 Welcome everyone to the October 10th meeting of the Arlington school committee. I'm Len Cardin chair and Jeff Thielman had a work engagement and may be joining later depending on our timing. Jane Morgan has a family engagement but we'll be joining later. Joining us is AEA rep Juliana Keys and Arlington high rep Margot Moore. He is a senior at Arlington High School and you're welcome to participate and just sort of indicate that you want to have something to say. You need to wait for the microphone to be handed down and then just so people can hear you at home and we welcome your participation. Alright so we have more we have new art this evening. It is from Arlington High School. So we will start with board A back there and on the left side is from the AP art and design class drawing 2D design and 3D 3D design. The AP program in studio art and design is intended for highly motivated students who are seriously interested in the study of art at the college level. The curriculum addresses three major concerns. A selection of the students best work over two years. A year long study in the creation of an in depth portfolio of one central theme and the study of major movements and art history and influences of various cultures with a focus on contemporary art. On the right side is ceramic sculpture in pottery one. In ceramic sculpture in pottery one at the high school students are practicing and honing skills of constructing with fire clay to create both functional pottery and sculptural pieces. Through lots of practice students have learned hand building techniques such as pinching coiling and slab building as well as using the potter's wheel. They have recently begun to apply and combine those skills in the creation of more complex work. Students have also begun to explore adding color to work through glazing. Over 2B over here. This is a selection of individual pieces from Miss Rebola's classes that made up this year's large scale collaborative installation in the art hallway of Ronton High School. The theme of the work is the idea of growth. Over 300 students were asked to design, create and create a piece that visually represents a form of growth whether it be physical, emotional, organic or any other kind of growth. All pieces came together to make a large garden-like installation that was intended to celebrate diversity within our community and contribute to an inclusive and welcome learning environment. C over here. Students in the new course drawing one explored a series of academic skills of observation where they applied different drawing techniques. This included a sequence of drawings focusing on line edges, space, relationships and form. Students applied different techniques with charcoal and graphite to render objects from careful observation. This variety of drawings will lay a foundation for the rest of the year. This is also continued under panel D. Panel D also contains collaborative works mentioned previously for the growth collaboration installation. And then in the back on E digital photography on display are photos inspired by a student by students family heritage. Students are encouraged to explore multiple aspects of photography. All are expected to develop a personal voice with thoughtful and meaningful expressions to a variety of subject matter and techniques. Many students are attracted to this media not only because the results are so immediate but because they seek an alternative means of expression. I guess also over there in display E are zen tangles, foundations of studio art. A zen tangle is a complicated looking drawing that is built one line at a time. Simple tangles or patterns are combined in unplanned ways that grow and change in amazing directions. Also known to help relieve anxiety and stress and stress help you focus and relaxes your body. Then tangles help to build confidence in one's creative abilities. Thank you to all of the Arlington High School art teachers for putting this together and all of the art students on your wonderful work. Next we're going to go to the AHS service learning and cultural exchange trip. I believe Mr. Bostas is here to present or ask, answer any questions that we have. For new trips we have the sponsors come to us to basically describe why they're pursuing the trip. So this trip it was born out of our experience with Arlington running our two South Africa trips that we've taken Arlington students to. And the last trip we took to South Africa we actually were flying over Puerto Rico just around the time of the hurricane. And what struck me was here we're taking at that time it was 47 high school students thousands of miles to go serve the poor in South Africa. If you notice the accent that's where I'm from. But I'm an American citizen and I was sitting there going we're flying over American citizens in need. These kids are going to go do this phenomenal work they did an amazing job doing what they did and we began to say well what about the need in Puerto Rico. So as a company we began to explore doing those trips to Puerto Rico. We sent staff members over got to know people on the ground got in relationship with a couple of non-profits there as well sending some board members over to resource and sort out a trip that we could offer. And we began to talk to Arlington about that and we brought an initial trip to the board last year which you approved. Unfortunately through some logistical error we were only informed with three weeks left to the start of the trip and we're like there's no way we can pull that off in three weeks. So we asked for a change in the date. But the purpose of the trip is to do very much the same as what we do in South Africa which is introducing kids to educational elements that they experiencing here in their school but taking them out of the classroom so that they have a different aspect of learning. The way I try to describe it is putting flesh and blood onto your subjects. So they're going to go and do service work in Puerto Rico working with a community called Children of New Hope in Sabana Seca which is a suburb of San Juan and they'll be working with that non-profit that reaches about 150 children and doing their work with them. Whatever that non-profit needs at the time what that we're working with them now is that they'll be preparing for their summer camp so they'll be working in the organization preparing them for their summer camping. But we tie to the service project learning opportunity so that they would learn the culture the story and history of Puerto Rico and begin to dismantle some of the perspectives that people have about seeing Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens, substandard citizens so bridging those gaps in relationship buildings so that students when they come back here begin to view their environment differently. And we did that in South Africa where we introduced them to the apartheid structure of South Africa the first third world system in South Africa and as happens kids began to begin to ask themselves well are those same elements present back in our school in our town in our country and we're able to break through some of those barriers where some significant conversations can happen. The idea of the Puerto Rico trip is something that's more accessible to more people it's a cheaper trip it's closer I mean 18 hours of flying is a killer so four hours I'll take that any day and Liz Morris as the teacher is very intrigued by this on a number of different fronts to bring her teams closer to make it accessible to more children in the school and then achieve something great with it that might be something that is an ongoing opportunity as we go through it. The difference between Hammer and Chisel and some of the other tour companies out there the major difference is that Hammer and Chisel is not a tour company. We don't run lots of tour businesses with other agencies and school trips is one thing we do we're an education enhancement company so we try to work with specific schools and specific teachers with them selecting goals for the trips and then we tailor the trip to those goals so our staff go along on the trip they teach on the trip alongside the teachers they use opportunities to broaden and widen children's perspectives and bringing some unique elements so I do the South Africa trip because that's where I grew up so I have some special insights to that but other the staff members provide different aspects to that so Liz Morris is the key teacher on this trip I believe she's asked Kevin Toro if he can be the male attendant on the trip I don't know where she stands with that obviously I have no say in which teachers go but we'll be sending two staff members along on the trip our staff members and participating in that I'll be doing the South Africa trip which is also on your docket for approval tonight which is at the same time so we have two Hammer and Chisel staff members going to Puerto Rico and two going to South Africa so that's the trip in a brief breakdown any questions I was just curious about what are the service opportunities that in the two places what do you expect students in Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico yeah yeah in Puerto Rico they'll be working with Savannah second so they're going to be setting up their preparing for their camps so they will be doing a mixture of classroom preparation camp preparation work we also are trying to do some community work the details of that haven't been worked out too specifics yet but we're looking at taking some students into the Savannah second community and working with the elderly so shut-ins who need visits or yard cleanup those sorts of things there'll be two to three service projects sprayed over three days so they won't be working eight till five but it will be more like a nine to two time frame and in South Africa in South Africa we'll be working with an organization called Moulding Power Serve they work with the homeless in the northern suburbs of Cape Town so the students will do what they've done on previous trips a street store where they offer they set up and run a clothing store for the homeless where the students are serving as retail clerks and they guide homeless people who get to choose their clothing and then because they choose their clothing there's dignity in that and they don't pay for it but we wrap it up and bag it for the homeless person as well as doing other work around the homeless area they have a nightly shelter that they run will be cleaning that up perhaps prepping their food bank that they run and as part of a expanded experience will go to the after-school centers that they run with elementary-aged kids in the afternoons on two of the afternoons there'll be options to do those and they get to play with the kids and hang out with them. Any other questions? I think it would be beneficial for us to have the students when they come back do a small presentation of what they've experienced and stuff I think it would be good for them and good for the community sure yeah as a follow-up yeah absolutely thank you so much just one more question so I saw that people can donate to a scholarship fund I know that we have a scholarship fund at the school is that or would students be eligible for that yes okay yes that would be able to access and we are working with with the teacher that we can increase the price slightly and add a scholarship to the price so that we can subsidize that that's just something that the school needs to say they want us to do and we can add that on to it okay I don't think it's right for us to just start charging more and call it a scholarship but if you want us to do that that's easily accessible so it's a question about the contract which I signed here which hadn't seen before do we normally sign contracts with the to our vendors after you prove it usually I sign it or no okay we talked about the policy we were trying to make a distinction between teacher sponsored trips and school sponsored trips sure and I thought we were mainly approving teacher sponsored trips teachers that were you they were coming to us for approval because they were using school resources to you know promote the trips right but we when you cross the line into a school sponsored trip there is liability issues that we really have a look at so I do you see these as school sponsored trips or teacher sponsored trips I don't the reason we ask for a contract with the school or is just so that we can with our board start making good conscious bookings right because in the past when we don't have them teachers can pull out at any minute there's no financial obligation to that it just authorizes us to begin the work so I don't I work with so many different districts that they code that differently so I would let you decide which one it is we just need to be kind of authorized to prove it having said that though we kind of ran into a thing where the flight bookings needed deposits paid ahead of time before the last committee meeting so we took the risk on that and and paid the deposits for the flights because there is the flight prices in April are just astronomically ridiculous I got quotes that were literally $2,000 apart per person and so we wanted to secure the good pricing we had so we paid for the deposits they're not refundable but we all take that risk so but that's why we may want to consider looking into some more yeah I mean the whole thing is is that our two issues were one in terms of how of money flowing through the district and as the district paying a large chunk to a vendor which presented legal issues and then the other was of course to ensure that liability is properly assigned so I can answer just from history that we've done both with Arlington our first South Africa trip all the money came to the school and then the school paid us money the second trip we did we collected all the money and nothing came to the school which was a lot simpler and easier that's what we really feel we need to do because the issues with having the money flowing through us yeah it's very it's tough that it becomes a direct relationship between the student and and you and we're just sort of saying okay your private operator you're we're allowing you to talk to our students and recruit them but it's your trip and not ours right and that's probably how we would view it is to prefer doing it that way because it also gives us more accessibility to the financial oversight of it and then one last comment which is not for you but for the administrative team I'm glad to see a domestic trip but it's still an expensive domestic trip right so we still have parents that are you know a little frustrated that it's two thousand three thousand four thousand dollars for their kids to go on these trips and you know to the extent they really are teacher sponsored then it's around the teacher's interest and they're interested in Spain or whatever fine but to the extent that it's a little bit of a school sponsored trip maybe we can get some teachers together to do a trip to Washington like we used to or a trip to you know New York City and do a service trip in New York City something like that so I think you know it's great that we offer these but it might be who behoove us to promote something a little bit more affordable there's been discussions about that and in fact we've had trips to the Grand Canyon and think well some other there were some other places in this country where this was sponsored by a middle school teacher and actually always had something like 10 to 15 students that would go in a couple of so we have done that not so much at the high school though on those trips there were I think some high school students no we don't disagree and in fact this issue of whether you reduce the price or you have a scholarship these are things that actually Dr. Janger and I were talking about the other day we do have some money for scholarships which which has a process that goes through you know the art international coordinator so it's a very we want to promote students they having these opportunities what I think all of us know from our own experience how transformative these trips are and how world you're at your world view changes I think that that's been really true of all the students that have gone on the South Africa trip it has been so impactful and I I agree with Mr. Hain I think it'd be great to have some of the students come if they would be willing to do that and talk about their experience we've had having 47 students go to South Africa given the cost is huge one of the things that that I feel strongly about in and as shared by others is that want to create a map of trips that we know that we're going to be doing over four years so when the 8th grade parents come with 8th grade students come we say I want to these are the trips that will be available during your high school years so you can plan ahead and I think it's very helpful when students have that and they say well I really want to go to that music trip or I want to go to the Holocaust trip or the exchange to France or the South Africa trip that they can plan and start savings for that because I think it makes more it has more meaning for them when they participate financially in this so actually that's one of the things we're working on developing for this year something I recommended to Chelsea High School who are asking about trips because obviously they were saying we just can't afford South Africa I recommended that they approach the Cummings Foundation which focuses on this specific district I mean County that they offer grants they are giving away $20 million to 100 nonprofit schools included in that number every year so you can submit grant applications to them for trips for example and that helps reduce some of that cost all right thank you thank you thank you thank you I guess we have this under the consent agenda but I think normally we would approve it as a new trip separately right so do I have a motion to approve so move any further discussion just a clarification are we approving both or just the Puerto Rico just the Puerto Rico trip okay thank you all those in favor I have any opposed any abstentions all right unanimous thank you all right public comment is there anyone here for public comment tonight all right so meet the new administration dr. Bodie do you want to take it from here yes well I would like first on the list we have is actually mr. John Bowler who is our new athletic director as of this summer and he is not someone who's new to the Arlington public schools as he's been a very beloved and successful boys basketball coach over these years and has worked at the Boys and Girls Club so this is an opportunity for him to talk a little bit about his experience so far and to have you have an opportunity to ask some some questions hi how's everyone doing today good great good um yeah so you know I mean it's John Bowler I graduated from Arlington High in 1993 so and I've been you know fortunate coach here as well so I think I have a perspective where I was a student athlete here in a co-chair you know and I was fortunate enough to work for the Boys and Girls Club for 21 years a place that I loved and enjoyed going to work every day and this is the only place I would have left it for because I you know love Arlington High School I love this community and to have an opportunity to the basketball coach you know I loved working with my student athletes but to have a be able to have a bigger impact on the the whole student body and all the student athletes and all the sports was was something I just couldn't pass up you know