2022-05-10 School Committee Meeting

001we will be rising for the pledge of allegiance but however um i would like to uh as far as a moment of silence meditation we would like to observe that for brian staley retired director of administration of finance and bill day will add a few comments on his time spent with brian during brian's 21 years at chu cheruhou so after our silent meditation mr day would like the floor on july 15 2016 brian received a double lung transplant at cleveland clinic and on april 21st 2020 and 22nd 2020 the retired school finance director became the first patient at cleveland clinic to receive a double organ transplant liver and kidney um brian passed away on may 4th since their condolences to brian's family so at this time we would please rise for a moment pledge allegiance

002and then a moment of silence in honor of brian 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 thank you very much mr day you have the floor thank you uh as a note said uh ryan and i had uh 21 years of uh experience there working within the district but uh brian goes back farther than that with me i coached him as a 10 11 year 12 year old in little league and back then brian was the same type of individual that he was here at jericho very quiet very hard working never wanted to be the main focus of anybody's uh thing there he just worked so so so diligently as a

003little leaguer he wasn't the best ball player but uh he he made himself into a good ball player by the by the time he he finished his little league career i would like to share one uh what this might be considered a positive motion in some people's minds uh brian uh bought a bmw with a sunroof in the car and a few people here might remember this one but uh he was coming back from uh from his home one day which is just down the road as some of you people know and uh he had the sunroof open and a bird flew by and did what a bird did on his head and messed his hair up which wasn't much hair to mess up but uh after after that uh i talked to brian and

004was giving him a hard time about it and he's brian b and brian said well you know he said it could be worse i could be living in arrogance and it could have been a seagull and that's the kind of person that i knew as a little leaguer and as a very hard worker here at this district so i'm going to miss him thank you mr day i recommend the minutes relating to the privacy of students and their records approval of home instruction requests remain sealed there's been a motion by mr luzon and the second by mr callahan to um that the minutes relating to the privacy of students their records remain sealed any discussion nope those in favor and that's unanimous okay thank you i recommend that minutes pertaining to collective bargaining and ea

005esp negotiation update remains sealed until such time as an agreement has been reached been a motion by mrs lagurias second by mr callahan to recommend a recommendation that minutes pertaining to collective bargaining any esp negotiation update remains sealed until such time an agreement has been reached those in favor any of opposition refusals abstentions refusal one thank you sir okay miss giusti disclosure of executive session votes thank you you're welcome um the vote for executive session minutes of april 12 2022 superintendent's evaluation approved by abbott callahan chambers day juicy ligouri luzon lyle reynolds and spears abstaining with mcallister executive session minutes of april 12 2022 home instruction requests approved by abbott callahan chambers day juicy libori luzon lyle reynolds and spears mcallister abstained executive session minutes april 12 2022 zell versus cheruhou approved by abbott callahan

006chambers day juicy laguardia luzon lyle mccallis i'm sorry and spears macalester of steam and reynolds recused executive session minutes april 12 2022 town of barrington uh versus barrington school committee approved by abbott callahan chambers day juicy ligouri luzon lyle reynolds and spears macalester obscene executive session minutes of april 12 2022 rgb update approved by abbott callahan chambers day juicy ligouri luzon lyle reynolds and spears macalester abstain home instruction request tonight all approving abbott callahan chambers day juicy libori luzon lyle mcallister reynolds and spears and finally going back into executive session abbott callahan chambers day juicy ligouri lyle mcallister reynolds and spears thank you thank you miss juicy i'll miss recognition please join me in congratulating and thanking the following students 2022 fbla state competition winners caitlin rojick first place business communication and digital video production

007third place advertising sarah berry first place digital video production tatiana so first place digital video production caitlyn burns first place graphic design fifth place journalism reagan trembley first place job interview fourth place organizational leadership cooper beck second place economics and sports and entertainment management fourth place public speaking elena deangelis second place health care administration third place introduction to business presentation and introduction to financial math character had the second place local chapter newsletter third place local chapter scrapbook andrew pat second place sports and entertainment management fifth place business law features carol cuevas third place insurance and risk management macy mcleod third place introduction to business presentation and introduction to fbla fourth place counting one and a special thanks to fbla advisor susie scanipieco we would also like to recognize judy and kimon de fallos owners of

008town pizzas 2 for their generosity during the high school student vocational community trip organized by high school intern julia potts for the staff and students in cheryl lightfritz's brittany ruggieri's and keith cronin's class chef mike demonstrated the art of pizza making and students are allowed to create and eat their own pizzas town pizza server crystal was amazing with all the students and town pizza provided all this at no cost to the district i'd also like to recognize the 74th rhode island ffa state convention winners ariana collette second place extravanias public speaking amber daniels first place employment skills second place agriculture skills demonstration and illustrated talk chelsea flynn first place prepared public speaking eligible for the national competition lola hernandez third place creed speaking third place agricultural skills and demonstration illustrated talk charlotte kona first place

009agricultural skills and demonstration illustrated talk and finally i'd like to recognize our cala students and staff who are recognized by the state for increasing student efficiency student proficiency on the 2021 rycast assessment despite the challenges of the pandemic congratulations [Applause] this is uh puppet forum time um those of you who like to speak please come to the mic introduce yourself yourself and which town you're from please and we may have a number of speakers today given our our audience so um try to limit to two minutes to start if we have more time at the end we can also um you know have other people come up and speak so um i guess you're ready to go please i approach the mic hello there um i want to start by saying i am a mother

010of four that all the kids go to this district i'm a taxpayer the whole thing but yeah we have some things to say i need your name yeah oh i'm in the background that's okay it's my first time doing it well i know i understand okay so i'm ashley marsh okay ashley thank you where are you from miss marsh um i'm a resident of hopkinton thank you very much so um i'm a preschool teacher assistant at hope valley and i'll start off with saying i love my job i do my job first for the love i've had the pleasure of being some of your children's teachers some out here and i'm here but as much as i wish my car could run on love and not gas and my groceries could be bought with love

011this is not the case um on paper i'm worth a lot i am cpi certified which i don't know if all of you know but that's crisis in prevention intervention not all of us are but some of us are um i'm first aid certified cpr certified hours and hours of training and pds on social and emotional behavior management trauma anything you can imagine most of us are um and i truly sometimes feel like i don't get paid what i'm worth my daughter's boyfriend works at walmart and makes what i make stocking shelves and we're responsible to keep children alive especially me because i teach three to five-year-olds so my job involves a lot of safety management um because of the world we live in and the many factors including the pandemic we are in a

012complete social and emotional crisis across every age gap so most of us are dealing with behaviors we've never seen before many of us are trained to de-escalate a child in crisis some of us are not and have been thrown into situations that are above our rank yet we've all stepped up to the plate and we've all shown up especially during these last two trying years i know all the people in this room wearing red they all do this job for the love of the children like me i know that because they've all ju done this job without respect and without a contract for many many years all we're just asking is for attention and a little respect respect that we're giving to all of you we're not coming to you from a negative place we're

013coming to you because we're all sad and we'd feel undervalued and that's all i really have to say is that we just require a little bit of attention in this matter i don't think anybody would want to do a job where they don't have a contract and feel like they're walking through limbo and we were told for many months that it was because of the pandemic and we're all patient with that and then we were thrown a bone and gave a 35 raise over three years and we were patient through that and now we're just asking for a tried and true contract that you know makes us feel valued so that's it thank you thank you hi my name is helen sheehan and i'm from richmond and i appreciate all of you using your microphones

014because i don't i don't like to miss anything that you're saying so i'd like to start by saying that i am in full support of the teachers they work very hard we have very good teachers in charital i also appreciate all the members of the school committee because it's really it's not an easy job to do so i believe you all have commitment as a taxpayer i do have some concerns and some thoughts one of the thoughts is that when businesses try to continue to have the services look at where are the efficiencies that they can make one of the efficiencies that they do is unfortunately they look at middle management so wherever you have a vice something not the teachers but one of the vice people assistants or whatever are some ways that maybe

015things can be cut or maybe some things can be contracted out where you'd only pay a little bit like less money than what you pay to have a regular employee my other concern is that two of the positions that you have in the regular budget i need to this is the public forum is for items not on the agenda we will be discussing discussing the party we'll come back to that we'll come back to it so you'll have your time i promise thank you very much i appreciate that because we do have thank you hello hi good evening school committee members my name is doreen riley i live in westerly and work for have worked for the district for the last 24 years the reason we are here is because we have been without a

016contract for some time now where we are showing our frustration and to be heard we have been silent long enough the lack of progress is very disheartening we want to go to the table and stop with the funny business i'm okay not getting respect from children who are in the learning stages but not okay with the lack of respect from the adults on this committee i challenge any one of you to please come follow me for a full day to see what we do we work hard and we would appreciate the committee to sit down with us and talk thank you for your time thank you [Applause] good evening everybody and i think you know who i am by now but if you don't i'm tom purny and uh a proud taxpayer proud graduate uh

017father in the district here and i appreciate it uh appreciative what you folks do here on a daily basis it's the most thankless work um that really anybody can do um i feel like we're at that point here uh now uh amongst our members so clearly there's uh a good support good showing here and a large show of support amongst our members they're tired of being not heard i've done my work long enough and this is going to continue as long as it needs to until we're at the table and we start feeling value it will continue weekly at school or monthly at school committee meetings budget meetings things like that our voices will be heard and continue to be heard okay all we want is a seat at the table and some respect i

018anticipate and hope that will happen very soon thank you [Applause] are we does anyone else like to come and speak during public forum no okay um i guess i'll close public forum and we'll move on to policy thank you all for speaking public foreign policy revision the item was requested by bill day as this policy was in conflict with the committee's rules of conduct pushing to the amount of time provided for speakers during public forum i recommend approval of the revision to this policy which will avoid future conflicts should there be a change to the rules of conduct so moved second there's been a motion to approve the public forum policy as amended and uh second by ms uh miss giusti and i i now open this up to a discussion mr day you have

019the floor i i failed to see where this is going to solve any problems and do anything because essentially what you've done is taken away the five minutes and our policy and stated that the chair will depending on the number of people present so we don't know whether 60 people here today wanted to get up and speak and you were going to limit them to a minute or two or where the five people are going to get up and speak so our rules of contract states that we have a sign-in sheet and people get called on and we have a half an hour limit i this is this is this is not addressing what i think that the citizens here would like to know that when they walk in here there's going to be a

