 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Allen School Committee on Thursday, December 16th, 2021. I am Bill Hain of the chair for make me to confirm that all members of persons anticipated in the agenda present can hear me when I call your name. Please respond in the affirmative. This accident. Yes. Mr. Thielman here. Ms. Morgan here. And I'll get back to the others as they come in Dr. Holman. Dr. McNeil here. Mr. Spiegel here. Mr. Mason. Ms. Elmer here. Mr. Linton educational association representative Ms. Keys here and student representative Megan Carmody here. Thank you. Tonight's meeting of the Allen to school committee is being conducted remotely consistent with an act signed into law on June 16 2021 that extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency. That includes an extension until April 1 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The governor's order which is referenced with agenda materials on the town's website for this meeting, laws public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin permit me to offer a few notes. First this meeting is being conducted via zoom. It's being recorded and also being simultaneously broadcast an ACMI persons wishing to join the meeting by zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Participating by zoom reminded that they may be visible to others and that if they wish to participate who asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment, and those persons are not required to identify themselves. Both zoom participants and persons watching an ACMI can follow the proposed posted agenda materials also found on the town's website using novice agenda platform. Finally each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. Hello. I'm Mr. Cardin, would you verify that you're present. Yes, thank you. And I don't see anyone else. Mr. Heyner Dr Allison Ampi also was not sent the link, but I sent it to her and then she needs she's going to need to be promoted from the ACMI's list when she gets here. Okay, and I asked this diggers to send it also. Mr. Schleckman. Okay. Next item public participation for members of the public who wish to address the committee, there will be 30 minutes of public comment. Depending on the number of people who sign up time allowments may be reduced but will not exceed three minutes each. The number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 30 minutes the number of speakers will be capped and will be invited to speak based on the timestamp of their email to miss diggins school committee respectfully request participants of the public to utilize their camera, if possible, speaking into it here to the public comment policy bdh requires participants, participants to provide their name and address speakers may offer such some objective criticism of the school operations and programs as concern them, but in public session the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel, nor against any member of the school community, except for the school committee or the superintendent in the capacity as the operational leader of the island to public schools. Additionally, the committee will not hear anything that may identify or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you would like to sign up to speak, please email e diggins at allington.k 12 dot ma dot us by 12 noon on the date of the meeting. I've been informed no one of the public has signed up to speak. The next item on the agenda is allington high school student representative miss comedy do you have anything to share with us tonight. Yes, I have a few things to share. So, next week at the high school we'll be doing a holiday spirit week just to get everyone into the holiday spirit and sort of boost morale before we go on break. And then as well, the student council is very excited to be bringing back the battle of the bands this year, which will be happening on January 28 that's 7pm at the region and everyone on the community is welcome to join. Thank you very much. The next item is budget requests talk to homing. Good evening members of the school committee, all of the leaders who have joined us and as well as Juliana keys, and everybody watching at home. We have shared with the school committee a request a budget request report which has listed in the report. I want to thank everybody for putting in thoughtful budget requests this year and developing rationales and sharing the data that supports those requests, and some of their reasoning for those requests. I also want to thank Michael Mason, our CFO who has spent countless hours with me and on his own developing the report for all of you so that it would be in a format that is readable. We have all of our leaders here to answer any specific questions from the committee about the report. And that is so that if you have specific questions that myself or Mr Mason are unable to answer with specificity one of our leaders can jump in and help clarify what that request was about. We've spent many hours over the last several weeks assessing the needs of the district we have organized these requests according to the five year budget plan that the school committee developed. And that is posted to the district's website from 2019. We organize the requests according to that plan and also aligned them those the request that we're not explicitly in the plan so positions that were not explicitly listed as part of that five year plan. We aligned with the categories in the plan so there were categories related to closing the achievement gap to improving instruction to enrollment and we tried to align any additional requests with those categories. And that includes major supply and equipment requests that would require us to increase departmental or school budgets. And it is evident from the report I hope that the committee and community can tell that there are many needs that have risen to our attention as a result of the pandemic, and many exciting initiatives that would benefit our students and our schools. And that over the next several weeks as we develop a proposed budget for the school committee we're going to need to prioritize requests in our planning and make some decisions about what it is is most important for us as we look forward to next school year. So with that said I'd like to leave as much time and space as possible for questions from the committee is Mr. Mason here he was. Yes, I'm here. All right, so we are ready to answer any questions that the committee has and if we need to pass something off to one of our leaders who have taken the time to be with us this evening we will do so. Before we do that I just want to welcome Mr. Schlickman we had a little hiccup and getting everybody in. So, begin with any of the members of the committee have any questions or comments that like to make this morning. Are you nervous working for anybody or is it just me that it's not working for just me. Everybody else is a novice awesome. Okay, thank you. Thank you me nervous you're all you're all. Okay, I welcome Dr. Ampe just came into you. We had a little hiccup and connecting so do you have a question on the budget, Dr. Ampe. Yeah, I have a few questions and comments. Okay. So my questions first. Item number 43 is a teacher who is to be the internship coordinator. I think this is currently stipend it is this included. I mean is the stipend rolled into this or how does that work. Okay, I'm going to go back to Dr. Janger who can explain how this is currently organized and what the increase is are you here, Dr. Janger. I am, I am I didn't think I'd be the first person column but so the internship program right now is a point to position. It has gotten up to in the past few years about 60. A little over 60 students participants. We have always thought that when we got to about 80 that we would need to expand the position to be a point for. At the moment, also as a result of COVID, we've shifted for just this year, the internships to the spring. So actually the internship coordinator will be setting folks up for next fall at the same time as she's supervising the students were in internships this spring. But our long term goal is to expand the program to be year round and to have a larger work study and paid internship component. So in order to do those two things, we feel that we need to expand the position to a point for. Great, thanks. Then the next question is on item number 46 the coordinator. I'm just wondering what that person does it's the elementary level mathematics. Thank you I will defer that one to Matthew Coleman. Right here. So essentially, can you just clarify which lines they were. It's, it's item number 46. And math. Yeah, the math intervention is for Bishop and down. No, essentially coordinator. Oh coordinator. Oh, sorry. Thank you. So essentially, as it is right now the elementary math program is expanding. We have coaches at every program we have interventionist now, part of one of the items. I didn't hear the first part. Part of one of the items also was an expansion of the intervention program as well. So essentially it's getting to the point where for me to oversee and for me to feel as though I'm doing a good job, just in terms of thinking about the restructuring a little bit more consistent oversight over all the program to give it a little bit more attention. For me right now I'm also working with computer science as well with six to 12 and intervention in six through nine as well. So it's just having a little bit more oversight and a little more coordination. Okay, great. Thank you. And then my final question on the items is on number 58, the registrar. I thought we already had one or I'm confused. Yeah, so we do have a district registrar we have increased some of the expectations of those roles I know we don't have Patricia Shepherd who is our town CIO on tonight but we do have Dan, she and I believe are you there Dan, there's so many of you. I am here. Okay, I don't know if you can help us speak to that one Dan be helpful. It's, it's an increased workload in the registration office and a shifting of some of the responsibilities but it's more parents interaction that's taking place in this office. So this is to help out with that and help it run more efficiently. Okay, so then we would end up having to. Yes. Okay. Okay. I will add to that that this would add the additional support needed sometimes my families need a lot of interaction with the registration office in order to understand what documentation they're missing to be supported with the language that they need the materials in or if they need us to get some interpretation to help them work through all of the documentation required. It could help with coordinating screening when we have students who might need to be screened or might need additional community resources so we have had more families. As I understand it this year who required a little bit more one on one support as they got registered, and this would provide that support as well as support when we launch registration at the start of the registration process to make sure that all families register that we can station registration support out at schools when we do care registration. This would just enable us to have a lot more personnel behind that work. Okay, thank you. And then I have three quick comments. First, going forward as we as you plan the actual budget, it'd be helpful to have an understanding of what the totals are with the additions that you're proposing. And especially a model of the total elementary school desired staffing and some assessment of where the different schools lie in terms of fulfilling this model. And it also be nice to have it in at some place, you know, potentially to budget or something just to explain what their staffing. It seems like there's some restructuring or, you know, big increases here and I'd like to understand what the plan isn't and the rationale is behind it. And then, finally, I just, I appreciate that we're adding the coaches and that this is helping the teachers teach our students better and helping the instructor helping improve instruction, but I'm also just wondering how do we know it's working. And what metrics we have that we can point at just because, you know, down the road, we're going to have to justify everything we ask for either to the town manager and the finance committee for our budget requests or ultimately we're going to override at some point and we need. It is very helpful for us when we do this to not just be able to say that this helps but also have clear identifiable metrics in which we show improvement and, and that this improvement is continuing. So, that's all my question started takes a long thanks. Thank you. So the community have a comment or question. Mr. Thielman. