 As a preliminary matter, this is I am Jane Morgan, the chair of the Arlington School Committee. Please permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Members, when I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Oh, I don't even have my sticky note tonight. Aye, aye, you guys. Len Cardin. Yes. Liz X, Elizabeth Xden. Yes. Paul Schlickman. In the affirmative. Will Hayner. Yes. Ruthie Allison Ampey. Yes. And Jeff Dilman. Yes. Staff, when I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Dr. Bodie. Here. Mr. Mason. Here. And Mr. Spiegel. Here. Okay. And anticipated speakers on the agenda are not here at this point, so we'll circle back to that. Good afternoon. Good evening. This open meeting of the Arlington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020 due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order, which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Ensuring public access does not ensure public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment for people who signed up in advance. For this meeting, the Arlington School Committee is convening by Zoom as posted on the town's website, identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that some, that other folks may be able to see you and that take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by their recording. All of the materials for this meeting except any executive session materials are available on the Novus agenda dashboard and we recommend the members and the public follow the agenda as posted on Novus unless I note otherwise. We are now turning to the first item on the agenda. Before we do so, permit me to cover some ground rules for effective and clear conduct of our business and to ensure accurate meeting minutes. I will introduce each speaker on the agenda after they conclude their remarks. I will go down the list of members inviting each by name to provide any comment, question or motions. Please hold until your name is called. Further, please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. Please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes for any response, please wait until the chair yields the floor to you and state your name before speaking if members wish to engage in colloquy with other members. Please do so through the chair taking care to identify yourself. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. So the first item on the agenda for tonight is executive session. Do we need to vote to go into executive session? Yes. Okay, so I need a motion. Mr. Schlinger. So move. Thank you, Mr. Hainer. Well, now you can't so move. I moved it into your executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with the union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with the union and or non-union in which you've held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect and to conduct strategy with respect to collective body a bargaining or litigation which have held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. Collective bargaining may also be conducted to discuss AFL CIO State Council 93 local 680 traffic supervisors to discuss Dr. Roderick McNeil and Malice and Elmer's contracts and to discuss a legal contract, a legal concern involving EDCO. Second. Roll call Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also yet. So that's a unanimous vote. So we are going to go into executive session. All right. Welcome to the June 25th, 2020 meeting of the Arlington School Committee. I'm gonna, there are a lot of boxes on the screen right now. I am gonna do a quick roll call. I read our open meeting law script already. At the beginning of the meeting before we went into executive session, but I just wanna make sure that we're all here, everybody who we need on the agenda. So Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. I see her. Dr. Allison Ampey. Sorry, I have problems. You're fine. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Hello. Mr. Hater. Yes. I'm Ms. Morgan. I am here. Mr. Dr. McNeil. Here. Great. Ms. Elmer. Yes. I see you. Mr. Merringer. Here. Ms. Salvatore. Here. Dr. Janger. Not yet. Mr. Mason. Yeah. And then Ms. Rogers. Here. And Ms. Jolin. Jolin, is that correct? That's correct. Hi. You're welcome. I think that's everybody. So we're just waiting for Dr. Janger at some point. I think he'll join us. Did you get me? No, I did not. I'm here. And Ms. Kees from the AA is with us. Hi. Hi, welcome. Jan Kees will be here in a minute. Pardon, what Karen? Happy Bodie will be right there. Yeah. We should thank her. Thank you. Long commute. Ms. Fitzgerald, did we have anybody who had public comment or wanted to do public comment tonight? I didn't, I know we didn't get any. I was all taken care of. Okay. All right. And nobody signed up for public comment. No, we did not. Okay. So public comment is, is, we need to, okay. So let's start. I see Dr. Janger. It's still looking for Dr. Bodie. You want to do the contract in the meantime? Let's do the contract. Yeah. Cause we could just do those ourselves. So I need a motion for Dr. McNeil's contract first. I move that we direct the chair to sign the contract with Dr. McNeil. Second. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. Excuse me. Yes. Does this also mean we're passing the contract too? Do we need a second vote for that? I think if we authorize to sign it, it is adopted. It's adopted. Yeah. Fine. I have no problem. Thank you. My answer is yes. Okay. Thank you. I also vote yes. So that's a seven nothing vote. Now I need another motion. So I move that we adopt Dr. Bodie's recommendation to offer a contract to Allison Elmer and that we direct the chair to sign the contract. Second. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. No. Ms. Morgan and I'm also yes. So that's a six one vote. Okay. Moving on. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Ms. Cardin. Thank you. Can I just provide a little context for this? So these are both renewal contracts for Ms. Elmer who's been here for quite a long time now and for Dr. McNeil who's on his second contract having been here three years. These are both renewal contracts the terms of which were discussed in executive session. And so we are required to then vote them an open session, which we just did. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anybody else? There's so many of you. It's really hard to see if your hands go up right now. So I need like really significant motion and then I will catch you. All right. So the next item on the agenda is the Erlington Human Rights Commission two appointments. Mr. Hainer. Thank you. We were very fortunate. We opened this up. We ended up having 21 applicants which kept Ms. Eksten and Mr. Thielman and I busy for one whole night. We whittled that down to eight individuals for interviews on Tuesday night this past week. Seven of them came and we labored till it's to the late hours of the morning, not really. And we came up with two of the candidates which are here with us tonight. And if it through the chair, if it's all right I'd like to introduce Kathy Rogers and hopefully I pronounce this right. Hannah Jolin. And invite any of the other members of the committee to ask them any questions or discuss it. These are the two candidates that we feel in a moment there will be motions to bring them forward as our representatives on the Human Rights Commission here in Erlington. Thank you. Fantastic. Ms. Rogers, can I just give you just a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself. I know that you came before most of us just a year ago but it's great to see you back. Thank you for continuing to be willing to serve. But we do have, we have a new member since then and I would just love to give you a minute to just introduce yourself. I'm Kathy Rogers. I've been an Arlington resident for 30 years which is half of my life. I've had two children go through the Arlington school system through the Brackett the Audison and then the high school that was Max and Sarah Schaller. They're both very well launched having gone into fantastic colleges and that is no small measure and in honor of the teachers, they had fantastic teachers and great experiences and we're so happy with the town. I'm at a point in my life where I have an empty nest, a retired husband and time on my hands and it's time to give back. And so 10 months ago, I started to serve in the Arlington Human Rights Commission. I filled a position that was vacated by somebody. It's been a great 10 months. I've enjoyed the work. I found it challenging. I'm learning. It's been an honor to be, to learn more about how the town of Arlington works and to serve the town. I'm delighted and thank Mr. Hayner very much for his confidence and Ms. Ekston. I'm sorry, there's one other person that I don't know. Confidence in me and I hope I'll make you proud with my work. Thank you very much. Ms. Jolin. Hi everyone. So I'm only a five year resident of Arlington. I have two very young boys, a little too young during quarantine that are going through the school system now at Stratton. Actually, my youngest will be starting kindergarten in September. So we'll see what that looks like as well. But I think I just really wanted to get involved with the community and establish roots in the town. And I think the best way to do it was to aim high and try to get involved with the members of this community. And I was honored that I was called back for an interview and absolutely stunned as I was at a car dealership when I got the email that I would be introduced to the larger committee. So I'm definitely looking forward to working with everyone. And hopefully I'll get to the point where I can say I'm a 30 year resident and it'll be fantastic. Thank you so much. Welcome. We're glad you're here. Mr. Heiner. I'd like to commend Ms. Exton and Mr. Thillman for the time and diligence they went through to go through this. They kept my hand to the fire throughout the whole thing. So it was a wonderful experience. Glad we only have to do this every three years. So through the chair, I'd invite Ms. Exton to make a motion. Yes, Ms. Exton. I move to appoint Kathy Rogers to a three-year term expiring on June 30th, 2023 to the Arlington Human Rights Commission. I'll second the motion. We'll call vote Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Dempsey. Yes. Mr. Thillman. Yes. Mr. Clickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also yes. That's a seven-nothing vote. Congratulations, Ms. Rogers. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Mr. Thillman. I move that we appoint to the Arlington Human Rights Commission for a three-year term expiring on June 30th, 2023, Ms. Hina Jolin. Second. And we'll have a roll call vote. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Dempsey. Yes. Mr. Thillman. Yes. Mr. Clickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. I am also yes. That is a seven-nothing vote. And I do want to compliment the chair, Bill, on doing a great job. There were a lot of applicants, so it was quite a process. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. And congratulations, and welcome, Ms. Jolin. Thank you. Okay. So the next item on the agenda is the fall opening. Could we sign off? Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being willing to serve. Thank you. Fall reopening, opening, reopening overview. Dr. Bodie, you're on mute. Thank you. As many of you know, today we received the initial fall reopening guidelines from the Department of Education. There was a press conference today that also talked about these initial guidelines. The primary message from the Department of Education is that they are really advocating for a safe return to school for as many students as possible. And we can talk a little bit more about what that means as many students as possible because it's related to what the safety protocols would be in any school. And they're in this particular guidelines, which the commissioner outlined today. There are very clear health and safety requirements that we will have to adhere to. I think that the only one that is a surprise has to do with social distancing, which we'll talk about in a second. The guidelines have evolved as many of the things that we've learned about COVID over these last few months has evolved as medical information becomes more readily available as there's more research. And the Department of Education conferred with a number of medical teams, Brigham and Women, the Academy of Pediatrics, the medical group that was advising the governor, and there were others besides CDC and so forth. And that was the underlying basis for the many of the recommendations that they have made with respect to reopening in the fall. Essentially, they're looking for the districts to look at three options. And one is that we have a return where for as many students as possible with very clear and strict safety protocols in place. Another possibility would be that we have some kind of hybrid situation where a smaller group of students would alternate with another cohort of students on an every other day or every other week basis. We've been sort of thinking and that could be a possibility in Arlington for some time as we've been going through this crisis. And of course, the third one is having more of a fully remote experience. I will say that one of the things that in the call that the commissioner said to superintendents is that it's very possible that we're going to go in between these. We just don't know how all of this will evolve with the virus over the fall and how it intermixes with the flu season as well. So what is being asked of every single district is that you have three plans. And you have a plan for the return as many students as possible with the safety protocols as well as a hybrid plan, as well as a remote learning plan. And all three plans have to be submitted to the department sometime in August. The dates of this have not been set yet at all. The state is going to be providing some additional monies for districts for K-12 schools. There's going to be 193 million, actually closer to 194. There's also the COVID relief fund which we've already submitted claims for that is I think for the state, it's about 500 million. And then there's also going to be some competitive grants for federal funds as well. So we have a deadline for submitting a grant which we will be in the process of working on over the next few weeks. So one of the things that they're going to emphasize this fall in terms of safety protocol because of the vulnerability of students is that parents are going to have to make sure that their child's vaccinations are up to date. And we'll send a reminder out to parents because I think one of the things we're finding out from local pediatricians that they haven't been coming in to get these vaccinations and they do need to have them for the start of school. So there will be some rigorous protocols that we're going to have to follow in the fall. But underlying all of this, and probably should have been said at the beginning, is something I think we all agree with. Certainly all of our, in the Ireland's public schools, and I think parents have also believed it's true, is that there's not a real great substitute for in-school learning. And so to the extent that we can have students back in the classroom, that would be the ideal. The medical underlines of this is what they have found that schools do not seem to play a major role in COVID-19 transmission. In general, COVID infections are considerably lower than the general population. So as a comparison nationwide, about 22% of the population are students in K-12, but they only had 2% of the infections. They're also finding that exposed children are less likely to become infected with COVID-19. And additionally, if infected, it appears that children are less likely to infect others. And actually, the majority of transmissions go from adults to children rather than the other way around. So this is documented information and there is a company, these guidelines are some of the documentation from that. So what are the kinds of requirements that are going to be in place in the fall for any opening, whether this is to the extent possible full or a hybrid, and that students and adults are going to have to wear masks. The mask wearing is going to begin with students as young as grade two, students in K and first grade are going to be encouraged to wear masks, but they're not going to necessarily be required all the time to wear them. There will be some exceptions to the mask wearing, but there will be based on disabilities or medical conditions. And we don't go through all the issues on that. One of the things they talked about is having mask breaks. If anybody's worn a mask for any length of time, you know that it can be challenging. So we'd have to figure out how that could occur in a safe way. We have as a district already purchased a lot of PPE equipment. I think we'll probably have to be purchasing more in time, but we've already got a head start on a lot of the masks, the gloves, the gowns that our nurses are going to have to wear and some other staff people as well. For those that are going to be riding a bus, it's going to be absolutely required that you have a mask on. I think the guidelines for the buses are still going to be, are still in the process of being determined. One of the things I've learned just in the last couple of days that there's such a thing as a transparent mask. And so we're looking into that. We've already bought face shields off of the district. So there is going to be an emphasis on physical distancing. We've all heard the six foot, but what the research is showing is that for students in this wide age group, the three feet is a social distance that we can go to. So what we are going to be looking at is how many students desks can be placed in a classroom. And that's going to vary quite a bit throughout the district because we do have various size classrooms. And they have to be, the desks themselves have to be three feet apart. So we've already begun that process. We're going to, we're going to have to take an inventory of all of our classrooms to see what that would be. And then that will be the data that we will use to determine what it means to have as many students back as possible. And I can report more on that as we go through the summer, but we're just collecting the data on that right now. We did learn that we positioning, we're not going to do rectangular grids. We've learned from our director of math that we should be doing something a little bit different in terms of staggering to get maximum desks in the classroom. So that is one thing that we will have to look at. There's going to of course be, even when students are in the building some distance requirements. And that's going to be, I think, challenging to be under the students are. We're going to have a lot of work to do in terms of just creating the facility configurations for next year. And we'll talk more about that later. I know that right now that the Department of Education wants us to look at some of our largest spaces, such as our gyms, our cafeteria libraries as potential sort of overflow in order to be able to have more students. And there is more protocols for our nurses and for staff that have to work more closely with students and cannot necessarily always wear a mask. Well, they should be wearing a mask, but can't always be, is maintain that kind of social distancing. They're encouraging us to keep cohorts of groups as small as we can, but they cohorts stay together throughout the day. That's more challenging the older the student becomes. It becomes very challenging at the high school, as you can imagine. We're also, there's not any required minimum on capacity. It's really going to be determined whether you can maintain that three foot distancing. So one big change that's happened over the last couple of weeks is that we're not going to have any screening that when students enter school that temperature checks are not recommended because the data is showing there's too many false negatives, false positives. Though we have ordered those thermometers, but we'll still be handy to have in a nurses office. So what was going to be very important is, and this is something we said to parents last year is that there's actually going to be no tolerance for students coming to school six. They will have to go home. We certainly cannot have students