Hi, I'm Mary Harrell for Tan Books. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. And this is certainly true of the leaders of communist China today and the dynasty that currently rules it. Talking about this topic today is Stephen Moser. Stephen is an internationally recognized authority on China and population issues, as well as an acclaimed author and speaker. He has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs and has helped hundreds of thousands of women and their families worldwide over the years. His new book today with Tian is The Devil and Communist China from Mao down to Xi. Stephen, thanks for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me on.  You weren't born there, you don't have heritage there. How did you come to know the country and all of its ills so intimately? Well, when I resigned my commission in the US Navy in 1976, I went to Hong Kong and studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Chinese language and history and culture. And then a couple of years later at Stanford University, I was chosen to be the first American social scientist since the 1940s to be allowed into China. I arrived in China in March of 1979 thanks to Deng Xiaoping himself. Now, how did the Chinese dictator take notice of me? Well, the issue was brought up by former president Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping said this American scholar will be welcome in China. So all doors were open to me. I went to Guangdong province in the South. I can read, write and speak Chinese. I was able to jump right into life in China from the get go. And what I found was that the Chinese Communist Party had brutalized the Chinese people for three decades. This was 1979, they'd taken the power in 1949. And what really opened my eyes was the beginning of the one child policy where women were rounded up and forced to have abortions. But I was also taken out to the mass grave sites outside the village where people who had opposed the Chinese Communist Party had been shot and buried. I was taken out to another mass grave site where hundreds of people who had died in the great famine caused by Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in 1960 were buried. I was taken out to the local hill called Turtle Mountain where a supposed counter-revolutionaries were taken out and shot in the 1950s. It was a bloody history that was gradually revealed to me by the people of China. You know, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that it was getting rid of the old landlords and the capitalists. Well, you know what the people in rural China called the Chinese Communist Party? They called it the big landlord because it had taken over everything in China. And of course, the Chinese Communist Party was led by none other than the vicious Chairman Mao Zedong himself. Pee, were you shown these things out of pride by the government or were you showed to them by the people as liquid has been done to us in the last decade? Well, the people once they came to trust me began to tell me the dark horrible secrets of life under Communist rule. And so this was how I found out about all these atrocities that had been committed by the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, the principal myth of Communist China was that it improved life for the people. Well, in 1979, that wasn't true because people in 1979 and 1980 were telling me life had been better under the nationalist regime under the nationalist government in the 1930s and 40s than it was after 30 years of communism. That was another eye-opening statement. The Chinese Communist Party presents itself as a party of workers and peasants. It is not. It is a party of communist elites who have basically stolen the entire wealth of the country and treat the people of China, the masses as they call them, as a kind of disposable resource. And they have disposed literally of hundreds of millions of them over the last 70 years of their rule. Pee, to start really with the book and what you're covering in the book, the devil in Communist China, you're making a definitive connection here between Chinese leadership and the Prince of Darkness between Satan. Do you have an actual proof or any evidence of possession or even a formal connection between Mao? Was he a devil worshiper? Why do you make that connection so strongly? Well, I make that connection because Marxism in China has been a kind of dance of death, one that could only please the Prince of Darkness. Now, Paul Kanger in his book, Carl Marx and the devil and Carl Marx makes the point that the devil was literally in Marx's mind as he was writing his evil screed about communism. In Mao's case, it's interesting to me as a China scholar that when he was a little boy, his mother took him out to a local pagan god, a monolith outside the village that was said to be possessed by a spirit and consecrated him in a pagan ritual to this monolith. And she after that referred to him as the third son of the monolith. Now, I don't know whether that constitutes possession or not, but there was certainly an evil about Chairman Mao that you don't find replicated in very many human beings. At every point in his life, when he could choose between good and evil, he invariably chose evil. At every point in life, when he could choose between accomplishing some end by doing the right thing or doing a deceitful, underhanded thing that would result in death and injury. He always chose death and injury over light and goodness. So if he wasn't possessed, he might as well have been because he behaved as if he were in so many ways. In that line with Chairman Mao, he had an incredibly long reign of terror in his country, a little over 40 years, I believe you say in the book, and that's longer than Lenin and Stalin combined.  Was his goal in this just to consolidate power and to get rid of all enemies? Is there another tangent of why his murder streak is so many millions of Chinese wide?  Well, that's a very interesting question. He did, his policies resulted in the death of what I estimate to be 500 million people. That's a half a billion people. Now I understand that's just a number. And it's a number so large that it's sort of people sort of, their eyes sort of glaze over. But the actual fact of the matter that each of these numbers was actually a living human being who was sacrificed unnecessarily by Mao in his unlimited drive for unlimited power. Anyone who got in Mao's way, he would seek revenge and retribution over time. Even his closest allies, people who had supported him for decades, like Joe Enlai, the former premier under Chairman Mao, who was the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Joe Enlai was the premier of the communist regime in the 50s and 60s and 70s.  And Chairman Mao said, don't treat the bladder cancer, don't treat the cancer, let it spread.  How evil do you have to be to carry out something like that? He was very skilled at doing what the Chinese call killing with a borrowed sword.  In fact, what he did with the nationalist army after the Civil War is striking to me because once the nationalists surrendered in 1949, most of their armies were intact. They went right over to the communists. They were enlisted in the communist armies. And what did Chairman Mao do? Again, he killed with a borrowed sword. He sent the nationalist armies which had been sworn into the Red Army into Korea to fight against us, to fight against the Americans and allowed the nationalist army soldiers and officers whom he did not trust to be killed by us in the Korean War and hundreds of thousands were, again, killing with a borrowed sword. Cold-blooded. Steve, when you consider China's one-child policy, you've spent an extensive amount of your career fighting population control just like this you see in China. As you said, 500 million people, Chinese killed by Mao, but 400 million of that, you say really could just be abortions and infanticide of children. So that's a staggering number. I think especially when you put into perspective that since 1973 in Roe v. Wade in America, only 63 million children killed here, 400 million. Does the weight of that kind of evil and the sheer numbers of that, when you're researching this and writing about it, does it ever just weigh you down? It's weighed me down since March of 1980 when I was in the operating room when women who were seven, eight and nine months pregnant were being forcibly aborted by communist doctors under guard, under duress, by Caesarean section abortions. It's weighed me down since I saw those babies killed by lethal injection shortly before after birth. That was the result of the one-child policy. I was in China when it began. And I saw these women arrested for the crime of being pregnant. Why was it a crime? Because the Chinese Communist Party had suddenly decided that there were too many babies being born in China. And so all of a sudden women who had six months before, eight months before conceived children when it was legal to have a second or third child were now suddenly told by communist officials, your pregnancy is illegal. We're going to arrest you for the crime of being pregnant and we're going to take you in for forced abortion and sterilization. And that's exactly what they did. I went with them on this sad Via de la Rosa that wound up with the death of their unborn child and the grievous wounding of the mother. Suicide rates among Chinese women in the 80s, 90s and up until a few years ago were very, very high because so many had been forced to be aborted late in pregnancy and really devastated psychologically as a result. This continued for decades and decades. And why? Because in 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong arguably the greatest mass murderer in human history declared that we need to regulate births in China in the same way we regulate the production in other sectors of the economy. In the same way we regulate the production of bicycles and tons of steel, we need to regulate human reproduction. And that's exactly what happened a few decades later. They began to regulate human reproduction and they've regulated 400 million little humans right out of existence. Now they have the opposite problem. They've killed off so many of the last two generations that China now has a birth