BERKSHIRE HILLS REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT

Great Barrington     Stockbridge       West Stockbridge

SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEETING – Meet & Confer

BHRSD District Offices – Conference Room

September 29, 2016 – 7:00 p.m.

Present:

School Committee:    S. Bannon, J. St. Peter, W. Fields, R. Dohoney, R. Bradway, A. Potter, D. Weston

Administration:          P. Dillon

Staff/Public:                B. Doren, M. Young, M. Berle, J. Briggs, J. Curletti, L. Dupont

Absent:                       F. Clark

List of Documents Distributed:

Timeline For Supporting the Process

RECORDER NOTE:  Meeting was not attended by recorder and minutes were transcribed by Christine Kelly after the fact from live recording provided by CTSB.   Length of meeting:  1 hour, 42 minutes

CALL TO ORDER

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

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE 

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

MINUTES – None

SUPERINTENDENT’S REPORT–

  • Good News Item(s) – None
  • Meet & Confer – P. Dillon. Tonight’s Meet & Confer, is to have a less formal conversation and dialogue.  I’m going to hand out an outline for tonight.  Typically, I don’t do this, but there is a lot I want to say and share so it will help folks follow along.  We are going to do a little brain-storming activity with post-it notes and organize them.    Timeline For Supporting the Process sheet was handed out separately.
  • Re-Imagine – P. Dillon –  I am hoping our outcome for tonight, is that I share updates on the process and generate additional ideas.  The big goal of the reimagination process is:  examine how we best meet the needs of our students while balancing fiscal responsibilities to our communities.  Quote from Fred Clark (who is missing) is “We have the system we want, can we afford the system we have?”
    • So far, our process to date: In August, the principals and I, and also the administrative team, met for a few days and had an administrative retreat.  We brainstormed across many areas and generated some ideas we think are interesting.  We then had a half day with faculty and staff, really the teachers and paras this past Friday, where we brainstormed with them.  We brainstormed in slightly different areas.  The administrators have a role in everything districtwide so we brainstormed about everything.  With the teachers and paras we tried to rely on their expertise in their own wheelhouse which is instruction, curriculum, assessment and a few other areas.  There was also a catch-all category of “other”.  “Other” became a bit of a controversial basket.  We got some good information there, but as we reflected on it and as people participated and shared feedback, they felt the process was a little rushed, which I acknowledged.  I don’t think those ideas are yet the best ideas that people can generate, so we are going to do another couple of rounds with people, and I will talk about that in the context of the sheet with the blue on it.
    • What we are hoping to do tonight with the School Committee, is do another brainstorming process, and in this area is where we think your areas of expertise come in. As much as I know Bill (Fields), Bill likes to talk about Assessment, however Assessment is not up on the board as one of the School Committee areas of expertise.  There is Politics and Other, so Assessment could go in the “Other” basket.  In a minute, we will be looking at Politics, Funding, Community Outreach, Shared Services, Facility Use, Safety, What Do We Hope/Expect Kids will be able to know and do as they complete 4th, 8th and 12th  It is convenient and intentional that 4th grade is at the end of Muddy Brook, 8th grade is the end of Monument Valley and 12th the end of Monument Mountain.  Sometimes we just talk about what we hope kids will be able to do when they graduate and waiting 12 or 13 years to figure that out is too much.  It is unyielding and it is unmanageable.
    • What we hope will happen, and what we are trying to structure going forward, is that we will have two groups that will reinforce and support each other. We have a sense of a reimagination committee that would be compiled of four teachers, likely a para from each of the three schools, to meet with some subset of administrator to kick around ideas and be like a RND group.  Connected is our involvement in the radar project, and I have shared that a couple of times.  That is where we are one of eight districts in the state that is getting support from the state to use very specific analytic tools to make sense of what we are doing.  Those two things will reinforce each other.  If the Reimagination Committee comes up with some good ideas, the radar group can vet and assess them.
    • If you could now look at the blue sheet. This is a representation of what has happened and what we expect to come.
      • August was the Administrator Retreat
      • September 19th we met with the union to plan some of the 23rd
      • Today we are sharing feedback
      • We have set-up two faculty meetings at each of the buildings, listed below, to continue this work. It’s one thing to have a conversation in a theater with 200 people, it’s another thing to do it in a building with 40.  So we go back and forth.
      • The ongoing radar work will happen.
      • The Finance Committee blocked the dates of October 17th, November 1st, November 16th
      • Then we have our budget process that happens.
    • So we are juggling a lot of things and there will be a lot of information, but this is the commitment we are making. What is not reflected on this sheet is the amount of time the Reimagination Committee is working.  I think they will be working in and around these other meetings to help generate other ideas.  Then will meet likely after school, an occasional weekend that will then get shared in the faculty meetings, with the Finance Committee and potentially with the whole School Committee.
    • What we are trying to do is a really heavy lift. I think this speaks to our committee to try to pull it off.  It is a lot of time we are investing on top of the time that we are investing in other things.  Meaningful Professional Development has to happen in the schools about math instruction, for example; or problem-based learning or literacy.  So we are doing all of that, plus we are trying to do this and make room for each to happen.  Are they any questions about the dates or timelines connected to this?
    • Potter – How do you see this tying into the budget process? P. Dillon – that is the big question.  What I hope happens, as I go back to the white sheet and go through this, I think we are engaged in multi-year planning.  We want to come up with a set of wonderful ideas that we can implement or plan for in the context for the budget you are going to hopefully pass this March.  Hopefully ideas will get implemented in the schools over the summer and will really start in September.  I think, simultaneously, we will move past our past practice of just budgeting year to year and generate a bunch of wonderful ideas that might happen.  If next year is year one, which also simultaneously we would be thinking about year two, three and four.  As we do this, there are some that are perceived as more low hanging fruit than others and those may be attractive.  We may do things that are slightly easier to implement than others; or we may do things that are foundational for us to be able to do other stuff.
    • Potter – do you see tangible things coming out soon enough to fit into….P. Dillon – I think it has to and if it doesn’t, it’s a failure and you will have my head. We have been talking about this for a while, and I want to manage expectations and be realistic.  My hope is that we come up with four to six really interesting ideas.  All of them that are impactful educationally, some of them that save you money or use our resources differently and potentially a couple that might cost more but are balanced some other way.  I think it is premature to start floating ideas, but when one looks at changed initiatives and opportunities in other districts, there are three to five areas (how to organize curriculum, how to organize time, how to organize people) and connected to that there are things like scheduling, bussing, start and time times, etc.  That is where I hope we are going.  I think there is a lot of opportunity.  I think that there is interest in doing this work collaboratively.  I think this will be one of those classic initiatives where there are some bottom-up ideas and there are some top-down ideas and we meet in the middle and work through it.
