 Good evening. Today is October 10th, 2013, and this is the meeting of the Arlington School Committee. My name is Judson Pierce, and I'm proud to chair this little engine that could hardworking committee. Yes, we are. Before we get started, I wanted to give our students a little bit of history. I see we have a student here tonight. I'm sorry I didn't get your name. Caroline from 10. Caroline? Thank you. Student rep. Linda Hansen from the AA, welcome. Thank you. So I wanted to give our students a little bit of history. On this date in 1963, the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests was signed by the United States, the UK, and the USSR. On this date in 1978, Steve Perry joined the rock band Journey. And also on this date in 1980, the Yankees lost 4-2 and were swept by the Kansas City Royals in the AL championship series. Just last year, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on G-protein coupled receptors. These dates in recent history remind me of something. And Mr. Haynor was around for all of those events. But seriously, students, it matters to focus. Excuse me, that was serious. Go ahead. Students, it matters to focus in your education and practice, practice, practice. Whether you grow up to be a musician, a diplomat, an athlete, or a Nobel Prize winner, or work in countless other important jobs, you have to start your practice now. Author Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers the Story of Success, repeatedly mentions the 10,000-hour rule, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, the matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Now, one thing our schools in Arlington promote is achievement and success through rigorous application of lessons and assessments. We'll hear a little bit about that tonight. But the work does not end when you leave the classroom. Students continue to apply your lessons in your daily life, whether you're in elementary school and you're keeping score at a Red Sox game, or middle school student, you pick up the paper, take notes of the current events, or you're in high school and you're applying lessons and civics to an internship that you have at an elected official's office. Keep the ball rolling so that this day in history can be read, and then in the year 2023, Arlington, Massachusetts native, Caroline, became the first person to, well, I'll leave that up to you, so that is my little chair speech tonight. Gonna stop talking. No, I'm not. There's some art on the walls that we have not introduced yet this school year. First, to my left, block prints, portraits, and insects, the student and Mrs. Muse's Art 2 class created a successful relief composition plate which developed into a numbered series of prints. Utilizing elements and principles of design, students were to develop contrast, texture, and balance, changing the paper surface before the printing process allowed for a range of diverse results. And you see examples of relief printing which is a printmaking process where protruding surface faces of the plate or block are inked, recessed areas are ink-free. Block printing was extensively used for decorative purposes such as fabrics, leather, and wallpaper, and woodblock printing. There's also examples of digital photography which I think is on that wall. Arlington High School's new digital photography course gives students the opportunity to learn a versatile media seen in all aspects of our daily life. This powerful and pervasive socioeconomic tool experienced so often through the internet, movies, television, and print media can also be a place of creative drama, poetry, and reflection. And the Art 1 Mrs. Robola class which I think is on that wall in the far corner, the pieces displayed are works created by students of mixed grade levels in the Art 1 course. In Art 1, students explore traditional media such as painting and imagine of drawing as well as non-traditional techniques like the use of embroidery and wire as a form of drawing. So thank you. Excellent pieces of art right in our room. 635, well it's a little after that. So I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce our assistant superintendent, Dr. Laura Chesson, who's going to be introducing some special guests for this evening. If I can have the three teachers that are here come to the table where the microphone is. As we all know we have many, many excellent teachers in Arlington and to their credit many of these teachers will share the work that they do with their colleagues not only in the school system, not only in the state but beyond. This evening it's my pleasure to introduce three teachers that are going to be speaking at conferences during the next school year. The first two teachers are Ann Marie Abbott and Nicole Melnick. Ann Marie is a fourth grade teacher at the Stratton School and Nicole is a first year teacher at the Thompson School and they are going to be speaking at the iPad Summit and they'll talk a little bit about their presentation. Hi, we wanted to start out tonight by thanking the school committee, Dr. Chesson, parents, principals and AEF for all the support that we've been given around technology in the many years previous. The opportunities that I personally have had for professional development began with the EDCOS summer courses in 2007. My experiences continued with state and national conferences such as the Allen November Building Learning Communities, the EdTech conferences and MassCue. Last year I was encouraged and supported by Dr. Chesson to be a presenter and I am excited again this year to have that opportunity with Nicole. We believe that sharing ideas makes more ideas and that the experiences that we have had collaborating with our colleagues in and out of the district has been instrumental in the current success of integrating technology in the Arlington Public Schools. Along with our colleagues we collaborate on a variety of different social media networks such as blogs, Twitter, Pinterest. We have joint YouTube channels where we share movies that we've created. Both Ann Marie and I have a blog where we communicate with our families, our parents and we look forward to sharing this experience in November at the iPad Summit in Boston where together we'll run a workshop where we share how student income is shared with parents and both colleagues. So we wanted to encourage you to visit the many teacher websites in Arlington that exemplify technology integration and we welcome you to visit our classrooms if you'd like. And finally we just wanted to say that we believe passionately that any funding that is available for teachers to pursue their interests for integrating technology goes a long way. Thank you. Any questions for Ann Marie and Nicole? Okay, the second teacher we have here tonight is Anita Cristina Calcutterra who is going to be presenting at the National ASCD Conference which is a curriculum conference and I'm gonna let her tell you a little bit about that. Thank you for having us tonight and I wanted to echo Ann Marie and Nicole's appreciation for the town and the organizations in town including the AEF. So Carrie Dunn and I have the great honor to represent the town of Arlington at the 69th annual ASCD which stands for Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development Conference. And as this organization is a global leader in developing and delivering innovative curriculum. And we are gonna be presenting the TeoCinti curriculum which I presented to you I think two years ago if you recall. And Carrie will also go on to do another separate presentation which I can talk about if you have a question about that. But the organization will have about 15 to 20,000 teachers and administrators at it and we're just thrilled to be able to raise Arlington's profile in the national education community. It's quite an honor to do that. So does anybody have any questions? Presentations. All three teachers are lead technology teachers in their building and they give extraordinary amount of support to the other teachers in their building for a very, very small stipend. All three teachers also helped us to run Tech University that was sponsored by the Arlington Educational Foundation this summer and we would not, not have gotten nearly as far with technology in the elementary schools without the help of these three women. I also wanna echo what, how proud we are that all of you are presenting at these major conferences because it's a great learning experience but as you were saying Anita, it also brings forth really the quality of the education that's going on in this district. I know that we probably said keep your comments brief so I knew you were holding to that but it might be very interesting for the committee just to hear like one or two of the technology integration uses that you're doing in schools today and of course Nicole is over at Thompson and you have the one to one right now which is maybe wanna just give us a little bit of some insight into what's going on in that. The, my most favorite thing that we've been doing so far this year is the Kids Weekly do a post on KidBlog and then their writing is published online, parents are going on and making comments to the children's writing, the children are making comments back, they're going through an editing and adding more to their writing. We've had a post from California, a post from Nebraska, just post from all over so writing is not just going in a folder and just I'm looking at after school, it's an ongoing digital learning community of writing which is just amazing. The kids sit there and write so many more details and add so many more words because they know so many people are gonna be reading their story so I'm really excited to see how that continues as the kids are able to write more and become more independent on the iPads. And you've used Skype this year too in your classroom? I did, we've Skyped with Louise Borden, an author who wrote off to first grade and we did it during the first week of school and she's actually gonna come visit us so the kids just feel very confident and it's amazing how many apps they're already able to use and what they're able to do on the iPads. And I could just quickly comment on that this year having a big focus on explain everything which is a creation app where the students are creating something that they can share with each other as a teaching tool and to show their thinking as an assessment for myself or their parents and they're really enjoying that, they just take this app and they can record and they can write their thinking, they can take pictures of work they've done, they're really, really excited and engaged every time they ask for it so it's a really great app that we'll be using a lot this year. So to progress from writing in first grade to fourth grade my students use a discussion board so that they have a prompt, usually about the literature that we're reading and then they discuss it as a class and they type it as a class, their response to my question and then they get to respond to other students' responses like a real discussion board. So this writing and being online sort of progresses into the virtual community that they'll move up into as they go to Autism in the high school so they'll do things online with each other. Also another great app is ScreenChomp so the students get just a very brief minute or two to explain a math concept and to draw it at the same time and then they can share with each other their ideas and how they're explaining things and it becomes something that they can, if a group decides that they like this one explanation they can project it up and talk about it. And Nicole and two other teachers from Thompson are now working with the creators of Scratch Junior which is coming out of the Tufts Research Lab and they'll be doing beta testing and they'll be actually teaching kindergarteners, first graders and second graders how to do computer programming. Mr. Thiel? This is very exciting stuff. What grades are we doing this now in? Is this in all elementary schools or? The Scratch Junior? Yeah. It's just being tested right now at Thompson. That's a Thompson. In a kindergarten classroom, a first grade classroom. And the other iPad work is just in, so we're just in Thompson right now? Just that specific Scratch Junior app that the other apps that they were talking about are being used at, I would say, all of the elementary schools. All the elementary schools, great. Every elementary school has that available to them either in a large capacity or a small capacity and hopefully everybody will have. And how widespread is the buy-in among all teachers? That's what I'm trying to get to. How widespread? We had a tech university over the summer and we ran a bunch of iPad 101s and I think altogether we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 150, 160 teachers that participated at grades K through eight. I don't think we had any high school teachers but we had K through eight. I would say from the emails that I get from teachers who wanna know if they can have this app or that app or why this app isn't on there or when is their Apple TV gonna be hooked up? I would say it's pretty widespread because the demand is very high. Mr. Hinner? I just wanna say as a former fourth grade teacher, I'm very, very jealous. I remember especially at the end of the year all the literature and stuff you'd make, printing it, copying it, putting books together. And the idea of right now, putting it together electronically, sending it home as a PDF and if parents wanna print it, they can print it and you have color and everything. I envy you and thank you so much. My kids love seeing their books in iBooks. They open up iBooks and their books are sitting on the bookshelf. It's pretty amazing for them to see. How do you see with respect to the typing on the iPads, the students progressing with that because I know that some of the assessments are gonna be moving towards that as a model. So how are they progressing with the keypad and keyboarding? I mean, I think it's going to be a process. But students today are very versatile. They're getting more and more used to touchscreen. So their touchpad capability, if it wasn't there, it comes very quickly and if they have it, then they actually get more expert and fluid in it. So yeah, I mean, I think it'll be a process. But they're all using them now. Yeah, I would think they're having more experience with typing than they would have had before the iPad. Yes, they are having more experience, yeah. That's great. Way more experience, yeah. Any other questions for everyone else? Let me just follow up on it. It is something that we've been talking about because actually, even though the park can be taken on an iPad, right now we've been told that a keypad will be required. So while we've had keyboarding, some schools still use the alpha board. We really do have to look into this because they can still, of course, do the hunt and pack, but we do need to have a more, a program across the district at earlier grades on keyboarding. I think that's gonna be something that we're, I know we are talking about it, we just don't have exactly what we're gonna do yet planned. They're all smiling because that's what we talked about today at the Tech Leader Teacher Meeting where that's gonna be our topic for our next meeting and we actually have an OT from one of the schools. Two OTs from some of the schools that are gonna talk to us about what their experiences are with a variety of typing teaching software so that we can pick the best one and we're gonna talk about what grade level that should go into. So that's gonna be our topic for our next meeting. I don't know if it still exists. We had one, it was for one, two, and three grades called the Wonderful World of Pause, P-A-W-S, and it taught keyboarding and by the time I got them to the fourth grade, it was pretty good. I don't know if it still exists, it was an Apple, now it's probably an Apple app. Miss harm? I actually wanted to ask, since you brought up keyboarding, when I see students use the iPad a lot of times, I see them do the split screen with the text modem, modus. Do you see that in the classrooms and is there any talk about perhaps they're not going to be used in traditional keep batting with these materials? I do