it's just it's a privilege to be the athletic director Arlington High School and I plan to be here for a very long time you know short-term you know I've been you know trying to learn as much as possible trying to learn all my fall coaches you know their coaching styles you know learning you know you know the school has been great the maintenance custodial the administration of team students coaches and my staff you know are all very helpful if I have questions so it's been you know just learning as much as I can you know I think each season will be a different kind of animal with the fall the winter and spring and so you know I'm hoping this year just to do a full full you know assessment of you know what's been kind of what's been going on this year in the past years and try to you know see what what will be best for the student athletes in the school in the community you know I think it's we have great coaches and they all have different styles and I've been going out to practices and games and you know watching them coach watching them practice and I want to bring you know you know all their coaching styles and maybe introduce them to different sports to give other coaches different styles that could work for them you know but I think it's been you know great experience so far and you know also short-term long-term is trying to figure out when we lose gym space like the blue gym and the pit you know trying to figure out where we're going to have those sports play and go I've been talking to the you know Winchester AD and Belmont because they're kind of going through a similar style Winchester went through a similar thing Belmont's going through something right now so in work was always Bill McCarthy about you know figuring out you know where we can play when different gyms are taken away or feel the taken away so I think that's what I'm you know focused on a little you know long term as well trying to figure out what's the best for us to an athlete you know where they can play and how we can you know not disrupt them as much as we can during the you know the building process. Great questions. Mrs. Go ahead. So actually not a question but so I one of the things I did this summer is looked over our policies. Yep. Which I've been on school committee for a while I should have read them earlier but they changed and so they anyway I did read them earlier but then they changed again. So one of the things that was mentioned there is that yearly that the school committee will look see a report on improvement needs of the various athletic facilities and conditions and needs of fields ranks courts etc. Associated amenities. I suspect that every athletics director has given that such a report to the superintendent but just sort of to talk about it I think to put the bug in your ear I think that's really helpful to come to the school committee because we handle budgets. Yep. So just sort of throwing that out there. This is sort of the end of the year type of thing. Oh yeah yeah yeah. So as you assess what you need for next year and what the next budgetary process. Yep. Yeah that's why I'll definitely look into that and you know we'll you know as you know we go through each season I'll definitely keep track of you know what we need and you know what we had to spend money on you know for our facilities. Mr. Hayner. I don't know if you had an opportunity. I was fortunate enough and I'm sure the building committee's been dealing with this to look at. Bill Erica's new high school and the the assistant principal that was taking us around was very involved in the athletic aspects of it. So we were showing off the gyms, the training rooms and things of that nature. If you haven't had a chance to take a look at it, he'll give you the tour for free. Mr. Brooks. Mr. Brooks was my JV basketball coach when I went to his school. I plan on going up there because I've seen pictures of their facility. It is really something to see. I mean I'm sure the building committee is working on stuff like that. But it's well thought out, well planned and there's a lot of community involved in it. They have the walking track, something that we're looking at. And so it's exciting. I just wanted to share that. You've got the connection already. Yeah. Yeah, I sort of second Mr. Hayner's remarks and we're really going to rely on everybody who has content area specific knowledge to lend their expertise as the building is being designed and we're looking at how we're going to equip it. And I think that the athletics are really enough of a specialty that your expertise is going to be very valuable. I just looking at what we're going to be going through in the next three or four years in terms of demolishing this building and building a new building around this plan. And I am thankful that you're looking toward that because that's going to be a bear of a job and keep us apprised of what you might need from us in terms of additional support through the process because I'm sure you're going to need our help. Definitely, definitely. I'll keep you updated on everything that's going on. I was just going to say that the board has been really involved. He sort of jumped into the deep end of the swimming pool this summer because we've had a number of meetings about fields and turf. And so he I just want to assure you that he's very involved in all of these discussions about phasing and where we're going to have to go and it's a it's a lot for a new moving into position that's as complicated and this is position and having this at the same time. I have to commend him for all the work he's done to help us out so far and more to come. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Another thing to put on your to do list, which I'm sure at this point is quite lengthy, there has been interest in revisiting athletic fees and how to structure them, how to ensure fairness, equity, maybe decrease the I mean, there are always parents, many parents who feel that they are too high and they are some of the highest in the middle sex league, if not the highest. And the problem it's it's been kind of under discussion to be looked at and has stalled the past two years for because we've been changing athletic directors, but that is something that we would be interested in doing in taking up when when you feel ready. I know. Yeah, I think I'm in the next in October sometime I'm going to meet with Michael. And he's actually outlined some different ways we can do user fees and different of what other schools kind of around here have done. And so we're just we're going to meet with him. We're going to look at and see what we think, you know, the best step will be for like, you know, for allington to look at in the future. But I'll definitely, you know, I can show you those numbers when I meet with him. Great. Thank you. So just an additional comment on that. So I think previously we had looked at it as revenue neutral. But we did have the override we have a little bit more flexibility on budget so I think, as you take a look at it, you know, keep an open mind for the possibility that there might be a slight reduction in revenue or something that we can certainly consider that in our budget process. But we need to know that sort of by January. So there is a time time limit on that. I think the previous second, not the media predecessor but the one before that had gotten pretty far on a proposal. Maybe maybe documents around with with the proposal to sort of collapse it into maybe two categories. I think there definitely is, you know, some sensitivity to the very high fees, but there's also sensitivity on the low end of not having, you know, cross country subsidize the other sports. So big puzzle, a lot to look at, but it's certainly something we would be interested in seeing sooner if possible. So one thing actually that didn't happen just because of all the craziness is community outreach shouldn't happen. I know that it's an issue of great anxiety to some community members and just to make sure that you serve here. Everyone's concerns and perspectives before any decisions get made or before you even come to us potentially just think people have a lot to say about this issue. Yeah. Okay. But you coached my son at the Boys and Girls Club a long time ago. A long time ago, 10 years, maybe six or seven years ago. So great. I was very excited to have you come over here and welcome to Arlington. Thank you. Welcome back to Arlington. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. Like I said, like, you know, with my when I coached basketball, you know, I could affect 45 kids, you know, during a season. But, you know, being able to do more, I think is, you know, what my family always tells me to do. And, you know, it's how I grew up. And I just think it's a great opportunity to have an impact on, you know, more, more student athletes. And I like tonight's school. Great. I'm sure you know this. So you've heard this a lot. But, you know, since you were hired, there's been tremendous comments that I've been receiving about how thrilled the community is to have you in this position. And I hope you're able to enjoy it and serve for a long time. Thank you. I mean, this is the last job I ever want to have. All right. Thank you. Great. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you. We had Mr. Boller has to run off to something else. So at any rate. I'm sure there's some sports in place. Oh, always, always. Yes. Thank you. So I would like to introduce to you our new director of science, Sam Hoya, who come on up. And maybe Sarah Huber, who is a care team. They have been a team quite a bit already. Whole month and a half. We are quite a team. They've done a lot of work in the last month and a half together. We have. She is amazing. And I'm so lucky to have her. So thank you very much for allowing me to have a science coach because I don't know how I would do this job without her. So thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And Sarah comes as a high school teacher a little bit in middle school. And so having Sarah Huber with her is terrific because they really balance each other out in terms of their content and knowledge and experience. Power team. Power team. Power team. Well, you came off as a power team the other day at the elementary principals meeting too. So that was great. That was great. So we're here tonight to welcome you, but also to have you talk a little bit about, you know, you know, yourselves and, you know, what you where you are right now in the process of this work. Would you like to go first or? Sure. So I'm just elementary elementary science coach. And I'm coming from the Needham public schools. So in Needham they have what they call the elementary science center, which serves curriculum and programming for K through five elementary. And so and it was it was a great job, but I was so glad to have a job here in Arlington that this is where I'm from Arlington. So which is very nice to have potentially a similar position here in Arlington in the elementary system. So I'm Sam Hoyo, and I come from the Rockland public school system on the south shore. It's a very small community, but it was a great place to kind of learn how to be a teacher and learn how to be an educator and a leader. And I was there for about 15 years. And I am finishing up my dissertation, which is around gender identity and how gender expansive youth experience education. And finishing that up and really kind of becoming a leader. I kind of tried to branch out a little bit and the Arlington job came up and I have a friend who is from the Arlington area. And she was like, you need to go here. Like this would be an ideal fit for you. And I was like, I don't know. Like no, no, no. Go. All right. And as soon as I met with the hiring committee, I was like, I want this job. I met everybody and I was like, I belong here. And I hadn't felt that way since I started in Rockland. So I knew that this is really where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. And so I was very thankful that the stars aligned and here I am. But we've really kind of been working on looking at the elementary level, looking at the curriculum that we have, which is FOSS, which is a great curriculum. But it's very in depth. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to create an equitable experience across all seven elementary schools. And to do that, we are working on essential standards and pulling out the essential pieces that everybody needs to cover. So that as our students go through the elementary schools, they're able to come out and go into the Gibbs with an equitable experience. So that's really kind of what we've been working on as well as common assessments. We're creating a set of common assessments again to help drive instruction. And our goal is that at the end of each unit, teachers will get together. They will assess themselves. They'll assess each other as a school. And then we will use that data to assess us as a district and kind of look to see, what are we doing well? What are we not doing well? How can we use all of this information to help move us forward as a group, not as a school, but as a district? So that's kind of what we've been working on there. At the middle school where we've just implemented the iScience curriculum. And so really kind of working out how does iScience fit with our new standards? And how do we get everyone on board with this whole new curriculum? Because it's terrifying whenever you're told as a teacher, here you have this new stuff to do. And you're like, yeah, but I like my old stuff. Let me go back. So really kind of working with each other and really kind of working six through eight to see where we're at. And then as a middle school, not as the Gibbs, not as the Autism, but as an entire middle school. And then the high school is amazing and it's doing so many great things. And there are so many great classes. And I'm just trying to get into different types of classes with different teachers to see what it is that everyone's doing here and kind of learning for the high school. So it's kind of where we've been at for the last six weeks or so. Intense. Like camping. Yes. Great. So questions. Mr. Shipman. I'm glad you're thrilled to be here. I mean, the enthusiasm is just thrilling. And again, the setup is the same thing. You know, first of all, I'm really interested in hearing later on how your evaluation, your unit evaluations are going. Because I like the thought of the reflective practice as being sort of the heart and soul of what you're doing. And that science is a great place for kids to do performance-based stuff and to really get out of the books and the paper and to embrace the kits and the hands-on and the worms. What was smelling up my second grade classrooms a couple years ago? Crayfish. We had crayfish. We also had something else that smelled even worse. Frogs. No, no. There's some bug things. Silkworms. Oh, the silkworms. Oh, those smell putrid. But it's a beautiful thing and the kids love them. But again, the other thing is, I don't know what Rockland's high school looked like or how you're looking at our science classrooms at the pillars in the middle. But again, be always thinking from now through the next couple of years, especially this year, which is heavy in the planning stage of what you want science classrooms to look like. So I'm actually coming off a building project. Ah, great. So I'm coming off a building project and onto another one. So I'm really excited about it. I was like, you know what? Where could I go that there's another building project? Because that was the easiest five years of my life. Let's go. You know, when I found out there was a building project on top of everything else, I was like, no, no, this is it. This is going to be my new home. You could be around the demolition work. That's a great size. But really, the fact is it's so thrilling to be able to have an influence on what the physical plant and what we have to work with is going to be going on for years and years and years. And again, I hope you're here to enjoy it for the long term. Me too. I'll keep looking at them and we hired them. So yeah. All right. So I'll keep looking at you guys. Mr. Heiner being the oldest one on the committee, I was fortunate enough in the fifties when science was brought into the public schools and everything. And the enthusiasm of teachers, although something new can be frightening. And I was a teacher myself. It's exciting to do things new. You're showing this enthusiasm, both of you. And I'm excited for our students. Robotics, both in the my two grandsons, ones in the fourth grade, ones in the eighth grade, the two different school system, but they're both actively involved in it. And it's exciting. The stretching and stuff. One thinks he's going to take over the world with AI and things of that nature. But we haven't told him yet. He's not, but that's okay. You never know. Is there plans for that? At all levels. I can remember doing the Lego with right with the turtles and stuff in the direct wiring. It disappeared for a while. Is it back or is it. So I'm not exactly sure. I know that at the elementary level right now we're focusing solely on content, but it is our goal over the next. Probably not this year because right now we're just focusing on the curriculum aspect, but our plan is to incorporate a tech piece. I don't know if that would be robotics or if it would be some sort of engineering kind of course or section or unit. But we haven't really talked about that here. And then at the high school, I think they do robotics. There's a club. I thought there was a class. But that doesn't fall under my purview as it stands right now. I think for a lot of kids when you get to do the hands on and get an actual chance of taking the thinking piece and making it real and it internalizes so quickly. Absolutely. All the units have some kind of in elementary. I'm sure across board have like an engineering design piece to each of the units. Each of the units will culminate in something that's that they have to think it through design and build. It's not it's different for each unit what it is exactly. And I think the robotics has been at the elementary level and after school program in the past. But but it's that's an addition. Yes. Yes. So I'm we are very excited to have you. And I think the community is very excited that there's more love being given to science in terms of sort of hours to hours. So I think that's really exciting. I have a couple of questions. One is one of the questions I've heard at the elementary level is that there aren't enough boss kits. And so that means that teachers can't all teach the same thing. I know they're very expensive. But I don't know if there's sort of a long term plan to maybe have enough for each classroom. I just think that's just too expensive and not worth it. Yeah. So right. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is something that we're kind of talking about. And we really kind of want to get through this year. We have talked about possibly taking all of the kits and having them stored in a central location. We will say these three schools will do first grade will do this kit at this time so that everybody can do it at the same time in those three schools. And then this set of schools will do this. That's something we've kind of played around with. Yeah. Yeah. Looking at whether or not the you know the essential standard pieces that we're doing right now work then we can possibly buy more pieces of equipment just for those lessons that they'll be doing. And that's going to be far more economical than buying whole kits. Right. If we're not using every single piece in the kit. So it's going to really depend at the end of this year what teachers decide that they want. Some teachers I know I was at Stratton and one fifth grade teacher teaches all of the life science and so the kids rotate amongst teachers. But I've been to other schools where they're like no one teacher teaches all three. And I don't want to dictate to teachers how they should teach either. So it's going to be really dependent upon how how they want to go moving forward. Good. I'm glad I'm glad you're thinking about it. The other question I have. So my dad was a chemistry teacher and then an AP science guy. And he was talking and this makes so much sense. I hadn't thought of it that there's a movement to switch chemistry and biology because you know biology is so much chemistry wasn't true. The way biology was taught 30 years ago. I was wondering what you think about that. So great questions of politics. I know I'd be very careful. But my bio teachers here may they might come to a coup tomorrow. It doesn't make sense. The question then becomes the math component. Right. So in my last district we did biology first. So it was biochemistry then physics because mathematically that makes sense. In an ideal world we would teach physics first. And then we would teach chemistry and then biology exactly because physics dictates chemistry chemistry dictates biology. But then when you try to put in the math piece then it becomes the whole can of worms because yes you can do physics conceptually. But to truly understand physics you need to have trigonometry but you don't get trigonometry until you know junior year. So in theory yes that would be the best way to teach science. It's probably not going to be one that we will move towards any time soon. Ideally my big push is going to be to have more students take physics. Right now all of our kids take physical science which is like this introductory physics course very conceptual which is great. But then you know this year I only have a hundred kids out of the entire building taking physics and that includes honors physics and AP. And I truly believe that all kids need physics. They need a higher level physics because it teaches them how to think and it teaches them how to look at a problem and really kind of go at the problem and say OK how do I solve this. OK I need to write down all of my givens and I need to draw a picture and I need to understand what's happening and I need to do all of these steps. Whereas a lot of times I know I'm I do this all the time. I just want the answer. I don't want to have to think through the process. But taking physics even though you're not going to be a physicist will help you kind of look at a problem and say this is how I have to go about solving it. So my push is really going to be to get kids to take more physics. And it's hard when you have a school that's like this one that's so great that has so many course. So many amazing courses in senior year. Exactly. There are so many really hard for kids to do. Yes. And it's like how do you tell kids no don't take this really awesome course because I want you to take this one. Right. Yeah. It's it's a thought the other things that you know Dr. Janger and I have kind of like talked about in passing about course programming and things like that that we're kind of thinking about. Good. Thanks. We're a family of scientists as well. So I love science. It's like magic but real. So echoing what Miss Sue said about the FOS kit sounds I have three elementary age students. I have a couple of fifth graders been in elementary school a long time. So much discussion about those kids was on the PTO. They were always coming asking us for money for the kids which like is weird. Right. Like we got to just do better. This is obviously all under like predecessors of yours but that's the the climate is one where I'm like all set talking about and we need to make sure that they're you know that your idea of having them centrally located sounds great. I hope you'll also look at you know my kids last year in fourth grade were at Stratton. They had the experience of having three different teachers for science. You know I you know I hope that as you guys talk about this this is something that you're actively engaging with teachers about I'm all for people teaching their subject area that they're interested in. At the same time there's like a pretty high ramp up time for a new teacher with a new classroom and we do lots of responsive classroom stuff at Stratton which is very time consuming. And I felt like it really cut into their time to actually do science because there was a big ramp up each time we changed teachers. And so there was this whole process and I felt like they did lots of like responsive classroom in science time with new teachers but not that much science. So I hope that you guys talk about that it maybe is working great. I don't know they may be getting more out of it than I saw as a parent at home but I hope it's something that you know continues to be part of the conversation. And then you know my understanding is that the physical science happening freshman year is driven a lot by the MCAS that they need some of that material to take their science. MCAS which is too bad because I think it does drive the sequencing a little bit and then we lose them and I work in higher ed with students who are not typically high achieving academic students and we get them in math classes and they would really have benefited from taking physics. They didn't need AP physics in high school. They really didn't like they would have benefited from just physics that wasn't and we can't do that in ninth grade. They don't have the math background. Most of them many of them haven't finished algebra one right by the time they're in ninth grade. So you can't have a robust physics class until you get them through some higher level math. So you know I hope that those it sounds like those are conversations that you guys are engaging in and I'm really excited about that and thinking about those opportunities especially for the kind of students that I see later on in their educational career who are not academically like we are an open enrollment institution. These are not academically strong students but they would really have benefited from having some more exposure to a little bit more robust science where they would have been required to use some of their math skills. I think that that's really exciting and I love that you guys are asking those questions. And I think moving forward you know Matt Coleman who's the math director and I are really planning on sitting down and kind of looking at our curriculums and trying to align them horizontally a little bit as well to see how we can help each other. Because a lot of times when I was a teacher I saw this that kids can look at a graph in math class and they're like yeah this is an xy graph and this is great and then you give them the same exact graph in physics and they're like I've never seen this before. What is this graph thing which you talk of and really kind of you know putting physics examples in math class or math examples in physics class and really kind of working together you know because math and science really do go hand in hand so well and really kind of working with each other to kind of get those skills up across the board. Two other quick things one when I was a math teacher high school math teacher we aligned our curriculum specifically to support the science so that we rearranged units and taught this early and moved things back in order to align with what was going on the science side and that's really an important thing. The other thing in terms of the where to teach biology versus chemistry thing now I struggled with biology in high school and I adored chemistry so I have a bias. I do as well. But the one thing is when you have a population of second language learners biology is the most difficult because it's most language intense. Correct. So that just in terms of being aware of the number of second language learners we service here in Arlington to have that in the back of everybody's mind as we're looking in terms of sequencing. Right no exactly and that's something that I think about in terms of not only our English language learners but also in terms of our special education students who you know many of them with language stability struggle with the bio because it is you're learning two languages simultaneously. So these are things that I think we can help mediate with support and scaffolding and you know just kind of working as as teams instead of as you know as individual islands. Maybe it's not one size fits all maybe we don't put everybody through biology first. You're going to put some go to chemistry first and then do biology later. You know they're not necessarily one year sequential. So that to lock in the whole school to do it in the same order is if we can find a way to have that flexibility of course selections wouldn't be a bad way to think about it as well. No I think I think that that's definitely something we can talk about. I think that that's going to be a cultural shift that happens to happen within the community. I think you know oftentimes we're locked into this idea of well ninth graders take physical science and 10th graders take biology and 11th graders take chemistry and what do you mean you want my ninth grader to take you know chemistry or or or my 10th grader to take physical science. It's a freshman class like so I think we have to kind of break out of that a little bit and really kind of explain to the community and get the community involved and understanding that you're right chemistry is its own year long course and yes it reaches out into the others but it can be taught as a self contained unit same with bio same with physics. It's not like math or English which kind of build on the skills that you learn from one to the other as much. But definitely do something to kind of think about it. It's something that I'm thinking about in terms of some of our students who have historically struggled with MCAS and maybe having them do biology first because it gives them more opportunities to take the test because the retake is only offered in biology. So if you take physical science as a freshman and you fail then you have to wait until the following June to take another MCAS was if you take the bio one first then you could retake in February. It just gives you more opportunities something that we're kind of looking at and you know special education and I kind of started that conversation the other day and talking about how do we help those students and then looking at the larger population and saying how do we help the students that have historically not done as well. And a new building is a good opportunity to break old ways. Miss Kees go ahead. Hi I just want to say our teachers are over the moon with Samantha. They are so excited. They feel supported. They feel encouraged. They feel refreshed and I think this is a great fit for Arlington. Thank you very much. Who is your friend that we need to like. She her friend is the one you have a friend who like set you here right. Yeah. Yeah. You should leave their name and number with some nice things some swag. Mr. Spiegel will do the recruiting gift. You have hats right. I will say Dr. McNeil and I went to Rockland High School on a site visit and met with Sam's colleagues former colleagues and students and they could not say enough great things about her and about what a loss she was going to be. They were a little upset that we were taking her away from rock. I mean more than a little upset but but they understood that she was you know have a great opportunity here and we're very you could I mean the way Julie just spoke about how the teachers that's how the teachers there spoke about her as well so. Excellent. All right. My turn. So so welcome. We're glad to have you one of one of the one of my concerns over the years is that when you you know MCAS is certainly not everything but it's the one measure we have right now you know fortunately you have your own assessments you're going to be getting but for now all we have is MCAS and historically Arlington as a district has done much poorer on MCAS than it has in the other areas. In science. In science. Yes. Sorry. So just looking at the scores that were just released we haven't really gotten the report on it yet but it looks like we actually had a jump in performance this year particularly at the high school so that's good so we're making progress but I just wanted to make sure you're aware of that concern and see if you know if you have any ideas of you know why that might be or you know maybe it doesn't start the elementary school is that you know any initial ideas of ways to tackle that. Yeah I mean I think historically looking at different districts you see districts perform much higher in ELA and math than in science and I think a lot of that has to do with the type of test it is in ELA and in math they're very much skills based whereas in science it's very much content based and so it's really it's very hard to be able to say well in math and ELA they do better than science well it's like apples and oranges you can't compare the two you can't compare content and skills those are two very different things and so. Right it's just to clarify if you if you rank the districts by MCAS score Arlington would be like maybe in the 30 40s in ELA and in math but much further down in science in the 50s or lower in science so clearly as a district we're doing really well in ELA and math in science we weren't I think it went up this year I haven't seen the rankings I think I think we did go up this year but that's just something that was out of whack. So I think that does have some things to do you know we spend the majority of the day on in the elementary schools on ELA and on math right and there's very little time for science and social studies and even when we is that time it's often cut into for other things and so I think that that does play a huge role and then by the time you get to sixth grade when they're starting to get science every day now sixth grade teachers are playing catch up from a lot of the elementary so and we're hoping that by standardizing our curriculum that that will help and really kind of doing different types of learning as well. The other initiative that we have is PBL so trying to do some project based learning in sixth seventh and eighth grade primarily in that moving it to the high school after that to really kind of bring that intrinsic extrinsic motivation to learning which I think will also play a huge role. Great. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you. So I am here today to present on our MCAS scores in our performance. This will be part one of a two part presentation. I will return on October 24th with Paul O'Sullivan who is our district data specialist and we'll delve more deeply into our subgroup results and compare them to how we're doing overall as an aggregate. So today's report. There it is. So our objectives for today's presentation will look at we'll review what the next generation achievement levels are because they did switch from the legacy MCAS will again define student growth percentile because we will be looking at some charts showing our student growth percentile. We'll look at what's new for the 2019 accountability reporting system. There are some changes and then we'll look at our accountability levels at the district and into each individual school. And then we'll look across the district at our grade level performance. We're not going to get into the subgroup data as I mentioned before. We'll look at that when I come back on part two on October 24th. And then I'll entertain questions and comments. So these are our next generation achievement levels. We've also received our parent reports which will be going out next week. And you see the different levels. There's exceeding expectations, meeting expectations, partially meeting expectations and not meeting expectations. So that's what the students those are the results as they for when they take the ELA the math and then in some cases in the science and we'll look at like in what areas and what grades they gave the next generation science and what grades they were still taking a legacy MCAS for science. Student growth percentiles. So they're using this in order to show student growth from year to year and they use they compare students who have a similar MCAS history scoring history and so they look at that they look at those cohort of students and they see how they perform from year to year and then they give them a percentile of growth. And you can ask questions along the way. So yes. Is there an issue using this comparison between the two different types next generation and the legacy? No. They've in certain tests where they've given the next generation they've found a way to formulate an algorithm for the comparison. Yes. Thank you. So what's new for the 2019 accountability? We're looking at the various things that they use for expanded advanced coursework which is you'll see in the scoring reports as part of our accountability at the high school level. They use that in order to give you additional points participation rate calculation. The subgroup participation rates are calculated for all subjects combined. All students rates all students rate remains calculated separately by subject. We're using two years of data. So when I show the targeted the criterion reference target percentages, they're from 2018 and 2019 and you're looking at the improvement that has taken place. So every year they set targets. And so you receive points in various categories for meeting those targets or not meeting those targets. And then they look at the targeted percentages and they weight them in order to come up with your 2019 accountability rating. So for 2018 they waited at 40% and then they wait the 2019 performance 60%. And then they've added they've restructured the categories. Last year there were three categories. There was not meeting partially meeting and meeting or exceeding. And so this year and I'll go to the next slide to show this. So based upon your target criterion reference target percentages, these are the percentage bands. If you look at them, you'll see at the bottom, if it's limited or no progress, you receive 0 to 24% of the points. The percentage of the target percentage. And then if you look at the moderate progress, you would have scored between 25 and 49%. Substantial progress, you score between 50 and 74% and meeting or exceeding target percentage is 75% to 100%. Any questions? And again, this is a weighted average between 2018 and 2019. So we're going to get into the accountability ratings that we received as a district and each individual school. So these are our public. I want to let our viewers know that all the results for the MCAS, they were embargoed up until a couple of weeks ago, but now they're probably been reading in the paper. So as we look at our accountability status, you'll see it's pretty consistent across the district. At the top, you'll see Arlington as a district. We received substantial progress, which is replicated in all the individuals. Now, these are the non-high school students. So these are elementary schools. So this is what their status is. And you'll see it correlates to those percentage points that I referred to in the previous slide. These are secondary schools, Gibbs, Addison, and Arlington. And I will say, without going to each individual school, because if I did, we'd be here for a while and I can't get into it in part two. But we did see, you know, some movement, some increases in our, the way that we, our target percentage for 2019. And because it's weighted, some of our schools have performed a lot better than they did last year. So we're going to get into it in part two. Our target percentage for 2019. And because it's weighted, some of our schools have performed a lot better than they did last year. Yes. Just a really quick question. Yank the sixth graders out of the Audison data from last year. Right, because we had, we had the sixth, we had their schools. No, I understand that. I just wanted, like I just, so you just took, you just compared it to the last year, sixth grade. Correct. At the Audison and pulled them out. That is the Audison reference target. 