each of the elementary schools within the supervisory unit we spent the better part of the last year working on the details of what the structure of a merged district would look like and so the purpose of tonight's meeting is to really give everyone a little more and so we'll take you through that time last night what we did was if you have a clarifying question as we're going along not an opinion but like a question that might be really helpful at this time go ahead raise your hand and we'll try to answer that we're going through it we've done this so many times now or i haven't done it but seen it so many times that it's all make sense to us and some of it may not make sense to you guys and that's funny that's why i want to ask the question so here  voluntary merger study committee who are we today this is the first slide and what we're talking about is trying to make sure that everyone is on the same page about how big our district is all the different towns that are involved we have five towns six elementary school districts that are pre k through four one union school district which is five to twelve that's two thirds of our students forty five elected school board members the c s u board of talk a little bit more about that later is twenty i want to point to people from that forty five so there's eight school boards eight separately approved budgets were comprised of the six elementary schools two middle schools and high school we have a central office fifteen thousand plus residents and to twenty five hundred students would be bold and coming to jericho richmond underhill ideally underhill town and they all have their own school district that we have them out mansfield using the school district again covering about two thirds of the students that we serve where we all work together to work on budgets policies and activities for that group that we possibly have to chip in to if supervisory union which encompass is a lot of the other shared services and that would be transportation negotiations special education and central office like human resources services that we all share along with that so all of these guys are the boss of the superintendent of schools who then is in charge of the principals is in charge of the teachers and support staff the superintendent is in charge of finances special education curriculum personnel and federal projects and then you and c e o s you have committees to try to help do the work that they needed to do especially to work together all of this has been wieldy to work with and i just want to give an example having started on the m n u board i got assi directly to policy for m m u on that committee and policy we have to chair that chair would listen to us about policy and then go meet with all of the other groups and bring our thoughts to them they want to talk about what they wanted for the prostate to bring it back i read it and then you and we could go on like that back and forth and back and forth with one person in between until somehow we ended up sort of agreeing on whatever policy it was to be able to pass it once we would pass it would have to be passed in each different district and i remember we had a federally mandated policy on bullying it took over a year and by the time we got to the point of a year the department of education decided well this is the way the policy is going to look anyway so thank you for writing that book this is now what you need to do so one of the things that i worked with john and couple of other people on was to change the way we did stuff to try to improve  on each committee at the same time we also had to convince all the people who worked on the policies that we were all going to now meet together as one and once we decided on the policies instead of passing them back and forth in we would go back to have a little bit of information bring it back for a final approval from that one committee and then have the executive committee approve it so that took a year to get everybody on board with that idea and it was restored resisted all of these boards can still no matter what we pass as a policy as a federally mandated legal probably one of these four is can decide to change them words those words could be important to a lawyer especially if we have some more central office employees that are going from desk from school district to district and that means they may be under a different policy depending on where they are so even though we've tried to change things we still have something that is very unwieldy very difficult to get everyone on board very difficult to get everyone to a meeting to make the changes at the same time i just wanted to illustrate that because that's been as the chair of the policy it's been a big work of mine and i'm happy to clarify with that with anybody later so that we would like to do the idea would be that all the towns would be sending representatives to one district court and this board would do the work and then the again in charge of the superintendent of schools who's in charge the principal principals of the teachers and support staff so that will streamline a lot of that work which might get things done past so where i'm at right now is that we have a choice between a unified union school district and the preferences that everybody who's been all together through m m u all of the towns be together in this new board which would be a unified union school district we have the option of a modified being a school district single board would oversee all the district schools have all the yes and that would dissolve all the existing school boards but if one or two of the towns vote no using their prerogative there is a modified union school district that would be created the towns voting no keep their elementary school boards in the modified union or it governs all the other schools this is where it gets complicated and we're happy to explain a little bit more about that how it looks but the idea of the premises is that if there is a town that's not reading the doesn't want to be part of that this is the law that we're functioning under allows them to do that and they'll still get taken care of so we created a committee