020a sign in sheet out there and they're going to sign up and they're going to be called in that order that they sign up and and if it's going to exceed a half an hour which we up uh rules of conduct state then uh we uh we're going to limit them to a time but if we've only got two or three people that want to talk and as long as they're adhering to our policies by not being uh accurate on what they say and they're not being disrespectful then we can let them go on and make a good argument for what their argument might be so but i i don't see where this thing solves anything because it's too open-ended and it's too confu it's going to be too confusing for people out here to

021know how we're going to go we're going to do something like this we need to we need to institute a sign-in sheet out there when they walk in the door and know how many people are going to speak so that now you know how how much time you can allow to eat a lot each person it's right it's right now rules of conduct i i don't understand why why we we decide to enforce some things around here and some things and other places we don't nobody understood in the rules of conduct how we can conduct a meeting i'm very i'm very disappointed in this policy and i i would urge the members here to uh to put it back put it back to somebody and and straighten it out thank you well first our semester

022today we are going to discuss it tonight that's why it's on the table so um yeah we can do whatever we want so um do you want to make a you want to make some suggestion how it wants to be written at this point i have no i i i've got one voice around him usually well no and lately nobody's been listening to this voice well i'm listening to you now so now you have a response now you have time i will i will i will try to live by it and if i don't believe in it i will i will voice my opinion so it's it's up to the committee on what they want to do okay so one of the things that you had suggested was that we have a sign-in sheet i

023kind of agree with you on that i like that suggestion it's in our rules of conduct no i understand that we're but we're updating the policy so if you think that we want to put it into the policy i think you know it's a good idea i don't know how the other members feel but i think that suggestion was a good suggestion madam chair yes don't we have a motion on the floor yes we do we're discussing the motion no no no wait it's open for discussion yeah so what those exactly right and we do have assignment sheet it's just never utilized but we do have one but it's not in this but it's not it doesn't need to be your rules of conduct state you have a sign-in sheet your rules of conduct also

024state two to three minutes right so if you follow your rules of conduct you do have a time limit you can enforce the sign-in sheet which we have had we just haven't had people signing in but we do have a signature okay sir this one already prepared so i since since i think that this is a bit you know amorphous here why don't we send this back with the instructions that this public forum policy is redrafted so that it aligns with our code of conduct and then we bring it back to the committee for discussion at that time yeah so i withdraw my motion okay and i would say all right so chair i make a motion to send this back for revision second there's been a motion by mr callahan in a second by

025mr luzon to take to send it back to table and send it back to for revision correct any discussion on that matter yes okay so there's we made a motion in a second any discussion on that matter i'll take it to vote those in favor to send it back okay that looks like that's unanimous thank you very much um moving on to business uh the next item is field trip request i recommend approval of the following contingent upon compliance with policy requests of skill usa advisor lieutenant robert wilde for 11 students and three chaperones to travel to the skills usa national championship in atlanta georgia from june 19th 2022 through june 25th 2022. do you want to take one at a time so yeah so move second has been a motion and a second um

026to approve the request of the skillsusa the first request to travel to the skillsusa national championship in atlanta georgia from june 19th to june 25th 2022. any discussion on that matter yes sir not really a discussion i'm i'm very much in favor of the the trip uh my daughter went to kansas city years ago with the nursing program but the question i do have is historically they have had a fundraising supper and i'm just curious as to any anybody in the administration can under uh make me understand why this hasn't been uh advertised as much as it has been in past years in past years uh i mean you you you had hundreds of people show up for this supper and i don't know i don't know how many people are planning on showing up

027but there's been no publicity whatsoever and i believe that supper is the 20th or something it's on a friday i want to say it's that it's not this friday next friday yeah well i say it's it's it's it's it seems like it's a big big big secret as to they have a major fundraiser to send these 11 students to uh to atlanta it's not cheap to go there but uh it's just just my thought on i'm very supportive of the trip and and i think it's great that we have that many students i'm just concerned that we're not more diligent and trying to raise funds uh i don't know who who that falls to but that's that's my uh concern so noted i think um to your point mr j we've had uh some reminders

028regarding the district calendar and making sure that we update that i think with covet there's a lot of events that weren't occurring so everyone's getting back on track but to your point um i know that uh the goal is to continue to reach out and publicize the events so we it was it was short notice correct i don't mean to monopolize this but i guess what i'm trying to get we do have a lot of people who watch this that there is a fundraiser coming up a week from those fridays there is there's three seating people in the community may may want to try to avail themselves it's showing up at this thing if they possibly can that's correct it's on the high school blog the ctc blog and it was there's a lot of

029people that don't have kids in this district that still support this district yep we will um talk to director auth to make sure that we continue to publicize so that it gets out to more than just our family members yes mister so can you expand on that right now and do the advertisement that bill's looking for i actually it wasn't it's in the reports i don't i can't do it now because it's not in the business item it's the field trip specifically so i want to make sure that she doesn't fundraising for that field trip for the supreme court we haven't noted for the report we do have it okay so there's been a motion in a second to approve this field trip any more discussion those in favor of the field trip thank you

030those opposed no recusals and no abstentions thank you very much so the next is the request of the fbi la advisor susie scanipieco for 10 students and two chaperones to travel to the fbla national competition in chicago illinois from june 28th and actually until july 3rd 2022. all right emotional to approve there's been a motion by mr um callahan in a second by ms luzon to approve the uh fbla trip to the national competition in chicago illinois from june 28th to july 3rd 2022. discussion on that yes sir third or july second july third she just changes to the third it should say the third oh okay any discussion on that matter those in favor any opposition refusals or abstentions nope that's unanimous thank you very much and now we're on to the technology curriculum

031should you get the next item on the agenda yes oh yes okay is the technology education curriculum k to eight revision dr camilla and tunisia's piece will review the living revisions and we have miss canopieco up at the podium um and i will recommend approval of the revised technology education curriculum k-8 there's been a motion by ms luzana second by mr callahan to um approve the technology education curriculum k-8 k-8 revision thank you susie floor hi hi everyone um as you might not know my name is susie scanipieco i'm the stem specialist for 5 through 12. and today we are presenting to you the kindergarten through 8th grade technology curriculum for revision that we've revised the i would always like to thank the team members who did the work behind the scenes um that are

032not here tonight so we had four elementary school writers two middle school writers and then the support and leadership of dr kamala brian lucas and um jeff scan people as well so i want to bring some attention to the new standards so that is in what we call the front pages of our curriculum the pages that you have all seen in all the other curriculum documents but i specifically wanted to bring our attention to these pages um that explain the guiding principles between of the new standards so the new standards are why the curriculum was written from scratch where we usually do the crossouts and the highlights this one was started from scratch because rhode island created their new uh standards in 2018 actually mrs daly was on that writing committee she was on the

033committee to have those um standards written so these are really what our bases are from kindergarten on broaden participation and equity i think that's really important to pay attention to because we started this work way back six years ago when we made sure that kindergarten kids were getting access to some of even just the vocabulary around computer science things like loops and iterations they hear those words often enough it becomes part of their vocabulary and that's where we built the equity if every student in our district is getting the same experience by the time they get to ninth grade and they get to choose whether that's an experience they want to continue in an elective or not but up until eighth grade it is equitable stimulating learning and curiosity specifically there you know of course

034computer science is something that is geared to some students but others are not so a lot of the work that we do is gamified or created in an atmosphere that the students are really engaged in and we really try to keep to those programs that keep that engagement high but at the same time we also teach that computer science is built into every industry nowadays so we try to take it from the angle of the sport they play or the work that they do in their day-to-day life and how that computer science will be built into that building connections across disciplines i think we have a little more work to do with that at the high school level specifically but even at the elementary middle school because eventually i do think we're going to see

035that computer science gets built into our math or built into our sciences especially with big data sets and things that use its big expel excel spreadsheets and all the formulas that go behind that i think that's still work to come but we're going to start building that it is part of our standards it is part of our curriculum but i think we'll see the integration a little bit better throughout the next couple of years um encourage workforce economic development basically you know what we want to say here is the this is the next reading writing and computer science we want to make sure that they have the base of this because they really can't get any um where in the next few years without at least having some base knowledge of this in the workforce

036so even if they don't want to become a computer programmer they should understand the language behind computer programmers so they could speak to their engineers speak to the people that are doing this work and they are the high paying jobs probably zero unemployment in that sector in a lot of the fields especially cyber security um and then supporting teachers that's a really big piece of this too because a lot of the teachers that are teaching this are not by far computer science teachers so having the support in a school district that says we understand that you're a math teacher convert or you might be an elementary school teacher being asked to learn this new curriculum from scratch with very little to no experience we want to make sure we get that support for those teachers

037and then the last is informing with current research i really wanted to speak to this one because i don't think it made a lot of sense if you read it from um you know not having known the background on that so the it says the standard will be based on current professional research and practice in computer science education and pedagogy specifically that pedagogy part i wanted to speak to we all think of computer programmers and back in the day it felt like it was a profession where you sat in a cubicle and you coded all day and one of the things they noticed is that to get more people in the field they wanted it to be a team of team aspect type of job where collaboration was a big part of it and so

038even in our programming they call it paired programming kids are sitting side by side learning how to program where one is the keyboard person who writes the code and the other is the person speaking it out and kind of giving them the coaching that is involved in doing that coding that is the pedagogy part of how we're teaching it in the classroom because that is how it's expected in the workforce so those are the parts when it says inform with current research that we're seeing more people go into those professions because we're changing the mold of what it used to be to be a computer science programmer so i felt like that was like a really important part to go through because the standards are things that we've already i think we were ahead of

039them honestly i think we were already ahead of them they brought you back to the memories of 2017. we had this written out if you could see it was done year over year we had a plan we stuck to the plan the plan has been implemented we have now a k through eight curriculum that pretty much is being done um with integrity i would say you know at the um we we had many different groups that came together to bring this work script teams people who volunteered their time to get work done and we kept to the program we had implementation plans and we stuck to them some long-term plans like i explained before in getting that integrated into a biology class that's still to come you know we even think it could go into

