 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Allicton School Committee for Thursday, January 27th, 2022. I am Bill Hain of the Chair, but may be to confirm that all members and persons anticipated in the agenda present can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Mr. Thielman. Here. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Ampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. In the affirmative. Dr. Holman. Yes. Dr. McNeil. Yes. Mr. Spiegel. Yes. Ms. Fernandez from the ADA. Yes. And I don't see this accident at the moment. She'll be here soon, I assume. Tonight's meeting of the Allicton School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with the act signed into law on June 16th, 2021, that extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency. The act includes an extension until April 1st, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The governor's order, which is referenced with the agenda materials on the town's website, this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely, so long as a reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom, is being recorded and is also being simultaneously broadcast at ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record for the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those people, persons are not required to identify themselves. Both Zoom participants and persons watching an ACMI can follow the post agenda materials, also found on the town's website using the Nova's agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. No one has signed up a particular public participation so we will go directly to the superintendent's entry plan. Dr. Holman. Thank you. Give me a minute to share my screen. You should see my slides, yes? Great. So it is my pleasure to present to the community members who are watching and to the committee, the findings from my superintendent's entry plan. If the committee and community recall, I had shared with everyone right as I had started in July, on July 1st of 2021, my entry plan, which included a lot of activities that had actually begun back in February of 2021 due to the transition contract that the committee had negotiated with me when I was appointed and gave me a lot of opportunities to get to know the Arlington community very well over the last several months. And I've really enjoyed that process. So tonight my goal is to share with you, first to remind you of the process that undertaken over the last several months and also to share with you some of the initial findings of that entry plan process. I wanna emphasize that the goal of the entry plan report is not so much to lay out specific initiatives that the district needs to undertake or even to define priorities because that's going to be the work that happens next. Really the goal here is for me to uncover and share with all of you some of the things that I've noticed, the themes that have emerged and what has come from the data that I've analyzed over the course of the last several months. Some of that data I will share with you, certainly not all of it. There was a lot to comb through and what I do share in the report is something of an executive summary because I think to really unpack all of the things that I think we're going to work on over the next several years would have been a much longer report. And I imagine if you didn't wanna read many more than 30 pages. So the full report is in your materials for tonight. I'm going to go over a little bit of my methods process. I'm gonna talk about the four overarching goal areas that the school committee has already defined and some key strengths and potential future directions or opportunities within each one of those. So student achievement, staff excellence, professional development, resources, infrastructure and educational environment and operations, communications and stakeholder engagement. So to start, what I did over the last several months was a lot of focus groups with Arlington students K through 12 at all levels. Lots of family listening sessions with families. I had messaged these out to families and many families showed up to me. Hey Liz, I think something's gone weird with your screen. Do you wanna just unshare and there we go. Are we back? I got the overview. Is everyone else got it? I fixed it. Yeah. We're good. Thank you. Thanks for flagging that for me. Okay, so at least 20 focus groups with the students seven with families, seven with staff, one-on-one entry meetings with administrators, visits to the schools. I visited every Arlington school, many of them several times. It's been wonderful to visit the schools. It's my favorite part of my job to go see what's going on in classrooms. I also looked at the climate and culture surveys that were conducted in fall of 2020 and fall of 2021. We also did a round of surveys in the spring of 21 but those didn't have nearly the same sort of level of participation. And so I was really looking at the two surveys that we had done that had gotten the highest levels of participation. I took a look at achievement and accountability data for Arlington public schools, not just this year but over the past several years and several reviews and audits of the school systems as well as budgets, financial reports and other reports. And the full litany of things that I looked through is also included in the entry plan and a list there. So from there, like I said, I've organized this report around the four overarching goal areas of the Arlington public schools. So I want to start actually with the words of students as we look at student achievement. The focus groups with students have really been the highlight of my last few months. I don't intend to stop doing them because they really have helped me gain a good understanding of how students are experiencing school. And I'd like to talk about the strengths that they named. Students across Arlington talked about how much they love their teachers and feel valued and cared for by them. They shared how their teachers help them when they are struggling with something and do not give up on them and continue to encourage them to keep trying. They shared how much they love opportunities to show and explore their curiosities and their passions and their interests and really highlighted moments when their teachers have given them opportunities to explore something that they chose