dearth. China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. China has a population that's aging and dying more rapidly than any human population. Why? Because of this communist killing spree that resulted in the death of 400 million unborn Chinese babies. Because Dujie and the current ruling class of China, do they recognize this coming population bomb that this aging demographic that they created for themselves? Do they acknowledge this or is this something that we just purely can see outside numerically that this is obvious? Well, they've been acknowledging it for the last few years. In 2016, she desperately went to a two-child policy. He said to everyone in China, now you're free to have two children. They didn't. They didn't want any children or at most they wanted to stop at one. Two years ago, they decided to go to a three-child policy. Again, the new policy was met with a giant yawn. But again, the Chinese Communist Party, this diabolically controlled institution will not stop by simply saying to people, you're free to have children. They are now moving in the direction of forced pregnancy. They are now telling Communist Party officials, for example, and people in the military that they must marry and they must have at least three children. That policy, which is now instituted among Communist Party members and members of the People's Liberation Army, I believe will soon be expanded to the population as a whole. Young women will not have a choice. They will bear children for the Chinese Communist Party if the Chinese Communist Party decides that they must do so. This is a hellish regime which will stop at nothing to achieve its ends. And if it has decided that it has then the herd too much by killing off half of the last two generations, it will force the herd to grow by forcing young women to marry and have children one way or another. Even worse than I thought it was going to be talking about such evil. Steve, you make a startling connection at the beginning of the book, I think, between Chairman Mao and the devil about how Mao considered himself both lawless and godless. And you connect him with the Latin phrase, non-Servium. I hadn't made that connection before, but that's truly what Communism is, the replacement of religion and the will for anything divine, right? And making themselves the ultimate authority. Well, like Lucifer, the father of lies, Mao Zedong thrived on lying. And of course, other people have spoken of Communism as a culture of lies, but few communists could really achieve the level of Mao's deceit and deception. Like Lucifer, Mao built his kingdom entirely on lies. And the lie that he was gonna improve the life of the people when he actually wound up living like an emperor. The lie that people under Communism would find their lives greatly improved when actually they found themselves being really reduced to the status of nothing better than serfs. Serfs under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, slaves of the party who could be told where to go, where to live, how to live, how many children to have, what to eat and so forth. The level of control in China is just astonishing. They have more surveillance cameras than any other country in the world. They have more artificial intelligence, AI, monitoring what people do, controlling what people spend. They have a social credit system now, which is really a political credit system, which tracks everything you do and say on the internet. And if you become suspect by the regime, they lower your social credit so that you're not able to travel. You're not able to get a loan from a bank. You're not able to buy a house or a car. You become basically a non entity, a non person within the system itself. On the other hand, if you sing praises of the late chairman Mao and his successor, Xi Jinping, your social credit score goes up and all those things become possible for you. So this is a truly totalitarian system tyrannical system of total control of people, which aspires to keep everybody in tiny isolated cells of fear and tells them exactly how they are to live their lives every facet of their lives. The China wasn't always a communist country. And I don't, I was a communist before Chairman Mao came to power. What was the transition? No, the China was for a long time, of course, ruled by an emperor who claimed the kind of godlike status. But the Manchu dynasty, the Qing dynasty is the Chinese call it, fell in 1911. And after a few years, the warlord parade, we call it, the country began to be unified under the nationalist party which was founded by Sun Yat-sen and then led by Chiang Kai-shek. People don't know that Sun Yat-sen was an admirer of the American constitution. He lived in Hawaii. He wrote the Republic of China constitution model on our own. People don't know that Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader, was a committed Christian and wanted to encourage the practice of Christianity in his country. And so when we go back to Chairman Mao and the rise of the atheist communist party, this was another reason for the hatred of this diabolically inspired party, the Chinese Communist Party for the nationalist regime because there were so many Christians in the nationalist regime who were trying to improve the lives of the Chinese people and the nationalist regime itself was trying to emulate in some respects our own governmental system with its separation of powers and its protection for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The battle of course was lost not because of the nationalist failure as so much because the Soviet Union, the source of this evil of communism supplied Chairman Mao and his guerrillas with troops and tanks and arms, weapons of all kinds and trained them into a modern armed force that was able to conquer all of China. So the revolution that came to China was fostered and promoted by the evil of Soviet Russia. Steve, when you see the specter of communism raising its ugly head here in America or people either praising Xi or praising the possibility that again, communism just hasn't been done properly, right? And that's why it's failed.  Well, there are a lot of people in this country who have been educated beyond their intelligence. I was at Stanford University in the late 1970s and there were openly communist professors on the faculty who sang the praises of red China who claimed to me that the Chinese Communist Party had actually been the best thing that had ever happened to the Chinese people. I had fortunately the experience of living and working in China and being able to speak the language and win the confidence of the local people. And so I was able to find out that that wasn't true in any respect. This is an evil system. It is a system that guarantees when it takes power that a tiny elite will ruthlessly control the much larger population. That human rights will be neglected, that mass murder will ensue and that people will lose whatever freedoms they had. Most educated people in this country, especially if they've graduated from our elite universities like Stanford, as I did like Yale or Harvard, will not know these things. Not only will they not know about the evils of communism, they will have been taught that it is a system that is admirable in many respects and that the only reason it's failed is that it has never been properly instituted. And so they fall again and again for this deceit, this deception that man himself can create heaven on earth. Man with the help of God can create a society where evils are restricted, but not totally eliminated.  And I would suggest that if people, including those who have degrees from Harvard and Stanford and Yale would read my book, they would understand the truth about communism and not be so gullible and naive in the future as to believe the propaganda that comes out of that regime. We've got a question for you here. In the midst of all the death, murder, abortion, and fantasize that you discussed in the book and all the evil, all the associations with Satan and the communist dynasty in China, you have advice for your reader. You say, we should not be mesmerized by the horrors of communist China and all the death in the book. So what is the antidote? How do you keep, how should the reader keep a balance in their mind of peace away from all of that? What is the medicine for that? Well, here's what I had to do when I was writing the devil in Chinese communism. After spending a day immersed in the crimes of Chairman Mao against the Chinese people, the lies, the deceit, the killing, the torture and all of the other atrocities that were committed. I had to take a shower. I also had to read the Bible and look up in the Catechism the right way to behave. Because evil can have a terrible power over one's mind, of course, you don't wanna open the door to diabolical inspiration without turning immediately to Christ and reflecting on the good and the true and the beautiful. But it's also necessary, I think, for people to educate themselves about what is really going on in the world, not just in China and not just in countries around China where Chinese communism has spread.  But also realize that communism, the ideas of socialism and leftist, Marxist ideas, cultural Marxism has a strong hold on the minds of many people in the West, especially those who have been educated, as I say, beyond their intelligence. And so we need to familiarize ourselves with the danger lest we succumb to it. At the same time, we need to strengthen ourselves by reading scripture and praying as I do a daily rosary and doing reading, inspirational reading every night before I go to bed. It keeps me from having the nightmares that I would otherwise have from having been immersed in the evil of Chairman Mao's acts. Having seen them firsthand, I can't imagine what the nightmares you could have, but God bless you for exposing all of that evil to the world at large. Again, the book is The Devil and Communist China from Mao down to Xi. You can find it right here on tanbooks.com or ask about it at your local Catholic Book seller. Steve, thank you again for being such a strong voice against communism, against population control and abortion for all your work at PRI and for exposing again all of this to the world, the true nature of communism. And thank you for being with us today. Thank you.


