 Thank you. If everyone would take their seats, please. My name is John Leone. I'll be your moderator for the night. Unfortunately, I won't have his skills or his practice or his perch on the stage, but we'll try to run as open and democratic a meeting as possible. My name is Paul Schlichterman. I am the chair of the Arlington School Committee. My six colleagues are sitting to my left. We are starting a process here tonight. We are not coming to conclusions. We are not near any conclusions. We are at the beginning stages of looking at a vexing problem which derives from the utter popularity of this town. Arlington is such a wonderful place to live that people want to buy houses and rent apartments and live here and raise a family here. And that has put us in a position where we've had an enrollment increase from about 3700 at the beginning of Ed reform. We're now about 5,400 now. 5354 is about what will probably come in at this year with the October 1 count, which is the official number. And we have been warned that we need to be able to expect another 1,000 children to come into this town and populate our schools in the next 10 years. So, I mean, if you're going to have a problem, this is a good problem to have that you're well loved and popular, but it's going to be a problem that we're all going to have to wrestle with. And it's not one board's alone. It doesn't belong to the school committee. It doesn't belong just to the select committee or the finance committee or the capital planning committee or the permanent town building committee or the redevelopment board or town meeting. It's a problem that we all have to deal with as a community because we will all have a piece to play in finding and approving the eventual solutions to the challenges that face us, which is why we're here tonight. It's not good enough for us to sit in the school committee room and discuss this among ourselves. We want this initial presentation, and that's what this is, an initial presentation to be before as wide an audience as possible so that every person in town can think about the data, think about the options, think creatively about what we can do and participate in the process going forth. I know that we have an event at Arlington High this evening and that people who wanted to be here are also at a parent's night at the high school. Well, that's okay. I'm glad that they're at the high school participating with their students. They can watch this tape and we commit to having as many opportunities for as many people to express their opinions on this topic as possible as we're going through. I also want to note that there's one big variable that we do not have the answer for right now, and that is Arlington High School and the urgent need to renovate Arlington High. We have an application before the state in order to do that, the solutions we come with in terms of fixing Arlington High and maybe a reconfiguration there as well. When we're in that process with the state, we may come with options that are not apparent or not things that we can decide by ourselves. Lots of decisions to be made, lots of unknowns ahead of us, but there are decisions that we will need to make, the town will need to make, town meeting will need to make, and the voters will need to make. So let's start by learning tonight. The way I anticipate doing the meeting is having both presentations from Mr. McKibbin and from Ms. Cowles followed by one quick round through the school committee with questions and through the boards to the town meeting members to the general public. When we get through this, if somebody says something you agree with later on, feel free to say I agree with that point and not articulate it again just because there are so many people and I want as many people to have a voice tonight, but we're not stopping here. There will be plenty more opportunities. If you're watching on cable, if you're hearing about this later, you too will have an opportunity to learn about this, to voice your opinion as we're moving forward over the next few years when we will make the decisions. And with that I would like to start by introducing our superintendent, Dr. Bode. Good evening and thank you all for being here this evening. Just to give a little context to why we are where we are, as Mr. Schlickman mentioned, we have seen enrollment growth over the last decade. And in fact, in the last five years, we've had enrollment growth of over 450 students. If we were to add what we are seeing right now before October 1 numbers are finalized, we probably are in the high 500s. Now that is larger than any of our elementary schools right now, so it's a lot of students. And as a result, all of our schools right now are at or near capacity, probably a little bit more space at the Stratton School, but nonetheless still getting close to near capacity. So last winter, we saw it biz to do a space and enrollment study. And we were able to contract with HMFH architects and have the services of one of their principal architects, Lori Coles, who many of you in Arlington probably know as the architect for our beautiful Thompson School. So we're very pleased to be working with Lori again and also Ms. Coles worked with us in doing an analysis of the high school space as well. So this evening, we will be hearing both from Ms. Coles and from Dr. McKibbin, who is a demographer that works with HMFH. Our intent was to have another enrollment study done just to corroborate what we were seeing in our own projections. He will explain his methodology, which was different than the methodology the school department uses, which is a pretty traditional way that you do projections in school systems. But as Mr. Schlickman said, one of the findings of this forecasting is that we are going to see a significant enrollment in the next 10 years. What we've been seeing in the last few years is sort of a 2%, sometimes one year might be three, another year might be one. But if you were taking an average over the last few years, we're looking at slightly over a 2% increase. So with one or only one other comment, then I'll ask, we'll begin the presentation. We decided somewhat at the last minute to produce the report. I will say there's one part that's missing from it. It's the appendix with the floor plans of the schools, which we didn't feel it was necessary to have for this evening. The reason we wanted to have a hard copy is we were concerned that perhaps some people would have difficulty seeing the numbers on the screen and thought it would be better to have something in your hand to look at. But if you'd like to see all the floor plans, we have this report on our website, and it's under the section called announcements, as is the actual, Dr. McKibbin's report is embedded in the report that we presented tonight, but we also have that separately identified as well on the website. So I would like to introduce Ms. Lori Coles. We began working with the school department earlier this year, identifying where we could possibly handle all of these students as the main charge. So also, as Kathy has mentioned, I've brought with me Dr. McKibbin, and he will speak directly to the demography work that he has done for you and how that informed the work that I proceeded to do. I just want to give a brief outline. We intend to start with the enrollment projections. I will discuss sort of an overview of what we did in this planning process and sort of the background work that we did to understand the conditions at the all the school buildings, the sites, and so on, and then lead into the schemes that we've developed so far, and I say so far because there's always another tweak or a different way of doing something, but the way to start looking at this is to start and to begin to take each situation as it comes along and think about how it affects the next situation, meaning over the years. So that's our plan, and I am going to turn this over to Dr. McKibbin, and I'm going to flip the screen in one second. Thank you, Laurie, Dr. Bodie, ladies and gentlemen of the board. I'm going to go over the population enrollment forecasts for the district and I do this in a step-wise progression. One, first I have to explain, these are forecasts, not projections. Projections where you take past trends or variables, enrollment change from year to year, grade to grade, basically hold it constant, maybe add one or two variables into it and drive it out in the future. The only way a projection can be correct is if the socio-demographic economic factors of the previous five years stay constant for the next five or ten years, which is why they're so rarely right. A forecast is where you develop parameters, and you set socio-economic demographic parameters, and if these hold and are not violated, you should have forecasts at the district level that stay within a two percent band over the ten years. So the other thing is the two-step procedure. We first do a full population forecast for each of the attendance areas, some to the district, and the results of that population forecast then drive the enrollment forecast. It's based on your demographic dynamics, not your past history. So step one is to understand what the assumptions are, and I want to go through them all, but I'll dwell on the key ones. First is we don't go into recession. Second one is, and this is a very key one, particularly for Arlington, the 30-year fixed home mortgage rate stays below 5.5 percent over the next ten years. Now, why is this such an important variable? It's because in migration into the district, if you're going to buy a home, there's a lot of people who want to move into Arlington, but also becomes the question, can they get a mortgage? Can they be able to pay it off? Now, what's the mortgage approval rate? Now, five percent's what we call a tipping point. The same thing will work with unemployment rate also. If you go above five percent, that's when you start seeing a drag on home lending and young home buyers are going to have trouble making the payment or getting mortgages. There's a bit of a generational gap in this, too. Those of us who live through the 70s, 80s, and 90s who remember 30-year fixed being at 8, 9, 10, 11 percent, five percent sounds pretty good, okay? To this generation of the last ten years, it's seen nothing but 3.5, 3.0, 4.0, five sounds like highway robbery. So also, you get to remember, this generation's loaded up with a lot of college debt, too, so their debt structure is a lot different than those when we were younger. But we've calculated that at five percent, that's when you start seeing a drag on the housing market. Now, if it goes to 5.1, 5.2, stays there for a couple of months, drops back down, it's a slight drag. If it goes to 8 percent, your housing market will probably come to a screeching halt. So we assume that during these forecasts, it stays below 5 percent. And if Janet Yellen keeps at the current rate, that's a pretty safe face of assumption right now. The rate of mortgage approval stays at 99-02 levels, and we don't return to subprime mortgage practices, wide 99-2002. That was before the lending boom of the last decade. We've lost collectively, I think it was $16 trillion in the subprime bubble, busting, so we're pretty safe on this one. No additional restrictions on home mortgage lenders or additional bankruptcies of major credit providers. The main focus here is Freddie and Fannie. They now back 85 percent of the new home mortgage, particularly for starter homes in the U.S. So as long as Freddie and Fannie stay solvent and don't have trouble, we'll still have a lending market out there. The rate of foreclosures has done exceed 125 percent of the 0507 average, again, pre-lending bubble from Middlesex County for the year of the forecast. Full disclosure, for our housing data, we use Zillow and RealtyTrack. You can get both of them down to the parcel level. Most people don't realize that everything about your house is public domain data. We like to always use two data sets. Zillow does a better job on existing home sales and new home sales. RealtyTrack does a better job on foreclosures, and we're tracking that. Right now, you're running at about 109 percent of that average, so you're in pretty good shape on that one. All currently planned, planned and approved housing developments are built out and occupied or completed by 2023 and occupied by 2025. If there's any additional housing units that are planted in 2017, 18, 19, that are going to come online two or three years, that would need to be added to the forecast. Or conversely, if any of the ones that are approved now decided not to build, that needs to be subtracted from the forecast. As we saw in the last building bubble and collapse, it can go both ways. The unemployment rate from Metropolitan Boston stays below 6 percent. Again, that's a tipping point number. If it goes to 6.4, 6.5, a couple of months drops back down as a slight drag. If it goes to 9, 10, 11 percent, it's a big problem. You've got to have a job, you get a mortgage to buy a house, and that's one of the fundamental assumptions there. The rate of students transferring in and out of the public schools remains the same. We hold all your administrative policies constant, and there's a reason why we do that. That way, when you see the changes in the enrollment of the population, it's due to demographic factors, not administrative changes. If the district decides to change attendance area boundaries or move programs from one school to another or have more kids come from out of the district, we have no idea if you're going to do that three or four years of the future. Again, if you make an administrative policy change, you would need to add or subtract those from the forecast results. The buffer zone assignments stay the same. Inflation late for gas ring stays below 5 percent. No building moratorium. Business stays viable. Another key one here, the number of existing home sales in the district that are resolved to stress sales underwater mortgages will not exceed 20 percent total home sales. You're running about again 9 percent here, according to the realtor acts. It's not that bad. Housing turnover rate, and this is probably your most important variable right here. Sale of existing homes in the district remain at current levels. The majority of existing homes made by homeowners over the age of 55. 90 percent of your housing market is existing home sales, just like every place else in the country. If you saw the numbers that came out this week on new and existing home sales, existing home sales were down. New home sales were up. Existing home sales were 5.5 million. New home sales were 550,000. It's a nine, 10 to one margin and probably going to be an even bigger ratio as more boomers start downsizing. Existing home sales is your number one driver of population change, not new home construction. Now, most turnover, and this is a very key aspect for your housing market and you're in migration. You'll see a slight uptick at 62. You'll see a slight uptick at 65. Most people don't downsize their houses till they're in their 70s. It's not retirement that's the main driver. It's the death of one of the spouses. That's why we look at mortality rates. When we do the population forecast, it gives us an idea of how many houses will come on the market. And then, you know, the children will say, you know, the house is too big. It's, you know, come move close to us, put it on the market. And the number of houses going on the market will dictate both the magnitude and the type of your immigration. Private homeschool attendance rates remain constant, both a little bit in the last four or five years. Recent decline in home construction has ended and rates have stabilized and there's no foreclosure of commercial property over the next 10 years, basically remain 0407 averages. Now, these are the broad assumptions. We'll have other assumptions as we go in and we get to look like individual areas. But the first step here is to calculate the population forecast. And how we do that is our first step is we take your current elementary attendance area boundaries, superimpose that on 2010 census geography, figure out what tracks and blocks and block groups make up each attendance area, and pull the entire census and develop a demographic profile for each individual attendance area. All of our models are built by your attendance areas. We don't use national models, regional models, state models, we're generalizations, all the data is on this area. And I know immediately someone's going to say 2010 data, that's five years old. What good is that? Well, I'm going to get to that in a second. It's actually a powerful data and very useful. But what we do is develop a demographic profile for each area. And the most important variable, in fact it probably has about 40% of the explanatory value in the forecast, is the age distribution of the population. And this I want to introduce you to the population pyramid. This is the 2010 census. This is the district. We call this your demographic fingerprint. No two geographic areas have the same size and shape of population pyramid. It shows unique age distribution. And they're real easy to read. That zero to four bar, that's your preschool. That's your elementary, middle, high school. 20 through 34, family formation ages. 70 to 80% of all births occurred women between the ages of 20 and 34. Birth rates in this country haven't changed that much in the last 40 years, staying a real tight 10% band. Most of the change in birth, number of births in the area is not due to change in birth rate, but number of women in prime child bearing age. Ages 35 through 55, these are the ages where most households have kids in school. Could be elementary, could be middle, could be high school. 