 Hi, I'd like to bring this regular school committee meeting of February 8th, 2024 to order. We had a slight delay because we're still working out technical issues before eight. So first, we're able to do this in a hybrid form because of multiple governor orders. And I want to remind everyone who is at home that people can see what's on your computer screen. I also want to check formally that our school committee members who are participating remotely can hear and respond to us. So Ms. Goedelsen, I know I saw you before. And I can hear. Okay. Ms. Ekston, I'm going to need the... Brady Bunch here. The Brady Bunch here. The squares. I need the multiple screens. There we go. There we go. Yeah. Okay. That's good. I just... I need to be able to see everyone. Okay. Okay. So Ms. Ekston, can you... Yes. Yes. Okay. Ms. Ferrante is... Here's our AEA representative and the superintendent is listening in, but it will not be participating tonight. Okay. Ms. Ford... Dr. Ford Walker will be our acting superintendent today. And I think that's everybody. Okay. So now we go on to public comment. Before I begin, I'd like to review sections of our current policy, DEDH, which governs public comment. During the public comment section of regular school committee meetings, individuals or groups may address the committee on items of school business. The length of participation shall normally be no more than 20 minutes, but may be extended by the chair. Speakers must identify themselves by name and address and will be allowed up to three minutes to present their material. The chairperson may... I mean, the chairperson may reduce speaking time if needed and or may permit extension of this time limit. If improper conduct and remarks, including use of obscenity or abuse of language will not be allowed, if amateur or abuse of remarks are always out of order, if the speaker persists in improper conduct or remarks, the chairperson may terminate an individual's privilege of address. All remarks will be addressed through the chairperson of the meeting. Speakers may offer such objective criticisms of the school operations and programs as concerned them, but in public session, the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel nor against any other member of the school community except for the school committee or the superintendent in their capacity as the operational leader of Arlington Public Schools. Under most circumstances, administrative channels are the proper means for disposition of fluid legitimate complaints involving staff members. Public is reminded that the school committee does not hold jurisdiction over the performance of personnel other than the superintendent. So our first person on for public participation is Cattell Gullick. Gullick, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. Gellick, that's okay. Thank you. I didn't realize, so I apologize, I haven't been to a lot of these meetings, so I didn't realize that this was the first thing on the agenda. I thought that the presentations were first. No, you're up. Okay. Well, I've got two things I want to comment on quickly. One is my hope, I guess, since I haven't heard the presentation yet now that we'll hear some updates on how the district is trying to improve the way they serve the children getting special ed services here. And that includes things like, you know, what is the district's obligation to, you know, practice child find in a timely way, in a proactive way identifying our students with disabilities, and also the plans to improve communication and transparency between the district and families, which in my experience as a parent over the past five years has been sorely, sorely lacking. I know the school committee is aware of all this already, but we've been told that the more we bring it up, the more we might be heard. The other thing I wanted to mention, I'm a parent of a Gibbs student, and I'm really concerned about the way that the event there was addressed. Children were texting their parents from school, crying, saying they were terrified, saying I love you. And we haven't heard other than like the boilerplate email of like there's someone to talk to if they want to. We really haven't heard like how the kids' mental health is being addressed. We also haven't heard any update on whether the community member who dropped shell casings in the school and attends an evening class there is going to be back on campus. So actually I had to call Arlington police myself to get that update. And finally, I don't know why the district didn't use robocalls to reach parents, which they use when there are like snow days and other much less intense events. So many parents who can't check their emails regularly because of their jobs were quite surprised to find out what was happening at the school. So those are my comments. Okay, thank you very much. I forgot to mention that we don't respond at this time, I need the Brady bunch one again. The next, we don't respond. We just listen at this point. The next one is Cheryl Miller also remote. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, cool. My name is Cheryl Miller. My address is 10 Thesda Street, and I'm the parent of two autistic children with IEPs in the Arlington Public Schools. Tonight, Alison Elmer will be presenting her special education program report. That report list is one of the highlights of the year that the district is rolling out QBS trading. A crisis management and restraint training system to be used with some of the most vulnerable students in the district. According to the company's website, QBS training is grounded in behaviorism, particularly applied behavior analysis or ABA. ABA is often described as evidence based, but as far as I'm aware, the evidence is only that ABA increases compliance. If there is evidence that it improves well being, life satisfaction or mental health, I have not been able to find it. There is, however, evidence that ABA causes harm to those who are subjected to it. Experiencing ABA is associated with increased risk of PTSD among autistic people. Autistic people who have experienced behavior therapy have described it as dog training, as dehumanizing, and as abuse. I know that behaviorism and ABA are deeply embedded in the Arlington Public Schools. I know that you can't just snap your fingers and get rid of those practices and values overnight. However, if the district is authentic in its goal of creating an environment of safety and belonging for all students and in its DEI initiatives, particularly in the area of justice, then the goal must be to move away from behaviorist and compliance-based practices and toward practices based on respect for disabled children as full humans, not collections of behaviors to be analyzed and reinforced or extinguished. Choosing a behavior management system was an opportunity to listen to the voices of disabled and autistic people, the populations most likely to be subjected to it. Please, members of the school committee, don't let this go by you without asking the district how this decision was made, how disabled voices were heard in the process, and how it is consistent with the district's stated values. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, that closes public comment. Next, we have... Oh. What I brought up. Okay. Next, we have our AHS student-represented news. Christine Moe. Hello. I was in here at the last meeting, so I don't know if this was already talked about, but we had the winter crash fair and that went amazing. There is, I think, over 30 vendors, a lot of attendants from both school and community members. It was really fun. I actually got this necklace there. There's a lot of wonderful vendors. Also, in two days, there's Battle of the Bands at the Regent Theater. Get tickets. It's awesome. It'll be really fun. Tickets are on the Regent Theater website. And then next week, before break, we're having a spirit week, and that includes, on Tuesday, a trivia competition, where you dress up as a team to win, I think, like a gift card prize. And then the ponder cast, like a student-run podcast in a way, like a newsletter debuted today, I believe, and it's promising. And then sport seasons are coming to an end or going into playoffs, and teams are doing good. Great. Thank you very much. The ponder cast, how would somebody who is not in the building see it? That is a wonderful question. I believe they have an Instagram, but I don't know if it's posted on there. ACMI.tv will have it. Okay, good. YouTube slash ACMI.tv. YouTube slash ACMI.tv. Okay. Just wanted to make sure that people can see this wonderful thing. If it's indeed as wonderful as you say it. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Next, we have the Stratton. Do you want to? Sure. Good evening, everyone. Hello. I'd like to introduce Principal Amy Kelly and the Stratton team. Principal Kelly is in her first year here in Arlington. She's joined us with a number of years of experience as a school leader in Newton and a district leader in Weston. The Stratton community has warmly welcomed Principal Kelly. And I can speak on behalf of Dr. Holman and many others and say that Arlington is lucky to have Principal Kelly with us. We're very excited about the work that she's leading at Stratton and look forward to the team's presentation this evening. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Fortunately, I have a fabulous team here with me, but I do want to start by just thanking you all for the incredibly warm welcome and the support that I've already received here in Arlington. So I'm thrilled to be able to speak on behalf of the amazing educators and families at Stratton. And most of what we'll share tonight is the result of the work done by Stratton's instructional leadership team, many folks who are here tonight, and as well as our school council, our PTO, and also a response to the 100 plus entry interviews that I did as part of my entry process at Stratton. I think because the Stratton community and Arlington as a whole has been so welcoming, I forget that I've often, I mean, I've just done my entry process fairly recently. In fact, today was my 100th day of school at Stratton. So as I mentioned, I'm here with some members of our instructional leadership team who will introduce themselves in a moment. And if you'll change the slide, I'll share our agenda. So we're going to start by celebrating some of what's good at Stratton, and then we'll share a small slice of the data that we used for our improvement planning. We'll share our priority goals and some actions that we're already taking to meet those goals. And finally, we'll answer any questions that you have. So at, next slide, oh, good. So at Stratton, we start our meetings with this what's good protocol. This gives folks an opportunity to share good news in their personal lives or in their work lives. The good news ranges from the magnitude of a staff member's wedding celebration to a positive interaction with a student during a math lesson. Members of our ILT will share a couple of details about what's good at Stratton. I'll start us off. And I just wanna start by saying, Dr. O'Brien, our assistant principal had planned to be here tonight. She is not well, so we miss her and I'm taking her part right now. So just a couple of things to say about our instructional leadership team. We hadn't Stratton had an instructional leadership team last year. I feel like we've really come together this year around the foundational practices of a multi-tiered system of support in terms of academic and also social and emotional and behavioral work. So that's really been our focus learning about MTSS and beginning to look at our foundational pieces at Stratton. And now Amy is going to go next. So I'm Amy Lees. Move the microphone down. Move the microphone down. Either one. Okay. I'm Amy Lees and I teach third grade at Stratton. And I've had your children and your children and someone at home. Sam's mom, Liz, son too. So Stratton's core approach to teaching positive behavior is through responsive classroom. Our school wide positive behavior plan has three guidelines. It's be safe, be kind and be respectful. Like languages used by all when reminding and redirecting all areas of the school have specific expectations. Staff and students are well versed in these expectations and they're posted throughout the school and classrooms alongside classroom constitutions that are authored by the students. Okay, everybody. I'm Kathy Silman. I am the math coach at Stratton. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about our PLCs and in particular what we do around data analysis. So this year our weekly grade level meetings are occurring as PLCs or professional learning communities. In the fall grade level teams wrote common student learning and professional practice goals. And then these shared goals are what is primarily driving our PLC meetings. You have to either be right in the mic or much louder because this is highly directional. Do I need to start over? No. Oh, now I can understand. Oh, sorry. I'll just recap the good parts. So our grade level teams wrote common student learning and professional practice goals and this is what's primarily driving our PLC work. As part of the work we plan purposeful cycles to collect and analyze data. For example, in math we're looking at fluency screeners, unit screeners, MCAS and other types of formative assessments depending on the grade level and the goals. Over the course of the year our PLC work has included looking for patterns of students strengths, challenges based on data, professional learning and planning instructional responses for individual students, small groups and the whole class as needed. Overall teams are developing a greater sense of collective efficacy as we collaboratively design action steps, plan interventions and targeted activities, especially during wind times which we'll talk about in a minute. And we aim to build on students strengths while supporting their ongoing learning needs. And I'm gonna pass the mic to Ann Marie. Yeah, three percent. Hi, I'm Ann Marie Abbott. I'm a second grade teacher at Stratton. I'm just gonna speak to the professional development and collaboration with the SLC program. I am currently a general education teacher on the SLC team. I have felt very supported by the SLC team that supports my class. I have a couple of examples of that for you. When I communicated with the lead SLC teacher that I work with that I did not understand how the communication devices were used. I was invited to a training initiated by that teacher, professional development. My other example is after one of the SLC power professionals that I work with in my classroom, Daly and I brainstormed how to support a student during the morning meeting. We brought our ideas to this SLC lead teacher that afternoon and the next morning. We had a visual to support our vision for the student. The student has been very successful with the tool we created collaboratively, consultation and collaboration. So, thank you. I'm Stuart Deck. I'm a paraprofessional at Stratton Elementary School, particularly with a math focus. I work with students throughout the building in mathematics. We've held faculty workshops to expand the understanding of social, emotional learning, identity and culturally responsive teaching for paraprofessionals