supposed to look at the high school students because they they tend to you two don't but the high school students tend to give me a hard time if there isn't a snow day and especially the seniors because they don't have to make it up because graduation is always a set date but the we are giving back the three days that we haven't used as a snow day so those virtual days did pay off again snow days still exist in radnor uh but it's just got to be a good storm uh it's got to be a good reason to have it these safe summer days uh the days we're able to do virtual did save us this year and we're having the opportunity now to end the school year earlier so

031this is always one of those questions about you know the snow days feel really good in january and february but this time of year hearing we end three days early it feels really good that we didn't use them so we will be making that official tonight uh that the the the last official day now will be uh june 16th right i can't see with all the two by fours and everything um the screen but will be will be june 16th uh and we're just excited that uh the end of year activities are coming our way and that we're excited that for our students and everyone i think that i'm seeing the smiles uh with that ending date and moving forward we have just so many reasons to be radnor proud this is just a small

032sample and i'm not going to mention all the things on this slide but there's just so many wonderful things happening in radnor it's so nice to see so many activities and things that didn't happen this time last year or we were rushing to try to squeeze them in to see them coming back to have those opportunities to celebrate to see our students excelling in in so many in so many fashions across the district and we have some of those recognitions coming tonight as well so we just have countless reasons to be rather proud and i'm so appreciative of of our students and everything that they do and then upcoming activities as you can see it becomes a mad dash with next week being may uh until the end of the year we have a lot

033of activities happening so board i just want to give you an update on some of the upcoming activities as we move forward and then i believe that concludes the superintendent remarks thank you thank you dr batchelor and at this time we'll move into the recognitions and i'm going to turn the first one which honors the writer middle school grade seventh and eight seven and eight jazz band for their awards they've wanted festivals to miss stern thank you miss goldman this is a really exciting one for me my boys went through the jazz program here i'm a big fan of the ratner jazz program so congratulations to members of the radnor middle school 7th and 8th grade jazz band for receiving overall ratings of superior for their performance at the drexel hill middle school jazz festival

034on april 1st and an overall rating of excellent for their performance at the haverford middle school jazz festival on february 25th at the april 1st event the band's trumpet section was also awarded best overall and student shane lofton was awarded outstanding soloist at the february 25th event band member chase carlton was also awarded outstanding soloist of the band and shane was awarded best overall soloist of the night the members of the 7th and 8th grade jazz band are i'm going to call your names and if you want to come up i have a certificate for you so just come right up in here annika berry sachin batia bryce carlton chase carlton james fredericks juan felipe gallino you can come right back here connor haynes luke howard cush jane grace kimlinger samuel jacob kwan shane lofton

035caroline nagayumi anthony ramesh cooper smith coven paper and daniels you the superintendent along with the board and the radner community congratulates these students their parents and their teachers on this outstanding accomplishment great job everyone okay yes that would be great thank you that's a great idea and you are okay here we go oh bati alright there you go james fredericks great and you are okay there you go there we go and um if you want to go into the hallway boys and your parents want to go take some pictures there mr um petite will take a picture for our website congratulations everyone [Applause] oh i'm so sorry and their teacher was mr andrew obana it wasn't on the thing but congratulations mr urbainer thank you for anybody who might not have heard that i don't

036know how the mic was picking it up but the group is led by radner middle school teacher andrew urbana so thank you again for guiding those students to their great accomplishments and we'll move into the next recognition for the ratner high school sophomore sophia hill who set a new county record in pole vaulting and ms monaghan is going to walk us through that recognition okay i'd like to call sophia up here if you could join me um i am actually very honored and somewhat nostalgic to have an opportunity to give this award to sophia i've known the family for years being wayne elementary families sophia you're in my daughter's class and we are fellow jumpers i was a high jumper in high school so i understand the amount of work that goes into the training

037the weight lifting the measuring your steps to run up to the pole vault although i never did pole vaulting i don't even think it was approved for a woman at the time and not only that but just the mentality of waiting around with all the other jumpers and you get three attempts so i even can relate to a school record although county record that is a huge accomplishment as as a sophomore i can only imagine what is in store for you so it's my honor to have the opportunity to give this award to you um congratulations to radnor high school sophomore sophia hill for breaking the delaware county record in the pole vault at the pennsylvania track and field coaches association indoor carnival on february 12th at lehigh university her vault of 12 feet 6

038inches also set a new school record how tall is that is that like i mean i'm looking up is that like to the ceiling it could be sophia continued on to have a successful winter season qualifying for and finishing fourth at the ptfca indoor state championship on february 27th at penn state university she is currently competing as a member of the spring track and field team and will represent the school in pole vault at the high school girls pole vault championship at the 2022 penn relays on april 28th best of luck the superintendent along with the board and the radnor community congratulate sophia their parents and her coaches on this outstanding accomplishment congratulations and i'm going to give this to you i have to give you a help thank you sophie and miss monahan we

039talked about having our students who have these incredible accomplishments give us a little sample of what their accomplishment looks like and maybe someday we'll be able to do some get a pole vaulting uh set up in in the boardroom what do you think dr batchelor i i think that would be great i'm actually also very intrigued that mrs monahan mentioned she had a high school record is that what you heard her say is that what you understand i did and then we will move into our next recognition which is and congratulations again to all of our honorees so far we'll move on to our next recognition uh ms solomon will acknowledge our wayne elementary school fifth grade teacher mimi coppola so ms coppola you want to come on forward so i have the honor of

040presenting this award to you the wayne elementary school fifth grade teacher mimi coppola wins the citadel heart of learning award congratulations to wayne elementary school fifth grade teacher mimi coppola for being one of 31 teachers in the greater philadelphia region selected as a 2022 citadel heart of learning award winner she will be formally recognized at the citadel heart of learning award ceremony on may 2nd at the mann center for performing arts nominated by west's parents that's wayne elementary school parents and former students miss coppola will receive a 500 grant to use for her classroom and a heart-shaped glass blown award during the award ceremony three grand prize winners will be announced and awarded an additional monetary prize the citadel heart of learning award is one of the citadel's longest standing initiatives officially founded 21 years

041ago in partnership with the chester county intermediate unit to recognize local teachers who show dedication and go above and beyond in and outside of the classroom the superintendent along with the board and the radner community congratulate ms coppola on this outstanding accomplishment congratulations [Applause] [Laughter] and i also see her esteemed principle in the back i don't know if anyone wants to say anything or yes all right thank you she also likes a good april fool's joke i understand thank you miss congratulations ms coppola thank you ms solomon for the recognition and for all of the great accomplishments we've recognized tonight that will move us into our next item on the agenda which is the delaware county intermediate unit programs and supports this is a presentation information only and i want to welcome the executive director

042of the delaware county intermediate unit dr maria edelberg it's been a long time coming pre-pandemic we invited you here and we're so glad to see you here tonight for those who don't know the delaware county intermediate unit is a very important organization that supports all of our school districts and other schools in delaware county and dr edelberg is going to present an overview of student programming that's and the supports that are offered and provided by the delaware county intermediate unit if you want to introduce your fellow team members that would be great as well thank you uh bradner school board of directors and dr bachelor for inviting us here this evening we're really excited to present a high-level view of the delaware county intermediate unit and some of the services you do have a packet

043with you and i just want to the powerpoint is actually in there but i do want to call your attention to one of the documents and as we go through this document will actually help show how radner community um and the students and the district is connected to the delaware county intermediate unit and the exact services we are providing for your district so you just might want to keep this out and i'll do a little referring to it so tonight with me i have the pleasure of having dr steven butts who is our director for career and technical education and he's going to talk a little bit about career and technical education in addition i have dr joyce mundy who is the assistant to the executive director for teaching and learning and she's going to

044talk a little bit about some of the wonderful things we're doing around curriculum instruction and equity and diversity and inclusion so hopefully tonight we have about 15 20 minutes to kind of give an overview more than happy as we're going through this to stop ask questions i know your time is limited but more than happy to do any follow-up or if you have something specific i'd love to be able to have those conversations so kind of going um forward just to give a really quick overview of the intermediate units okay in 19 and for some who have been around and have studied any type of history of education there used to be a time we were county schools right and there's a county superintendent and in 1970 they really looked the legislator looked and created

045act 102 and act 102 kind of created what the intermediate units are and the intermediate units first person act 182 is we're going to be that intermediary between our schools bringing them together our local government the pennsylvania department of education and we're supposed to be helping to act as instruments for both federal state as well as any type of local issues with our school districts and it really came about to look at how do we achieve economies of scales and if you remember at one point how many districts there were in the state and then that all kind of collapsed to around 450 when intermediate units were created and then in 1910 and there's been a couple reiterations right of adding to the school code as we all know the school code gets more information