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. So, my question is so I just want to make sure I get our process right tonight you're sharing the preliminary fi 23 positions, we're going to vote on it in March, as of right now. There's 38.4 new fte's about 2.5 million dollars of expenses. Can you so it as new initiatives are developed and thinking about some of the school improvement plans it's possible that 38.4 number could change right it could be you got you could think about it by March and say we've got to add. We've got to either add two or three more fte's or subtract something we have here and add something new that's that's your kind of timeframe. Yeah, so you're looking at the new positions requested line right for that. Yeah, million that you're seeing yeah. Yeah, so for clarity what we're doing tonight is just showing you all of the requests that came in. Every question identified as needs and we didn't, we did our best not to leave any of them off some of them were duplicates like we would hear the same from multiple people. And we didn't duplicate them here so we're trying to show you everything that has been identified as a need by our team. And we have not accounted for things like efficiencies if there are places where we can make reductions I will be honest that not a lot of those have risen to the surface. Or, and we know we have not also identified some things that may come out of a grant for example the DEI specialist if you recall was actually embedded in our S or three planning for next year so some of the these expenses may not be true expenses to the general but they are requests that came in and from here we need to prioritize what we can actually place into the budget based on what we're expecting to have as an increase to the school budget for next year. So, this is very preliminary and it will committee has thoughts on directions that they would like us to shift priorities, or after a hearing with the community additional thoughts on that that's what we're happy to hear. Great. My, my thank you for clarifying that my second question is of the positions listed. Are there any that have been identified as as as the potential to be funded by a grand or ARPA funds or something else. Like do you look at this and say oh we can get this covered by something. Yes, the DEI specialist K to 12 and the and an additional literacy coach for elementary would that would have us with enough literacy coaches for building based literacy coaches are both slated for us or three for the following school year. Mr Mason, do we have any others that weren't included that were grant. Not, no, I don't believe that we didn't include anything else that would grant besides those two, two roles. And I'm not, I'm not versed enough, well enough tonight to know if there are any other possible grant opportunities for the positions on this list. Okay, thank you. And then Dr woman. I just like I want to understand just the process that you you you use a process internally in which you and your department heads and principals will meet and discuss some of these and then prioritize them yourselves based on needs in the district and our input. Okay, in your timeline for doing that is January, February or so, mostly January because I believe our deadline for having a proposed budget to you is the beginning of February. Okay, I just wanted that clarification. That helps. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hi, thank you, Mr. Heiner. This is my questions. So the, the senior custodial ground position, the mental health assessment and outreach coordinator and the CNAs are on here. Can somebody remind me. I, I'm sure it's correct that they're not here, but I just can't remember what we agreed to do with those folks. Mr Mason. Yeah, so those positions are not on this list because those are being currently held in the current budget, and they will be rolled over and carried forward in the fiscal 23 budget. Okay, for some reason, I thought that we had said that we were going to talk about them within the context of the FY 23 budget, but I'm, I'm fine. I mean, as long as they're contained within the budget, as they are, that's, that's fine. The other thing that I didn't see in here were any reserve positions. It looks like there are some enrollment increased positions. But I'm used to seeing reserve positions. I'm cool if there aren't going to be any that's fine. But that was something that I, I, I usually see that and I don't. So that's, so that's my next question and then I have another one too. There would be, I suppose a request from me that we would factor into the proposed budget that we would present to the school committee in February. So, no, I haven't requested it as part of the request report, but as we get a better handle on what our enrollment projections will be I'll have a better sense of how many reserve positions we may want to include in what how we structure the proposed budget. Got it. So then my next question is so line 17, the ELA coach school TBD is fine is line 17 under closing the achievement gap and line 23 the math coach at Bishop are those. Are those just in separate sections because the ELA coach was in the five year plan and the point five math coach wasn't or like I'm just wondering like they look the same tip like they look like the same thing to me but I'm curious why they're in different under different headings. Mr Mason. That was probably a simple mistake on my part and will be corrected going forward. Okay, so you think that that math person that math coach is probably I mean I didn't look at I didn't reconcile this with the five year plan guys so I don't know. So we're thinking that person was in the five year plan and we just need to move them up. And what I'm what I'm saying is that I guess I misunderstood your question your question. So the math the math coach that's below and the new position requested was not included in the five year plan when we reconciled. Okay, so that is indeed correct. If you're looking at the subcategory. I was actually responding to your close achievement gap versus enrollment. Oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Okay. And then I wanted to second. Dr Allison ampie's question I've, I've lost the plot on these coaches. I don't know where we have them, or how many. I don't know how many we want to have. It would be helpful to know what the goal is and then how far we've made it toward that goal. Right. So I see, like, let's say, I mean, let's say we got to hire all 38 of these people. And then, so if we got all of these people, how far would we be at getting whatever the vision is for the number of these folks we're going to have in each building that would be really helpful for me to understand what the, what the goal is and then I see new coaches right so now I see an ESL coach, which I don't think I've seen before, which is interesting. Yes, actually, I, I, I think that I thought that I saw Ms. Brzezi here. Is she here. I'm here. I'm here. Can I, can I just say something before we begin by all means, I would like to have Matt Coleman, who also has coaches in the math department. Dr. Cochran couldn't make it here. Dr. Hoyo is here so she can talk about the vision for coaches in the science department. And I just want to, I just want to give this one of when we were during the pandemic, when we were shut down. The coaches were the ones, the primary ones who provided the learning plans to all teachers across the district and help to implement the instructional model between hybrid and asynchronous. The kids that were out during those days. So when we were split with that hybrid model, the coaches were integral and providing curriculum so as you, as you think about the different impact that it that they've had on instruction. I just want to utilize that as a prime example, and that actually helped to alleviate some of the pressure that teachers had with coming up with curriculum so I'm going to let go ahead and let Ms. Brzezi talk about her vision for the ESL coach for the district and then I would like each one of the curriculum leaders to also talk about the impact and their vision for their departments. I, this is the SCI coaching that I placed into the budget for the district is new it wasn't in the five year plan. And the reasoning behind that is that working with teachers across the district I'm trying to develop an infrastructure of the English language learner department because currently it's myself and then teachers in the building. And with the impact of enrollment at the school level. There's no, there's not enough time in the day to kind of work with gen ed teachers in the push in model and getting in inclusion in the classrooms. So, I've had experience and working in other districts where the SCI coach really can provide some changes with working with a teacher for four or five weeks on SCI strategies and impact the learning in the classroom and then going on to work with another teacher so the reasoning behind that I surveyed the team, the ELL team and I work with Dr. McNeil as well on this. I'm trying to see how we can best service our students that are in the gen ed classroom through the inclusion model. So, as well as our team of teachers where I think we're at like, I could ask, I could get the exact percentage but we're at like almost 9899% all of our teachers are SCI endorsed, but when I go around to the schools and talk to teachers they're feeling that they, they're not using those strategies that they learned in the retail and the SCI endorsement. So having a coach will be able to actually provide more professional development in district for teachers. I answered your question Jane, but that was kind of the vision. That helps. Yeah. Thank you. Next up. Matt Coleman. Mr Coleman, can you speak about the impact on your department. Again, yeah. Thanks all. Just to consider and also just to give a little context. I think the district is also aware that we are investing a lot in coaching. And for this year we are working with a consultant to actually coordinate and actually bring I think a lot of the work across the district that we're doing into a little bit more of a unified vision which I've been lucky enough to be part of the design team and I think it's been great. I'll speak to specifically for the math portion, but then also kind of the overall goal for math, an aspect that we've always been working towards. I'm sure that we have a coach at each of the elementary schools, and for a variety of reasons it's been at different FTEs at different schools throughout our time. So the increase for that point five literally is just a an ask to get all schools up to 1.0. So for us that's just kind of filling out the remainder of the program. And also there's also an ask for a middle school coach. I think the last time I was at school committee we were talking about heterogeneous classes. And there was a comment from one of the members about what kind of infrastructure and support would you actually have if you were to switch to a seventh grade heterogeneous class. So the coach there is is essentially part of the infrastructure that we'd be planning for to move forward with that. So for me, the vision overall is, I'm a big believer in tier one instruction. I'm a big believer in ensuring that what we're offering inside of a class values as many kids as possible. What I've seen throughout the years is that my 10th year is an increase in the number of kids were in the high school, they're essentially enrolling in our honors class AP classes. There are fewer and fewer students in the middle school who need tier two and tier three intervention. These aren't perfect metrics I'm just trying to think of things off the top of my head. But those two things speak pretty heavily to me where we're reducing those students who need pull out services and we're increasing the number of students who are in accessing honors classes. To me that's been a direct result of that work that we've been doing over the past seven eight years with coaching for the math department. To kind of solidify that part. We started seven years ago with the math coaches who were working purely with tier one, and that program is grown when we first started it was three and a half. Now we're, I think 6.5 FT roughly around there. And we just wanted to finish off that. Miss Perry can you talk about the role the coaches have had in developing our early literacy instruction this just this past year. Certainly I'd be happy to. With the phonics phonics instruction that we're that we've been implementing in grades K to three, there's been a real necessary role for the coaches in helping teachers figure out how to not so much how to implement that the assessments, but how to use that implementation in their teaching. So there's a lot of modeling, a lot of PD individual work group work with those teachers, mostly to make the teachers comfortable with the processes that we need to use in order to have this new program. Alive and well and working. It's been very successful and the teachers I think are increasingly comfortable. So that's been a huge success for us. And this all moves towards having strong tier one instruction which is what Matt was talking about. We have added or we have a proposal to add a coach at the middle school level grade six and seven it's part of the school improvement plan for Gibbs. So the purpose of that is the same thing it's to sort of enhance your one instruction in the classroom, particularly around issues of reading comprehension, which is something we're trying to do to alleviate the pressure on reading teachers who are occupied very, very sort of comprehensively with with tier three instruction so that's that's a new ask that is good for you to know about. I think we should move on to the next person. Dr. Hoyle. Good evening everyone. Thank you. When I first came in to this position. One of the things I was hearing from the science teachers at the Gibbs was that they could tell what school each student came from based on their science knowledge. One of the things that that Miss Huber our science coach has really been focused on over the last three years is to create a standardized curriculum for K through five. And in addition to that, we're trying to move away from solely content knowledge and more focused on science skills or the science practices. So if we're not enough to know science, we really want to do science and we think that that is extremely important. However, most elementary teachers