and our entire teaching staff. We've engaged in exercises that helped us examine our assumptions about economic imbalances and how they can affect our teaching. Through focus group training, we've talked about how important a welcoming learning community is to the students themselves and we've worked on ways to be aware of widening our community circles so that no students feel left out. In particular, paraprofessional training, we've also worked together to understand the value of thoughtful use of language and how to carefully build learning communities. Beth Federico is to my right here with me. Thanks, Stuart. Beth Federico, I'm one of two teachers that works with multilingual students at Stratton. I'm going to talk about our regular communication. So our principal, Amy, has strengthened staff communication by sending us weekly updates about happenings and embedding inspirational content for us to consider. She also sends these to our parents. To connect with families, she's implemented monthly coffees with the principal and she works with the PTO and the school council. Notes from PTO meetings are shared with the Stratton staff. Something my ML colleague and I, due to foster communication, is create and share a monthly newsletter. Colleagues appreciate that we share the newsletter with them because it helps support all of our students and parents appreciate the newsletters because we use parent input to discuss topics that can be confusing or new to our multilingual parents. Thank you. So last year, Stratton had a DEI council, but it was solely a parent group. This year, we've added faculty members to that group and also the DEI council and the rainbow alliance have teamed up to support more school-wide initiatives and events. Most recently, the DEI council hosted Stratton's inaugural Pancakes Around the World event a couple of Sundays ago, which was quite delicious and well attended. We're also very excited about the opportunities that our EL curriculum, the new EL curriculum is and will continue to provide for supporting students to become participatory citizens through service learning. In November, our students participated in the wooden spoons project, where we raised money for Arlington Eats. We've got the Stratton Pride-a-thon coming up in the spring and soon our KTO, which is a student designed and led group will begin performing community service for our teachers by helping them after school with in-class small projects that they need help with. Next slide, that's all right, no, no, no. Okay, so here's some of our basic demographic data. I just want to draw your attention to our high needs numbers, our high needs percentage of nearly 30%. Our high needs focal group is an unduplicated count of all students belonging to at least one of the following groups. Students with disabilities, English language learners or multilingual learners, former English language learners or low-income students. So although we often look at these focal groups separately for this evening, in terms of our focus on our goals, we'll be speaking about our high needs group as our focal group. Next slide, thanks. So many of these goals are probably not new to you. My colleagues and I worked closely together to have some common goals. And you can see or you will see that we have two academic goals, a culture and climate goal and a family engagement goal. And I'm gonna go into more detail around each of these. Next slide. Okay. So our first academic goal is around addressing the achievement gap in literacy between our students identified as high needs and non-high needs. Similar to my colleagues in the other schools, we're using universal screening data to drive our approaches to instruction, as well as the consistent use of foundations, Hegerty and the adoption of our EL curriculum. Next slide, please. Okay. So why this goal? As you know, it's important to look at MCAS data, this kind of satellite level data. And here you can see a fairly large gap between the percentage of last year's third graders identified as high needs and non-high needs students exceeding or meeting or exceeding the expectations. And then if you go to the next slide, you'll see an even larger gap with last year's fourth graders. And then next slide. Gap narrowing here a bit, but still quite large with last year's fifth graders. So what's our plan? Firstly, we're like many other schools implementing our EL curriculum in, although we're implementing in K and five and supporting our teachers with solid professional development. This year, as Kathy described, every grade level has a weekly professional learning community meeting focused on continuous improvement by linking the needs of students with the professional learning and practice of teachers. This involves not only looking at satellite data like the MCAS data, but drilling down to map and street level data. We've added daily wind blocks to our schedule where students are engaging in intervention and extension of the curriculum. We've started to share some of this street level data with families like our Dibbles reports and providing ideas about how we can collaborate with families to support literacy achievement. Our second academic goal is also related to literacy, but it goes a little wider to improve classroom instruction and academic rigor by using EL protocols to increase students' engagement and academic mindset. Next slide. Of the students surveyed in the spring of last year, third, fourth and fifth grade students, only 66% reported favorably that their teacher had higher, extremely high expectations of them. That was up from the previous survey. Next slide. And last year in the fall of 2022, only 54% of families responded favorably that classroom lessons were motivating to their children. So we've been working to increase the use of these EL protocols, not only in the piloting classrooms for EL, but across all of our grades, as well as all of our content areas to support deeper learning and student engagement in discussions, inquiry, critical thinking and communication. The EL implementation has also gotten us into more peer observations. So this is providing both our observing teachers and our observed teachers with the opportunity to reflect on teaching and to consider the impact of specific instructional choices on student learning. Our third goal, our culture and climate goal, involves improving a sense of belonging for all of our students. We know that this is most urgent for our students who identify as LGBTQ plus, our multilingual learners and our students who receive services through IUPs and 504s. How did we land on this goal? Last spring, only 65% of our third, fourth and fifth graders responded favorably to feeling an overall sense of belonging at Stratton. Next slide. When we dug down a little bit deeper, we could see that almost half of our students surveyed didn't feel understood as, didn't feel that the folks at Stratton understood them as a person at school. Next slide, sorry. A little bit more here. I'm not gonna say much about this, just reinforcing that sense of, first of all, it was down 8%, but also only 70%. We can go on to the next one and move it along a little bit. And then we found that similarly, students felt, didn't feel respected or seen by other students, not just by adults. So on the next slide, this is what we're doing. We've got more work to do here, but mostly our action steps include, as you heard from my colleagues, include creating systems and structures of support. So my understanding is that there was a tremendous amount of turnover in staffing specifically at Stratton, but specifically in the SLC program. And we have worked to really support the staff in that program with specialized professional development, consultation and frankly, appreciation for the incredibly challenging work that they're doing every day. We've been, you spoke a little bit about this, but we've been working to align our social and emotional learning curriculum with our positive behavior support plan. So now we have some systems around teaching routines and expectations for our students. We have ways to celebrate and acknowledge those positive behaviors and our next steps are to layer on specific bullying prevention and intervention curricula. Sorry, I'm not quite done there, but we've been building our affinity spaces. We spoke about the Rainbow Alliance. We also have a caregiver group of families in our SLC and a Nepali family group, which is newly formed this year. We're working toward our students and our families feeling as though they can bring their whole selves to Stratton School and feel like they belong. Next slide. Working towards improving the belonging of all families through communication, inviting the perspectives of diverse voices and finding authentic ways for celebrating the rich diversity that exists within our school community. Stratton has a very, a history of rich tradition, especially around certain holidays. Some of these traditions have supported all families to experience belonging and frankly, some have not. So, we can see that in the next slide. In the fall of 2022, only 56% of the families who responded answered favorably that Stratton School valued students diverse backgrounds and only 43% responded favorably about the school valuing their opinions. Next slide. So, we've started to work on this goal by really trying to shift some of our celebrations to ensure that all families feel as though they are included and can participate. We are trying to build back up the engagement that so many schools are wrestling with. Post, well, not totally post COVID, but post intense COVID years. And we're doing this by trying to increase the communication frequency. I host monthly principal chats and we're beginning to pull together some focus groups. I mentioned the SLC focus group and we've got more focus groups on the way. I think that's it. Great, thank you. Any questions? Mr. Slickman. Well, happy day 100. Thank you. It was a fun day. What you do for day 100, I wanna hear that. There was a lot of counting, a lot of kindergarten classes, especially a lot of counting different things to 100. There were some pattern lanterns happening with 100 things on them. Some fun things. I've got a couple of notes here from what I've been hearing. First of all, it may not be true, but I'm really, if you're not the first group to bring a paraprofessional into your presentation, you're one of the first. And I want to, first of all, honor the district by making a commitment, Arlington Public School Loaves Paras. We know that paras are very important for us as a district. There's a lot of value in their work and we wanna make sure that they feel appreciated and that we're treating them like the talented professionals that they are and we're grateful for their work for us. So thank you for that inclusion and the discussion of the professional development as being provided for your paras. I'm interested in your multilingual learners. So what languages do you have? Lots. Spanish, Nepali, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, there's more, French, Creole, regular French, yeah. She speaks Greek. So you've got a lot of spatterings of small stuff. Yeah, yeah. So I've worked in communities with large second language populations and it becomes even more of a challenge when you have so many different languages with so many different roots. So thank you and keep up the work over there. My usual question first of all for the principals, what do you need from us? How much time do you have? I, your continued support, I, yeah, I think we're trying to figure out, you know, get ourselves internally kind of settled and assess the resources that we have and make sure that we're utilizing the resources in the best way possible. Can I get back to you on that? Oh sure, anytime you want. I mean, but budget season is here too. But supporting our schools is one of the poor jobs we have in terms of both policy and budget. The other one, the other question I have to ask because it's been raised in the past, how's your classroom utilization? Are you tired? Are you good? How are things going? Okay, we're making it work. I, you sound like you've got an ambitious agenda and the people who've bought into it and having a good time doing it. So keep on keeping on, thank you. I do want to say just Alison, your support and collaboration around supporting the SL, I mean, all of our student services, all of our, you know, services, but especially the support around the SLC and supporting our professionals within that program this year has been much appreciated and essential. Thank you. Great, thank you. Other questions? Mr. Fielin. Great report, I'll make sure most others to mic. Okay, am I talking loud enough? Great report, my questions are, so I too like fall in interest in the ELL population. Could you just talk about the ELL professional development that you're like, what does that look like? So the ELL curriculum, like the ELA curriculum or multilingual? No, multilingual, yeah. Multilingual, okay. I... Like what kind of professional development are you doing for teachers? For teachers of multilingual students, yeah. Like for me or for classroom teachers that have... I don't know, the whole group, whatever you're doing. I mean, you've been involved in our work around culturally responsive teaching. Absolutely, and the multi-tiered systems of support that we're trying to implement. And then I know on the professional development days, last year I taught an MLL PD to help general education teachers to support the students that are in their classroom. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I'm just curious to know what the conversation is like. Because I mean, this is like, it's a major challenge in our culture, right? We have a growing number of people coming into the country and the state that don't speak English. We want them to be successful in school and go into the workforce. And so I'm just curious to know what the conversations like in the school about how to respond to those learners. I could add on, as a general ed teacher, that you mentioned in my classroom, that I feel like there's a strong sense of pushing into the classroom, which is supportive of my learning, how to best support them as well. Best colleague Tiffany works in my classroom five days a week. And I just feel like that's the best possible professional development you can get. We're working there together, co-teaching, and I'm learning, we're learning from each other, so. Good, thanks a lot. I just, thank you. Ms. Morgan? Hi, great, thank you. I have a couple of things. The first one is just a comment, and I've made this to other elementary schools who have come in to talk to us. And the rollout of a new ELA curriculum is obviously like an extraordinary undertaking, takes a lot of resources, time, mental space. I just, you know, we can't lose sight of the math, right? And it's really, really important that that's part of the conversations. I'm sure that it is. And we just get like a very quick snapshot, but you guys are, you're the 10th we've had, right? The seventh elementary school, and we've heard about EL implementation from all of them, as is appropriate. And so, you know, I just don't want us to lose sight of the math work that we need to do with students. And so the first question that I had was, I see under the strategic academic goal too, it's talking about using the EL instructional practices. Is there any ability to use that kind of discussion about learning and how you interact with your classmates, et cetera, when we're doing math too? Like, there has to be some overlap, right? Absolutely. And we are talking about utilizing the EL protocols and the eight high leverage instructional practices around EL across all curricular areas. For instance, one of the EL core practices is grappling. So that is, it's amazing to talk about students grappling with kind of getting into the learning pit and really grappling in a productive struggle around learning something in math. And I feel like that's a perfect connection because we're doing that in EL and also talking about how we want students to struggle. It's not just about getting the answer quickly. It's about really grappling with new learning and that's the example that comes to mind for me. I don't know if you wanna talk about other. I don't know if this came up with other schools, but while cohort one was being trained in EL, everyone else, so everyone besides two grade levels per school were doing professional development with math, science, and social studies thinking about how the EL protocols will apply. And we looked at all the overlap between the high leverage practices from EL and NCTM's effective teaching practices. So things like elicit student understanding and thinking is projected one way in EL, another way in NCTM, but there's so much overlap. So we're looking at how is that playing into our curriculum. Grappling was another one, total participation techniques. So we hope that there'll be more and more opportunities for thinking about what's discreet about each curriculum and also how can we use what we're learning about these high leverage practices to apply across different curriculum. Great, that's great. Yeah, no, we sometimes don't hear about it and so you start, I get a little anxious in my heart. So my second, I teach higher ed math and so I do a lot of work with non-traditional learners and we get them like way down the road and there's just a lot of work to be done when you're an adult learner. So the other piece of feedback that I have and I appreciate that you guys are using the data that's been sort of given to you largely. So Dr. Ford-Walker, this may be feedback for Matt Coleman as you see fit, but I find that looking at these ELA persons percentages, like if I go, can you pull up the slides and go to the grade four ELA meeting or exceeding graph? So when I like scroll through these, I get to grade four and I think to myself, holy cow, what happened in grade four last year, right? Like the achievement of high needs kids went way up from 2022 and the achievement of high needs kids like cratered out from 2022. But of course, like that's the cohort effect, right? These are not the same kids that were here. They were not in fourth grade or most, I don't think any of them were in fourth grade in both of these years, right? So I, this one was particularly like, like my first reaction was like, up, up, keep going, keep going, keep going. Keep going, yeah, I'll tell you when. Keep going, keep going, keep going. You can talk, I'll tell her when. So just, you know, for me, like- No, keep, did you want math? There's no math. There's no math. One more, fourth grade. One more. Other way. Right, that one, right? So again, it requires a lot of mental gymnastics for me to track the cohort between these slides and I think it was the most obvious because I'm not sure that any other school gave us three years of ELA where I could be like, oh, okay, but I was literally like making my own graph like on a post-it note and it's like, well, because I want to understand, right? Because like 22% for high needs kids in fourth grade ELA is deeply concerning, right? I mean, and it is like fundamentally deeply concerning. They were at 35% in 2022. So there's been a decrease, but then, you know, there's also been a decrease in non-high needs kids within that cohort who were meeting and exceeding. So like, anyway, we can think more about how we present this. I know that you're presenting us largely what you've been asked to or not asked to, but like, because anyway, so that for me, it was particularly glaring in this presentation. And I guess the third and final thing is just around family engagement. I have been a Straton parent for 12 years. I have 80 days to go, apparently. Who knew? I do now. So, you know, I've been there for a really long time and I've seen like a lot has changed in the 12 years that I've been there with my kids. And I think family engagement is tricky to figure out how to do that and how to do that in 2024 is certainly not what it looked like in 2012 when I started there. But I encourage you to continue to look for ways to when you're changing something to think about something that you can add. What can we do? And how can we, you know, what can we do to bring families in to be with their kids in school in whatever way that you can? I mean, that's like, parents wanna go and be, I'm sure they come to your coffee chats and I'm sure that it's fantastic and a great time, but most parents wanna come and be at school with their kids, right? And ways to be able to do that and engage with them in their learning is something that from my experience certainly doesn't happen in the same way that it did 10 or 12 years ago. And I appreciate that some of those things are not a good idea to keep doing, right? But I hope that as you celebrate diversity and talk to focus groups and that you think about ways to give families opportunities to participate in school with their kids, engage with their teachers because that really helps build community and resilience as you move through all of these goals that you have. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Any, Mr. Cardin? So I wanted to ask where you were with the wind block and how that is working out. I know other schools have tried it and have had difficulty finding a time where the whole grade can set aside that time. So where are you on that? How is it working out? So we haven't had difficulty finding a time. We have wind every day in everyone's schedule at the same time at a grade level. So for instance, all the third grade classrooms have wind at the same time. We are in various stages of, it's new, right? So we're all figuring out, I think to your point, Jane, do we spend time during wind on math or ELA? And how do you, if a student needs, requires some supports in both, how do you use that time? So our teams have been amazing at working together to try and figure out how do you utilize wind effectively for each and every student and not only the students who require additional support but the students who need extensions. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Sexton. This presentation, I just want to bring up something else that we've talked about at a lot of the school improvement plan presentations, and that's around chronic absenteeism. And it just wasn't mentioned at all in this, but when I look at the numbers for Stratton for low income students and persons with disabilities, the attendance last year was concerning. It's like, I'm just wondering if that's something that you have talked about as a team, even though it wasn't a part of this presentation. So I've definitely talked a lot about it with my elementary principal colleagues and trying to understand how, what the protocols are in terms of how do we respond? And they have been incredibly helpful. Right now at Stratton, where we've been spending most of our time, honestly, is around foundational strategies and practices across the whole school that promote positive engagement, which ultimately should improve attendance, ensuring that all of our students feel like they belong in our school and feel great about coming to school. That's kind of the tier one, safe at school, engaged in school, enjoying school, and that's really where our work has been. That's not to say that on a case by case basis, we're certainly addressing chronic absenteeism with families and engaging with families, but our school-wide work has been at a tier one level. Okay, I think that's, we're all set. Thank you very much for your presentation. Do you have anything to add or no? Okay, great, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, so next, we have the special education program report from Ms. Elmer. So do you want it? So I just wanted to position this for the group. Folks may remember that last year we began a reorganization of the department under the Office of Student Services, which would then be overseen by an assistant superintendent of student services, and those departments include Special Ed Nursing School Counseling and Social Emotional Learning. Can you hear me? And so primarily tonight because you're asked for special education update, I'll be focusing on special education, but wanted to just kind of orient the audience to what our department, or who is in our department, and so within our Special Ed department we're organized under the assistant superintendent and then we have Special Ed coordinators who are district level administrators. They oversee the supervision and evaluation of special educators and related service providers within the buildings, oversee implementation of Special Ed programming, work alongside building administrators, principles to develop and implement programming and interview higher staff. And then we have our team chairpersons. They are within our teachers unit, but I think most folks recognize the team chairperson as the individual who often facilitates the IEP meeting and they are often a main point of contact for families with students who have IEPs. You can advance that. And then just kind of a glossary of terms because I know that in each district they're called different things, but our liaisons or learning specialists or sub-separate special education teachers, those are the special educators and who deliver your classroom instruction, whether that's inclusion services, pull-out services in our SLCs, supported learning centers that you heard about. And then we have our related service providers. Those are the folks who also work in all of our buildings and fill these different roles, specialized roles that are listed there as well. And then since we have to offer a continuum of services, we do also contract for a board-certified audiologist and a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing. We don't have enough need in the district for a full-time employee or part-time employee, so we do contract those services. And then we have our prayer professionals and what specialized support prayer professionals or SSPs to round out our department. And so just broadly overview of the district, we have about 1140 IEPs and within the district that's 100 or 1,000, about 25. We do serve students, as I've mentioned, we've offered a continuum of services, so sometimes we do have to place students out of district because we don't have the services and supports that they require here. And so we do have 52 students that the district has placed in either a public day, which are collaboratives. You're probably all familiar with the lab collaborative of which we're a member, but we do also place students in other collaboratives like SIEM, Valley, et cetera. And then there's some students who are in private day placements, which are approved private specialized schools. And then we do have a small number of students who are in a residential program and SEIS is special ed and institutional settings. So that's for students who are in the Department of Youth Services, DYS, or who may be in institutional care in one of the state hospitals. If they have IEP services, we are responsible for the provision of those as well. The others, well, you don't, the other, special ed program that we do also serve students who are residents of Arlington who do not attend Arlington public schools. They're privately placed at a school by their parents. So they might attend a parochial school. They may attend just a independent school as residents of Arlington. They are entitled to their special ed services. And we do have about 60 students who do come in what we call services only come in for those special ed services through a drop in model. The largest majority of those students are at the preschool. So now you may advance. And this is just a breakdown by school, the number of IEPs within the school. Monotomy is an integrated preschool. So you'll see that we have 55 students with IEPs out of the 93 students who attend our day program, which, you know, the integrated classroom should have seven students with IEPs, eight students without. So we do see higher, obviously concentrations of IEPs at the preschool. And as I mentioned, we do serve additional students for those drop in services. So those are students who may just come in for speech or OT, they may be in a private preschool or daycare or they may be at home and their parents bring them in. I did put asterisks against the elementary schools that do have our supported learning centers or sub separate special ed programs. Just to indicate, you know, if there's higher number of IEPs at those buildings, that's partially why you can advance that. And just to explain the special ed programs, I think folks often don't think of the preschool as a special ed program, but that's largely why districts have integrated or public preschools because our obligation to identify and serve students begins at the age of three. So monotomy is our integrated preschool program. And then we have the supported learning centers. Ms. Kelly shared that they have the, what we would call the SLCA over at the Stratton. So we have, when they get to the secondary level, we switch it up on you and we call it reach. Similarly, the SLCB is the program we have at Dallin. And then when you get to the secondary level, that program is called Summit. And then you can advance that. As well as the SLCC, which is now, it's in its final year at Brackett, and we'll talk a little bit more about it, and mostly over at Hardy. We started that transition two years ago, and then that becomes Compass at the secondary level. And previously I had presented on this, and I'll give you an update on that, but the most recent program that we've developed is the SLCD, which is currently at the elementary school at the Pierce. So since the last time, I think I did this presentation. We hadn't transitioned the program over there, but we've talked about it for several years. Earlier this fall, I did do a presentation for a subcommittee. So I just wanted to include a few of the slides for folks who weren't able to attend that subcommittee presentation and just kind of give an update. But as I mentioned, we began to transition the SLCC or the Compass program, which serves students with intellectual disabilities from the Brackett school to the Hardy Elementary primarily due to space concerns and having availability of classroom and equitable classroom spaces. And we tried to do that really thoughtfully. So that's why it did take several years for us to do that transition because we didn't want to disrupt the education of students who had been in the program at Brackett and