and a committee has representation from all the different towns this is just a review of who's on the committee  hands oh and then bill from under cali thank you yes so meetings in studies on now we did this phase one we've done this before with the study for consolidation it started in two thousand and ten but the idea of merging has been around way longer than that and i remember when i first came on the board there were some papers speaking passed around the talked about all kinds of reconfigurations people have been sort of looking at the idea of how we can combine and do things better for a long time so it's not exactly a new idea it's just been gradually gaining more prominence i think throughout which slightly sharon and throughout you know the pressures that have been going on with us financially too so we have the one and then this one is our in our voluntary merger planning committee and had twelve public meetings seven community forums and we have and had a head of oh that's right that was the one from previous and our current one were on either twelve or thirteen there's two forms tonight of the fourteen community forms our state board of education did approve our plan to do this we have a vote scheduled for november fourth if for some reason we don't answer your questions today you got one more chance to have a some middle school which meant more questions so should we unite are we better together and we try to divide up the so the answer this question in students taxpayers and community we believe on the committee generally fourteen to one that we can do better for students this way  a pre k through twelve unified education decisions and that means that everybody at the table is looking at the needs of all of our kids at the same time right now it's divided it's divided in your age groups and it's divided by your town so if everyone is together we can prioritize what we need for our kids together one example is that if the m m u level when we see a problem and we have seen some problems and we ask our leaders what would be the answer to try to improve to try to budge this issue of in this case it was our scores still aren't budging in terms of the kids who are not meeting  standards specially in a free and reduced lunch and one of the answers was we need better pre k we need to be putting more effort down at the bottom and we all looked at each other and said well we're not in charge of that we can't do anything about that and each town gets to do it the way they want to separate equity or equality and programs this is another thing that happens town to town we were just listening over at huntington they have a special writing program that was recommended for all the towns to start in the elementary schools three of the towns could fund it through the schools and three could not so not every school is offering the same things based on what they can afford out of their budget and as we all know those budgets are getting tighter and tighter so things that may be a great thing to afford can't always be afforded we have one budget we fund priorities and use our resources wisely we will still be looking at each building and each line item it's not like it's going to be one budget that wouldn't break that down administrators that can focus on teaching and learning as we showed you before right now the superintendent has forty five bosses and i have been in a meeting where one of the other board chairs said oh and have you done something about this thing that i asked you and then another one might be saying are you done something about another thing that i've asked you and that we can poll our administrators our content at many different directions and that makes it difficult for them to spend their time on learning sharing stuff right now we have a limited amount of share of staff that we can share and one of the things that happens is that even if we share them from building to building they're in different payroll units they're being paid by different entities so it's not like you can call up and say i need something today can you send this person over today it has to be sort of pre planned and we do have about seven employees i think there was that are shared in that way but they have specific contracts that that that clearly delineate how much time they spend in which district or which school innovation that's another thing i was getting very frustrated about i go to a lot of conferences where we hear about these fantastic ideas about innovation is the brand new types of schools are types of schooling but when i look at our system and i say well how stop going to have to know we don't have enough of it in one school and we can't get all of the schools together to be able to create this innovation we just don't have the structure to allow that to happen so if we have one system focused on the continuous progress of our students that's the structure that allow a lot more conversation about where we want to take our students where we want to take our schools because we'll have everybody at the table and we'll be looking at albany this is an example from friends middle school principal and these talks about this this now and you can read it but it's basically what i was talking about with the policy committee it's very difficult to navigate and very resistant to change to move and change so the proposed mark model is a much more streamlined model and it will be able to be much more versatile movie able to once we decide to make some changes to get them going quicker about forty four million this year how it's divvied up between the districts some quick math would would show that the smaller the school population the higher the school districts spending per pupil because all those districts are supporting at least one one building a film or another thing to point out is that there is a pretty good chunk of cost that is managed and decided at the supervisory union level that's about seven million dollars this year that budget covers those central services like transportation special education and the central office administrative costs and they get assessed down to the individual school districts based on some pre