good evening this is channel seventeen town meeting television and tonight we are doing one of our candidate forms cannonade moderations here and tonight my name is howard wooden by the way tonight we have two gentlemen who are unopposed for the south burlington school district i want to introduce the both of them and then give them to introduce themselves to you right here this is brian many are and he's running for the third year term and to his right is martin law and i said  to martin and he's running for the second year term are going to start with you i'll give you a couple minutes so the tell the south burlington citizens why you wanted to get into this and why why you want to be a school board member right i think it's more of not quite yet getting out of this because because this i've been on the board for nine years now and i'm running for the to your seat this time i've run for the three or seats the last three times  the main reason i'm running again is is for having continuity on the board i've been involved in a number of negotiations over the last nine years and next year will be a very interesting new negotiation because of how  the state is taking over negotiating health insurance so so i wanted to certainly be able to help with that and also we've been looking at what to do with our infrastructure master planning and visioning for it's been a few years now it started looking at the elementary schools and what to do there and then over the last couple years we've turned to really looking at the middle school and high school to see what kind of infrastructure improvements we need just to bring these fifty year old buildings up to snuff i don't think that's a technical architectural term but also look at what kind of changes can be made to the buildings to help for their education of our kids because the way we educate kids are a little bit different now in our building like i say was constructed fifty years ago so those are things that i really want to to see through and after two years off to decide if i will be coming back yet again but hopefully in the next couple of years we'll really have dealt with some of these issues i've been dealing with for a very long time nine years quite aware of brian what about your what your what your interest and why are you going after this unopposed even  a nine year old fourth grader at orchard and my wife is also back there in the darkness and disclosed age was also a product of orchard total in south burlington high school back in the day i married into this i'm a flatlander i grew up outside of pittsburgh  my wife and i started dating in ninety one which was the first time i came up to south burlington and came up a couple times per year after and in the late ninety's live just a few blocks from here in the old north and on manhattan drive after which she and i went to graduate school in madison wisconsin both first slavic languages and literature and both our kids were born while we were out there and just through beautiful serendipity she got a job teaching russian at the university in the spring of ten i guess it was so moved back to south burlington very pleased to be able to do so very lucky and have had a great time here since so just the opportunity now that my kids are a bit older to be able to do something for the schools that i really had a wonderful experience and for the community too so brian have you ever been on a board before is this your first experience of being on a school board it is my first one the first big volunteer experience too i would say is you know i coach my daughter's soccer team i've helped out a little bit in orchard you know the book fair at the school play but this would be the first time doing anything at all given the fact that you're going to be you know a fairly new to the to the board and you've got people like martin who have been on there for now nine years what do you think you're going to how are you going to approach your first  year or so on the board were do you see yourself well first of all learn a lot and i ask a lot of questions from my colleagues for whom i've been i have a lot of respect and i'm very impressed with how the board has been doing its business on the financial side of things the jobs that i had after graduate school at the medical foundation in wisconsin the g e health care i think gave me a good familiarity with databases spreadsheets you know working with these kinds of ideas on the financial side i think i'm on on firm footing but i actually think the more important part is the skills that i acquired during my academic time learning how to consume a lot of information dissecting arguments figure out what you want to do about it and presented in a way that people can understand sort of show your work as all of my math teacher said over the years you  too much right and so i really want to get in deep on that if i can without stepping on bridges toes so yeah martin when you talk about negotiation what has been your role in the past on  have you been heavily involved in the go shushan process as a board member and what do you see for the future what do you think is going to be going down especially with those changes in the state right i have  n for most of the negotiations the whole board is is at the table this negotiation session which we started in november and last negotiations session a couple years ago  had a negotiating subcommittee and it was the chair lizabeth fitzgerald and i two times ago or not the current time because it's current time i've i've i've just been supporting that somewhat but  historically with the teacher negotiation we end up at a point where the whole board is mediating or negotiating so so been involved with that but there's also other negotiations we do we negotiate with  a really big part of the job and not necessarily the most fun part because it is an adversarial process often but but that's fine you know that the teachers the staff the administrators though we sometimes have tough negotiations i think we are compensating our teachers