 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Allicton School Committee on Thursday, February 10th, 2022. I am Bill Hain of the Chair. I may be to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Ms. Eckston. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. The affirmative. Dr. Rampy. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Holman. Yes. Dr. McNeil. I don't see him at the moment. Mr. Spiegel. Yes. Mr. Mason. Yes. Dr. McNeil. Yes. Ms. Elmar. Yes. Ms. Kees. Yes. And the student rep, Ms. Schellaro. I'm not here at the moment. Tonight's meeting of the Allicton School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with an act signed into law on June 16th, 2021, that extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency. The act includes an extension until April 1st, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Bakers March 12th, 2020 executive order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The Governor's order, which is referenced with agenda materials on the town's website for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely, so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom and is being recorded. It is also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Two, persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record of the meeting. Three, all participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those persons are not required to identify themselves. Four, both Zoom participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials also found on the town's website using the Novus agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. We have several people signed up to speak for public participation so I'm gonna read the ground rules for that. For members of the public who wish to address the committee, there will be 30 minutes of public comment depending on the number of people signed up. Time allotments may be reduced but will not exceed three minutes each. The number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 30 minutes. The number of speakers will be capped and will be invited to speak based on the timestamp of their email to Ms. Diggins. The school committee respectfully request participants of the public utilize their camera if possible before speaking and to adhere to the public comment policy, BEDH that requires participants to give us their name and address. Speakers may offer such objective criticisms of the school operations and programs that concern them. But in public session, the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel nor against any member of the school community except for the school committee or the superintendent in the capacity as the operational leader of the Arlington Public Schools. Now we'll committee hear anything that might identify or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you'd like to sign up to speak, please email Ediggins at arlington.k12.ma.us by 12 noon on the date of the meeting. The first person for public speaking is Danuda Forbes. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm a town meeting member for a couple more months and I have two kids at Arlington High and I just wanted to comment on the process of this heterogeneous working group because on Friday night I got an email about a webinar on Monday that I couldn't make. So I requested that Principal Janger send out a recording and I still haven't heard about any available recording. So I just wanted to say this whole process has been a little bit confusing how the committee was selected, who's on the committee. And I think this is a really big change and I'd love to get a little bit more involved and hear more about it. But it seems like the webinar from friends who did attend said that there were a lot of questions that they asked that were not answered. And so I'm here tonight to ask for a more open and transparent process. I also wanna question why we're not addressing that this at the elementary and middle school level because I know several families of color who have decided to not send their kids to Arlington High for a variety of reasons, but mainly because their needs have not been met at the elementary or middle school level. And so I really welcome a more dialogue about this. I get the sense that this decision's been made and I'd like to know a little bit more about how what the professional development is gonna be, have the teachers had been asked, has there been anonymous survey? How do they feel? Will they have co-teachers? Do we have that in the budget? There are just a lot of questions that have not been answered and I look forward to hearing more about that process. Thanks. Thank you very much. The next person to speak is Julie Hall. Ms. Hall, could you turn on your camera please? Thank you. Okay, sorry about that. That's okay. Hello, my name is Julie Hall. I reside in Arlington. I have four boys and four schools, Brackett, Audison, Arlington Catholic and Providence College. It's been almost a year, I think since I spoke last spring when I probably was literally begging for five day in person and it feels like eternity since we were there and I'm so grateful that we went back to school five days and that we started off this year back in school. I'm grateful for our teachers and all that they're doing and the work that they're doing right now in a mask for six to eight hours a day. And I think the biggest thing I also wanna say is I think that we're really back in school too not just because of the teachers but also because of our nurses and I'm very aware of I have a good friend who was one and thank you to all of you, all the nurses for what they're doing every day with the testing. And that segues into like why I wanted to speak tonight which is about a mask optional policy. I believe our children would greatly benefit from this and I know many doctors believe that a properly fitted N95 mask is most effective against the Omkran variant. I'm not here to advocate that we don't wear masks in school but quite the opposite, I really hope that hope those who are most comfortable in a mask and children would still continue to wear this of mask of their choice. I think all children deserve to feel safe at school and then no person should discuss the merit or quality of another person's mask or lack thereof. This is a choice and I would like to have the same choice to allow my child and children to unmask and breathe fresh air in school. Various new sources are promoting one way masking. Top Massachusetts doctors and scientists are speaking out and there's a national movement named The Called and Normal signed by more than a thousand physicians and nurses which is created to really restore normalcy for US children. There is a new fear growing of what the long-term effects of masking will be. Some children are obedient and compliant while others are getting sick from wearing the mask. I hear stories of kids having headaches and this general malaise. Parents are finding it difficult to find pediatricians who will really write a medical waiver for their suffering child. And just recently a friend told me that her seven-year-old it doesn't really know what their friends look like. The story kind of broke my heart because that's kind of what I worried about the youngest learners and that's always been my concern of what really they're losing behind the mask. So I'm now speaking to all parents who happen to be listening tonight that are looking for some hope and a light. And I'm here to be a voice for our children again but also to encourage you to be your child's voice. I know that E. M. L. and Dr. Holman and she's very responsive. Our school committee members and let them know your own personal stories. The parents whose children are suffering, some do come to me, they feel alone, they feel helpless and they're the minority voices who are not really being heard and they're tired. Schools across the country are overwhelmed with emotional and social issues. The anxiety and fear is real. For two years we've been masked our children we have masked ourselves and our children. We all masked, we were scared, we were desperate to protect our families and their health but the time has given us meaningful data and facts and it's time to move onward and forward. One way masking is gaining headlines and it's our way to restore normalcy in our schools. So the facts, 84% of Arlington is fully vaccinated. 84 to 94% of other vaccination rates in each of our Arlington public schools. Some we're in that range. The 14 day average COVID positivity rate has come down to 3.68 below the state average of 3.80. So cases that are on the steady decline, which is wonderful. And our schools are pool testing and at home test kits are now readily available which we're grateful for. So all these facts I believe support a mask optional school policy. And I also hope that Dr. Holman can work with the Board of Health and drop the metrics that have been put in place pre-Omicron and the APS COVID recovery plan. The metrics do not reflect updated data and science and they also include the entire Middlesex County. If we do not make changes to our current Board of Health policies and the APS COVID recovery plan, my greatest fear is that my child will be in a mask in the fall of 2022. I implore you all to trust the facts and unmask our children with a mask optional policy as soon as possible. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Barry Tysco. Hi, thank you. Good evening members of the school committee. My name is Barry Tysco and I have two children attending Stratton. I'm also a member of the Safer Air Safer Schools Paragroup that formed about a month ago focused on keeping all Arlington kids safe. However, tonight I speak for myself in regards to the state's masking mandate changes. I want to start with a thank you. I'm assuming you all didn't take this position to function as pediatricians, epidemiologists, virologists, aerosol scientists. And yet that's the position that you've been put in as have your colleagues in the Arlington Public Schools Leadership Team. You've put the safety of our community and our kids first from the beginning. And for that, I'm incredibly grateful. And just a shout out to Nurse Janet Stratton. She is absolutely phenomenal as I know all of our school nurses are. So yes, you need to find an on-ramp, off-ramp, excuse me, for mandatory masking. The state abandoned you there again. And I'm not in a position to tell you what benchmark should inform that decision. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist. But we have seen over the last six months in particular the only thing that we can count on is that we literally cannot count on anything. When it comes to figuring out when to drop mandatory masking, for example, a member of the Cambridge Public Schools parent advisory committee, a CPS parent who happens to be an infectious disease epidemiologist and Professor of Public Health said this week, between setting metrics and reaching them, we've learned that they were not appropriate. We are living through an incredibly fluid and unpredictable situation. Unfortunately, there is a movement being led by a small group of doctors which has been mentioned that would make you think that our collective next steps are clear-clad. You'll be hearing more and more about the urgency of normal if you haven't already. They are giving what appear to be easy answers to what are incredibly complex problems. I don't have time to refute the authors and their assertions, but please, please, if and when these documents cross your desk, please approach their recommendations and the data that they use to support them with great skepticism. Instead, I would ask you to strongly consider the following. We are coming down from an infection rate that was unthinkable before December. However, our case rates are about where they were in late January, 2021. We cannot let the explosion of COVID in our communities of late skew our understanding of where we are today. People say follow the science. As of this week, 99.5% of U.S. counties are classified as higher substantial transmission under which CDC recommends indoor masking in public. Our county included. We do live in Arlington and we're doing better than the average, but we still live and work and interface with all of the other towns probably in the Middlesex County. Right now, only 18,000 Americans live in an area with lower moderate transmission that would per the CDC, say it's time to lift indoor mask mandates. So I ask as you puzzle through this next phase that if you follow another recommendations that you follow the CDCs. In addition, we're perhaps days away from emergency approval of a vaccine for children ages zero to four. Please give our Arlington families time to protect the youngest children in our community who are more vulnerable to bad outcomes. Finally, as you hear the growing drumbeat in the media, not necessarily with experts, but in the media that Omicron is mild. I implore you to approach that message with great caution. When it comes to the impacts of infection, particularly long-term effects, we don't know what we don't know. For many, for most, this appears to be a relatively benign infection, but there's growing evidence of some alarming long-term impacts, including cardiovascular damage, brain damage, auto immunity, et cetera. I don't wanna be fear mongering, but I think that the narrative that Omicron is mild is in many ways unproven. And what is even more murky are the proposed mental health impacts of mass wearing on little kids. Do not let people with no background in pediatric mental health convince you otherwise. I would posit that what is most damaging to a young person's mental health is apparent incapacitated by long COVID, a pregnant mom in the hospital, despite a vaccine and a booster, a baby sibling in the hospital. Again, I don't know exactly what the APS or when should start down the masking off-ramp, though I agree, we need one. And I don't envy your job, but I do know that per the CDC, our community is not ready yet. And as you make decisions, I would ask you to be very wary of formal anti-masking campaigns and the parents locally who echo those arguments. Finally, I encourage you to learn more about safer air, safer schools, and our efforts over the last month to distribute nearly 7,500 masks, as well as face shields and HEPA filters to Arlington schools and families directly through Arlington needs and individual parent-to-parent distribution. We would welcome the opportunity to be a resource. Thank you again. Thank you very much. That ends our public participation at this time. I do not see the high school representative. Is she here? I guess not. So we're gonna move on to the next item on the agenda. Overview of mental health data impacts and needs. Ms. Bird. Well, Sarah gets herself set up and is able to share. I'm sorry. Yeah, I just wanna say, we're bringing this presentation to you at the request of a couple of committee members who have asked some questions about mental health impacts. We had intended to bring this presentation to CIA subcommittee in December. That got bumped back into January and then January was full of other considerations as well. So we're pleased to bring this presentation to you tonight and Ms. Bird is going to present some of the data that we have on the mental health of our students and some of the actions that we're planning on taking in response to that. So it's all yours. Can you share your screen? I was just gonna ask you want me to share it or just somebody else have it and want to do so. If you'd like me to share just give me permission to do so and I'll pull it up. Give me one moment. You should have permission. It's up to you. What's the easiest for you? You're muted. I'll do it. Just give me one moment. I wanna make sure I have the most up-to-date one with your Arlington colors. How does that sound? You're giving me up too many windows because that's the way life works right now. I would say Liz too, if you have it faster than I do, you're more than welcome to pull it open because here we go. Okay. Excellent. All right, there may be... I've got it right here. Do you want me to pull it up and drive? I want you to do that because the ones that I have are slightly different from the ones you put in Novus. So I don't want people to be doing double takes. That would be great. Thank you. Yep, I got it. Thanks, team. All right. Hi, everybody. All right, we'll dive right in. I'm Sarah. Nice to be with you all again this evening. At any point, I'm going to move pretty swiftly through the data and the information here, but obviously please make note of any questions that you might have. I'll strive to answer. If there's any quick clarifying questions in the moment, please do let me know what they are. And then I'll answer any larger questions later on. Go ahead, Liz. Thank you. Okay. So we're going to talk about two brief things. One of them is the universal mental health screener that we're doing in the district. And then towards the end, I'm going to describe the social-emotional learning indicator score. There are two different assessments that we're using in the district. And they're looking at two very different elements of student learning and student needs. So the first one we're going to speak about is the mental health screening. And just very clearly here, it's a tool that we use with our entire population, all of our students, to identify which students may be at risk for needing additional