001Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us tonight for our April 8th, 2025 meeting of the Keen Board of Education. If you would all rise and join me in the um pledge of allegiance like to ask Dylan to lead us in the pledge. I 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. So this is our first meeting since the elections in March. And so being that it is our first meeting, our first order of business is to elect a chair for the Keen Board of Education. So I will open up the floor to nominations at this time. I'll nominate George Downey as chair. Second. I've got a first and a second for Mr.
002Downing. Any other nominations for board chair? Hearing none, I'll go ahead and close the nominations and I will ask uh those in favor of Mr. Downing continuing to serve as the chair for the King Board of Education, please indicate by saying I. I. Any opposed? Any um anyone sustaining? Motion carries 90. The meeting is now yours. Thank you, Rob. And we could just adjourn and go home. Um All right. Uh I'll open the floor to nominations for vice chair. I will uh nominate uh Raleigh Omar as vice chair. Any other nominations? Seeing none, all those in favor? Any opposed? Carries 90. Um, I believe I get to appoint the secretary. I actually reviewed our manual. Um, and Jacqueline, if you're willing. I am. All right. So, Jacqueline Hedings uh will be secretary and uh Chris,
003parliamentarian again. All right. Uh, we will go over committees. Rob. Yep. Just to be clear, those two responsibilities are not elected. Those are appointed by the board chair. So, that's why there isn't a second and a Therefore, you know, so on. Correct. Thank you. Uh we'll go over committees and school liaison uh later on the agenda. Um we have it under new business. Um which brings us to um Rob, we have no official recommen recognitions tonight. All right. Um public input is open. It is If I may, are we not doing Keem Middle School provided some recognitions? I did not get any any uh confirmation on that and we don't have anyone in attendance so we will invite them next month. All right. Um public input is open for half an hour. Um we don't
004have any public at this time. It is 6:35. So that'll stay open until 7:05. Uh if anyone happens to come in, we'll we'll invite them. Uh those of you watching on the live stream, if you wish to submit public input in writing, you can send it uh to the superintendent or the chair care of Shaina Pelky at uh the SAU central office. Uh and her email is available on the website spelkysa29.org. All right. Consent agenda. Can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? Second. Uh, anybody have documents they wish removed from the consent agenda? Yes. Yes, I do. Um, under uh finance committee, let's uh remove the uh gift so I can speak about that during committee presentation, please. All right, we can do that. Anything else anybody needs removed? Remove just scribble
005corrections. Yeah. Well, um, and that's my next question. Are there any, uh, scribblers, errors, corrections to the minutes that are contained? Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Jacqueline. Um, for our regular meeting minutes, um, on page five under new business, there's an S missing at the end of my last name. And then also in that, um, in the minutes, um, area agreements should be in the plural since we had multiple agreements, not a singular. Oh, nice. Catch. All right. Thank you. Any other corrections? All those in favor of passing the consent agenda minus the gift. All those Any opposed? Right. Carries 90. Thank you. Um we do have this doesn't fit under correction. Um but Jacqueline and I were going over the minutes earlier and she pointed out something that we missed. Uh we did have a
006special meeting that was primarily in non-public prior to uh last month's meeting and we did not seal the minutes to that special hearing, the non-public portion and we should have. I think that we all kind of assumed it was just grouped with the regular non-public, but that's not true. Um, so could I have a motion to seal the minutes of the nonpublic meeting from uh Oh, what was the date? Hold on. Let me just double check. March 11th. I don't think it was for the special. I think it was for our regular. Let me double check because one of them does indicate it's sealed and the other one does not. Um, I think what I saw was that we came out of our regular non-public session and sealed those minutes. So, for our full board
007non-public session meeting minutes, those do not indicate that they are sealed indefinitely. March 11th. Second. All right. Does everybody understand what we're doing here? Paige can figure out what we're Okay. All right. All those in favor? Any opposed? Carries. 90. No. And we just wanted to make sure. I think we we did the motion that night, but we only did it for one set of non-public and we had to make sure we got both of them. All right. Uh and thank you, Jacqueline, for catching that earlier. All right. uh report of the student representative, Miss Holmes. Yep. Um the the 2025 Keen High School Prom is May 17th. The theme is Once Upon a Time. It will be $55 a ticket, and to purchase a ticket, all attendees will need to return to to turn
008in a waiver, and it has to be signed. Um the location is the same as last year, Hidden Hills and Ring, but the time changed. It's now 8 to 11:00 p.m. Tickets for seniors will go on sale Tuesday, April 15th. And for the rest of the juniors, it will go on sale after April break on Monday, April 28th. There will be an Amazon wish list sent out for any parents or community members who would like to help out with purchasing decorations. Um, Mr. Keen High. Um, it will be held in the Keen High auditorium on Saturday, May 10th with a tenative start time of 700 p.m. It's a fundraiser for charity and the winner gets to choose which charity all proceeds are donated to. Um, we invite everyone from the community to come out and
