001that was sus. Oh yeah. I would Yeah. Don't get me and So, this was his last time getting to go to Did he have a blast? So fun. You You looked amaz like you had a balcony. That's so nice. I've only been on one cruise. Well, and on my cruise, I won a pre- cruise. So I just did the same thing, but I was like a poor college student, so we or just had like an indoor luckily I have like no claustrophobia or anything like that, but if I went on one now, I would definitely get like a enough to go to the beach. Hey, how are you? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a casino. We did just decide on her next year's vacation. We picked up a hat where we were going to go. We're
002going to do Oh, she's wonderful. Any of her gets the aces. She did. She did. Oh, yeah. Boy, did she ever. Yes, please. Thank you. Thank you very much. The chief emailed religion. I don't have access to the Okay. So, I'd like to call to order the Mermarmac Valley School Board meeting for May 5th, 2025. And Kristen, if you could call the roll call. Yeah. Here. She is uh excused absence. Julia Jones, here. Melissa Muzzy. I haven't heard from her. I assume she'll be here. Okay. Jessica Willer Russell here. Here. David here. Stacy Dor here. Carla here. Liberty here. Did you this? I don't know why you could get it to Thank you. So, uh minutes um of the previous board meeting in your packet. Um any corrections? Anything that people needed to say? Sally
003did That's okay. Sally did not give me any um corrections, any um grammar corrections as of yet. So, um, when I get them, I'll send them to you, Kristen. And I did send you last month's. Yeah. So, everything, anybody, uh, want to make a motion? David, thank you. Motion for to approve the minutes from last month's meeting. Second. Thank you, Julia. Seconded by Julia. Oh, that's why Bill stood up. Yeah, I was going to say we didn't. Okay. So, I did it a little bit different today, Bill. Um, all those in favor of the minutes say I. Any opposed? Thank you. Okay. So, if you could please rise for the Bill, could you lead us to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under
004God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thanks. You're the best. Um, first is public comment about agenda items. Anybody have any public comment about the items on the agenda? Okay, then next the finance report. Oh, thank you. Uh in your packet is the uh finance report. I added the the couple of changes that were suggested uh noting up top about the uh highlighted um areas uh there were over 2500. I also put uh some comments where appropriate uh for any of those uh function totals that were um that were over spent. I'm happy to try to answer any questions. Um I have one. Um so hello. There we go. I will just get right up here. Okay. So um first off, I think the notes are great. That was very helpful. Thank you for
005adding that. Um, I had a question about the 2620 function overage versus overtime and summer work. Um, I was wondering what I know that we do like can you just elaborate on like what the overtime like what might have caused the overtime a little like just curious about that. Yeah. And I I can say that, you know, looking ahead to this summer, you know, we've already tried to find ways of exactly how many people we had some of the uh bigger projects and uh and things like that. So, we had uh quite a bit of summer help and um you know, the line was was overspent from that from that time. And again, we took a look at that and I think you can see if you look up that column a little bit. It's
006primarily under salaries. the rest of the things kind of mitigate that to some degree, but um the salaries were definite overage and Fred's been working real hard to keep that under um as we look ahead to this this coming summer to make sure that our hiring um you know even though we may have to pull folks from one job to go to another, but try to keep that. Awesome. Thank you. Anybody else have any questions? Just for clarification on the loud enough. I think it's just close. Is it Is it on? Okay. So, on the 2722 just what is the insurance and telecommunications? Yeah, that's actually not a good title. I meant to change that in this month's report. Um the 500 object. Yeah. Um that would be22. Yeah. On well it shows up asations
007but that's not a real appropriate um Okay. La, can we look that up and get back to you? Thank you. Anyone else? Action is required. No, no, no, no. That I'm not saying action is required for you. No, no. I'm not waiting. Laura was willing to wait. Yeah. I'll make a motion to accept the report. A second. Thank you. Stacy seconded that. All those in favor of the financial report say I. I. Good. Uh um next on the agenda is the good news and um there was some great good news in the um in the digital packet. I'm having trouble with my words today. Sorry. Um and uh anybody have anything else they'd like to say about good news before we go to we have a couple of presentations? Okay. Um so first on the
008list we are going to um it's actually under new business in on the agenda and that is our life donation and that is uh Michelle Salvatore and um Kurt Laski. So um if you could give them a microphone that'd be great. Thank you guys. Hi, we're from the American Legion in Pentecost. This is Amanda Kurtaski. I'm children and youth officer. Um there was a choking incident on a bus in Manchester not long ago. So we decided to buy lifeaxs for the school buses and we're donating 10 of them. Um we'll give training if they need it. Um, you want to talk about like what lifeback is? Okay, we can take it out. So, it's it's a choking machine and you put it over a child or an adult's mouth and you push it in really