that they were curious about and really wanted to go learn more about. The most memorable learning experiences for them were the ones that combined disciplines into projects with tangible outcomes, including they talked about performances, presentations, interactions with the community or projects that they could take home and share with their families. And our students really feel like they're held to high standards by their teachers, that their teachers genuinely know who they are as people and they talked about their favorite teachers as those who got to know them as people. One student shared an example of a teacher who made it an assignment to set aside 15 minutes of time to have a conversation with the teacher and set the time aside as part of that as a way of getting to know their students and they felt like that was a really powerful instance in which they could tell that their teachers cared about not just who they were academically but who they are as people. We also have some opportunities in the area of student achievement. We've had significant and pretty persistent gaps in achievement amongst certain subgroups, particularly our high needs students, our students who have IEPs and our students who are people of color. And we have declining achievement in mathematics and this is particularly notable throughout the pandemic. Though we exceeded targets in 2019 and we have been given academic targets for the coming school year. 2019 was the last year since the state reported accountability data. The pandemic has definitely had an impact on and time on learning in mathematics is not even with time on learning in ELA particularly at the elementary level. So that could be something that we take a look at in the coming year so that we can make sure we continue to exceed targets in mathematics alongside that 2019 trend. Gaps in specific areas of ELA achievement also stood out, particularly for certain subgroups in particular vocabulary and informational text comprehension are areas of concern. They have been when we've disaggregated MCAS findings and they are also highlighted here in the slide. This slide shows reading assessment performance on the fall 2020 and fall 2021 IREDI assessment, which is a formative assessment that we conduct multiple times per year at the elementary level. And what you will notice is that from 2020 to 2021 in the areas of vocabulary and informational text comprehension, we see our students have slipped. There are fewer students who are performing at or above grade level in third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade in these domains. And there are some curricula that are designed to meet the demands of the frameworks in these areas in order to prepare students for increasingly complex informational texts in the upper grades. And as I shared in the findings report, the curriculum that Arlington Public Schools currently uses has not been rated very highly in these areas. And so it may be something for us to look at as part of a collaborative community conversation in the coming years. When it comes to staff excellence and professional development, staff professional culture in Arlington is extremely strong. It was really encouraging to see that staff are reporting improvements in wellbeing as we've returned to pandemic teaching and learning. I won't say post pandemic yet after the Omicron situation that we just went through, but it is encouraging to see that as we return to in-person learning, as teachers return to classrooms, they're seeing their wellbeing improve and their investment in their work improve. Teachers expressed significant esteem for their colleagues and appreciation for time that they spend collaborating both with administrators and with their teacher colleagues and families and students talked about how wonderful Arlington's teachers are as I talked about when we were talking about student achievement. Teachers are expressing a desire for and so are families and students, some improvements to particularly professional development. So teachers talked a lot about having an opportunity for more meaningful and relevant learning opportunities and more opportunities to design that professional development in collaboration with administrators and their colleagues and to be involved in decision-making processes and planning processes when it comes to curriculum changes or school improvement planning, they really wanted to be involved in that. And families agreed. They noted that instructional consistency is something that Arlington Public Schools could take a look at and improve. And they said that if teachers across roles, across special education departments and across disciplines and across grade levels had more opportunities to work together on common goals that they believe that instructional consistency would be improved. Families raised instructional consistency is an equity issue as well that particularly impacts students with IEPs. For the resources infrastructure and educational environment priority area, our families noted that they feel very supported by a safe and high quality school system. They appreciate that Arlington Public Schools has put significant effort into building up libraries, improving learning technologies, prioritizing fine arts, making sure that we have a rich program of studies at the high school and students can follow their passions and engage in extracurricular activities. They would like, they shared more access to after-school programming and for the district to continue offering and improving access to extracurricular activities and diverse coursework at the high school in particular. When it came to opportunities for resources infrastructure and educational environment, a major resource need for the public schools has been and will continue to be. It has historically been and continues to be a focus on improving the salaries of our professional and paraprofessional staff so that we're more in line with neighboring and comparable districts. This is something that you all talked about as well when we talked about budget priorities for the coming year, last time we met. And furthermore, APS staff, students and families talked a lot about how important it is going to be for us to recruit diverse professionals and leaders in the coming years that will better mirror our student population. These two areas of opportunity are things that