 Good evening. Today is June 12th, 2014. It's the Allington School Committee. We're going to do things a little bit out of order. I'm going to invite the superintendent, Kathleen Bode, and Chief Ryan to come forward. They're going to give us an update on what's happened in the past week. I don't usually get to sit here. This evening I want to give you a brief update on the Stratton situation last week. Not that you're not aware of that. I just want to go over just the overview of the main facts of the situation. And the Chief, Chief Ryan, will also talk about a couple of decisions that the police department made and then open it up for any questions that you might have. So last Wednesday, June 4th, there was a very unsettling incident at Stratton after school between a parent who was very angry and Principal Hannah. During the incident, the parent removed his Massachusetts license to carry firearms from his wallet and made references to owning and carrying firearms. At no time, however, was a threat implied either implicitly or explicitly made about the school, faculty, or students. Sometime after that evening, Mr. Hannah contacted me, our school resource officer, and our court liaison, and to discuss the situation. The next day, the police, this matter was referred to the police and the police met with the parent. A decision was made to issue the parent a no trespassing order until July 1. Everything that was done in response to this incident was done to protect the safety of our students, faculty, and staff. And we did not believe then or now that there was a threat to the safety of any of them. Sometime Thursday evening, a person in the Stratton community sent to the advocate a link to the parent's rap video and blog, which became known to all media outlets late on Friday afternoon. At this point, there was the next part of this happened Friday morning or Friday sometime during the day. And I'll ask Chief Ryan if he could just speak a little bit to what the decision was on the police's part in response to this. Thank you, Dr. Bode. And I should point out that I'm here with our school resource officer, Steve Porchella, as well. And so, Friday, we made some decisions relative to this individual and his authority to have a license to carry firearms. By way of background on the Massachusetts law, there's an element of the statute that gives the police chief some discretion. And it's in the suitability section. And we decided that based on what we learned about what had occurred at Stratton, as well as some of the other information that had been made available to us about the conduct of this individual, that I felt at that point that he was not a suitable person to possess a firearm. So we promptly relieved him of his license to carry a firearm as well as the firearm that he had in his custody. A criticism of the school department is that the parents found out about the events through the media, which we agree is a valid criticism and should not have happened. The steps that we're going to take so that this lapse will not occur again is that we'll be reviewing our protocols about when parents should be contacted about events in schools as well as our contact protocols in central office. A complicating factor on that Friday was that I was out of state. The assistant superintendent was in panel for second day and jury duty, so there was no one in central office to respond to the media. And so we're going to have to have a little bit deeper contact protocols in central office for events that hopefully will never happen that had those kind of circumstances. So primarily those are sort of the facts of the situation. I think that in terms of the operational part of it and from the point the incident happened until what happened on Thursday evening it was handled appropriately. One of the, even though I'm saying we're going to be reviewing and we are going to be reviewing our protocols, parent notification is a very complicated thing because it involves issues of privacy and appropriateness and those are all become judgment issues. But an incident like this is a good time to reflect again, which we will be doing on when in what circumstances should we send notices home about any kind of activity in the schools that would be of cause for concern. Any committee have anything they would like to ask either of these individuals this time? If I understand correctly, the decision about whether it was a threat or not a threat, the initial decision was with Mr. Hannah talking with you and then deciding that it merited talking to the police, not not saying it was a threat, but can you not hear me? I would, every other word I was getting, I'll try again. I was asking about when decisions were made about it being a threat versus not a threat. And if I am understanding correctly, the initial decision was by Mr. Hannah talking with you and referring it to the police, not calling it a threat at that point, but feeling that it merited something action by the police or at least discussion with the police. And then after that, the next kind of level of decision was made by the police and the assessment of the threat was by the police. That's correct. That's correct. What transpired was totally inappropriate. As the chief has said, there are some things that you simply don't do. You don't yell fire in a theater. You don't yell bomb at an airport. And you certainly don't, you know, talk about having guns in a school, especially when you're angry. It was totally inappropriate. And because it was inappropriate, and we sort of in our society today have certain things that kick in when people make those kind of comments. This is what happened. It meant needed to be referred to the police, which it was that evening. Mr. Hannah spoke with our school resource officer. And then there was contact with the rest of the with the chief as well. Do you want to make any comments? No, I think, you know, that sums it up. We felt very strongly that, you know, I'd rather be criticized for burying on the side of caution for safety, which I welcome. And when we learned about the facts, we, we, as I said, we quickly ensured that this person didn't have access to his firearms anymore. We completed our investigation. And as you know, I put out a press release on losing track. It was a Friday that I put out a press release that we had sought criminal complaints for the, for a criminal threat. And, and there are, there are valid reasons why we feel strongly that this matter belongs in the criminal justice system. And before a neutral magistrate who can make decisions moving forward, that are lawful and constitutional about whether this person has future criminal complaints against him or not. Yeah, just to clarify, I wasn't trying to question your judgment. It was just there has been concerns that the schools didn't appropriately assess the threat. And I was trying to point out that we were going by the threat assessment of the police that and, and that's going by the threat assessment of the police. Okay, thank you. Also, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. This time, I will go back to the I would ask that we have a moment of silence for Mary Ronan, a member of the town finance committee. John Greeley, who is the lead dispatcher for the town of Allington police and fire departments, Mary ice kid Moore, mother of former school principal Charles kid more and Margaret Driscoll, mother of Dr Eileen Woods, darling principal who all passed away in the past week or so moment of silence please. Thank you. Today we had staff recognition day. And I had the honor of going around to all the schools and passing out flowers to teachers who have been in service to the district from ranging from 20 to 40 years. And it was really a pleasure. I had three very proud principles who insisted I take a tour of their schools, which I truly enjoyed. I got to see things that I haven't seen in a long time. My first time through the new pier school, and it's almost 11 years old. So that was my first time in there. It was really wonderful. This afternoon, we had a continued staff recognition again for those teachers that have been in service, but new teachers who have just reached professional teaching status, which is a milestone in education. And to those staff members who have made a decision to retire, and they're all going to be solely missed in this part. And I would like on behalf of the committee to thank them all for their service to the town and to the children. At this moment seems tonight, I'm going to have everything on my plate. We have some new art in the room. We're going to begin right over here. It's a display that was made after completing a study of Laura Numeroff. If you give a pig a party, we decorated balloons and ice cream cones. The balloons were created with watercolors and the ice cream cones were created with puff paint. And oh, excuse me, thank you. These are all artwork from our preschool. Normally I would have put this off until September, but they're our most important constituent constituents. They're going to be with us for the longest. Moving right down on the line here, we have mouse shapes. They read about mouse shapes. Fred Martin and Violet are on the run from the cat and hide in a pile of shapes. When the cat is gone, they begin to build things with shapes. The mouse pointed out differences with shapes and described attributes of each shape. To the back of the room, preschool completed an author study of Eric Carl. One of the most popular books was Very Busy Spider. As a follow up of activity, children constructed their own spiders with pre-cut materials. You'll notice that only one spider has eight legs. They all have two eyes. Clearly the goal of the activity is fun. Practice with glue and paper, participation in group activity. Moving over here, Miss Amy's classroom integrated preschool. We studied the ocean and read commotion in the ocean by Giles Andre. We followed up by doing an art activity where we created three different sea creatures, crabs, fish, and octopus. The activity was differentiated so that the children could complete parts of the activity independently. And our last piece right over here, the children in the preschool five used red, white, and blue paint to make beautiful July 4 prints. They used finger paint, shape stamps, textured rollers, and glitter created this wonderful summer fun pictures. I think they're exciting. They've added a lot to this room. Right now I would like to recognize our AEA president, Linda Hansen, who has joined us here. As the chairman of the school committee, I take this prerogative at this time to commend to the community, to the board, and to our superintendent, William McCarthy, the high school vice principal for all his work, especially during the scholarship night and graduation. I think a lot of people don't see Bill McCarthy, but he is a solid bulwark to our building. Okay, at this time, we're going to have public participation. But before we start, I'd like to just put a slight caveat. We've had two meetings at the Stratton school. Several speakers are going to talk some possibly from Stratton, other people are going to talk in other areas. So let's just go with that. The first person, the speaking is going to be limited to three minutes. Just let you know up ahead of time. Jane Morgan, please. Hello, my name is Jane Morgan. I'm a parent of a Stratton first grader. And then I have identical twin sons who are going to be kindergartners at Stratton in September. And then I have number four who is home with me. And he's only one. So I'm going to be at this for quite some time. And I was planning on coming here tonight to speak to all of you about kindergarten at Stratton this afternoon. And we got an email from Dr. Bodie this afternoon saying that there would indeed be three kindergarten classes at Stratton next year. So I didn't need to come to talk to you about that. It was already on the calendar at home that my husband was going to put all four kids to bed. So I couldn't I had to take the opportunity to come and say something because getting out of that is a rare occurrence. Anyway, I'm here. I just on behalf of myself and the rest of the parents who have been asking a lot of questions about this. I know you've heard a lot from us. We have been really the response has been very candid, very transparent, very timely, and we really have appreciated that. I understand that this time it looks like the numbers worked out for us, which is great. That doesn't always happen. But we are very grateful to have heard about it in June, as opposed to in August, so that we can work, you know, to get our kids ready for kindergarten. And my kids need they have a lot of things they need to learn before September. So we have a lot of work to do. So we really appreciate it. And so just wanted to thank you all for your time. We heard back from so many of you and are just are grateful that we really felt like we were heard and we understand, you know, the way that it worked out. And you know, we're pleased that it worked out the way we wanted it to. But we felt very much like we were listened to throughout the process. So anyway, thank you. Enjoy the night. I recommend Trist. Jacqueline Gagan. I apologize if I mispronounce it. I am Jacqueline Gagan, parent of a student at Stratton and Madison. I am also a teacher and academic administrator. As both a teacher and academic administrator, I am utterly appalled at the actions and more importantly, the inactions of the leadership of Arlington Public Schools the past week. I have already sent my longer statement to the school committee. And I'm a co signer on a letter that was published today in the Arlington advocates. I am here tonight again, to urge the school committee to undertake an independent external review of Arlington Public School leadership. Thank you for your consideration and your service to the community. Thank you. Naomi Alperin. I apologize. I'm Naomi Alperin. I'm in the sixth grade at Odyssey Middle School. And my cluster got to pilot the park test. And we don't think that it should be used next year. First, the computer glitches a few times throughout the test. And at times, I was unable to type in my answers or use the calculator they provided. This was very distracting. Second, we all thought that the questions weren't straightforward enough. The format was very tricky and how they asked the questions. I'm a good student. I like being challenged, but I really don't think that it was challenging kids in the way that they were probably hoping they would. A lot of my fellow students describe their experience as frustrating, aggravating and annoying. And I know that the park is all about thinking and being challenged. But that doesn't mean that I should be spending several minutes trying to figure out what the directions are. And to me, that's not fair. We also came across some questions about material that was never taught to us or on the curriculum. And that feels very unfair. And a lot of my classmates and I think it's extremely hard to concentrate on the computer screen for that long without your eyes hurting or getting bored. Whereas for MCAS, your flipping page is constantly to keep you alert. And overall, I know the park test probably has some good things that I'm not aware of. But being a student having to take the test, these are the things I noticed and I would rather take the MCAS next year. And I made and 50 students agreed and I made a petition. So Karen, right over there. She'll make sure we all get a copy of it. Thank you very, very much. Thank you so much. Excuse me, Naomi. Can we ask that you forward, Ms. Fitzgerald, a copy of your statement too? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent job. Rebecca Steinitz, please. So I do know Naomi and I know that that's her only copy. So if once you make copies, if you could get it back, that would be great. But she's not here for, I promise you, I did not have anything to do with that. So and Bill, I might go like seconds over three minutes, but I've tried so hard to go. So I'm here tonight as an Arlington parent and as an educator who supports the Common Core, which I see improving student learning and understanding both in the urban schools where I work and in Arlington. That said, I am here this evening to urge you to stick with the MCAS next year, rather than voluntarily adopting the park tests. I have four reasons for my position. First, I have seen little evidence that the park tests are effective assessments and the park consortium will not release any data anytime soon to help me out. From looking closely at the practice tests and I need to say I'm talking about ELA, which is my field, I believe the questions are badly written and developmentally inappropriate, as I've said elsewhere and I think many of you have read what else I've written about this. I also believe that the tests do not align to the standards, at least in my area of expertise writing, where the test doesn't address four out of 10 standards. While some say the tests will get better, at this point that's speculation and I have no interest in my child serving as a testing guinea pig. Second, moving to the park test will more than double the time most of our children spend testing in ELA and math. The MCAS usually takes four days, two for reading in March and two for math in May, although in fourth, seventh, and tenth grade there's an extra day for the long composition. Park involves nine days of testing, 11, pardon me, five for performance tasks in ELA and math in March and April and four more multiple choice in May. That's five extra days of testing and five fewer days of instruction. That's third graders testing for nine days and I think most of us here have had third graders and know what that means. We will have to do this if Massachusetts adopts park down the line, but why do it before we have to? Third, Massachusetts will not decide whether to adopt park until fall 2015. So if we shift now we may end up subjecting our teachers and students to multiple testing regimes. And I need to point out here that the Department of Education is making a highly biased and even unethical push for park. They have offered an enormous bribe telling districts that their test scores will be, quote, held harmless if they choose park. This will make it very hard for districts with schools that are at risk not to choose park, which come fall 2015 will contribute to the impression that park is inevitable, which I think is what the department wants. Why is this unethical? Because Commissioner Mitchell Chester is the chair of Park, which is a significant conflict of interest and that's not my original point. What does it mean for Arlington? I think it means nothing. Our schools are not at risk and we don't need to succumb to this bribe. Finally, it is not an overstatement to say that park is a sinking ship. The consortium started out in 2010 with 23 states in the District of Columbia. With Arizona's withdrawal last week, 12 states and the district remain. Do we really want to be among the last survivors on that ship? One argument I've heard from moving to park sooner is that because it is computer based, it will reduce administrative burdens, shuffling paper, getting data, etc. That's reasonable and there's no question that Massachusetts should and will move toward online testing, but is that a good enough reason to adopt a problematic test? The other argument I can come up with is that adopting the test early will give our students a chance to practice the tests in case Massachusetts adopts park in 2015. But if we have confidence in our Arlington teachers, which I do, we can be confident that our students will be prepared for whatever tests they encounter and I am. