Java Park, we are going to have now Matthew Johnson and Niles Hiker, we're gonna talk about packaging with Java Helper. You must probably know Matthew because he gave the previous topic for lunch and presented. So he has a long-term contributor to the Debian Java team and has contributed all these great tools we use. And Niles is also working on that and also not for his work on the Eclipse packaging. So, without further ado. So, when I started packaging Java software, I noticed there was quite a lot of work required and not from any tools to support it. So I wrote Java Helper. Java Helper gives you tools to help you with the packaging workflow all the way from processing upstream releases, which, with a lot of Java software, is more tricky than one would like, right through to installing and building the resulting dev. So, I'm gonna go over a bunch of the tasks that have specialist Java requirements and how the tools in Java Helper can help you do that. And then, also a quick summary of how to use Java Helper from CDBS and DH7. So, firstly, upstream. The problem with a lot of Java upstreams is they give you their source as Java files or as zip files, which obviously we can't put in the archive. A lot of the time they will have bundled the jars that they're from the third-party libraries they depend on. They may even include all of the built-class files and the Java doc that they want to ship as well in the source is all in a single bundle. And if you have to repack this, then you're gonna have to do it every single time there's a new upstream release. So, in order to help with it, we have JHRepack. So, JHRepack is something you can give to Uscan, so you can put it at the end of your watch file list and if you do that, Uscan will invoke it for you every time it gets a new upstream release. Or you can obviously call it by hand with the same syntax. So, what JHRepack will do is, the first thing it will do is it will take whatever archive format upstream has and turn it into a TGZ. It will also go through and remove any of the jars and class files that are embedded in it. And if there's a Java doc tree, it will remove that whole tree and try and clean up all of the directories. So, with any luck, this is sufficient for you to get a DFSG free toggle, which you can actually use as a source file for your package. Now, once you've got your upstream toggle, there may be some things wrong with the build system. So, the first problem is if you've stripped out all of the third-party libraries, the build system is still going to expect you to have them in the tree and not in user-shared Java or wherever else that you're pulling the packaged dependencies from. The build system might not actually work. This is sadly a lot more common than you would like. Oh, it might not even exist. There's a lot of Java upstreams where they ship you some Java files and they say compile them. And they don't give you anything more of a build system than that. And then the build system also might not produce the Java doc, which as I mentioned in the previous talk, we would like all libraries to provide Java docs for the people using it. So, there are a couple of tools here which help with these problems. The first is JHlinkJas. This basically looks through your list of build dependencies and finds all of the jars that are contained within them and simlinks them into the directory where upstreams build system is expecting to find them. This may give you some extra jars that you unnecessarily require links in there, but hopefully the upstreams build system will ignore any of the ones it's not using. And you can do this in the normal DevPelper style by putting a file in Debian directory, just mentioning where you'd like them linked into. And if you do that, one of the things that Java helper has is a clean command which will automatically remove all of the ones there if it's mentioned in Debian link jars. If you don't have a working build system at all, and it may be the case that it fails the same build system test rather than just doesn't work, perhaps actually what you wanna do is just throw it out completely. So jhbuild is designed to, as a simple point and click, I've got a bunch of Java files here, please compile them all and put them in a jar. But for a large number of packages, this is actually all you need from a build system. So there's a selection of ways to call this. Again, there's Debian slash Java build and if you have this file you just list the jar file you want to be produced and where all of your source files are. And it will find all of the Java files and compile them for you. One of the things you will need to do is to set the Java home and the class path because we require all Java packages to build with a known good VM all of the time. So you have to declare which one that is and it can't figure out your class path. Having done that though, it does do a number of useful things for you. It will put the class path in the manifest of the jar and it will also build the Java doc for you. All of the jars which you require to build. Do feel free to chip in with questions at any time I believe there is a mic around. So, that's build systems. If you find that you actually have a reasonably complicated package, this may not be suitable for you. It is designed for the common simple case and in that case you may end up writing an Antwerp Maven build file which you keep in the Debian directory in order to build the package. But hopefully not too many of them. Now if you do have an upstream build system that works at least to some extent, it may miss a few things which actually in Debian we would like. I was talking in the previous talk about whether we should require library packages to declare their class path in the manifest entries. And that is generally a good idea because it means that your R depends don't have to know about your dependencies. However, most Java upstreams are of the opinion that if they release some code, it's in a jar, they've told you what jars you need and perhaps maybe in upstreams world they embed the jars into all of their third party libraries, they don't need to have a manifest entry. So a lot of Java upstreams are missing them. So in order to make this easier, there are a couple of tools for doing that. The Debian specific manifest entries I will refer to later. So the simplest one is JH class path where you basically just have a Debian class path file where you list the path to a jar and the list of jars that it depends on and it will update the class path entry for you. In some more complicated case, maybe you need to set the main class because this is going to be executed with Java dash jar. You can use Debian manifest where you basically embed a manifest entry for each jar that you want. Again, you can just invoke these without any arguments and then if there is a Debian manifest or class path file, it will pick those up. So it's perfect for using in the normal Debian helpful style. So once you've got past building upstream, Java policy gives you a number of requirements for how you install things into your package. In order to avoid code duplication to support all of these, there are a couple of useful Java helper tools as well. So in addition, we may want to change some of these requirements future in policy and if there's a tool that does it for you, then we only have to rebuild packages, we don't have to make source changes. So the first one of these is JH install lips. The policy currently requires that if you have a Java library then at least the top level jar you expect people to link against, you need to put in user share Java and it has to be of a particular format. So package name-version.jar with a sim link from package name.jar. If you just simply list some jar files in Debian slash Jlibs, then they will all get put into the correct location and the version number appended and the sim link set up. Not only that, it will attempt to strip out from the jar file name, things like upstream versions and so on. So it will do quite a good job of guessing that upstream's built this jar file name but we should install it like this. If it will use the package version and strip off DFSG suffixes and things, if you find that you've got a case which is more complicated than the automatic detection works you can give it a regex or help it along if it doesn't can't work things out by itself. The second one here is jh install javadoc and this has three forms. The simplest one, you tell it where your javadoc has been built and it will install it to use shared doc, your package name slash api and it will also generate doc base entry and install that as well. So you get it registered with doc base automatically. If you want, and actually this is one of the more common cases that you want the api to exist under the part user share doc and the, was the doc in a separate package. So live through Java rather than live through Java doc then you can give it the path that you actually want to install it to. And finally, if you've used jh build in order to generate your javadoc, if you say internal it will go off and find the javadoc that it built for you earlier and install that in a normal fashion. So now that will get you as far as giving you a binary package but your binary package at runtime may need some help. Every Java program needs a wrapper script. The kernel can't execute Java code natively. And in some cases you may want to load libjvm.so in your own application, not so much in a Java application but in something which can embed Java inside itself. Now the problem with this is that this is shipped in an architecture specific directory which doesn't use the same architecture names as Debian. So there are a few tools here which provided to help you with that. Oh, I don't have a separate slide for that. So jarapper is a bin format miskelper for jar files. If you set your jar file to be executable and depend on jarapper, then you can invoke it exactly like you would any other program and the kernel will go and run jarapper with your jar as an argument. And jarapper calls java-jar. And in order for that to work, you have to have a, all of your class path entries in a manifest and you need to have a main class attribute to tell it which class is the or entry point to your program. And as I showed earlier, that you can specify some arguments to JH build and it will set those up for you or you can use JH manifest and it will fix the manifest entry of your jar file for you. If you're in the unfortunate situation, which a lot of people are, that you need to pass extra arguments to the JVM or you need to use a specific JVM, there are also a dev-in-specific manifest entries for those which it will unpack and then use that in order to invoke the JVM on your jar file. Go and have a look at the documentation if you want to know what those are. It's documented in the jara-java-helper docs, yeah. Now, one of the other tools I have is JH exec. Now, this makes it quite easy to set up an executable jar file. It will, package build time, scan all of the places it expects a binary to be. If one of those is either a jar or a sim link to a jar, it will set that executable for you and then automatically in your build tree. And then as we'll see later, this will automatically generate a dependency on jar wrapper for you. So, if you install your jar as normal and use DH link to put a sim link into user bin, everything else will happen for you. Java files.show is something which is shipped. There's two versions of it. One's shipped in java-helper and one is shipped with jar wrapper. If at runtime you need to know, get, for example, the path to libjvm.so, you give it a java-home and it will look at your devian architecture and work out the path you need for that. There's also a version which is a make file snippet so that you can include this at build time if you needed it at build time, which is shipped with java-helper as well. So, now, dependence lines. After having put all of your libraries in build depends and put all of them in your class path and put all of them in your manifest entry, putting the list in the menu depends line is also a little tedious. Fortunately, we can do something about that. So, there's also a few other things you need in your depends lines like some alternate depends on different jarris and