this meeting to order. I've insured a quorum. There are five present in the room. Sarah's online. I want to thank everybody. Thank you for coming again. Also a thank you to the public for pointing out that the agenda wasn't posted online and a thank you to Katya for just pausing things. It's really important that we of course follow the state law, the open meeting law. Okay, the meeting purpose remains the same. Financial planning, budgeting, board training, also reports from committees and outside organizations. We will start with public comment. I'm gonna go ahead and read the preamble. The board welcomes comments, but is not able to take any action on them other than to direct the public to the appropriate staff member or to the complaint procedure. Comments are limited to three minutes per speaker. Time may not be seated to another speaker. Comments are to be addressed to me, the board chair or the board as a whole, not to any individual on the board on the staff or in the public. Please raise your hand and wait to speak until you are asked to. Please identify yourself with your first and last name and your town of residence. Please refrain from restating comments that have already been shared. You can certainly express your agreement with those comments, but keep it short if you would order into corn shall be observed by everyone. Shouting and profanity are prohibited. As the board chair, I will maintain the order and form of the meeting. I also do want to make sure that everyone does sign in. So we have public record of who's present. And with that, do I have someone who Chelsea usually keeps time, but she can't be there. Okay, great. So with that, I'll open for throwing and public comment. Yes, Emma. Hi. Thanks for having me again. My name is Emma Janicki. I'm the four through sixth grade science and social studies teacher at Braintree, and I reside in Montpelier. I said this at the meeting that was canceled, but I wanted to reiterate I was really surprised to receive the community survey about finding money for a school resource officer position. When we at Braintree don't have a full time nurse, a full time social worker, a full time guidance counselor, we don't have dedicated behavior interventions full time at our school. We're relying on one special educator and our administrative assistant to essentially do the jobs of about seven people. So I just wanted to say again that it was surprising that there might possibly be money for this police officer role when there are mental health roles and school nurse roles that are not currently being funded full time at our school. Thank you. Thank you, Emma. Okay. Thank you. We need to vote everybody on the motions that were made and voted on in last Wednesday's attempted meeting. So do I have this is regarding the employees? Yes, regarding what is actually next on the agenda, but unless people feel the need to discuss it further, we can vote to affirm the vote we made last week. We have still have that motion written down. So some moved. Moved by Katya seconded by Sam for their discussion. Sure. Kyle, do you have the motion language with you to just the house? Was it a charge? Yeah, the motion was charging lane to look into the retirement request the board to charge lane requested the board to charge him with getting more information on the on the retirement and what it would take in any other employees that might be in fact right and any other employees in the financial implications of back. Yeah. So moved by Katya seconded by Sam. All those in favor. Opposed. Extensions. You were in favor. Yes, Sarah. Okay, great. Then it passes unanimously. Thank you. So we can skip the next. Ms. Skolnick, Nora, if you'd like to start what I understand is going to be kind of a comment from you, but also open for questions from the board. Great. So we wanted to follow up on on things that the issues that we had raised in the previous meeting. So I'm not sure if I want to present a letter to the whole board and that I'm going to read it, but to have a copy and that's been signed by all the faculty at RES and support staff and I have copies for other members as well. Or here you can take a pass. To the members of the Orange Southwest School District board, I'm reading the undersigned faculty and staff of Randolph Elementary School had been working under some very challenging conditions. It is clear that we are in need of greater resources than we currently enjoy where to properly provide all care and services to all of our students. There has been some progress made in improving conditions. Staff has been meeting week three to create and improve systems and to prevent and or deal with disruptive behaviors. Our building administrators have been working with staff to help with the decision process regarding if and when restraint is necessary. We also are going to have two half days of in-service training on de-acceleration techniques in January. There are, however, some serious items that have not yet been addressed and we come now before you to seek the following. One, an action plan created and agreed upon jointly by the SCL, the social and emotional learning team, staff and administrators for effectively engaging with challenging student behaviors. The one that has been put out, I want to clarify, is an action plan has not been agreed upon or discussed or had any input from the RES staff. Two, in-person training for all staff in an agreed upon program such as CPI or handle of care so that if the restraint is needed staff will be able to perform it in a safe and respectful manner. Training should include time for practice and clarification and should be paid to mind. I want to clarify on that one as well. There has been CPI training offered but there has been no time for, it's been a video that's been shown with time for some questions but there's been no hands-on practice for the techniques. Number three, planning for and development of an in-district alternative classroom options for students with demonstrated need. Four, reinstating the RISE program in its original form. This program has done amazing work and that work is now being undermined. If the district wishes to expand RISE programs to other schools in the district an additional staff needs to be hired rather than taking staff from the existing program and I'm going to circle back to clarify that a little bit more in a moment. And five, we ask additionally that communication between district administration and the schools be improved. While we have full trust and confidence in our principal the Linda Robinson the same cannot be said in regards to other members of the district administration. Melinda listens to staff and does her best to provide remedies for problems disclosed to her in the interest of providing the best for students. She respects our intelligence, our education, experience, opinions and professionalism. She trusts our intent to do our best based on our knowledge of an experience with the children we teach and guide each day. Unfortunately decisions made and behaviors exhibited at the district level have shown that we are not held in that same regard. Staff morale is extremely low and there are many who are not certain whether they can continue now or return next year if conditions do not improve significantly. What we're asking here will we believe help ease some of the burdens by providing to us more of what we need to best support the children in our care. Thank you for our attention. So I do want to circle back to a little more explanation on the RISE program and I'm going to turn things over to Natalie Sugarman who is one of the co-teachers in the RISE. I am so happy that some things are new to look at as well. So the catch is that as being used without includes the RISE program distinction which outlines what we do in RISE and some surveys that we completed last year and the year before. So Deb and I were hired to create the RISE program from scratch and we did it. RISE is doing exactly what the district had hoped it would do. We're helping students with some of the most challenging behaviors be successful. We are teaching students with trauma to understand why they are responding in unsuccessful ways and having to regulate their emotions and behaviors. This enables them to be successful as students and children. We have done this in a way that has allowed students to remain in their classroom and be a part of their school community. We did not need a school within a school to do that. We have successfully supported numerous students who would otherwise then consider for referral to an alternative school but the program we built allowed these students the opportunity to stay in their home school and learn the skills they needed to be successful. With the continued support of RISE these students are still doing it as well. Will there be a small fraction of students who need more? Yes, of course. It is impossible to believe that we are going to help every single child. There are some students who will need a greater level of care but that is only a very small fraction of students. In terms of the expansion of RISE the superintendent's report says that RISE is now expanded into Braintree but that's not really correct because right now one staff member from RISE has been pulled away from her duties and her caseload of students to support Braintree and offer them support as they try and fill the open counseling positions that they were unable to fill earlier this year. Pulling someone out of their daily caseload and move them over to another school without notice does not allow for an thoughtful planning or potential for success. We are more than happy to help Braintree but this is not the way to do it. It takes away from the much needed services at RISE. They don't need to be blunt or disrespectful but it's Robin Peter to pay costs. We are happy that the district wants to develop services at Braintree and Brookfield. Deb and I have offered to help to consult the shared curriculum and growing similar services in most two schools in order to expand the services that need sort of thoughtful planning. It's important to figure out the unique needs of those two schools. Deb and I welcome the opportunity to share our thoughts and our ideas but let's please do it the right way. In my final note, and Deb Couton who is on Zoom right now and is not feeling well, unable to join, put together a poster board. So when we started in 2019 there's the report that goes up from the superintendent and Mr. Millington had written in here that you know program, brand new program like RISE and the preschool that the schools were developing, it would take three to four years for us to start seeing benefits of these programs and so we're in our fifth year and in our third year and our fourth year we've conducted surveys to parents, students, teachers and Deb was able to capture some of the results of that and put it down for you to just read but it was very favorable. There's a lot of positive feedback on teachers, parents and students on how successful the program has been to them and for families and so I just wanted to talk about that and the importance of RISE and what it has done with the district or for at least our RISE. I think a further clarification just to explain is that this year I think part due to the crisis that we've been under in terms of the challenging behaviors rather than RISE working in how it has been for the last couple of years it sort of has become a dumping ground where children are dysregulated and they're put into that room for a little while or those or Natalie and Deb are being called to help with those on top of Mike and Kayleigh and because there's just not it's too much for two people and therefore they're also not able to do the original program and that's an awesome part of what we mean by that it needs to get back to that form the program that they had in RISE. So this is open for the board to ask questions. I guess I have a just to clarify one that the that the request to the board because as you know we work from a kind of a policy level and budgeting right. So what I hear from both of you on one hand and this is just a small part of it is this funding piece though and and and more staff. So that's something that we may or may not be able to have an effect on but in terms of I don't want to misquote an action plan being created that's not necessarily a directive that would come from us because it's operational. People can interrupt me anytime between correct or okay. Yes. I have a variety of comments. The first one I guess is that I think we might be in the gray area in terms of meeting loss because there was no specific topic for this discussion item and so it would have been nice to have been able to come in and have an understanding of what people were going to discuss so that I could have an intelligent kind of informed conversation kind of path. So I guess that's kind of my first concern. There are a lot of parts and pieces in here that I think are important to kind of talk a little bit about so I'm glad books brought it up. The first is the action plan. A generic action plan was created with the paraprofessionals as well as a local psychologist in town that I spent a little bit of time with talking about the issues that are happening at RES as well as with a behavioral panelist. It was left open-ended so that folks at RES could actually start to fill in the blanks of the six or seven kind of goals that were part of that action plan and my understanding is that RES has been working very closely with the Linda who is under the direction of central office to actually do that work and it sounds like that work has been progressing quite well. So there is an action plan in place the teams that are working on it have input into the components of the action plan and Melinda has been doing a wonderful job as far as I can tell you know guiding that process taking in people's inputs and modifying what was needed based upon what people were saying. In terms of classroom options that one is probably a part of the action planning work that we're doing so I can't talk and tell us what we have about that but the RES program I think we need to spend a little bit of time on it. Five or six years ago Eric McLaughlin this year he spent a tremendous amount of time kind of talking about trauma-based behaviors and trying to create a program that might address those. That program was sold to the community at a cost of about three hundred thousand dollars with the intent that it would serve all elementary students across the district and there was a very specific written plan and intent behind that program that was sold to the community which is how we got the budget to pass. That program has never with the exception of the last week when thankfully folks were willing to go out to Braintree and help out with some of the problems that they're experiencing in terms of challenging behavior with kids has never been realized. It has primarily been focused almost entirely at RES and it's been a bone of contention for five years about the expansion of the program. I personally could support having more people there to be able to kind of expand on the program but the idea that it was intended for RES and is only for RES was never a part of the plan it was not what was sold to the community this part of the budgeting process for about five years ago and so I think it's a worthy discussion to have those are my basic comments you know like I said unprepared as I am because I didn't know what the comments were talking