 We just met for a little while in an executive session, so thank you all for coming. Before I get started tonight, I just wanted to ask your pass for your indulgence here on a brief moment of silence for the Commonwealth's late Governor, Paul Solucci, who was a memorial to him today in the statehouse, and I'd like to just ask for a moment of silence for Governor Solucci. Thank you. To go over the agenda tonight, we'll have public participation. We'll have an update on school safety from our superintendent. We'll have a presentation on district-determined measures and common core alignment. Our assistant superintendent and department heads. Approval of the school calendar for next year, the approval of the job description. We'll go to approve our district goals for next year, the superintendent's report update on our Thompson Rebuild project, monthly financial report, subcommittee reports, our consent agenda followed by the secretary's report, and if necessary, and I believe it may well be, entertain a motion to enter executive session once again. So, not sure, I didn't see the list. Is there any public participation? None. Okay. We'll move on to update on school safety, Dr. Bode. There was a request to just have an end of the year report on how we've been doing with securing the buildings, though I will say the school safety and security also extends to the types of practice and drills that we do so that students and staff are both ready in the case of an emergency. And I will say with this, that particular issue, we have met all of our goals with respect to fire drills and lockdown procedures at every school. And Ellen Digby, who is the person in the district who is responsible for making sure that all happens and making sure that every school meets those requirements, has assured me that that has happened this year. With respect to the buildings being locked and secured, the, let's talk about each level. At the elementary school, I believe that, and I'm very confident that we have very secure schools. One of the things that we added to our protocols this year was making sure that when teachers and students left the building for recess, that the door behind them locked. And for a while there, in some buildings, they had to go around to the front door and buzz in, but that became pretty inconvenient. So we did relock, put new locks into those doors, and we have a secure key system where teachers are able to exit and enter through a locked door that always remains locked. At the middle school, the same, though they don't go out for recess, but you cannot get into the building unless you are buzzed in, and that even happens for the gym classes as well that go out and play on the field. So the security there is, I think, is very tight. I know that one parent mentioned that another, someone held the door open for them and they were able to enter and not without identifying themselves. And I think as our consciousness about security grows, there will be less of that. And that's sort of hard as a school system to entirely make sure it doesn't happen, though we have been trying to change the culture around that as well as we go forward. So I know the building principals have addressed that in different ways in their own schools. Our challenge still remains the high school, and I get a range of complaints. Frankly, more of the complaints is nobody can get in and they want to get in and making sure that everybody's on board as to when the doors need to be open for community ed or for school committees or any other kinds of meetings. But one of the challenges we have is that our support staff has decreased over the years due to budget reductions. And we really only have two people in the office and both are very busy. Imagine a high school this size that one person is managing really the phones and the buzzers most of the time. What we really need to have, and this won't solve all of our problems, but it certainly will go a long way to improving the situation, is to have someone that sits at that front desk in the foyer throughout the day has the ability to do the buzzing in, check people, making sure that they sign in, that they have badges, that we know where they're going in the building, to the extent possible, notify the people in the building that they're coming. Particularly now that we have central registration in the high school, there have been some issues with that even in the last couple of weeks. So my recommendation, at least going forward for next year, is that we do have someone in that role. We did not include that as an additive position when we were discussing the budget, but I'm asking that you make a motion too, that we could add that position and where I would find the money to pay for it would be out of the international revolving account. And then next year we'll look at how it becomes part of the base budget going forward. I do think that would be important, and the other piece is that we are looking to put a proposal together this summer for capital, looking at providing more cameras and secure doors, primarily at the high school, but certainly at Ottison and the elementary as well. And once we have that proposal together, we will share it with you, and that will be ready for capital. Usually their deadline is sometime in August, is that right? So that's an update. So the proposal I have is that you vote to make a motion to authorize me to hire someone for that position, it would be at a TA salary. So moved. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those against? Thank you. Any questions for Dr. Bodie on this issue? Moving on. District Determine Measures, Common Core Alignment. I see a lot of department heads here with us tonight. Thank you, and good evening. We should introduce everyone, and I really appreciate them coming this evening because it's a busy, busy time of the year, as you all know. These represent our five core department chairs. We have Deb Perry, who is our K-12 English Language Arts Department Chair, Matt Coleman, Mathematics, Larry Weathers, Science, Kerry Dunn, Social Studies History, and Catherine Ritz, World Languages. So I'll turn this over to Laura. We're actually going to start with the presentation on the Common Core Alignment because it is from this that the district determined measures. This is what the district determined measures will be measuring, so I wanted to start a little bit with this. There are some slides in here that are very dense, and they're mainly for your information and not to actually go over in great detail this evening. I want to talk a little bit to remind everybody about our overarching view of the Common Core State Standards. Talk about the major changes that we have put in in terms of literacy and numeracy. Give you a current status on our implementation and talk a little bit about the work that lies ahead. We've been talking a lot about the Common Core over the last year, and we really needed to boil it down to just exactly what does this look like and what does it mean to our students. So if we take the pages and pages and pages of documentation, and there are quite a few of them, on the Common Core, basically it boils down to this. We need to prepare our students to work both independently and collaboratively. They need to be able to analyze and synthesize multiple sources of evidence of varying types. We need to be able to use that evidence. They need to be able to use that evidence in creation of robust arguments, and they need to be able to communicate those arguments in oral, written, and digital forms. This is what the Common Core means across all subject areas. The ability to analyze and synthesize multiple sources of evidence is important in English language arts, in social studies, in science, and in mathematics, and even in world language. The ability to create those arguments using that evidence, again, crosses all subject areas, and students need to be able to communicate those arguments in oral, written, and digital forms. And why is it important to sort of melt it down to this? And that is when you hear the district-determined measures, and as we go through the rest of the slides, you're going to hear the word evidence over and over again. When you hear the district-determined measures, you're going to hear analyze and synthesize over and over and over again, and you're going to hear things about performance tasks, which are students' ability to communicate those arguments in oral, written, and digital form. So this is at the heart of everything that we do. When we look at major elements in literacy and the changes that we've had to make in terms of our curriculum, and we discussed this last time when we talked about the calendar, questions came about when we spent a whole year on the Common Core, why aren't we not done? And my answer was that we're done with the, or we're fairly done with the documenting of the curriculum, but the biggest change in the Common Core is not so much what year you cover what topic, but rather what you ask students to do to be able to demonstrate their knowledge about that topic. So in the area of literacy and reading, there's a staircase of complexity, so students go all the way from the beginnings of reading until the demands that are at college and career-ready. And they need to be ready for that no later than at the end of high school. And so that's something that we had to realign our curriculum to match. We're looking at progressive development of reading comprehension so that students are advancing through the grades, are able to gain more and more from what they read, and that's often termed as going from learning to read to reading to learn. They need to be able to read a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature, as well as informational text. And you hear a lot about that. Students need to be able to be able to gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives. And so we've been working K through 12 at what does literacy look like in terms of reading across all subject areas to make sure that students will be able to meet the needs of the Common Core. In terms of writing, again, the word argument comes back. Substance of claims, talking about evidence, sound reasoning, which you'll hear when we talk about the theories of the mathematical practices. You'll hear Ms. Dunn talk about research and the focus on research and social studies, and that also comes across in the area of science. It's emphasized through all the standards, but most prominently in the writing strand. Literacy doesn't just involve reading and writing. It also involves speaking and listening in the Common Core standards. So students need to be able to not only gain that information but gain it through listening and speaking. They need to be able to have academic discussions in one-on-one small group and whole class settings. So when you hear about the Common Assessments, you're not going to hear only about paper and pencil tests, but you're also going to hear about other performance assessments. And formal presentations are one way in which students need to have this talk occur, but also informal settings. And those settings need to include digital settings, blogs, and online discussions. Vocabulary has a very big emphasis on the Common Core state standards, and so our English Language Arts and Literacy people have been working on how does it look to build that vocabulary. Students need to be able to use formal English, but they also need to be able to make informed and skilled choices. They need to be able to choose the right word and know what the right word would be in each circumstance. Vocabulary and conventions are treated in their own stand, not because they're in isolation, but that they go across the areas of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. And so I know, for example, Deb Perry has been working with our teachers on the discussion of how do you teach grammar and not make kids hate reading and writing at the same time. So what is the vision of implementation of literacy on the Common Core? It's cross-disciplinary. The literacy expectations are so that students must be prepared to enter college in the workforce. So what does that look like in practice? Because this is where the rub comes in. Not so much in lining everything on paper, but what it looks like in the classroom. There's an increased rigor. Students need the ability to quickly review and analyze information, and that is not something they are born doing. We need to teach them how to do that. Again, take a stance, create an argument, take a stance with evidence. They need to move well beyond summarization and narrative writing. Many oftentimes in the beginning years, especially, we want students to be able to enjoy writing. So we have them writing narratives primarily. That was under the formal curriculum. Now we're going to have to be doing informational writing at a very, very early age, right from the beginning. And we need to combine the research and thinking required for content area texts and the application of writing skills that are needed. So here's an example of what a prompt might look like that matches the Common Core State Standards from the SATs. You'll notice that this prompt provides some background information and then asks students to plan and write an essay in which they develop their point of view on this issue. But they need to support their position with reasoning and examples taken from reading, studies, experience, or observations. They are not asking people to write about their opinion. They're asking them to use evidence to back up their argument. What does that look like in an AP class? Because they may come in in kindergarten, but their goal is to get them here. So there's a sample synthesis essay prompt that talks about television and how it has been influential in presidential elections. It's telling students that they need to take information from six sources, including the introductory information from each source. And then synthesize that information from at least three of these sources and incorporate it into a coherent, well-developed essay. If that's what our students need to do by the end, and by the way, these are the sources, one from a book, one from an online article, one from an article in The New Yorker, one from a chart that gives some data information, and excerpts from two other books. So in about 45 minutes to an hour, the students need to look at this information and then write. How does this skill develop? If you get to there where the AP, where do students need to start? As early as kindergarten, we need students to use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to state an opinion or a preference about something, but they need to use evidence. As early as kindergarten, they need to use these things to compose an informational piece. They need to name the topic and information about the topic. So all the way from kindergarten to AP, that's what literacy looks like in the Common Core, and that's what we've been working on aligning with this year. In terms of major elements in numeracy, elementary school begins with the focus on number systems and works through our basic operations and to those things that are the bane of the existence of many a math teacher, fractions, negative numbers, and the beginnings of geometry. We come up with, in K through 5, and Matt Coleman's been working with the teachers to make sure that their curriculum is aligned in terms of topics this year. When we look at grades 7 through 12, we're building on that solid foundation and our hope would be, and this is a big goal, that students who have completed seventh grade and have mastered the content and skills through seventh grade and mastered the key word here, will be well prepared for algebra in grade 8. Every student, now that's a goal, we're not going to be there right from the start, but that is our goal. The middle school standards are robust and they have rich preparation for high school mathematics. High school standards call on students to practice mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues. It also prepares students to go out into college and career readiness to use mathematics in a number of situations. In this case, the key word in that last bullet item is novel situations. To apply mathematics to problems that they have not seen before. Mathematics in grades 7 through 12 needs to emphasize mathematical modeling. That modeling needs to link again class from mathematics and statistics, which you heard Matt talk about earlier this year, adding statistic class back in to everyday life. When making these mathematical models, technology is valuable to varying assumptions, exploring consequences, comparing predictions with data. As a matter of fact, if you look at the common core standards as early as kindergarten, students need to use technology in both literacy and numeracy. Those are things that we attended to this year. We need to connect the mathematical standards for practice to the common mathematical standards for content. We need to look at that base because if students don't have that base of understanding of that content, they're not going to be able to go to the areas of practice. Just to remind you, these are the standards for mathematical practice and we need to assess both the standards of content and the standards of mathematical practice. We also need to instruct students so that they are capable of being able to achieve on those assessments. I'm not going to go through these slides in order, in detail, but this is for your reference if you want to look back at later at what topics are covered in each grade level so that you can see how we are building towards high school. Where are we now? All our content is aligned in terms of scope and sequence. The majority of the alignment is documented in Atlas Rubicon, which is our online curriculum mapping system. It will be our focus for the summer and the 13-14 school year to focus on instructional and scaffolding to increase student expertise and analysis and synthesis. We need to have explicit instruction in evaluation and selection of evidence because too often, as you know, students Google and they get 450,000 pieces of evidence and they don't know how to tell which ones are the best ones and we need to work with them on that. There needs to be regular practice in the use of making evidence-based arguments and there has to be significant emphasis in the use of discourse across all subject levels, especially for students to demonstrate what they know and are able to do. So we have two days for each elementary grade for curriculum work and math this summer. Again, focusing more on the instructional techniques and the mathematical practices and discourse. One day for each subject area in 7-12 math. Two days for elementary grade level work and literacy, cross-curriculum work and social studies and literacy, tech university to focus on leveraging technology in order to change instruction and PD's experiences for our teacher and I have to thank Linda Hansen for calling this to my attention as we looked at that first slide at the beginning that talks about and I'm going to flip all the way back to it if I can do it faster now. The overarching view of Common Core State Standards. If we are expecting students to be able to work independently and collaboratively, then we have to have our teachers be able to do that. If we need to be able to analyze and have our students analyze and synthesize multiple sources of evidence of varying types, we need to give teachers experiences to do that because this is not the education that they grew up in. We need to give them the opportunity to practice using evidence in the creation of robust arguments and to communicate those arguments in oral, written and digital forms and that's where we are right now with the Common Core State Standards. I'm going to go ahead and go ahead of us is much steeper than the road behind us. Questions on that before we go on to the next topic. Thank you. Any members have any questions for Dr. Chesson on any of that? Okay we'll go on. Can you bring up the next panel? So the next thing is so how are we going to assess this? Arlington is very lucky in that we have had quite some time. And while we're required to have district determined measures by the state, we want to have district determined measures for us. But you'll see probably slightly less enthusiasm for district determined measures than the common formative assessments and I'll tell you why. So we're going to review the difference between those two and then I'm going to ask each curriculum director to come up and talk about assessments in their subject area and then I'll just finish up briefly with the work that lies ahead. Common formative assessments which our teachers are doing very extensively is assessment for learning. It allows teachers to adopt instruction based on the evidence again, making changes and benefits that will immediately benefit student learning. Students can use that evidence to actively manage and adjust their own learning and the feedback that occurs when there's still time to take action. And this is the measure of the highest interest for our teachers. They're very interested in this. I sat in and data meetings this week where people were talking about the DRA scores of students from the fall and the winter and the spring. There was a lot of conversation about how this can inform what students do over the summer and what they do in the fall. District determined measures are used to make judgments regarding what are the new teacher evaluation system. The assessment of learning is what happened on an annual basis and it's most closely tied with the measurements that are in our goals for the district for SGP of 51 or better and the PPI of 75 or better. And they were acquired by the state as part of the new teacher evaluation system. One of the hardest parts about this is that the state's directives as to what we need to be able to demonstrate where we are in the district have been changing significantly depending on the day. But at this point we were marching in this direction so they can change what we need to do but we're going to be ahead of the curve and I think you'll hear that tonight. And I'm going to start with grades K through 5 and I'm going to ask Linda Hanson to come up and talk about that. Hi, good evening everybody. So we're going to look quickly at elementary literacy. We'll start off with reading. And this is something you've heard of the DRA, the developmental reading assessment before. We don't have quite the right slide in here. We do have expectations for kindergarten at the winter and the spring benchmark. None actually when kindergartners come through the door though we give them a break for the first couple months. But these are measures that teachers understand really well. They know what they mean. They're diagnostic. They're very meaningful for teachers. So I would say that this is a common assessment that we've been using for a number of years in Arlington. But since we need to pick district determined measures for the state, this is one that we are going to pick at the K through 3 level because we can also measure beginning and end of year progress whether or not kids have made a full year's progress in a year's worth of time. No matter where they start we could still measure what the school looks like. In writing we are kind of bringing together a hybrid of the kinds of on-demand writing assessments that we have done in the past three times a year and the fall, winter, and spring. We're keeping that, retaining that writing on demand at the beginning and end of the year. But we're also introducing the collection of written pieces that are scored at the end of the year. So we're going to focus on that this year. We're going to look at the rubric after each unit of study in the Lucy Calkins writing program as we move further into the implementation of the Lucy Calkins writing. So what you see here is the on demand writing prompt and we're going to work on opinion writing. That's going to be the focus this year. That was the type of writing that's the newest for teachers. And the focus of the study is where we have, we've had a significant amount of experience in some of the units of study. Some are going to be brand new this year. So we're trying to do an incremental approach and add bits and pieces each year. So the focus this year will be opinion writing. The following year will be, the focus will be on informational writing. Not that we're not going to do any informational writing this year. But we're going to be doing that. And we're going to be doing that. And the expectations will revolve around opinion this year and information writing next year. And I would call this a common assessment. It's diagnostic, it's keeping track of kids writing over time. But we will not be using writing as a district determined measure this year as part of our pilot. Thank you. In the middle school, the teachers get together three times a year. They give the writing assessment on certain days and then they have a day or two to work together to get them corrected to look at the results to figure out what those results mean and how they need to change their instruction accordingly. In the high school, the common assessments work somewhat similarly although we don't have as much time for that. In fact, for next year, we're actually going to structure time for them to sit down and actually work with each other around the common assessments. As it is, currently they trade information, things that they've learned and they do it online and they do it in brief meetings but they need more time for that. So that's one of the things that we will use some of the release time for next year in a more concentrated way. We're going to add to this whole sense of how students learn to write because we're going to give the same writing prompt at the beginning of the year and the end of the year based on something that we think the kids should be able to have accomplished by the end of the year. In the middle school, we actually have some very nice assessments that use pieces of video and pieces of nonfiction. The kids look at those on one day, make notes on them and then the next day write according to a prompt and then those things will be corrected with a rubric. Many of the skills involved in all of that are directly related to the common core. So we're looking forward to being able to assess where the kids are at the beginning of sixth grade and how they've grown in those skills by the time they get through the year and hopefully the teachers have addressed most of those things. So that will be a very accurate way for us to see the growth that students have made. And then at the high school, we're not as geared exactly to all of the common core requirements in terms of using media and using other elements because the writing that we tend to do in English classes is argument based but it often uses literature and sometimes uses various kinds of literature to compare and contrast and that's what we'll be testing at the beginning of the year and at the end the same kind of thing. Thanks for having me guys. So as it is right now for us, the common assessments, the common assessments, I think there is a lot of crossover for math and one of the things that we're trying to do is for me anyways, avoid like assessment overload. So what I'm trying to do is actually intertwine the two and totally redesign what we're doing for our common assessments so that it actually has all the DDM stuff embedded inside of it. So right now in K through five, we're a little bit more of the common assessments at the elementary level are usually unit assessments that don't really show growth because all you're doing is summative assessments for the end of the chapter. So right now some of the work we're doing right now is just developing diagnostic tests. Our summer work is going to be really fleshing out this entire system for six through 12. The next slide. This is what we're going to try with the game I think for the high school. Our diagnostics. If I look at the kind of common assessments we have our diagnostics initially at the beginning of the year are always kind of basic skills. So we're going to totally revamp it and try to embed some of this DDM concept inside. So we'll still keep the basic skills and that's going to be part of the growth that we'll look at how students are doing overall. There are certain things that I would like to share. That's going to be a big part of our anchor of growth. How do they do with these core foundational ideas? Let's say before algebra that really tied algebra so we can look to see how the overall concepts develop. The weird little twist is we want to kind of maintain this idea of a formative assessment. So we're going to try to embed in that initial diagnostic also stuff that's for the first unit. So I'll use something like an Algebra 2. It's one of the first things for Algebra 2. So some of the ideas in that initial diagnostic at the beginning of the year will have some statistics so that way it's giving the teacher some data that they use initially, some data where they can look for growth and data they can see for where the child came from. So we're just trying to milk this thing for a lot. Laura had talked about the fact that we have multiple content and process standards to deal with. So we're going to look at that in the next segment. Then what's going to happen throughout the rest of the year is the mid-year exam will have components of the mid-year that