 Welcome to the January 23rd regular meeting of the Arlington School Committee. I'm Len Cardin, chair of the committee. Our condolences go to Dr. Bodie, whose father passed away this weekend and she's not with us tonight. Ms. Morgan has the flu and is also not with us and Mr. Thielman and Ms. Huss will be joining us shortly. We're starting tonight with new artwork from the Dallin School over on board A. Board A is Imagine Machines, a steam project for kindergarten through grade 3 artists. First, the K3 artist read the story Rosie Revere, engineer by Andrea Beatty. The students were then encouraged to imagine what kind of machine they would create. When they had an idea, students selected a paper that had a small machine part, such as a gear glued to it. Students were invited to begin drawing the parts of a machine around the gear on the paper. The student artists filled their papers and included such details as labels, titles, and color. The results are imaginative and innovative. Board B, here, letters of steam, art project for artists in grades K3. Steam is an acronym for the studies of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Students were encouraged to consider each letter and its meaning. Then students chose a letter of steam that they enjoy to embellish in a way that they would help convey its meaning to others. The resulting artworks are both informative and celebratory of the concepts they represent. Board C is kindergarten art. These are shape collages, two-picture books prepared by the kindergarten artist for this project. The Shape of Things by Dale Ann Dodds and Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh. Both stories help students think about how simple shapes can be used to combine, create more complex shapes, designs, scenes, and everyday objects we recognize. Students then created the collages by adhering foam shapes to paper. Some students chose to draw on additional details. The resulting collages are fun, colorful, and insightful. Board D, oh, over there, keep getting it wrong, painting with thoughts of color. Artists in K3 were introduced to the style of pointillism. In particular, the artist George Sorot. Students observed and discussed how colored dots appeared to be more than just dots when they overlap and begin to form shapes together. Students were then encouraged to explore painting a subject using only dots to see what kind of visual effects they could achieve. And finally, Board E in the back. More kindergarten art, tape-resist painting. Students looked at the work of LA-based contemporary artist Mark Bradford, who manages large-scale paintings full of birds, paper, tapes, string, paint, et cetera, that are both added on collage and eroded away decollage. Student kindergarten artists then had a gallery walk of the process of tape-resist painting and learned that tape can block or resist paint. To begin working on this multi-week art project, students first stuck pieces of masking tape over their papers that they either tore or cut with scissors. They then painted over all of it with tempura paints. After the paintings dried, students removed the masking tape to reveal clean white paper underneath. Most chose to refill that blank space with more color using markers, pencils, gel pens, and crayons. The results are full of colors and textures that show the time and attention these artists put into these imaginative creations. Thank you to all the Dallin artists and to Stacy Greenland, the art teacher at Dallin, for this wonderful art for our room. All right. Is there anybody here for public comment? All right. Yes, you are. Go ahead. So for public comment, as you know, we have three minutes and please state your name at the beginning. We typically do not respond to public comment because it needs to be a separate agenda item to discuss. Go ahead and start when you're ready. You'll need to be by the microphone because we're televised. That's yours. My name is Deborah Savage. I'm a parent. I represent a group called Arlington Special Education Alliance. We're a group of special education parents in town. I haven't been to the school committee for a while because we've been busy. We've been busy writing a report, a research report on the state of special education in Arlington, where we combined not only information from the lab report and little information from the regulatory compliance report by the state and a lot of crowdsourced information from parents to pull it all together in one place. Create a framework and some strategic themes regarding special education in Arlington and assess where there's been progress in areas where there still needs to be progress. This report took us a lot longer to write than we thought because special ed is very complicated. But the final draft chapters are out for review by parents and some experts, sped experts. And the full report in the executive summary will be available by mid-February. So I brought in a draft summary of the findings and recommendations. We've been talking to, we've talked to almost 200 parents of special ed students over the last not quite two years. And a lot of the information and report comes from them. Sorry I didn't bring multiple copies, but we did actually create a nice framework for understanding and reviewing the state of special education in Arlington. And then we've provided you with a series of tables with findings and recommendations. There were one, two, three, four, five, six areas where we feel like Arlington's making significant progress. A couple of general education areas where they're making progress. And these are gen ed initiatives where there's very clear links to special ed. But we found a huge number of areas of very high concern that per the currently available information, the district doesn't seem to be addressing adequately. And that's what this document outlines for you. And I'm guessing my three minutes are up. Close. Yeah, 45 seconds if you want. Yeah. Okay. I, the list is too long to actually go over it in the time that I have left, which is why I brought it in writing. I'm hoping that Mr. Cardin, I do have an extra copy. I can give you two copies. You guys could reproduce and make sure or if you want, I can email this out to the school committee if that's an easier way to do it. Yes. Okay. I will. Here's my extra hard copy for whoever wants to take a look at it. Pass it there or you can have it as the A. A rep. And I'll email it out to everyone else who needs a copy. Okay. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. All right. The next item on our agenda is the update to the Arlington High School program of studies. Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Dr. Janger. Good evening, everyone. I believe everyone received a copy of the updates and changes through Ms. Fitzgerald. Yes. So I just wanted to go over very quickly some of the updates and changes for the 2020-2021 school year. The first section policy and general information updates. We changed all references to the guidance office to the school counseling office. That's been an update across in our system as well as changing the physical education department to the wellness department, which reflects its updates in terms of going beyond physical education and into nutrition, yoga, and other areas of wellness. To be more aligned with our inclusivity, we have removed gender-specific pronouns throughout the program of studies, replacing he or she, his and her, with they and them when appropriate. We've also updated the MCAS as part of the Composite Determination. If you look to the last page of that update, the state has updated those scores and how they'll be scaling them. So we just want to make sure the program of studies reflects that. Most of these changes will not impact the class of 2020. They will impact the class of 2021, which will be next year. Very excited about some of the new courses we'll be offering. First of all, are there any questions about the policy or the updates? Some of the new courses we're going to be offering next year will be gender and society. That'll be through social studies. That'll tie in with our course on race and talk about gender equality. The PE courses, wellness courses, will be updated with personal fitness, recreational sports, both of those courses. We're going to be offering in the mornings to students who want to come in early and take a PE course. In much the same way we now have the chorus or the magical singers and the band for students that want to come in a little early and take advantage of that. We're also diversifying the science electives. We're setting up a new system now where some of our electives, such as astronomy and oceanography, will rotate through. The idea being one year you'll have those two options and the other year you'll have weather and climate and physiology of exercise and activity. That way over the course of your four years here you can have a wider range of science electives. With that in mind we'll also be reactivating video game development and advanced robotics as we make artificial intelligence with Python and JavaScript dormant for next year. We have several name changes and that is just to reflect updates whether that's the college board with the AP course, the AP art course, or the choir being changed to Corral as well. Are there any questions? Mr. Heiner, the robotics will that be part of a state national competition thing? We have a robotics team and they compete against those folks so there's the overlap between the two. Thank you. Ms. Seuss. Yeah, just a couple of questions. One dormant courses are just courses that are every other year that's part of the regular schedule, is that right? Yep. The gym classes, can you get credit for them? Can you fulfill your gym requirement with them? You can, okay. They're different than magicals, right? Right, so right now we have, well no, magicals is actually for credit. Oh it is, okay. And magicals can fulfill the fine arts requirement. Although it's usually hard to get in if you haven't already done it. Everybody's had it fine. Right, by that point. So the thinking behind that is we have the later start time. We already have a lot of kids who actually come in and actually the RRP department comes in and opens the weight room and they come in and do what they call team sports. Personal fitness. Personal fitness and there's also ping pong and all that sort of stuff. So the sports. And when we look at the research on sleep time, we're moving things half an hour later, but there's also really good research and exercising before school. And there's a lot of good research on giving kids flex time. So the idea that some kids could come in and be able to use that time to get some exercise before the day starts seemed like a positive use of the time. And then finally, as a former philosophy professor, I was very excited to see that there were two philosophy courses offered. There is a small mistake in there. You probably, other people have caught it as well probably. The asterisk that belongs to the weather sort of got repeated on the two philosophy courses for the honors. I'm sorry, could you repeat that? So for example, the interaction philosophy says students will have the options for an honors credit through more extensive weather sampling. That could be a philosophical question. That would be the one. And then purely a totally extra comment. I've never heard that definition of philosophy. I think probably most philosophers would have the opposite definition of philosophy, but that was just intriguing to me. The study questions that we have to assume we know the answer to just to conduct our daily lives. I think most philosophers would say it's the opposite. The opposite of? Well, that you would, I mean that you just don't. There are a bunch of things that you actually can conduct your life without knowing the answer. Knowing the answer adds value and interest and it's an examined life, but it's not. No, I hear what you're saying. So we can all know that it's wrong to torture small children without knowing why it's wrong. What's the underpinning of what makes it wrong? Which is a philosophical question. Yes, Ms. Hina. Yeah, I mean we can go back and take a look at that. I believe the language, both of these courses arose out of MOOCs that were run in the past years, which is why we knew there was student interest in them and why the teacher had experience teaching it at the high school level. I suspect this comes out of that curriculum, but it's always good with philosophers to try to get your language right so that you can, but they'll argue about it anyway. Okay, thank you for the indulgence. The marine biology class, does that require a prerequisite? The marine biology, do you have to finish biology? I'm just asking, I haven't been able to. Oh, for oceanography? I thought you mentioned marine biology as a course. Did I miss? We have weather and climate, physiology of exercise and activity. Okay. And those are for next year, and we have an oceanography course. Those courses do not have a prerequisite. I miss her. My son's a marine biologist, that's maybe worth it. I would love if there was a marine biology course. Well, they had it at his high school. They had it for four years. It was heavily subscribed to them. For whatever reason, they dropped it, they dropped it. Thank you. Yes, Mr. Schringer. Describe the courses we are saying goodbye to and the reasons. Of course. So, participation in government, public policy is an honors level course. There's just been a lack of interest in that course. It ran for two years and hasn't built a following. PEP Band and Rock Band both came out of our performing arts department. Our goal with the PEP Band was actually to build a band that would go to football games, basketball games, raise school spirits, and Rock Band, much like jazz, we were hoping to venture into a new venue of music. Both are being removed because of lack of interest. We usually end up with one or two students in both classes, which is not enough to run a band. And on both of them, so for the music department ones, one of the challenges is our musicians are already engaged. So the question was if we could find students, we could bring in. And then with the participation in government, there are other related courses that students are doing instead. It's not that we have no interest in government, it's just that that class has no gone. That's my assumption, but I'd just like to hear that. Of course. Dr. Allison Ampe. Two questions. One, are you going to have some identification of the courses which are biannual or that you're going to be running every other year so that people can look at that and plan ahead? Is there going to be a description in the catalog? In the program of studies, we do mark off those courses. When they become dormant, it's online and we've highlighted those courses. So they're marked that way. In addition, our school counselors meet with each student and talk to them about they're aware of what courses are becoming dormant and active, and they can work that out with the students when they show interest. So the idea is I think as you were getting it, so the students can plan ahead that they think that will be offered next year. Yes, exactly. In two years, if they can't do it this cycle, they'll know to do something else next year and plan for it the year after. And then the other thing is just the table where you list the MCAS results and the scores. The formatting is a little confusing to me. The last column that talks about subjects, because there's lines and I think there's lines and there really shouldn't be lines. If those lines could disappear, it would become more clear, at least to me. Because it looks like the next, I read the whole row across. Partially meeting expectations applies to math and then the meeting expectations applies to ELA. It's just confusing to me at least. I can definitely make that edit. Thank you. Anything else? Can we have a motion to approve? Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Yes. Any opposed or abstentions? Thank you very much. Thank you. Do we have any conclin and the history of social studies curriculum presentation? Good evening, everyone. It's great to see you. I want to preface just by expressing my thanks for the support over the past year through the additional FT at the high school. We'll talk about this in the presentation. We've been able to offer more electives than we ever have and our enrollment is up. The best example of your support has been sitting next to me right here. This is Crystal Power, a former third grade teacher at Pierce Elementary, now our K-5 social studies coach. She's going to spend some time talking about what she's been working on this year and where we're going. I feel like for the first time in my five years here in Arlington that our elementary school teachers are getting the support they need in order to teach social studies to the best of their abilities. And then we also have Lucy Conroy, who is one of our eighth grade teachers, to talk a little bit about the new eighth grade civics curriculum this year that has been very, very exciting for our students to get engaged in. So I'm going to start off by handing things off to Crystal. Thank you, Denny. First I wanted to formally thank all of you for your role in establishing this position and your assistance with making that process happen. As I was preparing for this presentation and thinking about how I would express to you what exactly my role encompasses and why exactly social studies deserves this investment, I kept coming back to a quote from the National Council for Social Studies, which explores a little bit about what social studies help students do. And I'm not going to read the whole quote, but I thought I would highlight some of the important aspects. Social studies helps students to understand and participate in their world. It helps them to explore relationships and it encourages productive problem solving. And I think that last part is the most important piece for us to consider for our students. It enables them to become responsible citizens who are ready for participation locally, nationally, and globally. Which for me ultimately comes down to the definition of what social studies is. We're preparing our next generation of citizens. And I think it's important that we can agree we were hoping to help our children grow into caring, compassionate, curious problem solvers who are ready to act on a global level. So thank you for demonstrating your investment in the next generation. Which comes down to what does a social studies coach do? It's a lot and it's an evolving role. It's a constantly evolving role that's going to change as our curriculum needs shifts, as the teachers need shift. One of the most important things I've done this year is build relationships, which is not as easy as you think. It's across the seven elementary schools, six grade levels, and the multiple administrative teams. But it's a really important step so that I can establish that trust so that they're ready to make the changes, both to the curriculum and their instructional practices. Another aspect has been to facilitate, this will be ongoing as well, to facilitate and coordinate professional development. To advise and assist in the creation and implementation of common assessments for the grades, as well as the analysis of the data from them to inform teachers' instructional practices. And a huge majority of the work right now is adapting curriculum. In 2018, the history and social science practices were updated to also include standards for history and social science practice. And this was a 15-year long overdue revision. So we're dealing with a lot of revision needs, adapting curriculum, revising, and in some cases creating new curriculum. To better align with these standards as well as district initiatives. So that leads us to my current workload. We've been working with teachers for on professional development to help them better understand the social science practices. These are almost similar to the math practice standards that many are familiar with. These are the thinking that people in history and social science, the disciplines, this is the type of thinking they would be expected to show. For example, we've done some work with fifth grade teachers this year on analyzing sources related to the Boston Massacre. And thinking about credibility of sources, corroborating evidence, and hoping to show them that these are the type of skills that we want our students to be showing. We also have been piloting a common assessment in fifth grade. And I've been working with teams of teachers to understand the assessment, to administer the assessment. I'll be working with them to norm and score the assessments to ensure consistency across the salvin elementary schools. And then we'll be meeting in teams to discuss the data to see how that can inform our practice in our curriculum moving forward. First grade has been the vast majority of my curriculum building this year. I'm really hoping to build a new scope and sequence out for first grade, which is pretty much done, that better reflects the 2018 standards. I'm also hoping to integrate better technologies such as Google Earth and create units that better reflect modern societies in North America and Africa than we currently use. One of my major goals has been around the creation of a unit on Africa that represents Africa as a continent versus a country. And enables students to see the great diversity, ingenuity, innovation, and economic growth occurring there. Moving forward next year, and as long as this position is funded hopefully, we'll be piloting next year the new first grade curriculum units across the district. So I'll be working with teachers to understand the units and to understand the formative and summative assessments that are embedded within those. We'll be looking at the second and fourth grade curriculum to further revise there. In fifth grade, we're going to work on implementing or creating supplementary materials that will continue to work on, continue to foster the development of historical thinking skills. I'm going to continue to work with teachers on professional development, fostering not only their understanding of the skills required within the discipline, but their background knowledge as well. And so that's pretty much where we're going. So a lot of stuff just going on, K-5. One other thing I'll add on is that we also, to take the tools of my curriculum, and then we created civic supplements to help kindergarten teachers introduce those civic skills to our kindergarteners. So it's been great having Crystal this year. It's reinvigorated my passion for all the elementary social studies stuff. I'm so excited that everything that's going on. I feel free to ask questions. Very, very happy to talk about it. At the secondary level, we are continuing on with our district goal and our 6-12 department goal working around research and research skills. So these are essential questions that I presented to you last year, and we're continuing on with these essential questions. This was the plan that we had laid out in order to meet and answer those essential questions. So the text in white, you can see are things that we had accomplished last year. The text in yellow are the things that we're working on this year. One of the biggest things we accomplished is we established a set of research skill focuses in grades 6-12. So we divided up categories of research, skills that we want students to have such as gathering evidence, organizing evidence, presenting their evidence. And then, well, really grades 6-11 because 11th grade is the last required history course. We've laid out what we specifically want each student to be able to do by the end of that grade. So with that in mind, we're creating common assessments and common activities, lessons where students can practice these skills. I was really excited going into one of the 6th grade classes at Gibbs. One of their skills that they're working on in 6th grade is how to just do a search, which I think we take for granted. But they're learning how to do advanced Google searches. They're learning how to narrow down their keywords. Most importantly, they're learning to go past the first page of search results, which research shows that 80% of people never go past the first page of search results. So it makes me excited that we're giving students really good skills to participate in society. So we're going to continue on with this goal throughout the rest of this year. This is just an example of what that skill chart that I mentioned earlier looks like. It's just a screenshot that illustrates 6th, 7th, and 8th grade and the skills that teachers have outlined for the work in these grades. So that's the big 6th or 12th initiative. We'll talk a little bit more about high school in a moment. But now, a great update on our new 8th grade civics course, Power, People, and Progress. Like I said, we have Lucy Conroy here. Unfortunately, one of our teachers... We want to have everybody here, but one of our teachers had depth in the family. One's in grad school and one's coaching. But we got Lucy in it. That's all we need. Oh, my God. Oh, Lucy was the first choice I thought. Oh, thank you. And it's great to be here tonight. And we're so excited about this curriculum. So I know the last time we were here, we were talking about what we were going to be doing. And now we're actually doing it. And the kids are amazing. They're just amazing what the students have been doing, what they're interested in. So I know you have the curriculum. But some of the things that we're focusing on, of course, is... And what's so amazing about this curriculum is that things are actually happening in real time that we could talk about. So when we're obviously talking about the powers of Congress and impeachment, we're talking about it day by day, what's happening. And the students can tell you who the house managers are and what their job is. So it's very exciting. I think the other piece is just sort of picking up on the research skills, just sort of giving examples, students as we're studying, you know, sort of the branches of government. You know, from our perspective, we want them to have the foundation, but also to be able to apply that as active citizens. So it's sort of that balance of having really understanding the Constitution and also then being able to apply that. So just as an example, students studied, of course, like just sort of how a bill becomes a law and did some research using the Senate website, the House of Representatives website, used this piece of it called Bill Tracker where they can research an issue, then find a piece of legislation having to do with the issue that they were interested in, and then the follow-up was writing a letter to a congressperson about that issue. So it wasn't just writing about the issue, but actually being able to go back and identify a piece of legislation where it was, what committee it was in, what the status of it was, and then be able to follow up by asking for action. So, and it was tremendous what the students did. And we have so many fantastic materials, so models for students to look at and just really, you know, even learning how to write a very effective letter, proofreading it, and then we're going to be mailing them this weekend to the various reps and senators. So it's just an example of kind of how we're piecing together, again, sort of the content, the skills, and then the, okay, as a citizen, what am I actually going to do about this? There's so many things I can talk about. Yeah, so much talk about it. I mean, I've been amazed in my observations of seeing some of these things. Recently, I was watching, or I was in the classrooms reading through their project that they did where they created third parties. It was fascinating to see students in groups conferring and thinking about the ideas that they could take from the current two major parties that we have and their own goals for society. And I was reading through these. I was like, this would be a great idea for a party. Like, why can't we should have this political party? So it was really, really exciting. It really does make me feel optimistic about this generation and the ideas that they're bouncing back and forth. One of the other lessons that I really loved, too, was thinking about the roots of American democracy in the Iroquois Confederacy, thinking about the legacy of Native peoples and the fact that a lot of the ideas for government we've taken from Native peoples, which I think is really important as well. From the teacher perspective, we've had a lot of time to meet and plan. Brian Maringer, the principal, a lot of students here tonight. He's been great in arranging time and coverage so that the eighth grade teachers can have a lot of in-service time and professional development. Some of the big successes so far have been student engagement. The second one is huge for eighth graders. Respectful, mature discussions. I think that for the past couple of years I've come out and I've said if we can allow our children in the town to be able to engage in civil discourse, that's the best skill we can give these kids. So a couple of weeks ago I was in the classroom and students were doing an agree-disagree activity about the statement, the government that governs least is best. And it was just wonderful hearing the students say, well, I don't really agree with you with what you said when you said this, because, but I agree, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just hearing the students be able to have those conversations in a calm way has been also very, very encouraging as well. As Lucy mentioned, there's been a lot of great opportunities to connect to current events. The challenges have been, there are so many resources. I think with the new civics curriculum, every textbook company, organization, they are just bombarding myself and the eighth grade teachers with resources. So distilling which resources we think are the best for using with students, resources that we can use to differentiate instruction, has been a little bit challenging at times. Another big challenge is that every district has done something a little different with the eighth grade civics. So it makes it hard to kind of have conversations with other districts and other eighth grade teachers about this course when there's a lot of variation right now as this course comes into maturity. I have to give credit to Arlington because we rolled out the civics course this year. There are a lot of districts that have not done that yet. So we're kind of ahead of the game with that, which is really awesome as well. Other things? Yeah, so we have had, again, you're just with the first year, so many different kinds of activities. You know, games, the projects, some of the projects, the letter writing that I just explained to you. I think students are very enthusiastic, I mean, beyond enthusiastic about expressing their viewpoints on the issues and truly care about what's going on in the community, what's happening in the country, what's happening in the world, so they're constantly looking for opportunities to express their ideas, actually do something about the ideas and I think a lot of our job is sort of just guiding that energy. But like Denny said, I'm so encouraged by these students. It's just amazing to see how much they do care and how anxious they are to take action on their ideas. They're not really cynical and that's wonderful, so we're sort of building on that and I think at this age, they are very open and excited and want to actually take action on a lot of these issues. So, again, you know, we're sort of doing different types of things. We're trying a lot of things as well and collaboratively, we meet every day in the cycle, every week, we have a four-day week in the cycle, but meet and sort of compare ideas. There's a lot of the things we're doing sort of exactly the same and there are other things that we're trying and then seeing how is that working out, are we going to do it again, are we going to not try it next year, so that gives us a chance to see kind of what's working what's not working as well. This is what the students have actually said. So we went in and we just grabbed some quotes from students and their reflection so far about what they're finding this year. So you have the presentation, so you can read through these on their own. I love that a student brought up Jerry Mandarin, because it's great that eighth graders now but no Jerry Mandarin is. So thinking a little bit about what is still ahead in the civics course. So our next unit is on state and local government, racial equality, women's equality, immigration equality for everyone and then finally our civics action project as we get towards the end of the year. But all of these, with this curriculum everything is building throughout the whole year. So it's not like we're going to introduce racial equality and we haven't talked about it. We've already talked about the 13th, 14th amendments to the Constitution and just everything is building and then coming back to it and then looking at if there's stuff happening currently with it, then we bring that in. But we have specific units set up for this but again kind of laying it out over the course of the year in building. So we'll be looking forward to seeing a civic action project that's part of the state requirement in the new civics law for eighth graders to complete some sort of civic action project as well as for another civics project to be completed at the high school level which we've been rolling out this year as well. So maybe next year we can talk a little bit more about some of those projects. In terms of things that are going on at high school, our big curriculum work has been in ninth grade this year with our modern world history course. We had a really open honest conversation at the beginning of the year with the modern world history teachers. Our question was what do students really need to know about modern world history in order to understand why the world is the way it is. And previous to this modern world history and chronological through the big history, a lot of it European focus. And I have to give props to the ninth grade teachers that have been working like crazy this year to essentially do a new curriculum. They started a year with many units on learning about the United Nations, the European Union, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We've added brand new units on conflict in modern Middle East. Even before the events of this year unfolded, they had planned a unit on Iran to understand Iran and then it just kind of paid off that all these developments have happened in current events. Modern China, modern Russia, modern Africa, and then thinking about migration patterns in Latin America. So it's been very, very exciting to see teachers dive into this new curriculum and see the connections that students are making. Our focus in U.S. 1 this year has been incorporating more of the history of Native peoples. And we've made a very concerted effort in U.S. 1 to not just talk about Native peoples but they were moved to another place and when they were, you know, subjugated and when their culture was taken away from them. But really, as we mentioned earlier with the Iroquois Confederacy, showing the positive ways that they have been part of the American narrative and the American story. We had new courses this year. We offered a brand new course through Syracuse University on Personal Finance. A new course called Social History through Sports and another new AP course called Social History. Last year, pending approval, but I guess now improved, we're excited to add the gender and society class to have students begin to think about notions of gender identity and the role that gender has played in peoples interactions throughout history. And to close out, because we love data and as a tribute to Matt Coleman in the math department, here are some statistics and numbers for you. Last year, 50% scored three or above, 58% scored four above. This current school year, our department enrollment is up 5% from last year. We're about 106% enrolled, which is significant knowing that there is no senior history requirement. So to know that more students are taking history courses their senior year and some students are doubling up on their history courses and history electives is significant. The statistic that always jumps