about. Rachel did you have the comment or a question? No I was just kind of thinking that yeah why should why should students at different elementary schools have different resources available to them I see your hand up I just want to give the the board the chance again if there are comments clarifications that you need uh if you have your own concerns about yes I had one question which is what is the budget for RISE and Blaine you just touched on that 300,000 here's a good way to take a little so. Yeah annually what would be the budget impact of expanding it to all the schools I think the team in the form that it's in in Randolph because it sounds like all the resources of that 300,000 have been put into Randolph and Brookfield and Braintree have been lined out with that resource application. I think there's a good thing that's going on now with one of the members of the RISE program over at Braintree because they can be able to help and provide an analysis of what might be helpful in terms of expanding the program. I think that somebody should probably spend a little bit of time up at Brookfield as well from the team to see what they're doing. Yeah we're here to tell them that that's not ideal and quite stressful. I don't know if I'm allowed to respond or not. Well I think it's part of the funding. How many how many staff members are allocated to that program? Two, three. There should be a pair of professionals as well. No, there's two. Where did the pair, do we know where the pair of professionals are? There has never been a pair of professional that has been specifically for the RISE program. So again so then. It's just been dead for time. What's that? It's just been dead for time to myself. So I'll have to go back and see what happened at RES, what happened with the pair but there was meant there was always supposed to be three and I can provide folks with the original intent. The pair of professional was there we had even talked about having an academic future as well at one time trying to expand the program. The purpose for the pair of professional was is if you have students that are having behaviors that are so challenging they can't access the curriculum anyway then it makes sense to really try to hone in if possible on the focus on the needs of the child right to try to deal with the problems that are getting in the way of learning and try to focus on them intently. The goal of the pair of professional in the program was to be able to as the child acquired skills and the behavior challenges lowered a little bit was to be able to get them back into the regular education setting as much as possible you know get them down there you know sit with them while they practice their new skills and then bring them back to the RISE program to debrief if things started to fall apart. So again we're far afield of the original intent. I have a question. So just to clarify we have 300,000 budget annually for this program but obviously if there's sounds like that that funding is not being used to the maximum of what's available for this line items that an understanding that maybe we're gonna find out I gotta find out what happened to the pair of professional. I have a couple of responses and maybe clarifications as well. So this is from the 2019 report that was put out and it talks specifically about the RISE program an elementary therapeutic program and it says because of the cost of the program we are only seeking to create a random elementary. RAS was chosen because of its central location but it would include qualifying for field and elementary students as long as their parents approve of their attending RAS. So the original intent was that if students in the other elementary schools needed this program they would then come to RAS. The the problem that we're having now is because the way the program was designed was for two the two staff members who are running it to be then they have a group of a poor group of students that they work with. Those are students who have been through a process to be proved to be part of the RISE program. When we take Natalie and we have her go to spend two hours a day I'm not sure if I'm speaking the correct amount so I'll let her clarify on that. A day in Rain Tree while it's now serving students in Rain Tree the students that are part of that poor program in Randolph are no longer getting her services. What they have offered numerous times is to have somebody be hired for Rain Tree or hired for the field. That's how you want to expand the program and then to train them and to work with them to creating the program in that setting or to go back to the original intent and have those students who needs to be part of that program come to Randolph to attend school in Randolph so that they can't but by spreading having her coach those times to Rain Tree she's no longer able to serve the students that she's supposed to be serving in Randolph and it's causing great tremendous difficulty for the students who are on the program that makes sense. So it seems like there are kind of two parallel conversations going on here. One is kind of not disagreement but what was the intent of it and is it fulfilling that intent and seeing the the success and the the survey results if that is indeed what's going on how might it be expanded because there is more need. Correct and I want to be clear that we're not saying that Rain Tree or Brookshill shouldn't have it or that there aren't serious difficulties with the behaviors in those schools and but I think as Natalie said you can't take from one and spread it thinner to serve all it needs to be expanded in a different way so that the needs aren't getting pulled from in one place. Are there any students from Brookshill that are returning to being transported to attending school at RES for this purpose? No and that's been the problem. The original intent was at the beginning of every year the teams the elementary principals were supposed to get together with all the kids that might qualify for participation in the RISE program and they were supposed to prioritize them and then those kids from Rain Tree and in Brookfield were intended if the parents were willing to have them come to Randolph Elementary. There was intense pushback in terms of having the children go to RES all across the five years at this point in time you know we're at a crisis point where Rain Tree is also experiencing a lot of challenging behaviors that are happening at RES across the state where they need help and they needed services in for five years. Both Rain Tree and Brookfield have been predominantly excluded from the services in the RISE program so it made sense to at least until and that was a temporary thing it was started up about a week week and a half ago and it was to go through the holiday season which is next week to get a second set of eyes in there to take a look so that when the teams came together to actually talk about the students and kind of what you're seeing and you know what might help in terms of accommodations we've got some other eyes on it so that that conversation can be much much more deep and fruitful was the intent. So what I'm hearing what I'm hearing in the room is actually a lot of people who are on the same in the same lane right and and maybe coming at it from a more administrative maybe coming at it from a more funding maybe but I just feel the need to acknowledge that there's a lot of agreement in the room so and I think it's important to emphasize that because we all want to look forward right we don't the past can inform us but we want to spend more time looking that way yes sorry I think it's relevant Richard had done a five six teacher here at Brookfield I think it's worth noting that over the past couple years as well not only do we not have the RISE program here at Brookfield but we've also had students at least two that I can think of who have come up who should have been Randolph but Randolph did not have the room to accommodate them and they were brought to Brookfield who absolutely qualified for the RISE program and didn't have access to that service so not only do we not have access to the problem ourselves we're taking the office bill from Randolph excuse me may I have your name please sir uh yeah Richard I'm sorry Richard Haywood thanks there you go the only other comment to make is I like the idea of the survey data that people are collecting but one of the pieces that was put in when the RISE program started that I still do not have and I've been asking for five years is objective data on which students are being served what the impact of the program has been on the students we did something similar with special education four or five years ago where the teachers created a wonderful rubric based upon the amount of service time that the students were receiving to be able to tell the impact of the services right the services are good over time the number of hours or minutes of services the students need should shrink we have no objective data or at least I have no objective data from the RISE program to show what's been produced and who would that come from to you that I have been asking for that from the principals who should have been working with the the RISE program staff to develop that it sounded like there was a start on that in the first year that there were some good ideas but I don't think it was ever capitalized on so I think it's a valuable program but it would be nice to have that data to be able to go out and sell it to the community that hey we've got an opportunity here to expand something that looks like it's working well here's the data to back up why we're asking for these funds. Melinda. Hi Melinda Robinson the principal at Randolph we have had the opportunity to qualify what levels of service our RISE program has had and I have I believe given that to you Lane I would like to also address the idea of students coming from other schools to RISE we have had times where we push back on that and I think one of the reasons that we've done that is because they do need it at Braintree and Brookfield as well it's too it's hard to have all at RISE because it overwhelms the general ed classrooms with a lot of extra needs at one school in certain grades where it becomes overwhelming so it's I would love to try to figure out how we could support getting the RISE program across the Brookfield and Braintree and RES schools so that it's equitable across them and we've been trying to work towards that thank you. Board members I'm thinking about the budget information that we received over the last couple of months and the concern that we're going to be in that with the change in funding that we're going to be in that area where what a huge RISE potentially or a penalty for being over budget in places and so if there is a there's a finite amount of money and this is the pot like and we decide we want to prioritize expanding the RISE program we have to take from somewhere that's what's on my mind. And you've got your budget presentation coming up a little while but hopefully it's not too confusing with how the legislation is that it'll make things a little clearer on what circumstances look like for the next five years. So what I'd like to suggest in order to keep things moving along and sticking to the agenda and trying to be more timely um this is clearly not a place we're going to come to solutions but it's an excellent exchange of information with lots of different places which I really appreciate. It's a lot of it is not new information but we're clarifying information for the board so more questions may come up from us and because it is part of our duty to immediately go to numbers the more information we have in this later presentation and also how we can work together to present to the community the needs and where we're taking from um the the further we can take this conversation. So I'm going to put a pause and I don't know but only because I'm trying to get so much better at this that I'm really putting I'm hitting the pause so I'm saying this agenda item is done um and we're and we're going to move on and I'm really trying to okay thank you everyone um for your clarifying question about what I just said yes okay is is it as as a member or can we submit things to the board that we weren't able to follow up on in writing um since we weren't able to to have as part of the conversation you can always submit information to the board it doesn't mean that you will receive either an answer or a statement because we have to speak as one procedure so that we're doing things properly. Every single person in this room every single person online and the people who are not present for this meeting always have access to board members. The tricky thing with sharing information when we're not in a public meeting is that we cannot engage in a back and forth. A sharing of information and an acknowledgement of receipt can happen that's where it ends until we are in another public meeting. I understood and I asked one final question sorry. When we do this do I address it do we address it to you as the chair or do we send it to the entire board? If you send it to me the board because then if I forward then it gets tricky so we've got electronic send it to each of us. Thank you. Thank you everyone again. Heather um wow you're ready your presentation of options for a superintendent's search. Thank you members of the board and community. I will try to keep this brief and maybe save you a few minutes. I'd like to present to the board and the community some options for the superintendent search. The district received the resignation of the current superintendent on December 8th and that resignation is effective June 30th so time is truly of the essence. The board is the hiring entity in this for this position. Currently there are five neighboring districts that are engaged in superintendent searches. Addison Central announced their opening of applications in August with the help of McPherson Jacobson search firm and they announced their selected candidate on November 28th. Dr. Wendy Baker will be starting with them July 1st. Two rivers supervisory union decided to run their own search without a search firm. They posted it in November and the applications closed December 14th and they're currently reviewing their applications. Both Caledonia Central and Grand Isle hired the Vermont School Board Association as their search firm. Both of them are posted until filled. Caledonia posted October 30th and Grand Isle posted December 11th and lastly Hartford. Hartford is opening their search soon. They have hired cooperative education services and they're hiring for 2025 so they are giving themselves a year and a half for this search. So I'm compelling the board to consider this an urgent measure to make a decision on how to move forward. You have a few choices. You can hire an executive search firm to manage your search as many districts do. This is the slowest process because you need to open an RFP request for proposals to receive your options before you select a firm which will add a month to your search. You conduct an eternal search run by the board open to the public. I recommend a subcommittee, an advisory hiring committee and I'll go into that more deeply or you can post the position internally and promote from within. So each of these have a cost and a timeline. The most expensive and the longest is with a search firm because just to open it for requests for proposals and to receive those and choose your vendor is a month. The lowest cost option