046added rarely do you take anything away and it's a pretty big volume at this point but in 1975 an amendment to the act really talked about how intermediate units were to serve our non-public schools and this is kind of coming through a different funding source and it goes with the per pupil that is in our non-public schools and there's an associated amount and it's really specific what we're supposed to provide and i'm not going to go through every single one of these the things on the slide but really the the big key piece of this is intermediate units work with our non-public schools and we do consultation with each of the public schools non-public schools and say what services are you looking for so we provide speech and language psychological services counseling services remedial reading

047remedial math and you know unfortunately but over the last couple years we've seen a real increase in having to also deal with crisis intervention assessments and you know with the mental health of our students it's we're seeing it kind of across the board not just in public education and if you actually look on the second page of that handout you'll actually see how many students from the radnor area township school district are in that we're actually serving within the non-public schools and what the non-public schools that we're actually in providing some direct service you know one of the biggest areas of the intermediate unit is student services and student service really takes in kind of three components one is early childhood and i'll talk a little bit about early childhood education because it is one

048of the largest programs we have and we're really excited and thrilled that we can serve our community of delaware county through early childhood of course special education and i think a lot of people associate intermediate units with special education programming because at one point that was a key role of intermediate units is to serve our students with disabilities and this all happened i think about 1975 the first public law that came out around serving students with disabilities and at one point all students came to the intermediate unit who needed support and services before the real movement towards inclusion and frankly funding sources changing and then we'll talk a little bit about some of the other services we do with pupil services so in our early childhood program we work with several different programs one is

049our early head start and i always say like all of our babies okay we serve probably close to over 3 000 little kids five and under throughout delaware county and so we actually start in our head start early head start program working with mothers who are pregnant and helping them work through developmentally what to expect making sure that they're connected with the right resources and medical needs that they might have through birth and then working with a lot of times we have first-time moms and really kind of working through those mom issues and some of the issues that you have with our babies then our head start program works with children three to five and head start is a program for individuals in low poverty and we serve about 900 of our three to five

050year olds across our county and then we have pre-k counts and pre-k counts what we have done there is that is a state program run to to look at individuals who are poverty but it could be 30 above poverty and we've done that in two ways one is we're a provider in some of our locations for pre-k counts we've partnered with two school districts and we run their pre-k accounts program within their district and really to try to look at how do we get families into the schools working with their teams providing early childhood education and also helping to facilitate those transitions to kindergarten and then we also have a program that a lot of people don't know about is our family centers and this is in collaboration with our county and it's really again

051to target our young families and helping our families connect to resources in the community connect to toddler type trainings connect to you know making sure that the if there's a issue around medical needs medical insurance but how we really hook our families up within their communities again how we wrap a child to help them grow to be able to go into school but also be able to have all of those resources that sometimes i think we take for granted and then our project elect program works with pregnant teens who on the real goal there is to keep a mom getting through school having a baby and making sure that she graduates because we know that graduating high school is a key indicator to any next steps in life and then the other thing the project

052elect program does work with is fathers because we know that a lot of times with young children who are having babies that connection with the paternal father doesn't always those relationships don't always foster and grow so it really is a program to help our young women in our county and unfortunately we do go down to middle school we do have children from middle school through high school within our project elect program one of the and and you can see some of the connections within this pamphlet of how that's connected to your district but one of the biggest programs that we do run is early intervention and in delaware county there's two components of early intervention there is what we call the birth to three program and the birth to three program is operated by the

053county of delaware dciu works with the county of delaware and we provide services to our babies who have a hearing impairment and or vision impairment so it's not uncommon when a child is born within the first month or two months if there's a hearing impairment we're called in to help assess and work with the family because there's so many options to what families are looking at are they going to be a family where we're going to have oral communication are we going to be a family that we're really looking at sign language and there's those preferences and how do we support families from when children are very very young and we also do that for vision once they turn three years of age they move into the delaware county intermediate units special education early intervention

054program and we serve 14 of the 15 districts chester upland is a district that we do not serve as the intermediate unit that is done by elwynn and that has been like a 40-year span of those services being with elwynn and so i think what's really important to understand when we're looking at 2100 that's how many babies three to five that we serve within the county most of those services are provided out in typical preschools our staff go to about 300 preschools in our county serving our children and then we also have services within our own centers and what we have done is all of our centers are inclusive settings because we do have the pre-k counts and the head start so that all of our children are able to have opportunities to interact with

055their non-disabled peers but again we run the gamut from out in our preschool programs providing consultation itinerant education itinerant speech to those students who might need a much more structured full-day program half-day program and what happens around january of every year our team works with districts and we have a special meeting for transitioning because each year students can transition when they're five to a district and i use the word can purposely because the code allows for a parent to elect to keep their child in early intervention for their kindergarten year okay so sometimes you might hear of a student who's coming from early intervention in first grade because it's a parent's choice and then in february we have meetings with the district with each of the families as a way of introducing them to the

056district and begin that transition process so as september comes along you know those relationships are built and plans can be developed for children and hopefully those transitions are smooth now one of the other big programs that we do work with is lots of different school age programs for students who have disabilities and i'm not going to go through every single one of these programs because we would be here till next week because i'll get so excited about talking about the fabulous stuff that we're doing but just to kind of give you a high level overview our emotional support programs we have a strong collaboration with the county and we provide not only the educational component but the mental health component we have counselors we have full-time psychiatrists within the program and those programs we have

057from kindergarten through 12th grade and in some cases sometimes our 12th graders might stay there year after they would have graduated because they might be in some sort of transition program with a work option and so we're really proud of that program because i think we know that school-based mental health is a real key component and to be able to offer those offerings to our district's students is really key one of the other programs and i think the big connection here is our low incidence program our low incidence program is at the marple education center and in radnor you have st edmunds village and so we have a relationship with roger township school district because we serve this children that go to st edmond so you'll probably see some time on your agenda a contract

058with the intermediate unit for these services and these are students who have significant needs both medical physical cognitively and you know we we serve probably about 45 students would be in what we would call our multi-disability support program also our low incident programs works with our children who have cognitive challenges and along with cognitive challenges have behavioral and adaptive skills as well as our children with autism and again the whole port of this program is to help one them grow as much as they can grow academically but also we know at the age of 21 if we can develop some really good adaptive living skills and adaptive skills the options for our children really expand so that's our program low incidence and that is at our marble education center you know one of the things

059that we are um doing a lot of is our options transition and that is really working with children 16 years and up and that program not only has we have apartments throughout the county that they're actually going in they're cooking their own meals they're shopping they're looking at how they can plan their social activities because for a lot of our students they have to be explicitly taught and then they have to transfer those skills so we have those environments and what it would look like if you were moving out on the very first time and then the other piece about the options program is we have a really strong relationship with the office of vocational rehabilitation and in fact have a contract with the office of vocational rehabilitation and we will work with adults who

060need to have job coaching maybe look at somebody who might have had an accident is looking to reintegrate into the community with new types of jobs and so we have kind of those specific contracts with the office of vocational rehabilitation the other two programs i'm just going to touch base on is one is our hearing and language program remember i talked a little bit about how we provide hearing and language for our little list of babies but our hearing and language program is known across this country as one of the the best programs and it's also in a relationship with wallingford swarthmore school district because we have our classes there it is an oral program it is a program that we teach oral language from birth through graduation and we have students all over coming

061from the state of delaware the state of new jersey so it really is a pretty renowned program and something that we're very proud of we're proud of all of our services so you'll hear me say that a couple times um and then you know one of the i think uniquenesses about what we have up here called the mobile support team there are so many unique situations that our districts and our constituents might need support with and so we have this team that we pull together based on a specific need so some of that need could be a district is saying i want to start x type of program we can come in help support setting that up we can even set it up staff it and you take it back over two we're having a

062specific issue with john doe we need some extra support we need maybe another look at what's happening with the program and then we can come in to provide that service as well or you need an evaluation so our mobile support team really is one of those programs in which we really try to say how do we say whatever the district needs build the right team around that need so we can provide that service and then the other big program i did talk a little bit about is act 89 and act 89 this year we're serving about 800 students across all of our non-public schools so that's a big highlight of some of our student services i'm going to turn it over to dr boots to talk a little bit about our career and technical high

063schools good evening i just want to highlight a couple items related to our career and technical schools and programs in your packet near the back of the right side are a number of items related to the technical school programs we have 21 different programs at the two campuses that we have fall crop and aston 23 programs overall cosmetology is duplicated at fall croft and aston and also culinary art is duplicated at the two campuses we also have a medical career program that are housed out of seven of our hospitals radnor has a number of students i believe it's students in the medical careers program and later on i'll touch on the medical careers program a little bit further our enrollment this year is right around right now 1 186 students in our secondary programs at

064the marple campus we also have a practical nursing program where we have currently 62 adult students a one-year program very intensive they start either in september or february and then they complete the program with clinical hours in the course of the year so we have a graduation in july and also in february that program recently was recognized for the second time in three years as the number one program in the state for return on investment meaning that those students and for 10 years after they have been in the program are the highest earners compared to any post-secondary program including several of the four-year colleges in the area what that's really saying is nursing careers are very in high demand right now and the nursing careers that we provide have a good reputation that our students