in the school coughing. And so we're going to have to be very flexible and very nimble in how we move forward in our planning. And what we don't know quite yet, and this will be emerging over the summer, is if we have a case of COVID, whether student or a faculty member, staff member, what that's going to mean in terms of the school itself. But that's still something that has not been sent to us. When I started this, I talked about this being initial and it is initial because we expect to be getting further guidelines over the summer. We're going to be keeping parents informed as we go through this process. It's probably likely to be another survey or more information later on this month. So at this point, we have a working org chart. I put it into, I don't know if we can put it on the screen or not, the org chart. Mr. Mason, is that possible for you to just put into the org chart so people can see how we're organizing as a district for these planning requirements? Yes, give me one second. Okay. This chart has been shared with administrators. I will share it with all of the faculty. They've just gone over it this week. We've talked about these different committees, but the chart just shows how everything is interrelated by a steering committee and then the major subcommittees that are going to have to look at a host of issues as we go forward. And one of the big committees, of course, is instruction because as we look at our planning, thank you. So I don't know if everybody can see this, but there's a lot of things under each one of these. We have communication is something that we're going to be needing to plan very carefully about keeping people up to date. We will have an FAQ as we continue forward like we did through the spring and the Department of Education is also going to develop an FAQ as well. Which will incorporate into ours. So we have instructional teaching and learning, SEL, and we're gonna have to look at curriculum maps, assessments, special education, more of the instructional part of special education, ELL instruction, remote learning plans, SEL, how that's gonna incorporate into all of what we do with students, professional development. We're going to be offering, besides just the technology of what we're looking, you know, we fortunately have had a lot of that. But one of the things we do have to provide more professional development in is how you teach in a remote environment. I think we've all got thrown into this and learned sort of by doing, but I think that there's more and more good information that we can use and learn about to incorporate. And then of course, digital literacy. Another major, and this is major, the school district operations. And there we have to look at health and safety, food service, technology, transportation, our after school programs, daycare, athletics, and all of our facilities. And so under these, we have our school-based committees. They have, for the preschool, elementary, middle and high school, and they have, they're going to, just as we take a look at some of the day camps, because they have really been focusing on a lot of procedures around drop off pickup. And so there's gonna be some different places where we're gonna pull in some great ideas on this. But in terms of, I don't know across the state, I just know that right now in Arlington, the support we're going to be offering to Title I and also for students who have been in intervention is all virtual. And later, as I said, Ms. Elmer, we'll talk about the ESY. Right, I'm not sure if I was clear. I was trying to say that it feels like Desi has an opportunity that if they can get some people to actually try this over the summer, we can find out if it works before we send everybody into it and find out that way. I haven't heard anything like that. Okay, and then did they make any advisory on the number of school days that'll be required or the length of the school day for next year? I think that that is something that they are considering at the moment, no. They haven't, but in a conversation there's been, I think one of the other issues is, we have attendance requirements and they're looking at that issue as well. They said this is sort of an evolving process and we'll learn more as the summer goes on. And then finally, I didn't see anything about having options for parents to take remote learning as an option. So is that ruled out completely? I don't think so and I think those parents that are going to want to have that as an option and some in cases is because their child may have a compromised medical condition. So we need to be very flexible to be able to move into remote right away. You saw how quickly schools closed in March and so we are going to have a remote option as we go forward because I think it's going to be necessary to have something along that. Now, how that looks, we don't know yet. We're working on it. Our initial idea on it was that we would have something by level for sure and this would not be something that necessarily you float in and out of, but how this evolves is something I can talk about more as we get toward late in July. That's all, thank you. Great, Ms. Extend. With regard to the working groups, you talked about building base, are there grade level bands or across the district as well? Yes, there is and I think we're all feeling we're going to have lots of meetings. We have the building base but then we have some standing committees that actually go vertically as well. And so what we have recognized is that communication, both horizontally, vertically is extremely important. We've created, besides this org chart that just gives you the vision, we've created a tool to keep the communication very clear, common agenda templates and also spreadsheets in which we can keep track of members in all of the meetings. We also have, when I have a central calendar with all of the standing meetings, which are many. Many, many as we go forward. Thank you. I'm thinking about what K1 and 2 is going to look like. You talked about how high school is going to be challenging in its own way, so just making sure that teachers are having their voices heard in all of those pieces. They are, they definitely are. It's very important. They have, this is affecting them as well in terms of what, you know, and I suspect that there's a lot of staff people who are also very concerned about their own health and that's something that we are in discussions about and we've talked about that today as well as how that, how we're going to find out what, which teachers may need to have some consideration in this area. Thanks. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Bodie. So just on the organization chart, it might be helpful, it would be helpful for me at least if there was a little bit more information on who is doing what. So for example, there's communication is sort of in topic, but who is, who is in charge? Is there a communication working group? You know, things like that. I think some more detail on what are these working groups? Who's on each working group? Who is in charge of coming back with a plan to communicate or a plan to do, to set up the classrooms? You know, a little bit more detail I think might be helpful going forward. I know you just, you're just starting on it. We have chairs for everything. Mr. Thielman. Thank you. My question, so I have a couple of questions. First, when do you expect to make a decision and announce to the public a plan for the fall? Like when will you decide whether it's a hybrid model, all remote, all in, what's the... We have to have this plan probably ready sometime in August. The commissioner hasn't set a date, but I think it's going to be based on our data. What we're going to do is we're going to, we have to do an inventory of every classroom in the district. Some of that won't be that difficult because they're sort of standard in some schools. You know, the classrooms that's ratten are pretty much the same in the wings. So you'll be able to tell how many deaths are possible. In the early grades, we have issues around tables. That's a question that we have to talk to the department of education about because in terms of the orientation of these tables and how students could sit at them safely. But having said that, it's really going to be based on data. So if we can only get 15, 16 deaths in a room, and yet our class is 24, we're going to have to see if it's possible to how we would handle having that difference of nine students, how would this work? Would there be two cohorts within that class? Would we use another part of the school? We may find that it's just not possible. All of our schools, as you know so well, do not have a lot of extra space. They just simply do not. And so it's going to be challenging to see how that would work. We also may have parents that decide to take a remote option and that may change also the number of students. So it's really going to be very database and based on the physical buildings. But are you kind of saying, well, I'm going to announce something by August 15th or? Oh, absolutely. Okay. We have to do that. But like a date would be, when is the date? I'm just curious. It would probably be sometime the first week of August. Okay, all right. Now my other follow-up question is, and this is a follow-up to what Lynn asked, or maybe Kirstie, I forgot, is that the report that came out today, the 28-page report that Commissioner Riley sent to everyone, or that we got, talks about a family survey, just as you get close to the reopening of school, and it talks about the three models, the hybrid, the all remote and the all in-person. It seems to me you might be able to back into a model in which some parents might say they don't want to send their children to school no matter what, even if it's a hybrid model. And so I'm wondering if to pick up on Lynn's question, if there is a fourth model, which is a viable fourth option, which is some parents saying, I would like to send my kids my one to send my children, and then another percentage of the population saying, I'm not sending my children, and that actually gives you enough flexibility in terms of kids in classrooms. That's exactly what we need to find out, and later in the agenda, I'm gonna talk about the parent survey, which I think will give you some insight into where a lot of parents are. And the other thing is I, you know, I don't know, this is a school, I think my own theory would be for what it's, there's a suggestion is that, you know, you have to do social distancing as best you can, because you know, kids are kids, they're gonna talk to each other, bump into each other, and I don't know, I think you just have to do the best you can. I'm not sure it's ever gonna, as a parent, I wouldn't expect it to be perfect. I wouldn't expect perfect social distancing, perfect three feet radius run every kid all day long, the mask on all the time. I just, I can't, I'm not sure, some parents might expect that, I wouldn't. I think there's gotta be some, I think there's gotta be some give and some, especially what the data is telling us about, you know, that schools are not the places where there's likely to be COVID issues, serious COVID issues. It feels like some flexibility, and I hope that parents are gonna be able to give and be flexible when their kids come back and talk about their day in school. That's all I got to say. Thanks. Mr. Schlickerman? Well, I mean, I saw the desi document come through this morning, and I'm an educator, not a public health person. All I can say is that for a high school, I think that this is relatively easy to play. As somebody with an experience is in pre-K and early childhood, the younger the kids, the more difficult this is gonna be. The thing that I'm really torn by is looking at what's going on out west and to the south, is that all of a sudden this is skyrocketing all over again. And nationally, we don't have this under control, so I don't know where we're gonna be at in August and September. And the thing is, people keep asking me what we're going to do. And I don't have a public health background and I don't have public health data available to me. I think that we're really gonna need to work with the Board of Health and try to see what data we can get beyond what is publicly available to make an informed decision. I'm not ready to make any kind of decision right now, although I think that the more I listen, the more I think we're heading to some sort of a hybrid situation in the fall. That's all I've got to say. Mr. Hainer. Is there, I just did a cursory look at the report. Did they have anything to do with athletics? Did they talk about that at all? So if they didn't, I'm just concerned. I mean, the possibility of doing athletics late winter, spring, I think communicating to the students and to the families that the possibility or the probability of no athletics in the fall needs to be communicated as soon as possible. I'm just concerned about that aspect about it. I agree with Mr. Schlickman. I have no idea how you're gonna do primary grades, especially kindergarten and things of that nature. I applaud you and everyone else that is going through this. Thank you. We don't know about athletics yet, but I expect that there'll be a decision about that probably late July, because fall sports start in August. So just a few things from me. I'm glad to hear that regardless of where the direction looks to be, that you're gonna be doing some remote learning PD over the summer seems like time well spent, given the uncertainty and given how challenging it was this spring. I think that I'm looking forward to the survey highlights later on, and we can talk about this a little bit more at that time. I do think there's value in continuing to survey families with a very short survey. If we have in-person school, are you planning to send your child yes or no? And just continually, not every week, obviously, but I think it's the kind of thing where as to Mr. Schluckman's point, as information changes in the world, people's decisions are gonna change. And I feel like even my position, when I think about my kids, I kind of squiggle around, I operate around a mean, but I'd go one way or the other given what information I have in any given day or week. So I do think that people, this is something where people's opinions change and some could swing pretty dramatically one way or another given what they see or hear. So the question that I have, just because I want, I think it's really important that here around this Zoom we're talking with the same language and the same definitions. What I saw in the guidance today, and Dr. Bode, you can tell me if you read this differently or if I'm wrong, because that's also totally possible, was that you're being asked to produce plans for three different models. One would be a return to school in the maximum, bringing in the maximum number of students that you could given these guidelines, which may or may not be every student every day, right? Which would swing us into what we've been sort of bantering about this term of like hybrid, right? And in my mind, a hybrid model is a model in which students are in school some of the time and at home some of the time, which could be its own entity, could be its own intentional model, right? We could say, oh, we're gonna do hybrid intentionally or hybrid could be a consequence, that's sort of a tough word, but a consequence of the size of our buildings and our ability to staff classrooms, right? Because we could have kids that end up having to stay home because of the social distancing and requirements from Desi, we can't actually bring them to school every day because we either don't have a place to physically put them safely or a person to physically teach them in that space. And then fully remote, I think we are all painfully aware of the definition of that, right? We've all lived through that. So I think we're really clear about that I feel like things get a little squidgy is this difference between full return and a hybrid. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how you see those two in the context of how we're doing this. And in my mind, so like the governor's phasing, like we did phase one and now we're in phase two and if the numbers keep going well, then we get to go to phase three and then if we keep doing good, then we get to go to phase four, right? The return to school isn't really like that, right? We're not starting in one, like we might have to move to any of these phases at any given time, given what the data tells us. But can you talk just a little bit about the, what we're talking, we're using this word hybrid and I feel like it means two different things. It either means we can't bring enough kids in because of the constraints of our buildings and our staffing or it's like an intentional model where we choose not to bring in a certain number of kids. Do you understand my question? It's kind of convoluted. I think so. The data may show that we really can't do it in any kind, when I say we cannot bring a lot of our students back at the same time now. To your point about surveys, that might be very helpful. It might be that we could. We wanna be very careful though that we're consistent across the district. We don't want one school doing one thing or another school, it has to be consistent. I think the data will determine how many we can have and whether that is a good idea or not. And so, but to your question, do we have to send three completely different reports in? Yes. And so if, on that one bringing the maximum back, we would have to say what is the maximum we could bring back in various schools and it could be that it's not gonna work well and we're gonna choose something that has a lot more fairness and regularity to it and meets our standards and we might go to that. Whether we choose to do alternating weeks, which I think would be the preference of Department of Education, just in terms of the issue of having more time out in terms of social, well, not being in an infection situation potentially or bringing infection in. It's not a full quarantine, but at least it's like eight, nine days. So I think that's a little bit of preference there, but again, this is gonna be, I think, somewhat local, but that may change as well. One thing we're learning, things can change. You do the very best you can in planning for the moment, the things can change. One issue about local decision-making has its impact on our staff because not all of our staff lives in Arlington and many of our staff members have children. So they could be in a school district that has a different plan. Maybe they have more space, maybe they have an excise school. There's just so many variabilities here. And I do understand why Department of Education is couching what they're saying because there is that kind of variability. You look at Boston, Boston has lots of extra schools that were gonna excise or sell. So that could change, but that would mean they'd have to hire more staff. And so then there's a financial issue. So all of these things have their interconnectedness and we will have to make the best decision for Arlington unless something comes along that says, you know, that's, we're doing it this way in the state. But at least initially that's not what we're hearing. Tomorrow is a Q and A with the commissioner for superintendents and I'll probably know a lot more after tomorrow. So as far as remote, there's one thing I do wanna mention about remote if you're alluding to the spring. The remote that we will have in the fall is going to be very different than what we had in the spring. It is gonna be much more synchronous. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that the kids are literally on the screen for six and a half hours, but they may be engaged for six and a half hour, have a lesson, then they go do some work, they may do an activity, they come back into a lesson. It's going to be a very different model than what we had. And we have the time to plan that. The other thing about what we're doing is that we're going to have consistency across all of the elementary and with remote. We're all gonna be in the same place at the same time so that if we do have to do some changing and moving out, we're not having gaps across the district. So as you can see, as we're talking about this, this is a huge amount of planning that's going on and we'll have to go on every school across the district. So, hopefully I answered your question, but I think that's about all we can do at this point. No, that helps a lot. I think what makes people anxious or makes me anxious is that when we hear things like, well, the remote we will have in the fall will be. And so then we start to be like, wait a second, we're gonna have remote in the fall, ah! Right, and so I think the remote option that we may have to have, the push is going to be to bring kids back to school. And you told us that many, many times around this table that that's the desire is to bring as many back as possible, can be done safely per this initial and evolving guidance that we're getting from the state with the recognition that there may also have to be a remote option for families and that that remote option would not look the same as what we had in the spring. Is that fair to say? I just, I just, because I started to get heart palpitations when I hear like, well, we will have remote. And I'm like, well, but I thought we were gonna try and go back to school. And so, but I think we're saying that there's a high likelihood that both scenarios could happen, are going to be planned for and actually could potentially happen concurrently. Simultaneously. Yes, so many things. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. Dr. Allison Ampe. I just wanted to point out that one thing to think about is that if we do have options for families to choose to do remote learning that those kids don't have to be tied to, at least for elementary school, they don't have to be tied to their school. You could have a remote classroom composed of kids all across the district. And it could make finding the teaching staff easier. We hope, but yes, it will, it will definitely not be tied to a particular classroom. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify a bit on the timeframe that in response to Jeff's question earlier. So the current requirement is that we have these three plans submitted to the state in August. We don't know what date it's being required, but hopefully early August or so. And then they're going to look at those plans. So by August, by that deadline, the public will know what our full return plan looks like, what our hybrid plan looks like, and what our remote plan looks like. So there'll be details such as hybrid is one week on, one week off, or maybe it's two days on, two days off, whatever we come up with. That detail will be in the plan. Same thing with remote. One district in Virginia has said their remote plan is four days on, one day of teacher develop, catch up teacher prep work. So those details will be available for the public in August. But we won't know in August, in early August, which of those plans we'll need to implement. That decision will happen, obviously before the first day of school, but sometime between the submission of those plans and the opening of school. We're not clear if Desi's going to pick the plan for us or the version for us. If the health data is going to require us to do remote or hybrid, we just don't know that information yet. So unfortunately, there won't be a definite information about what the first day of school will look like until sometime well into August. Does that sound right? Yes, I hope it's not too far into August because there's still a lot of things to prepare. And we also, it's staffing, as you can see, and you have all of these different scenarios, we actually may need to do some supplementation too. But I think the district is very anxious to get a plan because even when you have a plan, there's still a lot that you have to do to get ready. And there's, so we have to think about staffing, we have to think about who's going to be attending school, not attending school, but you're right, that we're still having some uncertainty but it is starting to come together and I know it's hard to live with uncertainty, we're all human beings who don't really like that. We'd like to have answers as soon as we can but it's an evolving situation and I just think that's what we're gonna have to realize. The earlier we can get the plan, saying this we're gonna do in Arlington, believe me, the whole district would like that besides parents would like that. Mr. Haynes. In your planning, does Desi require or are you submitting the physical plans that you would be implementing these plans in? Because going along with what Mr. Cardin says, I'd be really nervous if Desi turns around and says you got to do this and they're not aware of our physical limitations. So in your- That's part of it. They may even ask that information ahead of the plans. But I would suggest to you that in your presentation to them with the plans, even if they don't ask it, that you let them know that some of our buildings do not have the physical space to put a full class size or even three feet apart. Thank you. I think we're gonna move to our next item. Looking around. So presentation on detentions. Dr. McNeil. Thank you. I think I have to also share my screen. So let me go ahead and do that. Okay, can everybody see my screen? Okay, perfect. So thank you, Ms. Morgan. So yes, tonight we are presenting a discipline report. We have the secondary principals building administrators here. The reason why we are starting at the secondary level and we're gonna focus on the secondary level is because in the last four years, we've had maybe one detention at the elementary level. But I just want to also inform the school committee and the public that doesn't mean that we're not focusing on discipline at the elementary level. We will, we have a big interest in tracking office referrals. So those discussions have already been started with the elementary principals. Just so for the purpose of tonight, we're looking at the middle school and high school detentions. And so tonight our presenters will be myself, Wendy Salvatore, the assistant principal from Gibbs, Brian Manger, principal of the Odyssey Middle School and Dr. Matthew Janger, principal of the Arlington High School. Our objectives for tonight's presentation will be to review current and past detention data at the secondary level, provide an analysis of the data, discuss current detention policy and practices and identify next steps to address disproportionality. And then we'll end with questions and comments. So our agenda is I have actually prepared an opening statement that I would like to read. Then we'll move into the Gibbs School presentation and then the Odyssey Middle School presentation and then the Arlington High School presentation. And then again, we'll end with questions and comments. So within the Arlington Public School, so here's my statement, within the Arlington Public School district, building administrators and staff are committed to providing an equitable learning environment for all students. To support this commitment, we continue to review discipline data in order to look for trends and identify students who have been on the receiving end of various consequences. As a result, district administrators, teachers, counselors, social workers and support staff monitor specific discipline data to support students who may have difficulty adjusting to their school environment. In addition, methods for using discipline situations as a learning experience are being constantly explored. The process of examination has highlighted the painful truth that our black and brown students are the recipients of discipline consequences at a disproportionate rate. As a result, building and district administrators have been asked, have been tasked with identifying practices and strategies that will provide systematic reform. The resulting strategies have resulted in building administrators receiving monthly building reports that contain discipline data that has been desegregated by gender and race and participating in and providing implicit bias training for staff. At Arlington High School, Dr. Janger has invested in collaborative problem solving training for the entire staff. At the elementary and middle school, at the elementary and middle schools, we have invested in responsive classroom and other SEL curricula to teach students how to cultivate and maintain positive relationships, become self-aware of their own emotions, increase social awareness, become responsible decision makers and understand how to self-manage their individual behaviors and impulses. Additional training opportunities have been included in annual district-wide professional development day for the past three years focused on race, equity and inclusion. We've contracted Dr. Liza Tolucin to lead parent forums on how to talk about race with children. We've applied for and received funds from AEF to contract an outside consultant to conduct an equity audit of the district's K through 12 curriculum to ensure that the resources used for instruction are inclusive of all cultures and devoid of misinformation and prejudicial material, prejudicial material that may represent specific cultures in a demeaning manner. In addition, district administrators have participated in a book study of culture responsive teaching in the brain, promoting authentic engagement and rigor amongst culturally and linguistically diverse students by Zoretta Hammond and applied for and received another AEF grant to contract ideas to facilitate workshops that train teachers and staff in anti-racist teaching practices. We have also applied for and received a Chinah 17 grant to study the barriers that may prevent our black and African-American student from accessing the mental health professionals within the district. We have used the funding to send from the Chinah 17 grant to send our school counselors and social workers to the ideas anti-racism class and funded leadership training for the student officers in the black student union at the high school. In addition, I have created an equity and inclusion webpage that contains resources that Allington staff can access to learn more about the topic of race and sexual orientation. Despite the efforts that have taken place thus far, we openly acknowledge that much more work must be done to reach our goal of providing an equitable learning environment in which all students have an equal opportunity to be successful. In response to a request made by this school committee to focus more closely on our detention data, I have worked with our data department to gather together detention data from the last three years and shared it with secondary building administrators. In addition, we have taken the questions submitted by school committee members and other community members into consideration when creating this presentation. Thus, the purpose of the presentation is today is to share and overview of the discipline data, provide an analysis of what the data exhibits and speak about next steps to address the disparities that exists between our subgroups of students. As a disclaimer for tonight's presentation, we desegregated the data by race and ethnicity. However, we have done so in the past and still will continue to desegregate the data in a variety of ways that include other social identifiers, IEP and 504 status, as well as ELL status. And with that, I would like to present our first presenter, Wendy Salvatore from the Gibbs School. Thank you. So at the Gibbs School, we look through the sixth grade lands when we're approaching discipline, when we're doing things with suspension and school suspension and detentions. Can you all hear me okay? We use logical consequences when we are working with students. We do not have a history of using detention. You know, our discipline system is modeled after responsive classroom. We involve students in clear posted expectations at the beginning of the year. We interactive model how we expect students to behave in the halls and the cafeteria and the nurses office at recess, in their classrooms and breakout spaces in all areas of our building. We do a lot of skill building when we're redirecting them and remodeling and reminding them of the expectations. We hold problem solving conferences with students and teachers, with students and students, if there's been any kind of conflict between the two. And we always reinforce students following the expectations. Again, with our logical consequences and part of responsive classroom, we use a break it fix it model, time and space, loss of privilege, time owed, or logical consequence slips. And I actually have, like I brought some home with me. I would have them in case you asked what the logical consequence slips are for. We have a logical consequence slip for unexpected behavior outside at recess. We have a logical consequence slip for unexpected. Our first year at the Gibbs, we had a lot of students with hoods. It's a violation of our dress code. Unexpected behavior in the cafeteria. If you're tardy from tardy to class, if you were unexpectedly found with your cell phone in the building, or if you are just, there's a behavior that is preventing you from being in class, you could potentially get these logical consequence slips as opposed to a detention entry into power school. Next slide, please. Thank you. And the slides are kind of cut off because I can see you guys on the side, on my right side, so I can't necessarily see everything that's there. The 18-19 data shows we had zero detentions. We did have 27 logical consequence slips, mostly for wearing hoods, students who were late to class, or a loss of privilege with recess. And we did not institute the logical consequence slips until May of our first year. We didn't feel the need to have them at first. There was a lot of work that we did with teachers at the beginning of our first year at Gibbs to try to really work with, break it, fix it, and time and space. Our 1920 data shows that we had 0.56% of our white population received detention. There was students that did receive a detention this year. It rose to the level in our handbook that the behavior wouldn't require a detention. That was an office detention. They did time with me after school. We did have 37 logical consequence slips this year from September to March for time owed, loss of recess privilege, and cafeteria privilege. Hold on, I'm trying to advance. Here we go. So some of the things that Kristin and I noticed when we put these slides together and our next steps. We noticed that during our fifth grade visits, one of the first questions that fifth graders ask us always is will we have detention? We noticed that the same students are showing up on our lists more than once. We noticed that there are teachers that are showing up on our lists more than once. We do keep track of the logical consequence slips on a Google sheet in our Trailblazer folder. We noticed that behaviors are disrupting class. We noticed that students are in the wrong place at the wrong time. We noticed that students can be physical. We noticed that they're experimenting with inappropriate language. And we noticed that there are more males than females that are receiving logical consequence forms. Some of our next steps, which we are not doing currently with our logical consequence data is we are not tracking the subcategory. So we will look to make a new column in our logical consequence data that shows us race, ethnicity, and like Rod said, special education, 504 ELLs. Gibbs needs to think about how we explore the data with teachers, which is something that Kristen and I would have done this spring. We just didn't really get the chance to do it. And we need to continue to support our students with skill building. And that is it for Gibbs, unless you have our, will they ask me questions right now or at the end? Well, let me ask Ms. Morgan. Ms. Morgan, would you like us to stop between each presentation and take questions? I think we should keep going and then do it holistically at the end. We're pretty good. I have my questions for Ms. Salvatore written down. So I only have one. So I think we can come back to them at the end. Great. Thank you. I will mute. So now I present Mr. Brian Manager, who is the principal of the Addison Middle School. Thanks, Dr. Green-Nail. What I hope to do is give you a, share some data with you. Talk about how detention is assigned at the middle school at the Addison. Talk about how we track the data, a little bit of what we can learn, some of the steps that we have taken and some of the steps that we need to take. So from the 2017-2018 year, this is the following data. Remember, we had three grades at the Addison at that time. So one of the things that you'll notice is a lot more of the males are getting detention. That's a trend for all three years than the females. You will also notice the huge percentage of detentions given to African-Americans compared to the population. So they made up 3.7% of the population but received 26% of the detention. You'll also know that the Caucasian is 50%, which is a lot less than their population of the school. Mixed race, I did want to talk a little bit. One of the things I did find that we might have to fix with the data is that if you look at the mixed data results, sometimes that can be a parent who's Asian and a parent who's white or a parent who is African-American and a parent who is white. However, put in the white Hispanic category is sometimes both parents are Hispanic or one parent is Hispanic and one is white. I'm not sure why that is not included in the mixed race category, but I did want to point that out as well. So clearly in the 17-18 year, the African-Americans are receiving detention at a huge percentage compared to their percentage of the population, which leads me to the next year, which is the first year I was principal of the school. We're a two grade school now, not a three grade school. So the number of incidents decreases, but remember, we've lost a third of the students. What we do notice there is the percentage for African-American does go down, but it's still proportionally higher than it should be for the population. We do know that the mixed race category also increases. It's 6.2% of the population, but the detention rate goes up to 14%. The wider Caucasian students is a little bit more aligned with the number of students that we have. And then if we go into this year, which obviously was interrupted, we didn't have any detentions after we closed, you'll notice once again, the African-American amount of detention is pretty stable compared to the year before. The mixed race subgroup drops considerably and more or less the Asian population, which has been the same throughout the three years. Stay steady, the white population of our student is pretty proportional. So that's more or less the data that we had over the last three years. So I wanted to talk a little bit about detention and how you're assigned detention here at the Odyssey Middle School. There's really kind of three ways. The first one is that a teacher holds a student after school. A lot of times there's not documentation about this. It's something a student that is doing that needs to come after school. I think many times the student would look at it as detention, but it might be a five, 10 minute conversation. To me, it's what I would prefer because I believe a lot of times when a teacher has their own student after school, they can really work on that relationship. And I find having positive relationships is the most important thing we do as educators. So it's obviously the preferred style, but we haven't tracked it. So I'm not really sure in individual teachers when they're asking students to come back, if it's five minutes, it's 10 minutes, a half an hour, what are the different things that are happening? The second thing is teachers sometimes assign an office detention. Those slips are usually given to a teacher that has a stipend to run the detention, which is unlike the high school in which the deans run the detention. The administrators are alerted that the student has detention through getting a slip. I do find, and I'll talk a little bit more about this, I think we've tried to do a better job of communication. I felt my first year, we didn't communicate very well of who was getting multiple detentions to kind of look at what we could do to help those kids build skills that would be, so they wouldn't end up in detention again and again. And the last thing is a student is sent to administrator. It might be because of something they've done in the hallway or something really that they've disrupted a class and they'd be