supports. And that's exactly what it is. It's a screening. It's not a diagnostic tool. It's not something that's going to diagnose and tell us who has what or needs what. But it is going to let us know what we may need to look further into. Thanks, Liz. You can go to the next one. So what we do, it's very proactive, which is great. Instead of waiting for students to have drastic dire needs at a highest level, sitting waiting for students to be hospitalized or becoming very, very anxious or school avoidant, it's a proactive way of identifying students and referring them for services at the right level of need. So instead of overloading our highly intensified individual services that students might need at a tier three level, we can perhaps identify students at a tier two level where they're starting to need additional support or double doses of tier one universal education and information. And we can give them those double doses and the information they need within the general ed setting, which is what's so lovely about this. And it can also not only reduce the crises but also help to inform what kind of proactive universal curriculum we might need to have in place and so on. Great. So this was last year's data. Just as a point of reference, and thank you for bearing with me, any of the data slides that don't have a date on them are from last school year. So this is from the last school year. We screened grades five through 12 using some grant funding from the state. And this gave us pretty much an overall snapshot of the percentage of students who were elevated across the entire district. And when I say elevated, I mean at a moderate or a severe level. So we were looking at both the students who would require a tier two level of support and a level that was at tier three. We put both of those categories together and took that percentage. So you'll notice anywhere from about, I think it was 19% at the sixth grade all the way up to 38.3% at the 11th grade was our range last year. All of the students in the fifth through 12th grade took the same exact screener. And it looked as if it was affecting a pretty strong proportion of our students. Normally when you have a, I would say a healthy distribution of mental health needs, ideally you would have a distribution that looks more like three to 5% of your students requiring tier three needs. And anywhere from 15 to 20, I would say 10 to 15% of your students requiring something that was tier two. So to automatically have students ranking anywhere from 20% and higher, we knew it was higher. But our numbers fell well within national and local regional trends. Still alarming, but we were able to for every single one of these students that was flagged, get a phone call from a mental health provider within the district, be offered a referral to an outpatient therapist through a partnership we have with Interface and AYCC as well as being offered a small group therapeutic support within the district all through the general education setting. So every single one of these students who was elevated and indicated so was offered that right step level intervention whether it was a tier two and just that were a tier two and a tier three referral. You can go to the next one, Liz, thank you. In this school year, we shifted away from that one screener we used last year. We used the COVID-19 stress and trauma screener last year. It was out of UCLA and we wanted to intentionally use it. So we didn't end up picking up a number of false positives from our students. We recognized that everybody was dealing with a lot of unique stressors due to the COVID situation and this screener out of UCLA was going to help insulate for any anxiety or depression symptoms that were popping up because of the intensity of the situation. And it was helping us to sift through that and find students that were really struggling to function and we're really struggling to have appropriate feelings and responses as young people or teenagers. So that's why we chose that screener last year. Again, along with many communities around us. This year, however, through the conversations with all of our social workers and counselors, we made a move to come away from the COVID-specific screener and to go towards the GAD7, the Penn State worry questionnaire and the BSAT. And those are looking at much more of our typical presentations we have with students and that's looking at anxiety, depression and substance use. So the Penn State worry questionnaire is what we use with the elementary age students. The GAD7 is what we use in the sixth grade building with Gibbs and then once you hit the seventh grade through the 12th grade, we use both the GAD and the BSAT. I can go to the next one. Now, this is where we have the opportunity to take a look at our screening data so far this year. I wanna share that right now we have just started screening the fourth grade. So this is incomplete fourth grade data. It's only from about two of our seven buildings. So that number will change. We have also not been able to screen at our high school yet that is scheduled for shortly in the spring. So the darker color is this school year and the lighter color is last school year. And you will see that the overall percentage of students the same exact metric that I shared with you earlier. This is the percentage of students that were flagged as either moderately elevated on the screener or highly elevated. I want you also to keep in mind though that we are comparing percentages of elevated scores on different screeners. So that's worth also keeping in mind. These are all evidence based screeners and the cut scores are also comparable but it is worth noting the difference in the high numbers of scores at our fourth and fifth grade and the lower numbers of score once you get to the upper levels. You can go to the next one. Okay, this is just to come back to why. So why are we even using this psychosocial data? What is it going to do for us? Because we do have a lot of data in Arlington. I want to come back to the fact that every single student who's in that percentage and those bar graphs of elevated scores those families get phone calls individualized. They get offered referrals to outpatient therapy if they want to take it as well as other things like being referred to the Arlington COVID relief fund in case some of the stressors that are coming up in the family are not necessarily connected to anxiety and depression but perhaps financial needs and so on. But that data can also help us to assess overall as a district how is our SEL curriculum being implemented and how do we need to revisit the delivery of that or our fidelity of that implementation? It informs our prevention work to say, wow, specifically within the anxiety area of our screener our students are still quite worried. So how can we go back and target some of those lessons and support our students who are experiencing those needs? It also helps us to inform our tier two our small group interventions. So what we're offering for small groups this year is different from what we offered last year to align it with the newer screeners. It helps us to identify where we need to be allocating funding and resources. So this year, we've actually just hired a mental health assessment coordinator and outreach worker which is a position that you all helped to approve earlier this year. We finally found a really great candidate for that who's quite experienced in this and this data helped us to understand the needs specifically we were looking for. But it also helps us to understand and dig in deeper why are certain families not opting into the small groups or not responding to the referrals to outpatient therapy and how does race, ethnicity, ability, socioeconomic status, language, how are those barriers things that we can further build into our screening process to make sure that we're offering the same access to all of our students regardless what building they're in what barriers may exist in our system and make sure that we're overcoming them. You can go to the next one. And this is something I just wanna share about our group participation last year. So you'll notice that the yellow is the total response from all of the students who participated. And then every single student was offered as I mentioned that who was elevated that small group intervention rate and you'll notice the younger they are the more eager they are to participate in an intervention or the more agency their families have over engaging them in that intervention. The older they get, the less eager they were but we have to also remember that a lot of these groups were virtual last year. And so that's gonna be a new dynamic that we have this year because they're going to be face to face. A lot of them are already face to face. So that's something that we're using to inform our small group interventions as well specifically starting at the seventh grade. How can we ensure that we're getting more of the students who are saying thanks, but no thanks. I don't wanna participate in the small group. How can we diversify some of the tier two offerings? So we have more than one, we're not a one trick pony. We have more than one thing that we can offer in terms of a tier two support within the general ed setting. It's already a huge leap to have a general ed mental health support at the tier two and tier three levels robustly and systemically across all of our buildings. But we also know from the data it's not meeting all of our students. So how do we learn from this data and ensure that we have other pieces to offer? I will additionally say, I don't have, oh, you can go ahead, Liz. I don't have the progress monitoring data on a slide here, but we have progress monitoring data from all the students who did participate in the groups. And what we saw is over the course of the six sessions, whether you were in fifth grade or 12th grade, the student data reported that they felt better increasingly from the first session to the sixth session. So we do know that the intervention worked, that students actually felt better as they went through the six sessions, even though they were all virtual. So that was really promising too, that even when the first year of implementing this at a full scale, it had an impact on the students who participated. So now we wanna know how do we get to the rest of the students? And then the other reason why it's so important for us to be using the screening to support those small groups is, yes, we wanna follow up with individuals, but we also wanna take a look at are there major themes here? And instead of dealing with them individually and targeted, we also sometimes wanna use those themes to push back down to tier one and inform that. It can be very tempting to say, holy cow, 60% of the fourth grade screened in at a heightened level, we now need to hire 20 more social workers across the district. And that's not what the data is telling us. What the data is telling us is that we, if you think of this as a math teacher or any other content area, if 60% of the students don't know how to work fractions, you go back to the lessons and you say, wow, I have to reteach fractions. So what this is also telling us by looking at this data is, what are the instructional practices and social emotional learning and in mental health, advocacy, health and wellness, how do we go back to our health and wellness, to our PE, to our SEL curriculum and ensure that the screening data at the tier two level is informing our tier one instructional practices too. You can go on to the next one, Liz. And what we do know is that COVID is drastically impacting this data. So this is a project that is large scale, but it's also large scale at a moment in time where these mental health needs are larger than life. So we're seeing massive needs that are at this point probably even larger than two to three times greater than pre-pandemic levels. We also know that they're under reported because what we're screening for is really just little slices of the pie. And so the question is, we still have to screen for it. Even if we don't screen for it, it doesn't mean it's going away. We're still gonna see it presenting in our classrooms. It's just gonna manifest in different ways. So how are we going to address these needs? Next slide. So the small print simply says we're gonna continue with this screening process. We're gonna continue to use the data to inform what our tiered supports are and continue to write grants. We currently have, I think five different grants from the state for a variety of places along that continuum that are supporting the work, which is phenomenal. We're gonna continue to expand the cognitive behavioral therapy groups that are emerging. We have executive functioning groups at the Odyssey. We have the Trails to Wellness program offering to students at the fourth grade level all the way through the high school, which is developmentally appropriate there. And we've also added a district-wide social work position to lift the load because of the sheer volume of students that are coming through and being flagged on the screener. And so that's been very helpful as well as the hiring for the mental health assessment coordinator position. So those two positions have been added this year, newly, and they will be rolling over into next year and onward. So although they're not necessarily going to pop up in the budget for next year, they are going to be felt as newer positions because they are beginning right now in the budget because they're being added in real time. And thank you for that. And I think there was one more piece there, but that's okay. Oh, and the curriculum, yeah, so thank you. So we're continuing to implement the ACL curriculum pieces. Part of the grant that we got from the Department of Ed recently has given us an influx of cash to purchase more materials and have hire some additional ACL support staff to push into the classrooms and really model with teachers the additional work in terms of getting second step in responsive classroom and ruler up and running as soon as we can and to support teachers with their own ACL skills and needs this year because it is quite a behemoth of a time as we know. So thank you. All right. So we talked about this already, all the different stages in the life cycle. You can ignore those years on the side. I just didn't delete those. This was a template I had borrowed. So we can continue on to the next one. I already talked about prevention. Trails to Wellness is the program that we're using at the tier two level. It is quite powerful. Folks are really excited about it and we are looking forward to seeing what the data looks like for students. The nice thing about this in terms of use for our staff and our families is that it does have a family component that goes home. The materials are all put together already for our staff. Nobody's creating anything. It is research based. So we know we're working with something that has some legs underneath it. It's in the process of developing its evidence base. And we also have some very preliminary progress monitoring data that's come out of it as well. So it's moving in the right direction but hopefully we get some positive data coming out of this and it's matched quite nicely to the screen air that we have in place this year. So I'm gonna switch from mental health to social-emotional learning and I only have two or three slides on this one but I do wanna make a very stark, draw a stark line in the sand here because these two assessments are very, very different in nature. The mental health assessment is catching student needs and delivering the supports that they need in real time based on what an individual's score is telling us. The social-emotional learning indicator score is drastically different because it's a learning assessment. It's just like if it was a reading comprehension or a social studies unit test. It's a learning assessment data point to inform instruction. It's something that classroom teachers can take a look at and say, oh, okay, this is how well my class is doing with their relationship building skills or how well Tanisha and Johnny are doing with their social awareness and how well they're doing with their decision-making. So this is something that we can be using in instructional practices and teachers can be using to guide their curriculum instruction. Getting over to the next slide. And what I wanna share with you all just briefly is that we are aligned with the CASEL-5, which are those competencies you saw on the last page, as well as aligned with our state standards. We do have standards in SEL for a couple of grade levels. We also have been participating in a state pilot to begin assessing our students using this cellist tool to figure out how our students are learning, their social-emotional learning skills. And one of the pieces I wanna share with you is just this one piece is the learning profile. So how could we potentially wrap our heads around how students are learning in regards to their SEL skills? And one of the ways we can do that is by looking at learners profiles. The students, this is a self-scored assessment. They respond to a number of different items and it lets us know as educators how well they view themselves as competent in these different areas. And so if you look on the next slide, what you'll see is that there we get about a scale of I think 300 to 800 or so. And so I'm comparing students who score in the 500 on self-awareness to a student who scores in the 700 on self-awareness, right? And if you were to distribute them across the data points, the students who score in the 500 are performing in about the 24th percentile versus students who score in the 700 scores are performing in the 96th percentile, okay? Just to kind of give you an idea of how this lays out. But sometimes those numbers aren't enough. Part of what we are doing in this pilot program is understanding not just what the numbers mean, but how that actually translates to how a student is learning. And that's where these profiles come in just to bring your attention to the words in bold, right? The difference between a student at the 24th percentile in self-awareness versus a student in the 96th percentile in self-awareness is that students in the 24th percentile are aware of their strengths, but they have a hard time taking risks in class, for example, speaking up, if they're not sure they know the answer. Whereas a student in the 96th percentile is fully aware of their strengths and it is very easy for them to take risks and offer answers even when they know they might not be right. The classroom is a safe place for them to speak up with great confidence. And they are fully aware of their interests, whereas students at the 500 level have some confidence and they're a bit aware, but they're not fully free and confident to speak their mind in our classrooms and our learning spaces. The reason I share these two side-by-side is because Arlington as a whole community, if you were to just look at an overall aggregate, our students are scoring in the 500s for all five SEL competencies on our pilot scores. So if we were to look broad strokes at where do we have room to improve on our SEL learning, we have lots of room to improve because we wanna move the student perceptions and confidence in their own SEL competencies up out of the 24th percentile and get our students up to, let's try for 600. Let's get them moving up to a space where they feel much more confident in their SEL skills so that we can keep approaching some higher levels where they're feeling safe and self-aware to really engage in their learning. And that's how far I'll go into SELIS for now. That was the end of my slides, are we? Yeah, that's it. Questions? That's it, hopefully you get a sense of how these two data points are very different and part of an ecology. And at that point, I'm just gonna see what folks are curious about. Bill, you are muted. Any members of the committee? Dr. Ampe. Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing this. I'm still understanding all of it, but one question I have is, how do we, so you're, if I understood correctly, you're saying part of the reason the kids have so much anxiety and you are scoring high on the screening tests is because they have a lack of SEL skills or that if we enhance their SEL skills that that will help. Is that correct? I mean, it's one of the possibilities. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different factors. What we do know is that students who have stronger grasp on self-management skills, relationship skills, self-awareness skills are able to manage stressful situations and conflicts and chronic stress such as pandemics and adolescence and so on. They're able to manage those a lot more deftly when they have those skills, when they have people they can turn to, when they can ask for help and assistance, when students don't have those skills or young people, when any people don't have those skills, the stressful situations, the difficult encounters and scenarios tend to be having a bit more of an impact on them and what we do know is that these skills build them up as protective factors and we want to increase the protective factors. We really don't have much of an input or say on risk factors, but we can always lift up the protective factors that we're offering students. Okay, I think that the thing that I'm struggling with is you gave an analogy of if a teacher sees that all the kids don't understand how to do a certain type of mouth problem that we need to bolster their skills in that and what I don't understand is whether it's, it's like what you just described or if it's like a broken leg and that's gonna need specific medical treatment to get better, you know, some skills will, you know, skills or training or whatever could help, but I'm just, I'm trying to understand where... I'll help you out a little bit with this one. It's a, I'll help you out with this. It's a yes and I had braces when I was in middle school and when my dentist saw that I had an overbite and I was gonna need braces, I got an orthodontist too. That didn't mean that I lost my dentist. I had an orthodontist and a dentist. I still went for my regular cleanings, but I also had an acute need where I would need to go for my, you know, regular checkups with my orthodontist until they fixed and corrected the piece that was out of order in my mouth, right? I still went for my regular cleanings and I still brushed my teeth every day, right? Just because you go for a cleaning every once in a while, what is it? Twice a year, right? And just because you see your orthodontist to fix the issue you have, like my orthodontist was my tier three need, like my mental health need. My dentist was my tier two, like it's the extra cleaning that you get to get rid of the plaque and, you know, to remind you you should floss because you're a slacker and you don't floss and then my brushing of my teeth was the thing I should be doing every single day, my tier one thing. We need all of them layered when it's appropriate, right? So I don't have braces now. I don't have an orthodontist now. So to your point of your broken leg, the idea is that the tier three needs are temporary. If we're successful and for some cases we're able to then remove them when they're not necessary anymore. And now I'm just back to brushing all the time having a dentist. But if I have another acute thing that emerges I will get referred to that and get that support and then be able to phase back. The mental health screener connects us to our orthodontists. The mental health screener connects us to what we need but it doesn't ever mean that we stop brushing our teeth. So the SEL lessons and the SEL curriculum is our oral hygiene. We never stop learning how to engage in our community, how to get a sense of who we are and how we relate to the ever-changing social network of what's going on in the space around us, in our families and especially for our young people, the changing chemicals in their body and what's going on with them, right? So I think that we have to understand that it's a yes and that's why I share both of these together. And I thank you for asking that question because when we share both of them together we sometimes have the tendency to say it's one or the other and what we really need to communicate, it's both and. We need both of them, mm-hmm. Okay, does that help? Yeah, yeah, no, that helps. I think somehow in the way it was put, yeah, I kind of lost track of the addition, you know, the tier three stuff. Sure. It felt like it was saying that the tier one and two was enough and I was iffy about that. So it's possible. No, that's possible. Thank you for pulling that out. Mr. Schluckman. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Sarah, as well. I note that we did get a $350,000 grant titled Supporting Student Social Emotional Learning, Behavior and Mental Health and Wellness through Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, which is a typically long, desi title. I'm also told that we must spend it within this fiscal year. Can you just give us some details of exactly how we're gonna spend this money? Yes, no problem. And that typically long desi title is basically what Kersi was just asking about. That's the multi-tiered system of supports in mental health and behavioral health. That's it. Just to unpack it, that's the multi-tier one, two and three. How we're spending it is in a number of different ways and we are well on our way. We have three different responsive classroom trainings that are coming up at the end of the school year. We have a middle school training. We have a core elementary training and we have an advanced elementary training. Given the past few years with the pandemic, we haven't been able to gather people together to train them and onboard them and given the amount of turnover, we have enough people to fill those three trainings, potentially even more and those are quite costly. So that is a major element of it. The second piece is that given the mental health screener, as we mentioned, it is quite a large project and given the percentages of students that have screened in at elevated levels, as you just saw, we're making individual phone calls to over half of the fourth and the fifth grade students in the entire district. That is way more than is reasonable to ask building-based social workers to do right now. So we're also hiring social workers for the next four months or so to come on and help us with lifting that load. They will be making the phone calls out to families in tandem with the building-based folks. They will be assisting us in running those tier two trails to wellness groups, as well as helping us with making referrals to outpatient therapists. Another piece I will mention is that Interface, our partner for making referrals, has temporarily shut its doors because of the sheer volume that they have received for referrals. So every time we make a referral to a family, it's no longer just here's one number and helping you to make that referral. We have to manually go through databases and help families navigate that system. So it's going to be an increase in time. So we're hiring a number of staff to help us navigate that so that we're not turning to families and saying good luck in Godspeed, but rather we're helping them with a mental health professional navigating this system at a very dire time, at a moment that that family may be experiencing distress themselves. So we don't want to leave families with phone numbers and directories and saying good luck. So that's a number of places the funding is going. Additionally, partnering with the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, there are a number of projects underway at the high school and at the Otteson in particular, where we're looking at ways of expanding upon affinity groups and some work on identity with students and staff and looking into certain outside facilitators. We're looking at a couple of different partnerships that we have, but figuring out how we can get them to assist us and the building principal and the DEI director have been talking about ways that we can really build community there given the presence of the anti-Semitic and racist slurs and graffiti and incidents that we've seen there. So that's another major project that's coming from that. And there's more, but I'll hit the other major bucket of youth mental health first aid. So now that we're also able to come back and train staff, another major request has been in the area of staff wondering what is a mental health crisis and what is not. And so being able to retrain our youth mental health first aid instructors so that they're up to speed on the new materials because there are new materials and then pay for the training of all new staff who have not been trained in the youth mental health first aid and there's funding for that. If you'd like more details, I can share it all with you but that's mostly it. The last piece I'll share, I think I mentioned it earlier is the SEL coaching positions. We have an existing SEL coach in the district right now, teachers are inviting her into classrooms for coaching cycles but also for their own adult SEL coaching and support and there's only one of her. So what we have been able to use the grant for is to bring in another two SEL coaches for the next four months to go to teachers classrooms support them in bringing the SEL curriculum in and modeling and coaching. These are experts in education. So people who have retired and want to come back and help out and also to just be there as morale and support in a non-evaluative sense for our staff. Why? That's really rich in detail. And it does seem to correspond very well to a lot of the data that we've seen over the past couple of meetings about the needs of kids within the district. Congratulations on getting the grant. I know how difficult it is to write these things and look forward to hearing some good news as a result. Thank you. Mr. Thailman. Thank you, Mr. Hanner. Thank you, Sarah, for the presentation. As always, it's great. My question for you is staffing. I want to get clear in your department which is the school counseling or counseling and social emotional learning that the department you oversee. How many staff do we have? How many staff have we added with the new funding? That's what I kind of want to get straight on. Yes. So the permanent positions that have been added this year are two positions. One of them is a district-wide social worker to assist with the mental health screening. It's primarily been helping out at the elementary level but that's the position. It's the district-wide social worker. The second position is the mental health assessment coordinator and outreach worker. Those two positions that are permanent have been added this year and will be carried over into next year. Those positions plus the existing SEL coach are the three outside of existing school counselors and social workers that are building-based. And so the three positions you just described and then in each building, what's the total? This is where I'm going to defer to Rob. Rob just sat up in his chair. This is where you're going to defer to each building. I'm going to have to check my list but there's at least one school social worker in every elementary building. Some have two and there's school counselors and social workers at every other level. So I can get you a number in a few minutes. I don't want to, I'm kind of curious what the numbers are. Because as I look at this chart, the chart you put together and the 40% of 11th graders last year were in need of assistance 30, I mean, it feels to me like there's a need for more staff to be responding to the immediate needs of these students. So in the budget for next year, you're also going to see the addition of a high school school counselor at the high school because of that, but it was also in the five-year plan because we knew that there was going to be an increased need at the high school. So the high schools do. So it's appropriate that we're going to see the addition in the budget request for a high school counselor to meet that need as well as other needs that have emerged there. Yeah, because what I saw was what we had in the five-year plan, but okay, all right. Okay, thank you for that. Lizzie. I also want to note that we have set aside funds as part of our SR3 dollars. We were able to move some of what we hadn't spent of SR2 over from SR3 into SR2. SR3 goes for the next two years and we've allocated some resources as part of that funding for some emergency social work additional support that's district level. We just haven't figured out quite what the allocation approach or service delivery approach to those positions will be because they obviously don't split perfectly across all of the schools. So we're still working on what the model for that will look like, but we've set that aside as part of our emergency funding to respond to COVID. Got it, thank you. Any other members have any questions or comments on this? Seeing none. Thank you, Ms. Byrd. Excellent presentation, really appreciate it. Before we move on, I'd like to ask a student rep. She'd like to share anything with us, Amy. Hi, thank you. Sorry again for being late. Updates from the high school, everyone is just super, super excited to move into the new building. Recently I got a tour of it and that was awesome to see and it's crazy that I'm only moving in there in like a week. Like a week after breaks, I guess two weeks, but everyone's going crazy and they all want to see it. Everyone's asking me for pictures, but I wasn't allowed to take any. Thank you, Amy. Look forward to the official pictures when you get a chance to do it. It's, they're going to be great. We're now on the building, you know. Actually, officially today we're on the building, so you can take pictures now. Oh, that's great. That's up to Amy. Thank you. How long is the building? So take, okay. Is that it, Amy? You all set? Yeah, all the, all the lots of seniors who haven't gotten any of their like graduation requirements for moving, for volunteer hours, they're getting all theirs by helping the teachers move. So it's all working together very nicely. Great, thank you for sharing. Next item on the agenda is superintendent's proposed budget, Dr. Holman. All right, I'm going to share my screen. And Mr. Mason and I will be very happy to share with you the proposed budget for FY23, but I want to start by saying that walking through the high school with Amy and her peers was easily the highlight of my week. So we had a lot of fun going through. So I am happy to be here tonight to present the FY23 proposed budget and to thank our wonderful students for the beautiful artwork that graces the cover of this, what I think is really a beautiful and well-organized budget book. And I really am also grateful to members of our team who have put a lot of