move them in their third grade year of that. So we did start by starting students from the preschool or coming in at the kindergarten level over at the Hardy while we maintained the Brackett program. And then as the students were aging out of the Brackett program, we have been shifting more of the classrooms over to Hardy. So this year we have two classrooms at Hardy and two students remain at Brackett as fifth graders and they will be transitioning out. And the next year, the program will exist solely at Hardy. Can you advance that? Again, similarly, since I had presented last time, we did develop and implement a supported learning center over at the Pierce, the SLCD. This is primarily for students with language-based learning disabilities. So think of dyslexia, dysgrapia and other communications disorders related to language differences. And we have that program, as you can see, began in 2021. And we have been serving a similar amount of students through that program. We initially consulted with Dr. Melissa Orkin who has presented to you before and continues to work with the district in professional development. But in the last two years have been working directly with Landmark Consulting, which is a consulting arm of the Landmark School, which is one of those private specialized schools that specifically addresses language-based learning disabilities. Can you advance that? Another special ed program that we've implemented in the last two years is the Macy program, which is the Massachusetts Inclusive Concurrent Enrollment Initiative. That was passed through legislation. And so this allows students who otherwise would not receive our high school diploma to attend community colleges. Previously, we used to have students go through the Macy program through the lab collaborative. We would pay tuition to lab and these students would then enroll in Middlesex Community College. About, well, three years ago, we began to explore a direct relationship with Middlesex to have a program directly with us. And so two years ago, we did start to implement that. You can advance this. They have, since, you may advance that please, they have since passed additional legislation, which has allowed a broader range of students to participate. Now there are students who could have passed MCAS. It used to be that you couldn't pass MCAS. That was one of the criteria that they had not passed MCAS and therefore would not earn a diploma. Now students who have passed MCAS can still participate in this program, assuming they require additional transitional supports. And so we have had two students, not the same two students, each cohort, but two students in each in the last two cohort years. And we do have a educational coach which is essentially a paraprofessional who accompanies the students on site to the campus at Middlesex Community College and also works on travel training. What not, we take public transportation there. So we get to also address other transitional skills. And as I mentioned, actually I believe, Representative Garberley was one of the folks behind the legislation to support the expansion of the Macy programs across the state. So we were really glad to see that they have done that. And then a lot of new stuff has come up just with the opportunities around the new high school and we're really excited about that. We did also in partnership with that, or while in developing the partnership with Macy, we now have a full-time transition specialist. She really led that work with Macy. And it was a teacher previously who had been kind of filling it part-time as doing direct instruction teaching and doing this transition specialist role, but she's now full-time and it's really led to, again, the creation of a young adult living seminar. She serves as a liaison to the adult service agencies and will be, as we continue to expand now with the new high school, developing more of the programming that we have for activities of daily living, community partnerships for employment opportunities. Those things are all in the pipeline. And as we've expanded the Compass Program at the high school to include students to the ages of 18 to 22 when special and entitlement ends in Massachusetts, we've identified areas of need for training. So we've been training folks in RAVO, which is one of the explicit reading interventions, as well as we now have reading specialists at the high school that can also deliver Orton Gillingham. We've been working, the math coaches have been working with our special ed teams at Audison and at the high school to align our math curriculum around more of those personally relevant academics, which you would in the past might call functional academics, but those are things related to budgeting, depending on the student making change or creating a personal budget, things like that. And we've also implemented a social boundaries curriculum called the Circles Curriculum. As I said, with the new high school, with most of the project done for special ed, we have a lot of new opportunities. The Student Cafe and Print Shop are going to give us opportunities for job skills as well as the kitchen facilities that we now have. And one of the really cool features that we were able to put into the design of the building and work with the architects around was a apartment classroom. So it is a classroom that is designed to be like an apartment so that you can learn about making your bed, dishes, we've had to purchase a lot of things like plates and silverware so that you can practice loading the dishwasher, putting things away, making your bed, things like that doing laundry. And then you already saw the Monotomy Preschool when we opened it in January. It's just a beautiful space. But it also, we saw the return of the, we've always had the early childhood class working with Monotomy, but now they have a classroom within Monotomy so that they can do their classwork as well as intern in our preschool classrooms and just the space itself was allowed for a really state of the art related services, the UPCR OT space or our physical therapy space as well as our related service providers, speech and social work having their own dedicated spaces. We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity that's in the new preschool. Additionally, you've heard folks talk about the implementation or the adoption of expeditionary learning from Special Ed. Many of us were part of that literacy selection team and some of the, what are now district-wide, programs like Hagerty was previously a Special Ed intervention for Phenemic Awareness now that that's district-wide, something that we have been working with our colleagues on including the expansion of foundations to third grade as well as implementing those Dibble screeners across, although I really do see that partnership that we've had with General Ed in making these changes for the whole district. Since 1920, school year 1920, we've been able through grant funds to train 30 educators, Special Educators in Orton-Gillingham, which is an extensive training program and then an additional 13 have been certified they have to complete a year-long practical at the associates level and there's another six who are currently completing it this year so that they will have the associates level certification as well. And then you heard in public comment about our QBS training. So just to give a little bit of background around QBS the state does require that we have restraining and de-escalation prevention training and at its core, QBS and all of the programs are a de-escalation training program so we're trying to prevent the need to go hands-on. We are a low-incidence district when it comes to administering restraints. One of the things that we, when we were exploring the transition from TCI, Therapeutic Crisis Intervention which we had previously been implementing, we began this process two years ago when we were looking across the state to see what other folks were using of the 75 districts that we were able to get in contact with 40 of those districts use QBS or safety care with the other ones primarily using TCI which we were using and CPI Crisis Prevention Intervention so those are the three big providers. Western Mass has another program called Calm not many folks on the eastern part of the state use that program. I do think that it's a bit of a misnomer to imply that it is applied behavioral analysis, it's based in the principles of applied behavioral analysis which yes, when we initially, we as a country, Lovas back in the 20s and 30s implemented applied behavioral analysis there was a heavy component punishment and positive reinforcement and very strict and explicit principles of ABA which are often part of what we would call discreet trials pointing at a pitcher, receive a reinforcement pointing at the wrong pitcher. That has shifted over the last 80 years where ABA is much broader than that. QBS itself specifically is based on the principles of positive reinforcement is tied to, as I said, mainly preventing and avoiding restraint so the biggest number of folks have actually taken the verbal de-escalation training which in its own description, focuses on verbally de-escalating a student. That's what we've had the most folks in the district trained in and so I'm happy to answer any questions about that. I do have a few more slides though if you wanna advance them. I did mention briefly that health and nursing is also within the department so just wanted to kinda show you how that department is organized. You can advance that. And just some of the things that the nursing department is working on. We have a grant through the affiliate comprehensive school health services program and we're continuing to do that, I believe we're in our second year of that. We are piloting this year's SNAP which is the Electronic Health Records but there's a portal for families so Bishop and I believe Gibbs have been piloting that this year for roll out for next year for all families. We are continuing to participate in the University of Connecticut Child Anxiety Learning Modules study. You see us advertising all the time that we are offering vaccine clinics and not just for COVID but flu as well and then they similarly too, the nursing department's been really excited about the new spaces that have been available to us in the new high school as well as monotomy preschool. You wanna advance that? And then the final department, I think you will be hearing from Magalie Olander in the spring about SEL and counseling. If you remember, Ms. Olander was the Interim Director last year and she's now this year been our full-time director after a thorough search last spring to identify a permanent director. We're super excited that Magalie is in this role with us. This is also that department and how it breaks out. Do you wanna advance the slides? And the things that SEL and counseling department are working on at the elementary level, they're working really closely with the school social workers and the multitude systems of support. You heard a little bit about this supporting SEL and mental health, both the curricula and our screeners, as well as Simone Cortava is our SEL specialist and she is also working with the teams implementing EL. We have been administering the universal mental health screeners this year. We previously did grades three through 12. This year we're doing four through 12 based on feedback from both the staff administering it and teachers just around how valid and reliable the information we were getting from third graders were as far as being able to ask the questions that these screeners do of those students. This year was the return of youth mental health first aid during COVID, youth mental health first aid had shifted a lot to online, delivering that training. We have under our SAMHSA grant, we are able to have a youth mental health coordinator who is training, you've probably seen announcements. She's trained both school staff as well as community members in youth mental health first aid. And then this spring we will be offering Healing Center engagement certifications for our faculty and students. Tonight I just plugged but it's already passed but tonight there was one of our parent offering was the trails suicide awareness and prevention that was earlier this evening and that families had an opportunity to engage him. Neon. Great, thank you very much. How do you have time? Any questions? Mr. Schlockman. Okay, one of the problems for us as the school committee is special education is probably the hardest thing for us to get our heads around. My experience as a principal administrator is that because special education is done on the basis of a collection of IEPs, individual education plans, that they are all very individual and that if you're looking at things systemically, I could take a look at third grade performance, I could take a look at how the athletic teams are doing. I can, there are a lot of things that I can get my hands on, but the relationship between district family kid within that structure of IEPs is very difficult for us to get our handle on. Now I know that this district has a reputation in the past for being particularly difficult to deal with. I know the 20 years ago, and I'm really going back in time, the state was really not very enamored with us and poor Mr. Thielman had to go to Maldon in order to receive a scathing report and we've certainly made a lot of progress over the past time, but still from this seat, it's very difficult for us to measure document and talk about the progress we're making. Let me probe a little in that, how do we as a committee and communicating as a community indicate the progress because what we're talking about within the metrics in the strategic plan, we acknowledge this takes time and considerable resources, but our commitment is to transforming because we're not there yet. The Arlington Public Schools into a system that eliminates opportunity gaps, thereby allowing all students to thrive while pacing benchmarks to reflect ambitious and attainable progress. And we can take a look at MCAS scores, that doesn't really tell us where we're at in this. If we reverse positions and you're in the school committee and you were looking for metrics that we could use to evaluate and demonstrate to the community that we're making progress according to what we say we're going to do, how would we do that? I think there's a couple of things we could look at and I acknowledge, I think that districts in general have this challenge, as you said, that they are individual. So students, when you have an individual education program, a student is, our job is to set reasonably ambitious, yet achievable goals in which the individual can achieve within a year, right? So a student receives a progress report against their individual IEP goals. And these are not public documents, so these are- Right, exactly. And they receive those progress reports at least as frequently as a non-disabled peer gets a report card. So generally, three times a year, if there's four report cards, that's four times a year. At the preschool, we have two report cards, so they get those. So there's that. And as you've mentioned, yes, MCAS is one measure. We do look at student with disability, that category for achievement data. I think we've started to an appreciated Mr. Coleman