not have a lot, I don't allow my students to, they have to do the keyboard. I haven't split screened them yet, so I'm not exposed to that. I haven't seen them use that. I had a student that tried it just because he thought it looked more like an iPhone, so he wanted to try it, but he quickly realized that this way was faster for him, so he changed back. I know children in my class use the stylus for their writing, so they're kind of using the fine motor in the same way. Some kids have the tripod stylus if they need some extra support for fine motor, so we are kind of using the traditional pencil grip, even though it's on the iPad too, which I know a lot of parents were really happy that we're still practicing the fine motor for pencil. Thank you. Great, thank you very much for coming in. Just one last comment. I just want to, oh, sorry. That what you need to understand also, and those of you that are educators know this, to be invited to speak at an ASCD conference or any of these major conferences is quite an accomplishment. They received hundreds, ASCD thousands of applications to present, and so to be chosen is really quite an honor, and congratulations to all three. Absolutely, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, moving on. I don't see any one interested in public participation. So our next item on the agenda this evening is diversity hiring report. Mr. Spiegel. All right, thank you. So I want to direct your attention to the blue sheet that I just passed. We just passed out. There was a couple of minor mistakes on the other sheet. So what you have in front of you is the report for diversity hiring from the past year, and what I'm, the data that shows is from October 1 of 2012 through this past September 30th, 2013, because the previous report from 2012 only captured through September of 2012. That being said, I mean, one of the highlights for us is that we have increased some of our diversity hiring this year through many efforts by the district, by all the administrators, by the superintendent and her diversity advisory committee, by our membership in the mass partnership for diversity in education and job fairs that we've hosted here at Arlington High School and follow up coffees that the superintendent hosted for applicants of color. So one of the, to highlight some of the positions that the employees of color who have been hired recently hold, I mean, they do, there are positions throughout the district. One thing that we had strived for is to increase employees of color who are in the classroom, who are teachers in the district under the teacher's contract. And to that end, we were somewhat successful this year. We do have a long way to go to increase our diversity hiring of the employees of the new hires this school year. We have three new teachers in the district who are black or African-American employees. One is a special ed teacher at the high school, one is a special ed teacher at the Stratton Elementary School, and one is a guidance counselor here at the high school. Of the new Asian employees hired this year, one is a teacher at the high school and the Autism, she is our Mandarin teacher, which is good to have someone, she is a native speaker and from China originally, but has lived in the United States for several years and is a good addition to the Orleans Public Schools now that we've brought Mandarin in full time as an employee here. And the two Hispanic employees who are newly hired this school year are actually both Spanish teachers. Actually, one is newly hired this school year, one was hired at the middle of last school year. And they're both Spanish teachers, one is a native Spanish speaker from South America and one was a teacher in another district and came to Arlington this year. Just wanna highlight a couple of the other hires we do have of our diversity hires. We have some cafeteria workers, some teaching assistants, one of our new building substitutes at the Audison and also some of our new, two of our new computer IT department employees who were hired about in the fall of last year after our report was issued last year, one is an Asian man and one is an African-American man. So we have, and they are in schools all the time they're in classrooms so the students get to see them and I think one of the goals that the Diversity Committee has and that we have as a district in our diversity hiring is to have people in the district who represent all of our students and that our students can see people who look like them and who can, and so that students who are not in the same racial or ethnic group can see people in professional and other positions in the district who are working in the world because that's the world that we live in and increasingly live in and I think our goal will continue to be to increase diversity hiring and to retain those employees that we've hired this year. All right, any questions from the committee on this? Mr. Spiegel, I just wanted to take the opportunity to read off what our goal is from the 2013-2014 school year which is goal four item two which pertains to this report which is the diversity of APS staff will increase from the 2012-2013 baseline in order to better reflect the diversity of our student population. So are we looking at the numbers from the 2013 report as our baseline for this coming year and these district goals? For the 2012. For the 2012 report. I was thinking we were looking at the 2012 report but to increase for this year. Good job, you're up 15. Next year I mean I guess there will be a similar increase. I mean we would have to, we would know whether that goal, I mean so we've definitely done, we've worked well on that goal if we consider it from last year we have increased from last year's baseline, the goal would be to continue to increase from the baseline for next year and about this time next year we would see how we do. Right. Are there any updates in terms of new hires so far since this school year has begun? So a couple of the people who are reflected on this report are new hires since this school year has begun. There were some late hires in September. One is, and two African American employees, one is a building substitute at the Audison. One is a teaching assistant at the bracket. There have been a few other new hires this school year, some late teaching assistant additions who are Caucasian. But so there hasn't been a lot of hiring in September but there have been a few positions that were added then. I just have to say a word thanks to the Superintendent's Diversity Advisory Committee who I've become knowledgeable being a liaison from the school committee with them and the hard work that they do and the meetings that they have with all of you in terms of expressing how we can increase these hires. So thank you to those folks who are out there who might be watching who are on the Superintendent's Diversity Advisory Committee and those of you who don't know much about them. It's wonderful. We're gonna be hosting another coffee I think to attract candidates to Arlington this year. We're going to host another hiring fair. We are gonna host the MPDE job fair in the spring and usually soon after that, which happened this year, we will host, we would plan probably to host a coffee again for our candidates and one of the candidates who we did hire was both at the MPDE job fair and came to the coffee and we hired that person. Great and I also saw something in the emails going around about letters going out and can you tell us anything about letters that are being drafted or sent out? I think right now at this time of the year, the lead in sending letters out is from the Superintendent's Advisory Committee directly, not from us at this point. We will send more letters out in probably in the winter, early spring to colleges and we've sent letters out in the past couple years to the historically black colleges and universities that hasn't resulted in a lot of applicants here but I think it's something that we would continue to do to see there are students at those colleges who are from the Boston area who might want to return here. The advisory committee is focusing on places of worship that are largely in minority communities but that is more appropriate from an outside group than from us as a public school district to send those letters out. When you say you send letters to minority colleges, if you send letters to non-minority colleges but addressing them to a minority office in those colleges. We've send, excuse me, yes, we send letters to the state colleges and universities in Massachusetts and other colleges in the area that we draw from and I know this is also an interest of the colleges and universities themselves. I think I've spoken with people at Leslie and other colleges and universities that they're trying to attract more applicants of color to go into ed programs at the colleges and universities and I will also say that I was at my associations meeting last Friday, the Mass Association of School Personnel Administrators and the whole topic of our meeting last Friday was on diversity and so this is an issue that districts across the state are dealing with because especially for licensed employees, educators in Massachusetts, there is not a large pool of people who, applicants of color who are graduating from the ed schools and taking the M-Tels and getting licensed, I mean, there is a number but it's definitely not as great as it could be and I think this is an overall statewide initiative that is gonna be coming forward to really increase the diversity across Massachusetts and you're gonna be hearing a lot more about that if you haven't already and the other thing I will mention that at this meeting we had last week, Dr. Betty Perkins who is the Executive Director of Today Students Tomorrow's Teachers presented the Today Students Tomorrow's Teachers Program to all the people who were in attendance. We obviously as a district participate in that program as does Brookline Lexington and Andover and Worcester Public Schools and soon to be the Boston Public Schools so we are there, the program is hoping to get into more public school districts in our area and we as a region just hired a new regional program manager for the TSTT program and we have agreed through the superintendent's agreed and the administration of the building, I wanna thank Matthew Janger and Bill McCarthy, the assistant principal of the high school for doing the work to find a location for the new regional program manager to work at the high school in Arlington when she's here. She's also gonna be on the road a lot visiting other schools and colleges and doing a lot of the work is on the road but we'll have a home base here. How many students do we have currently in that TSTT? Right now we only have four students in Arlington. We could add two more and we're trying to do that. We're trying to, through the teacher mentor and other staff at the high school, identify students who are interested in and qualified. They definitely, this is a rigorous program and the students in the program need to have strong academic potential and really it's a lot of work. Other questions? Dr. Allison? Yeah, I just wanted to commend Mr. Spiegel, the administration because the number, there was a really big jump in numbers that I think doesn't come across to our audience that we went from five new hires of diverse backgrounds in 2012 to 19 new hires this year. The total number of staff has gone up by over a third. I don't have my calculator to get exact numbers but the other thing I was wondering about is if you've talked to any of the new people that you've brought in about the different things that we've been doing as outreach and if any of those are particularly helpful or just to get a sense of the coffees were good or I feel like that. I have not done that yet. The Diversity Advisory Committee is planning to host a get together that's gonna be planned sort of mid-year for all the employees of color in the district to sort of get current employees who will then be current employees to sort of have some of those, an opportunity for social interaction and discussion about that. Great, thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome, thank you. Moving on, next item on the agenda is the MCAST data update reports. This piece of the agenda pertains to our district goals 1.1 and 1.4 and let me just read those out briefly. Students in grades K through 12 will learn mathematics and English language arts curricula that are fully aligned with the mass common core state standard CCSS. That's goal 1.1 and goal 1.4, this is all under student achievement. For our district students in the aggregate at each grade level tested in English language arts and mathematics will attain a student growth percentile of 51 or greater. The pleasure of introducing again Dr. Cheson who will lead us through this presentation. Thank you. One of the things that I would just like to start off with is to say that while we take this data extraordinarily seriously and we monitor it, we use it as just one of the many indicators when we look at student success across the district. So this evening we're gonna start out a little bit different than we might have in the past as we looked at MCAST data to really look at the accountability goals that were set by the school committee and the superintendent in this area to also look for I think the first time at analysis of individual school performance in terms of accountability. And then to talk about a comparison of our results to the state and also like districts do a detailed analysis of the subject area results and then give a little bit of summary and tell you how we're gonna move forward using the information that comes from this report. So as Mr. Thielman just went over there are two district accountability goals and one has us attaining an annual PPI of 75 or greater for high need students in every school and the other is to attain an SGP of 51 or greater at each grade level in the areas of ELA and math. But as the superintendent often reminds us and I think everyone echoes her sentiments, our overarching student achievement target is that all our level one schools will remain at their level one status and our level two schools will make progress towards level one and I think we have some indication tonight for several of the level two schools that they're on their way there. We talked a little bit the last time at the school committee meeting that we're looking at PPI or the progress and performance index. It combines two metrics, one of which talks about narrowing the proficiency gap and the other metric focus on student growth. There are two types of PPI. One is accumulative PPI, which is a weight of average of the last four years of a school's performance and then the annual PPI, which compares this year to last year. This will, the accumulative PPI will determine what accountability level that designate the school is given by the State Department of Education. And an important to note that some ratings are given if there are 30 or more students, some metrics are given if there are 20 or more and some metrics are if there are 10 or more. So one of those deals where you can't really tell players without a scorecard sometimes. Just to look at the overall district accountability data in the area of English language arts, the PPI was 75, so we're on target. Math 75 on target and science at 100. So we were above the target. Now to break that down a little further. To take a look at cumulative PPI by school and again this gives the accountability level, you'll see the PPI for all students and high need students for each of the schools in the district, the high school, Audison and the seven elementary schools. The asterisk besides Audison is that we've recently received notification that Audison has been in fact been moved to a level two school. The appeal was granted and we are now a level two district. So you'll see we're almost equally split among level two schools and level one schools. And I wanna remind everyone that 80% of the schools in Massachusetts are a level one or a level two school. This chart goes back to the goal that we saw before that all our high needs at every school, the annual PPI will be 75. The schools that are circled in red met that target