55 through 69 are your empty nest households. And over 70 are your potential turnover households. Okay? Now, the first thing we do, we do a forecast. We look at what we call a dummy forecast. If nothing happens, nobody moves. No end migration, no out migration. What would happen? And you'll note here, your zero to four bar is bigger than your five to nine. We're now five years later. These zero to four are now five. That's your elementary age population. So your elementary enrollment has grown. Of course it has. It better have because you had bigger cohorts going in. Just like you had more middle school, more high school, you have larger cohorts aging into it. And again, we'll revisit this point again later as well. So this is expected growth that will compare that to what you actually had. And the residual will be your either in or out migration. Okay? Same thing for middle, same thing for high. Now, you don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out where your out migration is. Your biggest out migration flow is 18 to 22 year olds. Better than 80% of your high school graduates go on to post-secondary education. And they graduate, they go away, and they don't come back. So they're not here to produce the next generation of school age kids. So these are in migrants. And most of the in migrants who are coming in over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years did not grow up in Arlington. They're from someplace else. And you also have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out that over the next 10 years, the fastest growing household type in the district is going to be empty nest households. At the same time, you're going to see a growing number of households move into turnover ages. But the peak of that won't hit till after 2025, which is beyond the scope of this forecast. So we'll get there. You're seeing the very beginnings of that major turnover phase starting at the end of the forecast series. And then you'll see an increase there. So the key point is, is having enough people moving in, bringing kids with them, and maybe having a few after they come here, to replace those who are aging out. The in migration is the key factor. Your population alone as it's structured right now does not have enough women and prime childbearing age to produce grade cohorts the size you need in migration. In fact, if you have zero migration, you're almost start dropping the next day. It's you're that's that critical for it. Now quickly, I want to go through each one of the attendance areas. And this is again, the district average. And this is one reason why we use district averages. You'll notice that all of them are different. Okay, this is Bishop and then it's associated buffer zone. An older population, their peak is 45 now in the early 50s, really empty nesting. And you'll notice the zero to four bar is about the same size as five to nine. Okay, so if you've seen enrollment growth in Bishop over the last five years, it had to be due to in migration. There was not a natural bubble coming in or wave coming in from the zero to four population. Same situation with Bracken, smaller population. The population of your attendance areas are very varied. They're not equal at all. But again, bigger dearth here in the 20s and 25s again, makes it much more dependent upon immigration, because the fertility wouldn't be high enough to produce those same size cohorts. Dowling the buffer zone, a similar situation, a little bit younger. Peak is now in their late 40s. The problem is this we start looking at households in the district and people will always fall back on anecdotal information. You see a house down there, the Smiths of the Jones may live there, but they're not empty nests, but they may be empty nest of elementary kids because they're all in middle school or high school. They may be empty nest of elementary middle school. So you have to expand your definition of empty nesting too as it goes through the life course. Okay, so a lot of the households here will still have kids in school. They just may not be elementary. Hardy in the buffer zone. This is also the area has the highest number of rental properties in it. This is why we very, very key variable. There is single family detached homes. There's rental property. Renters move an average year every 18 months. Homeowners move an average every nine and a half years. They have two completely different dynamics. Homeowners are older, tend to have established families. Renters tend to be younger, still having children, and probably will move sometime in the future. And note this area with a high, relative high number of people in prime childbearing age has the biggest zero to four way. Now the thing with apartments, they may be born there, but once that first child or the second one gets to age four or five, then they start looking for a house to live in. Most people, if they have the economic resources, don't want to raise their kid in an apartment, want to have a house. So you wouldn't see this much enrollment rise over five years, because many of these will have moved out of the apartments and gone to houses, either other places within the district might be first choice or someplace from the surrounding towns. But this is where a lot of your preschool waves coming in from. Pierce, again, you see a bit of the zero to four wave here. Probably the most equal distribution, you still see a peak here in the 40s, but a little higher percentage in the 20s and early 30s. So more women in prime childbearing age, and then of course, Stratton, not much of a preschool wave coming in. And again, the peak of the population is now in their 50s. Your fastest growing household type over the next 10 years will be emptiness householders over the age of 50. Some may move out, but not enough. You may see people move away. The question is not so much, are they moving away? But how soon after their last kid graduates high school and how fast and how many of them? The magnitude is the key point here. Then finally, Thompson, again, another area that has rental property in it, and you see the large zero to four wave coming in. So when you look back, we've grown the last five years in enrollment. The first thing I look at is, should you have grown? And how much should you have grown without in migration? And we can establish that number from the 2010 census. We just bring everything forward five years, because we're exactly five years from the census now. So again, it's like balancing your checkbook. You have to have an opening balance to start with, and that's what we use the census for, and that's where we work all our calculations off of. We also look at, this is a forecasted population change for the district, 2.3% pop growth to this year, and then 2.2 towards the end of the decade. And then it's spread quite a bit over the different ones. Hardy growing the fastest over this period, Bishop growing the slowest, and you'll see a very, very, well, I'll get Thompson in there too. There's a very strong correlation between the median age of an area and how fast the population is growing. If you have an area where the median age is in their 40s and they have a lot of kids in middle school and elementary, slower population, why? Because they're empty nesting. The Smith House, which has four people in it now, is only going to have two people in it five years from now. That's why we don't use the housing unit method. It doesn't have an outmigration component in it. It assumes that household size stays the same. It doesn't. In fact, household size as a rule tends to drop the longer the occupants have been in there. Also look at household characteristics, and you'll see there's a variation throughout the district. And people find this most surprising. Only about 28% of the households in Arlington have under 18 population. That's under 18 population. That's not school age. That's just under 18. School age is probably closer, like 23%. Average household size, 2.2. But it runs the gamut from 2.07 in peers to as high as 256 in Dowling. Again, you'll find this real strong correlation between age structure of the population, their household size, household population. We take out group quarters. We're looking at people in the households. That's probably pretty close to probably getting up close to 20,000 households now at this point with your building. Percent of householders 35 to 54. Again, these are the ages where most people have kids in school. 41.7% at the census. It's been dropping slightly since then. Percent of homeowners 65 and older, 24%. Again, quite a range here within the district. And then home owners. And this gives us a proxy of how many of these over 65 are home owners. If they're in elder housing or rental property, it tends to be if they move out, other elder will move in. We're looking for homeowners that have been there for a long time. And when they move out, a new young family will move in. Single person households 34% are single person households in the district. But 12% are single and over 65. Again, a proxy number of this is usually households if they're a single person detached homes, where the spouse has probably already died. And this gives us an idea of what percentage of households are probably going to come on the market. Again, Bishop has the greatest percentage as they get farther into the 70s. If they're just going into the 70s now, it's going to take a while. We're all living a little longer. So it might be more late 70s before they start turning over. And then this is my favorite one. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the population count by individual age for each of the attendance area. And this shows you the relative cohort size. And you can see basically in 2010, this is kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and you do it for each one of the attendance area districts as a whole. But as you can see from 2010, if these size cohorts are going on the middle school and these size cohorts are going to come in, you're almost going to grow. Because they're already here. You have large cohorts replacing small cohorts. That's going to vary from attendance area to attendance area. Again, look at Thompson's a great example. You have cohorts in the 60s, 70s, 50s. That one big one here in the 90s. And 100, 140 coming in if they all stay put. Conversely, you have a place like Pierce where it's relatively flat. But it also gives us something else we can look at too. Notice here in Pierce, 50s, 74, 62. Sometimes you'll have a one-year large cohort. When you use the old cohort survival method, you'll see this big cohort come in. It's growth. Well, isn't it or isn't it? It may just be a one-year big cohort and tracks that. That's exactly what it was in that aspect. It could be more even. So what we do is we do what we call a market share. Let me give you example of the district level next. This is taking... We do these for each one of the attendance areas. This is the easiest one to show. This is your 2010 enrollment. That's what they counted the 2010 census. And we can calculate then a market share, kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth, fifth. And we can track that cohort through time. They're now first graders in 11, second graders in 12, third graders in 13, fourth grade last year. And we can see how the percentage changes. And if the percentage goes up, you've had a migration. If the percentage goes down, you've had out migration. And with this information, you can then do an imputation on an age-specific migration model. How? Well, it's been my experience that when a third grader moves, they tend to take the whole family with them. So pretty safe bet. Well, sometimes they don't, but that's another story. But you can also look at, okay, here's what you've got for kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth, fifth in 2010. And this would be kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth, fifth in 2015, or whichever correspondent you want to do. And see what the cohort should have been. And if you take this number K through five and compare it to this number K through five and look at the difference, it's almost exactly what your elementary enrollment growth was over the last four years, which tells me that about 85% of your enrollment growth in the last five years are kids that already lived here. And the other 15% is net immigration. Most demographic correlations associations are not real time. Not households moving in, not households being built. There's tend to be a delayed reaction. For example, if a family moves into the district and they have household formations complete, their kids are age five and older, you see the immediate impact total of that household on your enrollment right there. Okay, three kids, boom, they're in your school the next year. If they're a young couple moving in and haven't had their kids yet, or they have one that's a preschooler, maybe have another one there later, you may not see the full impact of that household moving into your district for three, five, seven years. Okay, so the problem is people will see things anecdotally and what they see is correct. I mean, I've never heard anybody at a school board meeting tell me something that's not right about their district. The problem is they think that the impact is immediate in real time and they want to generalize it to the entire population and they only look at one or two variables and there's actually about 25 out there you'd be looking at. Okay, but this will tell us empirically how your population is doing and actually measure what is the net impact of the new housing construction and more importantly the existing home sales. And you'll notice that you're averaging probably in the high 80s, which is pretty normal for an inner ring suburban school district. I think the highest I've ever seen is like 96%, there's some other ones I've seen is low in the low 70s, but no one has 100%. You've got private school, you've got home school, you know, out of district transfers, whatever the case may be. So high 80s is probably pretty normal. So now this is probably what's thrown a lot of people off. Notice there your new home construction that's going from 40 up to 120, probably do 120 this year too. You see this increase in home construction over the last five years and you want to assume, okay, that's what's causing our enrollment growth. It's not. Okay, it may later, but not right now. You know, of course a lot of us has apartments too. So again, there's going to be a two, three, sometimes five year lag on that. Each, this is for the district as a total, each of the attendance there is also in your report has a, the full population forecast. This is total, there's male and female above it, but a couple of key things here. One is median age, 41.8 for the district heading for 43, okay. When your median age gets above 40, it's real tough to grow. You're going to have to have a lot of migration to compensate for that because most people are done having kids at that time. So we also look at number of births and deaths. This is for the period 2010, 2015, 2400 births, 1900 deaths, natural increase, 500 net migration, 610. And you'll notice that the birth go down and the deaths go up slightly. Well, the deaths go up because you're getting older and the births go down because it's fewer people perhaps child growing age. Now someone's going to notice 610 people migration for five years. That's way too low net migration, okay. Net is, here's number of people moving in, my number of people moving out. Your total migrants is for the five year period. You're probably looking at about, I'd say about 5000 moving in and about 4,400 moving out, okay. And again, most are out migration, 18 to 22 year olds and the over 70s. Most are in migration, 25 to 40 year olds and zero to fours, okay. But the net impact, let's just get to remember, because everybody can tell me where the growth is to where people are moving in. They won't tell me where the decline is and you have to look at both sides of the equation if you're going to get it right, okay. So the results of these population forecasts then drive the enrollment forecast, okay. Now there's another aspect here I have to introduce you to and the analogy I use is a bucket of water, okay. If I have a bucket of water and I'm pouring water in the top and there's a hole in the bottom of the bucket, think in migration out migration. If I'm pouring water in the top faster it's going out that hole in the bottom the level is going to rise. But if for some reason that hole in the bottom gets bigger and the water is now going out faster than I'm pouring it in, even if I'm pouring it at the same rate the level is going to drop. Enrollment works the same way. You're looking at year to year changes. What's the number of students graduating out versus the number of students coming in? Why is your overall growth slowing down after the end of the decade? Very, very simple. You're going from high school senior classes of around 300 to heading to almost 400. The hole in the bottom of the bucket is getting bigger. So even if people move in at the same rate, same number of kids, I have that effect on people. Look at the kindergarten, the first grade doesn't really change that much but most of this slowdown is due to larger cohorts graduating out. So that's why you see this this bending trend and you see it more in the in the elementary grades because again you're going from basically close to 400 fifth grade cohorts to 500. People keep moving in having kids. That's why you can't keep growing forever. And you you top off about 2019, 2020 and slowly decline. Having said that I want you to note that you go from 2884 last year to forecast in 3033 in 2024. So yes you have that arc pattern but if you have space and facility issues now you're going to have space and facility issues 10 years from now too. You're not going to be saved by a demographic downturn. Indeed in fact you see the wave continue to go into your middle school 1100 peaking almost 1500 not quite getting there before it starts turning and at the high school 1200 to about 1600 and of all the numbers I have up there the 12th grade or the high school forecast I have the most confidence in. Why is that? Because almost 90% of that growth are kids that already live in the district. They don't have to move anywhere they're already here. It's just bigger cohorts going through. So you're pretty much going to go to about 1600 high school in the next 10 years as these larger cohorts start aging into your your school. Now one of the procedures we do with all of our forecasts and we've done over a thousand school districts in 23 states over the country over the last 25 years. For the first three years after due the forecast we contact the district the next fall have them send us their official fall numbers and we do performance evaluations. We've been doing this for years. We want to see how we're doing. Have the assumptions been violated? Is it administrative change? Is it demographic change? And kind of help the school district and the administration the board and the community understand what's going on. Now we have preliminary numbers for this year. This will change a little bit. But this is the evaluation against this year's ADM numbers and our forecast for 86 students too high about 1.6%. We're hoping that works out a little bit better when the final enrollment numbers come in. Still within our 2% ban. But the thing that really concerns me the most is the kindergarten. Kindergarten came in 69 students below what we forecasted 14%. That's way beyond the bounds. Now we don't use kindergarten to fire our forecast. We use first grade because kindergarten has way too much variability in it. And also you're taking a birth year and you're turning it into a school cohort. When you look at births you get any kind of census data is January 1 to January 1. Whereas the school year is whatever your cutoff day is, some states is June, July, August, whatever it might be. And if you have a year where a high proportion of your births are in the fall, we call it the cold winter effect. You'll see a disproportionately small, like a small cohort in the large one the next year. We're tracking it for this year too after the last winter. So next year when we do the forecast, this number may stay in the low 500 range. But if that is what happened, we'll see a kindergarten number that's back up above 550. So again, that's the big thing here. The first grade was only off by 20. So that's kind of within the bounds. It's pretty close at that point. But for all in all, it's not too bad for the run through. So again, we'll go back and look at an evaluation in fall of 2016 and tracking. So our tracking growth, you're still growing. You will continue to grow. We just have to keep a close eye on your cohort sizes. And when the official October numbers do come in, we'll put together a final review. But we did this by school too, by the way. We'll send the district a final revised evaluation for the first year of the forecast. Thank you very much, Jerry. So that was a lot of information. I've heard it a lot and it's a lot to process. So speaking of process, that's what I want to go over with you all is what did we do in this space planning effort. Concurrent. I was doing some work concurrently while the forecasts were being developed and surely the forecasts are one of the first things that are the most important thing. Everything I'm going to show you you have in your packet is a lot of numbers and I don't expect you to be able to read them as much as we tried to blow them up as much as possible. But the colors are helpful. So what I did was I took Jerry's lots of information and numbers and called it down to some peak numbers and where, stress points are going to happen and at what schools and when. So what you're seeing here is the first five-year numbers and where the growth is happening, Brackett, Hardy, and Thompson, also at Audison and Arlington High School. This is a five-year change. You're looking at, you know, 87 more children at Brackett, 113 more at Hardy, 110 more at Thompson in five years. And then looking down to Audison, you're getting another additional 200 plus and at the high school over 150. The yellow highlighted numbers are the change that happen in the next five years. So that's showing that what again was an outcome of the forecast