    • What I would like us to do, and it is always a tough thing because I never know what peoples’ attentions spans are around this, but what I would like you to do and I will pass around many post-it notes in a second, I would only like this to take 10 minutes. I mentioned the administrators did this in one context and the teachers and paras did it in another.  I would like you to write down ideas on post-it notes and every so often go up and stick them on the board where you think they go.  Feel free to come up with eccentric ideas in the context of brainstorming.  Sometimes those are the ideas that let us get to the next level to do something wonderful.  We talked a little bit about it being hard to brainstorm in a room when there is a big TV camera staring you in the face but don’t write your names on your ideas.  As we go through them, if Rich writes something like “we should have hot air balloons in all the schools because it will be really cool”,  then when somebody reads it, please don’t ridicule Rich over his idea because that might help the next person who comes to another interesting idea.  The dual charge of how might this help us meet the needs of students and balance our fiscal responsibility?  I think these are the right categories for this group of thoughtful School Committee members but if I missed one, just stick it in the “Other” category.  We will do this for 10 minutes. We will post them up, and if you are reluctant to post it up, leave it in front of me and I will post it up.  Then we will go through a second process of trying to organize it all.  Pause while notes are being passed out…One other thing for the audience members.  I am not having the audience members brainstorm tonight.  There will be some other instance to do that.  Administrators and teachers did it and will do it again.  We will figure out some venue or avenue for the community to participate but tonight’s not the night to do that.  Pause while writing ideas…
    • So I will go up and in some context we might do a little gallery walk and everybody go up and read it and reflect it. I think both because of the TV and our audience that I will just go up and I will read.  I’ll read them once and people can digest them and then we will do something else.  There is a strong possibility that there are some really great ideas up there and there is also the possibility you will come up with even better ideas when you are driving home tonight or tomorrow.  If you do, please keep sharing because this is just meant to be a starting point.
    • I will do one read-through of all of them and then depending on what is up there, we may go back and arrange them a little. Like the two in the “other” category there may not be a lot of arranging to do there.
    • On the Funding one, there are five ideas.
    • Make a greater effort to fund the stabilization fund
    • Set goal of ideal number of high school students to increase tuition numbers and decrease choice numbers around it
    • Advocate for reform of the state’s funding formula
    • Get the greatest utility out of funding
    • Constant review of the Regional Agreement
    • Under Politics
      • Multi-year priorities and budgets
      • Get towns to talk like partners
      • Develop long-term planning with town boards
      • Put our lobbying efforts into areas where it is realistic to see results
      • Create a lobbying group funded by a combination of Berkshire County Regional School Districts to advocate for specific changes to choice and tuition rates and production in DESE mandates
      • More frequent meeting with town leaders
      • Pass the amended Regional Agreement
    • In Community Outreach
      • Newsletter
      • Frequent and constant communication
      • Community partnerships with cultural and ethnic organizations
      • Develop and push communications rather than passive blogs and websites
      • Increase online participation and contact
      • Rebuild concept of schools as the center of community
    • Under Shared Services
      • South County plan for Chapter 74 vocational programs
      • Don’t let personnel drive decisions
      • Continue meetings with towns and districts
      • Distance learning
      • Consolidate smaller classes and disciplines across schools
      • Pursue merger with other districts
      • Form an education group made up of all Southern Berkshire school committees to study and advocate for the reduction of high schools in South County.
    • Facilities
      • Renovate the high school
      • Restart community forums
      • Review and act upon facility priorities and get them in the budget
      • Upkeep of the buildings; no more deferred maintenance
      • Ban parking in front of Muddy Brook
      • Replant grass
      • 21st Century Schools – plan high school improvements and funding around payoff of Muddy Brook and Middle School in 6-7 years.
      • Practical renovation design around Monument Mountain
    • Safety
      • Community partnerships
      • Consider bonding safety improvements
      • Make safety a higher priority
      • Bring the high school up to code
    • Know and Do
      • In 4th grade – social/emotional learning
      • In 8th grade – read and write and speak a foreign language
      • In 12th grade – financial literacy
      • In 12th grade – to have all graduates no vote Republican!
    • Other
      • To have all Berkshire County school form an assessment group to draw upon our own locally based creative assessment measures to offer to DESE in place of state standardized testing system. (Also under Shared Services).
      • Review vocational offerings with an eye toward true value and do that with the workforce.
  • Dillon – I thought there might be grouping to do and I am wondering what folks’ reactions are. Do we want to try to go one level deeper now that you have heard them and prioritize them?  Do you think there are few enough that they just speak for themselves?  D. Weston – I missed the first five minutes, I wasn’t quite sure why we were doing this.  I don’t fully understand the goal.  P. Dillon – Yes, those were really the pivotal five minutes.  Two parts to tonight are updates about where we have been in this reimagination process and to generate additional ideas.  We captured a lot of stuff from the administrators.  We captured an initial round from the teachers and paras but we are going to go back and do that and dig in a little more so it is more robust.  Each time we gathered information, it was around an expertise of the group sharing it.  The reason why these seven categories are here and they are very different from the teacher categories and different from the administrator categories, we felt this is the area where the committee has expertise.  D. Weston – there is not too much I would say is reimagined up there with the exception of only having two high schools south of the Pike.  Most of it is pretty much what we have been doing.  I didn’t come up with closing the high school so I can’t say I was part of that reimagination, but we really didn’t think too far out of the box at all.  I am not sure how well we participated.  P. Dillon – it is really hard to do this on the spot but in some ways this primes the pump.  If we all go home in a happy optimistic way and say the communication ideas were really good ideas, and it is something we need to do better and maybe it is okay because it is not a radical idea.  There may be ideas that are just simple that we need to do better and that has value.  There may be some ideas that are actually radical that are also good, and I think we find a balance around that.  S. Bannon – I think these ideas are the ones that have been simmering on the surface for a while and we haven’t done and that’s ok.  I’m not saying we have had time or we should have done them but it is almost goals for the next year or two as opposed to grand schemes, things that we just need to take up and work on.  A. Potter – also, a lot of these are dependent on external parties to execute.  Certainly in shared services; certainly in politics, funding.  All three of those categories, most of those ideas revolve around the unknown willingness of external parties to cooperate.  We can talk about developing a framework by which third parties could fit into.  S. Bannon – We may fail at it but I think this is saying that we need to continue to try or start to try depending on which idea it is.  Some things we have done and some things we haven’t.