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the time. Ms. Hansen. Hi, good evening everybody. Linda Hansen, president of the Arlington Education Association and I attended a policies and procedures meeting earlier this week on this topic of park versus MCAS and I think what interests me about the topic really is this whole issue of standardized testing in general, so that's what I'm going to be addressing this evening. And so standardized testing in general and the role it plays in the educational life of students in general, but more specifically in Arlington. So I began teaching in the late 80s before state standards and before state mandated standardized tests. I thought the advent of the state curriculum was a great idea, put the best minds together and develop a comprehensive curriculum. Why should 350 school districts expend a huge amount of time and money developing their own district curricula? When the MCAS test came along a few years later it was a quite a shock to educators who were not used to being held accountable for a test they didn't write and would not be scoring. It was also a big shift because for the first time educators were being held accountable in a very public way for test results the era of high stakes tests had begun. While it took a while for the test makers to get the reading levels, question types and scoring issues sorted out 20 years later I think most educators feel like the MCAS is a pretty fair test and it gives us a different kind of information than we get with our teacher developed common assessments. I clearly remember though when the state reduced the number of testing sessions in both reading and math from three down to two. Reducing the testing load by a third helped a lot. It was that much less disruptive to the overall school schedule and took that much less time out of the school day and year to administer and we still got the information we needed. From the outside you might think about the testing load of one grade of students be it two days or three days but from the inside of a school where multiple grades are tested it looks very different. It's not just the time to get all the kids to the bathroom, read the test administration manual and proctor the test. It's also the time to rearrange the desks in the classroom, the disruption of pulling teaching assistants, reading teachers, and special educators away from their regular schedule to provide the individualized and small group accommodations that many students require. This disruption happens for every grade that is tested so currently for example at an elementary school the two days for reading and two days for math at each grade level add up to 12 days of disruption for grades three four and five so that many days of disruption for the school climate and schedule with the addition of a long comp day for grade four and two science and engineering testing days for grade five. With the new wave of standards we're experiencing a greatly increased interest on the part of the state for additional standardized testing not only in the form of the park assessment for grades three to eleven but also for students in the kindergarten through second grades. This week kindergarten teachers are undergoing training to learn about a new state mandated assessment called the teaching stand strategies gold assessment system. Altogether there are nine areas of data collection and a combined 38 indicators that will eventually need to be documented for each child. We're starting small this year I believe only two of these areas are going to be in play this year but when you look at the whole picture it's an awful lot of work. The state has taken a cue from the federal department of education and decided to use the power of the purse in this case our state full day kindergarten grant allocation of two hundred thirty eight thousand dollars in Arlington to force districts to adopt this new system which leads me to my final point this evening. I started out by stating that I believe in the need for a statewide assessment to gauge how well our students are doing compared to a statewide sample but I also believe that we should constantly strive to streamline the need to rearrange classrooms pull out teachers from their normal roles and disrupt the learning process. Testing is not teaching. I welcome this conversation because I think we need to have an analytical stance vis-a-vis any mandate that takes up teacher and student time. Is it worth the trade-off? In time our most precious resource does it give us information we don't otherwise have? Is this the only or best way to get this data? I will leave you with a final thought Finland is no slouch when it comes to their relative placement on international benchmark assessments often coming in at the head of the class. Do you know how many standardized assessments they have? Anybody? One. Exactly one. During the twelve years of public education students are primarily assessed by teacher teacher made tests that vary from one school to another. They use a national level sample based student assessment similar to the national assessment of education process the NAEP that have no stakes for students, teachers or schools as the main means to inform policymakers and the public on Finland's school system and how the school system is performing. The only standardized external test is the national matriculation examination. A high stakes exam that determines college readiness and that all students are required to pass in order to graduate high school and enter university. Here are some sample essay topics from this final exam. Media is competing for audiences. What are the consequences? Compare Chlamydia and Kondoloma. Glad I don't have to write on that one. Design a study to find out how personality affects individuals behavior on Facebook or other social media. Discuss the ethical considerations for that type of study. It's kind of fascinating. I'm not suggesting we adopt this system anytime soon but I am suggesting that it is vitally important that we maintain a critical stance in regards to the amount and types of assessments the state is requiring. Teachers in Arlington are excited about the common core but leery about the kind and number of new assessment demands let's proceed with caution. And I also want to say that Naomi is a great example though of opinion writing at its best petition writing about a cause you care about so that's the common core in action. Thank you. Ms. Newman and Ms. Feeney. Actually I'm not here to talk about anything that's technically on the agenda. If being staff appreciation week we are here to recognize Kathleen Lockelier's dedication as the special education chairperson and we are members of the parent advisory council of CPAC as it's called for the town and we just wanted to thank Kathleen in the district for all of your help helping to create effective policies for our special needs children and for working with families in the district. You have a very dedicated staff and you've been a great leader for them and we really do appreciate all of your work. Thank you. Well I'm really glad I came tonight. That ends our public participation right now we uh I invite uh Mr. Weathers to come forward uh to discuss uh the district determined measures and common assessments. You have to change your settings for the endurance I think in your display but in your settings it has you have to change it so the display is mirroring it's not had good luck with that let's just put it that way. We need you near a microphone we need you near a microphone. Okay thank you I uh welcome the opportunity to share some of the things we we do in our classes and whatever and um hopefully I'll have a few images up there shortly and so um I'll just I'll go quickly through the uh plan of what we've been doing for our DDMs in science. The our primary focus has been two areas one um has been to do pre and post tests on topical units uh by either semester or yearly basis and that's really just to kind of stay with the the concrete content program. Another focus has been uh the our alignment with the common core um in the sense that we want to really foster the reading and writing and interpretation and communication skills that are important for science. So those are the two primary areas but we really have um tried to try to explore out of the box as well and that's what I was going to show you a couple of things uh if we if it comes up and um again I apologize for the uh technical thing I I just assumed because I use my computer downstairs that it was plug and play but uh I don't use it up here very often. So um let me just go through some of the things in some of the things that we've done out of the box is um for example in our chemistry sections we we have instituted what's called a or the teachers have a chemical misconceptions inventory because in our common everyday lives we we have all these misconceptions all of us do and and they're really difficult to get rid of and that's what the research tells us and so we're really focusing on those and so um for example a question there would be you can imagine here instead of the looking at a photo on a powerpoint we have a tea kettle a glass tea kettle and it's boiling it's been boiling for a while you see the big bubbles emerging and so one of the one of the questions on the chemical inventory is is what's in those bubbles and and the multiple choice questions are a air oxygen gas a b oxygen gas and hydrogen gas c oxygen d water vapor and e heat and so what I'm going to ask you to just for 10 seconds is form your own answer consult with your neighbor this is what we do in our classes we we try to get the kids involved and and see if you agree with your neighbors answer i'm not going to ask you what your answer is i'm just going to ask you if you agree with your neighbor air oxygen and hydrogen oxygen water vapor and heat okay so here's a show of hands if you agree with your neighbor put your hands up okay so there's there's some disagreement and um well it ends up that the correct answer is water vapor that's what's in okay so we would we would tease this out a little bit more in a class by having the kids discuss what they why they thought what they thought and it couldn't be he pardon it couldn't be heat couldn't be heat no couldn't be heat so so well when when um we we get the kids we get the kids result but we had a discussion about heat i want to tell you show our work when we get the kids results we see that there are um some really um different answers that they all have for example the most common answer there for the kids is b which is oxygen and hydrogen and it isn't it's water vapor and i i'm sorry for the trouble karen um and and what we see then is like for example b has a 40 percent 43 percent uh choice rate whereas d has a 32 percent choice rate to correct the answer in the beginning okay and then we test again after the unit where the kids would have learned that information and lo and behold all of a sudden d comes up 85 percent of the time but we test again at the end of the year and we find that it drops okay that's that persistence of miss uh miss the um misconceptions okay so we're focusing on that kind of growth the uh there i'm sorry great so if you'll just forward ahead to there's there are the bubbles there are the choices one more at oh i'm sorry one back oh i'm sorry i i hid one slide so that it wouldn't i have it open here but so you can just you can leave it there we have it here thank you very much so so we're focusing on the growth of dispelling these misconceptions so that's a little bit out of the box um and then in another uh area we are uh some of our biology teachers started a uh an activity called journal club where they where they it's not really a club it's part of their classroom activities and they they um uh they they have the kids read scientific articles starting in fall and then they have them read more you know and more thoroughly and they tease them apart in class what did the what did the author mean by this statement and and they and they work with that then uh at the end of the year what they're what they're asked to do is to pick a topic find three original research articles on that topic and then do a meta analysis of all those three and then present it so they have to they have to start to understand the language they have to um they have to be able to talk about it and articulate about it and they have to start start to be able to present to other people about it so we're looking at the growth of that we um it culminates in this final project called the biology symposium which just happened last week and this is a kind of a picture of it from afar because the these there's a close-up picture on the bottom and a distant picture although we really filled up the whole red gym because all of the biology students do this every level at every academic level and and so the kids have to uh to learn about the reading and writing and that's one of the goals of this project so we're we're measuring their growth on this on a rubric but we we're still teasing out that rubric we're not totally satisfied with it so we're we have a lot of anecdotal information if i had been able to use my computer i have a little quick 60 second video of kids and their attestation about what they learned about the language of science and it's really amazing to hear them saying that it was like a foreign language they really had to dig and dig and dig to learn how to do it so one of our district determined measures is dealing with that um another is um sorry i'm going between two different things here is a um in our ninth grade physical science we we give two of those uh content-based testing uh programs where we test the beginning of the year and then the end of the first semester beginning of the first semester in the end of the second semester in the end of the second semester basically mechanics and waves and so we're seeing how kids grow some of the teacher this is a measure of the growth this is the growth this is not the absolute score so this the numbers start around 78 percent which is really uh attesting to the great background that our ninth graders get in their middle school they already are quite familiar with some of those content areas but they yet they still make a pretty significant growth from that 78 percent up to you know another 30 percent higher or 30 something percent we're also teasing that information out i'm sorry um this is just a hand printed graph that a teacher made this is question by question on those tests so we can see the growth in each topical area a lot of color coding i i deliberately fusted so you couldn't see names and stuff like that but you can see there's a lot of color coding about which topical areas the kids grew in and which they didn't grow in which they need more growth in and so that is again a district determined measure for these teachers who are really kind of figuring out how to do it better and then one other oh let's see um some of these slides i added so i'm going to have to tell you about this next one um it's a it's a program called jog knock and we're using it in in our eighth seventh sixth seventh and eighth grade technology program it's a commercial program but what it allows students to do is is answer questions based on the topical areas and they can go back to those questions they do it at home so it's sort of a little bit of a flipped classroom and the kids get color coded charts of how they've done and it goes kind of like from red to yellow to green and so you can see and the teacher can see how the progress of the student is moving along i just got an email from the jog knock uh producers and they have a global competition it's a friendly one and it includes uh 43 states and 11 countries 400 and something school districts and we ranked 29th out of those 431 so we're pretty happy what what the teachers get out of it is they see the growth of each individual kid and they see the growth of of the class as a whole or where the deficits are so we're looking into using that a little bit more rather than just in the technology area so um and then this final uh just an image here in in our eighth grade another example is claims evidence reasoning the writing of claim of the process of making a claim based on evidence and then explaining your reasoning about why you made that claim it's part of the again it's aligned with the common core and it's you can see here in the very beginning of the year the kids claims and reasoning as it was presented is short it's it's unclear and by the end they become articulate and and I have some videos of these things that are awesome these kids are talking for 10 minutes about what they saw in their experiment so we're measuring that growth on a rubric as well so um without all the fanfare those are the um um some of the examples and and from the materials that I sent you in the packet you know you can see what each grade level is doing all the way from from 5 through 12 and um so we're excited about the things we're doing we you know can do some of them better and some of them will probably shift a little bit and um it's all helping us to focus more and more on what the kids need so I don't know if you have any questions for me I'm happy to answer ask or answer anything anyone from the committee yeah um so we've been talking already we'll be talking more mcast park common core maybe you can give us a little bit of how science fits into that because I know that uh science is coming a little later yeah the the way the states and the the federal activities going the common core in ELA and math were developed earlier and and um so there was this focus on that which is certainly important and and we we want to do our part in terms of uh helping the kids to learn about the reading and writing of science as well but but now we have uh state frameworks they came out they're only a draft but they are assuring us that they're only they're not approving them because there's so much on people's plates they want to just wait a little bit but they said it's really going to the draft is going to be what we end up with in a year or two so uh we have we have stuff to rely on now I I'm eager to focus on this we have a lot of elementary teachers that have so many things on their plates with you know you can imagine with one elementary teacher having common core ELA and math and now all of a sudden new set of science standards on their plate so uh we we'd really like to kind of get in motion to to um to focus on that and how the all those three things come together how how uh reading and writing can be done in science how how the two or three things can all overlap um we probably need some help in that because the um uh we focus so much on math and ELA that we don't have the support at the elementary school right now uh there are seven buildings and there are teachers that need to see examples and be worked with in terms of how how um how to incorporate reading and writing into science and overlap some of those those um tasks that they have to do so uh and maybe in in fall when the science um frameworks are you know we have even more time to talk about them stuff like i could uh i'd love to come and show you in a 10 or 15 minute thing what they're all about what the new standards are so that would be great thank you okay so any other questions yes this is a follow-up to a question i asked last week these are the d dms are you are there common assessments that that are yes these are these are all common as well so we're saying yeah other right other than a couple of little glitches that we had where there were some part-time people that couldn't be here at the right time but 99 percent of the time these are all like for all of our ninth grade all of the teachers teaching ninth grade are doing these same common assessments and they are also the d dms so you're using common assessments and d dms they mean the same interchangeably for the most part yes okay i think it's uh it's on our part it's it's an efficiency move uh there's there's so many things on people's plates that if we don't uh make sure that we work smart on these things it we're gonna we're gonna over burden the teachers and we're not gonna focus as much let me do do people um do people feel the the staff your teaching staff they feel ownership over the d dms they feel that this is something that that's that they've had a they've had a role in developing or they feel this has been put upon them by a new evaluation system you know i i think i think that's an um an ongoing progression of their understanding of course they're a little nervous at first they're a little anxious about what is all this stuff coming up you know and and what do we do with it but uh we've given them license to you know to say you know think of something that's going to be valuable for the kids and that you could actually accomplish and uh so in that sense they've taken ownership of what they chose to do you know i didn't choose or in order the evaluation system choose the chemical inventory or the end of semester test for ninth grade or the claims evidence writing of the eighth grade those teachers taught that they bought into that and most of them now have said gee i want to do this even better next year so that's kind of an indication there's one of things i i've been kind of pushing for up here is that we we frame all of this all of the mandates in the state whatever they are d dms evaluations um as you know this is okay this is what the state of massachusetts wants us to do okay i get that but we need to we need to own it locally we need to make it our own and uh we