72% of last, well, two school years ago, just seventh and eighth graders. Or was it six, seven and eight? In 2017, it was six, seventh and eighth. 2018, it was six, it was six, seventh and eighth. So you look, so this is, so this is the 19, right? So you're looking at the spring of 2019. So you have to go back by spring. So in 2019, Gibbs came online, was opened up, right? I just, so I just wanted to make sure that the, because these are reference targets that are comparing to past performance, right? Correct. So it's just, it's comparing to past seventh and eighth grade Audison students that 2019 number. Yes. Yes. So 2017 would have been the first year that they introduced the next generation MCAS. Got it. So that was the benchmark. So then they took, so every year they compared to the previous year and that's how you receive your points. Right. And you, they set targets. So you have to either meet or exceed those targets and you get points for meeting those targets as an aggregate and each subgroup. Right. So what I'm just saying is that this is the first year that we've seen the sixth grade pulled out. Correct. This is the first. I mean, yeah, right? Right. I mean, it's good. I just was, I was trying to compare it to what we've seen historically for Audison, but also realizing that it's a different. Right. They're, they're, they're, they have their own school. So you want to see what the impact that that may be. I hear you. Yeah. I understand. Thank you. So 2019 would have been the first year that our sixth graders at Gibbs took the MCAS. And it would be the first year that we would be seeing the sixth grade MCAS scores being pulled out with this kind of data. Because it used to be they were all locked together at the Audison. Right. Correct. Oh, so I was going to ask this later, but what is the impetus for the weighted average? Is it, is it districts feeling like they were being unfairly evaluated going up and down? Sort of what, why are we, why are they doing that now? So I think that what that they're trying to do is they're trying to get everyone to really focus on, you know, decreasing the achievement gap. And so they're really focused on the improvement. They've, they've changed a lot of the scoring. So, you know, now it's like the lowest 25 percentile. So a lot of that has to do. I think overall they're trying to find a way to have us look at our, you know, our lowest 25 percent. And they're trying to say, we're going to, we're going to set these targets. And then we're going to really, we're going to reward you for any type of improvement that you receive. And that's why I think they put more weight on your current year's percentage because they take your current year. We didn't have any weighted average before, right? It was just year to year. So the, so the difference is that it's a two year average now rather than just a one year. Correct. Is that the difference? No, no, no. It's, it's, okay. So, can you state your question again? Oh, so, so I was assuming that we're always, that in past we were always comparing it year to year. Starting now it seems like there's a difference that we're comparing in this two year period. Starting in 2017, when they introduced the next generation MCAS, they, then they introduced in 2018 a new accountability system for looking at it. So they're really, so they compared your 2000 performance was your benchmark. That was your benchmark performance because that's the first year of the next generation in some, in some grades from K through five. And I have to really think about this as I look at the middle school and you'll see that. So you'll, so they looked at the performance in 2017 and then you received your two, your results in 2018. Right. And then they set targets for your 2018. So you receive points. Right. So you got a targeted percentage, a criterion reference targeted percentage for 2018. And then in 2019 it is a weighted average. I don't have to look back. So that was the question is why, why there's a change. Point of order or whatever. Under the old accountability system is weighted four years. It was 40% for the most current 30, 20, 10. Okay. So the weighting is not new. So the weighting system across years is not new because they wanted to even things out so that if you had a particularly good cohort or a bag cohort going through, particularly for a smaller school, it wouldn't have such an impact. They were looking for stability and consistency. However, what happened when we went off the old MCAS and we split between electronic testing and park versus legacy MCAS, everything fell apart. So they had to reconstitute the accountability system. And last year was the first year of common measures that were able to be used under the new system. So that was a one year thing. And it's going as we go out for four years, it will return to a 40, 30, 20, 10. Okay. Thank you for that. And they also did this in order to, because some schools didn't have the subgroups. So before it was like you're looking, so you were actually rewarded for not having subgroups. So you might have some students that didn't, you didn't have like students with disabilities. So by just looking at the lowest 25% tile, that was another reason why they changed accountability system. So they're now, they're saying, oh, you still have a low 25% tile. They just might not all fall into a particular subgroup. So now we're looking at across the board, the lowest 25% tile. So they're trying to ensure that we're still focusing on that achievement gap. All right. And that's a way of like leveling it off. I know parents are very excited by that because they felt they were being overlooked before because they didn't fit into a category. But it also rewarded those students, those schools that didn't have the subgroup population. And so even though they were reporting that they were doing very well, they were, you still had to look at. So how is your lowest 25% doing? So I hope I explained that. And thank you, Mr. Schlipman for adding that. And I just point out for the Arlington High School, if you don't look at the weighted average at 55, it went from 38% to 67%. Correct. And so that's where you see the marketed improvement. So I'm sorry, I skipped a slide. And the Gibbs will never have a bottom 25 because you have to be in the same school for two years in order to have that. Oh, but it's not just taking the sixth graders from? No, no, the lower 25 calculation is a school-based population. So they're going to look at the bottom 25% in your previous year and see how they did in the subsequent year. But nobody at the Gibbs was at the Gibbs the previous year. So under the oddities of the system, you won't have that. I understand. They were somewhere. They were just down the road. So looking at it, moving on, we're going to look at our district ELA results. And so we're going to, the way that I structured the charts, as you'll see, is that we're looking at them. And because I felt, and conferring with Paula O'Sullivan, our district data specialist, we felt that this was the best way to show the results so you can see a comparison from year to year. So if you look at the chart, you'll see that starting in 2017, because that's the first year of the next generation MCAS for grade three, that you'll see that you can now compare, you can compare on the chart, meeting and exceeding. So I just have on the chart here, meeting and exceeding, the blue is meeting and the green is exceeding. So then you can, we teased out the percentage of students that were exceeding and the percentage of students that are meeting. And so you can compare just by looking at the chart from year to year, and also you can compare our performance in 2019 to the state. So just looking at this, and some of the things that jump out is that you'll see that in various grades, you'll see that we've kind of maintained from year to year starting, especially in 2008, when I look at 2018 and 2019. And then some of that has to do with like, and I tried to think about and reflect upon where we were curriculum wise. So in grade three and grade five in the last couple of years, we've introduced new units of study in the workshop model for reading. And so you see that you'll see a jump in grade three. As you look at the performance in 2019 as a district, you see there was a marketed improvement. And then as you look at grade four, again as we look at the professional development and the focus with the coaches, we focus more on grade three and grade five. So we have to go back and look at those various grades and see how we can continue to show improvement as we have adopted the new units of study. Any questions? Any questions on this particular? Yes. So the white part all the way to 100 are the students who are not meeting? I'm sorry. No. No. That is not true. Okay. I'm only putting, you can't assume like all this over here. I'm sorry. You can't assume that that is, I've only put up there the percentage of students that are meeting and exceeding. And then you have the other categories as partially and not meeting. But that gets you all the way to 100. Correct. And we'll delve more into that in the second part, which will be on October 24th. So moving to, and all these slides are, you know, as you'll see is our ELA. So looking at six through eighth grade, if you look at the comparison from year to year, we see that in sixth grade, there was a dip there. So we want to look at that. But we also went, but I want to also celebrate in grade seven that where we have an increase in the numbers in the percentage of students that are in the exceeding. And under 2019 passed. And then looking at grade eight, you'll see that there's another improvement in the percentage of students that are scoring in the exceeding. And then in all grades, you'll see that we have done a lot better than the state. So we continue to improve in seventh and eighth grade. We have to look at sixth grade and see, you know, where we can shore up our instruction and kind of identify those areas that we need to improve upon and by looking at an item analysis of the MCAS and really hone in on what we need to focus on through our instruction in order to show that improvement. Yes. So I know you don't necessarily, I think these slides are really helpful. What is really disconcerting to me is that if you go one slide back, your hundred percent was the far right. And then you just, if you go there, now we're at 80%. So the first thing I said to Mr. Cardin here was like, gosh, why do we do so well in middle school? And then I looked at, so anyway, I'm like a real stickler for that kind of stuff. And like representation really matters. And so I just, No, I couldn't figure out when I was like doing the slides. Like totally. So with the Google slides and the charts, for some reason I couldn't get them all, like for these slides, when I tried to put in, so you can put in a range of zero percent to a hundred percent. Yeah. And when I put in a hundred percent, it just went screwy. Okay. So I have to figure out how to make that adjustment. And I wasn't able to figure out for this presentation, but I will try to make sure that moving forward, I'm able to figure that out and make them all consistent with the ranges. Yeah, yeah. Cause I mean, I think we do do better in middle school, but like I'm such a visual learner that it's, yeah, thank you. It's a technical glitch that I couldn't figure out. So looking at grade 10, now you'll notice here in grade 10, that in 2017 and 2018 there's a difference in color with, and so you can see on this one, I was able to figure out the zero to a hundred percent. And I just have no idea. I think that Google, we're not friends right now, so. But if you look at the color of the chart, you'll see that in 2017 and 2018, the results are a different color, the percentages. And that's because that was the legacy MCAS. Okay. And so in grade, for grade 10, last year was the first year that 10th graders in the state took the ELA MCAS online. So there's a difference. And you'll see the one thing that I want to point out is that if you look at the percentages and the gap between us and the state for 2017 and 2018, it's not that significant. But even on the more rigorous tests, which they're claiming that the next generation MCAS is, you'll see that we have increased our performance and there's more of a gap between us and the state. And that we have quite a high percentage of students scoring in the exceeding. Now, we're not where we want to be. Of course, we want to continue to improve in that area. But I think switching from one, the legacy to the next generation, we didn't see a big fall off. I mean, I think it's relative to what the state did as well. But I think that is something to highlight that, hey, you know, we're still doing okay, but we want to continue to push that percentage of students who are in the meeting and exceeding to a higher percentage. So there's some work to be done there. And I'm claiming that right now. Yes. So I know that the test has gotten harder in 10th grade than it used to be. Are we seeing the proportion of kids who just aren't making it go off at all? Or is it most of the remaining gap before 100 in the partially meeting? No, we're still, so this is where, this is where they've, you know, this is where they give you an interpretive guide. So if we were to take that interpretive guide, and to answer your question, no. We're not seeing an increase, okay. An increase of, you know, students not meeting. You'll see that in the second presentation. Okay, great. So they give you an interpretive guide as how you can compare for how the students did on the next generation with the legacy. And so, you know, if we were to take these scores and translate them, we would probably be in the same percentile we were on the legacy, because they give you that opportunity to do that. But, you know, just looking at the way that we're performing on the next generation, again, you know, we're still maintaining where we were, if that makes sense. Because, you know, I try to look back to say, okay, what if... So we would have more students who are failing and need to then take it over again. That's not increasing. Right. Okay, great. Okay. So I'm going to go to our district math results. So again, looking at grades three through five, highlighting that 2017 was the first year we had our next generation. And just comparing how we did from year to year, you'll see that there has been an uptick on fourth grade and fifth grade when compared to 2018. We have more students scoring in the meeting and the exceeding, which means that we're moving in the right direction. And then again, I look at that and I look at where we focused our efforts last year with fourth and fifth grade. We integrated new units, where we integrated the investigations, new resource in fourth and fifth grade. We had a lot of job embedded PD. And I think that that, you know, uptick in the scores is showing where that, where those efforts are paying off. Any questions? Looking at our sixth and eighth grade scores. Again, we're across the board here. We're seeing an increase in percentage of students that are scoring in the exceeding. That was something I wanted to highlight. And that's in all grade sixth, seventh and eighth. There was a little drop there in sixth grade. But, you know, I don't, you know, looking at the percentage points, anything under like five percentage points. Okay, we want to keep moving in the right direction and moving up. But I think one thing to celebrate is we have more students scoring and the more percentage of students scoring in the exceeding. But there's a little drop off there and I'm recognizing that. And I know that we have to look to see what's going to happen. And I'm acknowledging that. But in seventh and eighth grade, we definitely increased quite a bit in the exceeding. And I want to attribute that to the fact that we have hired a brand new principal at Addison. So there's like a stability there. The leadership was there. And so a lot of that has to do, I think, with that leadership and our focus on curriculum and aligning our standards. And it's starting to pay off. And again, you see the different colors in the chart. The teal, I don't even know what color green that is, but it's green. A shade of green and teal represents the legacy. And then the navy blue and the green at the bottom represent the next generation. And so again, I want to point out the fact here as you see that the distance between how we did overall when compared to the state on the next generation is still very significant. Significantly better. And so again, we're going to continue to work and do some item analysis and figure out where we need to focus our efforts to continue that improvement. Looking at our science results. And I know a comment was made earlier about our science results. So this, you know, you have to look through it to really focus on where the next generation assessment was given and where the legacy was given. So in grade five, you'll see in 2017 and 2018, we gave the legacy MCAS. And then in 2019, which would have been the last year, is the first year that we gave the next generation MCAS. And you'll see in grade five, and I think this is a result of, you know, implementing and putting the false science kits that the implementation was complete. And therefore you see that there is a, you know, I think we did a very good job based upon, and it's starting to show off like how we're doing, because there is an improvement. And that improvement took place even though it's on a more rigorous test. So if you see in 2019, it's two percentage points, but it's not as if we dropped off. You know, we continue to maintain and I think has a lot to do with our alignment with the standards and the introduction of the false science kits. So, you know, just so everybody knows, they only give the science assessment in fifth and eighth and tenth grade. So we're looking at the eighth grade results. I'm very proud of how we've done at eighth grade in eighth grade because we see a huge improvement even though they changed the test of the percentage of students that are scoring in the exceeding category. And then again in tenth grade, they gave the legacy test and we pretty much maintained our performance in that on 2019 when compared to previous years. So we're going to get into the student growth percentiles. I think I want to give the ranges. So the ranges of the growth percentiles is that you want to be 60% or higher. So these are given in percentiles. So as we look at this quadrant, you want to be in the upper right side, which has high achievement and high growth. The black dot in the middle is the state and then the colors