  • Dohoney – I understand it as an internal form of how we deliver education. The role of the school committee is, we are not in charge of education, we are just a check and balance to make sure the community is represented and that there is still a vocal control of education and to do that; I mean if there is broad reforms in the way we deliver education that has to come from education professionals not from a bunch of yahoos.  P. Dillon – I appreciate that and I think we are setting up the process of the career educators, the teachers and administrators and the paras, generate some really wonderful ideas about opportunities to rethink possibilities connected to learning and teaching.  Maybe there are some structural changes that are slightly outside of the teachers’ bailiwick that are connected to other things like bussing.  Maybe we tie that with the political thinking that of your levels of expertise.  We all complain about state funding and the state funding formula is being revisited but to my knowledge, every once in a while, we write a letter to the commissioner complaining about something but we have not activated…. R. Dohoney – but is that part of our agenda item “reimagine”, our relationship to the state is part of that?  P. Dillon – I think it very well could be.  That is a three year thing to lobby the state to make a change on something.  If we sort of put our heads in the sand and ignore it.  If regional transportation is never fully funded and we complain about it every year but don’t fully do anything about it, then we get what we deserve.  B. Fields – we really don’t have an organization for Berkshire County that lobbies.  We have the Mass Association for School Committees but they are representing everybody.  It is my idea that we do what the big guys do.  They hire a firm to lobby specifically for Berkshire County exactly for pushing people to get together to make substantial changes in the way Berkshire County education, especially regional schools, is both handled and is felt by the state.  For years, we have said, transportations, I was on the other end of it with the Finance Committee in Great Barrington and it seems like it is all…ok, who represents us?  We have Smitty and one senator and as Denny Duffin said to me many years ago as a state representative, he could be president if trees would vote.  Well, we are outnumbered.  S. Bannon – So, Bill, you always think a little broader than I do but, we are a member of the Mass Association of School Committees and probably one of their most inactive members and so therefore maybe our first step should to become more active with the Mass Association of School Committees because that is low hanging fruit.  We should be doing more with them.  A. Potter – we could have somebody look into their organization.  S. Bannon – once again we are going to miss the conference this year, which this School Committee used to be one of the high represented in the state.  We used to have seven or eight people go to it.  R. Bradway – that’s an argument.  We cut the funding to do that stuff and in the big scheme of things, it was a couple of cents but in the grand scheme of things…B. Fields – my idea was just having, besides that, just having another group would be totally for Berkshire County that wouldn’t be diluted with regional school districts from all over the state.  You can form a non-profit.  P. Dillon – there is another parallel group that you might want to look into and it started in the last year.  It is a rural school association and it is based out of Turner Falls or Ashfield somewhere out there.  Maybe Quabbin.  I can look back, but I don’t know if Berkshire County is alone or if we have enough juice to get enough attention.
  • Dohoney – I misunderstood what we were doing. I thought we were looking at what we and Berkshire Hill Regional School District, all of these others are important, they are actually more important to me and the roll again of the school committee is to do those things.  I am not so hot that we have to change education.  P. Dillon – what I shared what the process that we are doing but we are not ready today to pitch you fifteen ideas.  R. Dohoney – I wasn’t expecting that either.  B. Fields – can I ask your opinion, maybe this isn’t the time to ask you this but, where are we in sync with what was offered by the faculty and the paras?  Are there common interests that you could point out right now?  Beside probably renovate Monument.  P. Dillon – there is interest and tension over that across the board.  As we structured it for the faculty, there were different categories.  They talked a lot about curriculum and instruction.  There is some overlap with that connected with Shared Services and the “Other” category there was a lot of thought about shared services and then we also asked which of these ideas is excited and which is frightening or makes you lose sleep at night.  Again, I don’t feel comfortable enough that I did it in as thoughtful a way that I got all of the information I wanted so dancing around not sharing that information right now but I think I can come back to you in a little bit of time with more information.
  • Bradway – One thing that I have always talked about is communication. I think we do a pretty decent job communicating to families and parents and students but beyond that I don’t feel that we communicate very well to community.  I think that is maybe how it is when you are dealing with various things that we deal with if it is the Regional Amendment Agreement of the high school renovation, but we are so much closer to the information and the facts and data that we know we are talking about stuff that is fairly concrete but it is fairly esoteric to the community.  There are times that we start talking about renovation all of this stuff gets put out there by people because they just don’t agree with what we are trying to do and they are much more effective with communicating that misinformation that we are often times up against a wall just to start a process.  To me we need to do a better job of communication to the community and doing it in a much better and frequent way so that there is no….there are always going to be people that question stuff but often times it is like an epiphany before we even start.  That would be one thing that we need to focus on.  The other thing I found interesting was someone said looking at bringing schools to be the center of our community and one of the things that I am finding as we go each year is that, and this is something that needs assessment, more and more of community supports for our kids are coming from our schools and less from our community.  I think our school district is probably as centralized to the center of our community as it can be but the thing is that our communities need to start thinking about ways of providing these supports outside of school because the more it is put on school and the school district and that is more burden on the school budget we will continually have to fight and argue for.  A. Potter – It is basically proactive push communication with the community, makes me want to write another one for community outreach which is to actually have this body establish a subcommittee on public information so that there is at least a monthly proactive conversation around what issues need to be out there and how should they be communicated because we really don’t have time, we don’t do that in meetings.  The administration doesn’t have time and isn’t resourced to do that and to have some sort of a proactive subcommittee formed around the idea of community outreach and public information would be quite valuable.  That is a really long post-it note.  R. Dohoney – my proposal is that we should have somebody, a stock person, I think your comments were really appropriate.  I think people feel connected with the school, parents, etc.  It is the next layer that don’t have that natural connection to the school.  I don’t know if we aren’t doing enough or not doing the right things that is why we need….R. Bradway – what is really apparent is, like doing the RAC, a lot of this information was put out there and then all of these people started repeating this misinformation and it is still there like, ok, either you have to find a way to ignore it or actually have the discussion and come to some conclusion on the RAC or we need to…it’s a lot of noise.  R. Dohoney – I think the RAC was a good example of that because we had people on that committee that weren’t the usual suspects and eventually it was a great success and a consensus was built.  R. Bradway – in 30 some year.  R. Dohoney – I know but part of the success of that effort was it wasn’t the usual suspects.  B. Fields – it went through its ups and downs and it still isn’t a done deal but certainly it is a lot better than when some of the media was predicting our demise and having harsh things to say about the RAC itself.  R. Bradway – a lot of that was dealing with misinformation and dealing with all that noise.  B. Fields – I think too, to your point Rich, I like what you said.  I don’t want to go back to the past.  The renovation project there was something that was missing in regards to people who voted against it, I am not sure were fully aware what it was they were voting against.  I think there we so many things mixed up.  I think the communications dealt with preaching to the choir and forgetting maybe another segment and once we started the….the people we were going to have on June 24th, that Saturday, whatever it was called, we have different people who suddenly realized that this is more complex than I thought it was.  The whole issue.  We should be doing something to get through to people who don’t have any children in the school district, who are here as new people moving in coming from another environment where things are done differently and handled differently, and I don’t know how we deal with that but that is a sizeable group now.