we need to nuance it and modify it so that it works for arlington and our staff so and so i just want i'm just i'm not in the classroom every day i don't supervise you directly so but i just want that that's a sentiment that i have as one member of this body yeah i i appreciate that because i think if we don't if we don't let our teachers have some ownership of that they lose focus and and um and it's going to be an iterative thing and they're going to shift something and say you know we didn't do that as well as we could have let's try it a different way and and as long as they're buying into it uh and choosing to do those things i you know i think that'll come out as part of their passion for teaching which i see a lot of around thank you okay thank you very much okay thank you very much i'm sorry for the glitch i'm sorry karen uh we're now going to have a presentation on math uh christin silberman and carol and gaffey please let me just say oh go ahead i think we'll say and it's gonna say this right first and silberman and carol and gaffey are two of our math coaches the elementary level and um matt colman who is the director of math could not be here this evening so they are presenting the math overview for ddms and dds yes all right all right thank you all right so i'll try to be matt as best i can um so we're talking about the dds from grades one three twelve um so some things that we wanted to take note of um we tried to use the assessments that teachers were already using as dds um and when possible we automated it so in k one and two they're using the amc anywhere um where the teachers ask students questions and then they can put the students response directly into ipads and so that gives us reports um and they're using those assessments in grades one and two um and then in grade four we're we're doing the ddm um in a google form so again the teachers are getting those scores directly from the ipads we're trying to make it as simple as possible um and then we tried to be strategic too with the timing of them so this is a really small print but um here are different types of assessments the dds mostly are on demand um and performance based assessments um and the elementary ones are all constructed response um and some of the middle and high school ones are selected response so in grade one um in grades one through five we focused on the major cluster standards when picking the topics that the dds would be on from the common core so in grade one we're doing the hiding assessment where students need to um they need to know their combinations up to ten so what numbers add to five what numbers add to six what numbers add to seven all the way up through ten and so that's what the ddm is focused on so students are giving the hiding assessment in the fall and then again in the spring and we're looking for student growth over that time um originally first grade teachers were already giving this assessment in the spring so we've just added giving it in the fall so they can see student growth um in grade two they're also using an amc assessment that they were already using in the spring so again the second grade teachers are just adding the assessment in the fall um and the second grade assessment is about two-digit addition and subtraction so it's one on one with the teacher the teacher asks students some addition subtraction again the teacher can put those responses directly into the ipads and then it gives them nice reports makes everybody easier for everybody to see um in grade three these are uh this is an assessment that the grade three teachers wrote students look at a six by four array and determine how many boxes there are and then they're asked to write a an equation based on that I think so this is this what this is done one-on-one with the student it's also an interview um and then so these are the questions that the teacher asks and then this is what the student sees and then they're asked to write an equation so this is focusing on their understanding of multiplication so coming into third grade um we don't expect students to have a lot of multiplication and then hopefully by the end they do and this is the rubric um so we piloted in grades three four and five two ddms this year um which was a lot of work for a lot of people um and our hope then was that teachers could pick which one they liked better and so that's the process we've been going through this spring sort of which one they liked better um we didn't collect any of the data this year it really was just a pilot um in grade four this is another ddm that teachers wrote um and they're working on comparing fractions so students are given a couple different fractions I don't think I can click on the link but um to compare um in each set um we're expecting them to use a different strategy when comparing fractions so the first two fractions have a common denominator the second two fractions I think have common numerators and so it goes on it gets more increasingly difficult there's six different fractions that they have to compare it gets increasingly difficult as they go through and so teachers can see depending on how far um they're getting correct answers sort of where they are um on that we tried to make the ddms useful too so we're showing student growth but we also want it to be something that you know all fourth graders are working on and so the teacher can have data that she can use in her classroom um and the grade five ddm are fraction word problems um so they they're everything from addition subtraction to multiplication and division so we piloted actually eight fraction word problems which everybody said took way too long it was taking kids it was taking kids a long time and so the teachers did not like it so um we're next year the the fraction there will only be four and so we really picked the ones that teachers thought were most useful and what they were they were getting a lot out of I think there's something to add you can stop me um so that's grades one through five which I know the most about um in grades six through 12 they're using five to six questions on their um common assessments and I was looking at the grade seven so they've picked a couple of topics to focus on and they're giving a question on their beginning of year assessment on let's say adding mixed numbers and then something on their mid-year assessment and then comparing that way through the year um in grades six through 12 that's what they're doing I think that's it so I went through it really fast if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them anyone on the committee do any of these assessments come home for the children to work on at home or are they all administered in these ones are all administered in school I want to uh ask about the process of developing the dds yes and and then the process of kind of people uh modifying their practice and improving their practice with the results of the dds yes are you convened teachers by grade level yes in each school and across schools yes so all all seven elementary schools they'll get so tell me about the how does that work okay so we started this work last summer um and so over the summer it's hard to get people to come and talk about math but the teachers that did come sort of they were the ones that developed the dds as where the when the conversations began um and then over the school year when we were meeting we meet by grade level yeah let's say on a professional development day um those were times that we had further conversations about the dds some teachers um used the dds as data for their student growth goal in their evaluations this year um so even though it was a pilot they were already using the data um and i think those teachers found the dds the the most useful because it was changing their practice um and they were the also the ones i think that were able to talk about what changes would make it more effective and after you field test the dds do you modify them based on yeah so we changed the fifth grade one um and we were giving another one at fourth grade that the teachers didn't like because they didn't think it it really gave them a lot of data so we we have changed them um for next year um i believe at all except for grades one and two they were already giving the amc assessments all the other ones have been modified based on teacher response and let's say let's say a classroom in the fourth grade at one school is having success with the ddm students are getting at their advancing their scores are good um but in another classroom that isn't happening there's the teacher is i don't run an elementary school so i'm way out of my league here but uh is it possible for teachers to go and observe someone who's having success or do they do they talk or how does that what happens um like practice building after that luckily you have math coaches so that's where the math coach would step in solves the problem okay it does educate me on how that works it does i think being being in the schools and seeing those things happen um the math coaches meet weekly and so we have those conversations you know these this group of fourth graders at this school is really struggling with this concept are you seeing that in your schools too oh yes you know my fourth graders are struggling with that too or oh this teacher is doing this really great thing and then after having those conversations with us we're able to then ask that teacher will you come and present at this PD this professional development workshop and we've done that a couple times this year and teachers really like hearing from other teachers and I think having us in the buildings has allowed us to see the really great things that are already going on sort of spread them across the district because people don't having seven elementary schools people don't always know what is going on in each of those classrooms you track the ddm data separately we didn't track it this year because it was a pilot and we didn't want anybody to feel like we were looking at it or using it for any evaluation tools so we didn't track it this year but next year it will be tracked separately because they're they're separate assessments we're not giving them on the common assessment so we'll have a unit end of unit assessment that everybody will give and then the ddm's are separate from okay now my favorite question just to help me out do we do in math do we do ddm's and common assessments in the elementary schools we are okay we are cutting back on our common assessments we're trying to make them short snapshots and so next year the beginning of your assessment will have four questions on it for third fourth and fifth grade and so we we're trying to make things short we don't want kids sitting for long assessments and what we're realizing is as we're trying to sort of put all these things together in one place we're making assessments longer and longer which are less useful so we're trying to make them short snapshots so we really get down to what students understand what they don't use to be about 10 to 15 questions and we're really bearing it down okay and then you heard my whole thing about making teachers on it and all that stuff so is that that's a goal yes okay yeah what else are you gonna say right buddy yeah no no we don't want anybody on it okay did you uh i would just say that's been the reality for years okay all of the assessments that have been used in the at all levels are all teacher-created okay yeah okay great mr. family had already asked my good question i'm sorry i'll ask just a little one what does amc stand for i knew somebody was gonna ask me that and i really don't know do you remember i was like i should look that up before i go and i say it but i really math council i think isn't it is it it's but it's the kathy richardson it's a kathy richardson right um math curriculum that we use in the lower grades it's called amc but i can't remember what the amc stands for thank you here it's american math competitions but i don't think no that's not it yeah if you look it up with kathy richardson had a math concepts it might be math it's something math concepts yeah i can't remember what the a stands for that that doesn't go to make a break you i think that's what it is it's assessing math that's it that's the a great thank you just talk this one up thank you mr schlickman okay um i'm listening to this cold i haven't seen the assessments and part of the problem is i am an elementary person so uh to my ear listening to this it sounds like the ddms are narrow and computational would you explain that why they're not what do you mean by narrowing competition that you're really only taking a couple of very narrow items out of the common core that it's not i'm saying the thing that i'm saying looking at is for a ddm to be successful they need to be representative of the common core the curriculum of the grade and uh represent truly representative of student growth so that if you if you're using a ddm to measure growth from the beginning of the year the end of the year it by necessity has to represent a year's growth and so that it has to be a reliable and valid instrument to do that uh and the to my ear on the presentation you're talking about um things that sounded like relatively small elements of of a great level curriculum in of of a computational manner okay so that's that's what i'm hearing and i'm hoping that's not accurate and if in so that here's my invitation for an explanation uh of the depth richness and association of higher level thinking standards and the other things in the common core so i'll start with the grade one in particular so the in the grade one um hiding assessment amc six students are asked i would say there are probably about 20 possible questions that students can be asked so the teacher starts with a number of counters in front of her let's say five and she says i'm hiding i'm hiding some counters i'm showing you two how many am i hiding so students in grade one our expectation is that they're starting to learn the parts of the number so our goal by the end of first grade is is students know up to i would say three four five six and then ten is a number that we want them to know the parts of so they spend a lot of time in first grade working on this concept it sounds to us like adults that this is something really easy but they spend a lot of their time on that so the teacher will then move on and ask them if they're they're able to do all the parts of five she'll then go on and ask them the parts of six the parts of seven up to the point where they can't answer anymore so we're assessing basically what a child's we call it a working number so we identify what a child's working number is based on what number they can get up to knowing all the parts of and then the teacher then can use that data in in the classroom to inform her instruction she can make groups based on children's working numbers so this group may be they're all working with the number five this group's all working with the number six this group's all working with the number seven so having that data at the beginning of the year teachers can already differentiate their classrooms based on those working numbers and then students work all year to work up to a higher number so we're seeing the progress that they've made based on what their working number is at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year we do have kids that come in with working numbers at the beginning of the year first grade three and four and leave at the end of first grade with working numbers of eight and ten which is that's huge growth i mean students need to have a lot of experiences in that first grade to to make that kind of game so it's it does sound like parts of numbers i mean as an adult i think it it's it sounds like something that we expect kids to sort of memorize but this what we're really expecting them is to know the parts of the number you're decomposing the numbers so that as you're getting up into third grade uh can you give me a sense of exactly how the um ddm is representing the depth of the curriculum and right so in year's growth in third grade our our main goal in third grade really is to have kids understand multiplication so they come in from second grade they've done a little tiny work little bit of work with arrays in second grade but multiplication is the the major cluster in third grade that we're expecting kids to know so we start out by showing them the array what's the equation you can write and then the final question is can you write all can you draw all the other arrays with 24 boxes so we're looking for the three by eight the two the two by 12 all the all the other factor pairs basically with 24 so our expectation again at the beginning of the year is that kids may write four plus four plus four six times they might six plus six plus six four times and they may be able to draw one other array maybe two but definitely we wouldn't expect at the beginning of third grade for students to be able to draw all the other arrays with 24 at the end of third grade again the expectation is when they see an array after all this work that they've done all year they see an array and they immediately think of multiplication and hopefully they'll say six times four and four by six because they recognize that it is it is the turn around we call it the turn around fact and then they should then know also the other factor pairs of 24 and easily be able to draw the other rectangles with 24 okay and just my last question which is totally irrelevant to to what I just asked you were talking about making sure that the ddms that this year were not viewed as evaluative you did this as research this is a difficult concept I know that we've worked in unison low in a long time and it's taken a long time for everybody who feel comfortable with this is the culture exist in in our school department where whereas the coaches are really seen as a support stream rather than the evaluative stream which is coming out of the administration the principles is that do you find that a working relationship I think I think I talked about this last time I was here but I think in the beginning of the year it was difficult because I think we there's lots of changes everything sort of is changing at once we have a new evaluation system we have common core we have possible changes in testing I think everyone just is on edge I mean there's retail there's just a lot going on in the district and so I think at the beginning of the year it was scary for people they weren't sure why the coaches were there and they weren't sure how we could be used I think we are viewed extreme extremely differently now I think everyone has realized what can come from having somebody support you in your building and how great it is to be able to say hey you know I'm really struggling with this concept can you help me or can you help my kids and so I think now we've definitely seen a shift and I think I think having the data for the DDMs this year just would have compounded all of those other things that are going on so hopefully it'll be less scary going forward Tom Brady has a coach and I think that every teacher deserves a coach so you know it's something I think it's important and I'm glad you're doing this work thank you I just want to interject one thing that Kristen didn't touch on but if you caught it many many of these DDMs are done on a performance space assessment between the teacher and the student and therefore you get a view into the mathematical processes which is the other part that I think you're alluding to so by having a conversation with the student and having the student be able to have to talk through the mathematics as opposed to putting a compute you know strictly putting a computation on a piece of paper I think you get a view into that part of the yeah that was a very important nuance that I picked up and listening to it I'm glad you articulated it it almost sounds like you're doing fontis and penelope math almost like that yes good thank you mr. Pierce I just note in grade one description of assessment one-on-one interview with students how does class size in the grade one impact that ability of the teacher to do this and perform this the way she wants to it makes it difficult yeah it makes it difficult there are sweet spot number where teachers seemingly like to land I don't think there's a low end there's no low end no there's no floor okay one-on-one um so memorization versus visual explanation I noted when you were talking about the arrays that there was like another take on the the facts like you're not acting asking for strict memorization like some of us may have experienced but in the elementary