Minutes – April 11, 2019

BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington                     Stockbridge                  West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING

Regular Meeting

Monument Mountain Regional High School – Library

April 11, 2019 – 7pm

Present:

School Committee:                 S. Bannon, J. St. Peter, B. Fields, A. Potter, D. Weston, D. Singer, S. Stephen, M. Thomas, A. Hutchinson

Administration:                      P. Dillon

Staff/Public:                             T. Lee, K. Farina, B. Doren

Absent:                                     R. Dohoney, S. Harrison, D. Wine

List of Documents Distributed:
School Committee Minutes of Meeting dated March 28, 2019

RECORDER NOTE:  Meeting attended by recorder and minutes transcribed during the meeting and after the fact from live recording provided by CTSB.  Length of meeting:    hour, 40 minutes.

CALL TO ORDER

Chairman Steve Bannon called the meeting to order immediately at 7pm.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

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

MINUTES:
March 28, 2019

MOTION TO ACCEPT SCHOOL COMMITTEE MINUTES OF MEETING DATED March 28, 2019 – B. FIELDS                SECONDED:  A. POTTER                      ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS

TREASURER’S REPORT:

• SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT: Dillon – I sent an email around last night to parents and this morning to inform them that the school district is on its own well and water system and we follow a rigorous DEP testing schedule.  Our water is wonderfully clean.  We didn’t have to do anything.  That is a testament to Steve and his guys.  If that had not been the case, we might have actually had to close school.
• Good News Item(s):
  • Tim Lee, Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School: Just a few bits of good news tonight.  I would first like to recognize our fourth grade teacher team, especially Ms. Cosel, and our fourth grade students who are members of our Green Team.  They did a presentation over the weekend at the Berkshire Earth Expo and they had a booth.  They talked about the composting program that we have at Muddy Brook, composting food scraps near the greenhouse.  I would especially like to recognize Sam Dobson, one of our fourth grade students who led a talk describing the program in a presentation style.  He did a great job.  Good job Green Team.  Also, another piece of faculty news; I just wanted to mention to folks that our English Language Learner teacher, Emily Olds, was recently accepted to a doctoral program at UMass Amherst.  She is going to be earning a PhD in Language and Literacy, no doubt bringing those skills back to the classroom in her work with our kids.  Congratulations Emily.  I shared with your some copies of our school newspaper, The Coyote.  You probably have all of the issues we have done for this year.  There will be one more.  All the rest of the good news that is happening at our school is shared with you in these editions, written by students.  I just wanted to give kudos to all of the students on our school newspaper but also to Kristin Finnerty, second grade teacher and advisor of the newspaper staff who is doing a tremendous job getting some real quality writing out of students in this newspaper format.
  • Ben Doren, Du Bois Regional Middle School: You picked a great week for a school committee meeting.  Nature’s Classroom…fifth graders are out there.  They have been out there all week.  It is really a hallmark in many ways into the middle school.  Miles Wheat our assistant principal has been gone out for the full week this year.  He is now working on curriculum connections.  It is an amazing experience.  The kids go out there and have nature, they do environmental studies, adventure, team building.  It is pretty wonderful.  There are a few things we kind of bring back the school and into the classroom.  It has been a great experience for the kids.  Miles is talking to the sixth grade teachers to see if it is a way to meet the fifth graders at the end of their fifth grade experience, etc.  I am appreciating what Miles is doing and what the teaching teams are doing as they start to work more closely together.  It has a real effect on the kids.  On the other end of the middle school, the eighth graders just did their Shakespeare performance last night at Shakespeare & Co.  They put on Hamlet; all 100 students.  It was pretty amazing.  Every single kid gets to be on stage; has some lines; some of they many, some of they a few.  Shakespeare and Co. comes for an eight-week residency.  It is very intense.  They work with every single class and the kids really get exposed to Shakespeare.  What I love about that is every kid gets on stage and there were at least two kids that I saw that I said wow, I never knew you had that in you.  It is a really nice experience for them.  Of course, only a few months later and really only two months later into their school experience in ninth grade is fall festival.  It is a great gateway experience.  We have the eighth grade DC trip which is coming up.  Planning is ramping up.  Seventh grade is going to take an awesome trip to Boston.  The teams are putting together a nice itinerary for a day trip.  The sixth grade has been doing some amazing community work.  What I love about the sixth grade team is they just try wrap around the kids and not just have an academic experience but a community experience.  They did an amazing connection with CATA which is Community Access to the Arts where all of them did a fundraiser for CATA and raised hundreds of dollars.  It was a great experience and some were able to go out and have a writing experience with some of the clients at CATA.  It was super meaningful for the sixth graders to give back to their community.  They pretty much have picked a community activity a month for the whole year.  We are very impressed with them.  We are having fun at the middle school!
  • Peter Dillon (for Doug Wine) – Some of you are maybe many of you attended the spring musical production. It was fun and interesting and engaging.  They teased me several times.  It was good.  It is college, post-secondary planning time.  Young people at the high school heard about colleges and people are making decisions, going on visits, picking things and we will have some updates on that.  A couple of people are going to Williams, student athletes and scholars going to Emory in Atlanta, another student going into both Colorado College and Carlton which is interesting.  On and on….a number of people into UMass including the honor college there.  Two very strong musicians to the Berkeley School of Music which is a nice pattern; also some going to to BCC and Hudson Valley Community College and some straight into the military so a wonderful range of things.  I will give you an update when the dust settles.
  • Every year we typically nominate three educators, one from each building for the Berkshire County Educator recognition award and this year Kathy Erikson, one of the MMRHS math teachers was selected. That is a great honor so we will send a group people up to celebrate that with her at MCLA on May 2nd.