I see as and many of the stakeholders I talked to saw is closely linked to one another because competitive salaries are more likely to attract diverse and talented staff from neighboring districts. And so if we're going to diversify our staff, it's also going to be important for us to have competitive salaries with neighboring communities. And when it comes to operations, communications and engagement, the collaborative relationship that we have between town and schools came up in several interviews and has been evident also in the work that I've been doing my early collaborations with town commissions and elected officials. The town has passed multiple overrides that have directly supported education in the building of a beautiful new high school. Town departments have collaborated with the schools both proactively and in crisis situations. And I've had a front row seat to that. We've had excellent collaborations with the Health and Human Services Department that I believe are directly creditable to the fact that Arlington has the highest pediatric vaccination rate in the state and has continued to for the past couple of months. Those collaborative efforts have earned Arlington a reputation not only within Arlington but external to Arlington for inclusive and collaborative governance and that extends to the schools. Families talked a lot about being willing to and their engagement with school PTOs, DIG groups and school councils. And in a lot of those conversations also expressed a desire for those groups to be equitably distributed across all of the schools, equitably attended across all of the schools and easy to access for families who wanted to participate in them. Families also expressed areas for growth when it comes to operations and communications. They said that they wanna be asked not only for their feedback in the surveys that we do but also for partnership. They want to be part of the decision-making process. They want to be included as partners in their children's education. They also expressed that they hope actions will be taken based on their feedback or at least for there to be follow-up in response to shared feedback so that the administration will take in feedback but also share what they're doing in response to that with concrete actions that are visible to families in their daily lives and in their interactions with the schools. Multiple families, students and teachers expressed that those with resources have an easier time accessing collaboration and engaging with the schools in Arlington and that for dual working families, communication and collaboration can be challenging to access. And so with that in mind, they expressed a desire for the schools to work on transparency in messaging and initiatives, share things early and often and as concisely as possible, make communications available in multiple formats and convey necessary information and clear action steps that families need to be taking. And to partner with families as much as possible with two-way communications and opportunities to meet with teachers, meet with administration when they have concerns. So those are, that is a very high level overview of some of the findings that are outlined more comprehensively in the larger report that you all received in your materials. And with that, I will stop sharing and take any questions from the committee. Thank you, Dr. Holman. Any of the members have any questions or comments that I'd like to share with Dr. Holman? Mr. Thielman. Thank you, Dr. Holman. That was very helpful, comprehensive. Thanks for taking all the time to meet with so many different stakeholders in the town. I, you know, the student achievement, the opportunity slide was, brought information that I hadn't seen in a while or maybe I missed. And that was the percentage of students performing mid or above grade level in third, fourth, fifth grade in reading assessments, especially in vocabulary and comprehensive informational texts, comprehensive literature. And I'm kind of wondering where, you know, what you're thinking is and how you're thinking of addressing it because some of the percentage are, I didn't see, I never saw break broken out this way before. Maybe I missed. I may, I will start answering this and I'm going to ask Dr. McNeil if he wants to weigh in because that chart that you're looking at is one that he actually developed and has done some analysis on. And I'm very grateful for that because it was the stuff when it comes to this instructional improvement. What I will say about that particular chart and what it's conveying is that it's conveying two things. One is that there is an area for improvement in the domains of vocabulary and comprehension and informational texts. It's also conveying that there have been significant improvements to phonological awareness, phonics and high-frequency words, which are foundational literacy components that the district has worked on comprehensively over the last several years and has done a lot of really spectacular work around. So it's showing that the work we have done has been really strong and that the domains that are left for us to look at and consider are those around vocabulary and the comprehension of informational texts. And those can be addressed through how the literacy curriculum is organized and what literacy curriculum you are using and how it builds informational texts into what students experience every day alongside narrative texts. And so one of the things that I highlighted in the report was the fact that we're currently working with the curriculum that in these particular domains has been critiqued by various curriculum organizations that do audits and analysis of ELA curriculum resources for schools. So that could be something worth examining further but this analysis also shows the 2020 versus 21 against one another. And that was actually, I think the reason Dr. McNeil did this analysis was to look at how are we doing in fall of 2020 when our students were in a position where they were in hybrid or remote and how are they doing in 21? And so Dr. McNeil, do you have any other pieces to share about what you're noticing in that data? Because he did that from ELA math across grade levels across domains. Yes, thank you. So the data that we use and I already, a lot of that went into how we looked at the various standards that we're gonna focus on for this year. So