009hard, pops it right out. They're very they work very good. I have one I run it in there. I have it at my house. If they have to if they have to use it on a child or an adult, you send in the paperwork and you get a whole new kit free. for life. So, we're donating 10 of those today um to go on some of the school buses. [Applause] So, on behalf of American Legion, hopefully don't have to use these. There we go. Um I noticed somebody had a camera here. Um would like to I have Actually, you need to be in the picture, too, don't you? Who's gonna demo it? Thank you. Thank you. So, mama, I got you this. Well, neither can I. And I do have an answer, too. Okay. Randy
010has if we can just jump in before the good stuff and I'll jump back to question. the uh 500 um function that's listed under 2722 object rather um is for um out of district transportation and transient um transportation. So it's um you know homeless and district. Wow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Um, okay. So, next on the agenda is um Anakook Elementary School. Let's get a different one. Sure. Uh good evening everybody. Uh my name is Jennifer Moore and I am the principal of Pen Elementary School. Uh thank you for having us. I am accompanied by Zach Stevenson who is our assistant principal and our title one LEA. Um today we're here just to talk to you a little bit about how we've been um engaging families at Penrook Elementary School. We're trying
011to get families into the building as much as we can. Um, and we're also going to share with you a little bit about our pushin model, which we just started this school year. So, I'm gonna hand it over to Zach, who will fill you in on. Hi, everybody, and thank you to the board for hearing us tonight. Nice in front of you. I do want to apologize. PES did not make it to the good news this week packet. I dropped the ball. Um, we're here. There was some good stuff in there. So, if you're interested, I do post this more on our Facebook page. to get out there. Um, so I just want to talk a little bit about family engagement and really what that means. Um, with our purpose of family engagement is to
012bring parents, families, students into from our community into our school after hours to see all the amazing work that we're doing. Um, and really to see what our curriculum is, what do the students engage in, what are they learning in the 21st century. Um, by doing this, it really creates a warm, welcoming environment that people feel they belong in. Um, and we've had amazing feedback from these which we'll go over. Um, this is my first year at Penrook Elementary School, so I I have heard great things about the past and our numbers have increased since last year as well. So, I'm going to go over a few of our, you know, uh, biggest nights that we've had. Um, some of you have been to these nights. So, in November, we had our steam night. Last
013year, this was catered to our grades three through five students. This year, it was our K through two. Um we had 249 participants which is a very large number. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with you know events like this but it's a packed house. Um and as you see here this was the map of our school and they would um basically check off when they went through these different pieces. So there's science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics throughout the building. Um there's different tasks, skill building and some fun stuff as well. Um, and it's just a really fun event to see people happy in learning. The kids are just truly engaged. Not a phone in sight unless they're taking pictures. It's something that see pictures here added. Um, you can see those
014smiling faces. That's me there in the bottom parent drop off. But we, you know, we have different like strategic games. They're building chicken animals, balloons. um they were doing this balancing game with in the middle picture there with these balls teamwork. So just a lot of different engaging activities that was pretty phenomenal to see. Um one of our biggest hits was our escape game night which is basically a large escape room. You might have saw it was featured in monitor as well. Um this is a night where last year they used the zoo zoo. So it was different like you know animal kingdom this year Mario Super Mario was a huge hit over the year. Um so as students came into and students of came into our library they were given a map they were
015given instructions and they're also given spotlight reader and there was different codes uh like cues and codes throughout our school that had to like riddles all Super Mario related. Um, and they had to basically go through each of these Mario Kingdoms to reach the final stage which was this race um on um what do you call this? Like the the four-wheel things you have at PE the scooter boards. Yeah. And you know I was in a Bowser outfit on that thing ripping around. Mrs. Kennedy back there, Miss Kennedy um was also I think succeeding in that. It was just a very fun night to see. Um, and like I said, it's packed. I mean, every single room in that school is flooded with people right up until 6:30 at night. Um, and we had about
016so 202 participants at that event. Again, this is this is race 325 only. Uh, we could not have the whole school. It' just be too much. You're thinking 500 to 600 people in the building at once, which is a little unmanageable. Um, here's some more photos there just to look at. This is where you'd enter. So under the tent there was some and the maps were over to the that on the bottom left there we can see the picture of um the kids were getting these like game pieces to play with. Um a lot of time went into like our title one team is phenomenal. It's made up of three people who are reading specialists. I can't I mean I wish they were here because they deserve all the credit in the world. Um I
017basically provide them with the funds through grants and they go crazy. Um so yeah that's our escape to game night. And then recently we had our paint night um which is limited to about 50 or so participants. We did go over this year's 55 um and they painted this mural of a what would you call bird um which Jen did make a beautiful one that's hanging our school now. Um but it's basically directed painting activity. You know like a guided painting um where all people no matter what your skill level is at painting can succeed. And this year you'll see on the left there was the first annual community mural which is still being you know worked on right now which will be displayed in our school um which had you know almost all attendees