is we have a wave. We have a wave going through the system and what's happening is your elementary's are growing first and that cohort of children are going to move into your middle school and then move into your high school. And so the yellow that you're seeing here is showing that continued growth. So on top of the 200 or so children at the middle school, another 150 plus would be coming in. Similarly, on top of the 154 at the high school in the first five years, it's projected to be another 226 students. So I just want to click to everyone's favorite image which unfortunately I forgot to put in the report. It will be on the website and on the report next time. But Kathy likes this one a lot. This one is a graphic showing what that chart just said. The first image, they're both a map of the town. The first image is the five-year change and you're seeing schools like Thompson and Hardy. The differential is the blue. And then when you come another five years on top of that, so 10 years out from now, you're seeing that bubble hit your high school, hit your middle school. And there's still, there's still growth. There's still more students at the elementary schools than you have now. But it's not continuing to grow. I'm not going to probably describe this very well. I'll make Jerry chime in if he needs to. But the interesting thing is we can't all say, oh, good. Oh, good. It's going down. It's going to just double bubble right through here and we'll be all set. If you think about those pyramids that Jerry was showing you, every neighborhood is growing at its different rate. So now we're talking about, again, these particular elementary neighborhoods. But in time, it will be a different neighborhood that's selling their homes with new families coming in with children. So it's something to be aware of. It is a wave. Again, all things being equal that the Boston area and Arlington with it will be economically sound and a place that people want to live. Let's all hope for that. The wave will continue. Home sales will continue to happen. New people will come in. And so it's just keep that in mind because I know a lot of folks would look back to this and say, oh, well, it all levels off there at the elementary schools. We're going to be in good shape. In truth, 10 years from now, the elementary schools will be higher than they are today, even without this growth pushing through still at that age level. Again, that we can forecast. So another step, and I'm not going to go into too much detail. I'm happy to answer questions. Another step that we did in the space planning process was to go to all of the schools, to look at their sites, the property around the schools, to assess what's happening inside and outside the building. Why did we do this? We wanted to understand two things. One, the capacity of the buildings, and two, their ability to be expanded. Can they take an addition? Can they have modulars? Is there a way to grow at this site, at this school? And so, in effect, Cathi already highlighted, generally, most of your elementaries, with the exception of Stratton, are reaching their capacity. The oddison is also more than reaching its capacity. But only some of them have a good outlook for being able to put an addition on. And that has to do with things like the size of the site, the property, the topography around the school. If it's very, you know, rolly hilly, it's hard to actually put an addition on. It also has to do with where you could physically attach to the building. All of these things were looked at at the school buildings. I will preface this conversation that I'm not ignoring the high school, but I did not focus too much on the high school, mainly because we know and hope that it's going to be a project that will get a full feasibility study and assessment in the next year or so. So we just want to preface that. I'm not ignoring it. It's just we really wanted to focus on, first of all, the immediate need at the elementary levels and so on. So, back to that. So the use and capacity, again, I don't need you to be able to read this. They're all in your handout and on the web. What we did was in walking through the school buildings, identified classrooms, how many there are, how they're being used, if there's any additional space in those room in those school buildings. So we hit sort of the key, you know, number of kindergartens, classrooms, art, music. Is there a computer space? Is there an afterschool space? And quantified the number of specialist spaces. And I need to have a big asterisk. Again, you'll see in the report to explain this. The identifier for my thinking about this, about a specialist space, is it a room that's the size of a classroom? So could it be a general classroom? So it's not to say that there's only one specialist space at Bishop. There may be other smaller size rooms that are used by specialists. But that's not what I was looking at. I was purely looking at are there rooms here that could be a general classroom? But the point being, these are all programs that you have. And so they can't become general classrooms all that easily without eliminating a program, moving a program to a different school, things like that. So again, this was just more of a fact finding gathering mission. School acreage, this data, like collected a lot of data from the town's website. And then just looking at, there is a difference with how many students are in the classroom. And therefore, how many students you can accommodate in that school building. So again, just as a diagram, I said, you know, what up there's 25 students per classroom? What up there's 22 students per classroom? So again, all of this is part of a fact finding mission, gathering the information to understand what we have. So we then launched into looking at scenarios, schemes, ideas of how we might accommodate the different enrollment growth needs at different schools. So I'm going to preface this conversation by initially when we were looking at this puzzle, the strat and renovation was in the mix, meaning we were thinking, oh, well, we need to accommodate those students for the one year that the building's being renovated somewhere. Why don't we do that? And it will also solve other problems. The struggle we were coming across at that point was we were making a rush decision about what would affect all of the rest of the decisions you were going to make. So it was decided at the last school committee meeting to, in fact, house the strat and population on the strat and school site in one year temporary modular classrooms. So it sort of solved that need within its project budget. So it became separate from this discussion so that we could then focus on going forward as opposed to feeling tied to making a decision, an immediate decision for strat and that would affect other decisions. I hope that's clear. So one of our schemes is to put modular additions on Hardy and Thompson. The bracket, which is also experience and growth, the concept here is to relocate two program spaces to therefore get classroom spaces at Brackett, which will, at least for the near term, solve the needs at Brackett. I say that very clearly because, and again I know it's hard to see everything on the screen here, but the highlighted, not in gray, but in the light orange, are peak numbers at each of these schools. And so Brackett is projected to continue to go up. So we will need to, if that does, as expected, think a little more about what can happen at Brackett. The more immediate elementary needs are at Hardy and Thompson. And so this scenario assumes that we put additions on those two schools, additions of six classrooms each. And in scheme 1A, those additions are made out of modular construction. Doesn't necessarily cost less, but it's faster. And the difference between scheme 1 and scheme 1A, as you're about to see, is 1A assumes we put those same additions on in permanent traditional construction additions, which will take a year longer. So the next piece of this puzzle, and we've talked a lot about this amongst the group of the school department, is to do with the Gibbs School, formally the East Middle School. And we have gone there. We have looked at the school. We are, as you all are aware, it's fully used right now under leased agreements by very important programs for the community. So all of that being said, this is not an easy thought process, but it is a school-owned property. And if, as things bear out, and we have a thousand more kids in 10 years, we need to be looking at what's available, what's possible. So this scenario looks at using the Gibbs School for the sixth grade. And what that does is allow Audison Middle School to function with a little over a thousand students instead of over 1,500 students, which for any of you that have been to the Audison Middle School would know that 1,500 students is impossible in that building. It's pretty much reached its capacity now. And there's a lot of challenges to considering expanding that building, which we're happy to talk more about. But the idea that in the interim to be able to do the work that's needed at Gibbs, there would be some temporary modules also needed at Audison. That's how pressing their enrollment growth is. And then this assumes the existing sort of 9-12, 9-12th grade high school would go through the process with the state funding agency. And hopefully in that process there will be an agreement on the enrollment numbers that you'll be designing for. Because what we're looking at here, and this is at the end of the page, at 10 years, you're almost at 1,600 students at the high school with no signs of that slowing down yet. Another thing to discuss just on this first slide before we go into the other ones, which is relevant to all of them, is the note stand here with the words comparative costs. These are not cost estimates. These are not numbers to go out and buy something with tomorrow. These are comparative costs between the schemes that we have. So they are relative to each other. They are my best professional guess, but I am not a cost estimator. And they're not based on developed drawings of details of anything. They're based on cost per square foot and sort of rule of thumb numbers. But by that point they're all based on that same thinking. So therefore it's a tool to use for all of us as a comparison between the schemes. Okay, that one's more expensive than the other one. Oh, that'll be less expensive than the other one. That is all it's for. So the next scenario is very similar as far as time frame. And the only difference is the dollars go up a little bit because this is the one that would have permanent traditional construction additions at your two elementary schools. And going on to the next scheme two. So scheme two says, well, what do we do something a little different? What if we just temporarily solve what's needed at the elementary schools? Because we're going to renovate Gibbs for the fifth grade. So I call this one a little bit about kicking the can down the road a little bit because so now we're moving those students out of the already at capacity elementary schools moving that fifth grade into Gibbs. What does that mean? Well, that means now we still need to solve Audison because Audison cannot handle all of its population. And so this scenario says, well, to handle Audison you now move the eighth grade to the high school. And so the eighth grade becomes part of the planning process that you would do with the state for a new high school. And so you would have an 812 campus. So it does, you know, it would solve Audison a little bit later because you would be waiting for that. But again, in the interim, I think I'm showing sort of two different banks of, you know, getting modulars temporarily at Audison until a high school project was put online. The last little note here you're seeing here, we also looked at using Gibbs as a kindergarten school building. And physically, you could make that happen. We believe a couple things. Number one, the renovation would be more costly because I think we all know kindergarten rooms get their own bathrooms. So that's a lot of bathrooms you'd be putting in there. Busing costs would be higher. And we're talking about a three-story building, which is not ideal for your youngest population to be traveling up and down three stories. But we did look at that. It would have the same effect in terms of the rest of the scheme here. It would then alleviate the pressures that are happening at the elementary, move it over to the middle school, then moving the eighth grade over to the high school. So again, a step by step. Now, the other note that's on here that's important is those comparative costs that I've developed. In this scenario, there would be a cost to putting the eighth grade at the high school. So your high school project overall would be a more expensive project. I'm again just projecting a number of what that might be. There would be state reimbursement at that point. Again, I don't know that exact number. So these are just sort of rule of thumb, square foot, and so on numbers to give an understanding of the impact of the scenario that we're talking about. And then we go to, I think I might have skipped something, to A. I don't have a graph for it. So this one was a little different in that that we were going to move the fifth to oddison, seventh to Gibbs, and eighth to the high school. So again, what you're seeing here time frame-wise and the fact that that's how you're solving that first elementary crunch is still the same. It's just a matter of what grades are where in the system. There's been a lot of very initial conversations about sixth grade is an incredible transition grade. It would be great that they were in their own building. Oh, well, maybe seventh grade. It would be good if they were in their own building. So there's pluses and minuses to all of these scenarios. But sorry, 2A is on your sheet. It's just a little note on the bottom. It's just that scenario different. Otherwise, everything else about it is very similar to this whole chart. So in scheme three, it says, can we solve everything just with modular additions? And so this is looking at, again, similar to 1-in-1A in terms of the elementary schools. And they would each get six modular classrooms additions. The crux of this is what happens at Otteson. And ultimately over a period of, I think it's six, seven years, Otteson would need 20 classrooms as an addition. And I'm talking about classrooms. I'm not talking about increasing the size of the cafeteria or the gymnasium or the nurses office or the administration or any of the shared use core spaces of that building. And again, if anyone's ever been in that building, it's fully used now. This scenario is saying you're going to go from, we're just a little over 1,100 to over 1,500 kids on this site and in this building. You're hearing the way I'm saying it. It's not something that I would recommend only because I do not believe that that school building could handle that population, even with, again, putting modular classrooms. So that is what this note is saying here. It does not increase the core spaces. And there is physically no way to increase the core spaces. Otteson is more or less landlocked and topography locked. So there's no way to expand the building. Even what we're talking about for these 20 classroom modules, which would be stacked modules, you'd be taking over the parking lot. So it would be even that much more of a landlocked and difficult building to maneuver around. And then we have just one more, the fourth scheme. So this one we looked at to say, is there a way to get two grades at the Gibbs school building? And the only way to do that is, in fact, to not only just renovate the building, but add on to the building. And so this would say that first of all, we would just do the temporary modules that we need to to get by at the elementary levels until Gibbs was online. So that's similar to some of the other ones. And it says that if you pulled a sixth grade out, then you've also solved Otteson. So on the surface, this is very much like, wow, we do one thing on one site and we solve elementary and middle school difficulties. I think the difficulty that that comes in here is that Gibbs is not a very big site. And so it's, you would, by building this addition to accommodate two full grades here, you would be more or less taking over anything that's open there, the whole parking, the basketball courts, and so on. The other problem here is similar to what we were just saying about Otteson, is that addition would be the classrooms. It would not be solving the size of the cafeteria, the size of the gymnasium, and so on. So this would be, again, nearly 1,000 student school. And you would need more shared use core space to be able to make it function. So again, we looked at it. We're happy to continue looking at any of these and other sort of variables, because I think more heads in the room, somebody's going to come up with some other scenario that we haven't thought of. And that's just the way it should be. This is a work in progress. This is a beginning of that process. It's a puzzle. And what we're going to show here is just a little bit of a thought-provoking diagram. So what this is is the four schemes plus the 1a, what happens at the elementary, what happens at the middle, what happens at Gibbs, and what would happen at the high school. And so the one I'm missing is the one I keep missing, but it's 2a, and it's very similar to 2. It's just what grades are where. So the impact is the same. So what this next diagram shows is we have to make a decision. What's the first decision you made? Let's say you've made the decision to put permanent traditional construction at Hardy and Thompson. So that's something we need to be thinking about in the near term, and that decision gets made. As you can see, as you can see, that starts to preclude other things from happening, if that makes sense. So once you sort of made the decision that you're going to put permanent additions at these two schools, well you're now no longer moving the fifth grade to Gibbs. And if you're not moving the fifth grade to Gibbs, you're also not doing this scenario of moving fifth and sixth to Gibbs because you're still not moving the fifth grade because you just put additions on your other schools. So if you're starting to follow the thinking here, it's the puzzle of when you make one decision, it will impact how these other decisions are made or just sort of eliminate things that may be, oh, that was a good idea, oh, but now we can't do that because no longer makes sense. And that's going to happen. So we were calling these the if thens. So similarly, now if you've also made the decision to build modular construction but with the thought that it's a long term modular additions to the schools, which happen in scheme one and in scheme three, you again are solving it at the elementary grade. You are no longer moving fifth grade. So these scenarios do not happen. And then, I think I have one more. So now let's just say we just start with some temporary modulars. We just start to next year put some temporaries on or maybe the year after and hedge our bets for a decision or something. And that's fine too. So that would be the start of or thinking of the schemes two and four here. But that starts to take away, I'm sorry, I'm losing my train of thought on this one. It takes away, I know it does, these two here. Oh, because you're not doing permanent. So you haven't solved fifth grade anywhere. You're only temporarily solving it. So other things are still open to you in terms of moving the fifth grade. So you can just this is just a small example. We could keep going with these, but I was getting a little bonkers going if then, if then, it will be like that. So I want to end here. I'm going to just end on our bubbles that you didn't get a chance to see in your handout, but you will be able to see in the on the website soon. And I think we're going to open to questions and they may be questions to do with the enrollments. Jerry