do not get trained in science, their, their courses are very math and math-based. And so that's really the work that we're doing right now is teaching teachers how to teach science how do you teach inquiry how do you teach students to ask questions, and really focusing on science practices and to have one coach, you know, help 125 teachers it's extremely difficult. So we're really looking to add support so that that work can be done. Thank you. And I Mr. Conklin could not be here so I can just give a quick summary like similar to science social studies are curating their own curriculum. And in order to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all students and being inclusive of all cultures and backgrounds. It takes a lot of work to look at the current standards and understand how to supplement them. Right now we have two social studies coaches and we need to add another one so that they can service the number of elementary schools in our district and the number of teachers. And as you can see from the different explanation, we are really focused on strengthening tier one because that's going to give the most efficient and the most equitable way of approaching instruction instead of trying to prevent prevention our way out of it so thank you everyone for contributing and hopefully that was answering some of the questions from the school committee members. Thank you Miss Morgan and Dr Allison amp before your questions. You haven't anything more Jane. It would be helpful. So I think that that was helpful. I'm definitely intrigued with the, the, the ELA coach at the Gibbs because that seems new and I starts starts me wondering if you know as where where do we go from there like I don't know right I don't know where the what the vision is but it would be helpful. I guess to get that in writing somehow I appreciate the vision from the from the chairs I just I don't have a sense of of where this is of where this is going so that that like where this is in terms of how many, you know, how many people were talking about down the road. So that that will be helpful for me and understanding how much of that this particular list of asks addresses and how much is still sort of left on the table. So, thank you. That's all I have Mr. Heiner. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So, first off, follow up on the on the coaching coaching. And when we did the five year plan we did have that vision for one literacy coach and one math coach at each of the elementary schools. And so, yes, we're on the way to achieving that. And maybe there are some tweaks that are needed we had a coordinator, a half time coordinator position in the five year plan and now maybe we need it as a full time out who knows those. So those kind of tweaks are expected but I think some of what we're seeing. Sorry, hold on a minute. What we're seeing in the request is sort of this, this new idea that we need coaches at the middle school level, maybe, instead of just one elementary school coach and science and social studies we need more. We need one in ESL we need one in SEL. So, again, just some sort of vision of of when we built the five year plan, you know, Dr. Allison was very clear we wanted a vision of what our elementary schools would look like at the end of that five year plan. So I think what we want, I mean we're not going to be able to do this coaching model in one year but if there is this new idea of this new time expanded coaching model. What is it going to look like when we get there at the end of a multi year implementation plan. And what is that going to get us, as somebody else had mentioned what is, what are we going to use that use to measure success. Question and we will have opportunity for my fellow members on on under the budget schedule of the budget calendar our next meeting January 13 is when we give our input of you know what we see as the priorities. Not that we can't give input now but that's that's also on the agenda. Just a question of the items 32 and 41 the learning specialists at the elementary school. So that would that at Hardy and Thompson that would bring us to four at each of those schools is we're just adding another learning specialist now is that what we're doing. Ms. Peretz nodding her head yes. Yeah so I'm happy to have the principles or and or Ms. Elmer speak to that as well but Ms. Peretz do you want to start. Sure. And this request comes from. Sorry, I have a little cold so I'm a little horse this evening, forgive me comes from really wanting to support our students as best we can with the most highly qualified people possible. It's a secret that we've been having staffing issues, and a lot of those positions that have been left unfilled this year have been in the paraprofessional department. And so what is happening is that, and you know some of this has to do with the pandemic obviously, and hopefully we'll be able to build our staff back up in the future. And that what we're seeing is without those supports in place. We're doing the best that we can but there are services that are being left undone kids who are being left and you hear this in the news across the country so hard he's not unique in this but in our opinion, you know being able to put forward and support for the most highly qualified people those are the jobs we're able to fill. We don't have those problems within our professional teaching staff. And I think that what we're seeing as we look at our data with our students is that we really do need those people who are highly trained to be with those children who, you know have the right to those services on their ips. So support an increase of point two for EL services so that we can have two full time EL teachers at Hardy to help support those students as well. So I think it's trying to find more of a balance it's also about making sure that we're really looking at the distribution the workload of the learning specialist specifically at this time and thinking about how we can create a plan that is more equitable. So those are some of the basic talking points. Great thank you so I mean it again as a request of what additional information would be helpful would be the caseloads of each at each school. Right so how many kids require learning specialist support at each school. And you know are the needs what I know we have a separate working group on on special education workloads. But I don't I don't know what the typical workload is I mean when my kid started in elementary school I think Mrs. Z probably the only one here that remembers that there was one learning specialist at each elementary school. And now we're talking and obviously they're bigger now but we're now we're talking to go to going to four. So and I don't know that we've closed the achievement gap with our students so you know I would like to see more information on what the caseloads are and more justification for doing this at those two select schools. I think I would add to that just a little bit of sorry Dr. Helen. It's okay go ahead. I just would add to that to that I agree with you. And I think that we also need to really look at you know what services that we're offering. And the kinds of needs that our students have I think we're seeing that that's that's changing. And the needs are becoming greater and so that I you know, we can have IEP's that have different levels of service. So we have to take that next step to really kind of tease out. There's a number of IEP's there's a number of students that are serviced by our our our educational professionals but that it's also the kind of service that's being given and the number of staff members who are part of that I think we have to look at the bigger structure. Also, special education brings a lot of paperwork with it. And so that maybe there are also other ways that we can look at who the point people are for different children within their IEP's and really think about the roles of those learning specialists at the same time. So that kind of vision about what the team chair does what the learning specialists do, what the paraprofessionals do at other districts they have inclusion support professionals that are a different position, and that are paid higher. So I think, you know, would sort of like again we'd like to see what the vision is going to be for the long term for for inclusion support in order to sort of justify whatever it is we want to do in the budget. Can I respond to this quickly. I think this is, I appreciate the feedback to sort of lay out a vision for what an elementary schools service levels may need to be an analysis of what the service delivery grid demands, as well as caseloads are for each school will certainly be part of the analysis that we do when the budget to bring forward to the school committee, but I appreciate this desire to sort of see a vision for what the staffing levels that school might need to look like and what we might hope for it to be over the next five years so that's something we can think about developing into the budget I didn't know if Ms. Elmer had more to say about this particular topic. Not to put you on the spot. So I think what you were seeing is that these were requests that came from the individual budget meetings we had with buildings as well with curriculum directors so I think each of the buildings made their rationale for that, as opposed to what you're requesting, Mr. Cardin a larger picture of that structure so as Dr. Holman is talking about, you know, we have to fit that into the larger discussion around what our structures what our staffing what our ways that we can also reorganize how we do things, you know, are there efficiencies and are there ways to group students and to schedule interventions and to do classroom assignments that can also make sure that we aren't overtaxing our special educators so I think there's a lot of work of it. To do with that and as Dr. Holman said these are initial requests coming from the building that we're going to explore and then as we do more of that analysis, make final recommendations to you later. Great that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. First, I just wanted to say thank you for the way that this was laid out. It was really helpful to see what was coming from the five year plan and what we're new asks and how they met different district goals so I appreciate the way that this was set up. A lot of my questions have been asked but I guess to follow up on Mr. Cardin. Can you, because I'm going to explain the difference between 32 and 41 special education learning specialist and 39 a learning specialist at Pierce or is that the same thing. I believe that is the same thing with a slightly different title Mr Mason and Mr. Amadi do you agree. Yeah, yeah. So is that so actually Mr. Cardin mentioned this too so like an inclusion specialist is the idea that that they are pushing into the general education classroom to support students as a in that space is that Miss X and I do believe that what you're seeing is a combination of different things that we've talked about. So any of those requests that are in there right now would be learning specialists that came from the buildings if they're tied to a specific building that means the building principal made that request. Mr. Cardin had mentioned inclusion specialists are something that we are considering as we think to the future inclusion specialists do serve a different role. When you look at other districts inclusion specialists often will support the team and planning and executing and guiding and thinking about strategies and supports and may not have a direct service caseload in the sense that you know they're pulling students they would they would be more of as an inclusion to a different role within the special ed department. If you look at some of our neighboring districts, Belmont has a role new public schools have that role so that is definitely something we are looking into, but that is just a typo on that current document you have. So this individual service delivery, not an inclusion specialist. This is a place that says allow the peers to shift to an inclusion model that allows a special education teacher to work in one or two specific classes daily that's not. That's more about service delivery. So I'm sure that specialist, right, it would create they currently have two learning specialists at the pier school and so if it's our smallest school. It is growing in size but it's referring to having that ability to, you know, group or team with four and five grades, two and three grades came one rather than the two individuals but it would be a traditional learning specialist role that Mr. Amadi was requesting. Thank you and then I had a question. The same question as this Morgan about reserve teachers. So I think I'm all set. Thank you. Thank you very much. A lot of my questions have been answered but I do sort of puzzle around line 7677 and 78 painting at all schools flooring at all schools and ceiling tile replacement. This isn't add on list so my question is, how are we funding painting flooring and ceiling tiles currently and why wouldn't this be looked at is sort of a, in addition to a line item and a regular budget rather than what seems to be adding a new place is this something that we really knew or what's going on here. This is a good question this is a request that came to us from Mr Walters on one of his final days with the district, I will defer it to Mr Mason because he had many conversations about facilities maintenance with Mr Walters. Mr Mason. Yes, thank you, Dr homin. Thank you, Mr Slickman for asking this question. So this as this put this