determined methods thing so a little bit about this from a good perspective about right can you know the camera taxpayer of all saw on aid budgets but every taxpayer does vote on to give you your vote on your elementary school budget and then you vote on the menu budget and then you asked your your elected officials to vote on that supervisor you union budget they get allocated out so with this merger for each district that joins you'll be asked to vote on just one budget that covers all costs from pre k to twelve  having that one budget that does save we think a lot of time effort and money that we do that we spend right now aligning on decisions diane already mentioned is on the benefits of sharing resources not only is not a benefit to the students but we also feel that it's a benefit to the taxpayer to flow from an aspect of really optimizing the cost of those resources spend just a little more time on this one about this excess  smallest districts right now are either impacted or close to being impacted by what's called an excess spending threshold and that's a line in the tax formula that says if your per pupil spending is above a certain threshold any cost over that they're going to double and count that against you so it's it's literally a penalty for having a high per pupil spending come out and that when focus more energy on i can we spend more wisely also this merger brings opportunities for cost efficiencies and other savings to the last two ball it's very important understand how they deal with the the state tax incentives ok so this merger is being done under a law that really encourages districts financially to do this there's two incentives one of them is tax rate stability and yes and so that step tax rate stability is for the first four years this this incentive is over a four year type period for that first four years of your tax rate cannot go up or down by more than five five percent now five percent hopefully is a big number year to year but when you look historically recently and on my district the last two years we would be gracious if we only had a five percent increase last two years have been closer to the temper said than the five percent the other part of the incentive is that the tax rate would actually just come down right off the right of the start so if our tax rate were a dollar fifty the state would would assess us down to a dollar forty two that first year just an eight cent reduction and then for the next three years that reduction would taper off and that fifth year after the merger there would be no plus or minus five percent and there'd be no instead of a back to where we are today the average of all these rates is around one fifty ok that's what it would be if we had this in place this year what we would see has the actual tax rates if this were in place this year are shown here here's the percent change doesn't change text year very this is like just looking at today's dollars we don't know what's going to happen next year ok all we know is that if we do emerge we're going to be benefited by these two incentives one is our tax rate won't go up by more than five percent and the other one is our tax rates will be reduced by eight cents ok so there are some serious incentives by the state to encourage this merger incidentally the actual budget for five plus or minus five percent is for four years that each year we lose two cents on the tax reduction so it tapers off thank you and so the third perspective that we looked at is from the perspective of the community ok there's a theme or out accountability so the more boards you have you feel the more good fusing it is and more difficult it is to really know which board to talk to about what what orders accountable for which item in the school this will certainly simplify that if there is one board that's the board you go to there's also some precedence that's been set for about the last fifty years we've all worked together  just for grades fifth or twelve ok so it's worthwhile generally speaking we feel pretty good about the current avenue we think we can we can do just as good with our pre k through fourth grade fourth  around and the key comment there elected by all so all of our members would feel like did we would be getting rid of that appointed board that is appointed by elected officials and then the last bought around meaningful local control so what that means is by having this simple fight structure where you have that one board accountable we feel that could actually give you more meaning of local control because you know who is getting what  school board thirty plus fifteen that's a total of forty five school board members that we have today will be we're eliminating those boards preserving this board same representation by the way is what we have now would be what would be in the new new board would also be we would have the need for this additional point to board at the supervisor union level and i want a new board we need to form and organize and figure out how they're going to run there's  committees have to be represented by all the different boards so if there are six boards or a ports you know you have to have at least that many people on these committees with this board with this new board we may not need you know that many people are more or may decide to put that many people off but we do expect will be still executing with debates so i don't think this is one of our last charts just to talk to some of the things that i've done by our school board so far school board representation as well as community representation on the merger committee has given this report of approval fourteen of the fifteen folks on the board voted in favor of it then the school boards have met recently at least the five year passed a resolution or voted to publicly support this merger none of the boards none of the only for school boards more of them there's two things i have forgot to say when i was doing my slides and i just wanted to make clear about that when we talk about the ability to share staff one of the things that's come up is we have two sets of schools in either side of the district down to richmond and up in the jericho