 Are we ready? Yes. OK, folks, we're live. My name is Jeff Thielman. I'm the vice chair of the Arlington School Committee. Our chairman, Bill Haynerm, is at the touchdown club tonight with some of our students. And so I'm substituting for Bill until he arrives a little bit later on. A few announcements. First of all, we want to have a moment of silence for Catherine Zeno. She is the mother of Mary Morocco. Mary is one of the secretaries here on the sixth floor, one of the administrative assistants on this floor. And so we'll have a moment of silence for Catherine, her mother, who passed away this week. Thank you very much. I want to introduce our student representative, Mickey Zaganjar. He is a junior, two-year varsity letterman, power forward on the basketball team, junior class officer, school secretary, secretary of the class. That's right. Did I get that right? Siobhan Foley is the Arlington Education Association representative. And she's here. And tonight is the birthday, I won't say the number, of our administrative secretary, Karen Fitzgerald. So Karen, happy birthday. I remember when I turned 30. Enjoy it. Enjoy it while it is. Thank you. All right. Yeah, when you started here, we had to get your working papers. OK, so we're going to have a presentation on the EdTech conference, and then public participation. And then this is the seventh grade. What am I reading here? Seventh grade, special places, group installation. Oh, that's the artwork. Oh, the artwork. That's the artwork. OK, I haven't done this in a while. It's been a few years. So around the room, we have a display called Special Places by seventh grade students in Mrs. Serafini's 3D course. They chose a place that they felt personally connected to, and then looked up a topographic map of the place online. The kids then replicated a part of that map for our special places group installation. There will be over 100 of these works displayed together at our Audison Spring Art Show on May 22. The lesson connected to their topography unit is in their geography classes. All right, so there you have it. And I just came from the Bracket Art Show, so there's art going on all over the district tonight. OK, the EdTech conference, we're going to hear from students from the Audison Middle School. It's my pleasure to introduce Lillian O'Donald and students from the 610 cluster at the Audison Middle School. These students were selected to speak at a national conference called the Tech Forum, sponsored by Technology and Learning Magazine. And they were keynote speakers in the afternoon, along with students from the first grade at Thompson Elementary School. So we were well represented, and they're going to share a little bit of their experience with you tonight. So yes, I'm Lillian O'Donald. I am the co-teacher for the 610s. And I'll just go ahead and introduce the students. Otto, Julia, Avril, and Owen. And so we were lucky enough to have the iPad pilot happen in the 610, so each student has a one-to-one iPad. And we got started with that in November, and it's really changed the way that we teach and learn in the 610s. So I thought that it would make sense for Otto and Julia to talk a little bit about how the conference went on Friday. It was really exciting for them. And then maybe Avril and Owen could talk a little bit about being on the iPad Council, which all four are a member of, so student representatives for leadership opportunities. Hi. So some of the topics we talked about in the tech forum were writing and research, organization, and all of the things that make iPads more efficient. And so Otto's going to tell you about what the tech forum was like. Yeah, what kind of questions did they ask you? Well, some of the main questions were asked, like, what do we decide during the iPad Council meetings? What is the iPad Council? Why are we here? And why did only the 610s get the one-to-one iPad pilot program? And while the iPad Council is a council that was formed by the 610s, we all had to enter a little thing about ourselves saying, why do we want to be in it? Why would this would be a good experience for us? And so then we all got in. And what we decide on is what things we could put on the iPads, what things we should take off the iPads, like unnecessary apps and things like that. And we also just decide on main things, like, what are some advantages and disadvantages about them? Like, are they distracting the kids during classes? Do they help us do research? And also, oh, I forgot what I was going to say. Julia, do you want to talk maybe about the format of it? Yeah. My sources. That's the iPad action. So we, sorry, what was the question? Like the format. So you were on a panel, right? And then there was also a second round where you guys sat around and they asked you questions. Yeah. So at first we just presented, we separately had different explain everything about different topics. And then everybody asked us questions, like Otto said. And then after that, it was listening to other people and what they do with the iPads. And it was really interesting. And also we make, what's it called? Yeah, like we make spreadsheets and forms for people to fill out. So if we have questions, if people like verbally research, yeah, the way they like to learn. So we got information like that that helps us learn what we need to know and what we need to do with the iPads. Great. So I think about how it's changed the climate of school. So very quickly, Averill and Owen. Yeah, so I'm Owen and this is Averill. And something that the iPads have really helped us with is organization. So students binders are less cluttered because we're not getting passed out as much paper. So that's also good for the environment. And so the cool thing is instead of passing out 116 sheets of paper, we're getting one Google Doc share with all of us so we can all collaborate on it. So I just did a project with a few friends and we all went to the library to work on it. And we had four different laptops and we were able to all do it at the same time. And that's definitely very useful. This is a picture. This is a picture of a shared Google document. So if you see on the right-hand side, there's comments. And people are putting input on what they like or what they think should be changed. So that's a great opportunity to teach at the moment, but also students are giving each other feedback. And you'll find that often when you're typing, they know other students can see what they've written that they'll put in a little more effort to. I wanted to talk about the website. Oh yeah, so for the creation of the iPad Cancel, we had to create a website. So we created it on Wix. Does anyone know Wix? So we created it on Wix. And we have a home page where there's lots of pictures of the iPads and work and how they're used in classes. And we have a page with our rules that we created when we first got the iPads. And we also have a page with the data we collected from the surveys we made. So we made surveys on Google Docs. We sent it to everyone in the cluster, and they had to do it. And there were questions like, do you type or write faster? Do you think the iPads have helped you with projects and being more creative in class? Things like that. And we put it on the website. So there's some pretty interesting stuff there. Yeah, it's pretty cool that they did it all on their own. So just lastly, from a teacher, it's really changed in that it's really created some wonderful leadership opportunities for students. They're really excited about it on the council, but also within the classes. They give us more class time because you're not shoveling around papers as much. You're not passing out information. It's all distributed very quickly. It really allows us to differentiate very easily because there are always enrichment activities, videos on topics students can do Khan Academy for math. All these different extensions that they can do immediately at their fingertips. It also encourages a broader use of resources for teaching. I find a lot more multimedia. Let's just on paper, we're talking videos, PowerPoints. To the voice we do, NPR, listening to history class is really amazing. So I think overall, that's kind of a little bit about what we've been up to. I don't know if anyone has any questions for us. We're excited to be here. So thank you very much for having us. Thank you very much. Cindy. Would you recommend that this pilot move forward? Would that be your, you would definitely, and you would like to see it move to other six grades as well as continue up with you in seventh grade? Yeah, definitely. Yeah? Yeah, I also think that maybe from all the different clusters we could have a group if the iPads get to all the different classes in school because then there would be a whole, a wider or a bigger group to share ideas. Cool. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you very much. Great job, guys. Thank you very much. I think the highlight of the tech forum was the dessert bar. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. But they did extraordinarily well and people were very, very impressed. And they were, all the other students that presented that were from other districts besides Arlington were high school students. And they called me at the last minute to say we'd really like to have elementary and middle because we had originally put in for our high school computer programming students and I said, what grade do you want? And they were like, you have, like, yep, great. Tell me who. And so they were chosen to speak. So they did a great job. Terrific. Is there anybody here for public participation? All right. We'll move on to Generation Citizen Partnership Program with Carrie Dunn and her team. Thank you, guys. Hi, thanks for having us. I'm Carrie Dunn. I'm the head of the History and Social Studies Department, K-12, but also the high school and middle school history department at. And I'm here tonight to talk a little bit about our Generation Citizenship Program. I'll just briefly introduce it and then I'll allow Jerry Pay and Tess Ross Callahan to talk about the program as it exists at Arlington High School and then I'll be talking a little bit about the program as it stands as an extracurricular program at the Audison Middle School. So we became involved with Generation Citizen three years ago. I was approached by this organization. It's a nonprofit. It's nationwide and they have a large Boston chapter affiliated with a number of universities in the area, BU in Tufts in particular. And their mission is to improve civics education and to teach students how to be active citizens in their communities. Most of their partnerships are with urban districts. We're actually the only kind of urban suburban district that they're partnering with right now. Their initial partnership in Massachusetts was with the Maldon Public Schools. I'm a good friend of the Social Studies K-12 by counterpart there. She recommended it highly and she had actually helped them develop their middle school program. What they do is they train university students to work as teachers and mentors in this program. So they come out once a week, these trained students, and they work with our students to develop a civic advocacy project. So our students think about something that they're interested in, something in their community they wanna change, and this university student works with them to help them flush out the idea, articulate the idea, take action on the idea, and then in the end, many of our student programs are selected to be presented at the state house to actual legislature. With that, I'll let one of our students, Tess Ross Callahan, and one of our teachers, Jerry Paye, talk about the program at the high school and Tess can tell us about her individual project. Jerry Paye is a social studies teacher. He teaches grade nine modern world history as well as our symposium elective, which is where we house this program currently. And Tess is a senior who will be heading to Tufts University in the fall. So let's start with Jerry and then Tess. Right, thank you very much. Just wanna share a little bit about my experience with Generation Citizen. I teach, as Ms. Dunn said, a current events elective, so we examine both domestic and international policy. So when Carrie approached me about Generation Citizen, it seemed like a perfect fit because it added a third dimension of local policy, local activism. And so typically, as Carrie said, college students come once a week and they teach our students about lobbying, how to be an advocate for a cause, how to use social networks to promote a cause. And I've seen it really gives students a voice. Oftentimes they feel powerless to enact any kind of real change. So the program really encourages students and teaches them how to talk to adults, to administrators and community members in order to enact change. And so it kind of turns their powerlessness into having more of a voice. And even though our projects are pretty small scale, we do a class project and they've ranged from anti-bullying initiatives to recycling initiatives to access to talk about career education. They're pretty small scale projects, but I think the students can build upon that down the road. And maybe with this civics education, they will then in turn one day attend school committee meetings and town hall meetings and promote change and activism at their colleges and beyond. So I think it's a great program about just really emphasizing the importance of civics that students have a voice, that we educate them about being informed and knowledgeable. But I think the program encourages them to take that extra step and better the community and better schools through their knowledge and their experiences. So that's about it. Thank you for your time. Hello everyone. My name is Tess. This is cool. I, like Ms. Dunn said, I'm a senior this year. And what that means obviously is that I have just completed the college process. And I don't know how many of you have kids who have just gone through that or if you've just gone through it yourself, but well it's a big one. But they have this thing. Every school has this thing called Accepted Students Day. And that's basically where they invite the kids there and they have activities fairs and they try to recruit you to come to their school. And I was at one of these Accepted Students Days recently and I saw someone I thought I knew. And I looked at her and I was trying to figure out who it was and I realized it was Emily. And she had been my mentor for Generation Citizen. She had been the woman who came and helped us with our, what they call, action issue, which was, as Mr. Pei said, career education. And so we did that sort of like weird eye contact. Like I remember you, do you remember me? And then she came out and gave me a big hug and I said, are you still a democracy coach? And she said no and I was disappointed. And she said actually now I'm leading an advocacy group, which is sort of a step up in the program. And at first I was kind of surprised because Emily had started Generation Citizen as a freshman in high school, in college. And she was almost our age when she came to our class and so she had requested to work with middle schoolers, which they also do. And she had sort of ended up with this older boy who was working with her and hadn't really gone how she'd planned and yet here she was, she was going further and further in the program. And then I thought about it and realized that it's actually, it's not that surprising because that story, that story about where you sort of try Generation Citizen on a whim and then fall in love with it and keep going. Like I know that story because it's my story. I found that though I had started Generation Citizen just because I needed an extra class to fill the block that I was missing in my fall semester, pretty soon it was kind of the best part of my day. I would come into class and it was the first class I had that was really, it was just like completely unlike anything else, there were no notes, there were no tests. And I would actually talk. You don't realize how many classes as a junior in high school are just this formula of notes, lectures, tests and that's necessary for success but I realized how little I was talking each day except at lunch and then in this class we were all, I mean literally using our voices but also developing our voices sort of in the broader sense of learning how to advocate for a cause and that meant so much to me and pretty soon I was asked to use my voice to talk at the state house and so when we went to present our project to the board of legislators as Ms. Dunn was describing they also had me give a keynote speech in front of a bunch of big scary important people and I was really nervous and it actually it went really well and this past fall I only applied to schools that were participating in Generation Citizen because I'm so excited about being a democracy coach next year and I bothered Mr. Pei until he got us T-shirts for Generation Citizen and I frequently like look at their website to check out the news and to practice the application because I can't actually start it until I'm a college student but I'm excited about it and I think it's amazing that this program can be not only the best part of someone's day and such an empowering change but it can also become the map for your future and that's what it became for me so thank you. Can you just, what was your project? We were doing career education in the