there is going to be your Vermont School Board Association. They only charge about $15,000 for the search but some of the executive search firms charge $40,000 to $100,000. So the Vermont School Board Association only accepts three per year and I think they I don't know if they have capacity for another one but I would reach out to them to be quiet because they do good work and they are not terribly expensive. Conducting your own board search would be much faster because you would cut out the RFP process and your cost would be limited to your own expenses and possible stipends for committee members and it would probably be under $10,000 and your third option is to post internally. I do recommend whatever option you choose you highly consider creating an advisory hiring committee beyond the board and that would be you would choose a cohort of people to advise you and I would recommend that you include students, support staff, teachers, administrators, other citizens including senior citizens, business owners and any community stakeholders you think should have a voice in this choice. And then so I compel you to action. I think time is up the essence to get the best candidates. I think this district deserves the best candidates so if you'd like to retain a search firm I compel you to not delay in funding that expense and opening the RFP. If you decide to conduct your own search whether it's open or from within the creation of a subcommittee if you so choose would be a possible next step and that's it. I would have five minutes open for questions and comments. So let's let's discuss it is I agree thank you Heather my question something for us to jar talking about right now well I'm speaking right now Hanna Arias that was Heather Lawler assistant superintendent who was giving that presentation that was a question from online. Thoughts? Do you think you should we should hire a partner? I see lots of nods is our two nods and do you have a different Bob, Sarah as well? Well I'm just thinking if we want to expand our rise program and the that that's a lot more expensive and I would suggest that we try VSBA before we jump to it. That's hiring a firm. Right. That's hiring VSBA. Okay that's what I would I would mean that direction and if and if rather than a expensive executive search firm I'm just not not sure that's the best. Yeah hiring an outside not having the I think we still need a subcommittee. Yes we would still yeah so it would that just thinking about that topic would it be kind of a call for interested vote would it be how would we perform it in full transparency I've already been approached by a few people who would be interested in and being a part of such a committee if one existed so how would we do it do we do we have a consensus on the one of the three options here are we well I think like shifting shifting well that we're going to shifting here we started with what are we going to do yes to the well and one of them yes is a given right because you just said the advisory committee is a given so right right let's thank you but but figuring out how we put an advisory committee together is another it's a different topic another thing to discuss if you if you hire a firm they will help you with the creation of the there it is okay so then I propose that we vote to charge someone uh to um contact VSBA and perhaps a couple of other places to get yeah I think we should go ahead and open a request for proposals and because if the VSBA is already maxed for this year if they've already done because this was just neighboring districts this is not state statewide that you're looking at and they've got three per year and they cover the state so if they're like we can't help you this year you still need to move right and quickly because all of those districts are must have us looking at the same pool yeah I'll make a motion to have board chair look into uh already examining outside firm including VSBA open our question open and open the question do I have a second for the discussion all those in favor awesome opposed abstentions passes unanimously I will do that non-pro. um review annual report to voters so uh Chelsea had sent out a letter for us to read and respond to um do people have I won't start with concerns do people have enthusiastic responses concerns about the letter a full rewrite do they have suggestions of edits where the letter is this this is in the town report the town report personally I really liked it um you know our biggest I think one of the biggest things this year has been connection um ownership linkage and what that means and and how we're trying to strengthen it um it's in our package isn't it it was separate uh no it was separate it was separately yeah all right oh no she didn't she hand it out the end of last year she did that's great yeah that's it right there yep oh there it is yes and you got it okay um so is there anyone with concerns a with anything in the letter and b with the deciding tonight if this is if this speaks for us when do we have to submit this January right mid-january no it's not in the air from week before the march vote so February 6th I think we've been absolutely dropped in that's when it still gets printed though into the town report yeah it's earlier better if you can that's you assist me on report okay oh yeah so I don't want to vote on it tonight right okay so yeah but I know it well it sounds like um although we've all had a chance to read it and we will speak for myself like the direction it's going there are some specific things that we want to either edit takeout ad so I'd like to suggest that Chelsea's not here tonight and you know partially because she has some stuff going on so table this till next month's meeting well what Ben had said in the meeting because I was working with Chelsea on this is you know if people I believe we sent out or Chelsea was sending out an electronic copy so if um yeah yeah um and then and then it's it's ours to do with you know and edit it to where we want it to be so if folks have can we turn over turn this over to email correspondents with the expectation that we'll vote next month um what I would feel more comfortable with is if people want to send edits to Anne as the other member of that committee and she put them in and that could be presented at the next meeting just because again we don't want to get into a baton for or working on something elaborate like an email discussion yeah right email edits to Anne and then we'll vote next week what I might do um what if I uh do you guys know how to use the suggestions and the track change and the track change for the google docs so I'll make it into a google doc and then you can just edit the google doc and is the board okay with Chelsea and I and making the final decision about we're going to accept these we're going to read the final yes okay but do you want us to but do you want us to put through all those suggestions as they come in yeah okay where we think it's appropriate okay then you get another chance to look at it yeah okay just for sure thank you so that's just an action item there's no vote there great um review board member terms so uh three there are three terms commitment ends in perch um one from Braintree one from Brookfield one from Randall it's my understanding that the this is the conversation we have right it's my understanding that um there will be an open seat in Randall and an open seat in Brookfield so those that are here yeah let people know um and and have them come if you find someone that's interested have them come for meetings see how we how we operate and great board members too spread spread the word uh so I think they declare they're open seats at all all right there are two that do not intend to sorry to not intend to read yeah so Megan is not ready is that correct okay so maybe something about and Chelsea's not gonna run and who's the other open who's Rachel Rachel uh Rachel and Braintree and Rachel's okay thank you for learning there are three open seats was that okay okay next up the complaint procedure Katya you have requested that this um that we review one more time yeah you want to take over no I just um I just think that the board should evaluate step one personally I think that I don't know how to make this a um I don't know just it just feels that sometimes having somebody have to go to that individual that they have a complaint against can be a challenge um and I wouldn't want to dissuade people from bringing complaints forward or the discomfort of having to first the first step being to confront that individual they have does that make sense what I'm saying it does make sense what you're saying so I'm not I'm just saying I I just feel it's worthwhile just evaluating if that is how we feel or should be or if we don't what the other way where yeah oh it's in the packet did we not have it I I have that same issue with the procedure and I understand the purpose of initially that being in I think the purpose was to try to get things resolved and so that way for us bringing hearings more frequently than necessary um but I do share that same concern with the discomfort of having to the complaint to having to face the person so what would you suggest instead maybe we can be right or maybe we can think of maybe some examples so how you know if it's a teacher might have a complaint with an administrator do they hop over that administrator and go to the superintendent if it's a teacher a parent is a problem with a teacher right do they go to the principal can there be a central can there be a central complaint receiver within the district that facilitates facilitates a discussion of the cba the cba probably has some rules about how two or three things just to be aware of as you approach this uh pull on one of them right now so the cba requires uh an informal staff before like agreements process which means that people are supposed to sit down and talk it out one of the reasons I think to do that is so there's no automatic resumption of guilt the other party the other piece let me see if I can find this just a second b-27 you might have to change other policies if you go about this b-27 has two pretty specific pieces to it that would probably also have to be looked at it is the policy of the orange southwest school district to see the complaints about school personnel are considered in a timely manner that is fair to all parties the district places trust in its employees and desires to support their actions in such a manner that employees are freed from unnecessary spiteful or unjustified criticism or complaints which is probably why that first step is is there there is another piece here um the individual employee involved so this is the person who the complaint as it gets shall be given every opportunity for explanation comment and presentation of the facts as he or she she sees them so those components either would need to be preserved in whatever you're thinking about or you would have to change the statement of b-27 as well I think step one could stand as long as you put in language for when there's a disparity of power how to facilitate right so that if there's a student who wants to complain about a teacher there's a disparity power there so you need language for like how they might get an advocate or facilitator we've got really good counselors that have served that role in the past or even a perception of an imbalance of power you know just that they have access to an advocate and who that guidance to who that advocate should be be it union representation or something like that I think in any in any conflict there's going to be a a perception of sure just very powerful that's very insightful yeah I like the idea of a facility a training facilitator maybe that's part of the HR revamp for the district is right and we talked about the importance of HR I think just making that making that available to anyone who wants who needs to go through step one anyone who needs to go through step one may have may access a facilitator employee assistant program provides them takes a little bit of time but they one of the things that they do is they do provide but then what about what about for the students more parents or any other parents who don't have the yeah there's a lot of different scenarios lots of different relationships and then it may even I mean if it's someone from outside the district there may be a perception of bias going to a facilitator that's employed by the district I don't think we can fix all the problems I hear no I don't think we can fix all the problems but if we're going to offer up something and call it an unbiased resource I think there needs to be an acknowledgement that when you're employed there is a disparity of power there is a perception of there is the restorative justice program out of South Wales and you could probably provide the solution outside for those students here as a brain starter that you're talking about yeah the AOE actually yeah recommended that because you're thinking about policy and in fact if the board wants me to I can talk to this person who recommended it said talking to Scott what actually would be because he's very connected with that like recommendations do you think you could just do that just to say if you would like an assistance or step one you can access somebody at that store and then it could be if you want if you want support or assistance with step one you're going to access an advocate or hear the response correct I just think that we need to have a well since it's such a huge part of how we operate I suggest we keep putting on the agenda until we come up with language that people are comfortable with you know it might be interesting to know how accessible the Center for Restorative Justice is in that can you make phone calls and say hey would there be someone willing to um facilitate how um how quickly that can happen because let's not forget that a complaint might be very you know be creative a tricky working environment or learning environment or so can we have somebody we should probably have somebody looking into what the options are or are we just gonna what I'm hearing is seems like people like the idea of having having access to someone that might be able to help you if you are concerned about going making a complaint so do we want to have somebody look at what the different options are find out what they have suggestions suggestions of people who might be available or open and that we would feel comfortable having an procedure do we want to um check with our legal counsel to just to make sure we're not putting ourselves in a just to see what they might recommend or some suggestions on how this is done or this is how it's done or maybe another school does it another way or maybe they've already got a so that's that might be contact or that's contact I think if we should we make a motion give her authority to pass on behalf of us I don't know I don't know but I appreciate it confidence all right I'll entertain a motion to give Katya the authority to contact Piedra to offer guidance as to step one step one sounds like you make a motion optional I move yes you can yes you can oh and I do yeah move that do I have a second I'm second and second I'm second oh and Sarah seconds and Sarah second uh all those in favor hi hi hi awesome opposed abstentions passes unanimously so do we have another vote right away we do not we have committee updates if committees have updates um but we have a facilities monitoring report later so I assume you don't have a separate update um the evaluation