looks back at your basic skills so that we can measure growth from there. You'll look back at the foundational concepts and see how they did with the stuff that's relevant to that unit. The idea of an initial diagnostic, one at the beginning, one at the end of the year, one at the end of the year, one at the end of the year and one at the end of the year is more chunking it. The last little thing we're going to tie in with the growth of the overall writing and communication, that initial diagnostic will have writing at the beginning of the year but instead of trying to make every one of these big assessments so, like, huge, at the end of the first term there will be another open-ended writing and look at the communication skills going through so we can just kind of hopefully have this as our overall structure. The teachers have been working on the diagnostic and they're coming up with really good things that they've used before and just kind of putting it together, which is kind of nice so far. Any questions? Can we wait till the speaker? Hi, all. Thanks for having me. I'll warn you, my second slide is going to be a little bit of a little bit of a spoiler and I can certainly talk about what was on it. I'll start with where we are now in social studies. We do have common assessments in place and we feel very good about them. We feel that they're actionable and allow us to intervene and help students who are struggling throughout the year and identify skills where there are strengths and skills where students need help. We have unit-based common assessments non-fiction writing-based assessment six times over the course of grade 7 aligned with each unit but it is the actual same assessment just the content that the students write about and the actual source that they use changes with each unit. And in grades 8 through 11 we have three common assessments per year. Some grades actually have more but we have a standard of 3 per year. One is students applying a technology skill or platform that they've learned and making a presentation, designing a website, that sort of thing based on content that they've learned in history class. We do a thorough research process that culminates in the production of a thesis and research paper based on students own research and then we have a common final exam. So that's what we have in place now. We'll be able to use some of that in the development of our district determined measures but we do have to talk about what we'll look like next year and going forward. Grade 7, actually we're going to keep exactly the same. We'll use our first and our last of our nonfiction writing assessments as our two measures within a year. Grade 6 we'll be focusing on source analysis throughout the year and we'll use a first early sample and a late year sample of source analysis as our measurements. Grade 8 through 11 we're really going to focus on the umbrella of research skills and source analysis in all of our district determined measures so what we do need to add and we're working on now is an early in the year grade level appropriate diagnostic to assessed students research skills when they enter the grade then we'll use the thesis last research paper that students complete late in the year as the second sample measurement based on a variety of measures that the teacher will look at in the paper the teacher will be able to determine their skill at that point in time in meeting our research and writing goals. Let me tell you where we are with the common assessments we didn't have the common assessments in my department prior to the beginning so last year we spent the entire year really developing what we wanted our common assessments to look like and this year we've piloted them so to give you an overview in the modern languages we decided to focus the three common assessments around the three modes of communication so these are really crucial in foreign language study you have interpretive communication which is when you are faced with a resource like a radio announcement or a news article and you have to interpret and understand what it is that you're what you're presented with interpersonal communication is when you have basically a two way exchange of conversation or email exchange with someone else and presentational communication is basically what I'm doing right now you've prepared a discussion or you've prepared an essay or a writing that you present and we also wanted to incorporate the four key skills in foreign language reading, listening, speaking and writing so that's essentially the way we've framed the common assessments and by focusing on really a skill and a mode of communication this is something we can track the progress of it's not very it's not based on sort of the discreet content it's a skill that can be tracked up the levels for the classical languages which is Latin in our district we focused on the skill of translation and reading comprehension so that's where we are with the common assessments and I want to just report before I talk about the district determine measures actually spent the day and I'm going to go through at a DEAC district determined measure anchor standard panel anchor development panel it's a long wordy title and I served on the French one to two panel where we really were looking at the curriculum frameworks and coming up with anchor standards that could then be used to help districts develop the district determined measures and so the next step would be to submit exemplars to the state and I actually felt very very good coming out of the meeting today feeling like that we were really addressing the standards that will be used as you know the anchor standards for the state so I feel very confident about that so the two district determined measures that we're planning to use for next year we decided to choose the interpersonal communication and the presentation communication skill for the modern languages so to give you an example in let's say Spanish one the students have a basic conversation hello how are you what's your name tell me you know a little bit of information about yourself we have been filming these we have rubrics that we've developed that really track the progress up the proficiency scales so the rubrics are reflect the Actful which is the American Council in the teaching of foreign languages proficiency scale going from novice to intermediate to low advanced so we have five rubrics to kind of track the students as they go up in the levels and then to jump to three the students are looking at a piece of artwork by like Dolly or a famous Spanish painter and they have to have a conversation with each other and ask what is your opinion of this based on what there is some bringing in of evidence you know what what movement is this from or whatever so the conversation becomes increasingly complex as the students move up in the presentational assessment we focused on writing so they have an in-class essay and it's really the same thing where at level one you've got a very good family or about food that you like to eat and as they go up the levels it becomes increasingly complex in terms of what they're able to write and report on give evidence or give or make develop an argument on X topic and you know support it with whatever so it really focuses on just this increase in difficulty on a very you know a specific skill so that's the overview and very briefly the the classical languages for Latin again it's a translation we have level appropriate as the students have to translate them the Latin teachers also developed rubrics that reflect the skill as it progresses up in difficulty as the text move from I guess sort of leveled readers up into authentic Latin where you know with it just becomes increasingly difficult for them to to interpret to translate as well as with the reading comprehension so I thank you for letting us share our work with the staff and students with you in the in the science department as Dr. Chesson said there are two two areas that we have to watch this content and there's practices we are focusing on two areas of common assessments and and district determined measures they overlap to some extent especially in the area of content although our common assessments tend to be more frequent and sometimes smaller than the larger district determined measures that we are in the process of developing and utilizing so in in our first area of focus we're analyzing pre and post testing data on topical or longer periods of time and we're trying to figure out where where it's best to use smaller groups of time like a topical unit as our district determined measure and where it's best to use year long assessment and that's determined in a sense by us by what the needs are each course is a little different each time of the school of the students life is a little different so we are choosing critical areas topical areas areas that show weakness that have special needs and high needs I mean and some of these are we're exploring and trying things like flip classrooms and how to introduce questions that are long term questions that that we can get some sense of what's happening to a student's understanding throughout the year by monitoring those questions and we're using that as a district determined measure and then our secondary focus is on on growth and as the common core the area of science has a newly developed framework called the next generation science standards it's just come out a month ago and from that framework the state of Massachusetts is now revising its science standards and those will be published in fall and I've spoken with Dr. about coming when those are finalized coming in trying to give an explanation of where they are and what they're all about but those the next generation science standards in a sense overlap with the ELA and mathematics common core it has practices and a very significant overlap of those practices deal with creating arguments from evidence being able to communicate and interpret scientific writings knowing what the meaning of the data is and so we're basing our second focus of district determined measures on measuring that growth it's part of the common core it's part of the next generation science standards we are looking at kids abilities to read and write about scientific articles and recently as recently as last week we are piloting some measures we had our 10th graders involved in a biology symposium organized by our biology teachers which student all of the 10th grade biology students presented their findings on scientific readings that they had done they synthesized their own report from reading multiple scientific papers and had to explain that to a panel of students and adults from the community so the kinds of skills that come out of that are things that we're trying to measure now with a rubric base and it could take the form of lab reports or scientific articles and we're still exploring other possibilities thank you so you've heard from the five major subject areas but the state requirement is that we have district determined measures across every educator we have one district determined measure fitness gram that's currently actually has been used for quite some time in PE we are in the process of creating and piloting two district determined measures in music art and health and we're in the process of creating and piloting two district determined measures for the work of related service providers such as guidance counselors and OT and speech and language pathologists I think one of the things that's evident in addition to the fact that you've heard the same words over again evidence, synthesize, analyze writing using content but not just knowing the content or learning the content but using the content district determined measures came from the staff we did not tell them what they should do it came from the teacher level and that is a very unique way of handling this when we talk to other districts and we still need to negotiate the final version of the district determined measures with the union but I think that developing it from the ground up will really help us get buy-in from teachers and the measures that they want to have their success be determined by so questions for myself or anybody else thank you I'll start I'll start first I want to make sure I've got the concept straight because it finally included so the common assessments are like little tests that you do at any point and they just measure do they know this or not yes they inform instruction right they may not be a test it's a test in the bigger broader yes and then the district determined measurements are like a yard sticking at the beginning and an end and you're measuring what's in between right and you want to know if you went all of 36 inches you got it so then my second question is for subject areas which are assessed via the standardized tests such as MCAS or the new park or whatever how do you plan to go back and see how the district determined measures correlate with what we find what results we see on the MCAS and can I just explain where I'm coming from with this so as we roll all these evaluations forward part of what's rolled back with the calendar is that the district goals need to be set much earlier now and so we're not going to have the MCAS back at that point and so if we have robust information coming from the district determined measures that is helpful well one of the things that will be helpful is that and I'm going to ask Matt to come up here because he knows park more inside and out than I do but that some of the park measurements will actually be back much quicker than the MCAS and if we do the park online we're going to get almost all the results back by the time you want to set district goals but can you talk about the other so the way park is structured is right now through certain level high school through 75% of the year as well as as close to the end of the year as possible so the one that's the 75% of the way through the year will include some running assessments both ELA and mathematics so what they want is that extra time to be able to grade those in between so what they're saying right now is that you take the 75% of the way through they have that little chunk of time to grade you take the as far as the end of the year once that's in you should have all of your assessment data in a week so as long as you're doing it online so it's a quick turnaround because the one at the end of the year is going to be all computer based so it's not going to be person scored so you know people have asked you know 75% can we get that back sooner but it's not going to be until after the other one is done so it's quicker than ever before you know for math I could say one of the things that I'm trying to do with our DDMs is actually mimic what they're doing for park just because you know we need to it's not a bad structure you know park in the long run what they essentially would like to do is do an initial diagnostic a mid-year exam 75% 95% so you have this idea of the growth all the way through but right now the only two that are mandatory components are the 75% and 95% of the way through the year okay thank you Miss Hyde just to piggyback a little bit off of Ms. Nampi in terms of the measures we're going to be having a beginning of the year to set that baseline we're going to be having an end of the year I think one of the challenges in the past with some of our common assessments that we've had grade level is when they've assessed prior learning that's taken place before that year so that determination of skill base there's the temptation for teachers to actually go back to curriculum that actually was a previous year's curriculum because of the foundation I know for formative assessments there's a certain amount where teachers need to address gaps before they actually can move on with new information where this is going to be tying into the evaluation what safeguards are going to be in place to make sure that the teachers don't get so tied up in what the children are coming into their room with to begin with that they're not actually spending adequate time on what the curriculum is for that year because there's no way we can assess every single component of what they're doing do I understand your question to be at the beginning of the year if I have a diagnostic and then I realize that my students didn't learn everything that they learned the previous year that I would spend time reviewing as opposed to covering the new curriculum is that the question you're asking that's part of the question that's an age old question in the sense that as a math teacher there's always the temptation you know there was always the temptation to spend the beginning of the year reviewing thinking well they didn't get it so I'm going to give it to them I'm going to there is so much material that has to be covered and as we talked about when you know those charts were very busy and I didn't go through everything from grades K through 8 but in order to be ready or close ready to algebra by 8th grade if you take too many steps backwards you're never going to take enough step forward so I understand it's tied to the evaluation system but I think one of the best things about that is that's why we've asked teachers to design these assessments and that will be also working with teachers to understand that that's only one piece of evidence that we're using and will be very clear about the lack of reliance that we'll have on that we need to look at a teacher's performance in a broader sense and I think that that's going to be part of the trust thing and that's what the whole educator evaluation system is based on trust and about discourse between evaluator and educator and as long as we keep to that and keep building that trust I think we'll avoid that but I do think that that was always a problem even before there was a district determined measure that teachers would say well they didn't learn this or that and try to go back and spend the first six weeks of school reviewing. And one other question and once again piggybacks off of one of Drs. Allison Ampe's some of the measures have been in place for a long time there's a lot of evidence to support and we'll develop where they're actually mapping to other tools that we've used and showing their validity on the areas where there have not been or great spends where they have not been those measures what ways are you going to have to normalize the data that you're getting from it and to make sure that it actually is an accurate assessment because taking that step back sometimes is a challenge when so much time has been invested in. We need to make sure that there's a correlation to other measures that we see so for example in English Language Arts if we have an assessment that shows the variety of students have gotten to a certain level at writing and reading and then we have the park assessment and it doesn't match up or you have to take a grain of salt with classroom grades because there's so much involved in effort a student can actually score as we well know very well on the MCAS but not have good classroom grades and vice-versa as a matter of fact so we want to make sure that we're looking at the same type of assessment so that is why we will not be throwing our cognitive form of assessments aside and that information will also so we have to look at the whole picture and put all those pieces of information together I don't know that normed I mean the DRA has a normed database sort of but in some ways because you can look at what an A1 is but then again an individual teacher does that assessment and so unless you are constantly calibrating it you know there's some subjectivity that's involved and the same thing with any of these assessments except for the ones that are scantron so I mean I think we have to look at it in terms of all the other data that's there I don't know that we'll have it norm referenced in the strictest sense of the word ever but we will be piloting it we will be looking at these assessments and saying does what we see make sense and if it doesn't then we'll have to talk about possibly changing the assessment and forgive me because you may have mentioned this is there the idea of actually pooling evaluation of student performance on the assessments so the teacher that has those children is not necessarily the only one that's seeing seeing the open response portion or this or that absolutely I mean that's one of the parts of a professional learning community to do cross grading and calibration grading and also at the elementary level they have we're talking about increasing the frequency of it but they have regular meetings where they look at data across students all together so all those things will continue to happen thank you so I want to pick up on the point that Matt made about embedding the district determined measures in the common assessments to what degree can we do that in other subject areas you're going to do that in math I think almost everybody in the effort to try to not be constantly assessing in having assessment overload is going to try to do that to the largest extent possible there's always some overlap with district determined measures in common formative assessments and we go for the greater degree of overlap as makes sense district determined measures tend to just be bookended and so common we need more frequent assessments in order to know whether we need to change our instruction okay so it's the goal of all the department heads yes it is that's what I want to understand and also so we have common assessments now aligned with the common core now that we did world language with all subject areas right I should they're aligned with the content of the common core we need we are in the process of aligning our assessments with the instructional emphasis of the common core but that's pretty I mean that's I think it's something you should all be very pleased with that's that's quite an achievement and I suspect that's ahead of a several many districts yes yes I mean I would say that science there will be possibly be some shifting because the next generation science standards just came out but aside from that yes anyone else yeah I'm looking I'm looking upon this is really being a standards based operation that these district determined measures are really tied to standards and what we're looking to do is align our assessments to standards and to really be tracking our students to standards and one of the things that I'm really interested in is how we assess and report out of the standards of mathematical practice I mean this is new for teachers and parents to deal with and I'm wondering what we're doing to communicate that part of the standards to our parents I mean well I agree I actually think that this is something that not to make it a huge issue that even park and everybody is struggling with is that habits these are ways in which we want our kids to think and you want to embrace that within the assessments so the way I'm going to tackle it the way I'm going to go for it is with those writing assignments that are much more open-ended that do encourage it does ask for the students to do do the mathematics but the certain qualities are going to be when I'm thinking about this I'm thinking more of a whole list of a qualitative rubric that we can actually look at what they're doing so we'll keep track of that the next thing we have to do and you're saying conveying this information I could say for the elementary school right now we have to totally revamp and redevelop what our record code is and this day and age in the way in which we collect our information like for me I want to reimagine how we convey this I want to start to use the technology to you kind of alluded to the fact that we're going standards based I don't want to create a list of every single standard and say met not met you know emerging I'd like to do something a little bit more consumable so for us right now you know what we're going to work on these writing assignments work on things that are more holistic we're going to create that rubric that really matches up with what we want to see and then in the elementary school specifically we're going to start to work on this summer Nadian Solomon who's one of the elementary math special and I are going to work with some teachers do some research figure out what's out there and then a bulk of next year good portion next year is going to be spent trying to design and create something that we feel pretty comfortable with that actually is parent friendly consumable friendly that people can read and it's meaningful to them as well because I think that is a big issue I don't have a great answer for you right now but that's something that we already know we need to work on I think this is something we're all in the business working on and we've started to incorporate some of the standards of mathematical practice into our elementary report card in Lowell and it's a journey we're looking at how it worked this year and what do we have to do to tweak it next year but the statement that really caught my ear was that MCAS as an indicator does not necessarily correlate well with report card grades because effort and other things that get mixed in there get in there and I'm a little uncomfortable with that because you know I've got to say that if what we're really stating is that students need to make standards that our grading system needs to reflect standards and not how pretty the cover is on the report or whether the kid is a good compliant student within the classroom I think that I think you might have missed what I'm talking about is that a student may not turn in a project or they may not turn in homework and that's going to be reflected in their grade but however when you give them the MCAS they may have mastered the standards for that grade level and it may come across in their score so does a kid who masters the content it doesn't turn in the project fail the class it's a longer discussion I think than we have time for tonight I think that's the discussion that this is leading to I'm not asking for the answer but I'm saying this is a question that we need to be addressing and be a part of because I think that as a district we need to advance into this area with our eyes open I mean certainly something we have to discuss and quickly guys because we're running we're running real late Miss Starks I don't want to I just like to thank you all and without being nasty about it this new talk in Boston about all this new technology that the high tech people want to add to the whole curriculum and everything they want everybody to take computer science from grade 7 some of the stuff that I've been listening to they sound like they're talking about redoing the whole thing over again which is common with DSE that once we get it working they have to shuffle the deck again you're doing a great job thank you so much for everything yes and may I respectfully request that if the members come up with other questions because tonight was so much in so little time for us to digest may we submit questions or to the department heads or CC everyone that would be wonderful and I'd love to see some of this I would love to see some of this come back to us during the course of this coming year this year of transition and I forgot to introduce Linda Hansen at the table here tonight thank you for joining us thank you I snuck in a little bit I think after you started your formal meeting since this is really the first meeting I believe that they've addressed district determined measures in front of the school committee I do feel the need to just kind of make a couple points here one is that I do appreciate the work that Massachusetts has done I feel like on behalf of educators and administrators and school committees to say one standardized test is not going to be the be all and all that you're going to be measured against or that kids are going to be measured against so we've come up with this thing which is good in concept called district determined measures it's never going to be a normed standardized thing nor should it be if we think about the money the time the size the population size the expertise that the state has put into developing the standardized test we have that so this doesn't need to replicate that it should mirror and match the standards but it should be important and meaningful to teachers when you give these things can make all the difference of the world we could give a reading test the first week after kids come back from summer vacation and what you're measuring is summer loss basically if we take it two weeks later we're going to get a different result if we're going to measure kids at the end of the year based on that dipstick in the fall it depends when you get it I want us to really keep some common sense in all of this and just not think about it as needing to replicate we have a standardized test and we're going to have more park I actually think that someday park if we get into these 75% 95% they're even talking about mid-year writing samples earlier on if we have one comprehensive set of assessments we don't need to replicate that we need to understand why what the purpose is that we're using these other parallel assessments for and also just the measure ability of it I know teachers are really concerned about what does a year growth look like in terms of research skills or an on-demand writing prompt what does a half year of growth look like so cohort size are we measuring year over year are we tracking one cohort through you know as they go up through the