high school so that was where we tried to sort of, I guess you would say revise an existing program the capstone program to be sort of better known throughout the school and community and more accessible to the students and it actually ended up winning grand prize at the State House so that was cool. So our program at the high school has just been a smashing success and Generation Citizen, this organization we've partnered with has been very, very pleased with it not surprisingly they loved working with Jerry Pei and they wanted to expand their activities in Arlington because they'd had such a positive partnership with us so far so I suggested the middle school and they actually changed their model for us so in Jerry's class they go into the classroom once a week into his regular class but the middle school doesn't really fit with our curriculum where we do ancient civ, world geography and then an early world history class an American civics component doesn't mesh in there so my suggestion to them was could you make it an after school module that is an extracurricular opportunity for our kids so they actually worked really hard all summer to redesign their program to work that way. We then put it together, Eric stepped up to be the advisor, he's going to talk a little bit about the program and some of what his students have put together in the projects they've worked with but it's filled a great niche, we've had terrific participation at the middle school after school. I think it's addressing also a hidden achievement issue and equity issue where students who have means who are middle schoolers go home to all sorts of rich activities that their parents sponsor them for. This is something that's wonderful and it's really rich and it's open to everyone and it costs nothing. So it's been a terrific addition to I think the Odyssey middle school experience for many students as a result. So I'll let Eric talk about how the program works there as an extracurricular and some of the projects that his students have put together. Hi everybody, thank you so much for having us come and speak. It's really an amazing program that we do and one of the things that I think is most amazing about it is that the students get to show what they've been working on at the end and not often enough does the community get to see what's going on in our schools and especially at the middle school whenever someone from the community we had a newspaper journalist come in to do an interview with the students he was so amazed at how professional these students could be. He thought that their maturity, the way that they approached the issues and the ideas that they came up with were really great. And I'm privileged, a lot of us are privileged to work with the young students of Arlington and see that and it's just an amazing opportunity for them to show that to the community as well. So the way that it works at Audison is it's an after school program. The students, I had originally thought about doing sort of an interview process see if the students were willing to make the commitment and we wound up leaving it as an open invitation for any students who are interested and the numbers, the first year had a big meeting, the opening meeting and then there were less students and then the second year that I've run it this year it's increased as we've gone along. We've picked up more kids who have heard about it and how interesting it was. So it does take a commitment from the students and their time and in their research and we're very careful. I try to make sure that there's not too much work outside of the meeting times for students because I wanna be respectful of their other activities and what they're capable of accomplishing is really amazing stuff. They take the first meetings, the first half of our series of meetings, they learn all about the government, they learn about the levels of government, federal, state and local government, all the different potential avenues for change and they discuss different issues if you wanted to change something like X, where would you go? Is that appropriate to talk to the president about? Cause that's everyone's first guess. We should write a letter to the president. So how do you best affect change? And it's just a terrific opportunity for the students to learn about our government, about civics and then the best part is they do something about it. The issue that they chose our first year was cleaning up Monotony Rocks Park and I have a presentation, a couple of pictures, I'm not sure if you'll be able to see them too well, everybody, but those are some students at the state house. Sorry, Gary. You're just looking for issues. Yeah, so those are some students at the state house and if you can see, they have a big tree-shaped brochure, a big tree-shaped presentation in the background. So they wanted to get trash barrels put into Monotony Rocks Parks just to help with the litter and other issues and they really correctly identified it as sort of a symbol of Arlington. So they banked on that. This year they decided to try to work on some of the street crossings, pedestrian safety. Arlington's a wonderful community. I've felt that way since I first started working here. You can really sense the community and the students are part of that and part of walking around and biking builds that community and so they thought that this would be an important thing that people would get really excited about to try to make Arlington more walkable. And so the Park Ave that goes from Route 2 to Mass Ave, there's an elementary school on one side and the middle school on the other and a lot of students cross Park Ave every day to pick up younger siblings or drop them off and so they were concerned about those crossings. So they called the newspaper, they went on Arlington Public Access TV. I don't know if any of you saw but it was really an amazing interview that was conducted by someone who did Generation Citizen the year before, Gaydre, and she does an awesome job editing it and everyone was really very professional during that time. So we presented at the State House. These are some pictures that I took from that day and the students again, as Ms. Dunn said, cute middle school kids dressed up in suits. But they really were very professional and they did an amazing job presenting and we won an award, the Action Award. So the first year we won the Changemakers Award, sorry. So the students were recognized as being empowered to make change in their community. And then this year's award, they got more specific with their award categories. Out of 43 groups presenting, the Autism Middle School students won the Action Award for identifying and taking the most steps towards reaching their goal, targeting appropriate people. They go over ideas of what you can do and our students went to do all of them. They tried to be successful in every way they could. And in the end I told them, it doesn't really matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. And I think that this award really emphasized that for them. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Anybody have any questions? All right. I just wanted to thank you, Eric and Jerry for being here. And of course, I wanted to ask you how many students participated in your class year and how many in your class, Eric? Or in your club? So how many are in your club this year? So this year we had about 15 students. It was about the same number last year. And my classes tended to vary by enrollment but anywhere from, you know, by average about 20 students get involved each semester. Thank you. Thank you. There is a question in the school plan. I missed it from the left side. I'm assuming that this will go on next year. It sounds great. If kids are interested in either enrolling in the class or participating, how would they find out? Well, we're actually concluding our course enrollment process at Arlington High School now. But any student can take our Symposium and Current World Issues class that Jerry teaches. It has no prerequisites, it's open to all. We always get great numbers in it. I think the word is out that it's a terrific class and it's really interactive and experiential, which many of our students are looking for. It's also a heterogeneous class. So they're in the same classroom but they can take it for either honors weight or curriculum A weight. So we have a full range of students from all different backgrounds in that class getting this generation citizen experience, learning how to be community activists. So they can talk to Jerry about it and he'll tell them, take the class. So it was Symposium in what? Symposium in Current World Issues. And then to join the club. So I do extensive advertising to my own students and then I also put up flyers around the school beforehand. There's a website and the students get a list of all after school activities and Generation Citizen is one of them. So the awareness at the middle school is increasing. Every year we get a little better about publicizing it so that more than just the students that have me telling them about it in the morning is all exciting to come. But yes, so. Okay, so they would look for Generation Citizen. I mean, that's what you're calling the group. Yes, I call it Generation Citizen. Okay, great. Just to make it straightforward. Thank you. I have to say this is impressive and I like the story of starting at the president and then redirecting. And I'm really impressed because that's where my heart is that you have ended up in a nice local government issue. So what's their reaction as they move from the president to 252 town meeting members, five select men, a town manager, DPW director, a school committee and other such people who are governing things in town? I'll let Eric answer that. But I will say I was at the DPW last year for another purpose, for placing an intern and the director did say, are you the one sending me all those middle school kids? I'm like, no, they're coming on their own. So I think it's really important that students don't get a sugar-coated version of the world and that they're prepared to go out into our society and be successful. And so in many ways, I think that that's what they're running into with that situation going on. But then I also feel like at the end of the day, they feel a little more heard. If you write a letter to the president, you're gonna get a generic letter back. If you call someone and he laughs at you because your middle school student hangs up the phone but then sees your email, gets another letter from, you know, a message from his secretary that you've called again, it shows them persistence in a way that I don't think you could be persistent with the president or with a senator. So I think that it teaches them really valuable lessons about making real change. But you're right, there is a little disillusionment to that. I'm sort of interested in seeing our first warrant article in the annual town meeting from Generation Citizen. And I expect that it'll be coming. Great job, thank you very much. I also want to thank Carrie Dunn for bringing this to Arlington. It's really terrific, it's a wonderful experience. And I wish you the most success next year at Tufts and hopefully you'll come back and maybe be a mentor here, perhaps, maybe. You're close by. All right, thank you very much for coming this evening. So now we're gonna hear about district determined measures in social studies and world languages with Carrie, Dunn and Catherine Ritz, I think both at the same time, yep. Come on up. Carrie. If you don't mind, I can go first. Go ahead. All right, so there should be in your packet a handout from me. And that's something that I think could be put on the school committee website if people wanted to view it at home, okay. All right, so I'll talk a little bit about our district determined measures as we've enacted them in the history and social studies department at the secondary level. So just stating the obvious here, one of the reasons, and the initial reason why we're implementing these this year is that this is part of a state and a larger federal initiative that's mandated. However, I think we have tried to seize the opportunity here to do something really good for teachers and students in Arlington. And it's been an opportunity for teachers in the history and social studies department to collaborate with one another to build some even more, I think we're already quite good in this area, but to build even more consistency from teacher to teacher between teachers with the same subject, same grade and something that we really had to do anyways with the implementation of the new ELA Common Core for technical subjects, which includes history and social studies. This was an opportunity for us to develop some new assessments that really measured skills that were emphasized in the adoption of the new Common Core. So this did involve a fair amount of change for us. We actually went into this process thinking we are in great shape. We already had common assessments. So we had at least three common assessments in every grade. We had a technology-based assessment. We had a research skills-based assessment in the upper grades that was a kind of a classical research paper and we had a common final exam. So we thought, hey, we can just use those. It turned out that we couldn't and that was fine. It was a good opportunity for us to change and grow. And the reason why we couldn't was because really the purpose of a district determined measure is to show growth in one school year. And in order to do that, you need to have paired measures so you can see growth over the course of a year. And none of our existing common assessments were actually paired. So we could have paired them. We could have done something like give our final exam the first week of school and lo and behold, the kids did much better at the end of the year. But that didn't seem very genuine and we thought we could do a lot better than that. I think that probably is what is occurring elsewhere, but we thought we could certainly do better than that. And again, coming back to the implementation of the new ELA Common Core, we saw this as an opportunity to do some good work here. So we really decided to focus the development of our district determined measures on the area of research skills. This is something no matter what field a student ends up in, it's going to be important to them, even in just daily life being able to evaluate information, determine the validity of information, compare sources to substantiate your opinion or a claim with evidence is important in all fields. So we saw it as being something that was very, very relevant beyond just the area of history that we teach. Also, there are a lot of other skills that are emphasized throughout the ELA Common Core that can be embedded in research skills instruction. So there's a lot of nonfiction reading. There's persuasive and informational writing. There's developing a claim and substantiating it with evidence. So in this handout, I pulled out the ELA standard for writing and literacy that we most use, which is research to build and present knowledge, but there certainly are other ELA skills that we're emphasizing in the process of doing that. We're also working quite heavily along the ideas of developing an understanding of citation. Why we cite, how to cite, why it's important, not just in history class, but in other activities throughout life to cite. So we've put together two sets of assessments. And I've got a little two-page handout here that walks you through grade by grade, the first pairing and the second pairing. All of these are teacher-developed. We're not using any sort of package products, right? So these are all things that Arlington teachers have developed that they think are grade-level appropriate, appropriate for their students, connect to the curriculum that we actually teach in that grade. The first pairing we've implemented, we planned last year and we've implemented this year. So the students have had the first assessment and in most cases they're either taking the second assessment now or they will take it shortly. We've also planned the second pairing which will be implemented next year, right? So I won't read this aloud to you, right? But we're looking at different skills within the research skills umbrella, right? Again, varying from grade to grade, looking at differentiating between a primary and secondary source, analyzing primary sources, developing a claim and substantiating it with evidence, analyzing a visual source, identifying bias, identifying point of view and in all of these activities we ask students to do that by displaying their own knowledge and putting a particular source in context of that period in history and time and who the speaker was and what their perspective might be. As far as what we are going to do with the data, that's very interesting and that could make this very purposeful as well. We've already used our first assessment along with other assessments that we give as a formative assessment to address particular student needs of students who it was clear from their first assessment had a great deal of growth to make in their understanding of that particular research skill measure. We'll be very interested in looking at growth that's occurred between the beginning of the year and the end of the year in June. We have some departmental meeting time in June that we'll use for that purpose. We'll be interested next spring