levels we're talking about visual explanation of how they get there is that a common core element yes absolutely okay yes we're much more interested on having kids be able to use the really related facts to get to so I'm going to use five times five to help with five times seven absolutely and is it helpful for math coaches to be teachers as well and in your past lives where you are you teachers as well in my past life yes I was a teacher and I think it does I think it does help yes absolutely you're a teacher okay teacher okay thank you also thank you very much for taking the time and sharing all this information with us thank you very much this time uh here will give us an in-depth brief assessment on special education and her whole team and I would like to invite the entire special ed team to come forward one person missing your son I don't think Ian ever had she may have been just gone by that I don't know I don't know coaches are new where are we really in special education good evening I think that I've heard Bill say a brief short concise whatever about 22 times so we'll do the best we can we're just really giving a short survey of our work this year and kind of linking it to some other I've been here for three years this is going to be my last year in this position but linking it to some of the other initiatives you've heard about and just kind of you know really giving you some pictures of how things have turned out some news about some of the other things that you know a lot about so we'll get started and we have a presentation up here that will help us move towards if you see the big picture the presentation we're kind of heading to the top of that hill and we kind of do feel like we did climb a mountain during this period of time so it's a little hill it's not a mountain so on the fundamental principles I'm not going to read all of the items there you certainly can read them we did share them with you and folks at home can take a look at them as well a couple of things I'd talk about is something that's been really important for us is it and we'll talk about our the model that we have for our administration but trying to work with all of the town and trying not to respond just to the hot items that happened but to be able in a very you know formative way work with each of the schools in the district and that's I think with something we've been successful with probably one of the highlights on that slide is really thinking about a partnership with general education that's one of the lessons that we've learned from working with in special education is nothing works if we're not working together with general ed if general ed's working we're working better and vice versa the other thing I would say is that we listed on here is compliance with regulations and procedures becoming routine and timely so I have something really good and kind of big to report about that when I came here three years ago we were all spending a lot of that time on our on a report that came from the state that highlighted all of the issues that we had and we spent a lot of the first year responding to that we just had our revisit this year this spring and while the report isn't out and we're all kind of really waiting for it I've tried to move it along but that didn't happen we got excellent feedback from the state um they really you know gave us a real pep talk to say that we've really been working at systemic issues what was clear to them and they have a very fascinating process but what was clear to them was that we were working really on the things that really matter um they look at precise data points and put it together so I'm looking forward to a really good report that really makes all of us feel better about the state of special education in regard to compliance and what that's really helped us do is move on to other issues um we have it more ingrained it's more part of what we do everybody's aware of the regulations and we have practices that are really helping reinforce them on their own um so going to our administrative structure we have coordinators at each of the schools and my job as special education director really does become one of leadership and I did really appreciate the parents um speaking about that tonight when they gave me those lovely flowers um so you know we all do work together as a team and I think we do a great job with that I think the important thing is that we're also helping our staff out in the schools and we have teams in each of the schools working together um so it's been a real strength and we think you know we really feel that you continue some of the points are that with coordinators at each of the building we're able to have better oversight we have more contact with teachers people are more accessible to um to staff and and students and parents as well um and we're providing consistency we've been able to really work on transition planning that's probably the highlight I would talk about here um and that's transition from preschool to kindergarten um from kindergarten to to grade level expectations from fifth grade to sixth grade um and again at eighth grade to ninth grade um we also have been managing our the needs of our out-of-district students um really quite well and very differently I think we all know those students much better because of the work that's been done in that regard um so we do have a 1.5 team chairs for our out-of-district students and those are both new positions since um three years ago 11 percent of our students now are out and out of district um and one of the things that we use um one of the things that happens is that those team chairs come back report a lot to us we all know placements well and we've learned a lot of lessons from the things that happen to support those students that have been unable to be supported adequately within the district and replicated some of those practices during that time um and the so I think that the out-of-district work has really increased the awareness of the complexity of students needs um one of the highlights to highlight some of the things that have really caught our attention anxiety is and and emotional needs is something that you know it's not this district alone it's all districts it's been an enormous um issue for us to respond to for students that really aren't able to access their at the education because of a level of anxiety and it's generalized anxiety it's not so much anxiety about school um it's a great need and I think we've developed um protocols and methods to respond to it and we've learned a lot from the students who you know have been able to get through that issue and get back to school and we'll continue to look at that so you see a number of the complex student needs um vision and hearing needs are increasing needs for connecting with homes and families and doing home training and doing home assessment and functional behavior assessment that help parents work with their students out of school as well as in school I think those those are really kind of dramatic things that we've been doing so database decision makings making we do have data and that's everybody was interested in EZIP it's working pretty well I actually wanted to share with you a really kind of mini piece of of data work that's been done we sent all of our occupational therapists who are related service providers to a training last year and some of them came back this year and instituted action research based on that training and I'll pass this little book around just for you to take a look so this was at bracket school the OT did a little project there was concern about as it was kind of timely because we've talked about concern about students being able to keyboard and we've talked about students being their handwriting kind of because of the use of technology iPads or whatever handwriting being something that's of concern OTs work a lot with fine motor and motor adaptive skills so one of the so the action research was is there a way to not take a lot of time away from the curriculum but try to do some focus on that so this OT actually devised a project and she did eight mini lessons in classrooms of about eight of them for about 20 minutes went into the classroom worked with a group while other groups were doing focusing on something else she did a pre-test and a post-test and she found just in those eight minutes of calling attention to different elements of handwriting there was a very a very marked change in the students attention she sent that little booklet that will go around to you home for parents to know what they were doing and so she her findings were they were the same as the research that had been discussed at the meeting that they went to told them just these mini lessons and mini attention to it really helped students and she saw the gains continue so that's kind of a really micro look at using data and then sharing it with her staff I've recommended that they consider presenting there's another project about sensory issues that was done at the Stratton school so I've recommended that they present that to some other staff because it's a really simple way to kind of go back to a skill and we know the fine motor development some of that helps children remember things if they're able to you know write them in that way so then our early childhood great so you know I want to go back and introduce people because I meant to do that when we talked about our administrative structure so I'm going to start with Ben Hellfatt so I was just going to mention Sheila we have this nice nice preschool art and I thought which she or something else and send it around I figure at this point that you need some motivation so this is a great little preschool book that one of the staff members shared with me that parents made to share with the team they did some interviews with students in the a certain classroom and so it's kind of nice and to look at and kind of perk you up about it's another way to look at what's happening at the preschool there's been a lot of work happening at the preschool you'll see the bullet points up there probably the biggest thing that's happening is that there is much more collaboration at the preschool we're thinking together about restructuring we've made some changes and where people just recently participate with the kindergarten in a common assessment program the gold which is going to be starting at the preschool as well as at the kindergarten so that'll be a common assessment they have which opens away to a lot of other things happening as far as curriculum goes we're also going to be studying mathematics curriculum which is called building blocks and it's an excellent preschool curriculum and they're having training in that in the next few days too so those are just a few of the things that are happening but there's a real coming together and actually it's really palpable there's just lots of great things happening at preschool we should be really proud of it elementary you can see our bullet points up there and probably what to concentrate on there is really our teams the social workers psychologists team chair and principals in each of the seven schools they meet weekly to go over any of the issues they review students who are doing well they review students who may need some other support and then there's action that happens and some of that action is the RTI and the SST practice the student support teams getting together and really planning for interventions this I would I don't want to single out schools because and say it's not happening everywhere it is but Thompson school has done a remarkable job with their RTI and SST process and that's really been a model for our elementary schools and the secondary we talked about the transition the specialized courses really geared to gaps one of the things I'd talk about and highlight there is we hear a lot about executive function skills students not having kind of the building blocks that they need to really function well in school we've been able to we have a project at the middle school with ILD which is an organization acronym Institute for Learning and Development which is funded by one of the Cummings grants and they're working with us to develop a peer-to-peer executive function program where we're training eighth grade students who then will help sixth grade students and they're found in their research which is pretty much international research that is one of the best ways to affect changes in executive function is to have children giving hints and tips to others along with obviously using a teacher the alternative program that's been opened as an Arlington high school site is another one of the things that's very you know working very well and you've heard more about the transition at other points during the year anything else you want me to comment on so just looking forward we're really moving from compliance as I mentioned to high quality data-driven comprehensive progress models I actually never am satisfied with quality I'm never satisfied that we can't be doing better for students we luckily have students who really challenge us to do better all the time so that's really the spirit of we feel moving forward is to keep at it we learn more about students the more we learn the more we know that we really don't know and need to keep finding out and moving forward so that's a spirit a focus on internal program quality is what we're really looking at we're looking at that at the preschool as I mentioned we're looking at it through grade 12 and in transitional services one of the things I think also in our supportive learning classrooms that's an area that we're really looking at to look at the modification of curriculum and the what kind of curriculum and practice can really assist the students who are in those programs and the increase of collaboration and communication to all stakeholders it's been really important to us it's a value that we have I don't think that there probably are few calls that fall through but I don't think there are many calls that don't come into our office that are responded to we have some checks and balances in that regard we all respond to email we're all accessible to people so within a very short turnaround time I would say whenever anybody tells me they've been trying to call and don't get an answer I research it and generally the issue is they're either calling the wrong number or the wrong person or they really just didn't get through to to the call the call didn't come in so we really take it seriously and I think we've you know I think we've had great communication with a small group of CPAC parents this year we're planning much more robust year next year and and then a person to person communication just really listening is as important as the talking so that's kind of our big picture from above and what I'd say is we'll respond to questions but I'd also invite any of the members here to speak up about something that we didn't think about talking about I didn't think about I was very interested in the mid-cycle review and I'm glad to hear that it sounds like it's mostly positive do you have an idea of when it's going to come out it's probably going to come out tomorrow just because we're meeting tonight no I just he promised it in early June mid June but you know we really had a really really excellent feedback and the feedback usually mirrors what is written down I just I'm happy for Arlington because you know they did discuss I talked to Dr. Bodie about it they did discuss that they really wanted to report back to others at the department that Arlington has kind of found a way to be more systemically responsive to the issues that they come out and measure and the part about that that's great is once we're doing that we can get on to what I think is the much more important business of supporting learning and then one more question is there anything that when you came in three years ago you thought this should definitely has to get done that you still feel still developing you just didn't with all the other challenges didn't quite get to it or is there the most important thing I guess. Well I'd love people to pipe in one of the things that comes to my mind because it's on my mind is you know looking for the very best curriculum for our students we we have a core curriculum that we're all guided by but just looking making sure that we really look and see if students need alternative approaches that we find the right ones that's something that's on my mind in the classroom well in the classroom within the learning centers that you know that with the learning specialists and in our supportive learning classroom so in all settings anybody else I mean I think one of the things that we've been really working on at all levels really is building the trust and communication and while I would say that we've gone a long way and mid-cycle review really showed that I think there's still a long way to go we're in a place where we're really trying to make sure that we're supporting all students which is obviously what all of the districts doing but it's it's a difficult job and without the trust and without the collaboration of families general ed and everything else it's really it's really an impossible job so that's really a big piece of what we're doing and I think that's going to have to be ongoing in any district especially here as well good I think I would say one word capacity I think what we've really focused on the last three years and I think we need to continue to focus on is building a capacity and I think you know certainly the work that we've done in the department and the collaboration and really bringing special education from a top-down approach to really a building-centered approach you know has made us grown in a lot of ways and I think you know I'm hoping that we can continue that work as we move forward so I would say at the preschool level what we've tried to do and I think we have been successful and hope to continue along those lines is is establishing trust and collaboration amongst our staff members but also then in outreach to our families who are coming in we've really you know we see ourselves as the introduction that these families have to the school district and we want to make it as positive an experience as possible whether children are qualifying for special education services or not and so to that end when we sometimes will find children who we know you know are having some struggles but aren't quite fitting the criteria for an IEP let's say then we try to provide them with something and keep an eye on them and then keep communication open with the family and and we've gotten really good response with families along those lines and and for a little over a year now we've really started with these types of groups and and they've only expanded and met with really great success with you know families and the students certainly Jill I would say I've I've been a clinician for so many decades that one of my passions in this department is the supported learning centers and I think where the focus I think what you'll see next year is much more focus on looking at the complexity of learning in those programs and the amount of curriculum that you really do need it's very different than a general that experience a lot of the teachers in the supported learning centers if you've never done that work the intensity of it is extreme it's potentially a very burnout job it's it's potentially high high turnover and any districts I've ever consulted to in which is many as a behavior analyst it is the kind of work that I think if you haven't done that kind of work you don't really get what it's like in that classroom but it's really I would I really kind of look forward to the committee kind of like and us like over time just looking at that the work that's done in those programs for these children I think that the teachers really have spoken a lot over the the number of years I've been in the district and I think that the kind of gelling of the community of that SLCs is just even at the beginning stages for people to work across the district for people we've really worked at that programming intensely at the secondary level it looks very different than it did even two years ago but I think that's an area that I'm extremely interested in and in the elementaries we have a lot of teachers but I just have a lot of respect for those teachers so I just think that's an area of growth that we'll kind of moving forward to and I just want to thank Kathleen on behalf of our team I know that we all have that in our minds but the giving of the flowers at the CPAC I haven't been many school committee meetings where the CPAC comes in