Good morning, John. So you know how COVID-19 is a disease that is caused by SARS-CoV-2, which is a virus? It feels like it would be better and simpler if we just called that the COVID-19 virus, right? So why don't we just do that? Well, in the early 1900s, doctors started noticing something weird about some different diseases. They would sometimes have patients with shingles, a really specific disease where you get a very painful rash on just one side of your body. But then later, those patients' children would often come down with a totally different disease, chickenpox, which is like lots of different itchy bumps all over the body. So they started to think that those two diseases might be caused by the same pathogen, and they started to look for evidence of that. After a lot of work in the 1950s, it was finally confirmed separately in two different ways by two different scientists, Thomas Huckleweller and Evelyn Nicole. So this is one reason why we don't name viruses after the disease they cause. Indeed, it looks like SARS-CoV-2 might kind of cause more than one disease. There's COVID-19, and then there's like a blurry line between that and long COVID. If you wanna know more about long COVID, we did an amazing SciShow video about it. I'll put a link in the doobly-doo. The varicella zoster virus, though, which causes both shingles and chickenpox is a very clear-cut case. Children get chickenpox when they are infected by the varicella zoster virus, and that happens either through droplets in the air or through exposure to the fluid from the rash or the bumps, or more rarely, they can get it from exposure to a person with the shingles rash, which also contains the virus. Then almost all the time, quite quickly, the child's immune system will fight off the disease, and that virus will take refuge in your body for the rest of your life. It finds a place to hide, and that place is at the base of nerves near your spine. And then, as you get older, your immune system might get weakened by stress or by medication or just by getting older, and it will kinda forget about the herpes zoster virus, and that will allow it to spring forth and infect the nerve. At first, that causes like tingling and then itching and then pain as the nerves get inflamed, and this is why shingles almost always happens just on one side of the body in a specific area, because it's the individual nerve that is having the infection. The severity of the pain and discomfort from shingles, which I can now personally attest to because I'm getting over a case right now, feeling much better, but it was very, very bad. It doesn't hurt anymore, it just itches. It's one of the reasons why we vaccinate almost all children against chickenpox in the US now. This means far fewer kids are getting chickenpox, and in the future, they will be much less likely to get shingles as adults. Because you don't catch shingles. Shingles is, in effect, people might be mad at me for saying this, like long chickenpox. But other places that aren't the US are not vaccinating kids against chickenpox, and the reason why is wild and may include my individual case of shingles. In the US, 95% of adults have had chickenpox, which means that they could get shingles, but only around one in three of them will. But in 1995, we started to vaccinate pretty much every kid against chickenpox. In cases of chickenpox, among kids, of course, plummeted. And that meant that younger people, like me, were less likely to be exposed to the virus from sick kids. That exposure would be like a kind of natural vaccine that would work best for people in their 30s and 40s. Those people have fairly good immune systems. They're also more likely to be around sick kids. That would normally remind our immune systems to keep up the fight. Without those reminders, the immune system is more likely to let the virus already in our body start to replicate. And shingles slips through those cracks. And that's especially the case when combined with immune suppressant medication and stress, of which I have both. So in effect, I may have gotten shingles so that my son doesn't have to. Shingles rates kind of have to go up before they can go down. Rates of shingles in young people like me have indeed been on the rise, although it doesn't seem to be affecting the rates of shingles in older people where it is more dangerous. And that's also helped along by the fact that we now have a very effective shingles vaccine in addition to the separate chickenpox vaccine. Right now you can only get it if you're over 50 because it's in short supply, but my guess is it will be available to younger people eventually. This is just another example of how complicated disease and epidemiology and public health are. It's just all complicated and hard to figure out. And so I'm very grateful to all the people who are working to figure it out right now. And to the people who have worked to figure it out in the past, including Evelyn Nicole, who was in her 20s when she first isolated the varicella zoster virus and who died of complications from COVID-19 in 2020. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


Meeting to order, focus of meeting. We're going to discuss negotiations with unions, facility plans, and raving update. We have also a, we're going to talk about the community outreach of the board. Do board work after, at the end, after our executive sessions. Someone willing to do the evaluation of the meeting. I know Anne, you did it last time. One of the three of you do one this time. Thank you. All right, we have no community engagement tonight. So let's start on the review of the wellness policy. This is a federally mandated federal language, right? Or is there something that's unique to us? No, there was, we talked at the last meeting they did the food audit. They came in, they usually look at a school or two every year. And one of the findings that they had was the fact that we had left them, actually hand those back to us. Is this new? I have one in our packet. Yeah, so this has the additional language in it. Okay, thank you. It was missing some wording from Healthy Hunger for Kids Act of 2010. And so if you flip to the second page, the wording based upon talking with the agency of education and kind of doing a review of that act, Ms. Inred there in D and E. It mostly deals with food that is served outside of the regular school food program. So any kind of, they call them smart snack snacks. So everything's gotta meet their smart snack nutritional guidelines is the big thing. And that includes vending machine, it looks like. Yeah. And also that if we have entities that are coming in from the outside, you know, sports teams and whatnot that are doing fundraisers, you know, trying to promote with them. Yeah, you know, do some advertising. We advertise for the smart snacks. So those are the two pieces that we're seeing a lot of them. So we were in compliance with this, even, you know, besides the language as far as what we're providing. Everything else was at least in terms of this policy, everything else was in compliance. I think we had talked a little bit at the last time about the food audit is that there were, it was mostly paperwork things. You know, do you have the right form on the refrigerator to mark the temperature every day and things like that? But this was a little bit bigger because it has to come to the board for approval. And I believe you need two readings of it before it can be approved. So this would be the first. First reading, okay. So just to confirm the vending machines now have been updated to reflect this in the schools. They're supposed to, yeah. Yeah, so it wasn't, the issue wasn't with the vending machines themselves, it just was, we were missing the language in our long list policy. Okay. That's required with that act. Any other questions? So we'll approve this at the next meeting then. Okay. Next, negotiations with unions. Teachers are currently at impasse. They had started off asking for an 8% increase. They did move a little, but not too much. I think they got down to 6%. In the last session, the discussion kind of settled on this idea as we asked them in principle, if they wanted to move forward, that you would agree to be in the comparable range. Comparables, there's anywhere right now from 2.7 to 3.5 that usually averages out right around 3%. They weren't willing to agree even in principle to that. So now we're in pass. The meeting is scheduled for May 8th, the first week of the year. So they were holding, so it was just a salary that was sort of fighting back and forth? Yeah, we had talked back and forth in some of the language pieces that they wanted, but it really kind of came down to the point where it was like, if we can't agree on salary, the rest is moot because you gotta know this because some of the language pieces may have a salary impact. So hopefully it won't be in mediation and who covers that expense for the mediation? Both sides, 50 to 50. And it's usually pretty expensive, I think, minimally probably 10 grand. So it's 5,000 each, or 10 grand per side. Okay. 5,000 each to start, that's usually the minimum. And is that still done here locally or do you have to go somewhere? The plan is to actually be here. Right at this table, yeah. I thought you were gonna skip mediation. We were trying to, the idea that Paul had was maybe we can skip mediation, go right to fact finding and we can't go out of order unless they agree. No. And further we're finding out that none of it's binding anyway. So basically the only difference between the meetings that we were having and having the mediator there is now we have somebody running back and forth between the two of us as opposed to us just sitting face to face and having the discussion. And the teachers were not willing to skip mediation then? Nope. Did you get either Paul or Melody to go with you that day if you didn't? Yeah. Actually, I think we had all three. I eventually showed up. I just can't get here when it starts. Yeah. And Paul's usually there too. He's usually there right off the bat. We did reach a tentative agreement with the support staff, which I can put out to you and talk about a little bit. So both sides have agreed at the end of the last session together. So the next step would be for the larger board here if they decide to approve. And then they also have to bring this in front of their constituency and have that approved as well. And when are they meeting with their constituency? That I do not have a date. Yeah, I was emailing back and forth a little bit with Debra today. Sorry about that. I'm sorry. April 24th date on something. That may be it. So with the support staff, when we took a look at the comparables, they were below. You know, one of the executive limitations requires me to get them up to the comparables in competitive. And this does that. There were two places that got some pretty good increases. The first was the hiring grid. We up that. We're trying to get it as close to $15 an hour for everybody as possible. One of the reasons being is it's probably gonna be mandatory. Sooner than later. We had three areas where people were hurting a lot. That was the cooks, the secretaries, and the custodians. And so we brought them up significantly to try to help as well with a lot of the turnover that we've been having in those positions. In addition, the folks that are off the hiring grid. So the hiring grid determines where you start when you walk in the door. After that, your increases are basically the cost of the increases that the board gives them. Typically is two to 3% per year. What we're looking at for everybody else who is off the grid is 4.25%. Oh, wow. To kind of get them up there in that comparable range and competitive. This does not break the bank in terms of what we had set aside in the budget for negotiations. It actually comes in right where we wanted it to. Which was good. Did the negotiating team think that this was going to be accepted by the membership? Yeah. Great. So do we need now to approve this? What you