virtual packages. And if you've got an executable jar, you also need jar wrapper in your dependencies. So, we have jh-depends. The advantage of jh-depends is this is a single place where all of this happens for you. So, you don't have to write the code and if we change any of this in policy, it'll all happen automatically. So, jh-depends will do a number of things for you. First thing it does is it looks at all of your jar files. If those jar files have a class path entry, it takes the jars listed in there and works out which packages contain them and then it puts those into your depends. In fact, it populates a variable called javacode on depends which you can then put in your control file. The second thing it will do is if you have an executable jar or you've called it to tell it that you need to depend on a runtime, it will automatically figure out which virtual package you need to depend on based on your class file versions. And it will also, you can also specify which VM you want to be as default. CS. So, the next thing I'm gonna hand over to Niles who's written the support for Eclipse and Eclipse and features in Java Helper. Yeah. As said, I have built some tools for building Eclipse packages, not Eclipse itself, but packages like hopefully Eclipse CDT and EMF and RSS, which are already in the archive. They use these helpers. They're based on the PDE-based build from upstream which basically looks at the manifest files of the plugin it's building and a number of other files and auto-generates an end-base build on that. Which is also very great, but the problem is that the clean target doesn't clean up these auto-generated build files which causes a problem in terms of our requirements for cleaning. The solution to that is today is to simply copy the whole thing into a new year, build it there and then remove that directory when we're done building. This is also the thing we do for Eclipse itself when we build. And for that, we have JHA setup environment where you simply tell it which files it should copy into a build there, which it will create for you. There is a deep helpful file for that, which is not listed here, but you can make it help a like file for that. Secondly, Eclipse is based on a lot of non-Eclipse plugins and they have a special syntax for being a second special requirement to be included in the build. Namely, Eclipse plugins are automatically figured out from their features that are included. But when you need to build a link against something like some of the Apache graph files which are actually pretty common in Eclipse, they have to be specified as orbit dependencies, which is actually a very fancy name for just external dependencies. That being said, there are some special requirements for that. First of all, it needs to have the USGEI metadata, which most of them most often don't share with by default. We are in the luck that most Eclipse core plugins, they take the upstream plugins themselves and compile them with this so we can just download the official OSG bundles, OSGI bundles and read the manifest from there and just copy it to our build and include it. In some cases, however, they embed the actual orbit dependency directly into the Eclipse bundle and just had this require bundle class path that tells Eclipse to load the jar file from within another jar file. And that obviously doesn't work too well. Again, we have to manually solve this by adding the USGEI metadata to the external dependency and then replace the bundle class path with a require bundle instead. But other than that, it's mostly done. So, other than that, by default, if it just from orbit, what we do instead here in Daven is we set up a orbit directory during build time where we just put symlinks to their actual dependencies. And we have a help or two to that because it's relativious and the names doesn't fit. So, JH to generate orbit deal will be given a list of jar files. It will read all it needs to know from these jar files if they have the OSGI metadata and we'll just create the actual symlinks and names. It will even go further and generate a part of a dependency list for in a substitution mark called the orbit call and dependence you can use for your package. It will always be set if you use this tool, even if there are no orbit dependencies. So you can always just add it. Next thing is actually building these plugins and currently we only have support for building a feature which is basically a set of plugins or sometimes a set of features. In this case, upstreams are usually very good at separating each plugin to a folder with manifest, its source files and also it's very neatly separated. And the manifests have all the information we need thanks to the OSGI metadata. And in fact, just starting the build, the upstream build system which is a modified version of and on top of that will actually figure everything out itself. So the problem is as listed, it takes our ten arguments to invoke this to avoid it writing to your home directory which we can't do during a build deed even sort of other things. We have been working with Linux tools, specifically the Eclipse build start project which has provided us two wrapper scripts for this, one to be used directly and one that's used behind the scenes and they do a very good job of starting handling all of this but still it does not work very much like a Debian build, a Debian help out tool. And for that, I have created DH compile features which is a wrapper on that. Simply given a list of IDs to build and this can also be specified in a Debian help out file which is unfortunately not mentioned. It will generate all the features for you and just leave them for Eclipse install. Now DH install Eclipse which will then pick them up and install them. The only thing you need to do is list which packages each features goes into. We also have another problem with the build features is that they contain the open dependencies, a full copy of it. So when you use this, it will un-pack time when it installs into the package find these open dependencies and we replace them with a sim link. But other than that, it's just a fancy wrapper find zip that we had nowhere to find the given zip files and that was basically it on Eclipse over. So having gone over all of the individual programs, fortunately we're now in an enlightened age where you don't have to list all of these manually in your Debian rules file. We have instead a number of frameworks for doing packaging. So let's have a look first, DH7. That's a DH7 file, which Debian rules file which will do everything you need to do for building Java packages, hopefully. So the old dash with Java helper, obviously you depend on Java helper and you need to give it perhaps a class path and the path to a Java home. Now if you're using Ant, then Depp Helpers auto build support should hopefully pick up your Ant build scripts and invoke that correctly and if you're using JH build then that will all be picked up just by doing this. CDBS is reasonably similar. Instead we have environment variables to do the JH build invocation and then you have to include Java help.mk as well as the CDBS stuff. But otherwise it's the same. Obviously this is only the ideal world so you may end up having to override some things but that will just work exactly like you'd expect with Depp Helper you can do override some JH tool and that'll work perfectly normally. So in order to make this even easier for people I wrote a tool called JH make package and you can rock up in some build tree from upstream call that and it will try and build for you a Debian directory which will need a little bit of modification with copyright files and so on but we'll basically hopefully get a lot of this stuff right for you. One that doesn't need a lot of extra talk tweaking if you don't have a working build system and you need to patch it or give it unusual arguments or whatever then you're gonna need to tweak this for a bit. So Java helper contains documentation in the package which is installed in the obvious place. We have a website and a mailing list if you want to ask any questions about this and this will shortly be linked from the website as I mentioned previously, a series of examples which I'm writing which gives you all of the packaging you need to build and install a simple package of various types of various different build systems. So one of the things I haven't mentioned in this talk is Maven. Maven is a build system which is gaining a lot of popularity with upstreams. It works for the model that the Maven repositories will contain all the sources in the world ever and when you run your Maven script it will go and download them all for you and attempt to build everything which obviously is not great when you're trying to build on a buildy without network access. As such we have solutions for this which are separate to Java helper. There's a number of Maven packaging tools which is why I haven't mentioned them here but you'll have to go and look this up separately but if you do have a package that uses Maven we do have some support for that. So does anybody have any questions about this or anything else related to packaging Java? Do you know how many packages are using Java helper for now? I think at least 70 maybe 80 as I recall. What's the question in the back? So having not seen your examples yet can you point me to some packages which you think have good practices? Well you should have a look at the examples I've written if I'll go to, not there apparently. I will have a sort that out in a minute after some of the questions. All of my packages are done using Java helper and with that help of seven. A lot of the ones where I'm also upstream use make files as the build system which is atypical for Java but I like make. So there's also a free market Java for an example of how to link Java docs. It's one of the first ones that were converted to that part. Yes, one of the things I forgot to mention because it was written after we wrote the slides is that when you're generating Java doc if JH build will automatically work out if you have a Java doc package in your dependencies it will use links so that the generated Java doc links to the new one and if you do have Java doc which has links like that then we will automatically give you a dependency list or a recommend list containing those other Java doc packages. So again, this is all done for you. Yeah, that will first be in 232. Yeah, which hopefully we'll upload this week. Yeah, I just wanted to talk a little bit about man pages. So as with any program that's in Devian if you ship a program you ship man page for it. There's no specific support in here for generating man pages. There are other things which will do that if your upstream doesn't contain a man page which with Java software is almost certain. But yes, you should provide a man page for it. No, we don't have anything there but there are tools like Dotbook to man and the various other things where or help to man if you're in the lucky position that it has a usable help output which is also unlikely. But yeah, that's documented elsewhere. Dotbook to man, help to man. You can see the pattern. Yes, I'm looking at packaging Etherpad which is quite a big mess, I suppose. It's very beautiful. That's common. Yeah, so how much can Java helper help out with? And also a lot of the jar files, they bundle jar files and build with some shell script. And the jar files, some of them are in already existing Debian packages like openoffice.org-common. How? Ideally you're gonna have to package all of the dependencies independently and it may be the case that to package your program you need to then first of all package five or so libraries separately. Which I have started doing. Yeah, if your libraries are of the form here are some Java files, compile them and stick them in a jar. Java helper makes that almost entirely trivial. Everything gets done for you. If you're in a situation where actually you do have quite a complicated piece of software it needs to do various things at runtime which mean that you can't just run a jar file and so on then that becomes a lot more difficult. And there's not a lot we can do to try and help. However, where we can, if you have any suggestions for extra helper tools I'm more than happy to include them. But a lot of the things