particular request is has not been necessarily been funded at the level that is reflected in this document. So, in the past, we've done painting projects prior to last year. I mean there was a year before that we would have summer workers or students go around and paint the buildings and there was a minor budget set aside around $20,000 to paint all schools, and that program slightly shifted with when we when we brought in the new facilities director, we went to hire more contracted workers to provide the services and with the last years. We had a little bit of funding at the end of the year we were able to shift some of the funding to do that but there was never any dedicated line for. And that's where what Greg Walters Mr Walters and I discussed was how to set up a plan where we are painting, having a schedule of painting or replacing flooring throughout the district. And at the same time we were going to propose to put it to capital as well. Just want to provide an update to this that we were going through our natural capital planning this was the reasoning. I was late to today's meeting was there was discussion about these exact requests and capital, capital planning film that as though this is regular maintenance when this is these are substantial projects. And so this these requests are indeed should remain here. And we would just need to try to incorporate and find a way to fund these projects in fiscal 23 and onward. And the thought that I like to share is that these funds do not will not cover a substantial portion of the school district, especially, you know as we program the new high school, and that square footage comes on as well. So even though that when a new high school starts off you may need it in the out years will need to program additional funding as well so I just wanted to throw that out there as well so those are the thoughts behind why we're putting this request in there. It was to try to put a normal schedule to what needs to be maintained in the buildings that were not necessarily scheduled or funded in the current budget. I understand why I get a little nervous when I see this popping up here in that, if this is something that was funded say out of capital budget, and they're telling us no no no, we're not going to do it out of capital, you need to do it out of operating. All of a sudden we have a shift of expenditures into our operating budget and we're governed by a funding formula on what we can raise for operations. So, if funding, if costs are being shifted into our operating budget. We're going to need to be able to identify that going forward with Fincom so that we don't end up losing $310,000 worth of services to students because something was moved into our operating budget. The only other thing is this is very very good listen I'm glad to have it have it done early, but it would help for analysis, not to have this as a PDF but to have this is an Excel file. And so I'd just like to ask that members get this as an Excel file as well. Thanks. Thank you Dr. Holman thank you to the hall all the staff. And I will leave it to you whether you can let these people go make them stay all night. I would love to let them go they've had a very long day. Thank you all so much for being here and taking the time. We appreciate you. Thank you all happy holidays. The next item on the agenda is space school improvement plan Dr. Holman. I'm very happy to introduce the principal and assistant principal of the pierce school Mr. Amati and Ms. Goodrich are Ms. Goodrich are here, and they're going to present the pierce school improvement plan I know they had a wonderful rainbow commission event at their school this week, and that there are many happy faces and the pictures that I saw from that event, and I'm sure they'll share that many more wonderful things about pierce with you tonight so Mr. Amati it's all yours. And Ms. Goodrich are you able to project the slide deck. Thank you very much. I want to start by just saying hello. I'm Andrew Amati this is my second year leading this wonderful school pierce elementary. Thank you. Thank Dr. Holman for the opportunity to present this evening. And I want to say thank you to members of the school committee for what you do to support our town, and also specifically for approving the role of assistant principal last year. With that I want to introduce Ms. Olivia Goodrich and give her a chance to say hello. Hi everyone my name is Olivia Goodrich I'm happy to be here and I just wanted to say that I've really enjoyed getting to know the pierce community and the greater Arlington community over the past couple of months. We can go to the next slide please. So this is our agenda for the evening. We'll do a brief introduction, talk about a few wins a few areas to focus on some of our specific priorities and action steps. A brief discussion about potential resources and at the end I'm open to answer any any questions you may have for me. So, I feel very fortunate to be to be the school leader here at the pierce building. We are a tight knit community of really strong educators. We currently have 17 sections and the addition of a new slc the slcd were benefited by a very strong teaching core, a hard working pto supportive school council, our school dig, and they are our rainbow Alliance team who is well represented by families faculty. And as Dr. Homan alluded to, we had a wonderful event on Tuesday where we had about a dozen faculty members, 50, 50 or 60 students and their family members do read aloud together, centered around inclusivity and and mutual respect and that was a really wonderful event for us. We're a growing community. Right now we serve approximately 330 students. And over the course of the last five years we have grown by a section each year, year over year with the expectation that will grow by by one more section next year into our fifth grade which would which would then have 18 sections along with our supported learning center. Next slide please. As I mentioned, we have a very strong pto here at Pierce that works very hard to support our families, our students and our teachers. And that really one of the kind of hallmarks of what our pto is done is to support our school library, which is something we're very proud of, and it's kind of a cornerstone of our school. So to kind of move into the wins block here one of the things I want to start with by sharing is the work that we've done during our ace blocks this year. We have really focused our ace blocks around four week coaching cycles that we've used specifically to plan and reflect on tier one instruction. We prioritized peer observations across our school. So what that looks like so far this this fall has been teachers from specific grade levels going and watching their colleagues, teach mathematics across the school and this is something that's new for the Pierce building and was was kind of kicked off by our, our, our wonderful math coach, Steph McKenna, and it's something we want to build on. It's an it's an initial win for our school, and it's something we want to build on in the second half of the year and moving forward. And I'll share just a couple other brief wins that we'll see in the in the data as well. Last year, in terms of our school achievement we noted some very strong achievement data in our fifth grade, specifically in science, but also in other content areas as well. We noted a strength in language acquisition that is above average for English language learners and former English language learners and both math and literacy. Another noted win is a is a we have a culture that I believe is cohesive and collaborative with with staff with families with our local partnerships. This is a place where people know one another they care about one another. And in many, many ways. And the last one I've noted is that we have some strengths in our professional learning here. And as I alluded to the, the utilization of ace has been really integral to our professional learning so far this year. And we also have had quite a bit of faculty support and input around our faculty means and our professional learning opportunities so far this year. We've had great areas to focus on this year which the first being around, sorry, something my eye here around mathematics instruction. Last year on our on our MCAS in grades three through five. About 40% of our students are not proficient in mathematics across grades three, four and five. And that's really not acceptable. And I don't mean to say like acceptable from from what folks are doing but we know that we want our students more students that are on grade level or above grade level. And we have some specific areas that we want to focus in with math, one to focus on grade level standards, cohesion across grade levels, along with working on specific teaching moves and one of the things we're focusing on. So here as a school is academic discourse, which can be called different things but essentially that students discuss mathematics, daily in class with one another. It's kind of a priority for our school. The second area that we're focusing on is family engagement. And really what this with this goal is about is doing more outreach, more specific outreach outreach and multiple languages and multiple modes to allow all families to be fully participatory, respecting cultures and respecting languages and giving everyone associated with the pierce an opportunity to engage. The last area of focus is really around an emphasis on early literacy prioritizing early universal screening assessments, deploying more resources into our earliest grades and making sure that as our students move through grades K one and two that they're fully prepared to access all content areas in the upper elementary grades. All right, so, and I'll be brief in these upcoming graphs. This is really an overview of mathematics on the left hand side. What we're seeing here is kind of a flat math achievement over the course of the 2018 2019 and 2021 school year. And on the right hand side. This is a measure of how we kind of do compared to the district, or how we did last year, compared to the district and they're relatively similar when you when you compare pierce to the district at large in grade 335. On this slide. We have language arts on the on the left side. Science on the right. And what we see is again in language arts, our, our performance mirrors relatively closely what we see at the district level with approximately 25% of our students, not meeting or exceeding great little benchmarks. And on the right hand side is one of the areas I noted as a real area of when so this is our science data, or approximately. You know, 80% of our students have meet meet met proficiency or above. And this is a real area of when for us. And one of the things I wanted to note on this slide that you won't see in the data is that when we talk to students about what do you really love about school what are your favorite things to learn about. So often that we hear that that science is one of those is one of those topics students are very excited about science and so I noted this tonight just as a, an area that we're very proud of and that we know students are excited about here at the pierce school. So we touch on some of these kind of early signals. We see areas of strength with our language learners and former language learners. When we look at our students that are categorized as high needs which encompasses many categories. It tells us different things. So we know that we've made improvements and that students with disabilities have more access across tier one instruction. And we also know that that we need to do more to support our students in the classroom to be successful in all content areas. So with respect to our BIPOC students, what we are seeing right now are lower rates of proficiency, particularly in mathematics. And this is an area why we why we are one of the reasons why we feel like academic discourse across mathematics daily is such a vital thing for our school because if we can do that well all students will have the opportunity to speak daily and be able to analyze and critique one another's math instruction. And it is our kind of theory of action that doing that will raise all students, all students up in the area of mathematics. And what we have here is a overview of our panorama survey data. So the left side being the percent favorable, the middle column being a comparison of Pierce to other elementary schools. And on the right hand side, a comparison over time so when you see the up arrow, the up green arrow, that's in reference to how families said that we did from the fall to the spring. So, you know, we had some upward trends and in every area here which we're proud of, notably in cultural awareness and action. This is an area that our families noticed that you know that we do, we do well here at Pierce that we are culturally aware that we put actions into place to, to value all of our students and families. And it was also noted that in learning behaviors that our families recognized that there were things that we could do to improve and these, this was a measure of things like how much do kids talk about learning at home, how often do they read for fun, how organized are they in their own work. And so this is this is noted as kind of an area that we're working in within our professional learning here at Pierce. Now I won't go into all of these but essentially these are our action steps here and things that we will be centering our professional work around this year. And I would say kind of the, the kind of through line here in terms of what we'll be working on