assigned a detention by an administrator. So how do we track discipline data? I think we've always been good with the suspension data because it was more or less became law. And so I think if you went to the Gibbs, the high school or the Audison, we have similar procedures and protocols. So I think it's easy to compare six through 12 kids who are getting suspended to track it and looking at subgroups and what are some of the incidents. I think the detention has been a little bit more difficult to track. Once again, I don't know what we wanna call when a teacher gives a student an individual you need to stay at the school. And I also know that my first year when the detention slips just went to a secretary and went to the detention teacher and another slip went to the administrators, I didn't find that as helpful. So this year what we did is we had instead of the secretaries enter the data, we had the assistant principals enter all the data which I really found helpful because they really knew who was getting detention. I thought it would just made us more efficient and was able to look at individual students in cases with a better eye. So if you go to the next slide, which is what do we learn from the data? Boys are more likely to receive a detention than girls. I mean, if you look at the data, a lot of times it's 75 to 25%. This year it was 90% males who received detention compared to 10% of the girls. So it is a huge, the males or the boys get detention a lot more. African-Americans for all three years, we looked at the data, received detentions at a higher rate than their percentage of populations. I think it's been good to be looking at this data because I think it makes us really wonder how we can be a more effective school for everyone. I want to say though that most of the Arlington students, I think sometimes when you dial down and you start talking detentions, you think sometimes that the kids are misbehaving at a certain rate. I think more it's looking at who are assigning detentions and the negative consequences that certain groups are having. And I assume that spills into achievement gaps and we really need to look at that so everyone's getting the same fair treatment. However, we had less than, we had 110 detentions, we had more than that in terms of days. So we are having right now pretty much one detention for every 900 kids per day. So most of the kids in Arlington are very, very well behaved. I just wanted to make sure we acknowledged that as well. So what are some of the steps that we've taken over the last few years? I did reach out to Eileen Woods who was the interim principal before I came on board. She had a series with Dr. Carlos Hoyt in which they were talking about conversations of race and had professional development, talking about implicit bias, systemic racism and white privilege. For the last two years we've had full day training. I think it's really helped a lot of the white educators being included to really reflect on implicit bias that we might hold and some of the white privilege we have and to try to look at the systemic racism. We also had Jessica Minahan or Dr. Woods had Jessica Minahan come in and talk about some of the interactions we have with some of our special education students and gave teachers some strategies. She also had them read Power of Our Words, which is a responsive classroom book that talks about your interactions with certain students but really building a positive environment. And I think that's really what we wanna do at the Odyssey is build a positive environment in which everyone feels trusted and respected. And last year we watched the documentary that all the Odyssey staff did called American Promises, which follows two African American students in a predominantly white private school in New York. And I thought it gave us an excellent example of their perspective of being in a predominantly white school and what their days look like. So where do we kind of move and what do we need to do next? So I think one of the things that we've talked about both Wendy, Matthew and myself is making sure we're pretty vertically aligned. And I think we need to talk a little bit more and share how we can have consistent approaches to discipline. I know they have responsive classroom at the Gibbs. I know that Matthew does collaborative problem solving and I know I'm kind of in the middle. And I think I need to figure out what works best for the Odyssey going through because I understand that we are a bridge from fifth, sixth grade up in high school. What works best with the population that we have at the Odyssey? I think we still need to continue obviously professional development around anti-racism, around topics of implicit bias, white privilege and systematic racism. I think we need a better multi-tiered system of support program so that we're giving kids the necessary skills that they need to have. So hopefully we're not having them in detention. The last thing is kind of a, I would ask for in the negotiation when you have that coming up is I would prefer the stipend for a after school. Detention would move a little bit like what they have at the high school which is where the deans have it and they run it because I think it would be more effective that if a kid receives a detention in their after school there with the administrators and we can keep a closer eye and I think our data will improve. Lastly, I'm gonna steal a line from Dr. Janger. I do think detention has a negative connotation. I think we think of breakfast club when we think of detention and that kids are sitting around just sitting in for 45 minutes and then they're kind of free to go. I would say most of the times that we have detention we are working with our students. They are doing work many times. If you receive a detention, but instead you wanna have extra help with a teacher that is allowed. So we do understand that detention is hopefully not a punishment, not a shame, but it is a consequence but we're trying to build you back up and trying to make sure that the most important thing we can do is educate you as a student. So I will listen to Matthew and then look forward to your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Manager. And next up we have Dr. Janger for Arlington High School. Thank you all. I'm reminded of the story about Woodstock where nobody wanted to go on after Jimi Hendrix. So I feel bad going last because I'm going after a lot of very good presentations. So there's a few things just in terms of the general review. One, I'm really excited to be having this conversation. We've been talking about suspension data for the last two years and I've gone pretty deep into that because that data set is small and getting smaller and because it's something that I'm able to go through personally and kind of code by hand to really disaggregate behaviors and responses. And I think it's important when we think about discipline data is to think about what it is we're trying to track and how it is we use this. Because our real focus, there's two focuses. One is improving student behavior. That's ought to be why we're doing discipline. But the second is what is our response to the student behavior? Is it effective? Is it fair? And are there ways we can do it better? And so being able to dig down further into the data is really important. When we looked at the suspension data we saw going back about four years that not only did we see the disproportionality that we see in this data but we also saw if we looked under the disproportionality certain kinds of interactions like conflict between students and conflicts between students and staff that were more disproportional. And one of the things that's been really helpful as we've moved forward and working on our approaches to discipline which is particularly collaborative problem solving but a bunch of other things as well is that we've seen not just that the data overall has gone down but that the data having that kind of a component to it has also gone down in some ways almost to zero. The problem of course we get other issues around behavior and then we have to figure out interventions that are effective for those. So just as a quick overview this is a cool little chart from a cool little tool that professor at MIT has loaned me and I'm gonna try to convince everybody in the district to use once we've finished it where it's still a beta thing. But what you're seeing there is a chart over the last three years of detention data month to month and each trough is the summer. And this is particularly helpful to visualize because it's hard to tell whether this year we're doing better or worse because this year got cut off. And I know we end up having a lot of the time of worse things at the end of the year but as you can see sort of looking at comparable periods of time we really have seen a general downward trend. Go to the next slide. So that's all, this is the chart not of just detention data but all disciplinary incidents. Anything, so we took out notes because we keep notes in the log we took out interventions because we log CPS if it's something that's done by the deans this is all disciplinary events and again you'll see a downward trend which makes me happy. Now it's a mixed bag, suspensions really seem to be going down in school suspensions are a little harder to read over three years and the tensions and we'll go to the next slide. We have to be honest about what we mean when we log the tensions. So first I think if you're paying close attention you'll see that Wendy at Gibbs talked about sort of what they do around things like attendance with logical consequences and then Brian talked about some of the things that teachers do and then I'll talk about what we do. We all use the word a little bit differently and choose to log the data a little bit differently. So at the high school detention is assigned almost entirely by the deans. 90% of the cases are things having to do with attendance. A bunch of tardies cutting a class or leaving school without permission. And then there are 10% which are having to do with the deans having some sort of a conversation around some sort of behavior that results in a disciplinary detention. And I'll talk a little bit about the end about how I think we might improve that coding to make it more useful to us. Hold on Dr. Janker. I just got a text that somebody at home was saying that they can't see your slides and I don't understand why. It says interpreting detention data. No, no, no, I know, but somebody texts me from home actually Karen Donato and she said she cannot see your slides. Our viewers can't see the slides so I'm not sure if they can see. I don't know. I can see them, but. But you're gonna say someone texted me from home and my numbers are completely wrong. I was getting a little palpitation. No, no, no. Okay, we'll continue. I don't know how to fix this technical glitch right now. Numbers, you know, you go over them a thousand times because if they're like a little bit wrong, you sort of lose the whole thread. So. Sorry about that. Sorry for the intro. Not to worry. So the thing, two things that are important to know when we're interpreting our detention data is we have not used detention as a metric. Detention is not something that reports to the state. It's something that we log in order to keep track of it. And so two things happen. Our detentions went up three years ago not just because student behavior changed, but because with three deans, we put a lot of attention into addressing attendance. So it's like if you suddenly decided that you really wanted to deal with parking and sent out a lot more traffic cops, you would see more. So that's been consistent across three years. So the fact that it's going down is a positive indicator. But the reality is, and I'm excited about this opportunity in these conversations, because what I really need to be able to do is to track attendance as it relates to detention as it relates to kids. And actually something we've been trying to build with MGH as part of the collaborative problem solving model and evaluation was a tool that would let us look at dosing and sort of how that indicates different outcomes. We're not there yet, but I'd love to have support. The second is these are numbers of incidents, not numbers of students. And sometimes if you've got a student with whom you're working a lot, that student will actually have a lot of log entries because you're trying to keep track of what's going on. And then also in terms of interpreting what we mean by detention data, I want to echo Mr. Merringer. The detention is not a particularly punitive thing. It's generally the dean says, I want to talk to you after school. If you miss class, you have a study hall, you can go see a teacher, you can get a Chromebook. One of my children recently was discussing having gotten a detention with me and described it as the most productive half hour of their school year. Because they had a nice quiet place to sit with a Chromebook and get work done. So it's meant to be makeup time for the attendance. So one of the questions I think we need to talk about is what we call detention and what we maybe call logical consequence or makeup time and how we do that. We try to be honest, we're not trying to hide anything. So if we ask to get to come after school, we log it as a detention. So it has been difficult to access or analyze the data. Our office has gotten a lot better at giving us more reliable data. Over the last four years, Dr. McNeil has been giving sort of more regular updates where we're able to code and check it. And so those are really important. The thing at the end though is what's the punchline when we look at this? And now I'm gonna go through this. The simple answer is you see the same disproportionality we see in other data. So you can skip to the next slide. That's fine. So if you look across the last three years, starting three years ago, we had 680 detentions overall. If you look at the number of those detentions that goes to the populations where we tend to see disproportionalities, African-American, Hispanic, and multi-ethnic, you'll see that we have a 3.3, so 338% disproportionality for African-Americans. And this year, we have a 200% disproportionality for Hispanic students. And you'll see those bounce around because the numbers of students get smaller. And so the volatility of the numbers get smaller. The smaller is good, but the disproportionality continues. So you can go to 7 to 18.19. So in 18.19, you see a small drop in the number of detentions logged, and you see a small change in the disproportionality. It's still about two times for Hispanic students. Now it's about two and a half, but still close to three times for African-American students. And in the case of detentions for Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders, you can see it's a very small number of students. One of the things that's fun about this tool is that we can actually, if we put a whole data set for the whole school in there, we can log the overlapping sets. And I've done some of that analysis myself, but I don't present it here. So we can go through every single student who identifies as at least in part African-American. We can take out every student who identifies as at least in part Hispanic. In the case of the way the state does the base rates, and we're using the state base rates here, anyone who has Hispanic as part of the ethnicities that they report gets multi-race non, gets, I'm sorry, gets Hispanic. And anybody who's multi-raced but doesn't have Hispanic gets multi-race non-Hispanic. But there's an awful lot of students who identify as black who are in the category of Hispanic as well. So I think we need to look at those overlapping rates and not have a set that adds up to 100%. Going to 2019-20. So in 2019-20, you see a proportional drop. So we're down to 253 for two thirds of the year. I had a long conversation with MGH when they did their analysis of this of how one should do it. They said we should just do September through March of all three years as our comparison group. I think that's a reasonable way to do it. I said we should do one and a half times the year. They thought that was a reasonable way to do it. The chart that we show that shows the sort of general downward trend, I think gives an indication this does seem to be a drop. And then again, you see a higher proportion of African-American students, but the overall number has dropped to 43 detentions. And actually it's also interesting to go back and do it by individual students, as opposed to by the number. It was just too much to go through right here. So next slide. So what do we wanna pay attention to? And so there's a bunch of things that we wanna pay attention to in this. We wanna go going forward and going back. The things that we are most attentive to in our own practice is discipline for behavior that's based on attribution and relationships. And I guess I should probably talk for those of you who are new to me ranting about collaborative problem solving. This is the part of the conversation where I'll give my quick little overview. So the idea in collaborative problem solving is that challenging behavior is an interaction between the student and the situation. And what we wanna focus on, and the idea is that what we're trying to focus on is changing the situation and improving the student's skill to handle the situation because then we're not gonna have challenging behavior. The tendency in a lot of discipline is we say that it's students behave that way because they want to, so we make them not want to by giving them a detention or giving them a suspension. And that completely is no longer our philosophy. Just like the philosophy of, what's it called? RC, what does RC stand for? Responsive classroom. For RC, a responsive classroom. Just like their philosophy is that these are logical consequences. These are ways of teaching kids expectations and teaching the skills. That's what we really wanna focus on. So the plan A behavior that do this or else, the extrinsic motivation, really is something that we wanna limit to simply letting people know that things are the rules, relatively low level stuff or really high level things where we simply don't have a way to address it in the context of school using just the collaborative problem solving. And as we expand out our ability to handle those things and teach kids more skills, we expect behavior to improve and our disciplinary response to become less about punitive discipline and more about interventions. So what we wanna look at in the detention data and look more closely is behavior that's based on attribution. So what are we worried about? We're worried about implicit bias, right? We're worried about ways in which we're assuming privilege or assuming expectations around the students which are not fair to the student in the situation. So when I see something that says disruptive, disorderly behavior, disrespectful, those are the ones where like implicit bias is more likely to hide and we really need to track those more closely to look at the specific incidents. That's where we looked when we looked at suspension data and one of the really exciting things about suspension data is the number of those kinds of events or events that led started with that kind of behavior dropped to zero. So that's really positive. Discipline based on student-teacher interaction. So that's again, where conversations and interactions between the teacher and the student escalate to a problematic state. We wanna see those go to zero because those are things where we control the situation in which we experience the challenging behavior. So we wanna start working with addressing those more effectively to de-escalate them and to resolve them in a positive way with the student because that's gonna build positive relationships. And so the fundamental point the collaborative problem with solving would say is the tension is based on this idea of will not skill. If you're late, if you do this, therefore that. And if you do this, therefore that actually works fine for kids who can generally get to school on time and generally do. The joke is like, if a kid gets one or two detentions, detention works. If the kid gets three or four detentions, detention's not working anymore. And so those are the students on whom we really wanna focus. And then the last is this point I was making before that