there are still gonna be useful and still gonna be able to help you package them more quickly. So I mean it depends precisely what is going on with your piece of software. It may be the case that you can have a rules file that looks like that and a few files in Debian and if so that's great. If it's reasonably large and complicated then you'll probably have to do at least some stuff by hand but hopefully we can get rid of some of the problems for you. Yeah, the Debian Java team is very helpful so far I've seen so. Thanks. So on IRC you had mentioned a preference for DH7 over CDBS. Any, can you elaborate on that a little bit? What Beedow said. I don't really understand CDBS very much. I wrote this by cribbing from some other things. DH7 just seems a lot more obvious as to how it works to me. All of the override stuff is very nice and you read it and it's pretty obvious what's going on if you understand DH7. All DH7 does is just run all the DH commands in order. So yeah, it's basically it's a long form old Dev helper but without having all of the tedious typing. Plus I suppose Java helper might do great slightly better because I understand what's going on. I was just gonna say, in addition to a nice simple DH7 file, I mean the other thing that seems to have to happen packaging up Java stuff is you need to patch up an upstream ant file if it's done with ant because they'll hard code jar versions and things like that. And I'm just wondering, this is just an idea I'm throwing out there. Maybe that could be automated where we actually, we look at the name of the jar maybe we sure as typically figure out well. We have this jar in Debian or we don't. I mean sometimes it's even knowing where to start. Yeah, because you gotta find all those jars to figure out whether or not they're actually in there. It's a version you need. So I'm actually working on free TTS at the moment which is the flight re-implementation in Java and contrary to popular belief if you leave the Java sound API stuff off the rest of it's completely free software and works just great. But I spent a lot of time angsting over whether to care about the existing ant build.xml or not because in fact about 90% of its content is a poorly written attempt to do all the things that you don't actually wanna do for a Debian package. But by which I mean it emits an incredibly heavy jar file that has all the docs and lots of demo executables and other junk in it. And a lot of the logic that's in there is all about building all these subservient pieces and making them part of the distributable thing. And after spending quite a bit of time trying to unwrap that and understand, get over my fierce aversion to XML for build logic and dig through it, what I realized is oh, what I actually want to have happen here is really, really simple and this is just the wrong approach. So I'm actually right now sort of sitting here doing it the other way which is forget the existing build file, treat it as if it just didn't come with one and craft from scratch and I think I'm gonna end up with something I'm much, much happier with. This course is obviously very dependent on the individual case of what the upstream gave you. So the URL is actually packagejava.aleas.org slash examples and this is what we have at the moment. So if you have a look at the simplest case here, then it'll give you everything you need in your debinder, which is that much. And the trivial debind rules file. So that's the sort of thing I've got for the examples and it does at the moment only cover simple cases with Ant and with using JH Build as the build system but that should give you enough of a clue to work from there and I'm hoping to add more examples as I think them up. And any other questions? Cool, well I'm happy for anybody to column me afterwards and ask me questions and or to come and talk on IOC or the mailing list. Sorry, I had a last question. So all these tools, you feel comfortable maintaining them yourself. You want more people to help you and isn't there written in pro? I'm always happy to have help. Niles is now helping working on them. The majority of, now about half and half, I originally started writing things as shell scripts. We're slowly moving stuff over to Pearlware where it's too complicated for that or where Niles has written them because he speaks Pearl and I don't. I'm perfectly happy for people to submit patches or entirely new tools or rewrite things in Pearl for me, that's totally fine. Yeah, one of the tricks of rewriting the things in Pearl is we can use the official debhelber backend which deals with a lot of problems for us like argument parsing, a lot of them just gets fixed by debhelber backend so that's one of the reasons. I'm happy for people to rewrite stuff in Pearl for me but I don't know enough Pearl to do it myself yet. Cool.


We had a fabulous time in Vernon. It was thanks to the great group we had and to our facilitator, Penny. So thanks, Penny. I just wanted to... We were really influenced by the work of Allington, of course. But Fay talked so much about that yesterday that we were just going to just skim over that little piece. But what I really liked was the book that we chose to use, and we used it as a book study. And so that was kind of the piece that made things maybe a little different for our school district. We chose Catching Readers Before They Fall. And something that Judy mentioned this morning that really rung true for me was the link between the research, what Allington was saying, what Fay was telling us, and then what was in this book was really powerful. So if you haven't looked at it and you're looking for a great book to support your work, this one really does the trick. Our teachers loved it. So we need the next slide. Oh, wow, that was good. One of the pieces that we spent a lot of time thinking about was every child reading accurately. This brought up all kinds of questions for us around the 98% accuracy and then the balance with choice. And we did talk about that yesterday, but we talked a lot about that with our group as well. And I think it was a conversation that helped everyone deepen their understanding about what are we actually trying to do with the different types of reading that we're doing throughout the day. So we found a huge growth with our students when they worked with books where they were really confident because the kids came to us not particularly liking reading and they left loving reading. So we found that it built self-confidence, a willingness to try strategies and built stamina when we worked with some easier books with them. And that was a very important piece for us. The other piece that worked was really successful was the one around writing about something personally meaningful. We had them writing little books and we got this idea out of catching readers. So they were making little books that the kids helped to write and it was just a lot of fun. And one of the other things that we did was we found some really funny pictures on the internet of animals and put together these funny animal books. And then the children just wrote in their little group, they created a book together. And even though the language that they used was far more sophisticated than what they could read, this was their favorite book to read every time. So we sent these pictures out to all the people in the groups and they all used them and it was a really powerful thing. And the kids just had such ownership on them that they wanted them and we made them eat a copy and they took them home. So that was just a really fun thing that we did. We also looked at every child read something that he or she understands. This made our thinking change to looking at meaning, to read for meaning. And it was funny where we would always interrupt the child. When they started to struggle on a word or sentence, we'd always jump in and give them the strategy that we felt that they needed to use. So we kind of went, okay, Allington says, quit interrupting them, let them read to the bottom of the page. And then we decided we would ask them, did that make sense or really decide? Do you understand what you just read? So we liked that idea, but it was hard for us as teachers just to sit and not say anything. And at one point the student would struggle with the word and I'd go, then they already knew that they'd made a mistake. So we had to sit on our hands and close our mouths and just let that child read through and figure out did they make a mistake, did it make sense and was that okay? Faye brought this queuing system to our attention and I think we'd probably all heard about it before, but I think between what we learned here and what we got out of the book, this really changed our thinking, this MS and V stuff. So it was totally new thinking for some of our teachers and some of us just kind of needed to think about it again. And look more closely at it. So that was something that the book did a really good job on. It helped deepen our understanding of that and helped us realize that not all of our children need to be working on the same strategies and we need to figure out which strategies they need to work on. We had to observe very closely thinking about meaning and the MSV changed the way we did think about that. So we had to start observing very closely. In this way we were able to give our children that immediate feedback that they needed. In fact we had, this is one of our case study students, he didn't have the language to tell us what he was thinking. So we had to really watch closely. Our teacher here was watching his eyes. Where were they? What was he doing? Is he looking at the pictures? Is he rereading? What cues are we seeing? What strategies is he using? And he eventually, at the end of the case study, he was able to articulate what it was that he was doing and what strategies worked for him. I love this whole idea of making all of this a little bit more fun, a little bit more joyful. And some of the things that we were doing was, and another person showed this this morning, or yesterday I'm not sure, but cutting up the sentences and then playing with it, that was a really powerful thing for helping children think about what makes sense and that one around, does this sound right? And then using the magnetic letters helped them really focus on visual cues. So we all learned that we needed to think about our kids as individuals and not have a predetermined lesson plan. So we became more flexible and we started, we moved all of our word work from the beginning of our guided reading lesson plan to the end of our lesson plan so that we were seeing what they were actually doing before we decided what words we were going to focus on and what skills. So that was kind of a neat thing for a nice change that we made. And of course this stuff is all supported in the book that we were reading. And going along with the fun theme, I pulled out markers one day, you can use word markers as well. We did word work right on the tables that we were reading at. So we pulled out a marker and started writing on the table, looking at words that were taken directly from the books that we were reading. So it made the learning more authentic. You can use different colors and for different words. So we were working on compound words this day. And the kids were so excited to go back to their class and say, Mrs. McLaughlin pulled the mark, we wrote on the tables! And I've printed the pictures out and have them up on the wall. And they bring kids into my classroom and they go, look what we were doing. So it just brought a whole lot of fun back into it for them. And then just finally, one of the big things, and of course Sharon talked about this, that we noticed with our group was the engagement and the confidence that changed. And that they actually loved reading afterwards. I remember asking this little boy, when he first came, he hated reading. He told me he hated reading. And when he left, I asked him, and he was just so excited about the books he was reading and how much he loved it. And he recognized the change in himself, so that was really fun. But the other piece that was so important here was that the teachers in our group loved teaching reading. They were so excited and I thought that was a really cool piece to it as well. So thank you. That was our story.