  • Bradway – well look at things now, like Choice. One group will say that it is a massive weight on the community and the other says no it is actually helping.  Yet we never get anywhere with that, and it is always the conversation when we are trying to get other things done.  R. Dohoney – two things, one we can’t always reach out to the community when there is an ask attached to it.  It has to be ongoing.  I don’t know if it is necessarily communication but possibly the second layer of people who don’t have any connection to the schools.  Our schools are something we should be very proud of and if you haven’t grown up around here is that pride doesn’t reach that second level anymore and I think a part of it is because of the demographics of our three towns.  It is a lot of these people who have moved here.  I look to our friends from the north who have a great reputation as a school district and they have the highest level assessment in their town and they do a good job of breeding pride through the whole community even to those who are connected to the schools.  I think we need to figure out a way to do that.  R. Bradway – it is rare that you find that someone goes to a football game or a band concert that isn’t directly involved with the school district.  S. Bannon – I think therein is an idea.  R. Bradway – I think there are certain exceptions, but by in large….S. Bannon – maybe we don’t publicize it enough and maybe more people would go if we did a better job of going on our website and looking at the calendar is not something people are going to do but …. B. Fields – Giving them a reason why that is important even though they might not have a direct stake in it.  Getting people to see that all of this is connected.  That there presence here, without having any children, without having any connection with the school, they are part of the community.  It is almost getting back to Chip Elitzer with the RAC when he gave him thing about how we are all connected and we have a trust in public education.  As I said at one of the meeting earlier, 96% of all the kids in this country are going to public schools, no matter what the charter movement results in.  You could look at that here too.  I am kind of rethinking what Rich said.  It was my first year when he came up with that, and I was like wait a minute, wait a minute.  A PR person when we are doing all of these other cuts?  There is where we could think out of the box.  We could use kids in the high school to create a program to put out.  Eileen could publish it in the newsletter.  We do have kids writing for the publications.  We had a sophomore, I don’t know if she is writing for The Record anymore, but she was.  I tried to get a girl last year to cover the school committee meetings on the school level so the kids would be more aware of it but we need somebody like that to be an advocate and to connect.  I think of the forum we had in Housatonic and somebody said something about the sewer system under the new plan.  The question was “what do we do with the sewer system we have now?”  The answer was we don’t have to worry about it.  It has already been done at the two new schools.  That is already new.  They did not know that.  The guy who asked the question turned and said “I didn’t know that?  How long as the school been there?”  I thought to myself, who is missing that.  Like have a publication available at Aberdale’s almost like a Shopper’s Guide.  Maybe a Regional School Guide.  When I asked somebody that, they said “well, your standard answer is come to the meetings.”  Well, that is true but also there are people that aren’t going to come to meetings.  They may watch it on TV.  This morning I went and got my flu shot in Housatonic, and I walked in and nobody was there.  I was number 3.  I said this is like the primary vote because I am a warden at the precinct.  We started talking and I asked why nobody was there.  We have a large elderly group in Housatonic.  The woman said that they did robo calls last year and we couldn’t keep the people out.  Where did you find out about this flu clinic?  I said I read about it in The Eagle in the Around Town section.   I asked what they didn’t do robo calls again.  They cut it because of expense.  So Housatonic people didn’t show up.  In a way, maybe we ought to do things to connect people.  A. Potter – the other piece too, Bill, looking back at the idea that was posted on the Community Outreach, the school as a community center.  I think what we have been talking about of things going on in the school as opposed to having it as a two-way process because you can argue where those facilities … the Golden Knights is at the gyms, so we do have community people using the facilities and interacting with the schools in that way.  Is that an area that could broaden in order to pull that community interest in?  The school as community center.  Again, we can tell people all the good things we are doing but unless there is an obvious connection then…R. Bradway – when you get someone to help you with the communication, look at the example of the high school concert at the Mahaiwe; that thing is massive, and we can hardly get half of the auditorium filled for a spring concert.  There is an idea where you could work with a person to find ways to build more awareness.  A. Potter – I am thinking things like for the last few years, I have been getting my flu shot in the gym at the middle school.  That is a community thing and is promoted through a number of health organizations in the county.  That kind of activity where the school facilities are leveraged for a larger, certainly not pulling away from the mission of the schools.  R. Bradway- what about the farmers’ market that is in the gymnasium at the middle school?  R. Dohoney – They got the floor cover so I’m happy.  That is a perfect example.
  • Weston – Peter, I guess my biggest question is what are barriers for being successful on this? P. Dillon – that this a good question.  D. Weston – I think there are some barriers here toward being successful.  We have really been talking about a tiny little sliver and kind of the same conversation we have the past six years.  S. Bannon – I bet if you looked back at the last strategic plan, there is a publicity person and a grant writer and we didn’t do either of them because we couldn’t fund them.  D. Weston – we put a very tall order toward the administration which is to think about things very differently.  I think it is a tremendous challenge for them to do.  For them to be successful, I need to know what the School Committee needs to do to be successful.  P. Dillon – for the last several years, I think the narrative for our budget process has not been good.  I think we have come to a situation where there’s pressure to make cuts and slowly we are doing death by a thousand cuts and if we pick the slightly better thing and the slight worse thing few people will come out and yell at us.  We put everybody through a lot of turmoil and it results in minor shifts that aren’t good from a cost savings prospective nor from an education prospective.  What I am trying to do in the process is shift the narrative and create space to come up with ways of doing it differently.  What is hard about it is historically we have always done it year by year, so the shift would be doing it over multiple years would help some.  The other thing that is hard and this keeps Sharon up at night, as creative as we want to be, she needs to start plugging in numbers and costs of things in late October/November to help us get to a place where we can have you vote on a budget by March.  There are two things going on simultaneously, and I think it will be truly challenging to get there.  I think you have more information as a School Committee as you have ever had in the context of the programmatic overviews and the high school study.  So you should feel really good about that.  You have a tremendous context.  The slight bummer is a few of you won’t be here going into that process so there will be some number of new people and they will have a very quick and very steep learning curve.  R. Bradway – I was just looking at the area of the 4th/8th/12th grade and what it boils down to as School Committee members is we are hoping that our expectation is those things that we talk about in the programmatic overviews and the school improvement plans that we are hitting those marks.  Really that is our goal right now.  If I ever put a post-it note up there it would say “are we hitting our marks?”  That is want defines and helps inform how we substantiate our budget.  I think for me, that has always been one of those things or “are we hitting our marks?”, does the budget that we propose actually align with that and often times it comes up with all of these questions at the last minute.  It is not a continuous dialog.