represent where each one of the grade levels falls on this particular quadrant. So we want to continue to move to the upper right side, which would mean high achievement and high growth. And the way that the scores are listed on the right hand side, we are moderate to high growth across the board. We want to continue to push that because that means that even though students may be scoring in a certain category, they're showing growth. And we want to keep moving and keep pushing that forward. Again, looking at, we're looking at, and so that, I'm sorry, that was ELA, grades three through eight. This is math, grades three through eight. Again, we're looking at the quadrant. The state is the black dot in the middle. And as you see in grades three through eight in math, you want to see, you want to see, you know, the scores are pretty much on the right hand side and moving in the right direction, where you have that high achievement and if you look to the right, you know, fifth grade is, that would be considered high growth. Eighth grade is 62%. That's high growth. And so we're moderate to high growth. We want to continue to push that. Grade 10, you're only going to see one dot. So this is ELA. We have moderate growth there. The state is the black dot. And again, we're going to continue to move that to the right of the black dot up to the right on the quadrant. This is math. Grade 10 math. And keeping in mind that this is also the next generation in ELA in math for grade 10. Questions or comments? Yes. Do you, uh, do you gather data on a specific cohort to follow them through the years? Yes. And to see if it's consistent. In other words, if they consistently score in those areas or showing growth in things of that nature. Yes, they do. On the Edwin's analytics where you, you know, you're able to get your MCAS reports, you can follow a cohort of a grade level cohort from one grade to the next. What's project lead the way? So project lead the way is similar to like project based learning where it's a form of instruction that you implement within your district or your school and it, it focuses on application like internships and really taking what the students learn in the classroom and giving them opportunities to apply it in a certain area. It's very similar to project based learning but it's like a, it's like a methodology of instruction. Okay. And then you mentioned on a few of these that you wanted to go back and look at why, why you got the results you did and what needs to happen with the, what changes need to happen with the curriculum or how to enable better student growth in the coming years. And I'm just hoping if once you have some of these results if you could come back and share them with us because that's something that was a little frustrating to me is that we see these results but we never see where what's happening because of the result. You know, what, what's, what are the steps being taken next and how does, how they relate to what we found on the MCAS. I'm not asking to see everyone's scores and stuff but just like, you know, we looked at it and we found out that people were missing this chunk of and so, you know, next year they're going to do that part longer or they're adding it or something like that. Thank you for bringing that. What I can do is I can maybe hit on that on part two of the presentation because it wouldn't be that hard to do that. Let me just tell you some of the ways that we do that. Great level teams and I think that this year we were able to, you know, change the elementary schedule that time to principals and great level teams to meet together, to review data look at student work and so the MCAS would be one assessment that they're already discussing in those, they call them ace blocks now and that they're looking at where in the curriculum in the standards where we did a great job, you know, celebrate our growth and then where are the areas we need to focus on and you can easily do that in an item analysis. And the MCAS, what they do is they release some questions, some questions they don't release but you can also pull reports where you can see the percentage of students and how we did in each one of the standards and then we break it down even more by looking at the various questions that were actually asked connected to that standard. Some of the questions they release, some they don't. But it definitely, you can break it down by subgroup population as an aggregate to see where students did well on a particular standard and where we need to say, hey, we really need to focus on this area in our instruction. So it wouldn't be that hard to do and I can come back with that information in part two and say, this is what we found out for this particular subgroup or looking at the aggregate and say, okay, this is what we found out by doing that item analysis Great, thank you. Anybody else? All right, great. Thank you. Next up, Poverty Hiring Report. Yeah, we're still on public comment. I'll try to go quickly. Not directed at you, that was directed at you. So, I'm going to start with some slides that I saw last week are the MASPA, the MASA Association of School Personnel Administrators Meeting was presented by Shea Edmund from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on some initiatives that they're doing. I'm not going to go over this whole slide, so it's in Novus, but there are a couple slides I thought were interesting that Batteries go bad quickly. Nice to use them. Yeah. So a couple things, they did some MCAS stuff, but student enrollment in Massachusetts by race and ethnicity, Massachusetts is about overall in the whole state, about 60% white student population about I think 20, a little over 20% Hispanic, a little under 10% African American and a little bit under that in Asia. If you look at the teachers, educator and teachers, they have the top bar is all Massachusetts educators, and the bar beneath that is just teachers. And if you look at that, 92% of the teachers in Massachusetts are white and compared to the students, when only 60% of the students in Massachusetts are white, there's a big disparity. Only about 3% of Massachusetts teachers are black and American and a smaller, only 2% Asian and I think the number of Hispanic is about 3% as well. So in the whole state, we have a huge disparity in terms of the number of students that we're serving versus the educators who are teaching them. Now I want to go back to our presentation. So I just wanted to put that in a little bit of context of what the whole, every district in the state is attempting to increase the diversity of the staff. In Arlington, our student population, we're about 70% white, 13% Asian, 3.44% black, African American, 1.1% Hispanic, Latino and about 6.82% multiracial. Our employee numbers similarly, we're predominantly white employees with smaller percentages of African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, then our student population similar in some ways to the population of the state teacher and educator employee numbers. Our new hires, the new hires are from October 1st, 2018 through September 30th, 2019 with the bulk of those new employees coming over the summer into for the beginning of this school year. One of the issues we have is the N is new employees who do not identify. We didn't get on the sheet that they fill out, they chose not to fill that section out, so there's 11, almost 12%, who didn't identify. Of those who did, well again, of the new hires, 74% are white, 4.41% Asian, 4.9% black, 3.43% Hispanic Native American or Indian is a small percentage of 1.4%. AIA employees are all the teachers in the AIA unit, a bargaining unit of the teachers there. I think it's closely aligned with what the state has in terms of predominantly white teaching or similar to the state, almost of a 91% small percentage of 2.5% Asian, 1.25% black or African American, 1.61% Hispanic, and then a number who don't identify. For new hires in the AIA since last year, 77 new hires, 70 are white, 3 Asian, 2 black, 1 Hispanic, 1 not identified. Paraprofessionals, a little bit higher percentage of paraprofessionals from diverse backgrounds, as you can see we've we have a little bit more. The percentages overall have increased in some areas and decreased in others but again predominantly white. The other thing that has kind of increased is the non-identified and I have to look at why that is if we were categorizing people differently in years past because that doesn't that number doesn't make that much sense so I have to go back to that. AAA, administration, principal, central office, IT and administrative assistance, those numbers have almost 85% white, 3.6% Asian, 6.12% black, 2.4% Hispanic and about 4% non-identified. Arlington after school program, that is actually one where our after school administration has had more success than any other group in the district in attracting and hiring a diverse staff and hiring more staff of color to teach in the after school programs at Hardy, Thompson Pierce, Gibbs and the Brackett Spanish immersion program. So you can see those numbers are definitely better in terms of more in some areas more closely aligning with the student population maintenance, transportation and food service similarly a little bit more diverse than the staff as a whole in the district and the comparison between students and staff ethnicity sort of side by side it's pretty clear that like the state like most districts in the state we have predominantly white staff serving a more a growingly diverse student body and our goal always is to increase the diversity of the staff to more mirror the student body and I think some of the things that we do that we've continued to do is participate in mass partnership for diversity in education attend targeted job fairs really try to encourage, strongly encourage our administrators to reach diverse audiences when they're recruiting and to their filters we can use in school spring and other job boards to attract a more diverse diverse teaching force. I think in the teaching people who are licensed educators in Massachusetts there are the state, if you look at the other presentation that I put in the state does have some programs that they've launched in the past couple years to try to increase the diversity of teachers specifically teachers in Massachusetts they have some grants some things that we unfortunately at this point don't qualify for a lot of those targeted grants and programs are targeted toward districts that are more high needs than we are and some of those programs are limited to other districts that we would not qualify for so we are, you know, we're continuing to do all of those things the mass partnership for diversity in education has seen increased interest by other districts who want to join I think a lot of, because a lot of districts are seeking to increase the diversity of their staff they're looking for ways to do that they think that, you know and it does help to join with other districts that have similar goals to share ideas and to share best practices and that's something we do I think in all of our with the superintendent assistant superintendent special ed director all of our our job-alike groups in the state this is an issue that we all are thinking of so and I think the principal's too Mr. Heiner the university's in teacher preparation do they reflect the stats that you're showing high percentage of white? They do, yeah I mean there was one slide in the other presentation from the state that I think it's 86% white enrollment in educator prep programs in the state part of the problem is the pool itself on the state level isn't being prepared. There are multiple challenges the pool itself people who are educators of color people of color wanting to go into education as a career and I think that's similar in other professions as well but attracting people of color into the educator prep programs and then continuing through those programs and becoming licensed educators being a little bit mercenary it's a seller's market so we are at a slight disadvantage with regard to teacher salaries in the area. We are. Okay I just want to make that clear even if the pool was there we'd still be an uphill struggle with us. We are competing against Boston, Cambridge, Lexington our 10-inch or 12 communities and our surrounding communities have a substantial difference in diverse staff than we do? Well I think because of that fact there are certain communities like Boston and Cambridge that have different I think still I think Boston and someone may be able to correct me if I'm wrong I think Boston might still be under an affirmative action decree from years ago and some other communities are as well but the financial aspect I guess my question is aside from Boston and required by court order and things of that nature the difference in salaries are any of them have a significant increase in diverse staff or is it still just the issue of the pool itself? I think the districts that have higher salaries are probably able to attract more diverse staff, more staff in general but I mean that's one factor Dr. McNeil had something to add? So this was a focus of my dissertation for my doctorate and we also have to realize that Arlington is a majority white district and as you look at those districts that you just named like Cambridge and Boston you might have individuals that want to go back to the communities from where they come from and they were educated and they want to give back to the community and because they have a higher percentage of students of color African American students that that might also be a factor of trying to recruit staff of color to come to a majority white district so I don't know whether or not you can because when you look at pay and research pay is not a very high on the indicator list of that's going to attract people to a particular district especially in teaching so it's because of the nature of the job and the way that people feel like they can give back to their community we're also competing with those districts that have a majority a higher percentage of students of color and so they're going to want to go back to those communities even if they're not from those communities when you look at staff of color when you speak to them they want to go to those communities where you have a higher percentage of color I think that is a major contributing factor but I also think I'm not suggesting we attempt to compete but schools like Lexington there is that additional factor when the salaries are increased by a higher percentage I agree with you I think giving back to the community that's one of the things educators you have a good education you want to give back a little bit more you want to share with you with the communities on that basis there's a degree of mercenary and you're looking at families and growing and things of that nature that's been an issue that we have in this community it's going to continue to be an issue in this community it's not going to be solved in one night and I also want to highlight the efforts that Mr. Spiegel has done in order to create opportunities for people of color to come and just explore the diversity of working in Arlington if you look at our diversity coffee that we had last year it was very well attended and that's because he's gone out to various job fairs at different universities in order to just speak with people and share various qualities of Arlington and invited them to the diversity coffee so we had a very nice turnout for our diversity coffee and then we had to match those positions with our vacancies it's a very complex problem and it's going to take some time for us to resolve it I do think there are also some if selling education is selling the profession to people in general as a place a career they want to explore and go into is something that I think our teachers our administrators are going to hand in and yeah yeah so I want to thank everyone for their efforts because I do think that we do take this seriously I would love to see the numbers of unidentified go down and I was going to ask that and I know that your answers are not sure yet why those numbers are so high I want to encourage people in the community we just heard the story of our new science or say that got the notice of the position because of a personal connection and I think personal connections can be very powerful so I want to encourage people in the community if they know people to sort of talk of Arlington because personal connection you know as you point out that pay is not necessarily the only motivation sort of showing that Arlington is a welcoming community can be really important and I want to encourage people to help spread the word I also want to make a comment it seems like one place that we could all sort of maybe focus our attention on and maybe their happen efforts is on the power of professionals which are a more diverse background and that who may not see themselves necessarily as teachers but are obviously interested in students who have been mentored in that direction and I think as I highlighted the last presentation just on the new higher presentation that we always hire paraprofessionals teaching assistants who have been teaching assistants to become licensed educators are hired in classroom positions usually at the elementary level but sometimes in other levels as well and that happens every year and so attracting more diverse will lead to more teachers right and then just also any sort of mentorship that we can give people who may not know what the path is it's helpful thanks Dr. Hanby I read through the desi presentation that you gave I thought it was very interesting one thing right after their slide where they talk about the mass educator preparation program demographics they talk about barriers recruiting teachers of color and the three things they have listed are obstacles to completing college impact of student debt on teacher preparation enrollment and completion and teacher licensure exams but I was wondering looking at the demographics I'm not sure I feel like the barriers they show match the demographics are there and I just did they talk about I don't know if that's a reasonable assessment or not but it feels like there's something else going on they definitely talked about the mtels as a barrier for some people and there is a cost to take the mtels and if you don't pass the mtels you have to pay to take them again so that is that can be a barrier I mean that is one thing that's something that comes up frequently in meetings I attend of different groups that's an issue it just seems like it feels like the barriers before they get into college because they're not right so when I went to college I attended state schools undergraduate you got a degree in elementary or secondary secondary and you got to teach high school and the certification was lifetime now you have to you're expected to get a master's degree within five years or with some extensions you have to pass the mtels and you have to continually every five years take more courses and things of that nature so there's a financial issue I mean they were they specialized in all the different areas of education so there is a private schools now that would cost your fortune BU and the other schools around BC and things of that nature so I think to get a degree in education and to stay in education there is a financial cost even if you're successful on the mtels there are some areas if you want to teach special education there's a lot of mtels there's a lot of coursework that you have to take to get that license and I