for the last testing cycle. And we're gonna also address those school districts as we come forward that were level twos. Was there a question? Okay. So now we're gonna look at growth data a little bit. We talked about PPI. That was one of the school district accountability goals. And the second one has to do with growth data. This is the overall growth chart for English language arts for the entire district. The goal here for schools would be to have a bubble that relates to that school and the upper right hand quadrant, because that would represent schools that are high growth and high achievement. So that would be our ultimate goal for all our students, schools to have the bubble that represents that school, because each one of the bubbles on that chart represents one of our schools in the school district. And as you can see, the vast majority of our bubbles are in the quadrant we'd like to see them in. And when we look at the same chart for mathematics for all of the schools within the district, again, each bubble representing one school, we again, the vast majority of our schools are in the higher growth, higher achievement. So when we look at SGP by grade, we look for ELA in math, with the exception of the three groups that are there highlighted in red. The schools are making the, at each grade in each subject area are making the 51 target. The grade, the SGPs that you see for grades four and five are the mean or the average of the median SGPs for all of the elementary schools. At grade six, I know that's been a concern of the school committee in the past. We did see significant improvement from last year. We still have some work to do, particularly in the area of high need students. That's what is one of the drivers behind that not being 51, but it is an area where we have a plan and I'll talk about that in just a moment. In the seventh grade, we didn't meet the target in English language arts, but again, the driver behind that is the high need students and their growth, specifically their growth, and we'll talk about that in a moment. And lastly, the high school fell slightly short in the area of mathematics and we'll discuss that in detail in a moment. SGP by elementary schools, you'll see this, that when we break it down by elementary school to grades four and grade five, where you get SGP, you'll see that with the exception of Thompson, the grade five math, all of the elementary schools individually hit the target. So we talked a little bit about the concern about autism, so I wanted to display this chart to you. So you can see the growth that we've had, particularly in the area of English language arts. Again, with one exception of that one grade, the other two grades are in the higher growth, higher achievement quadrant. With mathematics, we made significant progress again, as we said this year, with most of the grades again in that upper right hand quadrant. So how do we compare when we look at our growth to other school districts? And this comes from what the State Department of Education would interpret as like school districts. And when you'll see, when we look at the median SGPs in the fifth column over, that we are better than some and slightly less than others. However, when we look at the percentage of low income students, our results are as good or better than schools that have the same amount of district of low income students. When we look at math for comparable districts, about the same results is what you're saying. Okay. So as we said in the beginning, our goal is for all our level one schools to maintain their level one growth and for our level two schools to increase to a level one or to increase their performance towards a level one. So I wanna talk briefly about the level two schools and the action plans for this year. I think this graph really shows the trajectory of the Stratton school, which will be the first school that we'll talk about. If you look at the increase that they've had in their annual PPI for their high needs students, it's exceptional. Excuse me. Yes. Could you define high needs? High needs would include all students that are low income students with disabilities, students who have ELL or students that belong to a minority group and they don't double count a student. So if a student would be low income and ELL, they would only count once. And because they belong to an ethnic group, they would fall into this? It depends on the other fact. Nope, Mr. Staleman. No, ethnicity is going to be removed from the high needs. High needs is strictly defined as ELL, SPED, or free and reduced lunch. I apologize. I stand corrected. If you belong to two groups, which group is? Because you have to have 30 or more, right? Yeah, if there were enough students, you could be reported in both of the groups, but you would only be counted in the high needs student group once. You wouldn't double count a student is what I'm saying. OK. We're only accountability on all and high needs. So you don't get a second language learner, Hispanic, free and reduced lunch kid being counted three times. Correct. Thank you. Thank you. So when we look at the detailed analysis for Stratton, in English language arts, we showed some progress in student growth. We received bonus points for decreasing the percentage of students at the warning level. And in math, we again showed some progress in student growth and received bonus points for decreasing the percentage of students at the warning level. So our plans for 2014, through this year, as you remember through the budget cycle, we now have math coaches at the elementary level. And we've had moved our reading personnel to also focus on literacy. So our literacy and math coaches will work with our teachers to use what we call our win block or what I need block, also sometimes referred to as the flex block, to provide additional enrichment activities for students at the benchmark to move them to advance so that we'll get bonus points in that area. We'll also have these coaches working with teachers to plan intervention activities for use also during that block to continue to raise the performance for our students that are at needs improvement or warning level and also to increase student growth for students in the low growth area. So we'll be working, and you'll see this in every area, we'll be working at a very detailed level with the teachers and the administration in these buildings to identify those students who have either low performance and or low growth. That will be something we'll be really focusing in on this year. But in addition, we also want to move those students who are at benchmark to advanced, not only to get the bonus points, but because that's our goal for student achievement. This is the graph of the Pierce PPI over time. Again, you'll see over the last three years that have a significant trajectory. Although the vast majority, you can only get 100 points. They actually did score 113 points. And they are also headed in the right direction. They received points for narrowing the achievement gap in English language arts. They received bonus points for both increasing the students at advanced and decreasing those students at warning. In math, they made some progress in narrowing the achievement gap, and they received bonus points again for increasing the percentage of students at the advanced level and decreasing the percentage of students at the warning level. For 2014, again, we would like our math coaches to work with teachers to plan intervention activities for use during that wind block to continue to raise performance for students in needs improvement to the proficient level. And we plan to identify students with low SGP and plan interventions for each of those students with the teachers, and we'll be monitoring the progress towards this, yes. Regarding the wind block and the plan for 2014, is it akin to trying to put an RTI program for math in these elementary schools? Yes, but the services for RTI with the exception of one of the elementary schools that has, appears actually, that has a Title I person that's working in their schools, everyone else at every other school, the intervention is provided by the classroom teacher, but the coaching as to what should be included in that intervention is provided by the coaches. So the coaches will work with the classroom teachers to develop their capacity to do the interventions. And responses to differentiation and instruction as well? Yes, sir. What is wind block? What I need? What I need. Mr. Hannah, the intervention, does the person that's working with the teacher, they tooling it to the individual needs of the child, or is it a generic help or plan? No, it's tooling to the individual needs of the child. And the teachers might work together, so say there's several teachers at grade three. They would look at the data, and not only just from the MCAS, but from the common assessments that we have, and determine which students perhaps were on benchmark, which students were above benchmark, which students were below benchmark, perhaps reorganize those students during this wind block so that different teachers take different groups of students, and in some schools this is actually happening during the main topic time for that school. Are all the schools in sync in terms of wind blocks during the? They all have a wind block. They're not all at the same time? No, each grade and each school has it all at the same time, but not all fourth grades across the district. At that time. At that time. So it's just once a week? Once a day. Once a day. Once a day. Right. And that's also time when students can receive ELL services or special education services should their plan require pull out, although our model now is to have much more push in than pull out. This is the graph for Thompson, which is also a level two school, but as you can see, although there was a slight dip in 2012, the overall slope of the graph is on its way up. This year at Thompson, they had some points that they received for narrowing the achievement gap. They received bonus points for increasing the percentage of students at the advanced level and they were above target for student growth in English language arts. In math, they received bonus points for increasing student at the advanced level and they were on target for student growth. Among our plans for them for 2014 will be to use our literacy and math coaches to work with teachers to plan intervention activities during the wind block to continue to raise performance for students in needs improvement and warning levels. So as you look at through the plans for 2014, you will see that we analyzed where they did receive points and where they didn't receive points and in many cases suggested interventions with the, that we'll be working on with the teachers and the administration to look at those leverage points for the points that they missed. This is the graph for Thompson, I'm sorry, middle school of the annual PPI over time. This year at Audison, they were on target for student growth in English language arts. They received points for narrowing the achievement gap in math, they received extra credits for reducing the percentage of students at warning level in math and were on target for student growth. And in science, they received extra credit for increasing the percentage of students at advanced. Our plans for 2014 are to have coordinated efforts on literacy across all subject areas. And this past summer, teachers from English language arts and social studies met and focused on work in the area of academic vocabulary that they will be using across all of those subject areas. We also will have coaches to work with math teachers to expand differentiated curriculum. We did a little bit of work last year on differentiated curriculum. We're gonna really expand that this year. And identification of students whose achievement gap is persistent and develop intervention plans for those students. Yes, sir. What's the difference between on target and met target? My typing. It's the same thing, yes, sorry. I mean, I've seen it going back. Well, we try to not bore you. So I was trying to use a different way to say the same thing. Mr. Thielman, do you have a question? No, I just, I'm sorry. Can we just go back to the previous screen for a second? And just coach me through this if you would, the 2012 high needs number versus the 2013 high needs number. So there was a decrease in the PPI for 2012 to 2013. And did we lose students? Did they go up? No, the points that we got decreased. That's not the number of students. These are points. And so there was a decrease in the points from last year to this year. The maximum is over 100, right? The maximum is 100. The high needs students didn't do as well. Right, the high needs students did not do as well in 20, yes. And this is all throughout the middle school. It's sixth, seventh, and eighth. That's correct. That's for the entire school. Yes. Questions? Mr. Schlegel? Just to point out, this is a weighted average when you calculate the accountability score. 2013 is 40% of the score. 2012 is 30%, 2011 is 20%, and 2010 is 10%. So when you go and take that weighted average, that is the score that's reported out. So a 60 is below the 75, but it's not hurting you like the 40 does. But that 40 is gonna weigh out less next year. So a strong effort next year in the 90 area, they could hit their cumulative PPI next year. So in other words, our points in 2013 were over 60, but it's 60 because you're weighing in the other years? No, this is the annual. When we calculate the cumulative PPI, which determines the accountability rating, which is level two for this school, what Mr. Schlegelman is saying is that to calculate that, you take 60 and you multiply it by four, you take 90 and multiply it by three, you take 40 and multiply it by two, and you take the 70, you add that all up and divide it by 10, and that will give you your cumulative PPI. Mr. Sturks? I'm sorry, I'm gonna go back to the annual PPI over time by school because I'm realizing that we're going over the schools that are level two schools. Yes. But my concern, I have a look at Brackett and it's PPI went from 113 in 2012 to 38 in 2013. That's correct. And we're in the process of working with the school to determine that. I mean, in my initial analysis. It's not like a math error, except that I see Pierce to the opposite. I know it's possible, but I... These numbers are volatile, particularly the small populations. Right, and remember that's a high needs, which is a small number of students at that school. So a couple of students one way or another, as Mr. Schlegelman has said, it can be very volatile. Dr. Allison? Plus, I would think if you get extra points by increasing the numbers, if you're the closer you're pushing them higher scores, you're going to lose those extra points the next year. That's correct. If all your students were at advanced, you would not be able to get any points at the advanced level. If all of your students were passing and there were none that were failing, then you couldn't get the extra points for being in that. So yes, you would lose both the... That's correct. So there's some funky stuff going on with those. Exactly. Just one other thing is the reason why they do that over four year time is because of the inherent volatility of one year. So that one bad year isn't going to croak you, one good year isn't going to get you out of jeopardy. But over, it trends over time, four years are pretty accurately reflected by this. And you can move your numbers pretty quickly year to year. So it's probably a much more accurate picture of what's going on in terms of the accountability measure than the old system was relying strictly on CPI. So in terms of our district goals, Paul, would you say that we should in the future look to making it cumulative rather than annual? I mean, we wrote into our district goals the annual staff. Well, we wrote in the annual purposely because there are a couple of schools that would have been extremely hard to make the cumulative based on what happened two or three years ago. But you had the annual in there, I think was more helpful given last year's data. I would rewrite it this year so that they either make annual or cumulative. So that the reason why we'd wanna go and put the annual on