and Dr. Ford Walker's analysis. I think that we haven't really broken it down previously to that degree. I do think we have other data sets as we look at the dibbles and the literacy screening that we can start to track that. As I was mentioning with those department highlights, I do think the adoption of things like the EL curriculum, I don't think it's a secret that as special educators, we were pretty critical of the Lucy Cawkins curriculum. We were some of the early adopters around the science of reading, as far as training our staff and having PD around that. And I also mentioned expanding those previous special ed interventions like Hegerty to the general public. That's how I think we eliminate, reduce opportunity and achievement gaps. The idea that the rising tide raises all ships. I do think that the stuff that works for our students with disabilities are the things that are good practices for everybody. So I'm optimistic that our theory of action to close that gap is to implement curricula that is universally designed, that is multi-sensory, that is systematic in its approach. And I think we have a long way to go. You had pointed out to Ms. Kelly, the gaps between that high needs group of which students with disabilities are part of that group. So I don't think I specifically gave you an answer, but I'm curious what you folks would like to see or what you think would be helpful. Do we measure parent satisfaction? I mean, we get it randomly. I mean, we talk to people and I've got a range of people that range from very unhappy to very satisfied. And it's not a systemic thing. I'm sure with IEPs, it's all a very individual thing that you've got this parent who's unhappy, this parent who's just thrilled. How do we... Yeah, so we have two... How do we give a handle? Yeah, we have a couple of measures, those more qualitative measures. So panorama does start to separate out students with disabilities, so those caregivers can indicate that they have a child with disabilities. So we have that data source. We do at the conclusion of each IEP meeting or we send it with a paperwork, we do send a survey to get feedback on how they felt, they were heard at the team meeting, was there participation like, I will say since we shifted to more online meetings, during COVID and then once we could come back in person, people didn't want to surprisingly, a lot of families opted I think for the convenience of not having to leave work and being able to log on to an IEP meeting rather than taking half a day to come back and meet in person. I've seen fewer of those folks responding to that survey and I don't know if that's just a product of, you're not there in person and someone has handed it to you even if you receive it electronically. And the other thing is the CPAC will be presenting to you this spring, the last three years now, they have been collecting, we've partnered with them around a parent survey. Okay, and I know that a lot of the positions are challenging to fill, particularly the ones that you have responsibility for. Meeting the needs with our staffing, are we budgeted to meet the needs or we have a gap in terms of our ability to attract the employees we need and do you have enough administrative staff to do all the work you need to do? I think we are very appreciative of the override because I do think that will help us to have, if the plan is, I think to put most of that money towards competitive salaries, I do think that will assist us with this. I do, we have noticed a shift since COVID that positions that were more easily filled in your right and special ed, they aren't easily filled often but our related service providers usually were. Cause those are, I don't think folks realize, like if you become a speech and language pathologist, you can work at the clinic at MGH or you can work in a public school, right? If you're an OT, you've gone through the same training that the folks at Spalding have gone through, right? You're just delivering those services in the school setting and that used to be really attractive to a lot of those folks. I think telehealth opportunities for a lot of providers has changed things, whereas maybe that school-based position isn't as attractive as it once was as far as salaries and the hours and the schedule used to be. I think we were getting more folks the last few years. We've seen smaller numbers of applicants for those related service providers, though I am optimistic, I'm looking at Rob and folks who are on the negotiation committee that with increased salaries that we can be more competitive. I'm certainly hopeful that our para salaries will also, that had been the hardest position to fill. We continue to rely on agencies, which obviously cost us much more, right? We are essentially paying someone else to find the employee and they're charging us a higher rate than if we paid the person directly. So I'm optimistic that with the new para salaries that we will be able to get more of those people directly and they'll be our permanent employees rather than year-long employees. Okay, thank you. More questions? So Massachusetts issued a new IEP form. I know it might not be in the software yet, but do we have any thoughts about rolling that out or not rolling that out? Everyone will be required to roll it out in September. So this year we have been starting in the fall. I believe it was the beginning of October. We sent a team of our team chairs, coordinators and myself, to the state's training for that. Our third-party provider, PCG, EZIEP that we use has not yet completed that software. I will say that I don't know that anyone, I believe Aspen is the first one to actually have it electronically and they just started to roll it out because Lexington is anticipating doing it in this February, but they've been waiting. So we will be training our staff this spring and then having trainings for families as well, but across the state we will be using the new IEP format. And there are changes to what it looks like. I think that will look different to people. There is an emphasis on student input into it in a way that I think at the secondary level we always have had, so that won't be much of a shift for teams, but even at the preschool level they want to have input from the student about what their goals and objectives for themselves in developmentally appropriate ways, are for the next three to five years, as well as the way in which just portions of the IEP are broken out and I could just start going off on acronyms and people won't know what they mean, but looking at accommodations just differently how they're laid out as well as what we call the present levels of educational performance, those are big shifts and a real focus on the data collection piece for monitoring progress, I think are some of the biggest shifts in that program and it just, it physically looks different. The state is showing you something that's landscaped instead of portrait, but that layout, it is meant to also be more, to increase compliance not in a, so if someone has, if a student has their qualifying disability is autism, there's required paperwork that has to be completed as part of the process, this system will now, if you select autism as a disability, it will automatically populate these forms for you, so there's no way that someone can, oh we forgot to do that form, if you have a specific learning disability there's required forms, the design of the software is such that once you select specific learning disability, those required forms will be there. A student who's over 14 has to do transition planning, but if it's students 10, then you won't even see those, like currently now, you all get the same form, right? So it will be more geared toward the individual student. Great, thank you. Any more questions? Ms. Goodelson. Hi, thank you. So I just wanted to give you an opportunity, Dr. Elmer, to answer the question that Ms. Gallick asked in during public comment about how does the district meet its obligations under child find? Sure, and I feel like I always have to say this, I'm Ms. Elmer, although my mother would be very happy if I had that doctorate. So child find for folks who aren't familiar with the terminology is the district's affirmative responsibility to locate and identify students with disabilities possibly disabilities for evaluation. So we do that in a number of ways. You will see on our website are what we call our child find notice that tells you if you suspect that your child has a disability, here's who to contact for an evaluation. We participate in a early childhood network here in town so that all of the private preschools, I mentioned we have students from private preschools coming in for special ed services so that they're aware of if you are seeing a student that our child in your preschool program that you have concerns about with the family direct them to the school district because you are eligible starting at the age of three to be evaluated for services. We do share that with the doctors offices, the pediatricians offices will often get referrals from them as well as we publicly post it. It's actually no longer required, but we still do that. I don't know if people read the newspaper but we do publicly post it in the newspaper every year as well and offer screenings throughout the year at the preschool. And then what we also have is our proportionate chair, equitable services meeting three times a year and that's where we actually meet with the private preschools here in town. So the private schools here in town, sorry, St. Agnes, Arlington Catholic, Wesley Ellis and New Covenant and also share our child find obligations to let them know if you're suspecting or you have families in your town to refer them to us. So child find requires us to evaluate. I do wanna make sure that there may be, you can be evaluated for a disability, you may have a disability, you may not be eligible for specialized services based on the determination of the team, but that child find obligation is to do the evaluation is not to determine eligibility. Thank you. I also wanted to ask a little bit about, so this is my first year hearing your report on the school committee and I learned a lot about the different SLCs but I did sort of find it kind of glaringly obvious that there are no SLCs for sixth graders. And so in particular, I guess I'm wondering what the thoughts are of the district about particularly with the SLCD that's at Pierce for those fifth graders as they transition into the Gibbs, how are their needs gonna get met? And then more broadly, how does that, the lack of those SLCs at that level, it just seems like it would make what is often a difficult transition for kids and kids who have extra challenges, it could make it even more difficult so I'd like to hear your thinking about that. Sure, so I do wanna clear that up. So we talked about this when we initially were exploring the options of whether we were gonna create a standalone sixth grade school or we were going to create a smaller middle school when the Odyssey was reaching its capacity. So by going to a one year only school, we identified early on that what we lose is those economies of scale. At the elementary school, the cohorts run from fifth grade down to kindergarten. So we can group students within a program, similarly at Odyssey, you can have seventh and eighth graders at the time, sixth, seventh and eighth graders to create cohorts. When you go to a one year model, we lose that large cohort because you might have one student coming out of Dallin's SLCB, you might have three students coming out of Stratton's SLCA, vice versa, right? And each year, that number that, that both that number and that that grouping of students, right, is going to change. So the next year it could be the compass program is sending more students, right? So what we have to do is it's not that we don't have programming to meet those students' needs. What we do is a lot of planning. So beginning at the end of February and in March, what we do is the fifth grade teams from each of the elementary schools meet individually with the Gibbs team and we go over all the IEPs coming out of that school. So all the fifth grade IEPs coming out of the Dallin. We look at what services the student currently has and what they require. So we look and say, does a student receive small group ELA instruction because they're significantly behind grade level and they're working on personally relevant academics and perhaps that's a student coming out of the SLCC or the program for students with intellectual disabilities or is that student receiving small group instruction because they have an emotional impairment and being in a large classroom is really overwhelming, distracting or perhaps they are at grade level but they are in the SLCA and that environment is overstimulating and so they receive small group instruction. So we do that for all of the students coming out of his grade. Generally it's about 90 students we've been averaging who have IEPs each year at the Gibbs program and then we start to build the programming and build the schedules. So if we need small group math for as I said, for grade level but they need small group then we build that into the schedule and programming. If there's a second group that needs small group math because they're significantly below grade level then we build that into the programming. So there is sub separate programming. There could be a student who receives all small group instruction at the Gibbs. There could be students who receive a combination of small group ELA and social studies but then are in co-taught or in just full inclusion general ed class for math and sciences. It's really individual to the student. Great. Any more questions? Yes, Morgan. Can I just ask a follow up question on Ms. Goodall? So when you talked about obligations under child find you talked about kids before they come to kindergarten. Right, like preschools and stuff but that obligation to do child find doesn't stop when they turn five. We're obligated to find them the whole time. Right, that's the equitable services meeting I told you about so that we meet with students who and families of homeschool students, students at St. Agnes, Leslie Ellis, New Covenant and Arlington Catholic are four. So we are there, that's three times a year. The next one's coming up at the end of February I believe and we explain that child find obligation. Any parent who is a resident of Arlington also like I said it's on our website. We receive notification from right over the street, the International Baccalaureate School. They will refer students back to us if they're residents of Arlington for evaluation. So we do continue that throughout. Oh, like what about our students who are in APS? Right, so while our students in APS I mean they're being constantly seen by teachers and so we are looking at our grade level our ACE meetings which are those grade level data meetings. We have our SST which is the student support team where a teacher may bring an individual student that they are struggling to meet their needs and problem solve around that. That's part of our multi-tiered systems of support. We also implement our literacy screeners to see who is performing well below grade level to identify them for intervention. So those are all part of our