BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington                    Stockbridge                 West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING

Du Bois Regional Middle School – Library

February 16, 2017 – 7:00 p.m.

Present:

School Committee:    S. Bannon, W. Fields, K. Piasecki, J. St. Peter, A. Potter, R. Dohoney, A. Hutchinson, D. Singer

Administration:          P. Dillon, S. Harrison

Staff/Public:                B. Doren, M. Young, M. Berle, J. Briggs, K. Burdsall, D. Long, E. Mooney, Student Members Teddy Michaels and Jack Gibson

Absent:                       D. Weston, S. Stephens

List of Documents Distributed:

Draft 2017-2018 Calendar for BHRSD

Personnel Report dated 2/16/2017

BHRSD Annual Financial Statements for the Year Ended June 30, 2016 including Independent Auditor’s Report

RECORDER NOTE:  Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed during the meeting and after the fact from live recording provided by CTSB.  Length of meeting:  1 hours 40 minutes.  CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order @ 7:00pm.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE 

The listing of agenda items are those reasonably anticipated by the chair, which may be discussed at the meeting. Not all items listed may in fact be discussed, and other items not listed may be brought up for discussion to the extent permitted by law. This meeting is being recorded by CTSB, Committee Recorder, members of the public with prior Chair permission and will be broadcast at a later date. Minutes will be transcribed and made public, as well as added to our website, www.bhrsd.org once approved.

MINUTES

BHRSD School Committee minutes for September 29, 2016

BHRSD School Committee minutes for February 2, 2017

Motion to approve both minutes:  S. Bannon               Seconded:  B. Fields                Approved:  Unanimous

TREASURER’S REPORT – None

SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT–

  • Dillon – Hello, before we start with the good news, I would like to share something that became news the other day and by no means is it good news. It may be good news for her but not for us.  Marianne Young announced yesterday to her faculty that she would be stepping down at the end of this year, sometime in the summer.  I wasn’t going to say a lot now and I will say much more later, but we are very blessed as a community to have Marianne to work her for so many years and we will miss her tremendously.  When I met with her about this I was quite sad and very quickly together with her a plan for all of the things that she needs to do before she leaves.  The second thing was help on finding a great person to step in.  The third thing was a way to celebrate her.  Marianne very humbly said, as only Marianne could say, I don’t want any big celebration.  I would just like everybody to come to graduation which will be our 50th graduation.  We will talk more about that and I hope we can do that.  I would like you to very informally know and recognize everything that Marianne has done for the district including for my own kids and we will talk to her a lot about things going forward in the future.  S. Bannon – I will just say one thing, Marianne, if you will remember, the School Committee interviewed you which doesn’t happen anymore when we do the process.  There were two applicants, Marianne and another lady.  I was told by the smaller search committee that the other woman was by far the better candidate and then you just blew us away.  I have never listened to those people again because there were totally wrong.  We have never been disappointed since.  Thank you.
  • Good News Item(s) – See below
  • 2017-2018 School Calendar
    • Dillon – The next thing in the packet is a draft version of our calendar. We share this with the community as a whole all the time.  The big highlight is, when the first day of school is and we are doing it again the Wednesday before Labor Day so we have a three-day week, then a four-day week, then a five-day week.  That seems to work nicely.  It lets us have two professional development days with the teachers the week before school starts.  The rest of the calendar is fairly straight forward.  It is a little longer winter break than this year because of how the holidays fall.  Our proposed last day of school would be June 14th.  We will go back into this, or Doreen will, and add other dates, but this is the initial one.  Do want to formally vote on it?  S-Bannon – Yes, we usually do.  A. Potter – can I ask a quick question?  Was there any response from the state about a waiver for the August 30th date?  Remember we had an issue about that the last time.  P. Dillon – that is interesting.   I have not prodded them and they have not gotten back to me.  I’ll reach out to the state again on that.  R. Dohoney – so how are we calendaring now?  P. Dillon – we are tentatively doing what we did this year which is the first day of classes for all students, if the state will let us do what our past practice was, it would be the first day for all students, EK-9 and then 10th, 11th and 12th graders would start the next day.  S. Bannon – so the 30th would be just the 9th graders are the high school and the 31st would be all students.  P. Dillon – correct.  B. Fields – Do we have to tell the state?  Why don’t we just do it?  That’s what we used to do.  S. Bannon – Now that they are aware of it, there is an ethical dilemma there plus some people like to keep their licenses.  P. Dillon – plus we are on TV.

Motion to Approve the Draft 2017-2018 Calendar for BHRSD – A. Potter         Seconded – S. Bannon;  Approved:       Unanimous

  • Proposed Motion to Approve & Award 2017-2022 Transportation Contract
    • Dillon – the next thing is and I will let Sharon explain this. She will give some context on the Transportation Contract and then the proposed vote.  S. Harrison – at the last meeting we talked about the Transportation contact; that we had received our bids and we were going back to the bidder, the one bidder, to try to negotiate and get the rates down from 37% increase.  We were successful with that.  What you have in front of you is the rates that we negotiated.  This year would be a 17%, next year a 15% and then you see it goes down with the last two to virtually zero.  What we tried to do with that was to stick to what the bid had come in at but make it easier for both Southern Berkshire District and Berkshire Hills to be able to absorb the cost over the first couple of year.  The second goal was to make sure your five did not increase to dramatically that would set the stage for the next five year transportation contract.  This list all the van.  I just want to point out two things.  One is the activity bus and the other activity bus 2.  Activity bus 2 is an extra bus that Southern Berkshire would like to add so it is going to be in the pricing in the accepted bid but that is for Southern Berkshire.  Midday van, we often have a midday van for students who find it difficult to be in school for the full day and we are trying to transition them into that.  They sometimes leave at midday.  What I ask of the committee, and we talked about this a little bit last time, when a question came up from the audience, was why do we go with a five-year contract instead of a three.  The reason is that the contractor has bid based on being able to amortize their bus over the life of the contract.  We if we can do that over a five-year contract it really is better financially for us.  So the first thing I ask is that we accept, which the School Committee has to do before we can accept a five-year contract versus a three by law.  The second thing I would ask is to accept the rewarding of the contract to the successful bidder, the only bidder, who was Massini Bus Company.  S. Bannon – Just for public knowledge, these prices for run are competitive with other companies.  S. Harrison – yes.  At the last meeting, I handed out a survey, and our first year is pretty much right in the middle of what the runs are.  There is one school district that has an extraordinarily low price that was negotiated many years ago but other than that they are all in the 290 and they are expected to be into the low 300s with this next round of bidding.