committee it's Chelsea who yeah chairs it um I was on that committee and ownership link is we don't have an update and and I know we don't have she Rachel chairs but I know we don't have an update so committees have work to do in the next month uh okay Kara please um Brookfield elementary update from the principal so I'm trying to do I'll swap with it I don't like it that's probably it by the screen it's going to be open by the music stand thank you all for having me this is really nice to be able to uh let you all know what's going on in our school so thanks um I'm Kara Houston I'm the principal of the elementary school really excited to be here to tell you about our school this is my first year at Brookfield as principal I'm really thankful to be a part of this school family one of the first things that struck me when I first started visiting the school last spring is that this is a community where everyone has a strong sense of responsibility and care for one another so let me give you an example right now sledding is a big hit although that's not going to be happening after today yesterday but I've had older students who are helping younger kids get into sleds they're showing them how and where to climb up the hill after they slide down I have students asking others that they might not always play with to come and sled with them kids are respectfully reminding each other of the rules that we have for sledding and they ask one another to join it if somebody's feeling left out now I don't just see this with the kids I see it with the staff too a great example is a teacher covering a lunch duty for somebody who needed time to process a situation with a student or they consistently come together to use their collective means to support our kiddos who need extra practice or help whether it's in academics or building their social skills this group of individuals care for one another greatly and this care is one of the things that makes our community shine so here's a fraction of our caring individuals we're a small school with about 80 students and 22 staff six of our staff members are shared between Brookfield and Braintree or Brookfield and Randolph these are the individuals who work tirelessly to ensure that our students are getting what they need to grow into lifelong learners so a great example of how we ensure students are getting what they need is through the use of data and collaboration the three elementary schools have reinvested in professional learning communities where we come together and analyze recent data create goals around that data and adjust our teaching strategies accordingly so we're collecting pertinent data regularly whether it's from our benchmark assessments which happen at the beginning and middle and end of the school year our unit assessments daily or weekly check-ins or exit tickets these are all used to inform instruction decisions instructional decisions within the classroom and create global driven interventions that will be regularly monitored by the classroom teachers and or the academic interventionists we have we work closely with the other grade level teachers at Braintree and Randolph as well as a whole school team this consistent practice helps our teachers refine their teaching strategies and strengthen their instructional skills it also helps me determine the needs for professional development at a small scale during our building level plc meetings and staff meetings and to advocate for what we do at the district level now academic mastery is crucial to our staff and students and we also value the work of our community members and families in our area and we show this value through farm to school so this year Brookfield was awarded the farm to school and early childhood education grant and our school is building some strong connections between the classrooms the community and the cafeteria when it comes to food systems students are receiving monthly lessons from the harvest of the month curriculum which are taught by our nurse mrs. Brooke Gray this harvest food is then utilized by miss Ann who conducts a cooking class or cooking lesson and a taste test with classes and we've also spent a lot of time creating a robust composting program initiated by our fourth grade class and here they you can see the picture of them presenting it to the whole school and that was done under mrs. Ferris's direction the students are learning about where local foods are coming from farm systems sustainability of farms and our land and local economies farm to school learning doesn't only happen during school day our after school program has also been extending these experiences like a few classes picked apples at Liberty orchards in the fall at a field trip and the kids in aftercare use some of those apples to make dehydrated apple stacks for later on in the week the funds that we have received from this grant have been used to purchase a food cart for easy classroom cooking experiments we'll be using those funds to build more garden beds out here this other part of the building possibly adds some fruit trees to the property we'll be marketing our harvest to the school and the community and possibly creating a farm stand we'll see so farm school program has been one of the ways we are connecting with our community members this year our goal is to extend those connections because research shows they expand and enrich learning opportunities fosters civic responsibility and encourage a sense of unity and pride for the place that we live so here are the different ways that we're building those connection connections we're doing a lot we're trying to increase participation in school club meetings and events and our school club is the name of our pto to make it more inclusive we're working with the brick field historical society to promote learning of local history we're working with local artists and farms to extend our learning experiences for instance stephanie from third branch pottery came up last week and did some pottery with our pre-pay classes or pre-pay class and what we're hoping to have a local sculptor for our artists and residency program in the springtime we even have a volunteer coming in to support personal and small group learning projects weekly so these are just some of the ways that we're building those connections with our community this year we really really want to increase participation in our school club and this is twofold we want to grow the number of individuals attending our school club meetings and increase that participation in the event that we plan most events have occurred after school hours causing scheduling conflicts for a lot of families so in an effort to reach all students the school club is trying to provide activities and events during the school day and so we gave it a try this year with our halloween stations we parent volunteers run five different stations like making sugar treat bags playing halloween games it was a wonderful event and the kids and the families that participated had last we're also trying to provide a wide variety of events for instance two weeks ago we held a family moving night and more than 80 people came we have plans for an afternoon with a bonfire and sledding and then a community variety show held in the evening for kids to show off their skills whatever they may be and have a silent auction during the intermission to raise funds for the school club so we can continue to put out these types of events we're excited to continue our second year with STEM education at our field this provides students with the early exposure to STEM concepts real-world application creativity preparation for a technological future our STEM classes work to build a range of skills from interpersonal to analytical to problem solving and our STEM education also helps to develop that curious mindset to foster that lifelong learning students work with our STEM teacher Miss Conti weekly in addition to their brain level science units which are taught by their classroom teacher students have engaged in a variety of learning experience experiences such as our outdoor learning robotics and coding engineering experiments and more for two months a group of students worked with linking engineering to life in our after-school program these students participated in weekly virtual challenges and are headed to beta technologies for a field trip to see electric airplane engineering in production so we'll be going to that in January which is a really great event so not only are we working on building our students skills in STEM we're also building leadership skills so at Parkfield we are a school that implements the components of positive behavioral interventions and supports PBIS through PBIS we hope to build students self-awareness and accountability for their behavior by providing opportunities for leadership both in the classrooms and in the school students are becoming more aware of their greater impact on the community using these positive opportunities models what we expect while at Brookfield and give students many ways to shine so we do this in a few different ways expectations in the classroom in school are modeled taught and frequently revisited throughout the school year this sets the stage for the kids so they know what they should be doing and when and it helps the flow team and creates more instruction time we reinforce positive behavior with tokens and celebrations of hard work at our community circles with our shout outs which are displayed in our bulletin board in the hallway which you should check out we celebrate as a whole school when we earn a massive container full of tokens for example last Friday the students earned a crazy hair day from our November collection of tokens the last part is supporting our students when they when they falter talking to them about their behavior giving them options practicing expectations with them we have support from our social worker and board certified behavior analysts to support staffing students around more extreme behaviors but to build on and extend those positive behaviors we've been implementing leadership roles these roles empower students by providing them responsibilities and opportunities to positively impact the school build interpersonal skills and continue to foster a sense of community within our school so these are just a few of the many things we are doing here and while this is just a glimpse of the school we would love for you to come and see it for yourself and be happy to show you all around at some time do you have any questions a lot that i just gave you i was just going to say i'm excited that you're doing farm to school you'll have to speak i'm excited you're doing farm to school as the last a new elementary school in the district that hasn't had that program yet so that's exciting that you yeah we're able to get that grant and bring that award yes it's been it's been really fun to reinvigorate the school and farm to school this year and they've had they've had had it but not to the extent that we have been building this year how big is your school club i mean how much participation do you have so last year there were only three members including the former principal this year i we've increased it increased the membership to the last meeting i had three different individuals which was great uh but i think now we're at six new people who have communicated that they want to be involved and and have been coming to meetings when they can so we're we're getting there so people can just show up and people just show up to our to our monthly meetings like where should i talk to monthly meetings happening every wednesday that's i didn't right here in this room please come did you just say monthly meetings every which wednesday the first wednesday of every month yeah and so it doesn't i was like i was like that's every wednesday but do you when you have events at this school yes is parking a problem for families parking is a problem um people make do though because it's from off right you most people after there's super rooms or four-wheel drive vehicles so they'll park on the side of the road we also have the outdoor school driveway so people have been parking up along that driveway there's a few go past you can see a little dirt road so people can go up there in part but it is challenging for those who need that accessibility because 80 is a lot you said you had 80 people almost 80 students yep yeah thank you for your presentation of course yeah yeah i'm happy to happy to do it thank you for listening and if uh you need anything or have any further questions please feel free to reach out thanks thank you very excited about the school here facilities monitoring is the next item absolutely so i have a request that we move the facilities monitoring report up to the uh before we're viewing EL reports just to be mindful of schedules of people that live on that side so let's do we don't have to vote on that no no okay great so for the facilities monitoring report is that you yes so that's yours wasn't i submitted the engineering board the filly support to you the the board where you were due and we're here in case you have any specific questions that we can ask not for people are there you know it's okay i've got a couple updates the the generator for the rs we're in the middle of a waiver process on that we only did successfully get two bids on that so this is putting a waiver process on that we got the committees established in this uh melinda has the committees for the playground equipment as well as the new bleachers and the reverse osmosis which is the last highlighted one is scheduled now confirmed for the uh 19 february break that's for your school miscarriage when's the mascot going up in the field that's uh going up on the 29th and the high school can you remind me what happened to the bleachers that are is i think you told yes i don't remember they're old they failed inspection yeah they failed inspection severe we knew it was coming we we lived along and we um successfully secured that linberg architect for the feasibility study ma'am i did not hear you i'm sorry did we successfully secured um linberg architect for the oh yes ma'am that for a hoop i i can't hear very well but you didn't jump on another committee here earlier tonight did you because you're gonna be real busy son third i did not okay good standing standing tension linberg's first last and second meeting is uh Thursday morning can you give us an update on the brookfield well situation brookfield well yeah i gave up on it we put a lot of money in it the well exists out there and it it is producing good sweet water but the the radon target for schools is it's so it's like a burlington pcb problem so i mean i i mean i'm creating i get good sweet water i can supply the water for the whole town but we can't use it for school so that's why i'm putting in the uh reverse osmosis back here and i had uh i have an engineering review coming tomorrow morning zero eight so we're gonna be fussing around here they did they did a good job on that there was an engineering report from uh years ago it was but they had a series of steps that they recommended us take right from the least costly to the most and so we went through all the steps never at the most costly none of the other ones fixed the problem along the way that we tried so the water issue out of brookfield there's kind of an automated between uh less and out of both that don't have hair because we've been pulling our hair out because of the water she's been working on it for five