work hours, thought, planning, conversation, deliberation, recommendation time into the decisions that have ultimately come together into this proposed budget proposal that we're bringing to you tonight. I want to start us off very briefly before I hand this over to Mr. Mason by highlighting some of the priorities that were central to the decision-making process for this year's budget, as well as the highlights that are supporting the continuous improvement of our schools in this budget. These highlights are just a snapshot and we'll talk in more detail about what the additions are that we've made to the budget for FY23. I do think that I'm very grateful that Ms. Bird was here to present this evening because she paints a picture of some of the things, some of the many things that are really driving some of our prioritization and planning and strategy as we think ahead to next year. A lot of it is driven by student need. Before I dive into priorities and highlights, I want to acknowledge that the planning work for this budget year started back in October as we planned for a process that would include all of our administrators and give everybody an opportunity to speak directly in person with us, with the cabinet team and with me about what it was they believed that their departments and their schools needed. All of those leaders also spoke with individuals in their departments with the teachers who work with them. I took into consideration as well what I've heard from families and from students throughout my entry plan about the things that are important to them and what they want to have access to in the schools. And so the priorities that have guided a lot of the decision making around this budget proposal is to ensure flexibility for salaries and collective bargaining. We know this is a collective bargaining year. We know that we have some major priorities around having competitive salaries so that we can diversify our educator workforce. And so that was one of the big priorities that we kept in mind as we planned for this year. We want to be sure that we are supporting students social, emotional and mental health to the points that Ms. Byrd made. We wanted to make sure that we carried forward a lot of the positions that were added in FY 22. We added a substantial number of social workers as we prepared for this year knowing that mental health was probably going to be a major consideration as it has been. And we also added positions as we moved through this year both in nursing and in social, emotional and mental health and counseling. We wanted to address increasing enrollments at the secondary level that are going to impact all areas of our schools and make sure that we have the sections that we need at Odyssey and the high school in preparation for larger class sizes moving through. We wanted to make sure that we ensured access to necessary related services for all students. Some schools have seen an increase in English learners. Other schools need additional special education support and we wanted to continue to work towards the goals of the five year budget plan. Some of the highlights of this budget include the elimination of elementary instrumental music fees, the elimination of high school athletic fees. These two things are things that we believe increase access for all of our students to the rich programming that we offer in the Arlington Public Schools. We're very excited to work to eliminate barriers that some families could feel or individual students could feel to participating in some of the extra curricular and in terms of elementary instrumental music actually curricular part of the school day opportunities that we think are really important to a well-rounded educational program for Arlington. We have added another elementary librarian and a digital learning teacher, elementary math interventionists. This gets us to one point out every school. I'll talk about that a little more later. We've added teachers at the middle and high school level to address the increases and projected increases in enrollments at the secondary level and English learner and special education professionals to make sure that we're meeting the needs of students in our schools. I will speak briefly to enrollments before I hand it off to Mr. Mason to talk about the details of the budget and the bill. But what you're seeing here is a graph that we've shared with long range planning committee and also with the finance committee last night. And it shows the projections in APS, both historical actual and historical projections as well as newer projections that we have. So the light blue line is showing a projection that we received prior to the pandemic for APS enrollments. And you see that it goes up at the rate that it had been going up and then levels off right around FY24, 25 with some slight increases there. What you see in the darker blue is the actual enrollment pre-pandemic. And then of course you see the dip in enrollment as a result of the pandemic. And it's notable that that actual enrollment was tracking above the line of the projected, the previous projections we had received from McKibben. And then what you'll see in these other lines are newer projections. One, two of them are decision insight projections. This is a new vendor that we worked with this year to get projections for the coming year. The orange line is their conservative projection. The green or the sort of teal line is their moderate projection. That projects us having more students over the next few years. You'll see that that moderate projection has that same leveling off trend. And then the green line is Mr. Mason's projection, our APS projection. And what you'll notice is that our snapshot at October one was here, but our snapshot right now as of January 25th of 2022 actually has us above the projection for next year. So we're watching enrollments closely. We're keeping an eye on this. It looks like we may have more of a bounce back next year than some of our projections have indicated. And that's the reasoning for some of the reserve positions that you see in the budget. And with that, I will hand it off to Mr. Mason who will talk about some of the details of the proposed budget. Thank you, Dr. Holman. Yes, and don't mind, I have two screens going on. I might be shifting and looking at my notes and whatnot. So this slide here is the funding sources over from fiscal 19 to fiscal 23. And we'll actually just take a step back. First I wanna say a lot goes into the making of this budget. I think Dr. Holman said that from, working with all the department heads and then the school administrators. I do wanna take the time to thank Dr. Holman. For this process. Can you hear me? I'm not sure if I heard something. And it was different than years past. And I think we took the time to really go through this budget. And so that's really what I wanted to say in regards to the budget process overall. But what you'll see here is that these are the numbers. So this slide shows the funding sources from fiscal 19 to fiscal 23. So the funding sources include Circuit Breaker, which is, I know many of you know in the school committee, but those that do not know, it's reimbursement we get from the state to cover costs from special education out of district tuition and transportation. Also it includes special revenue and revolving funds, which includes tuition paid to Arlington Public Schools for students either we service from other districts or even countries that attend our schools in revenue from rentals of our surplus spaces. Federal and state and COVID-19 related grants. However, this does not include the one time grants or various grants that we are awarded from AES, the Arlington Education Foundation. So the only core grants that supplement the corn structure of the district are included in that category. It also were funded with chapter 70 state aid, which is funds that the state provides through the town of Arlington, which is driven by the chapter 70 formula, which considers enrollment. And then even further looks at the different populations of that enrollment to see if there are specific needs that need to be covered. So there are additional monies for those different populations. And then the local, it looks at the local income and tax levels to determine what the state will eventually give to the town of Arlington. And then lastly, the contribution includes the local contribution from the town, which is the amount that comes from the taxpayers of Arlington. What you'll see on this chart, however, is that there are two trend lines. There's a trend line above the chapter 70 state aid, which shows that the chapter 70 state aid is actually increasing at a higher rate than what our local contribution is increasing. And you can move to the next slide, which will be a pie chart, which you normally see every year is the different funding sources that I just stated, but these are the snapshots of the funding sources just for this fiscal year. As you'll see that even though the local contribution percentage may be decreasing compared to previous years, there's still a substantial portion of the budget. And chapter 78 is the second largest segment where the others are not as large factors, but they do provide a strategic one-time spending or temporary spending. And some of our grants are part of our staffing, our core special education staff and whatnot. You can go to the next slide. This is a pie chart just showing the budget expenses by budget transfer category. What's different on this slide or this pie chart this year and what you've put, if you've read the, if you've got a chance to glimpse the budget book, I know there's a lot of pages to read in it and I'm not sure if everybody's read through it, but there we did create a separate budget transfer category that we would like the school committee to consider which is for out-of-district tuition and transportation. And that is because that type of expenses, the uncertainty around the enrollment and the volatility to that spending, it makes sense to keep it separate. And you'll see why as we go further into the presentation. But overall, I mean, over 70% of our budget goes directly to instruction services or services to directly support our students. So this is a snapshot comparing fiscal 23, the anticipated funding sources and compared to fiscal 22. And what you'll see is that overall, the local contribution is increasing by 4.69%, which is the less than the state aid increased percentage of 8.66%. Those two categories total up to be with the town appropriations and those numbers we'll talk about shortly. As always, this budget is just level funding grants. So we can't, we don't know what our grant figures are for next year yet. And so we'll keep the school committee apprised as we get updated numbers. And the COVID related grants, we separate it because those are one-time grants, but they were substantial enough to provide resources to remote instruction in the past. And they provided a lot of funding for mental health and social emotional needs that we thought it was important to keep it out we don't anticipate to get any more awards related to COVID-19 related grants. And then our special revenue and revolving is going to decrease by 397,000 around that amount, which is anticipated due to the reduction or elimination of instrumental music fees and athletic participation fees. And our circuit breaker to cover reimbursement is increasing by 300,000. So when you net all of this together, our budget overall budget is increasing by 2.2 million amongst all fund sources, which is 2.53%. We can go to the next slide. So just focusing on the general fund where most of our services and most of the budget is focused around, our fiscal 23 budget is 84,447,869 dollars. And when it appeared that that's general fund-wise it's actually $4.3 million higher than last year. And so that's the number that we have to work with to do our necessary increases such as, our contractual obligations or as Dr. Holman discussed earlier, we would like to have the flexibility for bargaining to make our, hopefully get our salaries to be more competitive or comparable to our town manager 12 districts. And as well as other non-personnel contractual obligation as well. Also included is, about 450,000 dollars and department budget increases. And we'll also discuss about how we, they didn't leave much money after going through all the natural increases or cost of living increases that we've required. We had to do some budget efficiencies to actually make this budget work. So we had to do about 2.1 million dollars worth of budget reductions. And which that led to about 2,426,000 dollars left for us to do our proposed additions which Dr. Holman will talk about shortly after my segment. You can go to the next slide. And so our budget efficiency, this slide, the first item to talk about, and we've been talking about for maybe the last few years is about special education out of district tuition and now also transportation. And over the last few years that we've seen that this budget has been over, this budget line item has been over budget. And after reviewing and combing through line by line of this budget with my team and working with the special education department, we believe that is we need to right size this budget line item. So I will talk shortly about the analysis of how that works and how does that look in the next slide. But this budget also includes reductions of three elementary teachers based on enrollment projections. We do see that there's a possibility to reduce three sections throughout the district. It also includes Dr. Holman talked about adding math interventionists in the highlight slide, which we are actually reducing 1.6 FTE in math intervention paraprofessionals to be able to support a professional level, a teaching staff for math intervention. It also includes some reductions tied to reorganization or acknowledgement of duties that have already been delegated to individuals throughout the district. And as well as throughout this budget process there are positions that were either carried in this budget that were not being filled or there were just cleanup items over the last few years that we were trying to align to what was actually happening in the district in operations versus what's actually needed in the out going for fiscal 23. And so that was another line item which was over $300,000, giving us our 2.1 million total budget efficiencies or a bunch of reductions. You go to the next slide. This slide talks about the accommodation bar graph. The blue bars in this slide are the budget amounts from fiscal 18 to fiscal 22 and the proposed amount for fiscal 23. And it includes the orange bars are the actual spending of out of district tuition and transportation. And what you'll see in fiscal 18 that we were tightly aligned with the budget amount. And we went into fiscal 19 slightly increasing the out of district tuition and transportation budget lines. However, spending actually went down. And as you can see, there's a great line that correlates to the spending trends which is tied to the out of district enrollment. And so if you look at that line, it looks like, and what we're budgeting is around similar numbers to what we're currently enrolled and there's also some contingency in there, but the spending is going down also due to that enrollment decline and out of district tuition or students that we sent to out of district placements. And you'll see that the orange lines definitely showing that decrease in spending even in the budget is also decreasing over time. But it looks like if you look at the spending the fiscal 23 budget will be more in line to where spending should be based on looking at where we're currently projected to end spending for fiscal 22. If you go to the next slide, this reduction in out of district tuition and transportation budgets does not mean that we're not committed to special education or what we're spending on in-district wise. So as you can see, once again, this slide shows the same type of data, budgets versus actuals with the enrollment of our in-district students actually increasing over time and our spending has increased as well to match that as well as to show further commitment to special education. And so over the, from fiscal 11, fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2021, we've seen a compounded annual growth of special education in-district spending around 10%. And if you will look year over year of the last few years, the year specifically in this chart has been 8% year over year on each of those years. Once again, I would like to say that it's important to note in this budget that for those that may feel comfortable on the school committee that there is definitely funds set aside in this budget for a couple of one-time upticks in out of district tuition and transportation. That's more specifically in using special revenue, which you would see. And as well, you will talk about in the monthly report section of tonight's meeting. If the current budget holds up, we will be proposing that in the end of the year the school committee would either prepay tuition or vote to move any excess special ed related dollars into the special ed reserve fund. Now turn it over to Dr. Holm to discuss the proposed additions. So I'm going to move through these quickly and then open it up to questions. At the high school level, we've prioritized counseling supports as well as additional teachers to add sections