could do is make a motion to approve it as part of the consent agenda. Okay. Do we have a motion to approve the support staff offer as part of the consent agenda? Second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All right, so we'll. Now it's in the consent agenda too. Okay, great. Oh good, it's in there. Yep. So we'll proper vote on that. All right. Anything else as far as the negotiations with unions go? No, we do have another one from the emergency posting that we did that we should probably talk about as part of board governance and as the transfer. Right. Less folks at other. Right. Any questions? Yes, let's. Does anyone have any other questions about the negotiations either with the teacher or the staff? Paul, Paul, so you can grow them too. Yeah. All that we only want. Pick it on you. All right, so talk about the appointment of a new OSSD treasurer. So we had spoken together a few times and had come up in the audit report that the current treasurer that we had was not keeping up with the reconciliations. One of the things that they do is it's an outside body that comes in and takes a look at our payable accounts, any money that's going out the door and make sure that everything is balanced the way that it should, it's a check to make sure that there's nothing funny going on with the money. They also, as a secondary part of the position, they also sign any of the actual live checks that go out the door. The person that we've had for the last year and a half is a great person, but was not keeping up on the reconciliations. We are typically anywhere from six to nine months behind. We spent probably the last six months robbing, especially talking with her, trying to get her up to speed, helping out a little bit to try to get the reconciliations done, was not happening. Because it put us in liability in terms of risk, and especially because it would probably show up in the audit report in May, my stepped up, asked the person to resign and she did. And so we are in a position right now to hopefully ask the board's indulgence to approve having Teresa Godfrey, who was the person who was voted in his treasurer to begin July 1st, to step in at this point in time. And you can appoint her. And it would be nice to get that done because we've got nobody to sign checks right now. And she is willing to be appointed early? Okay. That's to be. The other piece of this was they were actually paying two stipends. They were paying 7,000 for the treasurer's position. There was another 1,500 that they were paying for an assistant treasurer. In case the treasurer was out, somebody to sign checks. I don't believe we've ever used that person before. So there is really no need for an assistant treasurer. What we do need is a second body to be able to sign checks in an emergency. And the auditors have said that's perfectly fine for Robin to do it. Again, if the board is willing in terms of that structural change. They also made the point which was interesting is that in most cases it is the business manager who was also the treasurer's school officer, Oh, is that legal then? Seems like you'd want more separation. Yeah, I don't want. Yeah, it just doesn't sit right with me coming from banking myself. I like the way that it's split. But again, the big thing with her is so that Robin's name is on the account so that she can sign checks in case she was out. Well, it seems as if you can be six or nine months behind. If she misses one, she's late a week, it wouldn't matter, right? So she's very reliable. So I couldn't, it doesn't seem like we need an assistant. Robin told her it's only one time a month that you have to do it. So if it's not this week, it could be next. And it's a little bit bigger than a normal checkbook. But I mean, what you're signing off on those warrants, it's basically the repayables account since it's coming out. They had a nice list in the summers. So it's basically balance in the checkbook whatsoever. Big one, but. What do you guys think? Do you think we need an assistant? I don't think so. Sounds like we're saving a patina or not. Is there a, when we set up the district, is there a legal requirement in our corporation that we need to get so that we adapt to? I can go back and I'll double check, but I do remember reading the articles in incorporation. I don't remember there being any. Okay, I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't, I think, much in there. I can't remember it either, but that doesn't mean. Let me, actually not. I'll type it right in here. My notes. Did you ask Patreon about the appointing of a treasurer since the current one resigned? Is there any special thing we have to do for a conference when we had a board member resign and we had to go through some pretty snitches? So what we got back verbally, we don't have it in writing yet for whatever reason there were a little bit behind because all this happened in the last two, three days. As they said, the board can appoint, but they didn't give us the full details on what the process is. So I believe as long as we do in good faith. Yeah, I think I'd like to see in writing, or you see in writing what his office's guidance is on what we can do just because there were a lot of. Couple of little steps. Yeah, there was steps, and it doesn't seem like we would have those because it's not from an individual town, whereas the board member, so it feels like we should be able to appoint it, but I'm wondering if we have to open it for who wants to be it, you know, like these kinds of things, I don't know. So the argument, only argument I would have is that we should be able, I'll find out tomorrow and I'll get it out to the board, is that because you are managing the system and right now we do not have somebody who can write those checks for payroll and things. That's pretty urgent. Yeah, and I feel, I have some confidence because she's already been appointed or voted as of July 1st, it just, you know, you wouldn't want a provisional or temporary person, so definitely not. But I will check, I'll put some pressure on him again tomorrow. So can we vote to approve her appointment in a provisional way, just. Pending some. Yeah, pending. Yeah, review by the legal counsel or whatever. Who was it? Theresa Godfrey. I'd like to make a motion to appoint Theresa Godfrey as the Charger, tending a conversation between Lane and Pedro's Lynn Lynn Blackman's attorney. Do I have a second? I second that. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. So hopefully you can do that soon and we'll get her on board, hopefully they can. Yeah, like I said, we had the phone conversation we were waiting for something written from Lynn which has not come yet. Yeah, okay. All right, next is, you know, monitoring. We have the facility plans and Raven update. Sounds like you're making some progress on that. So the Raven, we are moving forward and having the program take over the OSSD warehouse and on the demolition of the old Raven building. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be seeking the vote from the board tonight to have access to up to 600,000 of the reserve funds for that work. We do not believe it will take 600,000, based upon kind of the initial magnitude estimates earlier. It's not, that's not putting us over what our first estimate was way back where. Right. So we think that's well in line. It also looks, don't quote me, that at the end of this year, we will probably have between 200 and 300,000 left in terms of the surplus to be able to apply to this before we even have to access the 600. Du Bois and King right now is generating the total kind of initial estimate. We're meeting weekly every Friday afternoon and we've got the team that comes in to figure out where we're at and what the next steps are. So we've got the fire marshal coming in this week to provide feedback, making sure the egresses are the way that they should be. And also to help us check out the ADA compliance. There is an upper area up there which was intended to be turned into a conference room previously, which is ideal for a classroom but it's only stairs. So we've got to find a way to make that ADA compliant either with the lift or. Oh. We've never had a student in the program that has needed it, but still it's a new building. Right. Under the law it should have been ADA compliant for what it was built. My question I have is 600,000 was the initial quote we've got. For a shell. Yeah. But we're not building a shell. We're not building anything. And so my question is what exactly is needed? What is a more realistic expectation of how much is going to be spent? So we're trying to, we'll start off on the demolition side. Can't imagine it's going to be more than 90. Actually can't imagine it's going to be more than 50. So 50 is probably reasonable, but I don't want people taking that verbatim until the Du Bois and King finishes its assessment. Part of the positive piece about that is that there was no asbestos found when we did the initial survey of that building. In terms of Raven itself, what you're looking at is you're looking at putting in a classroom space. You're looking at putting in a kitchen. You are looking at moving the heating system. We've got a propane heater that's up there in that conference loft that needs to be moved. They've got to bring in a lift. It looks like they're going to get the new lift that was never used from the tech center. Get that bolted in out for somebody to look it over and make sure that it's safe. They're trying to decide if they need a second bathroom for females. They have one unisex. They've got to figure out if it's enough. They are also talking about chopping up the space a little bit on the inside so that they've got a place for their welding equipment, which is separate because you don't want people viewing the, I can say the sparks, but the UV light that comes from the welding and just some general storage for the kids. So there is some internal renovation going on. How much do we suspect that that might cost? If I were to throw my hat into the ring, again without having the fire marshal say and on other parts and pieces, I might see 250. So you know, you're probably totally, total talking about 350 is my best guess based upon reading the engineering reports and what was in there for the previous work we were looking at. And then my, I guess the follow up question is, is it premature to ask for a 600, why do we need to improve at this meeting 600,000 where that was for basically a different project? So the intent isn't to spend the whole 600,000. It's to prevent during crunch time having to come back to the board potentially waiting a month if we hit, if we hit something that's unexpected. There's also the piece that we've talked about. Wouldn't necessarily have to happen this year, but the footprints of that building is smaller, not a lot, but it's a little smaller than the primary building. And then the possibility of laying down a slab and adding an addition to this, which would be all that expensive. Isn't the plan, the long-term plan is within, that's just a temporary, potentially. And so here's the strategy piece is right now in the legislative world. They are talking about taking the moratorium off of matching funds for work. So the best thing to do is to get them up here, get them situated like it's permanent in case it is. But if the moratorium on the matching funds for construction is removed, then that would be the ideal time to go and pursue rebuilding on that spot. We have no need for a building there. That warehouse was pretty much unused. It had four years of toilet paper that was stored in it. I think Wes actually used it maybe once or twice a week back in the office area. So it's not really serving a full purpose at this point. But it doesn't seem wise then to build, we might as well just build one, which we're doing now. Like why, I mean, I don't wanna throw money into another building. Not unless there's a reason for it. If at some point in the future, given the number of trauma students that we have and that's