years take off the hat that's all right the um the green space near the district office that's been started right i saw it and we made a lot of people angry in the community um they get over it i get over to mr white uh david white he was he realizes that uh most of that stuff that he has back there is on our land so he's been very very dominating he realized everything about it but we're kind of down right now why is it why is it upsetting to people pardon me why is it upsetting to people good we should shut that road down oh inconvenience the inconvenience they weren't as angry as they were about the uh speak bumps that they were pretty important shut the road down that's exciting how are things going with the road that we redid by our tcc and the traffic situation he's been real quiet it's been real quiet um you guys were cautioned we were all cautioned that we we designed that road for a long term but it needs to be paid needs to be paid entirely correctly uh mr girls is absolutely adamantly refusing to go that way mr millington is discussed with our legal maybe we can strong on him but in the bottom line we want to be good neighbors too okay so i don't know anybody know mr girls personally he's a he's a nice guy um lonely guy thank you you're not doing anything Thursday morning who you come see me thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for suggesting that jacket um eo reports 2.4 and 2.5 2.4 is financial planning which is partly given all the work that we're doing and trying to figure out all the changes this year due to the legislation um but it's really about ensuring that the budgeting process considers changes in the legislation which we'll talk a little bit about today any trends that can be anticipated so i do report compliance at this point in time and i don't know if there's questions on 2.4 usually this is the first this is the first right yeah and then 2.5 is emergency superintendent succession and the purpose of that self-evident we do have an assistant superintendent the other thing is that this report contains the instructions to the board should you have to change authority at any point in time there's a process to go through and notify and kind of some of the state agencies and the secretary of education so that's all in this report if you ever need it questions is this is the procedure for temporary delegation of authority somewhere other than in this report is it in a yeah there's a what's in the report came from the actual guidance from the aoe they have an actual form that they they sent out to explain the process a lot of it is just the board you know providing the authority most of the powers are signatory so that the aoe is notified right but you know board delegated the authority we're notifying the aoe so they know who the signatory is going to accept let me see it policy c9 wellness and concrete help thank you thank you this is the second read um the changes uh that were compelled um we're in the first read there have been no subsequent changes any questions or concerns on uh required policy c9 wellness and comprehensive health it's kind of depressing it's the injecting policy as in our last meeting i chose the most lenient language that does leave a small amount of room for celebratory foods move to accept um board chair had to step away from it well do we need to we don't work with it it's just part of the concept agenda right is it no no it's separate separate you could move out of the concept agenda no you've got no i've moved to accept um policy c9 wellness and comprehensive health policy the required second second second by sam all those in favor all right all right oh yes sir this is my judgment yes okay hesitatingly unanimously oh we did that one okay budget overview here we go do you really want to as much as we want to accept that so a lot of this is about choices um and so you know especially in terms of talking about the technical center budget there's a couple of choices there in talking about the potential orange southwest district budget there's three choices there for the board to consider and you can kind of mix match so the goal would be able to walk away with a little bit of direction about kind of where the board is feeling that we should be kind of directing our energy recognize that there are three budgets that the orange southwest school district manages and they're all completely separate there's the orange southwest district budget as a whole which deals with our schools there is the technical center budget which is completely separate that's mostly funded by tuition plus some grant support from the state and then there is the raven program budget and so we'll talk about all three of those tonight um one of the things to be aware of um and the thing that i'm trying to do especially with this budget um is just trying to maximize options um the 24 25 district budget um is really designed to serve a few kind of important roles there's quirks in the new education funding legislation that we're we're dealing with right now that if we use it effectively it's going to open up kind of a greater range of budget options in the later years we've got this five year kind of adjustment period right state made a lot of changes and said okay we're going to put some caps on things and we're going to be five years to figure out how to manage stuff and get everything in line so when the five years is up and caps go away you're not in kind of a catastrophic place um so our primary goal is kind of maximizing these options so the next administrator the next superintendent has a wider variety of strategies that they can employ to manage what's going to be a difficult five-year period for budget development um in addition and one of the things that i think it's really important because this will have a an impact on staff um is we've got to contend with the fact that there's going to be a significant loss in grant funding this year the essert grants the covid era grants that have been supporting about 1.5 million dollars worth of personnel this year are gone at the end of this year um so this is going to have a major impact on the services that we're able to currently provide to students and stop me or or talk with me at any point in time um if things get a little confusing some of this is going to make more sense to folks that deal with with budget stuff a little bit more but i'm going to try to hopefully make some sense for folks here um i think the big thing is to kind of review from last month the quarks and the law so we can figure out how to use them and then the numbers that we're going to talk about that are in the slide they're really used as an example to illustrate how the new legislation functions um the legislature pretty much figured out the districts would need some time to adjust to the education funding overhaul so they did build in this five-year adjustment period and during this adjustment period they added some guardrails that we can use to kind of maximize our budget options and that's what we're going to talk about so the first thing to recognize is that there is a five percent cap on school tax rates and this was to help districts who are going to suffer a loss in funding due to the new legislation of which we are one right if we want to be able to maintain what we did last year because of this change and we're we've lost money we're going to have to make up for it somehow just to be back to where we were to keep ourselves hold and for an example let's say that we need to increase our tax rate by eight percent to make up the funding loss our community will only have to manage a five percent increase that's with the cap right we asked for eight percent um they're only going to charge us for five but they'll give us the full amount for the eight percent there is a reckoning and we talked about this a little bit at the last meeting however if we depend upon that extra three percent right we're going to eight three percent above the the um the cap um if we depend upon that three percent by making a permanent part of our budgets going forward we'll have to increase our budget in five years to cover as long as we eliminate that additional three percent or anything that's above the five percent over the next five years um we won't be on the hook for it when 2030 comes does that make a little bit of sense so they're helping us out a little bit um and they're saying yeah if you go over it there may be a reckoning but we're giving you five years to get that straight we can talk can i just yeah so by 2030 our budgets need to be increasing only by five percent not by eight percent is that what you're saying our our tax rates um so i'm using this as an example all right it's probably easy so if we were to stick at the five percent cap and not go over the five percent cap for tax rates this is what would happen with our budget these are fairly realistic numbers compared to our budget over the course of the next five years let's say that hey you know we have extra additions there we've got some challenges in our district that are going on right now so we're going to go over that five percent cap we're going to go to eight percent every year and the reason that we're going to do that is maybe to help out a little bit with the challenging behaviors we have at r.e.s and for h.h.e. in Brookfield to try to preserve some of the lesser era people that we've hired on board so if we go to eight percent what ends up happening is at the end of the five five years right this is where our budget's going to be that we're depending upon this is where it would be if it were just the five percent but the problem is when we get to that fifth year we're now on the hook for all that additional above the five percent cap so that would be about four or five million dollars we'd have to make up in that one year that's the quick so we can't do that because that would be really irresponsible no we can't but there's some games to play that we probably do want to play we are going to be over the five percent anyway this first year just because just because of the increases that we've gotten staff salaries the sixteen seventeen percent increase in health care increases in spend which are all kind of images which will show on a different slide but so if we stay under go through the kind of summer here because i think it'll really play it out well for folks if we stay at or under the five percent cap for each of the next five years the district's going to be in good stead as there will be no additional money we're on the hook for it come 2030 if we go over the five percent cap and don't do anything to eliminate the excess during the five year adjustment period we will have a fiscal cliff in 2030 right in the example that we just talked about shows what the district would face if it exceeded the cap by three percent each year and made that extra money a permanent part of each budget going forward in year 2030 we need to suddenly raise an additional four point six million just to maintain the previous year's level of funding the best solution that i am proposing and then i'll give you the logic for this is if the taxpayers are willing is to exceed the five percent cap but by a very small amount the five percent cap only exists if it is used in the previous year if we don't use it we lose it permanently right if we go over that five percent cap maybe we go to five point one percent each of the five years that means that we have the option of going above five percent not paying for it in the coming years so that if something catastrophic happens we have maneuverability right oh my god we had something that we couldn't anticipate that just blew up and it's going to cost an awful lot to to manage our way through it and so as long as we're hitting that five percent cap just a little bit over we'll always have access to it over the five years so to maximize the district's budget options i recommend exceeding the cap by a small amount this way the caps benefits are available to use in future years as something catastrophic happens in the fiscal cliff we'll have to deal with in 2030 will be small right over a little bit yeah we're going to have to pay for it in the end but you know what if we get to the end of five years and that fiscal cliff is fifty thousand dollars in a twenty five to thirty million dollar budget not that big a deal next year which is year one of the five we will exceed the five percent cap just to cover our mandatory costs how far we exceed it will be up to the board in terms of additional spending all right and the one thing that i want to talk to you about right now is this idea that we're still missing data from the state typically at this time i'd be able to talk with the community about what their actual tax rates might be in each of these scenarios we do not have that information yet at the latest we're supposed to have it by law by january first they've already written to us and said they won't have it in time i don't know what that means that might mean that there might need to be a special board meeting or two to make sure that we're hitting our time windows for your budget vote because there's a certain amount of time between when you've had the final vote on the the budget and when we have the actual vote in March and so we've got to make sure we hit those time frames so all right um a couple of parts and pieces here so i've split this up into two different pockets of funding we've got what's mandatory in other words we got to do it because it's required under contract it's required to provide services to special education students that are it's required under federal law there was also another little tricky thing that the legislators slipped in that nobody really knew about we found out about about a month ago and that's the early education child care tax they're trying to get early education right preschools across the state but they had no funding mechanism so they slipped into the law a little tax that they charge every district on the cost of their staff so our staff salaries have a little bit of tax on that we're going to have to pay the other things that are mandatory is they are resetting what's called the tier one funding and this will take a little bit of explanation but hopefully it's pretty simple when the state back in the 90s decided that education was fundamentally unequal in the state of Vermont they tried to equalize what they were giving to students and so the first thing that most people are familiar with is what's called the yield right the yield is how much the state gives us per student and that's how much it gives everybody per student across the state that's the equalization because they're saying hey there's a certain amount of money that's required to give students a proper education and if we believe in equality we have to make sure that every student in the state gets the same amount last year the yield was about fifteen thousand four hundred dollars this year it's about nine thousand four hundred okay so there was a huge change in the yield now to make sure with all the changes that happened in terms of the legislation to make sure that they're adequately funding education with all these changes they have to reset that tier one funding platform and so that's what the tier one funding is that equality money right that's your it's what we used to call the yield to reset that based upon the new legislation is going to require an 18.5 percent increase in tax rates across the state right off the bat so they're resetting what's required for