underhill area we've got a middle school and it elementary school next to each other they can't share maintenance staff they can't share lawn mowers they can't share things that are part of their separate budget and that's just based on the structure that we have and we think that's unfortunate we'd like to be able to make that work better this is a structure that could make that work better also when we get to the idea of local control people have different concepts of what local control is certainly one i came into this i thought when people were talking about local control they meant local control of their budget but i think people are are pretty much on the same page that if you like in terms of jericho the amount of budget that you actually controlled by your own int was about twenty percent because we're all tied together with all of the things that we share that we have expanded first of all one and so like even if you were to cut personnel the actual  salary is dictated by the group in other words the entire c s u so you just want to make sure that we're clear about that that other people may have a different idea of what local control is but in terms of the budget each elementary school owns about to people here who have this is not your first information meeting it's probably not even your second third fourth or fifth and you've come here to share some of your own comments and i'm sure we all appreciate that and some of you this may be your first information meeting and you've come here with some very specific questions that perhaps we haven't answered some of you may just be here to absorb some of you may have may get questions along the way what i'm going to try to anyone would like to respond to that question or give you an opportunity to to an extent that you know we don't keep saying the same thing over and over again of course but as i feel like that question has been you know addressed so what else with another question you don't ask him to talk about topics but i'd like to if you could for me the first part really focused on getting questions trying to get good answers to them and then moving to sharing of additional information or opinions so i see mr along the way i understand along these incentives that you spoke about exist to motivate people in our situation to basically develop their own consolidation plans but the agency of education folks come up earlier have an agenda around school district consolidations and i've always heard that once the incentives are gone there's still a possibility that the you know people in our situation haven't done anything or haven't taken you know for committee are taking steps where they can be essentially told how to consolidate so just wondering if if that's your understanding of the law from accurate and if we go into this modified supervisory union situation if there's a possibility four years down the road or five years down the road that my pillar can come along and say well that's just ridiculous you know the other two towns are one town have to jump on on board it's really unfair question and like the willing as long as the majority you know one small town can't prove it can't prevent everybody else from doing so you know the law at this point is this it's a voluntary merge now in the last session perhaps a mandatory merger and there is no doubt in my mind that there will be mandatory mergers and that this is our last chance to do it our way ok and the state of the state has committed to console the schools two hundred seventy seven school districts are too many in their prime target is small schools that are not mean this is the prime kind of target this law was largely written with kidneys and money and so there i mean there was no doubt you are right there will be mergers in the house says we don't know what will happen the house passed the entire bill that we were exempt from we would have been exempt from because we were getting this process  children but i have three children through elementary school middle school and i just have a question and maybe this is just tearing up a teacher to student ratio change and there's very little options for school districts to change the ratio with sometimes having a really large family garden or a really small can be garden and a merger would provide some options so we could take answered that also we do have a policy on minimum class size there's a policy a maximum class size minimum a minimum the maximum and so that's been in existence already our ability to meet that and it here to that varies basically because of our schools and then we have some schools where there are combined grades to try to meet that so we still  and the reason for that is remember i saw your tax rate can't go up or down more than five percent from the previous year ok so your basis for that calculation is the tax rate this year for next year which means these guys are not under help there and can only go up or down five percent next year but because their rate was so long already this is the the actual like rate that it would come to so their rate would only come down to one one point seven you well know that everybody's cordie how this formula works and i've run a lot of different analysis on it it's built to make it so that every district gains some financial benefit or set the other way around there are no losers that's how these incidents are designed so that every district went because history would say that for those of you can say george c george are now starting up and down history say if there's any district i would never lose it's very difficult to get a murder to pass so these incentives are put into place to make it so that we can eventually converge on one tax rate in all the same five years from now w tax rate one carry on common level appraisal is at the community level but the common level of appraisal on the property tax values really don't factor into budgeting and how this calculation works that's just to make we don't actually use the if the term is an effective tax rate term for the homestead tax rate this is the right name and this is what it is this year right and if we were under one taxpayer and i want to know about