behavior is an interaction between the student and the school. And so we wanna work on building the skills of the student but also understanding their perspective. You can go to the next slide. Actually, before I go to that, I just wanna read a little statement because I do talk about collaborative problem solving a fair amount. And hang on, let me find this little statement I had here. And they talk about how collaborative problem solving is really useful in addressing these issues of implicit bias in school. And so I'm just gonna read it because they say it better than I do. Collaborative problem solving offers a potential solution to the problem of implicit racial bias as it relates to school discipline. First, CPS replaces teachers' assumptions about the causes of challenging behavior from one about motivation to one about neurocognitive impact of chronic stress. Second, teachers learn that the beginning step in collaborative problem solving is to avoid assumptions and ask open-ended questions like, I noticed that or can you tell me what's going on? Through this type of inquiry, implicit assumptions are overridden by the individual student's true and specific concerns which the teacher can then help address rather than responding in traditional punitive ways. Helping teachers understand challenging behaviors accurately through the lens of a lag in skill development, not a lack of will, holds great promise to reduce the massive human and societal costs of disproportionate discipline. So the next steps first for analysis and then sort of in programming. This past year, because when I said if we're tracking detentions and they're mainly for attendance, we need to be able to link them better to attendance. Our attendance data has not been that great either. So this past year, we have created a centralized attendance office so that we would have much more consistent data about attendance. So we follow up with teachers, we follow up with kids to make sure we're actually logging tardies and attendance better so that when we do the analysis, we're actually getting a result that's based on student's actual behavior. We really do need IT and consultant support for coding, reviewing and entering behavior data. I love mucking around in this stuff but when I have to code it by hand, I don't have the time. And so Dr. McNeil has been great about trying to get these more regular reports. And one of the things that we need to be able to do is if we're going to code behaviors consistently and then we're gonna code disciplinary responses consistently and we wanna be able to look under the surface not just it was there a detention, but what it was, we need to start using consistent language around the behavior descriptors because then I can run codes that will actually pull out key language and allow us to code underneath. And then, and one of the things we need to do is to do that, to set metrics for behavior outcomes and interventions. So what are the actual behaviors that we're gonna log and that we're gonna try to see how they are, understand the patterns and then change. So if we're tracking it absences, we track both. And then the last piece is that we need to target disproportionality and overall rates because both of those things are going to have impacts in terms of making the school more equitable. If we know that we have disproportionality of three or four times more disciplinary activity for our students of color and cutting disciplinary activity in half and cutting the behavior associated with it is going to disproportionately positively impact our African American and other students of color. At the same time, we need to keep digging down into the disproportionality and finding out why it's there and what it is that we can do about it to support our students. I have a pretty detailed report on the think kids, both the discipline analysis and this year's evaluation. I would love to come back in the future and talk about it. I think I have turned into a tiresome proponent of the program and I apologize, but I'm happy to say that I had a conversation with both Mr. Merinder and with Fabien today. Fabien, I can't pronounce your name off the top of my head so I'm not gonna try. Can't remember. And they both have agreed to go to a CPS initial training so I'm excited to have someone who understands that to see how they do that as well. So what we see going forward based on the evaluation and successes is we believe that we should continue with collaborative problem solving implementation, but it's a both and because even though those conversations are about building empathy and understanding students' perspectives, if we do not understand better the history and the implicit bias and the way in which those things function in our own views, we're not gonna effectively engage in the empathy phase. So we need to do both of those things and continue to do more specific training and unconscious bias. We have created an anti-racism working group this summer which is a great outcome of sort of renewed interest. People are pretty tired, but we have a real opportunity with student activism and with faculty activism and with what's going on in the community right now to bring additional energy to it. And so that's really great. We actually met today and went through norming and looking at student recommendations and trying to figure out how we break up this enormous task into a lot of different activities. I think we need to review interventions versus detentions. So we need to think about where and how we can develop as many as possible intervention approaches to dealing with challenging behaviors. And I'll give just a couple of quick examples. One of the things that Dr. Bodhi mentioned, I think in her letter to the community which I've mentioned before, is that although we've seen a lot of the conduct around conflict and misbehavior declining, at the same time, we've had a rise in drug offenses with the legalization of marijuana. It's become more available and the stigma has gone away, but it's a real issue and challenge for kids. So one of the things that we were working to do this year, Dr. Bodhi communicated with EDCO, I know other superintendents that I'm sure, and they created a treatment model so that students could receive drug treatment short-term while still engaging with academics. Because the reality is if a student in our situation needs to get into drug treatment, often it's either a long time to get them in because it's very difficult to get into programs depending on family resources, or the setting it up ends up interrupting their access to academics. And so that the problem is that the kids need to deal with the drug issues, but we wanna keep them connected to school. So we had just started to experiment with that when we went to out of school. It will have expenses. I mean, for it to be effective, I think we need to provide transportation. And we need to be able to sort of figure out what it is we're tracking so that we're being transparent about if we've taken those out of the tensions, where are they a lot residing and how are we still tracking? We've talked about having an academic support model for absences. So again, doing something more like what they do at the Gibbs so that that 90% that's really around absences is more about having a kid sit down and catch up with their work and re-engage. So that it's really about getting them back into class. And then we have, I could have listed at the beginning, we have been for the last seven years doing an enormous number of other efforts on a climate culture curriculum. Dr. McNeil talked about some of those at the beginning, but things like student training, an anti-bias student leadership creation of the student affinity clubs like the BSU, Inclusion Day has been a program that we've had for four years, it seems a little bit cursed. We've got snowed out one year and this year we had made sure there was a snow day and it was right after, planned for right after we do COVID, there's been a lot of other programming. We had to play Thurgoodcom. We have had students going field trips. We were planning for this spring to do the African American History Trail in Boston as a field trip with the BSU and other students. There's an enormous amount of effort going on around that and I'm very excited to keep on working on those as well. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Janger. And so I'm gonna stop sharing my screen right now so we can take questions or comments. Okay, great. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. Ms. Ekston. Thank you. Thank you all for all the time that you put into preparing this. It was a lot. I have a lot of questions. I know I won't get to all of them. A lot about what was being implemented to support students in learning skills, to follow expectations, making sure they know what expectations are. But I'm wondering how teachers and administrators are deciding about what the expectations and rules are, sort of hearing words about kids being well behaved, who's deciding what's a disruption or what's not well behaved. So why don't we have Wendy and go first and then Brian and then Dr. Janger. So when we talk about our expectations in the various buildings, in the various spots in our buildings, we do that during an advisory activity. And so advisory is with a teacher and about anywhere between 13 and 15 students and so the students and the teachers come up with the expectations and the norms for in the classroom, in the hall, at recess, in the cafeteria, they make those in advisory and they post those posters in those areas. So it's student led. So at the, I would say at the audition, I would hope that the teachers would say, especially in class, when you are disrupting the learning of others, that is when something might, you might receive a consequence. So I think most teachers would say that if a student is doing something that is maybe not falling along, you obviously want that student to fall along, but if it's not disrupting the learning of others. And I think with the team model that we have at the middle school level, it's pretty easy where the team of teachers go over kind of their expectations with kids. And then at team of teachers, that learning community is meeting with the assistant principals and then the assistant principals are hopefully going in and doing interventions with students who are not following along with the expectations that have been laid out by the teachers. And the assistant principals will also have monthly meetings with kids, just to remind them of certain protocols or certain things that we want to follow. But we usually pretty learning community-based and those four learning communities in the seventh and in the eighth grade are really shepherded by the assistant principals. And I would like to think that the teachers realize that when we're talking about discipline, it's to correct a behavior, it's not a punishment or shame. Is that me? Sorry. So I think I hear under the question sort of the point I was trying to make before about disruption that sometimes disruptive behavior is in the eye of the beholder, right? And so the reality is that for a higher level of discipline, it's pretty straightforward. It's things like fighting, profanity, hate speech, just destruction of property. For detentions, I think one of the things we really want to look closely at is do we define behavior differently based on who the kids are, right? Because that is where implicit bias hides, right? If one kid, the way, if when, I mean, if when in my past school, when I taught where I think there were much more significant issues, there was a whole discussion about two incidents where two kids, one white and one black, essentially said the same thing. But the teacher's interpretation of the tone of voice was that the black kid was being really disrespectful in a very disruptive way and that the white kid wasn't. And so the two things that we're really doing to address that is it has to, that has to be relational. And so it has to be about not about having a situation where that conversation is something that happens in interaction. So there's a conversation with the student about, this was what was going on there and the kid can talk about what was going on there and the teacher's implicit biases and their understanding switches over to the student's perspective. And a lot of the time that resolves that issue. I mean, we've seen people getting a lot better at it. And then we have to really think about our own unconscious bias. You know, when we hear a loud noise in the hall, does the way in which we hear loud noises reflect real differences in behavior on students' parts or does it represent behavior in our parts? For the most part, we would really like to move away from disciplinary consequences for anything that is not really pretty substantially disruptive. You know, if you knock over the table in the middle of class, that's going to disrupt the class. If you swear at the teacher, which doesn't actually ever happen, you know, that's going to be pretty disruptive. If you're smoking in the classroom, that's pretty disruptive. He was disrespectful. I'm hoping that that's not a conversation that we have because they're able to build that relationship and have that conversation and we address it in non-punitive ways. And I think that's the next level of conversation that we really want to be able to have. So I'm hearing sort of different things at different schools. And I think, you know, having the students be a part of that, the expectations is important, but I'm also thinking about, you know, are black students feeling comfortable advocating for what they think the expectations should be or are these expectations sort of becoming a somewhat Eurocentric or what traditionally we've expected from students because that's the majority of who's in the classroom. And I want to make sure that, you know, all of our students' voices are being heard when we're sort of deciding what behaviors or whatever we want to call it are expected. And so I guess, and I will finish after this, I'm sort of looking at as a bigger picture issue of are we looking at policies and handbooks and codes of conduct for potential bias in what we're asking of our students? So I would, Dr. Janker would like to respond to that. I also want him to speak about the listening sessions he's had over the last month with our black and African American students at the high school level. Well, actually, so for the last month, there's been a group of students that have been meeting to sort of just talk about anti-racism efforts and anti-racism perspectives. It's been a mixed group, not all African American students. I have also met in the last year, multiple times with students in the BSU because that's sort of a conversation where its majority black group of students who really sort of control that space. I mean, the answer I think is yes, that we are doing that review. And I think it is something that, and if you look at our expectation, and I can't speak for all the other levels, but if you look at our expectations, like it needs to be something where we learn as teachers to listen to and hear what's going on with our students. And so you're setting those expectations and norms in a class, and so if you look at different groups, you're looking at New Yorkers versus Bostonians, there are different conversational norms. My wife and I struggle with this, I'm a New Yorker. You go to my family dinner and everybody talks at the same time, and that's considered to be completely appropriate. And my wife's family dinner is everybody takes turns. And so if you have expectations about how that is reflected in your classroom, and I know my son, and this is not an issue of racial bias, but my son would talk and pretty much every single teacher at the end would say, can you get him to shut up? And so we needed to work for him, he's a member of the dominant culture, it wasn't very challenging for him to see that. So the point of sort of having that collaborative problem-solving approach is that we're not trying to force students, and that's, I think what you're saying, when I'm trying to say about having to do both CPS and unconscious bias training, we're not trying to force students to just be like talking the way we want them to talk and the way we're all talking. I think we need to make sure that we're letting students' voices be heard and we're trying to review through. The only things I think we should be doing detention for are things that are just straight up disruptive. And other than that, it's about creating community norms within classes where people are talking and everybody's comfortable. And then students are gonna need multiple, like one of the things we've been trying to do is give students multiple people that they can talk to. Because if I don't like my teacher, I can talk to my teacher if I got that skill, but if I don't have that skill, I don't feel comfortable. I can bring my parents to talk to that teacher, or I can talk to my guidance counselor, or I can talk to my advisor, or I can talk to my dean, or I can go to the BSU, or I can go to the GSA. Like we're trying to make it so that there's sort of multiple points of contact where people feel comfortable expressing those views so that then we can support having those conversations with the teachers and training ourselves to be able to really hear the students' voices. And it's not easy. We are used to being in charge, right? That's what we are trained to do and what we're trained to sort of expect. But we have young men and women who are coming into these classes and they have a lot of really good things to say. And the vast majority of the time, the vast majority of, I mean, it is a blissful place. You know, when you're not focused on sort of the detentions, it's a pretty blissful place to teach. You walk into classes and kids are just having conversations. But at the same time, there's still a lot of incidents. I mean, plus advice, incidents of students experiencing microaggressions, incidents of kids hearing things in the hall. And the impact of those on students of color are really pretty big. And we need to figure out how to sort of root them out in every corner. Thank you. I hope that what you're describing can trickle down into the middle school. Thanks. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. Thank you all for the presentation and for your efforts in this area. So just a comment, I mean, my concerns, you know, when we've looked at the suspension data, when we've looked at the achievement gaps, is that, you know, this isn't really a high enough priority for the district right now. I mean, obviously we've got COVID to deal with, but even absent COVID, you know, I think, you know, from the top down, it needs to be more of a priority that we need to be getting to the root causes of these disparities and doing more to narrow them. So, you know, maybe as we look at the goals for next year or going forward, you know, you know, we've heard a lot about collaborative problems, collaborative problems solving at the high school, which sounds wonderful, but you've been doing it for a few years and it hasn't tripled down to the middle schools yet. So I think we need to examine why not and why, you know, why kids are coming to the high school and being disruptive is that starting at the elementary schools even, is it starting at the middle school? Maybe we need an outside consultant. We've brought in a consultant to do an equity audit of our curriculum because we decided, you know, we needed some outside advice. And this might be an area where it's important enough to get some outside advice. So again, I would just recommend continued focus and maybe a little bit more urgency in addressing this. Thank you. Mr. Merringer. Yeah, I think one of the things this exercise has really, you know, when we sat down and Wendy and Matt and I talked is we really realized how much we need to be vertically aligned. And I think we have not been vertically aligned. And I think it probably was a good use of looking at the data. I mean, we went through a data-wise course that Dr. McNeil led the last year of looking at data. And I think what we've realized is we need to clean up some of the data so that we're a little bit more unified and look at what the natural progression is six through 12. So I think the actual discussion was great for Dr. McNeil, myself, Dr. Jango, Wendy, the assistant principals, the deans. A lot of us were in it. We could see what this brought up was some holes that we have to fix. So I actually think, you know, over the last two weeks when we've been looking at the data, it's been pretty fruitful. And I would agree. There are certain things that need to be done and vertically aligned. And, you know, I know that's in discipline and the other things. And, you know, I look forward to working with, you know, Fabian and Wendy down at the Gibbs and the high school deans and the assistant principals and my assistant principals so we can figure out how to go about collecting better data to be able to look at it more strategically and then figure out how to solve the problem. So I think it's been a worthwhile discussion. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. First, I appreciate the presentations. I think this has been really helpful. We can't see you. I don't know if that's normal or not. You just look up. Sorry. Is that better now? Yes. Okay. Okay. So I appreciate the discussion. It's been really helpful. And the presentations. I have a few questions on the presentations but also I wanted to say I appreciate Ms. Ekston's question. I think that was a really good point and I agree with Mr. Cardin. So with Gibbs, I was confused. So are logical consequences logged or not logged? Because it says out of 10 total logged infractions and then it gives breakdowns of race but it says 37 logical consequence slips this year. So it sounds like those are different? Logical consequence slips are logged internally in our discipline little folder in our Gibbs trailblazer folder. They're not logged into PowerSchool which is where we keep track of suspensions out of school suspensions and in school suspensions or detentions. Okay. So Art, and I think you said that you were going to start taking, paying more attention to recording the logical consequences. Well, one of our next steps, we don't separate them out by race, ethnicity, special ed, ELL, 504s. So one of the things that we'll do next year is put a column in that area so that we can separate them out and see how they identify. Okay. And then what does target mean when it says, one is listed as black parenthesis target and then elsewhere it says two are listed as white slash Hispanic parenthesis target. The slides that are being presented to you tonight you're looking at old slides. Okay. If you are, to answer your question, when you log a suspension, I think you're probably looking at a suspension that was there. When you log a suspension, you're supposed to log the student that was the aggressor and the target. Okay. Because there was an altercation between two students. So they both, one gets logged as the victim, one gets logged as the aggressor. Okay. And then my question for the middle school is, first, if the teacher says you have to stay after class, is that considered a detention? So I think it probably is by the student, but a lot of times it doesn't get documented that way. And I, you know, I've talked to Dr. Jenger about this as well, there are many times in which, you know, and I think this is probably where we're not as uniformed is that we'll have a teacher who will say, you know, whoever the student, student why is you need to stay after school. I'm not gonna put you in the kind of official detention, but we need to talk for five, six minutes. The same another teacher next door might say, hey, stay with me a few minutes after class. We have to kind of make sure that we're on the same page. So I think that's one of the things we have to discuss is when is it an intervention? When is it an official detention? When is it classroom detention? And I think right now we don't really, we're not really vertically aligned. So the number I gave to you is when a slip was given to stay in an office detention or a teacher felt like they were gonna keep someone probably for a half an hour plus, but there are plenty of other times that I think students are asked to go out of school and it might be five or six minutes. Now for a teacher, they might look at that as, hey, I just wanna work on a relationship. I need to give them the heads up, but I need some time. They need to get to the next class where I'm sure some student says, I've got a teacher, I got a detention. So I think it kind of depends on the perspective of the teacher versus the student and it might be something where we wanna explore, we wanna change the language. So kids know that if a teacher wants to talk to them, it's not a, you're gonna stay for a half an hour until three o'clock and then you're gonna be released, but it's something you need to stop by and we need to have a conversation. And so I think sometimes the adults would look at it as an intervention and I think some of the students would look at it as a detention. Okay. And then do you have the sense that anything has changed after kids going through the Gibbs sixth grade? So we don't have much data, right? But we've had some kids go through. Are you feeling like their community is different now with those kids in it? So I think the sample size is too small. I think just one year, especially the first year that they went through things. It is interesting if I look at the suspension data for the class of 2023, 2024 and 2025, the 2024 has by far the least amount of suspensions and much more versed in that because that is something by law you're paying attention to where the class of 2023 and 2025 were pretty similar. What is interesting is you look at the data is that the class of 2024, which the tensions and suspensions were much less than the other two classes is they are 55% girls and 45% boys. And this year's incoming Gibbs class was the reverse. It was 55% boys and 45% girls. And in a middle school way, you walked the halls last year in the seventh grade. It was a little quiet, not as rambunctious. You went up there, they were just many, they were more boys, they tend to be louder, they tend to be handsier. It was just kind of a different vibe. So I wouldn't have, I can't draw any conclusions because I think there's too many factors. I'd like to see a couple of years of data before now. I guess that was one thing that we were hoping for as we changed up the mix and the way that the Gibbs is approaching things. And then I'm glad that you're talking about trying to vertically align all of this, both the data and approaches. I think that'll be really helpful. That's all. Mr. Gilman. So I want to thank the teachers and administrators for this presentation. We're in a moment where all of us need to reflect on our implicit bias, not just school administrators and teachers, school board members need to do that as well. I would, you know, I'd point out that 253 detentions in a public high school with 1,400 students over the course of the year is about 1.4 detentions a day, something like that. So our numbers in Arlington in terms of detentions don't seem alarming to me. They don't seem alarming to me. I'm not dismissing that there may be some bias that has caused some of these detentions. And if you break down some of the numbers in some of the categories, and I'm not actually not asking for this data because it wasn't prepared, but there are probably some kids who have had multiple detentions. And then if you broke it down further, you might find that there are a core group of teachers who give multiple detentions. And that core group of teachers may need additional professional development and intervention and coaching around a lot of issues, including classroom management, the way, you know, pedagogy and, you know, being aware of implicit bias. So I just wanna say that, and I guess so my question for Dr. Janger is I suspect you're doing that. I suspect if you look at the 4% African-American population in 2019, 2020, that's about 50 to 60 kids. There were 43 detentions. You've probably looked at how many kids had repeat detentions and you've probably looked at how many teachers made those, you know, sent kids into detention. And you've probably thought about some interventions that you might have. And well, I don't wanna talk about individual teachers, but I'm gonna ask you, I'm sure you're doing that kind of thinking. Is that fair to say? I mean, so the answer is yes. I mean, there are, as I've said, the other thing though is realistically, you know, very few of our detentions are teacher-student conflict, right? And, you know, it's something that we, if you have a teacher who's finding that they're having repeated instances of that, that becomes clear very clearly because as you pointed out, it's just not that many detentions. I don't need to do a spreadsheet to figure that out. It's like, you know, if Joe has, if we have a Joe, so I don't say Joe, but you know, if Fred comes down, you know, with three kids, three different times that they're like having budding heads with, that would be huge. Like that's a very big disproportionality for us in terms of the teachers. So we start a conversation about that right away. And one of the things that's been really great about, I hate to say this, I'm really boring, but the CPS model has been a coaching model, right? So teachers have been able to come together in groups of 13 teachers with a professional coach twice a month and be like, here's a kid I was having a challenging time with. And then the conversation is okay, you go through what are the challenging behaviors? What are the situations in which the challenging behaviors happen? What do we think the lagging skills and unsolved problems are? How do we plan to have the intervention conversation with the kid? Do you need somebody to help you have that conversation? And that very quickly, when you do that a few times and there's this aha moment where you're like, oh, there is a difference between saying, Joey, why are you so disrespectful? You're late to my class all the time, come after school, or, hey, Joe, can I talk to you in five minutes? Joey, hey, I want you to be in class, what's up? Right, that's a very different conversation that leads to a very different thing. And training people to actually practice doing that and figuring out how to do that is the micro piece that really starts breaking down those relationships. Thank you. I guess my follow-up question for Wendy and Brian is, where's Wendy? Anyway, is whether, just kind of talk a little bit to what degree you guys are taking the data, sharing it either with teachers in PD sessions or even maybe with groups of teachers or individual teachers, how you're kind of using the data, sharing the data, talking about the data as professionals to try to improve practice and address bias. So, go ahead, Wendy. I think that one of our goals would have been in the spring after collecting the data for the whole year. As I said, we didn't start with the logical consequence forms last year until May because we found that there was a need for them. And so this year, we probably would have in the spring planned that somewhere into one of our staff meetings or our professional development to meet with teachers because we are able to see what class kids are being sent out of and what teacher is writing the logical consequence form or whether it's really just behavior at recess or behavior in the cafeteria. And by behavior, I mean, not keeping your body safe at recess or throwing food in the cafeteria. So I think it's something that we need to look at. We have not gone over detention data. We've gone over achievement gap data. We've gone over MCAS scores. We've gone over suspension data, but detention is not something in my, almost two years of being here that we've really broken down. But I think it does give us another indicator of negative interactions certain kids are having which is gonna affect them in the classroom. And so I feel like if we can be on the same page and really have some vertical alignment, I think it's important at the Odyssey for us to look at what kind of program we want and involve the teachers because at the end of the day, they're on the front lines. And if we go collaborative problem solving like Dr. Jengar, he's been at it. This is his third year. It's a big time investment. If we look at responsive classroom, it's something that they've been working on at the Gibbs or the elementary school for years. And so I do feel like when we're having this discussion, the Odyssey is obviously between these two schools that have a very kind of entrenched program or being entrenched. And it's something we're gonna have to look at, but I would want to have the feedback from the staff and from Matthew and from Wendy and Fabian at the Gibbs and the assistant principals, obviously administrators and teachers at the Odyssey to find out how we can vertically align and something that everyone buys into. But I think the detention data, suspension data gives teachers some real facts in front of them of what needs to be done. All right, thanks so much guys. Mr. Schluckman? Well, I've got about eight pages of notes and I could take about two hours here. Let me hit the big questions first and try to work my way down. Are we tracking it all for kids who have conduct incidents that lead to any sort of intervention, be it detention or intervention, towards a counselor or a social worker leading up to suspension? Are we tracking any of that for the length of time the child has been in the Orleans in public schools? For example, a child who started with us in kindergarten versus a child who showed up in eighth grade. I am not. I don't think the rest of us are as well. I think it's something that we have not looked close enough at the data of when people are entering the system or not, but I'll let Matthew and Wendy, maybe they have a different answer. I'm not sure I'm understanding your question. So when we log, when we use power school and we log a detention or an in-school suspension or an intervention or an out-of-school suspension, that starts, those log entries start in middle school. I mean, I've been in Arlington now for six years. I've never seen a student come up from elementary school with anything logged in power school. Well, no, that's not the question. The question is that if we're working for the programs we're doing in kindergarten to acculturate kids and building up a support structure within the system for a child who starts with us in kindergarten versus say a child who transfers in at grade six, grade seven, grade eight, grade 10, who has not come up with the community. Is that a division that would be more inclined to discipline versus less inclined? So I love your question. And the answer is I've done that by hand with suspension data because there was 35 cases. But what you're looking at is like have we run the regression? Have we done the causal model? I don't need statistics. Well, but I mean the question is like, and the honest truth is we, I think I'm hoping, but we don't currently have, we have not been able to get that deep into that big a data set to be able to do that analysis. I think it's possible it is on my list. I have something I really hope to do. So this is a trend thing because I'm taking a look at if we are effective with children, we have a K to 12 system that is supporting kids on the way up and somebody's coming in doesn't have the experience of what we're teaching in the earlier grades or has instability moving around different homes, different schools, different districts. That could be a cause that could be an underlying root cause that could be an underlying root cause that would require greater levels of introduction and intervention is a welcoming tool. Yeah, and the answer is in the suspension data, there's no question that students who had been, students who had been in the system, in our system for shorter periods of time were also overrepresented in our data. And one of the things is that students who are in the system at least in the past, I don't think that's as true this year. And in the past, when I looked at the suspension data, we had populations of students that looked more like the Boston area and therefore the base rate in terms of where those students were was also more students of color. Nonetheless, we still have the disproportionality. It's like the three to four times we find, we still find it. So I think your point also about having better programs for onboarding and receiving students due to the district, I think is an important one first to pay attention. I think that's critical for us. I'm also wondering about the consequence folder at the Gibbs. Is this something that's reported somewhat permanently that can be tracked for a child or does that disappear when the child goes to the Odyssey? That would disappear when the child goes to the Odyssey. The things that we hold on to that I transfer over to the Odyssey would be any bullet reports. So if I got any bullet reports on students in sixth grade, I passed those to the Odyssey so that they have that information to see if there's a trend. I mean, that's not to say that I would not have had conversations with Kristen about that this year and shared that slide. It's a Google form. It's not a Google form, it's a Google sheet. And I wouldn't have shared that Google sheet with next year's assistant principal so that they could have that. But our teachers, we do a pretty decent survey. The teachers fill out a pretty decent survey between sixth and seventh grade. So the seventh grade teachers get all of that data, whether or not a student needed a lot of teacher support, just tons of, I can't think of all of the different questions, but the transition information that the Odyssey gets from Gibbs is very comprehensive. Yeah, we're asking kids to make two transitions in a row. And the transition out of an elementary environment, which is very secure where everybody knows your name, all of a sudden coming into a different culture and nobody has a relationship with a child, a child who has a lot more insecurity in their adult relationships is going to run into more troubles as you're making that transition. And the one thing that I'm worried about is that if we're going to identify root causes as they're starting to emerge to try to intervene and provide social worker support or whatever other kind of support we can to keep a child functioning well if we're putting aside part of the picture every time the child transitions from building to building, that worries me. And I think that the Gibbs takes the transition really seriously, which is why we have, you know, we trained all of our teachers in RSC. I think the majority of the elementary schools are RSC trained. So we trained all of our teachers in responsive classroom also, so that we'd be able to carry that forward in that transition. Also, I want to just point out the fact that we have to really think about this very strategically because I don't want to get into tracking kids from one level to the next because there's a lot of different things in a kid's background that might cause them to have certain behaviors. And we have to be very careful about what that is because that's when we're starting to get into identifying those kids and not giving them the fair shake as they move from one level to the next. They might have had a difficulty at another level, they may have matured. There's a lot of different factors that goes into behaviors and I would be very careful not to track kids. And so when they start off on another level that we can identify them and already know that they may be a behavioral problem, that can lead to implicit bias. You know, I'm not going for behavior problems, but whenever I saw a kid who is having conduct issues as a principal, the first thing I do is hit the social worker and say, what's the backstory? What's happening here? What have we done? What do we need to do? What are we thinking about? And that network, not necessarily through power school or through people who are on the disciplinary track, but on the social worker track, making sure that we're watching kids and finding ways to provide help and support when a kid is struggling and showing behavior that's problematic. The gender thing also pops out. And so an interaction of race and gender would just be a multiplier. And I see that as being a double cultural issue. And Mr. Jengar, I feel your pain. I'm also in New Yorker and you took me a year or two to adjust to living here, but how can we make school a better