grades so I just feel like this is a really um intricate exercise that we're all going to be entering in on and I just want us to go in thoughtfully and to keep doing kind of a gut check on making sure it makes sense for kids and for teachers all right well thank you Dr. Thank you everyone heads thank you very very much okay so we are moving on to approval of the school calendar for 2013-2014 would uh okay so this has been a very collaborative effort and certainly a lot of input from all of you you've been doing moving forward with this one of the things just to put again in perspective what we've been trying to do is to be much more ahead of where we've been in the past before we didn't even get conferences on the calendar until the fall and what we felt was very strongly is that we really needed to have a calendar at the end of the year where people knew where the early release days, professional day vacations now the major things we've did back in December what we have been looking at very carefully is how we're going to be able to do all the professional development we need to do next year which is extensive and I think you get a sense of that here and this is just part of the whole picture there's so many other initiatives and mandates that are being required of us so we also were listening to parents, particular elementary parents who were concerned about the number of early release days and last time we told you we had brought the number from 13 down to 11 and that was the number sticking in our head in that time frame feedback we had from the principals of the elementary schools was and feedback from their teachers because they were actually counting it up if I have 25 kids in my class and I meet with parents for 20 minutes at conferences I need so much time the time that we had allotted was insufficient particularly if a teacher had a large class and we have some classes next year there will be 28 students so the elementary principals asked us if we would also include elementary in one of the conference days that we had designated for middle school as well which actually brings it up to 12 now we had told you we had told you we would try to stick to 11 but that's why now if you want to reduce one of the early release days for elementary you know that would be your prerogative but I will tell you that we have Dr. Chestin has worked with the our curriculum leaders and with principals around all of what we need to be able to fit in next year and it's tight we could use even more than we have but on the other hand there's always a balance between you know what we could use and what is reasonable for families so with that little sort of overview of this I want to turn this over Laura who is we have a calendar here and you saw both versions of it one which did not have the November 19th and one that did but Laura do you want to I just want to add and not because I know we're running late but we have 12 days for elementary as we said Dr. Bote said two of those are conference days two days are for work for the teacher on the new teacher evaluation system that leaves us the remaining days to be split up three days to math three days to common co-literacy one day for science and one day for social studies so science and social studies are really getting the short end of the stick but and that's going to be very difficult when we have the new generation science standards but it's also more difficult because as we look at the common core for standards for literacy as you heard tonight those are not just for the reading and writing in the literature that has to do with the vanilla literacy but science has literacy standards in them social studies have literacy standards in them so if we have to cut back we're going to be forced with the choice of where is that going to come from certainly it can't come from the conferences certainly it cannot come from the new teacher evaluation system so that means that we're going to have to look at the core for subject areas in order to say that they would not have a half day professional development day and and to be realistic they they get out you know at one it's not like they really have a hopeful day they have a chunk of time and it's very hopeful for that time but as Dr. Bordi said we could really you know have used more but we're happy if we could get the 12 questions for the superintendent or Dr. Chesson bill the professional development day that you have I'm looking at I think it's on both yes in November we talked about it before I say that you have two teacher days pride of the school year starting that's correct why wasn't that put at the beginning of the end after the students leave instead of November first thank you have it June for right now June 19th well the purpose of the professional day at that time of the year which I think there's a universal feeling that this is a really timely place in this because we are able to have a whole variety of opportunities for teachers one of the things that I think we need to do among many next year is to have time for our PLC's to be have to working on their team goals and have a chunk there we need to have more technology workshops that's the time once you get your year established you're ready to look at and you're getting to that point time to look at other ways that you're going to be sort of mapping the rest of your year out the end certainly a professional day at the end of the year would be terrific for other reasons the be the first two days how that how those work by contract is that half of the day is district determined and half of it is teachers to have in their classrooms to prepare we we this year instead of having an opening day speaker because our need is so great for curriculum overviews we are going to start with a a complication but it's going to be very time limited so we can give almost the entire morning to grade level and department level time to go over the work that's done this summer day two of those early days are given to faculty meetings at each one of the schools and they use that we have a whole array of mandates that have to be we have to go through every year in terms of trainings around for example so all of that happens the second day and that's how those first two days are used let's go around Jeff you know we discuss the calendar a lot I support the the professional development days that we have I'm always concerned with there is not enough time to do adequate professional development but I think we should adopt the calendar so I'm just going to move approval of the calendar so it's on the draft day or draft day is the one that has the November 19th data draft day was there a second to draft day okay further discussion on that motion this Dr. Anthony I saw you first I'll vote for it but with reluctance because I feel that this is a burden on our families and I'm still hoping that we can come up with some other alternatives I was just going to point out that whenever I've been part of professional development there's always been this discussion about the need for teachers to go back to their classroom the next day and implement it immediately and that's how districts provide effective professional development to allow it to become embedded and not ask people to remember it over the summer or not be able to try it out right away because they're busy getting kids settled into a new routine and schedule and don't really start instruction for a week later and so while this is challenging for our families I think given our responsibility to provide good professional development for our staff and the benefits it gives to our students when the teachers are given additional opportunities to expand their knowledge and integrate into their classrooms this is the least detrimental to the timeliness of instruction and is going to provide the most opportunity for it to be worthwhile I'm going to vote for it also but I think we've spent an awful lot of time discussing this several meetings during the year I think it would be good for us to look at the calendar and come up with some creative ways to meet the teacher needs the professional development needs and the parent needs I don't know if it can be done but I think we should spend more time on a meeting doing this I just want to echo a couple of words from my colleagues and add a couple of my own Dr. Ampey I couldn't agree more over the course of this last year I heard so much in the way of parental concern aggravation with the breakup of our year I look at 2013-2014 and I see EMS and ECR these are two conference dates Friday the 6th of December and Tuesday the 10th of December so for a working family to do an 11-15 on a Friday and then the following Tuesday back to back weeks I think that's really really hard and in terms of professional development 12 early release for that teacher of value two days could we not have some sort of teacher of value study over the summer I mean these are teacher of value professional development I mean I'm sure it can be done on an individual basis too I'd love to see next year something in the way of as Mr. Heiner was suggesting some sort of more creative out of the box thinking see a survey I want to see the principal say their teachers need the professional development I want to see the teachers on the ground in the classrooms say we need 13 days where we're going to do early release I'd love to see some type of survey some teachers come in here and say this is absolutely necessary because this is really hard this is really hard for me to approve I will vote yes on this I think it's important the school committee come down and say this is our school calendar it's important for the public out there to know that we're voting on this tonight with respect to high school graduation it is a change I want everyone to know that there's going to be a change to high school graduation from Sundays where they're customary to a Saturday and this was sort of brought on and I don't know how this developed what was the genesis of that who was called in to think about doing that so there are a lot of changes here and for the second straight year there's going to be 13 12 plus 1 12 early release in one professional development day 13 days there's going to be no school or early release and I'd love to see 2014 2015 calendar where it downgrades a little bit because we're not going to be in a year of transition we're not going to have to deal with a new teacher of our system in a common core system it will already have been implemented so I'd love to see a little bit more creativity and less breaks in our day and our year for working families so that said those in favor of the 2013-2014 draft day school calendar say aye all those against okay we will get this up on the website so people can have that thank you moving on approval of data assistant job description this is a position that was it is in the budget this current fiscal year this next fiscal year based on the needs of all the data needs in the district and the move to central registration our director of data has a lot of data responsibilities right now lots of reports that have to be done and has taken on the role of central registrar for the district as well so she is asked and we have felt that there's a need for some part time support down there this would be an assistant administrative assistant position 20 hours a week this would be a unity position and would be posted in accordance with the unity contract and looking for someone who has some data experience who has good technical skills very precise detail oriented in work with the director of data to accomplish all the reporting that needs to be done and the central registration we have a motion to approve approval second discussion is this person under unity yes thank you anything else all those in favor say aye all those against sorry I'll catch you next time do you have something to mention I'm sorry I just I don't see anything about confidential data that isn't the stuff that they're dealing I mean should that be mentioned in the job description or just a recognition that the data is confidential yeah we could add that isn't that there under item number six okay sorry thank you okay okay moving on we did vote just our goals 2013-2014 our second reading and a vote to approve these goals the committee spent quite a lot of time beginning of this year looking over our team goals and as we look to next year we've had a lot of discussion at the table both and we've had a lot of discussion at the administrative team as to what would be the major foci of next year and I think that the goals that you see here that we've talked about it more even during retreat reflects the efforts that we the primary efforts doesn't mean there's not a lot of other things that are going to be happening but that we want to particularly focus on as far as my particular goals for next year we'll discuss those in December but they represent elements of many of these goals motion on the goals move to approve the goals second discussion I just have one quick minor point on the bottom it says district goals 2012-2013 and that was a little mistake discussion we went over these a lot in retreat last week okay seeing none all those in favor say aye all those against okay thank you Dr. right you are on again superintendent's report good well I'm glad we picked up some time in these because I actually have a fairly long report but at your places tonight you have the final report of the visiting committee for NEASP and we're going posting that on our website and as well as distributing it with the high school staff I do not intend that this is the meeting that we're talking about the NEASP report we are going to need to have a separate meeting perhaps a summer and certainly this isn't something that we're going to be discussing over probably many meetings as we go forward but it is rather just simply to mention a few looking at the report looking at a few of the highlights and then you can have some time to read it more thoroughly and I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of questions and at that time we certainly want to invite the high school principal and our curriculum leaders and also the other administrators in the high school to come and be part of that discussion so this is really a very limited overview of where we are with this for those that are listening who may not be familiar with what NEASP is, NEAS is an independent accrediting agency it's called the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and they we are a member of that association and as part of our membership they come and do an assessment in a number of categories with regard to the number of standards every 10 years and once that report is issued then there is also follow up during the course of that 10 years this represents the 10 year visit and what they found that the team visited in December there was late spring a draft report that you always do that as part of the process draft report that we respond to and then a final report is issued and then after that it will be a period where they will have a summary letter of their standing relative to the report so when looking at the report there are a number of standards there are teaching and learning standards that look at core beliefs they look at curriculum they look at instruction and then after that they look at resources school culture resources in basically the community so I thought I would just go through a couple of the highlights of these looking at the overarching category of teaching and learning standards which looks at core beliefs and if you want to refer to this this is on page 18 of your report that you have it you have there and how the report is organized it has a narrative and then at the end of each one of the sections they will have commendations and recommendations that are given and it's going to take some time to read through this to have a sort of get a full understanding of it but for example in the commendations for this particular standard that the commendations this is one of six of them the identification of a set core set of core values which is the eye care and you've heard that mentioned here in this room before that are embodied by the vast majority of students and staff and it positively impacts the culture of the school and there are other commendations in that line as well one of the recommendations for the school in that regard is to implement a plan to regular review and update the core values beliefs and learning expectations so that's the nature of that particular standard if you turn to page 23 this is in that broad category again teaching and learning this is about curriculum and there are six commendations and five recommendations in this section again preceded by a narrative but for example a commendation is that the Arlington high school staff is committed to providing high quality curriculum to all of its students further down in another one it says they have authentic learning opportunities through community service and the capstone project as well as physical education and wilderness survival and wilderness camping a recommendation there's five of them that they would establish additional time for collaboration and ongoing work necessary to maintain 21st century standards and curriculum and actually some of that we're talking about with respect to calendar time to have that level of collaboration in a high school so those are challenges that will face us when you move on to the instruction section for teaching and learning page 27 accommodation and you've heard a little bit about this tonight the use of evaluations by administrators to ensure that instructional practices are consistent with the school's core values beliefs and 21st century learning expectations what is part of the learning culture and teaching culture of the high school are consistent common assessments to measure student learning what we're moving to is a different form of that which measures sort of the yardstick of what's learned in the course of one year they talk about the engagement of students as active and self-directed learners through a variety of research based instructional techniques and the faculty is committed to a high quality instruction in recommendations for example in this section they talk about ensuring that all teachers have equitable access to modern technology and appropriate training to enhance this instructional practices hence the professional learning day that's an ideal time for that but we also do a lot more with technology than that but again as you increase technology increase technology integration it also really increases the need for professional development if you turn to page 36 again in the teaching and learning assessment section this is on assessment one of the accommodations for assessment was that a wide variety of assessment strategies including formative and summative assessments in order to revise and improve curriculum and instruction used by teachers so it's a commendation that this is happening a recommendation again to the time issue provides sufficient formal time for teachers to collaborate in the creation analysis and revision of formative and summative assessments so you get the sense that there's a in this broad category there are a variety of commendations and recommendations and again this is not meant to do an in depth look at this but rather to look at how it's set up and just calling people's attention to it and letting them know that they can look at this online now that's the teaching and learning page 38 this will give you an outline of what the support standards are and there are three support standards school culture and leadership school resources for learning and community resources for learning if you look now at page 45 this is on school culture there are 11 commendations and 6 recommendations a commendation for example is the existence of a positive school culture which makes Arlington high school a safe and welcoming place for students and staff and they also mention the impressive array of extracurricular clubs and organization the exceptional demeanor and deportment of students in the school indicating a respectful and supportive school culture and also comment on the lack of barriers to general student enrollment and core and elective courses and the leadership and initiative demonstrated by teachers essential to the improvement of the school in a recommendation that they want to ensure that research based instructional strategies and teacher collaboration are supported by the school schedule again coming back to this issue of time and implement a way to address overcrowding in classroom settings in which the use of lab and studio equipment presents potential safety hazards so moving on to the next support standard resources for learning on page 52 one of the commendations on this is the comprehensive array of academic, social and emotional support programs and this is available to assist students in meeting 21st century expectations a recommendation is to assure the availability of language appropriate materials for assessing and placing ELL students and that's something we've talked about at this table as well so again you get the sense of there were eight commendations and two recommendations in this section I really want to call your attention to page 56 which is the community support standard and this theme is echoed through in the commendations recommendations and I just want to read this statement quality instruction is being delivered by teachers in spite of the impediments of a crowded and deteriorating building although students and teachers have pride in the programs at Arlington high school the advanced age of the building shows significant signs of wear and tear science labs are not sufficient in size or design for some classes that have larger enrollments columns and posts in rooms abstract student vision and movement but further down it says classrooms are insufficient in number and size especially in science and art classrooms where class size exceeds the number of available stations in some classrooms to achieve educational goals and objectives in spite of a facility with significant needs and if you turn to page 58 that sentiment is echoed again in the commendations and certainly in the recommendations in this section it's the reverse we have four commendations and ten recommendations six out of the ten deal with the building with the building right so we certainly need to have a follow up discussion at this table there's implications for a whole array of things in terms of support and time and teaching and learning certainly the building itself so this is something that we will do it's going to be something that probably will be in many ways in our meetings over the next year really because there's a lot of issues here and we might want to focus on we'll have to think about how we want to focus on this if we want to take it by standards or a couple of standards at a time and do it that way I just want to say I read through this kind of stuff all the time and I want to say that on one level this is one of the most exemplary reports that I've seen because when it comes to the heart and soul of teaching and learning this building they are commending the teachers they are commending the administration they are commending the students and when you look at the recommendations those are sort of the excellent to exemplary kind of recommendations the thing that will really move us to the very top of the field they're not describing things that are wrong they're sort of making us the next steps to get better and you can hear some of those steps being discussed earlier in the measures but on the flip side it is highly critical of the facility that we are unable to meet the needs of our students with our facility that the teachers are really going the extra mile to provide this high quality education as that sentence you read despite the fact that the facility that they're operating in is a definite drawback and reading through this I can't imagine being accredited 10 years from now unless we have a significant improvement in the facility that we're offering for our students okay alright so you need time to read it and we'll come back to it for sure alright some administrative announcements as you know we have a number of retirements and openings in key administrative positions or also support position and one is our attendance officer in court liaison we met in executive session with Ellen Diggby who has just done a phenomenal job in that role we had in all of these cases we had search committees and we will have to say the quality of candidates was really impressive for all of these positions and after a very thorough search I have offered the position to Cindy Sheridan and she has accepted that position and Cindy has comes to us from having been one of the was the program director in Arlington Lucille Nicholson who is our director of nursing is also retiring and this is a key position in the district we had two very strong internal candidates and that position has been offered and accepted to Sue Franke who just by the way received her doctorate oh wow very impressive and again for the athletic director we had a very quite a search and we had a number of really strong candidates and that position has been offered and accepted to Melissa Lou Lou so the G is silent and the L is silent Lou Lecky it's spelled D L U G O L E C K I and the press release went on that one already we won't be doing press release in the others but I thought you would know that because they are somewhat key positions in the district alright today we had our annual staff recognition day and I want to thank those of you that were able to comment to thank Mr. Pierce for coming and giving a very really lovely talk talking about some of the lyrics of one of the songs in Rent which was so appropriate to the work that they do but we have a number of just wonderful people retiring and I'll give you a copy of the program so you can see that but this is one of our most I should say cherished events of the year where we recognize the people who have been in the district the 45 year 35 year 20 year we also recognize that the people the teachers who have made professional status this past year because that we feel that that is something we're celebrating and then also this year with Linda and I thinking this through we really want to have a district wide acknowledgement of the people who are retiring and we did that today but one person I just want to bring up one of our staff members who did retire this year Nancy Ortwein 45 years of service in the Arlington Public Schools that really is quite unusual and the next person down that was retiring was Peter Rufo at 35 years so it's we have had people occasionally get into those 40s but not many alright and also with respect to graduation we graduated our class this year and what an outstanding class great speeches and I think that you've seen the ponder report and you can see where all of our students are going and it's a very impressive array of colleges that they've been accepted into and a more complete report will be coming out of the guidance department and talking about the percentages of first choice, second choice that type of thing but again I want to thank members of the school committee for coming out and I think that the presence really signifies the level of importance of this event and again thank you to Mr. Pierce for his speech this year we did hear some feedback last year about sound so we hired a company to come in for sound and while people couldn't hear last year now they heard like three times and you're staying in the microphone and they were being said twice it was a little disconcerting so that's now we have to work on that piece of it but it was a beautiful day and congratulations to all of our graduates and congratulations to the parents in this town for supporting these students in their success it's been our pleasure and really privileged to teach them for the years they've been here we had another little a recognition of our music department there is a magazine in Boston called the Bostoniano magazine and they had they featured two of our music teachers and our students in the Pops concert this year which was I have to say rather extraordinary where they had music that was playing two movies it was a very high-tech kind of concert but just a quick they had a quick quote in there but they really were commenting how flawlessly the students played and that's really such a compliment to the discipline and the inspiration that our music teachers give them as do our other teachers as well so congratulations to them and also I wanted to acknowledge Mary Valano who this week was given an award from the Rotary Club for person of community person of the year and well deserved the Rotary Club as you know is really focused on service and there were a lot of people that were honored this year who have given extraordinary service to Arlington but I believe the reason they acknowledge Mary Valano is the work that she has done in her years here in Arlington she's been here for 32 years and has had many roles but one of the things that has been true about her work in the school from day one has been her devotion and work toward involving students in community service and learning how to be a service in their school how to learn to be parents one of my first was having seen the dowels that the students were would be carrying around the school learning to be parents and what it meant to have a child and not to leave the