is here with me, Dr. McKibbin. So here's how we're going to do this. As I mentioned at the beginning of the meeting, what we're going to do is we're going to start, we're going to focus this meeting on questions and learning, rather than opining on any one particular solution. There'll be plenty of time for that later once we have all the facts out and the new ideas. So we're going to start. First of all, I do want to recognize Representative Garbley is here with us. Representative Garbley worked very hard with us and with the state to get the Thompson School renovated. He's been working with us with high school and he's going to be a great ally for us going forward in this project. And I'm very appreciative that he's here. He's a former member of the committee. So we'll start by going down the row. We'll start with Mr. Heiner. Microphone, please. There might be some immediate temporary ones, but in the final no. Okay. Who's next in line? Mr. Pierce. Nothing. Has it been discussed? I would say it has not been discussed and maybe the reason why is no one really thought there was any land. So no obvious blank plots of land or anywhere. And then what would it be? You know, would it be another elementary school in its entirety? Would it be a smaller middle school? I mean, so, you know, that certainly is possible, but we haven't talked about it at this stage yet. Thank you, Mr. Pierce. Dr. Allison Ampey. Microphone. Sorry. I have two questions. One for Mr. McKibbin. My understanding is Arlington has a historically higher than average maternal age at first birth. Does that affect your your calculations at all? A higher what? Higher age for women when they give birth to their first child. Yeah, that would have the effect of lowering average household size and number of children per woman. But later you start the fewer kids you have on average. But it's not going to affect what you have here? Well, if your age of first birth goes up to 35, yeah, I'm going to be way too high, you know. The key point is, again, going back to the point, it's not births. It's in migration. You don't have enough women in prime childbearing age now. Even if the total fertility rate was four, it had to be up up to that level before they have age cohorts large enough to, or women, cohorts producing, women producing cohorts this size. You're about half your enrollment has to come from outside of the district through in migration. So, and average age at first birth right now is 28. So, if it's more women, they're 30. But not here. Not on this time. Well, excuse me. We can't talk to the audience. Excuse me, ma'am. Everybody all have a chance to talk, but we've got to do this in order. If I had been allowed to finish, nationally the average age of first birth is 28. Any place where you have high socioeconomic and high educational attainment for the females, the age of first birth goes up. My wife is a PhD. Had her first child at 34 years old, but we have one. Ficundity is finite. It's from, technically it's from 15 to 44 years old. However, the biological ability, the fecundity of women to have kids after 35, as you all well know, drops off. If you start having kids at 34, you're most likely only to have one, two, maybe three on the outside. If you started having kids at 22, the probability of having four or five are much greater. That's what those numbers mean. Are you having kids? Yeah, by the way, and on this point, how many people here have kids? Okay, how many of you are going to have any more kids? That's the problem, folks. We know where the current kids are at. That's not the problem, but how many of you are going to leave the school district as soon as your last kid graduates high school? Aha, so here's the household with kids. It has them in there now, and there will not be another school-aged kid come out of your household until you move away and someone else moves in. That's the dynamic you're not looking at, okay? We know, and it was where we have the numbers, only a quarter of the households have kids in them. You need those nasty empty nesters to move out, let your families move in. That's the secret. But you guys, you're done. You're not going to contribute anything else to the pool here in the future, so that's what you're forgetting. Okay, thank you. And one question from Ms. Coles. Can you talk about how permanent the modules are? How long do they live? I mean, how well do they age and how long do they last? Yeah, so we talked a little bit about this. We would recommend if you were to plan on building them out of modular construction and want them to last, to do a lot of upgrades to what a traditional modular would be. If for those of you who are either familiar, have either been in one, I mean, basically a modular classroom is a box, so just a box, that's a metal box. They typically come, you know, when they're, they're typically for temporary use. I mean, they're literally, usually the job trailer for the contractor is using one of these. So a typical off the, off the assembly line would have sort of the least efficient mechanical, the noisiest mechanical equipment. Minimal insulation, poor window, I mean, they don't, they don't come like you would build a building. So we would recommend with the plan to keep them long-term that you would spend that additional money to do that, which may be in part why my numbers are pretty close in terms of the cost for it. You know, doing as much as you possibly can, they, they can, I mean, you would be cladding them in masonry, you would be making them as solid as you possibly can. You know, it's hard for me to say exactly, because we haven't built one like that. I think the closest thing my firm came to is a preschool for Wellesley, and they wanted it to be a 20-year building and if my memory is any good, which it's not, it's probably close to, you know, 14 or 15 years old now. But they were putting the extra money in for a 20-year solution. So would you start to feel the effects after 20 years of what you're doing, maybe? I mean, I think, you know, the creeks and groves and the settlement probably will, will be different than a traditional, you know, foundation up addition, which you expect to be a 50-year building. Ms. Tharks. I noticed in the enrollment numbers that we had, the kindergarten numbers for this year were listed as 479, and I was wondering if you could give us what the current kindergarten numbers are for this year. I think as of early this week, 483, they, they still seem to be a little bit of a flexibility of fascination with all of our numbers, but it's still in that neighborhood, yes. Mr. Thielman. This question is for Laurie. Could you just talk to, talk to, about your impressions of the Gibbs school when you walked around it, its viability as a, as a operating, operating public school, and the process that we would need to go through to verify its capacity to house a public school. So my impression was a good-sized building. I sort of envisioned something small and not very functional. It's a good-sized building, smallish but decent-sized gymnasium. There have been changes since it has been turned over to other uses, but it's still primarily being used as a school building. So in those changes, you no longer have a, a full functioning kitchen. So things like that would need to be done. The exterior envelope seems very solid to me. I think you'd want to do things like finishes and lighting to make it feel like a, you know, a newly thought-out building. I'm, I can only guess because I do not have a team of consultants with me that probably mechanical upgrades could be technology, data upgrades are needed. So what's the second part of that? How do you determine? I mean, I think, I think a fuller investigation with, with engineers involved to really look at the existing conditions and identify. And I think, you know, one of the things that we talked a lot about with the school department is, you know, what's the range because, you know, you could elect to do this amount or this amount on that building. So there will be certainly a cost differential based on how much scope of work you'd want to do. And I think that, you know, and it's not a long involved, but I think a little bit of a feasibility study that would tell you hear all the things that absolutely have to be done, should be done, would be nice to get done. You know, so you have sort of that understanding of what the possibilities are and then put some costs to that before you proceeded. Thank you. Dr. Seuss. Here. Yes. So I just wanted to share a worry that I shared with Dr. McKibbin earlier. According to the analysis, the kindergarten age should peak this year. Now, of course, we've seen numbers lower than expected. So that's interesting. But the assumption is that the number of in-migration is going to decrease and the number of out-integration is going to increase so that we only get a retention rate of around 78% five years from now. And that may be true. I mean, I think what you said to me is you don't think there's enough places for people who want to move in to move in. But I still sort of wonder, given the kind of recent trend that we've seen in the last couple of years and the retention rate that we've seen in the last couple of years, I'm just sort of worried about it, that maybe the numbers are sort of underestimating the problem a little bit. The second thing I wanted to ask is... I'm sorry, was there a question in there? No, actually, I wanted to just share a worry. And I know, I remember you gave me an answer and it very well may be true. There was something in there I wanted to respond to though. Well, do you think that there's a reason that either the out-migration is going to be bigger or the immigration is going to be smaller in the coming years, the next few years? Well, I think your out-migration is going to be bigger for two reasons. One, you're going to have more graduating seniors and two, you're going to have more population over the age of 70 downsizing. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I just mean families with kids under the age of five. So your assumption is that it's going to decrease to 78%? That's going to be driven by whether or not they can afford to get a mortgage or not. They may want to live here, they may love Arlington, but if they can't get a mortgage, it's not going to move here. The demand for moving into Arlington is far greater than, A, the number of houses available for people to move into, and B, their economic wherewithal to afford it. And that's your real dictating right there. So even though you have new housing here that's being built, it's not enough. And if you doubled it, that'd be a different issue. So it's pretty well cast and stone now given this age distribution, and the number of houses available, you see this trend. The in-migration, you'd have to have, if you could convince an extra hundred empty nesters a year to move out, that would help it. And you could do that maybe with some building of elder housing in the area. Allow people to downsize their homes and stay in their community they want to stay at. That might get people to decide, well, let's cash in, get the equity in the house, I could still live in Arlington or the area, and it puts it in the market. Right now, there's a pretty dire shortage of elder housing in the area, and I think that's probably the biggest shortfall right now to that. The second question was asked to me by several parents. I just wanted to ask you about it. Why have we not considered turning Gibbs into another middle school or re... And I raise it again because it starts prima facie seems like one obvious sort of thing to do, and so, and maybe it isn't to me, I'm just sort of curious about it. We did talk about it. But it is a much smaller building, and it always was. So when you had the two, I'm just going to roughly say one was only 500 and the other was a thousand at Audison. And so one scenario rather than taking the sixth grade there would be to take the cohorts from each. And the really interesting thing, the thing that struck me the most, make sure pointer, this is better. The thing that struck me the most is when you look at these diagrams is look where the hole is. That's where Gibbs is. So it was a very well thought out and planned community in terms of the schooling and the spaces and everything. But that is a good, that is a good thing. I mean, essentially you would be creating a much smaller population because again, without doing an addition, it's about a 500-ish student building. And certainly as a policy decision, the board can make it a later date, whether to put a grade there or to zone it and split it. Rather than asking questions myself, I want to move things forward. So I'm going to invite any member of the board of selection right now who'd like to come up to the microphone to ask questions. Mr. Kerl, why don't we get, I know it's a little more complicated, but they're standing over there. So we can work off of it this way. Good evening, Mr. Kerl. Good evening. Thank you very much. Joe Kerl from the board of selection. And I just first say how horrified I was to see that I'm at the peak of the demographic and right on the cliff of just sliding off into oblivion. Bye, Joe. I have three quick questions. One for Dr. McKibbin, one for the architect, and one for the superintendent. The first question is space, the space issue in this town doesn't just concern public space and finding space for our students and such. We're also kind of at the brink with our space for new construction. So the nature of new construction that you see here, much of it really isn't Greenfield. What you'll see is maybe an older home, a smaller home will be sold, will then be demoed, and then a larger home put in its place, which might be more attractive to a larger family. Whereas the previous dwelling on that lot was perhaps more attractive to a single or a couple. I was wondering if your models take that into account, the nature, or if there's a need to take that into account. Well, yes, we do. And we've seen this a lot of the other districts in the Boston area, too. Needham, Wellesley, Westwood, where you're pretty much built out. Unless they actually do drain the swamp and build something there, that's about the only big piece you've got left. But it's infill, it's tear down and rebuild, it's things like that. So the number of course we look at, I think you're not going to be able to sustain 120 a year over the 10 years of the forecast, I have about 80. But of more concern to me is the price. There's a great rule in demography. You can have money, you can have kids, but you can't have both. As income goes up, number of kids goes down. It's one of our great chicken and egg questions. Are you wealthy because you have fewer kids? I prescribed you that one. Or do you have fewer kids because you're not as wealthy? It goes that way. So home price, and again, in relative to the area, a starter house in the Carolinas would be $250,000. A starter house up here is a half million. So you have to judge this by the prices of the area. But if you go out and someone buys a $900,000 house even around this area, you usually don't turn to your spouse, say, hey, let's have another kid. You're pretty well booked out by then. But in a starter home, lower, more monthly price, you're going to see more future births come out of that or pre-school-aged kids. So it's not just so much the number. Again, going back to the existing housing market, I'm looking more at price, I think is the big determinant there. But for the record, I have you at 80 new housing units a year over the 10 years of the forecast, which is down from your right now, but I think a good average for the 10 years. Okay, great. Thank you. One question for architects, for Laurie. In your model of adding a grade to the high school, does that take into account, does that assume that the current town office uses and the preschool stay in place, or does it presuppose that we would have to find solutions to those elsewhere? It doesn't go so far to presume one way or the other. I think that's part of the feasibility study that would need to happen with the state when it started. I mean, it would be really looking at the, at that point, the functioning of the campus. So there's no answer yet on that one. Good question, though. Thank you. And lastly, to the superintendent, I want to just address, I think one of the elephants in the room right up front, because I think we'll hear it in public participation. Obviously, we know that some of the tenants in the current Gibbs building, you know, all roads seem to be pointing to the Gibbs. I mean, it seems like the solutions are pointing that direction. There's a reason why when I was on the school committee, we all voted to temporarily surplus that building, because we knew that it might be needed at some point. But I was just wondering, I think in particular, the Arlington Center for the Arts does have a history of partnerships with the school district and some of the fifth grade programming and such. They serve a lot of the same population. I was just wondering if there have been any preliminary discussions or thought about potentially finding some win-win solutions, assuming we go down the Gibbs road, where perhaps there could be some programmatic cooperation and allow that programming to continue in some fashion in cooperation with the schools under this model. I've had discussion within our conversations about that. We have not had any conversations specifically with the tenants for the Arlington Arts. However, my understanding is that most of the programming begins at five o'clock, roughly there, and I would have to educate myself more about the specifics. I think it's very possible. One of the things that is increasingly true about all of our schools is that they're in use much of the time after the school bell at the end of the day. All of our elementary schools have after school programs that go to six o'clock, and we have, certainly at the high school, we have the community education programs and a variety of other programs. Depending upon, here's the qualification, depending upon what the use of the Gibbs would be and how late we would need to have some of the school, whether we could work out some kind of partnership with the program is something I would be very open to looking into. I don't think there's any of us that really want to see these great tenants not be able to have the space. The issue is that what do we do as alternatives as a town as we're grappling with this enrollment increase? But certainly I would be very open to having very serious exploratory conversations about it, but it all depends on what we do. Sure. Thank you. Thank you all. Mr. Byrne. Thank you very much for having me. If I was a comedian, I'd make a joke about Donald Trump in building a wall around Arlington, but I'll leave the jokes to someone else tonight, I think. I don't think I'm quite ready to comment on the space planning schemes yet. That's certainly a lot to digest. But one thing that keeps sticking out to me, and I feel like I'm kind of getting punched in the gut every time I hear it, is Thompson. And I hopefully think that, I hope that moving forward, we certainly take into account do a little bit better job planning for enrollment in the feasibility process because for a school that was just built, that is far, you know, that's not right. And I don't mean to point fingers at anyone, and I know quite a bit of work went into that, but it certainly doesn't sit well with me. And I do have one question for Dr. McKinnon. So when you looked at the projected numbers versus the actual, they were off by about 90 people. 86. 