on their own and thanks Kathleen and the team building that she's done which has been great and I think we just I want to thank you for your work thank you for your work I will echo that Kathleen has done an extraordinary job these last three years I think we have come a long way in so many areas and she's put together a great team and she's been working with her predecessor to continue that but certainly in the area's compliance I it's such it was such a great report from the state was wonderful and but it's also about the quality of our programming for children that's just getting better and better all the time and a lot of that is attributed to to the work that she has done both in terms of really understanding what needs to happen but then to be able to coalesce the people that need to help help her with that vision so we're we're definitely on the right track we really have moved a great we've moved quite further past where we thought we would be even a year ago in terms of a number of things and and others for example just the idea of having the two liaisons at the elementary level was Kathleen's idea and it has worked out very well but there's been a number of these and we are a debt of gratitude and at this moment I actually also want to mention one of the things that has been a concern is what's going to happen this summer for transition because our new director Ms. Elmer will not start until August 25th and the plan that we have is that Kathleen is going to stay on is interim point five for the summer and Ben Halfett is going to to be sort of the acting assistant director for the other point five so the the office is always going to be covered we're always going to be able to meet whatever legal requirements we have to have and the office is open anyway all summer for any kind of communication so that's the plan going forward for the summer and I did want to add that the work continues with the coordinators to who and we have lots of plans for some systemic work to happen and we've been in touch with Alice and Elmer and soon as the school year ends for the time that we can we've had a good conversations with her and she'll be coming again in to meet with us and I think she's going to be a great director I have lots of confidence in that thank you very much thank you all for the work and everything you've done really appreciate it I just really want to say that you know the work I do was fine but I couldn't do it without them it wouldn't it what really it's hard work every single day by everybody in the in the district and it truly is you know everybody's working so hard I have such respect for that but it takes a good leader too thank you at this time I'd like to turn over the next part of the meeting to Dr. Ampe Annie and Alan can you come up this is on the Arlington Visual Budget it's a joint project with the town and the local company the intent is to display it's my hand that's on the purple if you want to see the motions the intent is to display financial information accessible engaging format and many of you saw the presentation that was given at town meeting in May by Annie and Alan because of the time pressures for tonight's meeting they're going to do a very truncated presentation like one slide maybe and then answer questions so you can come slide and the desire is to have the Arlington Public Schools provide additional data to further populate the AVB's website all data desired is already public record and I've talked to Ms. Johnson she's indicated her ability and willingness to the supply data but there may be decisions that need to be made and formatting and stuff so I'd like to make two motions you want me to make them now or do you want me to make them at the end why don't we make them at the end okay so it's your show well by way of introduction I'm Alan Jones I'm one of the three vice-chairs of the finance committee and it's my particular responsibility to put together the eye test chart that we give to town meeting every year and people people do love that because it puts all the town's finances together in one place but you need a good head for numbers and a magnifying glass to really get something out of it so person and our own Involution Studios which is their offices right across the library came with a proposal to do a visualization a web-based visualization of all the numbers I was on it like a cheap suit so I'm hoping that you've all seen Arlington Visual Budget and anybody out there in ACMI and I invite you all to go to the website which has been live for since last September it's ArlingtonVisualBudget.org spelled exactly the way you'd expect it to be it's a web-based tool that creates a visual map of very complicated financial data and it's structured so that the size of each item is proportional to the dollar amount of that item the great thing about it is you can drill down into each one of those to up to eight levels of detail to see exactly what goes into each piece there's also this feature we see $7,500 where you can type in your tax bill and go through the website and see exactly what part of the tax bill here for example special education $493 out of a $7,500 tax bill that's been a very popular feature among taxpayers we also have data represented by fiscal year so right there in the middle where the line is that's the updated numbers from the approved fiscal 2015 budget to the left of that is the actuals for five years previous and to the right of that's our projections for five years in the future we started this out we've got a lot of excellent response from taxpayers you probably know we won the innovation award from the mass municipal association which has generated a lot of interest from all over the state even all over the country we started out this year focusing on the town budgets we worked very closely with the town manager's office in particular assistant town manager Andrew Flanagan and analyst Mike Bhutan and got a lot of detail way down many levels into the town's budget where we like to go from here is to work with the treasurer's office to get a lot of detail on debt and investments of the funds we like to work with capital planning committee to get a lot of details about the capital plans especially how they all go together and we like to work with the school department to get more details in the school budgets and that's really why we're here to see if we can get that process started that's fantastic thank you members have any questions at this time nope I I have one and it I'm sorry it's the one that always shows up is there a cost no that's even better even sells it oh in the evolution labs is very kindly donated all the expertise to put this together and the rest of us are volunteers that's fantastic thank you okay so I'd like to make two motions I'll make them at the same time I move that this Arlington school committee approves the idea of APS supplying additional financial data for the visual budget project and second I move to authorize the budget subcommittee to work with the Arlington visual budget project and the CFO to determine what financial data to use and to make other decisions that may be necessary there's a second that's one motion in two parts yes thank you any discussion from the board Dr. Bode I think it's a great idea and they're gonna I've been looking forward to seeing our data included at this yeah no further discussion all those in favor all right any opposition Jean Adams vote thank you thank you very much we're working forward to it all right we'll be in touch your top on my agenda tonight awesome okay moving down to the next item we have the second read of the Arlington public school district goals for 2014-2015 Dr. Bode thank you there have been a few wordsmithing changes to these goals compared to what we had last time if you remember committee members were invited to give me comments which several people did and I've incorporated those comments some of them are very helpful so I think we have a better better exposition of what the intent of each one of the strategies are for the district goals so nothing has changed substantially in fact nothing has changed substantially but rather just the wording of it the only thing that was slightly changed and that is the issue of developing structured common planning time for teachers I think that this next year there's going to be a combination rather than just increasing it's going to be I think we need to look forward for many years in terms of how we're going to develop a plan to increase it some of that will require a considerable amount of planning in terms of how you you change schedules which is no small thing but even having said that there's going to be an effort next year to increase structured planning time and I'll be able to report back to you how successful that will be as we look at our existing schedules some of that extra planning time will really come in the form of how we use early release days and perhaps pullouts of teachers within the day which we've always done and we did a little bit more of that last year may be the only way to accomplish it so when you have a group of teachers say teaching ninth grade English that we give them a morning to plan together because it's very hard to put that into the schedule so we're just going to sort of keep a track of the ways that happens but other than that nothing's changed it's just been you know some comments some a little bit of wordsmithing with it from the last read comments concerns oh we gotta vote you okay may I have a motion at this time I move adoption of the district goals for 2014-15 as written second second any further discussion all those in favor all right any opposition unanimous vote second read on the Arlington Public Schools 2014-2015 school calendar Dr. Boadie again we've had no changes since the first reading of this calendar I move approval through a second we'll just get a second then we'll have a second any discussion I'm not sure where to put this the calendar as written doesn't satisfy that policy that we've got because we have a meeting that ends our 20th meeting is after the last day of school so if we want to take that up under policy either that or I had a discussion with Mr. Schluquen prior to the meeting that we can always I think we probably should leave it to policy and go like that do you have a problem passing this at this time and let policy rectify it no Mr. Thelma school year is broad term so I mean the last day of school you we there's faculty still there's faculty in staff that are still here okay a few days after so that's I don't think it's a big in the past we've treated the last day of school as the last year the school year but that's it's I understand it's it's glory in it and my suggestion is that we make we don't use school year we say like from between September and June or something like that modification of the policy yeah that that's okay between the school year as defined from September the first day of professional development to June 30th why don't we just say July 1st June 30th sir all right we can I mean we could figure out when we get to that I just have a question about um why did we not have November 6th as a school committee meeting that we have two bunch of I just don't remember why there's a conflict there's a conflict a conflict yeah there's a and just a small thing February spoke wrong in one of the places just a oh let's fix it so the parent is going to find that so under um HSD yeah HSD High School Delayed openings it's just February yeah so all right does that count spell check spell check oh I think schools should have correct spelling on any document going out I agree at least we'll hear about it if we don't want to I'm sure you try so any further discussion all those in favor with those changes all right any opposition unanimous vote thank you okay the finance monthly financial report our CFO is not here tonight if we have any questions I would ask you to direct them to Dr. Bode if she can't answer them she will if she can't she will pass them on to Diane and get back to you as soon as possible so are there any questions at this time now so let me just for people that are listening this evening I'm sure they want to know where we are at the end of this year word ahead you have a summary document here from Diane Johnson as you know all through the year we've been we've been talking about a deficit this year and that's exactly one of the reasons why we had to have the warrant article for Tom meeting in order to be able to access those stabilization monies as we get closer to the end and this number will probably change a little bit too as we move forward but we're getting a much tighter view of exactly what the deficit will be and then there's also while there's a deficit we have covered the deficit and I'll explain that in a second but the amount of the deficit is a slightly over a million dollars and that is all attributed to overages and special education costs this year and if you remember from our studies over the years there's just there's the years of peaks and valleys and it's just it's very hard to predict but as we get bills and you know for our fuel bills for example electrical bills as those get a little bit tighter we'll we'll be able to get a finer number for you what is what is a positive direction is that the prediction about a month or so goes 1.2 and it's actually just down closer to a million now we've been able to cover this deficit by the special education stabilization account that that we access through a voter time meeting and the we also have a lab credit that we're going to be able to use this year we don't use lab credits to build our budget but it's nice to know that it's possible to access some of those credits in a situation like this and then there was a reduction of revolving reserve balances from prior years um it has not depleted our reserves which is good you you we do need to have some reserves going into a new year but um it's a bit it's we're in a better position than we thought we would be a month ago so this is good Jesus I just have a few questions um so what's the difference between the number that's over a million and then the negative amount of 974 on the second page I think this is a question I'm gonna have to refer to Diane in fact perhaps the best thing to do if is just to send her an email and then another question um and this is just for background because I don't know enough um the resolving reserve balances are these from the tuition where where does that just because I don't know what where are they well we have um we have a a special ed revolving account that is for tuition in for better way of saying so in for some of our students we're able to bill out to their sending district the cost and it's it's and so whatever tuitions we have from that go into that revolving account okay thanks well we need to make any transfers to move items from line item to line I'm in order to get the budget done at the end of the year I don't think so but I I think that is a question that will probably need to to take a look at but I don't believe so if if you if Miss Johnson thought that was going to be the case she would have had these motions out here tonight I'll say thank you superintendent's report well in the superintendent's report there's a number of things one the most important item tonight is to have a discussion with you about the decision as to whether next year we will do the park assessments which Naomi was very eloquent about the the sixth grade experience we have some data from elementary experience that we'll share with you in a minute so sort of framing this the way this the state has set this up is that school districts can have a choice between doing park or mcast and then even within the park decision it's an all in nothing by the way if you choose park your whole district does park but within that decision you can also choose by school whether it's park online or it is park paper this year we piloted both in the district at different grade levels. There is a deadline that's coming before us which is the end of the end of June if a district wants to do the park online that is the that is the the last date that you can make this decision and be guaranteed being able to do the online or for that matter the paper and the reason for that is that the state is going to be entering into contracts with the service provider on this and the summer and because it's actually fairly expensive they want to have an an accurate number now that doesn't mean it's not possible that there might be there might be an ability to do this if you made the decision later the later date is October 1 but there's no guarantee on it now as far as MCAS goes that would be that would remain the same and next year regardless of what we're doing here 10th grade is going to be MCAS it also all of our alternates are going to be MCAS and all of our science tests are MCAS so the decision here is really about grades three through eight for English language arts and mathematics there is another decision we could make which is whether we're going to do park online or paper for 9th grade and of course tests and 11th grade however this evening we have no recommendation on that and in fact there's not the same issues around deadlines and part of the reason we don't have a recommendation on that is that there's a lot more discussion that's going on with curriculum leaders I they've all felt that we needed this summer to think about it and in fact most districts are for what I've been hearing from other superintendents are probably not going to do anything with the 9th and 11th next year but so our decision this evening and is about where we're going to be going with Arlington next year well the superintendent has to actually be the communicator to the state on this quite recently the interpretation of the law from both MASS attorneys and desi attorneys is that this really needs to be a vote of the school committee and as to the direction we're going to go and so I know that you've given you a lot of materials I'm sure you've been reading a lot you're you know and some of you have personal experience with this so this is sort of like the sort of the framework of what we're we need to talk about this evening and in fact we probably do need a vote now if you don't feel prepared to do a vote tonight I think we may need to schedule another meeting well we talked about he also sent out today a doodle for us to have a a retreat which it that's considered an open meeting as as such so we could also put it at that point but I think right at this moment we're a little bit ahead of schedule from where I thought we were going to be if it's all right with the board I'd like to invite the board to ask any further questions for clarification and at that point if we if there's a consensus to make a okay decision if not we can post one I know I have a couple of questions I need but I'll defer to the rest of the board at this time does anyone else have any Oh can I just enter I'm not finished actually sorry actually I was going to ask Laura Chesson if she would review some of the pros and cons I have to tell you I have been personally back and forth myself as to which which direction to go and there are and really needed to sit down and actually list out the pros and cons and you've heard from Miss Dinas tonight it's it's not a clear cut decision by any means I can say that it's probably 50 50 out there right now I was at a meeting today with a lot of edco superintendents and other than one they're all pretty much going with the the park online next year and in fact that is our recommendation this evening to do that I think Laura will go through our pros and cons as to where why we came to that and there is a number of them but actually one of the compelling things for me on this although there's many of these is that next year we will be held harmless that the amount even though we have more testing days we're going to be shorter testing periods that will go along with this I think they've made a mistake in having the sessions in March be so close to May if they're in fact March is supposed to be formative but it's probably likely that the Board of Education is going to go along with this the following fall and you know we will have had a year of experience getting the results back and just taking a look at in terms of of how we can you know maybe align our curriculum with better do a little bit more support so I think that this it's a good learning year that we can use that data from because the first year in 15 it will be held harmless in terms of accountability we'll get the data but in 16 we won't be so that that is something that's no small factor in this