4.11.2022 Fall River School Committee Public Hearing & Regular Meeting

i'd like to call to order the uh monday april 11th public hearing at cuss middle school on the budget um dad please call the roll drag yeah mr bailey mr here ms laravey here mrs pereira here mr rodriguez mayor coogan here salute to the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all

deb do we have any citizens input oh i'm sorry thanks guys stay with me pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible

do we have any citizens input yes we do i don't have the name or anything one from um colin dyas ray street fall river deb could you please read it good afternoon members of the fall river school committee i am writing during this citizen's input today to give my opinion on the fy 23 budget i think i share the opinion of the majority of the school committee and the city that this budget is mostly good i

also wish to take the time to commend the superintendent and her staff for their great efforts in increasing teaching and paraprofessional positions along with making efforts towards teacher retention and pay with each with which is a big issue in the school department however i believe it is a shame and a disgrace to the taxpayer that the school committee cannot make individual line item changes in the budget

the school committee gave away their own power to line item authority they can't make any changes in the budget i believe the residents of this community feel disrespected that their officials gave away their line item authority their own power that means the power of the people has been given away the school committee had the school committee are supposed to be representatives of the people and this

issue could be fixed mr aggier recently made a motion to take back your own power which did not get voted on i know members of this school committee want to be stewards of a transparent school department line item authority is a no-brainer towards full government transparency what is in place now is not transparent to the taxpayer and to the parents and students of this great community we

can't have a full transparent school department if we are making mises like these on no brainer votes school committee members i respectfully ask for your reasoning for not supporting line item authority when it's a no-brainer i think any vote should be taken on budget until the residents of the city have full transparent authority on all funds in the budget school committee members are representatives of

of the residents of this community if i were on the school committee i would support line item authority now on to some of my questions concerns with the budget again this is not an attack on the whole budget one why is the principal of durfee who i'm sure is a nice guy receiving a seven thousand dollar raise two why is the hr director thomas coogan the mayor's brother receiving a five thousand dollar raise

three i see their three new durfee open teacher positions one being a co-op position going on starting rates of 71 000 to 85 000.

four why do we have new teachers for sped self-containment classrooms i thought this school district was going was going to work towards integration in the classrooms five why is the mayor's nephew graham coogan the vice principal eternal receiving a seven thousand dollar raise six why is there an lpn position that has received a six thousand dollar raise when other nurse positions did not receive that amount

that is not fair for other nurses seven hearing about the five-year financial forecast the city's allocation to the schools will increase roughly two million dollars every single year which means the city's deficit will increase two million dollars every single year our state delegation should be working towards lowering the burden on the taxpayers not overbloating the school department budget that already has a lot

of resources one concern i have is how our finances are in the legal department are we still over using funds because of the former superintendent who should have been fired i have a budgetary taxpayer concern so we have mayor coogan who received an opinion from the state ethics commission to recuse himself from any action directly involving the superintendent because of his brother the hr director

the mayor followed the guidance so he didn't have to take any tough votes during a contested re-election anyways he claimed he followed the law my problem is the mayor said probably a thousand times he couldn't vote on anything to do directly with the superintendent my issue is that then he voted on matters related relating to the current superintendent maria ponce and attended executive session multiple times on

matters such as removing the interim tag the mayor has then advised randomly during the budgetary process to recuse himself on the vote that is unacceptable to me i would now ask attorney assad you randomly out of nowhere advised him to follow the law i am sure the mayor thinks he is being picked on however he holds himself to a high standard he ran for reelection on claims of full-time leadership he claims

to be the person to be fully transparent he only does that when it is convenient for him mayor coogan i doubt you purposefully violated the law because i believe you don't know you you don't even know the law let's no longer pull the wool on the taxpayers mr mayor you're a nice person i have a lot of respect for you however i'll say that everyone thinks you're no leader thank you very much for your time please

vote for line item authority if you support transparency colin dyers thanks deb um in accordance with mass general law chapter 71 section 38 this is a public hearing on the proposed fiscal year 2023 annual budget does anybody wish to weigh in anybody wish to comment on the 2023 annual budget hearing none no one here um i'll entertain a motion to adjourn motion thank you i have a motion a second deb

please call the role mr again yes mr bailey mr harp yes miss larabee yes ms pereira yes mr rodriguez yes mayor cookin public hearing adjourned

i'd like to call to order the april 11th monday 2022 meeting of the regular school committee deb would you please call the role mr again yeah mr bailey mr hart miss laravey here ms pereira here mr rodriguez here mayor coogan here salute to the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all

pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible deb do we have any citizens input tonight we do um first up is jeffrey gargrove palmer

street fall river hello mr mayor and elected members of the fall river school committee constituents of the residents of florida i am deeply dismayed of the news i have heard about the school committee except for mr agyar not being in favor of the line item authority the members of the fall river school committee are representatives of the people and without line item authority the people

do not have full transparency in authority in the budget i am sure the superintendent is doing the best she can however in general 98 percent of the budget could be good and you could have some areas that could be changed and the school committee has no authority to make any individual changes when they could have the power to the school committee member a school committee member most likely

won't vote no on an entire budget when they don't have when they don't support a small part of it the fact the school committee did not second mr aguero's motion to take back their power to line item authority is adhorent members of this school committee want to fl want to be full fully transparent with the voters and the residents however if you cannot support this no-brainer proposal towards transparency

are you all truly being transparent with the constituents you claim to serve again i know you can we can rely on kevin aggia and sarah rodriguez to be the champions of transparency on the school committee to the other school committee members please vote for line item authority if you support further transparency in the school district which is in dire need after what has happened over the last few years

we need to take any and all avenues towards full transparency in the school district not just some to show the voters we mean business miss pereira the last time we all wrote about transparency you are upset we didn't include you as a champion of transparency i would ask you to take the initiative and vote for line item authority line item authority means the people have more of a voice in the budget

absolutely nothing against the superintendent she seems like a great person but what is right is right unelected individuals should have the full control over crafting the budget bottom line fall river school committee if you if you support full transparency vote for lion item authority tonight thank you jeffrey gendro palmer street okay next up nelson vasquez sunset hill fall rover good afternoon school committee

it is disappointing that the school committee does not support line item authority i feel like this is disrespectful to the taxpayer and to the citizens of fall river line item authority means full transparency and accountability in the funds the school department which are funds of the taxpayer why won't the school committee take back their line item authority which would grant the citizens of follower of a full

access to edit where funds go through an elected body as the school committee is it makes no sense it's a no-brainer what's the hidden agenda thank you to sarah rodricks and kevin again for working towards a full transparent school district to the other school committee members please support line item authority if you support transparency in the four river public schools give the power back to the people you

are all representatives of the people remember as elected officials you're accountable and answerable to people at all times do not vote for a budget even if you support it without having line item authority deny the fy 23 budget until we have line item authority which is full transparency and accountability mr coogan wouldn't know what transparency looked like if it slapped him in the face

there are many examples but pinpoint your attention to the joint meeting recently and how his how this administration won't include a line item for durfee's debt payment he told the city that we're flush but in two years when we when hit his scratch ticket opera funds dry the true nature of the city's finances will be flushed down the toilet let's all be champions of transparency because that is the bar constituents

expect and for their local government to operate on the consistent basis thank you for allowing me this opportunity to address the public nelson vasquez next up sheila dice ray street fall over bar of the school committee i would love to see in the new budget more special needs support that is more inclusive in the classroom and not in a separate classroom which is proposed in this budget i have to ask why the school

committee is not allowed to make any edits or amendments to this budget it seems like a mostly fair budget from what i hear however why would the school committee give away that authority we need more transparency in the school committee for the sake of the public accountability please take back your line item authority i do appreciate the efforts the school committee has made towards transparency over the last few

months the students taxpayers and the residents of our great community deserve full transparency nothing less also thank you to the superintendent for doing a great job coming to a contentious road thank you for listening to my input sheila diaz 560 ray street i'm colin dyas ray street four thank you again members of the school committee and um before i begin i'm gonna try and keep my

comments brief um however i think everyone just heard my previous input from the budget i was running late that's why i submitted that one just in case i couldn't make it and i just want the public to know that there were parts in that citizen's input that was censored by the mayor of the city of fall river and i just want the public to know this is what you're getting from your administration a mayor who will

censor citizens inputs when it's something he doesn't agree with and mr mayor that's not okay but we will address that at the end i'm going to get back into what i was discussing one more line item on the budget i forgot to mention and it's small i'm sure i would um miss larabee would agree as well the pre-k positions it was just mentioned as the boys club and it's and i believe it's known as the

boys and girls club this small but i figured i would mention it and i think we just heard some members of the community boldly proclaim their interests for line item budgeting i mean it's just a no-brainer solution towards full accountability not only of our funds and being fully transparent with the public on how we expend our taxpayer funds and i just want the public at home to

know right now if i were there on that stage right now or if i ever am in the future i would be in support of this line item budgeting it's a no-brainer simple way that would allow school committee members to edit the budget so school committee members are not just going to vote a blank yes or blank no they have a say on where you can edit the budget

and again i also i agree i fully support the superintendent and i'm and i've seen the budget most the budget in general was great that's not the point i'm trying to make it doesn't mean i have to agree on every little thing i see in the budget and any budget any proposal just i just support sound fiscal practices and i ask all the school committee members to do the same

support a motion that was i believe at a previous meeting to allow for editing of the budget to support line item budgeting you don't have to vote for any budget i don't support any vote for any budget without the line out of budgeting the city council has it every city council in this state has it and i believe most school committees do as well and that's the way it should be

as simple as that and moving on to tonight's agenda and i'm happy we are modifying policies that had to be changed because we had a previous superintendent that wasn't following the law that thing thought he was above the law and he was allowed to stay in power for some time some of these policies should be passed on an emergency preamble because it's important that we pass these because they were violated

by a former superintendent and i know there's the legal controversy right now and gender in general i mean lastly i saw some requests on the agenda and i did see a faculty member that was attending a knee ask conference out in rhode island and this person and i know a few meetings back i um was a little bit over critical i think i'd say about um the 50 i don't see this person

asking for any travel allowance and i think we should consider that i mean it should be fair not only to one dean or faculty member we should be fair to all our members in our faculty i mean we shouldn't have double standards when we're paying an individual a budget and again i hope the school committee allows for line item budgeting in the future and and then just speaking about one citizen's input i just heard he

mentioned how the school committee how the school department how the durfee budget is going to be no longer a separate line item like we promised the taxpayers and i agree with that mr mayor i think you owe it to the community why that's not a separate line item and i just want to lastly state since i was censored i would ask attorney assad is the mayor under any ethics investigation i think it's important

that the community knows or the community has an understanding and full transparency if there's any investigation going on even if it was unintentional wrongdoing again what's happened with the last administration we've had plenty of investigations into there we should be fully transparent with the people the mayor may not agree but that's the way i see it and i think the majority of the city sees it that

way as well thank you very much for your time okay next up we have recognition awards and there are none at this time oh i'm sorry um miss pereira hi i just want to clear a few things up first of all to address the last piece that you said about the taxes going together um when i was at the joint meeting with the city council on thursday that was brought up and discussed and apparently by law

we have to include it all together however and you can go back and watch that meeting because there was a discussion about it however i believe it will appear separately on something whether it's their initial tax bill or everybody else was there i don't know if somebody wants to answer it better than me but unfortunately it has to be added together due to the law but there is going to be a way