065get get employed and advance fairly quickly in their careers so that was recognized by georgetown university national publication we were seventh i think i'm off by one eighth in the country for return in investment on investment over the course of a 10-year period looking ahead for career and technical programs next year we are hopefully wrapping up our admissions process fairly soon so we can give the notices to students coming in we are expecting wait lists across almost every program which will be the first time anytime recently that we've had to have a waitlist we've received over 1300 applications and expect about 800 openings this year so we will have a number of students that we will not be able to serve due to just space in our programs we are anticipating enrollment of about a

066thousand four hundred students which would be at or near capacity of our current programs that i came to the iu about two years ago and that was one of the goals that i set would be to fill our programs to capacity and then we are looking at what are some of the programs that we need to expand into so that's to be the next area that we continue to look at now radner students and radner proud that was uh emphasized in the superintendent's report i'll highlight three areas nocti which is our occupational testing that we do we just completed actually not quite completed almost completed the testing for this year we do not have the results back yet for all the students i am anticipating radnor's students did quite well last year 15 out of

06718 students who were seniors considered completers were competent or advanced in their performance two years ago school year april 9 out of 9 students at that time were competent or advanced i'm anticipating most if not all of your students will be competent advanced this year enrollment the radnor average has increased over the last couple of years we're currently at 31 a little over 31 students averaged throughout the year our current enrollment is 30 students that's also in the initial flyer on the inside cover first second page there is a listing of career and technical education programs you currently have two students in our automotive programs for in cosmetology three students in dental two in emergency protective services and i believe 19 students in medical careers so [Music] that is the enrollment now one of the

068pages right in front of the program guide which was the back please if you need some light reading the program guide is for some light reading when you guys take it home or give it to one of your neighbors give it to somebody that may be interested in career and tech in front of it was a listing of some of the items related to radnor students you have had in terms of recognitions and in terms of students that have done well in state competitions this year alone you had 12 students compete in april at the beginning of this month and receive awards first second third place winners at the state competition that state competition had over 2 000 individuals compete their names are listed in in your guide i would urge you to seek them

069out and recognition most if not all of them likely are going to the national competition which will be held in nashville in june and so we are looking at that i believe it's a little bit after your graduation which is a good thing so they hopefully will be back from any senior graduation activities and able to go on this trip in addition to the hosa future health occupation professions competition you also had a student achieve at a second place skills usa competition in employment application he was in our electrical program last year that was a winner for 2021 and then you also had 14 students recognized for national technical honor society over the last two years mostly this year but over the last two years so radner proud and that is the key things about

070the technical school at the end if you have any questions save them for the end and i'm to turn it over to dr joyce mundy thank you good evening everyone it's a pleasure to see you and thank you for having us this evening i'm going to talk a little bit about the division of teaching and learning at dciu which i have the pleasure to lead our team is made up of a very diverse group we have an administrative portion of our team that come from a variety of positions they've worked out in districts and and other agencies we have a team of 25 plus trainers they are professional development specialists and we also have a team called training and consultation those are people who are highly specialized and trained in special education initiatives from the

071pennsylvania department of ed our professional development specialists come from various backgrounds in curriculum teaching and learning and so that's really what our focus is we support our dciu programs and we also support 15 districts in the county and our non-public schools in the areas of teaching and learning so i'm just going to give you an overview big picture view of what we do and then i'll show you some resources that i included a big area of focus for our team is to think about systems leadership you know our districts our schools our programs themselves really look to our team to come in and support strategic planning we've been spending a great deal of time particularly and this started a bit before cuba but particularly since the return conducting program reviews we're working with many different

072teams on a variety of topics sending in our specialists to go in and really look strategically where we've been but also where we are and where we need to be so we conduct on any number of topics we've done social missional learning we've done curriculum any core areas instructional technology special education we've looked at culture and climate and our team goes in spends time partnering with the district and it leads to a very comprehensive report that's objective and very database that allows schools and districts to plan so we've been spending a great deal of time on that multi-tiered systems of support that's a very it's it's really become the umbrella to talk about how we identify and support students academically and behaviorally from an asset based perspective as well as understanding where there are gaps

073in needs so our team spends much of their time working with teams on how do we provide appropriate interventions supports enrichment in a tiered model really looking at database models a part of that becomes thinking about k-12 curriculum design and so we again we work in a variety of areas coming in we'll do curriculum assessments we will come in and build curriculums add supports for english language learners for special education students for all students for gifted learners so a lot of our time goes into supporting teams on that and lastly county-wide coalition so we really are fortunate to create a space for professionals to come together for javelik groups that could be curriculum directors principals reading specialists coaches we have a gifted network we do parent nights so we do a lot of convening of

074teams to come in and have dialogue an important discourse about education and the second slide that i prepared just to really capture the work that we do um much of our work has been spent and again particularly this year we're doing a lot more coaching and development on site we're going into classrooms working with teachers administrators and teams really supporting the work their job embedded professional development is truly the most effective and research shows that so we're taking advantage of coming into schools and supporting teams we do our parent community events we have spent time working with school systems particularly again as we're looking at bridging gaps for learning in this year has been really critical on data models and how to effectively set that up and an area of focus for the past three

075years has been thinking about inclusive practices um dr edelberg mentioned that that a priority for us has been really focusing on equity and we've been thinking about how are we inclusive in the broadest sense of the word how do we make sure that we see recognize and honor the dignity of all learners and create learning opportunities for those who serve them as well as for our teens to share a couple of things that are in your packet they may help to highlight a little bit of what we do you were shown this by dr ellenberg in the beginning so this teaching and learning section we wanted to give you an idea of the types of ways that radnor participates in our programs so you'll see the professional learning these are just some of the bigger

076topics that we have done with teams here including some book clubs and specialty trainings and then student competitions as well so that'll just give you an idea of that i did include in this because i did a very quick overview this document here really breaks down the buckets that i talked about and gives an example of the types of topics that we do in each of those areas all the way from strategic planning to family engagement i included just two flyers i could have included many more but i selected two that i thought might be of interest we are having a stem summer camp this year for students so parents can enroll their children in it there is still space in the camp for those who have not yet fully planned that runs two weeks

077in july and the last piece i wanted to share is is really important because it's about students across the county we started an initiative and it really grew from vision of the superintendents and dr edelberg and it was about three years ago we started having conversation about how we could increase student voice bring them into a conversation and we settled around thinking about again inclusive practices equity and social justice so we formed a group it was two years ago right before the closure so then we continued it during the closure and it was on zoom for the first part of it we were so excited the students finally were able to come in person this year and it's called our student forum they have spent the last two years researching planning and coming up with

078what they think are the most valuable learning opportunities for educators and community members board members and leaders and this is the event that they'll be running in may it's called delco under construction the work starts with us student-led sessions they've done in cooperation with community mentors um so we wanted to make sure that we brought this this evening you can see the focus areas on there we're extremely proud of the work that the students have done but we're most grateful for the participation and partnership of our superintendents school systems and and boards across the county so we invite you to take part in that and that concludes my comments again thank you so much for having us here tonight we're really proud of the work that we do at the delaware county intermediate unit and

079thank you for allowing time for us to share some of the exciting things that we're doing i'm more than happy to take questions but i also understand time is a limit yes so thank you for coming out my ninth year on the board and i this is just a really great overview to have uh i i'm quite comfortable and confident that when a student enters the radio township school district you know if they need services the the the dciu and the district work together and services are met i am curious how the dciu does outreach to families before they come to to public school and particularly birth to birth to three but then i'm also curious about this adult program that you mentioned what kind of outreach do you do to the adult community to

080let them know that these are services that you provide you know for for those two ends the the the ages that are not in the in the k-12 school system so when we talk talk about our um children under the age of five when we're looking at our birth to three what happens is at the 30 month of age point for a child they automatically get hooked up with the delaware county intermediate unit if they're one of the 14 school districts and we start planning at that point to help with those transitions so that is one no i'm sorry i i should have asked it a little bit differently if i'm a parent in in radnor or some other town here in delaware county and my child is not three how would i know to

081go seek you out if i had a concern and my child needed resources what kind of out what kind of um of of uh outreach do you do do you do because if a parent doesn't know about child find or you know anything like that and then in the adult area as well so one of the things that we have done a lot of work with is with physicians uh pediatricians because we do know that when most parents have a concern they're talking to their pediatrician and so we have done a lot of work with pediatricians offices so they know the services how to access the services how to inquire about services we also work with a lot of the preschools that are out there in delaware county because again there are a lot of