equality of education within the state so everybody is subject to this so right off the bat if you own a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar house in the state of Vermont you can expect your taxes to go up six hundred and fifty dollars right off the bat before we do anything so it's important to recognize the other piece that's unknown right now which hopefully will be known after tonight is the tuition impact of the technical center because that's one of the things you'll be looking at and hopefully voting on we sent 60 students to the tech center so if their tuitions go up we pay more and that impacts the ego ssd budget right because the rtcc budget is separate from ours so the things that we've talked about there were tons and tons of things that folks wanted that felt was important in these challenging times we've reduced them down to just a few and so i have three options for you and you could mix and match these if the board chooses and i'll talk about each one and why they're important the first one is kind of the maximum option so this is our discretionary funding stuff that we should do but we don't don't have to but there's probably going to be a cost if we don't so the first thing is that we've been building this full-day preschool for four-year-olds two of the sites are funded in the regular budget already one of the sites was being funded with the ester funding with the grant right to get it up and to make sure that everybody had access across the district that ester funding is going away so we have to move that money if you want to preserve that preschool program into the regular budget there are four people associated with that a teacher and three career professionals the cost to move it into the regular budget is 153 thousand nurses so this is an important piece so we heard folks talk a little bit earlier about the idea that yeah you know they don't have these mental health supports it's not because the money wasn't provided it's because we can't find them and so that's an important piece to know so we have been trying to provide those supports to the other schools but finding them is incredibly difficult especially brain tree has had the most problems this year in terms of challenging behaviors why the nurses are so important is that they are a calming presence in a building many of them know how to de-escalate children if we have full-time nurses in the two smaller buildings they will have a little bit of time on their hands above and beyond the medical assistance that they provide during the day and with a little training they can be kind of part of our mental health team that helps to work with the students right student comes in they're dysregulated we don't have a lot of other resources but the nurse can sit down for 10 or 15 minutes go through a de-escalation technique with the student get them back down into a good space so it would be maximizing that resource the requirement we have enough nurses around the building around the district that if we increase this by the equivalent of one full nursing position we would have a nurse in each school to be able to provide that service and again the idea is covering what we can't through their other mental health services because there's just a lot of people out there and all the districts have been competing for them over the last couple of years the custodian i've kind of split this up in the last day so this is not going to quite match what's in your your packets we need an additional custodian or two if we're really going to do a good work keeping up on everything that we've got to keep up on in terms of cleanliness in the buildings the other piece that's on here is a payroll assistant for central office we do not have a human resources person i primarily serve that role for 262 people but parts of that role are also ferried out to the other staff within the central office people whose job it is not to do payroll especially our two our payroll specialists and our assistant business manager are being kind of overwhelmed in terms of the HR piece here so what i am suggesting is that we bring in another assistant a payroll assistant who could act as the assistant superintendents or whoever the second body is in the district next year partially as their secretary but also provides support either to help out payroll to do some of the more minor functions to take them off the plate of the folks that are there or potentially to take off their plates some of the HR functions that were basic ones and so i think that's very important i've got people that are burning out in there this year and i don't want to lose them um school resource officer is on there in this first cut and school resource officer fits into kind of the same category for me as the nurses i've always had one in every district their primary role it's nice to have them there for safety that 90 95 percent of their time is being a mentor of the students a big brother a big sister somebody they can depend upon a good role model somebody that they can talk to somebody that can help out in the household if there are things that are going on in there somebody who can provide safety checks they are typically very highly looked up to by the students and i've had students that you know when they were struggling a little bit needed somebody to talk to that's the only person they trust to be able to talk to so that's one of the reasons to kind of consider it now again it's another kind of alternative way of getting to some of those mental health issues so this would be the the Cadillac plan and there's a couple other pieces in here to recognize we've got the mandatory that doesn't change in any of our scenarios and some of it is still unknown we don't know what the new tax rate is going to be my guess is it's going to be around it's going to go from 1.39 to 1.64 so this means that right now under the old base for tier one funding people were paying $1.39 per every hundred dollars of assessed value just to reset this because of the new legislation it's going to go to $1.64 the five percent cap does not count on this money okay so that happens anyway the five percent cap counts on this money so our discretionary so a couple of other numbers in here so this is the subtotal of the mandatory this is the subtotal of the additional asks and discretionary this is the two added up together so this budget would require a two million dollar increase um because we've done our homework and we've done a pretty good job in using our yearly surpluses to subsidize taxes i have a million a little over a million dollars that we can apply to subsidizing taxes this year so kind of with this unknown sitting here that's about how much we'd be asking the taxpayers it's within our control can i just ask you to repeat to make sure i understood the five percent cap applies only to the discretionary thank you okay so they call it tier one and tier two tier one is what's required for yeah for every student anything we want for our kids above and beyond that that's tier two that goes into what they call the liability pool so any other district that wants money above tier one we all ask for it from the state and then they ask all the taxpayers in the in the state to come up with that money and then they give it to us so all the taxpayers are processing um the second possibility is uh reducing these costs a little bit it would be reducing the custodian in the six percent increase the custodial supplies the real kind of bare bones budget would keep the payroll assistant and would keep the preschool regular budget and so this would be a place for some discussion or if you feel that there should be other options that we should be moving folks around i need a i need a basic direction i want the nurse in there i i feel um i i think mental health wise it's critical being in there so i hear a nurse so just just to be clear on the tier two stuff that all the districts get to ask for and it that will raise this we want to be as close to five percent as we can be this year where there's no way in half we're going to make it because between we're going to be over yeah just be just on the mandatory stuff we're going to be over we're going to be around 7.77 percent i think at the last calculation just on the mandatory stuff we don't want to go over 10 but the because then we have to go and explain it to the we don't want to be under yeah right because then we're paying for everybody else's extra stuff yeah yeah so what's going to happen is that you're going to have a tough year this year but you got four years to figure it out and i've already talked with the cabinet we have some plans in place that they are considering for future years so that they have their ducks and are on it whoever comes in next can take a look at that that's something we can talk about in the executive session at some point in time if you want and some districts are planning to spend 9.9 percent just not on salaries things that can be taken out of the budget after the five years like modernization funds oh yeah i was going to say i want to see what you can add that you could take out but yeah one time one time thing but the problem the problem is the people that are doing that because that comes in that liability pool so if if we're being prudent as we should be because taxes are going to be high for everybody and some districts are going to 9.9 percent everybody else is paying for them not being prudent that's right so there's an ethical component and this is just a yeah there were a lot of people that were talking about doing that i don't know if they understand or not but somewhere between five and ten as close to five as we can get yeah and i would i would argue i would argue yeah as close to five because that'll keep a small flip and if we still get our surpluses and people use it the way that i've been using it you may be able to cover that cliff pretty can't believe when we get there so other things that the board based upon the discussion out of these things wants to make sure that we preserve well the the preschool i the first two i see is kind of not for me are not okay doesn't mean we'll be able to pass the budget but we're going to try like the difference any other comments thoughts so the payroll assistant would be a new position as well as well as the yeah that that central office um and talking with the older staff like linda lou hold that soon that she was here they had between three and seven other people in there at one time and so they part of that is i've got their part of now how many staff are there currently i've got three administrative assistants the business manager myself and student services director i apologize which is and heather's only been the last but you know the biggest the biggest piece that is missing from this whole scenario hr if you got it if you've got a new superintendent that's coming in who is going to be a visionary who you want doing big leadership things you need to free them up so they can do that hr is the way to attack that if you can take the 262 people off their plate um so they're only dealing with you know super major issues that might come up once once a year once every other year you are going to be a much better staff uh this is my recommendation so we do payroll all in house currently no outside circles now we actually even brought on to try to help uh we brought in tyler we've been digitizing everything um to try to transfer over because it's a little bit more efficient you're not shuffle all the paper around it's still not enough i see the value in an hr person as a as another point of priority agree the first two lines are important to me hr or or a a smaller payroll hr hr person's going to be 150 ish range uh which is fine i think it's it's especially with the legality of everything we deal with as i understand the cost difference i guess the role the more important side of the role in my mind would be the hr function whether you title it that or not okay when we when we talked about when we talked about adding an assistant superintendent we talked about whether we would add an assistant superintendent or an hr person in that spot um so as we are looking at changes in our district leadership you know when we have a new superintendent we're all thinking the same things should we should we be having an hr person instead of an assistant superintendent or the other piece um in the background um again one of the reasons that i chose an assistant superintendent was because i wanted to make sure that succession was in place because i was not really fighting on the journey the hr piece i think is is vitally important but you could also keep the assistant superintendent i have two curriculum directors that are both getting ready to retire they're going to be in a reduced role next year i brought one in for k to 12 for math and one in for k to 12 eLA both of them have done an absolutely amazing job we built in teacher leaders this year to be able to take over a lot of the remaining functions so as those folks go those resources could be shifted to maintaining an assistant superintendent who one of their primary roles typically is curriculum and the curriculum director yeah they do grants they do curriculum and half a dozen other things equity coordination in your case but it's it's a gigantic job curriculum alone is enough for personal but i've also been doing some HR things too it's like we're chopped up all these jobs yeah so there could be some restructuring that could possibly benefit the bottom line sounds like sounds like it and also job satisfaction and longevity yep and the curriculum directors neither are grand funded one is one is one is so then that's not but it's but that doesn't that means that if they go that position that replaces it could be grand funded as well partially i have to change the title to give it some real so it's not s or fun no it's title good good every year easy isn't it so so what i'm hearing make sure i'm clear on this as i as i put rob into work because it's a lot of number crunching um nurse preschool HR professional yeah and i'd be interested in hearing um it sounds like there is some opinion on this restructuring like what the restructuring could potentially look like among as you were kind of alluding to and i'll leave that discussion up yeah i mean i think we get the people i think we get people that say how's this work it's kind of like my thought i don't know we can talk more about it yes all right that you might have yes after being on the ground okay so rtcc um there's deeper discussion we could have if we need to um but i think things are kind of straightforward um Heather can help out a little bit with this too to if there's other questions that come up but the the big thing about the tech center is that um we had a dramatic increase in tuitions uh a year or so ago um that had a huge impact on our budget um it drove up our budget by another 250 to 300 000 plus it impacts the willingness of our sending schools to send students here so i just want to put that kind of in the background total budget for the tech center um if we do this that's what it would be that would be the increase in tuition um what we're talking about and this was some good ideas that nika and heaven were working on was combining the dental program with the health program health program has said low numbers lately the dental program has said low numbers and it's been incredibly hard to get a dental person to come in we've had fantastic people but they're usually short-lived they can