in the second pairing and seeing how the data is different between the first and the second. That's the point when we can start really to develop kind of cohorts. We've realized already there is one change we'll have to make, we've got a great plan for our assessments. We do need to have standard measures from year to year that we're using so we can potentially down the road look at growth from year to year, not just across one year. So that's a little change we'll be making but not changing the actual assessments for next year. So our use of the data is going to become more sophisticated as time goes on and more actionable as time goes on. That's what I've got so I'm interested to see if you have any questions or comments or ideas for us. I just have a question about what the research skills test is and how does it differ? I assume then it's not the same test. It's not, yeah we wouldn't give a sixth grader a ninth grader the same one. Right, no, no, so beginning of sixth grade and the end of sixth grade, are they getting the same test in that case? Yes. Oh, they are. For these ones they are. Is it a choice test, is it a practical test, is it? They all use multiple measures so there actually are some just multiple choice questions where maybe there's something that students should be able to tell is actually a primary source and they have to select whether it is or isn't. Same thing with the secondary source. There's some citation formatting questions. Whether you need to cite something or not. Students have to write a couple of short pieces as part of it. We're using actual Google Forms for all of them so it really makes it very nice to organize the data and to look at the data and for the teachers to use it. So, but they are different from grade to grade. The ninth grade one is more complicated and challenging than the sixth grade one, for example. So what's your metric for growth? How are you determining growth? Well, that's where we're looking at changing the actual measures so, and that's something that we also need to talk about with Laura and between department heads too and see to what degree that should be standardized from department to department to DDM because there hasn't been clarity from the state that I've seen on that measurement of growth. So, really right now we're focusing on making them manageable and meaningful. So we wanna make sure that we're assessing some of the most important concepts or ideas that we teach in that grade and make it manageable so that if it's too unwieldy, teachers will give it just to get through the hoop but they're not gonna look at the data or they're gonna try to look for a way to get out of it. So we really need to make it definitely doable and that's one of the things that we're looking at. In terms of it being consistent, that will be something we'll have to take a look at at the data over time. Yeah, I think this is a difficult thing to do and it's gonna take a couple of years no matter where you are, especially if you don't have the benefit of a parallel measure such as MCAS or something else with a norm attached to it to get it done. So let me ask, and I'm just throwing these out not because you're gonna have the answer to this. No, it's a big question. It's one we've been thinking about too. I mean these are the questions that I'm thinking about too in my day job and I'm not laying them out to be difficult because they are the difficult questions. I'm laying it out because these are the things we really need to be thinking about professionally and by reflecting on them we will be as years progress refining the DDMs so that they come to a better part. So my next question is, if you're doing a pre-test, post-test model and a cohort of kids comes and blows through the pre-test with the top of every rubric you've got, how are you gonna measure growth then? Yeah, I think that's the failing of every measure of this sort. Unless there's something that you've thought of that I have not, but we have, actually I actually think the answer there is really on the assessments that, and it's a good thing that we have two, are not the actual kind of classical pre-test, post-test, research skills-based. I think where you're actually going to be able to see growth by even the most advanced student is something like, for example, what the grade 10 students are doing, where they're writing a primary source document analysis of the Mayflower Compact at the beginning year when they study that, and writing a primary source document analysis of the Gettysburg Address at the end of the year when they study that. You will see growth there, and there's no limit to it or a specific percentile measure of growth, the way that there might be with a classical, you know, multiple choice test or, because that's really one of the important things we have to face when we're trying to differentiate for high-achieving students. And when you're trying to construct, it's tough enough when you're constructing a growth measure statistically, like the growth score is attached to the MCAS, but when you're trying to do it on a local measure, and you've got the level of great teaching and high-achieving students who've got moving through this district, this is a real challenge. And I hope you're not discouraged when you find kids who are trying to go and subvert your whole plan by doing too well. Yeah, so I would say our answer to that is the writing-based assessments where every student can show authentic growth, whereas something that is objective, a top student can come in and score a 10 out of 10 on the first shot, and then where do we go from there with the post test? Yeah. There's you. I had a few quick questions. First, are the kids gonna be graded on the results of their tests? Okay. In some cases, we are actually using the DDM, and this is my favorite thing to do, as just they get a score on it for the DDM purposes. They never really see that score, but then it actually is just on their test, their unit test or their unit assessment. So when they were studying the Mayflower Compact anyways, they fully should have expected, their teacher probably told them that that would be a document, that they would have to analyze on their unit test, so it's right on there, and that's where they're writing about it. So the teacher is actually giving a measurement for the purpose of the DDM, but then it's just captured as part of the student's regular assessment. I like that because it's not adding an assessment on to an assessment. It's authentic, it's purposeful, it feels like it's important to kids. And there are other assessments that we're doing, our pre-test, post-test, those are just for our own information. Those are mainly with our younger students, our middle school students who they take it seriously, they want to do well, they want to show their teacher what they know. The teacher tells them that actually, specifically it's not graded, so don't stress about this, just do your best. This is for me to know what I need to teach this year. And I think the kids buy that and believe it, and it's good information to see at the end of the year where there has been growth. Then for the writing assessments, are there going to be standard rubrics that the teachers will grade against? Yeah. So those we have as consistency between teacher and... So those we did put in place, when we designed the assessment, we also designed the paired rubric to go with it for the writing assessments. Okay. And then finally, just looking at the example for grade six for the second, the second EDM where the first assessment is at the beginning of Mesopotamia and the second is at the end, isn't that going to be affected? I mean, won't the results be affected by the learning that's undergone during that time about the area and the civilization? And so won't, aren't you kind of grading, looking at two different things at the same time with that? There is a little bit of that, yes. And the teachers felt strongly, and I actually agreed with them that they saw this as an authentic use of a pre-test post-test. I mean, that's the case with any pre-test and post-test. They're learning, you know, you're gonna see, hopefully, that they learned a lot and are able to do a lot more in the post than the pre-test. This just happens to be a writing example of that. Right, I guess I'm saying what I'm thinking is that if you're trying to understand is whether students can learn from primary sources if their ability to use the primary sources is more that they fleshed out the background. That doesn't seem as genuine an assessment of whether they're learning from primary sources. To me. I would say that this is similar to, although not exactly the same, similar to the MCAS in the sense that we test students' ability to read a passage and do literary analysis. It's not the same passage from year to year, yet we look at those scores on those to determine the student's growth score. So much the same way. I understand that this is slightly heavier on content, although if there's a difference in the difficulty of a literary piece of work, then you may get a different result from the student in what you're trying to get at. There's skill as opposed to content. So this would be an example of where we test both content and skill, the content for the unit, but the skill for their ability to look at a primary source document and use the information that's in there. They have to provide evidence, and correct me please if I'm wrong, Carrie, but they have to provide evidence from the document, not just what they learned in the class. And, Kersi, I would say you're absolutely right, and that's the only grade where we're doing exactly what the state wants us to do. Okay, thank you. So those are two kind of incongruous thoughts, but that's the case. That's interesting and helpful, thank you. Jennifer, you had your hand up. Oh, yeah. I was just curious to, how teachers are using this to inform their own teaching? So are they comparing it with other instructors to see where they succeeded and where they may need work? Are they comparing it across time? Sort of how do they see it as a useful tool for them to develop more effective teaching strategies? Right now it's actually only thus far, because we're at where we are in the process. We're just implementing the second measure right now. It's only been really useful, but I would say it has been quite useful as a formative assessment. So highlighting knowledge gaps that the class might have collectively that you need to address with everyone and highlighting issues that particular students might have where you may have had a handful of students who just didn't do well at all on this. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you had those students who just blew it out of the water in the first shot, and maybe particularly at the middle school level, you need to give them some stretch assignments and opportunities, rather than reteaching something that they already know well. So they've used it for that purpose. Once we start looking at the data, that's when I think it will be interesting to see how different cohorts of students are doing, and it will be something that teachers have to think about and see maybe some of these students were particularly strong in an area, and they can talk to that person. We're not quite there yet, but we're very close to being there. Great, thank you very much. Catherine, you're on. Thank you, Carrie. Great job, as always. Good evening, everyone. So I will start with a little bit of a background into how we approach the common assessments, and I have to give you a little bit of a background into word language education. So when we approached development of our common assessments, we didn't have any. So I actually think this was fortuitous, so we could really start where we wanted to be. So we started by looking at the national standards from ACFL, the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. They have three major standards, the three modes of communication, which is what they're called in word languages. The interpersonal mode, which is two people interacting with each other, either through speaking or email. The interpretive mode, which is one-way communication where you're really receiving information. So right now you all are experiencing the interpretive mode of communication. I'm speaking to you and you're listening, or you might be reading a text and you have to interpret what it says. And the presentational mode, which is what I am doing right now, is it's one-way communication again, either speaking or writing where you've prepared something that you're speaking about or writing about. So we decided to approach our common assessments, focusing on these three modes. The first one that we worked on, the interpretive communication, this is not one of our district-determined measures, but this is just common assessment. So what we did is we took, for each language, we found authentic passages. And in world languages, when we say authentic materials, that means materials created by native speakers for native speakers. So not me and non-native French speaker are creating a text for my students that would be adapted to their level. It's just authentic like you would find in the streets of France or Madrid or wherever. So here you have a small example from a graphic organizer that has information about creativity in Spanish. So students have to read this and then they're asked questions, trying to interpret what they see. And the questions are focused on, for example, main idea, supporting details, trying to infer the meaning of a word that they might not know from the context, those types of things. So that's half of the assessment is reading. The other half is listening. So for example, in French, I think this is French too, we have found a video clip on how to make crème brûlée with a shirt and chocolate and the kids have to listen to it and try and think, and they have to answer multiple choice questions about what they hear. So again, it's really just interpreting what they're either reading or listening to. The second two common assessments we decided to turn into our district determined measures because they are performance assessments. So just to give you a quick background into the way that we set these up in order to track proficiency. Again, we looked to Actful and Actful has a proficiency scale that moves students up from novice to intermediate to advanced and then superior is not a level that's particularly attainable in the high school or in a K-12 program. Novice students to give you a visual and novice speaker is what we think of as like a parrot. So they're really just repeating memorized phrases and expressions or words. There's a lot of word listing. You know, what's your favorite food and they'll list words or lists of food. The intermediate speaker is a survivor so they can kind of get by in slightly more complex situations and the advanced speaker we think of as our storyteller so they can really describe what's happened and what was going on and they're talking in different tenses and so on. So we decided to use this scale as a way to kind of build students up and figure out and we set expectations for each level. So at the end of level one French, Spanish, Italian we would expect students to be either a novice mid or a novice high level and then the next year our expectations that they've moved up to a novice high intermediate low you know, an up and up and students in AP would probably hit advanced low on the proficiency scale. So the first, the interpersonal assessment which is our first district determined measure. I believe I gave you some samples and my absolute favorite assessment and the kids can have these ahead of time. It really doesn't make any difference because when they actually have to speak it's they have no notes, no script. It's just off the cuff. You have to just go and start speaking and my favorite Spanish one for example and actually for all the level one language is exactly the same. The basically in pairs, introduce yourself, greet your friend, ask them a couple questions. Where are you from? How old are you? What do you like to do on the week? I mean really kind of basic conversations and then in Spanish four which I believe our student representative is in the Spanish four class. It jumps from, you know, hello my name is to discuss current environmental problems that concern you and your partner. Endangered animals, climate change, energy and so on so that's really what we're hitting. I just think that that's amazing, that the progression from kind of learning basic language skills to discussing important topics in the language that you're studying. If I have, do I have enough time to show a quick clip if you would be interested? Okay. We're gonna learn how to make crème brûlée. Yeah. Only if you speak French. No something's wrong. Oh boy. It's like math. You better do your homework and think that's fine. They're saying what they like and don't like to do. They're like math. Everybody likes math. Is the person on the left was a teacher? No. No, that was another student? No. It's between two students. Yeah, the student on the left. So that's a Spanish one high school. Two students, yeah. So it's always between two students. So yeah, I think it's fantastic. And actually, I think it's really exciting the connection that teachers have made with their student achievement goals this year through the teacher evaluation system. I think