for residents to determine what amount of their taxes are you know are going towards the new high school so just to clear that up and then going back to the line item i'm just speaking for myself here not the other members that was my second meeting i believe and i didn't i don't know why anybody else didn't second that motion but i can tell you why i didn't and that was because i

wasn't knowledgeable enough on whether i should and i thought i needed time to figure out all the details before i made a decision because there's one thing i can say is that i will not vote according to anyone sitting at this table from kevin to the mayor all the way down i'm going to look at information i'm going to research so i know that i'm making the best decision possible for the students of our community

at that particular meeting it was something new that came up that i had never even heard this was an issue and i didn't think it was fair to adjourn a meeting and not listen to our our educators that had set up you know presentations for us that i thought i was doing the community a favor because i thought if they were tuning in they'd want to see where their tax dollars were going

and i thought that it made most sense to me and it was in the best interest of the children of our community that we heard that and listen to that meeting and not entertain entertaining changing about a budget process during the budget process i felt like that would hold the process up now as far as going forward to next year i think we've all discussed revisiting that um and i i just wanted to let you i

think you'll be happy as well as the others to know that i certainly am transparent and i honestly believe so is everybody else sitting up here i think it was just a difference of opinion and maybe was taken taken the wrong way but i'm never going to vote on something that i'm hearing about for the first time i can guarantee you that i'm going to look into it before i vote so

thank you for your comments and with that i yield okay uh item number four the superintendent's report i'm superintendent ponce thank you good evening so first i'm happy to report on a covet 19 update both staff and students are doing an outstanding job and taking precautions since our last meeting four weeks ago in march we have had seven student confirmed positive cases and 11 staff confirmed positive cases that's

within the last four weeks so kudos to everyone we will continue with mitigating strategies hand washing distancing where possible frequent cleaning etc to keep those numbers down also we have distributed 982 student at home test kits and 700 to staff within that period of time and for our mcas update the months of april and may are big months for mcas mcas is underway for students in grades three

to eight all schools have been administering the english language arts test which is going to be followed by math test and then that is scheduled to begin right after we come back from april vacation grade 5 and 8 will also take the science test which will differ school by schools after they've taken their math test and additionally grades 5 and 8 will participate in an innovative science assessment pilot

and that's part of the science mcas test one section will be a a pilot test and then finally we have the math acceleration academy next week follow public schools is going to be hosting its second math acceleration academy of the year this is part of a competitive grant we received from desi to fund math acceleration academics academies during february and april vacations these academies are intended to provide

engaging collaborative and hands-on learning experiences where students apply their mathematical knowledge and skills to real world problems following a successful week in february we have about 500 students registered for april's academy including almost 200 from middle and high school at durfee high school we'll be hosting the middle and high school academies five other school sites elementary sites

will host the remainder of the students in grades three to five over the course of the week students are going to engage in no less than 20 hours of mathematics instruction in small group aimed at accelerating their learning around grade level standards this is not about remediation it's about supporting students and coupled with the math acceleration work there will be enrichment opportunities which will vary

from site to site and it's going to include fine arts technology culinary arts swimming and various other physical activities to break up the day so those things are happening next week while people are enjoying a much deserved april break and that's it thank you superintendent ponce we have no student comment tonight we do have a series of minutes that need approval um do i have to take these individually

bruce or can i go on i would like after i read them if someone has any questions just point out the ones you're concerned about i'm looking for the approval of the minutes for the regular school committee on 214 22.

i'm looking for the approval of the minutes of the special school committee on 3122 i'm also looking for approval of the minutes of the special meeting on a school committee of on 3 7 22 and i'm looking for the approval of the minutes of the joint meeting of the city council and school committee from 38 22. can i get a motion in a second second i have a motion second any discussion

that please call the role mr again yes mr bailey mr yes ms laravey yes ms pereira yes miss roderick yes mayor coogan yes travel requests second i have a motion a second we only have a few um one is from our jeffrey high school principal matt demaris to tallman high school in pawtucket one is morton middle school principal to brownstone park in portland connecticut and the other is a trip for dr curley to northwestern

university i have a motion a second any discussion on trips mr again so i'm the first one the knee ass conference i'm not sure if uh why that would even be on here but i know it's out of state but typically i don't think i guess most times it's in massachusetts i'm not sure why they're going to rhode island but the issue of the funding that the person the citizen input talked about that's reimbursed by

the niask organization so that's why i wouldn't be on there in any way so it is reimbursed by whatever the percentage is for the mileage but i'm not opposed to it it just it is a little odd that it would be a rhode island school being that we're in massachusetts they have different rules but i guess they just need it i would assume that's just why it's part of the process just needed yes

they're going to go visit that school she's going to go visit that school that's what i'm saying but like logically it might make more sense to visit massachusetts schools that are under the massachusetts regulations but there must be some benefit to seeing how people do things in rhode island as well right yes that they're assigned so so that's one of the schools that yeah yeah i just wanted to clarify thank you

i yield i have a motion a second uh deb please call the roll miss drag yeah yes mr bailey mr hart yes ms ms pereira yes ms rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes item number eight is acceptance of donations i have a motion second i have a motion a second any discussion on the donations there's a question but mr aggio this seems like a pretty large donation to this foundation was

this applied for is this out of the how does it work that it's yearly they do that yearly mr mr um we've received it a couple times it's applied for by the uh by christian farias through this through this organization and what is it for is just open it's just anything so this program's for the parent child home program it helps us fund that program um it's for like home visitors and stuff to

work with kids like school like very very young kids yeah maybe if we could just get a little info on it thank you i yield sure anything further dad please call the roll mr aguero yes mr bailey mr harper yes miss slattery yes miss pereira yes miss rodricks yes mayor cogan yes um we have a number of contracts for approval in the 9.1 um does anybody have any questions on the con on the contracts

hearing none i'm looking for a motion in a second to approve second i have a motion a second question since my colleague to my right is on the smack board now as i remember does this mean that she shouldn't participate in that or does it not matter bruce um miss rodricks is on the smack board which is down towards the bottom should she yeah she should have stayed she should have stayed on that vote thank

you mr aggio anything further we'll take that one separate anything further let's do the uh the remainder first and we'll do the smack board second uh deb please call the roll let's drag yeah yes mr bailey miss mr harp yes ms laravey yes ms pereira yes ms rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes now for the southeastern mass educational collaborative motion to approve second i have a motion to second discussion

deb please call the role mr again yes mr bailey ms jahar yes miss laravey yes ms pereira yes mr rodriguez mayor coogan yes item number 10 is the approval of grants there are none this week number 11 is the start of the committee of the whole 11.1 is a discussion and vote to approve the evolve academy at durfee high school program of studies as referred by the special education alternative education

and early college subcommittee and presented by janet doyle director of the evolve hi everyone just to review evolve academy's mission and our vision our purpose really is to serve all of the off-track over age under credit students within the district who have disengaged from the traditional learning environment so we offer a competency-based project-based learning environment where

students have the ability to demonstrate mastery of set number of competencies through project-based units in this effort students are able to earn credit through a mastery-based system in order to get back on track and graduate with a durfee high school diploma so i'm here today to talk about the addendum to the durfee program of studies that we would like approval for that i share with everyone if you would

take a look at it the difference between our addendum for the program of studies is that it is mastery based so the grading system is a little different students will have to demonstrate mastery of set competencies that are embedded in projects at the end of every transformative learning experience that's what we're calling our project-based units or tle they have to show mastery in the final projects of

the tle and they can either exceed mastery which is equivalent to a grade of an a they can meet mastery which is equivalent to a grade of a b they can be approaching mastery of a competency which is also equivalent to a c if they are not even approaching mastery they would earn a grade of an incomplete and they have the ability to revise and constantly work on that competency and final project until

they're able to demonstrate mastery so this model again is very competency based and fosters a growth mindset of students and really fosters that level of agency and autonomy of learners where they're really motivated to keep growing and keep improving on their skills that they need in the addendum there are also the equivalencies between what a tle is and the durfee course requirements so

students still have to demonstrate 100 credits which is the same every durfee graduate will have to demonstrate it's just they're showing it in a different way and all of our tles are aligned to the same common core state standards that all the durfee courses require so it's just really embedded in how they're going to be demonstrating those standards in projects that really are aligned to specific skills and

competencies so there is equivalency in how they're demonstrating these competencies to what students have to do in a darfie a traditional durfee high school class so if you'll see in the chart on the second page they'll need a set number of tles if they enter as a sophomore versus a junior and again those two tles would kind of equal one traditional durfee course the amount of time that their

courses they're extended periods so it's not the same type of period schedule that a durfee student would be in we do have a different schedule where they're involved in longer project-based courses to show those competencies and again the same requirements for english math science and history one thing that is different we offer pact which is a social emotional learning group that students have to take

that would fulfill a health requirement for students they also have an advisory course where they have a primary person that they can consult with regarding their goals and their progress towards graduation as well as talk about what type of academic skills they need to work on we also have a capstone this is a project that all the seniors have to demonstrate one part of that is a competency review

where they have to demonstrate a portfolio of all their final projects that show mastery of the set competencies from those projects the capstone also includes graduation requirements for they have to be able to apply to a college they have to show that they've applied for financial aid they have to have a set transition plan for leaving high school so that's what the capstone course is

and as you'll see they'll still have to complete the mcas requirement that all durfee high school students do and at the end of the addendum you'll see a list of all the courses broken down by each content area of english math science and history rather than them being called the traditional courses such as algebra 1 or u.s history 1 per se these courses are named after the the type of more high

interest engaging projects that students would have to complete but again they're still meeting the same grade level standards or what we like to call the power standards from those units that are common core aligned so i'd like to ask for approval if there's any questions that the committee may have anybody have any questions for miss doyle mr aguiar not necessarily a question we did have a

subcommittee meeting where this was brought up i thought it was a good subcommittee with a lot of good quality questions related to the program uh the fact that it's at durfee high school how does that enter intertwined with the credit recovery options and the like so i wanted the committee to know that we did a thorough subcommittee vetting of this particular proposal and we all myself included i

have some homework to do to look at some of the curriculum pieces that mr oh just mentioned but was a very good subcommittee thank you for the presentation and i would urge everyone to support it thank you anything further on evolve miss rogers uh just to feedback on what mr aguirre was saying when we were talking about it we did talk about how um a mastery based model is really what's

developmentally appropriate for students and so you know for students that are struggling in students that are not struggling it really does work so i'm very interested and kind of excited to see what the outcomes are going to look like but i just wanted to um just comment on the fact that we did talk about that as well i yield anything further miss laravey just quickly i also enjoyed your presentation

uh at the subcommittee meeting a big big fan of mastery learning and i too can't wait to see the outcomes on this program are we the only school doing this right not outside of the mastery school but say high school level are we the only ones in our area or well according to the canopy project which is a database of all the national competency based and innovative school models that are trying this type of

learning we are one of the very few public high schools that are offering this on the south coast i think the closest one would be the map academy in plymouth right i wish you luck i'm supporting it wholeheartedly and i think it's it's something we need to look at expanding i think once we get those outcomes and those numbers and the success i think we're gonna i'm gonna move forward with this thank