082our children go to preschool and it's really helping the preschool continue to look at what those developmental milestones are if there is a concern to have those conversations and refer the families to us we also we're getting back to this during the pandemic that we didn't have many of these opportunities but we too try to go to a lot of the community events that are happening out there so that we can have a table and this way we can meet the public and meet the community so they're just some of the ways that we we are doing it there's also in delaware county watches across the state beach county has a local interagency coordinating council and on that you have county representatives you have individuals from the early learning center as well as preschool providers

083and parents on that committee and that's another area we will work with them to say here are the things we're doing what else do we need to do what are the other thoughts and then the other thing that really through the pandemic you know sometimes in the most challenging of situations some positive comes out and honestly you look at changing your practice so we held our first parent forum just two weeks ago and it was on zoom and we had close to 80 families that participated and it was again we just advertised do you want to know about services what they might look like and so we did have families come and to hear about some of the services we can provide so there's some of the things that we're doing around child find and

084outreach does anybody else have any questions again thank you so much dr edelberg and dr butts and dr mundy i just want to thank you um for the time that i served on the board i used to have a limited number of minutes to be able to give a report on the things that we covered in our board meetings and the state requires also that the delaware county intermediate unit board is populated by a representative from each of the 15 school districts that are that are exist here in delaware county and i used to say it's really hard in a couple minutes to convey the depth and the breadth of the services and programming that the delaware county intermediate unit and the rest of the the state legislature established intermediate units provide for support for

085school districts and other non-public school entities for children and adults in their respective communities i applaud your ability to try to convey that in in the slightly lengthier amount of time that you had and i hope that for the sake of the board and the community at large that you get a better sense of just how intertwined we all are with the inter the intermediate unit what kind of services it has to offer and i don't know if presently i'm looking over at the communications director down the row there but if we were to be able to if you were open to sharing your presentation from tonight perhaps there might be a place on our website where we could reference the the delaware county intermediate unit a little bit to ms stern's point about providing

086yet another point access point for our community to learn more about the delaware county intermediate unit but in the meantime i want to thank you i know you've all had very long days thank you for taking this extra time to come out and present our board and the community with an overview of the important services and programming that you provide for delaware county students and and other family members and i just want to echo that same appreciation for the three of you and also you know there's so many things you share tonight and uh there's there's one bullet that says chief school administrators uh and dr edelberg you were tasked with uh when covet hit to take a group of superintendents who met monthly and all of a sudden we started all meet weekly and

087thanks to your ability to bring us all together as a county i mean we were the first to do tests to stay there's a lot of things that we were able to do through covid that was thanks to the efforts of all the superintendents working together and we appreciated everything you do to bring us all together we're not always an easy group and but thank you yes and and thank you i think we recently recognized actually the students who were inducted into the uh honor the hall of fame for the national technical honor society and we will continue to um look for the students and their accomplishments at in the delaware county technical school as well so thank you again really appreciate your making the time and effort to come out and share with us

088and hope you have a wonderful evening you're welcome to stay if you want to hear what else we're discussing this evening and if not and have a safe trip home thank you again thank you very much all right and with that we will move into the public comments section of our agenda the board will provide an opportunity at each regular board meeting for eligible participants to comment on matters of concern official action or deliberation which are or may be before the board the board requires that public participants sign in with their name and address public participants must be residents of the district taxpayers of the district persons with a legal or contractual right to address the board persons recognized by the presiding officers having a special interest such that addressing the board would be appropriate

089eligible participants must be recognized by the presiding officer and must preface their comments by an announcement of their name and town public comments and by email must include the commenter's name street address town and topic to be addressed individual comment shall be limited to not more than four minutes administration will respond to general questions raised during public comments sometime after the meeting parents with questions specific to their child's educational experience are encouraged to contact their child's teacher and or building principal directly and with that i open it up to anyone in the room who might want to make public comment this evening good evening good evening um christina heinzer wayne i am here tonight as i know at the special committee meeting last week you were tabling the discussion vote regarding changes to the health

090and safety plan i'm referring specifically to removing the language regarding a mask mandate in the future i know this board mentioned giving the community members time to have their input and i'm here tonight to speak on behalf of many community members some hearing this comment might think this is an irrelevant point based on some of bachelor's comments tonight but i'm also hearing that the option for a mask for mask mandates will still be on the table for the future and i really want my voice to be heard i know a lot of us are happy and comfortable now that the mask mandate has been lifted for the time being i was overjoyed in february knowing that my immune compromised child and healthy child would not be forced to wear a mask covering their mouth and

091nose for 38 hours a week but i also was shocked to see that every single board member here still voted for a health and safety plan that allowed healthy children to be masked again at some point in the future were you not in the same room as i was in february i along with countless peers stood in this room highlighting the extensive dangers and damages mass caused we had doctors dentists lawyers and almost every educational background and experience voicing their opinion so strongly against this board masking their children i myself am a teacher and have a background in pediatric clinical research for many years i stood and listened and blindly stood and listened and blindly followed the instructions of doctors it was actually my job to do this at one point in time but after

092i watched my daughter suffer horrifically at the hands of western medicine i decided to make sure i protected her and her siblings at all costs i now research everything myself and carefully select based on research and science which medical interventions i believe will help my children master one medical intervention that i now feel so strongly against i came in here on two separate occasions in the past and spoke of 65 different research studies examining bodily harm caused by mass let me remind this board of those harms again research has proven that mass cause increase increase in breathing resistance increase in blood carbon dioxide increase in heart and respiratory rate decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity heart issues exhaustion breathing issues headache dental issues and emotional and social issues in addition to these negative health consequences i've also

093talked with this board about the fact that on december 10th the pennsylvania supreme court backed the pennsylvania commonwealth decision that the mass mandate is completely unlawful and unenforceable the pa supreme court affirms the commonwealth decision that we cannot force mass on healthy children in addition to completely ignoring this ruling this board has been in violation of the following pennsylvania public school codes 27.71 27.72 and 27.60 we poured out the research of the extensive negative health consequences must bring we explain the laws that this board is in violation of several times and you have been faced with a community begging and pleading to the out of the autonomy to make this important health decision for their children yet this board still voted for a health and safety plan that included the option to force a mass

094mandate again in the future and you are still saying here tonight that we will have the option to bring bass back in the future i'm sure you're aware of the several lawsuits currently happening within school districts around us these lawsuits are happening because board members have decided to overlook pennsylvania law and either keep a mass mandate or have a mass mandate as part of a future plan you do not have the authority to do this let's not become like these surrounding district districts fighting this out in court let radnor be the example that we can figure this out on our own tonight we are looking for a leader here on this board to step up remember the many community members fighting for autonomy over our children and also stand up for pennsylvania law finally this

095needs to be said it is so disappointing that we have a board member that would say in this room that we have wasted our time by coming to the february meeting i assure you during our civic duty and speaking up for our children without a voice is never a waste of our time in fact we will continue to show up and make sure our voices are heard and we have we have lost trust in this board right your wrongs follow pennsylvania law and remove any ability for a mass mandate in the future we want and deserve autonomy and we'll respect everyone's personal decision master or not but let's amend this help and safety plan correctly i'm on my last sentence can i finish let's amend this health and safety plan correctly and instead of ending

096up in court with strife in our community let's let radnor be the example that we don't need to take it to that point thank you thank you miss eiser is there any other public comment this evening in the room mr petiti any public comment that's been emailed yes we have two melissa sykes 720 mainland road new town square please bring back the cafeteria tables in the elementary schools so the children can sit together at lunch and socialize we were told the tables will return after spring break please remove this sentence from the health and safety plan quote the board authorizes the superintendent to implement mandatory masking at the superintendent's discretion unquote masking children is not a decision that should be made by school districts it is unlawful thank you cassandra newton eagle road wayne good

097evening while i know some of those on the board think it's a waste of parents time to send emails to the board or to come in person and speak to the board i did want to say that i think that the board should take the administration's recommendations on the health and safety plan i personally will not be masking my children again no matter what your decision is tonight that is all thank you mr petiti um dr batchelor did you have anything you wanted to respond to at this time sure no thank you uh mrs goldman and we'd like to try to quickly just respond to some public comment where we can and i think my uh comments earlier in the meeting and the superintendent remarks touched upon all of those comments as a school district

098the changes in our health and safety plan moving forward is removing that threshold of 2.5 that we set and and that setting of that threshold was very similar to what we have gone through with so much of covid we make a decision based on the information we had at the time we were looking to try to remove masking and then days later guidance changes we've experienced now some spreading cases but realize that we don't need and require to at this point require masking so we can remove that language so i think we have to continue to evaluate we have to continue to respond and i think all of us and i think want to speak for the school board i don't think any of us wants to be in the a place where we're having

099to require masking we recognize that you know moving forward it is an individual decision we also recognize though that what kobus has taught us is we don't know what we don't know uh you know on our health and safety plan we'll still acknowledge uh that you know if there are any type of local or national mandates as a school district we would follow those mandates uh in the future but we are all hoping uh we are moving forward and moving into a place where um the requirement of masking is something that we as a school district would not be in the place of having to do at the same time though we want to make sure we will be able to staff our buildings and and keep our buildings staffed and keep our kids all