child find obligation. Okay, thank you. Any more? No? Okay, thank you very much. It's very informative. So next we have Ms. Perez with the onboarding and leadership development. And I'll just give a quick introduction. I'm excited to introduce Kate Perez. She has been working on leadership development and onboarding programming this year. Kate has been working to identify district practices and structures that connect to onboarding school leaders and district leaders. She has also worked on other initiatives such as supporting the district with developing a partnership with the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity which is centered on mentoring current leaders in the district and retention. She has also worked on helping the teaching and learning department with expanding professional learning opportunities for paraprofessionals and APS. She is helping us create systems and structures for future use that will better support people who are currently in APS and future members of APS. Her work has been invaluable this year and she was also the former principal of Hardy Elementary. I'm happy to welcome Kate. Thank you so much. And thank you for the time to be here tonight to talk a little bit about the kinds of things that I've been working on this year. I think that it's been this really wonderful opportunity. To work more systemically on some of the issues that challenge us. And I really have appreciated the ability to work across the district with our building leaders and all of our educators, not just in a building-based way but thinking about the equitable ways that we can put processes in place to help support our staff specifically from my perspective this year. And so as I go through this it's been interesting because it's not something, it's not a role that we've had before. And so it has really come directly from some of the things that we have in our strategic plan and is very much this crossover between HR and teaching and learning and really the ways in which we're trying to continue a lot of the good things that we're doing within Arlington Public Schools and meet the needs also of expectations of the state and DESI. And it really started in the summer with building those relationships with our new administrators. So the first slide is titled Building Relationships because that was a lot of the summer work. We had 14 new administrators who came into Arlington Public Schools this year. That includes principals, assistant principals, directors, special education coordinators and central office staff too. And so there was a great deal of history and information that needed to be shared with people about all of our technical processes and the ways in which we do things but also really just making sure that that personal welcome was there. You know that there was someone to greet them and say, you know we really are happy that you're here and we wanna make sure that you do your best. And so part of that really was also the introduction to the strategic plan and really just assistance with summer tasks. And so that I was uniquely prepared to do that as an administrator myself in Arlington for five years previous to that. So we can go on to the next slide. One of the things that and it's been touched on quite a lot already is this idea of hiring and being able to have the staff and the ways in which we draw our staff into the system. And so we've been working on a lot of things to do this and especially within that area of the paraprofessionals and we've talked already quite a lot about the paraprofessionals tonight. And so this is just a snapshot of some of the things that we've been trying to do. In the summer we were able to have a hiring fair and it was a very collaborative effort in order to try to draw people in. And so not necessarily just paraprofessionals but all our support staff. So thinking about people who work within our food services, the paraprofessionals on all levels, but also connecting with people who perhaps are in some of those harder to place roles. Some of them certified staff as well. And so really being able to put that human into the human resources was helpful this summer. So we have had job fairs in the past in APS and our turnout has been limited. And I think that the numbers were much higher this year because we did work together with all of our different departments including communication and got it out there that we could do some hiring on the spot dependent on background checks and things like that, of course, but that personal outreach really brought people in. And so I think that being able to make sure that we're really front loading with this, these are the things that make Arlington Public Schools special. This is what's going to set us apart from our neighbors who are all going through all of the same things. And so we were able to hire quite a few people that summer based on that kind of personal outreach. And it came from that. A lot of it was really just that working together to make sure that we were casting a wide net. On the next slide, the onboarding piece of what I've been doing has been really something that was putting a lot of very strong or trying to put a lot of very strong systems into place. So, and I should say just in general that a lot of the things that I'll touch on this evening in these presentations are things that we've been working on in Arlington Public Schools for a long time. We have a very strong HR department. We have a very strong teaching and learning department. Working together with all of our building leaders has always been a strength in Arlington. But I think that what we know and see is that there are taxes on the system that make it very hard for people to do those things that they know are good practice. And so as we do the work through the course of the year, really putting those systems into place and documenting them in ways and getting feedback on how they're working so that we will have sustainable plans going forward into the future. And they hit these different categories, pre-boarding, orientation as a part of onboarding, building those strong foundations. This will include mentoring and creating buddy systems and also professional learning and training because we don't wanna confuse the ideas of what is orientation, which is really just this kind of one time, maybe a day or two in which we get the paperwork and the basic structures of you coming on to our system, benefits, et cetera, in place. But then onboarding is really something that is ongoing over the course of a year, two years, sometimes even three years of time. And it's something that we have done really well for our certified staff, for our teachers and special education, all of the people who are working under licenses here in APS. That mentoring system is really strong, that training and development has been something that's been developed and is ongoing for a long time. However, when it comes to some of these other positions that are really critical to the work that we're doing, there's much less attention paid. And so that might include paraprofessionals, but I also wanna be very careful to say that a lot of those people are within our special education department. And you just heard from Ms. Elmer, all of the things that have happened that are trainings with paraprofessionals over the years. So a lot of when I speak about this, it's about creating those equitable structures for everyone over all of our spaces. Next slide, please. And what I've really learned is that those first 30 days of your time in a space are critical. And when we talk to people about their experiences, they're really basic, not very hard questions that they should be able to answer. And so it's interesting that if they can't, right? And so the five questions, and so I didn't make these up, this comes from my research and from working with organizations specifically within the HR realm is like, what do we believe in around here? Well, we have this beautiful strategic plan that we worked on quite and got a lot of input on. So that's something that people should know. And not just that, but what's the culture in your school setting? What is your role here? What are the expectations of your role? Do you really know what it is expected of you? Do you get feedback from the people that work with you? What are your strengths? What are the things you need to work on? Who are your partners? That was a big piece of what happened when I spend time talking to people coming in over the summer, especially, is like, who do I work with? Who do I talk to? If I have a question about this, who do I ask? And so that seems like it should be something that's simple to have in place and sometimes it's just not so much, right? And so we've been working on that. And then also, what does my future here look like? And if people can answer those kinds of basic questions about their work, then they're much better able to engage in that work and stay. Because as been already mentioned too, is that the turnover that we see, especially in roles like paraprofessionals, it's expensive and as we are constantly, constantly getting new people into the system and training them, we don't have those people who are well trained and settled within our system working with our students. So there's definitely statistics and I don't need to bore you with all of them, but one really good one that comes up again and again is that a great onboarding experience can improve employee retention by 82% and productivity by over 70% and that's something that I've seen in lots of different places. Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their employer. So that's why onboarding is important. The next slide please. So again, there has been professional development and professional learning for our pairs for many years, but again I think the key here is additional work and support for them, adding more to that experience and making it consistent. And I've spent a great amount of time doing interviews with individuals and with groups to find out some of the things that people are really looking for in that role. And so the differentiation of it is something that feels important to people. Being able to have choice feels very important, having it be hand-on and personalized. People don't wanna spend a lot of time on Zoom calls we found out. And then also being able to really spend time in their schools with the people that they work with. Pair professionals are often people who are following a very busy schedule and don't necessarily cross paths with each other or with the people who are their supervisors as much as they would like. And so we've spent time adding more and you'll see on this slide, there are more opportunities for our pairs during our choice professional learning sessions that happen on Wednesdays in three and six session courses. We've added additional times that weren't there before. Celebrations of our paras where you see the great sticker that we got from our teaching and learning department. APS loves paras. And also being able to just bring them together for the elementary and the middle level training opportunities on early release conference days and there's some agendas linked in there if you're interested in what that looked like. Much more collaboration with administrators and with people within special education to really pinpoint what they're seeing on the ground and what we need to do in real life to help support the individuals who are working with our students. The interest that is coming from that paraprofessional group is a lot more that has to do with social emotional learning. Things like responsive classroom which we've been given some more information on that. I just had a class that I taught yesterday, early release PD on some of responsive classroom practices and it really overlapped quite a lot with other SEL approaches and it went really well. We're also doing kind of nuts and bolts things like creating a paraprofessional guidebook that's happening with substitute teachers as well being able to share the guidebook for the substitutes so they know what to expect and other things as well that you can see that are included on this slide. The next slide is just some pictures from Town Hall, I don't know if you heard this but that big meeting of all the elementary pairs, there are a lot of them so we needed to find a good big space for them and then also in a very old school way you might see that we collected some feedback. We've noticed that there are some challenges for our pairs in accessing some of the work that we would like to do. For example, it was easier to get everybody to write their feedback on a sticky note at Town Hall than it was to send a form and a Google form because sometimes the ability to access things on the computer is not as easy for our pairs as it might be for others and we see that as a challenge area that we need to work on that for them. Next slide. A big piece of what we're working on is mentoring so DESI has requirements for principal induction and mentoring and there are rubrics that have come from the state and so that's something that has been in place in Arlington in the past as new administrators come into their work here as it has been in other districts in which there were mentor matchups so having a mentor is not a new thing but being able to work with the rubrics and being able to have that induction process be something that has a specific focus on equity is and really anti-racist practices in schools is a somewhat new thing and it's something that not just Arlington but all of our neighboring districts are working on as well and I'm feeling great about this collaboration with Klee if you go to the next slide. As Dr. Ford Walker mentioned we have been able to connect ourselves to a grant with Klee the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity. You might know them as they've been rebranded but this is the organization that has the protocols, the school reform initiative originally way back when it started at Brown University they are based in Rhode Island but they worked with DESI to help write the rubrics for the principal induction program and so they really know where we're going with this and so they have a two-year seed grant through the federal government and we were able to get into that and so the work that we're doing for mentoring is free to APS so we like free and the point is to create the mentoring system the induction program and be able to do that in a way that is sustainable over time and so we have partnerships this year working together. The mentor administrator and the mentee administrator have been working with coaches through Klee doing online work through Canvas and also having peer-to-peer sessions with the whole cohort that is part of this there are about 12 different towns that are doing it and next year the new administrator will become the mentor and will be pulling in hopefully we're working on this right now I actually was just at a meeting this afternoon about this a teacher leader or someone who's interested in becoming a principal or just interested in leadership in general so hopefully that system will continue over time. I hope I've described that well and there are stipends for our mentors and so that's great. Next one, so ELAP is the name of this program it's the