will say that special education is one area where it's hard to find as much of a diverse applicant pool and with success in that area you're a high commodity to go to other states where it's cheaper to live as well and make a better salary I don't mean to be mercenary but if you succeed in this state and get certification you've got a high product to sell anybody else? I think one of the things we have to think about in terms of recruiting teachers where we are is that the experience that somebody has in the school system as a student is often the influence of whether they want to come back and feel welcome that if minority students who attend a system do not feel welcome or happy they will not come back to work for you so the marker is how many of the folks who are going through your system are coming back looking to work for you? Thank you Mr. Spiegel and next Ms. Seuss we have the Allington Human Rights Commission documents I want to take these up separately because there's different issues that I know members of the committee feel about the two things but I just want to give you the history of these two documents the guidelines for responding to Haydn since was brought to us both these were brought to us two years ago by the Allington Human Rights Committee at that point they had met with the chief then chief of police they had come up with this and they were presenting it to us for our consideration we at that time had some concerns which we gave back to them and through because of internal things going on with that committee and other things it sort of died for a while so that is we then this summer had a meeting to discuss this issue with the superintendent in our superintendent's office I attended that meeting there were teachers administrators, there was police officers and there was Human Rights Committee members where we did a lot of wordsmithing and came up with something that everyone felt good about then brought it to the Human Relations Committee and there were some more wordsmithing going on I sent that back to the Human Rights Committee they said that was fine and now it's being brought back to us now maybe Mr. Hayner would like to speak to this issue the one question is what is the status of this document and whether it's sort of a you know a document between the Human Rights Committee and the superintendent or whether it should be official school committee document the other thing the other document is the school liaison document that came about also about two years ago out of conversations that Sharon Grossman and I had that there was just a lot of frustration on both sides about what exactly the relationship was between the Human Rights Committee and the schools and the Human Rights Committee used to have a really great relationship 15 years ago and somehow it deteriorated and the idea was let's try to come up with some language that would codify that relationship between the who the liaisons are so that when a liaison goes to a principal the principal doesn't feel sort of put off by that and everyone sort of feels comfortable with it so we worked on that for a while the agreement was that there wouldn't be a liaison at each school or one or two people who really know the district know the research know the resources in the community and in the state who could then be both a resource for parents but also a potential resource for administrators if they so asked brought that to the Human Rights Committee Relations Committee and had some suggestions send it back to the Human Rights Committee they said yes to those suggestions and now it's back to us and this is potentially a document that we might have a different feeling about because it doesn't directly involve sort of a conversation about how we want the superintendent or the administration to behave right so we might as a committee feel differently about that document than the first subject so giving all that background I think we should take up each and turn if people should express their thoughts okay so let's start with the guidelines okay Mr. Haynor with the guidelines I think if we adopt and I'm not saying we do if we adopt these guidelines I think there are at least two areas that I have deep concern on what to do on the line notify the principal I would add the superintendent and the principal I think that's very important because and then going further down in the document down on follow up that that piece right there replace the word principal wherever it shows up in this paragraph with the word superintendent because I think it's very important that the superintendent not only be notified but the superintendent has historically been the spokesperson for the district and so that we speak with one voice and not have separate interpretations not to say that principals would do that but principals are concerned with their own particular school okay so I want to finish I'm not saying I see I'm not opposed to this the other part is all these areas have always belong to the school district I have no problem the rights commission being involved but and I appreciate all the changes that you've made they were very encompassing but I personally think the superintendent is the first and last word on communications of the community as the district Mrs. oh so I think I thought you're going to speak to the issue that you raised in the subcommittee meeting because there is a question about what the status of this document is so if it's a school committee document then we should be working on but if it's not a school committee document then you know the group of 20 people what we just do this well then the 20 people who are in the meeting including the police officers and stuff who work down on this language and I don't think the language is perfect it's just who do you go back to so do we gather those 20 people in the room together or do we say you know human rights so if it's a school committee document then we should be involved in where it's missing it but if it's not then we either say we like it or we don't I agree I have no problem going back to them but I don't think anyone but the superintendent should even talk to principals and get information from principals and directing principals what to do and that's why I suggested initially this belongs to the school committee as a document Dr. Allison Ampe I'm confused who this document is speaking to I mean it sounds like there's also confusion who it's coming from but who is it speaking to is the audience the staff the school staff is it parents is it both is it the community at large with a school related incident I don't understand who the audience is and that makes a difference in how I view it then I also when I read it and I understand this is wordsmithing stuff but I think it's trying to be this is what you do list but it has some things in depth it has other things that aren't mentioned it all except at the top and it it's kind of all over there it either needs to be this is what you do or a top level these are the kind of things you need to do and then referring to something else this is what you do in detail or I mean that's one way of doing it but it's confusing to me for several reasons okay this is so generally I mean I don't think it's written perfectly but you know you get a committee of 20 people and two years of process it ends up being messy in the end but basically I'll tell you what the history of it is the history was that there was a couple years ago that was not that was covered up if you remember and that alarmed both the police department and the human rights committee and they said let's work together on this document and that's what happened and they said let's come up with a protocol that would be shared with the superintendent's permission would be shared with all administrators so the idea is this is supposed to be a document that every time we have a new administrator you say this is our protocol we're going to radically change it has to do with what the status of it is and so I think we should talk about do we I mean they okay that's great they're on the human rights committee and the police department got together and they talked and other people got involved but we don't care because this kind of document should be ours and we're going to write the way we want or do we say no it's not our document it's something we can say yes you know oh it sounds great but it's not our document and I think that's a really good question here okay so I guess my feedback is I'm not speaking to the it's ours or not my feedback is as a protocol I don't think this works because it's you're asking for something that you can just hand the new principal and say here if something happens this is what you do but it says identify the incident and it has nothing about what you mean by identification I'm not saying preserve the evidence same thing it's like it doesn't talk about that but then it has notified the principal and then document and then down below it has document and it has more stuff it's just it's kind of it's not just I didn't create it no I'm just saying it's okay yes so yeah I think we need to hear from Dr. Bode because my understanding is that you have reviewed this and you are okay with it is this a document you'll be comfortable giving to principals the principals have seen this and they've given their blessing to it I don't think that I think that when you have a group of people trying to wordsmith it's not coming out perfectly but the intent of this is that there is this communication with the principal with the superintendent right away as well as the people in that school there is also communication with the police department which is done through our SRO doesn't mean that the chief and I don't talk we do and as well as having the Human Rights Commission so we actually unfortunately had this in practice this last week I think the incident you're referring to is that something that I didn't even know about right I mean it happened a number of years ago and I don't think that that was a I think that was a one-off situation that's not how it really operates you know I'm pretty much the very first person that the principal will call as we assess the situation and that's what happened this time and I'll talk a little bit more about it in my superintendent's report but everyone has seen this and people would argue with it's not perhaps as well worded or perhaps as you know do this, this, this and this but it captures the intent of how we want to operate okay if this is ours it becomes a policy and it should be written as a policy and given as a directive to the superintendent and the district that these are our expectations if this is something that the superintendent wishes to instruct her principles as to what her expectations are in the event of an instance we can look at this and say okay fine Superintendent Bode hands the principles this looks good to us and even without a vote sort of one of these without objections thank you for bringing this before us this looks like a reasonable process for you to direct your principles to do I view this in the latter category as something the superintendent is comfortable with this and the principles are comfortable receiving this direction and the Human Rights Commission is comfortable interacting with us in this manner it's a beautiful thing and we should just sit back and let it happen Ms. Morgan so I think it's interesting that the beginning of this was an incident that didn't get brought forward which I also am not privy to which is fine I think back to last year when there was an incident at Stratton that was not necessarily a hate incident there was graffiti that was violent that was not reported initially and so I I know that these kind of things it's very hard to parse so what is hate is saying you want to kill somebody hate well no because it's not directed to an individual or group of people based on these 12 to 14 characteristics presumably under that scenario this documentation wouldn't be necessarily followed so but I do what I get concerned about is that we have very specific sort of there are like checkboxes on this document as if like I could take my pen and be like okay did you do this did you do this when I see that with something like this and then I think about all of the other nuances that aren't going to fit into this to get to be uncomfortable I agree with Mr. Schluckman if this is what superintendent would like to have and hand out with check marks or not you know I I feel comfortable with how you handle these things so I have not been concerned historically or am I concerned now so if you want a piece of paper with boxes on it or if you don't or you don't I'm saying that sort of tongue and cheek but I'm kind of like I don't have a strong feeling about it I do think I would have a hard time sort of codifying this in any kind of official capacity anything else at first time yeah so I'm with Paul I don't I think this is a protocol that the procedure the superintendent has developed and she's comfortable with it and so I don't think there's anything the school committee would do here so yes I'm going to agree with my colleagues I think if the Human Rights Commission is looking for a specific policy then it needs to be much more narrowly tailored and I think this has been through the ringer for a couple of years it in the absence of the HR of the Human Rights Commission asking for this would we have developed this exact document certainly not but it was something that we were responding to them working with another organization in town the superintendent was receptive to that Jennifer played middleman quite a bit to help move it along and you know it covers I think sort of the basic requirements that I'm comfortable with and again it's not something that I think we should develop as a policy Mr. Heiner policy file ACH our procedures for addressing complaints discrimination or harassment based upon protected classifications retaliated related retaliation one where to file a complaint two content complaint whole procedure with your checklist investigation is part three for resolution of the complaint five timelines follow up six appeals with all the things this is our current revised policy listing all federal state statutes and regulations again if you want it it's ACH so it's already been codified codified okay so I think the consensus is we're not going to take action on that policy and you can communicate to the human rights commission that you've agreed with it and we'll distribute it to your principles moving on to the next one the liaisons is there sentiment about or suggestion about what to do with that one yes I just wanted to point out that guidelines I think does you know just to the word guidelines does I think suggest a looser interpretation of that policy but yeah so that when we met in subcommittee there was less concern about making that a school committee policy but we did want to bring it to the full committee to see if there was any thoughts that felt like a sort of agreement between the human rights committee and the superintendent and the administrative team about what felt comfortable to everyone and so but we did want to bring it to you to see if there's any questions or concerns or thoughts about its status so who are the liaisons they're not on the human rights commission but they're other people they are in the human rights commission so one of actually one of the historical so there was this great relationship 15 years ago and that sort of fell apart one of the concerns was that I think administrators weren't comfortable having a parent at each school sort of coming in and inserting themselves in a way that felt inappropriate and so the idea that if you have only one or two who really does have expertise in the kind of resources that are around and and then also can be a point person for the reason that this liaison role is really important is to sort of maybe diffuse tension parents who feel that something isn't being resolved or aren't sure what to do can talk to that liaison and that liaison can then maybe help that parent explain what has happened navigate the system communicate with the principal parents weren't always feeling like things were being resolved but they may not have known what had happened actually so so that was sort of the feeling that this person could one or two and the idea is that it's going to be one or two people and they hadn't decided either one person for the entire district or one person for elementary one person for secondary could sort of play that role Mr. Hinner clarification are they representing this are they the liaison between us Nope are they sent then why are we involved in it then if they are the liaison of the Human Rights Commission only because actually Sharon Grossman I helped develop this and we brought to Community Relations I understand that and I appreciate that I just want to be very clear that they're not representing the school committee and they'll have no authority with the principals whatsoever it's a communication right they have the authority that the town vests in the Human Rights Committee but not an additional authority thank you Dr. just for clarification are they actual members of Human Rights Commission as I understand that's what they're looking for okay in fact what I understand actually is that our new one of our new appointees Kathleen is I think has been tapped to be one of the people all right so other again so no action on this one as well we're saying okay bring it to you so good work on getting these done finally thank you for off the list of things to do thank you Jennifer yep all right MIS the annual business meeting so the resolutions that were in the list were not the full set but I did just notice that this afternoon and did email that around and I think we got that in the mail I haven't kept keeping up with my paper mail so it's probably somewhere in a pile in my house but I didn't see anything needed commenting on this here did anybody have any comment on the resolutions all right and so we have to appoint a what is it called delegate delegate yes that's the word is anybody attending that wants to be the delegate Mr. Schuchman move to approve Mr. Schuchman is the Ellington school committee delegate second all those in favor yes any opposed or abstentions unanimous great thank you superintendent's report right I actually have a number of things to talk about this evening but since we have on the on the schedule the AHS building project update let me start with that we have since actually early the summer after the override we have continued in the design process there have been numerous meetings as this process as the project evolved what I wanted to mention tonight is that we are at a stage where we're ready to have another community forum and the purpose of this forum is really just to update the community where the project is since the last community forum we have hired a contractor with consigli and they have not participated in any forums in the past and so they are going to present the information that they have at this point in terms of phasing and this community forum which will be moderated by our chair of the building committee Jeff Tillman will be on October 30th at town hall from 7 to 8 30 and we're going to get information out and the town will help us disseminate that information through that weekly newsletter but I think it's an opportunity for people to come and hear both the current status of the design where we are with the phasing of this whole project which we had a meeting about today as