040history classes for data for example and understanding a graph and understanding you know all the different um stats that are thrown out there and understanding where those stats come from so all of that is part of the work that i still think we need some we need to get there we're not there yet but soon so these were the new standards they are grade span specific which is different than for example the math standards you'll see that they go k to 2 3 to 5 and then 6 to 8. that's how we wrote our curriculum documents to match because we felt that if that's how the standards written that means they're giving the kids those three years to learn that content but at the same time we wanted to see the vertical articulation what does

041it look like year over year what pieces are repeated what parts are added and there will be repetition a kindergarten teacher is not getting a lot of time to do this because it's the library teacher that is implementing this curriculum they're getting very little time but again it's that repetitive nature of the vocabulary oh we're doing a loop they could be doing a loop at a little dance that they're doing it does not have to be on the computer we do a lot of unplugged activities they call them unplugged meaning away from their computer but it's the words that word loop if they hear that word loop for three years by the time they get to fourth grade they'll understand what a loop means um what else do we have so that's how those three

042curriculum we're in we made sure to show which one was the primary grade that they were going to focus on it um and then the content that we learned was specifically thrown in there bugging and debugging those are actual words um in the computer science world so if you guys have any questions for me i'm happy to answer i just kind of felt like those beginning pages were a little bit more the explanation of the work that was done here and not those details in the curriculum themselves yes mr day uh this is 60 pages of basically redacted information here right yes because we couldn't you can actually condense it down to 10 pages or less well it's actually going to whenever we need to do this we do that page the crossing out part

043for school committee only um to show what has been taken out and what will be added in so the yellow is the new stuff the crossouts will never be there mrs purney does a nice job of cleaning these documents up before they go to the public the old standards no longer exist we don't use them as part of our our curriculum so that's why you see all that crossout it will be condensed and there will also be um just like we did last time these will be clickable um and then you can go back up to the table of contents from each page like we did with the other curricula well i don't i don't want to sound flippant but we're trying to save money in the district and this give me 60 pages of

044information that is not used useful to anybody including and i don't know how the rest of the committee members felt but and i'm sure the honest time could have been used and in a different way than putting putting something like this together and and giving giving at us because this is useless i agree with the printout part but i don't know how many printouts are being done right okay because that was not created that was deleted from the old papers we never i never touched that i literally just took it and crossed it out that took me three minutes of my time to make sure what parts had to be crossed out the printing i have never printed this document ever once and i plan on never printing it so if they are being printed

045it is i think per request i believe but i'm not sure about that i think um dr camilla wanted to i just want to say i think our process is to show what's been redacted to your point before we do any kind of um final revisions right and there are schools members that only receive it digitally and other to request paper packets i'm sorry mister who's on youtube i just want to remind people this took a financial investment years ago and it continues to do so today yes it's wonderful yeah steve thank you the curriculum we use right now k to eight is free however code.org the the curricula we use in the day-to-day currently the resource i should say this is our curriculum the resource we use to follow the curriculum is free at

046the high school we have some parts that are paid but not at the k-8 level that things cost money the computer itself well as i remember back in the day i will bring up mr ritchie for a moment he said make sure this is not the glorified pencil to me computer science is the opposite of the glorified pencil we get to like rule the world with computer science if we know how to make the objects turn into smart things so i think that very much is what he wanted us all to use these very expensive machines for or to teach the kids to use them for i should say mr abbott you had your hand i heard of a new program being developed that um basically you could verbally ask a computer a system to

047make a program to solve a particular problem without getting into computer languages and such are you aware of that i don't i i don't know that one specifically but i can tell you that for example at the younger levels they are doing what they call drag and drop programming which means they are not typing lines and lines of code they are learning the main ideas behind code which is what parts need to be repetitive which parts are need to be distinctive which parts need to be very specific in their their um you know so that it's not ineffective so for example if i needed to get from here to the end there i would not go this way there are certain parts that we teach the kids to become efficient thinkers and how to get

048to an end in the best way possible that's where they're learning the computer science actually a lot of times it is not including typing code at all for a very very long time so it is the problem solving part of it that is completely the focus with the understanding of iterations and loops and if then statements and conditionals which are the main idea and i can tell you that i studied that 20 years ago and none of that has changed because that will never probably change if we're trying to solve problems as i understand it you could ask a computer develop a bus route with available resources to get from cheriho to providence correct and somebody built that software and that's what we're teaching this to do so that they build that software that's exactly

049what we're hoping for not to be used the user of that software but to build the builder of that software thank you thank you thank you thank you so sir there's been a moat yeah i know did you want to say something before okay so there's been a motion and a second to approve this technology curriculum i believe the discussion is over so those in favor of the curriculum thank you any opposition recusals or abstentions nope okay thank you very much susie thank you the next item is the resolution in support of full funding of categorical transportation aid as outlined in moral general law 16-7 0.2-6 i recommend approval of the resolution in support of full funding of categorical transportation aid as outlined in the law just stated so moved second it's been emotional with

050emphasis there's been a motion by mr luzon in a second by mr callahan to approve the resolution and so in support of full funding of categorical transportation aid as outlined in rhode island general law 16-7 that six okay i'm hoping that your discussion anybody have any comments on that i think we're all in agreement that we do support that mr uh dave did you have a hand raiser oh i thought you did okay if there's no discussion i'll take that to a vote those in favor of this resolution hardly with emphasis as mr luzon yes definitely that was unanimous thank you sir the next item is school improvement team membership i have reviewed the list and i found that each school's membership adheres to the policy i recommend approval of the school improvement team membership

051for the 2022-2023 school year i'm so moved second there's been a motion by mr callahan a second by miss giusti to approve the school improvement team membership i'll open this up to questions comments or we have our chart here so you can see that actually i thought this was done well i thought that you know there's a from where we started there's a lot of um people participating so that's awesome a lot of parents too that's even better okay so i guess i'll take that to vote those in favor to improve the team memberships okay and those opposed abstentions you're on one those are one recusal two okay two abstains okay thank you those two extensions thank you very much and we're on the survey the next item is the rhode island student survey i

052recommend that you authorize the administration of the rhode island student survey to students in grades 8 and 10 which is required for the contract with rhode island student assistant services as an opt-in survey second there's been a motion by mr i'm sorry but there's been a motion by mr luzon a second by um dr callahan to authorize the administration of the rhode island student survey to students in grades eight and ten which required per the contract um with rhode island student services assistance services um that was i'm going to open for that discussion yes miss juicy i had a question about so you just said it's an opt-in so it's going to be given or offered to grades eight and ten only correct um i can see i understand the purpose i think it's important

053data to gather i can see that there might be some parents who are leery of this questionnaire and i want to respect that um so can you talk to me about the opt-in process please so um the uri team creates a google form and as opposed to an opt-out where you would send this if you didn't want your child take a survey they would only take it if you if you filled out the form okay so you'd have to physically to submit the form in order for your child to take the survey it may limit participation but we felt it was the best way to ensure that parents understood what they were signing um when they had a question okay thank you miss chambers and then mr dave i've done this in the past opted

054in no no i was going to say because we had a really good showing on the result it's been um the opt out it has always been approved by the committee um come to the table but there's definitely questions um that many parents feel heightened about we felt made sure that we ensured that they understood that we were getting their participation and to follow up with that um i think that's a good idea so that it's completely transparent um but we probably will have less kids filling in this survey i would think that's what and that's too bad because i think that it was it's very important data together the committee can move to an opt out just to your point it was about transparency to ensure that we everyone was very clear about what

055the ask was mr day than miss luzon mr uh what is this survey going to be used for that you know i mean this is this i'm a little confused uh i look at the paperwork here and it says between january and may of 2020 on the first page and then on the second page it said between february and june 2020 so i'm a little confused as to whoever put this paper printed this piece of paper didn't know didn't know when the survey was even going to be taken yeah there was um some clarification around the dates but if i'm going to have you um thank you for coming hi everyone my name is heidi driscoll i'm the director of the south county regional prevention so we are the ones administering the survey it is

056through rhode island behavioral health developmental disabilities and hospitals also with ride and with the department of health so the three collective agencies are working together to get this data and i so agree with you how important this information is for our youth on substance use and their mental health especially after coming out of covert mr day had a question about the dates well again i i i i if this is the survey i've read it twice and i i can understand what cats i think it was catherine said there's some questions in here that that i don't have a child in it but i'd be i'd be uncomfortable and having them ask me whether i'm heterosexual or or gay or bisexual or any i don't i don't think this is any we anybody's business anybody's

057business would be asking asking 8th graders or 10th graders these are questions that that you don't even give them an opportunity to opt out it says i'm not sure you know these things are too too invasive in my opinion and i thank you for your opinion and actually when we first started doing the survey in 2016 we actually did not have those questions and we had many youth come to the table through focus groups and tell us that they wanted these questions on there and these are also per cdc how they are written just wanted to share with you thank you um mr day i'm getting nowhere thanks miss dr callahan then miss chambers dr callahan thank you and thank you for coming tonight i i guess my question is i'm looking at the data

058um or the the analytics that were applied to the survey respondents and is this the sum total of it or is there a larger data set that actually uses the demographics information meaning i'm sorry so you have in here where you have past 30 day use of substance and it breaks down the substance right you collect an awful lot of demographics information at the beginning of the survey you have age and grade and gender gender identity sexual orientation you also have um ethnicity none of that is incorporated into any of these responses and i'm just correct so for anonymity purposes correct we do not but if there was a question or two for specific grant writing purposes we might look at a particular um lgbtq youth using tobacco products that's actually a grant that we

059just received through the department of health because we were able to get some of these because there's a tremendous health disparity in that in that age grouping but if we were to present data we would never come in and say 10th graders who are etc we wouldn't break it down that that far for you so it would always be i i guess a follow-up question is if if we have because this gets into mental health and reporting of children who are thinking of self-harm or children who are describing bullying and i i get that there's this statistical number assigned to the breakdown of the respondents but that demographics information would allow us to respond in a much more strategic response for for children in need and if you're i don't know it to me it