we can make sure that those standards are highlighted within the units of study. And as Dr. Holman alluded to that, we are actually in the process of having a discussion the other day, looking at our current units of study, looking at what Desi, the various resources, literacy resources that they have recommended and look at the reports and be able to compare and contrast them. And so we're in the process of putting together a task force in order to look at those resources so we can understand exactly where we need to shore up and how it's related to the curriculum choices we have in place right now. Okay, thank you. I mean, it just, it seems like we have a higher percentage of children than I would have thought are below grade level in vocabulary, comprehension, informational text comprehension and literature comprehension. So I thank you very much for pulling that data. I think it's good that we know it. And then obviously the talent in the buildings, the teachers in the building and the leadership of Dr. McNeil and Dr. Holman have to sort of figure out a way to address it. Thank you for that report. Thank you. Is there anyone else at this time? Mr. Cardin and then Ms. Morgan. Thank you and thank you, Dr. Holman for again, meeting with so many groups and doing such a comprehensive entry plan in the middle of a pandemic. So it's quite a great accomplishment. I just had a sort of a question and comment. The safety data was from the family survey. Was that the panorama survey done last spring or was there one in the fall? That was the one that we just did this fall. Just in the fall, okay. So just passing on a comment that I actually just saw on Facebook actually that you presented as 92% being safe but the other way to present it is 8% being at least somewhat unsafe. And I think our other data shows that we probably know the populations that are feeling unsafe. It's minorities, LGBTQ communities. So I do think with our social emotional initiatives that's something to keep an eye on as well. I just wanted to pass that on. Thank you. Agreed, thank you. Ms. Morgan. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. Dr. Holman, can you remind me? I'm like frantically scrolling back in my email and I feel like you told us this in maybe July. What's the timing for phase four? Because I appreciate that this is sort of more of a readout of what you've seen. And obviously, like Mr. Thielman, I'm ready to talk about Lucy Calkins whenever we're ready to talk about her. But I appreciate that. I respect the part of the process that we're in. So what is the timeline for the sort of phase where you're gonna give us some of your recommendations? And I guess I'm asking for that because in my head, I'm reconciling that with where we're at in the budget process. That's a great question. So right now, the next phase of this process, the phase four would be the inclusive strategic planning piece that we've secured a grant from AEF that I've shared with all of you for. Or we did get delayed on our timeline for that compared to the one that we shared with AEF, obviously, on Macron kind of put things on hold for about a month. So we're now in a position where we're about to put the RFP out for that so that we can get a facilitator in who can do the inclusive strategic planning work with members of the community. As part of that, I can share with that group, both this report and what my recommendations would be so that they can use that to frame both their dive into some of these data and their building of some priorities. And then from there, some initiatives that would be part of a comprehensive strategic plan that would be going live in January of 2023. So the next, the big next step is in March for us to get that committee together to get the facilitator in place so that we can begin the convening of that committee in April and have them have set a vision and major priorities before the end of the school year because the goal would be to then write that plan in the fall. Does that help? It does. I mean, I guess the question and again, perhaps it'll be a situation where that plan, maybe goes live in January of 2023, but it's sort of funded in FY24. Yes, but I would also say that, we have not planned the FY23 budget with any of, we've planned the FY23 budget with these findings in mind. These are things that we've, a lot of these things we've discussed at length, Rod or Dr. McHale just referenced that we just had a meeting the other day about the literacy work that needs to happen and some auditing work that needs to happen. And so I would say a lot of the things that we know we need to get working on are things that would be funded as part of the FY23. It's that the specific initiative planning would, yeah, be funded in FY20 as part of the FY24 budget. Great, thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Hader. Thank you. Anyone else? Dr. Ampe. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Homan, for this comprehensive plan and for your quick summary. I just wanted to comment on one. So I especially enjoyed hearing about the recommendations for the communications because I feel that's something that families are, families have been concerned about for a long time and I feel there's already been significant movement towards that just in the time, in the past few months that you have been doing the very directive, very directed, transparent communications. And I look forward to that continuing. One thing that I wonder though is when families say they want to be a partner in education, I feel like I wonder what they mean by that. And I also wonder if everyone means the same thing. And if we're meaning the same thing when we say, because I know I've had one family come to me and say, I do this and I'd be happy to come in and teach my son's kindergarten about it and that just wasn't gonna happen. And so, and to me, I think that's what, she was trying to be a partner. And so I guess, I guess I'm pushing for as this goes forward, I think we need to have clear understanding, partner is too broad. We need to understand what people mean when they say that and communicate that too. So that's all. I can I respond to that. In the context of, so I did probe, people said, what does partnership look like? And I think in the context in which a lot of folks I was speaking to raised this particular area of improvement, it was in the context of