Motion:  For purposes of discussion, I move to contract for transportation services for five years FY18 through FY22.  Seconded:  B. Fields.    Discussion:

  • Dohoney – Just to be clear. We are voting on this because it is longer than a three-year contract.  S. Harrison – we are voting to do a five year.  S. Bannon – we always vote on the bus contract.  R. Dohoney – why is that?  I am not saying it is wrong.  I am just asking why.  S. Bannon – you won’s be satisfied if I just say for transportation and get on with it, will you?  R. Dohoney – No.  S. Bannon – I didn’t think so.  R. Dohoney – I understand that anything if we contract with anything over than three-years we vote on no matter what it is.  That is why I am not sure about the second motion.  We have the numbers but I don’t think we were ever provided the actual contract.  I tried to look for it today.  S. Bannon – we were not provided the actual contract.  S. Harrison – the bid is online.  There is no contract yet because we haven’t signed a contract but the contract is based on the bid with these numbers filled in.  R. Dohoney – I am comfortable with the presentation of the numbers but we are in the process of rediscussing our school times, bussing, bus runs.  I have concerns.  It is a government contract if we fail appropriate to it; we can terminate it at any time anyway but my questions are not about the numbers, maybe the other terms of the agreement.  A. Potter – would we be voting on the numbers here and not the contract itself?  Then see the contract downstream?  S. Bannon – well if we vote on the numbers only and not the contract, you will never see the contract unless we postpone the vote.  S. Harrison – the problem with postponing is the sooner we can get the contract out to the bidder the sooner they can order the buses and we are already running into a timeline.  It is up to the School Committee.  A. Potter – in terms of the contract itself, is there an impact from the reimagineering effort?  P. Dillon – do you want to talk about the alternative.  S. Harrison – we put in an alt bid with this.  The Southern Berkshire District already runs a one tier so we put in an alt bid for Berkshire Hills for a one tier and required any bidder to complete that form and it is the same price per run.  A. Potter – so we have that flexibility then?  S. Harrison – we had the flexibility to go to a one tier; we have the flexibility to cut busses should we need to.  When I first got here, in the first maybe three years, we cut three run because of the number of students, so we do have the flexibility to do that.  We have the flexibility to change the start and end time, even if we went to one tier.  Every year they adjust the start and end and the schools might tweak them a little bit based on what they are doing, so we have the flexibility to do that.  We have ultimate authority over approval on all runs that are posted.  S. Bannon – I have a question.  I know what we are trying to do here for operating services, do you think there is any advantage to us for running this shared RFP with Southern Berkshire other than you did all of the work and they got the benefit of the contract?  S. Harrison – Well, Chris did some work as well.  S. Bannon – I will stick to my story.  S. Harrison – I think the one reason that I pushed this is I tried to get more of the….S. Bannon – I am not saying it is bad.  I am saying that I don’t see the benefit.  S. Harrison – I guess the benefit that I was thinking would come out of this was actually the first thing with services that there was a very concrete way we could participate collaboratively.  It is a test.  S. Bannon – so it is very diplomatic but do we have …. Let me rephrase the question, did we get any benefit for doing this as a shared services contract?  S. Harrison – I don’t think so.  R. Dohoney – that is a little unfair characterization because the general principle in procurement is the larger the size for your big the better price you get.  Bussing in Berkshire County in an anomaly.  S. Bannon – I understand that.  I’m not sure if it was bad or good.  So far all of our shared services, some have been more successful than others and I am not against shared services.  I don’t see this as being a particularly award-winning thing, in that we saved any money.  B. Fields – following Steve’s question, how does this impact our budget that we are going to have presented tonight?  S. Harrison – these rates are in the budget that will be presented tonight.  B. Fields – so in order to do this, you had to put a number in.  Is this better for the budget or does it impact it on an increase level?  P. Dillon – it is an increase but when we went back and renegotiated how it is structured, we did it in a way so we didn’t take a big hit this first year so we have time to plan for the cost in subsequent years.  R. Dohoney – going back to my point and if it is important to move on this tonight, I will take the leap of faith but my gut is telling me that we are signing a five-year contract here where we know that we have a high probability of two things happening over that next five years.  We drastically reform the way we transport our kids, number 1 and number 2 is that the boundaries of our district will change.  If it is being represented that either one of those things happen, this contract doesn’t provide for any negative consequences it has full flexibility then I’m comfortable with that representation.  It that representation does not come to fruition and if I find out we can’t add another town to our district without paying a premium on bussing, or if we cut down on our bussing and we are not going to get the same pricing schedule, I don’t want that to happen.  B. Fields – in other words, is there a way in the contract that one can renegotiate at a certain period of time if what Rich says come to fruition, if for example the boundaries change and we add somebody, would the contract be able to be renegotiated with that contingency? Or is this just a straight deal, five years take it or leave it.  R. Dohoney – I think what I am hearing is that it is not a renegotiation and that the contract provides flexibility to accommodate that.  S. Harrison – should we add another town for example and we would have to bus, I’m not going to pick a town because we are on TV and somebody is going to say we are doing it, but if we took a town and we brought those students in, we could either combine it with an existing run, because the bus could start farther out and bring the kids in depending on the route.  So you might add a run or you might extend a run, but it does provide the flexibility to do that because then if the district is bigger and the contract is for transportation for district student, so if the students are part of our district than that transportation has to be provided to those students at this cost per run.  J. Bychowski (public) – I am from the town of Stockbridge.  Just one point, would it help to have language in that contract suggesting that the contract for a period ie five years would be based on material change to the district and no significant change in the student population.  Could you put that in which would give you a little cushion.  You need to legally look at it but it might be helpful.  That way you can get out if something changes.  S. Bannon – that is a possibility.  R. Dohoney – the backstop to my concern is if it is a School Committee vote then Steve is also signatory to the contract so it is on Steve to make sure what he is signing … P. Dillon – so if we already voted on it are we locked in to the existing language.  S. Harrison – I am not sure you would want to put language in that you would limit it to materially change because they bid on the contract that was put out.  You had a bid that was written in a particular way and if you are going to accept that bid, you have to accept it the way it was bid upon.  S. Bannon – while I am thinking about this, let me ask on more question.  You have year one down, and they increase prices for year 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, what are the increases from this to year one.  S.  Harrison – we are currently paying almost $275 for a bus.  B. Fields – It is $264.63.  S. Bannon – so now I’m confused.  It’s going to be $310?  S. Harrison – yes.   S. Bannon – what percentage is that?  S. Harrison – 17%.  S. Bannon – Peter just said that the first year, they give us a break so we could ease into it.  S. Harrison – it was initially bid at 37% increase.  S. Bannon – I don’t care what they bid.  It is immaterial to me; it’s what we can afford and 17% in the first year doesn’t seem like easing into it.  I’m going to try that with my next contract at work though.  P. Dillon – but by comparison the increase to Southern Berkshire is 60%.  S. Bannon – so what is the pleasure of this committee?  Do we want to vote on this tonight or do we want to see the contract?  We do have a motion and we can vote it down or we can withdraw the motion.