make a lot more money elsewhere so the idea would be to combine the two programs dental would be a unit um under the health program so we're still using our equipment and our current dental teacher seems to be pretty tickled at the idea of being able to come in and just do it for you know a couple of weeks each year and so we kind of plan that into the budgeting pieces paying her a statement to be able to do that the other bed are we funding that or Perkins or are we finding that out it was originally funded through a great call time which is for creating new equipments or new programs or modernizing programs there were qualification issues here and so that grant paid for it for but this year for the first time it was in the local budget the grant had been exhausted the program had been launched so currently that's in the local budget and there's only four students in that program and then in health careers there's under 10 is it thanks um and so uh one instructor can have up to 16 students so by putting those programs together right we're saving money but we're still providing pathways to both of those career paths or or even more we're thinking of adding emt as a possibility so students could attend this program and then earn various uh tier two IRC's like the industry recognized credentials based on their passion they could pursue it so we're not looking to cut we're really looking to the other other piece that would happen in this scenario is now you have a space in the building that opens up and they've got some new ideas or programs that would go in so it's not like you know we're going to be losing enrollment the idea is right they're getting one program from the two that's going to have pretty good enrollment um and then it's opening up a space where they can build hopefully another hydra sorting program where the drawbacks for which for combining combining those two if we did have 30 or 40 applications for the two programs we would want to re-expand in the future but we're not taking anything we're not taking anything off the table and you're because of the tuition jumps at 20 percent um the funding pathways are different so the way the tech center is funded is they take an average of six semesters they average that enrollment and that's the number of ADM that are tuition that you get but if you have a sudden jump of 20 percent you get actual actual enrollment so if that happened we could afford to hire another teacher with that up-up so the the only downside is I guess it's a little bit sad to take away a full dental program and make it a part of the health careers program but that program has struggled a bit it has since launching already yes it can always be built up in the future if the interest is there um but we're not getting we have so better to maintain it and maintain it in a more robust setting as a combination than to have it continue to decline and then have to lose it completely or something right because what if it's below eight students for three consecutive years it's generally looked at or the other other piece I think that's important one of the things that's kind of hindered us a little bit um when heather's talking about you know the the three years the six semester averaging they they look at the average students over over six semesters over three years and they give us money by student based upon that average that's really great if your numbers are declining right because your average is higher than the number of students you have so you have plenty of funding to be able to serve those students our problem is is our numbers were going up they weren't hitting the 20 increase threshold so they're giving us funding I think last year they were giving us funding for for 126 kids when we actually had 154 and so that also had an impact on on our tuition it's a little bit so it takes some time if those numbers stay high for the averages to catch up the state when they put that in place they were assuming everybody's enrollments were going down that wasn't happening here so the other piece that was added a year or so ago was a dean of students and that person was brought in at the time primarily to help out the student discipline that role has changed this year the the new dean is actually doing a lot of curriculum work within the technical center which is helpful in kind of bringing the student scores up which is one of the things that the state was worried about but he's also doing some discipline as well and so it is it is kind of an important position there it is currently being paid for through us your funding which dries up so if we're going to keep the dean position we're going to see a 634 increase in student tuition right for each student that comes into the tech center next year if we combine the dental with the health programs just like we talked about but we remove the dean position in other words we don't put it into the regular budget we'll actually see a 388 dollar per student decrease calculations on this for us 60 times 634 it's probably about forty thousand dollars that it would increase the OSSD budget if we keep the dean. How important is the dean? Oh okay so um so really like that's like really a nice question like how important is this person? Right right that's not what i meant to ask so no i'm not wrong but it's uh in last school year the person's primary responsibility was uh dean work doing discipline but this year we hired a different person in their primary responsibility is improving academic outcomes that is their number one that's been an issue at the tech center a real serious issue yeah the kids that come in are from all over the place all different backgrounds from all different schools many of the students are on plans at various levels and many are two grade levels or below um actual grade level in outcomes and so making sure there's intervention groups making sure that there is you know we're meeting the students where they are and helping them move forward is his primary role the numbers are promising we have seen an improvement in the academic scores and i mean from a passion point of view i want to see it persist i want to see this through um however i don't see enough money in the Perkins grant which is the equivalent of title for tech there's just not enough money to fund it completely through Perkins so at least a portion if we want to keep this role at least a portion of it has to go to the other other piece that he serves which is critical uh if we can actually get it up and run and have people attend that he is the adult event coordinator so there's a possibility that if we get some interesting programs going and he's got pretty tall order starting second semester to get some programs going that you know we're raising at least minor tuition money coming in from the adults that want to come in and participate so that's the other role that's a actually assistant director as long as you're part of state nine so there those are two pretty different recommendations yeah and that's what is what is your recommendation that's it they both are good i would actually and i hate increasing funding and tuitions and things i would actually go with this one for the simple fact that like i said you have students that are coming in from Williamstown from Northfield from Randolph um their academic careers prior to haven't always been top notch and so when they do take the state testing they perform poorly and the state has actually called us on that it was one of the reasons why we built in another English teacher in a math teacher over there was trying at those skills bolster so at least for now i would say keep the person curriculum work is a quirky thing in three years um you can get most of it done and then it should be handed off to the actual staff to keep it maintained and do the periodic reviews how often do you have to say curriculum work is kind of a funny thing how often do you have to have someone who's a curriculum director who's revamping your program then we kind of get it up and running and it kind of subsistence and then how often do you generally need to so we've been starting kind of from scratch when i started here there wasn't it was sporadic there were late social studies at high school was awesome elementary had the bridges program that they were kind of using kind of not depending upon which school you were in so it took four or five years and of course some of that was because COVID slowed things down for Catherine and Betty to be able to do the math and the yield of work and get the curriculum documents up get the running and people using them get people referring to them as they do their daily lesson planning so that is all in place and now we're at a position where we've got the assessment systems that are in place within the schools as well we're training the actual teacher leaders that we hired how to facilitate those conversation here's the data what is it what does it apply about what the students learn did they meet the standards that we taught if they didn't which ones did they not meet and what are we going to do differently right here and now to make sure that they meet before we move on and so once you get to that cultural piece where the staff are managing it then the curriculum directors can go away the only time that you would have need potentially of either another curriculum director or a consultant coming in from the outside to do this work is if there's like a major change in state legislation and they're throwing out common core and they're going with a new curriculum the documents should be reviewed probably every three years but that's something that a local team of teachers can do with the right guidance and house just to make sure that things are still alive and to actually frame this for how this hits our budget the difference between those two numbers is about 350 dollars and if you say around 60 students that's 15,000 which is less than the tuition of one student so it improves outcomes for 60 of our students so what's 634 times 60 no i deducted the two numbers they have nothing to do with each other they do of course they do if we go if we go if we go to this plan oh is that a negative that's a negative if we go with this how is that possible if we got rid of the the deans 634 times 60 the deans on a grant because like i said i think it's no it's much more than i thought i think it's 35 because i thought the difference between those two numbers was 300 but it's nine so yeah but it's it's it's it's it's about about 35 to 40 thousand if we go with the one on this side which again it might cause some of the sending schools the bulk in terms of our budget is minuscule it's an increase but it's it's nine so you guys have to vote on this because i need these numbers to be able to fill in one of those red boxes on the os sd budget for the next time so the two that you need to vote on will be the tech center budget one of the recommendations or something else that you come up with on on your own and in the raven budget which is really simple what are the other tech center tuition around our area are we are we way yeah we're number three compared to compared to are they comparing full day to full day or full day to half day summer half day but the tuitions we're number we're number three in the list southwest tech wherever that is is the highest again we had a couple of things that happened that caused the surge in our our tuition our tuition used to be in the 1819 range um and kind of stayed there because we don't we're always trying to keep it under 20 for whatever psychological reason crossing that 20 000 threshold only seemed to be a big deal um but uh perkins our tcc did not complete the perkins grant one yeah um and what that meant was that the people that were in perkins had to be paid for out of the regular budget until the grant was complete and whenever you pay somebody out of the regular budget they could never go back on a grant and so there was a jump in our tuition that year because of that failure to get the perkins grant done so you'll see these are our tuitions you know kind of leading up and then we had 18670 and then 20 23 24 it jumped like 4 000 bucks the person can't go back or the position can't go back uh the position can't go back it's called supplanting once you pay for it out of the regular budget you're you're locked out it's not all grants do that but most of the federal grants do which perkins is now we missed out dang the person responsible didn't do it uh maybe answered this earlier mentioned that um what are the enrollment projections looking like for our tcc um so nika oaks the current director has um some vision to increase enrollment um and uh one of them is through another time grant to improve the educational program modernize modernize is the language they like to use and that would keep the current educational services as it is and add on units in outdoor education to attract students into the profession so should we've written a grant to add kayaks and mountain bites and skiing um and we anticipate that that would significantly increase enrollment and the other um we're hoping to fund again with a grant to uh improve modernize is the language they like uh the ag program to add vet tech and some animal husbandry which we anticipate that's already a full program that would double that program we would be looking to um add another adult because you can only have 16 to 1 that's the highest ratio allowable so if we're successful with those initiatives of course we would hope enrollment would go up but enrollment is not declining it's sort of stagnant right now that's why these visionary ideas to hopefully attract students are the way we would see to improve their currently at 128 that's fte just um not actual students because the pre-tech students are counted as half so actual students i think is 130 well we're getting the 80m so our enrollments have been higher so what the state is giving us for an average this year is higher than our current actual i think we're getting like 134 is what they're paying us for but the enrollment right now um from what i got last night was was 128 the programs there are some programs that are performing really well um dental is low uh health careers construction uh culinary and ed services are all in that kind of five to eight range right now the rest of them are between 11 and 16 construction as well yeah hopefully it's a one-year glitch i apologize i was switching around when you talk about some of these new initiatives that you're looking at or looking into potentially bringing on board in future years does the facility currently would it be able to support like the current building would be able to support that student population and the potential expansion into those programs in the current space that we have or is that would that be an issue yes um so education services currently has a very small enrollment it's four and some of those students are in full-time co-op so if we could fill that program up to 16 the room is absolutely big enough for those students we just currently don't have the enrollment and also again with others yes so the answers yes we would be maximizing on facilities we already have okay yeah the goal the goal would be every one of the programs up to the 14 to 16 which we get us up around 160 bits um that's about the capacity let me list for it right now and if we can make that jump as i told you it changes our funding so thoughts on either of these two like i said if i can get recommend the board to to vote on one or the other