child there somewhere where you went off and did something else and I know that Mary offered in many occasions to babies at these dowels but it's really with the students inspiring them to understand that to think beyond themselves and to think about how they can be of service to their friends, to their school, to their community and she was exemplified that in her years here so that was a well-deserved honor and of course I've been getting emails about class sizes already and I know this concern I'm going to I will be sending to you where we are at this point but I have to tell you when we look at the numbers forward to next year it isn't state of flux it changes all the time we get five registrations one day and then we get to the next and it's just been going on like this now for several weeks and so the numbers have been changing we have students withdrawing and coming in but I will say looking ahead already we're seeing class sizes as a norm in the elementary getting in that 24 23, 24, 25 but we do have some class sizes that are going to be 27, 28 next year and we're going to be watching these class sizes very carefully over the the summer I know already grade three at Stratton and Thompson class sizes that are at the 27, 28 and grade three that's not to say that they will stay there they may not but they also may grow and so we're going to have to be watching that what is a concern though with respect to that in our budget as you know we had two reserve positions in the budget and we've already had to put one of those reserve positions in the money garden which we predicted to be no more than 50 is now 60 and growing so that's what's happening and we'll have to just keep you apprised as to where we are with all of that and the last thing is you came in the door you saw all of those yellow tape around the you probably wondering what's going on maybe not but what's going on there for the door this has been on the agenda for all year it was just like when did that come up on the the list the handicap accessibility with the buzzer all of that was put in long time ago but we need to get cutaways there so that the people can come up and what's going to happen now across in those cutaways is those first three places we'll be made into all of those cutaway places and the one down by the auditorium will no longer be a handicap because that's going to be the point of access but that's why you see it there that's my report tonight thank you are you ready to move on to the next one the Thompson rebuild update well we since the last meeting we really haven't had well that's not true yes we did and we're still on target and we're at the point where the last floor is being laid that took a little bit longer than we thought they were going to be but right now the time frame is still that we're going to be substantial completion on July 12 and at that point we'll still be punchless we'll go into August we expect furniture to start to be delivered in July though the first date is sometime early August what we're trying to do is to get the school at least for technology set up by the time we do tech university which is the second week of August we really want the Thompson teachers to be in their building using the technology then and so that's what that's why this substantial completion date is so important because there's other things that need to happen in order for the technology to be ready to go so so far I haven't seen anything to the contrary since our last meeting Jeff did you want to add anything to this well we're looking at dates for dedications ah yes thank you very much well dedications one is dedication for the building itself a ribbon cutting and we've contacted MSBA and basically they're just saying to us well let us know when you want to do it and we'll have somebody there I guess it's fair to say I have not we've been trying to mine all the calendars everywhere to see if there's any conflict on the 15th of September which is a Sunday and so far nothing it's my wedding anniversary okay this will be a good way to celebrate it that's gone wedding anniversary we didn't want it on town day weekend which is the next weekend the next Saturday it's not usually it's that weekend but it's not this year and the reason why because it's one of the Jewish holidays on Saturday but also we have the dedication of the library Bill Chase on the 29th of September and there's already an author that's coming so we need that ahead but I also think the community is going to be could hardly wait to come in and see the building and so I think the 15th works and so we're going to get those out we have a lot to have to do with invitations and what the ceremony is going to look like and inviting the community to come in and see the school and have tours I think it will be fabulous we don't have time yet it'll be in the afternoon definitely in the afternoon two-ish something like that those details was really getting the date that was the tough part and I feel even a little bit should I say it because is it definite I think it's like right there because I have not had any anybody say no we can't do it then so it'll be up and running and have students and people will be going to class before you do the dedication oh yes the students start back on the Tuesday after labor day so we'll have two weeks in the building which is better we originally thought maybe the 8th but that's just too soon a lot of people have a chance to sort of get in the building get a little bit subtle maybe you can have some student work up but people are really just going to want to come in not so much these student work because they really want to come in and see the building anything else on rebuild from the members thank you very much update in terms of us and needing a meeting perhaps in August I don't know we should talk about this before we all split apart for the summer but given that we're going to have a new school up and running right after labor day we might want to schedule a meeting at the school committee in August to talk about any potential issues that might arise between now and then on the Thompson we'll talk about that we can have a tentative one set up because the first meeting you're going to have is the 13th of September 12th of September yeah but it would be before the groundbreaking but there'll be more communication in terms of what you know your role and what's going to happen all of that thank you okay Miss Johnson monthly financial report you have the monthly tracking reports I was able to to delay the creation of these reports because of the data this meeting to capture the second to last payroll of the year so we're pretty spot on where we expect to land and we have we had a small amount of savings roughly 250 I won't know until the last payroll hits next week exactly what our total savings amount out of which we're going to be able to do some year end technology purchasing and some curricular supplies as well Mr. Hanner and maybe just my interpretation as it usually is but on page two of three budget tracking yes I'm sorry 8301 tuition to other schools yes that is I have not yet done the journal entry to the circuit breaker account and that's where you see the negative balance there well it's not so much the negative balance I'm looking at this the second column from everything else above the second and third column usually add together and you end up getting the fifth call my correct right the reason this is different is because I have elected to keep the tuition expenses in the in the general fund appropriation until the very last minute because I find that trying to manage how much we're spending in tuition when I have the expenses scattered out in multiple places is just inefficient so you know the budget when you look at the budget book we budgeted about 6.2 I believe I 6.2 6.3 for FY13 I'm sorry I have the FY14 numbers have superseded it at this point in my brain but the amount of that that was coming out of the appropriation was the 4683677 in the first column the reason the expenditures are so high is because I have both all the expenses that's the next column and all the encumbrances still sitting here in the general fund now it was always planned that the entire amount of the circuit breaker for FY12 would be used which is I think I just did the journal entry 1.46 and then the other part of that amount would be coming out of the tuition in account from SPAD and that was all part of the FY13 budget but I have elected not to have those expenses sitting in three different funding sources I'm just moving them now I guess why are we not on that first column putting in the budgeted amount of money because this is the appropriation this is just the appropriation this does not include circuit breaker it does not include tuition in tuition in appears part of the revolving expenditures so I'm going to have to be reminded monthly as this comes through every single time is this unique just to this type of an account well I mean whenever you're funding one type of expense out of multiple funding sources you have this inconsistency correct thank you Mr. Thielman the revolving revenue tracking this is on a cash basis correct so that's as of that date as of that date so I noticed we had a total budget of $350 on the building rental and we've collected $208 have you adjusted the budget for next year yes I have I had lowered it you lowered it yeah okay thank you so how do we track where we are in terms of out of district payments we have a very extensive spreadsheet on a student by student basis and so I know very minutely what our expectations are for out of district tuition we also whenever a student is placed we encumber the entire amount of that tuition through the close of the fiscal year and as student placements are changed say they leave one school and go to another then the balance of the purchase order that's encumbered but not yet expended gets released and a new encumbrance is made I've made it a priority with the SPED financial manager to always get the encumbrance in for the new expense and then clean up you know the PO's that need to be cancelled as we go along so sometimes it appears overstated but I would always rather have it be slightly overstated than understated so that's those are the two methodologies by which I keep track about a district tuition and I commend you I think that you're doing a great job on this but this is something that we need to be conversant on so that if somebody asks this is the kind of thing that people ask us you know how are we doing in terms out of district SPED placements and the expenses of that and certainly if I end up running into a FINGCOM member at the stop and shop you know that's certainly they're always welcome to call me well they might ask me and they'd sort of expect me to know the answer as well well and the reason I leave them and the reason I leave tuition in the appropriation in the main budget is because the sum of the expended fraud of district tuition and encumbered fraud of district tuition is as of that moment as tight as we can our expectation for total tuition for the year so our budgeted expectation going into this year where does that lie compared to where we're at right now I think we're right on in out of district tuition we were hoping to have some savings but as we've had placements creep up through the spring we are right on and will probably be over next year based on what we can anticipate but you know we do have reserves to guard against that's sort of a tracking number probably if we can look to include that in a monthly report would be a good thing for us to know so how about another line on the summary page that just says out of district I mean a lot of these are just check check check check things look pretty normal but that's the one that always gives right and that's exactly why even though it's confusing why I leave while I leave all the expenses in the appropriation until the end of the year so I can see it all the time because I understand that this is really great management but just so that we can understand breaking that out is a separate line on the revolving just plunking a line down below saying this is our total tuition out of district special ed tuition budget and this is where we stand right now that's a good deal I'm happy to do that. Excellent thank you. I appreciate you're explaining where the money for the computer hardware comes from I would hope that given the recent incident the Odyssey that part of the money will be spent on any necessary security devices you know the walking carts or anything that will keep things from developing little legs and walking away and also just if there was any additional money which wouldn't be able to be a part to manpower but is just extra if it's not possible to do like a deep thorough cleaning of the high school like a deep I'm thinking of like when you get your car detailed I wish we could have someone come in here and just detailed I have good news on that front we have successfully hired a day custodial supervisor and we are on the brink of hiring a night custodial supervisor and I am very excited about what that's going to mean in terms of the overall cleanliness of the building plus we will be as I said we're out to bid for a new subcontract but the real problem with the subcontract in addition to the recent events is that we did not have a management position who was tasked to keeping them on task and so with the addition of these two custodial positions I'm very hopeful that we're going to increase in the cleanliness of particularly the high school and the middle school and I appreciate that but I'm thinking wouldn't it be great if we could start from a baseline of clean and then it's maintained at clean instead of trying to dig all well summers are usually the time when we're able to get in and really scrub that's when we strip the floors and do the really heavy duty cleaning and we hire additional staff in the summer to help with that effort so we should be starting September with a clean building but it should be maintained at a higher level of cleanliness thanks to these new staffers I'm very excited about the day custodial supervisor he's terrific and I think he's going to bring a lot of energy that we really need to move things forward thank you thank you very much moving on to subcommittee and liaison reports policies and procedures okay thank you Judd before we start on this we talk about a meeting my own opinion from my experience is we shouldn't go 8 weeks without a meeting just keep that in mind we try to meet at some point okay so we have for first reading tonight three policies BDFA E-2 district wide goal setting and performance objective process basically we just simplify the process to so it's consistent with what we're now doing under the state regulations and we require by May 15th of each year the superintendent shall submit district goals for the insurance ensuing that should be ensuing fiscal year so it's a simplification of the policy so it's consistent with state law the next one is policy CBI superintendent evaluation and we've put in dates by which goals need to be submitted to the school committee for the superintendent and for the district and then the policy CBI the superintendent evaluation tool goes away because we're now following the new state regulations and that's first reading and we'll read it the second time whenever we meet again now or this summer in September okay questions for policies for me I know that in our policy manual we say by June 1st we'll have some sort of idea what policy procedures we'll do for the coming year maybe we could get that report at the summer meeting how about a meeting next week and I'll go over that in the chair report but would that be too soon I can't be next week I might be next week so you want to report on what policies we're going to do what section of the book you're going to review to be reported out of what meeting next one okay we'll have a report by the next school committee on what we're going to do budget we have nothing to report community relations curriculum instruction and accountability facilities so I think at this time I look forward to going through the NSDAC report and starting the work legal services there's a motion it's in purple on your desk and I ask that we continue the legal services review subcommittee because I understood that this was our last meeting for the fiscal year and we need a little bit more time to do our report it'll be at this point by the first meeting in October I hope earlier I'm just giving room so that it's done and I'll read the report I mean I'll read the motion move that the school committee continue the temporary legal services review subcommittee as allowed by policy BDE for the purposes of examining expenditures on legal services documenting needs around special education disputes and performing other work as appropriate scope of examination is to the fiscal year and as far back in time as a legal service review subcommittee feels it needs to analyze for useful comparison subcommittee is to look for a report by the first meeting October 2013 or earlier and we also okay second okay would you like to I discussed in advance anyone else all those in favor say aye and we did meet earlier this week and made some strong work on what we're going to include great chair report I'd like to have a motion on approval of school committee members myself Mr. and anyone else who desires to attend the MASS joint conference in November 2013 second all those in favor say aye all those against on our agenda I'd like to point out that we have a reappointment of longtime human rights commission member Nick Minton Nick's CV is on our tables I've known Nick for a variety of years and I'd appreciate a motion on his reappointment to the human rights commission so moved second okay discussion second all those against okay on one other matter it would appear that it would be beneficial I think to have one last meeting in June formally it's our last Thursday in June but with the superintendent's anticipated absence on good news for her family and her personal situation I would like to see if we can all get together for a meeting next Thursday now I understand we're going to do a barbecue as sort of a celebratory sort of customary thing at my home on Thursday evening Jeff I'm away I thought you asked me to repeat the barbecue you didn't I didn't I actually I think I said it but I'm away I can't be the next Thursday I can do something the last week of June if you want to look at the last week of June well maybe we could do a doodle about another meeting I'd like for us to discuss in that meeting particularly is what we just received this thick report from the ask and have any questions ready for the superintendent and Dr. Chesson there to be there of Mr. Schlegman I don't know that I'd want to do that in a formal meeting I sort in that we've got a new principal coming in who's going to be playing a major role in terms of looking at part of this so that assuming that he takes his position July 1 is that the intent that maybe if we were to have a subcommittee meeting to start the process where we can informally start to look at it into August so he's got time to look at it and confer with the superintendent the assistant superintendent just sort of get up to speed because there's two classes of things in here one is the teaching and learning stuff within the building that he'll be charged with working on and as I read through the report it looks like we're doing very very well and that the high school staff already has a handle on what the next steps are so I'm not really concerned about that the other side is all the facility stuff and I don't know that having a conversation about the NES report it right away is going to be the most productive use of our time so this is something we need to talk about but I think that it would be more constructive to have it a little ways out where we can start to think about some of the answers on the facilities short term and long term and also include the new principal and so we can talk about the rest of it well part of my concerns is in trying to establish a June meeting is obviously to accommodate the start you're away for a couple of months right I'm away starting June 21st through August 27th so and Mr. Thielman made a great point just a little while ago that we shouldn't wait eight weeks or more for another meeting we're probably going to miss at least one of us well definitely one of us for any summer meetings so let's try to minimize the absence as best we can I guess and make it two or three people Dr. just to comment to what Mr. Schwickman said I'd say the one reason why it would be good to talk about this sometime this is going to be being released to the public and it would be nice to at least have our first level of questions answered so that when people come to us we're not just going I don't know because it gets frustrating and it's not helpful for the schools and it's not helpful for our parents I'm sorry I actually wonder if talking about this might be best accomplished at a retreat rather than a regular meeting because this is a lot of information to parse through we did actually sit down with the NAS team and heard some of this firsthand from them and I believe all the members were present that evening but you know some people might want to you know reference their notes and I'm not sure I could adequately read through this within a week's time and feel that a useful discussion could come out of it without the new principal in place and so my recommendation would be that we look towards a retreat at some point this summer where this is a item for discussion and that any members that have specific questions for the report address them directly to the superintendent as they go through the report and get answers from her in terms of the standing because we looked out the new principal in place and without Ms. Johnson putting together recommendations to the capital planning there are certain pieces that it doesn't matter how much we discuss we're just missing key components all right so why don't we we'll talk about it and we'll try to maybe go doodle together and try to maximize our time together effectively if not for one meeting between now and September and in the interim Dr. Bode if any member was reading through the report and had questions I'm assuming either you or Ms. Chesson would be more than willing to sit down or have a phone conference to address those questions in the report thank you right Mr. Slick the one point that I think Mr. Theoman was making is that it's a long time to go from now until the beginning of September to have a meeting because there's business that's likely to come up in the interim and having a meeting next week is still going to leave us with that gap minus one week so that I just want to clarify my decision I really wanted to regular meetings in June with a retreat as opposed to one meeting this tonight and the retreat we had last Thursday I just thought that this would be a good opportunity as part of our next regular meeting to talk about it that's all and still have a summer meeting I didn't want to just say no summer meeting I think we're probably going to need one beginning of August just to take care of the business of the district something's bound to come up but do I have a sense from the members as to a meeting before an August meeting well I think Paul's right we don't if we go too long between meetings then the first meetings we're going to have too many things that will pile up so I would say Judd that we want to just look at some dates in July and August we won't get everyone there it's obvious but we'll do the best we can and we can get some business transactions obviously the things that are controversial or require a lot of deliberation we wouldn't want to do but there are a lot of housekeeping items and things we need to do that a member tubing absent wouldn't really jeopardize signed a warrant at the very least all right moving on to our 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 requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence approval of warrant number 13168 dated May 23rd, 2013 total warrant amount 615,146 dollars and 49 cents minutes of approval May 9th, 2013 and May 23rd, 2013 and the middle school in Arlington High School trip to Nagayokyo, Japan July 6th through the 16th, 2013 so moved second okay all those in favor say aye aye all those against passes secretaries report we have received the following correspondence since our last meeting a letter from Richard Greco regarding the passing of a retiree from the Arlington Public Schools and requesting a copy of the death certificate a letter to Miss D. Figgly from Chairman Pierce congratulating her on her appointment to the Arlington Human Rights Commission emailed from Principal Volano on the hiring of a new athletic director for the Arlington Public Schools as well as a copy of the press release announcing the hiring of a new athletic director for the Arlington Public Schools a letter to D.E.S.C. in Massachusetts from Superintendent Bode about or voted our last meeting not to participate in school choice for the 2013-14 school year a letter from MASC telling us about the end of your conference savings to attend the MASC MASS conference in Hyannis in November copies of the AHS senior awards night and commencement exercise program from last week in this past weekend June 2013 copy of the Ponder report pointed to the Superintendent's main newsletter emailed from Mary Cummings requesting the school committee to attend or submit written testimony to the hearings on June 27th regarding regulatory relief in the schools a copy of the regulatory relief bills before the 188th General Court on June 27th a copy of the resume of a resume of Nick Minton whose appointment to the Arlington Human Rights Commission expires in June of 2013 copy of the NEASC report of AHS and minutes of the EDCO Board of Directors meeting from May 9th 2013 Thank you All right Any other business? I'd like to move on I'd like to have a motion to enter an executive session to discuss the deployment of security personnel and devices for strategies with respect there too to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or nonunion personnel or contract negotiations with union and or nonunion which in held in an open meeting they have a detrimental effect renewal of contract with Stoneman, Chandler and Miller to conduct strategy with respect to environmental effect collective bargaining may also be conducted coming out only for the purposes of adjournment Second Aye Aye We're in an executive session Good evening and welcome to the meeting of the Arlington School Committee tonight Wednesday July 31st 630 we are in the lovely Selectman's quarters This is a wonderful place to be here. Thank you Selectman We have most of the school committee others will be arriving I think shortly To go over the agenda briefly with all of you here tonight and all of you on television we're going to start out with 20 minutes of public participation going into a discussion of the Arlington Public Schools 2013-2014 school year led by Dr. Bodie and Dr. Chesson We will then enter executive session to discuss strategy with respect to bargaining or litigation if an opening meeting may have a detrimental effect So before I get off to start off with public participation I would like to inform those here in the room tonight and those in the public that we will be having some recommendations after public participation by our superintendent and those recommendations to give you a heads up will have to do with the hiring of three elementary school teachers in district at Stratton, at Brackett and at the Dowlands With that said I don't know if that changes any public participants or wishes to speak on the matters but we will lead off with Kristen Chalmers Hi, so I just wanted to quickly talk because I know I have three minutes that about two weeks ago I received my son's class roster and it was 29 and I understand from the other class that it's 29 but I continuously keep getting very inaccurate reports that those are not the numbers so I would like to know where these numbers are why is why my I think my counting is pretty accurate it says 29 So I did find out that there is one SLC child in one of the classes and I would like to know why that child is counted for as a member of the class if the child has is on the roster which this child is and that they are they have a desk and they have a place in that community they should be counted as part of that 29 so that number doesn't change so I feel like the answers we get are incredibly inconsistent on are we going to get a third classroom 29 and 29 for third grade it's a really important year it's an MCAT's year and it needs to be something that we consider and I would also like to address the fact that there has been a mold issue in the basement of Stratton that classroom number 25 the teacher has had to move out of that classroom after being there for a while because of the mold situation and there have been children who have been getting sick and there's also I know for a fact that concrete does not hold mold but asbestos does and under that the school carpet is asbestos tile so I would like to figure out I would like to ask the school committee to try and figure out a way to solve that issue because if we happen to get a third class which would be lovely where are we going to put that class if there is a mold issue and who knows how many other classrooms in the basement