• Approvals:
  • Education Alliance Grant – P. Dillon – through the Lipton Mart which is connected to Exxon Mobile, we received a second Educational Alliance grant. Lipton Mart stores in collaboration with Exxon Mobile issued a check for $500.  The grant is to be used toward education and in return they asked for notable mention of the grant which is what I am doing.  We will put it in a newsletter as well and we are appreciative of that.  MOTION TO ACCEPT THE 2019 EDUCATION ALLIANCE GRANT              POTTER              SECONDED:  S. STEPHEN                ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS
  • Donation from EACH Foundation to Muddy Brook – MOTION TO ACCEPT THE $00 DONATION FROM EACH FOUNDATION TO MUDDY BROOK POTTER           SECONDED:  D. WESTON                ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS
  • Grant Award – Improving Student Access to Behavioral & Mental Health Services – P. Dillon – This is connected to some of the collaborative care work and also mental health. We are having a heck of a year writing grants and I hope we get them.  It is great and exciting.  This will let us work more broadly with Railroad Street.  Our kids from a pediatric care standpoint are largely served by three groups.  A number of them go to Macony, some through CHP and the remaining chunk are through a number of pediatric practices.  This creates space for us to expand the work that Deb Buccino and Adrian Conklin which Macony to CHP so we get almost full coverage of our student population.  MOTION TO ACCEPT STUDENT ACCESS TO BEHAVIORAL AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES           POTTER            SECONDED:  B. FIELDS               ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS
  • Dillon – the middle school is doing a trip to Flying Deer, which is across state lines, so per our policy, I need your permission to approve it. We are little a short.  Normally we try to do stuff across state lines within 30 days and this is less than that.  We have a nice relationship with Flying Deer.  It is in New Lebanon which is right across the border.  There is a little memo that explains it.  Ben or I will be happy to talk about it if anyone has any questions.  D. Weston – it is a Project Connection activity, not a school day activity?  B. Doren – it is an overnight and it is the second time we have done it.  You approved it last year.  It was a pretty spectacular experience for the kids.  Flying Deer gets kids into an adventure mindset and self-reliance mindset.  They have been working with us now for four or five years doing Outdoor Adventures and last year we tried out an overnight with the kids.  We had some great results.  MOTION TO APPROVE OUT OF STATE TRAVEL FOR THE FLYING DEER OVERNIGHT       A. POTTER               SECONDED:  B. FIELDS                   ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS
  • In the packet I gave you is an updated Home School Policy. Kate worked on this with me and it is a requirement for one of the evals that happens to us.  It is fairly straightforward.  In the third paragraph there is a typo.  The approval policy for home school in Massachusetts is a little unusual so parents submit a plan of study to the principal in the respective building and the principal looks at it and recommends it then it comes to me and I approve it.  The parents have to articulate a plan and sometimes it is a homegrown plan and sometimes it is part of a national web-based plan.  We approve it but we don’t have much authority over enforcing the actual implementation of the plan.  Sometimes people come to us with great plans and maybe they do them and maybe they don’t.  We don’t really get a chance to look at outcomes.  For some family and parents and kids, it can work out well.  Bannon – this will be the first reading?  There won’t be a vote?  P. Dillon – right.  S. Bannon – if you have any questions, please email Peter and we will vote at the next meeting.  A. Hutchinson – can I ask where periodic standardized testing takes place and how often?  It is the very last statement on the paper.  P. Dillon – this is part of what I was mentioning.  I am not making them do the MCAS but there should be some measure to see if somebody is making progress and it shouldn’t just be that as a homeschool parent, I made up a test and gave them a test and they got a 100 on it.  What does that mean?  Some of the more sophisticated systems of homeschooling have built in benchmark assessments and if you are doing it in a homegrown way, there are lots of free assessments nationally available you could use.  A. Hutchinson – does that come back to the school system?  Do you get those results?  P. Dillon – it is very rare that I do now.  I would be able to make a more informed decision about approving things if I did.  A. Hutchinson – so is this changing things?  P. Dillon – this is the recommended language by the attorneys and it may.  We may change it.  J. St. Peter – I think in the paragraph right before it, it says factors to be considered by the superintendent or school committee to approve .. so we can consider them or we cannot consider them.  P. Dillon -that is my interpretation.  I don’t want to make it be onerous and terrible, but on the other hand if somebody gives me a one page plan, it is very hard to know what is going on.