at the Pierce building is really focusing on peer observations and having faculty members have multiple opportunities to see their peers in action to offer compliments to learn practices, and to share any questions they have with one another. This has been a really popular and meaningful move so far for building and will be something that will. We're planning on using a cross content areas, as we move forward through the school year. And with that, I'll stop talking and open it up for any questions you may have for me. Thank you members of the committee. Have any questions or comments you'd like to share. Mr. Shlikman still has his hand up but I think that's from the last time is it Mr. Shlikman or do you have a question or comment. But it is from last time but I want to thank the Pierce community for for a very good report. Thank you. You mentioned this is not necessarily the first of all I agree with Mr. Shlikman excellent report and very uplifting and I congratulate you on all the innovations you brought to the school might question is about space and crowding in the building can you just speak to that a little bit. Sure Mr. Steeleman is there something specific you'd like me to address in that question or just in general terms. Yeah, so right now we have all of our space is essentially utilized all of our classrooms. We have we have consolidated adult working spaces to have shared offices. We currently have the daycare on the first floor. We have added the SLC D and if we need to move by one more section then then that will be something that you know we'll need to discuss. You know with the leadership team to find that to find that space. Because currently doesn't it doesn't really exist. Okay, that's where I was going so if we add one more or one more classroom one more section is added in the school there's you would lose another an art room or whatever. Yes, and I do not want to lose an art room. Okay. Okay, I don't want to take this off topic. Thank you very much. Mr. Thielman, I just want to note that we're not in a position to lose an art room at Pierce we're working on this and it's on our radar and we will have a plan to make sure that they have the classrooms that they need and the specialist rooms they need. Thank you Dr moments music to my ears. Anyone else. Mr. God. Just a quick question while you're here that's a little unrelated to the plan. The HCA, the Housing Corporation of America building that's in your district is is starting to open. Have you heard from them about families moving in with enrollments or or anything yet. I have not. Okay. Thanks. Thank you Mr. mighty and miss Goodrich. Please pass on your staff we appreciate all the work you're all doing. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I mean a motion to accept this. That's usually Mr. Schlickman's role. Okay. Mr. Thielman made a motion is there a second to accept this. School improvement plan. Second the motion to receive. Seeing none. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. I vote yes unanimous. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll set to move on to the bracket school improvement plan. Dr. Holman. Right. I want to welcome Ms. Sergekov. And where did she go? And Ms. Schwartz who are the principal and assistant principal at the bracket school for a very comprehensive school improvement plan report. One of my favorite things to do is visit bracket in the morning and stand with Ms. Sergekov out front, and I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. And I intend to do again because it's just absolutely wonderful to watch her welcome all of the kids into the school bracket. It's such a happy place to visit. So I'm looking forward to hearing their report too. It's all yours. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you for the kind words, Dr. Holman. And it is the highlight of your day to stand in front of school and watch all the boys and girls coming across the field together. Thank you. You learn a lot and you, it's wonderful to greet everyone. My name is Stephanie Sergekov and I have the best job in the world. I'm principal at Brackett school. And I am happy to be joined tonight by Nicole Schwartz. Nicole has been a teacher at Brackett since 2005. And she's taught both first grade and fourth grade. She's a teacher at Brackett school. She's been a teacher at Brackett school. She has recently stepped into the role as our assistant principal. She has been doing. Involved in the leadership team of the school for many years and has taken on. A lot of responsibilities and we are a better place for her work. We trust you've had the opportunity to look through our school improvement plan. And we are a better place for her work. We are a better place for her work. We are a better place for the administration team. District goals for the coming year in collaboration with the Brackett teaching teams. Building leadership team and the school council. Each year we reflect on the prior year and the data we have in front of us to come. Prize initiatives and action steps for moving forward. I do want to take a moment to thank all of the members of our community. Our community is a very important part of our school that we highly value. We have school value of our school community and we're hopeful that you see the threads of that in our school improvement plan because it is the driving force of our work. We want to point out here to everyone how important the ace block that we have built into our calendar is to the work that's happening across all disciplines. We want to recognize our weekly gray level blocks for professionals in the building to come together. During this time there's a collaboration between the teams of teachers, service providers and coaches around student performance and instructional practice. This time continues to be a valuable resource for all of our work. We continue to be dedicated to improving literacy instruction for all of our students. We have a lot of attention in the world around literacy and quality instruction and it is our belief that literacy is highly intertwined with not only students' ability to read, but their ability to access curriculum across the disciplines. Mathematics has also become a priority area for us to pay more attention to for our students, which Nicole will speak about in a few moments. So tonight we'll give you an overview of Bracket and we'll share some wins and challenges. Our priorities for the coming school years and some key initiatives and action steps that are already underway. Nicole. So hi, before I move into like any of the data that we're going to talk about and the data that we've done and the priorities that we've targeted for the year, I really just want to take a minute and point out how proud we are of our staff and our students and our families and the district team for like all of the work that everyone's put forth before the pandemic, but especially now during this pandemic. We know everyone's working really, really hard and we just think that everyone sort of in our building and across the district really deserves some praise for all of that hard work that they're doing. The priority I'm about to share with all of you are really just a small snapshot of the really amazing things that happen on a daily basis in our building. They're part of a collaboration as Stephanie said, they're part of a collaboration. They're part of a collaboration. They're partners, our service providers, the district coaches and the district admin team. So they say it takes a village and it really does. When looking at all of our building based data, which I personally have a really strong passion for analyzing and reflecting upon. We really try to take an equity lens. So rather than look at just how all students are doing, really looking at how some of our subgroups are doing as well. Our first building priority is really focused around literacy. So when looking at our response to intervention plan, students with reading goals on IEP grids, and really the overall model for literacy instruction, we realized that we were pretty limited with how many students could receive reading support, particularly in grades K through three from a reading specialist. So that's some of the data that you see here on the screen. We know really well that comprehension skills in the upper elementary school and middle school are directly correlated to early literacy skills, particularly phonics and phonemic awareness. So as a result of that, we really began to reflect in the model and reimagine how we could target the reading needs of the largest number of students in our building. So we looked back at data from 2018. We found that we were servicing about 55 students. That number stayed pretty stagnant for the next two years. But with prioritizing the hiring of a third reading specialist in our building, we are in a really great place today where I can proudly say we've been able to provide small group instruction in literacy to every student in our building and 110 students are receiving reading support from a reading specialist right now. So we're really excited about that. Our second school based priority is around mathematics, which you've heard from some of the other buildings is also a priority. When we looked back at our data back to 2015, we had noticed some decline in student achievement across our subgroups and as a whole. So with some support from our building based math coach and a partnership with our building, our district SEL coach, our goal this year as it pertains to math is really about paying close attention to how our students are performing and participating in their math communities and really trying to prioritize SEL work that happens and really needs to continue to happen across the disciplines, particularly in math. We feel pretty strongly that we can make some changes by focusing our attention on how students are participating on a daily basis in their math classes. We have a new math interventionist this year who is supporting students in classrooms with their math learning and we also have prioritized some enrichment and enrichment activities to enhance and promote some academic growth for our proficient students. So that's where we're looking sort of in terms of math priorities. Our third priority this year, which you'll see on the next two slides, is really a story that we need to address related to our high needs students. So our high needs population is really just a category created by the state that includes students who are receiving special education services, those students who are identified as low socio-economic in the low socio-economic subgroup and or those who are non-native speakers and are identified as English language learners. So really it's kind of a catch-all for some of those smaller subgroups. But what this group really shares is the risk categories. So some of these graphs here just show based on our accountability data in grades three through five that while only the range of students in grades three, four and five who are categorized in that high needs group, it ranges from 12 to 24. So while it doesn't seem so high, we really like to see some changes in some of their achievement. We feel pretty strongly that our students can and should learn without such a wide discrepancy in achievement. So our equity goal this year is really related to how our high needs students are performing and as a result providing our staff with opportunities for professional development to learn some techniques for differentiating instruction and all of our students. So it's really important for us to really encourage our students to work together to sort of remove some barriers for learning and decrease this achievement. So with all of that said, I'm going to try and quickly summarize some of a good chunk of what was just shared. And here are three objectives that we drafted this year after some of the data digging. One focusing on whole group and small group reading instruction and some continued progress in learning math instruction to ensure some equitable access to the curriculum. And then three prioritizing differentiation to meet the needs of all of our students. With that, what you have here are just a few of our key action steps to show kind of what this looks like on the ground and in the building. And I think what you'll find threaded in what I'm about to share is really a deep commitment not only to building teacher capacity and confidence, but also our commitment to our students and looking at the whole child. So already we've done some good PD with our teachers on new assessment tools in literacy and looking at some district-wide academic awareness curriculum and utilizing our literacy coaches to do some modeling in classrooms and work with that PD. We've worked really hard to operationalize the results of those assessments and those assessment tools and I've recently completed our first data cycle of small group instruction and are now in the process of progress monitoring and we're seeing some good success with our students. In math, we've partnered with our building-based math coach and the district-wide SEL coach around SEL practices in math classrooms and we've begun to create some teacher toolboxes to support students with intervention activities as well as enrichment needs and teachers have started to focus on some student participation and discourse and we've tried to build a lot of this work into our weekly ACE calendar, which I think you've heard from most of the principals and their school improvement plans has really been a great tool to utilize to get some of this work done. And then