 Good evening, welcome to the regular school committee meeting of Thursday, February 27th. Like to begin tonight's open session with a public hearing on the fiscal year 2015 Arlington Public School budget. Seeing no one here at the moment to speak on that, we'll leave that door open because it's scheduled from 6.30 to 7.00 p.m. this evening, so should anyone else come into the room in the next 20 minutes or so, we'll call them up and have them speak. They'll hopefully be another opportunity to speak on the budget as well, and we'll get to that later on in the night. For my opening remarks, again my name is Judd Pierce, I'm chair of this fine committee. Subject tonight for me to speak on is thinking outside the box. It's more than a cliche, I believe Wikipedia defines a metaphorical box or outside the box as something that can be real and measurable, something perceived as budgetary or organizational constraints, and we may feel trapped in a box by talking about the budget as we're going to do tonight. It's one of our most important functions on the school committee, but we shouldn't feel trapped in the box. For example, Mr. Haney and I, superintendent toward the Odyssey Middle School this morning, we saw firsthand the work that our instructors and educators and specialists are doing with our children every day. I was very impressed with the students' attention and work. I saw our librarian, Edith Mohsant in the library, she was in action, she was talking about her work, what she's doing, the authors she's bringing into our schools, the newsletters that are coming out, et cetera. I saw posters up for the upcoming performance of guys and dolls at the middle school next weekend. We watched our children exercising in the gym by playing basketball, exercising in their minds in the classroom with the science projects such as water rockets and air balloons. Amazing work is being done in our schools within our budget and our facilities constraints. This year in my opening remarks, I've often relayed anniversaries for this moment in time events because I feel it's useful to look back in our history to get some direction on where we're going. Two days ago would have been George Harrison's 71st birthday. George was lead guitarist for a pretty famous rock band. The Beatles were around in the 50s and the 60s and had an immeasurable contribution to our culture and to our music. Right Bill? Absolutely. Mr. Heyner was around then. It's amazing. Just a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of watching the 50th anniversary of their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. It was a special in CBS. It was a great, great program. If you haven't seen it, please try and find it and enjoy. It was such a special evening of musical tributes and history. It was kind of like a history lesson of sorts. What it taught me, and in part I already knew this, the Beatles thought outside the box creatively, unconventionally. They took chances by stopping touring in 1966 and devoting their energies to the music studio and finding unique innovative sounds that mixed a variety of cultures and times. As we move forward with our responsibilities this evening on our budget and setting our priorities for the schools, let's remember that we're moving across a long and winding road and we'll continue to work to make the school district the best it can be within the resources that we have and it is already happening. I would like to take a moment before we open it up to public participation on a sad note to ask for a brief moment of silence for the passing of Coach Ed Burns. Ed was a devoted family member, a loving member of town. Everyone knew him from athletic endeavors in the schools and beyond. Fifty years in ice hockey, 21 years coaching football. His winning percentage was amazing. He's a native of Arlington and there's very, very sad news that we learned about his passing just a few weeks ago, so I'd like to ask for a brief moment of silence. Thank you. All right. Public participation, I see gentlemen would you like to come up to the desk for us then? Hi, my name is Dante and I didn't expect to actually be leading off the meeting which is what I'm doing, but I actually expected a room that was overflowing, but I know that there's been, I came here to speak to you about the curriculum in the elementary schools and I know that there have been some people who have voiced dissatisfaction with the curriculum that's in place now, the tools of the mind curriculum and particularly the dreaded jacket and any books. My daughter who is in kindergarten is my oldest child, so I am new to participating in the whole town education process. Like most parents or most residents, I wasn't that interested until my children were in the system and I actually, I regret that, but I have to tell you that that program that is currently being used, the tools of the mind, has been very beneficial for my daughter. She's, the term that the teachers use is self-regulate. It's just, she's grown tremendously as far as self-control and the ability to little things like wait for others, not demanding immediate attention. The Jack and Annie books she enjoys, they seem to stimulate her curiosity about other places, other times, and I don't know how familiar you all are with them, but it's, you know, it's not fine literature. But the flip side is that that's not its purpose. You know, if we, you know, if we read them dickens, we'd be exposed to fine literature, but they'd tune out in a minute and a half. In my opinion, and I'm not a professional educator, but I'm reasonably intelligent, and the purpose of it is to engage the children so that they learn. And these books are very engaging. I know that some people have grumbled that the two main characters are white middle class, and it is what it is. But they go to all different kinds of places. It's terrible. It's certainly not sexist, simply because the female character is strong and brave, and the male, well, it could be sexist, but it's not sexist in a traditional sense. But, you know, let's just say it doesn't create traditional gender role models, or traditional gender roles. So anyway, in, I don't need to go on and on. I'm one person who is in favor of the current curriculum. I've seen great growth with my child. I've seen growth with our neighbors' children who are also in the curriculum. And that's basically it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else for public participation tonight? Okay. Before I get started introducing our next special guest, I'd like to introduce a few other special guests that we have here at the table tonight. Caroline Merta, Senior on the Student Advisory Council, is our student rep here tonight. Thank you for coming. Nice to see you. Feel free to chime in whenever you'd like. Siobhan Foley, AEA rep. Thank you, Siobhan, for being here. We have some student art up as well. I'd just like to point that out because we didn't have the meeting a couple of weeks ago, thankfully, because of the snow. But we are getting to it now. Caroline Thompson children did lots of interesting pieces around here. You'll see the kindergarten primary color paintings, which I believe is probably over there. They were using the paints to explore in the art room and they used different kinds of paint and they chose which correct type of brush and how to care for their tools. Oh, thank you. And they were free to choose their own subject matter, red, blue, and yellow, the three primaries. First, they were disappointed with just three colors, but they soon discovered that they could work an infinite number of new colors out. So thank you, kindergarten students of Thompson and Stratton. First graders did heart resist paintings. First grade students learned about the art of Jim Dine, and they looked at many of the wonderful paintings of hearts. And some students had even seen his sculpture, Two Big Black Hearts, in person at the Dakota Cordova Museum. And they drew hearts using oil castels. Very, very nice. Second grade snowman paintings behind the audience here. The second grade students were introduced to value, one of the elements of art, and they discussed the way artists use value to create an illusion of three-dimensional space. And they explored with mixing tints and shades, and they used white, blue, and black paint to create nighttime paintings of snowman. Good for that movie Frozen out right now. Fourth grade prints are over there behind Mr. Schlickman. They were introduced, the fourth grade students were introduced to the art of printmaking through creation of relief prints. After looking at a variety of landscape prints, students got to work on their own. And some students used printing plates made of soft balsalwood, and others used plates made of styrofoam. And using pencils, they inscribed lines into the printing plates. They were then inked using a brayer and water-based ink. And the highest parts of the plate received the most ink, and the inscribed lines remained ink-free. Very unique. And finally, fifth grade observational drawings, to my right, fifth grade students completed a classic lesson in observation when they drew their own shoes. They were asked to remove one of their own shoes and place it on a table, and closely observed the shape of their shoe. And they moved it around until they found an interesting point of view. And they noted areas of light and dark about which they were worn, and they used pencils and worked hard to capture the unique qualities of their shoes. These are very, very nice. Stratton, Thompson children, Thompson principal, Sherry Donovan, and Stratton principal, Michael Hanna. Thank you. Our teacher is Deborah Cantagna. Alright. Moving on. A little earlier than you expected. And you'll have to remind me again of your first name. It's Ms. Stewart. Emma Stewart. Please join us. Come to the table if you would. Take the mic. Sit. Whatever is most comfortable. More or less than Mr. Ham. He gets to decide in a month. It's getting punchy in this last few minutes. Good evening. My name is in fact Emma Stewart, and I'm a junior here at Arlington High. I am here tonight to request the addition of a high-level class focused on U.S. government and politics. I want to start by thanking everyone who's been a part of the initial conversations and everyone who has encouraged me up to the point of presenting here tonight. I bring with me and it is being passed around, a petition signed by 184 AHS students and staff who support the opportunity for a U.S. government politics class to be available. I have been speaking with Dr. Dunn, who is head of the history department, and she has presented me with two possible options for this course. The options are the standard U.S. AP U.S. government and politics course and the Syracuse University dual enrollment alternative public policy class. The course descriptions are in the sheet of paper I passed out earlier and I hope I got to everyone. If not, you can look on with a neighbor. In short, the major difference in the curriculum between the public policy class and the AP U.S. government class is that public policy focuses on, you guessed it, the policies of the government, what goes into making them and how they affect people. The AP course is more general and dabbles in political theory as well. In terms of the nuts and bolts of the due courses, both are offered at the AP level, so in transcript they would both be weighted at the AP level. Students, if we offered the Syracuse University dual enrollment class, students would also receive a Syracuse University transcript at the end of the class with their grade on it, which could be offered to colleges that students are applying to. A new instructor would not be needed to teach this course and it would be taught in person at Arlington High School, which is kind of misleading because of the name. The teacher would be trained at Syracuse University for two weeks in the summer. Dr. Dunn has already recommended several very competent teachers who would be willing and able to teach this course, such as Mr. Phant, Mr. Sancinito and Mr. Pei. Both courses would run for only one semester. There is a common misconception that the AP course would have to run for a full year, but that is only if it is being run alongside its sister course, the AP comparative government and politics. However, I'm only proposing the one semester AP course or the one semester Syracuse University dual enrollment class. There is a slight cost difference between the two classes. The AP exam at the end of the AP course costs $95 as of this year and the Syracuse University course costs $110. Dr. Dunn would like me to relate to you that she is very enthusiastic about offering either the AP government or the Syracuse University alternative, but she can only do this if she receives the increased staffing request that is currently in the budget proposal, which we'll talk about later this evening. During my meeting with her and some interested students yesterday afternoon, we discussed the pros and cons of both classes. The general consensus from the students at that meeting was that although the public policy class sounded interesting, the AP government course would be a better fit for our school due to its broader curriculum. We also agreed that the AP course might attract more students as its format is more familiar rather than the Syracuse University dual enrollment class. This also fit with the reactions I received from students outside the meeting. I've heard a lot of positive feedback in general and I feel bound to report to you due to the sheer amount of feedback I've received on one particular aspect of the subject that students would prefer Mr. Matson to teach that class although I know we don't have any control over that here. Dr. Dunn thought the reactions might be opposite for the staff and they might be leaning towards the public policy class that is that the new and cool thing to have in schools. And even at this late date literally 10 minutes before the program of studies is set to be approved here there is still time to add this course. Although the course description might not be in the physical packet, a flyer could be easily attached and so students would receive the information at the same time so there would be no late detriment and students wouldn't have time to sign up. Bottom line is I truly believe that this class should be offered at Arlington High. It would be one of the most relevant classes we could offer exploring how the longest continuous form of government runs, occasionally doesn't and what has kept it running for over 200 years. And every year I'm amazed at the wide variety of classes we offer here at Arlington High giving students the opportunity to expand their horizons with classes from economics to fashion and interior design. It would give students who are interested in going into the field of political science or who are just interested in how the government fits together the chance to learn about it. Because the Constitution is a living document, politics and government will never get old. America will always need a constant flow of new ideas and new minds working to come up with new solutions to both new problems and old. And although I don't think that 184 students will sign up for the course judging by how active our student government, model congress and model UNR, I think we will have more than the required 18 students to sign up for this course. And also judging by how many underclassmen are involved in at least the model congress, this course will have a long life here at Arlington High. Finally, in the proper lingo, I yield my time to questions. Thank you very much. Any of the members, any of them? Questions? Ms. Heim? You shared with us what the students preferred course was and you also shared with us what the staff's preferred course is. What's your preference? Well, I personally think that the public policy course is very interesting. However, it would be probably more to my advantage to take the AP government course and get a broader range to see how the government actually works and not just the policy parts of it. Thank you. It's possible to amend the, we have to have a motion to amend the program of studies to include both. How the high school works, as many of you know, is that the courses offered are entirely determined by student choice. So if both courses were offered, it would just depend on whether the number of students that signed up were sufficient to run the course. And so then people could have their choice. The part with the one for Syracuse, there is a piece of this we'd have to do, which we're willing to do, is do the training. As you know, we had a dual enrollment this year and we sent the teacher to Syracuse to have the training for the course. And our hope is over the next few years, and Dr. Janger has arrived as well as our assistant principal Bill McCarthy's been here. Maybe they can talk a little bit about this as well. But our hope would be to have more opportunities such as dual enrollment. So our students are leaving with some credits that they can use in college. But perhaps even more importantly, though that's not a small issue, is that it really enhances their application to college. That they, in high school, were able to take a college level course and do very well. So I applaud you, Mr. Stewart, for coming. You're very articulate and thank you for doing that. I don't know if you want to ask Dr. Janger. Bill, what Dr. Bodie said is that I think we should, as a committee, acknowledge the fact that 100, I don't know how many students signed up. 184. 184 students signed a petition asking not for more lunchtime, not for more free time, not for, yeah. We were doing so well. But for a course, an academic course, and an AP course at that. So congratulations for doing that. That I think says a lot. It says volumes about our students and about our high schools. So I don't know, I think it's a budget issue. If we can accommodate this, we should. And if it's a simple thing of at least putting it in the handbook so it's an option for the school, is there any reason why we wouldn't do that? I personally don't, but you could ask Principal Janger. Well, he works for you. I just have a note on that. Ms. Dunn says the only way that this course could be offered is that if she receives the increased staffing, so that's, if you approve it, and it goes into the course of studies, that would be the only limitation for its being accepted into the course. I'm a big believer in the superintendent getting involved in the school, so maybe she could, do you want to teach the course? AP government. I'll co-teach you. She's a licensed math teacher. Just clarification, you mentioned about putting both in. What happens if we have students to sign up for both? Do we offer the both courses? We don't have teachers. We don't have the teachers. That's my only concern. We are looking for additional staffing in the history department. And right now there would be, if we did not have additional staffing, you're absolutely correct, it would be impossible to have more electives. So the intent is to widen that, because the electives in the high school, particularly in the history, are very large classes. So it's, again, it's run by student choice. So that if both courses were to run, I mean, maybe another elective didn't have four sections, it had three sections. I'm far. Don't misunderstand me. I'm all for it 100%. I just want to make it work. I don't want to have any kings in. You've clarified that. Thank you. I might suggest maybe offering just one to start, because you need 18 students to sign up and participate in the class in order for it to be an elective. And since it's such a new course that would be offered, I wouldn't want to have students split so that there might be like 15 in one and 15 in another. So if there is enough popularity, I think maybe adding both courses later on, once it gains, like, catch on, then that might be a possibility, but I would recommend starting with just one of the courses. I know that within the student population, 80 courses are very popular right now because they look so good on a college application as a senior. I know that I wanted to have APs in my belt. So I think that offering the AP course first might be a better choice, and then I know that the economics class that is also a Syracuse class is very popular also, but I think that the AP would be a better choice to start off. I think more students would sign up. I'm really having a hard time, though, wrapping my head around the budget implications requiring additional staffing because my understanding is most of our students have fully committed schedules. The majority of our students do not have any gaps. If anything, we have children taking phys ed waivers so that they can take additional courses. So we have the majority of our students taking something like AP European history their senior year already. Whoever the staff is for that, it seems like there would be a migration because some of our students wouldn't be able to take both APs and might choose this instead. Because in my head, it feels like all we need is the professional development. I've got a loud voice. No, I was going to say there are a number of places where we have floated additional courses and the real decision about whether you can offer them then comes after we look at sign ups and we look at how many teachers we have. Right now we're asking for new social studies staff because our AP classes in particular are large. So the idea that we might float something like this and see what kind of sign ups we get seems perfectly reasonable and then if we were actually going to be able to run it, it would really depend on if we get the additional staffing we're requesting and that makes it more likely that we're able to do it. And then it really depends on how it shakes out. Does it pull from other classes we don't know? Does it end up being an additional