A lot of Joe artists wasn't really working with girls. I feel like he was one of the first ones I was I was cuz I like the girls.  Yeah, like when's the girl doing too much?  The clip may be done, but there's still more to come make sure y'all like comment and subscribe to stay up to date with the latest talk of the town interviews


So we're coming up on a new year and the last couple years have been great I have lots of viewers that I enjoy making videos for and along the way I've had a few supporters as well I have a donate button on my website to where you can donate and help support my site and I Occasionally get some donations, which is nice, but I thought I'd give you guys a little bit of encouragement to make a donation right now from the time of posting this video through January of due January of 2014 So a little over a month now any donations made on my website will go directly into buying Hardware I will do tutorials on I love doing software tutorials And I'd like to incorporate the software tutorials in with some hardware So I definitely would like to do more with hardware, but hardware costs money. I've done some tutorials on Arduinos in the past But it gets expensive even though the Arduino itself is cheap to get all these accessories to do cool things with it costs money So, you know, I would really love to to learn about You know building robots I'd like to try to build a quad bot at some point or a hexapod bot I'd love to look into what's very popular right now is the quad copters It'd be great if I could get a some sort of low-end 3d printer You know something some stuff along that lines, you know things that cost a couple hundred dollars that I don't have to spend That you guys might be interested in seeing videos on And seeing how they work and how we can incorporate some software into them especially with the robot or a quad copter writing software that interacts with them and sends them commands and As I said Any money that I receive through donations on my website films by chris.com That's chris with a K link in the description or maybe I'll put something up on the screen here Any donations made through the end of january 2014 will go directly into buying some sort of hardware Of course it all depends on how much money I receive and I'll discuss with the people donating the money what they would like to see And And I'll do videos on whatever is I'm able to purchase if I get twenty five dollars I'll find twenty five dollars worth of hardware and do some sort of tutorial on that if I get a thousand dollars I'll do a video on thousand. I know a thousand dollars. I could probably buy a couple of things hopefully But definitely would love to do some hardware tutorials Software tutorials that interact with the hardware that sort of stuff. So if you're interested in seeing that And you'd like to help support my site as well go to my site films by chris.com chris of the K link in the description And go ahead and make a donation. I appreciate all my donations. I have received up to date and I love Just making my videos and it's great when I have viewers that are willing and able to support me I thank you all who have supported me in the past and all that will support me in the future And again, this is just a little period of time where you know lots of times the stuff I when I get donations I Am able to put some of that back into You know hardware. I've done a few things. You know, I bought raspberry pies and stuff like that But mostly the money I receive is you know paying for the website Camera equipment microphones that sort of stuff. And of course I I get some of it for my time But directly into hardware you will see in the videos is what you will get with any donations made in the next Month and a half for about so I thank you for watching I hope you have a great day, and I hope that you have a little bit extra this holiday season to Go ahead and and help support my site and my videos. Thank you very much and as always have a great day


Rochester Stockbridge Unified School District remote public informational hearing notice and agenda for April 27th, 2021 and May 3rd, 2021. This is the May 3rd one, obviously. We'll be holding two public informational meetings and this is the second of them. The vote is tomorrow. Justine is here. Excellent. Good. First is additions or deletions to the agenda. I would like to add a board comment, which we will do right after additions or deletions. Yes, to the agenda. Is that acceptable to all our board members, Amy? Good. I can't see all the others, so I may have to hear from you, Carl. Carl, I'm good. Yep, Jenny. That's good. And Justine. Sounds good. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Amy, why don't you start with yours first? Oh, okay. Great. I just wanted to clarify. I had misspoke at the prior informational meeting and the research was clear that one of our endowments indeed can be used for building. So I wanted to clarify that. I misspoke last time. Very good. I have a couple of comments. I just want to make sure if anybody else has. Justine, do you have a board comment? No, thank you. Carl, do you have a board comment? I'm good for now. Jenny, do you have a board comment? I do not. Good. Thank you. Okay. Just to sort of finish up, first thing. Sorry. I forget my manners. Thank you and welcome all to all who have joined us tonight. We're very happy to have you here to they prepared our budget people have prepared a really good presentation for us tonight. We saw it last week and it was very impressed. So I hope and you'll have questions to answer. We'll get to that. The agenda is a little odd because it's designed as if we were in public session where we would talk about each article. We will get to that time where each article can be questioned. First, we're going to do our board comment. Then we're going to have a presentation about the entire budget by Amy, Tara and Jamie. And then we'll go article by article through the warning. And after each article, you will get a chance to ask questions about that specific article or anything. You know, we can get into more general questions as well about the budget at that time. So anything that's presented tonight. So just to say the agenda looks a little funny, but just so you know, it's it will get to that format where you get to comment. And finally, what I want to say too is just to make clear, I've been hearing some confusion and people were like, well, why do we vote on a budget when the schools are going to be unmerged? Well, of course, right now Stockbridge has an unmerged vote, they're going to revote on May 19. Rochester also has to vote. So the merger is not yet unmerged, but regardless, even if the merger does break up from the best information we've received is that the Department of Ed would not let the merger break up until after the next school year, it would take that amount of time so that the R side will be running the two campuses next year, regardless of the vote. I think that's very important that this isn't a frivolous budget to put out there and then the schools unmerge the two campuses unmerge. This is essential to get through our our next year regardless. Carl, you're muted. Well, exactly. I was going to say that we I want to remind everyone that assuming the Stockbridge vote, initial vote stands in the reconsideration election, assuming Rochester votes to unmerge as well, the State Board of Education still has to convene and look at the plan of how the assets will be divided, so on and so forth, basically the opposite process that we went through with the State Board of Education when we came together in the merger three years ago, four years ago or whatever. And if you recall, from that timeline, it does take a while. Once the once the votes are affirmed, the disposition of assets, the planning for the incorporation of the two districts, the electing of the of each of the town's new school board, there's a number of steps that need to happen. And so I want to support what Ethan's saying that yeah, this is not this will be a deal that will be done for the 2223 school year. If it happens. So we need a budget for next year. It's a good budget. We believe in it. They've worked hard on it. As you'll see tonight, I hope you'll ask good questions or excellent questions last week. And we hope you'll come out of this meeting fully informed. That is our goal. Finally, on board comment is this is our last meeting with two very valued board members, Jenny and Carl. And I would like to take a moment to say a few things about them both. And then I would like to open it up if anybody else would like to say in our gathering here tonight, I think it's a little unorthodox during board comment, but I just think it's an appropriate time. First, Carl, I just want to start off with you. I came into this knowing nothing really absolutely nothing about the schools let alone school board. And I just I have learned so much from you and your extensive knowledge of how this works. And not only how this board works or the meetings work, but how the school system works, how the state works. And I just, you know, I've learned so much from you. I think your your knowledge, but also your your you do so well in a crisis, my friend. I think of the tax one is the one that jumps on me where all of us were caught blindsided. And you just was like, took took it by the, you know, what is it, bull by the horns, something like that. And and just ran with it. And I so appreciate your ability to see all the pictures of that and and and pull us together and get us through it. So thank you, my friend. It's been great. As I said last time, I hope I can keep you on speed dial because there are going to be questions. We're going to come up and you're not going to be there to go, excuse me, we need to vote on this. So thank you so much. And it's been a privilege to serve with you. Jenny, I just first thing off is you've done an incredible job at the one job you were actually never supposed to do, which is keeping impeccable notes of our meetings. And perhaps you enjoyed it, perhaps it allowed you to keep sort of a frame of what you did here. But I think all of us who can appreciate who have looked over meeting notes can can just say your incredible attention to detail. But really, that's nothing compared to, for