is for a school that had a low cumulative, you really wanna reward that year's effort in terms of moving it up. But if they're above 75 that year, I mean, you can't really penalize them in accountability for previous year. But if they sustaining a cumulative, even though they may have dropped down to 60, that's okay, that could be statistical noise. But so that either or, I think, would be an appropriate way to go forward for next year. Ms. Hyde? I think we should probably have more discussion about that because there are some reasons where we might only wanna look at the achievement a certain school makes in a year and also not have it muddied by whatever happened three or four years ago. A goal is a goal for a year and sometimes beyond. I think that people who are listening to this, to some extent maybe shaking their heads at how complex this has become. And it has become very complex and I think that it's important that you look at this as one piece of information and that's how we're looking at it. What kind of a story does it tell us the things that we need to be improving? You can look at student achievement in terms of a number of students that are at the advanced level in a school and in fact, as we're working with some of the goals in different schools, that's actually in some ways a metric that I'm particularly interested in is the number of students that achieve at that level. But there are other types of metrics and some of the things we'll talk about in Superintendents Report in terms of their achievement in music and art and athletics. I mean, we don't want to as a district ever lose sight of the fact that we are teaching children who are growing and improving and that we're looking at them as whole people and not numbers and I do, while I think that I agree with Mr. Schluckman that this is a better measure than we've used in the past with AYP because what was happening is some of your most high-performing schools were not making their AYP. Well, you know what? That's still happening even with this metric. We have some very high-achieving schools in the Commonwealth that are, might not be making the PPI, their target scores. It's, but what I think it does for us and is thinking about, well, how can we improve? What can we do? What can we learn from this as we go forward? And that's the spirit and the reality of how we're approaching this in all of the work that we're doing in schools. Not, it's just part of a whole picture. Mr. Filman. So one point I want to, what I was thinking of is that the, any of the reports you're seeing surprise you because, and here's the context of my question, the sometimes in my own work when I get reports back on, when I get test data back I look at it and I'm like, you know, it doesn't surprise me because we had turnover in a position or we had a new teacher or we had someone who struggled with an intervention plan. So I guess that's my question to you is, does this sort of validate some of the assumptions you already had of some of these schools and some of these populations in terms of high needs populations? I think that in the area of math, particularly at the middle school, it validated that we were making some of the progress that we wanted to make. I think it also validated, although we have a high percentage of students that are proficient and advanced at the high school, that there's a small percentage of students that we need to do a better job with. So I think it validated those things. I think that particularly in the area of ELA at one of the grades at the middle school, we think perhaps underestimated slightly the persistence of the numbers of students that were having difficulty in the high needs group in ELA. And the teachers did a lot of work this summer that I think that's gonna address that. They would have done that work anyway in order to proceed towards the common core. But I think it's actually quite provenant that we did that. I think that's the most important outcome of this because you can get lost in these numbers. You can get in a big debate about what never means or nothing. But at the end of the day it comes down to people and whether or not people are meeting the expectations we have for them or we're giving them appropriate support professional development too. So I think that's, I just wanna make sure, it sounds like you are doing this, that you're using this data to validate assumptions you have about the people that are teaching our kids. We did some exceptional professional development in the area of mathematics at the middle school last year. We gave four days for each grade level of the teachers during the school day to work together. They developed, they looked at their scope and sequence. They short up areas of their curriculum. They developed common assessments and we're starting to see the fruition of that. I think that as we move forward and we begin to really look at that data of the common assessments and have that feedback loop from that, that we will know as we go along through the year that we have made the correct decisions and not be sort of holding our breath as much when we get to these results. Good, that's good. Can I, I have one question too. I'm going all the way back to where there were different towns and I just wanted to ask about the group of towns. Are those from the DSE DART program or I think it's great that we seem to be measuring up to them because when I look at that group of towns in my head, I think we're way below their average income household wise and given the influence that household income can have on achievement, I think it's we're achieving something, the fact that we're comparable, we're making up a lot of distance that was pushed by the household income that these other towns are bringing to their students. Certainly, I think that's a good point and I would say a number of those towns also have per pupil expenditures that are quite significantly larger than ours. So I think that those two things both come into play here. So yes, well you might look at that and say, well we're not higher than so many of them given those two factors that you just mentioned, but I think that that's very extraordinary. Yeah, and so are these from the DART or they? They would be either school districts that would be close by or as well as school districts that if you look for the vast majority of them, they're about with the exception of a new unit, they're about the same size. Okay. Most of them, not all of them, but many of them are also edco districts. So it's just sort of a group of districts that would be about that. Okay, okay, sorry. That's okay. And finally, the high school, as you can see they're pretty above the target all have been above the target all along. Again, the slope of the line is what we would like to see. They received their points for narrowing the achievement gap and student growth. They received bonus points for decreasing the percentage of students that failing. Again, we have a high percentage of students at advanced, so it's tough to get the bonus points there, but that is something we're working on. And in math, we met the target for student growth. In science, we're above the target for narrowing the achievement gap. Some exceptional progress in the area of science at the high school this year in terms of narrowing the achievement gap. And we received bonus points for decreasing the percentage of students that failing. We have restructured what the lower level classes look like. I promise Matt Coleman, the director of math that I would call this to your attention. He has sort of cut down on the class sizes, not sort of, he has cut down on the class sizes in the lowest level classes, which did require him to make the upper level classes larger, but felt that that was a need that we really had. He has coordinated vocabulary, we're coordinating vocabulary instruction just as we are in the middle school across subject areas and really focusing on an increase in academic vocabulary. And there was last year, and we'll continue to be additional PD and coaching on the differentiation of instruction at the, particularly in the area of math. So now we're gonna move on to results by subject area and we're gonna first look at the district's performance in English language arts. In each of these charts we'll be comparing the district percentage of students at advanced and proficient to the state percentage of students at advanced and proficient. And what we'd like to call your attention to here is the continuing gap in most areas at most grade levels between our percentage of proficient and advanced and the state, which means that we're consistently above the state in terms of the percentage of proficient in advance. That's third grade. At fourth grade, we saw a slight spike last year in LA, but again, even though it went down a little bit this year, we went down this year, we're still just a little bit, I'm sorry, the spike was last year at the state. We are still above the state average. Not been there. Is that funny? Yeah, I'm not really sure. The state, not funny, the way that. It could have been the test, yeah. In grade five English language arts, again, still, we saw a really nice bump up in the proficient in advance from 81% to 89% with a similar gain at the state, but less so than the district. I mean, we look at, go ahead, question. I think it's really nice. Is there any, do we look at any of the thing, in other words, the current fifth, the fifth grade that was reported here, do we look at the fourth grade, prior year to see if there was a difference in ability? In other words, you have a high achieving fourth grade who now becomes in the fifth grade, and that bump up, not to take anything away from the teachers and the instruction, but if your population, yeah, a higher achievers in the prior year. Right, actually, this year, we've done that in the past. We've done the through line from a particular class, and in fact, we can do that again in the interest of tonight in terms of what we were doing. We went back and focused on the accountability, since that's such a, something that the committee had decided as an important goal, but we can't. We can show you some through line once. I'm not asking you to do any extra work. I just want to put things into perspective. There's credit to the programs of working there, but you can also, your population can help you along with your increase as well. That's all right. And that is definitely one of the first things we look at if we see a decrease. If we see a decrease, we want to look at the history. We want to look at the history. We want to see if there's some additional information. Again, in grade six, we're significantly above the state. We had just a slight drop and as did the state. Pretty much the same thing as we see at grade sevens, slight increase in ours, a slight increase in the state, but still a difference. As we start to get closer to the eighth grade level, you'll see that the numbers sort of get a little bit closer, slight decrease for us, but a slight decrease for the state. And as we get into grade 10, because of the high stakes testing and the emphasis on grade 10, it's across the state you tend to see the best results at grade 10. And you'll see that we're about 97%, proficient in or advanced. It's gonna be pretty hard to get that last 3%. We're working on it. It's so amazing how closely it matches the state, which means that it is really sometimes the test, right? That's correct. Because that really is amazing how close. There's not how close they are, but how closely aligned the lines are, you know. But this one is also the do or die one, right? Yeah, that's correct. This is do or die. As I said, high stakes testing can have an impact. Yeah. Maybe the test and also maybe just general improvement across the state. That's true. There's a consistent growth from the year 2001. I'm trying. I know, I know. I'm recognizing the chair, you know. I thought we were supposed to do that. Miss Lyme. Thank you. I just wanted to point out that at the elementary levels, we're almost consistently 20 points above the state. And at the 10th grade level, I know that the state's numbers do inflate. So while we're high achieving, they're getting closer to us because we do have those students that also have chosen not to continue their activity careers that perhaps we're struggling at the lower level so there are multiple reasons why the state's numbers do get bumped at that rate. What I'm a little concerned about is the fact that at the middle school, though, we don't maintain that 20% above when it still is all our students compared to all the state students. And I'm wondering if there's any thoughts on whether that's the changes that have been made will allow that 20% gap to then take hold in the middle school or other factors that you feel might be affecting that? There's a number of plans that we put together as I talked about before for the middle school, particularly in the area of having the same vocabulary in terms of writing across this year in social studies and English language arts, but next year to also piggyback science and then filing mathematics. I think that when students hear the same vocabulary around writing the same expectations of use of evidence, the same academic vocabulary terminology, what does it mean to synthesize? What does it mean to analyze? Students truly understand that. I think that we're going to see an improvement in our scores. Do I know if it's gonna be the 20 point target that we're having at the elementary school? I certainly can't say that, but that is our target. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it seems that there's more focus being paid to students approaches to nonfiction writing. And particularly in the area of open response questions where students are required to use evidence and the expectation for using evidence is quite high in the middle school. And as we move forward to the park, it's gonna be even more critical. So that's really where an emphasis, and I'm not saying that they're not doing that in science because I actually have been in science classrooms where I hear teachers asking for evidence, but the particular attention for the professional development this summer was between English language arts and social studies. Okay, and that's the other piece where our science assessments, our students consistently do quite well on, so it's the ability to, I guess, cross those skills from core content into their ELA areas as well. Yeah, in ELA and social studies, the students ask to usually take evidence from a written passage as opposed to in science where it might be from the concept, and so I think that's where the difficulty lies, and that's what we're attacking. Thank you. This compares the students from the district and from the state at each grade level scoring advanced, and the arrows that you'll see there are arrows where we're significantly above the state average, and as was just discussed at the 10th grade level, it becomes closer together because the state's numbers are significantly higher. Again, this is a high stakes testing, and this is the percent increase over the last eight years. So our highlights for ELA, the Hardy Elementary School was first out of 879 students, schools, I'm sorry, in grade five, English language arts. Bishop was fifth at grade five, and Bishop's students were taught by both Bishop and Thompson teachers in blended classrooms with Thompson students. The data is separated, but the students were in the same classrooms. At the bracket, they were 13th out of 955 students in grade three, which puts them in the top 1%, and grade five was in the top 2%. At Dallin, they were also in the top 10% at grade three, and Thompson Elementary School, grade three students who were taught by teachers from a variety of schools and blended classrooms scored in the top 7% in ELA, as well as we see outstanding scores from Straton, grade five, and actually, Audison Middle School was in the top 14% for grade eight ELA, and the top 16% in grade seven ELA, and the top 12% in grade six ELA. So these would be some outstanding performances in the area of ELA. Moving on to mathematics, again, the same charts that show our percentage of advanced and proficient versus the state's percentage of advanced