class? There are some students whose schedules are overfall and there are also a lot of students with gaps in their schedules. Would those students choose are those students that have the gaps in their schedules, ones that are going to choose to take an AP class? It's just something we don't know. I think one way or another it sounds like something we can offer. Certainly at least the after school or dual enrollment option is something that's easier to do. I think what I hear when I hear the students asking for this is one more case for why it really is valuable for us to make that case for the additional social studies staff. We don't have a lot of social studies electives and students would take them. All kinds of electives. Just repeat back a little bit of what I think I heard. I think what you're telling me though is whether or not we have this course, we need the additional staffing. Correct. And so once again, my point is I'm viewing this as a wash because we need the staff to accommodate our student body currently with the current course offerings. This doesn't negate or add to that staffing need. Correct. Well, yes, what it might do is it's really hard to... I mean the honest truth is I've done this before. You go through and you have a certain number of sections and you have a certain number of sections kids have signed up for and you make this decision. Do we squeeze 30 into AP this so that we can have a section of this that's only got 18? Or do we cut the section of 18 in order to make the sections of the AP classes be 25? That sort of decision that we have to make as we go through right now we're very tight. So if you were to ask us to add an additional social studies class now, the likelihood is unless it was really bleeding kids off other classes we would be in a situation where we couldn't run things we wanted to run. With the additional staffing it's hard to tell. It's more likely that we'll be able to do it but we don't know until we run it. And once again, what's the average size for AP social studies classes? Very high. Very high. 30s. I was thinking 30s but what we've done is made that decision to make those classes up in the 30 area so that we can continue to run the other classes. And that's really in terms of the level of writing that students are expected to do and the amount of staff feedback we want to give the children as they're preparing for their AP exams. That's far from an optimal ratio to begin with. Correct. It puts a huge burden on the teachers and it cuts back on the amount of writing the kids are doing and the amount of feedback they're getting. Thank you for addressing those questions. I think in terms of just reading the course descriptions and listening to the discussion of why we were moving toward the Syracuse program last year I think that my preference going forward strategically would be to add the Syracuse. The description looks more case study oriented and I think would be a more substantive course by design. But I having scheduled a high school myself I can see what Ms. Hyam is saying that if all of a sudden we got a bunch of kids signing up for this, those bodies are going in that direction so that as we make the staffing decisions down the road we may need one more social studies teacher, we may need one less teacher or something else because people are flowing to these particular electives so that whether we're offering 15 sections of social studies and X number of sections of everything else or 12 sections of social studies and X plus 3 of everything else that in theory should be awash so I'm not looking upon this is a budgetary decision but I am looking upon this as a policy decision for us and this is an exercise in public policy as to where we want to take the curriculum of the high school so that in an ideal world I'd be looking at adding the Syracuse course in my mind to the course catalog. If it adds knowledge to you and helps you make a decision of what to do then I would go along with putting both in but I'd rather be going the route of offering the college credit courses than doing the AP courses. The Syracuse course certainly looks more appealing to me but I don't know the answer to this which is going to benefit the children more as far as getting into colleges because I know that AP tests are you get a 4 or a 5 on the AP test and it means something I don't know what a college credit course from a high school is going to do but I'm actually curious what you're talking about. I believe that if you were using that as the criteria probably the dual enrollment would be a little bit, have a little bit more cash in a resume to college. My suggestion here is that this is not the place to decide really which of the two courses that I would suggest amending the program of studies to potentially offer both and give it back to the high school administration to decide if they want to offer both this year or stagger it at least it's approved and then they could then maybe start one course this year or another. The thing about the dual enrollment though that may or may not make it possible this year is that the faculty member who teaches it actually has to go over the summer and do the training and I'm not sure that we have commitment on that part so it may but I don't know. I have a couple of points of information so I was talking to Dr. or Mrs. Dunn about this and there is about a 90% acceptance rate for colleges accepting the three credit Syracuse University course however the thing that she was concerned about is that there's not really like it wouldn't really get you out of like say if you're going into a political science major like American Government 101 because it's a separate thing from the AP course and yes it is harder to get those AP credits accepted especially if you're looking to go into top tier school but if you do get that chance to it would like get you out of those basic courses whereas the public policy might not fit as well. What is the training requirement for a teacher if we establish a new AP course? There's training for that as well. I forget how much time there's involved with the Syracuse course. One week for the AP. Thank you. The training for AP is not required but the approval of the syllabus by the college board is required so the training is recommended for the AP class but it's not required. Many people think it's required but it's actually not required to teach the class however the syllabus has to be and many times people want to go for the training because it helps them to develop a syllabus that will be approved. A few more quick comments or questions and then I'd like to hear a motion. First, thank you. It was a wonderful presentation. Second, I'd like some clarity on the budgetary things. I understand that it could be a wash but it could also pull from other electives non-social study related and I'm wondering when there's talk about need of additional staffing. Is that included in the budget discussing later or is that in addition to what's already built into this budget? It's already in the proposed budget. The thing I would say about the high school is that even though we might say .6 for that department, .4 for that department, really the final choice comes after student select courses. So there may be some changes in that so it would actually be probably better to think about it as a high school number of FTEs for the high school which will be determined by student choice. Dr. Janker, would you agree with that? Those FTEs are built into the budget. Once more. Again I would suggest that the high school handle this as a possibility and consider both. Make a motion. I guess I would go back to the question that this is a policy question for this committee. And then we're still stuck in the same decision making process that we're always in which is how many kids sign up. How can we staff it? Which staffing is it going to be? The sort of challenge now just that it's come a little late in the game. We have to stick to the assignment. You know, is that there's some pieces of legwork in terms of who would teach it in training if we haven't been thoroughly done. I would be the one. I support it being put in the program of studies and then it's something that's out there and something we can't offer. We might not be able to offer it. We might not be able to offer both. I figure out how to vote people on the assignment process. To clarify you would support putting both courses in the program of studies? I think at this point we don't really know. So put them both in? Okay. I move that we put both these programs into the course of study. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. All those against? Okay, 7-0. Thank you very much. We should clock for her. I'd just like to say this is your first victory in public policy. Well actually it's not because I already passed a proclamation through the Board of Select then so. Awesome. The proclamations have no standing whereas this is a decision. They're good at that sort of thing. Future politician. Some of the comments on these signature sheets are great. I know. A lot of enthusiasm for it. Great. Alright, moving on. Our next item on the agenda is for approval of the Arlington High School program of studies. We have Mr. McCarthy and Dr. Janger. Yeah, that'd be great. For the purpose of discussion I move that we accept the Arlington High School course of study. Second. Is this acceptable or approved? We're just accepting it. We just moved it. We didn't vote it. Now we're going to discuss it. Go ahead. Should I open up to the members for any questions? We could do highlights of some of the changes but it's not particularly complicated. I'm just going to try to remember off the top of my head. Do you want to do it? So what's going on right now is a packet. It contains the first 20 pages, 20 or 19 I believe, which contain a majority of the changes that we have made. The two that I would like to draw your attention to are on page 6 which states the policy for online coursework and dual enrollment coursework. As you know at the high school we offer several courses online and through dual enrollment, much as we just talked about with the Syracuse University. We just wanted to put a policy in place to help clarify what those courses are, how they would be created and who would approve them. In addition we have pages 15 through 19 are the new courses that we'll be offering at the high school. As Dr. Janger pointed out previously, we do put these courses out. We see if there is interest. If there is interest, we do run them. If there is not interest, we do not run them. We are excited with a lot of these new courses. We have courses in world language, mathematics, family and consumer sciences. Introduction to Wood Tech will be making a return and there'll be several new offerings at NPE. I didn't know if there are any questions about any of the new courses. I had a question earlier. We will not be eliminating any courses from last year's syllabus at this time. We are going to wait and see what the enrollment will be this year in terms of student requests for courses. We had a motion for discussion. Should we vote that? No, we don't. I'm confused what the motion on the floor is. I thought I voted to approve it. I stated for the purposes of the discussion, I made a motion to approve it. You said accept. Anyway, I have a question. I still don't understand the motion on the floor. The motion is to accept this. You approve it? I have a question. You mentioned that these are the add-ons. Have we eliminated any of the courses from last year's course of study? I said no. I apologize. I wasn't paying attention. What does happen is once we do student requests and review them, if a course does not have enough students requesting it in order to run it, we do eliminate it. Any other changes within the document vis-a-vis last year besides the addition of the courses? The dual enrollment policy and there's also a change in the language around the meaning of grades, not the actual nature of grades. Where's that? Just a moment. I'll look that up for you. What the language has shifted from is the old language was a fairly, it's on page nine, was a combination of traditional language. If you think about the way we've often talked about grades, one of the old versions from the early days of the creation of the whole Carnegie system was that A's were excellent, top 5%, B's, these are two different things. A's were excellent, B's were good, C's were fair or average, and then D's were poor and E's were fail. Some of those were versions of language, some of those were based on an assumption of a normal distribution of grades. The practice of grading in the United States in high schools at this point generally doesn't follow that approach at all, and the language that we shifted to was a more proficiency based. It's still the same grading system, but the idea is to focus on our people mastering the expectations and standards for the course. So an A talks about students doing superior work, that they exceed the standard for the course, B is meeting the standard for the course, C and D are partially meeting the standards for the course, and the F is still failing. The idea is to move it into language that's more consistent with the standards based approach, since that's the structure of the classes in terms of common assessments and standards that are being put out there. It's not something which I would expect will cause anybody's grades to actually change suddenly in terms of the grading practices that teachers do. There's a whole different range of the ways that teachers engage in their teaching practices, but the idea is to have that language move in that direction to start that conversation. Sorry, there was one other slight change. On page 4 under promotion and graduation, MCAS competency determination over the years as MCAS has changed. The wording in that paragraph was continually added to. I just tidied that up so it was a little clearer in terms of what the expectations are. I have a couple questions. One is, how does one have the graduation requirements changed at all? No, there is language that is slightly different under world language which the world language requirement is still two years of world language. Since our universities are asking for two to three years of language usually in the same language, we've added an expectation that if a student chooses not to pursue two years of the same language, that has to be approved by me and the world language teacher. We didn't want to change it as a seat time requirement because it really, that doesn't really move us in the direction we want to move in, but we did want to make sure that no student was making that without a very clear understanding that if they were going to meet the state minimum standard, two years of two different languages, that that was going to hamper them if they wanted to go on some post-indecuntary options. How does a student demonstrate competency in computer technology? I'm going to leave that one to Bill. I mean I can give you a bit of a hand waving answer, but I'm going to let Bill take a shot at it. Thank you, Dr. Janger. So in most of our classes, if not actually at this stage, I should say all of our classes, there are computer requirements in terms of word processing, online searching. You'd be difficult to find a syllabus in our school that does not have some component of computer usage including PE, and so that is used as a determinant. So it's embedded in the classroom standards and expectations. Okay, and can someone talk to me about why we require one year of fine arts as a parent of a student who has not yet met that requirement and has taken numerous technology classes and is now freaking out because he doesn't have any fine arts. So I just want to understand better, why do we require a year of fine arts? Because there are lots of kids for whom... I guess if you ask me that question, I can make an argument as to why I feel that would be a valuable standard, but the expectation is one that was set by the school committee in the past, not by me, so I don't know what the rationale was by which they got there. I would say I think it's a good idea to make sure those standards are covered. Okay, if I remember correctly, it used to say that you had to have one year of fine arts or performing arts. So fine arts, the way that our program studies, at least my understanding of it is that fine arts does include performing arts. Okay. So we do offer a wide array of courses ranging everything from art of the cinema, where students review great works of art in cinema to art that they produce. And I believe now, and correct me if I'm wrong, does Woodshop fall under that? It does not. It does not, thank you. It was a discussion. It was a new course, so we didn't put that in the exam. What is it? Woodshop? Whether or not Woodshop would fall under that, but it was a discussion we had. We decided not to do it at this stage because it is a new course. The rationale for a fine arts credit is that class has to be primarily focused on an aesthetic performance. So family and consumer science classes don't. There have been some in the past that have. That have been, for example, I believe the fashion class did. But there was a discussion about the Woodshop. The current standards of the Woodshop class are not focused on production of art or aesthetic outcomes or aesthetic appreciation. They're focused on being able to use the tools and make stuff. So it wouldn't meet that standard. We actually have some language proposed that's in an envelope that we thought about putting in there sort of guidelines on how we would come up with that standard. But it didn't seem like something that was necessary to be in there. It seemed helpful as a guideline for us to have. In that part of the class, we're actually doing debates. One of the topics being debated is whether art and music should be part of education. Statistically, the person who was presenting it gave listed off statistics that show that art and music and having that component in your learning is actually very beneficial to the learning process. As someone who has personally taken the fine arts requirement, it was, and I actually prefer the sciences as well. I've taken a lot more sciences courses since I've filled my requirement. But I took drama and it kind of forced me to step out of my comfort zone in a healthy way. It helped me to publicly speak better. Fine arts, I think, is a nice break in the day to give yourself to just be creative for a little bit. I think it's very important as part of the graduation requirements. Thank you. We're getting into a couple of things here. First of all, on page 9, the letter great expectations. First of all, the text is online because I pulled up the version online. And the draft that you handed us as a paragraph needs to be reviewed, see Matt's comments on the right. Is that a comment on the side? No, it's a little print in the heading. That's actually really important. We have to leave that in there. So while we're Matt's comments on the right. That will comment on everyone's opinions. Okay. Well, that's nice. That was what was written when it had the old language and I had written that language in the comment box. I like the rubric discussion. I don't like the fair work for the C kind of thing. I'd almost like to get the old language out of the first letters but that's beyond that. I've got to say I'm a little frustrated in that on the 14th we did ask for an annotated version detailing all the changes and now we've got the changes in the courses and then it's oh yeah, and we change this and then oh yeah, then we change a paragraph on page 9 relative to the requirements for world language. Commentary, yes. But the thing that is a policy document, it's important for us to know exactly where the changes are being made as a committee. And I have to say I'm a little frustrated here because I don't feel like I've got a handle on everything that's all the moving pieces. Dr. Allison? This is probably my fault. I may have missed a ball which was tossed to me and I didn't realize it. The document which we received did have track changes but it was not actually intended to be disseminated publicly. So that's why I didn't and it had commentary as opposed to changes. It was a working work in progress. It wasn't a this is new, this is old and that's why I didn't forward it to you. I didn't think to prepare or to ask to have prepared a separate document which just outlined things. Part of it is that there was also a fair amount of discussion of just cleaning up the text and moving things around without actually changing it and how that would be conveyed is a little bit what's confusing to me. So I apologize that you didn't get what you thought you should have next time I'll know better. We did have a fairly substantial discussion at our meeting and felt there we left it that there were still edits more again more for language and for fluidity than for anything that's changing making differences in policy and we left that the committee all voted to move that the handbook be approved as presented by Dr. Janger and you know next time we need to clarify a little bit who's bringing the changes and make sure that that comes. Alright any further discussion? I just want to bring up two points and it's revisiting a little bit. The graduation requirements on page four. First of all the fine arts piece for me that has to be a more everything because I have a equal number of students that I've heard say I'll never need my physics course again once I leave and this is a whole child education type of philosophy and I do feel that what we have here is reflective of the idea that we're educating children not just for college acceptance but also for citizenship. The second piece is in the past item number ten perform a document of the 40 hours of community service. We did hear that there have been times where that has