where we are anticipating increased enrollments as well as projecting some additional elective courses which you heard about when the program of studies was presented to you. We've also shifted a 0.2 in ELA to enable an expanded student internship program. It currently runs for half of the year, but we'd like to run the internship program for the entire school year. Finally, we're proposing the elimination of athletic fees for our LinkedIn high school students, which we're going to accomplish by absorbing the athletic coach stipends into the general fund budget. This allows all of our students to participate in or try out for whichever sports they choose with no financial limitations or barriers for our LinkedIn families. At the middle school level as discussed previously, we're anticipating increased enrollments at Audison as well as rolling that half LC that we added this year at grade seven up to the eighth grade. We're working to improve access to world languages across middle school levels, both at Gibbs and Audison and balance class sizes as those courses grow and ensure that our special education students in all learning communities are supported, which is why you see the special education teacher there at OMS that will go with the additional LC at the eighth grade. At the elementary level, our additions are primarily attended to balance needs based on enrollment and existing staffing levels. We currently have interventionists or math tutors instead of interventionists at Dallen and Bishop. This increase will help bring those positions to be professionally staffed at 1.0. That allows us to have a math interventionist at every elementary school. We're proposing a restructuring of special education to provide more support to the monotony where the team chair position is currently split with a coordinator and adding a 0.5 team chair at Hardy because the SLC there continues to grow that brings them to a 1.0. We've also welcomed more English learners at Hardy and Dallen making the proportion of EL students to teachers much larger than at other schools. So the additions of 0.2 at Hardy and 1.0 Bishop will help to balance our ratios of English learners to their teachers. Additionally, at the elementary level, we would like to add a specialist at Minotomy. So that will give students at Minotomy some enrichment programming during their teacher's common planning time. Add another library teacher to the district which will bring our total librarians up to 5.0. We did add an additional librarian during the school year this year as well and an additional learning, digital learning teacher to provide and plan lessons and provide additional digital learning support and collaboration for teachers at the elementary level in accordance with the five year budget plan. Finally, at the elementary level, we're looking forward to absorbing instrumental teachers into the general fund budget which will eliminate instrumental music fees for our families and students who wish to participate in fine arts programming during the school day. At the district level, we're including 3.0 reserve positions to provide some flexibility as we wait for enrollments to come in for next year. We are also planning on an additional section at the Pierce of fifth grade. We're looking forward to expanding a current 0.2 health and wellness director to be a full-time position. The current health and wellness director has voiced her intent to retire and we think it's important that that department have oversight of all health and physical education programming in the district and leadership of the department. We're proposing a restructuring of student services by adding an assistant superintendent of student services to oversee nursing, SEL and counseling as well as special education. This restructuring is also the reason for additional team chairs for out of district and monotomy which allows for the out of district coordinator, monotomy coordinators to be full-time special education administrators. Other budget additions include additions that happened after the passage of the FY22 budget that we're rolling over, some of which Ms. Burt talked about. They also include some of the nurses that we've added this year. The assistant business manager in the business office is offset by the reduction of a school account role and increases the managerial capacity of the business office. And then finally at the district level we would like to continue to support our payroll and grants offices. These offices have significantly more clerical demands on their time due to increase enrollments and staffing over the past few years but we haven't increased staffing in those departments much over the past several years to compensate for those increased staffing and enrollments. We would also like to increase substitute pay by 20% to be more competitive with neighboring districts, expand teacher leadership opportunities for our teachers provide our new DEI office with an operating budget and ensure that our visual arts department has the supplies that it needs to continue to support the imaginations of the young artists whose artwork graces the cover of this book. And from here, we're looking forward to your feedback and questions tonight, a public hearing on the budget in early March and visiting a finance committee and town meeting later on this spring. And with that, we will take the committee's questions. Any members of the committee wish to ask a question at this time. Mr. Slickman. Not so much a question or maybe it could be but a statement is that this is a district it's talked a lot about diversity, equity and inclusion but some of the fees we've been charging particularly for instrumental music have been barriers to lower income families participating in these programs. Can you tell us how you were able to make magic and make these vanish? Mr. Mason did most of that magic but I will say we heard from families we heard from kids that they love their instrumental time we heard from kids that they love their athletics time at the high school and that's how they connect with school and that's really important to their experience with school and our student athletes and our student musicians report a better experience with school and more connection with their educators. And I think I was said early in my interview process for Arlington actually that a budget will show your values and we found this to be something important that our administrators brought to us as proposals and we worked throughout the process to see what we were going to be able to include and this felt very important to our equity efforts. I'm thrilled by this. I just wanna thank everybody who worked to make this happen. Thank you. Mr. Cardin and Mr. Thielman. Thanks. Two questions. So in the school improvement plans and prior presentations we heard a lot about the request for coaches and I don't think any of the coaches made it into the budget. So I know we were reassessing the coaching model but I just wanted to know are we not including funds for coaches because we're reassessing the model and you don't know where we're headed or was it just not a priority compared to eliminating the athletic fees that we just discussed? We actually did some offset work with math coaching to reallocate and distribute some lead coach positions. It's completely net neutral but it does result in a full-time math coach at every school. For literacy, the ESSER plan has a 1.0 literacy coach in it for next year that gets us to 1.0 at every single school. So for right now we're prioritizing getting ourselves to the 1.0 math and literacy at every elementary school. We're holding on addition of district level coaches in part because we're doing the coaching model analysis and we wanna see what they're gonna recommend our initial draft of a coaching model at the moment sort of designates them as a different kind of specialist where they're doing curriculum specific work whereas coaching is really sort of job embedded and school-based. So we're waiting for that to finish up before we think about adding additional science coaches or social studies coaches at the elementary level. And we did have some coaching positions at the middle level that were proposed but we just think a little more work needs to be done and conversations need to be had and that teachers need to feel that that's a need before we go adding additional coaches at the middle level. So. Great, thank you. And the other question is, we're adding the assistant business manager position because we found that the CFO job was too big so to speak that without having somebody, a second person for handling financial matters, the CFO could not pay attention to the non-financial matters. So my question is with the new assistant director of students assistant superintendent for student services why we wouldn't face the same issue without having somebody in charge of special education underneath that position, isn't that position gonna be very hard to pay attention to the non-special education matters? I think that important to this shift is that it's a first pass at a restructuring. Part of that pass includes increasing coordinator roles so that those coordinator roles are dedicated. So like the out-of-district coordinator can really focus on out-of-district coordinator work and not be split with a team chair and increasing the team chair as well helps with the capacity of the coordinators. So we have a dedicated coordinator now at Monotomy, a dedicated coordinator for out-of-district and that is meant to increase the capacity of special education so that this additional assistant superintendent of student services has a larger administrative team sort of working beneath her but you could distribute that in multiple different ways. And so whoever would be in that role I would look to them for recommendations about any additional restructuring that would need to happen in the special education department. Right now the only addition to the reporting responsibilities under this role would be the addition of nursing because for this year we made an adjustment to reporting responsibilities and the director of SEL and counseling currently reports to the director of special education. So that piece that we are certainly wrapping in nursing as a student service but it's adding just that one responsibility in terms of reporting structures to the role. Thank you. Mr. Thielman. My question was related to the fees. Paul asked it. How much, maybe Mr. Mason knows this or maybe Dr. Holman, how much did we have in fee revenue in the FY in the last year's budget? So like five or $600,000? Closer to $400,000. $400,000. Okay. So Mike, I'm very happy that we can eliminate the fees. I just want to make sure this is sustainable going forward. That's a $400,000 that I mean because we could get to a situation where we look at the budget and say, well, we have to bring back the fees in order to have enough to do other things. Yeah. So a largest part of this reduction in the revenue sources is tied to the athletic fees. And those are tied to stipend payments that do not increase the same way our other labor costs increase. So we felt going through this process it was going to be sustainable because of that because those salaries have not increased as rapidly. Looking at also just the spending in the other areas, there were just areas where we were not spending or we were budgeting and was not aligned to the spending that, you know, and so I felt that working with Dr. Holman that it made sense that this was the right time that we could actually pull this off. We cannot predict some of the other parts of our budget plan in terms of special education out of district enrollment. But what I can say is that we've been building up these reserves for the special ed education spending. And I feel confident that with those reserves this is sustainable. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else at this time? Dr. Ampe. Thank you. First, I'd like to thank Dr. Holman and Mr. Mason for their great budget book and the presentation and in answering the questions that my colleagues have already asked. It's made things more clear. That said, I wanted to make two statements just because I can't not see them. First, with regards to the enrollment, I want to again note that neither decision insight nor Mr. Mason's projection include any analysis of gains that may be made by changes in migration patterns, essentially elderly people moving out, young families moving into their homes. And I'm bringing that up because that has been the major source of our enrollment growth over the past years. And it just makes me really nervous to be saying, oh, we're plateauing, but we're not actually looking at these numbers. Decision Insights Analysis did not look at that. They only looked at new development, which Arlington doesn't have because we're built out. So just want to be sure everybody's clear on that. And I understand not everyone shares my feelings. That's fine. And then the other thing is just to point out that yes, there's chapter 70. Yes, the town is receiving more chapter 70 in FY, or is projected to receive more chapter 70 in FY 23 than we are receiving in FY 22. However, that money is going to the town. And then the town decides how it is dispersed. And the fact that there is more chapter 70 money coming to the town is not this year reflected in the amount of money that we are getting dispersed from the town. And in fact, our money has gone down somewhat by a million free, whatever, because our enrollment had gone down and that's how the whole, it's a reconciling of enrollment numbers with a one-time increase or one-time funding of 970,000 for COVID-related expenses. And I just think we need, I'm saying it's not so much for the school committee, who I think know some of this, but more for our community because I don't want them to see these numbers and think, oh, look, that's great. The budget must have gone up because that's not how the money is distributed here. The advantage of the system that we use in Arlington is that even in low years, it all evens out and we keep getting our money, but we're not getting this 2 million increase to directly to the schools. So that's all, thank you. For anyone else? Ms. Morgan. Thank you. So I really enjoyed reading this budget book and that I appreciate all of the effort and work that went into it. I think that the quote that you were talking about, Dr. Holman, is this idea of show me your budget and I'll be able to tell you what you value, right? And I think that's really true. I think that this is a budget that as a school district we, I feel very proud of putting this forward. I think that it was done very thoughtfully and I think that it is reflective of where we are as a district and as a community right now. There are pieces in it that with all things like make me, I get a little nervous because this budget has accounted for some of the stabilization and enrollment at the elementary school, right? So we're not gonna be seeing the additions classrooms likely in our elementary schools that we've seen actually consistently throughout the 10 years I've been here. And so there are pieces that I'm like, oh boy, so we're gonna like pull those ones out and reallocate, which is absolutely the right thing to do. And I just, I feel like this is a brave budget and an aspirational budget. And so I think that there's something in here for everybody and I really appreciate that. I think to add on to what Dr. Allison Ampe said, well, I think that this budget as a district for our district absolutely represents our values. I do think that we have challenges as a town and as a community because I don't know that our school appropriation as a function of our town budget necessarily represents the value that the community thinks that it, that is placed on education here. And I think that that is a place where there is still work to do. A lot of that has to do with funding that comes from the state and what our state appropriation looks like, but when we looked at this and we looked at this in long range planning, based on if we were to fund our schools at the average per pupil spending of the town manager 12, right? So this is not, we're not comparing ourselves to Cambridge with their $25,000 per pupil spending, which would be great or Burlington and all their malls and, you know, or even while they are where Dr. Homan came from. So if we were to compare ourselves to those, we are still spending so much less per student that in order to bring this budget up to the level that to the average, we would have to infuse $10 million into it, we're that far back, right? And when you're that far back, it's really hard to fund things in your district the way that you want to, right? You have to underfund your salaries, you have to underfund special education. And so all of that to say, I think that this school budget was put together it's just so tremendously difficult to do because the top line amount is still not gonna be enough to meet the needs of all of our students. So that said, I still think that it's really well put together and it's very representative of the values of this district and of our staff and of this committee. So thank you so much. Mr. Klugman, did you wanna speak? Yeah, first of all, yeah, I agree 100% with Ms. Morgan, but I also wanted to underline what Dr. Allison Ampe said in that enrollment projections in Arlington are very difficult to do. And I think when you go and take