100in our buildings but we'll continue to evaluate and we appreciate the public comment and and i'd speak for the whole board appreciate the public comment tonight and i know i speak for all the board appreciate the public commented uh past meetings as well okay thank you and just to clarify what it is that's on our agenda for this evening is that the february decision this recommendation was presented to us by the administration in february the board approved it and now the administration is recommending a change to it and that's what's on our agenda tonight so when we get to that part of the agenda dr batchelor will probably have another comment or two to make all right we will move now into our report from board committees first up will be the curriculum committee ms

101dunn good evening yes the curriculum committee has been very busy we met twice this month we met on tuesday april 5th for a review of our diversity equity and inclusion plan which is part of the district's uh goals that was set a few years ago and we just with coven it's uh it's been unfortunately delayed so we got an update on the actions that have been taken though uh and april 19th we met again we got the second half of the student achievement report which was begun in our march meeting and we reviewed the business audit of our business curriculum at the high school thank you ms dunn and for the facilities committee ms monahan the facilities committee met on april 19th at the special board meeting to conduct committee work at this meeting it

102was information was shared on shaping the future and i believe dr bashler kind of did a very good recap during his superintendent remarks and i don't have anything further to add on that our next meeting is scheduled for may 10th at 7 30. thank you ms monahan and now the finance committee mr moore thank you the finance committee met on april 5th there was a budget update in that meeting the board is now even more up to date on the budget since this this board passed the proposed final budget at the subsequent special board meeting on april 19th on the meeting agenda for tonight in addition to the usual financial action items on the consent agenda there are a number of priority action items requiring this board's attention that we discussed in the finance committee

103meeting there is the appointment of two trustees for the delaware county community college and five directors to the dciu board to serve until june 30th 2025 including my own appointment and there was substantial discussion at the finance committee about a parameters resolution for series 2014 and 2015 bond refinancing i will assume that everyone on the board was able to view the meeting and understand what we are doing with that refinancing since the finance committee meeting there are two points of information that may be new that i'll just emphasize uh number one what is on the agenda is the actual text of the parameters resolution we didn't have the text before the finance committee meeting so you can now see all the legal requirements for that are now in there and there was a question that

104came up at the finance committee meeting about what those bonds were for originally and so if you refer to pages three through five of the resolution it actually goes through the entire history of what those bonds originally were for and how they were refinanced multiple times and i believe that will be a roll call vote if you have questions about any of these priority action items you can ask the administration at that time but i think all the information you needed was presented in finance committee thank you oh the next finance committee meeting will is tentatively scheduled for may 3rd thank you mr moore and then we turn to the policy committee ms duffy who is the chair of the policy committee has an excused absence this evening and the vice chair of the policy

105committee mr jubilee is going to provide a brief report in her absence yes policy committee met on april 5th we exclusively discussed policy uh well not exclusively but primarily discuss policy 006 meetings and public participation we've had that was our second committee discussing policy 006 where we had a robust discussion amongst our committee public comment as well tonight you'll see on the consent agenda policy 006 up for a first read it pertains to how the public um uh will be enhanced remote public comment process and um the and what the administration recommends and um uh upon that we our next meeting will be may third and should this uh move forward we will be further sharing and discussing how that process will be put into effectuated at that meeting thank you mr jubilee and government

106relations and communications dr babson okay so the grcc actually did not meet this past month our last meeting was in march but we did have uh an important activity this month to just discuss briefly we had our eighth annual legislative breakfast on thursday april the 7th there were lawmakers there board members district administrators teachers students and we had some really nice discussion together we learned a lot from each other talking about legislative issues and also specifically about promoting student mental health the next meeting of the grcc will be on tuesday may 3rd at 7 pm thank you dr babson and with that we're going to move into our priority discussion and action items first up is the proposed revision to the sr3 grant fund allocation this is just a discussion an informational item the administration

107is recommending an adjustment to the grant application and at this time i'll turn it over to dr batchelor to give his remarks thank you mrs goldman we were recipients of the the esther dollars is the elementary and secondary school relief emergency funds back in the fall we had several board meetings and actually going back to the summer time receiving uh you know discussion about how we wanted to spend those dollars this year this is sr3 we've already received what was sr1 and sr2 in previous years sr1 and 2 those dollars we use towards a lot of infrastructure providing our one-on-one technology providing professional development with of our mtss program focusing also on mental health and student services supports with those dollars with the plan that we put forward in the fall we identified several buckets

108on how we wanted to spend those dollars we knew at the time that we would be reassessing and reevaluating and we'll continue to reassess and reevaluate how we're using those dollars moving forward we have several years to spend those dollars in one particular area we hadn't used some of the money that we had anticipated in these uh stimulus dollars and these grant dollars and we were also spending some time this year looking at you know what is happening within our school district staff what is happening with education around the country we are zeroing in you know nationally and especially in the state of pennsylvania closing in and some districts are calling it a crisis of the amount of people who are going into education few and fewer people are going into education we have struggled

109the last two years not only when it comes to teachers we have struggled with support staff we have trouble struggled across the board i would say that thanks to the dedication of our staff we have done a lot better than many districts in in holding on to our staff but education like many sectors of our economy are struggling to hold on to their staffs our staff over the last two years have been just simply amazing all that our staff has done over the last two years to meet the needs of our students we have a phrase we often use that i i'll never get tired of using our goal is to unlock the potential in all of our students and it takes everyone in our district all of our staff play a role in helping

110us to unlock that potential and when i say everyone that's from administration to our faculty to our support staff and the support staff is a very broad term of of when i look at cafeteria i look at transportation i look at our operations department i look at our our secretarial staff every aspect of our district is critical into providing our educational program and providing the quality of the educational program that we expect here in radnor so looking at our esr funds knowing that the state of pennsylvania has encouraged school districts to use the esser funds as retention incentives or retention bonuses that is one of the things that the state has encouraged it is a one-time use of dollars the challenge we have with the esser dollars is that it's one-time money so the more

111we use it for positions the more we use it for things that are reoccurring these dollars will go away in the future and then we will have to assume you know that was in our budget or cut those programs so that's one of the reasons why the state does encourage us knowing what's happening in education across the commonwealth encourage us to use them as incentives of incentive bonuses and retentions for staff as well we're the is recommending tonight that we are going to resubmit our sr application and make an adjustment to provide a retention incentive for all of our staff here in the district uh that retention incentive that we are setting for all of our staff in recognition of the commitment and dedication over the last two years the commitment and dedication to our

112students we're going to set that at a thousand dollars for all full-time staff 500 for all part-time staff and then we're also going to look to try to do something for our supplemental holders roughly two hundred dollars for our supplemental holders but that would only be eligible if you're not receiving the thousand dollars or the five hundred dollars for those supplemental holders who are not you know who are not employed either part-time or full-time with the district so tonight i just wanted to share with the board the changes we are making to that application and give an opportunity for board to give any feedback before we submit those changes once we submit the changes once our grant application is approved by the state we would look to move forward to provide again those that this

113retention incentive to all of our staff thank you dr batchelor board members anybody have any questions mr moore thank you dr bachelor i appreciate the the spirit and the creativity behind this proposal um one question i have is uh what is the administration's expectation about what year the uh retention incentive would fall and and what the reasons are what are behind that timing so we would hope it would fall bef uh you know the actual uh payment would happen before the end of this school year would be our hopes but a lot of it depends on when the state gets back to us on our application uh and they they have actually been moving quickly through with that response so before the end of this year uh and the the incentive is for being with

114us uh this past school year for the entire school year is the incentive thank you anybody else mrs stern dr bachelet thank you i'm really grateful that the administration was able to find a way to to say thank you i just want to clarify so by staff we mean support staff teaching staff cafeteria staff every staff member correct every staff member yes and the only distinction will be the full-time versus part-time but that will be a distinction across all of our staff members great all right thank you so much are there any other questions or comments is done i i just i wanted to really say a heartfelt thank you to the administration i think we've all tried over the course of the last few years to thank the administration and the teachers and all

115the staff members for everything they've done and i think sometimes people say yeah yeah empty thank you they're empty words so i hope that this money goes a little bit further and and shows that we really really appreciate that that our children are only still in school and and succeeding because of the efforts of every person who walks in there every day thank you ms dunn anybody else could we vote to approve it i mean i i know that it's just information i mean i i echo missed on i think we all you know wholeheartedly support this this effort uh to say thank you uh there is nothing wrong with someone making a motion to to uh um to support this uh recommendation there's there's nothing wrong with that um it's not technically necessary only