a challenging set of interactions that they had with the school or with a particular staff member or in trying to work out an IEP disagreement, for example. And they said, and it wasn't only families with students who have IEPs who shared this, it was also families who have struggled with their child feeling discriminated against based on a classroom interaction or their child feeling bullied by another student. And what they were saying was, we really, when we raise a concern, want to feel as though we have been hard and we want to be part of building a solution together with the school. And we do not wanna be in a position where we feel as though we're told what the solution will be, but as though we've helped in building one out. And so it was more in the context of, it's not so much in the context of bringing new things as or into the schools that don't exist there yet. It was more in the context of when a conflict arises. How do we respond to that? And some families shared really spectacular experiences resolving conflicts with the schools, but there were some sentiments that maybe that was inconsistent or that families didn't always feel as though that happened. That's really helpful, thank you. Ms. Ekston. Thank you. Echoing the thanks for this really detailed and comprehensive report and the amount of time that you've spent gathering all of this information. I just wanna expand a little bit on something that Mr. Cardin said about the safety piece. And I thought about that as I was reading this and in another place in your report, you talk about how students' connections with their teachers and their sense of belonging is a precondition to their academic success. And then we think about who are these 8% that don't feel safe in our schools. And as Mr. Cardin pointed out, we can sort of make some assumptions and some of those numbers were shown to us at the CIA subcommittee meeting on Tuesday. And so, again, I just think about who is that 8% and then we look at the achievement gap and think about there are so many pieces playing into their academic performance, if you will, and making sure that we make sure that they feel safe because that is going to be one of the first steps in making sure that they're making academic progress. So just highlighting that you're bringing all of that together. And so continuing that we're going to think about that. And then the other thing similar to some other people, I was really excited to see the thoughts about the ELA curriculum and looking at how we're going to support the gaps in that. And I was also really pleased to see the progress that's already been made with some of the early grades and the work that has been brought into APS already. Thank you. Mr. Schleckman. Yeah, I want to, excuse me, thank the superintendent for a very comprehensive report as a educator, I've seen a lot of superintendents come and go in my workplace. And I've never seen a report come through that did such a good job of capturing what's happening within the district and presenting the foundation of a vision for how we're going to move forward. So I just find this to be highly commendable and I'm very impressed. Thank you. Ms. Morgan, did I see your hand up again? You sure didn't. Okay. Thank you for confusing. Thank you, Dr. Holman. I really appreciate your work as everyone has said. We all set to move on. Good. For those of you members did not see it, the monthly financial report is being postponed because Mr. Mason is not here at the time. We're now going down to superintendent's report. Again, Dr. Holman, you're gonna have the whole meeting tonight. All right. So I'm going to share my screen again. You should see the current COVID-19 rates and numbers. I do have to apologize. I don't have this week's Arlington data pulled yet. That's usually something I do on Thursday right before our meetings but I didn't get a chance this afternoon. So we do have last week's data for Arlington and I'm guessing that this week's has gone down because the schools have gone down pretty significantly. I will be going and pulling that and updating the dashboard as soon as possible. These rates right now, we have some cases that have come in today that I have not added to the dashboard again but we are seeing a significant decline in rates of COVID-19 in the schools tracking right there with the community and it has been wonderful to have more of our students, more of our staff back in schools this week and to be returning to a little bit more of our routines as usual. I did want to share some revisions that we have done to the APS testing program. These were messaged out to families earlier this week. There are a lot of adjustments that have been made due to a new testing program that was announced by Governor Baker. I believe it was last week. So the changes are listed here and I'm just going to walk through them a little bit and emphasize a couple of things that we really need families to do. We appreciate any help encouraging families to get these steps done and we will be issuing some reminders to families to make sure that we get through these steps as well. Our goal in the new testing program or the revised testing program is to focus on surveillance and response as opposed to focusing as much as we have been on rigorous tracing and testing for close contacts. Part of the reasoning for this is that we have a very, very low number of cases that we actually identify through contact tracing and testing of close contacts. And even in those instances where we do find cases, we're often able to track them outside of the schools. So it's not worth the efforts of our nursing teams. It's not worth the continued efforts of all of our staff to continue to do rigorous contact tracing and test and stay because we're not finding cases that way. COVID-19 including Omicron is not spreading in schools and in controlled environments with high quality ventilation. And so the adjustments include a continuation of weekly pool testing in all schools, which we typically do towards the beginning of the week, a continuation of symptomatic testing in all schools whenever a student is not feeling well if they're presenting with symptoms of COVID-19, we will do a test right then and there, send them home if it's positive. Implementation of new at-home testing once per week for all consented staff and students. This piece is really important. Staff