060sounds like you're collecting an awful lot of information that's not integrated into subsequent data analysis and so i'm not seeing the value of that demographics information the first 10 questions but you say that you could use it for grant writing those other things but that's a that i don't know how that's a value to the cheri jericho community um for example this particular grant from the department of health is for us all of south county so it is for all of the groupings that i work with which is north kingston south kingston narragansett black island westerly and the cheruhou district so it is beneficial okay um to to the district but okay thank you mr chambers and mr lagorie oh i'm sorry mr um i'm sorry mr abbott had his hand raised donna george and

061then and then gary donna thank you for coming and thank you for doing this and i in light of the results of the first survey the previous survey which was a bit shocking to me i'm naive but a bit shocking to me i think that it is really important to give the children our children this opportunity to express themselves in this way without having to reveal themselves and i think it's i i would totally support this survey in the sense that um kids can speak and acknowledge their own identity and my fear is is by opting in rather than out that we're not going to have the data when we collect this this current survey so that's just something that i would like to add but thank you because i don't know about the rest

062of the crew crew here but it was very surprising to me what we're dealing with here and i think some of the behaviors that we've had in the past that have been brought before the school committee have been reflective of the challenges that these children are facing now thank you thank you mr abbott and then mr laguardia oh it's under the impression based on my educational experience it's that personality development and choice of sexuality if there is such a thing isn't completely developed until a person reaches adulthood how do you feel about that um mr abbott that's really not related to the survey right now so well they're asking questions about this sort of follows up on what bill was saying you're asking questions about sexuality you're asking her opinion on sexual yeah okay i

063mean do you have it do you have an opinion on whether it might be too young to ask i know how critical this data is um and i also want to agree that normally the school districts do do an op out not an off in i know at this time of year how busy parents are um and that does concern me a bit that you know they just might not have a second to look at that piece of paper or that email to actually say yes i want my child to participate in this which concerns me a little bit because i i do know 2020 was the first year that jericho was able to participate in this and it would be great to start being able to get some trend data from this community to

064see and then to really to be able to target some of our evidence-based programs into the schools into the community as we're seeing you know different things pop up vaping is still an enormous issue we need to see that you know we need to know what the numbers are in our districts and our schools especially with our eighth and our tenth graders those such vital times in their life so thank you mr glory so i have three questions um i'm not sure in any particular order but so for one it says on on the informational sheet that 60 response rate is needed per grade class to be included however i said in 2020 57 responded yet the data were valid so unfortunately our evaluator was not able to come tonight um but i do believe

065after the data was scrubbed or cleaned it had gone to 57 which was very close to 60 but normally yes they like a 60 percent participation rate so that we're looking at data so that we're not able to trickle it down to individuals sure no i understand that i just think um i'm actually fine with the survey but i think if i'm a parent and i'm told sixty percent's the threshold but it it's 57 and it's used then you you didn't honor the language in the contract so i would be concerned with that um second this seems really similar to something that the youth brfss survey would the youth behavioral risk you're probably familiar with is that redundant to that so it is but yrbs is not done in every town in rhode island it's

066a select number of towns this is every school almost you know other school districts um do grades 7 through 12 so it's a much more rich abundant look at what's going on in our schools okay so that leads to my third and final question i realized the 2020 data were collected probably right before copenhagen what's been done with that information since and what will be done because what it says will be done is really we'll look for gaps and opportunities what what's the actual plan for what will be done with this information so basically what we do with it when we get this number one you know unfortunately i i don't think i have to tell you covet hit and you know we had some data collected we didn't have some data collected it ended

067up it was supposed to be spring of 2020 it then moved to fall of 2020 some school districts weren't able to do that um rhode island still really wanted that data to complete the set some of it moved to spring of 2021. it just really ended up not being a great data set for us to compare things to unfortunately but it did give us some indications of things so what normally would happen is i will be able to come back to you in the fall late fall with the information i can do a powerpoint for you slide deck show you the results of you know the 8th and 10th graders on prevalence and risk for substances and then what we do is really look at the data and then you go with evidence-based programming which

068will help support programs to work on those particular high-need areas whether it's in mental health areas um vaping i'm sure no surprise we're going to have probably very high numbers again on vaping you know some of our numbers seem to go down a little bit that was because kids didn't have access to these drugs because they were home thank you thank you karen just quickly no no that's okay are these two programs that you would bring into our district or these programs that we would have to contract out for nope we bring everything in and we're grant funded it's free of charge how would that be administered into the school so all different ways i mean previously we've worked in the schools a tremendous amount obviously with covet happening we weren't able to be in

069the schools the last two years and that's throughout the state but we come in and do community programs we're doing parent education we work with health teachers we work with sros with the police departments so we're all over the place mr jack yes please i have a question here you you're talking about data and being able to come back uh you asked the zip code what uh is this the way you identify cherijo by the zip codes or uh i mean the zip codes what what what is the need of a zip code here how how are you going to tell tell us that these individuals are terre haute students by the zip code i believe so yes again i'm not the evaluator i apologize um but that's something that's done statewide there's a little

070information here there's probably about ten dip them zip codes for the for childhood some of them right involve westerly some of them and miss out involve south kingston but so i hope that your evaluator has got some way to determine that when somebody has a bradford zip code they could be either in hopkinton or in westerly and if somebody has a west kingston zip code they could be in richmond or they could be in west kingston so this this to me is is another reason why this thing is probably not as effectively as you're trying to portray this bill i suspect every survey is coded per school district right so that would be an easy differentiator when they get the results why does the way you want a zip code then so they can do

071exactly what you're saying differentiate between bradford and westerly any other questions right now okay there's been emotion yes donna yeah i would um like to have well we have a motion on the floor to accept this survey sure i prove it actually to approve it approve it okay i would like to have a little discussion about of some discussion about opting in rather than opt i mean opting out rather than acting in um i think it's kind of coddling the parents to say that they have to opt in i mean if we send information home about what this survey is then it's up to the parents to determine whether they want to opt their children out of the survey i i don't think that we should be um just allowing them to say yes i

072can i can have my child participate i would rather see it opting out what do i want opting out rather than opting in yes okay anyway i just think it would give us better tracking as as you said and better data and i think it's important data personally to gather for the kids anyway so do i make a motion do i mend the motion there is a motion but it's an opt-in motion we do have someone from the audience that has a comment first i would like to speak but then we can get back to the donna's sorry hi my name is jennifer silvia i'm from hopkinton um just to give a parents perspective on this sometimes children don't hand you important papers and they get lost in the backpack or it never comes home

073this survey makes me a bit uncomfortable to be thinking that my child could be given it without my knowledge and without my consent because the paper didn't come home for me to opt out [Music] so i think if parents want to opt in then that's okay but i don't think that the school has any business having surveys with those kind of personal questions being administered at school this kind of survey could be administered by a pediatrician but parents parents need to have they they need to have the um [Music] the option to opt in if it's important to them for their children to be answering these personal questions they're all minors it's not it shouldn't be tried to be slid under the rug without the parent's knowledge but just to respond to that i appreciate

074what you're saying however you could miss if you wanted to your child to participate in this survey because you're interested in seeing this kind of data in a in the environment that the kids live in well that's not that would be on me that would that would be on me on paper also so i could miss that paper also yeah but my my child wouldn't be participating in something without my knowledge that i'm not comfortable with if if it's an opt-in if it's an opt-out then then they'd be participating something without my knowledge and i don't think that that's that's right at all thank you miss mcallister and then we have yeah i want to give somebody from the committee needs to speak first then we can go to the audience miss mccallum electronic um

075information to the parents and then it can opt interrupt out it is electronic it's via google form so it would be able to go to the parents okay so it's google but they need to sign permission and opt in okay okay yes mr kelly i prefer the opt-in yeah i do too yeah okay here no i think we got it okay yes thank you [Music] so high school kids have been having sex as long as oh i apologize i'm lindsay white from charlestown thank you um i fear that there is a lot of students in the district that are not allowed to be who they are at home and i feel that you know i support whatever you decide to you know opt in or opt out but i feel like if it's left up

076to the parents um you're you're not going to get accurate responses um i feel that there are a lot of students in the district that are not being supported the way that they need to be and i feel that mental health is a major issue um i personally was raped at 16 years old and have suffered from mental health issues ever since this is something that has been going on i'm 42 years old so it's happening whether you want to pretend it's not i think giving them the options of seeking help or just having an outlet of being who they are is a much safer option just my opinion thank you thank you yeah so i said i totally understand and thank you for sharing i guess my my position on this is that there's

077an awful lot of personal demographic information being asked of the students and the you know it this is this is a survey it's it's just a survey and i think that there's enough information that parents are going to have a hard time with and so i think that the opt-in is the position that that we should have and if we don't get the response or the the number of respondents that we need for this to work then we look at this again next year and and adjust then or you know i i could even consider getting rid of the first 10 questions on the demographic side which makes the survey a lot more palatable but you know i want to stay with the opt-in at this point yes that was going to be my next

078i mean if there are questions that um the committee would like to get rid of um i think at this point we could probably do that to for the sake of having uh you know higher than 60 response rate so at least we're getting the information known on usage and risk and the prevalence of these substances rather than if it's a boy or a girl or ethnicity or catherine um this is this is time sensitive yeah right yeah so did you have a date in mind of when you were thinking you were going to administer this survey it has to be completed by the end of the school year right okay is that i it sounds like i am okay with the survey as it stands but i also i started led the conversation with

079parents or should have the option to opt in or out of the survey um so i understand that there are some people who don't want their children ask these questions if there's an opportunity to amend the survey so you're still getting information on drug use alcohol use vaping but getting rid of those identifying questions i think that the committee might have an appetite to amend the survey i don't know if we want to do that today or if you know what the pleasure of the committee is that wait two weeks yeah mr laguardia and mr day so i spent the better part of my academic career designing surveys similar to this distributing them collecting the data and creating interventions where there were opportunities and from my perspective getting rid of the demographic questions makes the

080information basically useless you can't you if you find out there's a large number of people doing whatever or not doing whatever what you want to do is create an intervention to make it better but if you don't know who the people are your intervention is going to be broad and decades of public health research will show you that a broad intervention is useless you have to target your population so i'm opposed to the opt-out or opt-in but i'm more opposed to getting rid of the demographic information because then it's a pointless survey in my opinion so personally i'd rather have a lower response rate but we can target whomever than get rid of what i think is actually the most critical information that's good information mr day and then i i think that we ought

