Board Of Aldermen - Minutes - 2/9/2021 - P8
Special Board of Aldermen 02-09-2021 Page 8
During COVID-19 one of the areas that was probably most impacted by not having in-person capabilities is
our Arlington Street Community Center. Director Megan Caron has done an outstanding job in making sure
that the Community Center stayed relevant and provided services to Crown Hill and many others during
this time. You may have heard of the kits that they have offered the community; everything from STEM kits
to virtual painting. They had a New Year’s Eve activity for children and Holiday craft gifts. They did this
past December still get to give out the annual Christmas trees. It was just a little bit of a different approach
with drive up only.
We did purchase a Zoom Room Mobile Kit for the Center. That allows the Center to provide many of their
classes virtually. And you can see a list of programs there; everything from Dance to Adult Yoga is
provided. And these are all regular times and people can join in via Zoom. And really if you haven’t had a
chance to see one of these, it is a different experience than a Zoom Meeting such as this. | would
encourage you to take a look at one of her offerings. One of the probably largest accomplishments both
before COVID and now was the pre-kindergarten group. They wanted to keep that going; they had Rivier
students that worked with them to set up a virtual classroom. This has worked out very well with families
picking up their monthly kits at the beginning of the month. They have served 32 kids and 60% of them will
be attending a Title | School for Kindergarten this next year.
So one of the things that we looked at after the re-creation of the Administrative Services Division was
really bringing all of these Departments to collaborate and to work on issues and policies and procedures
with a lens that allowed everyone to participate because everyone had their special areas of expertise. We
developed some goals for Fiscal ’22 and we want to make sure that we are providing all of our Divisions
and our employees with the best that the City can offer. So this is just a short list of those goals, of course,
we want to ensure quality services. We always want to do that cost effectively. We want to analyze our
existing processes, increase our efficiency and our productivity. We want to enable an outstanding work
environment, build a high performing organization. One of the ways that we'd like to do this is through
workforce and leadership developmert.
A number of us have had opportunities to take these programs and we want to make sure that they are
made accessible to all employees. We want to build and sustain robust partnerships throughout the City.
We want to build a plan for the physical preservation of our assets. This is an area that Ross Dugas in Risk
Management has been out preparing what you saw for the Court Street Theater, the Condition Report. He
has been doing that Condition Report for every City Building. And we hope to put that together and look at
a long-term approach to make sure that all of our City Buildings and our City Assets are taken care of.
We want to use the Strategic Framework of guiding principles. So we have been looking at the different
Departments and how we function and how we can create one framework that defines how we
communicate and how we address shared processes and priorities. The group has worked extremely hard
this past year as has all of the City’s Divisions. We are very fortunate to have some very dedicated and
probably one of the best teams that I’ve ever seen. We just wanted to touch on some of the things that we
have worked on this past year. We thank the Board for allowing us the time to do so.
President Wilshire
Thank you Director Kleiner, that was very important. You are doing really a lot of good things so thank you
for the presentation this evening. Does anyone have a question before we wrap up this meeting?
Alderman Lopez
| have a question.
President Wilshire
Alderman Lopez?