you you're welcome sorry anything further uh deb do we have a motion a second we do not could i get a motion in a second to approve the evo i have a motion second i have a motion a second deb please call the role ms drag yeah yes mr bailey mr hart yes miss laramie yes ms pereira yes mr rodriguez yes yes next 11.2 is an update on powerschool as presented by scott cabral our chief

information officer good evening everyone we're at the point in the project with powerschool where we're going to be sending out these updates and it's actually going to become old information because the project is moving along rather rapidly uh mr michelaze and his team have been working diligently to get the data migration from x2 into powerschool so that we can begin to test the system

basically stress test the system um brian and his team have been working with the power school team now it seems like 14 hours a day rather than the standard work day he's been putting a lot of hours into this to make sure that this works efficiently and correctly right now we're in the process of adding new students in their data into the student portal we have some of the historical data in there

brian is looking at some other fields of data that we may decide to bring into the student portal as well we're in the process of bringing over custom in the state reporting fields um over the summer months we're going to begin to import the data from the 6 000 staff members that were existing and over 50 000 withdrawn students so that way all of the information is in the new system again i'll remind you x2

is still going to be around next year it'll be used basically for brian and his team to produce the reports for the state and then we're going to sunset x2 at the end of next school year so for a time there'll be two i guess you could say data places where we're going to have data we will not be updating x2 after this point brian and his team will be using it for state

reporting and such and will be moving forward with powerschool starting july 1st so as you can imagine it's a big undertaking because not only does the sims team have to make sure all that data is correct and working correctly but we also still have to maintain x2 in the coming school year for our state reporting um the enrollment module that we're using at the pace center is complete

it's working and it's functional um brian and his team worked with cindy kudo and her team at the pace center we're accepting the registrations in now the process is working correctly the workflow that brian and powerschool set up is working and we're also now taking registrations for you know students for next school year so again like we talked about for next year we're going to have two systems we're at the point

now in the project where we have two systems so we're still maintaining x2 right now and we're starting to implement some stuff into the new power school system one of the areas that we realized that school didn't support right now was the ability for staff attendance and to mainstay maintain staff accruals we've worked with the hr department we're going to continue to use our system front line and we're going to be

you know sending out training videos so that the staff know how to use that system for their attendance and accruals moving forward and powerschool has said that you know in the near future it's something that they may be working on so we'll keep our eye on that but for the next school year we're going to use front line in the upcoming months district sped special education department

administrators will participate in a four-day power school training on site for the special programs module it's the goal that powerschool will have some data in the system already for that training as far as our ieps they have finished the fit gap analysis for our ieps and we have come to the agreement that they're going to give us two years of live data and anything after those two years will be pdfs

brian and his team have worked on a solution where any form as well as iep uh documentation for a student will all live on one file so that way everything is seamless so if i had an iep in supporting forms it would live on one file it'll be named correctly it'll be ingested into the new power school system so it'll hopefully be a seamless transition for us internally we're preparing with the special education

department requested data fields that should be from x2 to power school um every time brian sits down and with kristen farias and mike losch they look at some things that they may want to do brian has been able to find some stuff before it's happened and say you know we need that field however power school may not have that exact field so he's been working diligently with power schools and with our special education

department to clean some of that piece up our in technology integration department with mr farias has successfully set up our single sign-on authentication so teachers will be able to use their google credentials that they use for their email and such and sign on the one piece that we were actually we found an error on their side we found a little bit of a floor that when we log

out power school doesn't actually think that we're logged out so these are the the pieces that it's great for our team to be able to sit there and basically break the system because if we can break the system they can work with powerschool to fix it powerschool is in the process right now at looking at their single sign-on um and it actually came out that there are a couple of other vendors that we've

used um that they're having the same type of issues with single sign-on so it's something we're gonna break this system that's what brian and his team are gonna do we're going to try to break things to make sure that it's correct and it's working efficiently one of the last pieces and it's going to be a rather large lift but i know that brian and his team will be able to handle it is we have a

bunch of other systems where the data comes out nightly and updates into those systems school messenger being one of them we're going to sunset school messenger this school year and use parent square but it's on the same kind of path we have to digest that information from the old systems and get it into our new system so brian is working with a number of power school districts that's the one thing i can say

that's been pretty decent with power school if there's another district out there and they've created it they're more than glad to share it with us so we don't have to start from scratch and we can tweak some of these scripts and some of the pieces that we use to get the data out of these systems as of right now we go live july 1st again we're going to run two systems

july 1st so we are going to have hiccups i'm not going to tell you that this is going to be perfect come july 1st it is going to be something that brian's team myself central administration we're learning as we go um however i have a you know good feeling brian and his team have a good handle on it um he is very eager to tell us if something is not looking right he meets with maria

myself and and tracy weekly and we we go through some of the issues so we will have you know growing pains as we move into this new system but we're ready for july 1st so any questions that you guys may have i'm here any questions on powerschool mr aguiar so i did see on the last contracts that when you said they gave us the iep thing we paid for that correct yeah after after going back and

forth on the original contract that stated the pdfs and that was the the lift in order for them to create the scripting process yeah i get it but i recall it being 26 000 or 25 000 but the amount was 35 000.

it was there something else that they didn't do so there was also a piece so when we purchase powerschool we're purchasing the base model when brian was looking at the student uh piece and i can have brian answer the question um it's just uh it's called the student power pack so it was some additional um pieces to power school to make the student side of it that much better and

smoother we can add some more data in so mr almeida lumped those two contracts together just because they were power school yeah i don't really have a problem with that maybe if you could just send us a little to the superintendent a paragraph on what that is i just recall the number you know i wasn't happy about when they came to us it was sort of all inclusive it was pretty good money that

we're paying and we pay a little more than another 10 grand now we you know things like that i think would be best if they're given to us with a little paragraph a couple lines or something so we know what it is i don't think anybody's doing anything that we don't need it's not frivolous but i just wanted to point that out i will say that we had a technology subcommittee the inaugural

technology subcommittee meeting i thought it was very uh informative you presented well your team presented well i left there with confidence that you all have the right mindset for what we need to do and coming up this positions that you need because you need to you know step up that game and we are going to meet again just for the education of the public and the committee i believe at the end of

april so we're not stopping this committee is going to be working very hard and we're going to create some documents that are going to be able to tell us on a regular basis what's truly happening in technology and i think you'll all be very impressed at the end of it with that ideal thank you anything further for scott cabral i just have a comment mr objects so it's not really about power school but i just

want to point something out um so we keep talking about we're moving towards inclusion right like we keep talking about this we have several people starting citizens input talk about moving towards inclusion i would just want to point out something that was actually kind of great that mr cabral just did so he started by saying an abbreviation for special education and then stopped and corrected himself

and i'm pointing that out because that's huge because for so long that term when we've abbreviated it it's really been used as a derogatory comment against students so the fact that you as an adult stood here and corrected yourself i think does show that at least we're trying right we're moving in that direction so i just wanted to say i appreciated that thank you and with that i yield anything further

thank you scott but you might as well stay there 11.3 is discussion and vote to approve the fourth technology job descriptions systems manager technology manager help desk coordinator and voip manager as referred by the technology subcommittee and presented by scott cabral chief information officer motion to approve second i have a motion a second any we've we've gone around on these uh job descriptions a few times

any further discussion on this mr aguilar i mentioned this at the um subcommittee as well that i think and i think i was told that we have to create the position first before it gets brought to whether it goes into the administrators union or different unions but i still maintain that a lot of these new positions that we keep creating should be administrators union positions so i would ask that after this gets

approved that we at least reach out to the union to put them as part of the table because i think we we're creating way too many positions that are not um union that should be my only other comment wasn't i probably it's just because you all are busy but we had the job uh the org chart for how these positions would fit into the overall scale of the so i just wanted to

point out again that the sooner you can get that to the committee i think it'll make a lot of sense i'm sure you're working on it but it points out where these positions are and who they fall under so i'm not being uh critical but i didn't know that we talked about it so as soon as you can get that we'd appreciate it thank you any further discussion i'm looking for a motion in a second

ready made he's already made it thank you uh deb please call the roll miss drag yeah yes mr bailey mr harp yes miss laravey yes miss pereira yes miss rodrick yes mayor coogan yes 11.4 is a first read for updated language on the following policies is referred by the policy and technology subcommittees we have a number of these um i will entertain questions on any specific ones people want to talk about but this

obviously is just the first read and they are in your computer or in your book any discussion on the policies mr again for the edification of the public can we please get a brief explanation of the policies mr almeida so the fiscal management policy specifically the major change to the fiscal management policy is the move to cost center budgeting moving forward um we uh through the recommendation from the

masc uh they're recommending that we move forward with that and so moving forward we're going to work on uh something for fy23 so that we can have it effective july first and we'll budget that way moving forward into next fiscal year thank you mr almeida digital device policy who's going to speak to that mr cabral this policy is just going to kind of be our guideline for chromebooks and everything technology

one of the biggest pieces that you'll see in the policy is fee structure for repeat offenders for malicious damage and also at the end of the document you'll see a student and a parent sign off which we anticipate that we'll be able to send out digitally with our rollout of parent square teachers and teachers staff anyone will be able to sign these documents on their cell phone

moving forward so it'll actually help us broaden the reach and get more people to participate and again the biggest piece is just trying to hold students staff family members parents responsible for the devices that the students have and work with daily thank you mr aguirre so uh i'm going back and forth on my paperwork but on the contracts i want to say it was uh how much were we spending on the new chromebooks

uh just under 425 thousand dollars to get i think it was like 2400 correct we're going to begin to start to refresh some of the older devices in the fleet this summer yep so just my own personal editorial uh position on this is that when we had the meeting and we you showed some of the documents that are presently in existence they indicated that the students are going to be responsible for damages

and we need to keep track of this because these things cost money and they should be treated with care regardless of whether the student's in you know fourth grade or in 12th grade and i've heard way too many times during the year that students break it and just give them another one and just give them another one and students aren't being held accountable for breaking the chromebooks replacing them

paying for the damages so i think this is a good policy to as we move forward but we're currently in a situation where we should be holding students accountable for how they treat these devices they shouldn't be throwing them down they shouldn't be throwing them down the stairs they shouldn't be breaking things and no ramifications i believe at the committee we asked the subcommittee we asked for some data

on that so i'm looking forward to getting that but i want to make sure as we're talking about this in a public meeting that parents understand that these devices are not free they don't get fixed for free and that we only have so much money to keep on spending to just give these things away so there's requirements and they need to be um they need to be maintained especially when you get into the older

grades the students that lose books or materials or break chromebooks there should be a consequence to them and we're looking forward to getting that data around how many and what it is with that i yield mr hart kevin um just piggybacking what mr again is talking about as far as the damaged chromebooks and whatnot and we're going to get that data i'm i'm assuming yeah we're working on it now

it's just it's very fluid because we probably repair about 150 to 200 chromebooks a day so is there a guesstimate as to what has been damaged and replaced i would say we have just over 12 000 devices in our network right now as far as chrome devices and i would say of those 12 000 just under 5 thousand have been repaired to this point this year um and if i had

to guess i'd say around seven to eight hundred have been completely not be able to be used again okay thank you very much miss laravey thank you um just a a guesstimate again about how many repeat offenders in the district so that's difficult to say because some buildings will turn them off once it's the second device the bills program is a little bit different because they have to be given