occurring in the other districts, it might be wise to build a bigger building. We may have need at some point in the future because of our growing population of autism students to put in a collaborative for autistic students. Yeah, and that would be down the line. So basically we're gonna get rid of that space over there and really we should be thinking Raven is not gonna be over on that section of the campus. So are you gonna, you had talked about sort of redoing parking or sort of rethinking how? So that'll be the next time we meet. Part of the work is if Raven had stayed in that same place, they have an aging septic tank that's there that's 50, 60 years old that needs to be replaced. So the wise thing to do would be to connect a new building if it were going in there to city water and city sewer. At the same time that they were proposing that work, they were gonna extend the city water to RUHS because the original main feeder line for the building was designed for when the building, before the building was added onto. I don't know how many years it went that way, so it's not quite supplying what it should. And so it seemed to know it was best to try to, you know, kill all those birds with one stone. With OSSD warehouse, that is already connected to the city water. So we've got that covered. Where Raven currently sits, right, it'll be demolished, it'll be leveled, it'll just look like grounds, grass implanted and whatnot, it'd be the intent for now. And then at some point in the future, if we decide that, you know, we wanna build something again there, we need to. We already have all the soil survey and work done to be able to put the foundation in, the right orientation, we've done the water and drainage work and everything else that we need to do. Can you remind me how many kids are in the Raven program? Raven program, it typically sits around 14 or 15. It has been as large as 18. They always do have a waiting list. So one of the ideas was that if we were gonna rebuild on site, make the building a little bit bigger to be able to take in the kids that were on the waiting list as well. Those students, they're part of a collaborative. They come from the seven sending districts that the tech center students do. They pay tuition to go there. But the biggest benefit for us in having the program is we average having three or three to four kids in that program each year. And it saves us about a million dollars every seven and nine years, as opposed to sending them out of transportation. So I'm assuming there's probably a square footage that has to be followed per student. So we said that we're downsizing. So does the, what impact does that have on that? None on the current sizes. None on the current sizes. So it could be able to continue to be around the way that it is. If we wanna build on, you know, an addition, that would help and that's one of the ideas behind it. So they're looking at those parts and pieces. So to get back to your original question. So we talked a little bit about the, there's the loading dock behind the school that needs to be replaced. It's dangerous the way that it is. And there's also the paving that needs to be done behind the school and around the site. And so that's rough estimate right now is 160,000 for those two. So they're getting the final estimates on that. But that probably may come back to the board and say, hey, those are funds, this would be a good project. But those are separate. So it seems to me that the 600,000 does seem like excessive. If you're expecting more to be 350, you know, if we, in a month's time, you would have a better idea if you needed more than that. I'll have a, well, we'll have a much better idea in terms of what we'll need because they're still kind of working on the blueprint and the internal changes and whatnot. The one thing that we're working against is time. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know what. I don't think it's that. You think, I mean. Yeah, I'm just wondering if we approved 350 today, instead of 600, would that prevent you from doing anything that you would have done if we approved 600 this month? I don't believe so. So if you ended up, if we get the report from Du Bois between now and the next meeting and you need an additional hour much ends up being, would that, I just feel odd giving me, saying we should approve 600,000 when it doesn't look like it's gonna be where it's near 600,000. Again, I don't know all the ins and outs and giving my best off. Yeah, right. There's also the point too, that I talked a little bit with Jim on, who runs the program, is this idea, well, if we're coming over, do we want those 60 year old tables that are falling apart, or should we buy new furniture? Should we, so that's part of the piece. I don't know what those costs would be in the end. That was part of the reason for having a little bit higher. But that wouldn't be 300,000. Well, I mean, I guess, and those funds could come later. I mean, it's not, I mean, No, piecemeal is fine too, if we need to. My guess is, my hope is, is that between the potential surplus that we've got at the end of this year, smaller than previous years, usually it was about four or 500,000, looks to be two to 300, between that and the 350, it may probably cover everything, that's my hope. Again, I don't know for sure on the demolition costs. We have a rough estimate, I think in 50, we're not sure. So, I mean, next month, if we need 160,000 for the loading dock and the parking, that would be another time we should vote on, whether we want to release the surplus funds for those projects. Works for me. Okay. Feel free, I'm just throwing why I did that. There's 3.8 million, just so folks know, between 3.5 and 3.8 in the facilities surplus. I agree, it's harder to put money in the reserve than it is to take it out. Right. In order to put money back in there, we're gonna have to have everybody vote. And have the surplus. So it's easier for us to say, yes, you can take this money, here you go. But it's harder for us, if say we give you 600,000, we need 300, then we're gonna have to add that into the, we're gonna vote for it to put into a budget. I think I got you. Yeah, because we don't pull the 600,000 out though, we only use what we need up to and no crossing the line. But once we've said you can spend this amount, doesn't that mean that that money's allocated for that and we can't use it for anything else? Potentially, yeah. And so if we don't use it, then we have $300,000 that is now allocated for something that we're not gonna spend it on. Oh, I see what you're saying. And so we'll have to vote to put it back in. Mix good stuff. And so it's easier for us to say, here's your new budget, 300,000, oh, you need 300 more, here's 300, but it's much harder for us to put it in because we'll have to wait till March to vote for it. That's the only reason why I'm cautious on saying, well, yeah, it takes 300,000. No, and again, I can't, my gut is it's not gonna be anywhere near 600,000. Right. I don't think so either, based on that. And 300,000 would get you a really good start. Because you keep referring to. That was the original, way back when we talked about creating a new Raven program, that was the number of little folks. So who's putting this together? Isn't it the facilities guys? This piece here? Yeah. So they're saying 600 still? Again, part of it is we don't have a total number right now on the potential cost of like if we redid the furniture for the kids, if we start to import them. So what they were trying to do is they just wanted to be able to run, get the work done, make sure that the kids were up about it and that we're all possible by the end of August. Which makes sense, but Paul's argument is very good. So are you only asking for money for Raven from surplus? The rest is in budget? Right now, yeah. Okay. We may come back and talk about the paving and the loading dock that that'll have firm estimates on it. Okay. Okay. So funds requested is just from the regular maintenance budget facilities maintenance budget. Say that again. He has. Oh, you're looking at this. Yeah, I haven't even moved over to that yet. Okay. So sorry about that. So what they did, so they had this funds requested, this has changed since the report was printed. They've been working over time in terms of all the maintenance and things that hadn't been done for years. There's been exceptional costs associated with that. So they've been doing all the critical things that have needed to be done. They bring in Visbit. Visbit has done a survey on audit with them just a short while ago and said, these things where it says funds requested, these are all the things, actually the first eight on here were things that they identified as needing to be done to be up to code. So like, not including the Raven. So balance the hot water, balance of hot water, heaters and tanks, and the circulators for the domestic hot water, the six mixing valves, the paving and the loading dock repair, which we've talked about a little bit, the basketball goals, and then the replacement repair, the fitness from equipment, some of that work has already been done. So these are things that Visbit has identified as we need to have done to be up to code. So they originally came when we had our meeting, our weekly meeting and said, we'd like you to put this in front of the board for approval so we can get the work done now. Robin and I pulled them back and said, wait a minute, we're giving you 217 extra thousand dollars next year to help out with some of this. Is any of it critical? Does it need to happen now or can it wait? So right now what's happening is all of this, with the exception eventually of the paving and the loading dock, is gonna be addressed in next year's, budget and then if they run out of money doing that work at that point in time, then we might consider coming to the board and saying, hey, we did what we could. But they've done a significant, a tremendous amount of work this year. A lot of it on HBAC, like I said, there was a lot of maintenance that wasn't done for years. So they had a lot of parts that needed to be replaced, a lot of work that still needs to be done. They did a tremendous amount of work in plumbing. They were replacing hot water heaters and a heat storage tank, probably a couple hundred thousand dollars worth, because when they put them in three, four years ago, they weren't plundering. They had the hot going into the cold, cold going into the hot, that sort of nonsense and it just, it burned them out. Well, that's delightful. So I have just a question about this format and the way the information is being presented. I appreciate this estimate and then we have a cost, but there is no indication that with these projects that are completed, what the estimate was or what the cost turned out to be. So again, I'm not sure like with governance policy, but I would say with financial oversight for us to be confident in the way that these are being estimated to us and actually coming in at a cost, where does that fall? Yeah, we should have that. So if you go to the very last page and we'll talk about why it's here for some time here, you'll see that that is in there. One of the reasons is because we started this up and we were reporting when we started this up, I think it was partially through the year. It was something that Brooke wanted to make sure that we did, we were following along with the format that Mark used, Mark McKinstry. We started to add in the cost and the estimates that we were moving forward. Some of this was looking back. Conceito, you just don't know.  