86, thank you. So would that compound throat the report? So that 86 is in this year, would that throw off the numbers moving forward? Well, again, almost all the year is in one grade, kindergarten. And again, kindergarten is the cohort that has the highest amount of variability because not everybody goes to kindergarten. There's private kindergarten, things like that. And again, you're establishing a grade cohort versus a birth cohort. So that's why we like to look at first grade, which is only off by 20. Next year, we go back and we still see that wide gap in that we're now in first graders next year, then that would be a point of concern, then an assumption's been violated, and your next year's kindergarten would also be low. That would dictate then going back and doing a recalculation. But at this stage, it's within the 2% parameters, so I would say no at this point. But it's something we definitely want to keep a look at for next year's evaluation. Thank you very much. So I guess I'll finish by saying that. I certainly look forward to seeing those numbers. And I think I know that we have to move fairly quickly and make some decisions, but I'll be very interested to see the outcome of that before we jump into anything. So thank you. Before we go further, I just want to note that when we do the Thompson or any other project that involves state reimbursement, they're setting a fairly strict set of rules. Dr. Bodie, work with the state. Would you like to comment on that? I would. We, at the time that we entered in the feasibility study with Thompson, our proposal was actually higher than with the number that we finally settled at. We had proposed something more like 420, but they had their own calculator and enrollment. And in fact, they didn't even think that we should have 380 as the number, given their calculator. And in this part of the condition of having it at 380 as the number, we had to agree to do redistricting, which is why we move forward with redistricting process, which ended up with our buffer zones. So we were aware of it, but I don't think that the full, at that time, we were fully aware of where this enrollment growth was going. A 420 would certainly have bought us more time for sure in that building. But if the number goes much higher than that, which is what the prediction, the forecast is, I should say, that we would still need to add space on. Okay, thank you very much. Board of Select, thank you. Next up would be the Capital Planning Committee. Any members of the Capital Planning Committee would like to come to the microphone? Please do. From this point on, I'd like folks to just introduce themselves and their roles going forward. Thank you, Mr. Schluckman, Chairman Schluckman. Charlie Foskett, I'm Chairman of the Capital Planning Committee. And I was intrigued by Dr. Seuss' comment that the consideration of a full middle school at the Gibbs might solve a number of these problems. But we have, in the Gibbs School right now, not just the Arlington Center of the Arts, but we have four other very, including some town activities, very credible and worthy programs. And I'm wondering if the school department has or is intending to consider how those programs get addressed? I will speak just as a chair, as a result of a vote of the whole board. But we certainly do appreciate in very many ways the programs for the Gibbs. We've participated in many of them. We love them. We want them to survive and thrive. We have a problem in that it's sitting in a school building which was designated as a temporary rental to preserve the space for possible future use. So that we're within that context. And if we do end up going down the road, where we need the Gibbs, I think one of the things that we'd really be concerned about is maintaining the programs that are within the Gibbs right now. Go ahead. In the town. And right now it's under a great deal of contention. And that's the Mugar property. And I'm wondering if anybody's considering the possibility of using that space, either for some of the community activities that take place in the Gibbs or in some other commercial or municipal public negotiation, extracting, let me call it some support from the proposed developers to create either academic facilities or community resources on that property. All of that sounds like a very good thinking. We did not go there. We did not get into acquiring other properties and how they might be used. Good morning. If someone on the Board of Selectment might comment on that. Mr. Currow. It's a simple answer. We have not discussed that possibility. But will you? I'm always willing to discuss anything. Thank you. Anyone else from Capital Planning? Seeing none. Finance Committee. Mr. Tosti. Mr. Tosti, Chair of the Finance Committee. I got three questions. The first for Dr. McKinnon. I'm looking at Chart 1, Permitted Housing Units. Would I be correct in saying this data came from the Building Inspector? No, it would come from the Census Bureau's 404 website. Okay. What I was curious about is it includes permitted housing units. So those are new units. Yes, those are not building permits but units. Sometimes an apartment will have one building permit but have 20 units in it. So that's why you might see discrepancy in the numbers there. So it's not building permit, it's permitted units. Okay, I was wondering, for example, most of the housing in Arlington now is teardowns. You can't walk through East Arlington without seeing a teardown. So if a two-family house is torn down and replaced with a duplex, does that mean we have two new units? You have a net gain of zero. You've lost two units, two demolitions, and you've put a duplex in there with two more units. So it's a net gain of zero. Okay, so I just wondered how that was going. Okay, my other questions are on the Ferrari. On the... First of all, I've noticed that one building, school building was not, at least I did not see it, was not contemplated use of, and that's the Parmenter School. Granted, it's a smaller school, but it is something that we might be able to use. Why was that not looked at? I think you answered it because of the size. I don't think it would fit a whole grade. I think it's pretty small. If Gibbs can fit a whole grade and it's much smaller than that, it would be a very small cohort of children. Okay, so it was just too small to have an impact? Yeah, yes. Okay, and being from the finance committee, my attention immediately was drawn to scheme three because it was the lowest cost. So would I be correct in looking at this and saying, it's going to add so-called permanent modular units to the Hardy, the Thompson, and the Audison. There would be no use of the Gibbs, and there would be no permanent infrastructure added to the school system. No permanent additions to the buildings. Right, they're looking... Well, again, it's that definition of permanence. So they wouldn't be leased. You'd have to buy them, and then how you construct them and how much money you put in them to make them more solid, they would last longer. So the same sort of answer I was giving earlier about what would you do to make a modular construction more lasting. So I think that's what we would be proposing for these because, again, the growth is there. Okay, so when you were looking at the cost estimates, you were thinking of well-done so-called permanent modular. Yes, but I'll ask you not to call them a cost estimate. Okay, but it seems to me the one problem in scheme three is it still leaves some of the core areas of the Audison under strain. Very. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Mr. Karman. Thank you, Mr. Schlickman. A few questions. The first one, I was looking at your total district enrollment, and I forget if you told me this was a projection or a forecast, so I guess I'll use them incorrectly. You always see between eighth grade and ninth grade that there's a drop-off in students because, and I'm assuming they're going to the local VOTEC, they're going to private schools, et cetera. As the population increases, how did you work with that drop-off? And I guess my concern is just because our LinkedIn's enrollment is increasing, doesn't mean, let's say, the private schools are increasing. So it'd be slowed off because I was just trying to do it on a percentage basis, I felt like it kept dropping. Well, usually in most school districts, you see an increase in ninth grade as private school kids come back to high school. So that gets into parental choice. But in yours it isn't. But in yours it's not. No, you don't. And that's kind of a New England type thing. You'll see some kids go off to, again, VOTEC, private school, schools outside of the district and the like. That's parental choice. And I would never be so bold as to try to forecast parental thinking patterns. So I hold that constant at the same rate as it's been the last five years. So the same remaining percentage attrition. Same attrition rate. Just like your high school drop-out rate, although it's miniscule compared to most school districts, I hold your drop-out rate constant over the last five-year average. Okay. But do you think, and I guess there's more Arlington specific, I guess we'll talk about it later, but we have a Catholic school in the town and we have the local VOTEC. So I guess my concern there is we're assuming that a proportional increase to the local Catholic school would be occurring as the town of Arlington is increasing. Or any private school. Again, that goes back to more of the economic factors. If you see unemployment rate kick up to like 8%, you're going to see fewer kids go to private school. I can guarantee you that. And we saw that back in 08, 09, and 10. And so that's again why the economic parameter is so important. If you stay within these economic bounds for the economy chugging along, being halfway decent, you can be pretty sure these proportions stay the same. But if the economy starts to boom, it may go the other direction as well. So you've got to have bounds to look at. But unless your unemployment rate gets above 7%, I would look for a drag on a high number of private school. They're kids at private school for a reason and it's more emotional than financial in many cases. Okay. My second question. On the space planning schemes, Appendix E, you had a column of kindergarten and classrooms have need, have need. So I think in order to do that, you have to have a judgment on average class size throughout. So how did you come up with that? Because I can't see the underlying of it. I think that we basically, we capped out at 25 and the upper grades and the lower, I think for kindergarten was 22. So it was just making a judgment. There is flexibility. There's no actual cap as it stands right now. So it was just a range. And that's going to fluctuate. So you might have, again, a larger cohort. So if we say you have three kindergarten and you're going to need four, you may still have one of those four with 23 kids. I mean, I'm just using numbers here, but that's the flexibility is in there. Right. But to understand what you were saying, so in order to quote the rejection, you came with an average class size of 22 in the lower grades, 25 as they moved to the upper grades. Correct. Got it. My third question is when you were talking about the Gibbs, you made a comment that it could fit one grade, but it couldn't probably fit two grade. So I guess I was thinking in my head as I was looking at the out years that the average class would be about 500 students. So you're saying it could fit 500, but it couldn't fit 1,000. Correct. What do you think the capacity of the Gibbs is? Just when you were looking at it. So we did do some diagrams which are on the web in the full packet of just where classrooms would be at Gibbs just to give a classroom count. And we had a classroom count of 24 general classrooms still allowing for music, art, and so on. The gymnasium is already there, reworking and having a cafeteria and so on. So I'm not sure I can specifically answer your question because I think that it's somewhere, I can't remember the numbers, I'm trying to picture my piece of paper, I think it probably could be up to like 600. So if you said, I mean I can't do the math in my head, 24 times 25, sorry, I did it but it doesn't have it in my head right now. So that's, you know, it starts to max out at that point I think. Okay, thank you. The last thing I guess would be a comment. And I would like to thank the superintendent, the school administration, and the school committee for hosting this forum. I think it's very easy to sit in school administration on the top floor in the school committee chambers and have a limited number of people and less accountability to the townspeople. When I look at the people that are standing up here and I'm sure that some of them will, when we get to the general public, might even start throwing tomatoes at you that, this is a more difficult path but I think it's a better path. So I do, you know, thank each and every one of you for hosting this forum. I think it's a great thing. Thank you. Hi, Len Cardin from the finance committee. Just a couple of quick questions. In the past we've had some issues similar to this handled by the school facilities working group. I wonder if there's been any thought about having that group be involved in this process. I think this is a major issue that we're dealing with. So we'll probably want to put together a task force that would probably be derived from the groups that are involved in this, the selectmen, capital planning, finance, school committee, so on, similar to the, we have a facilities planning committee exist right now. Dr. Bodie? Within the town. Not really. Mr. Chapelle and I have talked about this and we both collectively recommend putting together a task force, probably as a subgroup of one of the existing committees such as the budget task force committee. But I think this is such a town issue there's no one group that can solve this it's something we have to solve together. Great, thanks. Laurie, a question for you. You've been talking about the elementary forecast. You said something about it being permanent, but if you look at the actual forecast, you know for 2015-16, the forecast is 3,032, we're a little bit below that, but that's the forecast. And then in 2024-25, it's 3,033, almost exactly the same. There is a wave, but doesn't it come back down? Agreed. So I guess I just want to be clear whether it's a permanent wave or a temporary wave or we're not certain yet, but it may be a temporary wave at the elementary level that we're already in, granted we're already overcrowded. And then also the specialist space that you looked at, do you have a more detailed analysis of that? Well, I have a lot of chicken scratch. I haven't drawn anything like what's on the website in the full report. Briefly, very quickly today when the report went up, I did go through the diagrams and I counted based on my knowledge of some of the schools, basically up to 14 classrooms that could possibly, I don't know what all they're being used for, but 14 classrooms across the district that could possibly be made available if other spaces could be found for those specialists. So that's almost a whole school. So I think that's something we really need to look at. We still have the issue of the students are in the wrong place, but we may have spaces elsewhere for those students to move classes if needed temporarily. And then one last thing, the one sort of obvious permutation that I think was missing was option one, scheme one, but with an 8 to 12 configuration at the high school. And so I wonder if we could consider that as well, just throw that in the mix. Thank you. Okay. Okay. We're now to the Permanent Town Building Committee. Are there any members of the PTBC who'd like to question? Mr. Cole. Good evening, John Cole, Chair of the Building Committee. I'd like to applaud the efforts that have gone on to look at a broader planning process. Is the Gibbs suitable? Is the power mentor available, blah, blah, blah? And I would encourage to wind it a little further. My question is, could the town planning department identify parcels of a suitable size within the town or parcels that could be assembled that might help to solve the larger space issues, either for an educational facility or an offloading space to take some of the community activities out of parliament or Gibbs to give them a home and let the school site become school buildings again? I don't know who that question is directing. Mr. Chapter Lane, I'm pretending to be the moderator. I can throw the question anywhere I want. I think in cooperation with whatever task force is formed, that would be an absolutely recommendable path for the planning department to undertake. Anyone else from Permanent Town Building Committee? Redevelopment board will be next. Anyone from redevelopment? Okay, the question has been asked. Thank you very much. That is wonderful. The moderator is the first town meeting member. Would you like to ask a question? I saw the projections of cost. Name and precinct, please. John Leone, town moderator, precinct eight. I'm used to sitting up there. I saw the projections of the cost for these either temporary modules, permanent modules, anywhere from 11 million. And if we build something, 30 million. Maybe you said it, but are any of these things reimbursable by the state? Or is this all coming out of our budget? That's an excellent question. How about this working right now with MSBA? They do one project at a time. So while we are engaged in our statement of interest to MSBA for the high school, they would not consider anything else until that project was underway. And how long it would take, how many years it would take to be considered, I don't know. Now I know that Brookline that's doing some additions, they have to do the queuing as well in terms of whether they could get reimbursement. I don't know currently what the final decision was. We could always do it. It's just that it's so far down the road that it's not probably a viable alternative. So effectively we're going to have to pay for these out of our budget. That's probably correct or a debt exclusion. They are bondable? Yes. All right, Saul. Thank you. Just as a comment on that, I think one of the attractions of putting the eighth grade into the high school building is that you'd be adding that into a reimbursable project. So that would be a consideration in terms of the cost to the town if the state becomes engaged in the process and decides, yeah, you've got more than a high school problem and we're willing to help you out here. Go ahead. So we haven't submitted enough to the state on the high school that it's still open enough to add the eighth grade into it? Yeah. Okay. May I? Go ahead. We actually included that in our statement of interest as a possibility to consider in a feasibility study in both the first and the second one. And right now, we have been elevated to a senior study and we're going to be, MSBA is going to be coming out to the high school to have a working meeting. So I don't know if what that quite means. It just means that now taking much more notice of our statement of interest. And then if you're planning for the high school, if it included the eighth grade, would it be within the main building or would they be in their own little separate area? That would be all part of the feasibility study of what it would look like. I've done some preliminary discussion with the high school principal and one thought might be to have an eight, nine institute and then a 10, 12. The thing is that it would be, there's to be a lot of permeability because we have students to take upper level courses for freshmen. The issue with this is timing. Let's say hypothetically we were invited into the first phase just this year the earliest that we would be able to have eighth grade at the high school site would be 21, September 21. And if you look at the diagrams, so we're going to have to handle on a short, if we did this, we had to handle on a short term basis this growth for at least five years. So it's almost too late. Well, it's going to hit its peak, it's going to hit its peak then, just when they would be coming here. But what we don't, what we can say is it's probably going to stay fairly high relatives to now for the years after that as well. Because when you see that chart and you look in the second 10 years, I mean the second five of the 10 years, you still see growth at the, at