me, your strongest asset to us is your incredible attention to detail, ability to look through large documents, whether they're budgets or word documents or things like that, and see this, that, this, that, and then explain your point of view very clearly. And I just, invaluable, invaluable because I'm a, I'm a broad picture guy, I always have been, that's my nature. And to have someone like you who really pays attention to the little possibilities and brings that up. And the other part I would like to say is that there's several times in our meetings where we've all been sort of going around and around and, and you've really had the clarifying view and, and just sort of had the sort of simple, how about this? And I just, I just value that so much. And I think it's partially how you're able to sit back and sort of take in the big picture. So I very much appreciate your efforts for us. And, and thank you so much. I have, again, learned from you so much. And I've also enjoyed working on the, the annual report with you. And again, your attention to detail. So thank you very much. And now I would open it up. And this includes the public. If the public who has gathered here today would like to add in any comments, but let's start with our board first. And then if you would like to raise your hand, those of you on video, and I'll look and see if we have our own Google Meets. So, Justine, anything to add? Just, thank you for, for all your hard work. I mean, I haven't been on the board for very long, but you've both set very good examples for me. And I've learned a lot so far, different things from each of you. And I appreciate everything that you've done. So thank you. Sad to see both of you go, actually. Amy? Yeah, I agree with everything that you guys are saying. And it is very sad to see you guys go because this has been a really wonderful team. And it's been wonderful working with both of you. And you've just brought each of you have brought wonderful things to the table and are greatly appreciated. Megan, are you on at this moment? I am. I am. I just want to say thank you to both of you. You guys have just been incredible with your knowledge and your willingness to share. And there are definitely some big shoes fill. And I just hope you guys all come back for a meeting with me once in a while. See how we're doing. Just to say hi. Thank you for all that you've done. Yeah, of course, just to say hi. Maybe with a little budget help, too. But I greatly appreciate the dedication that you both have demonstrated and given so much of your time. And I just really appreciate it. Do either of you have comments, things you would like to share? And that's perfectly fine if you want to say no. Carl? Of course, I have something to say. This has been a really, I can't believe I've been doing this for 15 years. This was something that I got involved with because, you know, my kids were going to this school and there was the opportunity for me to do just this, speak up and get involved and say things. And Julie took the PTO and I took the school board. And it's been nice to work for the community. I felt really good about the things that I've done. And I at least feel like I did my part to make our little school a lot better. And I'm really, really confident that everyone going forward is going to do the same thing. Ethan, you know a lot more than you think you do. And I didn't know anything when I started, too. You live and you learn. You've got a good administration. You've got a good community. And you know, thank you to everyone that's sent me messages and dropped me a line. I really appreciate the positive support. And I'm sorry for all the people that I probably offended along the way because I'm sure I have. But thank you, everybody. It's been a wonderful time. Thank you, Carl. Jenny, do you have any comments? Yeah, I guess, first of all, I'd like to thank Carl as well for his 15 years of school board experience. I think a lot of board members have come and gone in that time. And you know, he definitely holds a lot of knowledge and all the procedures and state statues that he knows on top of his head. And I know it took a lot of time to build on that knowledge. Definitely thank him for his time. Bit of a short timer compared to Carl, but it's been a really great experience working with everyone on the board and the communities and the administration. I'm not going to say that it's easy, but it's been a really great experience. And I would encourage anyone to seek out an opportunity if it comes their way, whether it's school board or select board or PTO. I just think it's a really great learning experience for anyone. And also does bring you closer to your community. There's definitely some names on this list that I've come to know that I wouldn't know otherwise. And I just think overall, it's just a great opportunity to participate in your community. And myself, who has had one kid in the school, now has a different kid as a school as she works her way through. And it's a great way to learn the ins and outs of the school and the supervised reunion as well. I've definitely learned a lot through the process. So it's been great. Thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Jenny. Are there any members of our public who are on who would raise your hand if you would like to say a word or two, if not Beth Daly? I would like to thank both of them. Carl, your ability to calculate the school budget tax rate to the end before the budget is passed has always fascinated me. I couldn't even figure out how many people we were getting accounted for because of the formulas. So that minuté, and that's what you and Jenny have both brought to the board, is you know how to manage the minuté of running a school. The reports are precise and correct. And it's all there if you want to spend the time reading it because Jenny's put it there. Mm-hmm. Thank you so much, both of you. Thank you so much, Beth. Anyone else care to make a comment? Rebecca Burns. Go ahead, Rebecca. Actually, it's me here, Mother, because my computer is not working. Oh, no worries. Okay, I just want to thank Carl for his many years of service. I know we but it had sometimes Carl with the questions that I asked, but I appreciate all the information you gave to us. And Jenny, I want to thank you for serving the years that you've served. I think you've done a great job, both of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any further comments before we move on? Okay, very good. Well, thank you both. Yeah. Huh, it's going to be different. We'll see what's ahead. All right. Moving on, I think it's time for our, is Jamie here? Jamie's here. Tara's here. And Amy, if you'd like to take it away from the presentation. Right. Ray, do you want to project? And I'll hand it over to Ms. Stetson. Oh, Lindy too. Sorry, Pauline. No worries. I was happy to let someone else take over, but gladly. So welcome to our second informational meeting for those who are joining us and, you know, are looking virtually at some people that maybe you've never met in person before. Just some introductions. There's Ethan Bowen who serves as our Rochester Stockbridge Unified District School Board Chair. And Amy Wilt serves as our Vice Chair. Jenny Austin is serving as our clerk. I believe this is her last, maybe tomorrow is her last official duties as clerk. Carl Grappi, Justine Cavacus, and Megan Payne. In terms of administration, we have our superintendent, Jamie Canarney, myself and Bonnie Bowen serve as co-principals, and then Tara Weatherall is our business manager for the Supervisor Union. So just some details. We did have an informational meeting that was left Tuesday, and then again tonight at 6.30 if you're tuning in for the second night. Thank you. This is the same material, but the different pieces would be questions if folks have other questions. It is an Australian ballot for both communities, and both town offices are open from 10 to 7 tomorrow, which is where you can vote in person if you did not request your ballot via online or by calling the town offices. So it is something that's different this vote, because we did not just mass mail out to all registered voters their ballots. So you do have to either go to the town offices tomorrow or return your absentee ballots by tomorrow to your appropriate polling place. So as you can see here, there's a sample Rochester ballot. It is the same in both communities, with the exception of what was voted on on March 3rd was that each town would vote their representation in in terms of school board representatives. So you will see two seats in Rochester and one seat open in Stockford. Other way around everybody's flipping fingers. Sorry, Stockford has two seats open and Rochester has one. And I believe in Rochester, Amy Will is available for a write-in as well as in Stockbridge for the open seat that doesn't have a candidate. Patrick Hudson, I believe, is interested in the position. This is you, Mr. Kinnerney. Thanks. Good evening. Thanks for joining us. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Jamie Kinnerney. And the superintendent of the school is at WRBSU. And it's hard to believe this is the second budget now we're navigating together. And so some of the things that change at WRBSU, as you know, we had in general some significant issues around debt across the supervisory union and most of our member districts, not our side, but we did have a deficit that was run at the WRBSU the last two years, so what you pay part of. And so what we did back in the early fall is one, we adopted a new WRBSU policy in regards to budgeting. And what that spoke to was that we were going to go about it our work differently around zero base budgeting and not look at what do we spent money on historically. What do we need to have a highly functioning school district in operation? And I feel really confident that the administration has done a good job of going about their work that way in conjunction with the board. And what I think you have to for tomorrow is a policy statement that really speaks to making certain you have the resources needed to provide high quality support and instruction for students. Part of that was restructuring our central office for next year at the SU. We were able to redo several different admin positions. And where those reductions came from was how we were utilizing our consolidated federal grant money at the SU level. And what we've done when we get to look at the revenue page, you'll see that we were able to provide additional resources via Medicaid funds and the consolidated federal grant to our local school districts to increase supports to students and to have offsetting revenue to decrease the amount of money we needed to collect locally to fund the district. Again, we focused on fiscal responsibility throughout lens of proactive approach to student support and intervention. So we're trying to do more early intervention through something that folks hear me talk a lot about is called a multi-tiered system of supports, which is making certain every child and student in the SU gets what they need to succeed. And so that we support them to reach their greatest success. And what that's allowed us to do is to be able to keep our special education budget essentially flat for next year, which is a positive because it resulted in us not needing to increase the SU assessment on our local districts. We're putting a great deal of focus in investment in teachers and our programs. And what I mean by that is is that we're getting ready to launch a strategic professional development plan starting in August of this year that's going to focus on providing teachers additional training in mathematics in literacy and in social emotional support and learning. So that we have strategic PD so that teachers have common professional development that increases their content area knowledge so that they can better meet our students needs and differentiate to meet their students. And when I say meet our students needs, I mean all students, our highest achieving students and our students who we know need additional support and a different approach to education to reach proficiency. And then finally, I'm really proud that there's been an increase in our dependence around the three around our eight schools. And I can give you an example is that we've brought our school nurses together throughout COVID on a regular basis. We were able to have a pretty significant professional learning community that tackled our recovery effort for the WRV SU and that resulted in us being able to open up five days a week for in person learning. We were able to implement our own virtual learning academy that had our own licensed teachers and administrators from across the supervisory union, they were able to support our students across the SU K through 12 with virtual instruction if families chose that type of mode of learning due to safety concerns. And so we're able to do both of those and provide our own highly trained and licensed teachers and we would not been able to navigate that if we didn't work together. I'm so I'm very proud of those accomplishments and we look to continue to learn from each other and to really strengthen the relationship across the SU schools. Thank you. So as we start to move forward in our future and what we're really using this budget as a tool to help support our direction of learning as a unified district, we're really focusing on strengthening our universal instruction in literacy and mathematics. And what that means is not just professional development for teachers, the appropriate programming or materials they may need to support student learning as well as what they're providing for instruction, but it means all students will receive the highest quality of instruction from all our teachers in mathematics and literacy. We're also going to be using different literacy coaches as well as mathematics coach and interventionist, which will help really strengthen those skills of all our teachers, which really speaks to what Jamie was speaking about in terms of investing in our teachers and not programming. We have been building and continue to build on a robust multi-tiered system of supports for students. So that means meeting students every need or every need, excuse me, whether it's socially emotionally as well as academically through things like kinesthetic learning, outdoor education, all those opportunities that we're really trying to focus on for all our kids. And then we're improving our educational programming with this budget. We're excited to offer two new opportunities to our students and families next year, which will include outdoor education as well as world language. Some of the ways we're doing this and really focusing in is making decisions based on data. So we're focusing on developing what's known as a continuous improvement plan, how to continue to make sure our students are receiving the best education possible with this data-driven school-wide plan for both campuses that speaks to preschools through sixth grade schools for all our students. Some of the ways we're doing that is we're using a tool called STAR 360, which is an assessment given three times a year in both mathematics and literacy. And it provides great data around whether students are on grade level or different focus skills that we really need to hone in on to make sure our students are learning everything they need to for their grade level. We did want to highlight some celebrations, been a unique year with COVID, but our students on both the Rochester and Stockbridge campuses have maintained reading levels between last December pre-COVID and all the way now to January 2021. And we've seen this great rate of growth for all our students. They've closed some gaps very quickly just by returning to in-person learning. We've also seen the number of office referrals or some folks might think of that as time spent in the principal's office decreasing tremendously and actually able to celebrate more accomplishments than meeting learning expectations instead of having to think about ways for consequences of behavior. Probably the biggest highlight that's not that common statewide or nationwide is that we are able to return and did return for five days a week of in-person learning from day one for pre-K through six. And up to this point, I'm going to tack another five days on. So we're at 138 days so far and only of in-person learning and only 10 days of the school year have been virtual. We're not gone wood that we can continue in that great path. We are seeing math as an area that needs and deserves our focus. And we've already begun working through professional development, training, as well as sending some of our in-service time as staff to strengthen our universal instruction that all students receive in this area. And we'll continue this practice with coaching support throughout the 2021-2022 school year. And then we're very proud of how much time our kids spend outdoors, whether it's been in the woods or under tents or under these great trust structures that are on both campuses. And that wouldn't have been possible without community support or PTO support to be able to fund those projects. So it's been a great part of our success. And with that being said, that is one of our focal points of next year. 100% of our students pre-school through sixth grade have been able to access and learn outdoors throughout the entire year. Like I said, it can look a lot of different ways. It can be out in the woods. It could be under a tent or in a trust structure. And so in our 2021-2022 budget, we are excited to add outdoor education to our curriculum. Can I jump in real quick there? Yeah, absolutely. I just want, sorry to interrupt, I just want folks to know too, there's been, I had heard some questions in the budget about our winter wellness and how we were funding that. And I want folks to know that wellness, programming, and experiential ed is definitely a focus for us in our recovery plan efforts. And we will have plenty of federal funds to support those efforts that won't need to come out of a local budget. So I just want to add that to folks to know that we're definitely investing in ensuring that our students are engaged in programming like folks have come to readily know via winter wellness. And then, you know, in previous years, we've been able to have a lot of cross-campus events or school-wide celebrations together. And because of COVID, we haven't been able to do that, but we're still building a strong sense of community within its building and some within each of the buildings, excuse me. One of the things that we're excited about is in March, music lessons. We're able to start back up again. We've had music the entire year so far, but it's been very percussion based because of some of the restrictions because we're very excited for band and instrumental lessons to start back up. And we've also had a lot of great focus on kids showing their strengths and parents showing, you know, what they've learned virtually, kind of zooming in or Google meeting in and teaching kids different opportunities. So while we may not be open to everyone yet, we're still trying to find ways to connect with our community. And then just a few action shots for you. Good evening, everyone. I'm going to start on the 2021-2022 proposed budget. I'm going to start by a look back. So where is Rochester Stockbridge Unified District's current financial position? So in the fiscal year 2019 to 2020, the general fund started with a surplus of $500 and $1,260. The same year we ran a deficit of $40,063. And the SU, as Jamie expressed in his statements, that we also ran a deficit of $389,136, which is assessed out to each of our member districts. And our SUD's portion of that assessment was $41,638.37. So at the end of the 2019-2020 fiscal year, our SUD had a general fund surplus of $461,197. We were projecting a deficit of $7,566 at our last board meeting. So based on that, we estimated general fund surplus for 2020 to 2021 of $137,044. And I did just add in the statement here of how I get to that number. So we take the general fund balance at the end of FY20, that $461,197. We subtract from that the $142,987 that was committed to the revenue in the current fiscal year's budget. So it results in an unassigned fund balance of $318,210. We have projected using $173,600 in the FY21-22 budget. So you subtract that from the 318, and that brings us to the $144,610, less the projected deficit of the $7,566, and that brings you to the $137,044. We still have two months left of the fiscal year, so the