LRUEMSD/ LRUHSD Carousel Meeting

Melissa Fortuna gave a presentation on the assesments that the districts are required to pay to the SU. The way that these costs are distributed among both the EMS and HS districts is that it is per pupil which is the state recomendation. Some assesments are only required to be paid by either EMS or the High-School. If they were to apply assesments only on a per pupil basis it would shift more of the burden of the assesments to the high school. Melissa is recomending that they shift the assements to be all based off of enrollment. Melissa also said that with only one board there would be no need to do this if it was only one board. Barbara Postman from the highschool board of Barton moved to change the current policy which decides assesments based off of a variety of ways to only based on population of the two boards. Richard Carbonetti, the chair of the highschool board, from albany, said that there would be a reduction in admin time and hopefully cost.  Krista Mayer, EMS member from Glover said that she thought this may make it easier to pass budgets becuase it is seen as a ridiculous ammoun to the voters in the spring. Debbie Brunelle made a clariffying question about whether some of the assesments that are contracted services would stay assesed based on use instead of enrollment and Melissa said they would be. The motion passsed unaninmously.

The carousel meeting was ajourned at 7:14 PM.

Superintendent Ramsay-Tolman said that to meet state law they would be giving part time employees who are non union and who work 18 hours a week or more paid sick time. This process has already started as of this year.

Dan Rook gave a facilities update. He said that he will be working with Jeff Coburn to get everything online so members of the public can get to meetings and know what is happening.

Superintendent Jackie Ramsay-Tolman went through how the board shall assess itself and the district on how it is conducting itself. There is a large number of standards that the state wants the board to evaluate itself on by using a rubric that has several indicators. Ramsay-Tolman will be sending out a 29 page document that the board members will have to fill out. The evaluations are due November 21st to the state. Bernard White made the point that he thinks it would be more efficient to go through all this work on these standards and complete the forms the state is requiring. It was noted that there is a significant administrative burden to go through all of these things.

The full data from the Star 360 tests that were given to students this fall was discussed and presented. Several board members were confused on what the actual benchmark level was. It was noted that there has been a lot of improvement in the percentage of students taking the test but there still were 30 students across the district that didn’t take the test.

Link to packet with data: https://core-docs.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/3488/OCSU/6107189/10-27-25_Packet_LR-EMS_Carousel.pdf

Max Demaine asked about the new policy of taking an hour of teachers sick time for being five minute late to work, and how that would affect the ongoing contract negotiations with the meeting. He also asked if this policy was in place for administrators and people who work in the district office.  Neil Urie, Chairman of the EMS board said that this is the policy and that contract negotiations are ongoing

A community member asked the board what are the pros and cons of combining into one board and how that would look for representation of the individual schools. No one on the board commented.