So hearing nothing, I’ll call to question…

All in favor or extending from a three-year to a five-year contract  …..It is unanimous. 

Do you want to try the next motion?

  1. Dohoney – well I think this is where the issue comes up. S. Bannon – well we can vote it down. R. Dohoney – I don’t want to vote it down.  S. Bannon – we can withdraw it.  R. Dohoney – well there is no motion on the table right now.  S. Bannon – the question is do we want to vote tonight to approve this contract without having seen the language.  B. Fields – I feel like Rich does and I would like to see what Jay has said and you know because you are going to be signing it, you know I think the consensus as a committee wants to see…has Southern Berkshire voted on it already.  S. Harrison – I believe they are voting tonight but I am not certain.  B. Fields – so if they vote to approve it then I don’t think it makes things easier because now it is accepted, right?  S. Bannon – no it doesn’t.  S. Harrison – we cannot add the recommendation because when you put out the bid you are bidding on that specific language.  A. Potter – I think that is what it comes down to.  When we put and RFP out and they bid on it in good faith, essentially that is the contract, right?  S. Bannon – that is the question.  Are we going to be able, even if we see something in the contract that we don’t particularly like, if the RFP is already formulated, are we going to be able to make a fundamental change.  R. Dohoney – I appreciate Jay’s comments.  I am not so much into changing it, I just want to be sure before voting on it that I understand it to say, and this has been my understanding since Sharon talked about this weeks ago.  B. Fields – my own feeling is that I just want to see it.  If we are looking at reimagining and there is some flexibility in there… S. Bannon – and Sharon has told us it does.  R. Dohoney – if we were being told there was no flexibility or wasn’t sure there was flexibility, I would be voting no.  We need the flexibility.

Motion:  R. Dohoney:  I move to award the transportation contract to Massini Bus Company for transportation services for five year FY18 through FY22 at the rates presented.       Seconded:  B. Fields   Accepted:   Unanimous