deficit, and we continue to find savings. We are in hopes that that deficit will actually go away for the current fiscal year. So stay tuned for that at the next board meeting, and I'll bring an update for that. So one of the questions that came up at our last informational meeting was about the surplus and how it was being used. So I wanted to share the historical usage of that surplus and also the statute that I quoted at the last informational meeting. So each year, going back to the 2018-2019 budget cycle, the board has used the surplus as the way they were supposed to by using it as an offsetting revenue to reduce the tax rate, the tax collected from property taxes, and also what they received from the Ed fund. So I outlined there each year how much of that surplus was used in the revenue, which also matches up if you look at the revenue budget in your informational mailer is on page 38. So you can also see that it's the top line of each year of the revenue budget. And then I'll turn it over to Amy to talk about the changes in the budget. Okay, so what has changed in this budget? We have reduced down to just one principle. We have reduced 1.5 support staff. We have reduced intervention in our budget because it will be moved to the SU through the ESSER funding as Jamie was speaking of before. ESSER is Commentary and Secondary School Emergency Relief. It's part of the Coronavirus Aid Relief funds we receive. We are reinvesting by bringing foreign language program to our schools. We have been able to increase reading intervention locally and to increase our outdoor education. And we have been able to do all this and still save $43,199 over last year's budgets. We were able to increase the spending and these are great savings as we all know the cost of everything continues to go up on health insurance salaries and of course tuition all continue to increase. So we are very happy that we were able to find these savings. Okay, so the revenue, this chart compares the FY21 is the current year's budget we're school year that we're in right now. The proposed budget FY22 budget we'll be voting on. Just to know are the grant funds that Jamie spoke about earlier have increased in the SU $75,152 of revenue on the Medicaid and then $6,013 from other grants of revenues from the SU. Let's see. By having these additional local revenues it reduces the need to collect the Ed fund and from property taxes. One of the factors in the calculations on how we get to your per pupil spending which ultimately brings us to your tax rate is the equalized pupils. And as you can see from the chart over the last several fiscal years the equalized pupil for the Rochester Stockbridge Unified District continues to decrease and this year it went from 177.03 to 172.19. So as the equalized pupils go down that increases what your per pupil spending is. So this is just a quick snapshot of how we actually calculate your tax rate and when the next few slides will go over each of these individual sections of the tax rate.  The equalized tax rate is your per pupil spending divided by the yield minus any merger incentive that is left. And your final tax rate is your equalized tax rate divided by the common level of appraisal and that's in each individual town that will reflect what your projected tax rate is on your property tax bill. Budget changes from the current year to the proposed year as you can see on this chart in front of us. We have reduced spending by $43,198. We have increased the revenue by $1,246. So this reduces the end fund spending which also is your taxes. We have had a decrease in the equalized pupils of the reduction of $4.4. But as you can see we are still able to reduce the per pupil spending over the last year. You can't hear me. I'm just going to keep talking. So the yield and how that impacts your tax rate. Throughout the last informational meeting and several of the prior board meetings you may have heard us discussing the changes in the yield. The yield is set for us by the Vermont Department of Taxes. We get notification in December of what the projected yield is going to be and that's the yield that we use to start building the budgets. And the projection for next year was extremely low given the expected outcome of the education fund and the revenues received by the state. So the initial yield that we received in December was that 10,763 that you see on the second row of the chart. The current yield was 10,998. And in January we received notification that the ed fund was looking better and the revenue projections for the state were better than they anticipated. So they had given us a yield to use of $11,385. And there's currently a bill in the house that if it goes through that will be the finalized tax rate and that's $11,317. But that bill has not been approved as of this meeting still. So as you can see the fluctuation in the yield has an impact of about 10 cents depending on which one we ended up having to use. So again just to review the formula we take your equalized tax rate and to get your equalized tax rate we take the per pupil spending and we divide that by the yield. So the actual tax calculations. So this is the 2020-2021 as it compares to the 2021-2022 proposed budget. We start right up at the top at your per pupil spending. So in the current fiscal year the per pupil spending was the $18,755.83 and our projected per pupil spending for the budget for next year is $18,740.04 a change of $15.49. The yield using the $11,385 as a change of $387 brings us to a preliminary tax rate of 1.6460 which is a reduction of 0.0594 from the current tax rate. The merger incentive went down from four cents in the current fiscal year to two cents. So the equalized tax rate is 1.6260 which is a reduction of 0.0394 over the current equalized tax rate. So the next step on calculating the tax rate per town again is the individual town's common level of appraisal. We take that equalized tax rate from the prior page and we divide that by each town's individual CLA. So the current CLA in Rochester as you can see from the first column on the first side of the chart is the 109.89 percent which resulted in a tax rate of 1.5155 for Rochester. The projected CLA for 2022's fiscal year is that 102.98 so that reduction has an impact on the tax rate and will increase the tax rate to that 1.5790. Now on the second side of the chart we have the Stockbridge CLA is currently 105.31 percent which results in a tax rate of 1.5814 and the next year's CLA is 101.36 so that reduction again is having a negative impact on the tax rate which would be 1.6042. This page here shows the historical change in the CLA and as you can see it's fluctuated up and down over the years and the CLA again that's based on what your property values are versus what your properties sell for in your towns and that is set by the state and reviewed by your listers. So tax impact so what is each section of the budget impact the tax rate? So the net spending changes so that was the reduction in the expenditure budget would have been a savings for each of the individual towns of just over four cents. The equalized pupil decrease reduces that savings to it's still just over four cents. The incentive phase out is a reduction of two cents. The yield with the change there reduces the savings to the 0.0358 and then your CLA as you can see almost had a 10 cent impact on Rochester and a six cent impact in Stockbridge. So the projected total change for Rochester is an increase of 0.0635 and for Stockbridge is that 0.02288 so six cents and two cents if you round up. So next we move into each of the individual articles on the warning. Okay. Want me to take it Ethan? Yeah I will read I'll read out each article just so and then we can ask if there's any questions on them. Obviously if we're in person we would move the article and then vote on it but obviously this is just an informational meeting just to clarify that. All right so article four to fix the salaries in the amount of two thousand dollars for board chair thirteen one thousand three hundred and fifty each for vice chair and clerk one thousand one hundred for all other members for the school district officers for the twenty two thousand twenty one two thousand twenty two school year. Any questions on that article and those of you don't know the best way to do this is to that little hand icon at the bottom of your screen so let's see if we have any we have one phone call 294 um and because you have just one phone call in there if you need to have a question please just speak up. Okay being no questions on that article we'll move on article five to fix the salary and the amount of seven hundred fifty dollars for the school district treasurer for the two thousand twenty one two thousand twenty two year school year. Any questions on that article okay they're being none we'll move on article six shall the voters authorize the school board to borrow money by issuance of notes not in excess of anticipated resume venue for the fiscal year July 1 2021 through June 30th 2022. And I'd just like to add to this Ethan if I may absolutely this article is specific to the tax anticipation note that we get for each district each year and what this does it allows funds for the district to cover their payroll and their expenditures until the revenue is received from the education fund and property taxes which are divided out quarterly or sorry three payments from the ed fund and then based on how each individual town pays the district their property taxes so this is needed to help cover those fees and expenses and payroll. Carl you'd like to have a comment? Uh yeah I was just going to say that both article uh six as well as article five and article four are unchanged from past approved budgets um these are the while these are things that that we formally have to go through each year these are not changes from year to year the board salaries the treasurer salary and the approval of tax anticipation notes are things that are have been consistent over the last few years or consistent since we've merged. So thank you Carl. Any other questions about these articles so far? Okay article seven. Shall the voters of the school district approve the school board to expend four million three hundred and twenty eight thousand seven hundred and fifty two dollars which is the amount the school board has determined to be necessary for the ensuing fiscal year it is estimated that this proposed budget if approved will result in education spending of eighteen thousand seven hundred and forty dollars and four cents per equalized pupil this projected spending per equalized pupil is point oh eight percent lower than spending for the current year. Are there any questions on this article? Rebecca please I'm sorry what is your name? I see Rebecca is the computer name and uh what is your name? Go ahead please. Are you muted? Unmuted? So we can hear your question. Sorry about that.  