a look at all the renovations, our enrollment growth has been in smaller two bedroom units in primarily in two family homes in East Arlington, which had been renovated, condoized and purchased by families who are willing to sacrifice space for urban amenities. This trend is not going away. And I think that any enrollment projection that doesn't take that real estate trend into account is going to be missing some enrollment growth within the next 10 years. So I'm very, very nervous about any projections that don't align with the previous McKibben report, which I think really endeavored to look at the underlying real estate trends. Thank you. Anyone else at this time? Thank you, Dr. Holman. Thank you, Mr. Mason for a phenomenal job. Really appreciate it. And please again, thank the students for the artwork. It was really nice. Really enjoyed it. Next item on the agenda is superintendent's formative evaluation. Dr. Holman, do you want to begin? Oh, just a second, Mr. Thillman. Can we take a formal vote on this budget? What are we doing? Not at this time. I don't know. We're going to have the chance for the community to come and talk about it. We have the public hearing. Okay. Thank you. Don't want to shut them off. Okay. Dr. Holman, formative evaluation. So I will be very brief and answer any questions that you have about navigating. Really tonight is just about me sharing the evidence that I've already shared with you and how to navigate it. And then for all of you to discuss how it is that you would like to provide feedback to me, we had discussed earlier in the year, formative feedback coming in the form of narrative, not necessarily in the form of ratings, though of course you all have the authority to change your minds on that. I have shared with you a site that has an overview of my goals as well as embedded evidence on each of those goals. Most of that evident, there's a lot of evidence under that first goal of building a collaborative and equity focused leadership culture. There is also evidence under the goal too of improving and streamlining transparency, family engagement and communication and evidence under goal three, ensure a safe and supportive pandemic return and recovery and goal three, or sorry, goal actually four, which I will correct, which was my professional practice goal to engage in INSIP. And there's a reflection there as well for the professional practice goal. There's also, if you look along the top here, I just wanna draw your attention to the standard indicators that I had identified early in the process. These are the indicators from the rubric, from the superintendent's rubric that I have sort of set out to focus on in my own development work this year and in my own reflection and they're listed there for your reference, the idea being, according to the frameworks that you use these to sort of guide any feedback that you're giving me because these are the things that I'm focusing on. And then there's also a formative reflection on the second page that sort of is my thinking around the work of the year so far surrounding each of my goals. So with that, I will stop sharing. You have the materials available to you and I believe our calendar stated that you would provide feedback in whatever form or forum you decide before next, or our next meeting at the beginning of March. I'm gonna take prerogative of the chair just to express my reaction to this. It is my intent and just me alone that I will probably be writing a narrative presenting it to Dr. Holman ahead of time and then deciding whether I will, how much I will share publicly of that document at our next meeting. But the full document will be in Novus. It is considered a public document. So at this time, anyone else would like to add any more comments or questions to Dr. Holman on this? I do. Okay, Mr. Cotton, then Mr. Thielman. He got up a fraction ahead of you, Jeff. I just gotta say, you get an A plus for organizing evidence. Very organized. Thank you so much for putting that site together. No problem. Mr. Thielman. What is our to do? So our job is to, could you just kind of read? What is our to-do list as a committee? To provide the superintendent with feedback. And how you do that is your choice. If it is, whatever is presented to her has to be put in Novus. The final thing, your final piece would, my final piece will have to be put in Novus because it's considered a public document. Yep. And your job is, and you're looking for a document from us that we sent to you by a day. Not to me. I mean, this is up for discussion. If the body wants to send it to me, that's fine. But it, my understanding was that we were going to be sending it to Dr. Holman. Oh, director Morgan? And then Dr. Ampey. And then we just- This is my plan, Mr. Thielman. I'm going to write an email to Dr. Holman. I'm going to go through this website that we have. And I'm going to write an email to Dr. Holman with my feedback around the pieces that she's shared with us. I'm going to CC Mr. Hainer and probably Ms. Diggins because I want to get an A. And I like to get checked off on people's lists. And then- It doesn't trust me that I might lose it. Yeah, no, not at all. And then when we come here in two weeks, I'm probably going to say something to the effect of Dr. Holman. I sent you some thoughts. Here's my two sentences and then that will be it. That's kind of my plan. That was my understanding of what we sort of largely agreed to back in August with this process. So that was going to be my plan and I do want to get an A. So- And our deadline is the Friday before the meeting on the March 2nd, 3rd, whatever that date is. I think that's a reasonable, since we got that, we got almost three weeks before our next meeting. Three or four weeks. 24th thing. Okay. I just wanted to know the process. I hear you. Good to have a plan. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. My understanding from our discussion back in the summer was that we were going to have a form that you and Dr. Holman were going, or mainly you were going to put together so that we all were evaluating kind of the same things or something. And I was just, I'm searching for one of our old evaluation forms before this month with it. We have never done a formative evaluation as a school committee on a superintendent since this new thing has been started. We've done some of the tips. I'm just saying what we thought about. No, I'm saying we talked about it and we're going to have something that we were going to go. And I just found out that I'm supposed to be driving so I'm going to have to go on. Anyway, so I would kind of like us to have something so that we're all doing something similar. And I was trying to find the actual language that we used before, but it was something like we had things. Jeff, you remember better than me, we had things that were- You did say, we did say that. We did talk about it. And things that were to be worked on or something. I don't remember the exact words. We did talk about it. We did talk about doing a form. But at that time we had no idea the extent and the depth of what was going to be presented to us. The state does not provide a checklist the way it does on the summative. Yeah, I'm not saying we have to do that. I'm saying just that, okay, I had understood that we would have something that would focus us all on the same thing so that we're not like going all willy nilly, but that's fine. If you want to go willy nilly, we go willy nilly and whatever. That's all. I have curses, but I remember all curses- Okay, wait a minute, Jeff. I want to get that input from everybody. Jeff, hold on. I want to get an input from everybody. Ms. Axton. So I share Dr. Allison Ampey's memory that there was going to be some kind of share, something that we all have the same of, but I'm thinking that we can just use Dr. Homan has organized this so well that if you go to standard indicators and we look at the standards that she has selected, can we organize our, or I was going to organize my thoughts around the standard indicators that she chose for her goals and then use the evidence that she has provided to sort of share that. So if it would be helpful to people to have these things on a document, I'm happy to put that together. I can't believe I just volunteered for that. I think that is wonderful. I'm not even going to take a vote on that as the chair. I'm going to delegate this to you. You have 24 hours. No, do it to us when you can. Ms. I was waiting for that. I was waiting for somebody to come to the chair. I'll organize it. That's so great. She really wants to be the chair. I want you to know that. I can feel that right now. I needed a job. You got it. I will take this. Unless there's another member of the committee that wants to take it away from her. No, no, no, no, no. This is... Are you raising your hand for that? No, no, no. I was just going to say that I remember the discussion being that it would be a little bit less formal than that. So maybe there was an idea that there would be a form, but it would basically be like, here's a big blank, fill in the blank. And so that's how I... So I'm approaching it sort of like Jane is. And I didn't think that there were gonna be a standard one, standard two, and separate discussions like that. But I'm happy to look at the form and see if it works for me. Whenever Liz X thing comes up with, it's good for me. For those of us that have been on the committee throughout the history of the super desi things, we've had forms that are detailed and individuals do their own thing. Ms. X and I would appreciate you doing this. And when you get it to us, we will all say thank you. And so Dr. Holman, you'll be getting something in the next couple of weeks from each of us. Whatever that document is, I want the members just to be aware that document will be the one that we're going to know of us. Now, the final document, let me rephrase it, the final document, if there's something that needs clarification, that's between the individual members and Dr. Holman. We all said on this, Mr. Schleckman. Thank you. At this point, I just wanna say I hate coloring within the lines on these evaluation documents. I gave you the option. Well, those that want the parameters of the lines, go for it. Those that don't... It'll be like a graphic organizer. Just help you to organize your thoughts, you can use it or not. Well, I'm just saying... That's the key to our teacher giving us all the help we need. I appreciate having it. So we all have the same input, the same prompt for the input. But yeah, I really did view this as being a much more informal process and not... Because the desi form is so confining. I was happy to be in an instance where I didn't have to go in that direction. Okay, thank you enough. Goodbye. Thank you. We all said on this one. Great, moving on. Now to something really exciting, the superintendent's report. Dr. Holman. Okay. I believe this is my last presentation tonight. So you should see on your screen the COVID case rates currently in the system, as well as in Arlington. We are enjoying the precipitous decline of cases in the schools, but it is worth noting that we do still have more cases today than we did in October and earlier this summer. So we continue to track, we continue to keep track of where cases are, where we have multiple cases in rooms, we might take additional measures, we might do additional testing. We have had a successful launch of our new testing program, which I'll talk about a little bit more in a moment, but I wanted to share our rates. I also added in for today an update to our vaccination rates. We just got this update in this morning and it's been updated on the dashboard for APS as well. It's very notable that we are well over the 80% mark in terms of vaccinations at all of our schools the exception of monotomy, where not all of our students are eligible and of those who are eligible, we're at 60%. We're at over 85% at all of our schools and at some of our schools we're well into the 90%ile, particularly a bracket where we're at 94%. So our vaccination rates continued to be very high. In this chart, vaccination is defined as two doses. We'd also have a significant proportion of our students who are eligible for boosters who have gotten boosters. So we've had a number of updates that have come just this week, honestly within the last 48 hours or so to guidelines from the Department of Health and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. I'm going to speak to those extremely briefly tonight and I welcome the committee's thoughts. I know we heard from members of the public earlier this evening on their thoughts related to some of the updated masking guidelines, but we are not yet in a position where we're able to voice what it is the school's plan will be. We're still collaborating with the Town Department of Health and the Board of Health. We're still looking forward to them having a meeting next week and discussing masking guidelines and any adjustments will be made in alignment with the town and their policies. We are, it is important that we sort of share with the public and with the committee some of the protocol adjustments that we've made. We put a lot of additional measures in place in January that we are lifting as of February 1st. That includes the implementation. Well, some of the adjustments include the new implementation of the revised testing program, which includes the antigen tests that are going home with families. They go home with the students every other week and they go home with teachers on the off weeks and there are two tests in every kit. And our expectation is that families are having their students take that antigen test on Thursday mornings before they come to school. Thursday morning before they come to school because we do most of our pool testing at the beginning of the week on Mondays and Tuesdays. And so the idea is if they get pool tested at the beginning of the week and then they take an antigen test on the Thursday before coming into school, we are reaching students at the beginning of the week and at the end of the week with a COVID test. If families can also choose to use those COVID tests for tests to return in the event that they have a positive case in the household or they may choose to use a test for a symptomatic individual before sending that symptomatic student into school and we encourage that. If families need additional tests, we have them. So we have gotten a large shipment of additional antigen tests in the district and we can use those for any families that need to gain access to additional home testing. We are discontinuing contact tracing. We've messaged this to families while teachers are no longer required to keep and share strict seating charts as a result of that because those were intended to facilitate contact tracing. We still ask teachers if we have positive cases in the room. If we have multiple positive cases, we may still ask, you know, who was the student near? If it's a younger student or ask the student if it's an older student, you know who were you near on these particular days during the infectious period. Students may mix across groups and classrooms. We are allowing field trips and assemblies. Once again, we had actually been allowing them in the fall, but we had suspended things during the Omicron surge. Volunteers are allowed as they were earlier this year. They are once again allowed now that we're out of January and volunteers must comply with our APS COVID-19 visitor policies and protocols. And we are allowing and really looking forward to some community events at our schools later on this spring. We have 4,125 staff and student consents for the at home testing program, which is nearly doubled the last time I reported to all of you and a new form for reporting both new cases and all tests to return results. And that's really important that new form is linked on our website. If you test to return or if you have a positive case in your household we really want families to use this form. If you don't use the form we have to enter it in the form. So you save us a step if you use the form and there's a indicator there if you would like one of our staff members to reach out to you. With regards to the new masking guideline adjustments the commissioner announced along with governor Baker earlier this week that they will lift the mask mandate for schools with the waiver process effective February 28th which is the day that we return from vacation. There are a number of things to consider when considering unmasking students in schools among them case rates in town and in our schools at that moment in time. And while cases are declining we still have cases in our schools and we are certainly hoping that we are down to a rate that is low enough for us to have conversations about our masking requirement in our schools by then. We're not down at a rate that is as low as I might like for it to be right this minute but we are continuing to trend in that direction. It is also worth considering the impact of masking on students when it comes to their social emotional and mental health as well as their learning. It is harder for students to hear it's harder for teachers to hear it's hard to see what teachers are saying when you cannot see their mouths same for students. And so these are all things we're taking into considerations also worth considering our vaccination rates which are exceptionally high. And the fact that if we were to eliminate a masking requirement