and students need to consent to this new at-home testing program. This consent is separate from the consent for pool testing. We still have your consent for pool testing, but it only applies to pool testing. And so we need families too and staff to re-consent for in order to receive the at-home tests once per week. And what will happen actually is that the tests come in kits of two and staff will receive two tests for two weeks time. So they would take one test the first week and then they would take the next test the next week. And then the following week, students will receive their tests. So every other week, staff will receive two tests. Every other week, students will receive two tests. We're asking the students take those tests and staff on Thursday morning before coming to school because then we will have two touch points for testing during the week. We will have an early week pool test and we will have a later in the week at-home antigen test. Families may also use the at-home antigen test to symptomatic test if they become symptomatic in between the time periods where they're supposed to test and they still have tests available or they can use it for tests to return. And we do have tests that if they have not already arrived on our loading dock are set to arrive in the next couple of days, which are additions to these resources, which we can use to deploy if families need additional access to at-home tests and can't get that access. We will also be continuing surveillance and tracking of cases and monitoring of trends. We're not going to stop paying attention to where COVID is in our schools simply because we're not doing the contact tracing and notification. We always pay attention when we have multiple cases in a room, particularly if we have multiple cases where students are sitting near one another and we continue to keep an eye on those. Sometimes we'll do follow-up pool tests. Sometimes we'll do additional antigen tests just to make sure that we're not seeing instances of school spread. We'll be discontinuing test and stay. This is a stipulation of the state. If you're going to participate in the antigen testing, you must discontinue test and stay. We will be discontinuing centralized tests to return at Arlington High School. This will be replaced by the use of the at-home school distributed eye health tests for tests to return. And positive individuals will need to continue to need to stay home. Negative individuals will be allowed to come back in between days six and 11 or six and 10. We are asking the families to report their test results on a form that is posted to the district website. And we will also be discontinuing contact tracing. So those are all of the changes. There are a lot of changes to keep track of. If you have any questions about the adjustments, please don't hesitate to reach out to your school's administration, to our offices or to the your school nurses office. A couple of additional updates besides just stuff related to testing. The Arlington Public Schools, this is very exciting. We were surprised to learn that we were awarded $350,000 grant from the state, from DESC in a competitive grant related to supporting students' social and emotional learning, behavioral and mental health and wellness through multi-tiered systems of support. This large resource is going to be used to support social and emotional wellness through the course of this year, including some responsive classroom training for teachers who have not yet undergone responsive classroom training. Some additional staff just for the rest of this school year and additional mental health supports that we have proposed as part of the grant. This is to be expended by June of 2022. So these resources are only for this school year and we will be doing our best to make sure they are put to good use. And we certainly have the needs presented. So we're really excited about that. Gibbs and Arlington High School are also to be used as polling locations in the April, September and November elections. Many of these elections are occurring on days when we do not have students in Gibbs and Arlington High School. I know there are space considerations and I've already spoken with the administration at both schools to make sure that we can accommodate that these schools as polling locations for these elections. I'm also looking forward to sending you more information once we can work out all of the details about a potential partnership with Brandeis University to help with that teacher excellence and staff professional development item that we just talked about as part of the entry plan report. We're looking at a teacher leadership graduate program with them and they're considering holding some spots for Arlington teachers and we're working on the details of how to ensure that we can provide the resources for our teachers to participate in this. It's a great program that's not focused on teachers wanting to become administrators but teachers who want to be leaders and be teachers in their schools and partner with administration on important school improvement planning and other initiatives that improve student learning. So we're looking forward to that and as soon as I have more details about it I can share more. We had an Arlington High School Project forum on Tuesday of this past week. It was not hugely attended but there were some attendees there who asked some questions about what traffic would look like, what the move would look like and some excitement and got to look at some pictures of the new building which is coming together nicely and is looking absolutely wonderful inside. So that was a great opportunity for families to learn more and we will be posting the recordings to the Arlington High School Building Project website. I also have an update to your enrollment figures in your packet for this week and wanted to draw your attention to the fact that we are at 6,002 students as of the 25th of this month and that that is an increase of 161 students since October 1st and notably 40 students since the middle of December. This was a bit of a surprise when we pulled the numbers this month. It looks as though we've had a number of students come back to the Arlington Public Schools or enter the Arlington Public Schools or move into the town. We haven't done an analysis to figure out who exactly these 40 students are or the increase of 