but on the other hand it's it's part of a much larger picture of pros and cons and I'll let Laura if you would do that thank you so I since the policies and procedures meeting I tried to take the pros and cons and sort of divide them into certain categories to make it easier and it's on that blue sheet of paper that should have been put at your at your seat the first set would regarding the curriculum based considerations we have a great track record in Arlington getting students to score well on the AP exams and there are many tasks that that you move through as you get higher and higher in the levels of park that are very similar in the sense that you take information from multiple sources and and you put it in one writing document there are also types of questions that are asked on the park very similar in some ways to the DDMs that were discussed tonight for example one of them will say which of the two of the following answers are correct so there's not just one correct answer there are multiple correct answers and that's because there's a number of mathematical statements of which some are equivalent and so that's again very similar to our DDMs where we're looking for students to be able to find multiple right answers and to be able to convert easily from one to another and finally there are some tasks that a paper and pencil test just is not able to do we were working with different units with teachers from the Lucy Colkins program particularly at the middle school level and it's requiring students to be able to take information from audio from visual from written from nonfiction from literature and put all that information together and that is really difficult to simulate in a paper and pencil test so it sort of speaks to the wanting to use the computer test the instruction based again that the tasks and the questions that are asked albeit not all questions are excellent I will certainly agree to that are in line with the pedagogical techniques that are required by the common core more critical thinking those kinds of questions in terms of are the technical based consideration we were able to handle the park we had sixth grade and fifth grade testing at the same time and fifth grade and eighth grade testing at the same time really did not run into any trouble with technical support or bandwidth and in terms of devices we've already sat down and done a schedule and know that we can do that proctors report that students had very little difficulty accessing the tools and providing answers I think in part to the training that we did and I don't want to try to contradict the young lady that was there tonight but the data on the blue sheet that you see there actually comes from her class we did a survey of her class an online survey and all the students 80 students responded and when the students were asked you can see there that if they were asked if it was harder or easier you know pretty much you can see their responses there you can see some comments that they added there about what they why they thought something was easier or harder when you talked about the material almost resoundingly they said yes I've seen this material before they were honest in several cases and said not sure if I remember but I definitely have seen this material before and when we asked students if the directions were hard to understand the vast majority of the students said no or some or sometimes they were so when we look at that in terms of the response that we're getting and I have to echo what Dr. Bodie said in terms of future accountability it's very likely that the Department of Education is the Board of Education is going to approve this I there's been a lot said and to a certain degree I would agree that they've offered us a very big carrot by asking us to remain harmless but I'd like to look at the other flip side if they had come and said we want you to do this test next year but by the way we're going to hold you to it just like we have every other year in terms of accountability we wouldn't have been happy with that either so while I agree that they probably are not being totally altruistic and in their health harmless it would have been a lot worse had they said you're going to take this test and we're going to hold you to the same standard that we had always held you to before and I think it gives us an opportunity to look at the actual test not the practice test by having our students take it next year and I guess the last thing I want to talk about is yes in terms of administration it will be easier on the administrators and the guidance staff but that doesn't that doesn't make their life that easier it also means that they're more available for students if guidance counselors are not spending 30 hours getting ready for MCAS then they're working with students and if administrators are not tied up counting forms and packing up boxes for UPS then they're working with students so while it will be easier for them they will be working with students then they're not going to be taking a lunch break because they're not doing MCAS and Dr. Bodie one last point that Dr. Bodie also alluded to is that when you do MCAS because of the distribution of materials and because of the way the test is administered you blow half the day doing that once we got parked down to the point where we were able to sort of regularize it the administration of it it's about a 40-minute test and students could be in and out in an hour and 15 minutes and if taking an hour and 15-minute test blows the rest of the day out of the water then that means anytime we have a unit test the kids are taking we're blowing the rest to the day out of the water so while I think that in the beginning it will be harder for them to shift from one thing to another I really feel that in the end even though it's more days the amount of time sitting in a testing section will actually be less and cause more minimize the disruption at this time I would ask members to consider clarifying questions if they need more information at the moment then we can make a decision going forward anybody have any questions this time that starts all right I have a couple I want to better understand what's the impact to graduation what happens to the MCAS requirement for high school graduation is there an equivalent park or do those kids still have to take MCAS? right now they're holding the MCAS as the graduation requirement to 2017 because the law requires that the test has to be in place for a certain amount of time before it can be used for high stakes okay so they're still taking MCAS yes they're still taking 10 okay all right and so that's pencil that's still pencil and paper until then okay and I don't I guess part of me doesn't understand your recommendation given that Dr. Bode said a district is all or nothing so by recommending it for three to eight online I assume we're recommending it nine to eleven can be separated so you have three options you can do just three to eight you can do just nine you can do just eleven or you can do any combination thereof but three through eight is sort of like one from column A one from column B one from column C oh okay all right so just because you three three right district wide right by grade by grade thing okay and my third question is are we going to get the information from park next year this year I know no data was given to anybody and I want to know are we going to get information next year from the tests yes yes even though we're not going to be held accountable for it we won't be used for anything I just want to know if we're going to get it we're going to get it I think we're going to get it much sooner it will also will also have student growth percentiles there they've set up a statistical model to map some kind of equitability between between the two and now they have to do that because if you've got some districts doing MCAS you've got some doing park essentially this is how they're doing it if 20 percent let's just say hypothetically there's numbers 20 percent we're proficient or in some particular scale on MCAS they're mapping it into 20 percent that's going to be in park okay I'm not sure that there's lots of statisticians will look at that and go but but in order for equitability we're going to get the data because just just so because even if we can't map it to MCAS it means that we have a place to start the next year and so I just wanted to make sure we were actually going to get the data and one more piece of that it actually we do better you that that still is recorded as better it's only it's the harmless I think one of the things about the this is just it's it's all relative and that's one of the reasons we look at different districts and so forth is that we you know we we sort of and compare ourselves to each other we get a sense of where we are and if we find that you know the comparisons are very different next year than what we've seen in the past the things we need to look at within our curriculum and pedagogy and so forth right and and so lastly this obviously I just I want to make sure that everyone knows this this means that if we did park we will not do MCAS in those grades it will not be correct two tests it will just be with the exception of science because that's the for the for the grades to take science because there's no park but we won't do any writing in the there's writing in the performance-based assessments but yes okay but only as part as far as park not not the long all long and MCAS okay so just science I just your recommendations just up through the eighth grade that's correct the decision is really only about three through eight and then you could do ninth grade separately 11th grade what is your recommendation three to eight oh I'm only talking about three to eight we're not I'm making no recommendation nine and 12 tonight we don't have I just want to make that clear because I'm thinking when you just said there's no double testing high school kids would have still double test but it's not I got it right thank you all right I have a bunch more but I can come back to them okay both the technology just briefly I know other states are using a different type of test Connecticut has its own smart a lot of people have thought that that might be actually better than park I'm wondering why Massachusetts didn't give us an additional option do you guys do you know why that we are faced with these two choices and that's it well we talked about this before Dr. Chester is chairman of park well the balance is the other test so and the other thing I would I would bring up is something that I've been considering and thinking about a lot lately is what we just passed tonight which is our district goals for next year includes goal four four a public forum will be held communicate information about the common core mass standards and state assessments no later than February 2015 thinking that we have till October I'd like to see us conduct a public forum and get the parents involvement and communicate to them what park means a lot of folks I was at a PTO meeting last night PTO people who are very active in their school had never even known that this was going to be a choice for the school committee this evening so I'd really like to see us engage four four before we make this call thanks if you make the decision after June 30th then there is no guarantee of the online I understand okay okay not so much questions but some observations first of all the MCAS is an obsolete test right the biggest benefactor of the MCAS test is the United Parcel Service which benefits from shipping crates of paper from Dover, New Hampshire to every school on commonwealth and back again the there are lots of questions there are some really valid things in the MCAS and there's a lot of stuff that really isn't giving us data back that's very good at all the long comp is is almost useless statistically because there's a very little variance in it and really isn't telling you much so that the argument that Park isn't particularly well aligned to the writing of the Common Core MCAS is worse because it really doesn't it really doesn't measure writing well it does do a good job of doing open response questions Park strength is is open response and more higher order thinking teachers are more comfortable with MCAS because they've been teaching for it for a long time so their teaching has become aligned to the testing instrument not necessarily to the standards they've become aligned to teaching well against the instrument so that an unfamiliarity with the new instrument is not necessarily a measure that were the instrument is off it's that the current MCAS is offline to the to the to the new Common Core curriculum um next year's assessment date is going to be unreliable whichever way we go because a lot of the things we depend upon is having everybody in the state answering the same set of questions and that will not happen and because we are sitting here making a Park versus MCAS decision just like a lot of other districts my sense is there is something and I don't know what it is but there's something in common among districts who are choosing to go to Park that is different in nature than the districts who are choosing to stay with MCAS some unmeasurable factor is differentiating so there's going to be a difference in the school the schools using Park and the schools using MCAS which is going to further complicate the ability to compare across two instruments there is a no win situation here there are problems with both and me I am a consumer of this data I look at sub scores I look at growth scores I live for those two components of this and as far as I'm concerned one thing is happening here is that Mitchell Chester is asking us to trust him in that the data we're going to get is going to be good reliable robust and do all the things we wanted to do and we've not seen a decimal point of data come out from this and as far as I'm concerned having faith in Mitchell Chester is sort of like having faith in Edward Mojica in the 11th inning looking to hold the game together it's that's the biggest part that disturbs me about making this decision is that we're putting more faith in Mitchell Chester than Mitchell Chester has earned but I think that this is a reasonable way to go but only if we're going to go to the online testing and the thing that you said our subcommittee meaning is that you are fully confident that we have the technology that bandwidth in order to be able to do this and do this well and if that is the instance I think that from what I've seen of this the assessment is maybe not perfectly aligned but neither is MCAS it's probably more authentic and I think it's worth getting into this a little faster than others because as with MCAS the scores rose as people became familiar with it and I think that what's going to happen is a year of more familiarity is going to help us and even if the state does not eventually go park if Charlie Baker wins or if the wins of the State Board of Education change and all of a sudden park is not favored in Massachusetts wherever we're going to go a new MCAS which would be online or even if we go to the smarter balanced or if we go someplace else it's going to be more park computer like than what we're doing right now so that there'll there's no good answer and you know I can sit here and make an argument for staying with MCAS because it's the I know what I'm going to get in data and I'm happy with that and I can make the argument for going forward with park because the glimmers of hope within this are that it's going to be better online and it's going to be more focused on higher order thinking so it's a tough decision I do think that it's right for this district to go with the computer park I don't I also don't have exactly questions I didn't get your information until we sat down here today but I've gone through the survey that the desi's provided for students who took the online test unfortunately they didn't survey the kids who took the written test so the only data we have is from the online test so we have to make I'm making assumptions about the test which maybe it's actually just the online bit but I can't compare but there were a number of things that really concerned me most of them fall into the online part of the math exam 11% of the students could not understand the directions all the directions read by the person giving them students 13% almost always in 25% most of the time could not understand directions for questions on this test and when I look just looking quickly at some of your stats we're not so far from these numbers that were reported for tens of thousands of kids from looking when they look at the online test they say many students have little or no access to computers at home with 8 to 9% only a couple times a month 4% having no access I'm worried about how we want to have a test that's a testing achievement we don't want to have a test that's testing children's familiarity with computers and I question whether we were there yet there were significant numbers of problems with the test 46% of the students taking the math test had problems with the computer during the test 44% of the math students would prefer to take the math test on paper we didn't ask that question I would have liked to know that question but I think the fact that a student came in here with 50% we did ask them if it was easier or harder to take the test on the computer okay right but we didn't ask whether we wanted whether they wanted to take the test on paper or not and I think the fact that the student came in 15 signatures from her class which can't you know the clusters aren't that big can't have I mean that's half the cluster or a little bit less than half the cluster that's that's a lot of the kids from the test administrator survey 39% didn't feel the instructions covered all the materials necessary to take the test a lot of they also the way they assessed whether students needed extra time the numbers were really hard to parse out but the sense I got was around a third of the kids taking the test needed extra time and many of them needed more than 20 minutes and I'm concerned that test stress has been a big problem and continues to be a big problem and that all of these things to me suggest a test that's going to be more stressful to both our students and also our parents our parents I mean just when we started talking about computer based tests coming last year people started freaking and we haven't done the background work that we need to do to prepare our parents and prepare our students so that they know and feel confident going into it that they have mastered everything and I'm especially concerned when I look at all of these things and when I think about our high needs students and I'm talking special needs English language learners students from low-income homes all of the cluster all of these things seem more likely to be happening to them I mean needing more time having problems finishing a test having problems understanding directions all of these things seem to be happening more with this group and that's the group that I'm especially concerned about and the group that I really want to be able to follow good growth numbers I'm really concerned about the problems with directions because that's that's not so much English that's I mean that's not so much computer that's English and it's how it's phrased I'm worried that they haven't got the bugs worked out and that we're asking our students are going and take a test which isn't a hundred percent doable and that's not a good testing situation and it's not good psychologically for our kids and I feel that I'm not saying what we're going to do two years into the future I'm just looking at it this year I don't feel comfortable with our students taking part and especially online and that's I'm happy to hear counterarguments to my thought process but that's where I was coming from okay Mr. Tillman anything I do I have a few questions the you know one of the most important things to make any testing scheme work is that there's alignment between what we're doing in the classroom and what's being tested and there's buy-in by the teachers and understanding by teachers and staff and administrators and department heads that we're going to shift what we do in the curriculum we're going to shift what we do in the classroom so that our students are prepared to take prepared for the test and that the assessment is authentic the assessment is authentic of the of the learning is taking place so what I'm what I want to know about is I'm curious to know and I've just found my own experience anyway maybe I'm projecting too much but tonight but alignment between everybody