a device unless it's proven that it's malicious damage that data is going to be a little bit difficult because in the process we're also rolling out incident iq which is our new asset management software and we're importing all the student names and trying to attach them to an asset so it's a it's kind of a fluid number well right now currently they get a ticket or a ticket to fix it

no student name comes on these tickets it's just until about six weeks ago there were no student names because again we were trying to ingest those students in um brian had worked with uh robert our network engineer to get those names into the system so now what will happen is if little johnny comes into the help desk at cuss for example it'll track how many chromebooks he's had

write down the serial numbers but it'll also tell us what he did to the computer and or if it was something that he didn't do and that's happening as we last six weeks correct okay i yield thank you anything further just one follow-up mr aguirre so just based on the answer you gave to ms laravey the it always bothers me when when an administrator will say well it depends where your student goes to school like

which some places do one thing another place and does another if anything drives me crazy it's it's stuff like that so i just as you get the data i think the committee should know where the students are every school should know who has a chromebook who broke it and how many times they broke it i don't think that's that complicated that should already be active in every school as far as i'm concerned just as

meet one person so when we say like some places do it different it just drives me crazy because i think that we shouldn't we should know how many we have if we have a thousand books they should know who has the book who didn't return the book so um i just wanted to make that point that as you're dealing with the data you have to be honest if you don't have

it you don't have it but i for one want to know whether it's where is the data being collected properly where it's not and who's holding something accountable because we don't want to have one school holding kids accountable under one condition and another being different when i read these policies they basically very clear you shouldn't do it the bills piece i've approved a lot of

those grants why the heck is the villas going to get more than us like that i'm not looking for an answer i'm just saying these are thoughts as as we go forward that it just doesn't make uh a whole lot of sense and if you can just think of that as you're getting the data i appreciate it thank you anything further on the digital device face covering policy oh i'll take that

one do you have another question mr i yeah at the end i have a question on the fiscal one but we can go through yeah so i'll take the face covering uh policy um as you know we've moved to mask option unless students are ill are coming back from or staff come back from from a positive test and they will remain with masks for returning for five days and can only take them off when they're eating

etc also in addition to the mask policy was that masks are going to be worn as students enter the nurse's office obviously if you're seeing the nurse it might be for medication or if you're not feeling well but there will be other people in there that are not feeling well so it's a protection for everyone so all nurses offices will have masks and will require staff and students to wear masks while in there and

as you know wearing masks on school buses city buses that's a federal guideline federal mandate so students and staff are required to wear masks on school buses while under this federal mandate and the policy will sunset if the federal mandate is removed and dph regulations no longer exist so up until then obviously this is a policy that we have in place hopefully we're not going to be we're

not going to be using it often but we need to have it ready for if and when we need it thank you superintendent any questions on the face mask policy thank you use of school policy i'm assuming that's mr pacheco so one item um that we are we're looking to add is f on the first page of school use and that's all artificial turf fields will have a minimum cost with any usage not

directly associated with the four of the public schools the purpose of that is so that we will eventually have a fund available to replace the carpet so to speak when they reach their useful life other than that there's also an item going into subcommittee facilities and operations to re-look at the matrix the pricing matrix to make any changes that the committee feels necessary any questions on the use of school

policy mr aggio i also think that we um we had talked about at the policy subcommittee about the superintendent being the person that could waive some rights i know we had spoken at several meetings about whether a person or an organization could get their fees waived and that's also included in such policy that there'll be a mechanism now for the superintendent to do that i think that was definitely important to

be heard and the fees are going to a different subcommittee so that's how much they charged and all that would be stay tuned for facilities meetings thank you how are you mr heart and that that meeting's going to be the 25th the 25th so anything further on the use of school policy thank you mr pachico um homeless students enrollment rights and services dr taylor good evening everyone so there are

actually three policies before you there is the homeless student policy the policy for working with military families and policy working with children in foster care so in december 2021 we received a report from desi that indicated that we needed to update the language on the policies that we have so you'll see the updated language there we initially did not have a separation for military families in foster care and

that's new guidance from desi that'll allow us just get into compliance that's pretty cut and dry anybody have any questions on that one dr taylor anything further thank you thank you um the next one is non-discriminate discrimination policy including harassment and retaliation the policies that are before you tonight are a division of previous policies that were in existence and an updating of the regulations

so the first policy is ac non-discrimination including harassment retaliation what that policy is designed to do is to sort of um it points out those police activities that are prohibited and it also splits them into two categories um civil rights violations and those that are of a sexual natures uh anything involving uh title ix uh regulations uh at the bottom of page uh one of the ace policy ac

the second paragraph up says it shall be a violation of this policy for any member of the school committee to school community to engage in any form of discrimination including harassment retaliation or to violate any other civil right of any member of the school community we recognize this discrimination can take a range of forms and can be targeted or unintentional however discrimination in any form including

harassment and retaliation will not be tolerated so that covers a variety of circumstances the next policy is a c r a and that basically describes those activities that are in violation it also reports to two different areas students would go to the director of special education services and student services michael losch and anything that involves the adults or employees or contractors would come

through the hr office if it is a non-title ix violation and not a title ix relates to discrimination on the basis of sex gender sexual preference etc if it is not a title ix it would go to the civil rights grievance procedure and that is item acrb and i would call the committee's attention to page 3 at the bottom where it says the complaint reporting procedure and it specifically states any school

employee independent contractor or school volunteer who becomes aware or has a reasonable belief that harassment bullying discrimination retaliation or hate crime has occurred or may have occurred on school property or in any school related activity must promptly report the alleged incident to a designated official so that's the reporting requirement for any adult that is aware of that any member of the

school community adult or student so that they have to report that and that is for the non-title ix stuff if it is a title ix related event it goes to policy acab and that falls under the category of sexual harassment or harassment based on gender or sexual preference and then there are certain regulations that have been updated by the government on title nine and those who have all been reviewed uh by the

attorneys as well um that policy then has a a reference material acab r dash a and that is the sexual harassment agreement procedures and there's a number of pages in that document which spells out exactly how those investigations take place the last item is harassment of students and that covers student to student harassment as well as adult to student harassment and that is policy jick that is already

in existence this is merely an update with some new regulations that the government has improved any questions mr hart uh tom just real quick the policy subcommittee met um and it was it was a good meeting i think we got a lot accomplished and these are all first readings but i think we made it pretty clear in the policy subcommittee um that the language that we that we read and i believe well i think maybe uh

mr aguiar and i agree with it that it needs to be a lot more clear and simple uh as far as the open with the adult to adult along those lines like so i remember we i remember we were talking about that and we wanted the language was a little bit it wasn't clear enough it has to be kind of um is that right mr again we had a uh yeah

talking about the language itself it was a little unclear and we wanted to make it much more clear and much more um it just seemed to me it just seemed a little murky today so under the complaint reporting procedure where it says any school employee contractor or school volunteer who has become aware or has reasonable belief harassment bullying discrimination retaliation or hate crime has occurred

or may have occurred on school property or in any school related activity must promptly report the alleged incident to a designated official i mean i think that pretty much covers any adult that sees or you know takes part in anything like that that would be yeah i can't i can't exactly pinpoint what um what like what i remember from reading the policies that day but i know that we wanted to make it a lot more

clear and precise that's all sure thank you ms pereira i just have a couple of questions and thoughts i was actually gonna i was going through the policy handbook and i had a hard time finding anything related to adult adult harassment and i'm sure it's in there because you just eloquently read something um so i don't that sounded fine to me the language but i had difficulty finding it

in there and i i just didn't know where it was so that was going to be the question i asked you which you kind of answered where is it in there so in within the policy manual and the policy manual is i think somewhere in the neighborhood of 360 or 380 pages so it's very very very dense right but if you read in the index each section has sort of a theme to it in

other words it covers a certain range of policies and that's the the way the manual is set up by the mass association of school committees so section a might be on school committee guidance uh or general policy uh section b section c d e etc so when you get within a certain themed area for instance uh student policies this happens to be the last one i read those policies begin with the letter j

i is instruction and curriculum um there are different areas of this but these a policies pretty much apply to everybody across the entire system um and so that's what i would suggest for somebody looking for a specific policy go to the index first and look at the policies one at a time then you can read into those policies and sometimes they don't give you exactly what you want but they'll get

you close enough and at the end of each policy there's usually a cross reference which will tell you other policies that relate to that same topic i did do that i used the index and i found like i had to jump around to put everything together i just thought it seemed a little complicated and that maybe there was somewhere else that would have been easier i just would like it if

people you know i understand the book is very thick and it's difficult but i just questioned how difficult that was to find anyway the other um question i had and i don't know if this is actually even appropriate to ask you but to me it went under harassment student to student harassment so i'm going to throw it out there but um when we're talking about when i looked over reporting so if

a scholar wants to report whether they're a bystander or they're someone who is a victim of bullying the reporting procedure is to just speak to the designated person is that accurate that's correct now who is that designated person um it could be from the school principal or below that level if there is a particular vice principle that they're connected to i believe the language within jick directs the person

they can they can make also anonymous employee to student harassment student to student um now i don't mean to interrupt but when you say anonymous how would a student go about doing that they might leave a written uh description of it or say i want to make this complaint but i preferred my identity to be protected on that and then that would be typically handled by like a school adjustment counselor or

somebody within that realm sure so mike my and this has nothing to do with you mr coogan but my concern in that is if i'm a student who is a bystander and is witnessing bullying which we know happens in every school across the country fall river is no different um but i think it's it's a discussion we need to have to maybe see where improvements can be made

and i i think it would be difficult if i was a scholar in school to be able to snatch time where nobody saw me to run in and talk to the principal and i think let's take for example a recent incident that happened in the school in one of our schools there is no doubt to me in my mind maybe somebody would disagree but i don't doubt in my mind that you know students

students are very aware of what's going on and i think we need to give them a really safe environment to be able to report incidences and i don't know if the policy we have is the best way to make sure that they're safe in their their ability to do so they they could speak to anybody absolutely i agree but because you know there is a fear of retaliation when you're you know a student

and you're dealing with with younger people there's a fear that sometimes you want to stay quiet and i think maybe it would benefit us to look at maybe think out of the box and look at different ways that we can improve that situation so that scholars feel very empowered to be able to speak up when you know when something when something's wrong and then the last thing i said as i noticed in the policy

and this kind of goes with what mr aguiar was saying earlier in that schools can do things differently i notice in the policy it's up to the principal whether and maybe i'm reading it incorrectly but it was up to the principal whether a school counselor was involved in the situation and i respect that i respect our principles but i think that that allows for a lot of differences in between schools

and that i think when we're talking about something like with our students when we're talking about speaking just regarding students when we're talking about bullying or harassment of of our students that i think it would benefit the children if a counselor was always involved so whether the principal led the investigation right and the investor even if the investigation was completed and the

council is just reviewing it to then make a determination on their own uh whether maybe the student would require some services as far as social emotional help or mental health help and i don't know that putting that choice on our on our principles is necessarily the best way forward for our students it's not that they're not qualified to do it but when we have people with an educational background or more

expertise in that field maybe they should be the one determining what services that maybe we could offer to a student because we all know generally speaking not always sometimes it's just silly fights right that happen um but generally speaking certainly um children who are the offenders you know um often need help as well as the students who are the target so i think maybe we need to kind of