009support the crowning of the next Mr. Keenh High. And finally, Keenh High School's tradition yearly tradition of nostalgia is this Friday and Saturday, April 11th and 12th, starting at 7 p.m. It's the 49th time this show has been held at Keen High and lots of great acts are performing and a big thanks to the stage crew for all their contributions and help with putting on this event. Thanks, Aria. All right, report of the board chair. Um I this is uh two or three months worth of reports all kind of backed up together. Um and I do want to thank the support I got from the board um as I was going through some family troubles uh the last couple months you guys covered for me abley and I very much appreciate that. Um the first
010thing we need to talk about is what we saw happen in some neighboring districts at budget time. It did not happen in Keen this year, but it easily could. We had two neighboring districts that lost uh about 8% of their budget at their town meetings. Um an organized coalition came to each of their uh first sessions and removed uh $3 million off of a $30 million budget in both communities. And uh if you've been watching the news, you've seen how that's played out. It's going to have a devastating effect on those schools for the next year. Nobody in New Hampshire and especially nobody in this corner of New Hampshire operates with 8% extra money in their budget. I tried to do a thought exercise and figured out what that would mean for us and what
011we would have to cut and it's disastrous. Um there's no way to do that without cutting staff just for starters. Um, I know one district looked at cutting all of their supports, all of their extracurriculars uh in their their uh prek program uh just to get under the wire. Um, and we would be looking at similar kinds of cuts. It's important to remember u we are used to the Keen community supporting public education. Traditionally, they've been very supportive. Uh there's only been one time in my memory that the budget has been shot down and that was part of a larger rebellion on the part of Keen where they voted everything down on the ballot that year. Um except I think for the custodians contract if I remember correctly. Um we did have for a while
012um a organized group that came to our first session and tried to significantly cut our budget. Uh unfortunately we had uh a pretty organized resistance to that that was also coming. But uh we have though since COVID we've pretty much had about 50 members of the public come to our first session and about 40 of them have been in favor of what we're trying to do. So it's been a a comfortable meeting. But 50 is not a large bar if a group decided to coordinate and come and vote down our budget. Um, what that means for us as a board is we cannot take for granted the support that we get from Keen. We have to be conscious of what the city has asked us to do when the community sends us up here as
013board members. We have to be careful stewards of the money that goes into our schools. We have to make sure that we are producing a positive student outcome, providing safe schools for our students, um properly supporting the educators. That's what the community has told us that that they want. We have to do that and we have to do that openly and we have to communicate to the public that we're doing that especially as budget time comes around. We need to be proactive in informing this community of what we're doing and why we need their support and rallying them to come especially to first session to make sure that we don't face those same devastating cuts that other communities around us have. And I think that's going to be even more important as we move forward.
014Um I sure all of you have been watching the news and know that things are in chaos right now. And in a real sense, that chaos is going to show up in everybody's pocketbooks. Um, it's going to show up in tax bills from the state. Um, it is going to show up in concern and worry about being able to pay people's taxes. And we're going to have to recognize that that feeling is out there and work with our community to get through what's coming. Um, which leads us fairly neatly to my other major point. Um there are large segments of our school population that are under attack from the state and federal governments. Um right now it is mostly our most marginalized members of our community. That is also part of our job is to
015make sure that our schools are providing a safe space for those people and that we are setting policies and that we are ensuring that the district is adhering to policies that protect our most marginalized students and our most marginalized teachers. Um, you guys know I don't like to have to do stuff like this. I would like us all to be moving along smoothly and be able to concentrate just on our schools being the best they can, providing the best atmosphere for our students. Um, but this is too big. Um, we can't let our most marginalized be victimized. You hit on two very important and is basically to get one camp out. I am as an individual. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that concludes the public business tonight. Um thank you to all the administrators who hung
016out with us. Um and Jen of course for taking our minutes and anyone who was watching on the live stream. Uh, we will reconvene for non-public in the back room over here in 5 minutes.