Yeah, I think that'd be good. Right, and I just think, yeah, it's consistent. And the stuff on here is not all stuff that was asked out of surplus. This is just out of the regular documents to be clear for the new folks. So I'll have them go put that in. Okay, that'd be great. I actually requested it previously, but. Are we spending more than we had been in the past? I mean, you're saying all of this stuff was done and it was done improperly. Are we now going back and spending much more than we asked? I can answer the question, but you probably won't like the answer. There was a tremendous amount of work that was reported having been done that wasn't done. And you will also notice, if you think back over the last year and a half, that in terms of surplus funds from this board, the only thing that we've asked for was transportation was for the two buses. And we ended up not having to take money from that surplus fund after we requested it because the money that we earned from the kids, the school choice kids, isn't more than enough to cover. Did we do a roof fund a roof request? That was prior to me. So we have not, you know, we've done pretty darn well with what we've had, but the expenses are much higher just because of the maintenance piece. One of the reasons for putting in that 217,000 that was extra was because that was bringing us more in line facilities-wise than what the actual costs were. That will probably reduce in about two to three years because there's a lot of old maintenance that wasn't done. If we get caught up on it, then we can pull back a little bit. So I wanna know, what are you putting in place so this doesn't happen again? Because we're a lay board, we meet once a month. We need to know that you have a system in place so that we don't get caught with this again. True, yep. So tell us a little bit about that. First thing I'd like to do is get rid of this report. Again, this is not the format or the- What would you recommend for a format that would be something that we would get the same information for similar information? So I had done way back when we first started, when the request came in to start, you know, following through on the reports that Mark had been doing. I had started off with a summary report and there was a narrative associated with each new piece of each new budget thing that hit this month was in a summary report, told you the amount, the estimated amount, the cost, where it was in the progress, exactly what it was going towards. And I think that would be much better. The other thing that we could do is add another column on to the side where after it's done and it's come in at cost and it's been paid for, the business manager can put little initials next to it that's been confirmed. Because that's the piece I think that was missing. There was a lot of coming to the board for surplus funds as well. But I don't think there was a lot of confirmation where it actually went. Well, that would still be an issue, right? Because we're not going out and making sure that the plumbing was done correctly or that we received something. Because, so who is doing that? Obviously, Robin's not doing that. That would be part of the business manager's job as part of that reconciliation. I'm happy to do it too, but it comes down to that in the end, no matter who we have checking it, it's going to come down to trust. I'm not saying the monetary reconciliation only, but also inspecting the work done or that sort of follow through, which is not just monetary. The hot water being piped into cold water. Right, or whatever else. I think it demands some sort of technical expertise in some ways. So part of the problem, and again, I'm thinking my way through it with you, because usually if you have a contractor that comes in from the outside does the work, if there's a problem, you call them up, they come back and fix it. Right. The problem was that there was, again, based upon what I was seeing going through the old records, was that money was requested for things, the work was then done in-house and it was done incorrectly, so there was nobody to go back on. That is a function that, it was obvious. It was obvious in the records of me looking at it. It should have been obvious in the records of anyone else looking at it. Okay, so was Robin not following that line of follow through then, or whose responsibility? Robin, at that point in time, was matching invoices with dollar amounts. Not checking if the work was done, not her responsibility, that would fall on facilities and then on the superintendent above them. But we're still having a lot of work done in-house, and so we still have that saying. It's all, it's pretty much all contracted out. I mean, you've got the general work orders that come in that don't really cost a whole heck of a lot. Door needs to be repaired. I mean, we had 359 of them in the last three months, 311 of them were completed, so there's a tremendous amount of that. But right now, most of the work on the systems, the big stuff is contracted. I mean, that was one of the reasons why we were looking for the HVAC person to come in, because we were spending so much contracting those services out and it was an immediate need, given the state of things, that it was cheaper to have somebody come in and do it. But that's one of the reasons that we brought them in. That's a person, and I'll check with Visbit, I'll get a recommendation from them. That's a person that Visbit could check, because they come in and do our audits. I mean, the information that we have on whether things are up to code or not right now is coming from Visbit. But I'll find out from them. But again, you're asking questions, and politically it's tough for me to answer. I mean, if you want to go into executive session, I'll land a lot for you. Just because it deals with personnel. Personnel, right. Yeah. Hey, so. Other questions? So, I have a question. That's moving forward. I would just still say that, I mean, there is a, I mean, thinking back to the old structure, we had superintendent who was in charge of the whole system. He hires his facilities managers. He's got things in place, or she's got things in place, whoever it is.    Good enough to know if the paperwork matches. Right, but I don't think that was the issue. I don't think there was a paperwork issue. I think it was more from what you're saying, things were not done properly. Things were not done properly. There is also ample evidence to suggest that the paperwork was being falsified. So that comes down to, I don't care about the, I just want to know the system. So how are we to make sure, not we, because we're meeting once a month. We can't be, you're responsible for the system. So what are you putting in place so that doesn't happen under your watch? So first off, making sure that they're going out to bid when they should. Making sure that if there's questions, when I sit down weekly with Bob and Wes right now, and it doesn't sound right, I call in Robin for a second, and I ask their eyes like I did with the funding request over here. It didn't make sense to me, like one of the pieces that they were asking for, they'll give you a perfect example. If it's on here, is they were asking for 30,000 for HVAC work, 35,000 for HVAC work. And so the question is, well, geez, if we're hiring somebody on July 1st to do this work, why do you need 35,000 from them? So that was the process that I used to kind of weed through with this. I just said it's not, I talked with them, it's not sitting well with me. These are the things that don't make sense. I want you to check it too. And so that's the reason you're not getting a request for this, at this meeting, as Chris would follow through. But again, there is that piece of trust there. I will check with this bit. That'll be, we'll do a report at the next meeting and find out what their suggestions are. I don't worry as much if it's an outside service coming in and doing the work. It's easy to track paper. It's easy to know it's done. If it's not done to quality, you can get them to fix it. I worry more about in-house work. So the HVAC piece will be the... We did do a lot of in-house under the impression that that was gonna save us a lot of money. If we do it in-house, then we don't have to go out to bed and we have control. And I'll work on the reporting piece a little bit to make it a little bit clearer. For folks, again, I was just, we were just trying to follow along with how Mark had done it in the past. It was the past. But there's lots of other ways to present it. I just wanna make sure that, I mean, there's gotta be a system in place. You've gotta feel comfortable with it because we can see things, but... It's just paper. It's paper with numbers on it. And you can tell me, oh yeah, we've got this. And I mean, I... It's not a poison pipe, you know?  I mean, there's gotta be a general level of trust among people. And I'm assuming that you have good intentions for what you wanna do. But I'm also, I would think from your perspective that knowing that some stuff was done that was not done and not done correctly and now we were having to backtrack and fix that you're thinking to yourself, hmm, I better have a system in place so that this doesn't occur in the future. And I did talk with them a little bit about a materials audit and inventory, which they do make up. The part of that is the summers. I talked with them about going through and checking off on the list. We also talked in the last month about a surplus process. So in other words, if you've got an expensive item that's on that list and it's not needed anymore or it's defunct in most cases, what something like that above a certain dollar amount does is it goes in front of the board. It gets put on a sheet. People will write out what it is, what the cost is, and that way it's not officially removed from that material's list until or is approved at the end. So part of it is you guys have to decide if you want to have that much input, nothing wrong with it, it's normally what happens. And that would provide a little bit more in terms of material control. Another thing I saw was not on this list that we had talked about, I don't know, before Christmas I think, was installing solar panels at Braintree. I just wondered where we are in that process. We had talked a little bit about it. They had gone out to Green Mountain Power. They had checked with Green Mountain Power to see if there's capacity in the grid. So Green Mountain Power came back and said, Braintree not yet, we're working on it, but they won't give us a timeline. The same thing is true for most places in Randolph right now. So the follow up to that, and Robin has the contract is reviewing it, was Green Lantern Solar. So what Green Lantern is doing is they're building panels on the transfer station land, renting out to the town, and what they do is they generate the power themselves and then they sell it at a discount. So for us, if they were able to supply the entire district, it would be about a $22,000 savings a year. But is having that $22,000 savings a year worth signing into a minimum 20 year contract? So that's the piece that we're talking about. Robin and I have been kind of grown. By the same token, if we were able to get the panels on, Braintree, you know, those panels are good. You know, they reduce in capacity a little bit over time, but they're good for at least 40 years. You know, you'll still be at 80% capacity usually 40 years out.  