  • Dillon – I think the one thing that would be really helpful, at some point we need financial guidance. Sharon will write some numbers and we will need some frame there.  I don’t want to ask for that now because often it almost feels there is an arbitrary number that drives things.  I think it would be useful to know what your sense of the sacred cows are, the things we can’t touch.  I was joking with Christie about this yesterday and it ironic that she is a math teacher but if I brought up reorganizing math or cutting a math teacher, the only person that I ever knew that was a cheerleader for math was Carol Culler, the West Stockbridge School Committee person, and there would be very little debate about it.  It may be the most important things we do but if it was about a particular athletic team or as evidence, music or art or anything else, hundreds of people come out and make noise.  So what are the sacred cows; what are the things that…R. Dohoney – I think the administration needs to ask themselves that because those cuts always come from the administration.  They never come from the community.  Those are always suggested to us then the uproar happens.  So I think the question is being asked the wrong way.  R. Bradway – to say sacred cows is such a polarizing way of saying something.  A. Potter – that is another piece of the communication.  Weighing stuff out and building consensus on the front end before we all of a sudden have that two-week squeeze where it drops on the table, people hear about it and they come to a meeting.  There is much distress and discomfort.
  • Bannon – one of the ways that we are going to do it different this year is to the School Committee at least, the Finance Subcommittee will give them a much longer and detailed presentation I think than we have in the past. There were some things that we didn’t bring up that we could have because we were not ready to.  I think we are now ready to and it is going to be on TV and we need to let people know what we have talked about.  It may not be personnel, it may be this is where we are on health insurance.  It is very preliminary.  Don’t count on it but it may go down or it may go up but at least we are going to tell you what we have.  It is an open meeting and at least you won’t be surprised the last two weeks.  A. Potter – is isn’t so much my surprise as the community’s surprise.  I’m agile but the public opinion is not all that agile.  I think that there are elements in terms of what is going on at the state level, at the legislature level with various funding issues that we don’t communicate to others.  What we do, is we rely on, I have to admit that certainly the information with the new Eagle.  It throws a lot more of that stuff into its pages than what the old Eagle used to be.  I think that that is the type of thing that a communication plan would allow us to do is strategically allow us to communicate what the pressures are leading into developing that budget and the potential impacts that it might have and what the choice area.
  • Bradway – you know you spoke about our peers to the north that they have a lot of community pride in their schools. R. Dohoney – yes.  R. Bradway – so one of the things that they did was a community town survey of their school district.  I think we did the same thing too.  Didn’t we?  I am curious if we have done that here?  P. Dillon – yes we did and interestingly, the return was terrible on those.  They did the process which is quite admirable.  R. Bradway – maybe do it at the next town meeting when we are talking about the Regional Amendment Agreement; give them the survey and a discount to the pops concert or something.  S. Bannon – there is also outreach from the schools to various groups.  There is more than just a person to do this.  If the band or the chorus or orchestra goes to the senior centers in all three town not just around the holidays, we do some of this, art hangings in town halls, etc.  Maybe we do this and just don’t say much about it but we need to say something about it.  Eileen had a good idea at last night’s meeting.  We good news at every school committee meeting and some people like it and some don’t but if we had that in writing, if the principals had it in writing, that is something that whomever is there from the papers to take and work with.  Most of it is already written because they put their notes down.  There are others things that we could do without putting more money in it.  R. Dohoney – maybe we should make the public relations thing a separate School Committee agenda item.  I thought Dan has had the best point of the whole thing.  What are the challenges?
  • Bannon – what is interesting about the School Committee is that we have a good group here and as much as we are talking about what we can do here and thinking outside the box, I’m thinking I’m not so sure I need these ideas. These are things that we should be doing on a regular basis.  We have strived to do it; we haven’t succeeded at it so I am not so sure that we are so good out of the box.  R. Dohoney – we aren’t so good outside of the box because it is an increasingly smaller box.  S. Bannon – good point.  B. Fields – in 1993 the state defined the box for us.  It made the box.  It said, this is what you are going to do which is a good thing because it removes certain issues that weren’t too prevalent before the act but now it has put constraints on us in another way which defines this is what a School Committee should do.  S. Bannon – I understand you point.  My point is Peter gave us free reign of these categories and we didn’t stray too far out of the norm.  I am not criticizing don’t get me wrong.  P. Dillon – doing it once is hard but if you do it again and a third time it gets easier.  Going back to Dan’s thing, as the combination of the administrators and the teachers and paras generate a bunch of ideas and we float them to you hopefully frames the music proposal but much more in advance and pro-actively and less reactively, getting reactions, getting good questions around that, if you come to embrace an idea or two, supporting it and advocating for it, I think would be really helpful.  I think at some point when we have a better sense of where we are going to land with our projected budget and where we are going having conversation about … its two things – what’s the great program we can provide and if there is a cost and what are the fiscal realities of what we are doing.  I like the fiscal realities not necessarily be as driving as it has been in the past like let’s back into X% but I think there should be a little balance there.  S. Bannon – let me ask another question and this is too late right now.  With the building project we had trouble getting community input.  It is too late now to get community input but if we asked a group of citizens and I dare say I am not in favor of just having people show up because it is always people that have a certain view that I agree with or not, but what they think our needs are in these same ideas, Shared Services, Outreach, Politics, etc., would they back the School Committee?  If we asked the RAC committee, a pretty wide-ranging prospective group, are we off the mark?  Do we represent our community?  P. Dillon – I think that there is opportunity to do that.  What I would love to do is get…as we develop a bunch of ideas from the people that are doing the work day to day, I would love to get feedback on that.  Say some group of people internal the district came in with some neat ideas about vocational education, we are always talking about how everybody always wants vocational education to be transformative and wonderful in the community.  If they developed something around that at the high school, I would then love to then get people from the various industries to come in and react to that.  I don’t know if I have the time.  What we are trying to do with the district itself is like a degree of 12 difficulty triple Lutz back flip.  I don’t know if we can simultaneously do it with the community in year one.  S. Bannon – and I said that and I prefaced it with “it’s too late now” and I understand that but I do think that having community involvement is important.  P. Dillon – I do to.  R. Dohoney – it’s important but like I said earlier, these are educational curriculum decisions that need to be made by professionals.  The message I get from our community is that these are really quality schools, not what the particulars of it are.  The complaints are that they think we have really quality schools and they think we could have quality schools cheaper.  If that is true or not, I don’t know but that is the fight we really always have.  I think people might like the budget process a lot but we need to make sure we are delivering our quality schools at the right price.