place for our boys? Well, I think that the work that we're doing, first of all, I think we've done a lot. I tried to mention that in my opening statement. And I think that for me, I think that we have to really double down on the implicit bias training, the ideas classes. I've talked to teachers who have taken those anti-racism classes. They have ideas one that ideas two, they have curriculum classes. I think that as we, and then have listening sessions with our students. And I think that collecting that type of data, understanding what their experiences are and developing those relationships just on a macro level. And that's all kids, not just our black and brown kids, but also as it relates to our black and brown kids, we need to really double down on the training and the anti-racism classes that are out there and make sure that our teachers are exposed to that type of training. And we've done that through grants. I propose that we offer a ideas class every semester. Also that teachers can have access to it and have an opportunity to take that. So I think as we look at the various things that we're doing within the district, I think the equity audit of our curriculum will also give us a lot of information. It was mentioned tonight that we need to look at other policies and things that we're doing from an equity lens, bring in an outside consultant. Those type of things are an investment of financial resources. And that's where we need to answer your question. Those are the kind of things I think that will lead to policy changes. Because the policies are formed and then where they're implemented and we could give information about the impact that it has on the various subgroups of students as we do these type of equity audits. Do you think we need to establish a firm policy in the district for what and how we record conduct? I mean, I think that's what was the purpose of this presentation tonight. And that has been the focal point of our conversations as how we're recording the data, how we're analyzing it and looking at the various pieces of information that we're recording. So as Dr. Janger did not mention is that we looked at the monthly discipline reports. He made suggestions of the various pieces of data that would help him to do a more comprehensive analysis and we've made those changes. So we have to be able, and part of that is looking at power school and being able to use it to as full as potential and then triangulate that data with the other pieces of data that we have as Brian talked about, looking at the achievement data, attendance data, the discipline data. And so we're like doing profiles of students. When I say that, I mean like in the moment and understanding and also understanding the challenges that particular student is facing. So we just have to get to know our students better. I mean, to answer your question, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to create a data culture so that when we're making decisions and that's influencing how we're approaching instruction and how we're also making policies and setting our goals. I agree with you in getting to know the students better. That really is the key to making this work. I would like as we go through the budget process for next year to know exactly what we need to do to support moving the suspension and discipline numbers down. I think that the numbers are relatively low. I commend the system for moving them lower. I've seen progress since I've been here. We're still not where we need to be. And I would strongly urge again that we take the conduct models of my high school and bring it down to the oddison. So there's more of a connection. And I would be very willing to devote any resources we have in order to make something like that happen. And I'll leave the other three pages for now. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. I'd like to thank Dr. McNeil for your leadership with the three principals administration here for what you've done and what you're intending on doing going forward. I really appreciate it all. The idea of making each classroom at all the levels a safe place is paramount. And understanding the child for their behavior is just as strong. Thank you again. Thank you. So I had two sort of what I think are quick questions. So when students move from the oddison to the high school, Dr. Janger, can you see what are you, the royal you, you and your people, can you see their disciplinary data from the oddison? Yeah, we can see everything right back to the elementary school. Okay. And we actually just also, I mean, we have a handoff meeting with administrators and social workers in order. I mean, so there's always this trade off. I don't know where you're going with this, but there's always this trade off of like not wanting to label kids, but also preparing kids who need extra support for success, right? And so if a student is having a hard time in school, you don't do any favor by waiting till they get in trouble before you realize it. And so we really try to sort of bridge that gap for the students and to do it in a constructive way. The staff do not have access to that log. So we're not, you know, we're not labeling to the staff, you know, hear the kids to look out for in your class, but we are making sure their support's in place. Okay. Where I'm going with this is I'm trying to understand the implications for all of our students, but especially our students of color. We started this new school, right? The sixth grade school. And I'm trying to, and we created a sensibly another transition for our kids, right? Between, and did many other wonderful things, not the least of which was get them out of a very crowded building, but also bringing them into programming that was more developmentally appropriate. So, but we're talking about discipline tonight. So I want to focus on that. My other question was, are numbers of detentions ever reported out other than like, you know, we asked to talk about it, which I think is appropriate. And I appreciate your candor, all of yours candor in coming to talk about this in such a really prepared way. Because honestly, you know, this, we, you know, we only asked for this, you know, three or four weeks ago, right? So, our student detentions reported out. So if a student was applying to a, an independent school for ninth grade. Suspensions aren't reported out. We don't report discipline data at all. Okay. Suspensions are reported out to the state for like an aggregate, right? But individual student discipline data is never, okay, that's super, that's really helpful. So let me identify the three things that we have reported out to the state. I just want to be very specific with clarity. In school, like they have discipline consequences out of school suspensions and expulsions. Thank you. Okay. And if I can interrupt, sorry. I believe that- There are so many boxes on our screen. So starting, but I'm just trying to follow you because you moved to a different place. Sorry, I'm with you now. So what happens is I believe when Minuteman and different high schools do, when different high schools asks for, some will say, is the student ever been suspended? Yes or no? Some, and I believe Minuteman gets the logs of kids who would be suspended or detentions. I believe that is true. I'd have to go ask the guidance staff if that is true. But I believe they ask for transcript attendance and a discipline log. I think we do share that with Minuteman. But Minuteman, it's sort of a different situation, right? I mean, Minuteman is our other high school, right? So, but if Boobie and Anne requested that, you wouldn't provide it. You know, I am not sure. Most of the things that I have had to fill out is just whether it's suspension. I don't know if they've asked for a specific behavioral log. And there's so many schools that people applied to. I don't know. Individually, when I'm signing something, the question is always suspension, yes or no. And if, yes, why? All right, thank you. So, I'm trying to get my questions in here before we need to move the 10 o'clock rule. So, I'm watching my clock here. I think what I'm seeing is, we're transitioning our kids through these different schools and you've heard this echo to cross virtually everybody tonight. I am trying to understand these slips at the Gibbs that aren't put into power school are kind of detentions, but kind of not. They, you know, I don't want us to get into a situation. I appreciate the intent that we're not trying to like log these things and track them and be such slaves to power school. At the same time, I wanna make sure that we have enough data that we can talk about how we're improving, where we're improving, what's being implemented that might be working, what's being implemented that's not working. If, you know, if we see, you know, if we see at the Gibbs that these logical, what are they called? Logical consequences slips that we somehow get to a place where we're not seeing racial disparities in the implementation of those, that would be very, very interesting to understand and to say, oh, you know, so how is that, what's happening there where we're not seeing this disparate use, right? And, you know, we know that we have these disparities in detentions and so I guess, you know, I just, I hope that as you continue to talk about this, there is some, you know, consistency around what's being put into power school, what's being tracked, how it's being talked about so that to some extent we can increase our data set and actually continue to make inferences from it. And the other piece, and I know that I shared this with Dr. McNeil and it's gonna come across as sounding like a question that I'm not looking for an answer for tonight, but it's the continued conversation. What I'm really interested in our administrative team and to some extent with accountability to the school committee is a continued discussion about what are the metrics we're looking at that are going to tell us that we're making progress, right? Our overall number of suspensions or detentions coming down is certainly something that we wanna see, right? But as those numbers come down, you can actually have larger disparities between subgroups as your big, as your top line numbers start to drop, you actually can begin to have larger disparities among your subgroups, right? And so what are the metrics that we wanna talk about? Obviously we wanna talk about like aggregate numbers, right? Are we interested in aggregate numbers across six through 12? Are we interested in nine through 12 versus six through eight? I think we need to continue to have those conversations. We now have this sixth grade piece that's sort of been removed. And so we're recording our suspensions for the Gibbs separate from the Odyssey, which is appropriate. They're two different buildings with two different administrators. But I think we need to continue to have these conversations so that we can understand what the metrics are for success, right? Because looking at Dr. Janger's slides, it looked like, and I'm picking on you a little bit, which is it's unfair, but I'm trying to, like looking at the high school, we had one year where the disparity for black and African-American students, actually it didn't come into line with the population, but like it went down and then it popped back up again, right? But then the overall number in detentions went down. So it's so complicated, right? Because we're like, yay, fewer detentions, that's great. Oh, but now we're, you know, so it's just so complicated and understanding what metrics we want to look at. I think it's gonna be really important. Dr. Janger, I wanna answer you, but I know there's a lot of lawyers on here. And I know that I have to move us because our meetings have to end at 10. So I just need to do one quick thing before I come to you. So can I get a motion to move the 10 o'clock rule from somebody? Don't all jump at once. Dr. I move to move the 10 o'clock rule until what time do you want? At night. No, I, let's say 10.30. Yeah. 10.40. Yeah, 10.30. Second. Okay, roll call. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Omen. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Rehaner. Yes. Okay, Dr. Janger. Thank you. So, I mean, I had two things, thoughts on that in terms of metric. One, I think we want to focus our metrics on behavior, not on discipline, right? Because discipline is something we do to try to get better behavior. And then the second thing is, I think we want to really be tracking this data about discipline as a met, as a way of analyzing and understanding because weird things are going to happen. And so if we, you know, so we want to lower the rate overall and we want to just decrease disparities. Both of those are good things. And the more we lower the rate, the more variants you're going to get in the disproportionality because it one kid, two kids. I mean, last year in suspension, not in detention, but in suspension data, had we been proportional, we would have suspended one African-American kid last year given the proportion of kids in the school. And we suspended, I believe three. Now, there's a larger number because of some of the overlap with multiracial. But so the numbers are so small that you then really having these sort of larger conversations is not really the point. Like it's actually looking at what's going on individually. But I think we really want to dig down into the larger experience of our students of color, which is, you know, is attendance getting better overall? Is this proportionality getting better? Is GPA getting closer? We don't track that very well. It's very difficult to do it. Is the sort of more behavioral outcomes and more positive outcomes and being able to tie that to sort of students actual experiences in school more than getting too worried about like closing the gap when the numbers get really small. And can I just add onto that, Ms. Morgan? I would also add like looking at other data points, like the proportionality of our black and brown students taking higher level classes. Also, I would like to add not just looking at the quantitative data, but also looking at qualitative data. So, you know, checking in with them about their experiences and having listening sessions. And because I think that is really going to give you the indication of how, you know, that, you know, whether or not the things that you're doing within the school environment to improve their, you know, access to everything that we can offer, that to me is would be a very big metric that we could use talking to the parents of color and our black and brown students. So I think that that would be the help to add to our knowledge and let us know whether or not we're being successful in the things that we're trying to do. Absolutely. And I think, you know, that is something that's just, it's trickier to report out on to some extent, but I think, you know, I think we'll certainly inform all of your work and whatever we can do to support making that happen. You know, let us know. Okay. So, students, so we're gonna move on to our next agenda item, student survey results and we're only two hours behind. Student survey results, but like absolutely, this was time extraordinarily well-spent and I'm so grateful to Salvatore and Mr. Merringer and Dr. Janger and your teams for joining us and Dr. McNeil for putting this all together. I think this was really an important conversation. I think it's one that we're gonna need to have, you know, regularly, but it's really helpful for us to hear something that's been, you know, so clearly put together but also to, you know, that we can really appreciate as a work in progress and, you know, I think, you know, what you've heard from people about, you know, really prioritizing this work, it's really important to me. And so, you know, I'm glad that we were able to have this conversation, so thank you. So, student survey results and parent survey highlights. Dr. Bodie, do you wanna start on that? Well, first of all, let me just say about the parent survey. We just closed the parent survey last Sunday night. So we just really have some very broad over, you know, some of the statistics from it. I think that the parent survey is helpful in terms of the planning we're gonna do. We spent some time talking about earlier this evening. But it's also the student voice as well in terms of what experience they've gone through this spring and Dr. Medeal has a presentation on that. And why don't we do that though? I know you've got this 10.30 and there's some other things on the agenda as well. So if we can do a quick on this, quick overview and then maybe go in more depth later. If you would. And we could do, yeah, we could do, we can do the sort of the highlights tonight and then do more of it in two weeks time, if needed. Okay, I need to share my screen again. So I'm gonna do that now. Hold on one second, I'm getting better at this. Okay, can everyone see my screen? Yes, we can. Okay, thank you very much. I'm gonna be very brief. So the school closure, the student survey results are, excuse me, back up the survey for this school closure. We wanted to collect information from our six to 12 students. It closed a week ago Sunday. And so we have, I've created the slide deck in order to report out the data that we've collected from that survey. So the purpose of the slide deck is to communicate the results of the survey to the public, review the highlights of the survey and share the data in an organized and readable format and respond to any questions or comments. So I will, for the purpose of time, and Ms. Morgan, if you want me to go any deeper than that, I can, but the first two slides of the survey are pretty much the highlights. And so I'll share that the highest percentage of respondents came from Arlington High School and Addison Middle School. We had 650 students who did take the survey. The sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students represent the highest percentage of respondents along with the high school. And then we had 62.6% of the respondents self-identified as female, 34.6% of respondents self-identified as male. And proportionality, the sixth grade students were the highest percentage of respondents. But when you add everything together, you have more of the students from AHS and OMS in total. 88.1% of the respondents who answered selected always are often when asked if they can complete their assignments without any help from an adult. And that is something that was very important to me because we wanted to gauge the level of independence as it related to students being able to have access to the assignments and having access means that they can complete the assignments and they felt like they were getting enough support from the adults and from the directions and from their teachers. So with all the support that they were receiving, they were, the majority of the respondents answered that they could complete their assignments without additional help from a parent. 46.5% of the students preferred to attend a Google Meet and listen to the teacher explain a lesson. And again, I looked at the categories of always and often. We had other categories that they could select. And then 66% of the students preferred to watch a video when it was convenient. 58.6% of students reported that they spent three plus hours completing their assignments. And then this question, we had 609 of the students who responded to the survey answered this question. And then I broke it down by the actual number of hours. So we had 26.2% of the students said they spent three hours completing their assignments. 