the out of the middle. Not as much, but it's still, it's still, well it's growing. Right. So some of this is timing issues and what's going to make this a puzzle, using that word is a good description because there's so many, there's so many parts of this you don't, you're working with unclear information in terms of, well are we going to be accepted this year or is it going to be another year? And all of that has timing issues with respect to this. Okay, thank you. Thank you. The next portion would be for time meeting members. This is the way we're going to do it. Ms. Fitzgerald is going to put a sign-up sheet at each podium. I'm going to ask people to line, town meeting members at this point to line up at the two podiums. While you're waiting to speak, please put your name on the sign-in sheet. I'm going to ask the experts to use the portable mic so we'd have the podiums free. So any town meeting members who'd like to ask a question you can please line up at the two podiums and I'll alternate. I'm going to try to keep this down to a three-minute limit and questions and answers in order to get us to the point where we can get everyone who wants to have a chance to speak, ask a question to do so. So we'll start with gentlemen here, Naiman Precinct. Steve Liggett, Precinct 9. I'm proud Thompson parent. I had three questions. The third one was already covered around the high school plan, so I won't go there. But I wondered if there was any consideration of building vertically. You talked about the options of adding, adjoining walls, but I don't recall anything about vertical additions and wondered if that was included. In all the scenarios, the additions are multi-story additions. That's one thing, just maybe it wasn't clear. In terms of vertically meaning on top of what's existing in there, that would require sort of structural analysis of whether something could handle it and so on. And we did not get to that level and any of these. But in the case of the six classrooms at each of the elementary schools, they would be three stories. So I'm thinking specifically about the Thompson, which was just built, and I know you were heavily involved, and thank you. Is there, structurally, was it designed so that there could be a fourth floor, given that that was in the initial plan, as I recall? No. It was designed to have six classrooms extended off the end. That's where the expansion was planned for. It was not planned to go up even higher. Okay. My second question is probably not, I don't know who it's for, so Mr. Moderator will redirect. I wondered, given the Vision 2020 and the discussion about the possible overhauling of the zoning bylaws, if any changes in zoning were included in the forecast? I just note the master planning is primarily directed at the commercial business district at this time. Okay. If they're looking at rezoning or changing the zoning bylaws, I could imagine a world where your two-family zone for two-family could shift to zone for three-family, and that could have a pretty substantial, or might have an impact on the enrollment and growth. Yeah. Town meeting has the power to rezone. At the recommendation of the redevelopment board often, but the study and the proposals of the redevelopment board are working on right now, are strictly in terms of master plan for business districts, primarily focused along Mass Ave. Broadway, and not looking at substantive changes in the zoning bylaw to increase density for residential use. Okay. Good. That's it. Okay. Next, name and precinct, please. Bill Moyer, precinct 10, a town meeting member. Mr. Schlickman, great job taking what's going to be another very emotional issue in managing this forum very well. Thank you. So the first question is the projections were done based on permitted units. So my understanding is the potential new guard development is not yet permitted, so that's not included in your projections, correct? Correct. Okay. Have you looked at demographic changes, as the town changes the education levels, income levels, and their impacts on public parochial, vocational educations, and how that would affect the projections? No. Okay. Real quick on that, you can do what we call scenario forecast. We do a lot of those where they've built new auto plans for a steel mill shutdown. They've changed zoning laws, something. What would be the impact if X, Y, or Z changed? We just did a host of those for need. I've had three different variables I wanted to look at, you know, interest rates, things like that. You can do that scenario forecast. It has to be very specific, and that's what you're trying to measure on top of it. But as a rule, again, we hold everything constant because we're trying to identify your demographic changes, not policy or administrative changes or zoning changes or whatever. So would it have an impact? Yes, in the forecast? No, it's not. It's like draining the swamp and building the housing, our divisions out there. If they're building it, I'd put them in. But until they do that, it's just someone thinking about it. It would have an impact, but I'm not going to include it. Okay. Do you have any data? I'm an engineer, right? So everything I do has to have a minute and a max. It can't just work where I'd like it to be. It has to work over all possibilities. Do you have any minimum and maximum projections? Like yields for new housing units? For population in the final numbers? Well, yeah, but it's not just by households. Is it a owner? Is it by a renter? Are they people in their 20s, 30s, 40s? What's their income level? You could use one set like yield factor for an area, but you miss so many of the unique demographic characteristics of the individual areas by over-generalizing. So for each area, yeah, we have a basic yield. And the ones we use are for renter and for owner are the two basic ones. And then also another one for income level. But they're different for each one of your attendance areas. Okay. And another question that I probably would grab up. Excuse me? Okay. Final, last question for the programs that are at the Gibbs and this probably goes to the town manager. Do we know they're paying market rates above, below market rates? What are you, do we have any ideas? Anybody looked at that? Mr. Chapter. I would say in general they're paying below market rate. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Next, Mr. Paluso. Name and precinct. My name is Ted Paluso, all the town meeting member, and I actually have a couple of comments before. I guess the only one question that I have. First of all, comment number one. Everybody in here, this place looks very sad. This is a good thing. Growing population, growing young people in the town is good. It's not bad. Otherwise you become the retirement community of the Boston area. So smile about it a little bit. Sticking with my comments, we have a very strong real estate market in this town. And one of the reasons why you have a very strong real estate market is because you have a very fine school system. So, okay. So look at the, look at the long range and see whether or not these four alternatives you're presenting, which I think you're missing five and six to tell you the truth. If you looked at these four alternatives, I'm not so sure they're going to help keep the values of your real estate. I personally, although I'm not planning to have any new, new children, but you never know. My wife can't be sure about that. I checked with her. She said no. I'll never tell. I sort of don't like at the end of the day that you wind up with a 100-year-old building with the Gibbs. It was built in 1928. So you wind up with a 100-year-old building that I'm going to buy a house in this town to send my kids to a 100-year-old building. I'm not so sure. No matter what you do with the renovations, right? I don't like the idea if I read it right that high school's online? Is that what I'm reading here that at some point high, because you said something about high school online? Okay, then ignore that. That's just my terminology. Because, you know, very high school is very important to all of us. How else are we going to become the nasty people that we are, right? So you don't believe it, huh? So the question is very simple. Why wasn't there an analysis in this report on actually building something new? I want to tell you that I took a look at a couple of numbers. And from the Gibbs schools, you collect something like $330,000 a year in rental. You spend very little to keep it going. I have a feeling you might... I take out classes there, but it's a wreck, okay? It's true. So the question is, so you're giving up the $325,000 or $30,000, which you might even be able to increase, because that's the easy thing to do. So maybe a little long-range planning of this thing might work. So that's my real question. Why aren't you considering an alternative way? You actually do new construction of some sort. And if you think that's completely off the table, then that's fine. Question. Oh, Kathy, yeah. It's a great question. It's not that it didn't enter into our mind. It was how are we going to deal with the next five to 10 years and the assumption we made was that the high school is the first priority. And in that scenario, if you were going to build a brand-new building, I think that at the town... I'm just saying that we did think about it, and it's something the town could consider, but I think that it would be an issue that we would have to... Mr. Jafferling? Do you want to... No. Oh. You want to go next? Okay. Oh, I see. It's something that we... If we went to a new building, we'd want to engage with the Massachusetts Building Authority and for reimbursement. If the high school is the first priority, it's down the road. We were trying to look at the scenarios that we're going to solve our problems in the next five and then 10 years. And that choice probably would be much further down the road. Mr. Jafferling? I just couldn't let a go-going unanswered. The Gibbs is not free to operate. We probably clear about $30,000 a year. So I think it's irresponsible to suggest that it's just a cash cow that costs nothing to operate. Hello. Hi. Name and precinct, please. Deneutaphores, precinct 10. Just at the last town meeting, we saw projected budgets of cuts in the school budget. So I'm kind of wondering what you think about all this money that we're going to need to spend, and then we're going to vote on cutting the budget next year. So I want to ask about that. And then the other question I had for Laurie is what about just thinking geographically if you're going to use the Gibbs gym, maybe using having Thompson, Hardy and Bishop maybe have like a, they would use that for their middle school, sort of like the old East West, which would probably, so people could kind of walk to school since they do anyway. So that was one of the ideas I had. Yeah. Yeah. Again, that was the idea of one of your middle schools would be 1,000 students. The other one would be a 500. And what would that breakout look like? So it's similar in one of these scenarios. It's just not, it's just what cohorts are they pulling into that building. So it would be similar. And I don't know if Mr. Schaplin wants to address the budget issue, the projections that you presented at town meeting. I guess the best I can say is the school department budget went up over 5% last year. So I didn't see any budgetary reductions for the school department at FY 16. I'm talking about 2017. There was some projected. It's projected to go up more than 5% cumulatively. Each of the next five years throughout the long-range plan. OK, great. Thanks. Thank you. Any more town meeting members? Thank you. At this point, we're going to line up members of the public. By the way, if you're a member of the public and not a town meeting member and you aspire to be one, it's not hard. You go to the town clerk's office. You get a tit nominating petition. You get 10 signatures. You bring it back to the clerk's office. By the end of January, your neighbors vote for you and now you can sit in this hall in the spring and make some of these decisions. It's a wonderful thing. Again, Ms. Fitzgerald is going to put, please make sure you write your name on the sheet because we need to have a record of this. We'll be coming alternately left to right. Mr. Garbley first, would you like to say something? No, he's very happy. He said he'd go. Go say hello. The only thing I will say is we appreciate this public forum. We appreciate having this conversation. Your delegation will work extremely close for the board of selecting the school committee, all parties, the town manager, and working with MSPA to make sure that we are united in moving forward. And I pledge we'll work as hard as we can as we did in rebuilding the Thompson as we are and trying to reach an agreement with MSPA and rebuilding Arlington High. And we'll continue to do so. The town manager and I had a conversation about this afternoon before this meeting. We'll continue to have many more and we'll work extremely hard as a delegation to make sure MSPA hears our thoughts as the superintendent acknowledged earlier. We've worked to get MSPA to come out to Arlington High for a working meeting. We're going to have many of these conversations in the future, so thank you for having this meeting. Thank you. We're going to ask for a name and address and I will try to play Jeopardy because we haven't decided anything. So questions are probably the best venue for this and I'm going to gently nudge you when we hit three minutes. So first to my left. Great. Sharon Shalow, Precinct 8. I feel like I should be a town member, but I've been former member of the Arlington Cultural Council, current member of tourism and economic development. As I said, Precinct 8 ably represented a town meeting by many other people waiting in line to get a seat. I had a question, I guess, about ed policy. Nowhere in the, it seems that the given here is K to 5 and I wonder if you thought about the K to 3, intermediate 4 to 6 model and then 7 and 8 in an institute at the high school down the line. It strikes me that separating 7 and 8 seems really odd considering where the old frameworks used to go and where I think Common Core is, that those seem to be a unit. So I was wondering, and I'm not saying it solves the problem. I think there's a real problem here, but it seemed that these divisions were very strange. So I was just wondering what the thought was about, you know, rethinking how students are grouped at our various schools. And that was my main question. The other one though was about the high school. It strikes me as a better solution to have 7 and 8 in an institute and 9 through 12 in the school. And I was wondering if that's on the table. I mean, we're playing with all the options. That's all I can say. But none of these scenarios got away from the K to 12 model. So I wondered if the fundamental thing is still the neighborhood school K to 5 model or if we're looking at other ideas. I mean, we're open to playing with any of the configurations that we'll fit into to the right. Good evening. My name is Linda Shoemaker, 35 Warren Street. I am the Executive Director of the Arlington Center for the Arts. And I'd like to talk a little bit about the Gibbs Building. The Gibbs Building has been home to the Arlington Center for the Arts, the Leslie Ellis School, the Learn to Grow Preschool, and the Kelleher Center for Adults with Disabilities for 27 years. On behalf of all of us, we thank the school committee for the opportunity to address you in your October meeting and certainly heartened by the conversation and the support for our organizations in the room. But I didn't want, we didn't want to let this evening pass without speaking up about the major loss to our town if we lose these organizations and these services. The Gibbs organizations are not merely tenants. Over the course of nearly 30 years, we have become part of the fabric of this town. I'll speak particularly about the Arlington Center for the Arts. Since 1988, we have served and enriched the lives of tens of thousands of people in this community. ACA has become an integral part of our community and essential resource for our kids, teens, adults, seniors, artists, Ted Paluso, and all of us who want a vibrant and creative community life. At the core of our mission, we share with the school committee a commitment to our youth. We are committed to arts education and youth development through the arts. This year alone, we had over a thousand campers in February, April, and summer vacation arts programs. Hundreds more participating in arts classes, exhibits, including 80 students right now today who have artwork on display at the State House as part of our fifth grade images of Arlington partnership with the schools. For teenagers, ACA provides leadership development in a counselor and training program, which for many Arlington teens leads them to their first jobs as camp counselors at our program. Hundreds more teens take part in art classes, exhibits, a Friday night teen clubhouse, and a brand new LGBTQ program that just started this spring. ACA is also home to the Arlington Children's Theater and to the LARP Afterschool Program, both beloved community youth organizations serving hundreds more kids and families in our town. All of these students have found a home at ACA, a place where it's normal, where it is celebrated, to be creative, to do art, to sing, to dance, and to be different, and we need that in our town. We know. I know you agree with me about how important it is for our creative kids to feel like they have a place where they belong in our community. And the Arlington Center for the Arts is not just about kids. ACA is also part of what makes Arlington an attractive place to live. Shakespeare in the Park, Arlington Open Studios, Free Community Theater, Gallery Exhibits, a vibrant and active artist studio community. These classes, camps, programs for adults and kids, these are the very kinds of things that are attracting people to our town. These are some of the very reasons families are moving here now. Our town would most certainly be diminished. The opportunities we offer to our families and children would be diminished without the Arlington Center for the Arts, and I just want to wrap up. We recognize the challenges the school committee that we're all facing for meeting the needs of our growing student population, but we ask that as you deliberate, you seek out a solution that will accommodate the increasing enrollment and still preserve the Arlington Center for the Arts and our fellow organizations who call the Gibbs Building home and serve so many Arlington families and children. Thank you. We will welcome you next month so we can have a longer discussion with you. To my left. Is everybody signing in on the sheet too? Yeah. There's not a sheet. No sheet? Oh. Oh. Kristen Chalmers. I don't know what district I'm in. I just jot a few things down, but I want to rethink as I heard from the Arlington Center from the arts being a former dancer and now a working photographer to take away from the arts to get rid of Arlington Center for the Arts would be a travesty. But I am here as a concerned parent of a town that I love. I'm not from here. I moved here. Arlington is a town where people from Boston and Cambridge basically come to breed. They come to have children. They love the small town charm yet so close to a major city. I like to say that Arlington is not a suburb but a town of Boston. And that being said, if we do not address this problem of overcrowding and overspending, we will have a huge disaster on our hands. It will affect property values. It will affect how our children are educated. It will affect a lot of things. First of all, I know that it was discussed about the Hardy Reconstruction and that it was built basically to capacity, but I still... I have questions about that. I cannot believe that something like that was approved. As far as the suggestions presented today, I'm not sure who came up with the idea to mix eighth grade with a high school, but that sounds like a