Kathy Burns, K-A-T-H-E-B-U-R-N-S. Anyways I have a couple questions about the outdoor program. Have you looked at Bethel's program for their elementary kids? They have a great program. We just had a pre we just had a presentation by them at I think it was two board meetings ago maybe last board meeting in in in uh April so yeah we were very excited by what they had to present. Okay and also the the person that you're going to have do this outdoor program are they trained? Have you heard somebody yet? Lendi you want to speak to that? Um currently the plan for the person who does who is planning to fill that spot she does have an outdoor education background I do believe she will have to work on like some retraining because it's been a couple years since she's done it if that makes sense. Okay I have one more question how many days a week are we going to have the foreign language teacher at Stockbridge? Yep the um position is point here so we're working on a rotation where uh between the foreign language person or road languages person and um art where one school would one campus would get it for like six weeks for example and while the other campus gets it for six weeks and then they would rotate so each campus would end up with an equal amount of time about 12 weeks or more of the year that's a rough estimate and Lendi within that week how often would would the students it would be for 40 to 45 minutes a day so each class would get it 45 or one time a week 45 one time okay yep okay thank you thank you Kathy uh for the questions on article seven anybody else raise your hand if you have any other questions you can also talk about any of the presentation at this time this being the last um uh any general questions about the budget anything from within side your bulletin as well if you have any questions from information there Jamie go ahead I just wanted to add uh Rebecca when I talked about the SU working more closely together the outdoor educators is a group that we're looking to pull together on a regular basis and next year school calendar does provide for uh two half days of PD each month and that would be one of those professional learning communities that will look to pull together and coordinate so that they're sharing um their expertise with each other um and I'd just like to ask a question I think it sort of follows up on Kathy's a bit um and I know it's a question Charity's written as raised before and Lendi if you could speak to it what advantages about your education to strengthening educational um the educational experience and the educational results yeah gladly um say some some advantages I there's a lot more out there that I'm probably not going to hit all of them because I'm learning a lot about it as well um advantages are that it's engaging and it's kind of kinesthetic for those learners that want to learn hands on and in the moment um we have a lot of classrooms currently that use it some form of it from outdoors every day for extended period of time learning survival skills learning science in the woods writing about nature as they see it to uh groups that do things like first Fridays where they're out for a certain period of time and they've designed a shelter say in math class and they have to figure out how to now build it using the measurements they learned in math class or created in math class and if that's really possible what looks good on paper may not come out when you start the building process um and a wide variety of survival skills is great for natural sciences and our as well as um environmental science and just learning about our climate as well and just a few of the highlights if I if I may share a highly unscientific survey I've been doing of asking general people about the town when you were in elementary school would you have really liked to go outside there has been a resounding yes yes my brother who is a farmer particularly would have loved to have been outside working and learning um and all that's so good thank you further questions about um anything as I say anything in the bulletin anything in uh we've we've in the presentation tonight um we're happy to answer any questions you have so just raise your little hand icon to raise or if um our one phone caller has um a question and in this moment I will will just repeat that we do need a budget for next year because um regardless of the result of the of the merger unmerged votes coming up by the time all that process is played out we will be still our side will still be teaching even if we the final vote is to unmerge we'll be teaching in and in controlling the two campuses in Rochester and Stockbridge for at least one more year before the process is would be allowed to split off so just you know we need a budget for next year and we think this is a good one um there being no further I will uh entertain a motion to adjourn uh I would love to make uh my last motion uh to be a motion to adjourn very good Carl we have a motion to adjourn Jenny would you like to second just to I don't second that very good all in favor signify by saying aye thank you everybody very well Jenny thank you thank you all thank you all the administration everybody good work good night


Let's try this second phase change diagram question. So this is the phase diagram of carbon dioxide. And it says, for this phase diagram, answer the following question. So the first question says, what phases are present at point C? So I think the easiest way to do these problems is to write out the phases of the graph to begin with. So hopefully, we could do that this time. So what phase is present up here at very high pressures and low temperatures? Solid, right? So that's probably a good way to look at it. And what phase is present down here at very low temperatures and high pressures? Dacid. And then in the middle is a liquid. So we have that written down to start off, OK? Some things we know about carbon dioxide is atmospheric pressure does it, like just from what you know from dry ice, does it go to a liquid phase? No. So we want to keep that in mind, OK? So the first question is, what phases are present at point C? So notice point C is on that phase change boundary line, right? So this is actually the line you get. Does anybody know what equation will give you this line here? Is that equation that we learned in this chapter? The Clausius-Clapeyron equation, OK? If you do that Clausius-Clapeyron, it will give you that phase change line there, OK? That's what it's actually measuring. But what phases are present at point C? Liquid phase. And gas, OK? If since it's on the line, if it was up here, it would just be liquid, OK? So at point B, what phases are present? Solid. Just solid, OK? So let's turn our attention to point B and say, if we start at point B and we lowered the pressure to zero pressure, what phases would we go through, OK? So what would we start at here? Solid. And then when we go down, down, down, what do we change to? Gas. Gas. Do we ever see a liquid phase? No. No? So we just go from solid to gas. What's that phase change called? Solid to gas. Solid to gas is sublimation, right? Deposition would be the opposite of that, OK? And I'm sure you can understand why, OK? What if we started at point and increased the temperature? What would we do? What phases would we go through? Solid to gas. And gas again. So what is that called, phase change? Sublimation. Sublimation, like we just said, right? Solid to gas, OK? So what if we started at point C and decreased the temperature? What would we go through? Gas, liquid. Yeah, gas. Solid to solid, right? Like that, OK? Makes sense, right? OK, so now it'll ask us, well, what is the name of point D there? So point D, all phases are present at point D. So that kind of gives you a clue as to the name. So what is the name of that? That's your whole point, very good. So let's write that down so we don't forget it. There's one more point that wants us to identify. It's point E. What is that point called? The critical point. Above that point, what happens? Anybody know? No phases, liquid, gas, or water are present. This is the phase supercritical fluid, OK? That you won't know anything else about, except for supercritical fluid. Let's see what else we want to ask. What is the normal sublimation point of carbon dioxide? So remember, what does that mean? The normal, like if I said, what's the normal boiling point, or the normal freezing point? What would that mean? And the freezing point. The point at freezing at atmospheric pressure. So the normal sublimation point is going to be the point of sublimation at what? At atmospheric pressure, right? So what would be that temperature? Negative 78. Negative 78.5 degrees Celsius. OK, so that one there. And if I asked you, well, what's the pressure at the triple point? Could you tell me that? 5.11 ATM. Yeah, 5.11 ATM, OK? And then I guess the one last question we want to ask is, can we tell just by looking at this graph whether the solid is more dense or the liquid is more dense? And how will we do that? Well, part of the graph will we have to look at. Anybody know? So it's this portion here, the solid to liquid phase change line. We have to look at it, OK? If this is positive, OK? That means the solid is more dense than the liquid, OK? If it's negative like waters is, that means the liquid is more dense than the solid. So remember with water, the ice cubes float on top of the liquid, right? So the solid's less dense. And carbon dioxide is opposite, OK? So in this case, the solid is more dense than the liquid. So if you had both of those in the same container, the solid would be on the bottom of the liquid. Any questions about this phase diagram? OK, wonderful. Good job, guys.