almost half of the teachers in my department chose to focus on interpersonal communication as their student achievement goal and they decided to use the department rubric that we developed as the way that they were tracking progress towards achieving that goal. So I thought that was really nice and typically, I think traditionally, there's been too much emphasis on writing in foreign languages. So to have this, I think really shifts the focus of what we're doing in a very important way. The third common assessment, which is our second district determined measure is on presentational communication and we focused on the skill of writing. So similar to the interpersonal communication, the students get a prompt and they are expected to write on that prompt. So for, and they would write in class, prepare the essay, whatever length is appropriate on whatever topic. So again, if it's Spanish one or French one, be probably tell me things you like to do or tell me what you do at school or the classes you take and then as it goes up, they would be able to talk, like tell me what you did over the summer or using past tense or things that you wanna do in the future. For obviously, these three common assessments are for the modern languages that we have. So in the high school, Italian and also middle and high school, Mandarin, French, Spanish. And we also have, and high school, we also have Latin. So Latin, obviously we wouldn't use these three modes of communication and the most important skill that the Latin teachers focused on is on translations. So all of their common assessments and district determined measures focus on progress, the way that students progress doing translations, moving from sign of simplified Latin texts all the way up to quote unquote real Latin. And again, we developed rubrics that mirrored the actful proficiency scale to show kind of student progression over the years. So any questions? Go ahead, Tracy. So I was interested in your, this thing, the chart. Yes. Yeah. So there aren't, I mean, I think it makes sense what you're saying and to have the levels. This doesn't exist already. I mean, like, isn't there like a national organization of foreign language teachers who come up with, I mean, I'm thinking of all the reading, leveled reading things and that doesn't already exist? Are you talking about readings specifically or just in general? No, no, I'm talking about, there are, so actful recently came out with what's called the Apple assessment. If that's, so it's exactly this where you're assessing students in the different modes of communication and skills on the proficiency scale. There's also a national stamp assessment, which does the exact same thing. The stamp assessment and Apple run $20 per student. So it's not something that the district could afford. However, Dr. Chesson is supporting for us to test 30 students in French, 30 students in Spanish to norm ourselves, to make sure that what we are coming up with through these assessment match that. So unfortunately, I think it's just cost prohibitive, the assessments that already exist. The other thing we've had offers from a couple of at least one other school district to compare our stamp results with theirs so that we can build a bigger norming database and we would all do it with the same small number of students to make it cost efficient for all the districts. Great, thank you. Paul, it may be easier to do this in learning a second language than it is in measuring certain other things because there is a progression in building language proficiency in terms of acquiring vocabulary and being able to communicate and being able to put things together. But what you have shown us is really a nice logical progression and I think you're gonna get some really good DDMs out of this. I think this is going to be the framework for building valid and reliable measures that are gonna enable us to look at teaching and learning. So congratulations. Thank you, yeah. We're excited about them. Miguel. Palabar en español, un poco de español. Okay, okay. Puedes hablarnos sobre los problemas en el medio ambiente? Sí. How's your mic? ¿Cuáles son los problemas en el medio ambiente, Miguel? Sorry. Medio ambiente is environments, okay. Los problemas en el medio ambiente son como, let's see, los, por ejemplo, los animales en los zoológicos. Esto es un poco de medio ambiente. Yo, nosotros, clase de señor a toro en español cuatro, hicimos un proyecto de solo animales y hablamos de los zoológicos y que son buenos, que son malos de estos y escribimos un letra, un letter como un persuasivo y de hablar que es bueno de los zoológicos, que es malo y que se necesita cambiar. Y esto es un ejemplo de que hicimos. Muy bien. He was saying that there, so I asked him about problems in the environment and Mickey said that, good job on the spot, kiddo. I'm gonna, instead of we're gonna come back. Excellent. That wasn't, that wasn't, I know, but he handled it so well, this kid is great. Thank you. He is great, he's great, you handled it very well. But he was talking about problems in zoos and the problems that zoos, do I get that right? Yeah, yeah. Problems in the zoos. And you wrote a letter, who'd you write, una carta? We wrote a una carta para, should I say in Spanish or in English? So you would know Spanish. You've been trained well, this is good. We wrote a persuasive letter, either taking a side on the positive aspects of zoos and the negative aspects, but in regardless of which letter you wrote, you have to hint on both of them. So personally I took the negative aspect because one of the first articles that Miss Toro, or Mrs. Toro gave to us was how the treatment of animals in zoos, not only in America, but mostly in predominantly Spanish-speaking countries, South America, Spain. And that really just sort of, even though something I might look over in a Boston Globe or in a Herald, it's something that really was brought to my attention and I really sort of felt passionate for to write about. So I wrote about some zoos in Argentina, some zoos in Chile, and how the specifics of how they were treating the animals. And then I wrote about how in America and also in Latin American countries, how they treated the animals well. So there's a positive and a negative to both sides, but I hinted on the negative aspects. Great job, you're a good sport, you handled that well. Any other questions? I just have to applaud Miss Toro because you cannot cross the door, the door front, how do you say it, you must speak Spanish. And I go in there and without, class has not started and they're chatting away in Spanish and it's really impressive and the curriculum is just outstanding. That's great. So you're at Spanish Four this year, and next year what happens? AP Spanish? Good for you, good for you. Great. Great job everyone. Thank you. There's another one of these student reps who are gonna end up running for school committee, running for state rapper. Good, we need you, we need you. Run, run. Thank you very much, great job. As always, you guys, great job. All right, we're gonna hear about national criminal background checks, fingerprinting. This is a very uplifting topic, Rob, go ahead. Sorry to bring the room down a little after all this. All this excitement and yes. But we obviously have to comply with the new state law that was enacted last year and regulations were issued. It was signed into the law in January of 2013 and the state spent many months drafting regulations and deciding how they're gonna implement the law and we're sort of now beginning the implementation. We begun the implementation over the last couple months. So obviously we've had quarry checks for years. Quarry checks cover Massachusetts so we can see when someone comes in, we can check their quarry and see if they have had any criminal arrests or convictions in Massachusetts. This law now aligns Massachusetts with the rest of the country which does national criminal background checks. It's a sort of two-pronged fingerprint check that taps into both the state criminal database and the FBI database and we can get reports from those databases usually within 72 hours of the fingerprints being taken. And so again, we're aligned with the rest of the nation. So now fingerprinting has started. Right now it's new employees who were hired, have been hired since July 1, 2013. This includes any full or part-time employee who may have direct and unmonitored contact with children, any substitute employee that includes any student, teacher, apprentice or intern and any individual who regularly provides school-related transportation to children. We're in the implementation timeline now. For the past few months, there's been a lot of on the message boards for the HR administrators, for the school districts in Massachusetts, there's been a lot of discussion about fingerprinting and how it's going and how we're implementing it. So as I said, any newly hired employees since July 1, 2013 are supposed to be fingerprinted by the end of this current school year. Prior to anyone who was hired before that, who has been working for the district for years or any time before July 1, 2013, after this round of fingerprinting is done, basically for all the new employees, the state is going to set an implementation time table between 2014 and 2016 to get all of those employees, all of those employees fingerprinted. And so we'll know more probably over the summer what that timeline is gonna look like and how we're gonna implement that part of it. For any new employees who are starting next year, we're gonna be fingerprinting them upon making them an offer of employment along with doing the query check. So how are fingerprints collected? So the state has developed this application, Applicants' Fingerprint Identification Services, SAFIS program. The state is contracted with a vendor, Morpho Trust, which operates under Identigo. They have different locations where you have to go to get fingerprinted. This is not an area where you can just go to the police station and get fingerprinted. The state is not accepting that, it's not allowing that. It's only through this contracted vendor, which currently has 11 locations in Massachusetts. They're expanding slowly, probably over the next couple months to add several more. There will eventually be 33 enrollment centers. Applicants and employees, they schedule their appointments over the phone or online. All fingerprints, again, take place at one of the enrollment centers. However, they are accepting requests for onsite processing. So if you have a significant number of employees who need to be fingerprinted, based on their availability of having staff and equipment available and scheduling, they will make an appointment to come to your location. I am happy to announce that we have been able to have them come to set up at least one date right now for next Wednesday. They're coming to Arlington High School. They're gonna be set up shop in the conference room next to my office and do the fingerprinting for our employees who were hired since July 1 of last year. And then everyone needs to show identification when they appear for fingerprinting. And there is a fee. It's $35 or $55. It's $55 for licensed educators. Anyone who has a desi license pays the higher cost. And the fingerprints are electronic. There's no ink. It's an electronic read. And then once the fingerprints are collected, they're transmitted to the state police and the FBI for their searches. They're returned electronically to then the Department of Criminal Justice, which has to redact anything that's been sealed or juvenile records that have show up because we won't see those. And then again, within 72 hours, we get the results. Every district has a point of contact that's designated to receive the results. In most districts, it's the HR administrator. And that's the case here. I'm the point of contact here. And then once we get the results, what we're charged with doing is making a suitability determination. It's similar to what we do with CORE results. I mean, if we get a CORE result and we find that based on a CORE, someone isn't suitable to work in the Arlington Public Schools. We will exclude them based on that and follow the process required under the CORE law. Similar thing, we will have to make a suitability determination for every result we receive, whether they're suitable or not suitable. How have we communicated this to employees? So I've been emailing employees, all employees have received an email about the law and about those fingerprinting requirements. All new employees have had more detailed information several times to inform them about the process they need to do to undertake, to get the fingerprints done. We've sent another email today with very detailed instructions on how they need to register to enroll online to have their fingerprints taken here in Arlington next week. There's a special, it's called a special site scheduling and they've done it that way. So Kelly Piggit and Mariella Alicata in our office created very detailed instructions on how to do that. District policy, one of the requirements in the regs is that all school employers, the school committee here is the employer, must adopt a policy and DESI has created a model policy which I distributed in your packets. Right now it's not exactly clear what the deadline is for the policy. I sort of threw it out there on the lists for the other HR directors, what they're doing. Some of them are creating the policies now, their school committees are voting now. Others are waiting until the fall, others sort of just getting started with taking up the policy. I think we just have to have a policy. I think if we have a policy in place by the beginning of the next school year will be okay but I think we should get the process started and that's why I did put the model policy in the packet. There are resources available that I just sort of, there's a frequently asked questions section on DESI's website. There's the regs, our resource. And then I can show you, so I'm just linking to what we see. When you go onto the Identigo website for Massachusetts, this is a national company that does this kind of fingerprint background checks in multiple states across the country and so they have a specific Massachusetts site. When you click on that site, you can see towards the bottom of that page, online scheduling, that's where you click and go through the scheduling process where you have to put in your district code. We've provided the district code for all employees. You pay online, you can do a credit card payment. They will accept a check or money order at the time of the appointment, but they cannot accept cash. And it lists the locations that are currently available and they will add the locations that, to that list once they're there. So that's about, I think we're, for the end, if there's any questions about this, I can be happy to take them. Cindy. So the only cost is what individual teachers have to pay? Yes, according to the regulations, the cost is borne by the employee. This is what the state has said is that's the way it is in most other states, that it is kind of like, it's a cost of becoming an employee for a school district. So either $35 or $55, they would have to pay. So there's no additional cost for us to access the information, for us to get the information. We don't pay at all. We don't pay to get the information. Okay. No, they send the results via secure email. So I had to register and put, I have a, it's password protected and it's a secured encrypted email, I guess, that I get and I can then, once I put in my password, I can view the results. So for those who, so I understand that they're kind of, you know, starting with the newer people, is there any reason why all teachers shouldn't just go and get it done whenever they can? Well, one of the reasons is that we, the priority based on the law and the regulations is to get the new people done first. And you think about this, this statewide, anyone who was hired by a school district since July 1, 2013 until now, and this system has really just recently been fully, it's not even fully implemented yet because every location's not open yet and there's different, there's just a handful, I mean, 11 now locations and in different parts all over the state. So right now, I mean, I had to get fingerprinted because I'm gonna be looking at the fingerprinting results. So anyone who's doing that needs to get fingerprinted. I went to Dorchester to get fingerprinted, which is, I think, right near Jeff's school probably. And that was sort of one of the closest places to here at the time. They've since, they've added Framingham, there's a Tuxbury location, I think there's a few other, there might be one in Lowell or there will be, and there's just all over the place. I think there will be one in Watertown and within the next month or so, I think, but I'm not sure exactly when they're opening. One of the reasons it's taken a long time to open is that this is a private vendor that is setting up space and they have to do leases and that kind of stuff, so. Thanks, that's it. Would the school committee have to decide whether or not to charge volunteers who are giving their time for nothing anyway? So volunteers are not required to be fingerprinted. That would be something that we would decide, the school committee would decide based on the policy whether you would want volunteers to be fingerprinted, but it is not a requirement of the law. I'm thinking about what you