been a more challenging piece for the faculty at the high school to actually check into a monitor. Is it still reasonable that that is being appropriately supervised to actually count as a legitimate graduation requirement? I would say that it is. Currently what we do have the 40 hours completed over the course of four years. The system we have in place is that any student who does community service has a form signed off by an adult that they did the community service with. That form is stored in guidance. Our guidance secretary tracks all of the hours. If there ever is something that is questionable the contact information for the person who did the community service who signed off on it is available and we can call them. Oftentimes our students do community service around the building and through the school. So it's not something that we need to check up on if they're doing something say for instance junior community service day. Students will do three or four hours through that. The blanket statement I sign off the student who was there against the form. But we do I do feel that we do have a good system of tracking it. Is it perfect? No. But I do believe that when there is something questionable we can catch it. And then on page nine back to the descriptions of what the different letter grades mean. On one hand I'm very happy to see this language because it does it comments more on the level of competency and less on some fabulous ideal. But I do wonder if we're simply creating a system for grade inflation with these new definitions with the be as proficient. Not that I don't want my child you know I don't want you to go in and feel like you have to change her grades to prove this. But you know that definition between what it traditionally meant and what it be traditionally meant and whether we need to actually think what is reflective of that different and also from a high B to a low A. Where is that line between proficiency and superior? Is it a quantity? Is there a qualitative component that is really being looked for just to really differentiate that to another level. And you know it's being a very concrete person for me I would love to see that go one more step. This definitely, from my perspective shows a step in the right direction where I feel like children in the Arlington High School get a much more rigorous education than a lot of other places of being here to meet is much more meaningful than it would be in other systems because knowing that caliber of the expectations, what their peers are doing and what it takes to mean superior or proficient in relation. You know I do feel like I have a lot of very deserving students that are getting appropriate grades but I don't feel that this really teases it out as much. I'd like to call the vote if that's alright with the members. All those in favor of approving the Arlington High School program of studies 2014-2015 say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstain. One abstention. Thank you very much. You're done. Dr. Jango we need you just one more time. Mr. McCarthy you can stay up as well. This is the Arlington High School athletic handbook for 2014-2015 right so we want to right change the 13 of this part. Oh is that wrong? No actually I think it's for this year. Oh it's for this year. It's this year that we're in right now. We didn't have one before so it started to be drafted at the beginning of this year. So CIA also reviewed and discussed this actually at greater lengths and yes it is intended for this year. There was not. The athletic director had looked through all their files and there has been nothing in multiple years going backwards. So she created it from scratch. There were a few things that we asked to have changed. We worked with town council to come up with a phrasing for the discussion of fundraising and things that we wanted to fix. Anyway oh we added references to make sure that there were explicit references to hazing and bullying policies and the after these changes the CIA moved that the school committee approved this handbook as presented. Thank you. I have a motion to approve the Arlington athletics handbook. Second. Again this may be the old man not paying attention but will this be the handbook for the subsequent year as well? I would hope so. Thank you. Any further discussion, questions for Dr. Janger? Do you have any understanding as to why we didn't have one of these before? I'm just curious. I mean if you read through this an awful lot of this are policies that existed in other places. It's reiterations of MIA policies that are known. So some of this is just conveniently putting it all together in one place. I will say having coached in Arlington for many years the coaches often receive a packet that contains many of these forms but as Matt said or Dr. Janger said it's a chance to put them all in one spot. I'll send it to the athletic director for taking this on. We thought it was a great idea. So this will go to all athletes or all students? It would go to all athletes. But it will be available online for all students to access. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. All those against? Okay that passes 7-0. Thank you both very much. Thank you for your attendance report but I've been working very closely with both Mr. McCarthy and Dr. Janger on the upcoming presentations of the report that we have been working with an architect on the programmatic needs of the high school. And as you know next week you're going to hear that report Board of Selectment have been requested to put on the agenda on March 10th but we are also going to have a forum for parents and community members on Wednesday March 12th from 7-8 maybe it'll be 8-15. But in addition to that we're going to have tours of the building and we're working on the dates and the times for that and this will all be on our website and this will also be sent out to parents and hopefully even we'll ask perhaps one of the Tom meeting members on the committee here to forward it to Tom meeting members. But we're going to have three opportunities for tours of the high school and I'll let them talk a little bit about who are going to be the tour leaders. But the first tour is going to be on Saturday morning March 15th and that will be from 9.30 to 11. Then there will be two late afternoon meeting tours the following week on Tuesday the 18th 4-5.30 and then Thursday the 20th of March 4-5.30. For all three of these we would like people to RSVP so we know how many people are coming and just to figure out the groups and a number of people that are going to be helping but what I thought that they could talk a little bit about is the building committee that exists in the high school and their role on this in the tours. So I'm going to have to go in about two minutes because unfortunately the hockey drop off didn't work and my kid is waiting downstairs. But I apologize for that. We have got we have had since the beginning of the year a group called the future building committee it's an intentional pun the idea being that we would be building the future and talking about the future of the building and that group is a representative committee from all the departments and we've been looking both at the vision of what instruction would look like in a future building and then also looking at what we would be interested in having in a building in the future. So that group will be trained to they'll go around on the same tour that most of you have been on and all of you have been on and then they would be the tour leaders. We're also just while we're here mentioning we're also scheduled to go off and visit in the not too distant future a couple of other schools to look at their building projects and the things that they found in their schools. Thank you. Mr. Ham. Could I ask the superintendent to pass on all those dates and times to the committee? Oh I'm going to. Absolutely. We're going to disseminate this as widely as we can. How can folks RSVK? We haven't told her yet but Ann Albertase who is the secretary to the principal is going to be the person that will be on the notification as well. Hope she's not listening before we tell her. And I will one of the ways I mean I will also send it out as a forum so that folks can digitally do that as well. Hopefully that'll save her some phone calls. Questions on that? Okay great. Thank you. I apologize for running out. Thank you. Alright moving on. Just a little back up on behind five minutes. Dr. Bill Downing is here with us to discuss a warrant article for the annual special town meeting. This is to propose an elimination of fees for extracurricular activities. Good evening Mr. Downing. Hi. Thank you for putting me on the agenda. I'd like to talk about the warrant article that I filed to eliminate fees for extracurricular activities which are elementary instrumental music and high school athletics. A child's family has to pay $435 to play an instrument. I feel this fee is prohibitively high for one child. Never mind if the family has two or more children who would like to learn an instrument. If the price were halved it would still be difficult for most families to afford. As for high school athletics, Arlington's fees are some of the highest in the state. On the board is a spreadsheet of high school athletic fees with line one displaying Arlington's fees. The second line is the league average for the sport and the third line is the percentage difference between them. If you read across to football Arlington is 183 percent higher. Golf 81 percent higher. Soccer 45 percent. Basketball 74 percent. gymnastics 249 percent. Hockey 222 percent. Baseball 74 percent. And softball is 74 percent higher than league average. I think the very least we can do is lower our fees to be more in line with league averages. The money to sustain this can be found in the new base for chapter 70 state aid. We receive between 1.3 and 1.5 million dollars for full day kindergarten. And it costs the school department approximately 950,000 dollars. This would make available up to 450,000 dollars to finance music and sports. Young families are getting hammered by these fees. And I don't think that this is fair. So the parents and children of Arlington are asking for your support in town meeting to pass this article. Thank you. Any questions for Mr. Downing from the committee? Comments? Have you met with the town manager? Have you had a chance to meet with him yet? I haven't, no. I know that the finance committee unanimously voted against this. Just so you know. They voted no action. Yes. And you know unfortunately it's a tough predicament. I think that everyone on this committee would probably agree with you that we would rather have no fees. At the very least we would love to have much less fees. Unfortunately we don't have all the money to do everything we want. And you also know that our agreement with the town is a fairly word complex. Exactly. Complex one. And having just them and asked them for a significant amount of money to help us and making sure that that worked into the town long-term plan makes it very hard without understanding how this would impact the long-term plan to kind of vote for it. So I just want you to understand that's unfortunately the predicament that we are in. So unless I know from the town manager that he can fund this without any detriment to the long-term planning for the town, unfortunately even I can't be for it. Well I mean what you're saying is there's a ripple effect to this decision, right? Yes. I'm intrigued by this. And I think you're part of the way down a road that I think we probably should think about. The one thing I noted, I agree with you 100%, the athletic fees are way too high and the music fees are way too high. And how to fix that, there's no easy answer because if we were to just go within our budget and eliminate the fees, then we've got to make cuts also on the budget. And with the increase in enrollment and the increase in class sizes we have in the district, that would have a detrimental impact in another world. Back in 1993 when we started with the foundation budget, this was included in the foundation budget and we weren't charging a fee. The issue was is that as the foundation budget evolved and this is used to calculate state aid and expenditures, it hasn't inflated the key pace with the actual cost of delivering the service, which is why we and every other school committee around the state have been making cuts going for overrides and instituting fees for all sorts of things that were never conceived of when Edward Ford was instituted. Now, that said I think that you're starting down the road an interesting idea because if you were to do an override specifically for this purpose that would freeze that amount of money as a dedicated expenditure out of the levy. And that would inflate by 2.5% a year so that if the voters of the town decided that they looked at the subject of athletic and user fees and they wanted to do away with it and voted to do that within context of a specific override for that purpose, we could get rid of the fees forever because we would be legally bound to dedicate that stream of our levy to the purpose for which they passed the override. The fatal flaw, and I'm a town meeting member and that's a different argument for me there in what to do as a town meeting member which is where the decisionably made, but I think the fatal flaw here is even if we do this as a one time expenditure we'll write back where we were next year trying to balance the town budget and the school budget. But I think that that's looking upon this as having a conversation with the town and town meeting as a town exclusive of everything else would we want to do an override for the cost of running our athletic programs to pass that rate around to the entire population and not to the parents of the children in the program. That's something that I would certainly vote for both on the floor of town, meaning it's valid. So I don't know where town meeting is going to go with it this year, but I really very appreciative of your efforts on this and I think that there are ways to move this forward even if it's not successful this year. Thank you. Ms. Heim. In an ideal world, I would love public education to be free. I would love to have a system where every extracurricular had no cost. We could have all our students taking AP classes and we could cover the $95 a pop that those parents are paying. There are unfortunately what we're given by the state and as generous as our town is with education, we can't fully fund. We cannot fully fund everything and we do have a very delicate balance. When I looked at your breakdown and this was something that I actually had the headache of kind of going through years ago when we were first examining the fee structure, at that time this town's commitment was instead of looking towards flat fees across the board that we didn't want our cross-country team that pretty much was not necessarily having to pay any sort of additional fees for rental spaces was not having to have extra equipment to have to bear the burden of I'll use the team my chat was up briefly on the gymnastics team that needed other types of things and so at that time consensus was that a graduate structure where we actually looked at the costs per sport was the most equitable way of doing this and so it was directly user based and you know conversely on your chart you brought out the different sports that were above the average. When you look at cheering cross-country field hockey volleyball track wrestling the cross were below. So we tried to have some equity in terms of setting this up. We made an agreement with the town in terms of wanting to still have the school department decide how school funding occurred and not have that division. So while I'm always very grateful for people that are trying to actually make free public education free and public again I really feel like this kind of goes against some of what the work of this committee has been to try and make sure we provided the baseline of competent high quality education for the actual high school requirements. So I just have to say that. So that being said cheerleading actually looks like a bargain where below by 39%. However if you put in the choreography judge it was an extra $200. So cheerleading actually was about $300 this year and where that puts us 34% higher than the league. I didn't put it in because I didn't want to screw the numbers like that. Now I know about that because I paid it. Now I don't know what else is involved but it's not like you pay the $250 for soccer and that's it, you're done. You're still fundraising, you're still doing all the other stuff. For some of the prices for the price of football Bill Belichick should be coaching this team. Just so you know when we did these rubrics we actually looked at the number of coaches per student ratio. We looked at whether there were additional fees we had to pay such as green fees for golf such as ring time things like that transportation. So it's not perfect. At that time the cheerleading choreography piece we were told that the cheerleading parents council that was not part of the base and so that has always been done separately through their fundraising mechanism. So you're right it's not exactly true but in terms of what our coaches and our space costs are I understand the constraints you're under. Going on with what we said when the override was passed we made a commitment. We the committee to stay within the constraints of the percentages and stuff but at that time the kindergarten fee was still in existence and that was not a part of the formula and as such when that kindergarten fee was changed eliminated it brought in an additional $1.3 to $1.5 million of added chapter 70 money. This is my opinion. The town has taken what originally was a time and pushed it further forward and forward. Every additional cent that comes into this town seems to expand that. To quote Mr. Lyons, a farmer member, a person in this town who took issue with the town the last time they kept pushing things forward and forward and not dealing with it. The chapter 70 money comes to the town we take what the town gives us. I just want to say that more and more money comes in. There's an additional approximately $400,000 to $500,000 annually that was not part of that formula originally. Not asking the town to give it all but maybe a little bit more of it now and then. I'm going to hit a few different things. First we were aware that there were the extra costs for some sports and we put in a request to the then athletic director to give us information but I don't believe we ever got that information. We were concerned going forward that there was equity in the sports and I hope with the new athletic director that this is something that can be addressed maybe in the next year that there are these costs that you're paying here and then you're also paying over here and it shouldn't be that way. Then talking about the agreement with the town first I wanted to make sure everyone understands in our viewing audience that we did go to the town this year for our increased unexpected enrollment and we are going to be getting an additional $885,000 because we have too many students to teach with the amount of money that we had before. I can't support asking for an additional $400,000 on top of this $885,000 because the money doesn't just come from the town. The money comes from us. It comes from us as taxpayers or my neighbor who is a retiree and widow and she's paying property tax. This is in my mind ultimately a Massachusetts flaw and part of it is the way that things have been set up that too much of the burden of our schools are coming now down to property tax and that's for us the only place we can pretty much raise money although chapter 70 brings in some. So anything we ask the town to give us, the town is going to be coming back in a year earlier to say you've got to pay us more taxes and I don't want to do that to my neighbor. I don't want to do that to your neighbors and so that's where I just I appreciate the thought we're pushing off an override year after year and all I'm saying is that maybe a little bit of that $885,000 could have been put towards these fees maybe a little bit of that money that the town assault in a way to push off overrides could be put towards these fees and maybe they don't get eliminated but maybe they're in line with league averages and God forbid a little lower. That's all I'm asking. I'm not looking for an override. I can't do this off the top of my head but just looking at the league there are many towns in the league that I know have significantly higher per capita incomes in their town and I think that also have significantly higher per people income or per people spending that goes to their schools and we're trying Arlington is historically a town that has done a whole lot with not so much and the schools also do a whole lot with not so much but we're it's difficult to do and this is the fees have been one of the make do's that we've done. I'm not here complaining about what you do I have I think one piece is being overlooked and I think this is the piece that's being overlooked. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. Just a couple of things one I want to make sure although we do get we don't necessarily get all of that chapter 70 money the town is more than generous every year in giving us way more than it has to per student so the fact that they have done that year over year over year I in some ways am glad that for several years we've actually been able to positively affect the bottom line in some way and kind of move that forward. I really do think that this really has to be seen it's a full community town you know it's not the schools versus the town it's all of us together and as much as I want a lot more money for the schools because I know what we could do with that money that there just isn't that money to go around so we can't ask for money that isn't there. I also need to point out that unfortunately warrants that specifically ask for a certain amount kind of completely blow up or break the system that we use and we had this issue last year when we had someone who wanted money specifically for football helmets that's not the way the system works it's not the way the budgeting system works we don't go to the town and say we want this much for this and this much for this and this much for this we go to the town and say the schools need this much money here's our budget here's how we're going to spend it and so having warrants as much as we want to often have the money for the article that we have it's also kind of doesn't fit into the way we're supposed to have it work with the town so I just want to make sure that that's also clear for people the only action the school committee has to take if any if any is to be prepared if we want to have a position on this for a town meeting and so that's it. They're going to ask. Right I mean there's going to be a motion there's going to be a recommendation of no action by the finance committee that could be a substitute motion someone would say what's the school committee think and we have an opinion or we don't have an opinion and so that's that's that's so I just want to kind of move the discussion towards you know I want to finish this up pretty soon Mr. Schluckman have you spoken to him? You did. No I haven't had my hand up for a second time but yeah. You did Mr. Hanna? I correct me if I'm wrong I didn't hear Mr. Downey ask us to take a position other than support at town meeting and that that would be my understanding would be not as a school committee member but as a town meeting member correct. Well but no but we yes and you can speak individually but at this point we have not made any decision as to what the school committee would. Right but at the same time we do have a procedure that we go through each warrant article to make a decision at that time what the school committee's position we're going to be so I would ask I guess I would ask to defer at that time to make a decision for support not support or whatever action as a body when we go through the individual articles not tonight on that because if Mr. Downey had asked us specifically then this would be a chance but I'd say let's defer until that night. Yeah I'm grateful for the presentation I think the best strategy for us would not to be taking a stand on this article as a school committee but for us as individuals if we choose to get up and town meeting and even if we're not town meeting members as school committee members we do have a right to get up and speak and offer our opinions on this and I think that we do have varied opinions. Now being a 22 or some odd year town meeting member I've gone through all sorts of budget cycles with all sorts of problems and worked with this finance committee and they've done a lot to help us over these years and they're really when we eliminated the kindergarten fee there was a long term game a year out but there was a year that we needed to bridge and I think part of the additional money over the recoup of the fees for the first few years was in essence paying back the town for the extra money they laid out in the initial year where we got rid of the fee but didn't have the additional chapter 70 money because that expenditure lags for a year and after that impact went away. We went to the finance committee this year and said you know our chapter 70 is going up because our enrollment is going up and we weren't anticipating this back when we went through the original plan and they were very willing to come back with us with an additional $800,000 to cover the expenses. Now the fiscal responsibility override we did which was for stability was for more or less keeping the status quo not for expanding programs but to just be able to deliver the same level of services in the town so that the last override did not contemplate changing fees or other expenditures within the town and that we weren't going to raise them or we weren't going to eliminate them either so that to I think it is unconscionable to be charging high user fees for athletics I would rather spread this out to the rest of the town we can't do it in the current levy limit I'd love to see the town come together and say you know what this is not the kind of town we want to have we want to have a town where there are no user fees for athletics we want to support our kids we'll raise our taxes a dollar or two or whatever it is to the cost of our fees into a specific override to eliminate that but that would have to be a decision beyond us beyond town meeting it would be going to the voters of the entire town to say this is not acceptable we want to do something different and I agree this is an acceptable but we don't have the solution in our domain I'd like to just conclude this part of it by thanking you for coming to the budget subcommittee some weeks ago you've done a lot of work and you're still probably going to do some more work between now and town meeting I congratulate you on that like Mr. Thielman said we will be taking up this and other foreign articles that potentially could impact the school budget when we discuss those probably sometime next month so this will help us in our decision making thank you very much thank you okay moving on to superintendents budget superintendents voting make it your budget well actually you bring up a very interesting distinction and I don't think that people necessarily know the distinction at this juncture this is a budget that the superintendent presents to the school committee and I assure you that it's not just simply my being the author of this this is a very collaborative process in the district as we look very carefully at all of our needs and prioritize those needs but right now it's a superintendents budget it's at a budget where you're going to listen to our presentation this evening I will begin the presentation Diane Johnson will talk more about the numbers part of this presentation and for those of you that are watching and want to be able to follow or some of the questions that will be asked later on our first slide here is the link to the budget on the website now that looks pretty long and probably would rather be able to just you know tap it and get to that but if you go to the Arlington district website on the left hand column you'll see budget just open it up and then there'll be the link there right to the FY15 budget this power pardon I said I already used it to search for a bunch of things it's great yeah it's great because you can search and it'll show you all the lines that have that in it it took our webmaster Claudia Bertola you know about a week to be able to set that all up so it is searchable because otherwise it's a pretty complex document that really makes sense of in addition the power point that we're going to be presenting this evening will also be available online tomorrow because there's some interesting graphics in it I think that a number of people would like to be able to see so it's a superintendent's budget at this point you're going to ask questions you may have things you want us to amend and through this process we'll eventually get to a point where you're going to vote on this budget and once you vote on it then it is yours so it becomes the school committee's budget and that is the budget that we will be taking to the finance committee on the 17th of March and presenting that evening so moving along here actually there's already been a lot of discussion on the long range planning and I do want to acknowledge tonight the collaborative work that has gone on this fall to address the enrollment growth that we have experienced in the last two years in the last two years we have seen an increase of 280 students looking for the since 2000 we've seen an increase in the district of a thousand students but these last two really represent a big jump now will this continue that's hard to say but we have worked out collaboratively with of course the school committee has been part of this, the budget subcommittee the long range planning committee in town, the town manager, the finance committee and of course the school department of administration have all worked together to find a way that we are going to be able to deal with this enrollment growth as I think it was Mr. Schlickman mentioned when we had the override there was the assumption that we would be moving forward and basically having level service budgets and as part of that agreement that we had with the town and the voters in Arlington we agreed that the general budget of the school department would increase 3.5% each year special education part of the budget would increase 7% and then we've had another change which we'll talk about later which is of course we've already been mentioned to the kindergarten fees but what we have found over the last two years is that the those revenues cannot meet the needs of our increasing enrollment what we're seeing is very large class sizes particularly at the secondary level in our special classes that's where you really see some of the larger ones and certainly in our elective courses at the high school but even with that at Odyssey Middle School we have core classes that are all in that range of 25, 26 which is large that doesn't mean that there are classes that are substantially greater than that so I think everybody agreed that what we needed to be able to do is to have additional funds and those additional funds very thoughtfully decided how we would calculate it and it's 25% of the per pupil cost because some of the per pupil is really fixed costs that no matter how many students we have we're going to still have we're still having nine schools for example so there was a lot of thought out in many different models but that's what we finally agreed upon and it works both directions if our enrollments go down then we will be seeing a sort of corresponding decrease so anyway we're very grateful to all the people that work together I think that this was a great show of working together and that everybody acknowledged that there's a problem and how are we going to solve it so going on this you can look at the numbers but just with the real point of this is to show you the different line items there is the general education cost and as I said that increased 3.5% special education costs increased 7% when we went to the finance committee two years ago about this the 970,000 was what we had anticipated as revenue from kindergarten fees to run our full day kindergarten program but what we needed to be able to do was to have a bridge loan so to speak we added 770,000 added to our budget so that we could reduce the fees but by reducing the fees we brought in additional chapter 70 money which I believe is about additional 1.6 million so there's actually about 500,000 approximately so or more that has gone into the general ledger and so this coming year based on this formula that we have a 25% of per pupil cost we will have an additional $885,000 that we will have in our for our general funds for this for town appropriation now Diana is going to talk later that we are in the we are in the usual department in the district in the town in that not all of our revenue for running our programs comes directly from town appropriation so as we looked at our needs going forward there was a lot of work that was done with administrators and I believe even probably discussions with leadership teams at the school level certainly school councils about what are needs going forward and the list which was still pared down was in the neighborhood of about $2 million so the question I know some of you asked are there unmet needs yes there are unmet needs but we went through the process of prioritizing those needs so that we would understand where we would be allocating the monies from the additional $885,000 one of the important priorities was to reduce the class sizes at the middle school and we plan to accomplish that by adding an additional cluster of four teachers at the middle school and this will probably be a mixed grade cluster that hasn't been determined yet but it will we have an incoming class that's going to be larger than our present sixth grade so we know that for certain we're going to have a good part of that cluster being for sixth grade students we want to increase our math support of the elementary this has been an ongoing goal of the administration and as well as the school committee and we understand that we've had to take that forward in an incremental way this last year we were able to add two math coaches and the proposal this year would be to have a math interventionist and the distinction is that the math coaches work with teachers the math intervention is actually someone who does interventions with students as we do in the middle school we know that we need to add curriculum materials district wide particularly in the elementary schools around literacy we're going to increase reinforce our district wide commitment to special education team based services which was a new model and how we have restructured special education and that will include a number of positions a .5 team chair another behavioral specialist and behavioral aid that will support that person .5 social worker and other .5 speech and language teacher as well at the secondary level we also know that we definitely needed to fund more in technology but fortunately this year and thank you to Dr. Chassan and Miss Johnson they presented to the capital committee and the capital committee has very generously given us additional money next year to fund a number of the hardware issues for technology what the additional money from capital will allow us to do is to have one ipad cart for two classrooms in the elementary level additionally we will be able to replace for many many of our teachers who have current computers or laptops which cannot because they're so old use the program that we use for teacher evaluation baseline edge and for that matter sometimes can't even operate our student management system power school so there's a real need to be able to give our teachers the tools that they need in order to be able to do the work that's expected of them and that is something that the capital committee has agreed with us so we but when we put more hardware into the system we need to have the support from IT people in order to do this this year I have to say it was very strained we introduced more ipads into the system and we did not really increase at all on our support and I know that they have been very stressed by that by that the thinness of support so really what's in the budget is not hardware but rather the IT support and then of course we have to look for having money in the budget for reserve teaching positions last year if you recall from May to August we found ourselves in a position of having to add five elementary classrooms this was unprecedented in many years in addition to that we had the secondary level add point two here or something in order to be able to cover some large class sizes so we're putting additional money in for reserve and it could be that as we see how this all develops over the next few months more importantly probably from May to August it could be that we won't need all the reserve positions it's possible probably not likely but then we could come back to you and talk about what might have been some other priorities that we have that are not part of the budget that we're going forward with so that's sort of the overview the sort of the context of where this budget was developed from and basically we have taken what we have right now and rolled it over into next year added these additional positions as well as all of the fixed costs of going forward and fixed costs involve step in lane changes and salary increases for our teachers and other staff people who have contractual current contracts as well as the costs that we have for special education that creates a new base for next year as well and Diane will get into that a little bit in more detail so that's the overview and I'm going to now turn over to Miss Johnson. So unlike other departments in the town the schools only receive a portion of their budget admittedly the lion share of the budget from the town we also enjoy revenue streams from grants and from revolving our assumptions on grants for the upcoming year are pretty much level funded and we've assumed a 1% reduction based on our best information on most of the grants but overall we know for a fact that we have funding in the project success grant and there's some other balancing factors with the revolving we have factored in our fees assuming no increases to fees except the long term rentals for the after school program that we're going to take up later tonight and circuit breaker just to remind you that the way circuit breaker funding works is that we are actually in FY14 spending the circuit breaker revenue as we collected in FY13 and what we're proposing for FY15 is the amount we've been told that we'll receive this year. What often happens with circuit breaker funding is there is a differential at the end of the year if the state has additional funds they allocated out to the circuit breaker district so very often the fourth quarter payment is larger. In the fall when we come back together after the summer recess you'll receive an updated funding summary which shows where the grants came in actually as opposed to what we're proposing now and they also show the differential to circuit breaker. Those changes in this past fiscal year were very helpful in covering the five additional elementary teachers when we only had two reserves in the budget so I just wanted to make that clear. We're very fortunate and following state recommendations on the circuit breaker by retaining an entire year's circuit breaker spending the previous year, collecting the current year and planning on it. It also prevents us from having a situation where we're guessing circuit breaker will be enough and then we're in a positive situation. It also provides an additional cushion if we should need to dip into it we have those funds available to us. This slide compares FY14 to FY15 and shows the overall increase in revenue for people following along at home this is section 3 of the budget book, the funding summary. This chart though not showing up as well as I had hoped it looks better on a small screen and I thought green was an appropriate color since it's revenue. Shows the different sources of revenue I've broken out the chapter 70 allocation from the rest of the town appropriation but both of those pieces it's only the two small pies at the top that come from other sources. So given our net increase in revenue our total mandatory increases come to about $2.1 million. We're proposing $1.3 million of increases. We're doing some modest restructuring to bring ourselves into proof. This is represented best in the budget book in section 2 in the superintendent's budget message. For those at home if you haven't had a chance to read this, this is really the best single piece of the budget to look at to have an understanding of what's going on. There's a narrative that explains our goals and what we're proposing to do and how they tie back to the district goals. There's a summary of all of the additions and deletions to the budget. There's a footnote that explains each and every one in detail and at the very end there's also a list of those things that we would have wished to have done had we had more money but are unable to do. We considered them valuable but just the funding didn't reach that far. And this is a breakdown of our budget that allows us to look at sort of where our money's going as a whole. You see that it's regular ed, special ed are the big pieces of the pie. One of the new fields that we're looking at this year for the first time is something called Interventions and we'll talk about that a little bit more. That's the brown pie on the right hand side, about the middle. Looking at Diane, why don't you take Karen's microphone when you're talking. Looking at a five-year comparison by certain categories, you can see some of the trends that we've been looking at. General education in blue. Ms. Johnson, you're standing right in front of the screen. I'm sorry. But not obscuring the view from home. The blue represents general ed, green, special ed. Red in the middle is interventions and while that's a relatively small category in the budget, I think it's a very important category to bring to your attention because this represents the activity that supports the students that are struggling but whose struggles may not have reached the level of needing special intervention services. This is reading, math coaching, math interventions, literacy coaching, guidance. These are the things that really help the whole student and the student that isn't cruising and I think this is such an important part of the budget. Unfortunately, this is always a part of any school budget that's vulnerable to cuts. It doesn't affect class size. It tends to be those fungible areas that get the ax first and so I want to keep these in the front of the budget so we're thinking about it so that we don't think about that as stuff that's appropriate to liquidate when things start to tighten up. I really see them as a very important cost containment measure to help contain special ed costs but more importantly to really create what we need to support all learners, regular ed and special ed. Pretty much this slide just says in words what that said in pictures and I wanted to talk a little bit here about special ed cost growth because I know that's a matter of concern for our district and for many districts. As Dr. Bodie said we have asked and received from the town a growth factor of 7% on our special ed cost