ticking time bomb to me. Stratton parents fought like mad to eliminate moving forward by putting the fourth and fifth grades at the oddison. So I'm not sure about finding parental support with people on board putting eighth grade into a high school, especially with technology and I could go on and on about that. I'm not going to go there. I do think that putting sixth grade at the Gibbs and leaving everything else alone is maybe the most cost effective solution without possible permanent modules at the elementary school. While option four is not a bad idea, I would hate to rob children of a fifth grade experience. My son who was on the spectrum is thriving in a fifth grade, feeling strong and like he owns the school. I would hate to rob him of that. It's very important. I lived for fifth grade. Middle school stinks no matter what you do. Maybe Mr. Seuss' idea is really one we need to look at. The Gibbs gym was a junior high school before. Why not make that again? Another thought is, can we put sixth grade back into the elementary schools? Is that an option? That's just because- We're too crowded. I know there's no room, but like what if we put modules in and put sixth grade there? I don't know. These are just suggestions. I mean, I know this is an incredibly hard and difficult decision for everybody. And it's very emotional for everybody, but I just felt like if I didn't say anything, I would kick myself when I got home. Thank you. To my right. Okay. So I'm Stephanie Marlin-Curiel. I'm on the Arlington Commission of Arts and Culture. For those of you who do not know what the commission is, we advocate and preserve cultural and artistic resources in town and advise the Board of Selection on all matters, arts and culture. So we recognize that this is not and cannot be a contest between education and the arts. I mean, we cannot pit the Arlington Center for the Arts against the schools. We have to come up with a solution that accommodates boats. Both. The arts are part of the education and we all know how important that creativity and innovation will be for our children in their future that they're facing. It's already been said that the growing popularity of Arlington as a place to live is due to the quality of our schools and also the quality of our cultural life. And we do not want to lose either one of those. This is a problem that we're facing together and that we have to solve together. And the ACA must be part of the equation in terms of coming up with solutions including the costs that are projected for these solutions. And as to the question of state funds, there are state funds that are available for cultural facilities. So perhaps we could look at those. The Arlington Center for the Arts, everything that is offered, as Linda said, of course the loss of those would be extremely detrimental to our town as well as what the other Gibbs organizations are offering. The Arlington Commission on Arts and Culture was created in part to the groundswell of enthusiasm and momentum in the arts in this town in recent years. We're recognizing that there is an untapped creativity and the cultural resources that we have in town could be capitalized on to strengthen our businesses and enhance quality of life for everyone. And this includes helping to raise much needed revenue that could in turn support our schools. So the Arlington Commission on Arts and Culture is taking a specific step that I mentioned here because it pertains to the Arlington Center for the Arts and that we are trying to apply for cultural district status from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and this is a recognition of the state that would be applied to our town. The goals, well the cultural district is, recognizes that our town is very walkable, that it's compact and that it has a density of arts and culture resources. And the goals of districts are that they attract artists and cultural enterprises, they encourage business and job development, establish a district as a tourist destination, they enhance property values and foster local cultural development. And in order to apply for cultural district status we need to have a managing partnership. Arlington Center for the Arts is key to that managing partnership. They have already agreed along with a number of other key organizations in town to take on that role and they given their experience in managing in arts and cultural institution with very diverse range of activities happening inside it that they are uniquely qualified to help in the managing of this district and to help move Arlington forward in the arts. I just want to mention kind of in closing that there is a quote from Woody Dumas who's a former mayor of Baton Rouge that the arts are the best insurance policy a city can take on itself. And as we know Boston has also enhanced, has taken on, hired in arts and culture czars and investing in a cultural plan and ACAC is also helping Arlington to do the same in cooperation and huge support from the town and the board of selectmen for which we are grateful for that commitment. Thank you very much. Thank you. And to my left. Hello, my name is Jean Clark and I live at Ridge Street, Precinct 11. I have a daughter class of 2025 that sounds like a futuristic novel and I have a son class of 2027. And I also happen to be a member of the class of 1991. Don't worry. Whatever. So there you go. Historical context I want to provide for some folks here which we're diminishing in numbers is that Arlington in 1980 had 11 elementary schools and two junior highs and a high school. And then in 1990 that number was shifted down to four we lost four elementary schools the crib's closed and we're down to the high school. I mean obviously. So that's where we are now and it's amazing that was a 10-year blip and so those folks who they're you know kids were leaving the nest and based on the McKibben projections and they were 55, surprise surprise, 20, 25 years later they're selling their houses. So this is really a big shock I hope not considering you know people do projections but anyways I guess the point I'm trying to make or the question I have I feel sorry for the folks here because 20, 30 years ago I'm pretty sure you guys were thinking about different things and unfortunately the folks that were in your position made some really bad decisions. So I think it was short-sighted at the time to have sold off schools they sold off the lock and they sold off the cutter. Okay small parcels yes but where did that money go when they sold that off? I'm curious because that would have been nice if it was put in a nest egg for this current issue and then the rents we've been getting at Parmenter and Crosby all these years wouldn't it have been nice if they were maybe saved for like I don't know the cycle because Arlington's not Detroit it's not like we've lost housing units we physically have not lost structures in fact we've increased so one would assume that the population would go up again and here we are. So the question I have is I would love to see the McKibben report I don't know if it's going to cost more money but it had a lot of data but not the analysis that was spoken this evening was great but it wasn't in the report and so as someone who couldn't come to this meeting and reading a report and I'm looking and like I go data methodology no analysis no conclusion and it would be interesting to see that information I know that there are no land parcels available in this community I've did a zoning project when I was in graduate school for this and there's really very limited land so why did we sell off the Crosby in 2012 for 2.9 million dollars now Schools for Children is a great program like all these other great programs we have in this great community but and I'm glad to see them still here but it would have been nice if we had maybe thought about that space and I agree with I don't know how we pronounce your name but I agree with every comment this older gentleman over here made about the rebuilding but I also know that the high school is an issue and I just I really want to know where the money is going because it's permanent town building the buildings are under the permanent town building committee but they were schools and so like there was a reason our forebears built these schools for this community and I love that my kids can walk to their school and I would hate to see if this community was broken up into an area where people couldn't walk to their schools and that is pretty much probably it I'm sure some other thoughts will be repeated thank you for the time yeah hi we're sharing our time my name is Nancy Morrison I live at 56 Claremont Avenue I'm president of the Arlington Children's Theater and we're here to round out the hat trick on arts pro arts groups hi I'm Matt Lundin I'm the artistic director of Arlington Children's Theater so I just quickly have a few things to say about Arlington Children's Theater and what we do here in the Arlington community so like I said we are children's theater and we do about nine productions a year also summer camps as well as April and February vacation camps so throughout the year we work with about 500 kids and 70% of that number is Arlington kids we also go out into the schools in Arlington I myself currently started this week teaching after-school workshops at Brackett, Pierce and Bishop as well as for me I'm also a TA at Hardy Elementary and I was also a TA at Stratton Elementary while I was finishing my master's so I totally understand where you're all coming from as far as space issues but today I have to come from the point of view of my full-time job which is artistic director of this children's theater the kids involved all 500 of them are diverse in every way including those on the spectrum as well as kids that I work closely with going through issues of gender identity as well as sexual identity and all of that so I just want to hit on for that group ACT is a peer group a community in a safe place where they accepted for who they are for the kids the community of ACT is more important in life changing to them than the acting they do ACT has been a part of this community for 25 years we're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year and I myself have been with the organization for 10 and for 17 of those years we were nomadic we were in church basements and we finally found a spot at the Arlington Center for the Arts and for the last seven years have been working there with rehearsals and productions so now with that I turn it over to Nancy so the reason we're talking about this tonight is because we have so many of so many members of other town committees councils and offices because we really think that the Gibbs building is Arlington's current art center it's affordable theater and rehearsal space for the performing arts and it's space for artist studios classes and camps Arlington needs an art center if the Gibbs reverts to becoming a school then I think actually it's up to the town of Arlington to work together not just the school committee but all of the committees and councils in Arlington to work together to provide an art center to help provide a space for art not to necessarily fund the programs but to provide a space I've been thank you I've been thinking about this and the best analogy I can come up with is title nine title nine made it so that women's sports were funded in an equal manner as men's sports so I'm sort of thinking this as title nine point one that maybe recreation should be funded and art should be funded in the same way the town currently provides space for athletes fields for baseball and soccer basketball courts tennis courts an ice rink for hockey playgrounds for children space for our seniors to gather and learn and a library for everyone the town's doing a wonderful job the town through the school committee has been providing an art center as well and we've deeply appreciated that so we really think that this is a town issue that we need to have an art center Arlington Children's Theater would love to work with the schools or with the town on multi-purposing space because we only operate at night so we'd love to use empty rooms that are used by someone else during the day and we hope that you'll think about title nine point one and giving equal opportunity for arts as we do for athletics I also wanted to address the Mugar Enterprises in the past Mugar Foundation has provided funding for the various theaters in the Boston area their foundation is no longer doing that they have a different focus however Mugar Enterprises owns four or five theaters in the Boston area so there is a precedent for them actually building and operating the professional theater spaces and so that might be something that's worth looking into thank you Adam Street one of the previous speakers alluded to the mistake the town made of selling the Crosby School a few years ago if I remember right the agreement was that should the current owner decide to sell the town as the right of first refusal has anyone approached the owner about repurchasing that school no okay another question I had was in doing the space analysis was the was one of the constraints that they would not be redistricting done again no no okay then I guess I didn't understand the answer regarding the Parmenter School and another speaker mentioned the possibility of having K through six elementary school and the answer was that you couldn't have you couldn't reuse the Parmenter School because you wanted to put the fifth grade for the entire town in the Parmenter School but why wouldn't you just make that another elementary school and then redistribute the sixth grade across all of the existing elementary schools and if you needed to you know for a period of time get the modular you know classrooms as needed couldn't you do that you know couldn't that be a scenario because it's certainly something we can look into so I I mean I I just don't understand it seems to me that Parmenter was preemptively taken off the table and and I'm not sure we can put anything we want back on the table I hope you will just one final comment on the this plot in the book about permitted housing units Han of Arlington I would just point out that between 2011 and 2014 you can explain almost an entire increase by over 300 units of apartment developments at the Sims and the Brigham site and that's not you know typical development scenario in Arlington the possible Mugar development as a 40 B not withstanding I'm not sure how that affected the analysis or at all but I think it is something you need to consider thank you Dr. McKibbin do you have a answer to that question the the question was pertaining to the large developments in the in the past couple of years yeah that's that's why if you notice in the chart their building permits for above 100 we have dropped it down to 80 for the rest of it those are two abnormalities you you don't have any large apartment complexes coming on so what the residual is is mostly infill tear down rebuild so that's why I dropped the number down so much from your your current 140 thank you the podium to my right Rebecca Peterson precinct 16 I just really wanted to make a comment and say I'm thank you for this process but also I'm a former Dallin parent and now an Audison parent and I think since my first year at Dallin as a parent there in 2007 maybe around that time or the very next year there were space issues there were planning problems there were oh we're bursting out of the seams and I know over time at the Dallin just off the top of my head we lost a dedicated science room a computer lab dedicated after school space there might be more I don't know I know other schools are have faced same challenges and worse across town other elementary schools while I hope that the arts programs can be incorporated into a solution the solutions that you're looking at I do want to thank you that the Gibbs is still owned by the town because I feel like without that as an option we would be severely severely out of choices here and I think it's something we have to look at I don't want to say kick anyone out but I think the problem is so huge across the town space wise in the elementary schools and at the now I'm an autism parent of two children and it's terrible there and so I think we just we have to look at everything thank you thank you podium in my left my name is Jessica Conaway I'm a second grade I have a second grader at Thompson School I wanted to recognize Principal Donato who's here with us today she's a great principal and it's a great community so would you stand for us and yeah thank you it's great of her to be here with us and she's got to greet the students early in the morning my primary concern of course is class sizes and the student experience with the second grader I want to reference the comment that an earlier some person made around educational policy I've heard a lot of discussion around numbers demographics capital considerations but I haven't heard a whole lot about the student experience and I think I'd like to request at this moment that Superintendent Bode and the school committee put together some guiding principles for this process and how the students will be impacted both in their access to specials as well as in class sizes the other thing that's really thank you that is my absolute number one concern as a parent also I think all I can think about in this conversation is operating with the addition of all these classrooms of course you're going to need additional high quality teachers and I would like to have paired maybe on a parallel track with the capital considerations how is the district going to ensure that there are high quality teachers in every class that's going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit more teachers for every classroom of everyone that's added and I'm sure there is a plan for that but as a parent you know those are the things I think about is my child's experience going to be maintained in a modular classroom are they going to have access to gym to science to art and who's going to teach my kid so thank you for taking my questions or my people I think one of the things we've found is that modular classrooms tend to be quite nice thank you very much When we talked about them at the Addison, the teachers were lining up to get into those because they're air conditioned, they're nice, they're big, they're spacious, they're well designed even though they're modular. As for teaching staff, this district is always taking a very serious look at hiring the very best teachers we can. And the reason why you have great teachers in this district and I think that we've got really wonderful teachers in this district is this. We have principals who hire well, we have a central office that supports good teaching, we have a good professional development program. We are within the course of the way we do business, committed to recruiting, retaining, and supporting great teaching in the district, 5,000 students or 6,000. That's really wonderful to hear and I would just ask that throughout this process that that remain a commitment, just as strong and I know it will, but if you could also communicate out to the parent community, you know, how those commitments are being maintained while you're dealing with this bigger issue, that would be helpful to all of us and it would give us comfort that the student experience isn't being degraded while you're dealing with all these others. Oh, I think that everyone in this committee is very dedicated to the student experience in maintaining the high standards. That's why we're going through this, to make sure we have the space required to deliver that product, that our teachers have the best classrooms we can provide for them. No, I hear you and I do appreciate that, I just, I'm asking for communication and so it stops all the time. I'm just saying what you're asking. Okay, well, along the process, not just tonight, but throughout the process. Absolutely, and I'll say it as often as you like. If I stop saying it at some point, call me up, tell me to say