out to me this year is that last year we had 279 students taking AP courses in the history department. This year we have 333. So I think this is a lot about students and their willingness to challenge themselves as well as our ability to widen and diversify our AP offerings. So that is all the good stuff that we've been doing for this year. Again, we appreciate your support in the department and now if we can answer any questions you would have, we're very happy to do so. Mr. Hayner. I just want to say I think it's great doing modern history all the way through my high school and college. We never got to be on when I was born in 1945. It was ancient stuff and it's real. It makes it real and I think it's great putting it in the ninth grade. You can go back from that point but they know you care. Thank you. Thank you very much for this. It's really helpful. It sounds really interesting. I was wondering do you because this is a new course because it's rolling out across the entire state are there ever opportunities to talk to other eighth grade teachers in other towns you have to compare. We're doing this. We thought this worked really nicely. It seems like everybody's doing the same thing. Wouldn't it be nice to work through. In the summer we did a workshop so we had it was before we rolled out the curriculum but there was a lot of comparing about where schools had already done it what worked, what didn't work the people from running the workshops were experienced teachers who had taught it at the middle school level before so we were able to share ideas that worked and it actually helped us think about how to start the year which was probably we wouldn't have decided to start the year but we had talked to experienced eighth grade teachers who had done it before and advised kind of how to roll it out on going of course we do professional development through primary source and things like that so in that way we connect with other folks but there really isn't probably like a more structured way currently that we're meeting with other eighth grade. Okay. A very robust email chain between all the history department heads in the state of Massachusetts we're constantly talking about how our districts are dealing with various challenges relating to the curriculum and history and social studies in general. Okay, thank you. Mrs. Seuss. Super excited. I've been excited for years frankly but what's going on in the history department I just think there's just so much energy and excitement and reorganizing of rethinking things which is just great I'm excited to hear that the Africa curriculum is getting more robust more interesting than it certainly excited by the civics I'm excited that state and local government is going to be talked about next you know our state represents 40,000 people in Arlington the town meeting member represents about 2,000 people so you can actually access these representatives and you know talk to them and influence them and you know convince them of something and so it's really it's maybe more accessible sometimes than the people over there just super excited. Mr. Thielman. Are you going to trademark Arlington runs on history? You know I need to trademark this when I taught in Framingham I had a logo that was similar about Framingham's history and one year I actually had a parent that worked for Dunkin Donuts but she thought it was funny everything can be covered under that like if it's for education. So I do have quick questions so the world history curriculum in eighth grade that now is going to happen in high school what's the plan? It's a great question and something actually that the history department has throughout the state have been talking a lot about we don't really know where that is going as of now. In ninth grade we think we're going to do a little bit of a crash course of beginning to catch up on some of the big things to help students understand the curriculum but it's interesting that the state put this new civics course in eighth grade but never said where that other content should go. They made a loose recommendation for four years of required history but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon just because we love our senior electives that we offer to students so we're trying to find ways I think next year will be a very interesting year for our ninth grade teachers to see if there's any difference in the students background knowledge and contextual knowledge when they come in and find out that there is and then we'll figure out what are the things that we need to focus on we might find out that there isn't I mean I love the Protestant Reformation as much as the next person but I think it's really exciting to get this current relevant history that students can immediately see themselves in so TBD take your college elective another question I mean I'm excited about the civics curriculum those are big topics so I mean immigration is that's a big topic I understand a lot about history history of the country I just wonder how much teachers must have put a lot of time into figuring out how to teach this topic because you've got to frame it and you've got to do a lot of research and you've got to present it to the kids and give them enough context and conversation about this stuff so I mean immigration there have been law schools there's about 10 courses on it now so I don't know I just want to know how you approach all these big topics yeah I think it varies but I think a lot of it is driven by the students because for example we might give them options of some major research and they're generating their interests sort of looking at congress picking issues and then getting that sort of energy to and I'm going to research every part of this I think that's a big piece of what's coming from them and how we structure so they can sort of initiate that process so they can go to a primary source and learn about like whatever well I think yeah we provide the materials and then they can engage with it but I think in terms of presenting stuff I feel like we sort of present the structure but a lot of it is getting them to engage and research and then bring them back in because for a history teacher there's a lot to research there's a lot to research in the civics curriculum and we have so many materials so with this curriculum we have so many materials that are accessible for 8th graders compared to the previous curriculum which was great but was really hard to find materials for 8th grade level world history the civics curriculum has a ton available and at a lot of different reading levels so we can kids can access the material actually much better it's surprising when it's out there that's actually very accessible for this age group so in that respect there's a lot more out there that they can engage with you know we're not looking at a college textbook necessarily everything on immigration there's stuff out there that's already kind of put together for an 8th grade audience I'm excited about the new curriculum I do miss the castles I'll work with you thank you we'll talk about the old days we've got 50 states now I'll do that I was a junior in high school at the time of the 1968 election and those were turbulent times as well I think we're now engaged in as turbulent a time as we were then an interesting time to be teaching high school civics and history my question is more academic though I'm thinking about what's going on in the elementary level and I know that there has to be collaboration with literacy folks because of the focus on informational text and writing so a brief mention of how that interchange is working in many of the elementary classrooms they're using and the writing curriculums which fully align with a lot of the history practice standards asking students to think about perspectives in reading for example asking students to create an opinion based piece of writing using evidence and examples so it supports a lot of the work that we're doing with a lot of the Lucy cockens units however there's a fidelity that's needed to the curriculum and we're also dealing with a lot of our former integrated units are starting to fall apart a little bit and moving toward a shift more toward social studies so in the creation of a lot of the units now and we're also dealing with a lot of old topics for example where the current curriculum has us exploring Africa through folk tales and exploring Mexico through folk tales so trying to create something that's more modern in a lot of its reading and reading skills and writing skills and we're ignoring some of the practice skills here so we're looking at a variety of ways to create units that teachers can teach social studies and those skills which will also fully integrate their writing skills and look at other their reading skills and being able to interpret and analyze evidence then my usual bottom line question we're a policy and budget organization what do we need to know I mean at this point what would the continued support towards our curriculum resources and materials has been great professional development funds have been great I think that I would always argue for another social studies coach Crystal's doing a fantastic job this year but as she mentioned having seven different elementary schools with all those grades is a daunting task and I'm still continuing to try to do a lot of work specifically in fourth and fifth grade but inevitably just teachers aren't necessarily getting the support that they need so with everything Crystal's done this year she hasn't been able to do as much in second grade, hasn't really touched third grade so I think that we could ensure better equity by having an additional social studies coach to help split up some of that work I know how much reading is a priority for the district right now but I think that in the social studies department we continue to come back to the research that supports that increased reading comprehension comes through having better background knowledge, having better contextual information so we see ourselves as a department helping to further and contribute towards that district goal so while an additional social studies coach might not look like it's going to translate into different reading scores we believe that it is Crystal spent a lot of time this year doing some additional research on the connection between high quality social studies instruction for students and reading comprehension I don't think it's all about reading scores but the finding that I have is because it is not one of the areas that is tested and I'm glad it isn't because when they've dabbled with MCAS tests on social studies or history they've become trivia games rather than meaningful thought experiments but because of that there's less attention traditionally in a lot of places across the state to social studies as opposed to the other four content areas and I want to make sure that we're providing the history and the civics and the quality instruction that we need to be doing K-12 so that we have great engaged citizens to go out into the world definitely if we could just extend the elementary school day but an hour that would be good by decree right well we thought we'd begin union negotiations so here we are alright my question one question so the civic action project what does that look like for the eighth graders what topic yeah so we're looking at basically students researching an issue of concern in the community and then developing a project an action project around that idea so one of my colleagues has had a lot more experience with like Generation Citizen and actually doing these types of projects in seventh grade Eric Bakke and so he's going to sort of help us a lot I think with how we're going to actually design that so this year again of course first year going through we're going to our plans to begin sort of that process in February and I think that you know couple ideas one again is it being student generated in terms of each student individually choosing what it is you know sort of what their focus is going to be and hopefully this point in the year two students will have had enough experience with research and with sort of understanding kind of how things work that they're going to actually be able to design a have an idea and actually design a project that is something that's doable and we have sort of the right people involved at the high school level we're currently in the middle of a lot of our civic action projects right now so as Bill McCarthy had said we're not running that public policy course anymore a lot of it is embedded now within these projects so our 10th graders are researching public policy issues, local public policy issues I would expect that a school committee members you're going to get tapped into part of it is having them interview players and stakeholders I know we have some really interesting projects right now about whether or not we should require doctors notes to excuse absences and students are researching the connection between that and various equity issues we have a group of students researching Arlington Police should wear body cameras so they're really looking at a very micro level at local stuff which is great Dr. McNeil I just want to thank Mr. Coughlin and Crystal for their work at the elementary level and Lucy and all the social studies teachers throughout the district who have adapted to the new curriculum standards and they've just done a great job integrating this and infusing it into our instruction so it's not overwhelming for teachers so they've done a great job and it all has to do with Mr. Coughlin's leadership thank you thank you all very much okay next up is Arlington Community Education summer fun update Ms. Rothenberg I think that's one I think it's been before microphone that's the one can you pull the window up we sent the presentation that was a power point yeah okay should be able to do okay we will wing it that's fine I think I can control it from here nope I cannot can you scroll nope okay good evening thank you for having us I'm Jen Rothenberg I'm the director of Arlington Community Education and I'm Andrea Loeb I'm the youth programs manager for Arlington Community Education and we are happy to be here for our annual update we this is our busiest month right now we just launched our winter programming last week we sent our summer fun catalog to the printer yesterday and our spring catalog wraps up tomorrow so we are incredibly busy right now and but it's a really exciting time for us so I notice that the agenda says that this is a summer fun update but we sort of absolutely think of community education as full programming we program year round and we serve really kindergarteners through adult seniors and we offer enrichment programs our goals are always the same which is just to provide solid programming for all age groups we're very proud to be a part of the community and I know you have been working on the nights we have classes but if you've walked through the hallways you've probably seen the 40 people doing line dancing in the cafeteria and the ukulele players and language students knitting cooking you name it so you probably have felt their energy in the building on Thursday nights sorry you can't see all of these look there are the words so here's the heads of our staff members I guess I'd like to start that's our former director Donna Itson I would just like to take a minute and acknowledge Donna she retired back officially back in 2016 when I took over as a director but she stayed on as a consultant until just last spring Donna took over the program in 2005 a tiny little two sided piece of paper with some programs that happened here in the evenings she slowly grew it over her 10 year period as the director she added the summer fund program and KidZone and we are incredibly grateful for the organization that she left us and we wish her the best you know if you bump into her on a mountainside or on her sailboat thank her because so since we last came in we have added one new full-time staff member so we have there are their legs so there we have three full-time staff members four part-time staff members and then we have a couple of folks who help us in the evenings who are with us year round in addition of so for spring term for example the adult programming only I'm working with about 130 individual instructors just to create our adult programs Andrea works she has about 60 youth instructors per term about 30 of those are Arlington public school teachers this summer in 2020 she's going to have about 62 Arlington public school teachers working in our summer fund program of which Crystal is one of them we have eight elementary on-site coordinators so there's a coordinator at every school we hire lots of high school students to help us with our culinary programs and front-casting staff Manjot is one of our superstars in addition we have about 50 high school students who we work with during the summer program and we also participate in the high school internship program alright so on the youth side these are the programs that we offer for K-12 most of which are continuing to grow enrollments were up about 7% last year over last year for kids zone and teen zone and summer funds saw a 15% increase in enrollments last summer over the prior summer as for highlights in high school one of the exciting developments we've had here is that we've started working with the guidance counselors and the English department who have teamed up to offer a college boot camp application boot camp for the rising seniors we started that last summer we had a good response we had one-on-one small group attention with writing their essay working on the common app so they're going to continue with us this summer we're going to expand to two sessions and we hope to see that grow we also like to focus on general life skills for high schoolers such as financial literacy, self-defense that kind of thing for teen zone and kid zone new for kid zone last winter we launched a partnership with Arlington center for the arts we were very excited about that we're bringing in some of their arts educators to offer three to four classes every term in the elementary schools we're continuing our partnership with Arlington children's theater to do the