  • Bradway – the think is for us in the vacuum here, what do the teachers and administrators view as being a quality school and is that out of time with budget concerns and community concerns around our budget. R. Dohoney – my big issue with the budget is not about the angst of a cut here and a cut there, we are like a decade into level-funded budget.  That means the program hasn’t changed.  People are saying you have to change the programs to cut and I don’t agree with that.  Also, the programs should be changing for the better.  I feel like we are caught in this jenga where nobody wants to pull a piece out because they are afraid it is going to result in cuts so therefor they are not moving any of the pieces and rearranging them to have a better quality product.  That is what I was hoping this process was going to be about.  If we are changing what we are doing, I don’t care if we cut a dime or not and I won’t cut a dime if it erodes from the quality.  If we get to a point that we have a more quality product and we are delivering sufficiently and saving money that is winner winner, chicken dinner.  P. Dillon – so we are blessed to have a whole bunch or people in the room so get ready folks, because I am going to put you on the spot but I am asking for feedback to some degree and, I am hearing part of it but I am constrained by my own limitations and my own blind spots.  I think there is a possibility that Sharon, Mary, Ben, Marianne, Kate, Steve or Christie or anybody sitting over here has something that would be helpful for them to hear and get and if you are open us doing a round of that I think that might broaden and explain what I might not be articulating completely.  S. Bannon – I am fine with that, sure.  I do have comment on what Rich said.  I told our charge was to you and what you have articulated is that we were looking at new ways of doing things, they may be cost neutral, they may cost more and we will have to balance it out somehow or they may be a way to save money.  I hope our charge wasn’t let’s try to do things differently so we save money.  P. Dillon – no.  S. Bannon – that would be really short-sighted.  R. Dohoney – but is has been said a thousand times over, that if these little cuts which are painful to go through and don’t really amount to much anyway, don’t amount to much.  The only way you are going to get real savings is if you have major programmatic changes.  So whichever way you are going at it…I think we need major programmatic changes so that in the future we can have a high-quality program.  Other people would say if you want to save money you have to make those changes, so it is the same conversation.  P. Dillon – I think all organizations that are dynamic and interesting evolve overtime.  If we keep teaching whatever, science, the same way we taught it 30 years ago, it is a problem.  A. Potter – I think when you articulate those kinds of values in terms of change, review and imagination, that you achieve a level of commitment and buy-in for the budget process that you don’t get when it goes from year to year.  Whatever it is that we hurry up and do and put on the table.  Instead you have an obvious problem even though it has been a thoughtful process.  It can be documented as a thoughtful process.  It can be communicated as a thoughtful process then you start getting commitment and buy-in.
  • Dillon – if it is okay, let’s quickly do a go-around and we will start with Sharon as she thinks about this all the time, then we will work our way through the principals, Kate, Steve, Josh.  One or two things that would be helpful for you from the School Committee or from the Finance Committee in the context of the budget process.  S. Harrison – Highlighting of the most important values for the district because I do think that while the School Committee isn’t the expert I think knowing that in advance would be very helpful.  The admin team can come up with a number of ideas, but when we talk about no sacred cows the first thing that came up in my mind was the art teacher that was recommended two years in a row.  It causes a lot of angst and it gets put back in so a clearer definition of what the values are for fine arts or math, or English.  That would be very helpful to us so we are not spinning our wheels when we come back.  S. Bannon – that is an interesting thing.  I have always believed and still believe that the education experts should be making the recommendations to us and I have said it more than once when we overrule the educators and experts then the process has gone completely haywire.  I really have problems with telling you what the sacred cows are because I am expecting you to tell me what we need and maybe what we have had for a long time and it is time to get rid of them.  I know the process doesn’t work that way at the end, or hasn’t but I think it should.
  • Mary Berle – From my perspective and what I am trying to make sense of based on the meetings that I have been to is what is on the continuum of cutting to courage around innovation. What are you really looking for?  Courage around innovation is exciting and I think our team can really embrace that.  I also need a good sense from you about what kind of budget we are proposing because if it is level-program, that is a different kind of innovation than if we are really just trying to do the best possible program that we can make.  Clarity around what we are delivering is really what I need to do my best work.
  • Ben Doren – Values are very important and I agree that we know because that is what we do but if can have some clarity on what your overall values are; that is important and essential. Having a three to five year vision would really make a difference.  Going year to year is difficult and I know that we have to make a budget every year but having a three to five year plan based on values would really help us as a team.  We have a really good team and can talk about this, so for me getting clarity on a three to five year plan would be huge.
  • Marianne Young – the only thing that I can add to what everyone is saying is that as we go through the budget process, we all keep remembering that while we are a K-12 district that each piece of the K-12 district is very distinct and unique in its culture, population, needs of students that it is a district budget so if we need to make cuts or adjustments or we need to rethink how we do things that it is not just the schools are not just the place where that is going to happen. I understand that the bulk of the revenue or the bulk of money that we are spending is in those three schools, there are maybe other ways that we could be thinking about how we offer and maintain or exceed the quality of the programming that we are doing now.  The high school is not the same as the middle school, the middle school is not the same and the elementary school.  The needs and the approaches to both teaching and managing the buildings are different so respecting that, paying attention to that and keeping a district prospective when it comes to where we are finding our resources I think is really important.
  • Steve Soule – my budget could fluctuate an awful lot depending on where we, and by we, I mean all of you, fall with regard to our extent you will want to start putting money into the high school. I know that we have talked about it a lot and obviously we have gone through the additional renovation process and we all know how that ended up but I feel that when I am in the Buildings and Grounds Committee meetings, we are continually bumping into that question “do we fix this and do it right or do we Band-Aid this because in five years, seven years, two years, ten years, fifteen years, we are going to make another run at a major renovation?”  I think a little more clarity around that would help me form by budget.  Also, while we are thinking about that we also have to remember the two “new buildings” are 12 years old now so things are starting to fail that need to be repaired and replaced.