the effect of the income sensitivity short because it seems to me of that anybody who gets a rebate is not going to be affected by so call as a one to or go to another and use the word estimated it's giving us too much credit this is really just an example with some figures because we don't know what the tax rates are going to be next year we don't know what the budget is going to be next year we don't know at this stage it's going to do for how you know how of probably someone in their own that doesn't know what that means what that means is as a taxpayer you have a choice of either paying your property tax based on your property value or your income if your income falls below ninety thousand dollars or you can pay as a percentage of your income ok on the incentives to manage that as well so the income sensitivity percentage will also be governed and set of eyes for that plus or minus  percentage it's all it's all based on the tax rate the income sensitivity percentage is a result of the tax rate so the same thing applies ok unless anyone else school has some very expensive you know sports teams to support they are always coming forward with in their budgets to my way of thinking you know big infrastructure expenditures which no matter schools don't typically have to shoulder and it's not clear to me when those get merged how that conflict and we but we have one community of children and we don't look at you know the entire community of children from pre k through twelfth grade and decide you know what are the iceberg so we as a community didn't get just to decide whether football or expanded pre k was more important each teacher of the game board is optimizing their situation as opposed to optimizing the budget as a whole with the new board we're going to have one more to fifty people who are responsible for all of the children and all of the spending and be able to look at all the priorities and come up with a single you know it's single list and i think that tension will be the board's job is  resolving that but this for now for the first time will have everybody involved in the decisions in one room at one time and not off in the various corners kind of optimizing their situation i think if you look at him you know which was created hundred sixty s we merged grades first period seven through twelve and then grades five twelve into one district you know strong academic performance compared to other schools in the state there's twenty union high schools in the state going to twenty fifth and spending per pupil so the merger has created an environment where we are able to prioritize and i think make good investments at m m u level if you look at our six elementary school they're above average in the state for standard and i think by looking at everything together we can do a better job of avoiding it you know there's a lot of ways you can save money i mean this is again simple things we have elementary schools and little schools you know two hundred feet from each other and don't share maybe it stars don't share nursing staffs because there are different budgets with you know with different borders and i think we can over time you know we've got this really really into schools and we have a high school among mansfield we're already balancing some children who are technically elementary students five six years in the they're not sure exactly where you're going to do what you were going for is that the needs of the youngest and the tiniest children will be missed from that is that where you were thinking i wasn't thinking one way to go the the investment we make in the early years is what we read in the old if you're in the in the later years and so in their environment and their education and i think that that's a balance that we will constantly striving for because we can't shut off  people feel about that so we like to respond to that i was actually talking to somebody just yesterday with a very same question and one of the thoughts that we had was why dissolve the elementary school boards just because we're merging into this larger district these advisory boards could still exist and people are really focused on these kids and could be a group could be some kind of advisory board to the membership of the different things that they do and so we try to celebrate those differences and then see where some of them can work together and change over and get one thing from another which when i answer something  fourteen years decade at central office and one of the most impressed with across the board has been the ability to talk and to solve problems and you know they do that all the time they never talk about  town or a particular subset of students they talk about what's best for everybody and the level of equity and the menu is it's clear and and  it's not that way across all of our elementary schools i know a lot of that has to do just the pressure on the budgets and i think diane used a couple of examples where we've had we have this curriculum a great  curriculum and it has a great scope and sequence and it's coordinated but if you don't have the resources to implement it then it's not worth anything and so those are some of the challenges that we've had over the last five years in a number of system  you can't you get in the economy of scale you do and there's a lot of research out there if you want to look at schools as districts that would be like this unified district and it goes like this your proof per pupil cost go down go down go down go down go down and then they start to go up at about four thousand students we're not talking about anything like that you know this is twenty six hundred involved parent and community member work and i think in small schools we can we have we can blur those lines and when you look at what is school board work in it may not be on that same level but there's plenty of room for and we have been celebrating for years are committed parents and community members who are involved so if we're talking about changing the color of the paint we're talking about what needs to be added to the playground community member teams can be involved in that and they can bring those decisions to the