same that their teachers come into the schools after hours and we've heard from parents for many years they want keyboarding, keyboarding, keyboarding we are now up to five schools and we're hoping to get that to all seven so that's grades three to five chess is hugely popular we offer that Tuesday early release and then at the middle school this fall we started a class called things you should know which is a how to adult class and we got a very good response so we expanded to Otteson so we're going to run that this winter at both schools those are early release three hour workshops so we're hoping to continue that challenges for the high school general engagement we love to engage the students and the teachers we invite them to our lectures and special events give them a free entrance and some come we'd like to see more of course for kids own space is always a frustration you know victim of our success right for everybody we come up against the after school programs to try to find space we are finding more and more of our programs filling up immediately and with big wait lists so we're turning families away many of whom seem to need the extra hour after school we could probably double our programming but space is really our only only thing holding us back just to add to that many of the students who are in the after school programs at the elementary schools also participate in our programs so they get pulled from their program to do the enrichment class and then they're brought back so there's a demand for the families who need just an extra hour but clearly the students who are in those other class in the after school program the students who are in the after school programs the families are wanting them to also participate in whatever chess or language classes that are being offered so I think the demand is there I do wish we had more access to spaces and as Andrea said we could definitely double our programming in those schools if you know to help some of the families who are not in after school Vacation fund we're still offering this is a smaller version of summer fund this is we're not seeing as much growth here as we'd like so we're continuing to analyze whether or not we want to continue especially April which is quite small we are doing it next month in February and we are committed to April this year but we'll see what see what the numbers look like summer fund of course is our largest program and it's continuing to grow we have let's see it's all we always describe it as a pop-up elementary school it's 350 to 450 kids a day going into audison we have 25 plus classes in the morning and the afternoon we hired 62 Arlington staff this year it's really exciting we open registration on February 12 of the 3,000 seats we offer for the summer one third of those will sell out in 20 minutes so it's really exciting to say parents start calling in November for the schedule so we're bringing back Christine who's a Thompson teacher and Christine from Bishop they're going to serve as our full-time doctors again they were excellent the last two years and we're very proud of our counselor program that we've expanded last year we hired 50 Arlington high school kids and we did a combination of pay and volunteer hours and we did a formalized training and evaluations and interview process so we'll continue we think that there will be more and more demand for that and we'll probably have to start turning kids away but we're proud of that anything to add on okay and then summer fund challenges of course with growth the air conditioning is always a drag and parking we don't need to tell you that especially with the young families we have 300 families coming in and trying to drop off their sometimes six year olds with little kids in tow everybody is looking forward to moving the program back to high school eventually parents will be thrilled but we do pretty well at Otteson we've purchased some portable air conditioning units they take the edge off they're not great but they help okay so in terms of adult programings our program has continued to grow so since over the last year we've increased enrollments by about we are expanding our offerings we now have a new speaker series with local author Steve Almond and we collaborate with kickstand cafe and we have some very interesting topics that engage the community we've had a packed house the last couple of times and it's it's a lot of fun we offer expanded daytime and weekend programs we're working now with local businesses and organizations in a different way than we have in the past we are we're increasing those relationships we're currently in we drive up and down Mass Ave we're in all the libraries we're in fitness and yoga studios we're in the flower shops running classes we're all over the place we are also partnering this spring with the Arlington brought to us the program for the youth mental health first aid certification so that program is actually going to be run through us with the support of funding from the AEF we're able to offer that at a very low rate so we're excited to do that we also have added new this year trip this spring to Italy we're partnering with Maria Radowowski and EF and so we're running a trip we have about 20 adults registered for that program this spring we're going to be offering day trips for adults they'll most likely be over the weekend to places like Vermont for foliage trips and the Berkshires for history so we continue to expand and obviously more program we can do outside the building for the next five years probably the better one of the challenges that I wish you could see that picture one of the challenges that we're facing right now is that the central school is as you probably all know about to undergo major renovation starting in April and we actually do the programming for the council on aging we've been doing that for years so the way that we have worked it is that they don't have to hire a programmer at the council and we do the we've set up all the classes for them and they allow us to use the space for free so we have about that's better thank you we have about 20 classes that we run during the day throughout the week and because we've already had to plan programming we've had to scramble to find new spaces for those classes and we now have to pay rent in all of those spaces so that is a big budget concern for us so that is something that's probably going to last for about 18 months that's what the estimated rebuild is and on a smaller scale it kind of gives us a little taste of what's to come with the high school rebuild thank you so I think we obviously have a lot of concerns about the rebuild we have been working very closely with Bill McCarthy and Dr. Janger just in terms of the planning and the scheduling and I'm very grateful for that because we do have to plan so far in advance now that spring is done we're about to start thinking about fall and we know that with the renovation starting changes happening in the front of the building in March that will affect us greatly just trying to get our students into the building at night we probably have 300 students that come in at night for classes and making sure that they're safe, that everything is ADA accessible they have places to park those are all top on our list right now the parking right now is a problem as you all know but especially in the front of the building they're able to park on Mass App and they can kind of fan out into the neighborhoods once that area starts to close down and access is limited and we have our students trying to park in the back there's even though there will be expanded parking lots it won't be quite enough and so our concerns are that our students are going to just decide not to take classes with us so as we move into the interior renovations and we start losing old hall and the kitchens and the wood shop it's really going to change the types of programs that we can offer to students but we're continuing to build our relations within the school and around town we have come up with we're trying to devise a plan B which we've worked with Dr. Bodie and Brian Merringer about the possibility of potentially splitting our programming in the evening and doing some of the programming at Audison and some at Gibbs at night obviously that doubles all of our expenses it means twice the staff twice the custodial and so we're not sure how that's going to play out in the end we're certainly entering into an uncertain time our goal is to maintain the same level of programming that we've been able to maintain but we're concerned about being able to keep our students engaged and but as Andrew said we know they're all just as excited as we are about the possibility of this new building and moving into the new building so that's all we have right now but we're happy to answer any questions that you may have Mrs. so one is a comment about the adult programs one of the comments I heard years ago is that people were frustrated there weren't nothing during the day enough things for older adults and I think there's been a tremendous amount of huge amounts of offerings that we've seen in the last few years and that's great and I've heard that from the community question about how many people adults do you serve a year I know some people take more than one class but I'm just curious what the numbers look like in the fall this past fall we had about 2100 distinct students so that's one term so we have obviously some of those students will take classes in the winter and the spring there are a lot of repeats and as you say those students will take multiple classes but so we have three adult terms a year because one of the things we talked about when we were talking about the high school is how much the high school is very much community resource it serves the entire community obviously the most important thing is students but it really is a community resource a couple more questions for the youth programs for the space needs so I know when we talk to the after school programs there's issues about accreditation and certain rooms have to be accredited in certain ways most of what you're using is classroom space is that right so I was just wondering what are the challenges that we have teachers who are working late putting up things in their classroom and then don't want to give up that classroom space is there accessibility issues I'm curious about what classrooms are pretty good except for Tuesdays when the teachers are there we have the most demand of course it's the extra spaces so if we want to do a robust art program the art room gym programs are very limited there's only one school where we can use the gym and we have kids we could get 100 kids who want to take a karate class easily so it's the swing spaces got it there are questions Dr. Allison Ampe so thank you this is really great to hear each year and it's amazing how much it's been increasing over time one specific question just thinking ahead as we start site work are there any classes held by community ed in the high school over the summer either during the day or in the evening we do have our driver's ed program scheduled we have three weeks during July and August that we'll be running and those classes run Monday through Friday 9.30 to 3.30 we used to have other classes that would be here but we have moved them out except we do have the SAT prep we will have and then the boot camp we had mentioned earlier the high school program there are just three or four classes that are scheduled to still happen here thank you any other questions congratulations this is really amazing growth since this started thank you so I want to add my congratulations it's a terrific program in the 17-18 years I've lived here it's really like you said changed from a one sheet really robust similar to Cambridge and other really well established programs that's a great credit to you and your staff as far as contingency planning it's great that you're on the ball and doing all that you do have reserve funds that will hopefully enable you to get through with a lot of the extra expenses that you're encountering I think within the next 12 months we'd like to see a plan that would work for that there's a significant balance that you're sitting on so we understand that you need that for contingency purposes but at some point we need to see what's going to happen with that money sure thank you thanks our next item is collaborative problem solving Dr. Janger it says program solving collaborative oh what is it said collaborative program solving not proof the agenda so that is our new program in hacking we're going to like the curriculum together great those annoying programs they're gone so as I understand I have 15 minutes I have an hour and a half long presentation here it's a summary of a three-day training not to mention the evaluation of its outcomes so I will do this I'm going to look at my clock but I will do this in 15 minutes we'll try for 10 so forgive me if I'm going fast one of the things I really have noticed about collaborative problem solving is that we start with the philosophy because understanding kind of why you're thinking about what it is you're doing is the most important part but one of the big challenges is the elevator pitch the 30 second elevator pitch which you practice doing doesn't really do it justice because it sounds kind of like common sense so you have to think about why it's not common sense and why it's not what we do and why doing it with rigor matters so I'm going to back up for a second let's go to the next slide and talk a little bit about somebody's got an advantage I have a clicker, even better I'll go to the next slide maybe wrong button you broke it so collaborative problem solving is an evidence based approach for helping students with behavioral challenges and what we mean by behavioral challenges was students behavior does not meet our expectations and has a wide range of things that can be defined as behavioral challenges and it's based on the fundamental concept that kids lack the skill not the will to behave well and I'll talk more about that later instead of unmotivating students to do what you want giving them the skills to be able to be successful and then the point about that is that students that schools need skills to develop that as well as processes and organization because we're not necessarily structured in order to achieve those goals all throughout the building so how did we get here if you go back a couple of years actually about three years I've had in this district for as long as I've been here goals around equity goals around social emotional learning and goals around closing the achievement cap and improving student engagement those have been important goals and we've done a lot of experimentation and a lot of research with many different approaches for more positive discipline for different ways to engage kids for ways to teach skills and on those things they bring them in they see how they work in our context they see whether they can apply we do small research in PLCs or in the student study team and then we think about which of those things are most effective so going back two years we found that collaborative problem solving was one that we were having a lot of success within very small amounts and so we began a more rich pilot so two years ago we had all of the student study team we had a special training and then 13 folks did a full that three day training I talk about to get tier one trained and we began to try to implement that with students in that context and I was really surprised at how successful we were and how much buy-in we got if you think about a dean your life is to deal with challenging students on a pretty regular basis and it is certainly a lot easier to be efficient to say you do that again you're in trouble, you did it now it's a very efficient way of dealing things except for the fact that then they come back and you keep dealing with them over and over again and very quickly the deans and the counselors and the sub separate programs that were being trained in this came back really positive about it so we trained a larger group of people the second year we were working with Mass General Hospital who is the main trainer in this they have really great measures so we did metrics of school readiness of school understanding of the concepts of school buy-in to the concept and one of my favorites of teacher burnout because the idea is you don't want to implement a new program in a school unless people understand and buy-in to the philosophy people are open to sort of learning those skills and they're not burnt out if everybody is up to their head with other things then you're not going to be able to implement those new things and one of my favorite things about this program there are emphasis on that because it's one of the things we often forget about and our desire to do everything for everyone so the second year we decided we still needed to build our capacity so we piloted their training modem so we had this group of folks that had been tier one trained did online training with their coaches twice a month over the full year in order to improve our own approach we also did some more training with the staff and then we ran the readiness survey again I will say that if I sort of had my druthers I might have waited another year and done some more building of the capacity of the training group in the building but with the new construction coming remember burnout and capacity it really seemed like and the new start time as well it really seemed like the time to roll that out was this year so this year we did something which is pretty ambitious which is we reorganized the schedule in order to create training time so we did 16 hours of training Mass General Hospital when they talked to us about full implementation where you train everybody in a program most of the juvenile justice most of the behavioral programs most of the student detention programs in Massachusetts operated using this approach there are a lot of larger schools that do it elsewhere in the country but none in Massachusetts but their approach was they said it's really very simple everyone at the school does three days of training and then we coach them once a week they said we don't do three days