of Stratton or throughout Stratton have a mold dilemma and asbestos dilemma and that's really I mean I didn't want to I'm not going to go on and on so Megan Caradona Close I'm also from Stratton so I'm going to kind of expand upon this is kind of a group effort from the third grade parents statement from them when first just want to express how proud we are to be a part of the Arlington school system and how much how grateful we are to all of you for the hard work that you do because it's not a job personally that I would want to have I don't think as Kristin said one week ago when the first graders received their class list they each had 29 students on it which we feel those class sizes are unacceptable with those sizes it's not possible to differentiate instruction meet regularly with book groups guided reading groups from math groups poll students in a strategy group for extra support confer with students about their work differentiate instruction in any content area or keep up with reading 29 writing journals even and writing thoughtful comments back to those students this is also the first time the students will be exposed to state assessments as we transition from MCAS to park we need to prepare these students and that will be very difficult in the class of 29 behavior management is also challenging think of lost instructional time just transitioning such a large group from one place to another or if children start to act out on a daily basis and this could easily happen in classes so large truly one teacher no matter how good cannot meet the needs of 29 students which include general ad students with IEPs and some ELLs as well we were aware in the spring of the likelihood of these large class sizes and we made numerous attempts beginning in May to contact Dr. Bode to express their concerns and schedule a meeting with her most of these contacts were not responded to directly it was not until June 28th that Dr. Bode sent a letter to the parents stating that there would be two classes of 27 and 28 and offering to meet at the end of the July that meeting did take place last night some of our additional concerns include that Stratton has hosted other schools and really feels that we have received not much back in return and said we have repeatedly had some of the largest classes in town Dr. Bode stated to us last night that she wouldn't let kindergarten sizes go above 25 but this particular class that we are speaking about had 28 and 29 in kindergarten they also had 27 in at least one classroom that I am aware of and in addition they had no devoted principal their first grade year as well as being mixed with Thompson students the following year in addition the Sims project brings some concerns because these homes are in the buffer zone between Stratton and Bishop although nobody can predict the number of ages of these students Dr. Bode won't assure us that any incoming third graders would be sent automatically to Bishop because if there is a family with other children as well she would have to look at each grade and figure out what was best overall this may make it more likely that she would send them to Stratton as most of the other grades have space so being proactive and assigning another third grade teacher would make it easier to filter the Sims families towards Stratton without over taxing the classroom teachers and students so we are asking you to reconsider your decision to have only two grade three teachers at the Stratton School for the next school year thank you next on the list is Lauren Boyle Jeff I just want to first start out by thanking Dr. Bode it's terrific news to hear that there is going to be a recommendation in the school committee for these three positions as happy as I am to hear this and it's terrific news I do think it's kind of a bandaid and something that we need to look at and ask the school committee maybe to look into some kind of long term feasibility study or something like that about what we are going to do about this overcrowding problem it is an issue and as we have seen with redistricting that unfortunately has not solved a lot of this and for those of us who live in the heights especially in the Dallin area and the Brackett area we are just busting at the Sims and so this is something that is not going to go away today to talk about my son Jack who is going into the second grade who have been very worried about these large class sizes we have had a lot of turnover with our special ed department at Dallin Jack is on an IEP and it was just very concerning to us to have these kind of large class sizes and all of these new teachers coming in on the specialists and things like that without hearing that there would be any kind of aid or assistant in the class so I am thrilled to hear that there is going to be a new hire and I am thinking about my youngest next year who will be coming in through kindergarten I am just looking at these class sizes we have yet to be in a class at Dallin with under 25 kids from my oldest and my middle so we have large class sizes and I don't see it getting any better and as we all know each class is different my daughter's class she is going to have there is 25 and 26 in her class next year but I am not here to discuss I am here to discuss about my son I don't know if we have more needs so I would ask the superintendent and school committee when you are looking at these things that you look beyond the number because sometimes there are special needs within the classroom that we do need more teachers aids or we do need more classroom teachers and it is not just so much a number issue so I applaud you all I thank you very much for this but I do look for the long term I would love to be part of that help any way I could So, but thank you. Thank you, thanks. Marie Walsh Condon. Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the school committee and Dr. Bodie. Thanks for all that you do for our children. It's greatly appreciated. I'm a physician. Family medicine is my specialty. I've been a member of the Board of Health here in Arlington for the past five years representing our community on various public health issues. I just wanted to take a brief, brief moment to just highlight some key aspects of the development of the seven-year-old child. I'm the mother of a rising second-grade student at the Dallin, which is why I'm very happy to hear that there's going to be a recommendation for another classroom. Socially at this age, children are now starting to make comparisons to other children in the same age group. Why does Joey read chapter books? And I can only read this type of book. They often crave independence and responsibility, but don't quite yet have the maturity to execute certain tasks without guidance. They are starting to begin to really have an in-depth understanding of social concepts like justice and fairness, deeper understanding of rules and consequences. They're starting to sympathize with peers. This is when they can really recognize bullying on the playground and bring that to the attention of somebody who needs to intervene. Physically, however, they still continue to have a high energy level that needs to be calmed at times. They are really starting to hone their motor skills, if guided, which is why we all learned how to write cursive when we were in the second grade. Emotionally, they can often view criticism or even observation as a personal attack and take things personally without reassurance. They can victimize themselves and can lead to feelings of inadequacy. A saying might be, I'm not going to bother to study for that because I can't spell those words anyway or nobody likes me anyway. I'm not going to try to be their friend. Intellectually, however, they are exhibiting logic in their thinking at this point. They're developing an intellectual curiosity. Where do babies come from is a common second grade question. We all need to be able to answer that. They're able to do more complex problem solving if challenged, which is why board games were developed with seven-year-olds in mind. All of this, though, does take some guidance and some attention. So I'm thrilled to hear that there is a recommendation to make this classroom size a little bit smaller. Just as a real brief aside, I'm a lifelong Arlington resident born at Sims, so now you know how old I am, and have seen these schools grow and change through the years. And I hope that we can continue to work to provide the high-quality education we're known for. Thank you very much. Thank you. Lynn Cardin. Thank you. Thanks for, I think Dr. Bode for adding the positions. I did want to address the budget issues around this because that's what I do. I look at the budget. It's relevant not just to these positions but possibly to any other unmet needs that have arisen. I urged you in the spring when I spoke to you to take a fresh look at the budget either at your end of June meeting or over the summer. And you haven't done that yet, but I hope you will do that soon. There have been changes. There always are changes. The changes this year have been mostly on the good side. The special education circuit breaker, which was in the budget for $1.4 million. That was because the governor had cut some funds during the year, but he was able to put those funds back. So we actually received $1.5 million instead, 90,000 more. We received homeless transportation funding reimbursement for the first time. That was $68,000, which we received on July 3. There have been some teacher retirements. I'm aware of three. I'm sorry, five teacher retirements. Typically, the teachers leave at a high salary level and were replaced by entering teachers at the lower salary level. So if you do a conservative assumption of $15,000 savings for position, that's $75,000 just for the teachers. There are other retirements as well. And then the grant picture. Overall, the grant picture is very stable. The final augments may not have been made yet, but all of the state grant programs, the MECCO program, the kindergarten program, have been funded at the same levels or higher than last year. And the federal pass-through programs, those allocations, most of them have been made, and those are also stable, whereas the budget expected them all to decline. It appears to me to be about $100,000 of additional revenue from that. So that's $300,000. Now, things move around in the budget. I'm sure some of those dollars have already been accounted for. Maybe they were spent last year and just are being carried over. I don't know. But I do hope that the administration and it will come to you at a future meeting with a fresh look at the budget so that you can see if there are any other unmet needs that you might need to allocate some funds to. I do think that since running the deficit a few years back, we have been very conservative in our operating budget. Typically, that's a good thing. But I think perhaps we've gone too far over. And there are some unmet needs, like these three teachers, that we really do need to fund. And I'm glad that we are able to find the funds for that. And we're not being too cautious. We do have lots of reserves now. We've got the special education circuit breaker money coming in this year that we're not going to spend until next year that we can always rely on. We have a special $500,000 special education reserve fund. And we've got close to a million dollars last time I checked in various revolving funds, which again can be used in the event of other overruns. So I'm glad that we do seem to be able to find the funds for these positions. And I do hope that we will be a little bit more assertive and aggressive in meeting unmet needs as they come up, given the relatively favorable picture that we're finally in. Thank you. Thank you. Robert Simcoe. Hi, thanks very much. I didn't really come prepared to give remarks, but after speaking with some of the fellow parents, I had a couple of things to say. As somebody who works in the field of science, technology, engineering, and math education, I work on this at the collegiate level. My wife is a researcher on STEM education at the K through 12 level, and much of what I want to say reflects her thoughts on this. I first want to say that when we moved to Arlington, it must have been about seven years ago. It was because we had this sense that this is a place that actually had excellent schools without really having the pressure cooker environment that some places that have excellent schools have. And that was really important to us. And I think that all of you here are to be commended for creating this kind of wonderful atmosphere. And as a result of this, I think actually we've been sort of a victim of our own success in the sense that we start to see some of these issues of overcrowding, like several parents have been discussing here. I've seen it at the Dolan School because my son is in the second grade as well. And I would just echo the comments that Lauren Boyle had made just a little bit earlier, that because people are starting to realize that there's this confluence of excellent educational opportunity with a nice community, this is leading to demographic changes that I think are gonna be longstanding. And it's something that we're gonna have to think about moving forward. So, for better or for worse, that's what we may be heading towards. Now, coming back to the issue that I was discussing having to do with my wife's research in education, one of the things that I get to see is that there's different trends that come and go in the fields of education research. Something that she and I talk about fairly often is sort of the new math, which we've thought was taught quite well in my son's first grade classroom. People have different ideas about these and sometimes it comes and goes. There's one thing that everybody agrees on. And the one thing that everybody agrees on in educational research is that small class sizes benefit students. So to the extent that the budget allows it, this is always the right thing to do. And in fact, something that I found interesting is that 23 states actually have laws on the books that require maximum size, or they require more teachers to be hired if the classroom sizes exceed a certain amount. And what was surprising to me is that Massachusetts, given its reputation, is probably the best state in the union, or at least in the top few, for educational opportunities. It's not one of these states. So, we're not required by law to do this. However, there's been interest in passing laws like this in Massachusetts. And in fact, one of the champions of this legislation is our own representative, Representative Gabali, who I understand anecdotally may have served on one of the committees here in the past, although I don't know that firsthand. And he's been advancing legislation that was brought up in 2012, but didn't pass, but may come up again that would limit class sizes. Something that's been interesting is that this legislation is targeted more specifically towards, not necessarily towards towns like Arlington, in fact. Sir? We're just limited into three minutes and we have one speaker after you, so I'm just asking you to be mindful of the time. Okay, let me wrap it up. So the thing that was interesting was that, this was targeted towards schools that had a large fraction of their students on the school lunch assistance program. And I don't know that Arlington would qualify for that. My sense is that this was because these communities were deemed most at risk for having very large class sizes. Arlington's very lucky not to be necessarily in a position where there is a strong need for a large fraction of the students to be on assistance, but I'm glad that, in fact, it doesn't look like we're necessarily as at risk as we had thought for these large class sizes as well. If these recommendations will go forward, which is something that we very much appreciate, but I see this as something that will be a continuing issue going forward. So thanks very much for your time. Well, thank you very much. And I encourage everyone who hasn't spoken here tonight who would like to speak to us, to email us, to write us letters. We've received some emails over the summer on this issue and other issues. Please continue to do that. 20 minutes of public participation isn't enough for the entire community, so I invite, at least for me, and I'm sure my colleagues will look great, please contact us. Our emails, our phone numbers are on the district website. Thank you. Dr. Bodie, Dr. Cheson, I'd like to introduce you to those here. Most of you know each other. Would you like to, who would like to go first from the start of the discussion? Okay, thanks. What I wanted to do tonight, I wanna address the issue of enrollment and where the budget, how we're able to do this, but in terms of like an overview of what we want to do this evening, is just give you some updates. There's a number of reports at your desk. Some of them we can address in more depth later on, but just some snapshots around enrollment, where we are with hiring. This is still an ongoing process, and then Lord Cheson is going to give us a quick report on where we are with technology. So going to the enrollment issues, we are seeing this year a dramatic increase in our elementary enrollment. And so tonight I'm just really gonna limit my comments to what's going on with elementary. Compared to October one numbers last year, we're up about 140 students. Now, I don't want you to take that as a final number. There's going to be some decreases, there's gonna be some increases. In fact, one of our speakers tonight spoke to the 29, the 29 included two students that were in a transfer situation. So they were on one list and potentially on another list as well. So that was part of it. And there is still some of that that's going on in schools. We're in the process of reconciling withdrawals in the school. Sometimes the schools know more about who is withdrawing, moving out of state, moving districts and so forth. But let me come back that in a minute. Cause I want everyone to understand where we're able and why we're able to make this recommendation this evening. As you recall, when we set the budget for the year, we made an initial estimate of a reduction of 10%. And we changed that to 8% for our grants which represents sometimes as much as 17 or eight to 19% of our budget. We then changed that to 8% and with the hope that it would only be reduced 6%. And the reason for that was sequestration at the federal level and also the uncertainty what was going to happen at the state level. Fortunately, that did not come to pass. We have learned over the last, and some of them coming in as early as in July in terms of the homeless number, but special ed grants, title one, we're seeing that the grants are very close to what they were last year. So for whatever reason at the federal level, they're funding K-12 grants at last year's previous number. So what that does is allow us to have money available for as Mr. Cardin talked about and other people, the unmet needs. We've had some unmet needs that we've had to address in special education. So some of the money we had to sit down and really reconcile where we were at the budget to where we were retiring and some issues there. And we have done that. There have been some retirements, there's been turnover savings, but then there's other positions that have been expensive positions to fill just because of what the market is. So we have been, we're at an equilibrium at the moment on this. So what we have available is some additional money through the grants. Had this not happened, I will have to say we would be in a very difficult position to address some of these needs. And until we actually again looked at where we were with the budget and we did quite a bit of that discussion today, I couldn't go forward making this recommendation because we're not going to be in, we don't want to be before we start the school year looking at some difficult budget situation. So these are not the only class sizes in the district which are something that we have to have on a watch. What is happening for this year and it's actually quite a surprise is the increase in the number of elementary students. We have, as I said before, increased about 140 students since the October numbers came out. Now, to give you a perspective, when we looked at the last two years and we had a report on this this last year, we actually started to see the last two years, 10 and 11, and I actually had those numbers. As a total elementary population in 10, I were 25, 2520, then I went to 2583. And then it dropped again this last year to 2,569. Well, now up to 2,700, a little over 2,700. And we have more people making appointments to register. And anecdotally, I've learned even today of some people who haven't even, not even made appointments yet, but we know that they're going to make appointments. So this situation is not over yet and we're going to be having to see what happens over August. Right now, our kindergarten is up to 466. I think that one of the things that's very concerning and it's to the point that Boyle and Mr. Cardin alluded to and that is the issue of the size of our schools. We did a lot last year in terms of looking at buffer zones that could help us modify class sizes. And without this big influx, I think that it would have had, it was looking actually fairly good in early June that we were being able to manage it a little bit better than we have in past years. But if you look at, you know, Bracket and Dallon right now in terms of total school is up to 480 students. And that's a lot. And what's going to mean at Dallon in order to have this extra kindergarten is that it's a choice between the computer room and the music room. And that discussion Dr. Woods and I had today and as did Dr. Chesson, we've been looking at that. We don't know quite which way is going to go but that's the level that's there. At Bracket, we have a similar situation. We're going to have to find another place for our learning specialist because we're going to have to take that room. The computer room went last year. So we're in a very tight spot. There's fortunately for Stratton with Thompson moving back to their own school, there's a little bit more breeding space there for some extra classrooms, particularly for breakout rooms. So this is an issue. And you know, the last couple of years did not indicate that we were going to have this all of a sudden this spike. But, and it may be an aberration. It may be this year and then we'll level off again. It's just very hard to know. But it is something that we need to address and as we look to the budget next year, when you have schools that are much larger than other schools, I think we may need to start thinking about extra support for those schools in terms of administration. And we'll talk more about this this year but as many of you know we're moving in, in fact you all know, we're moving into a new evaluation system that's going to require our principals and our department chairs and all of our assistant principals to be in classrooms more doing observations. But when your school is almost twice as large, and in one case it is twice as large as another elementary school, this is an issue in terms that we have to look at. So, an issue of space. When we were looking at redistricting last year, we had the three schools pierced down and bracket and Bishop and it's very hard to move within that and really make any substantial changes when we have this kind of influx. So, this is something that I totally agree that we need to take a look at. It is a problem long term. And I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball. The only thing, we are the recipient of all the good work that we've been doing because people want to move here to town and we're seeing a lot of that, particularly this summer. This is really a summer phenomenon because in May we did not see this kind of shift, let alone at the budget time. So, that's where we are with respect to the enrollment and when we meet again at the next, we'll have a much clearer idea of exactly what happens over the next month. So, what we will be looking at is to look at the space issues and what makes the most sense in these schools, particularly down and bracket. And of course, we're gonna begin very soon the hiring process. I don't know if you want to ask any questions about this or... Does anyone have any questions on the enrollment? Mr. Hiner? Is a question about the grant money appropriate at this time to supporting the enrollment? Yeah, I guess that would fall under the discussion. In our budget and everything, and I want to make it clear, I'm very supportive of having the smaller class sizes and having the teachers with this question. By taking this money, are there any, with the anticipated cut in grants, were we anticipating reducing programs or whatever the grants were for? We'd already done that. So, we will continue with that, by using this grant money, this grant money to support the lower class sizes, we will continue it at the program that we were planning on going through. Yes, we've been able to... Yes, but we also have been able to enhance one program. A little bit by offsetting through some additional Title I. Title I is actually the grant that we got a little bit more. The others are pretty much level. But, Laura, I don't know if you want to mention a little bit how we're using some of that money. We had an extra about 15,000 there. Yeah, Title I will be using for some additional math support at Thompson and Pierce. So, we'll definitely have the programs that we planned on and we'll have a little bit of additional support in math at Thompson and Pierce. So, there's not in that area of math, yes. The other grant money that in anticipation of cuts in it, the programs that were planned for will not be put back. There were no programs. I understand what you're saying. I think what you're saying is because we had cuts in grants, we cut programs, or that we anticipated we were going to have... You anticipated the cuts? We just, there were no cuts in programs in order because of the cuts in grants. There were cuts in other areas. There was no programmatic... Then let me add to it. The cuts that were anticipated to support the potential cuts, they will be continued. Those cuts will stay there. The answer is yes and no. But for example, we anticipated being able to provide less professional development because our Title II grant was expected to be 8% less than it was and it's pretty much level funded now. So, professional development. So, that's $165,000 for three teachers. We use the $55,000 figure for a teacher, don't we? Yeah, we use $55,000. So, that's $165,000. I just want to be upfront. I'm supporting and I will vote for the three teachers. There's no question in that. And not because you folks are here. I mean, I'm a former educator and I appreciate everything with a smaller class size. I just want to be upfront with the public to understand that what we had planned on doing there has to be some give and take here unless we've found a magic $165,000. Well, the money for this is mainly out of the special education grant that we have. And then it becomes a, well, what we did have to increase our special education personnel, that was very clear. And so, we had to make sure that we were able to cover that. But one of the things was a particular gift that was alluded to is that we received, actually it was $80,000. About $80,000 more for Circuit Breaker from last year. And it's not next year. So we were able to cover a big chunk of that with that $80,000 and some of the transportation. My concern is that this money is not basically put on the base. And this is, I don't want to say a one time thing but it's going to be hard to continue to support the staffing that we have unless we get more money in the long run. I'm saying this to the parents, I'm saying this to the folks at home that the budget is going, we're now adding three teachers. And we may have to add other staff during the year and stuff like this. If this is done by extra grant money and things of that nature, it can't be sustained in the future unless the budget itself is increased. And I'm asking you all out there to support that. Thank you. I think what the superintendent is trying to say is that there are things that we normally do which are grant funded eligible that in anticipation of reduction of federal funds that we budgeted for out of local money. And as the federal money came in, we're able to move our local money to higher elementary teachers which has to come out of local money. Yeah, come out of grant money. Exactly. Because I think that the way we budgeted this was proper because I know that in Lowell that we were expecting a hit on our federal titled money and it was twice as bad as we expected. So we weren't level funded, we were taking a hit up in Lowell. So it was very prudent to move some of the expenditures that we need to do into local money in anticipation of reduction of federal funds. That's exactly what happened. So we moved into operating and we can now move them back into the proper grant funding and therefore that opens operating money up for this. So we're not paying for these teachers directly from the grant. It's really shifting money that we had put into operating, moving that back into the grant. So they scrutinize what we do very carefully and we have to submit very detailed reports so we are squeaky clean about all of that. Yeah, I just want to make it very clear that we're not supplanting with grant funding something that we should be paying out of local revenue in that what we were doing was looking to cover an anticipated loss of grants with local revenue and with the additional grant money coming in, we're now free to go and do this. I agree that it is a concern. I mean, the one thing I want to say is the school committee has been very much aware of the enrollment issue. You're saying we have 2,700 kids in our elementary. 