and proficient. At grade three, we see that we saw an increase while the state was pretty much level. A, at grade four, we are still above the state. There was a bump last year, went down a little bit this year, and we'll be looking at that decrease and why that might have happened in working with the fourth grade teachers. At grade five, we're still above the state. We saw some small amount of increase and as well as the state did. That would follow us to the next. At grade six, we saw an improvement as we discussed earlier, and there was a slight improvement across the state. Grade seven, still that 20, and in this case, there is a 20 point difference between the state and the district. And in grade eight, again, a significant difference between the district and the state in terms of percent of proficient advanced. And finally at grade 10, this is again where we see that we have 89% of our students at proficient advanced, and the state is at 86%, and for many reasons that we've already discussed. Our highlights for math, the Thomson Elementary School Grade Three students, again, who were taught in blended classrooms, scored in the top 5% in math. Audison Middle School, was in the top 12% for math, the top 13 for grade eight, the top 13% for grade seven, and the top 18% for grade six. The passing rate for grade 10 was at the high school for math, and that would be everybody in the needs improvement and above would be 98%. And Bishop, Brackett, and Hardy all scored in the top 8% in grade five. One question. Does the blended classroom, does it tell you, does it inform you anything? Because it's interesting that that popped up twice, both in the LA and math. I know that's not something that we can replicate on a yearly basis, but. I think there, I put that in there. There had been some concern expressed when the district made the decision to have blended classrooms in terms of how that would be affecting achievement. And clearly that's not the case. And I think another point that it makes is that we have great teachers in all of our schools. And I think that that is another thing that this demonstrates that different students in one school taught by teachers in another school, great results. Do you think there is something to the students in their learning when it happens to be students of another school around them or different environment? I mean, does it tell us? I think that our students have always benefited and every school that had the blended classes will say that that was a very positive experience to have that. And yet initially there was actually quite a bit of resistance to it. And I think it was the level of resistance and about this, which is why it's just pointed that out. Because I think it, yeah, I think it is great too. I appreciate all the work and everything that's done and everything, which you're reporting the top two categories. You're not reporting tonight the warning needs improvement. I'm concerned about that in the math. Again, at the middle school, because it's 20% plus when you add those two together. There is growth and there's no question to that. And I am truly appreciative. And it's good to have knowing that we're having such a high achieving group of people, but we also have to be aware of those that aren't achieving high. And I got a copy of a piece of paper that I pulled out of the MCAS thing and the website and 25% at the eighth grade, 28% at the seventh grade and 22% at the sixth grade needs improvement or warning. It's been a consistent concern of ours. Just sharing that. Right, and that is not that that is discounted because that's reflected in the other measures that you're talking about. So I'm not poo-pooing what you're saying. I think it is a definite concern. It is why at the high school, we decreased the size of the lowest level classes. It is why we have restructured the support for math at the middle school, why we will continue to do that. It's why we have made sure that those who are doing math support or teaching special education classes, math sections of special education classes at the middle school are involved in the professional development for them with the regular education math teachers. So yes, I totally agree with you that we have still have a long way to go. You go back and compare the 10th grade ELA scores. They're in the top 90%. 90% plus of our students are there. We look at the math ones, they're at the 85th percentile. I know every child cannot get 100% all the time. I recognize that. As long as we're aware, but tonight we're discussing the top two groups. I think in this forum we need to discuss all the groups. That's all I'm saying. One of the metrics that I look at is relative rankings because when you simply look at the chart that you produced, it does raise issues. And there's certainly things that we're concerned about. When we look at PPI scores, it raises issues. But then when you also see that middle schools across the state are seeing sort of a parallel experience, with the exception of the school Ms. Stark teaches in, that you realize that there are other perhaps issues with this that is not even our students specific. It may have a lot to do with the type of mathematics that we're having students learn at the grades that we're having them learn it. Are all students prepared for the level of abstraction that really becomes very much more part of the seventh grade math curriculum? And I think that these are questions that are being discussed and looked at everywhere. So each one of these metrics gives you an insight into some aspect of this. And then you sort of have to put the whole thing together a little bit and look at, well, that's why those relative where our math students are with relative the state is, you wouldn't expect, I guess, from those numbers in the chart to see that we're in the top 10 to 15, 18% in the state. So you have to say, okay, let's take a look at this. And we have, we really have really looked at our math curriculum and of course, everyone is trying to and have aligned with the Common Core State Standards, which addresses some of these issues as well. So what you point out is absolutely correct, but it's also just part of a whole picture. Mr. Schlickman. I mean, it's really tough looking across tests because the fourth grade test is the hardest of all the tests statistically. And the 10th is the easiest. The thing that really is a district measures what we're doing is the value we're at it as the growth score. And the state average would be 50. The state standard for PPI is hitting 51st percentile or above. If you're above that 50th percentile, you're above the state average in how much you're moving a child. The analogy would be if a child moves into the district previous year was a warning and you move that child into moderate to high needs improvement. On one level, you're looking at a student who's not proficient, on another level, you're looking at a child who's got very high growth. And if we're measuring the effectiveness of the school system, it's not what they knew when they walked in the door, it's how much you added to them, which is why that growth number is probably the most powerful analytical tool to see if we're doing fine or if there's something out of alignment. And it could be a curriculum out of alignment as well, because if you happen to be not aligned well with the state curriculum for a year, your growth could drop and it could pick up again the next year when you return to alignment. There are things you can look into it, but we've seen positive movement growth, that worrisome fifth grade growth, sixth grade growth that we were looking at the Odyssey moved this year, so that's been a very positive outcome. And generally speaking, we're above 51, so these are all fairly healthy signs. Some of it's nuanced, but from a policy level here, I think that comparing what we did this year to last year, we saw administration that looked at the data and was strategic about moving the data and I would anticipate the same thing happening for next year. Ms. Hansen. So what I'm interested in is actually the fact that these charts show at the 10th grade level is the one I'm looking at, data from 2001 to 2013. So what happened over a 12 year time span? And in 2001, an ELA, 68% of Arlington's kids were proficient or advanced, and by this last year 97% were, so that's a 29% increase over 12 years. But what I'm interested in about this is flashing forward to the new park assessment system and the fact that 1994 was when the first state standards came into play few years later is when we had our first MCAS tests. 2001 is about when the MCAS tests stabilized as a test in terms of the first few years there were a lot of really wacky reading levels at different levels and things like that. So I just think this is an interesting retrospective to keep in mind as we go forward, brand new standards, brand new testing system coming into play. These numbers, the 68% in ELA and the 63% in math, that's seven years into the last major reset of the standards. So I just think we need to keep talking about expectations going forward and what brand new standards and brand new assessment systems do to a whole educational system. So just, I thought it was interesting in light of that. Yeah, on that question, is it gonna be easily comparable? The new, I am, of course. You're asking my opinion. You know, I think that's really, really difficult. And I think, you know, I think there are some, there are going to be some efforts to try and compare the two. And I think we just need to be really careful about the statistical, you know, as we get further and further away from the actual tests and how kids do, some of these numbers start to get into, I'm gonna call it crazy land, but you know, I think we just need to always be really careful about the statistics and not just take it as face value. We need to really understand the numbers, understand how they're derived, understand if they're really, you know, really think about, are they really meaningful numbers for us? Another interesting point, I think, is that when this all started, the overall goal was get every child to proficient or advanced. 97% is, you know, where we're at in English and 89% in math, so that's great. But it took, you know, almost 20 years. And now we're upping the bar with the new Common Core Standards. Great, you know, we're all up for this, but we need to really think about what happens when the testing systems come in and is everyone's trying to catch up to all of this. So. One last question. Tonight, the first presentation we had were three teachers coming in talking about creativity and expansion and letting childs think on their own and things like this. And these types of tests are really putting people in boxes and structured and stuff like that. The new testing comes coming up. The advertising that it's talking about supposedly is gonna do both, I don't know. I hope that the state, here's what Ms. Hansen just said and we all here are too, that with the new things coming, it may take a dip. And not because we're not doing a good job teaching, not because that teaches on it working hard, it's a new thing. And we have to, I agree with Ms. Hansen, we have to be prepared for this. And the public has to understand this too. Mr. Schlicker. You know, it's just an indicator and you need to use it wisely. You need to look at trends. You need to get the realistic information. There's a lot more going on as well. When we go to park, they're burdening half of the classrooms in the state it seems with pilot testing for the park. And it's a huge burden but the reason why is they want to do as well as they can to equate statistically the two tests. Now, you're changing to the new common court framework and you're leading to a greater emphasis on a lot of process habits of mind discourse items that then you have in the old system. So you're going to be measuring something different. And it's gonna take patients for the next couple of years, first couple of years of park to actually figure it out, get a sense of what it's all about. That said, what happens is the things that are really outstanding things happening. If we're the fourth highest school in the state, that's an extreme score and it means something. If you've got growth scores in the 30s, particularly in a larger school, that's in the bottom 5% of the state, that means something. But a lot of it, it's also noise. And it's not, and I really want to say this to Ms. Hansen particularly. The scores do not represent the quality of teaching in the building, it's a curriculum alignment. There are a lot of factors that come in. And it could be something as simple as our curriculum doesn't line up to what the state is testing that year. But repeatedly low growth scores tells you something. Repeatedly high growth scores tell you something. But you're really looking for patterns and long-term trends and we shouldn't get all overjoyed or overwrought over one year's worth of data. This data I think is in a progression. It's a positive trend from last year and I'm pleased. Moving on. Okay, science and technology. Again, the same charts, less grades are tested so you'll see less charts. Significantly higher at advanced and proficient at the fifth grade than the state in terms of the percentage of proficient advanced. At eighth grade, although it's not perhaps as high as we would like it to be, again, significantly higher than the state. Is there any? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, about the technology piece at eighth grade? Right, when we get to the eighth grade, there's a heavy emphasis also in technology. It's not just the science piece. So we've included that in here as well. Would that be a reason to see that separation between the fifth grade? In terms of the results, this is gonna be almost pure science, although it does have some technology, there's a heavier emphasis on technology when we get to the eighth grade. Is that the first time they were exposed to the technology as a specific? There is some tech engineering on the fifth grade. There's gonna be more on the park. Okay. But the eighth grade is almost like a third. Okay, so that you'd expect. And the other thing that's important to note about that is while there is technology education in the eighth grade, we're currently looking the STEM teachers, directors, Larry Weathers, who's the science director, and Matt Coleman and I are working with the tech people at the middle school to really look at the STEM curriculum to see, I would expect that we'll have to look at beefing that up somewhat as we go forth to a park. So, and I guess that's the first time I meant to say this earlier, but as you look at our discussions about what we're going to do as we start to look at budget recommendations for next year, we'll be looking at the interventions that we're talking about as we look at budget priorities. The high school still shows a significant increase above the state. Now, at this point, it's a, although it's a science and technology test, it's a subject area test. And so our students take, for the vast majority of students, take physical science. There is actually a technology test, if we chose to give that, but we're giving the physical science test. Sometimes it's called physics, but it truly is physical science. That can also be a chemistry or biology. Biology test, yes, that's correct. But many, many schools have chosen to go with this test because it's where they find the best results. And as when it became a graduation requirement, schools really looked to the test that would give the best results for students. Oops, sorry. So we look at our science and technology highlights. Again, as you saw from the excellent grade five scores, that there were schools that, these four schools are in the top 10%. Hardy, Brackett, Bishop, and Pierce. Grade five in all of the Arlington Elementary schools scored in the top 12%. I would say that a lot of this has to do with our engineering as elementary curriculum, as well as our excellent fifth grade science teachers. We recently at a national conference for STEM and the presenters from engineering is elementary from the Museum of Science were there and they actually talked about the Arlington. We didn't know ahead of time that this