of training in public school we'd have to pay everybody to do that it would be prohibitively expensive and negotiated and impossible so they've really adjusted their own training they're doing it piloting it in two schools in Massachusetts so that they can do this bi-weekly training throughout the year so every staff member in rotating groups is receiving coaching and then there are team leaders who track the students who report back to and coordinate to make sure people know what's going on a group of us has been tier 2 trained and some folks are going on to get certified if you click on is there any way I can click on that link it opens for us they have a very sophisticated program evaluation which I will come back and talk about it another time but one of the wonderful things about working with MGH on this is if you think about our typical program evaluation what we do is dose the whole school with some general treatment or conversation and then we look at a sort of vaguely related outcome like I've done with many of my discipline presentations we did CPS and the outcome was fewer suspensions when in fact we know that there were 100 other things that contributed to the fewer suspensions and so what they're trying to look at is tracking who is being trained in what who is changing their behavior about what what students have been dosed in terms of actually participating in plan B conversations and then what kind of outcomes we have so it's a pretty rich evaluation we're at the mid-year point they're just going through the data and I'll have a better idea of that going forward so you can go back to the slides so let me go very quickly through the philosophy so as I said the idea here is that kids do well if they can and the difference of that is versus kids do well if they want to so kids do well if they can so that's a reasonable idea but and the idea is that if they can't something is getting in the way and our job is to figure it out the good news is they like to say is where our help they can do better the current practice and let's really think about this because we say it all the time and we wrote our program our student handbook around it and we have lots of conversations about this is that kids learn to use challenging behavior and what we need to do is make them want to so if a student is late to class we give them detention and if they're late to class again we give them a longer detention and we keep ratcheting up the pain until they decide they'd rather come to class and the thing about that is it works for kids who can come to school on time the useful thing about these sorts of things is you make them want to you motivate compliant behavior with rewards and punishments and just lower the expectation he's not going to come if I keep giving the tensions I'll just let him come in late please come on time Johnny and then they just work with that the challenge of that is that they do teach basic lessons they do motivate students but they don't teach complex thinking skills and for students who know how to do it they realize he really wants me to come on time I don't want that I'll come on time for a lot of our students coming on time it's impossible they understand why they need to do it so they do but for the ones who are in your third long late detention they already know they're supposed to come on time they already don't want a detention and they still come late and so then there's a lot of problems because it breaks the relationship it makes anger around them we know that when you suspend kids out of school for bad things it makes them fall behind it breaks the relationship and it tends to lead to worse outcomes so the impact of reward and punishment less intrinsic motivation because we tell the kids you're doing this because I make you right one of the things I say to the students a lot of the time is that one of the worst things we do in public schools in school in general is that we require you to come because it tells you that you wouldn't come if you didn't want to if you had a choice when in fact we know that they would but people make sense of things based on what we do it increases a fixed mindset it decreases growth and punishment also dysregulates kids when you do research on kids who really got blown up you'll look back and you'll say it wasn't their initial behavior they didn't walk into class and get blown up they walked into class and did something that was problematic and someone said to them now you're in trouble you get this consequence and then they really blew up right if you don't do this you're gonna have this happen and they really blow up so the unconventional wisdom the point they're making is that it's a learning disability and if you think about it as a learning disability it really changes the way you feel about your responsibility if you remember back 20 years ago 25, I don't know how long this came along maybe 30, 40 years ago people thought that kids who couldn't read were dumb or weren't trying and it turned out that an awful lot of them had a specific learning disability and if you taught them in a different way they could learn to read and it would be malpractice for our current elementary school teachers to treat students in that way and we know that the result has been we've gone from 75% graduation rates to 98% graduates in rates and we've had 75% graduation rates where a lot of kids couldn't read to everybody being able to read to at least a basic standard so the point is that kids do well if they can not if they want to so I'm gonna jump fast past that their basic point and this is really kind of a very interesting way to think about it is there really only three things that you can do with your expectations actually with anybody who doesn't meet your expectations you can say do it or else that's plan A which stands for adult you can not make them do it and we do that a lot of the time we say this kid's gonna get too anxious if they do this so we're just not gonna make them do it because it's gonna dysregulate them it's gonna cause them to disengage it may lead to bad behavior one of the sort of comments that they make which I find really helpful in school is they think of themselves as being divided between the plan A's and the plan C's the plan A's are the teachers who think to themselves if I did not hold up the standard this whole place would fall apart and the plan C's are the people like me who say is there anything you can do for Johnny and then they say I'm being asked to lower this expectation and the two of those things are important but they don't in the end achieve the goals that we have which is plan B both collaboratively problem solve with the student to find solutions that are durable both people's needs and it's easier said than done and most of us and this is the biggest challenge in a place like Arlington we don't have that many kids who are disruptive and our teachers are pretty much kind of almost doing this already right the challenge is actually not for Arlington that our teachers don't buy into this but that the need it doesn't feel as urgent but for the students who struggle it is and learning how to do it with rigor is really important and so what do the plans do and this is what they call the gold standard plan A meets expectations it forces kids to do what you want them to do right or it puts them somewhere else plan C reduces challenging behavior but only plan B meets expectations reduces challenging behavior builds skills durably solves the problem and builds a helping relationship and one of the things you realize if you're going to develop skills new skills if you've got anxiety you don't just remove all the triggers you give small doses of the stress in a safe environment in order to get people better at it if someone is cognitively inflexible you don't simply make it so that they never have changes in their routine what you do is you give them small changes in an environment that's safe with people that they trust that's the way we get stronger at things so to do this thoughtfully what they really want you to do is think about with the big issues sometimes you do it on the fly there's spontaneous plan B there's emergency plan B but this is proactive plan B which is what you want to be doing you want to think about what's going on there are three lists what are the challenging behaviors we start there you know why because that's what makes us crazy and we need to write them down so we feel better and then we set them over to the side the problems to be solved are when the challenging behaviors occur because challenging situations plus lagging skills lead to challenging behaviors and so what we want to identify is when those problems happen is this a laser pointer oh it is yeah but see what happens when I hit the laser pointer it already broke it got all excited that I could point why does the laser pointer set it up why does it set it back to how to presentation mode I get there real fast alright so that's the basic idea there and what we're trying to work on there's a large poster of it over there that fell down that I'll put up for your next meeting is these cognitive thinking skills and it's really helpful for us to think more more clearly about this is the situation in which these challenging behaviors happen and so these are the things we're working on and the nice thing about doing this is it doesn't actually really matter if you get it exactly right because what you need to do is start the conversation where the student can identify and have practice at doing the things that they're challenged by so this is the plan B conversation okay there are three stages empathize share and collaborate the most important phase is the first because the first thing you want to do is get yourself and the student regulated you can't solve problems you can't get kids to develop new skills until they and you are calm if you are dysregulated and I have this problem with my children if you are dysregulated you cannot regulate someone else right so you've got to be calm when you go in and you've got to stay calm and then what you're doing is you're saying to them here's the situation in which you seem to have a challenge let's talk about this you don't talk about what the behavior is you don't talk about the consequences and so there's four pieces to that right reassurance usually should probably be at the top and then clarifying questions educated guesses and you work with the student to bring out their concerns and what you find of course is when you do that that process builds cognitive flexibility it builds trust in relationships it builds the skills and then and only then do you move on to sharing the adult concern and practicing doing this in a structured way is what we really are working on with the teachers and one of the things that's really amazing is that you look at the challenging situations that people have so sometimes you will look at a teacher who says well I do this and so and really again most of our teachers are trying to understand the students and work with them but teachers will have an unexpected situation where they said something very nice and supportive to the student and they blew up and if you look back what you realize is that really thinking hard about how you introduce the concept and how you reassure and where you move when I look back at the sort of conversations that went wrong with students that I was trying to have supportive conversations with when you really start to be coached on this you realize oh yeah right I went straight to the challenging behavior you know hey Johnny I know you're upset about this and I realize that I probably should be saying you're doing a good job more often when you're playing this game the kids like that's not the issue why are you thinking that's the issue and then we get into an argument because now I've come up with the solution and I've sort of started to look at it and it's more complicated and what has to happen is that the kid needs to talk about it it's also incredibly valuable we find for me as an administrator especially in my role I find that what I do is I invite parents who come to me with a concern about a teacher to have a conversation where the teacher and the student do plan B and we sit in the room and I facilitate because really in the end the only people who are going to solve a relationship problem between a teacher and a student are the teacher and the student and the parent gets to watch their child build those skills which builds skills for them, builds understanding of what we do and is really positive alright so what has that done we've already talked more about this that's my old presentation I've updated a little bit the numbers on this but if you look at our discipline trends since we've been doing this we see a 55% drop over two years and if you look over the last two years at a comparison of what those things are about you'll see that we have this increase in circumstances but conflict there's 32 conflict and disruption related things and last year they dropped to 15 so those drop by half and one of the things I talked about before sort of where there's a conflict directly with a staff member which is sort of an area we have control over there were three, two years ago there was one last year and I know just from the incidents that in the first three everybody did anything wrong staff handled it very well and appropriately the way they had been trained but there were situations that escalated and we find that we just don't having those as much and the one that happened last year was not escalated by the staff escalated by the time the staff got there so it was really different so the evaluation where is that going so right now we've done a mid-year evaluation in November with the teachers and it's promising but not perfect as I would have expected we've seen a really strong move in teachers understanding and buying into the philosophy that was really positive in terms of applicability of the skills of feeling like they kind of could bring them into the classroom the feedback was good but not great the people at MGH were said we don't usually get that low numbers we're a little disappointed and I think that has a lot to do with the modality of doing this online because you don't have people here so we're going to continue to the end of the year but next year we're really going to switch over to smaller in-person trainings and trainings with everybody else because you really need to work with people who are on the ground with you working with the kids so as I said the philosophy in understanding is high the application is moderate and if you look over the last three years you see a steady movement in people looking feeling like we have the capacity to do this the philosophy feeling like it has a positive impact and burnout stays even now I'd like to see burnout going down because one of the goals is to increase teacher job satisfaction and sense of efficacy so we're working on that so that is the end of my presentation if anybody wants copies of the school discipline to fix which is Dr. Avon's book I have a few extra downstairs I'm happy to send them up to you I meant to bring them up there's a few folks that work on this a lot of really good resources out there the ThinkKids website is full of videos, trainings, online things tons of information so if you're interested in learning more there thank you very much great thank you Mr. Hayner you want to start is there any thought of doing something similar with the parents to help them develop the skills to support you folks so to train students in CPS to communicate you're working on communication with the students and the teachers to avoid the conflicts and to deal with them and things of this nature it doesn't exist in isolation I mean so CPS is actually very much an approach that is taught for parents and parenting I will tell you that as a person who's been doing it for three years and feels pretty good at it I can't do it with my own kids so I haven't quite figured out how that works because I get dysregulated I can appreciate it I'm very open to bringing the training in at this point it's sort of within our capacity to do things and we I did a presentation in November first at the training that Dr. McNeill organized which was wonderful and I had a full house for elementary school teachers and we had a little bit more time than this so we did some practice with it and so I'm a pretty strong proponent of it and think it can be really effective I would love to roll it out to parents thank you yeah actually I have a Stuart Applin's book on my night that I haven't read it yet but I'm very excited too and I've been looking forward to it so just to get a sense of a little bit of understanding of what you've done so far I know you plan to do some more stuff next year is at the end of the initiative with the exception of new faculty members new teachers or is there a longer process so we would like to build out to you know having trainers who are trained within the schools that we can maintain this so we have five or six people who are tier two trained right now a couple of those are going on to get certified that doesn't make you a trainer yet Mr. McNeill who's one of the deans actually went and presented at their training conference with all their trainers and I think he's pretty excited about moving forward on it I would be excited but then I saw how much time it took we'll have another crew of people tier two trained probably over the summer people we talked about doing it there is a training coming up for tier two but the people who you want to do it don't want to miss three days of school in the middle of the year so we'll train people over the summer but the plan would be if we're going to keep maintaining it with fidelity to have a cohort of at least three people because somebody is going to get a new job who are able to be doing training in-house to keep on training new staff as they come in to train new people part of the thinking for next year so we've used the X block this year to do the rotating training which has the X block has been great as a resource to students and teachers when they're not doing training and it's been helpful to have that time to do the training but it's a lot but it's