well and I think parents probably have a lot of questions and this is an opportunity for them to hear where we are so what's going to happen the rest of this fall is that we have a number of meetings that we're going to be engaging in about the design the MSBA has us go through a process where we have to look at the design and see if there's you know it's called the evolution of it in terms of the value engineering of the project and that is all part of the design process that we go through with MSBA so we have a meeting the committee meeting is coming Tuesday and in November I think we have probably four scheduled as we get closer to the point where we have to deliver to MSBA I think it's right before Thanksgiving our design documents and so that process then we'll move into construction drawings and as we have told the public and it is going to happen this way there's going to be construction in March and we can talk more about that the phasing is like down the road March we are going to be beginning in the pre-construction pre-construction pre-construction okay there's a number of things like laying utility lines and creating some additional parking and there's some footings had to be put in that phasing and to save money we're going to have some members of the school committee help the digging Mr. Heiner has a history of digging up front yesterday preparing to put the flags for heroes I got an emergency phone call said somebody is digging up the lawn they were out doing test pits yesterday right in the middle where I'm trying to locate my little plug so I panicked and the guy said if we find any careful he was very nice and the facilities people have been very good Mrs. Scott so when will we know sort of more details about the finances in terms of like do we have to make any cuts what timing of that is that probably in November what's happening so we show a recession right now pardon when we go out to yes I know 4 month recession when we go out to bid fake sales which is then when is the bidding then bidding will start next summer there will be some things that will happen before because you bid the phases out if you go along as we since June there has been a lot of design meetings that have gone on that have been with staff with the building principal and system principal you know just looking at I mean down into the weeds of can you put another desk in this office space and if you do where will the plugs be I mean it really has to get down to that level of detail those designs will go to another cost estimating because as you go through this MSP process there's different stages of completed completed reports are I would say the design drawings you go 60% to 90% and go forward eventually you're at 100% but at each one of those stages you go through a cost estimating process and so it's actually sort of hard to know what the changes that have been made over the last couple months as the project evolves how that's going to get costed out because the last time we did a costing out it was at the schematic stage which we had very limited diagrams that get down into that level so yes and that's why there's so many meetings in November because you know when we get the cost estimates back in November like the 15th we have a lot of decisions to make before it goes to MSBA got it just to kind of add some context the as Kathy said we're required by the contract we signed with the MSBA to do value engineering up until 2024 so we're required to do it all the time so we have a process in place in which the seven subcommittees are meeting between now and early November to frame out what reductions would look like, what would they accept or what could work in terms of reductions the committee is supposed to be meeting this month to do that kind of homework so that we're prepared for November votes got it and you know some things that we were to eliminate are permanent and some things would be alternate so we'll just see how people just have to be patient and we don't have any cost estimates back yet I wasn't at the last meeting which was last week but I think the sense of the committee is that you certainly have a hierarchy of priorities the things that you can't change later those are things you make sure you make excellent decisions about early on and there are things that you can change as someone said this is going to go on the entire length of the project making these decisions because it just costs change alright so I want to address a number of things one is the I think at this point everyone is aware of what happened to some extent that there was some anti-semitic graffiti one of the things that principal manager sent out to parents I think is really true unfortunately we're seeing these kinds of incidents throughout our whole country everywhere but what really is important is how you respond to them and we can't let these things go because being silent about them just said well it's okay just brush it aside we're not going to be silent about it but it also is a school and it's a middle school and this is a place where students have to learn and understand the impact of actions whether they're words or written words the effort at the middle school is to help students learn from this incident and certainly it began with meetings at the seventh and eighth grade level this week and in the ASPIRE meetings that they have with students they're going to be showing videos from facing history beginning tomorrow and on Monday an IT glitch today that didn't make it possible to move forward with that but the idea of this is to be an upstander not a bystander and that's a theme that is going to resonate through the school I know that in the seventh grade there's a book that they read and again it's on the same kind of theme which is warriors do not cry again being you know you can't let these things just slide and because that's when it becomes the new normal so you know we have Ms. Keyes here tonight and I don't know if she wants to, I don't want to put her in a spot but I don't know if she wants to say anything about how this has been at the middle school just that we have great kids and I think what we sometimes forget is that one thing middle schoolers are really great at is knowing how to push our buttons and they know exactly what to write on the wall to get everybody really upset and I don't see anti-Semitism at the Odyssey I don't I see kids liking to make a stir sometimes I think the response has been completely appropriate I think the majority of the kids are annoyed by this like why do we have to sit and talk about cultural competency again we know all these things we don't say these things this kids terrible that's why we reported it to you I'm so proud of the kids who immediately came forward and said there's something on the bathroom wall it was minutes so we have great kids and overall I hope that this doesn't cloud the perspective of that well said very well said so we're moving forward and the school is moving forward we're moving further on this and I applaud them for their thoughtful response to what has happened and hopefully this will be the last of it as I said in the press release as you mentioned they do know how to push your buttons and there's also that element of copycat and we're hoping that you know once you give this is the problem once you give attention and respond then you encourage other people to get their attention again on the other hand then there's that dilemma should you respond or not respond you know and so I think it's been as thoughtful as it probably could be in this particular instance onto another topic and that is there was an article in the Boston Globe about lunch times in the Arlington Public School some parents are complaining that they don't have adequate time for students to eat lunch and I'm actually going to send out a notice just a little letter to all of our elementary parents because we do not want students to be hungry in our schools we know that when that happens they're not going to be receptive to learning they're not going to be engaged in that process and actually over the many years we have been working to make sure that doesn't happen and I want to publicly express our gratitude to Arlington Eats for their partnership in making sure that we have healthy snacks in every building that's available all day long and if you go into our schools in some schools a little more obvious that's there but every principal knows that that's the case and faculty as well and Odesson has this is catch of healthy snacks every day for students as well and there's no teacher who would say if you're hungry you have something to eat we have 40 minute blocks 40 minute block 20 minutes goes for lunch and 20 minutes for recess what Arlington Public Schools did a number of years ago we looked at some research that had been done that actually when you have lunch before recess kids tend to rush through their lunch and not eat so whenever we've been able to do that we've flipped it where they go out to recess first and then lunch so that they're eating more of it it's always not possible so if two grades are paired for a lunch 40 minute block they have to flip during the year so that it's sort of divided up a little bit but the other thing is when they have early lunch and somebody mentioned kindergarten when they have an early lunch which is 1030 though I have to say having been many years as a teacher 1030 is when he starts to feel very hungry right they have afternoon snacks that just is part of how it works so there's really not a way to change you can't change the proportion in 2020 because you have often shared lunch periods but the important thing is for people to know that we do not want any child to be hungry if they are hungry they should eat something and tell their teacher they need to get a snack I'm sorry that this was a perception of parents but really the work we've done in the last five years to make sure this doesn't happen has been substantial and with the support of the Arlington community sorry just a comment on that I mean the perception is there because that's what parents think they haven't been clearly told that a lot of the schools do send out the notice about the closet of snacks but it sounds like that's for people who can't afford the snacks or forget a snack it's not for people who were rushed to lunch and didn't get a chance to finish their lunch or eat enough at lunch so I think I'm happy to look at the draft but I think if you and I think some of the teachers if you ask some of your elementary teachers they're not here and they're not here do you always permit your students to have snack do they know they're allowed to have snack they don't know that they're allowed to have snack if they're hungry I think this is great there should be a communication on it it should also go to the principals to the staff but I think the there's a lot of communication issues in the district and the perception is there because that's what people think it's not you know they haven't been communicated clearly that snacks are allowed so this will be a new communication it's great but it shouldn't be a big surprise I think so just in two things lots of elementary students that live in my house I have one that's at the very early end in first grade I have two fifth graders and I think that it's handled differently even in the elementary schools my fifth graders came home this year and said mom we can have snack whenever we want now which I then that happened and then I got four text messages from parents who were like my kids have allergies and there's all this food in the classroom and how are they going to stay safe and then I got a little tinder boxy and so I just think as we talk about it and communicate about it we just want to be really careful that we understand what's happening I have not asked my son's first grade teacher having volunteered weekly in kindergarten last year I can't imagine if it was a sort of snack you could have a snack at any time five year olds I don't know I can tell you that like snack with my kids at my house is very fraught they want this snack that day at 1 o'clock or they want to have a snack at 2.30 or they want to have a snack at 10 so I can't imagine being in a situation especially K through 3 or 4 where it could be snack free for all like if you're hungry you can have a snack like probably not right like I don't think we can have kids having snacks all the time or any time they want so I don't know that that's I just I think we want to be careful about I guess I urge you to be careful about how this is communicated because I do I think that it's you know I think that it's tricky does that make sense well yes and yes and no I hear that you're getting different messages as a parent from teachers or the kids are getting different messages and as a five year old know that if I'm starving I can have something to eat and would say something teacher question I'm not really sure how that would be but many others but many others would not it is true that you don't want kids eating all the you know throughout the entire day but I don't I haven't seen that that much and I sent out the message that's going to send which hasn't been sent yet to the principals to see if there was anything inaccurate in it and there may be more comments when I end this meeting as well and I may go out instead but it's there's probably no teacher in the district who would want to be knowing that a child is in the class and hungry just would not want that at all and would be very sensitive to it but you're you're right the one of the issues with snacks that are brought from home can be things that have to be do with allergies what I have seen from the snacks that we have available and Thompson is a really good example of that in fact it was just there on Tuesday you know you got apples and applesauce and they're not they're not necessarily snacks that are going to the bag of the carrots I mean those kinds of things they're not snacks that are going to are traditionally cause an allergic reaction that's not to say there's not children allergic to apples I get that so you're right it is tricky how to balance all these things and but the one thing that is not going to change in the near future is the amount of time that we have in the school day for lunch and so we're trying to maximize the time we have be sensitive to this issue of hungry children and at the same time give them recess as well I've been 14 going into the classroom mainly the third grade with some of the older ones at the elementary level when they first brought the the food in I asked about it I think we have a phenomenal staff aware of those kids that need immediate energy aspects to it as Dr. Bordi just said the food that's there is healthy and safe they're very conscious of that I've seen kids while I'm waiting to go into the classroom kids will walk by there's the whole layer just take a piece at all ages again I go along with what you said Mr. Garden communication is important that everyone knows it the teachers are in a constant balancing act of knowing medical histories of kids who has allergies who doesn't watching what's going on in the room and when I've done presentations in the classroom kids are very very respectful they're not all sitting there lounging and just feasting away they're respectful some kids need that energy boost right then and there other kids are aware of it and it's done very well I think unlike 20 years ago when I was teaching with somebody pulling out something and passing it around to be into distraction it's part of the regular program the teachers are good wouldn't hurt just to remind everybody one more time but I think the only I can only speak to the elementary I don't know what goes on at the the other ones but the elementary does an extremely good job and thanks to the people in the community that have supported this with us kudos to them yeah it's kind of the classroom management issue and the way you structure it in the kindergarten it's going to be different than what you're going to do in fifth grade so it's not going to be a blanket one one size fits all policy but the other thing that I want to make sure that the parents understand is that a tight control on the amount of time available in the calf for lunch is important because you want it to be the right just you have to hit it just right mark of long enough that you can get something to eat and eat it but not so long that they have too much time there and they get bored and antsy and start playing around and it becomes a problem so that you know a kid who is repeatedly not getting lunch because it's delayed you might want to find some way to make sure the kid gets earlier in the line and later in the line especially if they're coming in from the playground if they have the recess first and the kid doesn't want to come into lunch and is the last one in yeah okay it's going to be an issue maybe you have to watch for that but expanding the lunch period is not a good solution it will be up to us to work within the parameters that we've got I will say that I have observed the lunch lines in all of our elementary schools and I am always impressed at how efficient and fast they are the kids are very polite they move along and I think a thing I'm even more impressed at is how the elementary students recycle when they finish eating so they at 20 minutes besides getting their lunch eating their lunch they also very orderly will come up and do all the recycling they need to do so you're absolutely correct that you know what is the sweet spot in terms of time so it's something that we certainly will continue to look at but it's something that we're definitely responding to these concerns and make sure that perhaps the communication is clear and we make sure that teachers are more aware of the fact that maybe there are some students in here that may be hungry so anyway unless it's something else I may move on just a couple other things one I want to end with a little bit comments about my trip to Japan but in the meantime the parents I don't know if everybody is fully aware of the fact of how many parent community forums the Arlington Public Schools sponsors every year and there are a number sometimes they're very well attended we'll send reminders up but there are a lot of them that are quite apropos to some of the issues going on right now so for example on the 15th which is next week actually it's 15th 22nd 29th November 5th there's guiding good choices then there is on the 23rd building community support the LGBTQIA and youth and then there's vaping on the 16th the vaping alarm has rung so on our website on the quick links on the community parent community forums you will get the complete list of all of these and I urge you to do it because some of these are really important opportunities for parents to learn about some of these issues their children are facing but also along those lines there is another community conversation that's going to be scheduled next Tuesday on the 16th it's Thursday Thursday the 17th Thursday the 17th I'm going to send it out I thought it was Tuesday Thursday the 17th alright and this is going to be a community conversation again LGBTQ issues it's going to be at the Robbins Library and I believe it's at 630 on the fourth floor but I'll be sending reminders out to parents on that as well so I just want to give you some quick overview of the 35th anniversary celebration in Japan we had a small delegation go just like a small delegation here in April it was myself and the town manager and three of the people