081to give the parents an opportunity to opt in i think this is what the parents in this country want nowadays they're a little bit concerned and fed up with with some of the school districts they see where school committees and teachers are saying they're better equipped to deal with their kids and their other parents so i i think this is where we should be going mr mcallister i was just going to say that um i think we should move forward the way it is and then assess that data next year when we have something to look at you know we don't know now how many parents are not going to opt in so i say go ahead with the way with it as it stands stop singing okay that's okay and then someone can have

082a student number i will yield to the student thank you please please come to the podium [Music] hello hello um i'm isabelle sullivan radcliff i live in hope valley hopkinton i just kind of wanted to give the student perspective as someone who's actually taken the survey um i found that you know the questions i found that they were fine didn't you know sway me to have my sexuality be something or another i just took it and you know i think if anything students find it as an annoyance of something they have to do when they don't want to do it but i don't think it harms them in any way to answer demographic questions and i agree with the opt out i'm pretty sure i i don't think it's necessary that parents need to opt

083in because i think that would deter students from filling out this information that can provide useful information to the district and to the state so from the student perspective i found that these surveys have caused no harm to the students you know from myself and talking to other students it's something that i think has been perfectly fine the way it is and i think it should continue the way it is thank you thank you very much good perspective [Applause] so my final thoughts um because i've had many bites of the apple so i apologize um if we make this an opt-in which i think is fine if we keep the questions the way that they are which i also think is fine so it's a useful survey we give it a shot for a year

084which i also think is fine um i would just respectfully ask that when it goes out to parents because i've got a 10th grader please make it a standalone piece don't put it in the blog don't put it in something like that because respectfully i get lots of emails and it just all gets lost so i would like it to be a very targeted this is an important email please pay attention please opt into the survey and a clear and concise small bite of why we're collecting this data i think would be appreciated as a parent that's a good it's very good thank you do we have a clarification on exactly what the motion is we have a parent i guess the motion was standard oh sorry hi polly hopkins huntington i actually have a

085question maybe you know or she how long does this survey take it three minutes 30 minutes or less i look for it i couldn't find it thank you so i was just wondering it says 30 minutes or less 30 minutes okay i appreciate it thanks thanks mom anybody else so the oh so on the table right now is to approve the survey as is with an opt-in option meaning the parents have to give permission that's the that's on the table right now so are we ready to take it to a vote okay yesterday did you have another comment okay okay those in favor of the record the recommendation of the survey being sent out as is with an opt-in for parents those in favor those posed any abstentions or refusals there was one stream but

086she wanted to be i know that was a good discussion thank you all very much okay on to oh budget this is fy 23 budget adjustments on may 5th the majority of voters let us know that they did not support our budget and that in essence our 0.96 increase was too high we do remain committed to providing each and every student in charlestown richmond in hopkinton with a high quality public education at the same time we continue to recognize our responsibility to taxpayers and we continue to think through ways to increase efficiencies and revenue without negatively impacting quality of our programs i would be remiss if i did not mention that we were able to keep our budget at a point nine six percent increase because we had extra funding to purchase our professional development

087curriculum resources for both english language arts and mathematics which are required by state legislation and must be in place by 2023 as so sun sets in september 2024 there will be items that are state mandated such as science curriculum resources and ongoing curricular resource needs for english and mathematics k-12 our team is working to ensure that we have a strong return on investment and we have seen strong student progress in reading writing and mathematics during the school year however it will be important to keep this momentum i have prepared a list of potential cuts for the committee to review none of these are easy none of the these will all be difficult as anything is will impact our budget but will move us to a level fund i have made several cuts from all departments

088as it relates to supplies an example would be that novels were requested for example for middle school teachers that are supplemental and then to enhance the curriculum but they are not required there was several furniture requests to replace old furniture we have also pulled back on these as well we have reviewed our current out of district special education tuition numbers based on our enrollment as of today they would equate to annual tuitions of one million eighty four thousand four hundred thirty three dollars and thirty nine cents we had additional students enter already for the course of the year after the budget was created an additional four the high school science position was finalized as we had a request for a leave of absence recently come through and the high school also we've reviewed their course

089requests and based on those regrets the high school admin team agrees that we could cut the science position and not affect programming at the high school the 0.5 high school librarian and 0.5 middle school librarian was vacant due to the resignation of a teacher moving out of state at the end of january both teams agree that this position can be cut without major impacts on student programming a clerk fiscal position was recently vacated and as a result we are recommending that we merge those responsibilities with the district registration clerk the richmond elementary school grade three is proposed as a cut as well and will make class sizes 21 students in three of the classrooms and 22 in one of the classrooms based on our current enrollment the summary is aligned with our contract which allows

090up to 25 students the charleston elementary school grade 4 is another potential cut we would make our class size to 23 in both of those classrooms this class is also aligned with our current contract i'm happy to review however you want to begin with the committee and to clarify and answer your questions guess what i'd like to yes um gina how many elementary world language teachers do we have we have two [Music] are they full-time they're both full-time correct i would personally prefer to see them cut before you cut any elementary teachers so i was not here when the district created the strategic plan and typically when you create a strategic plan it's supposed to safeguard those goals and action steps related to that which is why i would not have put up the language

091as the committee who you know who passes that strategic plan that proves the final that could be something you um you do but i can tell you once you make those cuts like anything else to to reinstitute that level of work with global citizenship would be very difficult because you've now told the public and teachers to take those positions that they're at risk and world language teachers i can tell you are very difficult to find even for our high school and middle school i'm just wondering so what's the number that needs to be removed from this budget to achieve a level funded position thank you so we have to um cut 545 000 to be able to get to level funding and any number other than that would have to go back to the voters

092correct um just so the committee knows where my head's at um i i do not think a budget will pass i am i'm encouraging all of you to um to level fund tonight thank you actually just to clarify my apologies 525 750 exactly say that again please 525 hundred and fifty dollars exactly to be at level funding that saves us a little bit right there just just to clarify in your pages those are the items below uh your last decisions which aren't for 12 22. uh those are all included it's all the lines that have a blank next to each of the amounts and that represents our action today yeah proposed action sorry okay just to clarify that that list that's published that's below the yellow block all of those items in aggregate reach the

093525 number correct to the penny you know so just to follow that the 1.4 then that's the total from all the previous from all the previous actions yeah okay so where it says propose 510 22 would give us the 525 seventh so to example if we were to remove the grade four and grade three at richmond and charlestown and add the world language you would take those out and it would be the same cost i had i know those hands raised okay mr who's on mr day if the state is so impressed with our resolution hey i'm optimistic okay if the state is so impressed with that and they give us categorical transportation funding after this how does that does that change anything here because we're voting to go to level funded if what ryan's

094proposing yes go ahead mr j so so where i think that would take us and as you can see we've we've gotten to the place in our list where we're also affecting our ability to navigate cola i think that's where our conversation would lead if we were able to get more revenue at this point in time there's really no guarantees until that comes in so we can't budget for it you know cola because because of the timing of our negotiation process that's when we would be able to okay apply that resource and there are as you all know there are other items that we've already under budgeted for example fuel we had at three dollars and nine cents it's already almost close to five dollars i mean we're hoping that that's going to be lowered

095but so we have areas we have to watch fuel transportation and oil as well as a lot and i can like explain special education tuitions we've already saw four additional increases and they're not dcif placements they're actually at eighty thousand dollars not fifty five thousand dollars well personally i can accept what ryan's proposing but i i not with the elementary no i understood and again just to clarify strategic plan goals is not i was not a part of that so i mean we didn't have a crystal ball when we did it either no i understand i understand um miss chambers the concerns of the elementary school teachers but we're not violating a contract that the teachers signed many years ago and it just continued to uh to accept class size where we're under class size

096the problem we have in the district is that the towns created cheruhou the towns can improve charitable when you got class sizes in hopkinton at a in the high teens in the 20s this is where this is where the money is going and until the towns are prepared to turn around and make this more of a regional school district so that we have the ability to adjust class sizes as it pertains to locality as opposed to the town borders then we're always going to have this problem so i i i strongly uh believe what ryan has said that we we don't want to insulted the voters again by by trying to uh force another vote down their throat and we should just accept the superintendent's recommendations as i said the last meeting we hired her

097we have faith in her and now we're turning around telling her she doesn't know what the hell she's doing in plain english so i i support her recommendations and i would hope that the rest of the committee would and and hope that we can get through this year with some some additional state funding the governor the governor did us a big favor by one if people don't understand it they he level funded every school district in the state of rhode island whether you increase your population or whether you decrease your population that's an insult to a place like chiaro who has an increase in population and other school districts and i don't know the numbers but they're out there and they could probably tell me tell me a few of them but the their population

098decreased but they still got the same amount of money as they got last year and and we were only we're getting the same amount of money that we got this year uh basically and we we have an increase in population we have we have some some damn good school school school buildings down here administrators and and the like thank you miss chambers and mr kelly yeah um i i don't even know where to begin um we do not i have a question for gina but i want to um piggyback on what craig said and that is is when we made these recommendations and we put these wonderful things in our strategic plan and we did everything we could over the last i know eight years from my experience to improve the technology as susie just

099so eloquently presented to us and we're getting paybacks for that investment in the technology we are listening to the voters we have no choice but to listen to the voters but the crystal ball that we should have had would say that the voters would not continue to improve or support the funding of improvements on the things that we have worked very hard my fear is over the next few years that it starts going backwards and i see that happening especially when we have increased costs which we have not just in fuel but in salaries in cola and everything else like we do in our own personal budgets gina you said that we have already the number that we have had in the past of um out of tuition costs special education special education costs which

100we have no choice on i wish the voters would consider taking that kind of energy that they did to appeal to us and to appeal to the citizens of our three towns to not vote for this budget but to vote it down i wish they would take that energy to the to providence into the state house so that we're not ham that we're not tied to these recommend these mandates that we have to be tied to like paying for tui we could one student could cost this district a million dollars we have no choice in these so much of the budget was no choice as gina said we had no options on these things but you the the citizens have voted and i hope that they will accept the consequences where we have to cut