look into the policies surrounding that and maybe that's something they can do in the subcommittee but i think that it's a good idea for us to try to maybe investigate if we could do something a little bit different um in that regard to help to help basically i mean i've had a lot of calls i'm sure as many others and we want to make sure that parents you know feel safe with having their

children in schools because they are safe here i would say in response to that that typically the school adjustment counselors are sort of the you know the the front line of defense in those types of situations the policy uh jick at the bottom says the principle or the designee we want the principal to be aware of the situation because obviously many times there's more than one party involved and they want to make

sure that that gets handled correctly but typically it would be a counselor who can approach a child in a non-threatening manner to try to elicit the most information about the facts of the case and see if there are other witnesses and just sort of do the groundwork of uh you know of corroborating whether or not this is taking place and exactly what's happening and then taking appropriate

measures uh to that uh the principal merely is the the administrator in the process but not necessarily the person who's responsible for taking the actual statements complaints etc from the students but i would think that and if if i was a parent reading that policy i wouldn't necessarily think that's the way it worked because it sort of puts which the principal should be in charge it's their school they

absolutely they need to be aware of what's going on at all times but it almost the way i read it if i was a parent i would say wait why isn't you know the counselor always involved in every case why is that an optional situation you know if the policy read that the the principal is the one who initially starts the investigation and um you know like i said if it's something a

simple little fight okay fine but i think if you're involving counselors in every situation and if it read that way in the policy i think it would give parents a little more you know confidence i guess in the process and that's just my opinion but with that i yield thank you um mr aguiar so i was at the policy subcommittee as well is there anything new in the documents that we received since the

meeting no i just i thought it i thought the feedback from the committee about making sure that the language was specific to a requirement to report if any of this type of activity was going on as well as the coverage of adult to adult situations as well as a delta student situations and that's why uh in my own copy here i've highlighted the the language that covers that i mean if

we if we need to color but nothing has changed is what i'm saying so i'm seeing yellow there's yellow lines in certain right i'm taking that as that's the new stuff that wasn't in old policies not just highlighted are you saying i don't think i went as in depth in the subcommittee meeting as with the feedback from the committee i called i called that out by highlighting those areas so on page three

acrb where you read the complaint procedure yes is that new it's highlighted in yellow the first part of that paragraph is new it makes it a more stringent requirement to to report is that isn't that the law it's it's actually a combination of two policies from two different districts that brings that language into this but isn't it the law it it is part of the law yeah so i recall when we had a

situation going on here that that exact uh language i was reading in the lore as i was in looking into like what is it appropriate how certain people are getting harassed and bullied and the like so that what's highlighted i believe is the law that if you're last year two years ago any school employee a school volunteer who becomes aware or has a reasonable belief that harassment bullying

discrimination or a hate crime has occurred they have to let promptly report the alleged incident to a designated official and i think the law might actually read a supervisor under the thing so part of the reason why i was very aggravated with how this was handled two years ago was when i read this particular piece or some variation thereof in the law the person the school committee is actually the

boss of the superintendent so if you're asking for the supervisor anybody who would witness a superintendent acting inappropriately harassing somebody it was their duty to report that to the school committee two years ago when it first happened so i think that's important to put but i i think that that's not it's not what what mr hot was referring to what i was referring to at the subcommittee so

what i would like between meetings is if we had the subcommittee and then when we gonna take the feedback and then come to the full committee that we highlight what was what was changed so the request that was made and i still maintain this request is needed here i don't want to ever have in the city of florida school department ever again have an independent attorney look at something

see that it's clearly harassment of an adult against an adult and be able to say but for the fact that we don't have a policy we only have a policy that prohibits bullying of adults on students i don't want to ever hear that again now some of it might be built within this what i'm just asking for is quite simply at the top of a harassment page is that we do not want anybody whether

it's an adult against an adult or a student just clearly identify it's not okay that's what i was looking for between meetings because i think it would have satisfied a lot of the members so it's only the first read i think we got some time to take the feedback madam superintendent you take the feedback i think quite well from this committee that's basically what i'd be asking for something that

very clearly defines that this could be the detail but at the bullet level at the top of policy should say what are we basically saying here and read the details afterwards so with that i yield thank you anything further on the policies that's the first read mr mayor i had one on that first policy mention that uh the fiscal policy fiscal policy yes mr almeida you know that uh this was something i was very

passionate about and i do appreciate uh superintendent listening to the feedback and coming forth with the policy so the the new policy dbg reads the district budget is adopted by the committee at the cost center level cost centers should represent appropriate levels of transparency for the committee to oversee goal implementation while allowing for administrative day-to-day work

call centers will be agreed upon by the committee in the administration and then it goes on to talk about a couple other things so what i would say and i said this at the subcommittee meeting is we are passing a budget that doesn't include this at the current but i would like to starting july 1 have the actual budget organized in such cost centers that the superintendent mr almeidafield were

the proper ones and we talked about whether it's the school department the different departments and the like so i don't want to go into and believe at that point but i do think that starting july 1 when we're looking at the budget we should have it organized under what the mission is here isn't to talk about call centers i also mentioned what does a cost center mean and we talk about fte's full-time equivalent

employees i think it's important that each call center has a an fte component to it so we as a committee could look at whether it's 20 or 30 cost centers we would know those 20 or 30 core centers have x amount of employees in each it's just another way for us to feel like we're part of the process and um my last comment on it was uh it was suggested that uh

in lieu of having this kind of authority and the extra work that this takes that we would go to quarterly reports rather than the monthly report and i do agree with that as well so the more on the upfront that we get of what it is that we'll have quarterly reports instead of we have the monthly report and then the quarterly report we would be able to eliminate the monthly uh reporting but come back to the

committee quarterly with the transfers and you know whether it's in one line item or another my goal all along in this was to have the fiduciary responsibility to school committee be taken very seriously it's not to eliminate and and tie the hands of the superintendent in any way so i want to give kudos to mrs ponce and mr almeida for bringing this uh forward and i wholeheartedly support it are you thank you

thank you anything further on the policies srodricks i just have one comment about the sexual harassment policy so when i'm looking through it and it's in there but but sort of not explicit so it's not just about what one person is doing to another it also affects everybody else around them and so it's not very clear um and i think this is sort of what ms pereira was alluding to as well it's not

it's not very clear that this um also applies to people who are witnessing that so yes they have a duty to report absolutely but they also are the people that are affected and i don't know that that's specific in there so if somebody's reporting sexual harassment right it's it specifies unwelcome learning well unwelcome to who right the person who's identified as the victim sure but if that person isn't

reporting it this other person is and it may not just be well that person is reporting it it would be easier if i like made up names right so if mr aguiar is harassing me and i'm not necessarily bothered by i can just ignore him but miss pereira is really bothered by it she's the victim in that situation and therefore can also report it as she's the victim of sexual harassment i think people have

to understand that that it's not just that and it's not it's just not clear in there so clarity i think is always huge doing that i yield thank you okay that was all the policies 11.5 is a discussion on transportation for fy23 as presented by myself mr cook so this was the discussion that came up at the last meeting which i was um remiss in bringing forward any data or

any papers i see now that they're in your packets what we were asking for was using esser money for two years to relieve some of the strain on the taxpayers in the city of fall river to the tune of 2.1 million that is simply the increase the city is being assessed this year for the additional funding from the student opportunity act it's not going to save us but at the budget presentation the other night

between our stabilization and our free cash although we're better than many other years the city of fall river is woefully short changed in those areas this money will go a long way to take the strain off this budget increase some of our opportunities to save the residents money as we're trying to do with the durfee debt and look forward to what could be coming down the road for new revenue and

new expenses that could hit us at any time i would of course take any questions people might have on this but i think it's important to give the residents of the city of fall river a little break especially at this unique time in history when there is the opportunity to fund something like this uh we've did it before once for a million dollars and the city was extremely grateful for that um all of our

public safety officers let me know how they felt about the opportunity that the school committee gave them i thought it was great and i'm hoping that we can do something like that for this year and next year any questions miss rodricks i guess the the part that i'm stuck on is that those funds were already allocated so in order to take out 2.5 million that's going to pull from some supports

and services that that money was already allocated to so then how are we going to make that up for those supports and services and then i also get stuck on the fact that if this is one-time money what is the plan moving forward to resolve that issue because you know i hear that we did it before but i wha but with what so i for to this is you know this was

what month four of being on this committee so i'm not aware of using s or money in the past to do it but i'm just trying to understand like how does that what implications does it have on people right now and then what are we gonna do in the future so we're not stuck in the cycle again because all i see is we're pulling money from one place moving it but yet we're going to have an

issue in another place well that's a good point ms rogers but at the same time the way i have and maybe it's just my term but budget planning has been extremely testing because things are constantly shifting we never knew we'd be getting anything called arpa we did not know we'd be getting anything called esser we did not know we'd have covert and things move around a lot this money will will strengthen the city

of fall river financially as far as taking it from something it's already allocated to it's allocated in what i call batches it's not specifically purchased any items yet for the city of fall river it's being trenched into different things it's easy to file an amendment again the city schools are not only getting the student opportunity act to the tune of about 23 million but they're receiving another 60 million

in esser money this is a one-shot opportunity uh if it strengthens the reserves if it helps us to fund raises for public safety whatever way we can use it it'll be put to good use and i think it can make forever a better place to live and give our at the same time give our residents that supported durfee high school a little break on the rate there and i do

understand it's not a lot but when you look at the combination of things i think we're helping the rate payers public safety and the city's finances and again as far as i can see because of the influx of money into the schools we are not in a bad place and the school money is guaranteed for seven years this isn't i mean i think there's four years or five years left four or

four left i'm sorry but that money is going to be coming for the next four so we should be able to work our way through this and help the residents of fall river but i i'm still wondering what do we do moving forward so i don't want to make a decision now that we can't then account for in the future so we know our transportation uh budget goes up so this is where i'm just sort of

getting stuck well the transportation budget's a city budget right so we that will be on me to take care of that not you it's a city budget right but this is where this is where i'm going you're right it's not on me but that's why i'm asking a question right so but i am a resident of the city and i'm still a taxpayer payer so even though the budget's on you it's going to come out

of my pocket that's why i want to give you a tax break right but i don't want to break now that's then going to cause an issue in the future it really will not cause an issue in the future this money will be used to strengthen the budget right now and hopefully next year going forward it's an it's an infusion of money to strengthen the city of fall river and to

pay for things that are necessary to keep the city running the schools and the city have a unique partnership this money is all working together transportation for example and i had a conversation with someone today on the state level is a unique um item we buy for the schools i firmly believe that school transportation belongs in the school budget and i've said that from the minute i was

an elected official in this on the school committee it's something that is assessed to the city and i know how hard the schools work on transportation whether it's routes pickups anything they do the job and i tip my hat to them but at the same time that's the city cost that can use some relief occasionally we've done it in the past at no loss to the schools the money

didn't go down the money jumped up so i believe we can do that going forward right now i'm not going to believe the point because i feel like i'm sort of going in circles here but i am still stuck on how does this help people right here right now um so i'm going to yield and let any of my colleagues ask any other questions miss miss laravey i'm going to refer my