and staff and administrator is very well and for a reason because we have excellent teachers and excellent administrators and excellent staff and that's why the school district does so well it'll be interesting next year because the way we've negotiated in the past it's a complete compensation package that includes salary and benefits and all  of a sudden the state will be telling us what one of the most important benefit there are other benefits that we still have on the table so it will narrow what our negotiation is and i'm not sure how that's going to go well let's see it'll be and certainly we're going to complicate and i think more complicated than it has been and i want to remind our viewers though that you can call into question at any time the number is eight six two three nine six six and we'd love to take think the key point is that it will continue to offer the programming to meet our students needs it will continue to provide i think the exemplary education that we provide that the community  expects it will continue to provide opportunities for professional development for teachers to make sure they continue to be some of the best teachers in the state so it does all those things it also does the necessary  facility maintenance that we need to have as we're waiting for master planning and visioning to tell us what else might be done so i think it's definitely going to keep our public schools  solve burlington being top notch and yeah there is a there is an increase in the budget and there is a slight increase in the property tax rate although it's still lower than it was a couple years ago i think that the board in the administration really in the budget they present to us after going through a citizen advisory process we were looking looking at the bottom line very carefully but there are a lot of cost pressures that are out of our control including health insurance increases the need for facility means additional needs that we are covering with our students the student population that we have there seem to be a lot more behavioral issues that we're having to deal with in the school and all those things cost more money but i think our community expects the product that we're producing and we're doing it in a cost that so far they've been able to support brian you're new to this what do you think about this year's budget proposal absolutely supported i first started following the school board more closely about five years ago when there was a proposal from the superintendent to put the fifth grade elementary school school kids right in the middle school started paying attention then and after that time started attending more school board meetings had the chance to see budgets developed and i have to say i've  impressed with the job that they've done i don't see any prophecy in what they're doing the negotiations as far as i can tell have been hard nosed as evidenced by one strike by an imposition i mean it's you know there's not a lot of fat there and so i think you also need to take a look back at the long term perspective and say over the past ten years the average annual increase has been about two point two percent or something like that this is not huge especially in a community as martin said that values its education so highly the other thing to remember is whatever a budget is built as i understand it you do it from the ground up so nothing is grandfathered over from the previous year there's no extraneous stuff that could be cut out you say do we need this this year and i think if you look at what was put forward this year you know maybe eighty percent of the budget is baked in in the form of salaries and benefits and so you really need to look at is ok what's being added and you look at the additions to this year's budget and to me they all seem quite defensible it's it's access for kids so it's adding three f t e is fairly elementary education at central or it is changing the nine pair educators to five special educators to better give access to our kids with special needs there just isn't a whole lot there that you can take much issue with i don't think once you get into sort of a line by line look at it so yeah i think it's a great budget and i think it's all done and as we start to look ahead at martin was also talking about the facilities and you start looking at your plants what do you think are the capital need to marry things that are going to be popping up that you paid their you know their school districts going to have to deal with and you know some of this is near term and you can see that covered by the bond that's going to be on the us on the town meeting ballot so most of that by i think about half of that bond is for upgrades to months and field which if you've been to a game there in the weather is cold you have to use one of the porta potties you would probably agree that improvements could be used for longer term it's sort of the pens i mean we're still waiting to see exactly how city center is going to shake out and what that's going to affect how they're going to affect central we're still waiting to find out about all of the noise measurements from the basing of the f thirty five at burlington international does that change does that change chamberlain meaningfully hit may i have been impressed over the time that my kids have been the district by how much people value their neighborhood elementary schools and what a sense of community is built around them and so partly for it to preserve that feeling but partly just to be fiscally prudent i hope that we can just improve the facilities that we have to get them up to speed for twenty first century learning i do not want to see if possible consolidating into some large you know mega elementary school off in the southeast quadrant so martin what do you think your perspective now taking a look at the syllabus in the future what do you what do you  well especially you are talked about the educational changes that so the when we looked at the elementary schools and whether to consolidate ultimately we