equity leader accelerator program and it really is something that is focused on how do we come together to really work on the problems that a lot of us are facing it's not APS specific that there are opportunity gaps and that there are needs that have to do with making sure that we have equitable practices and anti-racist practices in our schools. So next slide, I also fill my days really staying very connected to the schools and just in case you're wondering the I sometimes act as like almost the principal sub right so I do some coverage from time to time and I also have been very open to being there to support administrators as they've asked for it. I've done a lot of thought partnership and support with school improvement planning. I am helping to co-facilitate part of the strategic plan one of the working groups 2.2. I have really enjoyed being a member of the ILT at Gibbs. We started this year and I know you'll hear much more about it a residency program with our DE IBJ department which we started at Gibbs just recently. Hiring is ongoing substitutes specifically in paraprofessionals all through the year and onboarding people as they go into their roles in the middle of the year. I talked about the creation of the guidebooks for many kinds of staff and the facilitation of the responsive classroom class. So those are just some of the things. Next slide. Looking ahead, working with Kaleigh certainly but also really thinking about the development of the documents and how they're going to be something that people are using like we're trying things, we're testing them out, we're asking how it's going but coming into some more committee-like work possibly as we solidify things before the end of the year I'm just continuously collecting that feedback. So those are some of the high points and any questions? Great, thank you very much, any? Just a few more. Good to see you again. Nice to see you again. My strategic planning. I know, partner, group three. Yeah. I think this has been needed for a long time and I'm really glad this program is in place. I'm curious to know how all this happened prior to, Mr. Parrot's coming in here. Rob. No, this is not a criticism. No, I know, as Mr. Parrot, we identified gaps. I mean, I think it was one of the reasons we created this position for this year because we do have some gaps in our onboarding, especially as we were looking at new administrators and paraprofessionals and how can we develop better systems for that? Because we have had a very strong educator teacher mentoring program for years and we wanted to sort of see what can we do. And we did, you know, there has been turnover in paraprofessionals. So it was something that was kind of done at the school level and we would identify mentors for new administrators coming in. Sometimes they were retired principals that we would contract with to provide mentorship. But this has become much more of a, an organized focus of the district this year, I think through Kate's leadership. That's great. And it's in your department, right? Well, we share, it's a combination of HR and teaching and learning. Well, I just want to say, I just want to, this is, I think it's a really important thing because what happens when you go into any administrative position or principal position where you're not getting good help on logistics and procedures and all the things that work, you just call up another principal and bug that. Yes. That may have happened to you. Yes. So I'm really glad this is here. So I just want to say I'm pleased that we're doing this. It's really necessary to have a good functioning district this size. Thank you. More questions? Mr. Schlippen. Yeah, I mean, I agree. This is one of those positions we've needed for a long time. And we're seeing growth now because well, one of the things is when Mr. Thielman and I both came on the committee originally, we were a district about 4,200 kids. Now we're over 6,000. And the administrative structure did not keep up with the growth both in the number of students and the demands that we have under ed reform and increased curriculum needs. So that as we're bringing in new people and redefining roles, it's been critical that we're filling gaps, major gaps that we've had. And one of the things that I've found from talking to folks who are new to the district is that we're viewed as a welcoming district. I know that principles have worked well together in this district in the past and building upon those relationships to bring in more people and create an even bigger community and move some of the district administrative tasks away from the principles and place them here in central office is very important. So I'm very appreciative that you've transitioned from being a building leader in the district to supporting building leaders in this district and the other staff. The one question I have is that we've done a lot of outreach for all sorts and maybe Rob is the person to ask too. But when I was teaching, I was working for a principal who was a Meco parent. She was a Meco parent and her kid was in Arlington. So I'm wondering what kind of connections we're making with our Meco families that would support drawing them into this community because I know that there are a lot of educators who live in Boston that are involved in Meco and could be a resource for us beyond what we can possibly contemplate. Yeah, and I think that's a really good thing to be thinking about. And I think it has to do with how do we set ourselves apart from other communities because there are certain things that we can do that are really critical like pay and benefits and all of those things that we need that we know are the obvious things. But then we also have to really think about like what is our vision and mission and all the things that we're talking about how is it alive here in Arlington and how does that set us apart? So as we continue to do this work of equity across our district, I think that's what people are going to start to see is that this isn't just another thing that people in APS are talking about. This lives and breathes in everything that we do. And so when we look at these really solid curricular practices, when we look at this really high quality education that we're giving to all of our students, not just some of them, then I think that that is really going to start to be a truly strong selling point for come to APS. And we will start to see a more diverse, we talk about wanting our students to be able to see themselves reflected in our staffing. And we don't really have that right now. And so I think we can start to build that when we really do have a community that believes in equity and shows it and calls it out when it's not happening and says we're working really hard to put in place things that will make this a better stronger plan for everyone. And I think it's sort of an expectation that we should have or any district should have is that if we have a diverse student population, our ability to hire from that group is that generation is moving forward. That they come back and want to be here is an important component. I wanna see, it's sort of a family thing that people feel compelled to come back. And I know it's difficult now because of housing costs and competitive salaries and how the teaching profession is not keeping up with other professions in terms of salary compensation benefits. But I hope that the community that we're building here among the students also that will populate the community that we're bringing in as staff members four years after they graduate. Yeah. And I think I would just add to that a little bit about the ways in which we connect with the staff members once they're here. Because I think that we have had times in which we've brought a more diverse staff member into our community and they haven't actually stayed. And so I think that we can continue to put things in place in which we're connecting with those people again on a very human level to say what doing things that are perhaps interviews or check ins or maybe it's working with our administrators on some training on how to do this, but so that we can adjust and try to really have, like midstream we can continue to adjust and change our practices. Like it doesn't always have to start in September on the first day. Like we have to be more fluid in our responses to the needs of our staff. It's not easy being alone or a visible minority within the community. And that's a really challenging thing for us to confront in terms of really making it a welcoming and supportive community beyond our good intent. But I appreciate the focus you're bringing in this position. And I've seen the need for it for a long time and I'm glad you're doing it. Thank you. Thank you. So can you speak at all too? So in the more sort of like practical, I work with a lot of educators and we talk a lot about setting really clear expectations for performance right from the beginning because it's so much easier to be consistent from the beginning than to go and fix it later because it's kind of confusing when you don't address it at the beginning and you come back later and say, well, actually, we really don't like that. So it's always easier to do it sort of start as you intend to go on. And I guess in your conversations with a lot of our new principals, is that sort of sense of being really clear about expectations around performance and especially for paraprofessionals who for some of them, it's not, it may be their first job or in their first five jobs, right? Is that something that you've talked to new principals about and is there anything sort of high level that you can share about any takeaways from that? About the work with the principals specifically. Yeah, yeah. Well, so what we're really lucky about is that our new administrators are not new to administration. And so we've been incredibly fortunate this year to have these wonderful, intelligent, creative people who've come on because they're bringing experiences from their other districts that they've already been very successful in. And Amy Kelly is a perfect example, is that she's someone who came from another district and she did a lot of work with paraprofessionals and their training in her previous district. And so I think pulling on their experiences has really been a highlight of what we're trying to do here and has really helped to support our planning. But yes, we talk about it because I think that it also kind of goes back to that other question is like, who was doing all this work before, right? Well, who was doing it is like all the administrators who were here, right? And so the building principles and the special egg coordinators and directors and all of those people, but I think that there's only so much we can put on people. Like there's only so much you can be responsible for. And I think sometimes, unfortunately, what happens is as our building, and I can speak to this because I was the principal at Hardy, right? So I know how that went is that when you only have so many hours in your day, there are sometimes things that fall by the wayside. And so that person who is the paraprofessional who you just managed to hire who's starting in November and there hasn't been anybody there before. And let's be honest, five years ago that person might have been a certified teacher who was just trying to get their foot in the door and it wasn't as big a problem because they had training. But now these people that are coming in and Allison talked about the agency, like the agencies aren't bringing us like a higher quality of, and I shouldn't know, she's looking at me like, don't say that, but it's true. She's not really, I'm teasing, I'm teasing, I'm teasing, but that it's not that these aren't good, strong people coming in to do their work. They're people who haven't had the same amount of experience as maybe we might have been used to in the past. And it's our responsibility to make sure they have what they need in order to do what's best for our students. And so when there's a thousand and one things happening during the day as a building principal, it can be hard to have that be the thousands and second thing that you have to do. And so I think it really is important that we support our leaders in this work. And so we do, we talk about it a lot and trying to think about sustainable practices that will help to get that put in place. And sometimes it might be solutions that have to do with technology, like some kinds of training could happen in a system in which people could be able to look at some of those things if they're not able to get that personal connection and that can happen throughout the year. It doesn't always have to be the principal who's doing that work, like who are the other people that we can tap to be leaders within the building to help support those people. And you'll see a lot of it, especially within those supported learning communities that we've been talking about tonight, the SLCs, that there are very talented people within those structures who are also helping to do onboarding and training and development and support with people like our SSPs, those paraprofessionals within those programs. So it's still a challenge area. It will continue to be a challenge area, but I think that we've made a lot of great strides this year in trying to meet some of those needs. That's great. And I have one other question, my last question. So in what I do, we know if we can get them, we can get our adjuncts through 12 weeks, the chances of them being successful. Like there's this magic that happens. Like if we can get them there, then they're much more likely to be successful. Do you have a sense of where that is with our paraprofessionals? Is it 30 days? Like you talked about 30 days. Like, cause you've probably been on the ground with more of these like new staff members than anybody we've ever had before. And do you have a sense of like, ish? Like where is it? Is it 20 days? Is it 50 days? Is it a hundred days? I guess it's been a hundred days. Well, so I think there's like, well, right. A hundred days, but not everyone has been here for the hundred days, right? And so it's a moving target. I'm not asking for anything. I'm just like curious what you're kind of like. Well, I guess there's probably two answers to that question. And one I will, I want to recognize just how satisfying it has been for me to have this opportunity to be able to spend so much time like, you know, in those trenches with people and doing things like shadowing a para through their schedule and observing them in their work and then being able to have time to kind of pull back and have a conversation about how did that went? And what are you thinking about? And do some training also with their supervisors about how are we gonna manage this? But I think that there's a piece where it's almost like an immediate thing. Like that first impression means a lot to this group of people. So if we can get them immediately welcomed and feeling that sense of just human belonging initially, like and connecting them with the people who are their team, then that's the first big step, right? And I think we've done a good job with that. And so that for the most part, people will stay past, you know, a few weeks, right? But then after that, it probably is really more of a, like we need a good more like 60 days to kind of dig into that, get into the routines, really start to understand what it is that we're expecting of you. And I think, you know, we really do hope that at the end of this year, we'll have a good amount of the people who started this year, especially within that paraprofessional group, who will want to stay next year. And I think the work within the contract and the talk of compensation and all of that will help support that. We'll be in so much better shape next year if we can really hold on to that pool of people and not have to start what feels like again every year. There are also people who have been in the district for a good long time, and I don't want to discount that, is that we have paraprofessionals who really have been an important part of our programming for years and years and years. And I think that's kind of something that we need to tap into too, is how do we help these people to also, like we talk about teacher leadership, be able to be leaders within their own, you know, group, professional group. So we'll see how that goes. Great, thank you so much. Great. More questions? Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate your report. Thank you Kate. Okay, next we have the superintendent's update. I'd like to begin by thanking the Arlington Police Department, the Gibbs School community, Cindy Sheridan Curran, Brian White, Gibbs School staff and principal Pierre Maxwell as they worked to quickly respond to yesterday's incident at Gibbs School. Madam Pierre Maxwell and her team worked hard to prioritize the safety of students and staff and respond to the situation with the guidance of the Arlington Police Department. The district had additional support on site today for students and staff and we also met with school leaders this morning to review district safety protocols and procedures and to answer questions. I'd like to thank families for your patience yesterday and for the feedback that you have provided to Madam Pierre Maxwell and the superintendent's office. We are appreciative of the feedback provided and suggestions offered. We are currently reviewing all feedback received and working on next steps, which include reviewing district processes, protocols and procedures. We will also be holding a forum for families next Tuesday at 6 p.m. via Zoom. More information, including the Zoom link will be shared with the community tomorrow. Again, thank you to the Gibbs team and to Gibbs families and the community. Yesterday we began our district-wide training for our cohort two teachers who will be teaching EL in grades K to five, beginning in fall 2024. Our special educators, kindergarten paraprofessionals, principals, assistant principals and multilingual learner teachers also participated in yesterday's professional learning session. Educators will be participating in a total of six of these sessions, which are organized and led by the curriculum developer and our PD provider EL Education. We are very excited to launch this partnership with EL Education and to have our educators begin professional development now. Yesterday's session focused on providing an introduction to the curriculum, specifically the systems and structures of the curriculum and the high-level instructional practices, which you've heard of including this evening by the Stratton team. Our kindergarten online registration opened earlier this afternoon. People can visit the district's website to learn more and to register. And thank you to our director of communications and family engagement, Wesley Etienne-Pierre and her team for their work to launch the online registration. Dr. Homan shared the most recent enrollment report and she also shared a projection sheet for your consideration and feedback, which also included recommendations. So please feel free to call or email Dr. Homan directly with any specific feedback or questions that you might have. And that's for the school committee members. And then finally, a huge congratulations to Arlington High School Honors Orchestra and their director, Tino Di Agostino. They were chosen to perform at the Massachusetts Music Educators Association Conference. The performance is scheduled for Thursday, March 21st in Worcester. We're proud of the AHS Honors Orchestra musicians for their high achievement and Mr. Di Agostino and performance arts director, Jing Wei, for their leadership. And that concludes the superintendent's report. Great, any questions? Okay. Moving on, we have first read policies. Mr. Schluckman. Well, it looks like a much longer list than it is in actuality. Within your packets, there's a long list of policies. Some are more trivial than others. And a draft copy of the minutes from our January 24th meeting, which offers more or less an explanation of what we're looking at. For first read right now, there are a couple of things that were of a little more substance. For example, file JLCD, administering medicines for students. That was a request of Dr. Allison Ampey to bring us into compliance with regulations. BEDH, we're revising our public comment to conform to current state law. DI, fiscal accounting and reporting, was requested by the budget subcommittee. We will be, if this policy is approved, changing from monthly financial reports, which are administratively burdensome to a more realistic schedule of reports in October, December, February, April, and June. So basically in every other month's cycle. There were some policies that were recommended by MASC to update, for example, for school meal policies. Now that we're doing universal free school meals, we need to change EFC and EFD to recognize the fact that we're not charging kids for meals and set our policy to conform with the regulations for the universal free meal program. Plus there are some technology adjustments that MASC recommended, which are files EHAA, EHB, GBE, IJND, IJNDB, IJNDC, KDC, and KDCB. Many of them are fairly minor. We're also doing some gender neutrality. Ms. Gittleson has called attention to the policies where we have gender-specific language and we'll be going through them on a regular basis to replace them with gender-neutral language. And the first five in that group right now are ACH, ACR, ACH-R, ADDA, and ADDA-R. So there's a little more detail about what's going on in the minute, so that's what's before you for first read comments, questions, or things that you might want to think about changing. We can do that between now and with a motion to amend it the next meeting. Also note that ACA, non-discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, we requested that the superintendent and town council take another look at it. I'm told that there is a new version that will be brought back to us at the next subcommittee meeting, so more work to do. Any questions or comments? Okay, I actually had some. Okay, so there's a few, some of the ones where you're doing updates at the end, it has a tagline which says this information is current as of May 2014, so we should. That will be updated after, that's a line that we change after we approve it, so we'll have an approval line approved at the meeting of February, whatever. Okay, but the bigger ones are, so first with BEDH, I appreciate that you've tried to address my concerns, but I am still concerned that it does not actually achieve the necessary specificity so that we are not providing a open forum and simultaneously putting restrictions on what people can say, specifically, I think they're ruling, the Spaulding ruling said that we can't provide an open forum and tell people that they can't talk about personnel, and the only way, in my understanding, that we can do it is by circumscribing what can be talked about as stuff that is under our specific domain, and the MASC example policy does that, but so I'd either ask, can you go back and look at that or talk to town council about this? Okay, if you can send the line, would you like the C put in, and we can double check. Okay, yeah, I think it's important we get the policy changed, so if we have an amendment that we can all agree to at the next meeting, we can do it that way. Okay, okay, that's, it's actually really tricky, and actually we're gonna want to have town council or someone come in and talk to all of us to understand what we can and under the new policy, what we can and won't be able to hear because a lot, my understanding is, if we put what MASC is suggesting in place, a lot of what we hear, have heard in the past for public comment isn't actually gonna be covered, and so we need to be all be really clear on what that is because everyone's gonna have to be drawing that line as they become chair and turn, and also so that you're not like going, well, why is a chair not letting these people talk because. So, okay, so that's one thing, and then the other, I think JLCD, the medication one, yeah. So that one I had brought up because I was concerned that we weren't in, I have to find the name, we weren't consistent with, oh God, what, what. At the meeting, the superintendent reported that while our language was vague, it's certainly in referencing the state policy conforms to what we need to have. Okay, have we had town council check that? I don't think so. Okay, I would ask that we have town council. Just, I think the regulatory part is a little ambiguous to me because it talks about policies and procedures and it talks about policies and it's not clear to me if we have procedures in place that aren't public but that everyone knows about if that's enough or if it all has to be in policy. So I just like someone to make sure that again we're doing this correctly. Yeah, that was what the superintendent said is that it was of her opinion, I don't know if she talked to cancel about that but she was pretty firm about saying that while we had at this point by referencing procedures and regulations that we're acknowledging them and we're following them. Okay, I'd still like to be sure. That's fine. So, okay, anybody else? Okay, seeing none, we will move on. Next we have, and don't worry about somehow the paragraphs about the consent agenda ended up in a bunch of the different things. So next we need to discuss a potential change of our school committee meeting in March. I would like to propose rescheduling it from March 28th to March 31st. We're doing this to accommodate a change in our budget in the superintendent's proposed budget and then our budget approval process. Mr. Cardin can give an update on that when we get to budget. But- So moved. Second. Any abstent- I mean, any- Oh, then you'll have to do a roll call. I know I have to do a roll call but first, anyone have any discussion or comments? I assume this is in order to better have a meeting deadline for getting a budget book before town meeting and dotting our eyes and crossing our T's with the test side. Yes, yes. It sounds reasonable to me. Okay. All in favor, this is a roll call vote. Ms. Gittleson? I get it. Ms. Eckston? Mr. Cardin? Yes. Ms. Morgan? Yes. Mr. Thielman? Yes. Mr. Flickman? Yes. And I also vote yes, so that's unanimous. So our school committee meeting of the 28th will now be held on the 21st. Next we have the consent agenda. So all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Warrant number 24194, $770,545.81, dated February 6th, 2024. Regular school committee meeting, draft minutes of January 25th, 2024. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor, roll call vote. Ms. Gittleson? You're muted. You're muted. I didn't, sorry, I was pricing in. Yes. Ms. Exton? Yes. Mr. Cardin? Yes. Ms. Morgan? Yes. Mr. Thielman? Yes. Mr. Schlickman? Yes. And I also vote yes, so that's unanimous. And now we go to subcommittee and liaison reports. Budget, Mr. Cardin. Hi, yes. So as all of you know, Mr. Mason had a baby. He's on parental leave. And came a little bit earlier than expected. So the team is still working on the budget. It was originally supposed to be presented tonight, but we are delaying. And the revised schedule, I don't have it written down, sorry, but we will present the budget, they will present the budget February 29th. The hearing will then be on March 14th and the March 21st meeting that we just rescheduled will be when we will approve the budget. We will go to finance committee that following Monday on March 25th. So things are a little bit tighter than normal, but it wasn't ready for tonight. So that's how we worked it out. There will be a budget subcommittee meeting over February break on the 22nd. We have another one scheduled for the 26th in case that's needed. And the budget will most likely be a little bit shorter, a little bit less granular than perhaps in the past, but it will have all the information we need to make our decisions. We may add a budget subcommittee meeting to which, I mean, everyone's always invited, but we will specifically invite the committee if there's any concern, anything more they wanna discuss about the budget during the week of March 4th. So that's in between the 29th and the 14th, just to give us an extra chance when we can all discuss things since we can't do it off camera, okay? Committee relations. That's a question. We're 29th to the 4th, are we having a, this is a chance for us to talk to the superintendent or at least that? The budget subcommittee meeting would be a chance for us to discuss the budget. If there's anything people. On the, what date is it? The week of the 4th, we'll schedule. The week of the 4th, yeah, so the 14th, the 14th is our budget securing. It's also time to give feedback on the budget, but they will only have a week to turn around the budget after that. So if we get the budget on the 29th and there's significant things we want changed, then we should do that at our budget subcommittee meeting on the 4th, that week of the 4th, it's not scheduled yet. Okay, I just wanna know the concept. I just wanna know if there's a date. Okay, thank you. Yeah, no, there's not a date for that one yet. So, okay, so community relations, Ms. Ecksten. There will be a school committee chat on Tuesday, February 27th at 9 a.m. on Zoom. There will be two school committee members and some administrators present and the topic is special education. And I still have not heard anything more about appointing school committee representatives to the Rainbow Commission. Okay, I'll send the information. Thanks. Okay, curriculum instruction accountability. No report. Okay, facilities. No report. Policy and procedure, we've already done. We've already done. Okay, high school building committee. We met on Tuesday. We'll have an updated schedule announcement from the superintendent in a short amount of time. Updated building schedule. Yeah, okay. Liaison reports saying none. And announcements and future agenda items. Okay, so now we're going into executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and or non-union in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. Collective bargaining may also be conducted and this is for the purpose of unit A negotiations. Roll call vote, Ms. Gillil. Oops. So moved. So a second, second, okay. Okay, okay. Roll call vote. Roll call was starting him. Ms. Gettleson, Ms. Eckston, Mr. Cardin. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Slick. Yes. And I also vote yes. Okay, so we're going and we will not be returning after executive session. Executive session, so.