  1. Dohoney – I have one comment. This is a big jump for us next year and basically pretty heavy jumps going forward, I think part of the transportation evaluation should be on bussing fees. I know they are not very common in Berkshire County but they are pretty universal at the other end of the state.  S. Bannon – yes, they are.  R. Dohoney – have we talked about it or thought about it.  S. Bannon – many years ago we did.  Not since you have been on but we did. It doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it again.  R. Dohoney – I think with these type of increases, I think we always have to talk about it and evaluate the costs.  P. Dillon – thank you for your support on that.
  • FY18 Budget Presentation
    • Dillon – Sharon and I have a budget presentation. We have a number of slides.  If it is easier, so you don’t have to crane your neck and for the looking at the slides part, if you want to sit in the audience, that might be a good choice.  Sharon and I will work through them together.  I’m going to do the first set of slides then Sharon is going to do a bunch in the middle and then I’m going to come back to do a bit at the end.  Whenever I give a budget presentation, I always start with our mission statement because I think the budget is a representation of what our mission is.  It is to ensure that all students are challenged through a wide range of experiences to become engaged, curious learners and problem solvers who effectively communicate, respect diversity and improve themselves and their community.  Then next one, where we are in terms of our budget policy.  These are three core ideas that the school committee has asked us over the years to adhere to.  The first is to achieve the greatest educational returns and contributions to the educational program in relation to dollars expended.  So are we getting a return on our investment?  The second is to establish levels of funding that will provide high quality education for all our students and the third is to use the best available techniques for budget development and management.  I think we have worked hard on all of these.  The budget, establish levels of funding, provide high quality education of all our students, and this next one.  What we do in terms of our process; the administrators work really hard individually and collectively to review new programs and align those programs with student needs and we go through line by line by line at the level or hundreds of dollars to see what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense.  Health insurance is a big challenge for everybody.  It is a national challenge and it is also a challenge for our district.  This was the year that our entire staff moved to deductible plans, this year.  This was the year the Berkshire Health Group voted to do it.  We were the first then we came up with a collaborative way of doing it.  The rate increase was 9.3%.  The net increase to our district was 2.19%.  Transportation, we just talked about this.  The new five-year contract, the initial rate increase for this coming year was 37%.  We negotiated that down and spread the pain out over several more years instead of over this first year.  So it will be 17.14% and then net increase is 9.09% which we had budget for.  That is why we backed into this.  From a personnel perspective and I will talk about this in a sec, most of our resources are tied with people and benefits connected to those people.  This is an interesting year because all contracts are expiring this year.  People involved in negotiations know that we are meeting all the time to negotiate with all three bargaining groups.  We have set aside resources in our contingency fund to be able to meet whatever obligations we have.  Now Sharon is going talk a bit about the proposed budget and I will do the slides.
    • Harrison – we thought we would so something a bit different this year. What we did was, for the first part of this presentation we thought we would look at the budget allocated by departments, schools, facilities, etc.  I think for all except for the people in this room, people don’t understand where all that money goes and all of the multiple line items we have.  What I did first was I looked at the benefits and I allocated those proportionately over the departments.  I call them departments but we are talking schools.  Then I took the transportation allocated to the schools, I didn’t do it by student.  That part isn’t perfect.  That is 1/3 – it is a student expense.  Then I took that salary contingency that Peter was talking about and I put that proportionately across the department as well instead of using just that one chunk of contingency based on the existing salary allocation.  So if one department had 30% of personnel would get 30% of the contingency.  It was not detailed.  This was just to give you an idea of where the money is actually being spent in gross.  The first is Muddy Brook.  This is the first time the principals are seeing this too.  We did salaries and benefits and you will that it is over 70%.  When we talk about that 74%, when we talk about it all the time, we are a service industry so most of our cost is going to be in our people and our benefits.  Then you go down and you see field trips and activities, tech and supplies, professional development, admin and other equipment maintenance and that is about another 4% of the budget.  When we talk about what do we need to do to cut the budget, you are going to see on the next few slides that it comes pretty obvious where if you want to make large cuts where it is going to have to be.  Then we apportion the cost of keeping the buildings, custodial supplies then you see at the bottom, transportation 1/3 and contingency for contract settlements.  If you look at all of that, unfortunately the elementary school is about 22% of the budget.  You see the same thing with Monument Valley.  That is just under 20%.  Monument Mountain is about 30%.  I wanted to point this out because when you look at the elementary school it is 22% out of our $24 million proposed budget, $5.8 million is going to the elementary school.  As you can see, it is not all education, but in order to keep that building going, to get our kids to school it is 5.8; it is 5.2 for Monument Valley and 7.8 for Monument Mountain.  Then we go to the rest of our expenditures.  Student services, so again we are talking more specifically about our students.  That is about 8.9% almost 9% total.  Out of district programs, we talked about that.  Those are our students that need programs that we don’t have here.  They are more wrap around services, they are the kind of programs they need.  The transportation, professional services and fees we talked about that before.  Legal and again the contingency contract.  I didn’t but the transportation here because the kids are in the school, it is just the SPED transportation.  Then we get into the rest of the support.  Facilities and maintenance; how do we keep this up.  We have the custodians in the buildings then we keep the rest in the grounds, the three maintenance guys and Steve Soule, the Director of Operations.  Then the utilities for the district wide which would be the waste water treatment, farmhouse, supply services and fees, equipment, maintenance and new equipment.  Then again the contingency and that is 2.8%.  School Committee administration and this is where people think there is money.  The District – this is the district.  People think that – you know, it’s a big budget, it’s $25 million and then when teachers are looking at how much they have to spend on supplies they think that there has to be millions somewhere because I have a couple thousand dollars, so there has to be millions somewhere.  Well, you will see that just for the administration, this is Peter and I, the secretarial staff, payroll, AP, professional services and fees, rental, school committee is part of that, contract settlements.  Peter and I are not getting that much money, just so you know.  Again, it is proportionate.  It is not proportionate on our salaries but on the number of people.  That is 3.8%.  Districtwide, I put the technology and food services at 2.5% and the next one is really a big one.  All other – 10% of all of our budget goes to things we have fairly little control over.  Health insurance for retirees and new employees; I always budget for new employees if people are retiring and new employees are coming on or during the year, from one year to the next, you may have current employees that are coming on our insurance that were not there before.  That is what that line is.  That is 65% of that 10% right there.  All of our other insurances, general insurance, auto insurance, property insurance, school choice, transportation non-public, recruiting and advertising and our short-term borrowing interest.
    • Dillon – Just to summarize this, the numbers sort of speak for themselves. The elementary school is 22%, the middle school is almost 20% and the high school is almost 30%, then student services are another 9%, so all summed is about 80.21%.  As we look at the next slide, the districtwide and all other that we looked at is 10.73%; school committee and administration districtwide are between three and change and two in change.  Let me pause there for a sec and see, because we threw a lot of information at you.  Do people have questions at this point?  R. Dohoney – Student services, so what is that.  S. Harrison – that is for students that need special services transportation.  It is for vans for students who might not be able to ride on the bus; it is our PK transportation and also transportation for students that may go to day programs outside the district as well as in district.  There is also reimbursement for paraprofessionals that take high school students to college programs, etc.  R. Dohoney – so that will not be outside of our contract.  S. Harrison – part of this is in the contract and part of it is outside.  Our transportation company does not have a driver and a van to go far outside of district so we contract for that separate.  B. Fields – the professional services on this sheet, I thought we were contracting…I thought at the last meeting we were contracted to have services brought back into the school and not using counselors.  S. Harrison – I did not include that in the budget because that has not been finalized, the positions haven’t been approved by the school committee; that was just a discussion.  We kept some under professional services and fees and then once it is approved, we will be taken under professional services and fees and put into the salary line.  B. Fields – so then will that be taken down to zero.  S. Harrison – it will not be zero because there are additional … there are translation services, there are things that we still need to contract for.  S. Bannon – for our programs that are $980,000, that won’t be reduced (inaudible)…S. Harrison – based on the presentation that Kate had done, in the first year (inaudible) and in the second year, we anticipate.  Sharon not at a microphone (inaudible).  We will put all of that in a budget folder so that you can refer back.