were saying about how the results come in and wondering, are our servers secure enough to be getting stuff like this? I'm not saying you know the answer to this, this is more. It's really just an email with an attached, there's an attached message. I have to log, I just have to put a password in to get the attachment because I'm already, I'm registered as. Right, but I mean it's coming through the email, it's not like a link that you go download it from. It's a link. Well it is a link, but it's, I mean, there's an email that I get to you, but it's, there's- It's an email with a link. Okay. And we have to put the password in. Oh, so it's not the document. It's not, right. That's where I was getting a little worried. No, because I don't think we have that kind of security. Yeah, that's right, yeah, okay. Here's a technical question that if, let's say you have a new teacher in another district. Yes. And they get fingerprinted this year in their old district. And we go and raid the neighboring district and hire a really great teacher away from them. Do the fingerprints follow them at that point or do they have to do this all over again? So the fingerprints don't follow you. You can, I can't share, from my perspective, I couldn't share the fingerprint results with another district. What I can share is our suitability determination. I can tell another HR director that, yes, we found this person suitable to work in Arlington. And they have the choice to rely on that suitability determination or not. I think under the regs, if they decide they don't want to rely on the suitability determination and make the person get fingerprinted again, then it's up to the district to pay the cost, in that case. Oh, that's good. All right, I think we're good. Yeah, go ahead, Mickey, you have a question? So, you would, you would. And so in Arlington, as many of you know, we have afterschool programs that are both, we have a couple at Thompson and Hardy that our district employees work at those schools. We will be fingerprinting them as, as our employees. The other elementary schools have, and Audison have, private contractors that use our space. And those private contractors have to, those, they're the employers of those, those people who work there, and they have to do the fingerprinting. Yeah. Well. I move we refer this to policies and procedures. We have a motion to move this to policies and procedures. I second. There's a second. Any discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Okay, so it's in the hands of policies and procedures. All right, we go to a discussion on the Arlington Public Schools 2014-2015 calendar with Dr. Cheson. Well, actually. Dr. Vody? Yes. Dr. Vody. Mr. Hayner would very much like to be part of this discussion. Oh, he would. He would. Because of, because of the school committee dates. Let me just quickly frame this, but maybe we could put table this. Well, let's just table this. Oh, we just table this until he gets there. Let's table it until he gets here. So Paul, you want to make the right motion. You know how to do that. Motion to table the discussion of the Arlington Public Schools 2014-2015 school calendar. Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Okay, it's tabled. Monthly report from Diane Johnson. Hi, good evening. Since our last monthly meeting, town meeting has begun. And at the special town meeting, a vote was passed to return the $500,000 we set into a stabilization account to help defray our special education overage for this year. And also to compensate us for the damage that happened at the Pierce due to a boiler failure and a subsequent pipe freezing and bursting. So we're very grateful for those votes and glad to be moving forward. The situation is pretty much the same as the last time I reported, Special Ed continues to run at about the same level of overage. And we have closed out our spending for the year. We are coming to the last place, but we're having some struggles with the heating bills coming in because the heating season extended a little longer than usual. March was unusually cold and we were still running full bore on the gas furnaces through the end of March. And so the bills tend to run a monthish behind. So I wanna get that all in place before I see the final energy. I'm hoping that we will be able to pick up some ground against the Special Ed overage with some available balance in the general fund. But this is a tough year for energy. We were able to close out an expensive litigation and Special Ed had a tough year. So the usual place is where we might pick up savings. It was a perfect storm. Nevertheless, we do have sufficient balances in our reserves. My hope is however that we might pick up some ground and not have to drain our reserves as thoroughly and still retain some for future. So I'll have a better picture of that. Actually, I won't be here at the beginning of June, albeit my 25th college reunion. I'd hope to introduce to you from my office, Harold Ansaw will be here in my place, but he is ill today, unfortunately, and couldn't be here, but he will be here in June in my place. And I'm sure we'll do his usual excellent job. When you talk about draining the reserves and the need to do this, is that including the Special Ed Circuit Breaker Reserve or is that still? No, no, I'm holding that. I really consider one of the strengths of our budget that we have a solid lock on our circuit breaker every year, because that's a highly flexible amount, very hard to lock down. And so that would be absolutely the last place I would go. Now if we were to have a dire year, God forbid next year, two bad years in a row, that does provide us a cushion, but I really think we are so advantaged by knowing exactly how much circuit breaker we have at the beginning of the budget process rather than making guesses and holding our breath all through the summer. Okay, thank you. Any other questions about the budget? In Spanish or English? Doesn't matter. No, I'll blow a spinal. Okay, thank you very much, Diane. Superintendent's report. Thank you, Mr. Filman. Well, first of all, I wanna congratulate Mr. Filman for making it to the front page of the globe today for his school, Crystal Ray. It's very impressive, very impressive achievement that you have 100% of your students accepted into four-year colleges. Thank you very much. Good team, I'm a good team to work with. It sounds like a very good team. Thank you. Wonderful. We have a, I have actually quite a few things to, and I'm always concerned that I missed something really important, but the first thing I wanted to bring your attention to, which I know that you're aware of, and I guess I take every opportunity I can to sort of talk about the distinction for the high school recently in US news and World Report having a gold award distinction. And it's something I think that certainly the high school is very proud about, as well as the whole district, because you don't have students prepared for doing well on standardized tests or rigorous courses just beginning in high school. Although, as you can see, I think you get a little bit of a window tonight into really some of the courses and the expectations and rigor of our high school. But the, there are several metrics that we use, which I think people may not completely understand that it's not just simply results in MCAS, but it's also the results of performance of our students in subgroups, as well as the AP exam results. And as you know, this is the fourth year the Arlington High School is on the College Board on a roll for not only expanding the number of students taking AP courses, but maintaining a fairly high percentage. In fact, the College Board puts 75% as the standard. We're in the mid-80s. It varies a little bit within a year, but we're in the 80% in terms of the number of students who take AP exams and score a three or better. And a three or better, three, four, or five allows you in college in some places to have credit, but more often these days it allows you to skip prerequisite courses, which for some students might mean that they could have one last semester of tuition. That's a possibility. So our students are doing very well on those and the ranking for the high school is 21st amongst the 75 high schools in Massachusetts that were ranked. There are actually 352 high schools. So they did very well and nationally, the ranking was 465 out of 31,242 schools. So it's a high school that's doing very well and I think our students should be very proud of themselves for their hard work and certainly our staff as well throughout the entire district. So congratulations. I'm sure you're part of the success story here. And I think if they were measuring Spanish as part of this, we'd even do better, right? Absolutely, he's good. All right, this week we had a wonderful event at the high school. In fact, I'll ask Laura to talk a little bit more about it and I also wanted to say give her a lot of credit for the wonderful exhibition of technology of exciting things that are happening in all of our schools. And I know thank you to many of you that were here that evening. This was co-sponsored with the Arlington Educational Foundation, which has been so supportive of helping us expand the ways that we, our technology hardware as well as opportunities for in this case to showcase it. But more importantly, they were the group that provided the STEM lab here at the high school, which is used all the time. And Laura was instrumental in this and also in helping us develop the next iteration of our technology plan. The technology plan is something that's just an ongoing plan that gets updated all the time. But I would like you to have a couple minutes to talk about it and all the students and the ages of the kids that participated. First of all, I have to say that while I may have lit the spark, there was a team of three people that really carried it to fruition, actually four people, Susan Bissen and Francis DeBara and Jeff Snyder, all from our tech department. And then Stacey's Kitsis, who's our library media specialist, really helped to carry off the night. We had 28 teachers present and most excitingly with their students. We had teachers and students from grade one all the way up through high school. The grade one students presented Scratch Junior, which is our programming partnership with the Tufts Media Lab. And they also presented at the tech forum last week. And people could not believe that the level of programming that were being done by first grade students. And we had people from every discipline, foreign language, the humanities, math, science. We even had a gentleman who was coming in and showing us what we might even use in the future, which is virtual reality glasses and a virtual reality system. So it was quite an exciting night. The place was packed. The level of excitement was palpable. And I just can't say enough about the teachers and their students. I think the students really helped make it. I noticed that the presenters who had students with them were far more well attended than the ones that just had teachers, which means that our students are far more interesting than we are as adults. And I just can't say enough about it. The last thing I want to say is that not only did AEF help us with the cost of the hardware, but they made a sizable grant last summer to help us with a tech university, which allowed us to train somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 teachers anywhere from one day to five days. And in addition, they helped us to sponsor T21, which was a year long graduate level course in the introduction of technology and the utilization of technology to better meet the needs of all students. And it was so successful that we'll actually be running a similar class, but funded by the district for this summer, particularly for teachers at the high school level. And really trying to expand in high school what we've started in the middle school and the elementary school. Thank you. And one of our presenters at night is Siobhan Foley, who is here. I don't know, Sean, put you on the spot a little bit. You want to talk a little bit about yours? Siobhan is fluent in Spanish. Siobhan is fluent in Spanish. How many were there? Obviously it was really incredible. What I presented out, and I do wish I had brought students with me, is in my classroom, I've been fortunate enough to have did a workshop with the Tufts University with my go's. And so I have a classroom set of MindStorm, which is fantastic. And I use it with my simple machines curriculum. And every year I give them this design project where they have to move a Lego person up and over the top of their Lego kit. And every year I try to get them to go through the engineering process and to become comfortable with failure and to learn how to learn from that. And it's been a very difficult thing for children to learn, obviously, for adults as well. Using the technology this year was fantastic. We used to be an output creator. And the kids had to, I forced them to document what they were doing. So they had to work with a partner, which was also a very difficult thing for a lot of them. So when people think of using technology in the classroom, that it can be an isolating experience. I don't think that's necessarily true. In this case, all the children had to be worked with a partner. They had to lend their designs together, and then they had to videotape testing out their designs, which is all part of the book on Book Creator. And whether or not it worked, I forced them to find something that they could make better. And they had to do the whole process again. And then I forced them to do it a third time, because I'm that kind of teacher. And at the end, I asked that they all write a reflection on. I just kept it very open. I said, just write down three to five things of what you've learned. And it really cracked me up to read some of the things, because some of the kids just focused on, gosh, it's really, really hard to work with a partner. We had a lot of things we had to work out. It was OK in the end. It was that level, too, that kids can learn. I learned that when you use a pulley, you really have to pull down on the rope. You can't just pull the rope across the top of the pulley. They learned all kinds of different things through the process. So it was really great. But one of the things that I was most grateful for and that I was most thankful to having iCats for was the fact that I was able to force the kids to go through the engineering design process, which was something that the pulley had not been able to achieve before. And I was able to really work in that collaboration aspect. And then the children were comfortable with failure, because they had a document, a living document, of something that they could show how they did progress. And so when their parents came in to see what they had done, they could also show them all the work they had done prior to that, as opposed to just seeing the final outcome. And if it didn't work, you'd have tears in the classroom. Well, this time the kids could show them, no, really, it didn't work. I have a video of it working. It just didn't work right now. So I just think it was having the iCats in the classroom can be a fantastic experience. So it was great to be able to share that and to have those conversations with people to showcase what we're doing here in Ireland. And I was amazed at what they're doing in some of the other schools. I wish I could even walk around myself and see more of that. But what I did see in the presentation was, you know, pulling me away. They're doing it the opposite. It's just fantastic. That's true. So thank you, Siobhan. It really was interesting. I got to most, but not to everything. It is very impressive. Where we have come in the last few years is amazing. And we look a year from now and even two years from now, it's going to be even more transformative in terms of what we're doing in education. And I think that one thing that was really clear from all the presentations is not technology for technology's sake. None of us want to do that. It's about how does technology enhance what we're doing and actually make it better. And I think your example is a great example on that one. Thank you. And as you heard earlier, we had a couple of groups go to the technology conference, ed tech conference last week and be presenters, which, you know, that's a great experience for our children to be in that kind of a role in a conference, in a room with people asking them questions, just like you would do as an adult presenter. It's terrific. A whole bunch of other things. Kindergarten enrollment. We are just, we're growing a lot. We're at 495 students right now. And we still have more registrations coming in next week. So we had done, as per policy, made all the assignments through the buffer zone policy, looking and making sure that everything was very equitable and that was only a couple of weeks ago. It is slowly, not slowly, quickly becoming unequitable. So it may actually be that we'll have to go and do some movement off the wait list again and some shifting because the goal is really to keep this as equitable as possible. But we're also looking at next year with a constraint while we increased our number of reserve positions to five, we're there, we're at five. And there's still some other needs going on right now. So we're looking at ways that we might be able to figure this out. So I'll give you more of a report on that as we go along. But we're seeing significant increases and one of the increases that we're anticipating is needing to have additional ELL teachers. And I think one of our next school committee meetings we'll talk a little bit more about that. We're still right now trying to figure this out, how we're going to staff to the needs we have. There are a number of congratulations to Mr. Heyner's not here, but we did see pictures in the advocate and I know the Lexington's paper had pictures of the Special Olympics. That was great. And we have buddies that go and we had some of our students go and participate with their buddy and help them through the Olympics. And congratulations to all of them. Those of you that heard the Pops concert this weekend, it was outstanding as it just only seems to get better and better and the comments people leaving these concerts are just amazed. In fact, we were at the Cherry Blossom just for our visit and a couple of you were here, the orchestra that was grades three, four and five. Weren't they amazing? Yeah. And of course we had our middle school orchestra win an award and having the judges being shocked that they were a middle school orchestra. So our music program is terrific and congratulations to all of them. We also have some oppressive results also in the art world. We have two students who have been recognized. One, Julie Foran, the Scholastic Arts Award. This is probably the most prestigious recognition program in art for students in the United States. And Julie is a sophomore and she received the highest regional Scholastic Award of a gold key. And when she went to the national level she received a silver medal and she will attend the national ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York in June. We also have an Art All State Award with Hadley Flavin and she, this is the 27th Massachusetts Art All State and this past, this coming I should say in the end of May at the Worcester Art Museum. And the most talented juniors from across the state come for this intensive two-day art experience but you have to be selected based on your artwork. So congratulations to both of them. We also had one of our nurses. This was National Teachers Week and Tuesday was National Teachers Day and also Wednesday was National Nurses Day. And Martha Benes, who is the nurse up at Stratton was congratulated in the Boston Globe for the work that she does up there, the many hats, the kindness that she wears and the acts of kindness she always is known for. So congratulations to Martha. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the Leslie interns cause this is something that's gonna be terrific for next year? We have established a partnership with Leslie that we will be taking three interns next year who will be getting dual certified in both elementary education and ELL. So they will not only, it's a win-win for both Leslie and for the district because we'll get some additional hands to help out with our ELL students and we'll also be able to provide them with the training grounds. We'll be matching them up with both a general education classroom teacher and an ELL teacher. We'll be placing one student at Hardy, one at Brackett and one at Thompson and we made those decisions based on the number of ELL students at those schools. This program has been running in Somerville for quite some time. The students go to school all summer and actually at the end of the summer we'll have already taken 12 graduate credits and we'll have already passed their MTEL exams. So they come to us quite prepared to contribute to the school system. Over time we hope to expand this program and Leslie is talking about offering some of their graduate courses for these students right here within Arlington. So it would be quite advantageous for the students that are accepted to this program. It's a pretty extensive application process and we have three interns that are coming on board. One actually has experience working in the Peace Corps teaching English in South America. One of the interns has currently been in aid for two years in special education in another district and the third person has been teaching after school programs and weekend programs for students. So they will not be as green as green can be. Certainly not certified teachers yet but they all have experience that they can bring to the table to share with our schools. It's nice that we are being considered a site. A lot of schools more increasingly want to have sites that they send at their interns or the student teachers to and it's nice that Arlington has been recognized as a good place to send students. And then one other ward, this was the other night at the Boys and Girls Club. Our own Cindy Sherrod and Curran received the Boys and Girls Faulkner Ward and this is for great service to the community and many of you know that she was one of the the prime movers of having the diversion program. She ran the diversion program and still runs the diversion program while at the same time working in our, the Arlington Public Schools as our attendance officer. She also for the last, I think seven years has been the president of the Hockey Association in town. So she has been very busy and was a very well deserved honor and her acceptance speech was quite well done. So congratulations to Cindy and that's all I have this evening. Does anyone have any questions for Dr. Bodie? Okay, we'll move on to the consent agenda. I'm sorry, I didn't have a question, so I forgot. You were saying that are you gonna talk more about that we need another ELL teacher next year? Is that because of the state regs change? Well, it's not that they've changed, they have changed a little bit. But yes, we need to be able to provide a certain number of hours of direct service, pull out service to students that are designated as a level one or level two student. Basically level one is they're coming in with no language skills at all and we do have a fair number of students just even recently received a couple of students that have no English skills. But they're all in different places and so I think the challenge is going to be to figure out how we can provide that level of intervention in the locations that the students are. I was just highlighting it because it's another one of the things that we're having to do that we're not getting extra money. The mandates, yes, it most certainly is. Consent agenda, all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine, 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. So on the consent agenda we have approval of warrant number 14148 dated April 10th, 2014 in the amount of $522,077.97. Approval of warrant 14154 dated April 24th, 2014 in the amount of $545,926.85. Approval of draft minutes of the Organizational and Regular School Committee meeting on April 10th, 2014 in approval of the AHS World Language France exchange trip during the April vacation. Mr. Hanner is here. I have a motion, second, all in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you very much, the chair is back. You can continue. No, okay. Well, we're gonna go right to the calendar. Let's just finish the subcommittees. Any subcommittee reports, policies and procedures? It looks like we have a policy to start working on. We have, yeah. Schedule a meeting soon. And we should talk to the attorney, yeah. Attorney Brown. Attorney Brown, yeah. Budget, Cindy? Yeah. We had a meeting yesterday with some members from FINCOM who the goal for me having these meetings was that I think that every year we go through this process where we have to meet with FINCOM and it felt like if we could get ahead of time or ahead of it kind of asking them what would make the process easier for us, what makes it easier for them to understand. It's a huge budget. It's a lot for people to get through. And so I think it was really good. It was kind of back and forth. I think we got some good ideas for kind of how to move forward. So I thought it was a good meeting. So that was great. I also wanted to say that I was excited. There were five of us who went to the day on the hill. So it was Jennifer, myself, Kiersey, Paul and Bill were up there. Beaten up on Dave and Sean who were in the midst of running to the floor to vote and then coming back and meeting with us, which was great. So it was right in the middle of budget, which was excellent. So it was kind of good they were there. And also we had a chance to meet with Senator Donnelly and really help him understand what it was. We were seeing where he could help. I have since been in contact back with his office, has decided to focus on amendments to the Metco funding and really helping hone in on how we can help make that better. And so we have, I have sent him the information that we had on kind of what the cost is, the differential. I told him that my focus was at least to try to get cities and towns who take Metco students to get chapter 70 money that would be Boston level chapter 70 money versus Arlington or wherever town they're going. Because the students that come often do come with more needs for interventions. And so to really help us kind of cover those costs. So I'm working with an aide in his office and we're kind of trying to pin that up. So it was also good because I feel like for the first time I understand the process that it always starts with the governor's budget and I've always known that then it goes to the house and then the Senate tries to amend stuff and tries to then massage it into something that everybody can live with. And so understanding that we had a couple of weeks now now that the house was actually past their version of it that we can now have a couple of weeks to help make up help our senators come up with the ideas they want to take and then they take one or two ideas and try to champion them and amend the budget according to that. So it's been kind of interesting as a process. So I was really glad it was it was a great. I thought it was a great meeting. We had some good topics. Did you want to talk about your. Oh yeah and one of the things that we had done as a budget subcommittee and I had them included in everybody's packet is that we had a budget meeting. So before yesterday we had a budget meeting about a week ago and just sat down with superintendent and with Ms. Johnson and tried to come up with actual costs for if we had the money we need to or all the costs of the things that we should implement that are unfunded mandates to get us to covering the new teacher evaluation system. We picked only these four the common core curriculum. The new ELL retail requirements and increased reporting mandates that have become fairly standard for districts and we just tried to say OK if we were to staff and do everything according to the way we read these mandates how much additional money should we put in our budget for this year to be able to do that so that they could understand because I think that people don't necessarily understand what it what it means to say that it's going to cost more if you don't know how much more is it $5 more is it $50 more as it turns out it's five million dollars more. So I thought that was really good. We tried to explain that to them. We also explained a lot of the different levels of students that we're seeing health issues. You know the fact that nursing and a lot of health care is still we are having to bear the burden of those costs and just that we're getting very different students and the concerns and issues that they're bringing into our schools are very different and that those costs are also just a burden. So I think it was just really good. I think you know it's really hard. I've realized more and more that we are in an awkward position we get all of our regulations and told what to do by the Department of Education which gives us no money to do anything and we get the money from the state and the two don't seem to talk very much and so trying to be the go between I feel like really if we think about it we are the only thing that those have in common is that our district is reliant on somebody being the person who's understanding that and explaining to our legislators what's going on because they don't necessarily know what Desi is telling us that we have to do or what those costs are and so to help them understand that. So I thought it was great. I always love it. I was excited that we had so many people there and I don't know if anyone else who Jennifer you want to say that they were very sympathetic that Charlie and Roger want to help us and that we can find especially small things that aren't just a increasing chapter 70 which everybody wants right? We can find some small things that are unique to Arlington. They are willing to go to that for us and so just to keep that in mind as we sort of look in the coming years. Great. Kirstie, what was that? I just thought it was really helpful having a bottom line number of this is what these things are costing us. I think it opened their eyes. I don't think they had realized that before and it just, it gave them something to think about and I think it prepares for further discussions. They're gonna be thinking about this for a while. Great job, Paul. The thing is is that if the Arlington delegation or in the legislature, the whole state be in a lot better shape. Our folks have been very responsive. It was such a pleasure talking to our two reps and our senator. The thing is is that as we lobby we have to be careful that we're lobbying for things that don't put us in a conflict that is zero sum game for others so that things like changing the chapter 70 formula to advantage Arlington would just mean redistributing the pie and the people who'd be losing and that tweak of the formula would be then looking to work against us so that what we have to do is work cooperatively with MASC to find things that the legislature is willing to do and that will be advantaged to us and other communities. The other thing is is that in the current setup the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has been left with a lot of discretion to do things to us and the more we can talk to our legislators about having some oversight on the actions of DESI legislatively would be a good thing. For example, one of the things we talked about is the commissioners decided that he wants to cap and reduce out of district tuitions to vocational schools which would not directly help or hurt the school committee but it will hurt this town because the revenues that don't come in out of district revenue need to be filled by local revenue when we're right now producing 38% of the local revenue to the school so lots of things to talk about in a very, very proactive group of legislators who want to do the right thing for us. Great. Just to go along with what Cindy said about making that connection between DESI and us regarding the MedCo I think I saw, I won't speak to the whole group but surprised in our delegations eyes when we indicated they come up with a MedCo budget that doesn't all get spent necessarily because they're planning on Chapter 70 funding for the city of Boston for all the students and stuff or from a prior year. Our Chapter 70 piece is smaller than the city of Boston and I felt very responsible especially Senator Donnelly to look at this very carefully that the money that is budgeted all we're asking for is an equitable share of that piece, all of us alone. Great. Community relations. Yeah, no report except that I was looking for Ms. Hyam. To report. Hailey, but we love you, we miss you. However, we had some really great community relations last night because the magical singers did a wonderful stellar crisp beautiful job in front of town meeting yesterday in their rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. I'm sure it's in the video file for ACMI and we should make sure the Red Sox and the Bruins see that. Good. Can we have instruction? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. As part of community relations I'm on the subcommittee, I think with you. There, I just want to make one plug. Saturday morning, nine to 12, there's Arlington cleanup which is going to take place starting at the municipal parking lot and people can pick up. I think here's who was a part of that. I think I saw you there last year. Pick up some garbage bags. It's great for the kids to get involved with the parents and to do significant cleanup. There was a lot done in three hours last year which was the first year. So nine to 12, there'll be muffins and coffee and beverages and stuff provided. So please come on down if you have some time free on Saturday morning. Terrific. And they meet, where do they meet? Municipal parking lot. Okay. We know where you'll be on Saturday. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I will be here. There'll be others from the Pierce family cleaning up. I'll be cleaning up here. Curriculum instruction, assessment and accountability. Nothing to report. I have nothing to report for facilities, special study group on superintendents evaluation. I had asked Mr. Schlickman to talk about that or IT. Okay. Basically we just had a preliminary discussion on this. We are talking about maintaining the November evaluation cycle, which really seems is critically important in terms of evaluating the superintendent as some of the measures that we use are state measures that don't get released to us till September. So that's where we're at this discussion and we'll be continued. I just might add and correct me if I again misunderstood it, but we're going to be working on the district goals who's coming Saturday at our meeting and from that making sure they're aligned with the superintendent's goals, which they probably have. Later. Yes. It's a multi-step process. Thank you. All right, so it's 8.35. We're right on time for the discussion. I'm probably, I don't think the public school is 2014, 2015 school calendar. We just, do you want a motion? Oh, I move we take the school calendar off the table. Second. All in favor? Aye. Okay, we're back at it. The chair is here. Did I frame it? Go for it. Okay. We've had a two-step process for developing the calendar for next year. We've already had a vote a couple of months ago with the start dates, school vacations, professional day, some of the major pieces of the calendar, which is what parents want to know. When should we back from vacation? And that has been done. But now, one of the goals that we have had for the last couple of years is trying to put everything in the calendar. For a while there, we were not putting the conferences on until the fall or we did have the early release days but we want to have a completely, a complete calendar at the end of the school year so people have an idea of when early releases are, when conferences are, and that is our goal. So tonight, there is a discussion in a couple of areas that we want your feedback for with the goal that next meeting we will come to you for first read with the calendar and see if there's anything further and then have a final vote on the school calendar for next year at the June meeting. So that's the timeline. So there's three areas and one area has to do with actually the school committee dates and now I'm gonna turn this over to the chair. Thank you. If you look at the calendar, the months of September, November, December and April because of holidays and different things, we would on our current calendar of the second and fourth Thursday of the month would only have one meeting. I would like you to consider potentially two options. One, for at least three of those months, September, November and December, and I'll talk to those moving into the first and third Thursday of the month. Or the second option, suspend the policy that has those third and fourth, excuse me, the second and fourth Thursday to try a first and third for the entire year. Two options to consider. The reason I'm mentioning September is that we're coming off the summer. I realize it's the first week of school where everybody is, especially you as parents that are sitting on the committee, it's that fairly hectic time. But we may have a lot of things going. Definitely November and December, that's budget. We have a lot of people coming to us for presentations and stuff and we also have the superintendent's evaluation that is in there that sometimes we even add a third one during that time. If we're down to one during November and one in December, I think we're really way behind. So what I'd like you to consider, at least the September, November and December, to go to the first and third and the second option. And by the way, these options, Karen and I, and I talked about it, we looked at on the town websites for the different committees and things, we didn't see any conflict. Now some of you may have something that is not posted on here that we're unaware of. That's why we're having this discussion like that. So I'll open it up for anybody that would like. I'm a start. So I actually have a third possibility, which would be suspend the policy for the year and have policies and procedures draft up a change. And I think that what it should say is that there will be 20 meetings to each month during the 10 months and that we will, when we set the calendar, we will set the dates so that we can look because every year these things change and it's really hard to say first and third, second and fourth, but if we just went through and chose 20 Thursdays, if we do it early enough, that gives everybody who needs the dates the time. And I think we do need 20 meetings. I think that we've had shorter ones in the past and we always end up adding them. Or I know as budget chair this year, I had to add two meetings because of them falling and I hate it when they're back to back. It's like, it's hard to get anything done and it's hard to have enough for a full agenda. So I would really like us to look at 20 Thursdays, trying to space them out and having two a month in the 10 months that we meet. Mr. Schlickman. I like that idea a lot. I'd like to expand upon it a little and that if we talk about having 20 Thursdays so that it doesn't even have to be within the September to June. For example, we might want to meet the last Thursday of August. In advance of opening school and the teachers are coming in because there can be lots of issues at that point in time that we need to deal with. The other out of the box solution would be instead of second and fourth, go for the last Thursday, especially when that lands on a fifth Thursday because a fifth Thursday usually doesn't conflict with anything else that they're scheduling second and fourth Thursdays. That's true, they're pretty. So that on the months where you have five Thursdays, we'd go land on that. So if we were under this paradigm being very strict, we'd go second and last rather than second and fourth. Right. The last available Thursday, so that when we have a holiday on a Thursday, it would be the last legal Thursday. But that's sort of a more constrained paradigm, expanding it out to just going through the calendar and picking 20 dates that align to the business of the committee would be a way to do it. Another way to do it is to just say, we are going to meet on the last Thursday of each month and then have that as the official business meeting and in the places where we need to schedule additional meetings, really not have those agendas fill with actionable items, but in terms of reports and discussions at a second meeting to the calendar, which is more a discussion meeting and conduct the business at the end of the month. Just so you know though, there are three months where the last Thursday is not. Our last legal Thursday, so that at that last Thursday is a holiday. But we can play with it, but I think what we should do is there's so many ways to play with this is that we should either do it in the subcommittee or engage in further discussion at the retreat. I mean, are people comfortable with the motion to move this to policies and procedures? I mean, so I'm going to move. Just one question. Is it the intent of the committee to resolve this so that we present to the superintendent with a calendar? Yes, I was going to put a time-certainment. Great. So I'm going to move that the policies and procedures subcommittee come up with a policy on the calendar by no later than... Our next meeting. The next meeting. By the June meeting? Yeah. Thank you. Two weeks. Well, they're going to present the calendar to us at the next meeting. And then we're going to finalize it in June, so you need it before the next meeting. Okay, by the next, what do you think? By the next meeting. By a date of two? I mean, what do you think? Well, you want it in the packet. No way, on the Wednesday before. So that they can produce the calendar. All right. Well, I mean, welcome back as the chair, John. Mr. Chair. Yes. Well, we could also have the committee do a policy, but just for this year, figure out what days you want. You could do that too. But if you want to first read the calendar the next meeting, that's only two weeks away. And besides, when you do a policy, you have to have a first read and second read too. So why don't we do this? Why don't, why doesn't the policies, I think some subcommittee, what subcommittee is going to meet? Is there any other committee meeting to kind of talk about this in more depth? That's what I was talking about. There's no other committee has a, okay, so we'll have to meet in the next two weeks. Okay, so I move that the policies for the subcommittee meet within the next 10 days, 14, two weeks, we're going to prepare a recommendation for the calendar for FY 15. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All those opposed? So notice it's not a policy, it's just a recommendation for the calendar. Keeping it, what the superintendent said. Well, I want you to look at the policy too. We will. Aye. Awesome. All right. We also want to talk about conference dates and release dates. We have done a lot of discussion with curriculum leaders, with principals. It has been a major topic. And Laura has done some work with the curriculum leaders, particularly at the elementary level, about what their needs are with respect to curriculum. I'm going to ask you to talk about that. You have this in your pack, well actually it's at your table, because it's been an ongoing document over the last couple of weeks. It's more just giving overview of what are the curriculum needs for professional development at the elementary level. And then we'll talk about what the significance of that is in a minute. But you might also, even before we get there, do you want to start with what the issue has been out of the district? All right, I really wanted to just present to you the kinds of data that we're collecting and get feedback from you about whether there's other types of data that you would like us to take under consideration as we build this calendar. And so, I again apologize that you didn't have these earlier, but particularly in terms of the curriculum PD needs, it's been a reeditive process and we did not have an opportunity to meet with all the stakeholders prior to tonight, so that's why you're getting that late. I just wanted to show that one of the questions we've had is comparable districts, and these are the districts that we compare ourselves to when we look at our MCAS results, that's the second page, what are the early release days that they have, and I've also included the percentage of free and reduced lunch that that district has, because a number of times members of the committee have raised concerns regarding working parents and the impact of early release days to those folks. So we wanted to make sure that you can see what the MCAS scores are for again, for overall, for those districts, you see how many students they have, the percentage of free and reduced lunch, and then how many early release days that those folks have. It's the second page of this document. And then the first page of that document outlines my discussions with the elementary principals, with the curriculum leaders, with the literacy folks, with the math coaches, about the number of early release days that are strictly for professional development that are necessary. As you saw when you created the document that you brought to the Hill, the amount of effort that's needed to implement the Common Core deeply in the classroom and to measure progress towards it is significantly more than it took to just align the paper documents to the curriculum. One of the things that we have really learned is that the needs can be a little bit different around time for professional development. The need is there, clearly. Let me actually start with the high school. At the high school level, teachers teach at least three different courses and different preps anywhere from grades nine through 12. And that's pretty common through most departments, except probably for English language arts, where they might have a 10th, you teach just 10th grade or ninth grade. But what is very difficult at the high school, and in fact, I don't know of any high school that can accomplish this, is to schedule common planning time. It's just not possible. So for planning time for high school teachers, the only way that they would have time would be in any kind of meeting times. We have three a month, three different Wednesdays, or the time that we could have in an early release day. And then we're constrained by making sure that we meet our 990. I will tell you that we're fine with meeting our hour requirements at all levels with the early release times that we have right now or the release times, I should say. Next year, one of the things with thinking of experimenting with is maybe having one less early release day at the high school and putting it in delayed openings, where there might be one per quarter of a delayed opening so that teachers that teach the same course would have an opportunity to have some common planning time. There's a very open reception to this at the high school because they're fresher and everybody could be there at the same time and we know where the students will be then. So that model doesn't work as well at the middle school and the elementary and that's the feedback after much discussion we've received. So we, and I wanna go back to some other data that we've recently had, we did a survey and you've seen the results of that survey on professional development and also one of the issues that's come up in the tell results from the district. Now I'll talk more about that at the next, another school committee meeting. But the need for common planning time and also some professional development that is also more directed by the teachers is something that is very loud and clear that we need to be doing. Yet we also have the constraint of only so much time and as you can see with this list here, this is just elementary, the needs for curriculum professional development that is aligned with the common course frameworks. And if we're introducing a writing program which we have, Lucy Calkins, that's not something that you just do professional development for one year. This requires multiple years of sustained professional development. If you're doing anything with the common core mathematics the same idea. We have a change in our science standards and in fact the proportion of science may have to shift in the years going out because we need to get professional development on the engineering kits. For example, we have the Museum of Science. We have done some of that. So there's this but then there's also a need for teachers to be able to do professional development that is aligned with their individual needs or interests. Which, so I can't see the district cutting back on the amount of release time. The question is really how could it, how is it going to be allocated for what needs? And so that's the issue here. And so when we come to you with the early release days we'll have them designated for whether they're curriculum or conference. Which is one of the things I wanna talk about in a second. But the one thing I wanted to ask you is how would you feel about the idea of experimenting next year with some delayed openings at the high school? That be, right, that be? I think it's a great idea, I think the kids would love it. I mean my son is a junior and I don't know he has something where he has a study first block. He's open, open. Somehow that means he gets to come in late a couple of times a week and it's just, he's a different kid when he gets another hour of sleep. When I'm waking him up at 7.30 instead of 6.30 it's just, it's great. So I think that they would love it. I think it's perfect. It's a great way to kind of give the kids the time where they can use it. Cause a lot of them when we do have half days leave and then come back for sports and other things anyway. So the fact that instead of just having a chunk in the day they would start later and then they would just have the rest of their day it makes so much sense. Cause one of the other issues we have at the high school are coaching. Even though teachers are not, they still must go to professional development and skip practice. When games are scheduled by the league they can't, they can't skip them. Yeah we have that same problem at Africa. Yeah and so this might change things a little bit so that there'd be more opportunity for everybody to be there. This isn't speaking to your point but I had a question just to think about. Just stand up for one second because I was just gonna ask student rep. What do you think? Oh. Yeah. How do you feel about that issue? A general question. I know, I just wanna make sure I have a point. Some days we have early release days in other words you'd go home at noon time. What? At the end of your school day. Instead of putting it at the end of the day you'd start the day later. Yeah. I know I actually, I'm a junior at the high school club and I have a B block free period which is, we have a rotational, a Saturday rotation and B block usually might come first period so I could come in if I would like it nine but one thing that that has allowed me to do is play on my time and manage like maybe if I need to get work done or like today I had a practice AP event for history and I came in and sort of, we have an independent studies, independent study center I guess in the media center where people could study so I think if they were put towards the beginning of the day rather than the end of the day you would have some students that would oppose that because they'd like to be in an early lunch or whatever, but you would have I think a majority of students really deciding to go earlier in the day because wanted more sleep, I think it would allow them to function or that needs to be throughout the day rather than in the beginning. Thank you. Okay. This is? I just have a question. What would be open in the high school? So what would students be able to do? So could they go to the media center for example to get something done