  • Kate Burdsall – I will go with Ben who talked about the clarity of the three to five year vision for the school committee as I think about that in terms of my budget and what I am going to be presenting to you soon. I am looking at the program needs of special education from K-12 and I am doing a long-term vision right now and there is going to be an impact potentially for next year but then for several years beyond that.  I think being able to connect the vision of what I can see with our numbers and our trends and have that connect with your three to five year vision is important.  Dillon –that is really good and I am excited about that.
  • Joshua Briggs – as part of that vision it might be that the savings are more long term and there is a possibility of long-term savings and balancing that against short-term savings. As we are engaging in this reimaging process to not get caught up in the thought that when you look at your program, you think about how you can innovate part of that should be to look at things and recognize that we are innovating and that our staff has been innovating and doing remarkable work that we might investigate and say let’s keep doing that part of it; to make sure that we are not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
  • Kristi Farina – Josh actually took the words right out of my mouth. Mary talked about innovation being exciting and I think on behalf of the staff that is exciting but in context of the budget there is confusion in terms of what the expectations are exactly.  Are we looking at the work we do; figuring out where we can do better?  Certainly we are always doing that but to do that with a three to five year plan is exciting but it will take time and in the context of this budget conversation it feels like a time crunch so having you be aware of that and balancing that for us a little bit would help us to do better work.
  • Bannon – we started at the Great Barrington Town Meeting in May by promising we would look at everything in our budget and hopefully start with this year, so the pressure has been self-imposed and we all agree with that. I think that we have to do something this year.  Do we have to do everything this year?  No.  I think it can be a three to five year plan but I do think that we have to do something.  The other important part, and I won’t speak for the school committee, but I have not heard in any of the subcommittee meetings this year, that we have talked about a level-program budget.  P. Dillon – no we haven’t.  S. Bannon – but that word has been mentioned and just to be clear, every other year we have mentioned it in every other sentence so that is not right now on the table.  We have not asked the administration for that.  We have asked that you look at things in a different way.  P. Dillon – a thing I will mention in passing, at the Finance Subcommittee meeting Eileen almost cheered and I don’t often see Eileen do this and Steve made a pledge to not do any of this work in Executive Session and just be open and transparent.  I think that is admirable.  S. Bannon – in addition to what Andy said, we need to get the word out and we can’t get the word out from Executive Sessions.  A. Potter – that’s community outreach.  R. Dohoney – I just want to say one more thing in response to Christie.  At the end of the day, we can sit here and say that decisions need to be made by educators but the people get to vote on the budget.  I have always said that the public isn’t looking for cuts, they are just looking to make sure that are getting a good competent budget.  We need to have a process to get people to believe that.  That is why I was such a hard driver to complete the Finance Committee.  At least you have something to show.  Every year the budget has been bad and this long term process has been vetted and because people don’t understand why it costs so much.  If I wasn’t involved in schools, I wouldn’t understand either.  The thing that can undermine all of the great work that everybody does is when there is a flaw.  When there is a program that is being highly funded and isn’t be used by the students, or faculty that isn’t being used to their full potential.  That is the apple that spoils the whole batch.  If you have a good process, then it just building public confidence.  S. Bannon – the interesting part is, what I said was I am not going to make educational suggestions.  That is up to the educators but ultimately we get the last say in it and then the town’s people do with the budget but give the educators the first try at it because they are the experts.  You are right that the Town Meeting is the actual final say whether it is a good idea or not in their mind.  We have to respect that.
  • Fields – I agree with what Rich is saying. I am not going to say I disagree with anything you have said.  I think though that we are educators.  We are educating the public and in a sense that is just as important as what we listen to.  I don’t like the idea that we just have to…maybe it is because of Dan’s and my background, he is in current education and I am a former one, I am not sure if we should just say let the professionals tell us what to do.  I think in a sense we do have a duty to question and I think we are an intelligent group.  I am amazed in my years here, which haven’t been many, at the knowledge that this committee brings. I think we have a duty to educate the public and to explain to them, and I was just thinking of another idea of community outreach, I think we need more, I know nobody will come to them, but I think we need more community meetings in the towns.  Maybe one or two of us having a coffee hour and 5pm at the community with the Great Barrington representatives and the Stockbridge representative and an intermingling not just Great Barrington representative; have Rich come down to the Housie Dome.  Stuff like that because the RAC committee is really interesting because we are all distinct, and I asked myself last time, all of these people are really interested.  We had one person from Stockbridge who is a wonderful finance committee member who admitted “I am ignorant about some of this.  Can you tell me?”  You did a great job of explaining it and it was wonderful.  There is our education role.  I think we need to play a part.  We take what the professionals have said, we understand it, we filter it that is part of our roll, then we give it to the public.  We are the representatives of that budget.  We are not asking Christie to stand up in front of the three town meetings; that has to be us so we are educators in a sense.  The other thing that people have to realize when they are on the school committee is that they have to be educated.  They have to get on board.  They have to find out how the process works.
  • Bannon – just to be clear, I am not saying that when Peter proposes a budget we should vote 10-0 and not have any discussion. What I am saying is that Peter needs to educate us why this is a really healthy educational budget then we have to decide if that makes sense or not.  R. Bradway – you should be entitled to question that.  A. Potter – even though Peter is the authority we still have the ability to question that.  D. Weston – The most recent issues that caused lots of budget angst, I really never had all of the information I needed.  When administration is making a recommendation and I am saying how many people will be in that music class, how many people will be in that art class?  I never actually get that information.  I can’t vote efficiently and I make assumptions.  I have made right assumptions and I have made wrong assumptions but maybe I am just throwing the shot across the bow because I asked last time but I didn’t push hard enough.  The information has to be really accurate and really detailed.  P. Dillon – that is a really concrete thing that I and the administrators can do better.  Are there other things like that that will make things easier?