still one more thing for teachers to do so next year with the new start time and the way we're planning on doing it which I'll send you a memo on eventually to plan B conversations there with support from the folks that are better at doing them because the teachers, I mean we want the teachers to understand the philosophy they're not likely to be the experts the teachers in the sub separate classrooms have been most of them more heavily trained and those teachers actually do represent some of the experts so we want to keep, we want to continue to roll it out next year to put it in place and you know so it's reflected in the handbook so for a really great student study team we do not have what are called teacher assistance teams very well structured in high school so if a teacher is struggling with a student or if there's a group of teachers struggling with a student it's really challenging for us to get together and have that conversation about how do we collectively support the students across classes people do it by running around a lot and having lots of little conversations and so we'd really like to structure that in and CPS really becomes the core of that one more I don't see it roll that actually to the middle school because I think one of the things that happened with our family is I kept going to the middle school teacher saying our kid doesn't know how to do this X and they said well she's not coming to see me so I don't count right so it was like I kept saying she needs these skills and you know you need to keep to train her in this way and I think there was at that time a few years ago there was underappreciation of skill building and I will say level to I mean so CPS is something you can do K through 12 at the same time in the district right they're doing a responsive classroom at the elementary school which is you know they are friendly approaches right they are consistent with each other in basic philosophy they all do it slightly differently I got into a debate accidentally recently with someone about positive behavioral intervention and support but there's a conversation between Belgium and the Netherlands right they're friendly neighbors they're not problematic and so I think it's really a rich conversation right now to be trying both of those and thinking about how they fit in together so I know the middle school is working out a lot of those things and I'd be happy to work with them on CPS but I also respect that they're also doing a lot of other work that's related to that you actually answered my question how can this be maintained how many people have been trained so far in the school like what percentage of the staff well the entire staff will be tier 1 strained by the end of the year currently there are 25 people who are tier 1 trained and have had coaching thank you Dr. Allison Ampey I had the same question about whether it should be moving down to the middle school so that was answered I'd say yes but it's not my vote and then my other question just thinking about so what happens if the child you're trying to have one of these conversations and the child won't talk to you so you get what's called dissociative compliance a fair amount they say what they think you want to hear so you'll go away and depending on how challenging the behavior is and how significant the lagging skills are sometimes you only get through empathy you have the conversation with the kid you empathize with the kid they actually hear that you're hearing them they don't believe it no one's ever done that before and they don't know the solution or the problem and it sort of went through a little bit of practice you don't just keep going around and around that helps you to build the helping relationship the kid has an opportunity of learning not to be dysregulated when you talk about this and to reflect upon it and so sometimes you have to go back many many times like the big finding for us was it's not a magic bullet you've got a student by the time they get to high school the more challenging behaviors are heavily learned and significant lagging skills and so it takes a while to build those relationships to start to move beyond so that's the way it works and sometimes one thing that's important to understand collaborative problem solving is not just plan B collaborative problem solving is plan A, B, and C used thoughtfully as part of a plan so you create a behavioral intervention plan sometimes the deans will sit down in our meeting we'll talk about a kid and somebody will say I think it's time for a little plan A like the reality some things are unacceptable and some things cannot be left so you look to sit down with a kid it's like okay look you can't bring drugs to school we're going to throw you out you can't bring drugs to school there are great CPS approaches to drug treatment but we're not a drug treatment center so that's not what we do CPS for in the high school when you come back and you're working to be supported in sort of managing things that you use to manage with drugs then we'll involve in plan B conversation with you and the same thing is true also there are some things where we have to say we're going to be a little loose on this and part of what you really hope for in terms of the communication is that that behavioral intervention plan which goes out to teachers they're understanding like oh yeah that's not going to happen this is what we're working on and we're going to let this go for now but it's not just this kid doesn't have to come to class on time it's like we're going to be a little loose on this because we're working on that Dr. Ablon tells a story about the school police department and he said they were not listening very well they were like this is dumb the liberal stuff we're not going to do it and he said he went out afterwards and one of the guys walked up to them the head of the SWAT team and said you don't understand that behavior is dangerous it is not okay and it needs to stop and Dr. Ablon went back the next day and started his meeting by saying let's be clear this behavior is dangerous it is not okay and it needs to stop and then they were on board because there are some things that need to not happen and we're not going to have a conversation about those things we still have to address those things I just want to join in in the cheers for the program and that there's a certain need in the district for consistency in that a unifying theme that blends our elementary approach and our high school approach that unites at a level I think is essential so that my message to the district administration is if this is the discussion and setting we're using to build social and emotional learning among our students at the high school it only makes sense to bring it down to meet what we're doing at the elementary so that we're consistent and unified in our approach across the district I would say from a medical model point of view we are at the point in the clinical trials where we are very strongly positive but not at the point in the clinical trials where I would say to everybody else you should stop your experiment and take my medication does that make sense so I think one of the really positive things right now is that everybody is still working at their level on how these things work but for a district you're bringing in kids into ninth grade who are coming from our eighth grade and this is a transition and these are always the toughest and if the expectations and the methodology and the systems and the way of thinking and the languages consistent throughout our stream it makes it easier for our children and it makes it easier for all concern to deal with the struggles of transition I mean I won't talk about another district where I work except to say that every time we level the problems expand and that the disparities in our suspension rates expand because supports in relationships that a child may have and may need desperately in a building when they move up to the next building are all gone in their building building up from scratch and to have some sort of a systemic approach to this greater moving up to ninth is really critical to reducing the suspension rate and reducing the incidence that require intervention on the part of the staff well thank you for presenting this is wonderful work that you've been doing I was just searching to see how much information you had given parents about this mention of a parent's coffee where you discussed it but Kristen did really well was sort of like to promote responsive classroom endlessly because all this stuff is very confusing for parents unless they've read one of these books so I would encourage you to do a little bit more newsletter whatever to parents about what you've accomplished, where you're going very briefly what this is, where they can read more I think it might be helpful there's a write up that went out in the opening letter okay so in the letter that went out in the summer there is a description of it at the parent orientations to talk about it I just haven't talked about it at the coffee I do think we are due for a write up that goes out to people to try to explain it and I will certainly send something out I'm actually waiting till I get the well in a few weeks we've got our first term discipline data and so I'm hoping we see something positive I will say as I said to you last time we continue to have a rise in drug possessions in the school which is an issue and unfortunately you can't just wave your hands over the big number in order to sort of explain it great thank you so I would like to applaud Dr. Janger for devising a way to roll this out and develop the professional development that needs to take place in order to integrate this into the high school because it's not an easy task so in order to do that it takes a lot of thought and strategic planning so great job great thank you thank you alright next up Ms. Elmer and the lab report update so that we don't have to keep going back and forth and jumping up I'll just sit here so I can control the presentation as well that works for everybody so just to point out to Dr. Seuss I know you would ask for a presentation also on inclusion given the scope of this and your request to have presentations within 15 minutes we decided that we would do a later presentation and hopefully bring in both our consultant on co-teaching and perhaps the consultant on what we're doing with reading so later so I don't want you to be disappointed that I didn't cover what you wanted so just to review for folks we had a the program evaluation took place in October 2017 a team of external evaluators were on site they did observations they interviewed staff did a record review they issued a report in 2018 of which I shared the findings with you in September of 2018 and then last June we did a second presentation on the implementation of those recommendations the report itself issued 33 findings which fell into the broad categories that we've defined as pre-referral multi-tiered systems of support teacher assistance co-teaching and inclusion IEP development and evaluation and communication internal processes as I mentioned we had shared those largely the first time we presented so tonight it was going to focus on the recommendation and explanations they broke each finding down they followed with recommendations in the following areas trying to see what the color looks like for you so I can read them so people can see it at home student support team processes co-teaching model of instruction professional development team meetings assigning of teacher assistance administrative transition practices evidence-based practice program development entrance and exit guidelines program and staffing oversight for each of those recommendations the report went on to offer explanations that were intended to kind of explain the recommendation they included an appendix which were additional recommendations for the sub-separate programs they were given the scope of the time for the evaluation the focus was on inclusionary practices they did not get to speak with substantially separate staff or review the records or any programs related to the or any materials related to the program so that's why it was included in an appendix because it was not what they actually observed or evaluated so in Novus you have an accompanying spreadsheet where you can see the recommendations and explanations it's 109 lines so I was trying to find a way to capture it here in a powerpoint so I'm just going to pause and ask how you would like me to proceed just to be aware it came out on 102 pages page 1 and page 51 are the same page it cut a page and you got to reduce it it's next to impossible to read so I shared it with Mrs. Tussoni she can probably share with you she probably made it into a pdf versus an excel sheet so that breaks down each individual one I don't think we have time to go through each of those individually I don't know if you want to I think going through your slides is fine we need to get the excel file to us so we can print it on legal size paper or at least look at it on our screen we can't even look at it intelligently on our screen so don't convert it don't convert it okay so I've broken down the recommendations for student support team processes they had two broad recommendations around more uniform they talked about what they're referring to is RTI the state are moving to a model of multi-cured systems of support RTI can exist within a framework of MTSS they tend to use the language interchangeably so I think it's noteworthy for you when you see those terms they're using them interchangeably we don't kind of interchange those three terms and that the district needs to continue efforts that have been in place last June I mentioned that I had shared some action steps on the spreadsheet that you're unable to read you can see both what we did in last school year and what we are continuing to do this year so some of this is a repeat from what you saw in June around they recommend creating a binder we have a shared electronic resource for the materials and protocols as well as we've sent a district-wide team to the states MTSS institute in September and that same team will be going next month to the follow-up today institute we also had another team that went to the systemic student support or S3 Academy that was sponsored by the DESE but run by Boston College in the RENI center and that was a year-long group that we worked with around systemic student supports specifically to address SST there were recommendations around gathering and sharing of data the reviewers didn't ask for the data at the time so referral source and eligibility determinations that information is shared annually with administrators we also applied for a school climate transformation grant which was similar to the success grant that the district had received about five or six years ago it was a large federal grant unfortunately we did not receive it though we scored really well we did we were not selected however that also outlines several of the proposed actions regarding MTSS that the district is taking and last year as well as this year we're continuing in a data-wise training data-wise is from Harvard University teachers 21 has been working with both district administrators, reading specialist and then we also have a program for teachers who elect to take the course after school and we've been running that for two years as well around using the data cycle to do root cause analyses problem solve test or hypotheses what not so we've been continuing to do that so Mr. Cardin you are interested in the budget implications for a number of these recommendations I'm focusing solely on the request that you're seeing this year the recommendations for the student support team largely again call for district-wide initiatives to align practices across buildings Sarah the director of school counseling has been doing a lot of that work but she has a dual role of also being the head of guidance and so last year you saw a request for a lead counselor this year you'll see a request for an assistant director so that she can focus more of that role in a district-wide capacity rather than just being focused on the middle and high school guidance departments and elementary assistant principals the report calls for administrative presence during this process building team at the building level leadership around this and given the singular role of the elementary principal it's really currently not possible for them to be at student support teams each time that they're happening grade level team meetings doing building operations and what not so that request you see that request for elementary assistant principals I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the co-teaching only because I mentioned that we're going to do another presentation on that however the recommendations around co-teaching focused on the essentially the inconsistencies between the levels where we have it at Gibbs Ottison and the high school and so the recommendation is to establish a clear and consistent approach across the district and recommendations specifically around enrollment in co-teaching classes which are things that kind of fall after you establish a consistent process and in the spreadsheet that I provided you see more of the very specific actions around teacher training classroom assignment things of that nature so we have I for the last several years have been sending both general education and special education teacher teams offsite to co-teaching workshops mentioned that we were going to be working with an onsite coach consultant for this year and we have been she's working with our teams grades 6 through 12 as well as the administrators both curriculum directors special ed coordinators Mr. McNeill and the building principals the other piece that again the program recommendations are for a multi-year rollout once we establish a consistent practice at the secondary level it makes sense to move to looking at the work at the elementary level but some of that groundwork requires things like the elementary schedule so we have implemented a schedule that will allow for common instructional blocks which has been a barrier historically to really implementing co-teaching in the