or would they not have access to that? There's going to have to be something open with some supervision because we really won't be able to change the medical buses for example. Right. So that would, we would need that and there'd have to be very definitive places that you could go as a student. Most likely it would be the media center. Okay. We'll open it up for other questions. I have other questions. Okay, so I'm looking at this calendar and it has the nice city of ending in June 17th and I realized that you're asking for a lot of half days for the elementary school students and I remember asking a long time ago about how many half days, when I say half days, I mean early release days, how many early release days would count as a, how many, would you get into a full day if we took a full day of professional development? And I realized there's contract issues and everything but I'm wondering if there's any possibility of taking one more full professional day and getting rid of some of the half days or some of the early release days. That would not count as a school day. Oh yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know. I realize it would push it but we're not. That's a major contract thing because you'd be literally adding a day of prorated pay. What would it cost us about? Yeah, we actually looked at that because a teacher, we had a professional development survey that we did and one of the suggestions that teachers had was to add that, a couple of teachers and it would cost us in the neighborhood of $150 to $200,000 for an additional day. Okay. Let's just outside the contract. Yeah, no, I realize there's contractual things but there were pluses too. It was seen when I asked the question, it was seen as a much better thing than having a whole bunch of little pieces. Oh, we would like to have some longer days too. We're actually doing some other creative things along those lines though. For example, in the math department, at the middle school the director has created a professional day for a grade level to come and meet for the day and we get subs for that whole grade and we're doing more, we've done that in a fair amount, so we can do it. It's manageable if it's for a small group but it's too expensive to do it for a whole school system. That's the issue. Actually, I have a few things, I have comments and some questions. So I'm in favor of professional development. You don't have to sell me on that idea. It's great, we definitely need it. We need common time to meet. Hanging on the playground, I think parents' frustration is often, we have a lot of parents who work part-time. So a parent who works full-time usually has accommodations and it's very easy but if they work 20 hours a week then it becomes very difficult. And I think what I've heard from parents is that they would love the opportunity, if there was some place that the kids could go, some sort of option for them in each school, that when there's an early release there is some activity that's being offered by say the Boys and Girls Club or something, or there certainly are organizations that bring programs into the elementary schools and maybe we could sort of seek to see whether that's a possibility here. Something to look at. Pardon? Something to look at. Well, it's something to look at. I think it would have to be heavily parent component though of doing supervision and keeping in mind that at every school we have an after-school program in which we have... But this is not accessible to these parents or they can't, the after-school programs are filled. They can't just go to the after-school program. So I'm thinking, so most of the elementary schools have things like language or extra activities that are after school. The enrichment. And I'm blanking on the new... Putting the enrichment earlier. Yeah, just bringing in some special things during those days. There's something we can look at because we have a... Parents who have access to the after-school, they're fine. There's no problem. It's these sort of parents who trying to juggle it that it's really stressful for. As you know, we have an enrichment program in all of our schools after school and we can talk about that possibility of doing something like that. I think that would alleviate a lot of sort of stress and anxiety. But then I have questions. I don't quite understand this sort of, this thing. So what's the relevance of... So first of all, I've seen the number of students as elementary school students or... Total number of students in the district. Okay, so we were saying Arlington is listed as 25, 36. It's gotta be elementary. I might have taken our elementary numbers but the numbers that we have there are... The other ones are total and are... No, Lexington. I don't think so. Lexington is, what? That's the... Thank you, Mr. Schleifman, he is exactly correct. Those are the numbers of students who take the MCAS test. Oh, the MCAS. Oh, so I just don't understand... How many more students take MCAS? Because kindergarten students don't. Right, right. It's grade three, three through eight and 10. Yeah, right, right. So I'm just... So what is being... What's the purpose of these numbers? So why are we looking at MCAS results in relation to early release days? There was some discussion in the past about the impact of early release days and the work that teachers did on student achievement and if there was a direct correlation, weak correlation at best. But just to look at the surrounding districts, these are the districts we compare ourselves to on a regular basis when we look at our MCAS scores. Okay, so... And you'll see that we're just as... Most of our MCAS scores are pretty much, or at least in the English Languards, we're pretty much in the pack. In the terms of early release days, we're pretty much in the pack. It runs all the way from districts that have four times a year, but they actually release earlier to districts that release early every single week. So there's been an argument made by somebody that releasing kids earlier is hurting their MCAS or helping their MCAS? No, there was an argument made that if the teachers have more time to work together, it increases their ability to be effective. It's good for them, okay. And then what's the relevance of the low-income numbers? Again, this was to... Generally, the higher percentage of students who are on free and reduced lunch, the higher percentage of working parents and dual working parents, and whether there would be a stronger impact. I see. But again, I feel it... I'm not sure that that's so obvious. I find that very erroneous because all the parents that talk to me about wanting coverage would never even qualify that they're higher income. Yeah, it's these 20-hour... Parents who work 20 hours a week that it's really difficult for them. But it's also... As people that work quality, both parents are working. And that's where the issue is coming. And I just find that I think the impact of coverage for the students is across the board on income. I don't think... Yeah. This is a relative thing for us to... I'll say if you're high income and your kids are in care, then it really doesn't matter to you, right? It's more... It's the other cases, yeah. It was just one piece of information. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I wanted to speak to that same chart. I appreciate that you have the district low income, but the point that we've made in the past about this set of comparables is that when you compare us on income, including all the low income people, this set of towns are significantly higher than... I don't think anyone has a lower income than we do on average. And my ballpark just looking at the numbers is they're $20,000 to $30,000 a year higher. Just the average of these things. And I may be wrong. I may be higher than that. So... I'm talking about whether it's the median... I'm talking, yeah. Yeah, I wasn't considering that. I just strictly looked at their percentage... It's just something that you need to be thinking about because those income differences really make a difference in terms of what opportunities are available here versus all the other places with these things. I think that we can even take the come. It's a very, there's probably no correlation with it. But the issue is really that one of the most important things that we do in terms of affecting student achievement is also to help our teachers have the time to plan, have professional development that's relevant to their practice and content areas. And a high quality school system is going to be able to provide robust professional development. And that's, unfortunately, that often means that you have to have time in the day to be able to do that. It's very important at the elementary level to have all third grade teachers together for professional development. You can take slices at the secondary. You can take just the ELL teachers in seventh grade, but you can't do that as easily. So the, I think there's certainly enough research out there that correlates professional development to student achievement. And it's significant. I think the purpose of seeing this is just that high performing school districts give time to professional development. And that's the point of this. Just five teachers once a week, 10 times during the year, it's 3750. And that was, I'd base that on the substitute pay. So a grade, an average grade at the elementary wouldn't be any more than five, would it? All right, it would be like 20 to 24 years. I thought you were talking about in the building to me. You're talking, you put a whole, like a fifth grade at one time, well. We've done that though. We have done that. No, I understand that. That takes it up a little higher, but I was just thinking at a grade level, the Lexington school system has a half day every single week at the elementary level. Okay. And they added 20 minutes. I've said this before, Allenton had it when I did my student teaching here 40 years ago, they added 20 minutes to the school week. And that built in a half day every single week. They did all, everything during that half day was very well organized. But one of the other ways is in school, you got to be careful, taking too much, taking classes out on a regular basis, because that will have an effect on the continuity of education in the classroom. There are many creative ways. I don't think we're going to solve them all tonight. I applaud you for bringing this here. And I think that the idea of doing it upfront at the high school, maybe something we may want to even expand later on as it goes forward. I see it. I don't see any downside to it. Anything, so my own preference on this is, I would like us to have the same amount of professional development as the districts we compete with. So that's my own personal preference. It's really hard to gauge how much this is going to, this is always an inconvenience to parents, but I think as long as we know several months in advance, and it's fairly articulated, these are the early release days, please plan ahead and it's sort of message to people as early as June, we can plan. So that's the thing. I just want to refer the committee again to the article that I sent out last week from, it's entitled, Killing Mom Softly with Half Days. It's a really dead on poignant article, in line with what Missus was just talking about, which is, the quote that really stuck out at me was, they rearrange things because the work world is not conducive to school hours, so rather than say let's change the system, we change ourselves. And I would just like to use the, maybe part of Saturday morning when we're together to do a little bit more out of the box thinking on this. I think it's, we can talk this all tonight. I appreciate everybody's input. I think we have to also recognize, we all want the upside of professional development. We also want to recognize the needs of parents and lives at the same time. It's a high thing to balance. There's several of the things that have been offered tonight that are discussed tonight have been creative ways of blending this. The doing it up front at the high school, well at the high school level, I think it has less of an impact on the childcare at the elementary and would cause the same issue with the front or the back end. But at this time, I'd like to leave it to our pros and get feedback from them. Mr. Schlegler. The only impact to doing an early, delayed opening at the high school, on the same day we're doing an early release in the other buildings, we wouldn't do that. Okay, that's good. We find in Lowell that we have to align things because there are instances where we have high school students who are picking up or caretakers of the elementary kids and if they don't align, we have a problem there. But if we're not gonna align that up, I really do think that going for a delayed opening at the high school is worth trying and I think we should do it, try it twice next year as an experiment and see how it works. And I think that eight is a reasonable number of early release days if they're predictable and with a lot of advanced notice. I would like the superintendent to look at the idea and maybe give us the financial impact of doing it during the day. With subs. With substitute teachers and stuff. School-wide, I think even at the elementary level, maybe prohibitive and very logistically impossible, but I've seen, and from my perspective as a teacher, inside one building, grade-levelly, very effective. And then having system-wide, maybe once or twice a year for everyone to get together in coordinating. Just about. Can I take a break? Okay. So this is just a pie in the sky sort of fantasy suggestion which is that would satisfy a lot of people and a lot of different things that they're interested in to make the school day slightly longer. Add extra recess and make that time available, you know, if we can't afford it and make that time available for professional development. But the other thing I just wanted to ask is, do we get a list of sort of what's planned for professional development at the beginning of the year? Is there, does that usually happen? We actually will have a professional development calendar that will be available in August and it will tell you what we're doing for each grade level. Okay, so we'll know and be able to, okay. Yeah, that was the other thing. Sorry. Yeah. I think we can turn you around to that. One more piece on this. You mentioned eight, Paul. We may be, when we put the conferences in, it might not. We are gonna experiment with one thing at the middle school next year, a little different. We're gonna have a morning for conferences where the kids are there. And they're gonna have some kind of an assembly with people who don't normally have parent conferences doing it so that there'll be a morning which will shorten up the early release piece of it because this year one of the things we found is that doing an early release that had three and a half hours was too long. So in order to get the extra time, I don't wanna do another early release. So we're gonna experiment with this. So we're experimenting with something at the high school, it's a little different and at the middle school. And I think the elementary is gonna pretty much be the same. Except for the elementary, we're gonna go down one parent night. Hmm, okay, that's it. Cool. I apologize to the committee and to people at home that I was not here earlier. So if you've already covered this, did you have any discussion over the meeting that this Gerald and I went to yesterday with regard to going paperless? No. But I was going to bring it up on Saturday, but I know one or two members may not be there Saturday. If anyone would like further information, we were three vendors who were online with them and discussing what they could offer. Before we make any full decision on it, I would like to ask any member of the committee that would like to contact me, Adam asked me to be the conduit, that he would try to give you a showing of what was presented to us. It won't be the whole thing because you won't be able to act with the vendor. But if you get a chance to see that, and I apologize if it's, I misunderstood. Yesterday he said it should have been open to anyone that wanted to come. I don't know if we would have fit them in the room because we tacked the little room that he had anyway. But let me know in the next day or two. You can do it on Saturday again and again. Just send me an email on that. I was impressed. Dolzen whistles right down to press on a button for us to record our votes by name and it can go up like the poor Karen though. She's the one that we have to make sure. We're the users. She's the doer among other things. But he was very impressed. Do we have anything for executive session tonight? Do you want to talk about anything right now? I think we do. Okay. But there's no vote. That's fine. Okay. We will be entering the executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and non-unipersonality contract or contract negotiations with union and non-union in which you're held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. Discuss strategies with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so you play us. We will come out. The only purpose is to adjourn. We'll call it to the vote. It has to be a lot of us. Would that be a yes? Oh, to adjourn? Yes. No, to enter executive sessions. Oh, oh, enters executive, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Chocolate almond? Yes.