decided really where we needed to put our emphasis and our money was at the high school in middle school we thought we'd get more educational bang for the buck by investing in those schools so we've been working with with an architect that also has a lot of expertise  in school construction have built a renovated schools in vermont in massachusetts we have a group of individuals on the including teachers and staff and community members a board administrators who have been looking at this issue with with the with the architecture and their experts experts as well so we've been looking at what we can do  with the high school middle school and we're going have a number of options which will be presented and we'll be looking at more closely and what we'll be looking at is again if we invest in a certain thing what is our educational return what is the return as far as just the school learning environment for students and that's the kind of things it's sometimes a little hard to really understand those benefits but but we want to as clearly as we can kind of match the benefits to what the cost  is and then determine how to go forward because it's going to be substantial it'll be a substantial bond that over the next couple years i would imagine we may be asking the community to support but the buildings are there a little bit tired they're not  they do need some work although it's not just the buildings really that that creates the culture of the school i mean it's the students it's the staff it's the teachers so i think it's still a very vibrant community but we could certainly have a upgraded facility well and that really was impressed with the idea that you instead of saying facilities or buildings you use the term infrastructure which i thought was great because i think that is kind of the way we need to start looking at it's not just buildings it's the infrastructure all the way through and that to me seems like a change in the approach is we're not just looking at facilities we're looking at the entire school system you know we're trying to see how this whole corn i think is very impressive i think you know this is going to be a little controversial but it's on it's one of the questions and i wanted to talk to both of you a little bit about racial bias and those things that are happening you know the state i think is still dealing more work continuing to deal with a lot of those issues and and where do you think south burlington stands in where do should they can be going with this start with the right i mean it's a work in progress right and so i think it was about half a year ago we were looking at one of my wife's old pictures from when she was an orchard elementary school and we compared it to my daughter's picture from her second grade year and the difference was right there you know the community has become more diverse and i'm glad to see that reflected in what's happening in our schools i mean it's being embraced early on in elementary school by having days where you celebrate different cultures the kids the posters about their countries there's different food served and so just at the low level it starts happening and then as you get up into the middle and high school curriculum i do believe it's being addressed more in language arts and social studies classes this notion of diversity what does that mean why is it important  just recently obviously the choice was made by the students there was just this you know it was the student diversity and to request the flying of the black lives matter flag the administration and the board agreed to that and i agree with that decision i think it's important to have these conversations i don't think you to see that choice as a political one but rather as an issue of civil rights you can say it's black history month but this isn't just history these things continue to happen they continue to happen and they're affecting what's going on right now so i think the issue of racial bias is a real one i hope it's being mitigated and mediated somewhat just by the fact that we're becoming more diverse and more aware of these issues but i'm very glad that the students brought this up and that the board and the administration supported them and wanting that really started with retiring the rebels name you know respecting the alumni who were rebels but but understanding going forward that it was no longer appropriate and that really came i give the credit to our administration and  the students i mean the board the way we work our policy governance is what it's called is we really defer to the experts the administrators in the school and they were saying for instance that  name was not working it was excluding students it was making students uncomfortable and we fully supported that change and i think the next step in this really the student justice union has really been historic implicit bias that we see so are we have staff and teachers being trained we have implicit bias training so that it's really trying to build the understanding that there are these  biases and that we need to deal with them to have as equitable offering to our students is possible and we will continue to look at this it is it is a statewide issue and i know that the house has passed a bill that is going to create a group to help come up with an inclusive ethnic diversity curriculum and trying to have us understand that there are more stories than what we've been telling and explaining over the over the past decade so so that will be an improvement as well that will take a little time but it's something we're dealing with and i think we recognize it and we are  trying to improve the situation i want interesting is that why it's almost the rest of the state south burlington school population can to is either you know continues to go up or at least level off versus the rest of the stay which seems to be in somewhat of a decline for students and what do you trigger that the two were very fortunate in that way that's true of our population is increasing somewhat our student age population