way that we have come to define and understand it through the workshops and trainings at the elementary level again we've opened more sections at the high school to allow for more of that balanced enrollment in the classes you know there's a danger and they speak to that in the report across districts that they co-teaching classes become a catch-all not only for special ed students but English language learners students who are receiving 504s so that you really need in order to make this happen you need to make sure you're balancing the enrollment in those classes and one of the ways obviously we need to do that is by expanding those and because of the model we established at Gibbs we were able to expand it to more learning communities whereas at Ottison the model they have allows for one learning community to have a co-teaching model where at Gibbs it's spread across four learning communities to see requests for professional development the consultant in the budget the increase in both general education and special education staffing in order to make this happen I've said before inclusion doesn't save us money it may in out of district placements but it costs money to do it and to do it well so it is not a cost savings per se to be providing this I spent a lot of time last year going over the professional development that we had done over the course of last year we can come back in the spring to share what we've done this year I didn't want to put all of the items in there but the focus is on having a unified approach between general ed and special ed on our professional development topics specifically focusing on teacher assistance and the training they require and receive and just creating general awareness around special ed regulations terminology procedures across the district for all staff so as I mentioned I shared last year very specifically the trainings that individuals had gone to we've also created an all district training that everyone is required to take each year which kind of gives an overview of the department of special ed regulations the process of special ed that was reviewed and approved by the DESE I provide weekly communication to the special ed staff around state and federal regulations and our new teacher orientation because some of the recommendations were very acknowledged that things were in place but people didn't always know where it was, who to go to, who to ask so we've kind of created for staff a scavenger hunt so to speak so that they learn to navigate the different places in the district where this information does exist or is shared specifically whether it's our internal Google sites or department websites things like that our legal counsel has presented to our administrative staff they'll actually be coming back on site, they were on site in November to present to our school counselors and they'll be back in February specific to the Medicaid training to work with our staff and that's the Medicaid expansion the new teacher orientation for all teachers so I do I have two hours with all of the new staff and so we use this year to focus on supporting students in inclusion and how to work with another adult in the classroom whether that be a preparer professional whether it be a related service provider or another special educator and how to support students in a way that focuses and supports building independence not dependence and we'll continue with that for all new staff this coming year I mentioned the common planning time at the elementary schedule that was also a by-product of the common instructional time and then also the AEA joint committee Jason go we have a joint committee of AEA and special education administrators that have been in group for three years we spent the last year collecting and analyzing district-wide data on staff needs for professional development as it relates to the inclusion of special ed students and diverse learners and we share this analysis with principals curriculum directors assistant superintendent superintendent so that they can look at that information to determine how they also want to use whether it's their building meeting time department time to focus on this this was not just special educators that we gathered this information from and most recently the DESE is revising their professional tool around is special education the right service the recommendations were very specific around people questioning like what qualifies for disability how does a student how do you determine if a student is eligible for special education the department is revising the tool that they have had and several of us have participated in a feedback session into that document and then they're going to have follow-up so we'll continue to work with the DESE on that tool and once that's completed that'll be a resource for us to use in district with staff and as I mentioned you can look at the presentation I did last June for more description of the professional development the budget implications obviously are professional development and the consultants but also you've heard a lot of the curriculum directors ask for instructional coaches I just want to reiterate again that this report was on inclusion practices and special education is not the only one who's responsible for inclusion and that the work that needs to be done to support all students including special ed students doesn't only have to be done by special educators and when we have instructional coaches who are working on delivering the science curricula or the math curricula they also have to help teachers be able to universally design their lessons and meet the needs of a range of learners and so you're going to see the curriculum directors recognizing that need and they're asking for instructional coaches in their budget requests the next recommendations around team meetings are very specific to creation of documents a chain of command a assessment handbook a procedural manual and a very specific recommendation around they labeled it team decision making but it was very specific to the recommendation that learning specialist or special education teacher complete the initial academic testing currently the districts practices the school psychologist does both the cognitive battery as well as the academic and I mentioned in the spreadsheet that this has been an issue the district has been trying to address with the union so we have created the communication ladder both for families as well as an internal one for staff members for them to be clear about who you go to for support or decision making or questions or who you should see for that as well as I mentioned just orienting them to the places that all of these exist we already have an assessment handbook they didn't review it when they were on site that has been created and updated they refer to a manual we have that also but it's an electronic resource as a shared drive I think some of the recommendations were more generic in the nature of just how you would say it versus what we're not going to have you know 27 binders existing we have a shared electronic resource for that there weren't any budget implications to that the assigning of teaching assistance and the recommendation that we need to establish guidelines for which teaching assistance are assigned to a student a group a program or a classroom I did want to note that we have both general education and special education paraprofessionals in the district so there are both district processes around class size and building TAs and whatnot that are driven both by the collective bargaining agreement at the end of the day if a paraprofessional goes into a student IEP written into a student IEP then that's a team decision that is made by the team members at the time when they're developing the IEP however we have begun to review rubrics or we reviewed rubrics last year that were shared from other districts around how teams can collect data around that need to justify the need whether it's for one to one or whatnot and then we've begun to implement a pilot of some of the selected rubrics to see what staff are finding most useful or helpful in that decision making as well as the business office and human resources creating some internal checks and hiring practices to make sure that when paraprofessionals are hired that it has gone through the proper decision making channels and then as I mentioned we've done training on the use of adult support in the inclusive classroom and they reference a very specific advisory from the department the DESE around the use of paraprofessionals and how that can actually be more restrictive to a student's independence and so that advisory has been shared with both special education staff and general education staff for those of you who work in special education it's probably not surprising to learn that more often than not it's the general educator who's asking for a TA support rather than necessarily the special educator for the TA support so that advisory has been helpful to share with general educators as well the next recommendation was around oversight of the department if this as I mentioned this report was from two years ago so they were reflecting on the what had historically been turnover in the role of the director at the time so some of the recommendations are to allow the current director to make recommendations around programming and structure so not as many actionable items at this point as I mentioned we've had a joint committee the previous year the committee worked on job descriptions there were recommendations around clearly defining roles and responsibilities and job descriptions we've engaged in that work as well as our related service providers working with we've presented to you previously on how we use the logic model to help kind of develop what are the inputs and outputs that are necessary and they've been working with our related service providers during our early release time to develop that for each of their roles and there were specific recommendations around what we would say onboarding of new staff who aren't part of that orientation and so the director of human resources has created a Google classroom so staff who start after that orientation period are still getting that training that we are providing to everybody in August another recommendation was around transition practices and the recommendation to be structured more sequentially and consistent this is another area in which we have both general education and special education transition our special education transition is pretty prescriptive we have very specific meeting times, documents that teams are sharing we meet for we'll be meeting in the first week of March to go from each elementary school to the Gibbs where the special education staff fifth grade special education staff will be meeting with the sixth grade special education staff and going through each of the IEPs of incoming students we do that again from sixth to seventh and then there is an eighth to ninth grade transition process as well as preschool to kindergarten memorializing those so they are written and that they don't exist with just the people who know them is what we've been working on and so this year we'll be working on making sure that middle to high school transition gets memorialized I didn't speak to the general education practices because they're not undertaken by the special ed department here but there were recommendations specific to general education as well the evidence based review of evidence based practice and this started to come into when we got some of this in the appendices for various special education instruction in both in-class support and the programs in the district and a recommendation for unified data collection in the spreadsheet I note that they noted that there is data collection but that each practitioners are using their own form of data collection and they made the recommendation that there be a unified one in reviewing that recommendation we've been looking at that and seeing that there's a reason that people are using individual things because it's often tied to the specific goal that you've written what you're collecting data on and how you're collecting it but that we do need to work on how we're writing those goals so that the data collection becomes more obvious and more efficient and so we'll be working with and we have been working with staff on that as I mentioned we're going to bring Dr. Keith in who's been working with us on co-teaching and hopefully Dr. Orkin who's been working on us with reading to speak specifically about the work that they've been doing with both our elementary special educators around reading that's Dr. Orkin and Dr. Keith has been doing with our special ed and general educators around classroom instruction regarding co-teaching we have purchased an executive function curriculum to pilot in the middle school this year and they're using that and it does identify a need to also think about how we communicate or provide education around the purposes of academic support the several of the explanations were very specific to the academic support model and that understanding that academic support isn't for more help so we need to work on how we are messaging what the purpose of academic support is because it's not to complete your homework or your long-term assignments it's to learn how to do that and how do you apply this skill to several different assignments that you have and you may be working on an individual assignment to practice that but it's not that you're going in there to get your homework done each day or get help while you complete your homework that's not the intent of academic support so we need to do more education and training around that and that executive function and I don't want to go into a huge description of executive function but executive function strategies need to be embedded into the work of all of our educators executive function isn't an individual thing it's a a set of cognitive skills that may not be fully developed into young adulthood and unfortunately for males it may even be a little bit later than for females into your early twenties so we all need to be working on this whether a student has an identified weakness in that area because it's a developmental need and so that's something that we need to be working on across the district again you're going to see request professional development consultants to continue the program development that we have been doing with our sub-separate programs as well as instructional materials that may accompany that specifically we have a library a decodable text library that we're looking to purchase as some of those instructional materials to support the work that we're doing with reading they recommend that we continue to further develop and expand our program options for the special education process we look at this every year as we're preparing for the budget you know to see where our needs lie last year you saw that we requested increase staffing to the summit program and to expand the campus program at the high school level because we recognize that need for those populations also there was recommendations specific to supporting staff who are working with specific populations so our high school summit program is our first students identified with emotional impairment those are some of the individuals Dr. Janger mentioned who are the kind of those leads on collaborative problem solving they've also been working with McLean's hospital because we do do school-based and over the last two years we trained with them and now McLean is doing an onsite consultation with us the director of school counseling and SEL and I have created a district wide behavioral health team to address those professional that professional population that really addresses our students behavioral health whether that's school counselors, school social workers school psychologists school nurses, the BCBAs those individuals that help to support behavioral health and so we are creating a district wide committee I mentioned some of the consultants who are working with us I know that there's been a question around the five year plan and we had for this year had proposed in addition an expansion of the SLC Ms. Morgan was asking about that was not in this year's request because it had been noted last year and as I mentioned when we review for the budget each year we look at where our population and our enrollment trends are and the SLC programs at Brackett and Dallin where we had proposed initially adding a class have really stayed steady the Brackett program is 12 between two classrooms and Dallin has 10 and so we're not seeing a projecting significant increase to that so we do not need an additional class at this point a class is generally a teacher and two to three either TAs or BSPs so that's why you saw that decrease in the request from the previous from the five year plan and another recommendation was made around entrance and exit guidelines this is an area that in working with our legal counsel we also recognize we're never going to have hard and fast cutoffs because it's an individual determination so it is not going to be that you must have a score below this level on this test in order to be eligible for this program or you have to have met these very specific criteria but we do have the work that we've been doing and I shared with you last year around that logic model we developed for the summit program at we've been doing that we did it with the reach program at the high school and it's as well and that really helps to define who are the students that are served by this program what are their needs and then how do you plan for those needs and in the logic model you can see that we say what are the needs what are the practices evidence based practices that are matched to those needs so whether that's DBT which is one of the outcomes for summit was to look at for students who have anxiety what is an evidence based program for that and DBT was that and so then staff got trained in school based DBT and that's part of their program profile so we've been doing that work with WDECO since 2015 and kind of working our way through the programs at the different level in the high school as I mentioned that was