it again. I'll take you on that. Thank you. Right podium. Hi, I'm Jennifer Leaguerre, Thompson Mom, District 5, I think that is. I'm here tonight, yes, I'm a Thompson Mom, but I actually got here and delved into those numbers in that report to make my own pictures to understand what was going on. Thanks to the email I got from Linda of the ACA because I care so much about that amazing organic cluster of both big and tiny cultural resources and it worries me that if they were displaced, I just don't see how it could be recreated elsewhere. So I just want to express my agreement with every point that's been made in support of the ACA staying at the Gibbs and other spaces being looked at. But as a Thompson parent who has now looked into these numbers and seen that we're already at capacity and we're foreseen to have to support about 17 percent more kids five years from now. And already we have kindergartners eating at 10 something in the morning for lunch because there isn't room in the cafeteria. We have our fourth and fifth graders doubled up for gym and that's this year. Not two, three, four years from now. And I just wanted to make that point, but about the core spaces because this is about the cafeteria, the gym. These schemes that we have, we might be able to add classrooms, but where is the help in terms of those core spaces, if I could please ask you that question. I agree with you and I think that we touched pace on that on a certain, you know, certainly in Otteson and at the Gibbs for having too many students, right? You can accommodate them in a general classroom, but what about the specialists? What about the shared use spaces and so on? It is a concern. You know, in any of these scenarios before anything would be embarked upon, a study needs to be done and looked at. And so if as you're speaking to specifically Thompson, which is very near and dear to my heart in particular, that the findings are that there's not enough room in the cafeteria or the gymnasium, well then that's a bigger concern. So that has not, you know, been brought to my attention until just this minute. So again, this is why it's all part of a process and a lot needs to still occur. Okay, we have four people online, so I'm just going to ask the last two people online to come over to this podium and at this point will, unless they're sitting down, they're sitting down. Oh, they're walking around. You could have walked in front here. Yeah, and we're just going to go one, two, three, four and then we'll end the public discussion so we can do some concluding business of the committee and get home at a reasonable hour to feed the cat, you know. Sir. Maybe too late for a reasonable hour. Joe Barr, 24 Park Street, third grader at the Thompson School. I guess just two things. One, I guess following up on some of the earlier comments, I'd just like to officially ask that the school committee make the idea of looking at the, now I've forgotten the name of the school, the Giveth School as a second junior high for Hardy and Thompson. If I'm reading the numbers right, there's about 170, 180 students per grade. If you put three grades into that, that's about five to 600. So it seems like it fits its capacity, whether you, however you divide it up and that seems like a reasonable approach and also would solve other problems in terms of transportation and other things that we all want to achieve, I think, out of the school. So just sort of officially make that request if the Giveth School is on the table, which obviously has impacts. But since it is, I think that should be a scenario five or whatever or six or seven, however many you get up to. And I guess the other point I'll just make is that the master plan was mentioned and I was on the master plan advisory committee for the town. And although I might quibble with whether the zoning will actually include housing or not, I think the larger point there is that it's important as you move forward with this process to think about the larger goals that were expressed in that plan in terms of open space, affordable housing, et cetera, et cetera. The school plays, the school system plays a very important role in that. So I encourage you to make sure that as you move from just this early analysis into the real feasibility and planning phases, you include the goals as well as the conclusions of the master plan and your thinking. Thanks. Thank you. And to my right. Mark Rosenthal, 61 at Street. Before I came to the meeting, I obviously didn't know what you had in mind, so I had some thoughts about what you might be thinking. And I ran some numbers of my own. I downloaded Dr. McGiven's report from the web and I took the numbers that I have for the school capacities, subtracted them year by year, and then started the results school by school for each year. The end result is that, let's see, this year, the school that's most overcapacity is bracket. Next year, the school that's most overcapacity is bracket. And on and on year after year, up until 2021, after which Hardy beats it by about five students. That being the case, I found myself wondering, not knowing that you were thinking that Gibbs might be used for an entire grade. I found myself wondering why you would be adding capacity on the other side of town from the area where the demand is the highest. And when you have a building owned by the town that could be used to alleviate some of the overcrowding. So I would like to reinforce the suggestion that you consider Parmenter possibly as another K through five to handle some of the overcrowding at Brackett and Hardy. And that then might make it possible to use only part of Gibbs for whatever, for the rest of the overcrowding, leaving some of Gibbs available for the Arlington Center for the Arts. Thank you. Thank you, to my left. Good evening. Hi, my name is Adam Del Molino. I live at 170 Newport Street, Precinct 10, and I'm on the board of library trustees as well. I'd just like to point out and say thank you. Thank you for taking the time to sit down and listen to everyone in the audience here this evening. I think it's been a great conversation and very important. I don't envy you. I really don't. Arlington is really a victim of its own success. And I think that's by having a conversation and a dialogue like this is so important. I'm a father of a kindergarten at Brackett, but I'm also the father of a one-year-old with Down syndrome. And when I look at this plan and I look at the six different scenarios that you guys are being presented this evening, five out of those six scenarios would move those students and their students. It's not moving the program. It's moving the students from the Brackett to the Pierce School. When my wife and I moved here in 2008, we moved to Newport Street because we're two blocks away from the Brackett. It makes no sense to me why you would have a kid that's going to be going to school and visiting that school every day and following her little sister up the hill with school every day for the next five years. And then she's going to have to go to school all the way across town. It just doesn't make sense to me. If that's the case, if you're going to move the program to the Pierce School, then I hope that the Brackett looks at doing full inclusion for children with Down syndrome at the Brackett School in their classrooms. I guess my message is this. Don't underestimate the richness that those children who have disabilities can bring to their schools. Embrace them. Embrace full inclusion for those children at that school if that's what your intention is. And just thank you very much. Thanks for taking the time to sit down this evening. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And when my wife and I conclude this program, I think we have one more as well. Well, I asked and cut it off at that. But if it's a very quick question, I'll put you on the 32nd clock. Your name and screen please? I'm just signing in. My name's John Islany. I'm 51 Tough Street, which means. You're across from the Gibbs. Across from the Gibbs. I love the Gibbs. It's also a reason why I moved to Arlington, had a child. And I believe that I was the only person that raised my hand when the question, second question, was asked, are you going to have more kids? So I'm a fight customer. And I really appreciate the fact that we've had all the demographic information and all the study. This is clearly the start of a really long open process in the town. And as a director of student affairs of a well-known school around town, I'm glad that we're going from this point forward to start really thinking about the student experience. Because if these projects were presented at my school, they would be shot down pretty hard. I would also want the school board to make a commitment that if through the process we end up that we do have to do modulars, that we have some sort of commitment from the town or from the school board, that we will have formaldehyde free to the highest environmental standards so that we're not putting our children into chemical baths for a few years before they get into the next school. I think that's a very important component of modular building. I think we've all seen through the famous FEMA trailers and everything. So something to think about as we move forward, if we do end up having to do the being counter option, which I think a lot of people don't want to do, but we may have to do. And in terms of the Gibbs, I have a lot of concern about a single grade solution either at the Gibbs or anywhere else. I think that that is something that is drifting so far away from the purpose of education. And also the issue of we can fit 25 here, 25 there times 24 and do the math. Whoa, we should not be looking at class sizes of 25 if we're gonna be building, all right? Let's start looking at class sizes for a little bit smaller. This is, and I forgot the gentleman's name, he's always got great comments, Ted or Tom. Mr. Paluso. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, you know. When you run for town meeting, you can come and hear him regularly on the floor. I'd like to invite you to a cup of coffee, Mr. Paluso, because many meetings, I always find your comments very interesting at least. I did write down, the first thing I wrote when I saw the great demographic information was, this is great, this is fantastic. If the problem that Arlington has is that we get to build new schools for a new population, then let's do it right. Let's make sure that we figure out how we're gonna do it. And the last thing that I'd like to say is that, and it does reflect a little bit about the fact that, you know, a student without Down syndrome gains immensely from being with children with Down syndrome, et cetera, you know. Well, it's also, the last thing I'll say is, it also has to do with intergenerational experiences. I do not wanna live in Arlington that has a senior center on one end of town and an art center on the other end of town and preschool in the other end of town. If we can come up with some solutions here that maybe have seniors interacting with middle schoolers, I think that that's a great option. I think if we could take a look and maybe if we're gonna have a school like the Gibbs transformed into more traditional education, well, what if it were like an arts middle school? You know, and it only served 350 students, but they were all the artistic students and they had a children's theater in house and they had an art in a center for arts in house and you kind of just kick out the private school and put in the public school kids and keep all the art programming and you'd probably find a decent solution. So, something to think about, you know. So, but I thank you. Ms. Cowles, can you just comment on the quality of portables? Cause that issue was mentioned. I know you've spoken to us in the past about that. Very, very quick response. Cause I want- My question was if they look at me. Oh, wait, you're asking the question. Actually, her question was also about- Well, come on in. I'm Rachelle Dobbs, District 9. I have- What's your name? Rachelle Dobbs, District 9. I have twin boys in first grade at Thompson in a couple of years. I have twin girls coming in Thompson. I'm part of the problem. Yay! And I just feel, sorry, sorry, Arlington. And I just feel whether it's short term or long term, these modules are gonna be part of our school system but I have no idea what they look like. I feel like I would feel better. Is there a place to go where we can see a rendering of what they would look like, particularly these two stories? Like I think of construction worker trailers and that's not where I work with my kid. Like I have no idea what these look like. Is there a place to go? The committee has seen some of this and it's impressive but- Cause I've never seen anything. Can you give a brief explanation of how wonderful these things are? Yeah, I don't know what websites are. Okay, so a lot of people are talking about a lot of different things when it comes to modules. So there's temporary modules, which you wouldn't do a lot of if you're just gonna have it for a year. And I agree with what your assessment, most people, teachers love to be in them because they're air conditioned. So they're very, very popular until they start to leak which happens a few years down the road. But if you're using them as a temporary solution, you would not gussie up the outside. It would look like a metal building. I'll call it a box because they usually come 30 by 30 or some dimension like that. They have all the things that you need. They have flooring, they have lighting, they have ceilings, they have mechanical equipment, all of that. So, and they are not, they do not, wherever that gentleman went, have formaldehyde in them. They are perfectly safe boxes. They're just not designed. They don't fit into the context, all of that. So, back to the idea of putting additions onto the elementary schools. The idea behind that would be if you used modular construction, the reason to use that is it's a little bit faster and because they can do a lot of stuff offsite and bring it to the site. That's generally the idea. What I was layering on in my infinite calculations was gussying them up. They would have brick exterior. They would look like brick building from the outside. And again, we talked a little bit earlier about improved mechanical, improved windows, installation, things like that to make them better for the long haul. So, in that case, in what we're talking about here, it would look like a building. It wouldn't look like something else. Well, sure, so, same kind of idea. The more you do to it, the more you don't know that it was a modular to begin with. I would say the one thing that I can think of that you would know is a difference from the two is that there is sort of a fixed height dimension. So, for instance, at the Thompson School, you have 10 foot ceiling heights in your classroom. You would not have that in the addition. Those additions, probably, if you were lucky, you would get nine. So, there would be that subtle difference because you're dealing with a modular dimension when you use modular construction. But please don't consider me an expert on modulars. So, they are something that you can go online. You can look at them. We've helped a number of communities to put them in temporarily. So, like a temporary modular? When you go online. Oh, oh, I would recommend Triumph Modular. That is a very popular manufacturer. You can go to just about any school in the town of Newton. Lexington High is just standing out. Okay, at this point, I'm going to ask one quick run down the committee for any last questions or comments. Mr. Hayner, Mr. Pierce. Let's move the 10 o'clock rule, please. Oh, we do have to do that, don't we? Motion by Mr. Pierce to move the 10 o'clock rule to 11. Okay, motion by Mr. Pierce. Second by Mr. Steeleman, who's nodding his head. All in favor, say aye. Opposed, six to one, we are extended to 11 o'clock. Further down the line, Mr. Pierce, any comments or questions? No, thank all the people who presented tonight and all the people who came out. Thank you very much. Dr. Allison Ampey. What Mr. Pierce said. Ms. Starks. Mr. Steeleman. Dr. Seuss. Sorry, yeah, I just wanted to add I wasn't necessarily advocating that the Gibbs be a middle school. I was just suggesting that we consider the possibility. I amend the Gibbs almost every day. My kids are at the Gibbs almost every day. I tremendously value the programs that are in there. I just want to sort of open up the possibility to consider. Okay, thank you. And my only last comment would be that the only property we haven't mentioned is the Winchester Country Club. Next item of business is public participation. For anything that has nothing to do with this, did anybody come to talk to us about any other topic? Hearing none, next item after that will be the superintendents report and we'll take about a two minute recess for their room to clear. Quick superintendents report, we'll do the consent agenda, then we'll watch the report in steps, the escalators, and the chairmen. What are the two things? No, I mean the two things. I was gonna hold off the warm crisis, the martyrs left it. Yeah, the martyrs left it, it's an abyss. Thank you. It went off in September one, so yeah. I told them very quickly. Okay, let's see if we can't wrap this up. We're gonna do a very brief superintendents report, followed by the consent agenda, then we'll entertain a motion to adjourn. Superintendent Bode, you have a couple of things to mention. Two things. First of all, I did mention earlier during the meeting that we have been invited by MSBA into a senior study. What that means, it is not a commitment to begin the next process. What it means is that they want to meet with school personnel about, it's a working meeting to. Excuse me, all please suspend, we're conducting business. So I'll repeat this, we were notified a week or so ago that MSBA invited Arlington into a senior study for the high school. What that means is it is a working meeting with school personnel on the conditions of the high school, educational impact. It is not a guarantee that we're invited into the first stage of the process, but it is a signal that they are taking our statement of interest very seriously, and that visit will be happening before the end of September. The second thing is we talked about the Great River Charter School, which was being proposed for this region of five districts. The notice came yesterday that the commissioner is not considering the application for that school. Okay. It's a question that's down there. A question, Dr. Allison Ampe. Dr. Bodie, can you speak to whether the presence of school committee members at this meeting for the MSBA would be helpful? I didn't catch it. Can you tell, is it good for the school committee to be at the MSBA? Should the school committee get involved? I don't think so at this stage. I mean, having a couple of people come just to show the school committee support would be fine. We're going to start with an initial meeting, and then we're going to go on a tour. They already have indicated the types of things that they want to see. They want to know, of course, that there's broad support for this, so we can talk about that possibility. Or the Charter School hearing none. I'd entertain, hear a motion for the consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine. It will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items, unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence, approval of minutes. September 10th, 2015, approval of warrant, number 16039, dated September 10th, 2015, total warrant amount $332,011.12. Approval of trip foreign exchange program for AHS students in French, Quebec City, Canada, trip January 29th through February 1st. Days may change slightly for foreign language students. Moved by Dr. Seuss, second by Mr. Heiner, all in favor. Opposed, unanimous vote. I'll entertain a motion to adjourn, Mr. Heiner. Second. By Starks, Heiner, Starks, all in favor. Good job tonight, thank you very much.