20 years ago, we had about 3,700, maybe even less 3,400 total in the district. So as Arlington became a more desirable community, the number of children who are being educated in the public schools has increased dramatically and we're obviously still seeing the gains of our success and we have spent a lot of time in school committee meetings trying to be strategic about what to do because this group of kids will eventually end up at the odyssey and we not only have to worry about class size, but we also have to worry about facility. Is this a one time deal or is this going to be a permanent increase in our six through eight population? We have to weigh facilities considerations of what to do about middle school, how to handle our elementary enrollment along with the needs of a high school that is in warning on accreditation because of the condition of the facility and we need the state to be a partner with us in terms of meeting the facility's needs. So the facility's issue is a very difficult one that's certainly in our radar. When you start budgeting process, this has started in January, we had to have a final budget prepared for town meeting by April. We're doing this with the best guess as things change and they do. You have to have some ability to go and make changes and I'm glad that with the federal money coming back a little stronger than we budgeted that we're able to go and do this. This is a concern of ours that we do have an increasing enrollment and we do have funding capped under the fiscal management plan based on the last overwrite. So these are continuing challenges and be aware of that and make sure that you town leaders, the people who normally sit in these seats are also aware of our needs. Ms. Hyde? I just wanted to point out though, first of all, this type of situation where we have increased enrollment that exceeds what we expected, we've been in the situation before. Thanks to grant money coming in higher, doing what Mr. Schlickman said, we can put it where it was supposed to go, we have the money available to expend our classrooms. These students are gonna count for October ones though. So we're not gonna see money from the state this year for these children, but we will see money for the state next year for these children. So while the town does contribute a significant amount to the education of all our students, we will get some reimbursement or a leavement from the state. These three positions are not completely on our budgets back rolling forward and that's something that the budget subcommittee has looked at. The piece though I wanted to add to this is it's fortuitous that this additional money got realized at a time we had this need. The budget subcommittee did though forward a list of recommendations on projects to accelerate that we saw as crucial to raising the level of education of our students that are being phased in, such as math program purchases, such as the technology piece. And I would just say that from this day forward I would expect that list to also be referred to where we are if there is any additional surplus that comes in that reduces what comes out of the town's coffers. So that's my bit about the budget piece. In terms of the kindergarten enrollment, this is the first year that we actually have had the buffers really in place for this. And I'm noticing that with the exception of the bracket which has just been solved, these are the most level sized classes I've ever seen in terms of coming in. And I'm wondering whether you feel that having that access to the buffering helped do that or whether you're collecting information so that if the plan does need revision at some point we have some concrete data to look at. Well, I think we need to, I'd like to reserve some comment on that so later I can sort of look at the whole piece of it. It has helped but it also, you have to understand, we had two reserve positions in the budget. They've already been expended on kindergarten, one to Dallin and one to Stratton. Totally unpredicted. Now I tried through the buffer zones to keep the Dallin moving so that we could stay with three but it became impossible. And in fact, I had to move some other students around after consulting with the families. So I still have to go back next week and look at the people now that we have these other kindergarten, what do I need to do with respect to the wait lists to make sure that we can maybe even them off a little bit more. So there's still more work to be done on this. We're keeping all the data, you're gonna be able to see all of it. We'll get a complete report to you on this. We, I don't even know the number right now but I think at the end of June I had evaluated about 80 applications for buffer zones. So it's a significant number. It fell a little bit less than 25% because the buffer zones take about 25% of the town. The total number, as you can see, if it was 80 at the end of June, it may have changed now because last week, for example, we had 20 registrations and we're looking at 11, it's just ongoing but an absolutely unprecedented in the summer anyway. So let me reserve on that and wait and see. But it was not 25% of the total number for a kindergarten that was in that and buffer zones. In light of what you just said, Dr. Vody, I do wonder though, as we're adding classes to accommodate certain influxes for grade levels, what safeguards do we have in line for pretty much the design strand per grade for each building? So if we're adding a fourth bracket kindergarten, are we then putting ourselves in a position where next year we can never have more than three or we're forced to compress? I know. Those are some of the long range things that we have to look at. I mean, one thing that we couldn't do at Brackett, we can't do it in such short term this year is take a look at special education programs, look at daycare. But the thing is, as a community, do we want to have schools that are super large and other schools that are not? And I don't know if that percent of the buffer zones can really entirely deal with the kind of growth that we're seeing in areas that we're seeing. It's really just tinkering around the edges to keep them a little bit more even. But even then, the numbers are growing. Having classes of 25 and 24 and 26 are becoming more of the norm in this town than the not. I don't like to see kindergarten go over 25 and particularly dent this year because of the new tools of the mine curriculum that we're putting in. And because larger kindergartners do put in other pressures on teachers and we're trying to be able to do a full implementation this year. I wish I had a crystal ball to say how this is going to go in the next few years. I don't know, but clearly, clearly people love coming out and moving to Arlington. Which is a very positive thing. I do hope though, as we look towards the space issue that we also think about where the age divisions are in terms of which building students attend and whether we need to think about something different for the Odyssey span and whether that works well with the K to five. Thank you. First, I wanna point out that I have a conflict of interest and so if this comes to a vote, I will be abstaining because of that. But I did wanna point out, we need to hear, I understand we're mainly talking about elementary school here today, but we need to have some idea of what's happening with the middle and high school. I mean, if they suddenly had 300 students at each school or something in addition, we need to know that now or we're going to look really silly when we find out in a month or two. So I'm just concerned that there's a whole chunk of numbers that we have not heard yet. I will have to get you that report sometime in the next week or so. Right now, the registration for the high school and the middle school are done at the middle school and high school. And the high school has been doing it through guidance. So I don't have all of the updated numbers there yet, nor do I have the middle school. I will say that the schedules are almost done at both. And so far, the people who are doing the schedules have not said, we've had a few sections we've had to add, but not an alarming number. A few, you know, point two here, we need that and we need a couple other sections here, but pretty normal, pretty normal. This has not been the norm for the last couple of years, having this kind of spike at the elementary. Mr. Films? Oh, you finished? Thank you. So I have the same issue as Kirstie. I have a conflict of interest. I can't be voting on the motion. And you see I'm the guy that just puts it on the table. It's with me. It's a long, but I can't do that. So here we are. So I would say a few things. I think we have, as we, we have to learn from this experience and we have to do some, we have to be proactive about planning the FY15 budget in light of our experience this summer. And I think we're gonna need direction from the team, the leadership team, the district on a few things. First of all, what's the priority in terms of these larger schools? The bracket in Dallin is a priority, some more administrative assistance, administrative leadership to do the evaluations. Is that a priority? Yes or no? And why or why not? We need to start to think about that if we're gonna add those positions and if we're gonna advertise for those positions, you start advertising for a position like that mid-year. So we need to think about that. The second thing is we need to really think through is this a one-time event? Is 5% increase in enrollment? Or is this the beginning of a trend? And there needs to be some thought, reflection, research on that. Because that impacts the budget going forward, it impacts how many reserve positions we put in the FY15 budget. And then there's this ongoing conversation that educators always have, we always have about class sizes and teacher effectiveness and what's really important and what really drives student improvement and student performance. And so I think we need to have that conversation in public, perhaps in our subcommittees so that we can flesh out some of the issues that's around issues like class sizes and what really drives student improvement. Because there's a lot of debate and a lot of research about whether the degree to which class size has an impact on a child's learning and the degree to which the quality instructor has an impact on a child's learning. A lot of research out there on that. A lot of division and we should explore that, talk about it, think about it. So those are some points. But I would say there's a timeline here in terms of the direction we want to go for FY15, especially if there's a desire to add some staff to some of these places. And that is that we really need to think, get this straightened out and talk this through in September, October, and November, so that we can make some judgments for the next year. This, the motion is a motion to approve these recommendations. So we're not moving, it's not a budget transfer, we're not transferring money from one bucket to another. It's simply a motion to approve the superintendent's recommendation. Well, I can't move. Mr. Schlickman? I think the motion is to amend the budget by adding the positions. So my motion, unless I would stand corrected, I moved to amend the fiscal 2014 budget by adding three positions. A teacher for Brackett Kindergart and a teacher for Dallin, grade two, and a teacher for Stratton, grade three. Second. Any further discussion? Sorry. Do we, typically we don't actually state the schools and the positions. We should just, I was going to say, not that I don't like them to be anywhere else, but that's not, that's not typical. Actually what we do in the original budget is we have the staffing laid out for us within the budget and we're approving that staffing. So that if you take a little bit of budget book, you're approving positions relative to schools. Yeah, this isn't reserved for teachers that were approved. No, no, no, but pretty much we approve it in both ways. We approve the, And we're placing them in specific places, that's neat. You know, I just was raising the question of procedure. Okay. Procedurally, I think it sounds. I withdraw the question then. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those against? All those abstain? Aye. Okay. Motion carries. All right, Dr. Bode, thank you folks for coming tonight and speaking to us. Please stay in touch over the summer. Have a good summer break though. Okay. This is very strange, watching yourself on the video. Just don't fix your hair. I didn't look up. I didn't look up. Dr. Bode, you had mentioned two other things on this. Yes, I just want to give you an update. We're going to spend more time on this. This is just a snapshot right now. Cause I thought you'd like to know since we're meeting anyway to get a sense of this. And I apologize that we don't have all of this to you more timely. We were sort of scrambling to sort of stay with what all that we're doing right now and getting some report to you, which we normally wouldn't put together until much later. So these are not final reports. These are just moments in time in terms of where we are with hiring. So far we've had 37 hires and we are not finished. Obviously for tonight we have more, but we also have a number of other positions that we need to fill. We have teaching positions. We have teaching assistant positions. And what happens in the summer, and those of you in schools know this happens, is just there is changes. I don't think a week or sometimes even a day doesn't go by where there hasn't been some change. People have to move out of town or they get a different job or various things. So this report here, and it's really, I don't need to go through it in any great detail, but Mr. Spiegel put this together for you in terms of just so you have an idea of where things are with respect to the different positions. But one of the things that I think that is worth mentioning is that it remains true. And I think this isn't just true for Arlington. It is true in other districts as well. One of the sure ways, the sure ways to have a teaching position, which are very difficult to find. At the elementary level in particular, we can get a thousand applications very quickly when we post something easily. Is that if you've done your student teaching in the district, or you've been a teaching assistant and people can see the quality of your work, that you have a little bit of an edge. So we put a lot of time and attention too into the people we have as teaching assistants. And very often, in fact, I would say, majority of our teaching assistants are either on the road to certification or have their certification. And as you can see here that we hired eight this year so far. And we also did people who had their student teaching here. Five did their student teaching in Arlington. And then we had some people that were also returning. So I think that this report will be updated. You can see from the chart here by school where the hires were, but it's hiring going on in every school. So that hopefully is helpful to you to see where that's going. Any questions from the committee on hiring? We will give you a more complete, I should say, I should have, we've had some more success this year in hiring, minority hiring. And you'll get a complete report on that later. Mr. Hannah. In the two positions we just approved, is there anticipation of internal people? The answer is yes in one of them. Because August is tomorrow and it's gonna be very, very difficult getting these positions filled, I think, this late. Well, we have some other positions too, elementary positions that are happening in two schools. And so the two principals there are going to, it's actually two grade four positions, and they're going to jointly interview and put combined forces on that. And yes, it is, it's a lot. And the principals, they have to pull together a little team. It's a lot. Thank you. Anyone else? Mr. Feynman. Do you have a sense of the salary exchange with some of these hires yet? Are you kind of tracking that or is Diane tracking that? Oh yes. We definitely track it. And in fact, that was one of the things we had to do was to tracking all the salaries against the budget to see where we were. And we were, a week and a half ago, just fine. Right now, we'll have to do that again in a couple more weeks. So there's not a surplus in the, I mean, so it's just staying even. So you're not saving money? We were not, no, we didn't have a surplus, no. It just seems that when you're replacing although, so it would you then I have to assume that you're, some of the teachers are replacing are not necessarily higher paid people. They're people that are leaving the district after four, five, six years or? That's happened. Yeah. That's happened. And yes, we haven't had a few retirements, but then if you hire someone that in some positions, the market is such that you're gonna, you might actually end up having an exchange of equal salaries. Because some positions are very hard to fill. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Bodie, if you'd like to, do you have another? I was gonna ask Laura to give you an update on where we are with technology. Did you have a question on the staffing? I have no further questions on the staffing. I'd like to ask through the chair approximately how long because how long do you think your presentation? I can do it in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15. You tell me how long you want it to be and that's how fast I'll do it. Well, we just got the materials tonight. If we could just have a brief five minute overview. Sure. Absolutely. And then we'll adjust it. Sure. We'll have a more complete one in the fall. This is just to give you a snippet of where we are. That'd be great. Okay. Thank you. We've been focusing on technology as Ms. Hyman talked about that was one of the, if we had end of the year money that we wanted it to go to that. In addition, we always have an investment that we make every year in technology. So we're going to be putting a large amount of technology at the elementary schools and a little bit at the Audison that's funded by the school budget. Those will all be in the neighborhood of iPad carts. We have had some pretty hefty professional development for every teacher that's going to be in a school. It's going to have iPad carts. We are also making it very equitable by the end of the summer. Every elementary teacher will have their own iPad and there will be at least three iPad carts in every elementary school and then all the way to, there runs the gamut till Thompson, which is going to be a one-to-one. And that's because of the construction that's allowed. We've also had a number of partnerships that we've now began to set up through the MASQ and an organization called LaunchLearn. We have four, actually five companies that we're working with that are going to allow us to pilot or beta test their software for free and we'll be giving them feedback. Two are in the area of supportive mathematics. One is in computer programming and two will assist us in doing our literacy work with our students. In addition, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the fundraising efforts from the Arlington Educational Foundation. They, as you know from last year, have started a capital campaign for fundraising. We've had a number of events. We currently have in the neighborhood of $40,000 per year pledges for three years. This is to fund STEM technology at the high school. We actually expect that amount to increase and efforts are still continuing. Matt Coleman and I actually went to Google today and had a meeting with that company and we have another local entrepreneur that we're going to be meeting with either next week or the week after and these folks have stepped up and are hosting evenings where we bring in people within the district that are in the technology field and might be in the position to make sizable donations to this program and so we'll be continuing that over the summer. One of the things that I want to call to your attention is the Scratch Camp, which is a one week camp for programming at the middle school and that there has been, recently in the paper you may have read that there was a number of organizations in the state that have reached out to the governor's office to try to include the requirement for programming courses or the programming standards, computer science standards to be included in the next generation science standards. It looks like that that's very likely going to happen as Massachusetts selects which part of the next generation science standards that it adopts and so I think we'll be poised to be able to meet that need, should that go through? I just, the last thing I want to talk about is professional development for support technology because there was concerns raised about the committee, about the level of technology that we're putting into the buildings and would the teachers receive support? We've run a number of, already run a number of iPad 101 sessions where folks that received an iPad were required to come for four hours of training and many of them have signed on for additional trainings without that requirement of their own volition. For the second half of the year, the second half of the summer, we'll be running Tech University. If you have time then you're available if you'd like to come to Thompson. Next Thursday and Friday we have most of the Thompson staff will be in for the beginnings of Tech University phase one where we have outside consultants from EdTech teacher coming in to train our teachers. The next week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we have about 65 teachers coming of which about 20 are from Thompson and the rest are from all the other elementary schools and the middle school. We'll have outside staffing as well as our own teacher leaders that will be working with those teachers. But one of the things that we are very excited about is that we will be running a graduate level course, blended learning course for, primarily for Thompson, Pierce and Stratton teachers because it's gonna be funded by Title I. Next year to allow them to better utilize technology to meet the needs of all learners within the classroom. So we'll have more for that for you as we come into September. Great. Any questions from the committee? Thank you very much. No other? One motion? Yeah, I would love a motion. I'd like to motion to enter executive session, to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel and to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares and exit only for the purposes of adjournment. Second. Don't we need to name the contract? Yeah, we probably should. Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that in the middle and discuss contract with sternum Chandler, Miller potential renewal. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, thank you. We are in executive session. Good evening, the alley the school committee tonight is started. My name is Bill Hanna, I am the vice chair. The chair is not able to be here tonight because of family obligations and Ms. Starks is also not here. Up front, I see no one signed in for public participation. So we will begin right away with the enrollment update from Superintendent Bote. Good evening, everyone. We have had a very active summer with enrollment unusually so it has spiked our number of elementary students since October one numbers which are official numbers of the school district are up even since the chart that you received are up to a difference of 119 students and we've had more people registering today and more appointments tomorrow. Which has, as you know, necessitated this summer adding five classrooms in total. Two of which had been part of our reserve positions from last year's budget projections for FY 14 but we've had to add three additional classrooms this summer. We were able, fortunately able to do that because of our grants, federal grants, came in even while we had made the assumption last year due to sequestration concerns of anticipating 8% reduction. In fact, when we began the, just as an aside as we began the budget discussions last year the recommendation was as high as 10 and we brought that down to eight with hoping that would be six. So when they came in in August level funded that was very helpful in addressing some of these enrollment concerns. So it has been distributed fairly evenly but one of the things that is also a difference from last year we are approximately up 40 students in kindergarten where we have an enrolled class right now and increasing of 470 students. Last year's enrollment numbers for kindergarten October one were I believe 434 in that vicinity. So we're seeing a major spike in our elementary enrollments this summer. I will say that it's been very helpful and I can give you a more involved report later this month but it's been very helpful given the spike in enrollments to have the redistricting plan in place having the buffer zones because we have been able to even off class sizes somewhat. On the other hand, class sizes are growing just simply because there's just more students and of particular note are down and bracket which are both over 460 students. So it's a lot of students and I don't know whether this is an unusual year or whether this is a trend. Previous years, the last, I should say the last two years we had seen some growth but sort of had really started to taper off a little bit and then this was totally unexpected. Most of these enrollments have occurred since May. As far as the high school and the middle school the numbers that you see are slightly down from last year but I would not think that these are the numbers. The numbers traditionally in the high school change in the first couple of weeks of school and I expect that to happen again this year. The middle school probably be closer to these numbers so the middle school numbers are staying somewhat even to where they were last year. So even though we've seen this big spike at the elementary level, our net district at this point is under 100 students. It's probably in the mid 80s. But again, these are not our official numbers and I know that they are going to change over the next couple of weeks. And Mr. Schlickman did a very interesting graph earlier about some of the trends that we've seen but the trend overall, the trend line in that was just a steady upward growth. Any comments? I'd just like to reiterate to the public that as I said at our last meeting, we're fortunate that the grant money came in at the level we weren't expecting it and it allowed us to do this. We will not be able to sustain these added classrooms on grant money. So we're going to need the public support with our budget coming up in the following year if these numbers stay the way they are. Thank you. Moving on, hiring, update on hiring. Dr. Bordi, Mr. Spiegel. Did you have anything else on the other room? Okay. Unless there's some other questions, we will give you a more updated report as we go forward. But this is just where we are at the moment and it is an ever-changing scene these days. Sorry. No. Sorry. Mr. Spiegel. All right, so we sent out the interim hiring report and again, this is interim staffing report as of two days ago, August 27th. It has changed, it changes a little bit every day as we, new teaching assistants are hired. Most, I think all of the teacher positions are filled now. I don't think we still have any to hire for in that are AEA unit A positions. That, you know, what you have from two days ago is 53 new people that is equal to 47.1 FTEs. You know, as I sort of gave you some facts about some of them, there's a, most, the majority are replacing teachers who retired, resigned, or taking a leave of absence or moved to a different position. About 19 are filling new positions, some of the positions that Dr. Bodie referred to earlier that because of the added classes, some that we, when we, when you approve the budget in the spring, we added another learning specialist at each school, we added Mandarin, we added some other classrooms. And, you know, some are just part-time positions that are giving a little more coverage in some subject areas. You know, we have one teacher voluntarily went from full-time to half-time and we hired a half-time person to fill in and that worked out well. That's at the Audison that was, we were able to do that in that particular position. One thing that, one trend that we continue to see is that many of our teaching assistants who work in the elementary school, middle school, high school, get positions as teachers. A lot of our teaching assistants, as I've said before, are licensed teachers. Many have master's degrees. And because of, especially at the elementary level, there are so many, the pool of qualified candidates for all school districts is so large right now in Massachusetts. There's many teachers looking for jobs. We are, and many other districts are able to hire teaching assistants who have licenses and master's degrees and they do a great job in Arlington and the principals get to know them, the teachers get to know them and they end up getting jobs in Arlington. We've had six