was gonna happen and they actually talked about the Arlington program. And you'll see some expansion of that program in the budget priorities for next year. Audison eighth grade science and technology scored in the top 9% and the high school is in the top 17%. Just looking again briefly at the subgroups and the high need students. And again, these are the groups of students that it includes. When we look at our students that are reaching proficient, the white is all students, the darker purple is non high need students and the aqua would be our high need students. So when we look at MCAS and we look across the grade levels, you'll see that the achievement gap, if you sort of look at the trend of that aqua line, particularly from grade six through seven through eight through nine, you'll see that in the ELA MCAS they get closer together. So we're closing the achievement gap. And when we look at mathematics, you see that they even have a dramatically difference there and again from grade seven through eight through 10, you'll see that we're closing the achievement gap. Again, not as much as we would like, but we are growing at closing that achievement gap. And so finally, just to sort of summarize, these would be our rankings for math, for English language arts and for science compared to the rest of the schools in the Commonwealth. And you see we have some really significant rankings with some minor exceptions. Everybody is in the top 20% or just about there. So what lies ahead? This year we expect that we're gonna have deeper implementation of the use of data teams, particularly at two of the level two schools. And so we're gonna be looking very closely at those students who are persistent in the warning category or have low SGPs. So they're not making progress. We're gonna be looking very closely at all the MCAS data at all schools, but particularly with the level two schools and particularly in the loop. Oftentimes we look at data and we make changes, but we don't come back to look and see what the implications of those changes are. And we're gonna be looking at data hopefully as frequently as every 10 weeks in math and literacy. We're gonna be including math, science, attendance and discipline data in review at all data teams in level two schools. We have the baseline edge student analytics system which will allow data teams to quickly analyze data, drill down into data, document interventions and track the success of those interventions. Now I have to say that this system is very complex and very high powered and requires a level of teacher desk computers that for many of our schools is spotty or unattainable at that school. So we'll be looking forward to that about how we're gonna be able to handle that in the future. We'll have a wider review of all levels of common assessment data. We'll be using that what I need block, really using our literacy coaches and our math coaches at the elementary level to assist teachers with implementing and then monitoring plans to ensure an increase in student achievement for all students. And we'll be using the implementation of the new teacher evaluation system with specific school and teacher goals targeted to student achievement. So you'll see through lines where you have set goals and the school will have set achievement goals that reflect that and that individual teachers are selecting and teacher teams are selecting student achievement goals that then would help us to meet the goals that the district has set and that the schools have set. Any other questions? Any other questions? Mr. Filman? Well the one thing I noticed in the chart of the rankings on the MCAS is that our students are performing better, it looks like in math, I mean in ELA and science in there in math. That's the trend across the state pretty much. But this is comparison to the state. So in other words, we have in third grade, we're 21 out of 298 in math and then it's 49 out of 298. So the trend is we're performing, our students are performing better relative to the state in ELA and science as opposed to math. Which is our focus, which has been our focus. So that's the focus. And it's continued, it's gonna continue, which is why we now have three math coaches at the elementary school level as well as a math interventionist at two of the schools, a part-time person at two schools. Any other questions? Well thank you very, very much for presenting this. And it was very informative and like it was said before, this is just one aspect of many, many different things that are going on every day. Thank you. I don't see Miss Johnson, are we going to table this? We need to table to the next meeting. She's unable to be here tonight. So the monthly financial reports, they were in your packets. Have some questions, we will see her in a couple weeks. Okay, moving on to approval of this job description. I'm gonna let Mr. Spiegel speak to this. Thank you. So what you have in the light pink sheet is the job description for the MECCO Elementary Social Workers School Adjustment Counselor. This position has recently been identified as a need for the district and there is, we have, and I think either Dr. Bode or Dr. Chesson can speak to this a little better than I can. There is money in the MECCO grant that will cover this position for the rest of this year. And I think they can speak to the reasons why there is money identified in the MECCO grant now. But that is where the funding for this position will come from is the MECCO grant. And what we are seeing among our MECCO students is significant needs of social-emotional issues, especially at the elementary level, but probably at all levels, where to have a professional social worker adjustment counselor who is devoted to working with these students and working with teachers in the schools and other social workers and other related service providers in the school to help assist these students where they have needs. Mr. Stark. What schools, do all of our elementary schools have MECCO students? Not all of them. Right now we have MECCO students at Hardy and Bishop and Dallen and Pierce and we have like one or two at one at Bracket, I think, and maybe one at Stratton, but yeah. So this person would have to split their time between six schools? This person would have to split their time between six schools and would do it as where the needs are, depending on the numbers. I mean, it's not a, the case load, the overall case load is not a huge case load, but there are needs, so you don't have to get needs among some of the students in the MECCO population. And right now, we do have MECCO, they're MECCO teaching assistants. Currently we have two who split between two schools each, so we do have some shared MECCO staff anyway. Yes? Okay. Mr. Thielman. Aren't these students getting attention from our social workers already? They certainly are. They're not being ignored by our current school social workers at all, but I think the thought is there are, from our MECCO director and that there are more needs than, and a lot of our students, all of our students have, not all of our students, but there are needs among every elementary school among the general student population, so I don't know if Dr. Bode or Dr. Cheson want to add to that. As we have with any positions of social worker or nurse, when these, or a teaching assistant that's in a classroom, they're not simply entirely focused on the one or two children or the particular group of children. So if we were to have the social worker, it would be, there would be obviously some push in into the classrooms, but there would also be an opportunity to do some group work. And this is something that is needed. And actually the way that we have learned more about the, some new restrictions on the MECCO grant, if we were not to use this money for this purpose, this money actually would be returned to the state. So this is an opportunity we, to provide this service and it's not coming out of any operating budget. In fact, this would be money, as I said, that could not be used for any other purpose. Ms. Heim? I did want to ask about one of the bullets under performance responsibilities on the back page, providing follow through service to families who have left the system. I'm wondering, are we referring just to students that would be of age to receive transitional education services? Or are we talking about all students who are no longer attending Arlington? This would be MECCO students who, for whatever reason, have left the Arlington system of returning back to Boston to help them find appropriate placement for their students back in Boston. We have had students who have left the program and there is a need for a transition back. Sometimes it has to do with placement in special education programs in Boston. So that transition piece is something that our director certainly would be involved in as well. But this would be something that would be a benefit for the students at the elementary level. I guess I'm a little confused then about, I could see the need for somebody to do that as the child is transitioning into leaving Arlington to the next program. To me, I read this bullet as they're already gone and now we're gonna still provide some services and that's what. So just a question changing. It's really more that we should probably say leaving. The intent is the transition. Leaving, during the transition. So who are leaving? Who are leaving? Okay, fix it. And my other question, while this position is dedicated to the MECCO students that are spread over multiple buildings, this person would be able, though, to provide additional services to students that are in the school if it's in combination with the goals of the MECCO students. So for instance, could they do, if they're doing a group with one of the MECCO students, can it have non-MECCO students in it? I wouldn't say no to that. I think it would be sort of a situation specific. I actually thought you were gonna ask me if a situation had arisen in the school with a non-MECCO student, could they be supportive in that situation? And the answer would be clearly yes. I assumed that one. Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, there have been instances in the last week another pair of hands would have been really helpful and that did not involve any of the MECCO students. So, but in terms of the groups, I think the intent was to not have them be specific for MECCO students, but on the other hand, I would not say that that wouldn't be possible. And I guess part of what I'm wondering about is, maybe a student needs a social pragmatic group where they're learning to interact with their peers. If that child's the only one in that child, in that building that's MECCO and needs that group, could other students be part of that group and we could get the benefits and that child could also get the benefits of being with their classmates? I would say absolutely yes. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate this and I think it's very creative using the grant funding to fund this, but I always have a fear when we do this that we find out we have the need, we fill the need and the grant disappears. Oh, I'm sorry. Go for it, if you can anticipate where I'm going. I do know what you're going. We have been very specific in our appointment letters when we've had somebody hired specifically for a grant that it is a grant funded position. I realized that my concern is that during the year, this position is really valuable, serving a great service. If the grant doesn't come through, should we consider possibly putting as part of our contingency in our budget? In other words, if the grant doesn't support this in the future and we recognize the need for this position, I don't want us to get caught shot next year and not having the support funding for it and then having to make a decision that could be definitely. I think that at least for next year unless the state absolutely cuts medical, I don't think that'll be an issue, partly because this particular grant category, we're gonna be able to do some additional tutoring support. And so I think that that's what we would shave off first before we would go to this. Now, it's hard to know in the state of public government these days what's gonna be down the road, but there will be other things that are funded that probably would go first before this. Thank you. This starts. How is it that we currently have money in the grant to cover this? Did we have the money last year? How is it that this year we have? We did and we used it for support services and special education, yes, special education, but there are things that the grant is more defined in terms of what you can use the grant money for. So we have had this money. We were, I think we're pretty much flat funded from last year, so yes. But because there are certain things that have become more restrictive in terms of categories in which you can use it, we have to meet those categories. And that's true in a lot of grants. We have to be very specific in our budgets and do time and efforts in terms of how we're using it. So what's happening? Would you see all this discussion of detail? The same thing is going on with grants. Grant reports are very, very specific and you can't, I guess that's the best way of saying it. We have to be very careful that we are very specific about the particular thing that we are funding that it matches the category. So last year we didn't need. It wasn't as specific. The categories were not as specific or restrictive. Are there any other categories that earmark certain functions? I mean, are we gonna be hearing about other staff that has to be hired from this or? Not staff, but they're, as Dr. Bodie is saying, they were much more specific this year about where you could spend your money than they have been in the past. So there's no more staff that we're expecting. One more, Mr. Hatter? Reporting to the Metcode Director, this person would be under the new evaluation since they're in, I see in accordance with the AEA Unite contract twice as far as terms of employment. So that position, the Metcode Director would be the evaluator. Yes, the Metcode Director is in the AAA. AAA, right. Thank you. And the zip code's wrong on top, right? Are we not an O21, we're not an O2176 town? I don't know where that comes from. Any other questions on this? Okay, you're looking to us to vote this. To approve this job description. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those against? Okay. Job description is approved. All right, it was me. You're on. I'm on. I actually have a few things, and they're all very important. One is I want to actually, since we're still in sort of the halo of discussions about accountability and MCAS, to reiterate that the appeal that we put into the state to change Odyssey's level designation was approved and you have seen the copy of the letter in that regard, but I, so as a result, then the level designation of the district also changes. And it, they were, did determine that the students had been incorrectly coded, essentially incorrectly classified and changed their classification, which changed the level. So I just want people to know that. And I believe we're thinking of putting a press release out to that effect. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that I was actually in an event recently here in town, and I guess there was a little bit of confusion about the nearsk letter. And again, I just want to say this again, that the high school is accredited. So when people hear that we're on warning, apparently that's been in a few cases thought that maybe we were not accredited. The NEASC, the Accreditation Association for New England did accredit the high school in fact, was very complimentary of what was going on in terms of the education at the high school. The issue is the physical building. And being on warning means this, that the whole accreditation process is a 10 year cycle. And there are reports that have to be made within that 10 year. In fact, in this particular item, we have to do a January report to them to say what we're going to be doing about all of this. So there will be reports at the two year mark, the five year mark. Probably at the five year mark, if they don't see some significant progress, they're going to keep reminding us that we're getting close to that 10 year. And we would be in deep danger of not being accredited in 10 years if we do not do something about the high school. I can't say that they would absolutely do it, but I think that it's very clear that that's the message they're giving us. So I just want to make that clear that we presently are accredited with high compliments about what's the instructional practices of the teachers and the learning achievement of our students, but do something about the building. Of course, we've been talking about this building quite a bit. And I'm sure we'll be talking about it a lot more over the next few years, because it is going to be an important effort in the part of the community as we move forward with this. All right. I want to, I think you may have received some notice about this, but we've talked a lot tonight about academic achievement in ELA, science and math. But once again, the high school jazz band has achieved a new honor and award that I think is important for everybody to be aware of. There were 16 jazz bands in the nation that were invited to the National Jazz Band Festival in Dallas in January. Our jazz band had to audition for this and so they were picked, they were picked from probably thousands of possible candidates to this. And in fact, in the consent agenda, you're going to see an approval for this trip. It's really quite an honor to be invited to this. And when they are at the festival, I was assuming there's approval here at this evening, they will be able to have a half hour presentation and they will get feedback from some of the notables in jazz internationally today. This brings all of the many of the high performers and they've read the list here, probably jazz aficionados would recognize many of these names. So one of the issues of course in an event like this is how is it going to be funded? And because of the singular honor of this, the pop-up booster club is paying for the entire trip. So every student is going to be able to attend. That's great. It is wonderful. And of course, one of the concerns was again, this is how teachers in this high school think. Would it be okay if they missed those two days of school because they're already going to do a performance tour in Europe during the February break and have to miss a day? So, but this does not happen too many times in the life of a high school student. So of course that's my view of it. And certainly it's shared by the high school principal. And I think there'll be more articles about this in the newspaper I think and certainly in newsletters coming up. But again, it's just a terrific, terrific affirmation of what a terrific job this town, our music educators do and about the students. They throw their hearts and souls into this and they're willing to practice. And that's going to that 10,000 hours. I bet all of them have had their 10,000 hours. So yeah, probably already. So we have another honor is a school system and this is in athletics. And this year or this week, the Patriots organization honors a coach weekly and Arlington's high school football coach, John Dubzinski was named the Patriots High School Coach of the week. And the New England Patriots Charitable Foundation will donate $1,000 to the Arlington High School football program in his name and in recognition of his coach of the week selection. Just the other day, the group that televises this, they came here to the high school with the and televised the coach being presented with the award and the check. And this ceremony will be featured on the Patriots Weekly Television Magazine Show. I didn't know they had this. Patriots all access. So people can see this, it airs at 7 p.m. this Friday on WBZ-TV. So seven o'clock this Friday, you can tape it, football parents out there, but you'll see that award. So really it's quite an honor, but the thing about it is why he got the award. When he was nominated by our athletic director, she talked about the values that he was instilling in the students. That was skills yes, but it's about being a team player, being willing to work hard, have integrity being good sportsmen. And all of these qualities of how you come together as a team, this is the message and the modeling that he's doing with the football team. And it's really showing, they're doing very well, but again, it's great to win a game. It's great to have these honors, but what will be lasting are these values that our students will take away from participation in this program, which is what it's all about. And speaking of our athletic teams in terms of what it's all about, the, this, our cross country teams and their coaches worked spreading wood chips and pruning invasives along the reservoir cross country courses last Saturday. Some groups in town reached out to our athletic director, Ms. Dugalaki, to see if there would be any of our teams that would be willing to do community service projects. And so this is just the beginning of many that they're doing, but we had 40 or 50 students coming out to do this. And so again, it's great. And we had a thank you note from them about and how wonderfully enthusiastic they were. I wish we had had a picture of them coming to that site with carrying their shovels and so forth. It was almost like the vision of hi ho, hi ho, you know. And I think that's it. Other than, we did want, we did include in your packet the DDM report that we sent to the state. And actually, maybe this would be a good time for Laura to just talk briefly about this and what the reports, what the assessments were and what the state was requiring. But I do want to preface this by saying that in our goals across the district, we are looking to pilot DDMs in a number of our core subject areas, in our core disciplines, as well as physical education this year. And all of our performing arts and visual arts and other areas are working on developing theirs this year. So we are doing that. But that's a little bit different than what this report is all about. And I'll let you talk about that. There has, as we've discussed several times before, district determined measures are going to eventually be used as part of the educator evaluation system. And the state required every district in the Commonwealth to come up with five district determined measures that they would be piloting. And we're piloting more than five, but there were five that they requested. There was a requirement that one of these be in early grade literacy, early grade math, middle school math, high school writing to text and a traditionally non-tested subject. So with the acceptance of or the collaboration with the teachers, I should say, we have chosen reading the DRA assessment for grade two as our early grade literacy DDM. The AMC assessment from Kathy Richardson math for math for grade one as our early grade math assessment. I think one of the reasons the state picked these two is because there's no MCAS at those grade levels. In addition, much the way we've seen tonight, most districts are focusing on middle school math. So we have chosen the eighth grade math assessment, the development of a diagnostic that was developed locally that will assess knowledge in math, not only in grades K through seven, but also a preview of topics to be covered in grade eight. And then at the high school writing to text, this is also something that we were in the process of already working on at the 10th grade social studies level. Students will be writing in response to text. They'll be doing it once to the Mayflower Compact and once to the Gettysburg Address. And we'll be looking at student growth in that writing to text. And this is very similar type prompt that would be found on the AP exams later on in high school. And in our traditionally non-tested subject area, we have actually used fitness grant for quite some time. We are making that more technologically friendly is that all the middle school PE teachers now have iPads and they'll be entering the data right into that when they take up fitness grant measures. But that will be our non-traditional subject matter. And so these are the five that we chose. We have right now, the requirement is that in June, we will be telling the state the rest of our DDMs. That has recently been changed from February. Not sure if that will get changed yet again. Dr. Ellison Ampe? I'm just curious, why are they being called piloted if we've been doing them? The piloted in terms of the state is asking us to pilot them as district determined measures. We already have them as a common assessment. The difference between a common assessment and district determined measure would be that a common assessment is just for utilization within the district. And a district determined measure would be part of what is currently projected to be 30% of the teacher evaluation rating, which would determine whether a teacher would be on a one-year self-directed growth plan or two if they did not meet the goal that was set, part of that district determined measure. And that's part of the new teacher evaluation system regulations. But it's the same. It's being piloted for a different purpose. Its original purpose would be just for internal. And it wasn't part of the evaluation. It wasn't part of the evaluation structure. It just informed us about student's growth. And now under the new teacher evaluation system, these district determined measures will eventually become part of the teacher evaluation system. So the pilot refers to the purpose. OK, because it's the same test. Same test. Haven't changed it. Some of these are new, but in that case to the fitness group, we've been doing it for a long time. And DRA as well. We've been doing it for a long time. Any other questions on this? Thank you very much. Dr. Bodie, on the enrollment sheets, the numbers. I'm looking at the newly enrolled, and I added that up. And I got 183 new children. Are you adding? Don't forget. These aren't official October 1 numbers yet. But yes, we're really have a lot. We're approaching 200, yeah. And what's the typical number, if I may ask? We've been doing about 1.8% overall growth. And this is greater than that. Oh, yes. With elementary, it's about a little over 5%. OK, I just want to listen to the paper. This is going to be a statement. I just want people to understand we're busting at the seams. That's my opinion. You share that opinion, Dr. Bodie? I think at the elementary level, by having Thompson now, we've created a little bit of space. But we're busting at the seams, put it this way, is that we have class sizes that are in the mid-20s, a 23, 24. We have class sizes that a number of them that are 26, 27. Fortunately, this year we didn't go over 27th elementary. But at the secondary level, we have class sizes that are more than that. So well, we can physically house for a few more classes, well, not in all buildings. So some buildings are now just maxed out. It's an issue of staffing. And then at what point do you kick in another staff person? If you increase five more people, do you go to 30 pluses? Or do you then have really small classes again? So there's a lot of issues with this. I will say that, and I said this before, that the buffer zones did help a little bit. No, quite a bit, actually, in terms of balancing classes. And by the way, you will get a report this fall on that. My concern is that the number we've been talking to the public about, and we've been using this 140 plus, and now we're significantly above that 140 plus at 183, and as you stated, that's not our October 1st number? No, not yet. OK. It's not the October 1st number. We'll get that by the end of the month. If I may make the motion. Well, I would like to say that. And we're going to talk a little bit about the budget calendar in just a short bit. But I really, really hope that these enrollment projections inform our budget process going forward. In a way that maybe we haven't really had to use before. Because we've realized a very similar constant minor increase every year. But this is very telling. Yeah. On an unrelated or formal related, I'd like to make a motion to have the chair send a letter of thank you to the boosters in support of the jazz band. Second. Second. I'd be delighted to, since I'm a musician, and I am just totally excited. I wish I could be going, frankly. I see Brecker's name on there. And as a sax player, his brother was one of my heroes. And I'd be happy to write that letter. All those in favor? Aye. All those against? I am writing that letter. Do you want to take a vote to direct the chair to go on the trip? No, no, on his own. Wait a second. On expense? We're not paying for him. Then we're not paying for him, so. Has to be back for any meeting. All right. Moving on. Are we done with the report? I'm finished. Thank you, Dr. Bowie. Moving on to the content agenda, move that all items listed with the asterisks are considerably routine and will be enacted by one motion. That we no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant number 14043 dated 92613. Total warrant amount 869,562 dollars and 66 cents. Approval of draft minutes, none. Approval of Arlington High School jazz band to Dallas, Texas, January 9th through the 12th, 2014. So moved. Second. All those in favor? Aye. All those against? Senate agenda passed. Subcommittee and liaison reports. Policies and procedures. Yeah, you know the first four of these could have actually been on the consent agenda, but I didn't. Oh, that's OK. But at the fifth one probably shouldn't because we had a question for Judd. So why don't we just move GCO, GCO-R, GCO-1-R, all the first four? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. All those against? Passes. OK, so now BDEB, the chair was assigned. So BDEB, we're adding a line here. The school committee chair shall request that the PTO parent advisory councils of the district schools, namely ASONs to the school committee, do you get any response at all? I did not receive any feedback on that. So silence is consent. I happen to think that we could go forward on it. OK. That was the only thing that we had to check. OK, so I move that we adopt the amendment to file BDEB. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Carys. Anything else on policies? We're trying to schedule our next meeting. It's not that easy. We'll get it done. We shall all announce it. That's all it is. Rakes and eggs. This starts. All right, the budget subcommittee met on October 3rd. And you all have this lovely, I don't know what color this is, but it looks like this pumpkin. Yeah, because that's my season. All right, so what I want to do is, and what I need to get is approval of the budget calendar. I need to start by changing, obviously, the date. It is not going to happen, because Ms. Johnson is not here to get the FY13 review. Tonight it will happen at our next meeting, which is October 24th. As far as I can tell, though, that's the only change. So this is kind of how we laid it out. So in October, we would get the full FY13 review. That's last year. Then at the beginning of November, we will have our three to five year budget projections, as well as we will talk about how enrollment is playing a role in that. Enrollment projections, as well for FY15. And also, kind of what that enrollment reality from this current year, kind of what the impact is on this year. So as you know, with 183 students, we can all do the math if we divide by 25 in a class. That's at least seven teachers that we had to put into the elementary school. So we want to have some discussion about that. And one thing that I really want to focus on there is that if there are, that should say, an up-budget project, that's obviously budget projections. There's a typo. That any questions you have about things that you want to see in that long range, or you don't want to see, or questions that you think you have that you want to make sure we answer in that, you can feel free to just zip me an email. And we are going to try to meet everyone's needs. But we're going to try to give you the three to five year projections on the 14th and have some real discussion about those. Then on November 21st, that is just the week after. But that would be when we would start hearing from the elementary, we would start hearing from the principals. We'll start with the elementary principals on priorities for next year, as well. Then on December 12th, we would hear from the Audison and the AHS principals and department heads on their priorities for next fiscal year. So kind of what they see as budget priorities for the coming year. Then on December 19th, we would be able to have some time on the agenda for us to discuss our priorities for budget and also take input from the public as far as things that they might think should be priorities for our budget. On January 9th, we would then set our school committee priorities for the budget. And we would vote our first budget number to town meeting, which is just saying, yes, we'll take all the money you'll give us, which we do over here. On February 13th, we would then have the first look at the budget detail that would come to us. And at the same time, that is going to go to FINCOM this year. That's new. They wanted to have it as soon as possible to start looking through it. So we're going to send it to them as well. On February 27th, we would have our budget hearing. On March 13th, we would have the budget hearing is obviously the public hearing on the budget. March 13th would be our final vote on the budget. Some time after that, we would present to FINCOM. And then April 28th, we would have the budget books ready for the start of town meeting. That's the first day of town meeting. How does that look to everybody? Does anybody have anything that doesn't make sense, or you think needs to be added, or I missed? Silence is consent. Excellent. All right, so I move. Dr. Ellis, I have a comment. OK, good. It's not really in line. It's more for the administration going forward. But given the enrollment numbers, as we go forward, we need to have some input, I mean, some information about class sizes at the middle and high school, as well as what we're seeing. Because we keep seeing all this stuff about elementary school. And so it becomes very urgent, because we can see those numbers. And I know there's very large class sizes hidden in these. And we just have nothing. And we need to be hearing that. Yep, yep. And also, we're still trying also to figure out what the leap from 5th to 6th. We lose kids going from 5th to 6th. And we lose kids from 8 to 9. And we gain kids at both of those, too. So those transition years are also big in movement. And we were also having a discussion at the budget subcommittee meeting, is does the enormous growth in elementary school going to mean that we're going to still see some consistency in those ups and downs? Or is this also going to show us a much larger up or down in those as well? I mean, it's hard. I don't have a wish I did, but I don't have a crystal ball. So we're going to try, in the long-range planning, to see what we can do and show you some scenarios of, do we think this is a blip? Which would be great. Or do we think this is a new trend? Is this a resetting of our, are we going from 1.5% to 2% growth, which we can kind of see over the years? We've kind of gone up. But this year, this makes us almost 5% or 6% in the district, which is just really big. And so we need to understand that. And we have also built into the budget. We obviously, not only do we need teachers, but we also, there's needs to be other, there's other costs as well as just those teachers. There's administrative costs and classroom costs and all of the other things that also come with more students. And so we're also trying to come up with some kind of a number and some explanation for how we came up with that to show you really how that's going to impact the budget as we move forward. So if this continues at this rate, you'll see the impact over the years as well. So hopefully we will be able to answer that. I was just going to add to what Ms. Stark's already said. In our last meeting, we did talk about the high school impact of new students as well. And pretty much what we were informed was because of the greater number of offerings and the fact that we're not moving people between buildings, there is a greater ease in integrating those students without drastically affecting class sizes. The areas that they did see it in is when it's more of a higher level course that fewer students tend to take and where a couple of students might tip a class either overly large or into two sections, but that there was less of that compulsion at that level because of the greater flexibility of the staff. Yeah, I'm just, partly I'm talking because I know that there are some very large class sizes, at least in the middle school, and we never see anything about what the class sizes are. And we end up stressing over the elementary and I think it's not, it's doing that our middle schoolers and our high schoolers too, the service by not knowing what's going on, right? Do you think, is that a report that we could get? Of course. Parallel easily? Okay, Ms. Heim? The one question I have then about that report is there are how many hundreds of classes in a day at the high school? And so what might be the numbers for one class might be different numbers for another class and would we then be looking at all the sections or would we be looking at an average of what classes are for certain content area? I think we need to know at least the range and sort of where the numbers are. So yeah, I'd like to know all the numbers and just I don't think it has to be that complicated. I mean, it's a lot of numbers but it doesn't have to be. No, it depends. Let me just interject. There's a motion on the table about the budget calendar. Let's vote that and if there's any further discussion. Any further discussion on the budget calendar itself? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Thank you. I also just wanted to say that we also on Monday was the BRTF, the budget revenue task force met. We saw the latest long range plan for the town. This continues the current plan through FY19. Now in FY19, there is a considerable deficit of three and a half million dollars and in FY20, if they continue it out, it's actually a cliff, it's like $10 million. So we are already starting to note that in FY18 something has to be done and so we did talk a little bit about that although mostly it was just a kind of to see that that's where it's going. Now when we do our three year forecast for budget, we are focusing on the next three years because we have or the next three to four because we have another set of negotiations and so it's really hard for us. We can project out through the next set of negotiations but going beyond that seems kind of funny. So we're gonna try to do as much as we can within the same timeframe as the town is giving us as well but knowing that we do have negotiations coming next year. And most of the BRTF was actually discussions about Minuteman and how that's going and it was very optimistic hearing all the work that Mr. Foskett and as well as our state senators and representatives have done to actually kind of start to really get our arms around Minuteman and kind of what's happening and how that's moving forward. So that was very positive. We do have another budget subcommittee meeting on November 6th at 5 p.m. Thank you very much. Moving on to community relations. Nothing to report. Okay, curriculum instruction, assessment and accountability. Nothing to report. Facilities, I saw you meeting here earlier. We finally had a meeting. Tonight, I asked for an update from the superintendent on the letter, information on the letter she sent us last January on a committee to be formed by the townwide similar to the capital committee for maintenance and preventive maintenance plan for the school. Dr. Bordi said that it was ongoing and as far as the software for us to put all the needs for all the schools in, she is gonna check on that and get back to exactly where that is. An update on the SOI for the high schools still gathering information and waiting for a report from inside outside. There, under public participation, Ms. Hansen came and about concerns at several of the buildings and passed that on to the superintendent who will be coming back to us and give us an update on that. I attended last night the Bishop School at their PTO and through the principal today, two things to look into. There's a, near Crosby Street, there's a piece of the soil eroding that may be dangerous for the children and stuff and looking at and there's a section of the playground in the back that visual access for watching the kids and stuff is not there because of shrubbery and some of the equipment has caused some injuries in the past and the principal is looking into that. Received an email from Dr. Allison Ampe, parents from the Heidi School that contacted her and I passed the information about needs around the playground onto the superintendent and she will look into that. We have not set a date at this moment to go forward for another meeting, but it will be soon. I would like to also report today. I had my second meeting with Mr. Good regarding the going paperless and I met with Adam, I'm sorry, I forgot his last name. Dr. Lynch? No. Kuroski? Kuroski. Kuroski, who is, his title is, his new title is going to be. New title is Systems Analyst. Systems Analyst and you'll all appreciate this. I sat there for two hours and he did most of the talking and asking a lot of questions in detail about needs and stuff, things of that nature and at the end I suggested you've now got my needs, you have at least six other people's needs to hear and I'll be sending something out with Mr. Good to see if we as a group as the school committee can meet with him. He's very informative. One of the things he suggested that really got me excited is that if we go for him we'll get the, you'll call up the agenda and you tap on that one item and all the supporting documents will appear available to you right there. So he's exciting and it's going. And if I may ask the chair's indulgence, I would like at this time to commend Edith Moisan. I hope I pronounce it right, the library specialist at the Audison School for the phenomenal amount of work that she did to getting an author there. My stock with my granddaughter went up 90%. The author was fantastic. It was a wonderful event the other night. I'd like to also commend the staff who kept everybody entertained for an hour and a half prior to the author coming in. But Edith is a treasure. I would ask us, I know money's tight, we need to start considering our real librarians and treat them accordingly. Thank you. Yeah, I had an order on that. I saw it on my notes and I forgot to say it, but I saw you were there. I was standing on the end. I was amazed at how the author was able to hold all of these students 1200, there were 1200 in that gym. It was packed and really there's quite a credit to her organization and a coup. She was at a conference in New York and heard that he might be available to do speaking engagements. And this is the only one in New England. And it was the opening of the book. It was the opening of the book. And the opening of the book on top of it. These children have a first edition signed by the author. And I told my granddaughter she should never use it. That's not gonna happen. It was amazing, but he was fantastic. Yeah, I just wanted, he was, so it was Rick Riordan, I don't think we've mentioned the name. I have heard it, yes. And I had taken my seventh grader because she likes to write. And I thought author writer exposure was good. And he delivered tremendously. He talked about the craft of writing, how his path went, how he got to where he was going in all the ins and outs. And I think these are really good things for our students, especially our middle school students or approaching middle school students to here because they need to know that life isn't always linear and you can get places and you just work around the difficulties. And also that his bestselling books were started because he wanted to write a story for his son who is dyslexic. And the fact that he didn't start out to be a big writer, he was trying to tell a story for his son. And I just thought he really, he had a very compelling, well-told thing. It was a great event. He also made, I was there too. He was also made to know that he's done well financially. He showed us a picture of his house from the exact day. Financially well on the children's books, not his other books. All right, anything else from our facilities? Well, I just want to dovetail on Mr. Hayner and I spent a little time together the other day. It was yesterday morning in Boston. We were at this seminar at Mass Continuing Legal Education on public records and open meeting law. And they gave us this book, which we'll leave it here, if anyone wants to examine it and learn about the changes that happened a few years ago to our open meeting law in the state, but also the supervisor of documents was there. And it was a very interesting seminar to go on. And maybe subject for... Just to add, I don't know if I can transfer it, but I was able to download the whole book. Yeah, we have this on. Electronically and the checklist for us to look at for agendas and taking care of minutes and things of that nature. Send me an email, I'll be happy. The book is 15... No, 15, I don't know, it's a lot. It took a long time, I don't know. But I'll be happy to try to send it to you, if you're interested. And I just wanted to remind folks out in the public and here of the AYCC event next Friday evening at Town Hall. I believe there's still tickets available for it and it's the third annual. It's a wonderful cause and it's something that we should support if we can next Friday night. Thanks to Ms. Starks for pointing this out to me. It's a Boston Globe article of today. Catherine Wall is a teacher at our Dowling School and she happens to be the daughter of a teacher, a longtime teacher at the Bishop School, Jeannie Wall. And Catherine was profiled here in the Globe West section for heading to the UMass Boston Hall of Fame for her athletic achievements. And... She's a coach too, one of our high schools. And one of our coaches here in the district. So it's a wonderful article. Please look it up online or in the paper itself, today's edition. So congratulations, Catherine. And nothing further, Secretary's report. All right, correspondence for the school committee over the last couple of weeks. We have received the following correspondence. Email from a parent concerned about crossing Mass Ave at Marathon Street, getting to Hardy. Email invitation to the Massachusetts Bar Association conference on bullying. That's gonna be from 8.30 to 3.30 on Friday, October 25th at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge. Email from Dr. Bodie on Massachusetts education spending rankings from the Mass Budget and Policy Center. Information forwarded by Dr. Bodie from Adam Chapter Lane on the impact of the government shutdown is having on Massachusetts. Mitchell Chester's weekly update, dated October 4th, 2013. Client alert from Stonem, Chandler and Miller about healthcare exchanges. Email regarding the crossing guard, I already said that twice in there, sorry. Invitation to the Trickertrot 5K Fun Run, which is gonna support the Arlington High School sports to be held on Sunday, October 27th at 10 a.m., that's this Sunday. An ACMI alert regarding the primary election programming, and remind everybody to vote on Tuesday. Letter from Mass Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in response to our appeal over the rating of the oddison, granting our requested change and returning it to a level two school. And email from Principal Janger, informing us of coach Dubzinski's receiving the New England Patriots High School football coach of the week. And I would like to add our congratulations and the undefeated AHS High School football team so far. That's it. There's nothing further. I believe we'll, I'll entertain a motion to go into executive session, to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and or non-union which have held an open meeting, may have a detrimental effect. Or to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigation position of the public body in the chair, so it declares coming out only for the purposes of adjournment. Second. I roll call. I. I. I. I. I. Okay, we are in executive session. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.