What's the better? So that's kind of where the discussion is kind of sitting. But that would not entail selling the power to GMP or why does GMP have to be involved? You said that they didn't have the capacity. So what ends up happening with the power that's generated is if you think of the entire grid across Vermont, it's probably an easy way to look at it. Just because we're generating the power at Braintree doesn't mean that Braintree is using it. It goes into the grid. Anybody who needs it uses it. The power company gives us a credit for the amount that we're using, and then we can pull that much out of the grid ourselves and not have to pay for it. I see. Well, because in the summer, we're not going to use hardly anything. But you generate the most, right? But you generate the most, right? Yeah. So just to agree. It's expensive for green non-power. So the state legislatures mandates how much they need to accept. Okay. And so they're probably right. I think what you're saying is they're right at that. So they don't need to accept anymore? So they're not going to accept anymore? So that means we don't have the option. We don't have that option right now. But they've said part of it too is infrastructure. Do the wires, does the electrical grid in that specific area, can it handle that additional however many kilowatt hours of power that was going to be generated? And so the impression I got was it was more grid. Yeah, it is. In a piece that they don't, they physically don't have the physical structure for it. Right. The cost comes from they have to set that in order to receive more of the asset up. And so they don't want to do it because it's the cost cuts into the grid. Right. Yeah. So that one has been the brain tree piece is just sitting there because there's no answer. It's still remount power comes back and said yeah or nay. And again, they have not given a timeline. The other one that was being investigated in the interim was the green lantern. Okay. So are you requesting then today the approval of these reserve expenditures then? Let's, I would be, yes, I would, but go with Paul's suggestion over the 350. Okay. For the Raven or is it for Raven and others? Just, that's strictly for Raven, working on upgrading the OSSD warehouse in the demolition of the old building. All right. I'd like to make a motion of spending $350,000 for the Raven project. From the facilities reserve. Yeah, sorry, from the facilities reserve as described by Lane. Is there a second? So moved. Any further discussion on this? All right. Is there a vote to approve the motion as described? All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. Run with it. We look forward to lots of progress. Big thing is how long the permit may take. We're trying to fast track the permit. Yeah, that sounds fine. All right. Next is advocacy, seeing as we have no community comment. Legislative update. Couple, so S40, which is the Senate bill to require lead testing. We actually were able to meet with some of the senators and a lot of folks from the house at lunch, the superintendents were able to do that at our last conference. So the last wording that I had on it was they were looking at a threshold of three parts per billion for lead. So they want to go out and they want to test all the taps and all the public schools across the state. They want to have the testing done and the results back in 60 to 90 days of the work done this year if the remediation needs to happen. Wow. Wow, that's a lot. The EPA threshold is 15 parts per billion. They're looking for three. I think we spoke about this before here is that in a natural system, whenever you get close to the limit, zero being the limit here, it gets exponentially more expensive to do the work to get it done. So this is potentially a very expensive project at three parts per billion across the state. One of the big outcries that happened shortly after those discussions was this idea, oh heck, if you're expecting us all to get it done within a year and you're expecting districts to pay for 50% of it and our budgets are already set and costs may be astronomical because you chose something that's a third or even less than a third of what the EPA recommends, you're gonna put us in a pretty bad bind. If you've got a $19 million budget that comes in, you gotta do $6, $7 million worth of remediation. That doesn't seem to be too logical here. So that's kind of where the discussion ended at that point in time. Is that then, I mean, the House had a more lenient sort of limit, didn't they? Then 3% it was higher. They did and I'm not sure on the last round since that time what's happened. The House was great. They were actually coming in, listening to folks and listening to all the parts and pieces the Senate was just kind of doing its thing. So I don't know if that's the norm but that's kind of what it felt like. So maybe there will be some moderation of that extreme limit. And then the other piece that the superintendents were pushing for with them is look if you're gonna mandate this, especially when, you know, lead is bad but when there's not a crisis, if you're gonna mandate this then the state should be funding it was the push because there were no kids in the state that were having problems with lead from drinking water in the schools. The ones that had a problem actually when they did the research they went back and found out it was for lead pain in the homes. So they did have 30, 40, 50 kids that had lead problems but it was for lead pain in the homes. The bill on ethnic and social. So where is the push for this one coming from? Or is it just because of Flint and public health? I think what ended up happening and I'm using other people's words because you know my question kept coming where is the emergency here? Where is the emergency here? Because I'm not aware of what happened to the dry people in this direction. What they said is that they had those kids that they had lead poisoning so they jumped on the bandwagon to check all the water in the schools before they figured out that it, you know, did the research behind the scenes to find out well it wasn't come from the schools, it was from quite a long time. Which is not true. But now you've got the special interests working on the legislature that's gonna make tons and tons of money out of this is push and push and push. And so I think they said they had seven or nine different special interest groups that were there and really put the hammer on things. Because we even, the money would be very spent if they took a third of what they're talking about and saying any of a home in the state of Vermont that won't sell you anything. As like, remediate it, I know. Six million dollars a pop of school and they'll tell it's gonna cost them. Yeah, if your kid tests positive for lead we'll come and remediate your home. It might be cheaper. Yeah. And we, to kind of talk about us here, the one issue that we've had on and off has been Brookfield, the last testing came back clean. So what was that one? So you got that tested. So where are we, is it at the three that they're saying that it has to be at? The three parts we wanted to know. If I get, I think the number was around seven or eight so it's under the EPA threshold. But it wouldn't meet the new state one if it was at the three. No. So it's well under EPA but not where the state wants it. And part of one of the funding requests because they have been scrambling around trying to, because they're looking at so many different pieces as you see one of that funding request is 30,000. Potentially in case they need to do the lead remediation. They have had folks come in and take a look. Apparently there is one line that comes into the school that may be the source after they replaced all the faucets which solve some of most of the other problems. And the best way to remediate it is I can't think of the name of the chemical but basically what they do is they get the water out of the line they run the chemical through there and it coats the pipe. So now there's no more problems. There's nothing that can reach from the pipes. But then so you got the estimate on that if we have to do it as 30 grand. Chemistry is, wow, amazing, fun. Ethnic and social studies. The bill on ethnic and social justice studies was passed by both House and Senate. And so hopefully we'll get some, if the governor signs it, we'll get some information from the state on how to implement it. That typically tends to be a weakness. They feel that, oh, we're Vermont, we're independent. Everybody wants to figure out how to do it on their own without our help. So go for it. In the bills that were passed by both the House and Senate, was there funding in any of those? Never is. No, we actually, one of the things that I was pushing, I don't think I've said too many people but I kept harp and I said, if you wanna do something really good is put a moratorium on more mandates to education. There are some things that they put on us that are huge like those proficiency based graduation requirements and standards based report cards that literally would take 10 years to get up and running well. And yet instead of giving us time to do that they keep adding more and more stuff. And so the best thing they could do is for three to five years just let us complete the work on the stuff that I've already given you. That's never gonna happen. Yeah, it's a shame. So implementation of the statewide E-finance software is scheduled to go into effect across the state July 1st, 2020. There were a lot of issues with it. They were trying to consolidate all the financial software that the districts use so that it communicates better with the state system. There were two districts that were supposed to be up and running by July 1st and the software just isn't there. And they have no interest in actually extending the deadlines despite that. So there's a bit of a fight going on between the AOE, the education secretary. So the software doesn't exist. It's there but it's not, they were supposed to have these two districts up and running months ago. They're not. And the software doesn't appear to be in a complete enough state to do it supposed to. That's good. So but they're still, still forcing it. Basically the discussion at the AOE with the secretary there was basically this. Well, I've talked with the software vendor, they say it's good to go so. We'll see. So we'll see. Statewide longitudinal data system, that status is unknown. Basically it's part of the accountability to the federal government to get our federal grants money. We get about four to 500,000 in title funds each year, which is a part of this. To get that we have to be able to supply then with accountability data as back to show them that we're following through on what's required to get that money. The state for a long time was trying to pull together a centralized system that everybody was using for the reporting of data just to make it easier for the state to collect and be able to ship it out to the federal government. Again, it's a system that's not up and running. Yet the data was due to the state months ago. They have a soft estimate of maybe some time in May. So I don't know what that means in terms of grant funding from the federal government for us for next year. S209 we talked a little bit about in terms of Raven if we were gonna rebuild, that's the one that's seeking to remove the moratorium on matching funds for school construction. So there's still discussing that it looks like it's got some traction and the reason that it does is because it's an equity issue. Wealthier towns can afford to renovate and upgrade their buildings where poorer ones can live. And so it looks like that one very well may pass. Again, so it makes sense if we were ever gonna rebuild on that rate instead of holding off until that comes to pass. The big main focus at this point in time is on Act 173, which was previously passed in previous legislative sessions and that's the change over special education funding in the state from their current reimbursement system to a block grant system. One of the big things about it is the state's been charged in the law of providing support to districts to help with the transition. They are just starting to talk about the fact that they've gotta get this done and it should be up and running at some point in time. But we had that transition training. We were part of that pilot. There was a pilot program to collect data on terms of what went into and formed the law. So they had that DMG study where they went around to different schools, took a look at how schools were using their special education funds and the services they were providing to be able to report back to the legislature to say, hey, this is what looks like it's really working. This is what you want to include in your law. So that's what that was a part of. Okay, so that was not helping us. Now, they've got some person. I thought it was like, I thought it... It came back with the recommendations for the law, which they've incorporated. But in terms of