who's going to implement a new a new test new curriculum whatever it is is critical so I want to to what extent there have been conversations between the leadership of the district the department heads the principals maybe even the teachers about this new program there's been numerous conversations between the department heads and myself and the math coaches as you heard tonight I think that people don't think the test is perfect but they feel that it's sufficiently tested at this point because it was actually piloted in some districts last year there were some schools in the country that did it last year pieces of it I think they're heartened by the fact that when we interviewed or we surveyed 80 kids who didn't have to respond one way or another 72 said yes I've seen this material in my class I might not have remembered all of it but I've seen it in sixth grade and that's only one year into the common core will we find that there will be things that we haven't covered absolutely and I think the same thing happened in MCAS I remembered the first couple years that we gave MCAS we found that there were whole issues of things that we didn't cover but we really didn't get the real handle on what we didn't cover and how we didn't and how we may not have covered it until we started to look at that data it wasn't until we may have covered this topic in math and this topic in math but what we didn't do is look at the interconnectedness of those two things that everything we taught was in isolation so when a student had to use multiple skills to solve the same problem they were not doing well and because we were able to analyze those MCAS questions we changed how we taught in the classroom so while I think that teachers are completely perfect in their alignment and certainly in their pedagogical styles and instruction I think that this will start us down the road where we begin to collect data to find out where those things are and just like there were as Dr. Bodie I think are somebody alluded to tonight in the beginning actually it was Ms. Hansen in the beginning the MCAS had a lot of problems but it got better because people took the test they got lots and lots of data about what was good and what was bad to this date in MCAS there are questions that they test out every year and without large amounts of data you don't there's no way to improve the test among the department heads in the in the principals has there been a conversation about how they're going to shift the the direction of their staffs to prepare for the park we we provided yeah we've provided training for those teachers whose classes were taking the park we actually provided training for the students we had people come in and do practice tests with them so they were familiar with it I think that one of the reasons you're seeing on this blue sheet such positive experiences and that's what I viewed when I saw it was because this came out of Joanna Bunn's class and she prepared her students her students were prepared they felt comfortable so you know from from what I hear from on the ground from the math coaches from the literacy specialists that are working in the building the vast majority of our students grades three through eight particularly grades three and through five but also and six are using technology on a regular basis and they're comfortable with that as a matter of fact there's probably going to be an insurrection at the middle school next year when all those students from the Thomson come there and say where's my iPad and I also expect that the 122 students that were in cluster 610 that had one to one iPads this year are also going to have a shocker room when they get to 7th grade and as a matter of fact they keep asking me how they can come to school committee and bring their case forward so so to answer your question do we have it perfectly no will there have to be that's one of our cons that we will have to you know train people but I don't think it's insurmountable and we saw that we just didn't have the level of support we expected it to be a blood bath and it just wasn't that wasn't a blood bath I mean in terms of the technology well in terms of the kids in the classroom I expected to have kids crying I expected to have kids not taking it seriously I expected to have you know just wasn't like that it wasn't so what what so I am I am undecided on this that's that's problem tonight and so part of the reason I'm undecided is just I I don't feel like we have enough information you know and I I take the heart with Paul said is that we're there's a desire to do the park because the commissioner of education says it's a good test and and I was at a meeting today with desi people statewide accountability and assistance council that I sit on and no so they're all saying good things about park to me because I said I got a vote tonight on this so you know that but they work at this the department of elementary and secondary education so there's a part of this when if we vote to adapt park it's a it's a there's a leap of faith there's a there's a there's a yes there is and in fact that was when I said I have been between the two was one my first was the survey and also information that we learned a couple months ago that we would simple thing we would not know how the students did comparatively on the online version versus the paper and that data has never been given to us and I asked specifically the person who runs park at destiny and he said we're not going to have it and yes you are going to have to make that decision without that information so you're absolutely correct there's going to be a lot of things that we have to take a little bit of a leap of faith some of the data that you read I was concerned about to particularly the math of course but it was a number of students that did not feel that they the technology got in the way they fully admit that the all that that particular tool was not working well and that's actually what I've heard more than once that that is a major focus in terms of the revision of the the park for next year to fix that equation calculator so that that will improve I think the questions probably will improve because it's going to be very interesting the people who analyze this they're going to have the data on the paper versus online but like Laura I was in schools when the first MCAS came in and that that was lead a lot of improvements it wasn't it wasn't great and it wasn't necessarily aligned to what we're doing but on the other hand what has always been true of these these assessments they have changed what we do in schools and I think that there's been more positives from that than negatives in fact significantly more positives because there are students that you know 20 years ago we're not given the same kind of support so they just didn't get it they didn't get it and I think that it's just absolutely been revolutionary in how we we have approached this state and actually in this country so yes I see lots of problems with it and as I said sort of back and forth but I think I would rather get the data however flawed it might be in terms of how we do on it and work with that data to see how we can do better yeah so I mentioned to my kids today that there we might be doing a test that would take them nine to 11 days and they they were about to mute me from the family they're gonna leave I actually didn't know that the test is shorter for each session so that that's actually comforting to know I mean I was thinking nine full days 11 to 11 no no no so that that part's good I actually I feel torn too like Mr. Slickman I feel like we have no good options so that MCAS is not aligned with Common Core of course wasn't intended to be this seems imperfectly aligned with the Common Core the numbers I see even your internal numbers don't seem good enough so 28% said that it's harder because of technical issues you know it's over 30% of students who serve had trouble with it and similarly almost 30% so 17 27 kids said the directions were sometimes or always hard to understand and that just seems really it feels like this is a not really a well-developed test yet and that wouldn't it be great for other districts to be the guinea pigs and get a better test and then we come in hey it's it's much better so it just seems like you know we need districts to potentially if this is a test we're going to use which I I guess is probable but not guaranteed we need districts to test that to make the test questions better but I'm not yet convinced that we should be that district because if they're that seriously flawed when she finishes I get my shot that's what we second second round so I just feel torn and I'm just worried about the quality of the test now and just wonder if next year feels like it's going to be a wash no matter what we either have a sort of a not a great test or or a test that's not aligned to the common core it just feels like we have no way of winning next year two things and I'm glad Mr. Pierce brought this up we have a goal we brought that goal forward without belaboring it we had an incident this past week and a half on communication is it a risk to wait till October yes data coming in we're going to hear this data whether we take the test or not statewide as far as the MCAS I taught during that time teachers actually had input for about five or six years of what worked and what didn't work and then for some bizarre reason today teachers can't even look at the test because I kept I think they kept finding issues wrong with the test or questions in the test it is a much better test today than it was it doesn't deal with the common core I agree with that for all the reasons that have been said but in my mind and I'm going to be upfront right now I am not going to vote forward to go for the electronic for the June date I want to wait till the October October 1 I will risk mainly based on what Mr. Pierce brought up in our goals I feel strongly on that the commitment to the community and to go forward on that now if those of us if we're not ready to vote and we need more beyond statements and I just made mine I know I violated my own rule about asking questions Ms. Starks all right I have administered MCAS for five years I did not administer Park although I had several students who took Park they weren't I wasn't the homeroom teacher who got chosen so I didn't but I also have to tell you that if I asked my students these same questions about MCAS you would get the same percentage answers okay I have kids who don't understand the directions to MCAS and they don't understand the questions MCAS is asking them which is why they get the questions wrong they have you know there are just a ton of things I've talked to the teachers who did administer MCAS and Park we've had lots of faculty meeting time the people who administer Park said yes there were some glitches in the technology but they kind of expected that actually they were all shocked at the fact that there weren't major glitches like it was never it never just it never stopped working they were able to do it so and that is I think the case you know we see a lot of things even with MCAS you know glitches even in paper tests so I want to just remind ourselves that when you ask kids you get kid answers okay and the kids are still going to tell you that they don't want to take these tests no matter what and you know what I wish we didn't necessarily have to administer them so that being said you know and I've been going back and forth as well I was initially absolutely anti-Park I am not because I have gone to a presentation from Chelmsford a presentation from Framingham I've gone to anything in everything that the MASC has been able to hold for us to go to and I think that right now I'm still kind of I don't really know I think that it's probably better to move forward than to go backwards which is I think kind of where MCAS is going I do want everyone to know that MCAS is aligned with Common Core it absolutely is this year and next year it will test Common Core I'm a math teacher I know that I know what the questions were the Common Core is in there so they are now is it as good of a test no MCAS is not as good of a test of Common Core they're still asking rote memorization questions that I don't think are really the way we want to move education forward but that being said I still have some questions because when I heard from Burlington on their cost estimates when I heard from Framingham on their cost estimates they both said that they needed to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to their technology budgets in order to do MCAS to do park testing and I don't understand and so I need much more explanation of how do we possibly have the technology the hardware the infrastructure they all said that they needed like large numbers of IT staff to pull all this off they're intending to do the tests at the same time right that's exactly they're all going to take no they are not that's what my no in Framingham they're doing one grade a day okay well the former director at the Burlington the IT guy at Burlington told me it was their intent that everybody was going to take it at one time that's why they were putting it in their budget they're still not going to do it all on the same day they were looking to buy they were looking to have an instrument and using this to have the instrument for every single student in the district that was their intent and using this I went I spoke to both of them I spoke to the superintendents I spoke to this to the technology people in depth and I asked them in depth questions how are you doing this how is what are those expenses okay now Burlington did test 2,000 students this year they're one of the biggest online tests that they did this year they didn't all do it the same day the same time I didn't say that they're looking to have an instrument for every single student they're using this as a way to purchase instruments for everyone they're doing it one to one not at the same time Burlington already is one of them he means he means he wants one to one devices devices but they already are and that's not what they were talking about that wasn't part of the the the cost was three was broken out different ways I apologize I took us off I would like to have a motion put on the table I want to understand I want to hear how if your the recommendation is to go online how we are going to test six grades in the days that we have and it's not going to cost us they were both quoted as close to half a million dollars I can't tell you how they came up with their numbers I can tell you how we came up with our numbers and we sat down and we looked at the number of devices that we had to have in each building in order to be able to do that and we said what's missing and what we're missing was keyboards now I don't know what they're using for keyboards but we were using they also bought keyboards okay what we are using is are is a a device that allows you to plug in a very cheap keyboard through a device into the ipads and so the savings is so we're estimating because we're only going to test one grade at a time in each building and because of all the ipads we already have in the elementary schools where it's able we're able to do it for about thirty thousand dollars but that's because I'm using a much cheaper solution I think than they probably were going to do we need those keyboards anyway to begin to teach keyboarding in second and third grade in the elementary schools and so I can't tell you how they got theirs I can only tell you how we got ours they also may not be testing with a caching server they may be testing what's called live in the sense that they're pulling up sending the question the request for the question up and then when the student gets the question sending the answer back up they may be doing that if you do that you can only test about two hundred students a day with the bandwidth that we have but we've already our IT staff is telling me that we can test two thousand students a day with the bandwidth that we currently have by using what a technique that's called caching service will you basically bring the test down and at the end of the day when the students finish testing it sends the answers back up okay I know that in other costs were the fact that you have to run a piece of software so that nothing else is on running on the iPad at the same time so it's it's like twenty bucks a pop for each device to lock it so that it only runs the test okay it was it there was no there were no there was no costs for that this year so if there's a cost for that that is not something the APARC has communicated okay there was no there was no costs for that this year there's a cost for that there was a cost for the keyboards the stands but they figured out a way to use something that was pretty cheap that I thought was it's a dollar it's a dollar this and then they said that the other problem was that it took took them literally weeks to line up and make sure that all of all the software and all of the hardware devices were ready to go and that they had to they had to be you know kind of sequestered they couldn't be used on a day-to-day basis because they had to be used for the testing I just didn't have that issue we had major we did we had several days worth of work in the DCL labs at the middle school to make sure that they had the right version of Java on there and once we got that settled there were no more problems after that we have one person in the district that that went around and set up the iPads for that so that they would be locked down so that they couldn't get into any other applications but that was setting up test nav and that was you know he was able to do that in very short order so and how many did we test this year we tested grades six and eight online at the middle school all of six and eight no two classes in each and we tested Dallin at the at the fifth grade level okay so this is a huge ramp up we're going from like a couple hundred students to thousands and and that's the right that's why I sat with the IT staff and we talked about this long and hard this was not a decision we made lightly okay okay I'd like to put a motion on the table and we can continue discussing yeah I want to ask a clarifying question what if the school committee does what Bill is suggesting which is not make a decision until October till September what does that do for your planning for the year well if we don't have a decision it's hard it's hard to say it we can put in for park now the problem might be well if you make no decision and cast the default if you decide park and it's not possible to do it then your default is MCAS my understanding I thought you said that that the only the guarantee is is electronic in June is a maybe guarantee a maybe get electronic but we could still do paper in October am I wrong possibly not it's not clear because of the contract they're getting this summer can I also just say that the the complaints that we had about the directions at Thompson and and at Bishop were actually greater those are paper I just want to make sure my concern is the communication with the with our goal is to communicate assessment changes we are changing an assessment that's my I'm Park is over here for me right I've got mixed feelings plus and minus I want the instant feedback I think that's a wonderful thing in Park for us for budget reasons for educational reasons and all that aspect of it and I accept there is still but Mr. P has brought it up I think it's a valid for me it's going to drive my decision and it has nothing to do with the the mechanics of Park but you need to know that it's about communicating it's not about asking for it's not about getting feedback or input it's about communicating what's going on and that's different but I guess what I heard this past week and what I believe is communication is not me sitting here dictating what is going to be done I have to listen I may still make a decision contrary to what I listened to but I have to give another so I'm wondering we you know today is June 12th I'm wondering if it's possible for the school committee to make a decision to do more research and have a subcommittee meet and make a decision sometime in the month of June we have a meeting that's on the calendar I think for the and I'm not sure no we don't okay but but it's possible to find it's possible to find it on the meeting date to have a subcommittee do some a deeper dive on this and then have a we have a do it in the month did superintendent put out a doodle today for a for a treat meeting before the end of the month so it could happen then if it I can't make any of those dates there's only three