  • Dohoney – the second presentation we got on the second grade teacher situation was one of the best things I have ever gotten. R. Bradway – the detail we got from SPED was amazing.  There was hardly any discussion about that.  Having that level of detail.  B. Fields – I agree with you Rich.  When Mary stood up again that was on the day before.  R. Bradway – that was in the Finance Committee meeting.  B. Fields – it was the Finance Committee meeting in the student senate which was the day before we had to vote on the budget.  R. Dohoney – what I am trying to say though is that they were perceived that they were forced to give us cuts in the final stages of the budge process.  S. Bannon – we are doing things completely differently this year.  The Finance Subcommittee is meeting earlier and more often.  We are not waiting until December.  We are a new group.  This is only the third year of the Finance Subcommittee and I think some of the school committee members felt left out last year so I think everyone is kind of changing how they are looking at things and we can only be more successful.  R. Bradway – I am going to say something provocative.  Do we feel that we are getting the level of information from the administration that would be commensurate with laying expectations once budget dictates are being told to them?  I think one of the things last year and what we always have is we get all of this stuff saying how great it is that we want to do X, Y and Z and that is the blue sky approach and then there is the reality approach, so we have to consolidate a month’s worth of discussions into two weeks.  Unfortunately, we won’t put those discussions after the public input that we actually had them before the public input.  Do we feel we are getting that level of information?  Did the programmatic overviews do everything we wanted them to be so that we know come budget time where our problems are, where we have some opportunity to play with.  B. Fields – I just want to follow up Rich on what you are saying.  I wrote what Sharon said.  “Have we as a body, highlighted what our values and priorities are for our budget?”  Have we done that?  Do all of us know what our values and priorities of the budget are?  Have we had a discussion saying, ok, what are our values and priorities?  How important is the program of drama and arts K-12?  How important is science K-12?  R. Bradway – we could go back further to what Rich said how important is it that we are staffing things appropriately?
  • Fields – but what are our values and priorities? I think we have to come to an agreement or a consensus on what our values and priorities are.  S. Bannon – I don’t know if we can be that granular though.  A. Potter – you have to start at the ghost of Fred here.  You have to start where Fred has started in the past where he talks about “is it going to be a comprehensive high school or are we going to look at or can we afford the comprehensive high school?  R. Bradway – so like having three kids in an AP physics class.  Does that warrant having that teacher teach that class or do we push the administration to say there are these three other school districts that have a shortage of students in AP physical class is there a way we can consolidate those so that the kids are still getting the level or education that they want and need but we are not putting a bill for an excess person there.  B. Fields – then we are saying that we value AP.  P. Dillon – you might not muck around in AP physics but you might want to say as a school committee we have a strong preference…in the contract there are guidelines around class size and they are differentiated for different grade levels, you might say our strong preference is….already you know that you don’t want class size bigger than whatever it is, 20-24, you might be saying class size can’t be smaller than 10 or 8 or whatever the number is if it is then there needs to be a compelling reason.  R. Dohoney – there is a school district, I can’t remember which one it was that says a class size cannot be below what is approved by the school committee.
  • Bannon – I think we are doing things the opposite of what you are asking. I think we are asking Peter and Peter has offered to come to us with what his values are and what he thinks the school district should look like and it is up to us at that point, and it’s not going to be two weeks to decide whether we are in sync.  He is going to look at education and it’s not going to be this year, it’s going to be over three years.  It is not going all happen at once.  P. Dillon – importantly, even on my best day my values are wonderfully aligned with reality or the rest of the world but I can do a process so I work with principals and teachers and paras to come to some shared assumptions about what makes sense. S. Bannon – when I say to you, I am hoping you are representing the staff, administration and everyone else and if not, we have a larger problem.
  • St. Peter – I think we have to give Peter and the rest of the administration some budgetary guidelines because he needs from us what the budget is going to be. He could come with something that is ideal to give a great education system but it could blow the budget away.  So he is either making assumption on what we feel our maximum budget it or we have to give him some direction as to what that budgetary limit is.  I know it has been level service for a number of years but we have to ask him, without any guidelines, what he feels.  He is obviously doing it intuitively or he is getting some guidelines from somewhere what the budget it.  S. Bannon – the Finance Subcommittee at least is intentionally not doing that because we have done that.  It is the same thing we have done year after year.  Give us the best education you can give but make it at X percent.  That doesn’t work.
  • Weston – we didn’t do it every year. In the one year that we didn’t do that, they come in with the recommendation and we said too much.  We did it anyway.  We can’t budget without the reality of proposition 2 ½ and Town meetings.  I really hate to quote the person but I will.  Alan Chartock repeatedly says, politics, which is what we are, is the allocation of scarce resources.  That is what we always face.  P. Dillon – should we give people a quick update on the radar process as another tool in the toolbox or do we wait and do it at another meeting?  R. Dohoney – I would wait.  P. Dillon – ok we will wait.  There is a cool thing called Radar and we will talk about it at the next meeting.  A. Potter – Do like the idea of getting a fresh input that having some time then if there is a need…if politics is going to have a constraining effect on what comes from the administration, that’s our job.  Let’s see what comes first before throwing the constraints out.  That inhibits the possible.  S. Harrison – I have a question and maybe it is rhetorical but when you talk about the budget, when we get to that point, I just want to understand if you are talking about the increase to the budget or the increase to each of the towns.  That could be substantially different.  We have often come in with a budget at 2 ½ – 3%.  That’s the budget and then once we get…  S. Bannon – that is a balancing act.  S. Harrison – I think that is an important first step for me to know because if I am putting the numbers together based on these…S. Bannon – it needs to be well thought out.  R. Bradway – I think the priority at this point is to have an operating budget to see what is the increase to the three towns collectively.  I think if we are going to go down the road of saying let’s find a budget based on what one town wants, we are not getting anywhere.
  • Dohoney – we do this all the time. I didn’t think this was what we were doing here.  I want to hear, this is a better way to do Math at the high school and then decide.  Then if you tell me it costs too much, I’ll tell you we aren’t doing it because it cost too much.  That is what I thought this was.  Deciding how to cut stuff, unfortunately we are real good at that.  I haven’t voted on a program change since I have been on the school committee.  All we talk about is cutting, cutting, cutting.  I want to talk about education.  If it goes nowhere, it goes nowhere.  At least we tried.  S. Bannon – I think Rich is right.  I don’t want to build a budget around what the increases to the towns are.  I want to build a budget around education and hopefully we can afford the best education we can get.  If we can’t, then we have a problem.
  • Potter – what I tell my staff when they are developing plans is don’t compromise, don’t preemptively compromise. Compromise is inevitable as something goes up through an organization.  Don’t preemptively compromise then the compromise gets compromised then that continues as it goes forward.  I just leave that with you.  P. Dillon – just one last thing.  I would like to particularly appreciate the four teacher who came because like all of us who put in a long day, but to have them be part of the dialog in terms of our own internal communication is important and I am hoping that as we make sense of coming up with ideas and tweaking that there involvement will be really meaningful.  S. Bannon – I think that having staff here and at our subcommittee meetings is a way for them to hear firsthand what we are talking about.

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

Meeting Adjourned at 8:42pm

The next meeting is scheduled for October 13, 2016 – Regular Meeting –Monument Mountain Regional High School

Submitted by: Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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Christine M. Kelly, Recorder

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School Committee Secretary