who organized the student visits when they come here as well as help support the visit to Japan from Arlington in July it was just a remarkable trip I think the common theme that was discussed with the school officials the town officials and teachers was how important these sister city relationships are certainly for the adults but for our students we have anywhere from 20 to 24 students come here in the spring for 10 days in which they interact with our students and they are in host families and it has created some bonds that remain so significant in fact when we were there three of the people that were organized this have been host parents for a number of years, six, seven years and we had a night where we could meet with some of the students and I walked in and one of the students just from Japan just burst into tears she was so thrilled to see the person she had stayed with and that was 10 years ago so these relationships remain very strong and really are transformative in terms of your world view and your view of another culture and that's the whole purpose of these sister cities is that we learn to understand another culture more closely we develop these stronger bonds between them and my counterpart said this is how we're going to achieve through these kinds of exchanges with students because then they can have an appreciation of the world and so if anything it's the trip affirmed certainly my commitment and the commitment of the district to maintain this very special relationship this is the last year was the 15th year of the students coming here and we have students going there we got an opportunity to experience something with our students maybe a little bit different we spent a half day in three different schools which was terrific I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second but we also got to see some of the shrines and understand the importance of shrines and just all of the customs and rituals that are part of every Japanese family so when you go to schools you know some things are universally the same and that's children particularly at the elementary they're just so enthusiastic and so happy to see you it was just wonderful their schools physically are different than ours they're more of a California style where you have a building and then a walkway and then another building and it works because their weather isn't quite as extreme as ours for as long as ours is I will say it was quite warm there it was in the 80s all the time and when our students go in July it's often in the 90s and their students are in school so we go in July because of their summer session they divide the year into trimesters so there are a lot of similarities just on people to people level another big similarity is their junior high band is excellent and so I know when they come here they see our middle school band which is excellent and so there's something that's very similar I will say one difference between their band and ours is that there's more girls in the Japanese band really we were spellbound by their performances but there are differences too and one is they wear uniforms and I saw this in Kyoto and Tokyo too it's the same uniform it's navy blue for the girls skirts and for the boys pants or sometimes dark gray and white shirts and they all wear the same thing which in that kind of situation is you know the teachers said they loved to have uniforms because there was no differentiation about the differences in economic background another big difference is they stay in their classroom and teachers move they eat in their classroom so the food is delivered to the classroom and we went down to the kitchen and I actually have a picture that's really I probably should have put a slideshow together for you but they look like they're in hazmat suits with gloves and masks and everything is in white and they deliver the food to the classrooms and the kids pass out the food and there is a rule that you have to eat everything and you don't return your platter without everything eaten and one of the big this was actually a huge initiative in the town this year from the mayor that he wanted to have uniform hot lunches for all kids though interesting we were asking some of the students because we ate with them whether they liked that because they used to bring lunch from home and some of them admitted they liked having their lunch from home or they liked to have uniform lunch every day but again I was impressed at how nutritious it was and how large it was they did not by the way have much more time to eat than we have and they go out for recess another difference is that kids stay after school for much longer day they don't leave until 4.30 5.00 most of them are playing some kind of a sport or engaged in some kind of physical activity or some type of club or even a learning opportunity for one of the learning opportunities very popular at the middle school level they call it junior high is learning the formal tea process I didn't however see any young boys learning it girls learning it but they have things like that and they wanted to show us one of the other um one of the other activities they had was archery and they had hopefully there's no pictures of Adam and I oh going to see that one I could barely pull the bow back the bow was as big as I was and they do that they put on a demonstration and they were quite good there was a wonderful relationship between teachers and students there you could see that and certainly all the administrators I met were all very focused the other thing they do do is they have a lot of change administrator doesn't stay in a school more than two years three years maybe and they're just rotating people around all the time they're signed by the prefecture yeah but on the prefecture they get moved anywhere else in Kyoto prefecture they don't belong to the city especially the well the high school for sure high school yeah but it was it was wonderful we had a formal dinner just like we've had a formal dinner here and the US council for the Osaka Kyoto prefecture came with a couple of their staff people they actually have hired staff people on the consulate to manage sister cities because there are a lot of US or for that matter European South Australian sister city arrangements in Japan so the fact that there's so many they hired somebody to manage this who came to the dinner well for example Boston sister cities Kyoto now Boston has 10 sister cities we don't we have one two we have two what's the other one oh that's right Tiosente right that's right absolutely right Tiosente we have of course I know that so anyway if you want to go the students go in July and I know you would be certainly welcome to join the group I don't think we will have another exchange like this for five years but already people talking about the 40th and the last time we went as a delegation was at the 25th so there was some plans around the 30th but it didn't quite happen so happy to talk more about it another time if you'd like it was wonderful we can recommend Sinoe's hotel and Sinoe's hotel yes Sinoe is the person who organizes the students coming here she's really the program organizer and by the way while we were there they were doing the interviewing they had a lot of applications and they had 57 finalists and they narrowed it down to 20 and so for the next six months they will be preparing they will be taking extra English classes learning their history of the United States a little bit more one of the things that actually surprised me when they come you've seen them dance and I thought wow they do this choreography in six months well it turns out it's not exactly the case when we went to the junior high they did a performance for us in which the entire school over 400 there were like 400 kids in the gym did the dance so this is actually part of their arts program so they and the songs that kids sing they sang those songs so they don't there's six months preparations less about that part of it as it is about learning about the United States that's it all right consent agenda all items listed are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event each item will be considered in its normal sequence can you pull the trips well we already voted one of the trips well whichever one you didn't vote sure and we're not doing the minutes Kevin no so it's just the warrant approval of warrant, warrant number two thousand two zero zero six six dated ten one two thousand nineteen amount three eight three seven five two dot six nine so moved second just a correction on the warrant I thought it was dated ten fifteen and this is ten one this is the one we're signed last time got it thank you all those in favor any opposed abstentions unanimous so the South Africa trip yeah I just I find it really problematic that we support trips that cost four thousand one hundred and fifty dollars they're advertised at school there are flyers there are information nights that happen in our schools I can tell you there is no way that any of my children would ever be able to attend that kind of a trip and I don't know that that's necessarily the litmus test for whether or not we run them but I know if my kids can't go a lot a lot of kids also can't go and I'm just I'm uncomfortable with the idea that we send Arlington public school employees as chaperones who go and to me it makes it feel you know access to teachers and staff is one of the most important things for students and you know I don't think that there's a lack of that I think that the vast vast majority of faculty and staff spend an inordinate time with our kids but this to me feels kind of like pay to play and so I don't like it and so I'm going to vote against this one so I wanted to pull it off thanks alright any other discussion all those in favor yes any any opposition okay Mr. Heyner and Ms. Morgan any abstentions okay you got all that Karen discussion of district goals and evidence evidence and superintendent evaluation process so time to evaluate superintendent we actually no longer have the schedule in our policy but following the old schedule we're supposed to be doing it for the next for the evaluation forms to be returned at the next meeting the second meeting in October with the old policy but we can push that a little bit it's not a big deal but end of the month is really like the goal we don't have the forms yet right no we don't have the forms yet we don't have the evidence yet we don't have the evidence yet we don't have the evidence yet I just wanted to discuss when we want to get items how we want to get items Karen is asking about I guess Rod's assistant is doing it this year but she's asking about whether we want everything in novice or if I suggested if something is huge maybe we can just have a paper copy but it's not clear what the evidence is yet so can I speak so the evidence we have collected they're in files some of it was submitted electronically however you want it to be submitted what's convenient for you that's what we'll do I personally would like it electronically so if I want to refer to a piece in the evaluation I can cut and paste it as opposed to it would be efficient for me I don't know how much extra work that is for you folks if it's a lot of work I can do the typing but if it can be provided electronically I would appreciate it anybody else I novice worked really well I thought 100-page document obviously would be annoying it's going to be probably more than that in total but you don't want any individual document to be that big it's going to be a large I don't want to all together yes hopefully they would be individual documents I don't want one file yes we have cover sheets and we'll put them in there by a content area I just need to know how you want it organized and I will make sure that it's organized that way it seems each year that we get more and more and more where we were hoping to get at least I was hoping to get specifics based on the goals that we were discussing and things of that nature I just find I'll take whatever it is and go through it there are only certain goals that are evaluating you on right well I think this is something that we need to take another look at and I would suggest having some kind of retreat before we begin the next goal process and we can you know certainly talk about it refine what we're doing I think it's a good time I think it's a bit of an appropriate thing to do alright any other so as far as timing you extended the time for us to turn it into you do we have a specific date of when we're going to do well I wanted to find out when materials will be available when the narrative will be available certainly probably the weekend after next I mean the following week early part of the week I can get to it I haven't done much on it yet we're working on Karen and I were working on what all the different things we want to put into NOVA so that you have that information and the information that Dr. McNeil is talking about is just all of the evidence from the curriculum leaders of the work that they have done but there are more than just that particular goal there are all the other goals that we have but for example one of the district goals had to do with hiring practices and diversity reports I mean that report you saw you had tonight that will be something that can be uploaded many of these things you've already heard about seeing over the course of the year and this is an opportunity to have it all put back together again last year we made a real effort to make sure the people were in to talk to you so you could see what they were doing and so you're getting much sort of some reason of all that we have two meetings dedicated to the budget in December we have two meetings scheduled back to back in November so correctly if I'm wrong it's going to be have to be one of those two meetings in November right yes to do it you'll talk to Karen and you'll give us a deadline so it sounds like maybe that Dr. Buddy can get us the narrative which I think I'd like to see first before delving into things by it looks like the early part of the week of the 21st that sounds like a good timing and then we could maybe get things to you like by the 31st I'm just throwing at random dates to be discussed on the 14th or maybe the first is to discussed on the 14th if we're not getting the documents until the 31st we have to put out I mean 31st maybe you can give us more time but we would get you our comments or by by Monday the 4th if we're not actually reporting on the evaluation until the 14th then it can be into November 5th or something for the deadline so that's that seems like a good timing so I just want to be clear the way that the documents will be submitted will be by the district goals from last year and they will be have individual folders and they will be labeled by content they have evidence cover sheet that describes the actions to rationale and the description of the evidence that will be uploaded into Novus and that's the way you would like to have it fine with me is that correct it's always awkward because our district goals don't really work as well with the evaluation thing but it sounds good just pull this on and they're going to be as Dr. Bodie alluded to they're basically supporting the presentation that the curriculum leaders came and gave last spring so those were connected to the district goals it's not fair to you anything else no policy so committee liaison reports budget so we had our meeting last week unfortunately Mr. Mason was ill and Dr. Bodie was in Japan so it was just us but we did discuss the budget calendar of which you have a draft version in your package here and we'll approve that next week but that's just if anyone notices anything tell me we also discussed we're going to be working on the format and timing of the currently monthly budget reporting we think it can be somewhat less frequent and we'll be meeting again in the next couple weeks and then I need I realized something when I was sitting here that we had talked at our last meeting about enrollment and when I talked to Mr. Mason because after our meeting because he wasn't able to attend I talked to him and he mentioned that the consultant that he was looking into has a deadline of October 20th to get into this cycle and I'm concerned that our next meeting isn't for two weeks and if we need to have budget for hiring the consultant it seems like we need to do it now and I know we don't have any information I mean he was going back to them and getting a new estimate and I don't know what that was but I'm just wondering what do we want to do do we want to try and guess and give the superintendent approval to spend a certain amount do we need to wait do we want to beg them to give us five days and I just don't know unless it requires a budget transfer it's within the administration authority to contract for that and we usually don't even approach budget transfers until much later in the year yeah what he's going back is that they gave an estimate of a amount for five years and I said we just need to have we'll do a one year which is 12,500 now whether that's going to change or not I don't know we want to have a forecast and we can do later on see how the forecast matches to actuals but I don't think that we need to have a re-forecast every year for five years and that's what my understanding was what the proposal was so that's what he's going back to talk about okay alright policies and procedures we have a doodle out we're going to schedule a meeting right CIAA on October 24th at 545 for our school committee meeting community relations we met briefly to interview some candidates for school community representation for TAC we have a candidate to bring to the committee but timing being where it was we have to wait till next time hopefully we can prove that oh and then also we are have a doodle out for a meeting on after school issues where we are continuing to grapple with issues both big and small in our district facilities nothing to report services building committee covered calendar committee administration is sending out a doodle soon alright election modernization committee oh no we haven't met since we last we have a meeting coming up superintendent we also have the doodle out okay any liaison reports go ahead so I went to visit Stratton Stratton's my sort of liaison relationship and had a great conversation with the PTO there they echoed Ms. Markins concern about the way that classroom data is presented that it's sort of because it's such a large SLC program it looks like they have smaller classrooms than they really do so that was actually common concern among people at the PTO other things were you know kindergarten cutoff time questions about the high school library library books or books for new teachers they felt that there was a need for more readers so those were the things we just discussed great just an update from the AEF they'll be announcing an additional funding of the SEL grant social emotional learning grant but one thing I was excited about was that Sarah Bird did attend our meeting and talked about doing a parent university program in the spring or in March so that would be something very exciting in addition to all the community forums we talked about like a day long parent university that other towns have had on everything no on social emotional learning type type of stuff any other leads on announcements you don't have any announcements Bill 9 to 9 it's after 9.38 it's all announcements future agenda items great you do not have an executive session motion to adjourn all those in favor aye adjourned