question to either mr almeida or superintendent ponce is there any concern i mean our our duty as school committee members is to 100 support school committee financially any way we can is there any concern mr almeida if we were to vote to i guess give the money to the city side are you concerned with the short-term future of our budget like are you concerned with this decision at all i i really not concerned

with it what i'm concerned about is just you know we know that the transportation budget is 11 million dollars and it's only going to go up and so i don't want to be back at the podium in you know two years or three years from now saying that the transportation budget is 12 million and i hope we can fund 12 million 12 million so you know the budget you know will have to be it's it's one

of those things it'll it'll have to be looked at to say that we can't do it and for the time being if you know if it's the will of the committee to uh to shift the money around it it's something that we can do it'll amend an amendment will have to be filed through the esa grant to to make it happen as the mayor stated uh and we'll have to take it from something that we've

already committed to so but you know we have the funds to make it happen if you know if that's the will of the committee yes so if i if i just weigh in you just i mean you said our duty so as the superintendent of schools my duty is to advocate for funding for our students our staff and our district so yes we have gotten an infusion of money

we are an entity of the city if it's the will of the committee to do this then of course we will do what what the vote is but i i just want to make it clear we're asking for four million dollars not two million dollars 2.1 this year 2.1 next year um out of uh money that's already been allocated so we will have to look at some of the projects that we had um you know uh

when we uh apply for the money that would we had earmarked and then we'll have to look to see what we will have to do without as we move forward because it will come out of something um so i i just want to make that clear because next year it'll be another 2.1 and then the year after after that we will have if it's not net school spend um net school spending uh eligible

we're going to be right back here so i just want to make sure that the committee and the city knows that we will be here for the transportation costs after these two years i don't think you're going anywhere uh superintendent possibly oh i mean it's my job to advocate for the district right that's what any other discussion mr aguirre did miss larabee yielded oh i'm sorry yeah yes well miss paul

so i yield are you thank you thank you i'm mr again so obviously i've been pretty adamant about what this is and what it's not the ironic thing is i've kept saying we don't we're not getting any information the requisite information as a member of the school committee in order to make a decision such as this case in point last meeting we were told about two million dollars 2.1 today for the first time

in writing or anywhere else lo and behold it's 4 million because now it's two years so i for one was not in favor of it when it was 2 million now i i don't think i have to explain where i'm going to be when it's 4 million as the school committee member duly elected i agree with what the superintendent said the superintendent runs this district and has to support education across the board

all of the increased funds that everyone fought so hard for for the schools were not just so that we can have extra money to give to the city it was for the needs of the schools the federal grants are for the needs of the schools so i'm not supporting any of this for a variety of reasons but when you look at and you say well we gave a million well

what was the context when we gave a million dollars when we gave a million dollars to in the middle of covid or pre-covert or whatever right at the beginning to support it i want the committee members to be aware the city didn't have 10 million dollars in in re and unlimited on uh they can spend 10 million on whatever they wanted the school department didn't have that at the time they didn't have that

when we go forward with what has the school department been doing to try to support the city the indirect cost agreement says anything over 150 000 will be borne by the city mr almeida had a slide at the joint presentation that indicated such so the school department is helping the city by taking on a lot of projects we are helping the city by giving the million dollars we are helping where we can

but i think that this ask is is putting the car way before the horse it's just basically a gimmick it's a it's a money grab just to try to say well we're going to do this so we can give some some relief and i just don't agree with it in any way shape or form the mayor talks about what is the city the city is not the city is going to

survive whether we give this money or not because if it wasn't the administration would be saying we're going to take more of the 10 million dollars that is free money to the city and giving it to the taxpayers or balancing their budget with it so if don't get me wrong i want to help when it's needed and i've personally spoken to the mayor and told him ways that i think long term to me long long-term changes

with transportation little bit by little bit can actually help more so than just let's give four million dollars in in grant funds we have nothing before us today what we have before us is uh chapter 71 section 68 it's a law it's a copy of the law that's what we have to go by we have no recommendation in writing from the superintendent or mr almeida about where this money was going

to come from we have a bunch of things listed to add up to a number which i think is just quite frankly a back door number i would question whole a whole bunch of things on here that make no sense as to why is it making it look like as if we it's optional transportation i don't know if anybody here is proposing that we no longer transport middle in high school or reducing the elementary transportation

is anybody here saying that no i don't think so so what the heck are we doing what what is actually before us to say that we're going to just give us our funds for whatever it is i'm not in favor of it and i would recommend my my colleagues on this committee take their school committee responsibility to the workers to the to the educators and to the students very seriously and we not

just give away resources that we currently have i think the superintendent was being kind by saying you know whatever the will of the committee is but i can read through the lines quite quick quite clearly that both her and mr almeida don't think this is a smart thing to do for the school department what i'd rather recommend is that going forward we kick this either to a subcommittee or maybe a

finance subcommittee and we talk about what is it going to look like in the future for transportation costs and let's see if there's a way that we can within the confines of our budget actually help the city in ways that are not going to take four million dollars in essa funds we can chip away at it for instance we're talking about the 150 000 that the city should be paying i don't think the

city is going to have any money after we have to pay for diamond we have to pay for durfee we have a debt exclusion we have millions and millions of dollars of projects on the school site that are still going to be needing funding and bonding where is that money going to come from these are the answers that i've asked for ahead of time before we start to say well we'll just give you this money

i think looking down the road the school department's going to have to fund some of those projects in the bonds on our own to take some relief off the city i don't want to give this money now before we actually have that long-term plan with the superintendent with mr almeida and a well-thought-out plan this is simply just the money grabbing a gimmick on the city side i will also point out that two years ago

the city in their budgeted line of 11 million dollars took 3.6 or 3.7 million dollars into their free cash that came out of this transportation line and we're still arguing about whether we're going to pay the vendors the next year i think it was 2 million or something like that that came out of the 11 million so there's so many variables here that just you know they don't make any sense as far as i'm concerned and

my last point is just once again to tell anybody on the school committee we're all elected here myself included to fight for every dollar for the school department and i don't think that the mayor or anybody in the city has proven how this makes any sense for us to give four million dollars in grant funds over to the city i don't think we'd be doing a service to the workers the students

families or the staff in our buildings to do that and i won't be supporting it i think tonight just as a discussion so i think in the future if we're going to present something on how to help the city let's open up the indirect cost agreement let's talk about some things that we actually can do moving forward with agreement from everybody instead of throwing this out without the information that we need to make an

informed decision with that i yield okay well i i have to respond to a number of those things first of all i don't think funding of a city or funding of a school is in any way shape or form a gimmick this is people's jobs this is a reserve fund for the city school transportation that's paying for these things for our city none of this money is going into anywhere other than

helping the residents the students and the people that live in our city if for once we're able to give people a small tax break i think the residents deserve it if for once when we're at a time financially that we've never been at as long as i've been on either the diamond school committee or the former school committee or as mayor have i ever seen these kind of numbers it came at a horrific price

with the number of people sick and probably over 400 deaths i'm asking for relief to strengthen our city financially for two years mr aguiar goes back to um four million dollars it is over two years it's money that is going to increase next year in the school student opportunity act um mr almeida how much does the student opportunity act go up next year guessing i i i'm guessing probably about 10

million dollars a year is roughly what you're gonna get right 10 million dollars a year which will then increase the city's responsibilities to the school which we do gratefully but my point is during this one time i'm asking for the committee to seriously think about what can we do to help the people on whipple street or on robeson street to get a small tax break and to strengthen our finances going forward it is

funding a city and funding schools is in no way shape a form of gimmick nor do i ever think it is this is serious business this is taxpayers money and that's what we should be protecting i don't think the money's going into a vast wasteland it's going to help the residents of fall river and again i obviously respect any of my colleagues and whichever way they decide to vote is

up to them but at the same time i don't think this is a gimmick or something that we're doing in any way shape or form this is right out in front these are roots that we're not mandated by law to pay for we're asking the schools to help us for a couple years and that's the end of it as mr aguiar pointed out it's a discussion tonight so we'll be uh bringing it up at the next

meeting and again i appreciate your support and as you have ample opportunity in between to ask me any questions you have going forward and we'll work together whether you're pro or con on this issue so thanks for the time i really appreciate it anything further miss roderick i do um so a couple of things with that four million dollars over the course of two years is still four million dollars

that's still a lot of money and so when i'm looking at that and if i were to make an informed decision i would need to know exactly where that money is going to be pulled from so that way we can make that that call because that money has been allocated has not been spent but it's been allocated so we have x project that's going to get done if we pull money from that project that

project is not going to get done in the way that we wanted it to get done i have a really hard time doing that when we've got classic kindergarten classes of close to 30 kids with one teacher one para assigned right i have a really hard time doing that when we have teachers uh teaching positions that we can't fill because people are are leaving not just our district to make that very clear but

leaving the profession in general i'm having a really hard time with that when we can't fill you know sac positions or we can't fill these other positions because it's hard right now right so our kids need the support so if we're going to be pulling four million dollars i would need to know where where are we pulling the support from the kids because that's ultimately what it's going to be in order to do that

right and and i get that you know you're saying it's on you it's not on me but it is on me right because this decision then affects your decision in developing a city budget and so to say that it's not on me you know i am very willing to share how much i make i am a taxpayer that absolutely needs a break i just did my taxes last night i can assure you the amount of

money is quite possibly a tenth of what that i make personally it's probably a tenth of what people make here and i work close to 60 hours a week okay i'm definitely one of those tax prayers that could use a break but i can't see pulling from student support to pay for this right and to say oh it's not yes we're transporting them but it's technically you know it's extra transportation it's

not extra transportation when we have um an attendance rate that is so low so i'm just having a hard time balancing how are we going to pull from students when i've got kindergarten classes of close to 30 kids with such high needs in there you know and then then say okay let's let's take four million dollars away that's my last comment on that okay and with that i yield mr aggio yes so

i appreciate my colleague mr rodricks's comments i think they're spot on on a lot of ways when we look at what we have in esser projects so we have a lot of capital we have other things that are necessary expenses if because i can anticipate how the argument is going to try to go oh that's just a project that's just a capital project but if we don't have the resources and grants to fund some of

those things guess where they're going to come from from the budget from the budget becomes what miss rodricks has talked about it services for the kids we as a committee have voted to increase 175 employees or whatever it is this year we voted to increase our 80 last year when you plan long term which is why i said at the joint meeting mr almeida and mrs ponce bro gave us the breakdown of

how that money was how are we going to sustain that going forward they gave us that number but that number is looking at the increase that apparently now is just i guess we don't deserve it because it's too much money because we should give some of that soa money away everybody fought so hard to get the money now we're going to just say it's oh it's it's a little over the top so we

can give it away the money that we're getting 10 million a year 8 million a year is already expended because we've increased contracts we've increased employees we've increased health care all of those things are going to increase so it's not like we have just money just sitting on the side that we don't have any plans for the superintendent doesn't have any plans for when you look at the budget of

you know the voters voted for the durfee high project and i supported it but we have to understand the voters were also told a lot of things when they voted for that project that are simply just not even on the table anymore and i think people need to start realizing it we just have the diamond vote which i support the new diamond it has to be paid for i haven't seen a plan come from

the city council or the administration on exactly long term how that's going to be paid we the voters were told they were going to spend 3.6 million dollars on the new durfee for eight years comes out to about 32 000 32 million dollars and then it was going to be often the city was going to absorb it all there's no way the city can absorb all of that now so what they voted on was under a