as it relates to our equity goal, we're in the process right now of solidifying some workshops in the spring with CAST, SEL, which is a great tool to help students get into the wake field around universal design for learning, which is really just a way for thinking about teaching and learning that helps give students an equal opportunity to succeed, so it's an approach that just offers some flexible ways for students to access material, engage with it and to show what they know. Coming up in January, we're holding some workshops today, the SEL coach and our school psychologist around some specific areas of interest and need in our building related to differentiating needs for students and we've worked really hard this year to tighten our response to student needs by implementing a pretty robust student response team and process where teachers are working together to offer strategies to one another and interventions that can be used in classrooms to support students learning. We have resources in place that are supporting our work. We have a full time district and building specialists to support the ACE blocks and early release schedule and calendar that allows us the time to work on our goals, a building based math coach and interventionists and three reading specialists. To continue making progress towards our goals, we believe that we need to bring our third reading specialist and another special educator and a part time social worker to our team and we need to continue to provide meaningful professional development for all of our staff around our areas of focus. So this wraps up our presentation. Thank you for your time and we are open to questions and comments. Thank you very much. Thank you for your presentation. Very colorful and very informative. Any of the members have any questions or comments that they would like to make? Mr. Schleckman. First I wanted to say I was really touched by the description of greeting children coming into the school. When I was a principal I would greet them with a handbook. I would be very unhappy to have that greeting in the morning. But as to the school improvement plan that I'm looking at, if this thing was a hamburger, I would be very, very unhappy because this is so very well done. It's a very thoughtful analysis and I move or seat. I got to think about the analogy. Thank you for your presentation and your SIP. And also Mr. Armani, I thank you for yours too. They're both excellent. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the learning about implementing SEL in classroom mathematics communities. So yeah, so we've been working with SEL coach in the district around ways with which we can implement some more SEL practices across the disciplines as we're finding that particularly after the pandemic that students are showing some more social emotional needs than we have seen in the past, but really as best practices to be supporting students feeling of belonging to their communities and across those disciplines. So we've been working with SEL in the district around incorporating SEL across the day and not just in small separate segments of the day and coupled with that, we do have some SEL curriculum that's being implemented in buildings, which is a sort of offset that and teach some of the skills but really looking at how we can embed SEL across the day instead of just having some sort of instruction. Okay, that's helpful. I wasn't sure if it was perhaps targeted towards trying not to have kids be math phobic or something like that, but what you're saying makes much more sense. I just wasn't sure where it was going, so thank you. Anyone else at this time? Seeing none, there was a motion I think made to accept it. Second. Is there any further discussion? Oh, call of vote. Ms. Eckston. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Again. Okay. Don't confuse me. And I vote yes. Thank you very much. To your staff, to the principal, to the assistant principal, phenomenal job. Thank you so much. Do you have anything else you'd like to add? I would just like to thank the bracket and Pierce leadership for their work on these plans and let them go so that they can be ready for tomorrow. I have a wonderful holiday folks. Okay. Moving on to the agenda, monthly financial report, Mr. Mason. Thank you. Good evening school committee. Thank you for understanding last, the last meeting to allow, allow me to postpone it to this meeting to present you the documents that was shared previously. Those included the monthly reports, which was for month ending period, December 30th, that's period five. That included the monthly reports for the general fund, the revolving, the grants, which also included the COVID-19 grants and the electronic, the electronic bus grant. Sections as well as the end of year report. Summary page directly from the end of year report and a memo to disclose the changes from the previous years, as well as some small analysis of special education spending. I will start off with the financial reports for this period. As you can see, in that period for ending November 30th, the year day expended was around $21.7 million, which we've spent about 27% of the budget, where $54.6 million was encumbered at the time, which is about 68.2%, which means 95.3% of the budget has been either spent or obligated to be spent. That leaves about 4.7% left to be spent, which of that $2.5 million or $2.6 million or so is projected to be spent leaving right now a projected balance of $1.1 million still early. We still haven't even started, really it's upon the winter season. So we'll keep the school committee apprised of any changes. And most of this balance is once again tied to the vacant positions that we've been carrying and special education out of district tuition and transportation related to that in the budget. And what you'll see in the report, as well as a transfer that's yet to happen, which will be reflected in the December report, and we just posted that transfer for this month. The revolving funds, there's nothing new to note, except that you'll see that in the December reports, we'll see that transfer from the general fund to the sugar burger for related special education out of district tuition expenses. And we spent about 9.8% of the revolving budgets of that and we've collected about 29.8% of what we were expecting to collect as of period five. Our grants are in line. We've spent about 11.6% of the grants in the budget at this point, and we've collected about the same amount in terms of revenue. The COVID-19 related grants, we've been awarded about $2 million. They just recently be sent up the largest one, which is the S or three, which was included in the memo, in the emotions that was recommended for the school committee to accept. And as well, there's nothing changed in terms of the bus grant portion, except that we've awarded a vendor to manufacture the two buses, and that will take about nine to 12 months to complete. I just want to note that the three motions are the three grants that should be accepted by the school committee that we've, I recommend that you accept this evening is the safe and supportive schools competitive grant, which was up to $10,000. A smaller grant, which is the secretary advisories group on environmental education, which was for $350 for instructional materials, and the S or three grant, which we've previously presented on, which is $1,133,000, $650. $1,133,000, $653. That's it. I'll stop there. If anybody has any questions on the monthly reports and then I can go on to the end of your reports. Did we take that motion at this time? Dr. Ampe. So moved. I move all three motions. If I can together. There was second. Again, I second. Thank you. Any further discussion on that? Stuart will call a vote. Ms. Axton. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Mr. Schlichman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. And I vote yes. Motion is carried. Mr. Mason, do you have something more? Yes, I just, just, I mean, if there's any questions I can go if you would like me to briefly talk about the end of your report. I mean, I think the memo explains what our total spending was. We spent about $138 million in fiscal 21 on education in Arlington. We spent about $138 million on education. We spent about $138 million on education. We spent about $138 million on education. We spent about $138 million on education. We spent about $138 million on education. We spent about $138 million on education. That is an increase of 23% from the previous year. And most of that is tied about $16 million is tied. To the high school project. If you guys would like me to go any further. I could. Or if this specific questions I. I would answer. Dr. Ampe. Thanks. I actually had a question on the monthly report. I'm not sure. I don't know. Hi. Um, that, that is due to. Um, the, the increased, uh, of the use of software due to what we, what we, uh, started to do when we went remote. And we've, um, carried a lot of the software on, um, and considered the. Continue to have a subscription. So that would, um, include like things like dream box and, uh, um, Dr. Neil may know a couple of other names. But it's, it's mainly instructional software for the help students. Uh, in class and outside of the classroom. Okay. And we hadn't. I just did our budget for it. Cool. Okay. Thank you. Just like when you have something. Uh, no, thank you. Uh, let me. Okay. Anyone else. Thank you, Mr. Mason. I'll set to move on. Uh, superintendent's goals and formative assessment update. Dr. Holman. Okay. Thank you. Let me share my screen. Um, I have a quick update for the committee as we had scheduled as part of our school committee presentation calendar, uh, to just go over where I am with the progress towards my formative assessment, um, as well as to give you an improved, uh, an update on where I am relative to the goals and give the committee an opportunity to, uh, discuss or think about how they want to present feedback, um, to me. So I want to just give a quick overview of what the goals were and what the selected focus indicators were from the superintendent's rubric from the state of Massachusetts. Um, I had selected these focus indicators as areas that I was focused on in my work in my first year as a superintendent and areas where I both felt that I had strengths and wanted to develop my practice as part of my professional practice goal. I identified three district improvement goals at the start of the school year. The first one was to build a collaborative and equity focused leadership culture for the district. Um, and the goals for that were to support time for leaders to learn together and calibrate expectations and to support, uh, decision making on student level data and experiences. The second district improvement goal was to streamline transparency, family engagement and communication through processes that would include families in decision making and include their voices in the process of putting together plans and resources and communications that would be clear, timely and easy to access. The third goal was to make sure that we could come back to school full time and maintain as, um, regular of a school experience as possible and have students be in person. So, uh, a safe and supportive pandemic return and recovery was a major goal with a reduction in the number of students who experienced learning disruptions and need to be out of school as a result of the pandemic and a supportive post pandemic experience for our students and families. So, I'm going to update you on where I am with the key action steps under each goal and, uh, what I intend to provide you in January in terms of evidence and outcomes for the formative assessment. So, um, for each of the actions, and I'm not going to read each slide to you because I don't think that's necessary. Um, but for each of the actions that I have provided, uh, outline of where I am, if it says in progress, it means that it's ongoing. It probably will be throughout the course of the year. Some of these things might be fully completed by the end of the school year. Um, and in the formative evidence and outcomes for each of the action steps I had outlined at the start of the year, I provide what I anticipate will be prepared for you to review for the formative assessment in January. So, these are materials I will compile over the next several weeks and give you the opportunity to review before our first meeting in January. Um, I believe it's our first meeting in January and then you will have the opportunity to give you feedback on those materials. Most of these action steps, here's goal two, are in progress. Um, so I have things that are sort of, um, you know, thus far as evidence, but maybe not totally completed, including artifacts from communications, the entry plan report that I will present to the school committee when we return in January. Um, and I will also share with you some of the examples of work that has been done in any of these areas. Uh, one of the areas that has been completed is compiling the resources available to support pool testing and test and stay protocols. That's obviously still ongoing, but we have those resources available now in the district and we've expanded some of our nursing resources as we've gone along and some of these data sets are pieces that have been available to you throughout our meetings as well, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Um, and there's the professional practice goal. All of these are also still in progress and I'll provide a reflection memo on where I am with some of these tasks as part of my evidence as well. And the discussion