161 since last year but it is a notable increase. So I wanted to make sure that you were aware of it and that's all I have. Happy to take questions. Does anyone have any questions from the board? Mr. Carden. Thanks and thanks for the update, all the information. So the new protocols that timeline was driven by the state, we kind of rushed it out. We've been getting a lot of questions. I'm sure the principals have as well. Jane answered a bunch of them on Facebook for people. It probably would be helpful to do a follow-up communication next week maybe when there's more time with some of these FAQs. I can pass on some of them but what are we doing with athletes? Are they gonna have to test twice a week? Are we really gonna continue pool testing and antigens seems better at getting symptomatic individuals? Lots of questions about where we're going and what exactly the details, some of the details are. So thanks. It would be helpful if you have some of those FAQs, if we haven't included them on our list of FAQs at the end of the document that outlines it. If you could send those along to our team and then we can figure out a way to make sure we message that out. Any other members at this time? Dr. Ampe. Thank you. Thank you very much for this. I was just wondering about the enrollment. I wanted to be sure, are we tracking decreases in enrollment as well as we are tracking the increases? So it's definitely a net 40 ahead. There's not phantom students who have withdrawn and we don't know about yet. No phantoms, that's net for sure. Awesome, thank you. I was just wondering what the distribution was of this enrollment across the system. Is it all elementary, all high school, spread out? That's sort of my question. Yeah, so I'm gonna share the screen again. One more time, it's kind of hidden at the bottom here and I put it down pretty quickly. But since the 11th of December, 16 of those are at the secondary level. So Gibbs, Audison, AHS, and I think about 12 of them were actually at the high school. So most of them were at the high school. And then 17 of them were at the elementary level. One was an out of district increase and then six of them were pre-K. The magic number for us is the October one count. So if at some point, as we look down the rest of the year, we can compare our enrollment to the October one reported to the state because that's going to be important for us in terms of talking about equity between what has been reported for the calculation of our foundation enrollment and what we're actually experiencing as a platform for what we're going to expect next year. We're 161 students over where we were on October 1st, according to our first report. And the spread, because if they're high school seniors, it's not gonna matter, but if we see the bulges, you understand what I'm saying? Because we're gonna end up with having to deploy resources differently than we were thinking of previously. And to make the argument for funding for next year, it's where are they and how are they gonna fit in? Because if we're absorbing 40 kids into the high school is a different story than if we've got 40 additional kindergarten first graders. I can't share that only one of them was a senior, only one of these 40 since the middle of December was a senior. Okay, you understand where I'm coming from on this. So I don't have to carry on any further conversation. Anyone else? Dr. Ami. Thank you. I'm sorry, Dr. Holman, can you bring your slide back up? I'm confused because it says 10, 30, I'm sorry, 10, 120, is that? 20, oh, sorry, no, that's me, 2021. Okay, okay, I thought it was 20 and I think Mr. Schluckman did too. So that's why we were thrown. Okay, that's all, thank you. Dr. Holman, I have one quick question. The polling, is it gonna be in the new high school or the old high school? The old high school in the gym or a gym? Thank you. Any other questions this time? Okay, thank you, Dr. Holman. We're going down to Ed Coe, Lee Settlement. You all had a copy of the document. That document represents almost a year of negotiation with between Ed Coe and the company that owned the building. The lease had several years still on it and so the negotiation ended up with the figure at the top of the page and then reduced and Arlington's assessment. I will attempt to answer any questions while you're trying to have the vote to approve this amount of money. That's it, Dr. Ampe. So this is a fairly significant reduction in what we were potentially expecting, correct? Yes, if you look up at the top, the actual settlement was for 2.1 million dollars. There was a sweep account money offset. They've applied 750,000 to that and other members coming in and finding all the money into the settlement. It is considerable. Considerable reduction is one of them. Yes, thank you, I'm sorry. Considerable reduction from what we were expecting. Yeah, okay. No, thank you very much for all you've done with it. Mr. Hanner. Yes. So you're looking for a motion to approve the school committee's acceptance of the lease settlement. Is that what we need to do tonight? Yes, what we're gonna be doing when the discussion is over. Yes, our proportion of it, the 90,000 plus. I was just gonna put a motion on the table, but if you know, I can wait. Just a moment, I wanna get everyone a chance to, I miss Exton. You may have just answered my question, but so the prepaid amount applied to the lease has already been applied. And so our assessment is the 90,000. Yes, yes. Okay. Anybody else? I will entertain a motion at this time for the Allington School Committee to pay their assessment of $90,714.10. So moved. Is there a second? There is a second. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, roll call vote. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Dr. Rampey. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. And I vote yes, unanimous vote. Thank you very much, everyone. I will keep you appraised on any further developments on the edco dissolution going forward. We are now at 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. Warrant number 22161 in the amount of $566,161.11. Regular school committee minutes meeting minutes, January 13th, 2022. Is there a motion? Move. Is there a second? Yes, there's a second. Thank you. We'll call vote. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Ms. Dr. Rampey. I'm staying. Dr. Morgan, I mean Ms. Morgan. Yes. And I vote yes, unanimous. Set committee and liaison reports. Project Dr. Rampey. Nothing, just a moment. Okay, I'm gonna have to talk really quickly because I have to go pick up a daughter from a meet. Just, I'm sorry, I, there. Okay, we don't, I don't have anything to report for budget itself, but I, since I wasn't able to be at last week's meeting, I mean the meeting a couple of weeks ago, I just wanted to mention what my priority for the budget was. I concur with a lot of the ones I heard you folks mention, but the one additional thing I wanted to say is actually my highest priority for FY23, which is ensuring that our in-district special education services are appropriately resourced to the level and breadth of our students need, including staffing and equipment. And I don't know how to check if there is a mismatch, but I just, I hope that we are looking at that. And Ms. Olmer that you are advocating as strongly as possible for whatever needs you feel are not, it could be filled better. I'm not trying to say we're not doing anything right, but anyway, that's, so that is my priority. And then in terms of budget, we, I expect we'll be meeting in the next couple of weeks, but don't have anything scheduled yet. Thank you. Community relations, Ms. Extin. Thank you. We have another school committee chat on Saturday during the snowstorm on January 29th at 11 a.m. Mr. Heiner and Mr. Cardin will be hosting and we especially invite families of color to join us and hopefully the power works so that this can happen. Thanks. Thank you. Do you want me to report on the chat we had on Tuesday? When I did that, when I did that now. So Mr. Thielman and I had a weekday chat on Tuesday. Ms. Extin and our committee had scheduled that to give an alternative to parents who might not be able to make it on a Saturday. So we did have two parents attend and both did say that the weekday was easier because they didn't have the kids around. They both expressed questions about the heterogeneous initiatives and wanting more information about what the next steps would be, when there would be opportunity for parental input and things like that. Jeff, was there anything else that you noticed? That was the topic, that's what they wanted to talk about was the process for making decisions about heterogeneous groupings at the high school, yeah. Thanks. Thank you. Curriculum Instruction Assessment and Accountability, Mr. Cardin. Thank you. So we did address heterogeneous grouping initiative at the CIA meeting. I don't know that we have a definite plan on when there will be parental input, but that was part of the feedback that some of the committee members gave to the administration was that there should be more communication about what the next steps would be and when that would happen. There is a document on Novus, if people are interested, the links aren't available. The links aren't, there are links to other materials within that document that aren't working, that we'll have to figure out a way to post. But Dr. Janger did present about the work of the study group, they've met four times and they are doing a literature review meeting with the different, the next step is to meet with the different departments that are involved. And so there's more work going on. And again, the committee gave some feedback about different ways the process might continue. We also received a report on the Panorama Survey, some interesting, they do a sort of a heat map of areas where different subgroups are noted, notably off from the average. So again, there's some interesting material there for people who weren't able to attend. Thank you. Thank you. Facilities, Mr. Thielman. No report. Policy and procedure, Mr. Schleckman. In our email today, we received a copy of the memo that Doug Hyme, our town council sent to the select board pertaining to Shirtliffe versus the city of Boston. As you're aware, when we rewrote our banner policy, we had the town council work with us to write the policy so it conforms to the current thinking regarding issues of government speech and ensuring that we can maintain control over our facilities. If there is a Supreme Court decision that does not align to our present policy, we'll need to come back and look at it. But at this point, our policy is aligned to the current legal thinking at the time. So be aware, watch for that and we'll see what the Supreme Court does. Thank you. Allington High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. Yeah, so we had an excellent, Dr. Homan alluded to this, we had an excellent, or mentioned this, we had an excellent forum the other night and Dr. Homan and I and a member of our committee had a chance to tour the facility last week, I guess it was maybe two weeks ago now. And it's really, it's spectacular. I mean, it's really just, I think when we get the chance to walk through it together or apart or we do that, I think people are just gonna be blown away by how beautiful it is. So it's on time, it's on budget. Our next meeting of the building committee is Tuesday, February 1st at 6 p.m. on Zoom. And if you wanna tune in and get an update on where we're at, we hope you join us. Thank you. Any liaison reports at this time? Any announcements? I have one announcement, the Rotary Club of Allington, a week from Saturday on February 5th, we'll be doing a polar dunk raising money for polio. And the chairman of this committee may not be in the next meeting because I'm gonna be part of that polar dunk. Anyway, moving on. Are there any future agenda items? Seeing none. The school committee will be entering executive session and will not be returning to open session. We will be entering executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and our non-union personnel, or contract negotiation with union and non-union, which have held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which you've held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. We'll call vote. This next one. We need to make a motion. I have, thank you. I will entertain a motion to enter executive session. So moved. Thank you. Is there a second? Thank you. Ms. Ekston. Yes. Dr. Ampey, Mr. Thillman. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. I will yes, too. Thank you. Mr. Segment. I vote in the affirmative. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Hanna says yes. We're moving into executive session. Thank you, everyone.