• Update: Statement of Interest (SOI) – P. Dillon – This is literally hot off the presses.  I will pass it around.  The first thing you have in your hand is the updated Statement of Interest for the MSBA and Steve, Heather Ralph and I worked on this and ultimately submitted it today.  This is largely the same as the previous SOI.  It is mostly just a factual document.  We added five paragraphs and updated maybe ten things connected to the years and dates.  The previous one was our 50th year and now it is our 51st year.  You have all read this before.  The updates are around the grants we have received at the high school, some of the redesign things there and the work around CVTE.  I think it is fairly straightforward.  Steve, anything to add?  Soule – we included all the work we did over the summer and updated on the facilities.  P. Dillon – it is largely a factual document.  Attached to it is this letter I will also send around which is the fancy cover letter.  This letter is an updated version of a letter that was written a year ago at the urging of Jon Winiker to Diane Sullivan who is one of the people that runs this program.  This details additionally out of the context of the formal objectives and what we are doing and why we think it is a compelling case.  Things that are here that are a little different are some of the acknowledgement of the work of the Next Steps Committee, leaving a place holder for additional information to be submitted after that recommendation is finalized as well as some of the potential opportunities in relation to the Shaker Mountain School Union around moving forward.  You have seen similar or earlier version of this letter.  Tomorrow we will mail in hard copies of a few more things.  I will keep you updated on the response and what we hear from them.  I don’t image that they will take any formal action until maybe the summer and if we get back into the smaller pool, I would anticipate that they do a site visit as they have done previously maybe with a few more people with an engineering or architectural background.  The Next Step group had a meeting a few days ago and Bill can certainly add onto this, as reported in the papers, we had a good discussion and there is a lot of agreement in a whole lot of areas.  We did not take a formal vote.  At our next meeting, during the break, we will likely take a formal vote and start to structure recommendations that the group will present to the whole committee.  The discussion ranged around a new building or renovation or addition and the notion that I think many people were taken by was the previous thing that MSB has a program around a model building because you got all sort of incentive points.  The group was a little split slightly more people leaning toward a new building than a renovation/addition but not definitely one or the other.  In our consensus building process we will come back to the group with the commonalities and the things we share regardless or which way we are leaning and I image structure recommendation around those commonalities.  B. Fields – Everybody seems to be on the same page and the process of where we are headed with the CVTE.  That is really something that stands out.  We have a vision which was not articulated or even seen in the last project.  I am very pleased with what we have done so far.  It was a long meeting and all participated.  Not one person who was on the committee did not have something to say in regard to a rubric we had set up.  I knew it was going to come out in the newspapers as a vote.  It wasn’t really a formal vote as Peter said.  One vote would have been a split.  I am not sure where we are going to go but there are so many areas.  There is so much commonality.  We are going to have to do some sort of compromise or getting around it.  It will be ultimately up to this committee to make a definitely.  That is what we are elected for.  I like the attitude of this committee; everybody gets along and are very respectful.  Certainly not what you see on the national scene at all.  It is good to see with a wide range of people.  P. Dillon – then this committee will take that recommendation but presumably if we get back into the process with the MSBA, then we are doing that with there support for a whole other year with architects and designer and all.  It is moving us in a direction.  We are in a much more thoughtful and sophisticated place today than we were the last time.  Both the CVTE vision which is continuing to evolve and just the broader educational vision, is evolving in very interesting ways.  Bill keeps talking about this form follows function and we are starting to articulate a really clear function and that should help.  S. Bannon – the committee is split but in a good way.  I think it is clear that they represent the thoughts of the community and therefore it tells us which we already do, we have work to do no matter what choice we make.  Everyone was on agreement on many, many issues but they just came out with a different take on the end result.  The meetings have been fascinating and it has been good being on the sidelines to watch.  B. Fields – the differences are not that big.  Diane and I agree on many things.  She came on one side, I came on the other.  Our differences are so minute that it does get down to that basic issue that we all know with the dollars.  We all know in the long run, the price tag is going to make a difference.  Hopefully we will be able to overcome that with a vision of where we need to go that will override some of the concerns that have obviously been raised at Wahconah.  I think but this is my own opinion, the Wahconah vote was close but I had brought out that Dalton which is the big horse in that district passed it by over 300 votes and that was not emphasized too much in the coverage but I noted that.  That was pretty good.  I have some friends in Dalton and they talked about how close it was going to be.  It really wasn’t.  The fact that it was a passage no matter how close, a win is a win and that harbors well for where we are headed.