101i don't want to cut any of this i don't want to cut staff i think it's bad for morale for our teachers we saw the display of the um support staff this earlier in the in the meeting what do we say to them where do we find the money to give them what they really need anyway i'm going on and on and i don't mean to but i hope when those that are opposed and feel like it's really important to get the public out to vote down the budget will reconsider the consequences of these very drastic changes we have to make we have a beer bones budget and something we'll have to give that's it anyway mr callahan and then karen just just a couple of basic questions are we seeing an increase in negative

102behavior in our larger classrooms not necessarily i think we all know you could have 15 students in a classroom and have increased behaviors it's not necessarily to size but we definitely have seen an increase k-12 and our mental health needs and our students who are requiring more support absolutely okay would cutting world language affect our bi-literacy seal as we get as we get closer to the high school now it's a great question so um previous to my um coming into chiara how the school committee had made a cut to the world language program so that sort of goes into the visioning of what the goal was i believe you had it twice a week in elementary school with the goal of fluency be able to enter grade five with fluency it's now one day a

103week and with that really what you're doing is more of an exposure as opposed to a fluency-based um so it is a larger visioning question but right now the way the program stands it's not cr it's not built the way i think it was originally intended so it's not built the way it was originally written into our strategic it was implemented with the idea of the two days a week to be able to increase the fluency to be able to enter into grade five unfortunately when the first cut was made to go down to one day a week it really is not more of an exposure-based program they work very hard and they try their best but one day a week is very difficult in in elementary school would that impact our specials at the

104elementary no because our teachers are part of that part of that work they don't get that time off okay all good questions dr callahan you just once said we we need to have the committee speak first and about you i'll give you an opportunity thank you thank you sure um so i think we we know the number we need to get to in order to achieve a level fund position and i agree with bill that gina and ned you've done a great job going back through this again this i i do feel that given some of the uncertainties in some of these other areas fuel oil being one of them um and just life in general you know students that come into the district and and we need to add teachers or something to that

105effect i do feel we have a bit more exposure in this budget however i think that we've we've agreed that we're going to move to a level fund position i know we didn't vote on it but i think that's where everybody's heads at and we know the dollar amount we need to remove i i accept the list that you have provided us except i do not accept the charlestown or the richmond elementary school teacher eliminations and instead i would propose that we reduce um row 360 the amount needed in order to achieve the 525 6 30 6 30. so it's either 6 30 or 6 31 is it added it's listed in two places that but that's that's my proposal to this correct so okay so i know miss lausanne's recommendation the conversation was world

106language but and just dr kellyanne is the uh leave keep reading the world language but change the cola keep third and fourth grade teachers and change the cola okay so put 160 000 into the cola and keep the two teachers yes ma'am and the world language yes ma'am does everyone understand that okay gary you have a question what's the negative impact of doing that what do you mean by the negative he wants to take he wants to take the amount from the two teachers and take it from the cola line item okay it impacts all subsequent negotiations yeah it impacts negotiations okay so i think right now just to kind of put everyone i mean right now we we have three options it looks like do we have a motion and a no we're just

107no okay good so right now it looks like we have option one is to accept the cuts as is as was presented with meaning eliminating the two teachers okay and amongst other things but that's kind of where the big issues are option two would be to eliminate world language and keep the two classroom teachers that was brought to the table for discussion and then option three was the final one that dr callahan just suggested was to keep all cuts as as presented by gina hendre staff but to increase the cost of living or to i guess the cost of the teachers to be taken out of the cola line and not by 160 160 000 so those are the three options did i get those correct that's it right yes could you elaborate more on

108the cola i think maybe mr never should do that probably a number okay so so looking down at the bottom of the page um the ces grade four and the res grade three those would go to zero and that hundred and sixty thousand dollars would be added to the cut at the cost of living adjustment right so it climbed to 200 and i'm yeah 232 702. i think maybe the question is what does that mean for cost and living um that would significantly reduce the amount we could offer we're going to just specific percentages because we still haven't yeah sure so what would happen is with with that cut it would significantly reduce the options we have for cost of living adjustment uh so to mr luzon's point before at this time in the budget

109we have to stick with what we know and unless the transportation categorical came through we'd be limited in what we can say between now and when that funding would come through so we'd have to we'd have to make peace with a very low amount available for a cost of living adjustment which is trying to avoid that well i think it should be staged a raise yeah or race yes raises negotiating in world language elementary how much time per week do these do our kids get one period a week one year which is how long a half hour half an hour 35 minutes a half an hour [Music] option two i i think that uh that would be the less painful to the majority of the faculty and and students here thank you mr day yes

110ma'am that was your time you also agree with that option too but um i wanted to make one of the point that you just remind us yes i'm helen sheen from richmond i'm sorry there were two positions that were moved from the regular budget and using to the esr funds so positions were still funded but they weren't they didn't count as the regular school budget my concern is that when the esser funds are done we have two positions that are funded that now will be added to our tax base or cut depending on the situation yeah we are concerned with that and just to clarify the positions of sr are built to build capacity in those two years not to maintain those the only position moved that was that's that i would i recommended an

111operation was the dean for the middle school to be able to support okay that was good thinking yes ma'am now it's your turn i'm sorry thank you for waiting all right um hi everybody my name is uh sarah sowatsky and i live in charlestown and i'm actually the mother of two children at charlestown elementary school and my son is actually entering fourth grade in the fall i'm also a middle school teacher in another district and i understand the importance of small class size i do feel discouraged that charlestown approved the budget yet a fourth grade charlestown elementary school teacher may be cut if a fourth grade teacher is cut the fourth grade class size is estimated to shift from 15 to 16 students to 23 students which you stated earlier this is nearly a 50

112percent increase in class size this is a significant change for the students in their last year of elementary school this impacts personalization of instruction addressing gaps in the needs of learners and valuable time may be spent on classroom management rather than teaching and learning next year's fourth graders were in first grade my son was in first grade and when the pandemic ended on their in-school learning in march and consequently three of their academic years have been affected by covid um precautions and restrictions and therefore these students deserve to be educated in a classroom with fewer classmates so that they can get individualized attention and the instruction that they need and as an educator i've experienced negative impact on larger class sizes on student learning and i just now is not really the time to increase

113class size and our children deserve better and i understand that the class sizes will go up possibly when they're in elementary school in my district it's 29 students which is a lot but just my son and his needs and i get really nervous speaking in front of big adult groups so i'm okay in front of students but anyway so thank you for your time [Applause] so i'm lindsay white from charlestown um i had a very emotional day today um i had my last iep meeting with the charlestown um team that has been phenomenal with my family all three of my kids went through there i currently have one in high school and one in the middle school and [Music] i have two children that have been diagnosed with adhd they have benefited so much from

114the charlestown experience um [Music] i'm going to miss my support system [Music] cassie charrette is the most amazing person if it weren't for her my child would still be i don't even know how far behind um so in january i was diagnosed with the flu a couple days later my son got coveted my youngest wasn't completely vaccinated at the time i didn't know what i was gonna do pouring down rain i hear a knock at my door i get up and she's running back to her car she dropped off at my door the supplies that my daughter needed um i [Music] work for tri-county community action in heating assistance um which is still on the link thank you um [Music] so i have been tremendously short staffed this year and i have been beating myself

115up that i'm not checking that my you know nine-year-old adhd child is doing her homework and cassie has been supportive of me every step of the way um [Music] she i can't say enough good about all of the teachers in charlestown when covet hit and i had two kids at home with adhd trying to distance learn and manage all that mrs iredale knew that i was struggling [Music] and gave me her personal cell phone number and said if you need to talk you can call me at any time um so today my daughter was found ineligible for special education services after having struggled since birth i knew at birth that she had issues um [Music] i could go on and on about how much she is needed and all of them really i just want

116to say to the people that are voting down the budget because of your own personal beliefs and agendas um [Music] you're gonna hurt the kids absolutely um i brought my own daughter here today to inspire me to inspire her um [Music] it's it's it's disgusting and where do you people find the time to respond to all these comments that you don't agree with and it's it's it's heartbreaking it really is [Music] [Applause] so so if we have classes we do have a contract with the teachers and they can go up to 25 kids in a class so could you just explain to people what happens if it's by september 1st whether they exceed the 25 or if it's october 1st if we they exceed the 25 because there's a chance when you're getting 23 24

117kids you know you don't know what's gonna happen in the summer we could get more kids so would we be hiring teachers would they be getting an additional stipend could you elaborate please right if it's before october 1st we would have to hire the teacher if it's over the 25 so once we hit the 26 and if it's after october 1st we would pay the teachers for the overages okay i just want the people to hear that thank you mr day i can't speak for the rest of people but i'm ready to vote and i'd make a motion that we we voted on option two as mr lausanne said earlier because so we could go on or we could go on all night here going back and forth what we need to start making a

118decision if that one gets voted down and we need to make a motion on another one option two is all the cuts proposed removing the child strong grade four between grade three for the two world language teachers yes that's my motion that's his motion anyone want to make a second second mr buzan made a second i open that up to discussion before we take the vote uh miss chambers well it doesn't have to do with what we just made the motions okay then we need to have that we need the discussion needs to be about that motion okay well i just wanted to respond to the public comments now we're not right yet but yeah but you will okay this is miss spears you have the floor gina mentioned that it's harder to recruit for

119that position later right for a world language teacher so i know that our knee-jerk reaction is to make some decisions about the immediacy because the public is poorly informed and doesn't understand the longer term repercussions of some of the situations but i just want to point out it's harder to recruit for a world language teacher later if we cut it down yes it has been yes that is accurate been true yes you're welcome any other option yeah mr calhoun yeah just it if you cut the world language and i understand the position and the motion that's it it's it's gone from the elementary school for a while recovering that's going to be incredibly difficult um i i would encourage that um we think long and hard about that i think that it's been a district-wide

120objective it's going to send repercussions through there so i guess gina if this happens and we want to reinstate it what's our what's our time frame well if um we want to reinstate it it would be difficult once they would get layoff letters so that they would absolutely pursue opportunities which would exist because right now it is very difficult to find more language teachers so i'm sure that um if we decided to reinstitute them at any point finding two teachers to take those positions and believe that they're not going to be at the table because it provides a risk would be very incredibly difficult and i realize none of these decisions are easy yes ma'am great sylvia again from hopkinton [Music] i just like to speak to i feel like the value of the world