board if it's a budget thing that we need to act on a lot of that stuff can happen without the board i grew up in montgomery county maryland we had a county wide system  had more students in it than we have in the state of vermont we were just as involved in our schools because they were our local schools and our parents were and we did the same sort of work that needs to be done here also when i started sending my kids here i never went to the board but i sure went to the principal for everything i wanted to see happen or change and things did and i never had to go to the board to get a lot of the changes so we have to be careful what is our work and where is the room for community members and parents to still contribute and if for some reason we needed to add something you know the structure of that exists that we're talking about here is is a structure it doesn't say that the end result won't involve other community people or groups that might be influencing board work if it doesn't preclude that you question twenty articles a peer reviewed research actually thirty thirty twenty whatever it is where are they where is the peer reviewed review article of the twenty eight articles have a bias and you look at research confirmation bias is almost unavoidable but on top of that it's all this information is secret everybody else so now there's confirmation bias and secret knowledge yeah i don't know if there's a specific question but i think you have an opportunity here about sure i mean your specific question so i did a literature review for a doctoral program and the question that i looked at was does school district consolidation literature view i admit my my bias and i talked about how i would control that and so what i have done is i posted i think twelve peer reviewed journals that i think qualifies you that i talked about with you recently on our website so i am in favor of the merger but i also went and did some of the research to see do am i making a qualified statement and i can say yes i am because i looked at school districts similar to chyna nice to see what does it say and that's what i found twenty one years ago twenty second near here and lived in the house that we moved out to the granted for a while and still live there now and my husband was your superintendent that's the reason for coming here for eleven years and he's been a superintendent to other districts in the state as an interim till they found a new superintendent and i started visiting the girder committee meetings because i was curious as to what they were going to be talking about because the last time this went through i knew nothing about it until maybe about a month four weeks before as a vote and i was surprised that i hadn't heard anything if there was even any such vote coming up so i thought i would just start visiting and see how the process work and i decided i needed to be there every damn good every time they met because i feel i'm the opposite side so i felt like i was representing the no votes of the past and possibly the no votes this time around so i have a cover letter here just to introduce what is inside with the boss and i'll read as quickly as i can and i hope i don't take up too much time and regulations require the central office of the s use those of the supervisor unions to provide development for teachers and curriculum improvements and support for all the schools better within that supervisor to not only insist not only is this the yes you to provide professional development for teachers and curriculum innovations and improvements but has the authority to budget for the so giannini supervisor union they can budget for improvements and they're also not just coordinating things but they have the other to implement them to help the school supervisory union will continue to provide services to all districts under their su with or without a merger because that's the function of the supervisory union they don't have a choice that's why they're developed doesn't matter how you vote for a mob law requires the yes you to provide advice at that sorry all schools pay their fair share as for these mandated services this arrangement is a legal requirement now and it will be the same will happen if it's a modified union and there was a town or two voting out that's in their proposal a copy of this legal mandate this included with this cover letter we have highlighted some of the important directives that's me and my husband but i wrote this  skip down to that last sentence we have now been ysu provides for unity and sadistic this is always in the top ten of the state and i believe it's eight out of town of the top districts in the state and i know them or by aware of that have studied it have declined they voted no and the towns that vote no are going to be able to keep their board and their very important school boards with legal authority on are and we have them and we work really well together and the screens are not fighting and they're not worrying about you know anything like that so look quickly on the next page judy so the supervisor union or i'm not going to go over all of these duties of the board of each supervisor a union that's ours as c e o s you establish a supervisory union a wide curriculum it's the duty to do this by either developing the curriculum or assisting the member districts of development jointly and ensure implementation this is a new the last couple years on the books still that not only are they going to coordinate that they should coordinate this and develop a district than consider all the kids from kindergarten all the way through and we have this and we have a committee that brings the teachers together from the different schools and striving to equalize the opportunities in each school rest provide following services for the benefit of the member districts in a manner that counts if there should be some kind of can't find the exact words but every district within the supervisor union has to be treated to sa are all equal members and this is our c e o over here and he would like to do some of these projects to develop the curriculum and all that and so i want to read one more thing khan contracts that