false pretense of one thing and now it's totally different so when i keep on asking the mayor has nothing personal against the mayor the fact of the matter is is we need to look at what are we going to be when we have to pay for all these projects including the increase of two million dollars more every year for the next six years or more in the school department so

part of the reason why i keep asking this question is if i'm going to vote and i would recommend that if anybody else on this committee was going to vote to support helping the city and some things let's just make sure that we've dotted our eyes crossed our tees and know exactly what that plan is i think that makes more sense than just taking a rash decision and when i said it was a

gimmick the reason why i say it's a gimmick is because it's all we're going to take the city is going to take their 2 million in opera funds they're two million and we're going to reduce the cost on the debt that exclusion for the people but they're going to take our 2 million and we're not going to say it's to take that cost off we're going to just say it's going to go to the city to

give us a break that's what i'm calling as a gimmick it doesn't need to be a gimmick or what it needs to be is let's just all talk about what it is and what it's not i talked to the man specifically about this one issue we pay 300 000 a year in school crossing guards out of the transportation account now the school crossing guards to me is a city is a school department expense

like they're helping the children get to school now why would the city based on the legislature and the laws pay for that outside of net school spending to me doesn't make any sense or whatever so i think that's things like that are valid discussions to say maybe we should absorb that if there's a way to do that and not have it affect the net school spending but we could take 300 000

a year maybe we could take 500 000 a year out of our money going forward forever and say we're going to pay debt service in the amount of 500 000 that's going to get us new new additional buildings new fields at durfee that aren't included in the durfee project and those type of things those are the kind of discussions that i think we need to have between now and the next meeting so we can

either put this to bed or have the school committee just vote yeah we're going to give up 4 million but i'd rather have the discussions with our administrative team in the schools to say let's do something long-term that makes sense and if we're going to give away the money then take the vote but i'm telling you right now unless i get something different this member is not going to vote for it because i don't

think it's you know it's the right thing to do the last thing i think we need to do is evaluate this list of it says at the top regular and ell purchase order for advan for this year i don't know if that ell makes is that supposed to be elle but what whatever it says at the top of this it talks about late buses at durfee that's a that are voluntary i don't see

that as voluntary like i don't even know why this was put together and why anybody wasted their time spending hours doing it because this piece here makes no bearing to me on whether we give the two million dollars or not because i i just still don't understand it there's nothing leading up to it there's no information on why but i question some of these things some of these i would question now cross gate

we just told last meeting that that the gate kids are a lot less than before now we got three full buses at 150 000 just for that like i i would question some of this i haven't done that before but between now and next month i do plan on talking to the superintendent and trying to have a discussion about what this is but i don't think anybody's recommending we don't transport ell students to for varus

to silvia like i i don't understand why it's here i really don't i think we need to look at it and if that means it's going to get on the subcommittee agenda for transportation so be it but i i think that this is just for discussion but you know i for one need a lot more info and a lot more transparency on where things are in the in the city before i

vote for anything to go over with that i yield anything further again i want to be clear when i was referring to uh miss rodrick's the school transportation bill obviously she does as she described more than her share but that bill is a city bill and i meant that's what i meant when it was on me i meant the city side not paul coogan the city so we will

pay for our kids to go to school but it was just that in that reference only and as far as anything describing a budget is a gimmick i just i have take uh issue with that kind of language i think this is all very important stuff which is going to go a long way to help the residents in the city of fall river um i was been told by the superintendent there's a transportation subcommittee

meeting on the 25th i'd ask if we refer that i'm sorry a facility subcommittee can we refer it to that subcommittee yep uh and so it can be discussed i have a motion and a second uh anyone uh all in favor uh deb please call the role mr again so madam superintendent what would your what would you envision coming out of that meeting the facilities well i i would think that it fits to

clarify what you just said about what the money is about where those roots are these roots are that's why when you said that that that needed to be clarified we could have that discussion break that down but i would ask and i don't have a problem with it going to the subcommittee i just want to make sure that when we refer it that we're all on the same page about what we're going to

get coming out of there so i think this entire proposal needs to go before them because it's related to transportation so some of the questions that were asked here i think need to be answered maybe take some other questions along the way but um i really think that we need to take the whole picture not just so you if you clarify where the where these monies are coming from and there's two

so-called 2.1 million in extras which i disagree with but so be it if that's all that comes out of it it's a waste of time we need to take the whole what is now considered 4 million which i'm not going to go back into that but i just think we need to take the full discussion so when we come back in may at a regular meeting we have at least some further answers uh that were given

but that are you thank you thank you so we have a motion a second to refer oh i'm sorry let's have a quick miss pereira a quick question so if we if we vote some of these we've you know have been described obviously by law that it's not mandatory we transport certain students if we sit if we vote not to give this 2 million over to the city do we run the risk of

possibly the city deciding that they're not going to transport those seven to 12 year olds no i just want that to be clarified to me no thank you yeah with that i yield deb please call the role i didn't get who seconded the motion oh shelley second did it i think okay sure i'll second it yeah raising my hand to talk mr again yes mr bailey mr harp yes miss laravey yes

ms pereira yes mr rodricks yes mayor coogan yes i'm going to turn the gavel over to uh mr hart for 11.6 okay so 11.6 the discussion and vote to approve the proposed fiscal year 2023 annual budget of the florida public schools as presented by maria ponce superintendent of schools so what sorry so what you have before you is the recommendation for the approval of the fy 23 annual budget of 141 million 857 792 dollars

is there a motion on the uh on the floor so i'm over the question yep so moved is there a second second uh for the question mr again yes superintendent so the only question i have is i know that under the current thing where we're doing a um we're in transition to a call center approach the only thing i would would ask and i think i know this answer

but i don't think we've gotten it yet is what does the new budget look like when some of the you've taken some of our uh recommendations and stuff so i don't think it's necessary for this particular vote but as we proceed forward with this number i'm assuming that we're going to get sort of a revised um budget based on the recommendations and it doesn't need i mean it's only april

so but as we go forward in may i know i for one would want to see it but i've been part of the whole process so i kind of got an idea but at some point we're going to present i think to the public a new budget from the superintendent is that am i off base on saying that the the only change that we officially made along the way was the addition of the 10

paris to the self-contained classrooms so that was provided at the last meeting that was the some of the recommendations were within the number so everything's within some of those positions were within the number that was initially proposed but we might have changed positions within those numbers that we had if there are any changes then certainly we'll make those modifications but yeah what i'm saying is

this number is the bottom line number so the only thing i think that mr elementary was talking about to 10 was because we had a big number that we had to switch correct what i'm suggesting is even within this number within what you gave us in our book there's been some changes whether even though they're within the number like you might have said after listening to the committee or some people

that presented we might be going and it might change again and but as you go forward i think at the end of may early june or something i think we should get something that says starting july 1 here's what the new uh budget's going to go so it might be in concert with the cost centers so i'm not opposed to this in any way i just think that i think you have been listening and i

said that publicly over and over as we do that i think we just need a new document at some point that we could say this is what we did and there might be things that you still want to change so with that i yield thank you are there any other questions roll call mr again yes mr bailey mr harp yes ms laravey miss pereira yes mr rodriguez yes and mia cogan

vote passes can we get back to the uh

for 11.7 the discussion and vote to approve the proposed fiscal year 2023 transportation budget of the former public schools as presented by maria ponce superintendent schools so you have the projected um number for fy23 which is a projected 11 million dollar transportation budget okay uh any discussion on transportation other than what we already did mr aguiar just want to clarify again

so i've been on this board for a number of years i've uh voted on many budgets and transportation lines whose responsibility is it to pay for transportation transportation is not eligible for net school spending it's a city expense city expense so how many years has that been like that for as long as i've been here many many many behind much longer much longer than that yep so when we when we look at that as the um

as sort of the fact that when we used to have budgets that were very tight with the chapter 70 and all that stuff i recall many a time having this discussion with possibly you superintendents prior superintendents that how does transportation actually fit into the formula from the legislature for funding schools and i've always been told that it's a city it's not eligible for that school spending so it's a city

expense but they they um they don't include it in the big in the overall package so when it and when it's not included in the package if it was if this 11 million was or the responsibility for transportation was therefore put into the school budget as a responsibility the funding formula would you know put it all through and then it would determine that the city has to pay a lot more towards education

than they currently have am i wrong for saying that would you say they'd have to pay more their required contribution to education would have to go up if this 11 million was part of the overall package yes i've asked state reps that i've asked senators that i've asked the chairman of ways and means i've asked other ways and means folks so it's not as simple as just saying oh it shouldn't be an expense it is

so if the 11 million went into ours and ours went up by 11 their requirement to pay is going to also go up well it's kind of you know you can relate it to the regional transportation so you know the the state sets aside funds for regional transportation and in many cases they're reimbursed for the majority of their transportation expenses whereas for municipalities the city or towns are on

the hook to fund the whole thing so the legislature in their wisdom and how they do budgets are having an issue or should be having an issue cities cities should be having an issue on how regular transportation is funded versus regional transportation i think that's a valid concern and i think that's something that we all should advocate for and the mayor's i'm sure advocate for because

you just said it but the reason why i'm asking that question now with this 11 million is because in the prior conversation we had it it made it seem like as if well we should the city shouldn't be responsible for 11 million and if the city if the schools were responsible for all this the city would have would still have to pay millions of dollars more out of city funds to fund the education in

my opinion no pretty much no doubt about it so it's not as simple as can so when you have the subcommittee meeting maybe that discussion could also happen the last thing is when i asked about the mckinney-vento so out of this 11 is that in here is that a side so so when i provide you with the transportation budget it's the full transportation budget the city does have mckinney rental funds that they

receive every year and normally they offset a portion of the transportation monies to come from the mckinney dental funds so out of this 11 million let's say 200 270 to 300 thousand dollars is usually usually comes from the mckinney-vento account and where's the rest of the money in the mckinney-vento account go to it stays there state it's suspen it works as a special revenue account so

the money stays in a city special revenue account and whatever funds they have left over so how much is in that account now i i don't have the exact dollar amount mr mayor do you know no i don't wait a minute can i say something absolutely i thought when i'm looking at what you wrote on the paper 79 students transported by bus 85 by van that's per year what is the total cost

of the mckinney-vento um expenses for the city so mckinney-mento not the 300 so mckinney-vento in foster care is about 1 million to 1.1 million okay to give you the exact delineation between the two right maybe maybe 800 000 is mckinney-vento 300 000 foster care somewhere so did you just say the city gets the 800 000 too we only get the three hundred no no you only okay i i was you you only get that

three hundred you only get you only get the three hundred okay i i thought that's what he said so i myself i provided i provided an update you know last week but it's the reimbursement changes every year it's all based on whatever the state appropriation is and it could change this year it's ranged from as high as like 70 to as low as like 37 or something like that all right i'm sorry

mr aggie i cut you off so i did ask for that information before yes and when you look at the the document that i have for mr almeida it indicates in fy 20 which was the last year of reimbursement at 70 percent was reimbursed it says total expenses 728 274 total reimburse 510 613.