Sub-Committee Reports:

• Policy Sub Committee – S. Bannon – We met this evening. We already talked about one policy.  Dillon – we revisited something we have been working on for awhile and we will bring a formal thing to the whole group.  It is less a policy than a guidelines.  It is building structures in engaging in dialogue.  We are trying to craft a proactive response in working through celebrating diversity, multiculturalism.  This is in partnership with a couple dozen organizations.  We will bring that back at a future meeting.  We also had initial discussions about looking again at our valedictorian/salutatorian policy because it has been an issue since probably when the school opened but we have been talking about it for a few years.  We started an additional conversation around framing a vision of sustainability and resource use.  That could be connected to energy and the neat stuff we are doing with solar panels and geothermal both onsite and offsite as well as waste and waste management as well as purchasing and what kinds of choices we make around purchasing.  We will come back with some stuff there.  This is a little broader than policy, it is closer to direction setting than policy but it seemed like a good conversation to start.  B. Fields – can I ask a question about the valedictorian/salutatorian?  S. Bannon – we prefer you not but go ahead.  B. Fields – it has been around as long as I have taught here.  I was under the understanding that last year a student committee was formed and Amy was going to make some recommendations.  Did that ever come to fruition?  P. Dillon – they did some work, but not fully.  There are seven or eight competing issues that we need to look at on the state and national level and it is probably a good one to kick back to the high school and maybe academic affairs for possible solutions and what one best aligns with our mission.  B. Fields – so what should I say when I run into David Adler.  S. Bannon – Hi.  A. Potter – ask him about his plane.  S. Bannon – I think David knows we are working on it.  David like many of us doesn’t have patience.  He would like us to finish this but we haven’t.  If it was easy, we would have finished it years ago.
• Buildings and Grounds Sub Committee – N/A
• Superintendent’s Evaluation Sub Committee – N/A
• Technology Sub Committee N/A
• Finance Sub Committee – N/A
• District Consolidation & Sharing Sub Committee – N/A
• Next Steps Sub Committee – N/A

Personnel Report:

• Non-Certified Appointment(s)
• Resignation(s)
• Retirement(s)
• Extra-Curricular Appointment(s)

Business Operation:

Education News:

Old Business:

New Business:

• Public Comment
• Written Comment

MOTION TO ADJOURN – A. POTTER               SECONDED:  S. STEPHEN                       ACCEPTED:  UNANIMOUS  

The next school committee meeting will be held on May 2, 2019 – Regular Meeting, Muddy Brook, Library,  7pm

Meeting Adjourned at 7:40pm

Submitted by:  Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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School Committee Secretary