allocation from the town and if you compare as this chart does the special ed growth which is the jagged line from FYO 5 through the 4% elections and the 15 budget, you can see that over that period of time which is 10 years that we're tracking closely with the 7% line which is in the yellow. If you shorten the time horizon however since FY 11 our special ed cost growth has exceeded on overall the 10% cost line. I want to speak for a minute about the differences between the way we think about special education in Arlington versus the way the department of elementary and secondary education speaks about special ed. In Arlington we consider all of our special ed costs that are related to special ed regardless of their funding source. So circuit breaker which we consider a revolving funding source grants, we have a SPED 94-142 grant which provides significant funding for special ed. SPED transportation and SPED legal charges, we consider that all part of the whole SPED picture. But when the state is thinking about special ed expenditures they can find their thinking to that which comes out of the general fund. They don't include these other things though they do include circuit breakers so that's a little not right. They don't think about grants as part of SPED in the same way. The reason I'm bringing this up is because it was requested that we look at special ed expenditures compared to other districts like ourselves to see if our special ed expenditures which are growing in a significant pace are way out of line with other similar districts in the state. In order to do this comparison I felt we had to go to the Department of Elementary and Secondaries education's view of what is SPED so we could have an apples to apples comparison. So this compares Arlington with fiscally similar communities. These were the communities that were selected in the salary study by the committee that worked with the town manager. And you can see Arlington on the far left to the state average on the far right that while we exceed the state average we are not radically out of step with communities that have a similar fiscal base to our own in terms of their taxable income and I think development land and I'm not sure what all the factors were in creating these comparisons. This compares Arlington to its academically comparable communities who enjoy the same level of high academic achievement that we do. And again the state average is far to the right. And you can see that we're pretty much in step with this group as well. That our spending is not radically out of step. This data as I said comes from the DESC and it's based on fiscal 12 which is a little out of date at this point but that is the last year for which they had complete data. It would be interesting to look at this again in 13 and 14 when we have more data as we move forward through time. And just one final word. When you look at the budget it represents I've finally been able to give you three years of actuals when you look at the entire budget. I apologize for the tininess of the font but I do think it's important to be able to see three years of actuals. I give you FY14 projections but I want to inject a note of caution about projections. Many school expenses tend to be front loaded in the first half of the year. I download the expenditures out of our financial system at the midyear point and basically multiply it by two. And then I go back through the budget and I tweak it where I know why I have greater information. Obviously if I were to take the expenditures and the encumbrances for out of district tuition and multiply it by two we'd all have a heart attack because that would be radically wrong. So I spend a lot of time on that but as you delve into the finer and finer layers of granularity when you get into the budget detail for example in section eight the projections are often seem out of step and there are a variety of reasons why that may be so. I think it's very important when you're looking at the budget that you look at the three complete years of expenditures more closely than the most current year of projections. Just because of the timing even the midyear, the January 1 download when I what I'm doing for the expenditures to use that drives the projections does not capture the midyear point of teacher salary. It's actually short of that by a month because of the distribution of the ten months. Really what you want to look at are the three full years of expenditures, the actual expenditures. That's what really happened in those lines. And I use those much more heavily when I'm looking ahead to this year's budget. The projections only serve as markers for specific things about which I have knowledge. For example, I know transportation costs are going up next year. Based on the contract we have with the collaborative on sped transportation. I know based on a variety of factors that I reported to you before that out of district tuition is way up this year and that's driving next year. But for the most part on your finest lines of similarity it's the three years of actuals that are driving the bus in terms of what we're looking at comparatively. So please don't put too much emphasis on the projections column. It is especially at the tiny levels. At the bigger levels it works better but at the teeny tiny levels it doesn't work that well. So I want to ask some questions. I want to ask some general questions about the budget but I want to ask questions to start about special education. And we had a little conversation beforehand because I wanted to tell you what I was thinking. When I look at the where the budget is going in terms of special education costs from the FY11 actuals to the FY14 projections and FY15 proposed budget it's about a $4.8 million increase in special education costs and a 2% jump over a 5 year period. And I think it's critical that we're able since this is now going to become our budget we're able to explain to the finance committee and the public in town meeting the reasons for that. And we can't just explain it with anecdote. We've got to explain it with some data. And so the questions, the data that I think is critical for us to know is the number of out of district placements year to year because that's always a cost driver. It's always a huge cost driver. So that's an important thing for us to understand. I think it's important to understand the kinds of disabilities that we're confronting that we're confronting here in Arlington over the past 5 years and how similar and how different that is to other districts is that I think people need to understand is this a trend around the Commonwealth around the country or is this an Arlington trend that needs to be explained to people. And the other thing I think that we have to be conscious of when you see this kind of a jump a 4.8 million dollar jump in expenses over a 5 year period 33% increase over a 5 year period you know it has the danger of having a conflict or attention or unnecessary attention between parents who have children with special needs and parents who don't. That's something we have to just be aware of. And so I think it's the message and how we present it in the data is important especially in the finance committee presentation. It's not just anecdote. It's not just kids have more issues born with more issues and problems than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Maybe that's true but it needs to be documented with good references good support, good data for that. So that's something I'd like to see. The next overall comment I want to make about this or question I guess is you know a big thing and I don't have an answer by the way to the special education issue. I don't think I have an answer to the next question I'm going to ask. And that is that teachers which I think we're all in favor of that and we want to address the class size issue. That was a big thing in your presentation. But we also have to implement a new evaluation structure and the worry that I have is when I went through this budget is do we have enough administrative support supervision to implement the evaluation structure? And that's my and I don't I mean I don't know do you I mean I don't have an answer if I were the superintendent I'd say yes of course we do because I want the budget passed. But I mean in an honest I mean I guess the question a better way to phrase it is in all honesty are you I mean is this something that you're a little concerned about? Is there some issue that maybe we don't have enough structure here to do all the that we have to do with evaluation? Or maybe you've thought about it and we do. I have thought about it and I'm a little concerned yes. And we've been very even starting the year we did a lot of analysis about loads in terms of people. But even with that I think that there people are finding that this is very difficult certainly in the number of observations. So this is be something that we're going to be discussing with the AEA and the AAA as we as at the end of this year. So we our agreement is that we relook at this. I have expressed that concern with our administrators and we've talked about it. I have proposed thinking about even if not a full time but maybe an assistant at the elementary level to help with a number of evaluations. But I will say that the principals and curriculum leaders faced with putting money toward that would rather put it toward teachers. They were very clear about that. They would rather shoulder the burden in the intensity of this rather than not have whatever money could be available to put toward class sizes. I think that I would like to revisit this issue. In fact for me in that list I was telling about a million dollars plus we're not addressing that would be up there for me. And I will want to hear more as we for the end of this year when we debrief about it all what we might be able to do. So as I said in my initial comments we have put money aside for reserve positions to the extent that we may not need them all I would like to revisit some things and that is one of them. Is it possible maybe not in elementary school but in a secondary ed to lighten the load of a few teachers so that they can have some coaching and evaluation or is that not, I don't know. We've actually had a lot of discussion about that. Teachers that are teachers and they're part of the community can not do evaluations. And also there's been discussion about whether some people could be in both positions. And I know that some neighboring towns have done that and having lived with it for a year or two they've done away with it. It's sort of an either or situation. I think at the secondary level while there's certainly a lot of people who are evaluating the 20 plus level which is very high. Definitely high and there's some people even closer to 30 or more. It's a lot. We have set up a structure where we have a principal evaluator and a secondary. We have a very elaborate chart on how this is done. My concern is more at the elementary, to be honest. Because in a building the only person doing evaluations is the principal. Well I shouldn't say only person. Because we do have our special education coordinators helping with specialists. But some of the special education teachers that are liaisons are still evaluated by the principal. So I have some thoughts as to how we could use an assistant at the elementary. Even if it was part time. But right now that I was at the primary, isn't that true? Yes they said no we would rather put this into teachers. That's good to hear. Okay thank you. Another high level question is the fact that the move to the new common core I know at least in my district is causing a huge amount in our budget on new curriculum needs. Now I notice that curriculum is one of the things on here you don't necessarily specifically say that it's due to the move to common core. And I know that some may not require it. But for example I know in math the whole methodology of teaching and what is taught is changing at each grade level. So the need for new textbooks and new training and all of that stuff I don't know how much of that is also in this budget and where do we find that? You did vote in a significant uptick in math materials at the middle school and that carried from last year's budget to this year's budget. So that will enable us to continue to roll out the math at the middle school. This is an enhancement on top of that of curriculum materials. And I've moved the money around it's now in Dr. Chesson's budget so she can put it throughout the district where it's best suited and best needed. Judd, can I? I'm sorry I was the one that asked for the comparison to the other districts and I was the one that asked for the kind of the most detailed view of special ed. So thank you for doing that. I meant to preface my comments with that so thanks for doing that. I asked for it and you were kind enough to do it. Mr. Ham. Are we getting down on the nitty gritty? I don't see why not. I apologize if I hear you jumping around, Diane. Under tab 8 well first up let me just ask this. The $800,000 plus dollars that we've got from the town for our additional enrollment. Is that just spread out through the whole program? There wouldn't be a line item or anything. Under tab 8 on page 43 I guess school committee $57,000. You have $35,000 for school committee insurance. Correct. Could you or Dr. Bordi tell us what we're insured for? Is that a liability issue? Yes. Why aren't we covered under the Mass Torts Claim Act through the town as opposed to having us have a specific line item for $35,000? Well you are indemnified. Which is the Mass Torts Claim Act. Yes. But there also could be it's also beyond that it's potential to be sued for other things that would not be necessarily an issue of indemnification and if there was a settlement or a finding by courts that could be a place where you would look for the money rather than in the budget. I think that's a decision that we should probably send to the subcommittee and look at that very carefully. What's happened and this is not just Arlington. School committee insurance policies have gone up a lot when they're single, when it's just simply a policy. If we were to do something more townwide which is something we maybe should all talk about. But I think it's right now you haven't decided what you want to do and so it's in the budget. Maybe that's something we need to talk about. This is one of the situations where the projection is right on because it's already been paid for this year. So that projection is exactly what we paid. It's a small piece of the budget but it's $35,000 that I think municipal employees besides the Mass Torts Claim Act if we have a need for something that's slightly different I'm sure other boards and other in the town would too. I accept your idea of talking and maybe we can do it together. Something on that. The you don't have to go back and forth but on tab 6 page 2 legal services for special ed is listed as $200,000 and then that's line 6866 item number I'm sorry is $200,000 and then two lines down legal services for school committee is $400,000. Is that a total of $600,000 we're budgeting for legal services? Well it's actually three pieces and depending on the view you look at it it looks differently. In this case because you're looking at it by program code you see the special ed legal and what you see under legal services school committee is the $200,000 for school council which would include labor and $200,000 for settlements. Okay we've carried a $200,000 that is broken down a page back on tab 8. It's actually broken down in the object summary which is the next one it's a little easier to see it there. If you look at legal we get everybody the page tab. Yep it is tab 7. That's the next one it's 83102 it's on page 2 of 3 legal services. 831 legal services. So if you look across this line I think this is important to look at now this number right here would include the $200,000 for special ed legal services and the $200,000 for general ed school committee or superintendent legal services. The important consideration here on that $400,000 is the last year we were in negotiations is FY12 and if you go back to FY12 we spent $352,000 in that year. The subsequent years we've spent less because we haven't been in negotiations and so I felt the $400,000 in this upcoming year which will be a negotiation cycle would be prudent to be sure that we had sufficient to manage whatever was needed as part of the negotiations. The court judgments slash damage settlements 87601 is on page 3 of 3 and as you look across that line you can see that the amount that we've spent in settlements has varied widely over the years that we've carried this line from a low of not even $2,000 to a high of $120,000 to this year where it will be the entire $200,000 and so while that's a line where there's tremendous variations we've recommended the $200,000 again just because this is an area where it's good to have some security and knowing that that's there. Okay for clarification the what you just said in settlement are you talking special ed settlement and labor settlements? Yes. Yet the legal piece under special education was $200,000 but that's just for legal counsel not for settlements. We're budgeting $200,000 for legal counsel in special education. Am I correct? Yes. It's all of the involved. It's not just counsel fees. If it isn't settlement what else is it if it isn't counsel fees what else are we talking about? Well sometimes you can have people that have to be brought in as consultants in a legal case. I mean those would be costs that would be perhaps put special testers, special consultants. Under tab 8 and this may be just format page 43 and tab 8 under the school committee we have no legal services budgeted. Correct that now resides in the superintendent's budget. But it says school committee under the superintendent's budget. It does. You know legal services school committee is a modicum I took from the DESE and their chart of accounts. I'm not questioning it. It's just a misnomer. I'm just saying if you look at this it says the school committee has no legal services budgeted but if you go into the superintendent's budget it says the school committee has a $400,000 budget Right. It's just to me a little bit confusing. It is. And under it says court judgments damages and settlements $200,000 back in the expenditures for fiscal 13. See by looking at it in section 8 if it was budgeted in one place in one fiscal year and another place in another fiscal year you're not going to see the comparison. So the best place to see it is in the other tab. Fine. But if I'm the public and I just pick up this one line it looks like our expenditures for fiscal 13 was $1278. Well let's go back to tab 7. Right here. This is and that's exactly what it does show is $1278 for that year. That number was correct. So that would be 13. FY 13. Thank you. Questions for superintendent. Just a very simple request. In cases like that where we were allocating something as one area and that switched is there some way of just doing some sort of footnoting that would reference the different locations that we could find that because I think that might be a way of answering the questions when somebody is looking at it a footnote saying also refer to this. And if somebody sees a number in one place for a couple of years sees it in a different place for another couple it's just a lot. You're talking about a monstrous amount of work. I mean and if that's desirable but that's going to add weeks to my workload. You can do searches though. Yes you can search on the digital. If you use the online version you can plug that in and it will take you to every spot. You could use the object code and it would carry you to every spot in the budget where that was referenced. Right. Or maybe just some catch all at the beginning or end of the document just saying you know like you probably know off the top of your head which ones have transferred over the past few years. Or no better than I do. But some way of just having some kind of central easy way for people to do that it would make it I don't want to add weeks to anybody's job but it seems like there's whether there's like a note every time there's at the bottom of every single page saying like if an item is discontinued refer back to X section to you know find where that item would now be tracked. It's just every year it seems that oh I moved that now it's over here and oh I moved that and now it's over here so you know it gets zeroed out in one place and then a huge jump in another and I think it's just really hard to follow. Now I'm sure that it's hard to follow for you too but it's like impossible for us so we don't even know why. And I really why did it move what is it and this is the downside of this level of granularity and budgeting. I appreciate all the work that you have put into like Diane making this so much more transparent. I mean there are a few of us that have absolutely know where you took this from first hand and see where it is now and so like there's a tremendous amount of respect for the way you have been trying to tweak this and have this make sense and follow more uniformity between the state recording and our recording but it just remembering those days where there was so much public distrust just some catch all. Well here's my dilemma my training isn't as a finance person it's as a historian and so I have a deep and visceral knee jerk reaction against rewriting history but in terms of doing this the way to do it would be to go back in time and pretend it had always been in this line item and just simply move the expenses back in history so everything trues out. But my visceral reaction is I want to know the history. At some point a decision was made to put these expenses in this place. There was some thinking there and then they move for another reason and for some reason that I can't really articulate on the fly I feel there's