my question is if it's only 275 coming where's the other where's the difference between the 510 and the 275 where is that it stays in the special revenue account so it's there it's your special revenue account no it's the cities it's the cities yes so he's got revenue of at least let's say for that year so so let's say it was for the last five years it was 270 000 that got i guess

however that makes any sense but let's just go with that number so we got 510 and fy20 we had 440 in fy 19 420 in fy 18 272 back in fy17 and the state's been quietly like trying to increase this yes i personally sent a letter to the legislature asking for 100 so that that let's say that's a million bucks that million should be coming off of this 11 so we wouldn't have to worry

about it ever but we need as part of our information to know how much is in that special revenue account because if it's 275 a year i just prove to you that there's three or four hundred thousand more available to help the city then what why would we only be if you get reimbursed that i don't know why they're only taking 275. i know it's their account not yours but if you told

me we had a school department account with 510 000 reimbursed but we're only going to put 275 in the budget i think every member of this committee be telling you what the hell is going on here so and this was fy 21 is going to be different because of covid so the way the way the reimbursement works is we do we do the report the end of the report usually for september so whatever we did

for september of this year will get reimbursed usually by either june or july because when the when those funds will come in yeah but if they come in at 5 10 here's my point and i think i said this already at 510 so if it's 70 reimbursed so i think it comes out as a number we're going to spend a million bucks in mckinney vento this year so if if they

keep it at 70 percent that's 700 thousand dollars that the city is going to get potentially but if they only use 275 they're leaving 500 000 on the table so part of why i keep on pushing this is because i think we need to look at all those things to say they should be taking the whole thing so we can reduce it a little so that if we take the 300 000 for this

crossing guards it might be more palatable as we go forward but um i know i asked you for this info and i think you sent it to the end of it like to everybody but you might want to just resend it i know it you emailed it back to me and mrs sponson i appreciate that but i do think that that's important i also didn't send my letter that i requested

to everyone because i don't want to violate the open meeting or anything but mr superintendent or mrs almeida feel free to share whatever you want that i've sent because this is the type of stuff where we got to figure it out and let's work together to make sure that we can we can handle it because it's it's really not 11 million i know it's 11 million because we got to pay it but if we get

5 million less it just you know 500 000 less it should be a little lower and with that i yield thank you anything further on transportation do we have a motion in a second we do not we do not okay on transportation can i get emotional proof second i have a motion a second that please call the world mr again yes mr bailey mr yes mr miss laravey yes miss pereira yes mr rodriguez yes

11.8 vote to refer the fiscal year 2023 annual budget of the flora of public schools to the mayor for approval is there a motion on the floor emotional proof motion is made by mr aguiar is there a second second seconded by mr roderick's roll call miss dragon yes mr bailey mr hart yes miss laravey stain miss pereira yes mr rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes oh i'm sorry abstain i forgot

let me tell you about staying my fault 11.9 is a discussion and vote to approve the usage of the durfee high school parking lot to hold the drive-in movies again those are things we've done the last couple years in the summer on june 24th 29th and august 19th any discussion emotional proof motion in the second that oh mr egypt i always ask this uh i think it one point or another there's no fear attached to

this for the school so what i would recommend if there is a fee that it gets waived under the current uh issue there's no reason to have us it's a community use so i think we should be waived if that policy is not in place yet so i don't know if that means we gotta vote but i wouldn't want them having to pay for that with that are you that please call the role

mr again yes mr bailey mr hart yes miss laravey yes ms pereira yes miss rodricks yes mayor coogan yes 11 10 is a discussion and vote to approve the payroll manager job description is presented by kevin almeida chief financial officer so what you have in front of you is the payroll manager job description that we crafted that's tailored directly to our department this position is budgeted for in the fy 23 budget

anything further on the payroll management to approve i have a motion to approve second second i have a motion second mr aguiar this salary looks like it's empty is that a range it's usually to be negotiated so i was the the range i was looking for was 65 to 75 000 on this position the um you know i support this the only thing i would say is the same thing i said about

the other technology positions i think some of these management positions and this is called manager right in the title should be at least to the administrators union to talk about whether they fit in the administrators union so i would just like to ask that as an aside but i do support it with that i yield the second time i do have it call the roll please miss dragon yes mr bailey ms

jahar oh miss laravey yes miss pereira yes mr rodriguez yes yes 11 11 is a discussion and vote to approve the third quarter revolving fund is presented by kevin almeida the chief financial officer you have the third quarter report in front of you we are in very good standing with our revolving funds our balances as of march are at 9.7 million dollars the use of schools account shows a balance of 366 000

uh we have 16 000 worth of overtime that if this is approved the report is approved tonight we'll bring the balance down to 350 000 in the account so i'm looking for your approval tonight any discussion on the item mr again so when uh third light line item down school lunch what is the amount that we need to keep in that account uh at a minimum three months reserve you know what that is roughly like

probably about 1.8 to 2 million dollars total yes sir so um i'm seeing an i'm seeing a number 4.6 in the f 22 march balance and am i reading that wrong or is that that's correct that's correct so some of the things that i talk about when we talk about long-term planning and what we need to do here at the school department so back in october 3rd of 2018 we had a meeting to talk about the

nutrition and the financial operation we asked for some historical background on stuff and related to salaries and benefits so for the edification of the committee who wasn't on the board at the time the amount of money for health care for certain grant or i guess for grants or other revenues the healthcare comes out of that at some point so i made a recommendation back in 2018 that we are not self-sufficient and i

made a motion at the time to have the goal to be to be self-sufficient in the future was what i asked for and we talked about whether um it was possible to do or not and what this would do in my opinion it would um it would take the money let's say we spent three hundred thousand dollars in in health care on the school side that money should be reimbursed by the

nutrition account for the salary and benefits and then therefore would free up money in our budget to do something else with and this actually came out from the joint meeting when somebody i'm not sure if it was miss laravey and or miss pereira or somebody down the other end of the things that asked about why is it that we mr almeida had a chat and i said we paid for nutrition out of the the answer

was because we needed to help fund the diffie project so when that came up it it started getting me to think about what's this about and i've been carrying this around from 2018 saying this makes a lot of sense for us to do finally that the numbers are asking for it so i would like to ask the superintendent to potentially either place this on the facilities and operation agenda or full committee

when i look at that 4.4 number it's clearly doable that we should be able to make that a self-sufficient account and there might have to be other things wherever the funding is that i don't even know about but this has been a long time coming that we can actually make it self-sufficient and i'd request that we at least talk about it with that i yield thank you anything further on the third quarter revolving fund

do i have a motion second that no i need a motion emotional proof second i have a motion to second deb would you please call the role mr again yes mr bailey mr yes miss laravey yes miss pereira yes mr rodricks yes mayor coogan yes 11 12 is discussion about to approve a budget transfer as presented by kevin almeida chief financial officer so this this is the next round of transfers we're transferring 75 dollars

around a couple line items explanations are provided any discussion on the amount being transferred could i get a motion in a second emotional approve second i have a motion a second deb would you please call the rule mr again yes mr bailey aye mr harper yes miss laravey yes ms pereira yes ms rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes 1113 is a discussion and vote to approve the year-to-date budget report so moved

any discussion on the year-to-date budget report i have a motion can i get a second second mr aguiar i'd just like to request uh that the superintendent we have in the um monthly report the chat that goes across all the schools if we could potentially have that next month the one related to just the counseling services sure i i'm always confused by it i think there are any just just adjustment councils and

guidance councils or yeah i had sent a um personally i sent a draft of what i think it should look like to the superintendent so i can always help with it not that you have to do what i'm asking you to do but it basically took what the budget was each school and and added like the behaviorist the counselor and you know just so we can get a c now

so what is it going to look like 22 into 23 with that i yield thank you i have a motion a second deb would you please call the role mr again yes mr bailey mr harp yes ms laravey yes mr pereira yes mr rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes uh number 12 there's a number of retirements resignations appointments those are for your information um i have item number 13 new business

oh i'm sorry on the on the informational notice can i get a motion a second please motion to approve second i have a motion a second uh debit please call the roll mr again yes mr bailey mr hart yes ms laravey yes ms pereira yes mr rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes any uh new business to come before the committee if i could oh miss pereira um this is something that i just recently brought

to the super intent superintendent's attention excuse me i somehow became not feeling very well during this meeting so if my voice seems strange um it came to my intention by a loc by the local veterans organization that a law that was put into effect by governor romney back in 2005 section 4 chapter 71 basically allows veterans who have had to withdraw from high school due to serving either in world war ii

the korean conflict or the vietnam war are actually entitled to through their service acquire a high school diploma um and although it's um it's the job of the veterans associations in our community to inform that of that um i think that we need to look at streamlining that process so that when veterans are aware and are calling the superintendent there's maybe a point person to obviously if we can't look look

everybody up ourselves so a point person that can address that issue and i just wanted to bring that to the attention of of the committee to share the word that veterans are entitled to this if i can just respond to that i spoke to mr woodward from the high school today and he asked me to ask if i could share your information he will be the point person to get that going

okay great thank you i thought i yelled okay anything further is there um a need to go into executive session give the reasons okay national lords chapter 38 section 2187 to review and approve the executive session minutes for march 9 2022 special meeting of the school committee national laws chapter 38 section 2187 review and approve the executive session minutes for march 20 march 14 2022

regular school committee meeting national laws chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to like the bargain relative to all professional teaching employees the former school system including coaches title 1 teachers nurses occupation physical therapists and specialists in the teaching profession represented by the forward educators association as the chair has determined that no concession

may have a detrimental impact on the bargaining position of the committee national law chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining relative to all paraprofessional employees of the florida school system represented by the foreign federation of paraprofessionals as the chair has determined that no concession may have a detrimental impact on the bargaining position of the committee

mass general laws chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to collector bargaining relative to all civil clerical employees of the forward school system represented by the former department of civil service clerical employees association's chairs determined that no concession may have a detrimental impact on the bargaining position of the committee national laws chapter 38 section 2182

to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel in order to conduct contract negotiations with non-union personnel including maria ponce superintendent of schools we would reconvene there may not be statements at that time i'll entertain a motion in a second to go into executive session i have a motion sentence i have a motion second that please call the role

mr yes mr bailey mr hart yes maslarity yes miss pereira yes mr rodrick yes mayor coogan yes recess for executive sessions

we're coming out of executive session i'm deb please call the roll miss drag yeah here mr bailey mr harp here miss larabee here miss pereira mr rodriguez here mayor coogan here anything further to come before the committee mr mayor mr heart a motion to approve the executive session minutes for march 9 2022 special meeting of the school committee so moved second miss drag yeah yes mr bailey mr hart yes miss laravey

yes mrs pereira mr rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes come here mr hart motion to approve executive session minutes for march 14th 2022 regular school committee meeting second goal yes mr bailey mr harp yes miss laravey yes ms pereira mr rodricks yes mayor coogan yes mr hunt motion to approve contract as negotiated for units b and c f of f rea my apologies second promotion a second second

mr again yes mr bailey miss jahar yes miss laravey yes miss pereira miss rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes is there are there any other motions on the floor mr aguiar like to make a motion that we approve the four-year contract as negotiated with superintendent maria ponce is there a second second roll call miss drag yeah yes mr bailey mr harp yes miss laravey yes ms pereira it's rodricks yes mayor coogan abstain

anything further come before the committee mostly to adjourn i have a motion ted please call the role mr again yes mr bailey mr harp yes ms laravey yes ms pereira mr rodriguez yes mayor coogan yes