    • Dillon – I think particularly for the newer members of the committee who didn’t go through those very long and robust presentations to read them or skim through parts of them so you have some additional context. Let’s look at that last pie chart.  I’m sorry, do you have another question Rich?  R. Dohoney – yes. (Inaudible not at a microphone) Is the school committee getting salaries?  There is a line item for salaries.  P. Dillon – that is my salary.  This last chart and even this hurts my eyes, the largest piece of it are salaries and benefits and this is just another way of presenting it.  It looked good when we were looking at it on the computer but it does not project well.  That is really the big piece of it.  Transportation is another one.  I think this is a good one to look at online rather than me going through line by line.  So now I am going to have Sharon come up and talk about the very specific parts of the budget and then I will bring us home talking about what the impact is of this to each of the towns in terms of … S. Bannon – what I am not seeing is specific increases that are already in the expenses.  I don’t see anywhere that you are telling us where things are going up.  That’s what a budget it and that is what we are voting on but I don’t see it.  P. Dillon – be patient for a while.  I think we will address what you are hoping to hear.  S. Bannon – I am hoping that there is no increase that is why you didn’t show it.  P. Dillon – what you may be asking for are granular details on specific line items and we can come back and share that more.  S. Bannon – right, because if we are going to discuss the expenses versus revenue and we haven’t talked about if the expenses have increased, then we don’t know what to discuss.
    • Harrison – Steve have a good intro to that so we do see that the expenditures are increasing by a little over $1.4 million almost $1.5million. About $632,000, Steven I can tell you is in the contingency line for contract settlements so that is the majority of it.  It is in the salary line.  Remember all three contracts are expiring this year and typical of what we do because we don’t know what they are, we aren’t going to put them in the salary line because we keep everything in the contingency line.  That doesn’t mean that any one group is getting a particular amount until we negotiate but in order for us to bargain in good faith, we do have to have that in the budget.  That’s the bulk of it.  So about 150 is in insurance that is about the 2% and then 150 of that 40,000 is facilities under new equipment and part of that is an upgrade of the phone system at the high school which needs it desperately.  I am not sure what form that will look like.  There are some smaller, most of the utilities will stay about the same and we have some additional professional development and in the mentor line, because we have a very robust mentorship program.  B. Fields – Sharon, did the solar contract that we signed equate to what the figure was and was it accepted.  S. Harrison – I have to refer to Steve and have to ask him on that because he is running those now.  B. Fields – I saw a line item for Housatonic discount.  S. Harrison – so that is what he is anticipating on there.  I will get that from him.  J. St. Peter – How much was the increase in salary?  S. Harrison – I have in contingency $632,000.  That also includes $25,000 for longevity pay for teachers, it includes the annuities by contract for administrators, it also includes a few additional days for a couple of administrators and Peter will get into that when that has been settled.  R. Dohoney – so just to clarify, $1.4 million, how much of that is salary?  S. Harrison – $632,000 is in contingency for salary.  150 or so is for…130 is for insurance and about 133 is for transportation and then there is about, I could look in the book, but off the top of my head, I know that there is a bump in facilities and maintenance for new equipment plus an increase for maintenance for these two buildings because we have been really lucky.  We have been able to keep it low and we had to bump it for that.  There are going to be other lines that have smaller increases but those four things are the bulk of the increase.  That is the gross operating and then the net operating is up by more which is unusual.   The difference between the gross operating and the net operating budget is due to a reduction by choice and tuition revenue.  In order for us to be able to track from year to year our actual costs, we put in the gross operating budget.  Otherwise, we would see ups and dips and increases from year to year that aren’t actually true to our expenses.  Then I decrease the amount that we know we are going to move from expenses into the revolving funds.  The first one is choice; that is down by $193,160 due to a large 12th grade class going out and many few choice kids coming in.  A big part of that is enrollment is down across the county.  A. Potter – Sharon, does that also include the choice outs?  S. Harrison – no.  Choice out is level funded at 650.  This is just our choice in revenue.  Tuition is up by $40,000 after I use $100,000 in reserves so actually the tuition in is due to decreasing enrollment last year but we have reserves so I am recommending using $100,000 in reserves.  Actually for FY19, both our sending districts, Richmond and Farmington River have a large enrollment.  There seems to be more kids behind next year’s class.  That is the difference in the net increase.  P. Dillon – it is also unusual, there have been several people who have reached out to me from the state relative to tuition.  That is not done until it happens but as a committee we talk about charging them the full per-pupil cost and tuition is one of our revolving (inaudible).   S. Harrison – the next is the capital budget and this every year is pretty straight forward.  We have the elementary and middle school construction bond.  We will be paying 1.8 on that.  The 1.3 in principal and $469,000 interest for a total of $1,806,000 that gets paid off in 2024 so we are getting close.  Our short-term borrowing, we borrowed two years ago for tennis courts, a truck, technology, doors at the high school.  We borrowed two years in a row and we are now starting to pay that off.  We will pay down the principal of $100,000.  What I am trying to do is get that paid off in four years.  The interest I budgeted at 25 which not quite that high so whatever is left in the interest will go into paying on the principle.  So that is $1.9 million and we get $1,210,000 from MSBA to offset that $1.9 million.  Now, what does it look like for revenue?  Chapter 70 – that is our education funding from the state is up about 2% and what that represents is $20 per student increase.  We are at our max basically for what we get from the state and everybody who is in that position get $20 a student.  There are other, and again we talk about this every year, the legislature comes out and says we are funding education more than we ever have which is true.  What they are trying to do is bring those people who are below foundation up to foundation.  Those communities that have no capacity or very low capacity, get much more funding from the state.  Chapter 71 is our transportation reimbursement.  I am budgeting that actually high for next year at 65%.  I am trying to offset some of these increases.  That is an increase of 12%.  R. Dohoney – is that actual from the governor’s budget?  S. Harrison – the governor’s budget is a little lower.  We can now put it in the revolving accounts so we can pull it out of there but I have been hit twice with having it too lower, having the money come in too low, so I tend to be a little bit lower.  School choice is down as I said and tuition is up about 4% with a use of $100,000, MSBA is pretty steady at 1.1.  Other is up; the Medicaid reimbursement interest income and misc. income.  This is just our recommendation.  Medicaid reimbursement I increased $10,000 because last year we signed a certification on $130,000 so we do expect $130,000 from Medicaid, expected this year.  I don’t typically budget the full amount because it is a timing issue.  That money is coming in so I expect about the same amount for next year but we may not get the full amount.  If we get more than budgeted, that drops to E&D and we can use it in the following year.  The misc. income is increased by $30,000.  What Peter and I have looked at is the money that we are getting from our shared services  for the shared supintendency and that is coming in at about $60,000 and we are using $30,000 of that to increase the revenue.  Excess and deficiency – I am struggling.  I am putting in, I am recommending 250.  It is about doubling from last year but what we did to come up with that amount was we put in the 125 that we had for this year plus $90,000 from the revolving regional transportation fund that we used last year, so we dropped that to E&D.  We moved almost $90,000 out of transportation expenses from the operating budget into the revolving fund allowing that $90,000 to drop to E&D, so we want to give that back to the community.  That came up to about $214,000 then I put it up to $250,000.  That represents a use of 25% of our E&D balance.  A. Potter – that must have been hard for you.  S. Harrison – It was very, very hard.  This shows the revenue sources just like the expenses.  This one is a little bit easier because we don’t have a lot of sources.  The biggest part is assessments, and I do like to point out, the state still says we are getting our fair share, but I do like to point out that in 2003 our Chapter 70 funded almost 19% of our budget.  This year it is just over 10%.  Each year it is dropping.  The big part is the assessments.  The next is Chapter 70 at about 10%.  West Stockbridge and Stockbridge are on the right and the rest of the revenue…transportation reimbursement transferred to E&D.  Questions?
    • The assessment to the member towns are based on three things:
      • Population allocation, what is the percentage of enrollment for each town? We brought to the school committee and the public the Oct 1 enrollment; that is what we are talking