we would not stop anyone who wanted to wear a mask from wearing a mask no student, no staff member. It's worth noting that we still have members of our community who are vulnerable and who are not eligible to be vaccinated or who have immune compromised conditions and are unable to be vaccinated because of that or for whom the vaccine might not work. And so we're taking all of these things into consideration and there's not one line, one threshold, one metric that is going to inform any decision that I or the school committee might make relative to a decision around whether or not to lift the mask requirement. So I welcome the committee's conversation around that. I'm gonna finish up with the rest of my updates as well as the committee's input on how a decision like this might be or should be made noting that our next school committee meeting is not until March 3rd, which is after the February 28th date that the commissioner has set forward for lifting the masking requirement. A few more updates that are not related to COVID. So I wanted to, well, the first one actually is but the rest are not. I wanted to update the committee that we have an ongoing collaboration with MGH, National Hospital on a manuscript that's detailing APS's extensive tests to return program and efforts. This is in partnership with the Arlington Department of Health and the results will be shared with Desi if they haven't been already today in pre-print and submitted to journals for possible publication this spring. I'm pleased to report this because I've really enjoyed this collaboration. Our lead COVID nurse and the person who has just been absolutely the point person and developer of and implementer of all of our testing programs Sarah Lee, nurse Sarah at the high school is also going to be an author on this publication. We anonymize everything as we prepared for this and nothing is identifiable. And what they did was some analysis around the rates of positivity in our test to return results and helped us out with sort of looking at what days students tested to return and what the impact of the test to return program was in an effort to advocate for similar programs like that or consideration of antigen tests to return for both businesses and schools. Additionally, we have awarded long view education the opportunity to conduct an APS district wide equity audit that happened just within this past week. We also have an RFP for strategic planning facilitation which will be publicized early which will go live early next week and it'll take a few weeks for us to get RFPs in. A little behind on this, we got delayed by the pandemic surge but we're looking forward to getting started on it. The, I also wanted to share that we heard that the Massachusetts department of elementary and secondary education's local special education determination under part B came back and our LinkedIn public schools meets requirements. This happens on an ongoing basis and it's worth noting that we've done a great job ensuring that we're meeting all requirements for meeting students needs and special education over the past few years. We have a new teacher leadership partnership with Brandeis University. It's a teacher leadership graduate program and as you saw in the budget, we're providing some scholarships to teachers to participate in this wonderful program. Brandeis also offers scholarships that pay for about 50% of the program and our scholarships will pay for an additional 25% of the program so that our teachers can participate. They set aside four slots and we already have, I actually think more than four applicants to the program, which is very exciting. And I also wanna thank the AEA for collaborating with me on figuring out what that could look like and what the parameters of it would be. I also shared enrollments with you. I don't have a kindergarten enrollment report quite yet, but we do have 253 kindergartners enrolled as of yesterday and the overall enrollments with no significant changes from our last meeting are available to you in Novus. With that, I will stop sharing my screen and take any questions or comments. Anyone have any questions or comments for Dr. Holman? Seeing, Mr. Thelman. So I do think we need to be clear with the public about what the process will be to address or respond to Governor Baker's recent decision to lift the mask mandate effective February 28th. The, as I understand it, the Board of Health currently has in Arlington currently has a mask requirement for all indoor public spaces and that supersedes the governor's decision, I think. In other words, so it seems to me that whatever we do would be in consultation with or at least in coordination with the Board of Health and we really couldn't take any action until the Board of Health took action. The committee could adopt a motion which says that the Arlington Public Schools will move forward with the removal of masks when the Board of Health lifts its requirements. That's a motion we could take up debate and see where people land on it, not tonight because it's not on the agenda I don't think we've given anybody any time for this. So I think we have to give people time and we have to have it on the agenda and we have to let people know we're gonna talk about this so people are aware of it. So, I mean, I think we have to kind of come in agreement on the process. I think the decision of the Board of Health is pretty important here. And I think ultimately the committee should take a vote and it goes wherever it goes. That's my opinion. Thank you. Mr. Shulman and Mr. Cardin. You might still not unmute. Okay, first of all, I wanna say that it's time for us to get off a Zoom and meet in person. I mean, seriously, the conditions have changed so radically. Two years ago when we went to Zoom and when we shut things down and as we were bringing people back and kids back, we were dealing with an unvaccinated population. We were dealing with a virus that behaved differently than the current Omicron. When this whole thing started, I was among the most vulnerable demographic because I'm old and fat. Now I am double vaccinated, boosted and had a very mild case of COVID. So I'm as invincible as you can get under these circumstances. And the circumstances have changed dramatically. And I have been following the science. I've been following the data. I've been watching the poop counts and the poop counts are important because you can hide from a COVID test but you can't hide from your toilet and they're counting the virus loads coming through Deer Island. And that is giving us a huge indication of what's going on there. Masking is designed to, as a barrier is a prevention of intense spread. We should have that in the toolbox for when the cases are rising, when we're in a surge, but it loses its effectiveness and the community buy-in at the point that we're just gonna keep it unilaterally. So I think that we do need to have some sort of a process where we can come to the March 3rd meeting and finally make a determination on this. I would urge the Board of Health to give us the flexibility on this and to align their policies to the state policy. We have extensive testing. We have one of the highest vaccination rates in the nation. And the metrics that we're looking at in Arlington are very different than elsewhere in the county and to use middle sex as a marker, it doesn't make sense for us to be making decisions on based on what's going on in Ashby or Framingham. It's time for us to, I really do, I was one of the most cautious people in terms of opening back up all through this process, but it is now time for us to move forward and I welcome having the chance to make a decision at our March 3rd meeting and I hope we can do that together as a group. Thank you. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. So just a couple of things, because I agree with meeting in person and we should try to do that as soon as we can with the hybrid access for people that still cannot meet in person. As far as the mask requirement, we never as a body adopted that. So I don't think we need to vote to remove it. If, you know, I don't know that there will be a decision by the administration to lift it on February 28th, but that certainly would be possible because we've delegated that authority to her. So certainly if that decision is not made before the 28th and it's not made before our March meeting, then it makes sense for her to consult with us at our March meeting to make sure that we are all on the same page. But again, just procedurally, it's not required for us to vote to lift it. I agree with what's been said so far. Just reading from earlier today that Dr. Ashishja from the Brown School of Public Health who's been a leader, but very cautious. He raised a very important point that, if not now when cases are probably gonna go up again next winter, they're probably not gonna get down to the levels we saw over the summer when everybody was first vaccinated. So we do need to find the off ramp. It may not be February 28th, it may not be the first week in March, but at some point, unless we're gonna keep masks forever, we need to find an off ramp. So I look forward to the administration working closely with the Department of Health to figure out when that would be. Thank you. I just wanna add one other factor before I go to other members. Public meetings are also not allowed by the Board of Public Health here in town. So until they allow that, we don't have that choice. Once they do. I'd like to see that in writing. I've never seen that. I've looked through their minutes and I've never seen where they said that. Not by the Board of Health. Okay, I will get it because maybe I got it from Ms. Bonjour now she did something on her own, but I've not seen anything. I got it from the town manager when I asked about the select board. I'll get it for us. Okay, Ms. Axton. Thank you. I support the superintendent in making the decision. I think that the Arlington Health and Human Services Department and the Board of Health have always been really thoughtful and careful about the way that they've approached the pandemic and making decisions and getting access to vaccines, getting access to tests for our community. So I support whatever decision the board makes in conjunction with the superintendent. I do have some concerns about the timing of February 28th and the fact that that is at the end of our school vacation and we have seen after Thanksgiving, we have seen after the December break that that's when the cases rise the most. And so just thinking about, I don't think that that week is the best timing for making a decision like this, but I do agree that it's time. And if not, like others have said, if not now when, and there's always gonna be something coming up. I also am just concerned about the timing in terms of giving teachers and staff time to prepare for this. I'm just thinking about when the decision was made for students to not have to wear masks outside. I don't think that it happened here in Arlington this way, but my experience was the next day, kids didn't have to have masks. And that was really challenging for teachers and staff and principals to just manage with kids who were suddenly not having to have masks on outside. So I wanna make sure that we give the administration and the principals and everyone time to talk with their staff about what that's actually going to look like and how they're going to support students and families who decide that they wanna continue wearing masks and how are we going to ensure that those students do not feel excluded or ostracized. And so there's that piece to this too is the social-emotional community piece of students in a classroom whose families are making different decisions for them. And finally, I just wanna say that there have been huge, huge impacts on students' learning, particularly for the younger students, particularly for students with hearing impairments. We've heard a lot about the social-emotional impact and the mental health impact, but purely from an instructional standpoint, I'm really looking forward to being able to see my students' mouths and faces and for them to be able to see mine just for the learning that I think is gonna happen. But the bottom line is that I feel very, I put a lot of trust in the Arlington Health and Human Services and in the superintendent, and so I support them making the best decision for our community, so thank you. Ms. Morgan. Thank you. I guess where I go back to you on this is I think back to the spring, like Ms. Ekston said, when we stopped masking outside. And I remember that decision and I remember as a parent thinking, oh my God, wow. And then after a few days, it felt very normal to me and to my kids and to their friends. And that was a decision that the superintendent at the time made on her own in conjunction, presumably, with the Department of Health and Human Services on the townside. And I guess I don't see masking as being a political decision, really. I think that it's really just a decision that's made in response to data and knowledge and understanding around the public health situation. And I feel comfortable with following the guidance of the Board of Health. And in what they tell us is what we should be doing and I hope that if we stop required masking and go to a mask optional school experience for students, I hope that we never have to go back to a place where masks are required. But if we did at some point, then I would expect that guidance to come also from the Board of Health and from the Department of Health and Human Services. So for me, I never wanted to be an epidemiologist or a public health professional and I still don't two years into this. So I'm comfortable with what their recommendation is. So I don't, if people wanna, if we want, if there's a desire for us to weigh in in some way, I'm always happy to do that. But I feel very committed to being in line with what the Board of Health recommends. So that's all I have. Thank you. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. So first I apologize. I had to get my daughter from sports practice and it was late and then my Zoom is messed up. So I missed the discussion, but I've read the announced press release and things and I can gather from what everyone's been saying, kind of what's happening. So I basically concur with Ms. Morgan and that I trust the Board of Health and the superintendent to come up with something. The one thing I haven't heard spoken yet is that there is a vaccine coming perhaps very soon for the youngest age group. And I just wonder if we may want, if that should factor into the equation because the kids who would, they are youngest kids are gonna have their siblings and it'd be nice if they were vaccinated first. And also I agree that the idea of, so we can make a decision to have the unmasking come at a future date, right? So we could on March 3rd or whenever you could say, okay, we're going to unmask, but we're gonna do it on ex-date. Cause I agree that starting the day after everyone comes back from vacation seems iffy. So those are my two thoughts, but mainly that I trust the superintendent and the Board of Health to help guide this, hopefully just getting rid of masks or mask optional. And if we ever have to go back to it, then so be it. And if we need to be, if she would prefer that we're involved somehow, I'm happy to participate, thank you. Dr. Holman, do you have anything else that you need from us on this topic at this time? I don't believe so, but just for clarity's sake, I wanna make sure that I am clear on what my next steps are. So the Board of Health that we'll meet next week, they could choose, they're going to discuss this, they could choose to uphold the mask requirement in Arlington, or they could choose to end the mask requirement in Arlington. If they were to choose to end it, then the commissioner's lift would happen on February 28th, but our next meeting is not until March 3rd. And so what I'm hearing here is that at that point, once we hear what the Board of Health decides is best for Arlington, that I would have the ability to determine some next steps for the Arlington Public Schools, which I would of course communicate out to the committee what the plans were and welcome any feedback or input that any of you have for that. And at some point would need to message that out to families because I know that they're very eager to hear what Arlington Public Schools plans will be once we know what the Arlington Board of Health plans will be. I wanna make sure I have that correct. And that sounds like a reasonable plan to the committee. I'll call on board on that. Yeah. Thank you. Len did you? Yeah, Jeff and I both had our hands up. Okay, I'm sorry. I thought you had your thumbs up. I apologize. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, okay, wait, wait, Jeff. I'm gonna go ahead Len. You go first. You go first. I'm sorry. Oh, I was just saying March 3rd is a long time away though. So there does, I think there's going to need to be some messaging if the Board of Health decides something, at least in terms saying, the Board of Health has decided X, the school department's process is X, Y, and Z and you will know what's happening the first week of March or whatever that week after break, we're just still gonna be masking, but our process will be X. Just an update because as soon as the Board of Health decides, people are gonna expect a decision from us. Michael, we need to have something out before we went on February break that clearly articulates where the schools are at and what our plans are. Mr. Thielman. I heard something along the same lines. Is that, and that is that if the, you know, with the Board of Health's meeting, when's their meeting next Tuesday, Wednesday? I can't remember. I think it's Tuesday or Wednesday. Can't remember exactly Wednesday. I think that's exactly right. If the Board of Health keeps the mask mandate on for indoor public spaces in Arlington, there's really nothing to do. It's all, you know, we don't have any, we can't go beyond that and we just can't do that. So if they remove the mask mandate, then exactly what Mr. Cardin said needs to happen, the public needs to know the process. And so either the superintendent says, we're gonna do whatever we're gonna do and we've authorized the superintendent to make a decision. And she announces what the plan is on February 28th or the superintendent says, I'm gonna be consulting with the school committee and discussing with them on March 3rd and nothing will go into effect until at least March 7th or whatever the first Monday is in March. So there needs to be some communication of the process. I think fairly soon after the Board of Health vote, if they vote to lift the mask, requirement indoors in public spaces in Arlington. If they don't, there's nothing to do. I'd like you also to consider Dr. Holman with several of the members brought up the fact that vacation with people going all over the country and traveling and stuff, we've had an uptick. So again, thank you. I'll set to move on. Okay, school calendar, first read. Dr. Holman, you got one more. By one more, I wasn't done yet. So you have a first read of a draft school calendar for school year 2022, 23 in Novus. You have two pages. The first page is a slightly reformatted or maybe not so slightly reformatted calendar that I welcome folks thoughts and feedback on both with regards to formatting as well as with regards to dates. And there are no significant really changes to the formatting of this calendar with the exception of the fact that the elementary early release is shifted to Wednesdays. And that aligns all of the early releases across our schools so that families don't have differing early release days if they have students at multiple levels across the schools. And we made that adjustment in collaboration with the AEA and think that that will allow us to do some more flexible planning with regards to professional development as well. We've changed a little bit of how we're sort of indicating where the conference dates are the early release conference dates as well as the non-early release conference dates, the dates that have evening conferences. We weren't able to move all evening conferences off of school committee evening dates and chances are they will also fall on top of dates where there are other events going on in the evenings. But we have tried to make sure that there are multiple opportunities for folks to get in and have their conferences with their teachers. The color coding is notable in that all of the yellow days, all of the days in yellow are early release days for those levels that are indicated with the letters that are subscript on each of the dates. And all of the gray days are days where there is not school. The teacher days are not grayed out because there is still school for teachers, but we could gray those out depending on the committee's feedback. So I welcome your feedback on the calendar and I'll stop talking. Anyone have a comment at this time? Mr. Schlickman. I just also want to note that we're planning our all day professional development day on the November election day as well. True. Ms. Hexton. Thank you. First I just want to say I very much appreciate the new layout. I like that the weekends are on there, that every date has a number on it. And the sort of the key is at the bottom. So I very much appreciate the new layout. I did want to, so there's just a few things that I want to make sure we make clear. So these K screening days in June, the current kindergartners don't come to school. And I think that that somewhere needs to be indicated that essentially the last day of school for kindergartners on the way this is written right now is June 15th with no snow days. So that was just one piece of feedback. Another piece of feedback was the all early release days. With monotomy and elementary schools getting out at the same time can be challenging for pickup. So I don't know if it's possible to have a 30 minute difference for monotomy just so that I'm sure it's a handful of families, but if you have a kindergartner and a preschooler that's hard to be in two places at once. Another thing I was just thinking about was the two early release conference days in January back to back. I don't remember that happening. I think with enough notice it's okay, but I just want to point out that it did sort of make me take a note and bring it up here that two days in a row feels like a lot when they get out early once every week. Sorry, and then you had met, sorry. So you mentioned the evening conferences on the school committee nights. So I will leave that out. And then the other comment was more for the committee moving forward. I know some districts approve the calendar more than like more than one year at a time. And I was wondering if that's something that, not for this year, but moving forward we could consider the policy talks about the calendar for the next year. So I don't know if it's something that we would have to change in the policy or if it's something that we could just agree to do, but it was just a comment that I wanted to make. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else at this time? Ms. Morgan. Maybe like a kindergarten box, like just like you're special in kindergarten and you're new and we're so happy you're here and you get your own box. So then it can just be like they're just, just look at the box. The other thing, where are we at in, so that the Wednesday early release is a change at the elementary level, which is fine. I was having a good laugh about it with the elementary principle where my child goes to school because we've both been here the exact same amount of time and we were like, God, way back when do you remember when we did this and that was wild? Anyway, here we are. Now it's like Wednesdays, which is fine, whatever. It's just a day, but a lot of people really coordinate their after school around that day, like everybody is now gonna want Wednesdays for after school care instead of Tuesdays. And I don't know where we're at with people picking their days for next year, but this, like, I don't know where we are. Like it's, I guess we're probably early enough, right? February 10th, that people will have time. Like the returning families are all of a sudden gonna all flock to Wednesdays, right? So I just wanna make sure that that doesn't catch people unawares. So we think we're okay with that, at least for the after school programs, like the ones that we run, they haven't had to pick their days yet. It's my understanding that we are ahead of that process. I will double-check that with Todd Morse. Okay, cause like a March 3rd approval of this, right? Means we're three weeks out from tonight to approve it. I mean, we can start sending signals that it's Wednesday, but I do think it's gonna come as a, you know, it's pretty, I mean, those early release days for elementary are pretty impactful, right? They're every week, they're the kids who don't walk home on their own for the most part, they need somebody to pick them up. So I just wanna make sure that at least those folks who need after school care, who maybe didn't have Wednesdays are going to be able to put in for that and not feel like the rug's being pulled out from under them. Other than that, oh, cause we're giving tiny suggestions, there are two schools that are in a different font in the bottom of the school list. There's two that are like in a Sarah font anyway. I'll email you about that. It looks great, otherwise. So I like it, I like the colors. So that's all the feedback I have, thank you. Ms. Dixon, did you wanna say something else? I just wanted to say that the, my understanding is that the families returning to after school need to put in their requests for days by the, by next Friday before the February break. So we do need to somehow spread the word that. Is it fair to say that the committee has no problem with moving it from moving it to this day of the week? Does anyone have any problem with the superintendent sending out a, hello, guess what we're gonna probably, high probability of what we're gonna do on March 3rd? Mr. Schlickman. I think the answer is to send out a notice to the community that we received as a first read a calendar that would involve a Wednesday early release, as opposed to a Tuesday, which is accurate. And I'm not really anticipating us to go and start meddling with the calendar. I also wanna address the issue of calendars being done a couple of years in advance. And I think that there's a lot of detail on these calendars that don't need to, but I think the community would love to know in advance what the overall structure is as in, do we have the same holidays as the previous calendar? Do we have, and vacations and what is the first day of school? And I know that that's subject to negotiation so that after our contract is resolved with our various unions, we will be able to make some more of a statement on calendars going forward beyond the fiscal 23 calendar. Thanks. Bill said to move on. Dr. Ampey. Sorry. Yeah, I think it's been our goal to have the calendar much done much earlier and even have it ahead for years now and it's just never happened. Just in terms of comments, I'm not sure we need to have the number of instructional days on the calendar for each month or I'm not sure what it, I'm not sure who needs that and I don't think parents care, but so it just, you know, it just cleaned it up a bit. That's all. That's all, thank you. Well said. Thank you. Monthly financial report, Mr. Mason. Thank you. I'll make this quick. Tonight, I provided you with, first of all, I'm sorry for providing you such a late report and I appreciate your understanding due to obviously working on the proposed budget that Dr. Holman and I presented this evening. The financial reports I have for you to review this evening is for period seven. It includes the general fund or town appropriation spending of the fiscal 22 budget and it includes the revolving fund. I will state that the revolving fund report is different than previously that I've included the way I've displayed at this time and it's more specific to just this particular report. I wanna show the beginning and ending balances, current snapshot to go along with your budget review. So, you know, there's a more holistic view or understanding of some of the revolving on spending. What I will say is that the general fund projected balance is around $1 million. Once again, as I stated before, it's been driven by vacant positions and special education added district tuition budgets. And I would say that if the budget holds up, which I believe it probably will, unless, you know, there's major storms or some other type of unforeseen expense to occur that the school committee would either vote at the end of the year to move into the special, move the balance of the special ed reserve fund since majority of that is tied to out of district tuition and or prepaid to approve, approve prepayment of out of district tuition for fiscal 23, using fiscal 22 funds. I open up for any, oh, and one more note, I'm sorry, going back to the revolving fund report. Also, I forgot to note that what's also different on that report, even showing those balances is that negative balances are actually credit balances because our system shows revenues as credits and they're shown as negatives. So negatives do not mean deficits on that report. Those actually mean positive balances. So just kind of flip your thought process on that. And I will now feed back to the chair for any questions from the committee. Any members of the committee have any comments or questions from Mr. Mason? Thank you, Mr. Mason. Appreciate 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 in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Warrant number 22171 in the amount of $680,201.65 meeting minutes from regular school committee meeting January 27th, 2022. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Roll call vote. Dr. Rampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Ms. Eksten. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. And I vote yes. Subcommittee and liaison reports. Budget committee. Dr. Rampe. Nothing to report at this time. Community relations. Ms. Eksten. Thank you. We met on Tuesday and talked with Dr. Holman and her superintendent intern about outreach around the heterogeneous grouping initiative. And so just shared some feedback about having some focus groups and other ways to answer families' questions about it and share some of the proposals that might be coming. So Dr. Holman is working on a communication about where the study group is or perhaps Dr. Janger and scheduling some community forums. We also discussed the school committee chat schedule for the spring. Their attendance had dropped over the winter and so we talked a little bit about potentially making some changes. The committee members that were there. So Jeff, Jane and I felt that the focus groups that had high attendance, we had good conversations. So we were going to keep the focus groups that were scheduled for the spring and then we consolidated or we'd like to consolidate two into one. So there'll be one fewer chat this spring. So I think I only need four more slots filled. So I will send out a sign up but some of you are going to get off the hook. And then the last thing is that this Saturday, February 12th at 11 a.m. there is a chat for LGBTQ plus families. And Mr. Schlickman and Dr. Allison Ampey will be there. Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, it's also turns out to be the day of the Democratic caucus and I'm running as a delegate. So I'd invite one of my colleagues to swap the date with me. Somebody will contact you, okay? Excellent, thank you. Thank you. Is that it, Ms. Ekston? It is, yes. Thank you. Curriculum Instruction Assessment Accountability, Mr. Cardin. And I think the report tonight, thanks. Thank you. Facilities, Mr. Thielman. No report on facilities. Policies and procedures, Mr. Schlickman. No meetings, but I'd just like to make a request in our agenda. I noticed that we said public participation. That was changed. File BEDH lists this as public comment. And so the future agendas should go with the language that aligns with their policy. Thank you. Let me say it for a whole year. Now you want me to fix it at the end. Thank you. Arlington High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. We just got noticed tonight that we have received the certificate of occupancy. It says, is issued to the town of Arlington, which means we own the building except for the auditorium. So the students can't take any pictures if they go in the auditorium, but they can take pictures if they were else. So we own Arlington Building Part D, Academic Wing floors two through five in Roof Building Part E, Performing Arts Wing floors two, three in Roof, temporary connector between part E and the existing Fusco Building, excluding part E auditorium in state. That's going to come in April. We all understand exactly where those places are. Thank you very much. I understand, I'm teasing it. And so by the way, it's a huge accomplishment due to the teamwork of an outstanding construction design project management team, great leadership by both Superintendent Holman, Superintendent Bodie. So lots of people had a lot to do and a great building. I drove around the building today and as you come out, as you're looking at it to the left side, all the new parking spaces that they've already got those outlined right there. It's really nice. Thank you for your work. February 28th, 10.30 a.m., right? Liz, that's February 28th at 10.30 a.m. I saw something today that said 11.30 a.m. So I need to clarify. Okay. Is it 11.30? Okay, so we need to get clarification on that. All right. Amy's shaking her head, so it's got to be, it's got to work. Yeah, 11.30, it's a delayed start. That's the first day. I mean, and there'll be, the other stuff isn't a public invite thing. Are there any liaison reports at this time? Any announcements? Any future agenda items? Okay, moving on, executive session to conduct strategies, sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and non-union personnel, or contract negotiations with union and non-union in which it's held in open meeting may have a detrimental effect. To conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which it's held in opening meeting may have a detrimental effect. Collective bargaining may also be conducted. Conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel, or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel. We will be adjourning from that meeting. We will not be coming back to public session. Roll call vote. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Excuse me. I have a motion to go into executive session. Oh, moved. Is there a second? Thank you. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, yes. Ms. Hexton. Yes. And I vote yes. Thank you, everyone.