121language is very important to the kids the value of the teachers are very important to the kids the majority of the public voting no is we're voting no in the sense that we want the spending to be looked at very carefully and being financially responsible considering that the times that we're in right now everyone is facing increases in in cost of living and whatnot um i'm a physical therapist i have my doctorate i've been a physical therapist for 13 years and in all 13 years of my working i have never seen a raise because in healthcare hospitals have been getting bought out and when that happens whether a hospital is merging or [Music] in receivership the first thing that gets that gets cut so to speak is raises and it's not to say that i

122don't think that teachers value raises but it's hard for me to look and say i would rather cut two teachers salaries where they have where they're jobless then maybe maybe we forgo the raises that that to me seems like a little we're working together and you know each each side is compromising but we're not we're saving a teacher's livelihood and position um that we're saving their position and the value that the world language program has for terre haute so it's it's not everybody has to be able to to get we're all having to tighten our wallets right now everyone's budget for oil and gas is going up it's it just seems that i i thought that was a great idea that you had to to take the money from that and save the positions for

123the teachers thank you good evening louise dinsmore richmond um i have a couple of questions i'm not sure if they could be answered at this time before i make comment about the budget so my first question is was there a in fact a budget surplus last fiscal year at the end of last fiscal year and if so how much was that yes there's an unassigned fund balance of i believe it was roughly 3.4 million okay so an unassigned fund balance of 3.44 million um would in fact last year at this time were there students that were forecasted to come into the district and students that actually when the school year started um were expected to come into the district but actually didn't come into the district so when we're talking about classroom sizes was there

124a projection last year of how many kids were perhaps going to go into third grade but maybe that number was higher when the school year started or lower than when the school year started we had an increase this year than what was projected okay thank you for answering that question i appreciate that appreciate that so i think in light of the comments that mr draper just made about a budget surplus of 3.4 million i would be absolutely against elementary school teachers positions being removed we're looking at a hundred and sixty thousand dollars for those two positions and if we had a robust budget surplus i'm not sure why we're even having this discussion unless i i don't understand this discussion if you have okay go ahead if you cycle back into the current budget that

125you're looking at so that there's um in the presentation that's online goes through the difference of the unassigned fund balance versus the assigned fund balance so i want the finance right to take it over but in essence the money that was already in was already placed back into this year's budget okay so let's okay go ahead yeah the um when i misspoke it was 3.2 million okay um but the the way the chair hoe act functions we go through this process because cherijo as a regional district doesn't have taxing authority we go to the towns they tax the individuals and then they send us a check we get approval from all of the voters as to what our appropriation is going to the fund balance by policy the school committee has to set aside a

126certain amount of fund balance so that we don't get into trouble that's one of the things about a regional school district because of the the broad base of our budget as compared to the local budgets we're a significant operation at over 60 million dollars we have a lot of a lot of commitments that we have to to me of course that includes bond commitments 60 million dollars and we're looking at 160 000 where two teacher positions are at risk so what i'm saying is let's try to sharpen the pencils and find 160 000 if that's possible so two elementary school teachers can keep their jobs thank you [Music] hello good evening my name is michael kolasanti uh richmond resident uh a couple of things you mentioned i think one was great about the mandates if

127you want to take local control and power away just keep mandating more items now you said about going down to the general assembly and being an advocate to uh take some of these mandates away if you spearhead it you'll have a ton of people behind you and there's no better person to spare head this than somebody who's already an elected official on the school committee you will hold more weight when you go to the general assembly and you speak on a particular item such as that so let me just uh it's it's ride mandates also it's not law it's ride mandates that we have to comply with that's big yeah over the last 20 or 30 years it makes my head spin about how many new mandates they've implemented and alls it does is it

128takes local power local control away because now while we're trying to discuss this about budgetary issues you know that there's only so much we can do because we'd have to go to the state level in order to come back here to rectify uh some of the issues that we have okay and you know what you said about bare bones budget years back when i was really involved i never advocated cutting a position because that is the easiest thing anybody can do you need no expertise to do that no information at hand you could just stand up like i'm doing right now and say let's cut positions well let's cut payroll let's not give people raises i don't know if it was something that the business manager at that time was rhonda fabio under andreatti and

129john pini maybe they miss these items so it's always good to get feedback from the general public that will go through the budget and give you their viewpoint maybe you missed this one of those line items that they missed and again the school committee members said exactly what you said is that this is a bare bones budget there's nothing we can cut from this then i looked at this particular line item there were 30 teachers retiring at the high step 30 new teachers coming in they were still budgeting for the 30 high step teachers taking into account the higher salary the benefit packages and you know now the newer teachers coming in there's more that they pay towards their health insurance co-pays and whatnot so there was a savings of like almost 450 on a

13021 million dollar budget so we're not perfect human beings and maybe the current business manager maybe he misses things um somebody mentioned brian stanley great guy anybody who knows brian is a straight shooter after he became business manager when ronda fabio retired when i bumped into uh brian one day he said to me and i quote this and anybody who knows brian knows he's a straight shooter he said to me mike there is so much waste okay now when it's on somebody else's dollar it's a little easy to be a little bit more loosey-goosey the way money is spent um so with the business manager and this isn't meant to be disrespectful to you but you have some good resources here that there are a lot of people that look at this budget and basically

131i did pretty much like what you would consider like almost a forensic audit okay and the three years that character did not get an increase first year 1.9 million was cut second year 650 000 was cut and then the third year the hopkins taxpayers wanted 1.9 million i only advocated 1.3 and what was cut that third year was 1.3 i did my homework and not one teacher not one student lost sports lost books paper material curriculum not one thing was lost it was just created a tighter ship and that's exactly what we do in the private sector do you have a suggestion or something getting getting together with uh some of us that have looked through the budget and like i said maybe you missed something maybe we can you know bring it to your

132attention and you can say to yourself gee thank you very much and then it's a win-win situation all the way around that's all we're asking and again i don't advocate cutting anybody through covet with with my two businesses i did not cut one person from payroll i actually paid out of pocket i don't want to pat on the back i paid out of pocket to keep some of these people working vukovit because i know how important it is all right to keep your staff there thank you thank you sir thank you yes sir please come to the podium hello thank you my name is jeff noble and i live in richmond rhode island um i wish to talk about the decision about cola versus staffing but um also want to just uh hit a few

133highlights sorry first of all i was in the military about to retire with 20 years of service ended seven years here with the rhode island guard and quantity i grew up in st mary's ohio small farm town and the reason i bring all this up is basically the high school i graduated from had a level fund or the school system had basically a level fund the high school building i graduated from was built in 1929 my great-grandfather was on the school committee when the building was built my grandfather my father and i all graduated from the state building and the reason why i bring all this up is to talk about the consequences that i think we're not really addressing too much inflation is at nearly eight percent and that means that these cuts are

134or level funding is actually a cut of eight percent and what does that mean to the school system well obviously no raises for teachers that means they get an eight percent cut it means eight percent of the curriculum is going to have to be cut eight percent of transportation eight percent of any item that you think of that's a fixed cost or is good you know is going to increase as our dollar value goes down is going to be a cut it seems like everyone here thinks that well it's the same dollar amount so it's not a cut and that is completely wrong that's not how economics work i was an economics major i'm sorry um i'm very nervous because i'm very passionate about this my three kids go here we thought about moving uh

135looked at other school districts around the country because i have a job which i can fortunately commute to and we wanted to stay here and it just uh i wish the school committee would talk more about the consequences of what we're going to lose and communicate that to the public because i feel that it might not be articulated clearly enough um so basically um i know no one wants to lose their jobs and i know we don't want to you know forgo teacher raises but the thing is is like we're all just trying to stop the bleeding now because apparently the voters feel that the best course to action is to not have a tax increase and not fund our kids like i mean who doesn't want to fund our kids i just don't understand

136this i've been advocating advocating for the budget online i encourage a lot of more people to do this i encourage people to come out and talk about the negative consequences of the voters actions i'm very passionate about this as you can probably tell but i don't think people understand that this is only going to get worse as time goes on because the cost of everything that goes into the school is going to go up and what's going to get cut it's going to be the easy things first and then the the infrastructure right i mean we just had a fire at richmond elementary last night i mean what what i mean that's going to incur costs it's going to eat into your budget surplus that you talk about because you have to pay for these

137unexpected things i feel that there's a bunch of people around here who think that you guys willy-nilly come up with a budget and that is completely not true i want to say that i support you 100 percent please do the best for our kids i appreciate all the hard work you put into i know no one is getting rich around here doing the school committee work and again i want to say thank you have a great night [Applause] well that is a tough act to follow um real quick mr liz and i wanted to thank you for uh bringing up that point about the cola and i just want to make sure we're clear on that um you know i i respectfully uh or you know respectfully disagree i think with some of the cuts

138being made and everything else especially regarding staffing but i can tell you something right now you're gonna have to replace 150 support staff they're not going to continue to stay here for the rates that they're going and as far as i know there's been some administrative and you know higher level you know raises that were approved and and that does not get discussed either so i just want to be clear there's colas that need to happen for our staff and everything else but raises need to happen for us are those goals that need to happen and raises need to happen for our staff that oh that needs to happen otherwise we will not be able to open our schools come september i can assure you that thank you [Applause] hi i wasn't going to speak

139but my name is melissa d joseph i live in richmond i'm a parent i have a third grader at richmond and a preschooler who will be in kindergarten at richmond in september i'm also uh a behavior management assistant for the charitable alternative learning academy um so i wasn't going to talk because as you can probably understand it's a little conflicting for me being a parent and a taxpayer and an employee but um i'm just going to stick to the teacher because you're talking about especially at richmond uh in 2017 we lived in west warwick we had our first daughter who was not in school yet and we pretty much looked throughout the whole state to buy a house because we wanted essentially an ideal school department i had family that already lived in richmond and

140i said i'm not moving there it's too far away but after a lot of research my background in education i went to school for psych and early childhood ed so we did a lot of research on the school department and i can tell you it's the number one reason that we moved here [Music] i don't have a problem with the budget i voted for it both times i have no problem saying that um but that aside i think that um we're in a mental health crisis and these kids need the teachers they need all of the staff we actually could use a lot more and um [Music] i think it was lindsay i'm sorry if i got your name wrong said she's heartbroken and i think that i have to agree with her that if