about for population allocation.

  • Minimum local contribution – what does the state say that each can and should pay for education?
  • Net Assessment
  • So what I want to go before we get to the … I thought because some people may gasp when we get to the assessment changes, I wanted to look at what would happen if there was no enrollment change and no change in the minimum local contribution? These are things that are out of the administration’s control.  So no matter what we do with our budget, no matter what we do with our recommended budget, these things change and we have no control.  So if there was no change in enrollment or in the minimum local, how would that look?  Great Barrington would see the budget we are proposed at 4.18% increase, Stockbridge 4.39% and West Stockbridge 4.19%.  So about even with no change in minimum local, based on the budget we are recommending.  However, because Great Barrington went from 69.9 to 72% of the student, so their enrollment increased significantly, especially when you are small.  Stockbridge went down from 15 to 14.7% and West Stockbridge went down almost 1.5%.  You are going to see that despite the fact that if there had been no change in the minimum local contribution or enrollment, which is what you are seeing here, it was fairly equal but because of this change, it dramatically impacts it.  The second thing that impacts it is the minimum local contribution.  The minimum local contribution is based on what the state considers the relative wealth of a community.  If a community is doing better from year to year, their minimum local contribution is going to go up.  If they are not doing as well from year to year, it is going to go down.  Great Barrington with the growth and the new construction, you see that it is going up from 6.7 to 6.8 million.  Dohoney – it is not just the Great Barrington tax base that is dramatic but also income tax receipts and other well factors go into that.  S. Harrison – Stockbridge went up slightly from 1.338 million to 1.350 and West Stockbridge went down from $1,399,000 to $1,329,000 so a combination of those two effects the net assessments regardless of what we do.  You can’t spend anything less than the minimum local contribution.  Often the question that comes up is why don’t we just spend that.  The minimum local contribution is based on a foundation budget.  The state says our foundation budget is $10 million so the states says we can adequately education our students on $10 million.  I did the calculation on that once and I think we could have a PK – 6th grade school district.  The big reveal – with the budget that we just showed you, the net assessment change is Great Barrington goes from $14.4 million to $15.4 million; Stockbridge has about a $50,000 increase and West Stockbridge goes down about $120,000.  So you see that dramatic shift.  That shift in enrollment.  That shift in minimum local contribution plus the budget changes.  What you see on this slide is the total assessment based on the proposed budget.  The next slide shows the change so the percentages are the same but that is the dollar change.  Great Barrington is up $938,000, Stockbridge about $50,000 and West Stockbridge decreased by $124,000.  This is another picture of the pie.  This shows revenue and enrollment and one of the reasons one of the questions that come up is that we are paying x percentage and this shows verses what the net assessment shows is….that blue part on the top is Great Barrington so they pay 70% of the assessment.  What this chart shows is all revenue.  So they are paying about 53%.  P. Dillon – they are paying 51.4% and they have 53.51 of total enrollment.  Stockbridge is 10.92 of total enrollment and they are paying 10.86% and West Stockbridge has 9.77 of enrollment they are paying 10.15%.  Those were all pretty close to the line.  Let’s sit down for some questions.
  • Bycofski from Stockbridge – I have a question with respect to procedure. Let’s say we were fortunate enough to bring the year to take on an additional school district, would we be able to take on that district mid-school year or would we have to wait for the calendar year?  Would we have to reprepare a budget for them?  P. Dillon – my understanding would be effective July 1 of the next year so it really isn’t the calendar year it is the school fiscal year and one would reach an agreement sometime before, super complicated, sometime before July 1 that would reopen the regional agreement to bring them in.  It would have to be voted on in all the various towns and then it would happen July 1.  It might be a year process.  It might be a two year process.
  • Jack Gibson – if the district were to increase in size, would that be enough grounds or any ground at all to request or make another vote on redoing the high school? Dillon – it’s a good question and that would make it likely easier to do that but first step would be to file a statement of intent or statement of interest with the MSBA to get back in their pipeline to then do a design process. The nice thing is that MSBA has historically done is they give additional reimbursement points for new formed or reconfigured regions.  So if we were lucky enough to have another community join us and they were lucky enough to join us, then we would be likely eligible for additional reimbursement points.  That perhaps combined with the proposed regional agreement, we would be very cautiously optimistic that it will pass in the next two towns, that could be a real game changer in terms of a potential high school project.  S. Bannon – so what would you like to see the administration bring back from this meeting?  B. Fields – we are going to have a finance subcommittee meeting Tuesday?  R. Dohoney – correct.  S. Bannon – I am not hearing anything so you will have an opportunity if you come to the finance subcommittee meeting Tuesday but…P. Dillon – may I prime the pump a little?  S. Bannon – you may.  P. Dillon – often the school committee asks us to look at a range of possibilities to run models, explore the possibility of cuts and I think the school committee has struggled with the tension between letting finances drive the process and/or letting an education vision drive the process.  I don’t think they are mutually exclusive but I think you can look at both simultaneously.  In the past you have asked us if we were to cut X what impact would that have on the assessments and what impact would that have on learning and teaching and we have talked about that some.  S. Bannon – I guess what I will say is, first of all one of our complaints when we did debrief last year was there wasn’t enough time between the presentation and the vote so if we go tonight without any comment you are just shortening the time.  I comment on it and then we will move ahead.  I am somewhat torn on this.  I think it is a good budget.  It is a healthy budget.  It think the unfortunate or fortunate minimum local contribution change especially.  It is fortunate because Great Barrington is seeing growth and the growth is only starting because it doesn’t include any of the major downtown projects which will probably hit in two or three years.  It is not all of a negative for the local contribution increasing for Great Barrington.  It is unfortunately does affect the school budget also.  There is a positive part but there is also an increase in the school budget.  Having said that, if we went to each of the town and said it is going to be a 4% increase, maybe a little high than I like but not awful, I would be fine.  Seeing the percentage that we are going to have in Great Barrington through two sets of circumstances due to population and minimum local contribution, I am torn whether we at least should look at cuts.  I think it is our fiduciary responsibility to do that.  It doesn’t mean that we have to accept them, but I also don’t want to get into this frenzy of asking you to cut and then having people come and tell us why we shouldn’t cut anything; which we always do and then not cut anything.  I don’t want to look at cuts just for the sake of cutting but I do think it is our responsibility to look at some small percentage of cuts.  R. Dohoney – Maybe one good thing to look at that I already had a conversation with Sharon about this, an incremental $100,000 cut, how those end up reflecting to the assessment to the towns.  The problem is we get into this making cuts for Great Barrington particularly this year with how the formulas are broken out, we will kill ourselves cutting $100,000, $200,000 from this budget and it won’t really affect Great Barrington that much.  S. Bannon – that is part of the problem.  R. Dohoney – if tax payers of Great Barrington want to relief that can get dollar for dollar relieve from the Select Board because the cuts they make are dollar for dollar translation for the tax payers unlike cuts we make here that are now less than 50% translation to the tax payers.  S. Bannon – and Great Barrington’s budget is without the school increasing very little which Great Barrington right now is very healthy.  R. Dohoney – I am not saying I am proposing cuts or not but that may be something to look at next time around.  I think I want to talk about the E&D.  If we were deciding on a budget tonight, I would be making a motion to double the 250 to 500.  I don’t know if I would even get a second for it.  S. Bannon – you would get a second.  P. Dillon – I can just feel Sharon’s discomfort.  R. Dohoney – Sharon give me credit.  I first showed how that effects Great Barrington at it is not as much as you would like.  If it was a dollar thing, it would be a great idea.  What are we really saving tax payers by spending that 250?  Look at it from both ways.  I would rather not get into the line by line analysis.  I mean I have some questions but a lot of them I can ask the finance committee and ask them through the administration.  My thought is if we decide the number is too high we just propose a number cut and get on with it and let the administration how to deal with it because the other process doesn’t work.  They can decide between now and September 1 how they want to spend the money they have.  S. Bannon – any other comments?  We will continue this discussion Tuesday at the Finance Subcommittee meeting.  It is open to the public and open to all school committee members.  P. Dillon – it will be in Stockbridge at 5pm.  I believe it is already posted.
  • Updates:
    • Regional Agreement and Special Town Meetings – P. Dillon – West Stockbridge’s meeting is on the 27th so a week from Monday, at 7pm in West Stockbridge. It is my understanding that a quorum in West Stockbridge is 25 people.  It is my hope and expectation that we have many multiples of 25 people there.  The Stockbridge meeting will be at their regular town meeting.
    • Re-imagination – P. Dillon – The reimagination group met yesterday and we had a very positive meeting. We used the meeting to plan about how we would work with our whole faculty and staff on March 10th to get their reactions to the work the 20 or so of us have been working on.  We are going to start building by building and teachers and paras and other staff will have time to work through a range of ideas and possibilities, things we hope to implement for September and then the year after and potentially the year after that.  Then at 2pm we will convene in small cross building groups and share ideas.  It is not going to be a typical report out but we have two guiding questions around that.  What inspired you about the morning conversation and what supports to you need to implement these shifts going forward?  I am looking forward to that.  Bannon – my Thursday grumpy comments are that I am excited about the reimaginiation.  I am a little disappointed, because I know how much work has gone into it but that it didn’t appear at all in the budget presentation even if it was budget neutral so that we could see what changes are being made but I know it is just taking longer than we anticipated and there are a lot of good reasons for that.  P. Dillon – at our next meeting we can do a little update on that.
    • Southern Berkshire Shard Services Project (SBSSP) – P. Dillon – I met with Joshua Shaw today and he is the technology consultant that the group has hired and I think he met with Dave today. He is meeting with all of the technology directors in the six south county districts over this week and next week, a face to face meeting.  Then he is going to do some work back in California then he is going to come back again and do another round of visits.  That is moving along nicely.  We have talked with folks in the governor’s office about that and they are excited about that work.  Fields – I don’t know anything about computers, but I remember when Rich was on the committee, he talked about something to do with a shared platform and David is here.  Maybe he could explain.  It is where districts are all operating on the same platform and it could be a significant savings?  D. Long – I am not sure which conversation you are referring to but there are a number of conversations both locally and with people in the state to look at ways….a lot of us use a Hewlett Packard static (inaudible) complex to manage and not every school has all of those skills so we need to find out if there is a critical path to look at the resources that are in different schools so that we can share more effectively if we were using more similar tools to drive the information systems in each of them.  It really isn’t melding all of the IT departments but finding more effective ways of sharing talents that we have across schools, was mostly the conversation.  B. Fields – is there ultimately going to be a budget impact on those conversations?  D. Long – Just the significance of us coming in saved a tremendous amount of money last year because we were not paying consultants because now those towns were in house.  While we are great at something, we are not as good as some of the other schools in other areas and I think there is a lot of room for us to learn and be able to help each other.  A. Potter – that translates into dollars.  P. Dillon – I think there is the potential for some savings.  I think the bigger thing is it might let us reallocate what we are investing in to greater impact.  Instead of people running around and helping people reset their passwords, we might have an opportunity to have sophisticated technology people to work with teachers on supporting student learning more than hardware and infrastructure.  D. Long – I also think you will find across most of the district there is far more sophisticated stuff than they ever imagined.  You either know how to do some of these things or you don’t.  There are the cultural aspects, there is the money and the network.