man include terms facilitating arrangements between and among districts to share services of teachers we only do about with seven people now chris says you should do it with anybody as many as you want administrators and school personnel so we can share time and you didn't have a chance to say anything in the in the meeting so the committee meetings superintendent should be the chief executive officer for the supervisor union board for each school board within the supervisor and shall carry out the policies adopted by the school boards relating to educational and business affairs and everything that we do and he should prepare for the adoption of the local school board plans to achieve the educational goals established us and that means k through twelve curriculum and everything else and this is really important number three i said this last night not reading last and i didn't know this is the answer to a question or a criticism coming from one of the board members not on not on honey mean underhill but some from from some other school districts nominate a candidate for employment by the school district or supervisor union if a vacant position and couriers it has to be a licensed person it's a field of slot the teacher slot and if the board likes that candidate seems to meet their fit then they'll approve it and sign but the board chooses your teachers and you will lose that and this person that criticize that said no the superintendent or the administrators choose the teachers know this is the law and i knew it was like that and even some of the board members know it was like that but they were silent report all financial operations prepare for each district itemize report deal that this is a really important repair for the each district an itemized report detailing the portion of the proposed supervise union budget for which the district would be assessed for the subsequen identifying the component cost by category of an otherwise they have to repair of a report for each district now and they will still have to do that for the in districts that vote no  and that's going to be a real problem because we have to have representatives we still belong to any new we have to have representatives on that board we'll pick our own board but we won't be able to vote on the whole thing or everything they talk about because we're not part of that if we vote no and we're not part of that and that will make for the first time that we've ever heard of this having second class citizens on the more than five minutes a little bit and then ask everyone to try to respect this because i would like to have some dialogue back and forth but since that kind of took a good chunk of what i want to ask you is if somebody would like to open up another jericho i've been a resident for about twelve years before that seventeen years i'm rich but both of my grown sons have gone to the school district from as the superintendent hires the principal but he's going to do it based on feedback from the committee as well and the board and the process was much more sense of that i thought was going to be where we asked students teachers parents and school board nd then you at the same thing goes on with principal hires is there is a committee made up of parents and teachers who do review the candidates and they do that first before they involve the border and then also a personal committee and there's a personnel committee that will help review it so that all sides get to weigh in on what that community needs in terms of a fit for the teachers for the students and then and then the board just sort of weighs in on just the wider community and you know i do want to say that i can see some concerns about having board hiring teachers in our day and age especially when you think about it from a human resources and negotiations and contract and about kind of you know perspective that gets me a little swirly but a lot of other places what they do is they they hear the list of new hires as a board and they approve them and that that is another way that many other boards throughout the state may do it and the and the approval is just  an acknowledgement but that the people who are evaluating the qualities of the of the teacher in the qualifications should be are the people we delegated to which our superintendent by by the board one at a time and right after the thirty one left board with the principle was we would sit down and we would decide this is our first choice is or say third now a couple years i think it worked well that tunis cannot have that degree of host of involvement say a five person board for one school with my classroom teachers now i'm not saying that's good or vast so that of now the way it is now if we have been opening at underhill central school which isn't going to happen anytime soon unfortunately and we can hire anyone who or what we want we can go o sure then we would be forced to hire that person whether or not the person we are not that person is a prophet now i did just recently talk to someone  of the structure that we have we have lost some some really good folks because one spot on one place you know we have honest disagreements here is that teachers are really good teachers could still  i am alice and i and i live in richmond and i'm a career educator with over forty years of teaching experience i'm also a business owner and our mental planner i sort of  philosophical arm i'll deal with the practical ones first it's appalling to me that the voters are being presented with a valid it does not mean that the legal requirements for clarity of a voting ballot there is a law that says that a question on the voting ballot must contain a clear yes or no choice and because the way the law armories that if a different story of towns voted for the merger but not towns that would be false to the modified merger this means that there is no clear consequence of a yes the world so if somebody wants a modified merger but not a real total merger they don't know what they're voting for and there is actually a profit mystics i'm also concerned that isn't where the front page merger dark in that there's no specific information anywhere about the details of