not reviewed as part of this evaluation and that recommendation to create that we have those materials though we haven't they did have a very specific recommendation around doing something very similar with our related service providers and that's what we have been doing that during that early release time that we get for Tuesday afternoons so again the budget implication for that you're going to see the request for the consultant program oversight and staffing this was very specific to who do staff report to who are the supervisors and evaluators this is largely dictated by the collective bargaining agreement who supervises and evaluates and it is shared by the special ed coordinator for that level and the building principal or their designee in the secondary level it may be another administrator and they recommended which we've been doing since 2014 the continuation of the monthly meetings that I have with both with each principal as well as that special education coordinator so that we can go over issues specific to that building alright questions Mr. I didn't catch the time on the IEP is it specific who delivers the service as a teacher or TA and how many are being involved in that service? So when you have a grid so you would see a service delivery grid and you're going to have both the service like the goal area the service and then the service provider so in that the personnel who are responsible so what may say a special educator and a TA or a TA if we have a speech and language pathologist assistant they might so it's indicated for each individual student is it possible for just a TA to be delivering a service? Yeah a TA can deliver instruction they cannot design I understand that and I assume there will be somebody supervising the delivery so the special education teacher is the one who's designing the instruction that they're delivering and they're the ones who are still ultimately responsible for the supervision for the collective supervision that comes through the collective bargaining agreement but the day-to-day supervision the evaluative part of the delivery of the service part my second question if I may you mentioned before legal consultants for administrators what's being provided for that? Our legal council did presentations one of the recommendations was around training for specific special ed regulations so this summer I shared with you last year some of the training they've done on site but this past in August we solicited questions from administrators in advance of our retreat and two of the attorneys from Stoneman Chandler Miller our law firm came and did a presentation around questions around 504 what were some of the other topics a little bit on I mentioned we were doing one on the Medicaid expansion let me be more specific does it talk about liability with delivery of service or is it a workshop so that they understand what's required so student discipline bullying investigations what the regulations require us to do and what that looks like in practice I'm sorry Thank you Other questions? Well thank you for this update so I guess my comment would still be we want to fund more to help you and it seems like there's a lot of the piece here Impression Development and a piece over here and you know this and a piece here for consultant but you know we're not we're not in the budget being written but it would be good to see that in the narrative somewhere that there's these 10 pots of money that are all going towards improving our inclusion practices just so we can see that as an initiative that the district is pursuing even though it is all spread out across these different areas Dr. Ellis-Hampy As I was listening to this I was also thinking that we could use language like that also as we bring our budget request to the town that it feels like it's harder and harder to draw a fast line between this is special education and this is regular education like the coaching where do you put the coaching and stuff and I feel like we need to we're going to have to talk about whether we can continue supporting this idea of a hard and fast learning when so much of more of it is falling into gray areas because that's the better way to serve our students but it would be helpful to have that in your narratives like the things that you were telling us about how what the coaches are doing so that it's easier for me to remember if I read it too so I can speak with Julie Dunn and Michael Mason around Just in support of that the idea of inclusion and co-teaching blends this in but they're required by statute as well so that impetus is there it is gray but there is still the regulatory requirement if an IEP says that a child will be included and such and such we've got to do that and that's the choice on that aspect and so we have to pay for it and the idea is that in co-teaching the classes are generally smaller so I think what we look at is the composition of the class in general and so we have been at the high school able to create smaller cohorts but my point is that requires more general ed teachers where you saw that implication was both general ed and learning and the training that general ed teacher into the special ed aspect of that thing again which budget does it come out of so currently right now the special ed department is funding that consultant to work with both the general educators and the special educator thank you thank you all right so Mr. Mason is not able to attend tonight so people have a budgetary discussion most of anything but if you have the documents and you have any questions you can email for the monthly financial report that's next we do have the monthly financial report but if anybody has any questions send them to Michael I did notice that he updated the transfers that was the one change that I noted so he did actually move the money around to reflect where things were hitting this year so that's a good update so next Mr. Schlipman the superintendent search consultant okay on the 15th we had a meeting which we had some really good conversations with the two members of the subcommittee as well as Mr. Hayner was there so we had really thoughtful discussion around the text for the RFP and although authorized to move forward because it hasn't hit the streets yet I'll offer a motion to approve the RFP and then outline a couple of highlights in the RFP second okay so if we take a look at the first page under scope of work overview I want to emphasize that around C and D one of the things that we're looking for is very extensive community input this is something we've done in the past this is a hallmark of what we do as a committee when we did the give school we had very extensive community input moving forward and we're emphasizing the needs to have as many constituencies as we can identify as participants and the search process management I will highlight a couple of the dates as it's our intent to hit the streets with an add no later than September 18th the closing date no later than October 16th with our goal of selecting a new superintendent by December 17th of course the text is there unless it's mutually agreed upon by the school committee and the consultant which gives us the opportunity to move things back if we need to but these are the target dates we're advertising in RFP so that any consultant we're hiring is aware of that down to the fourth page under selection process again I want to emphasize the fact that we are looking to make sure that there is a diverse body of community members who are going to participate in the process all the way through and back another couple of pages to minimum evaluation criteria this is the part that's most important for us now our goal is to have a selection made of an consultant no later than March 26th so that we will be looking at a window for presentations by potential consultants in a window between February 24th and March 12th those are the highlights I think that we have been pretty explicit in what we think our community needs in terms of a search process we are very committed to having an open and inclusive search process and hiring a consultant who will help us to deliver that for the community Mr. Heiner? I don't say this enough I think you did a great job thank you Mr. Dillman thank you my question is so we are hoping to hire the search consultant by March and that means in April May June of this year they would start the community conversations April May June so that all the documentation and reports will be ready to go in September so as soon as we get past Labor Day we can go hit the street with a with all the documentation relevant to the job description to the desired characteristics right after Labor Day so that's the reasoning behind our time will there be when during this timeframe will there be a meeting with the school committee? that will be a part of it we're just setting forth the basic so of course the school committee is going to be approving all the final steps through here approving the search committee approving the documentation basically anything that is a decision is to be made it's the decision to the full school committee that's our job so my question is is there going to be a point while the consultant is meeting with different groups will there be a time where they meet with us? I'm sure that's certainly an important part of it that's under the section C including but not limited to elected and appointed town government officials I saw that I just wanted to make sure we were one of them seeing the consultant it was for us will it be a separate meeting? it depends on what we want to do we don't have to decide the parameters this is basically the framework the outer boundaries for what our expectations are once we hire the consultant we can work with them to further define the process so that we can have the input that we want in terms of the initial criteria great any other comment questions? all those in favor? any opposed or abstentions? unanimous thank you for your work on this second did that? I did all right superintendent's report Dr. McNeil will? yes so I have a couple of announcements for some events that are coming up the 2020 regional high school art show which will take place at the lexington arts and crafts society gallery the arlington high school visual art department is pleased to announce that over 60 arlington high school student artworks are part of a regional high school exhibit at the lexington arts and crafts society gallery if people this event will take place this Sunday January 26 from 1 to 3 p.m. all community members parents and friends are welcome there will be plenty of parking and refreshments are provided the dress is casual and there is a flyer that I have right here and I'll make sure that I can get it out to the community as well I'd like to also highlight our students and the art department in particular in david moore's digital photography course which students were selected to show their work at the griffin museum secondary school photography exhibition at the carney gallery regis college fine arts center in weston during the month of january arlington high school student jameson sparks won a prestigious third place award in 206 regional high schools and 104 students participated in this juried exhibition the sponsor of this exhibit the griffin museum in winchester offers workshops and courses in photography and honors local and national professional photographers with exhibitions so I'd like to highlight student jameson sparks congratulations and I'd also like to highlight one of our david moore a photography teacher at the high school he has been selected as an ap teacher panelist for the 2020 ap art and design standard setting david teaches to ap studio art courses at arlington high school only nine art teachers nationwide were selected for this important panel ap art and design standard setting will be conducted at the renaissance tamper international plaza hotel for example florida all travel and lodging expenses will be covered by the college board and panelists will receive a 1500 honorarium for their participation I'd like to also highlight an event that will take place this saturday is the annual battle of the bands it will take place at the regent theater doors will open at 7pm join us for a night of live music performed by seven fantastic student bands and a special appearance by arlington high school arlington high school's own teacher band the educated guest proceeds will benefit save the children and their support for child refugees around the world advance tickets are $15 you can get yours during all three lunches on friday tickets will also be available at the regent theater box office for $18 the night of the show this is a very exciting event we don't want community members to miss out and that concludes what I have to share thank you consent agenda all items listed are considered routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member makes a request the item will be considered in the normal sequence approval of warrant warrant number want to pull the trip approval of warrant warrant number 20140 dated 114 2020 total amount 487, 645.10 approval of minutes regular committee minutes So it's just the warrant move to move the warrant second all those in favor. Hi. Any opposed or abstentions? None. Okay, it's unanimous The trip are we holding it because it's probably a new trip or I've got a quay. Are we on to a new form? I noticed it was quite lengthy and yeah, little cumbersome to go through it. Yeah, it's just a administration thing I'm not gonna hold up my vote on it. I'm still gonna vote to approve it, but I'm just curious. My question was whether it's actually a new trip or so a new trip has to be presented Whereas a repeat trip can go into the consent agenda and it wasn't clear from the form whether it's a new or Repeat trip. Okay. Remember we're seeing one like this. Yeah, I have a substantive question I know one of the things we've talked about many times with these trips is that while Arlington Public Schools Helps facilitate communication and provides a meeting space to parents that these are not Arlington Public School trips per se, right? They're not we don't sponsor them and I had a problem and I'd never seen this language before if you look under That the very end of that very long thing that's been pasted and maybe a funny place Pre-trip prep in that very end It says that history teachers will be asked to mention the trip to their classes of Sophomores juniors and seniors and I don't think it's appropriate to require teachers to mention a trip in their class time I think they can you know, we can send messages through emails and stuff like that But I think that being a requirement of the program is problematic in my opinion Okay, so let's find out whether It's a repeat trip that's a repeat trip and they can go back on the consent agenda if it's not Then we would want one of the teachers to come to present. Yes Definitely great. All right No policy changes subcommittee liaison reports budget so budget we met yesterday morning We discussed the financial reporting And we have some some specific changes to make to the Reports we also discussed a budget book What else did we discuss we discussed lots of things mr. Mason was unable to join us, so I'll be communicating these things to him Was there anything else that we need to mention? I don't think so at this point We'll be meeting again later, but we have to do policies and procedures Nothing no report See I she's not here community relations. I need to get Kathy first before okay Facilities I will be making a facilities presentation to the Dowland PTO on January 28th at 7 p.m And the Odyssey and Gibbs PTO on February 4th at 7 p.m Great anything from the building committee. We have a public hearing on Tuesday February 4th at 7 p.m in the high school auditorium and we'll be Explaining the phasing of the project and it's a good time for incoming 8th graders 8th grade parents coming into the high school On high school parents to come to the meeting as well as the butters great May I just also say that mr. Thielman sent out an email pertaining to the More technical description of the geothermal and very appreciative of that I've had to give credit to Ryan Katowski Okay calendar committee We have a meeting scheduled Election monitor should be listed on here, but election modernization committee We have another meeting next. We had a meeting that I think I've told you about yeah Superdiner search process we just heard from nothing on negotiations. Are there any other announcements or liaison reports? Yes, missus, so I went to a wellness committee meeting which I it's been interesting and heard from the nurse at Dallin Who is piloting a program? To sort of restructure the way that the great body shop is taught and and to bring some of the material That was taught in the fifth grade, you know the sort of that stinky talk that people talk To fourth grade and in very age appropriate and then me and then maybe think about how fifth grade is going to be treated differently Cutting out things like I'm talking about the endocrine system, which Students don't quite get and in a very age appropriate way talking about issues of Consent gender identity and expression You know gender Sexual preferences, but in very you know the way she spoke about it was very it felt very very age-appropriate. So That's very exciting happening there. There's discussions about whether that will be a Suggested curriculum change and I said once they work everything out They will come to us, but they're not there yet. So just to tell you it's on the horizon Great Anything else this was announcements to you correct? Yeah, so I didn't hear the Acap I can't pronounce it Festival to belt out cancer the fourth annual is tomorrow at here at the high school 7 p.m. To 9 30 It's a benefit concert to raise funds for the Catherine J. Malatista Foundation Whose mission is to fund research into cures for sarcoma cancer And it also remembers Catherine Malatista of Arlington who died at age 16 after a seven and a half months Month battle with epithelioid sarcoma Yes, great. Thank you for mentioning that any future agenda items All right, we don't have any executive session great I got a motion to adjourn so move Second all those in favor