116because um we we don't need to have the board approve the yes or application uh but there would be nothing wrong with that as well and and again just the the you know the esser dollars this is not something we do in education but the esther dollars i think have given us an opportunity um to do this and has given us an opportunity as thank you for the comments to highlight that you know when we are a people intensive organization you know where we spend our money is on our people because that's who make a difference on the lives of our kids every day and we want to not only ensure that we hold on to them but we also want to ensure that they are aware how much we appreciate all that they've been

117doing i would like to make a motion in support of this idea ms solomon i'm just going to make a comment and then i will try come back to you for the motion if that's all right with you so not realizing how this was going to go in terms of a potential motion you prepare for everything and i just wanted to on behalf of the board and the administration again offer our profound appreciation to each and every staff member for your strength your ingenuity courage and commitment throughout the pandemic while care workers and many others on the front lines have deservedly been recognized as heroes it shouldn't be lost on any of us that so are educators and school staff radnor can only provide an educational program for our students in any format as long

118as we have the people working in and in support of our schools that we do from our custodians to our bus drivers and full transportation staff to our maintenance workers food service workers office and support staffers coaches student activity sponsors paraprofessionals administrators psychologists social workers counselors administrators administrators teachers and nurses for sure we couldn't have made it through the long and challenging days of the pandemic without you and while the pandemic is not over and the impact may linger we are in a position to rebound and thrive largely because we have the radnor township school district staff that we do so on behalf of the board i want to say we sincerely thank each and every one of you and now i will turn it over to ms solomon to make a motion so as

119ms goldman and ms dunn said so eloquently what we all think but words only go so far so i would like to make a motion that we support this idea that the administration is putting forth i'll second mr jubilee is going to second that any further comment before i call the vote okay seeing none all those in favor of supporting the administration's adjustments to the sr-3 grant application please indicate you've already done so by raising your hands and that is an eight to nothing unanimous vote thank you very much we will now move into the next item on our agenda which is the appointment of trustees for the delaware county community college board of trustees and the recommended action is that the board votes to appoint kimberly p reid and elizabeth a shepherd rabadam as

120trustees to the delaware county community college board of trustees at the april 5th 2022 finance committee meeting administration was given direction to recommend the appointment of kimberly p reid to fill the vacancy that will expire on june 30th 2027 and elizabeth a shepherd rabadam to fill the vacancy that will expire on june 30th 2023 as trustees to the delaware county community college board of trustees this will be a roll call vote and i'd like to before i ask for a motion and this well i'll ask for a motion may i have a motion from someone some moved thank you ms solomon and a second thank you miss dunn um if there's any discussion i can entertain that now and i'd actually like to ask ms solomon given that she is the board appointed liaison to

121the delaware county community college to see if she has any remarks she wants to make so the delaware county community college has a board which these two individuals are being put forth to join the board what they also have is a liaison committee which is made up of one member from each of the 15 school districts in delaware county i'm the liaison from the radnor school board to the community college liaison committee they put forth an offer to any of the 15 liaisons to be part of the interview committee to fill the actual board vacancies on the community college board so i was one of five people that volunteered to participate in the interviews of these two individuals so i endorsed both of these individuals i was part of the interview process and so i

122think these are two really strong candidates for the delaware county board so i support um this motion thank you ms solomon and thank you for the time you spent um as our liaison to the delaware county community college and doing this this preparatory work so these are going to be a roll call vote for each of the candidates we have a motion and a second for the first candidate is kimberly p reid and i'll turn it over to dr pauling to mr pauling to provide the roll call for us thank you ms goldman i'll start with you ms goldman aye ms dunn mr babson i miss duffy is absent uh mr jubilee aye ms monaghan aye mr moore aye ms solomon yes and miss stern aye aye to proof thank you and then i'll entertain

123a motion and a second for the second of uh candidate elizabeth a shepherd rabadam may i have a motion so moved ms solomon thank you second second ms monahan thank you mr pauling thank you ms goldman aye ms dunn aye mr babson aye mr jubileer aye ms monaghan aye mr moore aye ms solomon yes and miss stern aye ayda proof okay thank you very much and thank you mr pauling for walking us through that get ready for the next roll call vote which is item 9.03 the appointment of delaware county intermediate unit board of directors the recommended action is that the board approves the appointment of fred green edward harris bradley moore christine mcmenamin and sheree monroe to serve on the delaware county intermediate unit board of directors for the term commencing july 1st 2022

124and ending june 30th 2025. so moved hold on one quick i'm almost there thank you for your enthusiasm at the april 5th 2022 finance committee meeting administration recommended the approval of the following candidates for the delaware county intermediate unit board of directors for the term commencing july 1st 2022 and ending june 30th 2025. one thing that i'd like to mention is just where each of these candidates is from in terms of a school district mr fred greene is from chester upland mr edward harris is from inner barrow our own bradley moore is from radnor christine mcmenamin is from ridley and sheree monroe is from southeast delco with that i'd like to entertain we're going to do this as a slate unless anybody uh wants to do it otherwise i'd entertain a motion for the slate

125of candidates for the delaware county intermediate unit board so moved thank you mr second thank you dr babson mr pauling roll call thank you miss goldman aye ms dunn aye mr babson aye mr jubilee hi sorry miss monahan aye mr moore aye ms solomon i abstain from this vote as an employee of the dciu okay and ms stern aye okay seven approvals one abstention thank you very much and mr moore congratulations and i think after tonight's presentation by the delaware county intermediate unit as much as we appreciated the work of our board representative it's it's many more fold at this point given the the scope of the work that you do with as a representative of the del r board to the delaware county intermediate unit i appreciate the support and look forward to moving

126to work with the dciu with renewed vigor thank you like that enthusiasm as well all right we're going to move into item 9.04 which is the approval of parameters resolution for series 2014 and 2015 bond refunding the recommended action is that the board does hereby approve the parameters resolution and authorizes the administration to work with pfm financial advisors llc as financial advisor saul ewing as financial advisor saul ewing as bond council rbc capital markets as purchaser benning and scattergood inc as underwriter and the local solicitor in conjunction with the issuance of general obligation bonds series of 2022 for the purpose of refunding all or a portion of the general obligation bonds series of 2014 and 2015. zach willard from pfm financial advisors llc and michael lillies from rbc capital markets presented to the finance committee

127on april 5th 2022 the potential savings to the district if they refund the current 2014 and 2015 general obligation bonds do i have a motion so moved thank you ms solomon do i have a second second thank you ms dunn before we call the vote if for is there any discussion or questions i'll look i'm looking at mr moore as our finance chair i think uh we covered the particulars at finance committee and in my report this evening so we would just want to make sure no one has any questions for the administration and then we can call the vote does anybody have any questions no okay mr pauling thank you ms goldman aye ms dunn aye dr babson i apologize for not um addressing you as doctor earlier so no problem at all hi

128uh ms duffy is absent mr jubilee hi miss monahan aye mr moore aye ms solomon yes and ms stern aye okay eight approved okay thank you everyone and now we are moving into the consent agenda portion the consent agenda although board action is required it is generally unnecessary to hold discussion on these items with the consent of all board members they are therefore grouped and approval is given in one motion in the event a board member wants to discuss any item the board president will move it to an appropriate place on the agenda is there anything a board member would like to pull from the consent agenda this evening mr moore like to pull the minutes of last meeting 11.1 for a couple corrections 14.3 health and safety plan and 15.1 policy for first reading

129thank you is there anything else that anyone would like to pull okay then let's make a motion to approve the remaining consent agenda items which begin with 12.01 and go through 16.0 we are not at the moment approving 11.01 14.03 or 15.01 can i have a motion from someone thank you ms solomon a second a second thank you mr moore all those in favor please indicate by raising your hand and it looks like eight to nothing and we will then move to mr moore to begin with the item 11.01 um we'll just send those corrections and it can appear on the next agenda okay thank you so we will put those on for the for the next for the next meeting to be approved um mr moore you want to do 14.03 uh yes and

130procedural question do we need a motion in a second i have just a couple questions if i should do my questions first or if we should uh have a motion on the floor first yes we can would you like to make a motion uh i would like to uh invite any other board member who would like to move this item anybody else um i'll i'll make a motion to move it forward okay thank you miss monahan in a second second thank you ms solomon okay mr moore okay uh just a couple of things uh dr batchelor i appreciate all the answers you gave us at the previous meeting the special board meeting about this just a couple new things uh since then um i noticed that wallingford swarthmore school district had um they have a

131an even stricter threshold in their health and safety plan than we adopted in ours of two percent and one of their buildings met that threshold and i believe they were going to mass required for 14 days because of that i was just wondering if you had any interface with anyone from that district or any updates on how that was working out for them since that threshold was reached so a lot of districts did different things those districts that changed the masking or try attempted to remove masking before the cdc you know changed its guidance uh those districts that did that earlier did set a threshold uh wallingford swarthmore said i believe she said two percent well we said we said two and a half percent i know of two districts one district that set five