um that way that'll feedback into us this different next year and allow um robin also to get her announced tuition stuff i mean i will i'm concerned that we're already one of the higher programs um i mean at my option you know my my choice would be to not lose the steam and to move them to a local budget but then that would bring our proposed tuition up so you know and i don't know we can't you know foresee what the other schools would be doing too is if we're staying kind of in line with increases around the other school districts or if other districts are working to lower theirs and then ours is going to look like a significant jump in comparison to what other districts are doing and i don't know what the other districts are this is this year's data i don't know where they're going to be next year they could all have jumps next year i don't know i don't expect there to be major changes in the tuition rates from the other facilities i mean i do agree with combining the dental health program i think that that does make sense obviously um and kind of coming just to health care fields and i you know maybe exploring that other option of A&T down the road too i think would be interesting i wouldn't anticipate that many will go down in tuition given with just the cost of goods has gone up right and this isn't even that asking for any increase on any other lines at all they're saying that nobody else i don't think so i can't anticipate it with the way the cost of everything has gone up i i i don't i would not i would be surprised to see a tuition go down and as folks build new program it will over time be possible to start building personnel back into purpose which should help if we keep our enrollments up and keep that average high keep that average climbing like it's been doing the last several years of that will help too right because every additional kid we get some other chunk of money from the state as well as tuition from the setting school at this point in the year do we know how many of our students are landing on heading to the Texas are we still have about 60 or we don't i don't think it's it's much different than most years typically you don't get a real number until after the first couple of weeks of the year of the school year after it starts because some of them will switch programs some of them will decide it's not but now you'll you'll get some additions as well unless there's a significant change up it won't change the funding so if it were to drop or stay steady we know what's coming based on the six semester average and there's a certain window either 15 days within the year i don't remember which month it is for the tech centers that they actually take a look at what the student enrollments are that's what they use for calculations they make everything simple and there's no grant available to be the dean on the grant on the position in a grant on the position you know i keep my eyes open for grants and currently there isn't anything however i never know what's coming you know so a grant could be opened up next month that would be a perfect fit for um they might open something it would not surprise me to see a grant specifically to help districts who are dealing with this s or cliff um i but currently there is not anything not an election year they're all there won't be okay i guess not um we could put a portion on Perkins i think we could we could absorb um about thirty thousand dollars which is not a ton out of a hundred thousand dollar total benefit package cost but we could put that on Perkins the other component to just keep in the back of people's minds is that um the legislature has been working for three years now i'm going to be mapping the education funding for CTE centers um so we've been expecting a major beneficial change not a cop a beneficial change for about three years now and it will be on the legislative agenda this time i don't think given the other tax implications that people are going to be dealing with this year i don't think they'll be able to do much but they they've been working on it for a while so eventually something will happen whether it's two three four five years it does seem like it's the right time to be investing in technical education and the development of such and the promotion of such and so keeping the dean does that i'm for keeping the dean yeah do you need a vote yeah i move to uh go with option with recommendation one with combined dental health program and move to you can ask for the local budget i second the second in barrage those in but oh further discussion i'm good good okay sarah sarah any further discussion okay states was that the chief states chiefs uh all those in favor i i opposed extensions motion passes right last year um raven program uh works with students with challenging behaviors it is a school within itself that exists within the district on average it serves about three students from the district every year the other students actually come in from our sending schools to take advantage of the program they typically have anywhere from 10 to 14 students at any given time they all pay tuition to attend it's kind of an out placement and the tuition covers all of the costs of the program the benefit to the district is that if we sent these particular students to any of the other out placements it would cost three to five times more than what we're paying and our program is actually much more successful than many of the places that we could set up this program its existence saves us about a million dollars every five to seven years in terms of what we'd have to pay if the program didn't exist the only increase this year so they're going from 26 000 to 28 000 in terms of the tuition cost which is which is very reasonable and all of it is coming from the salary increases that we negotiated with you and so this one would would need to go to if people are what are we voting on because doesn't it require that we build the tuition reasons that we... Sarah has a question oh she's muted do i have to unmute her? nope she should be able to you can if you know how um so this is uh you just it's uh it's a low to accept the change you kind of don't have a choice it's mandatory that was my question yeah yeah but it's not approved until the board says it's just kind of maybe she was just wondering so so move to accept the proposed or the required budget how second and seconds further discussion all those in favor of the motion? thank you sarah oppose? no extensions? no unanimously passes i'm just sitting here because it's one and that is it unless there are other questions about budgeting what we'll do is we'll take the rtcc information we'll be able to hopefully continue to fill out you know what's currently missing and hopefully shortly after january 1st the state will have that final piece that we need to start calculating people's tax rates when that happens i will run my three informational meetings one in each town and then depending upon what our timeline is if it's required i'll talk with uh anna and chelsea about a potential special meeting just to make sure we're not missing our timelines but it all depends on we get that last information from the state now this update on the internal investigation is still up here but also to be discussed in executive session so i think um we'll skip it on the regular agenda we agreed right yeah uh so the the board governance policies um 4.4 was a holdover holdover was uh moved to tonight along with 4.5 4.4 is the chairs roll 4.5 uh code of conduct for board members 4.4 let's start discussing especially if i remember the board ensures the integrity of the board's process agree doing it okay occasionally represents the board's outside parties yep okay meeting discussion content will insist solely of issues that clearly belonged to the board to decide or to monitor according to policy consistent with that yeah information that is for neither monitoring performance nor board decisions will be avoided or minimized and always noted as such deliberation will be fair open and thorough but also timely orderly and kept to the point yep we thought it the chair consists in making decisions that fall within topics covered by board policies number one yes sorry i said number one yes we're doing we're doing the empowered to the shape and impact number two the chair has no authority to make decisions about policies created by the board within nth and executive limitation policy areas no authority to supervise or direct the superintendent yep represent the board to outside parties in announcing board stated positions stating chair positions and interpretations and reports such activity at the next meeting of the board yes we're doing that yep yes the chair may delegate this authority but remains accountable chair will ensure that the board fulfills its obligations and work to improve the board's performance very much in the scenario across but longer working on these policies can we change things to absolutely absolutely thank you um so was there anywhere people think that we need to sharp them home get it together okay so code of conduct interesting yes if there were anything in LA I didn't see anywhere in this policy that needed to be adjusted it was an error there was yeah on the chair one yeah on the chair one there was on we just read it number sorry um on number three within the area don't hurt her or him delegate to them who changes it I don't know just that has the um or is it just like live document we all have access to the document I believe but to make I think you all we all have editing because it's a google doc or it was a google doc these charts yeah yeah but they are the like but there are policies where's the policy like so we make a language just because we make a language that like any any policies that we are reviewing to change language from to gender neutral of a and even they and them like across the board yeah thank you oh so uh so I make a motion I make a motion that anytime we're reviewing policy if we see we change language to gender neutral language second by Sam for the discussion but are we going to charge someone to do that it should be well yet the heather we will charge heather with making those adjustments as we review these policies okay amended to that thank you thank you all those in favor I I opposed thank you sir you were not I was not opposed extensions passes the code of conduct this is an interesting one and I yeah tell me oh did you want me to table this one well I think yeah because we have a we have another length yeah yeah so I'd like to table this one for the time being just so you can keep the movement the meeting moving along it is a big one okay yes great so I it's been requested we move this to the next month's agenda okay I'll be doing this regularly and that's shifting it yeah time until we can catch what two little ones together um okay tabled do we need to go that's a change to the agenda I think we do yeah yeah I heard that that motion and she seconded and you seconded I sure did Rachel seconded it all those in favor I I opposed great unanimously tabled till next time thank you uh oh the the webinar just I we don't need to have a discussion about it but please do if you haven't had a chance yet please do listen to it it's very very informative and of course Pietro put some giggles in there for you so it's be our pocket is a movie trivia in there for you um policy decisions discuss me for two recommended policies I right I can make this easy for you yeah um I don't have anything from legally I made the first request on October 30th requested again on December 7th and again on 1214 I think they're just busy so what I'll do is that I'll won't bring it up again until I actually have a draft copy and then I'll ask for it to be placed on the agenda great great thank you great thanks um meeting with legislators um the fact that caucus listed here as the presenters a holdover and I didn't catch it when we were looking at last year's agenda but you did take that on last year right to contact and invite I think I don't know did I I think I might have well we talked about mainly because they were the new um because branchy was under a new area that's right now because we were broken out from Orange County so just wanted to make sure that we made sure to invite all of our legislators yeah um when that's typically what the February meeting that everywhere um and we typically just send an email inviting them to attend that meeting and do a five minute ten minute thing from each of them um we welcome them to be in person or they can meet online I think most of ours from up hillier area we had one in person and the other two were online and then we had our legislation this area we're who we're all in person as well so it was it wasn't hard is there someone who um good volunteer to take that on sure great Sam thank you um and it is uh I don't know if that would be a date in front of me I do it does it have to be the matter of public record it's the it's valentine's day it's the 14th oh oh wow thank you jade isn't happening um it has to be the matter of public record can I call a test um I'll move that you contact legislators to invite them to our February meeting beautiful do I have a second yeah I'll do that rachel seconds for the discussion all those in favor I I thank you sarah post extensions unanimously passes thank you sarah uh let's see minutes anyone have edits well just a question here approve raven budget didn't we just do that okay so that's not on and there's only so it's this the one faculty higher that I saw in here just the one yes the special education friend yeah um so move to approve the consent agenda thank you do I have a second I'll second and seconds for the discussion all those in favor I I sarah uh opposed extensions the motion passes unanimously superintendents report let's switch question you want to find the finance one is finances are in good shape where we should have spent 41 percent of our overall budget at this point in time in the year we spent 36 we're well that's great anyone have any questions for me uh financial reports questions there just help give us a near just where we're at uh action items okay so I am going to contact the bsba um quickly find out if they're available and open a request for these email edits suggestions uh um no sorry use the suggestions and track changes tool in google dots um and uh chelsea and ann will use their judgment in judging those into the letter and we will look at that letter next month next year um and all contact legislators your contact legislators codge will contact kato and I think that is it we do need to enter executive cish session at 843 for tuition waiver request and the 4500 investigation um inviting lane millington heather lawler and kate link into that meeting um and who sorry your name okay okay this is the waiver okay this is the waiver and daniel is coming to executive session as well for the waiver request oh if she goes first yeah okay so you can come into executive session for the waiver request and we'll do that first and then we have to come out and then we go back to pan again for our second decision oh okay so we'll do that one first that was very confusing yes everyone understand we did it really well joy out of a second so we'll go in first and I'll come out and we'll go back yes yes okay just we're going into executive session to deal with the for the tuition waiver for tuition waiver and then we'll come out and then we'll go into the second one so we're going to be in the new executive so