too and so these forces that you see in other parts of the state to consolidate schools  really don't feel them here and partly it's just such a vibrant interesting community lots of fun stuff to do i mean there's a reason my wife and i were delighted to come back here it's partly because she is from here and partly because it's a great place and so you put that together with job opportunities the best schools in the states and you have a critical mass and people want to come here and i'm glad it is sparing us some of the pain that you're finding elsewhere yeah yeah i mean people are coming to south burlington in part four for the schools that we have and but also there's a general demographic trend of urbanization in rural schools are where we're suffering the biggest decreases people are moving to urban areas including south burlington where they have the infrastructure where they have the infrastructure where they have the offerings where we have the opportunities and that's that's a big part of it as well is that we have the critical mass to have an excellent offering to our students what do you anticipate five years from now you may not be on the board anymore but you know where do you see what are they going to be the issues that you think this this community is going to have to deal with in five years but i think we see some of the same trends already we've we've been dealing with  mentioned behavior issues i think it's more of an understanding of aces and i'm going to probably forget exactly what that stands for adverse childhood experiences that's what it stands for and there's increasing awareness of trauma and how it affects children but there's also and this is been a trend for a while and i see it continuing that that we need to educate to the fullest extent every student that comes through the door it's not like that in the past where students could find a manufacturing job or can make a living we need to get them set you know can be a vocational job but we really need to pay attention to every student in maximize their opportunity to belittle and i don't see that all of a sudden change in five years i will see i will think that by then we will really be hitting their stride as far as personalized learning plans proficiency based graduation all these initiatives that have been starting over the last few are first class that will be graduating on proficiency based graduation requirements will be next year but there are there are kinks to work on on that and i think in five years will unless the state has completely e for the students to achieve that you talk not just about what are the skills and yes that's part of a personalized learning plan but you talk about the whole student like a disposition for lifelong learning what kind of a citizen are they going to be and so you're kind of doing things on both ends right you're trying to get kids in when they're three four five and doing the early education you're trying to open it up as widely as you can to people with different abilities and make sure that everybody gets the best education they can and then you're trying to turn them into a person who can not only find a job but who has meaning in their life and who can help their community and so i love the way that it's designed to agree with martin that the p o p is are a work in progress it was a little bit bumpy when we had our first meeting with our son's teacher too but it does seem to be coming together i like the idea that you're measuring actual skills that students can produce rather than you know time that their boat was in the seat right i'm very hopeful i really think the district is on a good course and i hope to continue you know i didn't come into that axe to grind or anything i want to help the good work continue let me i'm going off book a little because i think you guys can help me and others understand why what do you why can't we keep graduates here in vermont after they graduate from high school why w slow well i i think it's important to try to have opportunities for kids coming right out of college i'm more focused on trying to bring families back right brian came back when they have have children you know if there are opportunities in vermont to have students stay here that's great but i'm you know i'm not trying to tell my own kids that you  to stick around and say you know go out and find yourself in the world but come back when you have grandkids for me you know i say and so so i think that that's you know so i don't consider that a huge problem frankly i mean we do need to work on our workforce and that's a whole other separate issue and we do want to be very attractive to have families you know come come back from it we've got a couple of minutes left her less than a couple minutes the is there anything you'd like to leave the citizens and the final staving you'd like to make so before that which i will get to just a quick follow up on martin yes but i talked to david young a couple of days ago one of the ideas that i talked to him about that i was most excited about is this big picture project they have at the high school is the only one in the state where kids i think just in the last two years can partner with local companies like logic supply that is an industrial design firm and they can have almost like an internship experience in high school get great skills possibly have a job lined up afterwards i think that's one way you keep people around is get them lined up ahead of time like make a pipeline to these local businesses so that's one thing i'm super excited about in terms of a sum up i'm just pleased to be given the opportunity i love how the school's been running i want to keep them running and our pleasure to have you and so i want to urge voters to make sure you go out and vote on election day and that channel seventeen will post this this month at this forum on its website and you can find this and many other forms on the channel seven home seventeen hometown television website thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time