132percent and and another district that's at uh four percent um you know i can tell you that um from talking to my colleagues uh everyone is having a discussion right now um so not specific to wallingford but i can say everyone is having those who set these thresholds is all having a discussion right now about whether or not since the cdc changed its guidance whether or not uh those thresholds should continue it's something that discussions everyone having as i mentioned earlier in the meeting today i did have an opportunity to meet recently with with health officials and uh you know to discuss the idea of of what are those triggers that would move a district back to mandated masking or requiring masking and one of the triggers that everyone discusses within the health community that

133i've been talking about is that the hospitalizations where are we with the hospitalizations and thankfully the hospitalizations of covet patients is very low in our region and overall the spread is is uh we're still as accounting in low spread even though i think individual districts are experiencing what we're experiencing um i have reached out to them though this was to answer a specific question and they did they have moved and they are requiring masking right now at that particular building thank you for the update i really appreciate that and since you brought it up uh this evening you also uh in your superintendent remarks talked a little bit about the the dashboard and whether we would want to have a dashboard moving forward you know one of the things i thought that was helpful about

134what we decided to do in february was this idea that we know that with high quality masks masking works and the emphasis on individual choice and so i just like your reaction to the idea that if we really are uh removing all of the automatic thresholds and it truly just becomes individual choice absent the exercise of the superintendent's authority that remains in the plan um you know how important is it to have a dashboard so that people have information upon which to rely as they make that individual choice and everything about this the last two years has been um you know we we make adjustments and we we assess those adjustments and we make adjustments based on you know what we know right now and often the adjustments we make are easing us in one

135direction or another until some other guidance so i think as we make this adjustment now we as a district make sense to keep our dashboard i think those families that you know have concerns those families that um you know there are families that would like to see us requiring masking and again you know all of our decisions we appreciate the feedback the guidance that we receive from so many in our community is listened to and is appreciated but at the same time we make the decision based on what we believe is right for our kids uh it's not the loudest voice that has ever carried uh any decision for us for any recommendation uh it is a balancing really of of a great deal of feedback and guidance uh moving forward and our own experience

136has really guided us so i think right now we can keep it but i think we really need to be discussing in the next few weeks uh and and maybe it's the next month or two if we wind up keeping it to the end of this school year um you know right now and again everything changes but i'm not sure we want to start the school year next year with it uh and and i and i would even question whether we want to keep it till the end of the school year i think for now we should keep it as we make this a you know change in adjustment it makes sense it gives our parents and communities information i think it helps give information on when a student or staff member may want to

137mask but i think that the conversation i'm having with um you know health professionals in our region is that are we moving to a time where especially for kids why are we tracking this one thing and we're not tracking pertussis on a dashboard we're not tracking the flu on a dashboard uh whether that's you know the end of the school year into the summer we need to be having that discussion all right those were my only questions thank you very much thanks for taking a little extra time okay miss monaghan i i just wanted to share similar comments that i made at the special meeting when we talked about this for those that didn't have an opportunity to see that but i know that two and a half percent was originally set kind of as

138an arbitrary number what you explain in your superintendent comments and knowing we we have information as far as radnor you know percent vaccinations we know a lot of people within our community as well as at the schools have had covid unfortunately um and you know for me just reflective of what happened at iphone and how that was handled i i trust that the administration will know what to do when so i don't think we need to have a number in there and that's why i made the motion and we'll support this thank you ms monahan dr babson sure i just want to say a couple things first of all i endorse mr moore's comments i think that bringing up this topic is is important i think there's this one point i want to make with

139all due respect to comparisons to other diseases like pertussis or influenza there is a qualitative difference between those diseases and sars cov2 virus and covid as a disease i i don't think that i think that that's a fairly straightforward statement and because there is such qualitative difference i guess i'm led to wonder what is the cost that is involved in maintaining the dashboard um in other words what is what is the drawback i don't that i'm not really sure what that might be so i would welcome some kind of elaboration on that i think it's something that we need to continue to discuss and again i'm relaying having discussions with health professionals in the area who are openly starting to discuss and question why are we tracking one thing and not another what is our

140experience with our kids who are sick thankfully our kids that are have been out with coveted have had less symptoms than our kids who are out with the flu and out with other things this is not a me trying to wax philosophical or anything politically or about the virus is just the reality of what we are experiencing and what health professionals now are beginning to question and ask we're moving forward and keeping the dashboard right now but it is a question that and and discussion that we need to have as a as a school board moving forward and uh and and maybe it's something that is is for the start of the school year next year maybe we keep it until the remainder of this school year um what is the downside uh the downside

141is that you know it is it is labor intensive and we are tracking something uh where we're not tracking other things you know that are impacting our kids even more so if i may thank you for that and i think it also goes without saying that sure there will be a time when it will the pandemic will know it will no longer be a pandemic pandemics end and i understand that that that is a reality that we won't need this forever however um again i mean this is it's not my specialty but i'm just sort of you know going going by what i i learned but we haven't really i don't think we've reached any kind of endemic stage so i mean in my mind i i would i would think a dashboard would correlate

142or correspond to endemicity um but as you said dr bachelor this is an ongoing conversation thank you dr babson ms stern you had your hand raised i did um uh i am going to support this you and i have had good conversations about this i i do want to point out it's not just a qualitative difference with the flu and pertussis with all due respect dr batchelor um children as young as two months old can be uh begin their vaccination against pertussis so i'm still mindful of those families who have children who are too young to be immunized and that's where you know i think information is power and i i think i've been pretty consistent throughout this entire pandemic that every time we've made a change we've had to be willing to evaluate what

143impact the change had and i think we've i think we have largely as a district made good and timely decisions and we've been able to see the impact of those decisions through the dashboard so i would certainly support keeping it through this year because i do think it will be important for families to continue to evaluate this year what might be going on at the elementary school levels and for us as a district to understand what the impact of just a recommendation to mask at certain certain circumstances what impact that has on the numbers and for me this has always been about how can we keep children and and staff in school safely and sustainably and i and i do believe that for those families who do have children who are too young to be

144vaccinated that for right now that information is still really important and and babies and young children can be inoculated against the flu and pertussis so that is actually a really big difference so if and so their parents are already making those choices that provide additional additional uh uh safeguards for their children of of those two particular instances and i really appreciate the art i mean the the consideration of you know no we don't track everything we don't track hand foot mouth we don't track chicken pox and so i do appreciate the the argument but i would say with regard to those two particularly communicable diseases measles is another one there was a measles outbreak uh prior to the pandemic there was actually a very significant measles outbreak in uh close to new york city impacting

145families who chose not to vaccinate so that's the difference right now and i will support this because i i have i was really heartened by how people responded to your request to dr to dr boylan's request to mask i do think we have to be willing to look at the impact of this change and see how that's working for our community and i do think those parents deserve that information for right now to evaluate it and as we discuss these things it's always you know i'm not sitting here saying covet is pertussis or covet is another i know that okay i know that you meant to this highly communicable diseases i i totally took it as that nothing yes no absolutely and and our and it is our you know our medical community is recognizing

146um that this is less virulent coveted but very transmissible and they are recognizing that you know where um and and they are they are sharing with us what we are seeing ourselves and this is just the level of sickness we're seeing from our kids who have covid versus our kids who have the flu versus the stomach bug the things that are going around so that's the context when which i share it it is not the context of trying to to compare it just to say that we are seeing that our kids are actually experiencing less symptoms and are less ill than kids that are struggling with other things that we don't track that's what we're experiencing right now okay thank you everyone for the ms dunn i just had a couple questions the the health

147and safety plan as i recall this is not something we had before the pandemic this is something we were tasked with by the state is that accurate that is correct so do we have to have one again next year or have they finally dropped this requirement so i and i and i don't i won't you know everybody administrators quickly look down i'll if anyone if anybody wants to jump in who knows an answer or tell me if i'm wrong or if our solicitor knows um i believe right now moving forward health and safety plans i'm not sure the state is in a place to require them districts that are using esser dollars are required to have a health and safety plan while you're spending esther dollars so until our esther dollars are all spent we

148will have to have a health and safety plan is my understanding right now if any other anyone else has any insight on it and if you don't that's fine so just to clarify the state is putting requirements on the federal money we get i'd have to check on that i don't know if that i do think it's coming through this table because mr christopher wants to weigh in on this yeah i think the the requirement to have a health and safety plan was one of the requirements that was wrapped up in the federal uh grant that came up that it didn't say what your health and safety plan had to include but it said you had to have one so everybody was required to have one as part of requesting the money and it's required

149to be in place while you're spending the money at least as of now okay that's helpful thank you and the existing health and safety plan expires at the end of this year we have to do a whole new one next year is that correct i believe that that needs to be revised every six months i think that that's the timing of that so yes i think that's it actually it's got to be revised okay so um i should say revised it has to be reviewed uh every six months correct yeah re re reviewed and sort of reauthorized right yeah um okay so my preference on the dashboard is that we keep that through the end of the school year it may not really be necessary beyond then hopefully we're getting to a phase where it's