before you tonight is really to ask any questions that you have, provide me with any input that you have on data or evidence that you would like to see that I haven't listed in the slides that were in your slide. Um, and to discuss how you would like evidence to be submitted by me to the committee and how you would like feedback to be provided to me, um, either through the chair or as individuals. Um, and any other comments or questions that you have. Before we start is the formative information that you get back. Is that considered part of the permanent record? Yes. So the issue will this be treated the same way that we do a forum? Yes. So, uh, I guess, um, and I'm opening the discussion, but I'm suggesting to the committee, uh, what we've done in the past that you feed to the chair. The chair compiles it and it be presented. Uh, anything else? I'm hoping for any other suggestion. Dr. Ampe. Yeah. What. When you say that I'm wondering what. What's the. Floor of what we need to do. I understand we could do more than that, but what's the minimum that we have to provide. I'll stand corrected, but, uh, I understand that we have to respond. As a committee, not as an individual, but as a committee, but as an individual. Uh, has been listed as a goal and, uh, react to how Dr. Holman presents her evidence of, uh, where she is at this moment are achieving it or where she's continuing to go. Is there a formal. There's no as far as I know, there's no formal document for this. Okay. So it's not like the other one where we have the whole document. Okay. Like the summative. Should. Document. I'd make. Should we make our own document? Six different ones. Seven different ones. Is that what you're suggesting or. No, no, no. I'm saying one, one document that has all the different things on it and our response or something. So that we each fill out the same thing. Jane. I, so it's been a minute, but I thought that when we talked about this over the summer that we were going to provide some sort of. Narrative feedback in advance. Um, that we would, um, that would be part of the public, you know, be a part of the public record and that we would, um, that that, that that was what we were going to do at that time. If my memory serves, I would say that we were low. We were low to provide any kind of numerical. Ranking or. Quantitative feedback of any kind that we would provide. Qualitative feedback that we would provide both in writing and during a meeting. But. That's just what I remember. So I don't know. When did you have your hand up? Okay, Jeff. Yeah, thanks. I think Ms. Morgan and Dr. Allison Ampere both right. We agreed not to do anything numerical, but I think we agreed that it would be good to have a common form that we use. I don't know if the committee needs to create that. I think the district leadership can just come up with something. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Dr. Coleman and I can come up with something. Yeah, I just want to come up with a form that we all use. And it's a narrative. It's not numerical. And we just need to know the deadline when to get it to you. That's what. I think we can work on this in the next week. Can we duck home? That reasonable. No pressure. Yeah. I don't think it's a cop. All right. Thank you. We all said on this. It was easy. Okay. Moving on. Superintendents report. Hold on a moment. Let me share my screen again. So here is our update with regards to where we are with COVID cases in Arlington public schools as of this week, we are having a lighter week with COVID cases this week. And we have over the past two, which is good news. We have not had as many cases that have reached the schools. We are, however, if you look at the town side statistics on the right of the slide, seeing a really significant uptick in cases per 100,000 in town. So I want to continue to encourage everybody to take every precaution that you can. We do not have concerns about transmission in our schools. Our protocols are working very well. And we do intend to pool test over the holiday week next week. So we will be doing full pool testing next week. And we will be doing full pool testing next week. So I want to say a big thanks to our nursing team who is adjusting timelines so that they can get all of the pool tests done before we need it in enough time for us to get the results back so that we can do the contact tracing that's required as a result of pool testing. So they have needed to significantly shift, even though it's only a four day week, we know the holidays at the end of that week. So they've needed to significantly shift their timeline so that they can do the pool testing next week. But we're very glad that they can, that we give families the opportunity to be tested next week, given the rise in cases. We are not in a position where we're considering any sort of relaxation of protocols or mitigation measures right now for January. And we have received information from the state and the commissioner that any determinations about whether or not mass mandates will be extended will be made later on in January and have not been determined yet. I also wanted to share with the community our current vaccination rates for Arlington public school students as you will see some of our schools are well above the 80% mark, which is fantastic. Arlington high school has 89% of their students vaccinated. This is showing any students who have received at least one shot. We do not have this percentage of students fully vaccinated yet, but when we get back in January, I'm going to adjust these statistics to only show those students who are considered fully vaccinated. We wanted to make sure that we were tracking our younger students as well who had went, who had gotten at least one shot or have gotten both shots, but may not be past that two week mark, which most of our students who were in our very earliest round of vaccinations will just be hitting in the next week or so. We have very high rates and we're happy for that. And we're really hoping that we can get all of our schools above 80% or even better above the 90% mark in the next couple of weeks. And we're hoping that we can get all of our children vaccinated, especially as we head into the holiday and winter seasons. A few other items to update everybody on first, good news that we had our Arlington high school winter concert last night and it was a smashing success. The musicians were there. Everybody was masked and we had a lovely audience and the music was beautiful. The Arlington education foundation has also awarded the Arlington public schools, a district vision and strategic planning team for the Arlington public schools. We are very excited to be part of the Arlington public schools and vision Arlington and would like to thank them as well for their partnership on developing the grant proposal for this grant. An invitation for families and staff members and community members to apply to participate in the strategic planning team for Arlington public schools will go out in January and we're very much looking forward to an inclusive process for developing a vision and mission as well as the future. We were also awarded, this just came in yesterday, very exciting from Governor Baker's office, teacher diversification pilot program grant for $42,000 and this grant is going to support unlicensed Arlington public school staff, particularly any staff who are our TAs or BSPs in the district and to identify as individuals of color to acquire their professional license. We actually have a large number of educators in the district who are in our TA and BSP positions and we would love to have the opportunity to support them in getting a teaching license and staying with the school system. We're very excited about that opportunity. We also want to update you that we interviewed vendors today and we have more interviews to be conducted next week to conduct our equity audit which was part of our SR3 plan. We're going to begin those today and we have a representative stakeholder committee that includes family members, students and staff doing those interviews so that we can find the best possible person to conduct that audit for us. I also wanted to address a message that went out to families earlier today about a Tiktok and social media challenge or threat that has been making some nationwide news today. I want to emphasize what I emphasized in that discussion. We do not have concerns about public schools. We do not have concerns about safety tomorrow but because this is a national story and because other districts were messaging about what was going on in this social media realm we wanted to make sure that families were reassured that we were taking it seriously. We will be very vigilant during the day tomorrow and we are increasing police patrol around our schools and the district. About nine of those are paraprofessional or TA positions. The others are professional positions. We have special education openings and WBUR reported this week on pretty massive shortfalls in special education availability of staff. There is a staffing shortage in that area nationwide so we are seeing the impact of that in Arlington public schools as well. When it comes to snow days I have gotten this information. I thought I would go ahead and update everybody. I think I said at a previous meeting that the kids are pretty unanimous about snow days that we should have snow days and the commissioner weighed in this week and he agrees. We will be having snow days not remote schooling days on days when it snows but if we have a particularly challenging winter we will be in a position to consider remote days if the commissioner allows for it. I think we will be able to do that. I think we will be able to do that. I think we will be able to do that. I think we will be able to decide and play in the snow and not be on your computer. You have your enrollment report as usual and it doesn't show any significant changes since the last one that you received. With that I am done and I will take any questions from the committee. Anyone in the committee have any questions? Mr. Thelman. I have two questions. I mean have you looked at anything? Are there districts? Have you talked to superintendents about doing something creative? I don't know what that would be. I am not sure. We have heard about creative solutions such as signing bonuses. I think that those don't really attract staff in the way that we might anticipate that they do. We have done things such as add stipends to our positions. We have done things such as signing bonuses. We have done things such as signing bonuses for our nurses, all of them. Not just one new position but all of them. That has helped to attract into some of the positions that we have posted in mid-year. I think what is also problematic about things like signing bonuses, first of all, legally and in terms of our relationships with our bargaining units, it is problematic because we have been able to fill positions over the last couple of weeks. We do have the few that remain open. Mr. Spiegel, are you on? Go ahead. We have two of those positions that are listed. We are just filled today. The elementary math coach, which was a vacancy. And the district-wide social worker position. We have two positions that are listed. We have two positions that are listed. We are just filled today. The elementary math coach, social worker position. I just spoke today to those, the two people who will be taking those positions. And I am on, you know, our HR association in Massachusetts is actively, has an active listserv. And every district, all the HR directors in the state are having this issue of finding people, looking, the desi is trying to do things to publicize our openings to candidates. So, I mean, we're all sort of in the same boat. There is a real staffing shortage and we are trying everything, posting in different places and word of mouth. And it's a challenge. It's a challenge for everybody everywhere. So yeah. Yeah. This case. I'm just going to put a plug in here. It's not going to help with our, like, our staff or permanent positions, but we are so desperately short on substitutes. That like teachers are giving up prep time to cover classes just so we can keep buildings open at this point. If any college students are home and they're going to be home through January, subbing is awesome. Kids are really fun to work with. The hours are pretty predictable. Especially if you want to go into education, it's phenomenal experience. So like, please, please, please sign up and be a sub. And we do have some college students who've reached out to me who we've added, who we're adding. Now, and we'll be starting some tomorrow, a couple of tomorrow and through the next week. And then many of them have much of January off until they have to go back to the end of January. And just so for anyone listening to work in math, in any Massachusetts school, if you want to get fingerprinted, just, I, it's a, not a, it's a quick process, but I can send whoever is interested in that information. And we do require proof of COVID vaccination for staff. Thank you. I think it's probably hidden in the background of, of my, my white hand is hidden against the white background there. But I just wanted to add that we have used contract. We've been using agencies to fill many of our contracted positions. Mr. Thielman. So while, you know, we have posted vacancies because we're trying to hire permanent people. We have people in positions to cover services at this point. And we've been using contracted PTs to cover our physical therapist who's on their, her maternity leave. So we, we