GOOD NEWS ITEM(S)

Muddy Brook Elementary School (MBE) – M. Berle, Principal

Hello everybody.  We have a lot of good news at Muddy Brook.  Our chess club run by Dr. Gene Kalish has continued through the year and the tournament has just started.  There are quite a few kids involved.  Dr. Kalish does a beautiful job creating a context for kids wanting to play chess and interested in learning how to play chess.  He supports all kids and creates a very ornate plan for a tournament.  Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next weeks from 8-8:30am come see if you would like.  P. Dillon – Its double elimination which is very unusual.  M.  Berle – yes, we go for it.  Dr. Kalish goes for it in the best possible way.

The whole school is tubing tomorrow at Butternut.  We are really looking forward to it.  EK and PK are not going but we are thinking about whether we can get them in later in the season.  It is quite an event for us to take the whole school somewhere.  All teachers are really on board to make that a special day for kids and we are excited about it.

There is a K-12 choral concert that our 3rd and 4th graders are participating in March 8th at the high school.

We had a wonderful Valentine’s Day.  A lot of teachers and kids interpreted it as “random acts of kindness” throughout the school.  It was a very nice way to do that.

The grade 4 team had Patricia McLaughlin come last Friday.  She is a nationally known author.  Bonnie Groeber had reached out to her after reading one of her books and formed a connection which was funded by the Berkshire Fund for Excellence.  It was wonderful.

On March 1st our Early Childhood team plus our learning specialists will meet with Cynthia Segui and our retired teacher, Susan Ebitz, who is now working with Cynthia on the 0-5 project funded by United Way and the Taconic Foundation.  That is a project that has been going on for about a year, almost two years in the community to better support families and student readiness for kindergarten.  The results so far are great.  It is really fun to now be connecting that with our staff.  Also connected to that, Christine Kelly, did a beautiful job setting up our Early-Kindergarten and Pre-Kindergarten Registration this year.  We had some opportunities to make that a little more in depth, to advertise more, to get more families in at the right moment.  We had three teachers doing pre-kindergarten assessments all day long with no slots open in their schedules on Wednesday.  We were able to welcome families and meet wonderful new children.  We will be running a lottery and running those classes in a few weeks.  We will then go into Kindergarten registrations.

Everyone is looking forward to a week off.  We have had a lot of sickness so it will be good for kids to get rest at home and come back ready to go in a week.

Du Bois Regional Middle School (DBM) – Ben Doren, Principal

Good evening everyone.  It is good to see you.  Good news from the middle school, as Mary mentioned Valentine’s Day is a big day in the hearts and minds of elementary school students and middle schoolers.  Random Acts of Kindness was big and some 7th grade students decided to bring in hearts for every single kid in the 7th grade and proceeded to hand them out to everybody.  The Student Council was great and put together a fund raiser with roses and cards.  They raised $190 for the American Heart Association in conjunction with something from the high school.   It really feels good that when the kids do something to give back.  In the same way, Marianne’s amazing high school, the Young People’s Concert every year, we walked up and today was the day.  The entire middle school walks up first thing in the morning and hears the band play.  Mike Gillespie has done an amazing job taking over the band and the jazz band, and concert band.  It was a beautiful concert.  The kids were great and really into it.  The concert band is tough for young kids to listen to but they did great with John Williams’ music, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, couldn’t have been better.

For the academics, I have been doing my observations.  I had a great observation in science this week about inquiry.  How do you get kids to ask questions?  So you can do things like talk about the science activity you are going to do and they follow a sheet and the directions; they answer the questions, you ask what it means and they tell you because it is pretty much what the text book said.  This was different.  This was here is salt, here is pepper, we are studying mixtures, mix them together, here’s a bunch of tools, separate it.  It was really amazing to watch kids have to think, well do we pour it in water, do we use a balloon, do we use a magnet and it was amazing to watch kids for about 30 minutes just struggle and learn from each other.  That is what science should be, that is what science is.  We don’t know what to do; how do we do it?  Let’s ask questions.  There was a lot of excitement going on and there has been a lot of work in the science department to really push that kind of inquiry instead of just stepping through activities that explain an activity.