who did student teaching in Arlington. Again, we get great student teachers from all the local ed schools and if they do a good job and the teachers and the principals get to know them, that's a great way to get hired in Arlington when there are positions that open up. Another trend that we see is that we have returning teachers. Seven of our new hires this year are people who previously taught in Arlington and left for various reasons to step away from the profession for a while to raise a family and are coming back or went to another district and are coming back and I think that speaks well to Arlington, that people who have previously taught here and left on good terms and liked their experience here want to return when their time is right for them. As the report says, I've met with all the new teachers one to one over the summer in our shared office space over the summer. We were trying to find places to meet where Dr. Cheson and Ms. Johnson were sort of sharing an office for a couple months in the summer as there were some renovations up here but we were able to have the meetings with everyone. I obviously I reviewed the salary schedule with them, placed everyone on the salary schedule, reviewed essential information including ethics law, compliance, whenever health insurance options, the orientation schedule and et cetera and the orientation for all the new teachers just completed this past Monday. Obviously the first two days for teachers in the district for all teachers in the district were today and yesterday. There was a new teacher orientation on Monday at the Odyssey Middle School that Mr. Hayner spoke to all the new teachers and Dr. Bodie spoke to all the new teachers and there was some curriculum training last week for a lot of the different curriculum areas and the teachers get a lot of training here and we'll have a very solid mentoring program run by Marie Janiac. So we list the hires by school, by subject and grade. That's pretty set right now for teachers and I wanna thank again as always this is a team effort. The staff up here on the sixth floor do a lot of work to get the paperwork generated for all the new hires. Kelly Piggit in my office who manages benefits and many other things, helps all the new hires with health insurance and other benefits. Judy Chabader also in our office does a lot of work getting people set up. Maria Lalicata who is a new, who moved from the payroll office to the superintendent's office this summer, took on the role that Pat Plaggy vacated when she retired and that involves generating many, a lot of paperwork, a lot of letters for all the new hires and she's done a great job keeping up with it. There's been a lot of letters to go out and people in the payroll office, there's so much to enter in to make sure that we hire these people that get paid and there's a lot of work, the whole team and all the people who do the hiring, the principals and the curriculum directors have a huge job. Some of the other notable hires as you know, we hired a new high school principal, the Hardy School principal. We made official appointments in the budget to add a full-time high school assistant principal that was an increase from a half-time position in the previous budget and added a full-time middle school assistant principal. We added a school district accountants. We made the revisions for special education department. We have coordinators at each level that we officially appointed. We have a new nursing supervisor who after Lucille Nicholson retired, that's Sue Franke who had been a nurse in the district for several years. We have a new attendance officer, diversion coordinator following Ms. Digby's retirement and that's Cindy Sheridan Curran. And again, we've continued to hire teaching assistants. The final thing I'll talk about teaching assistants, we've really been in the last couple of weeks hiring a lot of new teaching assistants. Most of these are replacing teaching assistants who left and filling some of the new configurations at the schools as you might remember in the new budget for this year. The basic configuration for teaching assistants at the elementary schools is two special ed inclusion teaching assistants who will work with the new learning specialists and one building sub TA who will sort of float through all the building wherever needed. There are other teaching assistants in the special programs as well. So the hiring comes pretty late and it's actually maybe a little too late, later than we'd like but what tends to happen since I mentioned most of our teaching assistants have licenses and are looking for, they don't wanna be teaching assistants for their career, they're looking for teaching positions and there's a ripple effect throughout the districts surrounding us that their openings come up, these teaching assistants get jobs as teachers or guidance counselors or whatever and leave and which is understandable and so we have to fill in with new teaching assistants. So there's a lot of hiring going on right now with that and then we've just hired a new data assistant that was part of, there was a position that was approved to work with Leilani D'Agostino as director of data to help with the student registration and enrollment and our district data and that will be a big help and I can take questions if people have any. The next, just I'll mention, in one of the next meetings in September, I'm not sure if it'll be the first meeting or the second meeting in September, we'll have the ethnic diversity report that we always have but we don't have all the information yet to give you. Are there any vacancies or any positions you're still trying to fill? There are some teaching assistant positions that we're trying to fill. So all the other. I think everything else is pretty set with all the other, the teachers positions. I know we're trying to increase the diversity of our staff and I wonder if there's a path from TA to teacher in the district, if there's any way we can get any more TA's of diverse backgrounds. Yeah, yeah. And we do have some TA's of diverse backgrounds and I don't have the diversity report tonight but I can tell you just anecdotally, we have done better this year than we have in past years. We have some teachers of color that we've hired and I think they will be positive, it's positive for the district, they're great people. I think the people who hired them found that they were the best candidates for the job. So we'll have the numbers in September sometime but we are doing I think a little bit better this year than we have in the past. Thank you. I'd just like to thank you personally and I think the rest of the committee does too for the awesome work that you've done. I think very few school systems are on the first day, have all their teaching staff in place. I think you were the rest of you to be committed. So I will say the only thing, there are as always and every year we're gonna have some leaves, maternity leaves, we have some subs to the long-term sub positions that we still will need to hire but they aren't starting right now. We have the long-term subs in place who are for the teachers who are out right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thompson School Ribbon Cutting Ceremony. Dr. Bode? This is, we are so pleased where we are with Thompson Elementary School. It is going to be opening next week. In fact, this last Thursday, there was a Thompson parent student picnic and students and parents were able to tour the school. We've had some committees and we're opening it up to try to get more employees down there, town employees as well to be able to see the school. Last week, though, which would have been a prime time was a very busy week as still furniture trucks were coming in, furniture being assembled, paper on the floor, but that is all very much settled down right now and teachers have been in this week setting up their classrooms. So I know that there's tremendous interest in the community seeing the new Thompson School and our new reporter at the advocates, Spencer Buelos here tonight, and he did a terrific article on the new schools with a few pictures, but we need to have more pictures for the community. And I think we're ready at this point to do that. It'd be nice to have more of the classrooms set up. I think by early next week, that will be, well, certainly by early next week, well, the school will be in tip-top shape waiting for the students to come in. But because of the tremendous interest in seeing the school, we've set the ribbon cutting ceremony I think a little earlier than we have in past, for past schools that have come online. And it's going to be September 15th at two o'clock. We have been working on the program for that day and speakers and the chair of the committee, Judge Pierce has agreed to say a few words. So we have a program, we had a committee that was a subset of the Thompson Building Committee meeting to work on what the program will be that day. We are going to keep it short as possible because I think that the real issue is being able to come and celebrate the opening. I think that's going to be about a half hour program. We're going to have some music. We may even have a student speaker. We're looking at that possibility. And Mr. McCarthy, who is the executive director of MSBA will be the representative from MSBA at the ribbon cutting. Following that, two weeks later on September 29th at two o'clock in the afternoon, it's a Sunday as well, we're going to have the dedication of the Thompson Library in honor of Mr. Bill Chase. And Mr. Chase was a member of the Thompson Building Committee and the permanent Tom Building Committee among all the other activities he's participated in over his very dedicated life to this community as well as Salvation Army and other endeavors. But specifically with regard to the Allington Public Schools, he with several other people on the permanent Tom Building Committee oversaw the rebuild or renovation of the middle school and the other five elementary schools. And his commitment was to finish it, to finish Thompson and certainly to see the upgrade of Stratton as well. So the new Thompson was a dream of his and he was a very special person and that the library will be dedicated and they're working on a program for that day as well. To which you are certainly all welcome. In fact, we would hope you would be able to come. So we could not be more pleased about the status of the school. I do want to take this opportunity right now since we're talking about the Thompson School and I will say this again because I think it's worth saying. These last two years could have been really, they were challenging. They were challenging here to take a very large school relatively and move them into different schools and the Thompson teachers were amazingly flexible but equally so were the host schools. Stratton, Bishop and Hardy. They opened up their arms and they made this work. We did something that we've never done before when we've had schools relocate is that when they were in the host school classes were blended. So Bishop students and Thompson students were in class together and the same thing was true in all the other schools. Teachers form new friendships, new strong collegial relationships and I think it was a bittersweet moment when they all had to part ways in June but it still was a very enriching experience for everyone involved and so I thank them for their flexibility and their graciousness and same thing for the parents. The parents, PTOs could not have been better in the process but we were ready to move on and thank goodness we were able to move on because these numbers this summer would have just been really difficult to accommodate. When you think about it, when you're talking about 120 new students in the elementary that's a third of a school in one summer, it's huge. So anyway, it came in on time and under budget and we're thrilled. I just wanted to clarify, I don't know if it was the acoustics but the library was being dedicated to Mr. Bill Shea. Oh, what did I say? I was Bill, Bill Shea, yes, I'm very sorry, yes. I have a friend, thank you very much. If it's just against the public because I think all the members of the school committee have been in the building but try to make the ceremony and try to stop by the building. It is a spectacular building, it's a great design and it was budgeted appropriately. We, I think we're spending less than a lot of other communities for our school in Arlington and that's a tribute to a lot of things that happened in the course of all the public deliberations to get to the agreement we reached. But it's an example I think for the rest of the state because it's a well-designed school and it's smartly designed and it's cost-effective. It's a cost-effective school and I think we've set an example for other communities. So it's a great school to go see and if you haven't seen it yet, take a walk around. There's some spectacular views too. I mean, just when you get in the building, the views are just unbelievable of the playground and the area around it and I think it's gonna transform that whole neighborhood over time. Yes, it will. And a lot of thought was put into the placement of the school so that when you didn't, any part of the neighborhood would not see a wall. It would be seen something that would have an angular diagonal view of the building. Actually, the way it's been placed on the site, there's more land there than you had the sense of when the old Thompson was there. The landscaping is very nice, the playgrounds as well. One of the things that is part of the green school is you'll see that there are raised beds for every class to have a garden that they will tend as part of their curriculum. In addition to that, they're outside of each one of the kindergarten classrooms, there's an open outdoor classroom where they can go out and there's a bench to sort of define the area a little bit better. But we were able to get pretty much, I would say close to the maximum chips points, which have to do with issues of environmental greenness and efficiency that really added to the state's contribution to the school. So it is, it's a very efficient school. Even little details about having the windows that face the sun in the afternoon, having outside shades to protect more light coming in, but at the same time, forcing the light along the ceiling so it's reflected into the classroom. It was very well thought out. So it's a beautiful building, very whimsical in some respects. I think Mr. Buell talked about that, that used that word too. It did, it has that quality, which I think a lot of children are going to really love. In fact, the principal, Sherry Dunn of it, and I should give her a lot of credit. She has been there from the very beginning of this project, and I think that she deserves a lot of credit and recognition for the work she's done this summer just to keep the project on point, and making sure the furniture was there, the technology was ready to go. And in fact, Laura will talk a little bit about some of the technology initiative around Thompson in the summer that involved actually the whole district as well. So all in all, it's turning out very well, and I think that Bill Shea would be thrilled to see this. And then one of the pictures that was here, in fact, it's on the, well, it's actually up in the library area. We'll see this mosaic. I think I can, I think I can. That was one of his favorite books. And of course, anybody who knows, knew Bill, knew what an energizer person, energy person he was. So it's, it'll be a great tribute to him. Cario, Mr. Thielman said, I would invite the people to come and see the shades. I won't say any more. The shades are a unique part of that building. I didn't know what they were when I first saw them and you had to explain it on the outside. On the outside, yeah, the sunshades. The shades are on the outside of the building and they do the job. I couldn't believe it. They're so simple. Go and see them. Was that, any other comments? A couple of weeks ago, I went and peeked into one of the windows. I was driving by about 530 on a Friday afternoon. And little did I know that Principal Donovan was in her office working and getting this whole thing ready. So I know, well, I don't think I scared her, but you know, I wasn't expecting to find her there at 530 on a Friday afternoon, but there she was. And she's so proud of the building and I think there's a lot of love that's gone into it and the kids are just gonna be thrilled. Even just going there in April and seeing the way it lays out. Kids on the third floor are gonna have such great, beautiful, inspiring views out those windows because the way it's set on the property and this diagonal, it's just, I don't think even by looking at the outside, which is kind of cool, you're gonna get a sense of just how spectacular it is on the inside and what a warm, positive place it is. Moving on, superintendents report? We have a few things. The first is, well, the status of the school is you ask that question, Mr. Heiner. We are, we've had a much shorter summer than in past years, ending on June 28th and starting on August 28th. It feels very much shorter and it has been a difficult summer with all the projects going on around the district to stay on top of all of the cleaning that goes on every summer. But despite that and despite some very hot weeks, our custodial staff, along with a lot of the college students we hired, did a terrific job. Other than the high school, which will be finished by this Friday, the other schools were ready for teachers to be in them a week or so ago. So in fact, if you were in any of the elementary schools the end of last week and certainly this week you'll see a lot of teachers back preparing their rooms. So they're in great shape and as you can see up here we completed this project which was initially inspired by being able to put these new HVAC systems in which will save us an annual cost of about $50,000 in electricity and we were able to fund this through a grant. But in doing so we were also able to upgrade this room which is used all the time during, even though you use it, this district uses it as well for a lot of professional development. So this looks, I think a lot better, I know a lot better. Yeah. When Diane Johnson is here at the next meeting when she gives you a finance report she's also going to give you a more detailed summary of the capital projects that were done this summer just so that you're aware. At the last meeting on July 31st we had a number of parents from Stratton attending concerned about grade size, the number of students in grade three but they were all the one parent and expressed a concern about mold in the lower level of Stratton. And in fact this had come up the night before when I had met with them up at Stratton and we don't take these types of things concerns very lightly. So what we did is we hired a firm out of Wuburn called ProScience and had them do an analysis of the rooms that are down in the lower level and in your report that you received you have these specific room numbers. And to take a look at what mold structures may be in the atmosphere of those rooms. Since there are no state and federal guidelines around what is the proper number to be in an interior space the way that it's done this is the industry standard is to compare the outside mold structures to what the concentration is in the interior spaces. And that was what was done. And what they found is that the outside structures per cubic meter was 916 structures per cubic meter and the indoor concentrations ran range between 32 and 194. So if you are to average that over the classrooms there were test is about 85 structures per cubic meter which means that on average there were 10 times more mold structures outside the building than there were inside the building. One of the things that you always want to do too over the summer when you have a lower level such as we do with Stratton is to make sure that you're keeping the moisture level as low as possible. And all summer long 24 hours a day we ran humidifiers in all those rooms. The carpets were cleaned, in fact, rye cleaned. And so I feel very confident to say that those rooms are very safe rooms for our students and staff to be there. And in fact, the company when they wrote the report said that there's no abatement is recommended at this time given what they found. So I just wanted you to know that because you were made aware of this as well at the last meeting. Good. Just to look, the current emphasis on new schools and new classrooms and stuff is not to have any rugs at all. Is there any thought to removing these rugs in the future? Absolutely. We've had that on our capital list. It's actually fairly expensive. I understand that. To do it because we're actually gonna have to replace the flooring underneath, which by the way our custodians did go in, our maintenance people as well and do visual checks. And there was no visible mold under the rugs or on any of the structures in the room. But when some of those, there's a couple of rooms that we know that when the carpets come up just because of the, that they're gonna bring up tiles. And so we really have to retile everything as well. And probably we would need to do, right now it's contained, but we might have to do, if we test it and see what we'd have to do to more abatements. So we don't, we know that it's gonna cost about 15,000 in rooms, something like that to do. How many rooms still have carpets? I think there's five. I've rooms that do. Thank you. But you get the idea of where it is, so. There's a lot that still needs, we have money for the windows and the library. We want to get those in this year and just the number of things. But it's on our radar screen and we're trying to move forward with Straton as we can. All right. I was gonna ask Rob if he would talk a little bit about the report I sent you from the Traffic Advisory Committee. And let me just preface it a little bit. Well, I'll let Rob talk to it. But basically, anytime we have decisions we want to make around where they advise traffic supervisors to be stationed, we go to the Traffic Advisory Committee to get their analysis. And Rob, you can talk a little bit more about that because you've attended some of the meetings this summer. Yes. So as you probably, you know or recall that when Thompson has been closed the last two years, we have redeployed several traffic supervisors to the Hardy area. We actually had two on Mass Ave this past year, two years. And one more right around Hardy for the additional students coming in walking from Thompson to Hardy. Now that, and we also deployed an additional traffic supervisor to the Straton School because of the Thompson bus. We needed some help there because of the students coming on the bus. So there are actually four positions that are gonna be redeployed from the three from that were added to the Hardy area. One that was added to Straton are being moved. We also, we had one supervisor we've had at the Dunkin Donuts that has been a Thompson position on I think the North Union and Broadway Dunkin Donuts that Dunkin Donuts pays for. And we've had that and we're gonna continue to have that. So what's gonna happen is most of the traffic supervisors are on the list are gonna stay where they were last year at the other schools. The changes are Thompson were, there were a couple concerns of with the safest places and the best places to put the traffic supervisors now that we're back at Thompson. One is going to be at Broadway and Everett Street. The other one is, as I said, staying at Dunkin Donuts. Then there's gonna be one on the North Union, Fremont Street Purcell intersection. There's a lot of walking to the Thompson from that area. So there'll be one there. And then there'll be one at River Street University Street, River Street University Road Cornell Street, which is a block away from the main entrance to the Thompson on Everett Street. There will be staff at the Everett Street River Street crossing that will help the students across the street and during the busy traffic times. The other place, so what happened is we had 15 traffic supervisors total in the budget from last year that were carried forward in the budget to this year. There was, the Transportation Committee looked at options for the 15th traffic supervisor location. And they listed them in order from their perspective on safety priority based on traffic and they listed them at Chestnut Medford Street, Ridge Street, Crosby Street and Ryan Cliff and Dow. And we can only put one, we only have the funding in the budget for one position at one of those locations. So we are going to add the position actually at the Ridge and Crosby Street location near the Bishop School. We have had one, one at the Bishop School and we would add one more at that location. The recommendation is, they did recommend one at Chestnut and Medford Street. I know the superintendent has been in touch with the administration at St. Agnes to see if they would fund a traffic supervisor there but because it is not an Arlington public school, it's a parochial school, a private school. We do have a position at the international school that is funded by the international school. So we would do that if the St. Agnes would fund it. I don't know if the superintendent has any other comments about that. We would, we just, they were, the principal is going to take it to the board but I haven't heard anything further. Any comment? Yeah, I actually emailed MASC about that position because I was wondering about the legality of it and they said that we would definitely need to talk to our legal counsel because that the town or school district is barred from providing services only to a nonprofit using public funds by the anti-aid amendment of the state constitution. And I'm not saying they don't need a traffic supervisor near St. Agnes, just that I'm not, it's not clear that we could do it legally and fund that position. Yeah, I actually have not talked to town council specifically about this and I will, if there is funding for it from St. Agnes, I would. Oh, if they're paying for it, I don't think there's any question. I can forward you the rest of the email. Yeah, I mean, that was obviously one of our concerns as well. But yeah, I mean, this is a public safety issue and I think in some ways, I mean, it's a difficult position for, I'm not a public safety expert. I mean, I think the people at the police department are public safety experts and that's not my role, but it's sort of learning more about it in this job. So it's difficult for, in some ways, this is a town function that we have assumed. Yeah. Any other comments? I'd like to just, number one, these are Eilington residents. This is an, I'm talking about Chestnut Street. Eilington residents who paid taxes to the town and these are public streets. These are not part of the school proper. If we were asked to consider putting something on that and I don't feel it's an equal comparison with the international school because the majority of the students at the international school are not Eilington residents. The, as far as providing a service to the school I would disagree. This is providing safety to the Eilington children. That's my comment in that. I would ask if there was no, I would ask you this, if there was no funding coming, if they weren't willing to fund it or capable of funding it, would you, and there was not a conflict, would legal conflict of doing this, would you reconsider Chestnut Street? That's a hypothetical. I mean. It's a hypothetical. And you may not want to, I appreciate your position, but. It's, it's a, I don't think that there is an issue that it's needed, but I'm not saying that, well, TAC did order these. There's also a sense that all of these places they recommend are equally necessary. I would say, I want to put this in perspective. A number of years ago, we had, I think at one time we may have as many as 40 places in town where we had traffic supervisors. That's why we, we work closely with the traffic advisory committee because there are, there's a lot of need to do this. But if you recall, when we had the budget, we had to do $4 million worth of budget reductions a number of years ago, that was one of the things that we made a decision about. So we have added more in, in fact, was when Thompson was being relocated that we did add a couple more positions, but our budget is where our budget is at the moment. I appreciate that, but my concern is that this is one of the most busy traffic areas in the town. They're all, and the priority they have to me, it's a cut through. It's a traffic cut through in the morning and in the afternoon. It starts at about two o'clock in the afternoon. I'm concerned about it. With the, with the committee's acceptance, I would ask Rob to just check with town council about the conflict, potential conflict. I can shed some light. There was a time when we paid for, one of the 40 slots was at the St. Agnes and the district paid for it. So then we cut the traffic. So I'm not sure, I think legally we were fine and it was because it was a public safety issue. I think it was, it was cut. I don't know when we made the cut years ago, it was, it was due to the budget. It was just due to the budget. That's all. When we had the budget supervisor, this is the budget supervisor. When we had the traffic supervisor over there, they were stationed at, right at the traffic signal, all they were doing was pushing the button to change the traffic lights, which certainly was non-productive. This goes back