are. So some of those vacancies that you're seeing doesn't mean that there isn't somebody in that position at this moment, because it's a contracted service and we're continuing to keep it open. And I just wanted to let folks know that obviously that does come at a higher cost, which Michael Mason can probably share with you as, as far as what we are paying these agencies. And for whatever reason, they seem to have people who are not applying directly to the, the positions that we are posting. Thank you very much. The, the other question I had, if I get one more question and Mr. was some people have reached out and wanted to know, wanted clarification about what the policy of the district is regarding masks. In other words, would, what would the criteria be to get to a point where we would no longer require masks? I would say that that is a bit of a moving target. And one of the things we put in the reopening plan and the recovery plan was a 90% bar. That was because at the time we had a lot of conversation around where would we place the bar and the state had not weighed in on that at that point. They had not given us a metric. And so we created our own metric as part of the health and safety team. And since then the state has weighed in with a similar metric. They're not too far off from ours. And they've said 80% and you can apply for a waiver. And I think that that's a, that's a good metric to work with. And it's also really important that we be in line with the town health and human services department and what we're seeing. And if we are dealing with a more at the time, we were dealing with a very contagious delta variant. When we are now dealing with and maybe even more contagious Omicron variant in the next month or two, the, and we're fully indoors and we need to be able to close the school. And we need to be able to close the school because it's too cold for the students to have the windows open. We need to take that into consideration with everything else. And what I would also say is very important to keep in mind is that we need to be able to staff our buildings. And if you test positive for COVID-19 right now, you are out of the building for 14 days. And there's, there's no way around that. And if it is spreading in our schools, if we take mass often begins to spread in our schools. And we need to be able to close the school. And we need to be able to close the school. Because enough staff are out sick that we can't staff it. And that could be for an extended period of time because of how long somebody might need to be out with COVID-19. So while we are, while we would love to be in a position where we can begin to relax restrictions. And while we know the impact that the masking can have on students, social engagement. And on their ability to learn. We need to take safety into consideration and make sure we know that we're going to be able to do that. And that we're going to be able to do that. And that we're going to be able to do that. And that the state makes sense. And we will follow the commissioner's guidance. If he extends that mask mandate, that's something that we need to take into consideration. And we're going to work with the health and human services department. No determination will be made absent. All of those considerations. Thank you very much. Dr. I just wanted to add that. I hope we're also thinking. About how we had some. The masks are helping. Minimize the impact of those. I understand we're doing everything we can to make everything keep working, but. These are mechanical devices and occasionally they don't. And. Especially as we go into winter plus Omicron. It's. It gives us pause. I also wanted to ask, I can't find. I don't know exactly what I was looking for, but there was some concern that I heard from a parent that. They were not. Their student actually was a close contact and they were not. Identified by the contact testing or they weren't. I'm not sure if they weren't identified or if they weren't contacted. And. I don't. Just. Are we able to identify? I mean. Is this happening a lot? Are we identifying everybody? Are we having manpower problems? What, what's happening? So we identify any close contact and communicate with close contacts because there are expectations around close contacts in schools. We, it does depend who they will be contact traced by like who they are contacted by depends on where the contact actually took place. It has to have taken place during school. If the contact took place outside of school, obviously they're going to be contacted by health and human services. I do know that we had one occasion where we didn't immediately identify a close contact. We did identify that situation and then identify the close contact and communicate with that family. In the event that a family feels as though they weren't contacted, they should definitely reach out to us and get clarification on what our procedure was because we identify all close contacts regardless of vaccination status. Great. That's really helpful. Thank you. Great. I. So I think if you have COVID, I think the isolation is 10 days, not 14 days. But it's still a lot of days. Maybe it's 14 days and I'm wrong. The question I had as a follow up to. To Dr. Allison Ampes, it seems like this week in particular, we've had a hard time finding the positive cases in the pools. So there were five pools, but we only found like we were only able to disaggregate down to one, which we've been doing. It just seems like it's a bad week, right? Like that we've just haven't been able to find it, which happens. What I was curious and I couldn't find this anywhere is what it what, if any, are the protocols for notification. If. No, if they don't find the case, right? So like. So, and this happened to us this week. My daughter was in a positive pool. She was follow up tested. It was negative. I didn't receive any communication, which makes sense. But now that I go and look at the dashboard, I think to myself, ew, there were five pools, but only one of them we found the case. I wonder if she was in the four where we didn't find the case. And like, should I take her for a PCR test because like, maybe she has COVID and the by next didn't find it. And I guess I was just curious. If, if we had thought about. Like what the notification might look like in a situation where we have a test, a pool that comes back negative, but we're not able to find the case using the by next testing. I can. I can follow up with our health team on that. We don't currently, currently what we would do is retest them the following day to see if we identify the positive pool the following day. Often. Or in these cases, like in that case, we did not. So it's still the one and they're, we didn't find a follow up confirmed positive. And we have not been notifying if we aren't able to find the confirmed positive. Sometimes it'll show up in a next round of pool testing, and then we'll be able to confirm the positive pool. Often that won't happen. So, or the family will have a PCR test separate because somebody becomes symptomatic and then we'll be able to confirm the positive pool. Depending on how many days out, we can't really confirm the positive pools from that particular case because I can talk to the health team about what the capacity would be for notification in cases like this. We've had a surprising number of pools that have not been able to be confirmed this week. That's not typical. It seems like it. So it's the, it doesn't, this doesn't seem like a very, this seems like a very, like a small problem. I guess so to me anyway. It's just interesting that. Yeah, it's interesting that we're not finding them with the Binax tests this week. Let's, let's hope that's not indicative of anything to come. But okay, great. And, you know, I just that the, the dashboard and the transparency of the data and information is just, it's so appreciated. It is so helpful. It's so self-service. And we can get so much good information from it. And I'm, I appreciate it takes a lot of time to put something like this together and I'm, I'm just, I'm really grateful that we have it. So thank you, Dr. Holman. I know that you have a big hand in making this happen and you're standing on the shoulders of the giants who work in our nurses offices, making sure that this, you know, that this testing is happening every week. And it's just, it's really, it's really important. And I'm proud that we're doing it. And it's certainly, this is not the, you know, I, there are lots of districts that are testing, but not all of them. So it's great. Thank you so much. You have the best health team in the state. Hands down. Thank you very much. I want to circle back to the issues, substitutes. I'm, I've been watching the Stratton school parents, Facebook feed. And there is one parent over there who decided to become a substitute. And just as having a wonderful time doing it. And I just want to say that if you are a parent and you're available during the day, please consider doing this. You will find joy in working with the kids. You have it in your heart and soul to be a substitute and work with our kids. It's a wonderful thing to do. Thank you. Well said. Okay. Next item. First create draft school committee, regular meeting dates. Mr. Schlichman. We're doing this very early. Ms. Diggins was looking to put together a district calendar. And I scrambled to do this. So I'm going to move it quickly. And maybe a little too quickly, but. I'm going to move presentation for first reading pursuant to the provisions of file be a the following dates for the school year. 2022. 2023 school committee meetings. And in 2022, it will be September 8th, September 22nd, October 13th, October 27th, November 17th, December 1st and December 15th. And for 2023. It'll be January 12th and 26th, February 9th, March 2nd, 16th and 30th. April 13th and 27th, May 11th and 25th. And June 8th and June 22nd. Understanding that this is a first reading. And that the dates that, that I'm proposing here. Follow the pattern of meetings that were engaged in this year. And I have checked for the date for the MISC delegate assembly and conference and we are not in conflict if we adopt this schedule. So it is now before us as a first read. Think about it, compare it to your own calendars, debate it, discuss it, and we'll come back. We'll come back at the next meeting and adopt it. We all have the opportunity going forward to add dates or change dates to through a motion to speak. I just want to make sure everyone understands that. Those are the 21 dates. 19 dates were required to right schedule as regular meetings. We can add them. We can delete them at will, but we need to publish them for our policy. Okay. Did you have a comment? Just the December 15th date needs to be 2022, not 2023. On the list. No, the years are off. So we'll get it all fixed for next year. For next meeting, which will be next year. You know, it's really hard to get the years right when we're this, this far off. I have faith in you, Paul. You have a little trouble with your hand up and down, but other than that, you're doing a great job. We'll be gone. Consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so request. Which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Or number two, two, one, two, six, 776,813 dollars and two cents. Stratton school revised. School improvement plan 1213. 2021 school committee regular meeting minutes, November 18, 2021. School committee regular meeting minutes, December 2nd, 2021. I have a motion to accept to approve a move. Is there a second. Second. Mr. Cotton. Yes. This action. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. And I vote yes. Subcommittee liaison reports and announcements budget. Dr. Ampe. Nothing to report at this time. We'll be meeting again in the coming year. Many relations. Ms. Exton. This. Dr. Allison MP and I'm had a chat on Saturday. It was a small group. But it went well. Curriculum instruction assessment and accountability. Mr. Cardin. We are meeting in early January. I don't have the date in front of me. It'll be posted. So what is Mr. Thielman. We don't have a meeting. No report. Pass your procedure. Mr. Schlickman. Allington high school building committee, Mr. Thielman. We had a very successful forum. We had a forum. We had a forum. We had a forum. But we had a forum. And that was last night. We don't really know the attendance, but the link to the to the program is on the ACMI website. I don't know what's on the island school. On the island school building committee website, but it's on the ACMI website. People can watch it. And. Dr. Homon report afterwards. That about 30 plus 35 or so. People use the translation channels. Spanish Mandarin Japanese. I think I've got them all. So that was nice to see. And on top of that about 36 additional viewers in English. Yes. Any liaison reports at this time. Any announcements. Any future agenda items. Seeing none. Executive we will be entering executive session and Mr. Spiegel. It's my understanding we will not be returning to open meeting. Yeah, I don't know if it's it's not on the agenda. For an open meeting though. So now. Okay. To executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and our non union personnel. A contract negotiations with union and our known union, which have held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. I will entertain a motion to go into executive session. Move. Second. Thank you. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Dr. Rampe. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Ms. Ekston. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. And I vote yes. So move.