 

In the same way, with our collaboration with Flying Cloud, we had roaches in the building.  Still do, right upstairs.  Huge Madagascar roaches which are amazing because they crawl all over your hands, they can go on your head.  They are really amazing creatures.  It is all part of studying anatomy and animal development, evolution.  There are a lot of really neat things that go on but boy, nothing brings science alive like cockroaches crawling up your pants.

My teams have been meeting, my departments, over the past couple of weeks.  The end of last week, the math department met.  They had really important talks about gifted and talented, enrichment, high level kids; kids who are really working on the edge well above their grade level.  Some students are up to two grades about so how do we do that, how do we support that?  How do we have a 6th graders in 8th grade math?  How do we have a 5th grader in 6th grade math and how do we keep those kids going?  So the conversation that we have been having for about two years, and getting better each year, and our teams are getting pretty excited about working out a lot of the kinks and keeping kids moving along while also keeping excitement about math across the grade.  As well we have kept our focus around fractions.  We are realizing that kids are coming to us in 5th grade and leaving us in 8th grade don’t really have a great conceptual understanding of fractions.  Every year we will be teaching concepts, really mechanics, but not getting too deep into the concepts.  Another neat conversation there.

My ELA team met.  We decided with all of the rubrics we are doing with the performance assessments in the different departments; the other departments it’s more about this project and then evaluating the project.  The ELA team only meets twice a year; they get a portfolio.  Basically the kids collect all of their writing work and then they use a rubric of good writing to review it.  It is really neat because teachers are giving the kids feedback, the kids are using the rubric to have peer discussions then students are using it individually to get a reflection.  It is getting pretty deep in terms of kids starting to understand what it mean to be a good writer and what I need to do myself to be a good writer as opposed to just getting feedback on your essay.

I was in an English classroom the other day and two different periods.  One was the entire class giving feedback to one student who was asking questions about her writing and in another on there was a quick three minute conference between the teacher and the student.  The student really was able to ask questions of the teacher about how do I become a better writer.

Really neat stuff with the Rotary Club that Peter arranged.  Over the years, the Rotary Club has been very generous and has given things like dictionaries and thesaurus’ to all of our 7th graders which is great but in this day and age, kids don’t need that anymore.  They can just look stuff up on the internet.  They can look up a word and get everything they need about it.  So what do we do?  What is a relevant support that the Rotary Club can do?  Peter worked with the Rotary and came up with a really neat idea.  There is a micro-lending organization called Keeva, that basically does really neat…somebody from a developing country around the world could be anywhere and say “I need $40 to get fabric and thread to start a small business around making clothes.  Can I have $40?”  So basically you get to choose these small little micro loans and they support and make really good decisions about supporting people around the world.  The Rotary is basically going to give us resources, money every year, and the student council will make a decision every year, about who they are going to lend money to.  When the money comes back, we get to lend it out again so it starts to build a big pot of money to lend out.  I think it is a really great lesson in ethics and responsibility for kids.

Lastly, Shakespeare & Co. is coming to town.  That will be after vacation; they will start their residency.  I did a day with the 7th and 8th giving an overview of Shakespeare, making it relevant and then doing a residency with the 8th grade and putting on a Shakespeare play in the spring. This time next year, it will be at Shakespeare & Co.

Monument Mountain Regional High School (MMRHS) – M. Young, Principal

Presentation by Teddy Michaels and Jack Gibson

Good news from Monument starting with our very own Alliance Coalition and Student Senate along with Marianne Young, representatives from the Railroad Street Youth Project, Infinity groups at Monument which are the Students of Color Association, the Anti-Defamation League and the Gay Straight Alliance.  All of those and the Student Senate have come together to form what is in essence…they met last week or two weeks ago to talk about what we think the mission statement should be; what our goals are off the bat.  We talked about that and got an email sent out and right now we are in the process of improving our own mission statement.  We will be meeting as a preemptive committee to stop acts of racism, any type of inequality, hate, things like that before they happen but as well, we will be working on informing our community, doing joint functions with the other schools to come talk to the younger kids about how we can approach our differences and accepting them and dealing with the problems in our community.  There will be more updates on this as we go along.

About a month and a half ago or two months ago, the Student Senate started a campaign to make small cosmetic improvements to the high school.  We put out a survey; we got our results back.  Some of the things that are our plan is to put more Spartan decals throughout the school, like the cafeteria and in each wing of the school, bring plants up to the school as well.  Right now we are buying plant caddies for the plants and we will have them up in the next couple weeks.  Just a few cosmetic improvement to make life more fun.  We have more ideas like painting Spartan heads in the parking lot.  These are all things that are not too hard so we can tackle them one by one.

We have started planning for our Spirit Week.  This will be the first week in April.  Each class gets their own day and the class officers of each class get to design their day.  The pick a theme, for example twin day, beach day and so forth.  They plan activities during lunch for all of the students and it is a really good time.  Then on that Friday we have a pep rally at the end of the day with some fun activities and bring everyone together to build some school spirit.  At the same time the senior class will be getting their three year chance.  At the end of the week, points are tallied.

The wrestling team has won Western Mass and their coach was named Coach of the Year as well as the swim team that won States.

The Young People’s Concert was really fun.  I was there playing.  It went over really well and we are excited from the young children that come back hopefully with percussion written all over them.  We read through them all and tally each time someone mentions an instrument or section.  We tally it on the board and see who wins.

SUB-COMMITTEE REPORTS

  • Policy Sub Committee – None
  • Building and Grounds Sub Committee – None
  • Superintendent’s Evaluation Sub Committee – None
  • Technology Sub Committee – None
  • Finance Sub Committee – Tuesday, February 21st District Offices at 5pm
  • Regional Agreement Amendment Sub Committee – covered
  • District Consolidation & Sharing Sub Committee – need a meeting set

PERSONNEL REPORT

  • Non-Certified Appointment(s)
  • Retirement(s)
  • Leave(s) of Absence
  • Extra-Curricular Appointment(s)                                

BUSINESS OPERATION-None

EDUCATION NEWS- None

OLD BUSINESS- None

NEW BUSINESS- None

PUBLIC COMMENT- None

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION-None

Motion to Adjourn:    S. Bannon               Seconded R. Dohoney                    Approved:  Unanimous

Meeting Adjourned at 8:40pm

The next meeting is scheduled for March 2, 2017 – Public Hearing/Regular Meeting –Monument Valley Middle School

Submitted by:

Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

______________________________

Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

______________________________

School Committee Secretary