some value in knowing that. For example the legal costs once resided in the school committee budget they now reside in the superintendent's budget. You know at some level it's all money. But you know I just you know I would certainly much prefer though I don't like the idea to go back and change history and pretend it always lived where it lives now then I would like to go and footnote everything because that would drive me insane. And I can see when you do change history having an asterisk you know as like printing the new title and that just always means that this historical that there's history because there's always the hard copy somewhere that somebody can reference back if they really want to be those stories. And see my fear is that you know again with the eye to transparency I put it there once and FY11 it was here and now it's not. You're playing games with the past. And again my training is as a historian you don't move the past you leave it the way it is so you know this is what I'm up against it's tough to it's tough to do. I mean you know at this level of granularity it's impossible that everything is going to line up perfectly. It's just impossible and to go through and flag every anomaly to write about every anomaly to footnote every anomaly would make me want to seek a new line of employment. You know it's monstrous. So I'm you know I'm not really sure what to say about that. Perhaps you can give it some additional thought I certainly will. Another solution that we haven't brought but it seems like there has to be some way of tying well there is if you look at the higher levels of summary you see how it collapses together. You know in those other views in the object view in the program view in the in the cost interview you see how everything relates to each other. It's only when you get way down into the weeds that things start to come apart. And how valuable is that truly. But that's also the piece of having a line in the footnote section at the bottom of each page saying for items that have been moved refer back to this page so it's just constantly transparent. Okay we've given ourselves 60 minutes on this topic so I want to confine it to that. We've got 10 more minutes. Dr. Allison Ampe first. First I just wanted to ask if when something was moved if the column was just had a couple asterisks at the name so then you knew that that one's moved somewhere and hasn't just disappeared. Would that be helpful? Yes absolutely. And it doesn't even need to say where or why. It's just an asterisk so we know it went somewhere else. It's changed. This is a pivot table. It works as a digital database. It's not as simple as you suggest to throw a footnote the way you're suggesting. But I don't know how to do it so I'll go do some more research. See I'm not saying a footnote. I'm just saying in the name of something if it's moved to a different category in a different year it just gets an asterisk once it when you say okay I'm going to put this in a different category. So the legal expenses that were being talked about that move from one to the other the year that you decided that it was going to move from the school committee budget to the superintendent budget at that point you just put an asterisk at the school committee legal service and so we go okay that means it's moved so wait I know to go look for it. It's not that it's been zero. Right right. Just so that we know oh okay it didn't just zero out it got moved and we'll look for it somewhere else. I mean we don't need to know where we're not saying that we're just saying that you know. In the number thing instead of just a dash so it's not you know so we know it's not zeroed it's moved or something. Oh yeah yeah. Or conversely when something is zeroed put a zero. Have the zero there. So a dash then means. A dash means it moved somewhere. We're just trying to understand do you see what do you guys know how pivoting. No that's not going to work it's not going to work. Yeah. Now if I may try to get into this. Please help me. I love the granularity and I think that to go through this granularity and notate anything that's a change in this level of granularity would require you to hire a full time assistant to document the change on the granularity level. But in order to inform what happened perhaps one of the things we could do is take it off the pivot table cut and paste into a document do a search and have a set of threshold if something is zeroed out or if there is more than a 20% reduction or 20% gain on a line item or 50% or some threshold where it's a manageable thing where we're picking up the big changes and having a page for the big changes of note and not worry about all the rest that could be a quick down and dirty way to get it to the things that have moved without spending more in an hour or two compiling another page in the document. Having a cover sheet that talks about principal changes makes some sense. My fear about dumping it into an Excel and stripping out the pivot tables is then you run the risk of being out of proof. I mean all of the documents in this budget come out of one set of data and I slice and dice it using pivot tables so it comes out different ways. If I start killing that function by adding an asterisk or a dash or all of that I can't do it anymore. I understand that a pivot table of the data is the point and lots of things are pointing at it. So what we're saying is well maybe then the things pointing at it if it's a new thing it could be bold. If it's a thing that's been zeroed or moved it can be an asterisk. You can change the names. The pivot table is going to play with that. The data itself I understand you can't change. It's really a good one. I understand I had a bunch of concerns about discrepancies of salaries and I understand that you're saying that when they're pulled that when you multiply by two it's two early and so that's why there's a lot of lower levels. So you're concerned about discrepancies between the projections and the next year budget? Yeah it was the projections and well it was this year's budget versus the projected use for this year, projected expense for this year and in a lot of places they're like a full person down. So then when we're talking about adding someone it was just very confusing to me because it looks like there's already room for another person so are we adding really two people? There isn't. What the problem you're seeing very clearly is that people are being paid in the payroll system not where they've been budgeted. The teachers are all there. They're just not in the right place. This is something that's been a deficiency because we haven't had the staff be able to do a thorough comprehensive review on an annual or semi-annual basis to look at every single person in the payroll system where they're currently being paid and where I budgeted them to be paid. Particularly in the area of special ed they move around an awful lot but in other cases they're in grants, they're out of grants and this kind of practice of checking this every year has not been part of the practice and so we're trying to evolve that but I was down staff this summer and this is something and I have a new staff person who's coming on who's taking on this project who's begun this work but it wasn't completed in time for the projections this time. So I feel that we're very right on with our salary spending but the variations you're seeing at this granular level reflect the fact that maybe this teacher is being paid out of SLCB because that's where they were last year but actually they're budgeted as a liaison now. And that's the corrections that need to be made at a very person by person level that haven't been yet. So first I really didn't have anything that was special ed so I don't think it was that. I think it's great if you're working towards that just because it makes it much cleaner. It does and it just stops a bunch of conversations in their trunks and otherwise we're going to have to keep explaining this to people because they're going to look at it and people are going to come to us and say look there's already room here, why aren't there more teachers or whatever. And there are some spots where I believe I know I have personal knowledge that there is a person missing and that one was down and stuff so it's you know the few places where we have data it's hard to check so I applaud trying to get to there and just it'd be nice to have I mean for the salaries which we do know what they are it'll be nice to have the estimations match the expenditures and that was that is a big chunk of things I also shared Ms. Stark's concerns about the whether we have unmet needs and textbooks and stuff and I understand that now it's housed in the assistant superintendent's department but I'm concerned that I still don't have a sense of whether it's going to cover or not. I'm worried we've got a big problem that we don't know about because we're not looking at it and actually assigning numbers to it and then finally I'm concerned that we're spending an awful lot on legal and agree with Mr. Hayner I question whether we need 200,000 for court settlements in the setting of having to settle the major case that we had hanging over us. To just touch base just for a moment on textbooks we are in the process of looking at what our needs are for I know for example literacy grades K through 8 we already have our estimates for next year what we need in terms of what we absolutely need for Common Core and what we'd like to have for Common Core and just like when we come to every budget cycle there's always a difference between what we would really like to have and what we absolutely need to have and I feel more than comfortable that we're going to be covered for what we absolutely need to have and then we're trying to look and see how we can be creative with what's left over to get what we you know what it would be not nice but that's that next level but we are looking a lot at digital resources and open source resources particularly at the elementary level now where the level of technology is high enough that we would be able to do that so I hear you and I can't say we got it made but I do think it's something that we've looked at very carefully and will continue to look at carefully. The things that especially worry me are more science at the high school level foreign language at the high school level. I'm thinking I feel like we had math at the middle school level that we should have coasted for years past when it should have coasted and we didn't flag it as a need and I just worry that there's other things out there like that. I work very closely with Catherine Riz and Larry Weathers who are the curriculum directors for the area that you're talking about. Catherine has already highlighted the books that she needs for next year. We've already had that conversation. When we replaced books for her this year we bought classroom sets and then bought digital copies access for kids so those are the kinds of the trends that were going on and particularly in science with the exception of AP because the test is predicated on the book but when we look at the other areas of science again we're looking at many more digital resources than we've used in the past and we'll continue to do so. One comment further on the science. The new science standards have just been released and I know that the director is looking carefully at this in terms of what it is that we do need to have. The issue with science is that you could buy a textbook and it could be obsolete in a year or two. So knowing that it's what is the best way that we can have the materials that we need what kind of science kits do we need at the elementary there's going to be a process over the next year or two of really aligning content curriculum content to the new standards and I think that until that process is complete we're going to judiciously buy what we need but I'm not sure that we'll ever go the route of having a textbook going forward. That brings up just what's the difference between textbooks and then there were two line items instructional materials and books and then there's textbooks. It's increasingly fuzzy. That line is blurred and even the reason those two are distinct is because the state asks for them distinctly and even in how they're you know I think as things become more digital they'll fall more under the general rubric of instructional materials. One last point. I think that we've been struggling with a couple things here and I just want to get some clarity in my mind as to where we are in the budget process in that when we adopt this this becomes our policy document and so what we're really engaging in right here is a policy exercise of how we want our resources directed as opposed to an accounting exercise of where the line items are so that I you know in terms of looking at this I agree with my colleagues who are looking at the leadership issues given the workload of complying with the evaluation system in the district I think that we really need to look at doing more to fund that regardless of whether the principals think it's a good idea or not we're budgeting not only in terms of policy for the incumbents but in terms of having positions that will attract folks to get into it in the future and if our leadership positions become owners as a result of the principal of the staff of VAL system we're going to have a hard time attracting and retaining principals in the district so the heart of the principals is one thing but the reality of the world out there and the marketplace we live in when we need to hire principals and retain them is another thing and I think we should be looking at that a little more carefully in terms of budget going forward we have for five positions basically for additional teachers so if we were to look at this from a big point of view we have all of the teachers that we have right now what we're currently having and we're rolling it forward based on what the contractual obligations are we have a new base in special education that's gone up about $700,000 if we didn't have that enrollment growth we would be looking in the neighborhood of about $100,000 to $200,000 for anything beyond what we currently have so we have the $885,000 and what you saw we thought were the budget priorities so tonight really what we're looking from you is what we would cut from what we're currently doing to fund something else or what is it in the budget priorities that you would rather see than what we have offered to you as a collective priority list and if the issue is administrative support one way that we could look at that is reducing the number of potential positions to four in reserve and allocate that money I mean that's the kind of decisions that need to be made now the other thing I would say to everybody and this is well this is a blueprint things change and people moving we have people resigning moving in all the time and that whole piece is very fungible so these are our best estimates as we move forward each month we're going to have a clear idea particularly when we get into the summer so I'm not ruling out that possibility in fact to me that's very important but if right now you wanted to say as a matter of policy I think that's so important that I at least want to have it in the budget right now and let's just see how everything else spins out as we go forward that's the kind of information we're trying to have here from you because we'd have to modify this a little bit before you had your final budget so that's I think that I think I appreciate you coming back to what's the big picture we want to accomplish tonight so my question is in terms of the policy statement you know we've had an interim principal in one of our schools for two years it's getting harder to hire elementary principals the pools are reduced these are challenging positions and the workload is intense and if we were to particularly worried about the elementary folks because they're alone in their house what level of support particularly for the elementary principals can we make to lighten the load and are our middle and high school people with the support able to manage the task of being an evaluator within the system now it could be that there are ways to take administrative tasks off their plate by having a some sort of a non-instructional assistant to do some of the liaison work or you know sharing that kind of a job or by having a half-time teacher who is a principal intern or any kind of a scheme to build the pool of potential principals and to lighten the load on our current administrators I think is something that we should ask you what would be a framework that would be a starting point for supporting the leaders in the district bring up a very good point and I also think it's not one size fits all because we have elementary school that's under 300 but we have two that are approaching 500 480 so I think what is the level of support is going to vary we used to have principals an extra 19 hours a week administrative person we have not had that we've had volunteers in schools but not paid in that respect so I mean it may be that that be a sufficient thing in some schools but it may be that in other schools we would need some actual evaluation support so you know if you want to think about taking a reserve position and having that label for administrative support it could take on various ways that it would manifest itself as we go forward. I'm not looking to be prescriptive but I'm perceiving an issue within the district and I want to, this is one of those who's caring for the caregivers argument and there are certain people who just by nature of the job are going to be in a position where they want to do more and at some point you've got to prioritize things and make it a more doable job well it's to our administrators credit that we have great administrators and they would rather take on more themselves than have a large class size in their building or not have an extra section in the high school so that's their mindset and so what you're seeing is that as a superintendent I am a little concerned I share your concern and that's why I would like as we, as this go forward we either wait until later and deal with it and see where we are or now, now having said that even if we put it in now and we get another 130 students this year or more, 150 we're going to have to figure out how we're going to deal with that too. So, but I'd like to have a proposal or a thought of how do we do this and where are we being in the only way to do it so that everything ties out is really to take one of those reserve positions and put it into that. Otherwise that's really the only way. Ms. Darks. The only other thing that I would say and I want to congratulate everyone that once again you've pulled this off but I think part of the problem is that what doesn't come across in this book again is that people who are not here every day don't know that this year we have a new evaluation system that we had to implement and that is a huge stress on our schools and that we have a new set of curriculum standards and that is a huge stress on our schools and that we have the enrollment part is in here but I would like it if we could somehow say to people you know what, you need to understand that there are, these are all the factors that our schools are dealing with this year and I'm afraid that some of enough of that doesn't come across to me in the message because I want people to understand that that's why they don't see I don't know, massive innovation or massive changes or you know that there is a lot of things that are going on that we're dealing with and we deal with it all the time and I think that we get lost in that and we forget to tell people like but we have this whole new curriculum that we're trying to implement and this whole new evaluation system that we've been focused on. I mean I know that personally the only professional development I've gotten all year has been on the stupid teacher evaluation system you know I'm like okay great I know we have a new evaluation system but other people who don't live it every day don't understand that that's where a lot of our energy and money is going to or they may not understand that this new curriculum is also going to do the same thing and so I would like to, I think that there might be also some information that needs to be in there in the budget because the budget reflects that in some ways but also just so that people know what's going on in the schools like not just budgetarily wise but kind of where our mindset is, what our heads are at, what are we trying to handle so I just also want to put that out there as something that it would be good to get across. I know that we all are very aware of that but I think that a lot of people aren't. Well it might be possible I could amend the superintendent's message because this is just the superintendent's budget at this point but I could take a look at that this week so it'll give you maybe a newer version next week. Add this into the book, add this enrollment chart and highlight that in your message and say that this is part of the reason that we're doing certain things as an exhibit. She does talk about enrollment and the fact that that is impacting us but we don't talk about the other things that are also impacting and it's not us, it's the state. It's things from the state that we have to deal with. Just real quick, when you do the enrollment part you might even want to be able to take a look and see how it's grown in just one year. If you do a visual with that the increase in enrollment just over a year. Or even just giving people the total number of students in the schools. I think so many people still think that we have 4,000 students. I talk to people and that number is still out there. We have 2,000 students. I'm like no, no, no, we have 5,200 students. I want to make sure that we're getting across. We serve a lot of