dates only three days so we we didn't have we all have two people responding there's also not any agreement on the date I haven't had a chance to put a meeting on that that Thursday on the fourth Thursday I leave that to the committee suggestion is to have two weeks from tonight another school committee meeting you would probably be directed for this purpose only because I think it's because I think this is a critical this is a big decision and Cindy makes a very good point about communicating you know if this is a state mandate the test MCAS's state mandate park is is likely to be a state mandate there's only so much dialogue you can have about a state mandate you have to figure out what's going to be best for teaching and learning based on the information you have period and if if we could get two more weeks to do some study we could we could possibly make a decision I would help it would be good for me to do that additional research but I'm you know I'm one guy here so let's be clear the state mandate maybe will be in September 16 maybe yeah but I'm just talking about the I'm just talking about the communication piece it's it's it's communicating Cindy's right Mr. Pierce then Mr. Schleg it depends on how you define the word is is you know to me means not to dictate but rather to listen and understand that's what communicate means to me and what we don't know from state mandates are how our particular Arlington students react to stress and anxiety in the classroom and I think we heard tonight from the special lead leaders and we've heard all throughout the year that there's a particular attention now and I think we put that in our goals as well for the emotional and social well-being of our students that's another one of our goals that we're supposed to be paying attention to and we're not paying attention to that goal by choosing a high-stakes test like this I'm sorry putting it off one year make that yeah the difference okay Mr. Schleg we'll see okay several things have swum by here first of all directions being unclear on on the park it's the first time anybody's ever done it and the fact is is if we are actually going to be doing it for real people have administered it before and there'll be opportunities to practice tests so people become familiar with with with the testing instrument itself secondly the anxiety issue I I monitored MCAS testing I for the past 12 years I was an MCAS test coordinator you're putting that paper in front of the kids that's that's a stressful environment as well and whether or not the computer testing test creates some level of stress I see the the paper and pencil test which is such a foreign element to normal classroom practice to be even more of a stressor an interactive computer test will probably be for more students a less stressful component because this is generations used to going and doing things and responding to computers than they are to multiple choice paper paper and pencil test I think the issue of communication is an important one but I also think that as a district we need to make a decision and I don't think that it's fair to anyone need our teachers or our administration or our students to punt this and leave this till September because at this point where we are preparing for next year we're going to be putting in orders for the equipment we need and I think teachers starting in day one should know where we're going so I would very strongly urge us to meet in two weeks so I would make a motion that the school committee meet in two weeks for the purpose of deciding this is there a second any further discussion on that the motion itself so let's just be clear it's not just me I think it would be more specific meet and decide meet for the purpose of deciding this so we're going to meet on the 26th 6th of June at 6.30pm in this room for the purpose of deciding and any other matters at the submit and that's a regularly scheduled meeting anyway so we'd be blowing off a regularly scheduled meeting if we don't meet yes but I think other matters going to put on the agenda with the secretary yeah okay so I think we should I think we have a responsibility to make this decision yes on the motion on the motion actually I'm not sure if this is relevant but one reason not to make the decision now is because it's such a dynamic changing situation you know we have states that are deciding not to do it that we're once part of it we have New York state is sort of on the fence of it on it right now it's possible that we'll know a lot more in September and October well I would say this you know but you'll be just excuse me no excuse me so this is I guess you need to stay on the motion right now this is about the motion of whether we're going to make a decision in two weeks so one thing that'll but our decision could be we're waiting but for the decision in two weeks one thing I would point out is that in two weeks we'll probably have more information how and how other districts have voted mm-hmm okay head code districts I'm interested in that I'm interested to see the discussion we should ask the superintendent to to get that far us yeah I think you can just ask MASC it's been a little fine and as it was okay but not for the next two we have been involved there's two more weeks but this gives us can we play excuse me if you've got something you want to say please raise your hand and speak to the motion at the moment thank you any other discussion on the motion yes was the phrasing that the motion that we have to make a decision or for the purpose of making a decision okay does that mean that we have to because what it means the motion I'm just trying to make that will be on the agenda making a decision that we the motion will probably be brought forward we'll vote it up or down mm-hmm I'll make the more I'll prepare a motion mm-hmm okay so what I'm saying is I'm trying to understand if I think we should have a meeting I think we should discuss it positive we're going to come to a conclusion we may not well if we if we don't I'm trying if we don't vote a motion we have made a decision right but at this point we're we're but by doing nothing we're making a decision you know anything further on the motion well I would say this motion will be on the table to adopt park it will either pass or fail yeah mm-hmm that's when you're shooting the horses so that's a little pass or fail yeah and if it fails we couldn't dare come back in September and you can meet with and public yes we can always all those in favor of having a school committee meeting on June 26th say aye all right all those opposed unanimous vote no I'm opposed oh excuse me yes I'm opposed I'll say no you got to yell no in here in here my oh we're short sorry okay no problem okay and I can I come I'm not coming no I'm coming opposed to the meeting six one vote okay Dr. Bode the rest of your report exactly two and a half set no man go ready wait are we going are we going to try to have some kind of I mean here's the problem if we go out and ask parents no no most of them don't know what this is no no no two they of course are going to be against it as soon as no I'm not because it's hard to explain that wasn't my point was it wasn't asking for permission from the community to do one thing or another I understand that that wasn't my ask my ask was to have a a public forum as our goal state well I absolutely way before February 15 are we sure yeah absolutely we can do that well but ideally before we make a decision like this that's I'm sorry that's how I thought I agree I agree yeah but but I think that we've sufficiently warned the public that this is on the agenda oh two or five people were watching well people and the people on tv excuse me the chair's lost control and the chair wants control on another issue I'm not going to entertain any more discussion on this issue at this moment thank you and I no deal with him later thank you go okay enrollment enrollment's good a statement we have right now if you look at our total what our total difference will be next year as of this moment in time compared to where we were in October one numbers we will be up 178 students I suspect that we will go over 200 by the end of the summer our number of kindergarten students 511 this year is 469 now when I when we when I set the numbers for the kindergarten's back a couple of weeks ago they were pretty even throughout all of the school maybe one a plus or minus one or two but they were really even across the district that has really started to change and actually most significantly at Stratton Stratton numbers had gotten up to 28 and we also know we have some students will be included next year but more than they even were at this past year so it was I know you have received a lot of email around this issue and I know you have responded that these are all preliminary numbers as we go along we will see what is happening so what we will try to do even in the next couple of weeks and see if we can even ease off a little bit more but it's possible it was hard to say yet where we will go if we need another kindergarten but we clearly need one up at Stratton however Stratton's kindergarten will be a little bit smaller than the other the ones in the district so it that's just the way it's going to be we can't have kindergarten starting at 28 plus students that are going to be included as well so that's why confirm those numbers today and the decision was pretty clear so I just wanted to let you know where we stand with that now of those numbers that 178 I mentioned to you 142 are in the elementary we want to just a quick comments from the two of you on graduation and I just want to give a congratulations to the orchestra band and chorus boys chorus at Oddison I can as soon as I can find my piece of paper but do you want to say the go ahead your graduation was beautiful day the student speakers were very inspiring I want to thank the chair for the brevity of his of his words and and it was compelling and motivating wow we had we had a discussion of who's would be shorter mine was I owe him a dollar mine was three pages with a 48 font hers was one page with a short font that's how I got the dollar right but other than that other than that it was a wonderful day and they actually set a record for a short graduation of one hour in 40 minutes which I'm thinking that many parents very much appreciated the students were phenomenal they were I want to thank not only Dr. Cheson but Mr. Pierce Mr. Schlickman we all processed in our regalia and the students were were just something special and it was a pleasure I truly enjoyed being the chair and passing out I had the ability to tease a couple of the students that I knew I told a couple they had blank diplomas and they panicked for about two seconds so they sorry but it was a wonderful day which really was a wonderful weather the weather was just excellent yeah I'll say I just want to again another congratulations to the music department this time at the Odyssey Middle School they participated in this great east music festival that was up in New Hampshire which is a big musical festival for a middle school groups so the the band and the boys chorus received gold medals and the orchestra had a platinum and that platinum was with 98 out of 100 points so they did very very well so just congratulations to all of them and that's all I have great thank you we'll be on to the consent consent agenda all items listed with an asterisk that considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so request will be considered in a normal sequence approval of warrant warrant number one four one six eight dated May 22nd 2014 in the amount of seven hundred twenty three thousand three hundred ninety six dollars and forty five cents approval of draft minutes none approval of APS sister city student exchange trip to Japan July one through 13 2014 do I have a motion? so moved second second any discussion? all those in favor? all those opposed? hearing no opposition this is a unanimous vote subcommittee and liaison reports policies and procedures Mr. Pierce thank you we met again this week and we have before you for second reading our regular school committee meetings file revision of BEA and I understand what Dr. Allison Ampe was saying in terms of the first sentence there where we say during each school year I'd be fine with amending that to between September and June as a possibility or no? no our school year could actually a school year is July 1 to June 30 so we could actually do it anytime we want but the if you do it September to June and we want to do an August meeting we can't so I think the vagity the vague nature of the school year allows us the flexibility of scheduling our 20 meetings okay yeah I don't touch it yeah so we did we uh I would I would move that uh we adopt BEA I second the motion and for the discussion all those in favor aye opposed unanimous vote and uh we also took up the issue of fingerprinting we've been told that we have to have a new quarry policy in effect for next year as well as a new background checks policy and so it was suggested to us by MASC and by DESE was to discard our current ADDA policies of which there are four and to adopt though the ones their blue sheets and in front of you tonight on background checks and it talks about what we've talked about here in this meeting the fingerprinting of of school personnel and and the fees associated with that and how to request not only quarry information but CHRI information which is criminal history records information and then ADDA slash R is the quarry policy which is updated to meet the new the new laws so this is first read I don't know when we'll maybe if we meet yeah on the 26 we can get to it on the 2nd right here sounds good anything further we talked about park for and MCAS we got educated on it so we had a we had a little bit of a a leg up here tonight we had miss Hanson and Dr. Chesson and Dr. Bode talked to us a lot about that but we also talked about and we had four parents come I think five there was a couple talking to us about kindergarten and entry age we've been through this before as a committee since I've been on it they're talking to us and they'd like to open up the conversation and communication about kindergarten entry age we have a policy on that about age five as of September one age six for first grade as of September one and so they're really like three three choices you know you could you could leave the policies as is we could change the dates of starting age for either kindergarten or first or both and so I think some further studies going to be done on that we're going to have some ongoing communication with those parents who are interested on that so there's no recommendation at this time no thank you did you have a question oh yeah yes I have a question is um I know some of the parents want some flexibility or do any of these districts have the kind of flexibility that the parents are asking for are they pretty definite this is the date they did and I'm sorry in our packets we don't have what they provided us at the meeting I don't think but they did have examples of districts that had we have that coming like gray buffers areas okay okay thank you all set budget miss stocks we met yesterday we are working on things so we probably will have some things for the fall I don't think we didn't have anything that was coming forward today we talked about the visual budgeting stuff coming to us and I just wanted to put in my plug my husband and I worked last last at the end of the day and it was fun to see them all drag their butts in there by 11 o'clock and then we were there until one and then I could barely see straight anymore so we went home that we were on the first shift but I also wanted to put in a plug because last year I can do it because my son will be a senior next year so if you want to have fun if you really if you know any if you know seniors or if anybody knows that they want to especially especially need people from the one to five shift which is you know like but the nice thing is that now that's graduation is on Saturday you don't at least you don't have to get up and go to work which was really hard I worked it I worked the one to five shift two years when Morgan was in the high school when before I right right before I when I went back to work I had to take the day off so because you can't I I appreciate that just a point all the juniors that support the graduation were taking the SATs that day too yeah so they were running a little record so there's a plus and minus to having it on the Saturday yeah yeah but I noticed it was it's on Saturday again right next year all set great community relations Mr. Schlickman we met on May 27th when most of our conversation was about communicating with the community particularly with regard to web presence and dashboard the discussion is in the draft minutes that are at your table tonight in addition there's some correspondence in the packet here regarding Nagoka Co we have an article from the Koto Shinbun which I'm sure you've all read I've ordered over there yeah very clear very clear Rieka was kind it was kind enough to do a translation and we have a letter on record that was received by Matthew Janger the principal of Arlington High School which is a request from Nishito Kune High School which is the school that has been sending high school senior high school students to us as part of the program the kids who come in tend to be a mix of middle and high school students and the students who have been here I think we've had four students so far who have done a year at Arlington High and they are evolving students at this high school and they'd like it to formalize the relationship and have a sister school relationship between Arlington High School and their high school now this is sort of an important thing for next year in that unless the mayoral election changes the prevailing wins in the city government we'll need some sort of an official agency for us to have a relationship with when we receive students next year so that I'd like to ask that we place this on the agenda for the next meeting of the school committee to authorize this sister school relationship You're talking June 26th? Yeah Would you forward the relevant information to It's here so That's the fifth Yeah You all set with that? Yeah Okay Yeah And both Sinoe and Japan and Sue Schaeffler and who has coordinated it on the volunteer side for us are fully on board with taking the step to formalize relationship between Arlington High and their high school Thank you Facilities Mr. Thielman No report Special Study Group Superintendent's Evaluation No report The chair What about curriculum? I apologize Curriculum Instruction and Assessment Accountability Dr. Allison Abbey I apologize No No report But do you You didn't want to be left out I apologize No, no, no I'm sorry, but just a report Do you want us to take up any discussion about park and MCAS in between now and two weeks? I think I think if the committee can meet I think it should happen That would be great Okay Thank you Then we'll do that That's why I wanted to talk So who's on that committee? No You So what did I agree with you? So okay So let's Yeah You're doing the in-depth study Okay, no good. I think we should, I think Yeah, I don't know Okay As far as growing paperless Novus agenda was the one that was selected to do a pilot The support staff have had They correct me if I'm wrong, Ms. Fitzgerald Have you started any of the training? No They were They were Next week So maybe at the next meeting we'll have a little bit more in-depth report on that Secretary's report There's no secretary's report I thought we got rid of that Get rid of it Okay So we weren't sure And it's certainly not me And it's not her Okay Executive session Don't pick on the secretary We will We will be exiting for executive session We will be coming out to take a vote on some of the issues that may be discussed in the executive session contractual issues Executive session to conduct strategy strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and or non-union in which if held in open meeting may have a detrimental effect to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if in open meeting may have detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of a public body and the ChSO declares We will be discussing and vote to extend and modify the Alex and Education Association MOA on sending non-resident children to Arlington public schools We will be voting and discussing the AEA unit A evaluation contract provision MOA dated 5, 24, 213 Voting and discussion The traffic supervises AFSCME Council 93 local 680 MOA June 2014 Executive session to vote on above contracts