16.2% reported that they spent three and a half hours and 6.2% of students reported that they spent more than three and a half hours to complete their assignments. Then we had a question because I wanted to poll the students who opted out of participating in the online learning. And we had 42% of those students and there was 150 students who answered this question who reported that the reason why they opted out of the online learning is because the assignments did not count for grade. And then the next highest reason was the 6.16.7% of the students reported that they had access to outside learning activities. So those are some of the highlights. As I go through the slides, you'll see that there's a percentage and you'll see the questions that were asked on the survey. So the question was what school do you attend? And you'll see the breakdown here. And then you'll see what was the current grade. The way that some of the charts are out of the Google Forms, sometimes they don't have the percentage in there and I don't understand why. We also poll the students and because we wanted to segregate the data in many different ways. So we looked at the race and ethnicity, gender identity, and whether or not they're receiving special education support or support as an English language learner. And then these are the questions that we asked individually in order to understand their experience in this past spring's online learning program. And this is where we were asking the specific questions about those experiences. And then this is here without any help from an adult or a family member. And then, did they have any type of technology issues getting on to Google Meet? Did they have the proper technology and their support, their online learning? Did they have any problems using their spy ponders account in order to connect to the internet? And this is where we are asking specific questions about the way that they were delivering instruction. We're gonna utilize this as we move forward for our fall planning. And then how much effort were they putting towards their assignments? So we were looking at the challenge that they were being presented, how they were doing with being able to focus on their schoolwork in an online learning environment. How supportive were the teachers? And this is where we're getting into, again, asking about the way that we're delivering instruction, the use of the asynchronous videos. And then looking at the challenges that they had in their own environment, did they have to care for siblings or a parent or grandparents? Looking at the food security? Whether or not that was an issue or a barrier. And then this is how much time they're spending on their assignments on a daily basis. And then this is the question where we asked the subset of students about whether or not, why they, if they were not participating in online learning activities, why? And then these are some bonus slides that I added. I know that's not in the slide deck that you had. I can add this to the slide deck that you have through Novus, but I took the liberty of breaking down the individual open responses. So we had two open response questions. And then I went through the various questions, I mean, the responses and tried to look for themes. And then, and this is also the other, and I have to add the question, but this one was basically asking, what are some of the challenges that they had? What are some of the barriers? And this question was asking, what is one suggestion that they would give us as we move forward with what we need to know about online learning? And here it is, the challenges that you experience. I'm sorry, let me go back to this slide. This was, I took the assignment, I'm sorry, on this particular response, I took all the responses that had to do with the assignments that they received, and then I broke that down even further to figure out what are some of the comments they were making about those assignments. And so when you look at due date, they were saying like having a flexible due date was very helpful. Having, and when you make the due date, you assign assignments where they have a weekend in that continuum of time so they can spend extra time on completing the assignments. They're looking for more engagement. They were saying that some of the assignments were like worksheets, so they're making sure that we knew that they wanted the assignments to be more engaging, more project-based, and looking at the organization of assignments, how they are able to follow through Google Classroom, the directions, and then the percentage of students that said that there was just too much work. And then these are some of the challenges that they experience, and so I captured that as well in looking at those themes and the answers that they were giving. So that is that. So I can stop sharing my screen now and take any questions or comments. Ms. Epstein. I'm all set, thanks. Mr. Cardin. Nothing, thanks. Dr. Allison Ampey. Thanks for doing the survey, no questions at this time. Mr. Theoman. Thank you for doing the survey. I don't have any questions either. Mr. Schliffman. Thanks for doing the survey. I look forward to incorporating the data into the decisions we make going forward in September. Mr. Heiner. Thank you. And my only comment is that I hope, I've noted the potential to draw correlation between students making a lot of effort on their assignment and correlating that to perceived challenge. And I guess I would just caution about that. I think that a lot of our students think of themselves as students who put in a lot of effort into their work. And I don't know that it necessarily means that the work that they're doing is challenging. I think that they just see themselves as completing it and that takes effort. So that's my only feedback. But I think it's really important that this was done. I think it was a good response rate. I'm definitely intrigued by students who complete surveys and don't participate in remote learning. I think that's really want to know more about that subset. So thank you so much. Thank you. ESY, Extended School Year Update. So this, I put this on the agenda, Ms. Elmer, only because when we met two weeks ago, you gave us a pretty good overview of your intentions. So I don't think we need to re-cover that. But I know that you are expecting more. I'm trying to find where you are. Thank you. You're expecting more guidance, potentially middle of the week, last week. And so I just wanted to give you a chance to update us on that. Yes. Thank you. They did not issue the guidance, and instead I actually communicated them with them today regarding the guidance they issued for September to ask if that was what they were considering as the comprehensive summer guidance. And I received my response around 5 p.m. tonight. That is not the comprehensive summer guidance, and they're expecting it now next week. The issue is that we are not allowed to, no one is allowed to resume in-person services until that full or comprehensive guidance has been released and staff are trained. So we will begin remotely as we predicted and contingent on when that guidance is released, when the equipment that has been ordered comes in, when we can get trained staff, we hope to continue to transition to some limited in-person services for some students. But I don't have anything new since the last time we spoke, given the lack of guidance from the department. Thank you. Does anybody have any questions? I see Mr. Schlickman. All right, Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, I was asked by a parent the other day if we're going to be running an EL summer program. So Ms. Brusezi mentioned that. I know if Dr. McNeil wants to speak to that, that would not be through the special ed department. So we are, I have to talk to her. We did not have any ELL teachers who were willing to participate this year. Like I said before, this past spring has been very hard on our teachers and I feel like they just wanted to take a break, but I am going to speak to Ms. Brusezi and see if we can explore other options. If the parents said the program last year was so very valuable for their child and they're hoping to have it back. Yes, no, I understand what you're saying. Like I said before, it's a teacher, that's based upon teacher capacity. And so they are not required to work during the summer. So it's something that they volunteer to do. So we have to think of other ways to address that. Okay, thank you. So we need to vote to approve the 2020, 2021 Arlington Public Schools calendar, which is in Novus. And I know that Dr. Bodie, did you want to just speak briefly to the kindergarten screening for this spring? Very briefly. We are still looking at how we're going to do the kindergarten screening, similar to some of the evaluations you might do for special ed, some of these screening aspects are best done in person. So we're looking at that. As a result, last year we put three days at the end of the school year, it's half day for, actually no days for kindergarten. So we could do the screenings in June. We don't know if that will be the case. I think I'll have a better idea by September because we're gonna have to have a plan for this. It's a state regulation to do it and how we will do it is if we're back in school, that will be entirely, and I'm assuming we are gonna back in school, that will be possible. So I may be coming back to you in September to review when we would do screens for the incoming 21, 22 students. But at this point, since we don't know, I decided not to put it on. What is different about this calendar to the previous one is you now see where the conferences are and the early release days at the secondary level. We took the state holiday, which had been put on briefly, now it's off. And essentially that's really the only differences from what you had approved several months ago. That's it. Okay, does anybody have any questions or comments? Mr. Cardin. Thanks, I just wanna point out that like everything else, there's more uncertainty than typical this year and this is our intended calendar, but obviously things could change if we suddenly have to switch to remote learning model. We may need a week of professional development to start this school year. Who knows what's gonna happen? So this is our intended calendar, but unfortunately there's more uncertainty than typical. Thank you, agreed. Anybody else? So I need a motion to, because this is our second read, we need to vote to approve it tonight. Move the adoption of the calendar as proposed. Second. Second. So motion by Mr. Thielman, second by Ms. Exton. Roll call vote Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schliffman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. Yes. And I'm also a yes. So that's a seven nothing vote for approval of the intended 2020-2021 school year calendar. That brings us to the monthly financial report. Mr. Mason. Good evening. Ah, all right. So I'm not gonna bore you guys tonight, spare you guys that, but I did the monthly report, the core of that was addressed to the budget subcommittee and not too long ago. And there was a couple of motions on the report that need to be addressed. But overall, the, you know, the report is showing financials as of yesterday for the general fund or the town appropriation amount and the most accurate projection that I can provide. And I don't see this really changing from this point on. And that with a balance of $418,066 and approximately 40 cents. I, that those numbers can be hit and miss, but regardless in this, and the whole thing was driven by, mainly by special ed out of district tuition surplus, which we intend to in the motions asked the school committee to vote to move about $418,000 into the special ed reserve fund. In addition, tonight we'll be asking the school committee to vote on the prepayment of out of district tuition for FY 21 using FY 20 funds and amount a little bit over 1.3 million, which is also spelled out in the report, which would help us out in FY 21 budget and possibly put into the, depending on how FY 21 budget holds for FY 22 as well. And just to say we did have a lot of expenditures that had adjusted even since the budget subcommittee meeting, but mainly a lot of it's going to preparation for COVID expenses for reopening and as well as remote learning in cases and the issues as well as a lot of facility projects. But I'll leave, if anybody has some questions, so please feel free. All right, any questions? I see Dr. Allison Ampey, anybody else? Okay, you get to start. Are you at motion? Yeah, let me talk for a moment first. So the budget subcommittee met last week and did approve three motions. They've changed, which motions two and three are either exactly the same or substantially the same as what the budget subcommittee approved. Motion one has changed somewhat, but that has changed somewhat, but that is in part due to budget subcommittees recommendations. So I'm just saying that budget looked at this and I think looking at the two that it's pretty much what we recommended to the full school committee to approve. So any other questions or comments? Okay, so Mr. Schuchman. Yeah, I was just confused here for a second. The motions before us is the finance committee, or rather the budget committee agreeing to the numbers that are on page three of the handout from Mr. Mason. So the numbers, the problem is the numbers change. We only met once and Mr. Mason had earlier more preliminary numbers and we asked him to do some more looking at the budget and seeing if there was anything else that could be changed and he's done that and that's what you're seeing here. But the problem is as the budget subcommittee, I only have the vote that we took on the other motions that he had presented to us then. So I'm trying to say that we did look at this and I'm trying to speak for the budget subcommittee as a whole, but our motion doesn't, I mean, what we recommended isn't exactly what we're seeing here. But the reason we thought this was a good idea is it provides us with the maximum amount of flexibility for the coming year, potentially years and it does actually provide for some monies to come back to the town because of the COVID reimbursements because we're paying for COVID expenses now and then it's gonna be reimbursed and the reimbursement will go back to the town. So we felt this was a good, a fiscally responsible way of handling what ended up the deficit that we are not deficit, not deficit, the additional funds that we were able to find at the end of the year because of changes in our out of district spending. This appears to be very thoughtful and I just wanna make sure that, Kersi, you're okay with the numbers that I'm seeing tonight and the numbers on page three are what we should be voting. Yes. Okay, that's all. So we need a motion. I move that we approve the, okay, I'll read them, sorry. I move that we approve the following budget transfers, reduce special education by $1,687,974, reduce administration by $286,335, increase curriculum instruction by $24,928, increase elementary by $60,777, increase the other budget transfer category by $1,644,790, and increase secondary by $243,814. Do you want me to do them all at once? Yeah, okay. I move to approve the district administration to make prepayment of out of, sorry, I gotta make my screen bigger, make prepayment of special education out of district tuition in the amount of $479,546, dollars and 81 cents in accordance with MGL chapter 71, 71D. I move to approve the district administration to make prepayment of special education out of district tuition in the amount of $888,763.14 in accordance with MGL law chapter 70, section 4E. And I move to move up to $418,062 into the reserve fund for special education. Second. So, motion by Dr. Allison Ampe, seconded by Mr. Schlickman, roll call vote, Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes, but should we ask if there's any on discussion? Oh, yes, sorry. Any discussion about the motion? Seeing none, let's start over again. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Salmon. Yes. Ms. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Hayner. Yes. And I am also yes. So there's a seven nothing vote. We move on to the superintendent's report. Dr. Bode, do you think you can do that before we need to move past 1040? I mean, we're gonna have to move past 1040 because we're not gonna get through the consent agenda, but can you do your piece before 1040? We'll certainly give it a good try. Superintendent's report, you should start with the update on the high school. There's really not much to report, more probably after the next building committee meeting, we are working in coordination with the town on the DPW project, which is going to be going on simultaneously to the high school project, which presents some, it's a need for coordination for sure. The other thing is the, one of the banners is going to go up about the high schools. People are gonna see pictures of what the future high school looks like out in front very soon. And there's just basically the construction is going well on the renovation that needs to take place for the new entrance and parameter is still on time. All right, so onward, kindergarten report. You have the numbers in Novus. Right now we have 461 confirmed and 35 that are still pending. So that's putting us close to 596 if all students come, but we're still only in June. We're a little behind where we were this time last year, but just recently we're seeing an increase. And just watching it very carefully in terms of reserve positions, we know we're going forward with a reserve position of Pierce at these, not the kindergarten, because the kindergarten teachers will stay in place, but at the third grade, I think. Anyway, the other, that's really it. Those are the two things we wanted to talk about. I think I made it, Ms. Morgan. We did very, very well. We're gonna even get through the consent agenda before we have to move forward. And this fixed Gerald has even put asterisks in our agenda, which is great. So moving on, oh, sorry. Does anybody have any questions? Seeing none, we move on to the consent agenda. Nine o'clock, all items listed within asterisks are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant, warrant number 20309, total warrant amount $2,345,374.38 Dated June 16th, 2020. Approval of minutes, June 11th, 2020. School committee regular and organizational Zoom meeting minutes. Move the consent agenda. Second. Roll call vote. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Seelman. Yes. Mr. Schliffman. Yes. Mr. Hayner. Yes. And I am also yes. Seven nothing vote. Moving on to subcommittee liaison reports and announcements budget. Budget met last week. You just heard what we did. Community relations. You heard what we did at the beginning of the meeting. CIA. Nothing yet. Facilities. No report. Policy. No report. Arlington high school building committee. We already heard the report. Superintendent search process committee. Yeah, we met today at one o'clock. Things are going along. We've got over 850 responses to the survey. We're getting good participation in the focus groups more to come. Also the survey data, the to date, I've sent out an email to everybody. Liaison reports. Announcements. Future agenda items. I gotta find page three. Hold on guys. We're gonna do this. Oh wait. Percy. Dr. Allison Ampey. On future agenda items. Can we consider the resolution that's going around with MASC on anti-racism? Yeah. Can you forward that to me? Yes. Thank you. I didn't get it in time to forward it for this meeting. That's why I waited. Super. Thank you. Well, we're meeting again in two weeks. Okay. Mr. Thielman. One future agenda item. I brought this up before is that I do wanna make sure we get on the schedule at a time when the school committee talks about what we're looking for in a superintendent. We do our own focus group. Probably with the group with Glenn. It's just good to have it on the calendar for the summer so we know when it's gonna occur. Yep. I will speak with Mr. Slickman about that. He wants to skim to it. I see him over there in his box. Yes, Mr. Slickman. Yeah, we're the Brady Bunch, right? Yeah, I mean, we can do this as an agenda item for an hour at the next meeting. We talked to Glenn about that. That's the committee's desire. We could also do it on a night that there's not a normal meeting night but we can zoom it then as well. So can I ask that committee members email me with your preference either? I'll send an email out to all of you and then just respond to me about your preference if you wanna do a separate meeting or you wanna have this as an hour in two weeks time and then we can make a decision and move forward but I'm gonna send that email out like tomorrow morning and then I'm gonna make the decision like tomorrow afternoon so you gotta put your preference in right quick and then we'll do it. Okay, any other future agenda items? Seeing none. Motion to adjourn. Move adjournment. Second. Okay, roll call. Ms. Eksten. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schluckman. Yes. Mr. Heyner. Yes. And I am also yes. We are adjourned. Thank you guys. It's been vivid. This was a long one. Thank you so much. Thank you team. Good night. Good job.