150just not for board members who don't have kids in the schools please understand that we don't get noticed if we have high school or middle school students about any covid it only gets told to elementary school students so you can be sending your kid to school and find out over dinner conversation that yeah there are a couple of kids in their class out on zoom and suddenly that's how you know there's coveted in their class active covet in their classroom i i am a little surprised i'm not surprised i i would take note of the fact that in february when we passed this plan including the two and a half percent requirement people in the audience who had roundly criticized dust stood up and cheered and high-fived and jumped around they were so excited that

151we had approved this plan and i just feel like we have a lot of other things to do like dr batchelor said and i'd rather just look at this every six months i don't see a reason to change what's in there i've heard the explanations i'd rather just let it expire at the end of the year and next year when the school year starts again we can revisit what's necessary thank you miss dunn is there any other comment because we've been discussing a few things about around this motion i'm going to restate the motion because i want to just make sure that everyone is clear including the community what it is that we're voting on we were talking about the dashboard and that's actually not a part of the action that we're taking tonight that's

152going to be an ongoing conversation so i'm going to read even though we have a motion in a second i'm going to read the recommended action again and that is that the board approves the uh the updated administration updated health and safety plan to include changes to the masking guidelines we had a motion from ms monahan and we had a second from ms solomon i'll now call the vote all in favor please indicate by raising your hand let's see it's one two three four five okay all of those opposed three so the motion carries five to three thank you very much and we will move mr brown mr moore will you take us to 15.01 yes as with the previous item i would invite any board member who wishes to make a motion at this

153point let's have a motion for 15.01 who would like to make that motion some moved thank you ms solomon in a second second thank you miss dunn okay mr moore so i i followed the policy committee meeting discussions on this agenda item carefully and with much interest and i really just want to thank the committee members for their work and to the members of the public who submitted feedback to the committee and the administration for receiving that feedback and coming back to the committee multiple times this is such a large and complex policy covering many topics only one of which is public comment and many changes that are not just about public comment most of the feedback it seems focused on public comment but i just want to acknowledge this is a very um big

154undertaking that the committee took on and this is the kind of thing that you know could have been rushed through and it wasn't rushed through and so thank you for taking your time with it um all that said um i did prefer the original proposal that the administration submitted and so you know for for a number of reasons the main one is probably the focus on keeping the first comment period to items on the agenda last night i watched the sixers game i really regret having done so it was not just that they lost but how they lost that was so upsetting and what i could have done is one of my other favorite hobbies which is watching other school board members board meetings and lower marion had a great board meeting last night which

155i really should have watched instead of the sixers game um we really need to get you a netflix account and having having watched some other school board members other school board meetings i really do appreciate the um what comes out of the deliberation in those meetings and the discussion and efficiency when it's limited to limited to agenda items early on and then free comment after that um so that's something i especially liked about the initial proposal um there are some other things i like better about the initial proposal as well so i just wanted to make those comments if there's any other discussion before we call the vote that's fine is there any other comment mr jubilee yeah i appreciate uh mr moore and um i i want to just elucidate a little bit on

156your you're not concerned but you're why you know you would have preferred we did have a discussion about that specific item um and we still have in the um in the language that we would provide the presiding officer with the discretion to define the comment periods if needed so just looking at you know several you know we've looked at each you know tonight for example to date near not to date to our um we haven't had a significant amount of public comment so i think that it would be not not problematic to have you know different issues come up we've had other meetings over the last two years in particular where we've had hundreds of public comment and i think that this would enable some flexibility but i just think in one particular instance a

157few months ago or a month or so ago we had a some families here to talk about the calendar which was not on the agenda but they had children in the audience who were of an age that you know needed to go to bed so um i think it was it behooved us to enable them to provide their public comment in the first period i think so i just wanted to explain sort of our deliberation around that particular tenet of the policy um and how we came to that uh uh to support where it is right now all right and i appreciate that and i didn't want in my remarks to make it seem like i um you know was not aware that that flexibility was still in there and that's appreciated you know it

158would have been my preference for the default to have been um limited to the agenda in the first period and perhaps with the escape valve mechanism like that like the majority the board could entertain off-topic comments so it's really just a question of where the default lies but i do appreciate that clarification mr tripler thank you thank you is there any other comment on this item seeing none i will i we have a motion and a second well the motion is from the solomon and it was seconded by miss dunn all those in favor of i'm going to read the recommended action again that the board approves the i'm sorry we did that one that the board receives the policy zero zero six meetings and public participation for its first reading all those in favor

159please indicate by raising your hand and that's a one two forgive me for counting out loud everyone these partitions make it a little bit difficult to see the hand so indulge me here one two three four five six seven in favor of those opposed one opposed thank you very much and now we are going to move to our community liaison reports part of the agenda and these are reports from board liaisons and community announcements representatives to community boards may report on items pertinent to school district business and we'll start with the delaware county community college ms solomon no further report the delaware county intermediate unit mr moore i believe the presentation we heard earlier suffices thank you that's your shortest report ever mr moore and the pennsylvania school boards association miss duffy is our liaison

160to the school boards association she's not here however i'm sorry to put you on the spot mr moore but you and i were in harrisburg yesterday did you want to briefly report on that pennsylvania school board's association activity of ours um the activity in harrisburg was the annual advocacy day where the school board association arranges meetings between members of the school board across school boards in the state and their local representatives and sometimes other representatives so mrs goldman and i were able to attend a number of those meetings with the two current representatives who serve our district uh the state senate representative the state senator was not available because the senate was not in session but we really valued the conversations that we had with the representatives we met and their staff in addition we

161were able to sit in on an education committee meeting to hear about some proposals for changes to school code regarding mental health which is certainly an issue of much concern one of the themes of the advocacy day was the imposition of unfunded mandates from the legislature to school districts across the commonwealth so we were able to observe that you know although it was exciting to see that representatives were concerned about student mental health there was not as much discussion about how the initiatives they were moving forward would be funded and so it remains an ongoing discussion um i think as we all know there is a primary season coming up and that the discussion of the governor's budget of proposal will probably accelerate immediately after that primary election day so the conversations we had uh

162in in the capital were our first step as part of an ongoing effort and we will look forward to seeing um how they respond to um what we wanted them to listen to us about great thank you very much i think you may have mentioned it but we also had the opportunity to to speak with the minority chair of the house education committee yes yeah that was the uh that was the out of district uh meeting we had as well thank you for adding that mrs goldman thank you mr moore are there any other community announcements that anybody would like to make all right seeing none we are going to move now into the new business section does anybody have any new business to raise seeing none i'm going to give some of the next

163board announcements which are that on tuesday may 3rd at 5 o'clock we will have our policy committee meeting at six o'clock on that day will be our finance committee meeting and at seven o'clock will be the government relations and communications committee meeting all of those will take place in the ground floor conference room of the radnor township school district administration building which is at 135 south wayne avenue on tuesday may 10th the following week we are planning to have a curriculum committee meeting at five o'clock and we are planning to have facilities at 6 30. we are off the week of may 17th and because there's the primary taking place and our buildings will be in in use for the for voting so tuesday may 24th we are going to have our seven o'clock regular

164business meeting here in the radnorshire room of the radnor township municipal building 301 ivan avenue at this time i'm going to entertain a second round of public comment on new issues raised or subjects developed following priority discussion and action items the board will provide an opportunity to each regular business board meeting for eligible participants to comment on matters of concern official action or deliberation which are or may be before the board the board requires the public participants sign in with their name and address public participants must be residents of the district taxpayers of the district persons with a legal or contractual right to address the board and persons recognized by the presiding officer officers having a special interest such that addressing the board would be appropriate eligible participants must be recognized by the presiding officer

165and must preface their comments by an announcement of their name in town public comments sent by email must include the commenter's name street address town and topic to be addressed individual comments shall be limited to not more than four minutes administration will respond to general questions raised during public comment sometime after the meeting parents with questions specific to their child's educational experience are encouraged to contact their child's teacher and or building principal directly is there any public comment in the room this evening good evening mr king good evening president goldman board members and administration and pt our only remaining person in the audience so i'm here to speak on behalf of our members and i can't speak on behalf of all the employees of the district but i do just want to express our sincere

166gratitude for the bonus payment uh that was announced and voted on by the board tonight unanimously uh it's greatly appreciated uh take the words to heart that president goldman spoke about the past year and a half has been almost two years has been quite challenging and difficult and i think together uh we have found with strength courage humility and tenacity a way to to get through and and to provide the education that our students deserve and the community expects so just want to express that gratitude to you all and to dr batchelor too yeah thank you thank you rtea president mr king is there any email no okay all right then it is time to make a motion to adjourn to solomon and second miss monahan all those in favor that looks like eight to

167nothing this meeting is adjourned thank you you