018you know uh incorporating their skill onto that mural and then students will finish it. Um so I'm hoping that will be you know a tradition we can continue over the years and really fill our school with a lot of color and joy. As you know a lot of schools sometimes have the white walls and it's not always the most colorful place. So, this will really help bring it to life. And then the last thing I just wanted to touch on was we were rolling this out as we speak. Um there are 10 backpacks in our library that are available to check out and they have various um math, art, literacy games, problem solving, puzzles that students can bring home with their families and engage in that way. Uh they're all analog digital, so it's really
019bring that community piece back together. Um and it's like I said, it's a checkout. So the the students will come into the the library and check that out and return it within a week. This is the first year they've done that, so I'm not really sure how it's going to be received, but hopefully it's it's pretty awesome. Uh here's just some quotes from we we sent out a survey and we look for a lot of parent feedback into what we do with one family engagement events. Without the feedback, it wouldn't be possible. Um I'm not going to read through them all, but really people are just proud of our school for seeing this engagement. um they're blown away by like the creativity and how unique it is for kids to really engage things um and
020engaging students of all different levels of learning. You don't have to be, you know, a top tier student to succeed in these events. It could really be anybody. Um so we're just trying to bridge that gap because we're seeing I think when co happened, we saw a disconnect between families and schools and this is just really trying to bring that back. Um and something we're very proud of at the moment. I'm gonna turn it over to Jenna to talk a little bit about the push-in model that we have. Yeah, I'm just want to talk to you a little bit about this. I'm not going to take up much more of your time, but we uh at Pinnacle Elementary School used to do a pull out model for our our reading intervention. Uh basically any students
021who are needing support in the area of reading to get them back up to grade level, we would have those students pulled out during a specific RTI time. they would be working with an interventionist and they would uh we would hope that they would gain those skills and then go back to the classroom and we would see the results in the classroom. Um but we really wanted we really were doing some uh some some work in looking at different models and the pushin model is something that we decided to go with this year. We were able to leverage title one funds to get another interventionist. So now that we have three so we have three uh classrooms per grade level. So, we're able to have one interventionist in each classroom during that RTI time, which
022has been um which has been just so helpful. Um, and the nice thing about it is that we are able to um students are able to remain within their classroom. Um they're it's able to be more inclusive in that way. There's less of a stigma of needing to get help. Uh those students are able to just be in the classroom and they're working in a group just like everybody else is. We have stations in classrooms. So, some are working with the classroom teacher. Other students are working with the interventionists. The interventionists know exact and the classroom teachers know exactly who needs the support and they're they're working on those skills but within the classroom setting. And we have seen a lot of a lot of growth in that. And we are targeting grades K through
023uh two. And in the past, we were spreading ourselves over K through five. Um, and we're really hoping that by, you know, targeting grades K through two, we will see the the benefits. We'll reap the benefits in the upper elementaryaries and maybe we won't have as many students getting interventions in the upper elementary. Maybe our special ed numbers will decrease because they're getting that early intervention. So, we're really working to do that and um we're hoping that the data that we are seeing from this is really we're going to be able to see that in our numbers. Um, so that is something that we're we're going to be paying special attention to, but this is just another way that we're just trying to really um increase student achievement um overall. So that's basically all we
024have. If you have any questions or uh not that's great, too. Yes. First of all, thank you. This sounds really good. I appreciate your effort and all your research that you've done and tracking the data. I do have two questions. Are the interventionist certified teachers? They are. Okay. Does that change the role reading specialist at all? So, we have reading interventionists. We do not have a So, we have a PLA specialist that that is that supports us districtwide. Uh, but we have just our reading interventionist. One of them is a reading specialist. That's her her but they all do the same thing. Yep. Thank you. Yep. All right. Thank you very much. [Applause] So, I'm there. Okay. Next on the agenda is uh non-public session. We are going to go into non-public session under RSA
02591- A3-I B and C. Can I have a um a motion? So moved. Second. Want to call the roll? Yes. Melissa, yes. Jessica Russell, yes. Benson, yes. David. Yes. Stacy Jarvis. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, we are going to go into non-public now. So, in the hallway, we do have we will be um taking action upon returning to public session. So, um who is Um, Monday, thank you. For those of you listening at home, we are going to cut this