the assets and liabilities that the second question on the ballot asks you to assume you're supposed to assume the all the assets and liabilities the properties etc of all the school districts but there's nothing specific about what that is and so some people complained about that and they did get posted on the website but it's kind of an obscure little thing and from people without computers or who maybe don't have the right  dobe player i think it's hard to find that information so i think that the order is not being given a fair shake in this deal on it at all on i'm also concerned that i know the legislature wants to support good public policy by some of us don't consider mergers necessarily good public policy might be in some places but not in others and for them to be offering tax incentives to people who vote for a specific agenda many of us regard that as bribery and you know appropriate so there are some problems here and that i think need to be dealt with on this the proposed merger is basically a business model children are not costumers and they shouldn't be guinea pigs for some administrative experiment i feel that our democracy is in danger we have a democracy with a market economy it's becoming a market society where everything is for sale like rolls i i don't think that not every effort has been made to think forward about how consolidation will affect the quality of education but there's a lot of information about this available about such systems across the country if you read the current literature and listen to commentaries this model is passe we need a structure that allows us to keep our school boards that allows us to to simplify finances why not give up our schools that we your beauty selling your school for a dollar to the merger and even though part of all the schools you have floated away your ability to determine its destiny and we need the legislature to offer us a structure in which we can accomplish our needs with out sacrificing some i know some legislators are working on this and i think that rather than jump on this train which i think is headed for a cliff that we should encourage the really care to respond to any of the remarks we just h pigs and i don't think that representative phil's remarks reflect the amount of controversy there isn't one people here over how to how to deal with education or how to deal with property taxes so that's one one point i want to make i don't think that it's a good idea to start making a big commitment when things are up in the air and by the way we can vote no this november and still vote yes next november it will have exactly the same situation it's been devised by  merger planning committee so i think it would be prudent to wait and why for waiting as there's an excellent strategy in many areas i also wanted to comment about  made a comment about this process and there's there definitely has been a pro merger bandwagon and that's on the on the conceit or the narrative that and then you is great elementary schools are doing so well so the solution is merge all the elementary schools and then the apartments have had to take that things are good  and will be better if we make it bigger and tried to work with a narrative that things are really pretty good right now and haven't you and they're really pretty good with the elementary schools and this and the merger would make things worse i think there's another alternative analysis here and that is these things are so good and th school and browns your school that it's it's probably more like things are not so good and then you and this is probably just make that give us more of the same and  one way to look at that is a look at the home a more sophisticated look at the tax situation and then use tax impact is going up w none of this has been done by the you know this kind of analysis has been done by the planning committee and it's really turned out to be a  pretty weak study the last time they hired somebody seems to write an actual report with pros and the whole census was in two thousand and ten and it was called the phase one study times about just about property tax so i have no clue what this gentleman was referring to when he said that i would be happy to talk about those controversies but i have not done in terms of that we had a good discussion last night and i hear about that topic and just just to clarify you are correct that we wrote into the articles of agree with you that the committee a provision to allow the so to say that people haven't done their due diligence and worked hard and put time and effort on this is just not accurate and not fair to the folks that are on the thirty four percent over to murder studies spent hours and hours and hours working talking bating the last point i would make is that we're talking about twenty six hundred students that is a small school district where they were that's not a big school district is a small school district comparatively on any standard and any region of the country so we're still going to be a small network and a small community all together and a lot of different opinions that you're going to hear i do want to make a mention that in terms of the work of the voluntary merger committee the list of studies were part of our homework we all did read that we all did have to do the research we had to compare to different states we had to look at maine we had to look at massachusetts and a lot of it had to be done on our own time to come to some to come to the table prepared to discuss knowledgably about the merger so i do want to give credence to all the folks who put their heads behind researching legislation researching the trends researching where great innovation is happening in the united states and in the world where our scores are going a lot of work went into it sort of behind the scenes other than the agenda at the meeting which was definitely meant for us to move along on a process to get us to where we are today so good luck in your thoughts on it there we have one more merger  forum camel's hump on sunday and you've seen me on on front porch forum i'm excessive blow by email phone call me i'm happy to answer questions thank you all over