people. They need to know that and I really want to make sure that our schools are we do a lot and we do a lot for a lot more people every year. I just want to make sure that that gets across because I think it's important that people understand the world we're living in as we're trying to do this. It's not just the same thing this year. I think those are three of our biggest stressors this year and I want to make sure that people understand that we're dealing with those and that's one of the things that we're going through. To teachers, administrators, staff, people are dealing with this. They would all say that they are stressed and they would say that they were very tired for vacation. Very, very tired. No, it's been a hard year. Absolutely a hard year. I would ask if we could try to somehow get that across and make sure people understand that these are our numbers. This is our population. These are who we're serving and these are the things that we're internally been dealing with as well. Alright, thank you members. Thank you Dr. Bodie, Ms. Johnson, Dr. Chaston. Thank you very much for the work you put into this and this is a really good start to this. We're doing this presumably in a week so let's get ready for that. Oh, I can't make that meeting. I'll be at another meeting. Monthly financial reports to stay on the financial side of things. Ms. Johnson. I haven't, you know, there hasn't been anything that's substantively changed at the time of this reporting. We are hard on the heels of the next monthly reporting. We still haven't completed the winter so we don't know where our fuel bills are going to come out. The out of district tuition is still continuing to track high. There hasn't been a miraculous reversal and other than that everything seems to be going right along. So are there specific questions on the monthly reports? Since we're meeting again next week, I assume you'll be expecting reports instead of the second week as we normally meet in the month. Are we going to have a full meeting on the 13th? We haven't decided yet. Definitely maybe but not guaranteed. Okay. So, you know, there may be a, there may be, it may be too short a turnaround to turn out the reports and the budget stuff and the statement of interest stuff for next, for next meeting. If we decide not to have it, could you just email it to us? Sure. That I could do. Any questions? Thank you. Dr. Bode, Supervisor Ford. Short version. Short version? Did I hear that over there in that corner? Short version. I do have a few things. And of course you've already had the press release on this and I'm very pleased to re-announce that we have Thad Dighman who is going to be the new principal at Dallin. And I know that this was met with a lot of positive comments from both teachers and parents and it's a, I think it's a terrific appointment. But I will also say that the other two candidates we had were very strong candidates. And to your point about attracting really good people to Arlington I think we have really been being very successful in that in this year. We had 69 candidates for the position and Laura chaired the committee on the selection. You interviewed nine candidates of which we had three become finalists. And you know, honestly I do very extensive reference checking and positive across the board. But sometimes when you're looking at a person who you look for what is going to be the best match and we feel very strongly that Mr. Dighman will be. And very excited that he's going to be coming. So that's all good. One of the, the other thing, I actually want to turn this over to Dr. Cheson to talk a little bit about the one and update and where we are with the tools of the mine. And you can probably give them an overview of where we are at this point. Sure. As we had discussed a few meetings ago, we've established a committee to do the reconsideration of curriculum materials review. We're going to be having two meetings. The first meeting will be Monday, March 3rd at 6.30 which will be right here in the school committee room. We'll receive a short presentation at that time by the parents who requested the review regarding their concerns with the use of the books. They've been notified and have agreed to speak. Following that presentation in that same meeting, there will be an opportunity for up to 15 people to speak for up to five minutes each to share concerns that they may have regarding the use of the books. We really wanted to separate those who had concerns from those who were in support of so that we made sure that each voice got the same amount of time to be heard. So following that meeting, we will also have a meeting on Thursday, March 6th at 6.30 at the media center at the Hardee School because this room is currently being used at that time. That meeting will begin with a short presentation by two lead kindergarten teachers for the program who mentor the rest of the teachers in the program. They will give a presentation in support of the use of the Magic Tree House books. Following their presentation, there will again be an opportunity for up to 15 people to speak for up to five minutes each to speak in support of the use of the books. And then to just review the process that will follow after that. The review committee will then meet in privately to consider the information that they've heard and to deliberate. The committee will submit a report to the superintendent and the superintendent will then inform the school committee of her decision. It's expected that the timeframe for the recommendation or the report from the committee to the superintendent will be made no later than March 13th and probably significantly shorter than that. But that will be our outmost date. So that's the process going forward. The dates for those two meetings have been placed on the district website as well as we'll be sending out emails to all the elementary parents so that they will know that they will be able to come and speak at those meetings should they so desire. Great. Any questions on? Marie Pope Osborne should thank us for all the publicity we're giving her, the author. What about the statement of interest? The statement of interest? You have it on. Yes, well let me talk about that. We will be giving you a draft copy of the statement of interest next week. If it's not in your packets on Monday we'll be sending it to you electronically in the beginning of the week so that you have it. But in addition to that you're going to have the hard copy or we'll send it to of the architects report. And we're in the final stages of editing that report so you will have that as well. Now one of the issues I think the committee is going to have to think about for next week is whether you at that meeting want to vote the approval of the SOI though it is still a draft and there may be some things that we need to change. It's really, the SOI is just putting together the three major parts of the need of the school. The first of course is the physical facility itself. And we have a lot of data. In fact the challenge is to take the data and put it into the bytes that they want for the actual narrative. The second is why do we need besides fixing the, just simply the infrastructure of the building, what other things do we need? How does the building not support teaching and learning sufficiently? And that's really what your presentation you're going to get on Thursday night is about. And that's why we've hired an architect to take a look at what's, what an issue in this building and also comparing that to sort of standards that would exist out there. And then the third of course is enrollment growth. When we are looking at when this school say perhaps would be renovated, say five years out, or even seven years out, we're going to have a substantially larger population in this building. And currently we don't, we are struggling to have enough classrooms for their current enrollment. There are in many, in all the departments we have teachers that roam, so they don't have their own classroom. And every time we add a section, there's not another classroom, when you hire a teacher we're not going to, this next year, we're not going to be able to give them a classroom. That doesn't exist. They're going, we're going, in each department they have to figure out how we're going to schedule people in those rooms and of course where are we going to give that person, you know, some desk and place to meet with students. So even now we feel the crunch, but you now add 300 more students here approximately. This is going to be without doing some major reconfiguration or putting some areas into service that are currently not in service. This is going to be very difficult to do. If we were able to remove every non academic office, yours, the 6th floor basically the town offices and stuff, would we be able to have handle our enrollment today? Today? Yep. Well certainly they could use a few more classrooms up here, but the question is where does the administration go? I said that aside. We could use these classrooms, there's no doubt about that. I'm not so much sure about the town offices because of their location. They're on the ground floor. The other question I have, do we, we're on schedule to look at and either that night or subsequently accepted and approve. Do we have a date yet for the select or do they just, do we bring it forward to the select right after we do it? Well, they're both bodies, the school committee and the Board of Select when have to approve the submittal of the SOI. I know that the chair of the Board of Select when has agreed to have us on or is actually the committee, the Board of Select would know that we will be on their agenda on March 10th. I don't believe that they're planning to take a vote that night. We have to April 11th to submit this. Our intent and hope is to get this submitted assuming a positive vote on both boards the end of March. Dr. Cheson heard something very interesting on the day when you were out in Maynard that they're actually going to be inviting the people going into the next phase to a meeting at the end of May. So that tells me that between April 11th and the end of May they're going to make this decision. We will know fairly soon whether we're going into the next phase. If we are not invited into the next phase then we can resubmit again next year in that probably a parallel window. So in terms of the process going forward in the town, you'll hear this on the 6th. You don't know what's going to happen about the 13th. But you could vote it on your meeting on the 27th. That's a little late. The Board of Select, they only meet twice a month so their next meeting is the 24th. So hopefully they will put that on the agenda for a vote then. Could I impose upon you all and I know it's difficult to get us our copy as soon as we can so we can start looking at it and working on it. I don't want to rush any of the members of myself but I think the sooner we get it, the sooner we can digest it, get the vote and then put it in their ballpark. We have the part about enrollment done in the SOI and for the most part the mechanical parts is just a question of distilling and that's pretty much done. But we've been in this process of looking into programmatic and that's a piece of the SOI and that report is almost done and that's the part that has to go into it. So there's still a little bit more work to get that part of it in and we don't have a final document on that. We probably will have the final document Monday or Tuesday. So that's why the two are linked very closely. You wouldn't get the SOI before we finish this report. Thank you. So that's where we are. So I think that you're going to need to think about that whether when you want to vote this. I don't know if you want to vote it. Hopefully the Board of Selectment is going to approve this but their schedule will probably be here the presentation on the 10th and bring it to a vote on the 24th. Briefly, when you give us our copy is it at that time we possibly tweak it or is it just a matter of approval? No, I would like your thoughts on it and that's what we've put in the very beginning. We want this to be as strong as SOI as possible. People are listening to SOI statement of interest and while we're immersed in it and we're writing this, how you read it because we may not see where it may need to be shored up a little bit and I would like that feedback in which case over the next couple of weeks we'll do that. And the same thing for the Board of Selectment. I'm going to invite them if they have any suggestions as well. You won't have a final document on the 6th which is an issue. The final document probably we won't be completed for a couple more weeks until I get everybody's feedback. It's just a procedural issue that we have to sort of think about a little bit. You could wait until the 27th but I would like to get this in positive votes by the end of March. It might be. It depends on the Board of Selectment is going to get it in their packets next week on the Friday. But that's a draft. You're going to get the same thing. If I get comments can we incorporate that by the 13th? It depends how extensive it is. The other thing too is what you're voting isn't the document which you're voting is very specific language set forth by the MSBA. You have a very specific vote. Nothing in the vote says we love this language or we love this SOI. It says we're asking to go forward to seek funding for a project. So I don't think you need to couple the two. I think you could do the vote because they have this whole little fill out form of exactly what you have to vote. I just went online right now at the vote requirement say MSBA. And that gets attached to the whole big document when it goes in at the very last step. So the voting can be independent of it. Probably both that and that. What that would mean is that you would get the final document when we're ready to submit it. But I hope that I do we get feedback both positive and also constructive as well. Because again this is a collective effort and we want to make sure that we're doing the very best job we can in submitting this. Yes. But I did hear your colleague over there saying short. So let's speak short. Snow. I do have to emphasize over again that in the policy that we have that if parents feel that they do not think that children should their child should go to school that day they disagree with my decision which by the way is made very early in the morning and things we know have changed. They just need to notify the school and let them know that why they're not going to be there and for any they'll be marked as an absence but it would be essentially an excused absence. So we are now this is the part that I won't really want to bring up is that where we are right now is that we are going to have school on the Monday of the last week of June. We did that with the last snow day. I would hope that that's as far as we have to go. 23rd is currently the last day of school. Yes. Yes. So we shall see. The winter's not over as we all know. I think another issue and this I had this in an afforded email to me from one of the principals today. Some parents expressing concern that people are not shoveling their walks and as a result of those big mounds in a walkway so the kids are going more and more into the street and I think right now the problem we have in town everywhere actually is that these mounds are now solid ice blocks and so it is a problem. I know that DPW is trying very hard to get into sort of crucial corner areas and removing the snow as best as possible. But the winter's not over and hopefully we don't see any more major storms but I do urge people when we do have one to first of all remember that you do have parental discretion and two that people shovel their walks for the children. The other thing I just want and we can talk about this more another time actually give you some good news. We have one of our seniors athletes being recognized as the MIAA student athlete of the month and the MIAA has a monthly presentation to one male and one female athlete and students are nominated either by their athletic, the AD or the principal or teacher and the key issues of excellence are in the areas of academics, athletics and community service so it's not just an award for athletics and I'm very pleased to report that Anna Smokovic who is a senior at the high school has been selected as the MIAA student athlete of the month award for January and Anna is a three sport varsity athlete. She's captain of the Arlington High School volleyball, basketball and softball teams she's known for positive leadership, socialist motivation and support of both coaches and teammates. Academically, Anna has earned a 3.85 grade point average and a very rigorous course load and she also excels in community service efforts. She led the volleyball team with the highest attendance in supporting a recent road race fundraiser and she also volunteers at a recreation center and helps run different youth camps. I'll just give you the quote by our athletic director, Melissa Dugolecki I cannot recommend a student athlete more confidently as the one who exemplifies the standards of the MIAA and high school educational athletics. Her optimism, determination and accountability have yielded to her much personal and team success. Through her commitment to her teams and her role as a captain she has bettered programs year round through her three sport commitment while serving as a role model with her sportsmanship academic excellence and in yielding leadership. So congratulations to Anna Smokovic. The other thing I wanted to inform you about is the work that's going on. We'll spend more time another time but this but just this week 75 superintendents have met with the committee of NEASC. As you know we just went through an accreditation process in last year and we've talked a little bit about that. In fact we were talking about it in our statement of interest. But the purpose of this meeting was to address some issues that superintendents and high school principals want the MIAA and what NEAA has to look at and that is the mission, the cost of accreditation and the prescriptive nature of what they often tell school districts with respect to teaching and learning. So the NEASC has been very receptive to this suggestion of how we can evolve and to their credit before we had the world of standards and accountability, NEASC was there trying to raise the level of academic excellence in our schools going back decades. But what has happened in the last 10 years you're all well aware of is this constant escalation of accountability whether it's with standardized testing, whether it's with standards we have to be held to educator evaluation systems. So there's a whole set of metrics that are coming down from the state and the federal government that really are holding schools very accountable to very high standards. And NEASC mission hasn't quite kept up with that. So it's a time of readjusting evolving the organization because each school district that's a member is NEASC. It's a member organization and so the superintendents and actually I was part of one of the original groups asking NEASC to take a look a little bit better at what they want to have as their mission and how we can perhaps streamline the process in Arlington and this is true everywhere. In fact this was a common theme two years of time, all professional development time and the high school was used toward doing the paperwork collecting the evidence. We had crates and crates and crates of evidence that was given to the team. So in this day and age when we have a parallel accountability system we just need to be able to think about what would be the best youth of having peers come in and look at your school. So they're in the process of hearing testimony. They're going around to every state over the next week or two and they are going to put out, have a preliminary meeting in this in March and then follow up in May. So we're all very supportive of having the accreditation agency remain but remain stronger and more relevant to where we are today. So that's basically where we are at the moment. And then one last thing is the Odyssey Middle School play is this coming Thursday and Friday and guys and dolls and encourage people to buy tickets you can get them at the door or they're being sold at Odyssey during the lunch hour. Let me see if that's everything. That's it. Moving on to the consent agenda All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant 14109 data January 23rd 2014 the amount of $1,418,496.08 and warrant number 14109 dated February 13th 2014 amount of $853,053.70. Approval of draft minutes 1212.13 1219.13 which I'd like to call 119.14. Second. Which one's June? Pull in 1219. We had a vote. So for everything like that. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All those against? And I just have to abstain from 1219. So can we have a vote on that? All those in favor of 1219? Aye. Aye. Aye. All those against? Okay. Subcommittee liaison reports policies and procedures Mr. Thielman. So we have a first reading on policy KEB. This is a new policy that the committee, the subcommittee, the policies and procedures subcommittee has been working on with attorney Bryant from Stoneman Chandler and Miller. It basically replaces policies KE, KE, KE-E KEB and KEB-R. And so it all consolidates it into one policy on public complaints. The second, I mean the second first reading, is to remove policies H, HG and J, F, A, B, A which are inconsistent with current law or obsolete. Any questions? Yeah, I don't, I'm looking through the public complaints and I feel like there's a lot less process and I think what would be best dealt with is that it would be really good if people had some kind of a flow chart. If you have a complaint with a teacher, talk to the teacher. If you can't talk to the teacher, talk to the principal. If you can't talk to the principal, talk to the department head. If you can't talk to the department head. I mean, like saying that when a staff member receives a complaint, the school committee expects a staff member to do so courtlessly and make an appropriate reply. What is that? What do you do? I don't know. I feel like there needs to be more people need to understand the chain of command. Exactly. Public absolutely has a right to complain. They should absolutely complain or at least speak with the person directly but if they can't do that, they need to understand where that chain of command is. It certainly isn't to go directly to the superintendent of the school committee which is unfortunately what a lot of people do. So I would like it if it said more about if you have this kind of complaint, here's where you go. That would be more useful to people. We had a version that detailed. We concluded that it set us up for it exposes to more liability than we wanted to be close to. That's what we concluded. That was the conclusion. In other words, it was just too prescriptive. So the danger that Rebecca, Brian, attorney Brian said is that if you're too prescriptive, and that was an earlier version, it was very prescriptive, that if you're too prescriptive then you don't follow the procedure precisely then you expose yourself to liability. So that's what we did. I was also going to say it's my experience that when people do make complaints to me, they typically have not read the policy before bringing it forward. So however prescriptive or non-prescriptive we are in the policy, it's more important that it's the committee members what their proper response is than the actual other people may not. I mean what if it comes in somewhere else people need to know where it should go. So that we simplified it at the attorney's recommendation because we did have a complicated version that you just articulated. Very similar to what you said. I don't think it has to be. It doesn't have to be that specific. It should just say start at the level. But I want to make sure that the I'm on policy and I was representing pretty much the view that you've just described and I talked to Miss Bryant and this is actually a more complicated version than the original thing. It does have some different steps. It has some different people. The big concern was that if there is a do this then do that. If any of the steps are missed then that opens the door to someone coming in suing because of things. But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if you have a complaint with a teacher obviously go to the teacher. But I'm just trying to give people where they should go and what level. I'm not saying it has to go to that level. I'm just saying here's some entry level. I think people don't know where to go. Well it says so then I'm going to read the policy. I wasn't going to do that but I will. So when a staff member receives a complaint so a staff member presumes teacher, staff member, nurse the school committee expects a staff member to do so courteously and to make an appropriate reply. The school committee believes that complaints and concerns are best addressed and resolved as close to their origin as appropriate to the circumstances. Thus the committee encourages individuals to present and discuss any complaints they may have with the staff member against whom the complaint is directed whenever appropriate. If the individual is not comfortable addressing the matter with the staff member or if the matter remains unresolved after doing so, the individual may address the complaint to the building principal or his or her designee or to the superintendent of schools or his or her designee. Whenever a complaint is made directly to the school committee as a whole or to a school committee member as an individual it will be referred to the school administration for study and possible solution provided that the school committee may directly address complaints regarding the conduct and performance of the superintendent where appropriate. Should dissatisfaction remain after the above steps have been taken the complainant may contact the school committee chair who shall arrange for the school committee to address the matter if the chair deems appropriate. So the process is to go to the staff member, if you're not satisfied with what the teacher or the staff member says, then you go to the principal, if you're not satisfied there, then you go to the superintendent, if you're not satisfied there, then you go to the school committee. So that's the process and the policy and so that's as specific as the attorney recommended. Can I have a motion to move to 10 and 30? So moved. Second. All those members add? All those against? Good. I'm wondering in the interest of not making this more prescriptive but recognizing Ms. Stark's concerns about providing some more concrete examples in terms of how the process works, whether this is a case for an exhibit that would provide an example or whether that would be further. We took them all out for that reason. Yeah, we went through this with the attorney and it was really it made me think as to how we have to structure this in order to avoid problems because one of the reasons why we spend so much time in arbitration over previous case is that we had something in the policy manual that somebody challenged legally and the thing is is that it cost us a lot of money to go through that process. We can direct our staff without putting in the policy manual. The superintendent can set expectations which would be the reasonable normal expectations for a principal or a teacher as to what to do if somebody's complaining without it being in our policy manual and that the language that we came up with is a reasonable balance between what we had before and a general guideline which is saying try to solve it as low a level as possible and if it gets to us this is why. That's why we landed here and this is not something I would have approved looking at it before the subcommittee meeting but that extensive conversation with legal counsel as to how to craft this to protect the school district and to make sense of the outside world. This was sort of the balance between the two. I agree that I think the policy that's been presented meets the needs for guidance and direction and the person can always go to an administrator and ask for clarity on it but I would also suggest that one of the issues that was in the current policy that opened us up was the opening statement, complaints about school personnel being investigated fully and fairly. If we miss that or somebody misses it, that's the liability. That's the interpretation I got from our attorney when it was brought forward but I think what we have right now personally works. Just to put it in perspective, one of the original drafts, revision drafts was like a one line what was it, complaints will be referred to the administration or something like that. It was very brief so this is adding detail back to what she originally suggested was a possible okay with her policy that we didn't gave as much direction and direction to the parents or community members and also consistent CMR and school committee members so when we refer we can say here this is what the policy says you should go do. I just want to make sure that the CMR and all the statutory stuff is up today. Well on that level if it exists in CMR it doesn't necessarily have to be in the book. Some of the CMRs have changed. I think correct me if I'm wrong, the attorney is looking at all aspects of this. We're having another meeting with her but there's a cost every time you talk to her you realize that. So we have a meeting with her on Monday. Right? Monday at 7 o'clock. We're going to be taking a look at other policies and when that's done then she's going to give us some CMR language. So we've got to be conscious of the cost of talking to her because she charges every time you do. That's the way it is, right? You're in the business. Anything else? So the second reading, I'm sorry, the second issue is first reading of policy H, HG and JV, J F A B A. So these policies are absolutely consistent with current law. So it's just... That's correct. We are looking to amend file KFE which is also blue in your packet. KFE is a fee structure for rental of school building space and what we need to do is add all the changes are in bold. Everything else is staying the same. So we have in previous years when we created this fee structure we created groups one, two and three and what we're asking is that we also add in a group four which is specifically for long-term rentals explicitly for the after-school care of students, long-term being defined as 180 days or more. And because they are long-term it's basically giving them basically a break on the fees. So they pay one quarter of the usage fee, the energy fees and then also a damage deposit and all custodial fees. So the custodial fees and the energy fees are what everybody pays but giving them one quarter of the usage fee and I believe you can see on the back the other page here shows you what the part of the reason for doing this is that we have very disparate rates that the after-schools are paying and you can see the present rate right now for example at bright start is $25,725,000 but at Brack it is $38,600 and although there might have been some reason or some way as to how these were determined before, this new structure brings them one more in line with each other and is more in line with the size of the program, how much space they're using and on all of that and we felt it's just a lot fairer as far as usage and we've been doing a lot of work with the after-school programs to kind of make sure they are all aware of this they all understand that this is happening they are working on dealing with this increase obviously. The other change to the policy is that we would change the date originally it stated that the schedule of these fees would be set by May 15th but because after-school programs need to give people signing up for the next year usually they do it well before May they need those set much closer in the year so we and Miss Johnson agreed that moving it to March 15th was not hard and we could do that so we're also pulling that date up so that they understand that as long as they have enough notice that's so that is and lots of thanks to Neville who did all this work investigating she visited every after-school program she figured out how much space everybody was using and came up with this and it was actually pretty amazing she came up with the formula and then when she came up with the numbers she was amazed at how it actually works right it looks fair it's fair given the size of the space they're using brings them all a lot more in line with the actual usage that they have Any questions about this from the members? Is there supposed to be a period after this? Long-term rentals explicitly for the after-school care of students period? That's the group name Group 1 is Arlington Public School in town. Was there any consideration to maybe staggering the impact of what are really kind of huge increases over a period of two or three or four years to get up to because the difference at Breistar is going to be like 12,000 I mean a daily increase of $68 it just seems like a huge hit all at once was there any discussion about graduating it somehow? No there was no. Again to comment Paul commend Paul around this she did such great work I was surprised it was not questions of that or discussion on being treated unfairly all the people came in and they were appreciative for work too. I mean a woman who runs Breistar was fairly I think that she was probably most vocal about not being able to handle it but I figure I mean what we wanted to do was change the fee structure she wants to work that out with Diane that's not my concern as to how we roll it out but I feel like what I want to do is make sure that we have a place and that we reflect a fee structure specifically for these people so that they know what it is and so if and when a new one opens and there's a lot of other work going on as well creating contracts for all of these people and really helping them to know where their priority is in the use of the bill. A really nice part about this is if a program and it's not going to happen gets smaller the formula is built in for the fee if the program gets bigger on the square footage is what I'm saying it's based that way so this will not have to be redone over and over again I don't think anybody can give you a specific way a formula. We're not approving the rates that each school would pay we're just approving the formula that will be used so if in fact this is current usage if she comes back and says you know what I think the problem is that we don't really use as much space then the cost would go down So is this going to be part of the policy then? No that's just to show you that's not part of the policy that's just the memo that's just part of what we gave to the after school program people and we have a whole spreadsheet if you want that details what pieces are being used and how she came up with the whole math It's a pivot table? No Just an Excel spreadsheet so that's just a first reading we'll have a second reading next time Thank you very much Will you want to report? Real quick facilities we met there was an update on all the programs I would like to commend Miss Johnson in responding to the request especially by monotony preschool having not heard from them I assume everything is going well We're working on it. The request is being made. That's great I thought it was a good meeting. Thank you I just figured out we sort of brought up curriculum instruction a little higher in the meeting night with your motions than we had planned to do Do you have anything else to report though? No I just wanted to make a motion to add a regular school committee meeting a week from tonight March 6th at 6.30 to go over things such as the architects report, the draft statement of interest perhaps another public hearing for the budget now that it's been presented to us the public can maybe speak on it because at the front of the meeting tonight it really didn't make sense it would have been perfect if we had had the last meeting and possibly an appointment of director of special ed That could be a big item of discussion Do I have a second? Because I already have another commitment that I cannot get out of from 6 to 7.30. So my suggestion would be is there a way that we can break up the meeting and have two short meetings one on the 6th and one on the 13th Can we possibly do like a 7.30 to 9 and a 6.30 to 8 or something? I don't know One of the reasons why I'm bringing 3.6 to the 4 is because the architect can only do 3.6 That's the only date that she could come Well, it's not the only date she could come but the board of selectmen are hearing it on the 10th Can we do 3.6 at 7.30 at night? If we have an appointment though we could wait until the 13th I suppose The appointment part of the meeting If you missed that piece of it You think you could come if we're late? Yes I am committed until 7.30 Make a new motion to start at 7.30 on the 6th All those in favor say aye It's a regular 7.30 to 7.30 to 7.30 Okay, so we'll see how that goes and if we need to 3.13 still we'll keep it on if we don't 7.30 p.m. on the 6th If you're thinking of not having the 13th then what you might want to do is start a little bit earlier than 7.30 so you have a public hearing but I'm the budget chair You can't have the budget hearing without me please We don't really get a lot of people for these hearings They'll come and don't worry about it I take my nap, I don't care Secretary's report You've got a lot of stuff lined up on the chair Yes, there's a lot because we didn't have a meeting last time Starts off with an e-mail from parent Katie Coughlin about the process and issues surrounding tools of the mine curriculum in the kindergarten e-mail responses from Dr. Bodhi and e-mail Thank you from Ms. Coughlin where my glasses there they are MASC legislative bulletin data January 24th, 2014 E-mail from Emily Logan in support of the tools of the mine curriculum Press release forwarded by Dr. Bodhi about improvements in the high school graduation rate in Massachusetts for the 7th consecutive year E-mail from Dr. Bodhi that Sherry Dunovan has announced her retirement at the end of this school year E-mails about the rescheduled park seminar E-mail with appendix E of the part 4 of the Massachusetts model system for educator evaluator the model contract language forwarded by Dr. Bodhi from Mitchell Chester E-mail from principal Janger announcing the AHS students who earned all state honors for musical achievements going paperless survey from Adam Karowski copy of the final salary survey undertaken by the town and presented to the selectmen on February 3rd, 2014 invitation to an evening of choral voices K to 12, Tuesday February 4th, 7pm in the AHS auditorium letter from Juliette Lausanne in support of the tools of the mine curriculum invitation to the tools of the mine informational night for parents on Wednesday 212 at Thompson E-mail from Bishop K parents Fakit and Scott Lever with concerns and questions over the tools of the mine curriculum press release from Dr. Bodhi with the finalist for the Dallin principal some funny and when parents can meet him E-mail from Hardy kindergarten parent Anne Chabra in support of tools of the mind E-mail informing us about candidate for director of special education meeting on Monday February 10th at 4pm superintendents January newsletter handouts from the MASC park presentations E-mail about the passing of Ed Burns E-mail about students requesting AP government class for next year E-mail from Thompson parents Nilly Perlmutter and Todd Bierson who support the tools of the mine curriculum E-mail information from Tom Regeri about things going on at Audison E-mail forwarded from Dr. Bodhi announcing department of elementary and secondary education release list of schools to participate in 2014 park field test several E-mail with legal expenses from Anne Lerner and Miller E-mail from Dr. Bodhi with information about a student assault that happened on Tuesday February 11th E-mail on early closings of the EPS due to the storm on Thursday E-mail from Chuck Miller in support of the tools of the mine curriculum E-information on school loss symposium on Friday May 2nd IBB documents from Jeff Thielman E-mail announcing the choice of Thad Dingman as the next principal at Dallin E-mail from Hardy kindergarten parent Emily Logan with her support for tools of the mind and an accompanying spreadsheet of dozens of parents and their feedback on tools of the mind E-mail from Lisa Newmark a Thompson parent in support of the tools of the mind E-mail from Marbert de Loretto about the boys basketball boys ice hockey and wrestling teams on their exciting seasons and lastly a letter from Callie Martin on the editorial staff of the Arlington yearbook requesting that the school committee place an ad in this year's yearbook When's the deadline on that? It doesn't say It probably does The note didn't say it just said please take out an ad That's what I got Yep So if we're going to be going next week potentially to a vote on this budget I don't think I am fair We're not going to vote on the budget That's not on the calendar We are going to go to the 13th You have to confess I have a huge problem with the 13th just because I didn't know about when I went anyway so How can you have a big problem with it? It's been on the calendar I have a big problem with the 6th because we can still vote the budget on the 27th No, we got Fincom on the 17th Not going to the budget on the 6th to the 13th What does the budget calendar say? The 13th That's when we're doing it Even if we have a really short small meeting Which we've had before Maybe that would be the night to do the hearing Do it all at the same time I was thinking about this after this discussion tonight I don't know where the consensus of the committee is in terms of the reserve positions Or you want me to leave it as five reserve Change it to some administrative support It was never like a discussion about it Who said we'd like the possibility to look at Are you comfortable with your still Are you still firm in your position that you want the five reserve It might be just a moot point We may be having to do it anyway So maybe just leave it Five reserve positions without any title I would like to hear what proposals are For how you would alleviate The burden and which schools would be involved How would you target what would happen, what would be the cost And then there are other places we can cut It's not just reserve I wanted to say That I would be more likely to leave the reserve Rather than do that because even if we do get other people to take On that evaluative piece the principals Are part of that evaluation team in cycle and do their input And do a final say over the hiring environment and their buildings And if they're saying that their priority at this time Is this I think it would Remind their leadership within their Building for us to be second guessing how they're making their staffing decisions This is not related to the current Discussion I would ask the superintendent that if it's her decision to bring forward A candidate that she give us all the members background On that candidate in a timely manner So we Spend director I did I said that Excuse me Did any member want to make a motion To direct the superintendent to cut something So what we do is we look at the possibilities and then we look at The budget and we can vote to do that if we want and if we don't we don't And we can amend the budget later Any other topics or issues To discuss before we adjourn Now we won't need to go into Second No I have nothing Motion to adjourn Thank you We are adjourned Good evening everyone Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you