141any of the staff or the teachers were cut i would absolutely be totally heartbroken that's all thank you [Applause] i agree with what mr day said a little while ago about getting to a vote on this but i just want to make one statement you know it was said about nine months ago that we really don't let anybody speak if anything we go above and beyond to let everybody speak all right [Applause] so everybody has heard and we've heard the voters personally i don't want to cut anything but to me it's what i proposed was the lesser of two evils in my heart so that that's all i have to say about that as forrest gump would say i just want to ask one question to kind of reinforce what tom said earlier how short

142staffed are we in in the support staff now uh janitors and and and other people just a rough figure half a dozen we have four vacancies and custodials we have four full-time special ed teacher assistants that we need in high school two in high school two in middle school um five part-time teacher assistants um four of them are three-hour k positions and one is a special ed pre-k and we have a leave of absence for a general ta at the high school that's a dozen a dozen or more there so that just reinforces why this is the lesser of the two evils right now we don't have the luxury of moving on for another month or two before we can do it miss uh i'm sorry i forgot i forgot your name now mike i

143i know you for a lot of years i apologize we don't have the time to go into that right now but maybe we will have the time to uh to do some adjusting later on because we do have the luxury of moving money from one account to the next so i i just think that reinforces what what craig is trying to do here to get to get us to a budget without impacting the support staff and it keeps it keeps the two teachers in the in the elementary schools it just limits our ability to have a word language teacher as they said one one day a week or one hour a week is is is it good or is it is it a sufficient event that's a difficult difficult uh question to answer so i

144think all these choices are difficult any other comments with the motion that's on the table as is so to to remind everyone the motion that was made was to accept or agree or approve all the cuts made um that the superintendent and her staff made but to keep the ces and res grade level teachers in place and to actually remove two world language teachers instead that's the vote that we are going to take right now so those in favor of the motion i have one two three we have three oppositions eight with three opposites yes beers callahan yes so we did it reluctantly yes dr callahan we need to get a final calculation in place and then i guess adopt a budget still now that is correct time so do you want to make a

145motion to take a five minute recess second those in favor okay we're gonna take a five minute recess mr draper can figure out the final number so we're ready thank you everyone and thank you for that ten minute break and now i believe we have a recommendation from super superintendent picard i make a motion for the approval of the fy 23 budget in the amount of 68 million total budget including operating capital special revenues enterprise and debt service expenditures but does not include revenue of eleven million six hundred twelve thousand six hundred and twenty two dollars with the member towns contribution to be 54 million seven hundred four thousand three hundred forty seven dollars and twenty nine cents an increase of zero percent so move second there's been a motion to adopt the fy23 budget

146as read by superintendent picard and the amount of 68 million 385 944 dollars any discussion on this matter further conversation nope those in favor of docking this budget at zero percent increase and that was unanimous thank you all thank you all for that work that was very had a table each yeah i remember okay yes sir chair make a motion to table letter h indefinitely you have a second on that catholic okay so uh dr callahan made a motion to table the all-day budget referendum date and catherine trustee seconded it any discussion indefinitely thank you the word is the key word is indefinitely thank you okay i never would like to make a caveat okay yeah i just wanted to uh say one thing with those lines because of the way those teaching positions and

147the other teaching positions will line up whatever does not um line up exactly dollar for dollar will go into the cola i think there'll be a slight advantage and that'll just go into the cola number to make it better okay thank you i'm sorry we were at the uh approving of the table the h all day budget referendum we did get a motion in a second indefinitely um any discussion on that any questions on that nope those in favor okay that's unanimous thank you and now we're into consent agenda items we're going to pull a1 and a2 session minutes anything else need to be pulled for discussion mr day uh 10b i just uh have a question what what where's that wait wait wait wait ten feet roman b uh okay transfers transfer yes okay

148so gotcha oh my gosh oh b b b like in boy thank you okay transfers so we have those items pulled so madam chair yes at this time i make a motion to move the remainder but before i do i would like to recognize the donations one from mr ryan saunders chorus of wesley of the george kent performance hall in wesley for the cerro high school chorus benefit concert and two donation from sarah marcotte a little kids little kids incorporated office administrator of 3416 hand sanitizers to the district thank you very much thank you very much it has been a motion in a second to approve the consent agenda items those in favor thank you any opposition to that nope thank you very much madam chair yes sir i make a motion to approve a1

149the executive session miss of april 12 2022 approval of executive session minutes of march 22 2022 minutes not sealed second there's been a motion by mr luzon in a second by mr callahan to approve the executive session minutes of april 12 and it's the approval executive session minutes of march 22nd 20 22 minutes not sealed any discussion on those minutes nope those in favor any opposition any recusals or abstentions so that was unanimous thank you if she can vote madam chair make a motion to approve a two regular session minutes of april 12 2022. second there's been a motion by ms luzon in a second by mr callahan to approve the regular session minutes of april 12 2022. again any discussion amendments or comments on those minutes no i'll take that to a vote those

150in favor yes make approach the motion to approve b the transfers second has been a motion by ms luzon a second by dr callahan to approve the transfers now i give the floor to mr day the question i have is the transfer of funds to pay the lower bowl parking uh as as ned you know i was opposed to that i thought that uh that it wasn't an emergency and now we've overexpended what what you had we had was it 30 to 30 000 you projected to uh to do that originally no i don't i don't believe we've overexpended on that well we transferred funds oh oh you're talking you're talking the um the three thousand the three thousand the the three thousand uh was what we anticipated receiving from the student activities funds and

151when we got the final amount from the high school they did not have the full student activities funds they thought they had okay my second question do we plan on on uh mocking those parking spots so that we know that students that are parking there have have school passes because i can i can see the possibility and i've seen the possibility where cars have been parked in the entrance way uh already and they're not parked into in the actually in the field itself i do believe the idea is that when we line them for the fall i think that we're waiting because there's also some uh there's a pipeline looking for tomorrow i just want i just want to be assured that that we're not treating uh treating that as a as a offset law

152and kids that that are parking there aren't and they did have pat they have passes that they we've we can check and um ms paz has been down there herself verifying as well for sure because we know it was new and one didn't show that they were holding safely parking we hold the kids to the upper upper pocket here to a high standard and i i don't want that to slip slip out of the understood absolutely thank you mr day okay so on to reports uh oh i'm sorry we didn't vote for the consent energy transfer of the transfers okay those in favor of the recommended approval of the transfers sorry thank you okay that was unanimous get involved in those things okay now reports okay so subcommittee reports our health and wellness subcommittee uh

153meeting was today may 10th at 4 p.m in the high school library and close was the draft copy of the meeting on march 8th 2022 in my superintendence report we had our junior prom recently and it was outstanding the students had a lot of fun and more importantly i you know we were overwhelmed by the staff telling us how respectful polite and you know wonderful our students were so it's always nice to have positive feedback and miss spas i believe sent an email to all families and students um because it was just such a wonderful day and it was nice to see them all back at those kinds of activities and with such great praise from um likaville's staff we have our kindergarten registration update which i put back by accident so hold on so

154for um ashley elementary we have nine students currently enrolled for kindergarten next year in charlestown we have 19 in hope valley we have 20 and in richmond we have 33 to date and we anticipate that continuing throughout the summer we have our first ever ap commitment um celebration we were informed by the department of education that we are being celebrated at the state house next wednesday may 18th we are one of five districts being recognized for our outstanding commitment to advanced placement courses that's very exciting and we have students who will be attending that celebration with us we have uh coming events um we have recently we just had the hello dolly production as well which was outstanding if you had a chance to see it we were so impressed with our students as always

155and rebecca burns for a wonderful production and my understanding is the costumes were custom made and it was uh so we appreciate all the donations that came in to be able to support that program and all the wonderful actors and actresses that did an outstanding job it was definitely a wonderful weekend upcoming events tomorrow we have our state professional development day it is an asynchronous distance learning day for our students on may 17th ashaway has the take it out dinner all day at main street pizza on may 18th it's an early release day secondary will be dismissed at 12 45 elementary pre-k and mr j had asked earlier about our upcoming peach blossom buffet that is may 20th so that buffet is to support our skills usa dinner and it's being held on friday may

15620th there are three seatings 4 30 5 30 or 6 30. tickets for adults are 25 and tickets for children under 10 are 10 we hope you'll support this wonderful buffet the menu is amazing appetizers entrees desserts and our students are very excited about that event as well may 20th we also have secondary progress reports issued for fourth quarter may 23rd is our hope valley grade four visit to cheryl middle school and on may 25th our underclassmen awards night is six to nine pm in this middle school auditorium okay so this is the uh um any requests for future agenda items or legal opinions from the committee members yes mr day a few a few months ago uh brought up the student activities fund and i was uh led to believe that there was going

157to be a study on that to see if we could uh bring that into uh a better treatment of of the students especially at the middle schools where where some some teams had exorbitant amounts of money and other teams didn't i was just i'd like to have a little update on that uh if they've had any meetings or what's the focus is the second thing is i think we should have a meeting with our bus contractor uh i have the opportunity to be on the buses around charleston but primarily a couple days a week and the number of cars that are passing the light the buses with the lights on on route 1 and route 2 and stuff like that is is chilling uh i mean this is to me charleston is doing a good

158job i know that one of the bus drivers had to go to court here a couple a couple of weeks ago because you know there's no cameras there or anything like that so it was per word against the the the individual and he did uh they completed it down to half the cost half the cost of the fine but it's it's it's scary out there it really is that these people are just blown by the stop buses and i i'm just concerned about it so i i think that maybe the administration should would be beneficial to have the administration to have some contact with them to see if they could uh target at least some of those buses i'm sure the bus drivers can give them a better better breakdown of what buses might might

159need some sort of a backup so that they can punish some of these drivers that just ignore the lights that's a huge safety issue thank you any other school committee members have any other future gender items okay you ready for it yes you folks ready i'm ready madam chair let's make a motion to adjourn second motion mate i miss luzon a second by callahan to adjourn thank you those in favor we want any discussion on that yeah maybe yeah