training, it's actually getting people to come in and say, okay, if you're gonna use this system with best practice, this is what it looks like in your schools and we'll provide some training for your teachers and we'll provide some coaching and whatnot. Again, the law said that they are supposed to be doing that and they are not quite up to speed. They should be hopefully by mid-summer by the sounds of things. But one of the problems is, is that access to those services is gonna depend upon what they call accountability status. So in other words, if they can ever collect the data from everybody to say who's doing well and who's doing poorly, they're gonna target those that are doing poorly to get the lion's share of the help from the state, but they don't have a way of doing that yet until they get that data up and running. So there'll be a lot of motion on that front because that's coming pretty fast. So those are the biggies. Thank you. So we've got, next, the consent agenda. We'll vote on it as a whole slate. So it includes the minutes from the OSSD meeting, our last one, in March. Also the annual meeting, March 4th. I thought we approved those last time in our... They weren't in there because that's about when I broke my arm. So they weren't in there. All right, I better give them to you this time. Okay, so we'll approve both of those last minutes. We've got the professional staff contracts. What is that? I signed all that. We'll just need to approve them. That's, it's before the new contract goes into divorce. So it's just their steps if they get a step and it's out. So all the teachers will be sent next year's contract. Professional non-renewal list. What is that? We have one person. Okay. I don't know if we just have to approve that. And... The board, yeah, it's like the teachers contracts by April 15th, they have to be notified. They either have to have a contract in the hand or a statement that they're not being renewed. And so that's just to make sure the board does have to approve non-renewals. Okay. All right, so we have all the contracts, one non-renewal and then the staff collective bargaining agreement, which we've already discussed and agreed to have moved to the part of the consent agenda. Any changes or substitutions on either of those minutes? Any questions or discussion about anything on the consent agenda? So do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda as described? So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Reports and incidental information. Lane's report was included here. Anything to add? I thought it was interesting. A lot of the discussion was around Brookfield and the three elementary principles. Right. It sounded from their report that they were not filled with this. No, yeah. We can, there's some personnel issues associated with it. So if we go into executive session, I think it might be more appropriate. Okay. Financial report we can talk about since it's part of the reports and incidentals. So food services was one of the ones that it always looks horrible. I think it was 67,000 in the whole. Always looks that way this time of the year. We are actually $8,000 better than we were this time last year. And we did end in the black last year in terms of food services. Tuition in terms of what's coming in from our school choice students is actually 175,000 over what was expected. Right now the preschool program at Braintree may break even if we take into account the amount that the parents are paying for the extended day childcare as well as the afterschool program. We do not need to transfer any money from the Transportation Reserve Fund to pay for the two new buses. We, that was the one request in my time here that we asked from the board. And we won't need to do that with the money that's left over at the end of the year. The big piece is that, you know, facilities is going to be 35,000 to 50,000 in the red by year's end. And a lot of that is just kind of what we talked about. It's repairing, replacing those water heaters, the storage tanks, the plumbing work that went along with it, and then as well as the critical HVAC repairs.  Nothing caught on fire or burn, but one of those shunting valves associated with the heating unit on this end burned out. And when that happens, you get all sorts of ozone and fumes and whatnot. It's kind of delightful. And have to replace it a little bit. So, kind of like that. What does this idea be flow through if that looks like we're 76,000? We're just waiting for reimbursement, special education reimbursement so individuals with disabilities and Education Act money. Because we're still under the reimbursement system. There are some things that we pay for up front at the end of the year, we get back. A timeline for the kids who have school choice who could choose Randolph, when do we know those numbers? We've already passed. The lottery was done. So, I can give them to you. No, no, I'm wondering, not about our kids that are leaving. I was curious about like the Chelsea kids, you know, how we saw that, do we have, what's the outreach to those other schools that could send the students here? And when do we know how many are coming? So it's been happening all year. The outreach, especially the open house that they head over there, we were all there. We also have been doing on going, anyone who wants to come in toward the building, we've been putting ads in the paper, we have over the course of this year to do that. So they've connected directly up with a high school to have that happen. I've asked the principals to reach out, especially to the homeschoolers this year. So they're in their process of doing that to see if they wanna, you know, come back at least part-time because they can come part-time, they don't have to be full-time. But the work with the outreach has been ongoing. It's around the clock. And so when do we know? Or is that, I mean, do you not know until these school starts? What's like the commitment from the school? Oh, no, it's already there. We're up in additional seven kids from what we have last year. Which comparatively, and I'm gonna, I can pass this around because it's kind of interesting to see we're actually doing better than most of the districts out there. So right now we're up seven more, 16,000, 17,000 per kid. So that's pretty quick. It's actually, we get more revenue from school choice kids than we do from having our own town. What was interesting, and I'll pass this around for people to take a look at because it's, I think it's probably one of the leader performance measures to take a peek and see, and I'll explain it to you once everybody's got one. So if you take a look at the list, this tells you how many students have already left Randolph Union High School under school choice, and how many this year asked to leave. So we had one that is what they call a continuing out, was already out, is continuing to do so. We had two new requests. If you take a look at that list, we're one of the best schools in terms of retaining our students. So the 20, the number out for board, that's just as many as we allow, correct? So we allow 20 and only one out. One is already out, has been out, and then you guys actually know who that person is because you voted on her. And then two additionals this year. If you take a look at Stowe, Stowe's the only one to beat us. Yeah, well it's Stowe. And Williamstown, actually a little better than Williamstown. And they are about our size. We are retaining our students, and like I said, we're up in additional seven over the ones that we had last year. Good. Yeah, the biggest, I was hoping it was going to be a little bit bigger. The biggest shift was last year because a lot of the local high schools have closed down. And so we got a good chunk of students from that. And now you've got the year where people are kind of settling in, they've decided where they're at, or do they want to stay there to finish up their high school careers or not. So I think things will level off after this year. Yeah, and the new kids coming next year from a variety of places? Yeah, I shot an email out too because I just got the lottery information a day or so ago. So I sent out an email to Kara on death. So I'm waiting to hear from them. And I'll forward it to you guys as soon as I get it. All right. Anything else on financials? That wasn't really on financials. Not unless there's discretion. So the flow through, like I said, is the reimbursement. A lot of those students are also placed here by the state. So when they place them here, we pay up front, but then the state actually reimburses 100%. Okay. All right, staff appreciation. Every year we send a platter around to each of the different schools and then bus drivers and facilities, workers and that kind of stuff and we call it staff appreciation. And every year I've arranged it for the last, I don't know, four years, three years. At least. I don't know, it's been a while. I'm looking to have somebody shadow me this year and then hopefully next year they would take over. Essentially, it's me, all I do is send an email to the culinary arts director in RTCC. And then we talk about here what he is offered. Usually we have gone with whatever his students want to make is what they're going to do because they're gonna make it and they have fun doing it. And so whatever they want to make that year and then they make it and then he arranges for it to be delivered to all the different locations. So from our point of view, from what I've done, it's simple, all I do is contact Linda as for the current numbers of employees, where, and then following that up with the culinary arts. And we write cards, do you know? Yeah, we do sign cards and stuff here at the meeting. So Linda again, you know, she does the card. Lisa does the job. Yeah, it's me reminding you. And I think one year I signed it was the only one that signed it because we didn't remember the card. So it was me coming in and signing the card. May, I'm putting that on there. So is someone willing to shadow Paul and take over this job next year? It's one idea. All right. I'm just seeking you on several occasions. Yeah. Nothing. Thank you, Ashley. It's usually a very nice place for me to match here. Yeah. You need to do some samples and stuff. I would pick. Oh, samples. You know, I've never asked for samples. I've never asked for samples.  I don't think I need any samples for that. So is there a reason why we don't deliver it? That we aren't the ones that actually do it. They do it during the day. We have done it. We have done it. And I know when we've asked, everybody's working and so we haven't, it's just because it's in the middle of the school day. So what we can do is have it arranged because they'll tell us which day they're gonna do it. And so we'll ask Lane which day he would like it delivered. And then he will usually give us a couple of days where the principals want this day and this day and then Lane will pick one and then we make it happen. So we can let everybody on the board know this date, this time, and then whoever's available. Angelo used to drive it. I drove it once, but we usually have everyone done on the same day. So we'll do it. The first ones are the last ones. I forget which, but they're either really early or really late. Longs or you remember them. They prefer not to be forgotten. But now the culinary program does all of that? Yeah, the students have been doing the driving. Wow, the students did the delivery. Yeah, I think that's a great learning experience, you know. Yeah, part of food service. Yep, caring and delivery. Here you go. Good. So next is executive session.


Because of the Australia Awards, I can see the world with the Australian Spectacle, with a more sophisticated spectacle. I can say that I already see most of the world because I have friends from around the world and I see the world through their eyes. The methods, the approaches to conducting research. The new ways of doing things, that think carefully and planning for everything. Critical thinking skills and a big network.