to about 2004, 2005, when we had the 40 traffic supervisors and we went around looking to see where there was actually kids crossing. And our pedestrian flow and our kids were not aligned to where our traffic supervisors were. So we had traffic supervisors sitting in their cars at a location with no kids and some really dicey locations like on Mass Ave that had no traffic supervisor and a lot of kids crossing. So we, I'm really happy to see the attack getting involved in being strategic in terms of the placement. MASC, I saw the email back and it does raise an interesting legal question that if the police department out of their public safety budget decided they wanted to put a traffic supervisor in a location for pure safety reasons, that would certainly be within their purview, but for us to go and do it was sort of their legal question. And they didn't come out with a firm statement, but they said, tread carefully and check with your legal counsel. But if they are willing to pay for it, I think that's probably the best option because I mean, if the more we go and open more buildings and change our traffic patterns and have more kids going in more different places, we're spreading out the resources we need for traffic supervisors. And I don't think it's inappropriate for us to ask for a partnership when a private school opens and creates an additional need. Just to clarify, I'm sorry, go ahead. We will as both of you. I just wanna rephrase what I heard. There were three locations that there was the recommendation, Chestnut Medford being one, Crosby Ridge being the second, and then the third location. Based on our student utilization, we felt at this time Crosby Ridge was the best placement, which is a major cut through. People do that to cut the corner of route two and two A and three. So I certainly see the merit in that placement. I think that if we're getting to the point where we're spending more time on traffic safety than we are on what benefits Arlington Public Schools students in terms of their learning and safety in arriving to school, then perhaps this is a function that we need to consider whether it is properly housed as the public school because our purview is the public schools. And I've said my piece. I just wanted to read the rest of the email that Paul sort of alluded to. However, the question that arises here is whether the placement of a crossing guard near the Catholic school also provides a public benefit to public school student, public school children or the community at large. If there's a benefit to the public school children, the payment for the crossing guard could be justified in the school budget. If the benefit falls to the community as a whole, then the municipal budget may be the more appropriate place to appropriate the funds. So I'm not disagreeing that there is a need for a traffic supervisor there. I'm just, I'm raising the question, which I think honestly was never asked before, whether it was legal for us to pay for that position and saying that I think we should find that out before we reinstate it. Just a second Jeff. I'd like to clarify one thing. As far as a traffic supervisor pressing the traffic light, we have one at Pierce and we have one at Hardy. They're necessary there for those people that try to run the light or kids are still crossing when the light changes. And that's the benefit and the safety part. I think the best thing, we spend an awful lot of time whenever this comes up, even if it has nothing to do with a private school, the best thing for us to do is try to get this put where it belongs in the police department and away from us because we are relying on a police function attack group to make judgments for us to pay. So while we did ask years ago about this and we were told by town council at the time that it was not a violation. So we have a new town council now. Maybe there'll be a different opinion, I don't know. But years ago we were told it wasn't a violation. We have tried over the years to move this to the municipal budget and it's in our budget and that's where it is and we have 15 supervisors. And so I don't know. I think there's nothing for the school committee to decide at this point. Other than we've got a recommendation from TAC, the school administration looked at it and made a judgment that I support. Would you get back to us to let us know what the other board says if they'll come up with the funding? Oh. Thank you. If they do, I'll let you know for sure. Can I just say one thing? I mean it might be something that the superintendent would say and I don't wanna step on her toes either, but I think the public safety aspect of the traffic in Arlington, especially with school starting Tuesday, I mean I think we need everybody in town to be extra cautious. Absolutely. There's a lot, as we said, there's a lot of new students coming in, a lot of new people to Arlington who may not know the traffic patterns as well. And so especially a lot of kids are gonna be out walking to school, driving to school next week and we would ask everyone to be cautious. Thank you. Well said. All right. George, I just wanna give you a quick update on some issues around technology with Thompson and we can do a much more in-depth presentation about technology this year. As you know, Thompson will be our first one to one school where there will be one iPad for every student. Teachers also were given MacBooks as part of the construction budget so that they would be easily be able to translate the files that they would do on the MacBook to the iPads and vice versa. We had about a hundred teachers so that exceeded the Thompson teachers during the early part of August. And I think the best way to sum this up is for me to read a quote from Anita Christina Calcuttaire, who was a teacher, fourth grade teacher at Brackett, who participated in a very unique role at the university. She was one of the instructors but also one of the students in the sense there were times when she worked with teachers as an instructor but there were times when we brought instructors from outside and she participated as a student. And I asked teachers for feedback and this is what she sent me. Tech University prepared teachers to use iPads by befriending them with direct instruction and opportunities for hands-on creation with iPad applications at a range of levels from both the very novice to the very experienced. It provided mixed-level groups where several presenters guided teachers through in-depth use of applications, how to differentiate with iPads, classroom management tips and innovative applications available to the pilot. The presenters skillfully met the range of the skills of the mixed groups. In addition, it was a wonderful opportunity to learn from colleagues, the results of their work in the pilot iPad program, collaborate with others with the technology to design curriculum and to be part of discussions as many, many questions were asked and answered about a range of topics from tips on sharing iPads to troubleshooting storage problems. It was a very, very exciting time for all the teachers that were there and I'd like to again thank the Arlington Educational Foundation for their grant that made the Tech University possible and it is something that I could see us holding every summer because the teachers felt they not only learned the technology but they were able to do curriculum work at the same time together. Thank you. The last thing I've surprised you of but I think it's worth talking about here at the table is the parking situation here at the high school. We were notified, the school was notified for the first time on August 26th. I know that there is some belief on the part of selectment that we were notified in June that's not accurate. We were notified on the 26th that what was going to be happening is that there was gonna be much stricter enforcement of parking on Mass Ave and the side streets and I know that this comes from perhaps concerns of residents on some of the perpendicular streets into Mass Ave but it is a major concern right at the moment. The enforcement lease on Mass Ave is going to be not strictly enforced if teachers have decals at Arlington High School but it's still something that we have to figure out a solution to. The problem we have here at the high school is that there's not enough parking places for all of the staff and teachers. But there's also no parking for students and we don't have a busing program here and Mass Ave is an artery, yes, but we also have students that come from parts of town where it may not be easy to get public transportation and certainly perhaps a long walk to school. So this is something that's going to be an issue that we're gonna look at a little bit more carefully over the next couple of weeks but it was a bit of a surprise coming out of the clear blue two days before school was teachers were coming for the first day and of course, as you can imagine, it created a little bit of a firestorm in the school and but I'm working with the town manager and we're gonna see what we can do over the next couple of weeks. So just to clarify, they're not going to enforce the traffic rules and orders, Article 5, Section 2, Schedule 1, if you have an AHS decal as a teacher. For the next couple of weeks, yes. Are they gonna give us time to get the decals to the teachers or do we already have them? We have decals. Okay, how about the students? As far as, my understanding from the slackman's office that they will be allowed to buy the same thing that the AC students have for the public parking lot. No. They won't be allowed? No, no, that's no provision for that at the moment. That's my understanding. Well, you're not gonna see me flip go the other side what's good for the private school in town should be just as good for the public students. They're using a municipal parking lot which is, they're able to buy that at $50 a month there is no municipal parking lot nearby downtown. It's a municipal street municipal parking lot they can set up permanent if they want. And my question is, and I've gotta be really serious about this, is this targeted against us or is the slackman actually going to insist on rigorous parking enforcement from one end of Mass Ave to the other, including the box truck at Lake Street? Are they going to take Chestnut Street which is full of cars every day and it's no parking anytime Monday through Friday and there's never a ticket there and it's always parked up? Are they gonna take Chestnut Terrace which is no parking at any time and start enforcing that? Are they doing something rigorous throughout the town or is this just another special situation where we're gonna have inconsistent and targeted enforcement against the people they decide to go after? That's my question. You can purchase a permit for day and night parking at a reduced rate at any on-street parking on the public roads in here. That's- I think we should leave this to the superintendent to get more clarification. I'm sure you're gonna protect our students as well as the teachers. I think the slackmen are reasonable people. They don't wanna make it impossible for kids to learn and teachers to teach. I think that we need that. Kathy needs to meet with them and maybe something Paul is excited about this. So maybe Paul should be the liaison on this. We do have a selectman's liaison. Yeah, who is the liaison? Does anyone want to? Is it Chuck? I think it's Mr. Pierce. Yeah, it's you. And Mr. Pierce is a most reasonable person. And he's not here. I think the selectman would much rather see him on this issue than me. Maybe you both should go. Well, maybe. Yeah. Maybe you should both go. You're good in the bad part. But I think that we should see if we can't, if this isn't really resolved right away, we're gonna have to do things to maximize the parking on our property. And that might involve doing some pretty drastic things to recover spaces for public school department employees. Because we have control over the parking spots on our property, even though they're say municipal people who might be parking in them. And if the town is willing to go and give a permit for their employees to park on the street, maybe that'll work out. Who knows? But if there's a lot of cooperation between us and the town, we let them use our parking lots overnight for overnight parking. We really should get everybody in the same room and come up with some sort of a long-term strategic plan for working this out. And the fact is that the selectmen would go and pass these regulations and quietly announce vigorous enforcement around the high school without consulting us and without consulting the superintendent. I think it is a problem. And I think that we need to request, in fact, I'll make a motion requesting that the selectmen meet with the school committee to discuss parking issues around the high school. We have a second? Yes. Any discussion? I mean, do you like an amendment to that? I just, you know, I just wanted some clarification. We could, I'm happy to, it's always good to have a meeting with the selectmen to talk about anything, but are you, who are you meeting with now? Our manager and I are going to be working on this over the next couple of weeks. And why don't I just report back to you and my suggestion would be just to wait on that until we can do. We have a meeting on September 12th. So today, so two weeks from today, you're going to give us a report on the progress of your discussions with the town manager. Let's see what happens on the 12th. When you report back on the 12th, if there's no resolution, then I think that's the next step. Well, then I will draw the motion then and just ask that this get on the agenda for the next meeting. Good. Casey, did you have something? I was going to. Okay. Leva? I agree with Paul's withdrawal of the motion, but actually part of the reason I did second the motion is one thing we have historically done is have a joint meeting with the selectmen at various points. I'm not sure when our last one was, but given the nature of some of these issues that are coming up, it might be worth discussion about whether that is an option for this year to pretty much make sure that we are all on the same page because we are one town. I think that meeting should be left to the chair and the superintendent and the selectmen will work that out. You will report back to us on this. My only concern is the potential ticketing of students between now and then. So hopefully you can resolve it. I don't know whether I can resolve that, but I know that the high school principal, Mr. Janger, is going to notify parents or has, I think, already notified parents. Thank you. And students, I would hope. Pardon? I think the notification needs to be going not just to parents, but to students because the students are gonna be driving and I don't know from what I'm seeing with my middle school or by high school, I doubt that there's gonna be that, I was like, go to, they're off to school. I'm just saying that let's make sure we're notifying the people who are actually gonna be getting the tickets, which I think is gonna be the students. Sure, there will be a lot of discussion the first day of school on this. They have assemblies. Yeah, okay. Right, Ms. Sarathan. Is that it? Do you have any more? No, I don't. Moving on to the subcommittee and liaison reports. Policy and procedure, Mr. Thielman. Okay, so we have a number of policies to go over and just to clarify. In June, early June, the subcommittee adopted modifications to policy BDFA-E-2, which is the district-wide goal setting and performance objective process and CBI and CBI-E. So I wanna talk about those for, I wanna take them in chronological order. Mr. Hayner said the other day at the meeting, aren't we already done with this, shouldn't they be on the website, shouldn't they be posted? But the fact of the matter is the chronology is this. We adopted these, we made this recommendation on June 5th. We brought these to the retreat that we had in June. We discussed these at the retreat. The discussion at the retreat, there was, so there's been no change, we all agreed to this at the retreat. However, that's not a first reading. The retreat's not a first reading. So we have to do a first reading tonight and then people can make amendments to these policies at a second reading on September 12th. So it's pretty much what you saw at the retreat. There's absolutely no change. It's what we agreed to in terms of the new process with the superintendent for both BDA-E-2 and CBI and CBI-E. So it's what we agreed to, what we discussed at the retreat. It's just basically a new cycle that's consistent with the evaluation process that the state has created. So that's the first reading on CBI and CBI-E and BDA, BDFA-E-2. Does anyone have any comments or additions you want to add? I do. I just want to state for the record, I'm still concerned about having May 15th as the deadline for submitting district goals in that we won't get MCAS data and stuff. I'm concerned about what data they're going to be using to set, but I also understand there's the contractual obligations of the new district educator evaluation system. So I'm just voicing their concern. Liva. I just want to point out on BBA that I think... We're not doing that one yet. Oh, sorry. We're not there yet. Why did you move it to the right? Sorry. Okay, so thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think we all have the same concern about the May 15th deadline, but there's a contract, so I'm not sure what else we can do. All right, so that's, those are two policies, that's first reading. Okay, so now let's go through the second, the first reading of all the ones we adopted the other day. So now we'll go back to the order. Okay, BBA. During the sessions we had with the MASC on our governance, we... Questions were raised in those sessions about clause 10 of policy BBA. So the subcommittee met earlier in August and then earlier this week to talk through the concerns that were raised about clause 10. And we came up with this modification, which is basically saying approval of new, I'm sorry, approval of job descriptions for new positions with reference to qualifications for employment, salary schedules, annual budget and other personnel policies is in our purview. Approval of changes to the job descriptions of the superintendent, assistant superintendent, chief financial officer and special education director, because we hire those folks according to the law. Be informed by the superintendent of modifications to job descriptions for posted positions and ensure that the district has updated job descriptions on file for all personnel. So our feeling was that anything new, any new position, the subcommittee's feeling was that the school committee should still continue to approve those positions. Obviously we approve any changes to the people we hire directly. We should be informed about any modifications to job descriptions for posted positions. And we should ensure the policies should, you know, say that we ensure that the district has updated job descriptions on file for all personnel. And so that's it. That's the first reading on that one. I, Ms. Hanna. On that one, while this doesn't pertain to a section that's been altered, I believe there was a formatting issue that changed. Yeah, right, right, right, okay, you're gonna, okay, and thank you for modifying that for all our concerns. Just like to inform the representative from the newspaper, he's the first readings and they are not ready for publication. Well, they're public documents. Yes, documents. But they will not be policy until after the second reading. Yeah, they're not adopted, we're just presenting them for the first time. Yeah, okay, so that's, okay, so now we're on, okay, so there's two other, I guess it's not on the agenda, but it wasn't listed, but there's two other policies that we took up at our meeting on earlier this week. GBCA, Staff Health. The reason why this needs to be deleted, the pink one, is because it's, the law was changed, the law was deleted, what am I trying to say, the law was taken, the law. The law that it references has been repealed. And repealed, right. So we can't have a policy that requires us to comply with a repealed law. So that's GBGA. And then GDE-GDF needed to be consistent with our contracts, support staff recruiting, posting a vacancy, support staff hiring. So that means deleting the first paragraph and basically just having two sentences. When a vacancy occurs in a support staff position, the vacancy will be posted following applicable collective bargaining agreements. Interviews of support staff applicants shall be conducted by the immediate supervisor of the position being filled. So it's that simple, it just makes it consistent with all of our contracts. That was something that Rob picked up. And then the third one, I mean the next one is the bullying prevention policy. It's a little, anything highlighted, the highlights, anything highlighted is new language that is consistent with the law and this was developed by our legal counsel. The subcommittee went through it with Cindy Bouvier at the meeting earlier this week and we adopted this, we had, we recommended this to the full school committee for adoption. So basically the changes, Kathy you should help me out in case I'm missing something here, but bullying is the repeated use by one or more students and then there's a new language and we're reading in the second paragraph that's highlighted or by a member of a school staff including but now limited to an educator, administrator, school nurse, cafeteria worker, custodian, bus driver, athletic coach, advisor to an extracurricular activity or a paraprofessional. So basically the law now adds adults and then on page three of five investigation procedures, one, two, three, the fourth paragraph, the paragraph that begins with confidentiality, the law adds to the extent consistent with the school's obligations to investigate and take appropriate action. At the bottom of page three at a minimum the principal or his or her designee shall contact the parent or guardians as to the status of the investigation on a weekly basis. The next one, if a violation is found the parent of the targeted student will be informed of what steps will be taken to support the student and to prevent further acts of bullying or retaliation so long as consistent with applicable legal restrictions. For example, specific information about discipline and action taken will be generally not be released to the target parents or guardian unless it involves a stay away or the directive that the target must be aware of in order to report violations. Then the next paragraph, what is added is discipline and action for staff who have committed an act of bullying or retaliation shall be in accordance with expectations and standards appropriate to their roles and responsibilities. So essentially what the law does now is it adds a requirement that staff are included in this and there's a notification for parents. Did I get it? You did, I want to clarify, the new law is adult to students. Yes, adult to adult. Correct. Very, that's right. Correct. And that's why the language was written the way it was. That's correct. That's it for first reading. Any questions? The school committee, the subcommittee agreed to look at section G which is all about personnel because we have new collective bargaining agreements and there were several policies that are inconsistent with their agreements. There's four policies we're going to work. We have not set a date for our next meeting, but we will and there's four policies Rob is working to revise. That's it. Thank you. Budget, Ms. Starks is not here. So community relations. No report. Curriculum Instruction and Assessment Accountability. No report. Facilities, no report. Legal services review. Mr. Pierce is not here at the moment. That's me. We'll discuss our recommendations in executive session. Thank you. As the chair, I apologize for my nervousness and remiss in not introducing Valerie Sarazan, the AE rep sitting over here. And I would like to offer my congratulations to the administrative staff for the opening days, the two days that I attended last Monday, the new teachers up at Audison, the excitement other than making me feel very, very old. I thought they were all very young and energetic teachers and excited. I saw a couple of them afterwards. They were excited about the programs that Dr. Cheson provided them. And then yesterday, seeing the whole faculty here was the enthusiasm and I publicly would like to commend Dr. Bodie and her remarks, they were, they held me. And not often on the first day, can I say that about a superintendent? They were very well and very well done. So thank you very much. And please pass it on to the whole staff, including the teachers, their enthusiasm. Okay. Am I remiss on the agenda that I'm looking at? We do not have anything on the consent agenda? Okay. So moving on to executive session at this time. Can I impose on Mr. Schlickman to read it? I move that we go into executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel and to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares for the purposes of discussing the unit C contract and to discuss contract with Stonem, Chandler and Miller and a potential renewal of that contract. And we will be coming, sorry, thank you for the second. We will be coming out of executive session back to the public session for potential vote. I'll call the roll. Aye. Aye. Thank you. We now adjourn for executive session. We are returning from executive sessions for our regular session. At this time, I will entertain a motion. Okay. I move that the school committee authorize the chair to accept and sign on their behalf. The new agreement was Stonem, Chandler, and Miller for the next three years of legal services and retainer. It references a letter dated August, the services are described in a letter dated August 29th to Mr. Pierce and attachments. Your second? Second. Any discussion? I'd like to, Mr. Pierce had asked that I read his statement of why he was recommending the renewal. Stonem, Chandler, Miller. So this is a note for Mr. Pierce who was unable to be here this evening. Stonem, Chandler, Miller is experienced professional and has an ongoing relationship with the district that is beneficial to both parties. Institutional memory and knowledge of the way things are done in Arlington is present here and we should take that into account. It is the most cost effective way to handle our general school law and special education legal matters. We've learned that many firms, not many firms do this type of work in those that do charge more than SEM. It represents a collective effort to better clarify and enumerate the responsibilities of both parties. It represents a compromise in that the exchange in exchange for a significantly reduced hourly rate, a retainer plus arrangement that many districts do not have the benefit of having with a law firm. The APS will contract for three years and use SEM exclusively for general school law and special education matters. Finally, we have seen growth in our long-term relationship. For example, more clarity in our relationship is evidenced by this proposed agreement and different attorneys having been assigned to handle our cases responsible for better serving our needs and more growth is expected. Indeed, Attorney Stein has made every effort to say that even after a vote of approval of a new agreement with SEM, further communication about our ongoing relationship with them is not only helpful but welcomed. So he wrote this in recommendation of supporting the renewal of this. I'd like to add, for me, speaking on a personal level, I feel that Stono-Taylor-Miller has addressed some of the issues and concerns that we had brought forward and I hope that our relationship will continue to grow and thrive. Ms. Hayam, do you have anything? Yes, please. I'm going to be voting in support of this in addition to it being the recommendation of the subcommittee and our superintendent. I have found over the years that they have been responsive to the directives of our district administration and I believe this is the best interest of our continuing work with our students and I will therefore be voting to support this. I don't want to add. Yeah, for me, this is kind of a tough vote because I'm out of my area of expertise and we've got three people with, I think it's three people with a lot of agrees on this committee, two of which have one opinion, one has the other. I think that in my mind, it's sort of a close vote, but given where we are right now in the process and what we have before us, it's not an ideal situation, but I think it's the best option for the district, which is I'm voting yes. I would like to make it clear from the outset that the following statement is my opinion. I will be voting against continuing with Stoneman, Chandler and Miller as the Allenton School Committee's legal counsel for special education and general school law issues. This committee and past committees have invested a lot of money in this firm. I believe that Stoneman, Chandler and Miller have not always acted in the best interests of the Allenton school system in that they tend to be reactive rather than proactive in their legal advice. I believe that Allenton school system would be better served by seeking other councils where represent us special education and school law matters. Does anyone else have anything to say? I'll call the vote. Aye. Aye. Aye. Nay. I will entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you.