 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Allington School Committee on Thursday, October 28, 2021. I am Bill Hain of the Chair. Permit me to confirm that all members of the persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. When I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Ms. Ekston. Here. Mr. Schlickman. Good evening. Mr. Thielman. Here. Dr. Rampe. Mr. Cardin isn't here yet. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Dr. Holman. I'm here, but I'm trying to get on my computer. Okay. That's okay. As long as you can hear us. Dr. McNeil. Yes, I can hear you. Mr. Spiegel. Yes. Mr. Mason. Here. Yes. Ms. Elmer. She's not here. Okay. Allington Educational Association representative, Ms. Keys. Here. And student representative, Megan comedy or Amy Shalu. Okay. We'll just go from there tonight's meeting of the Allington Allington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with the act signed into law on June 16, 2021. The act includes an extension until April 1, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of the Governor Bakers, March 12, 2020, executive order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The governor's order, which is referenced with the agenda materials on the town's website for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely. This is reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin permit me to offer a few notes. First, the meeting is being conducted via zoom is being recorded and is also being simultaneously broadcast an ACMI person's wishing to join the meeting by zoom they find information on how to do so on the town's website. The participants participating by zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if you wish to participate you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record for the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those persons are not required to identify themselves. And persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials, also found on the town's website using the Novus agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call. We will now have public comment. And I'm going to read a brief statement before I let the people speak, but members of the public who wish to address the committee, there will be 30 minutes of public comment. Depending on the number of people who sign up. School committee, let me begin this again for members of the public who wish to address committee. There will be 30 minutes of public comment, depending on the number of people who sign up time allotments may be reduced but will not exceed three minutes each. The number of people who sign up exceeds what can be done in 30 minutes number of speakers will be capped and will be invited to speak based on timestamp of their emails to mistaken school committee respectfully request participants of the public to utilize their camera. This is possible while speaking and to adhere to the public comment policy be age that requires participants to provide their name and address big speakers may offer such objective criticism of the school operations and programs is concerned them. But in public session the committee will not hear personal complaints about school personnel, nor against any members of the school community, except for the school committee or the superintendent in the capacity as the operational leader of the island school public schools. The committee will not hear anything that might identify and or infringe upon a student's privacy by name or incident. If you'd like to sign up to speak please email. Miss diggins, the email is on our website is Mr swain here. If he is, can you let him in. Mr. Heyner, Sean has his hand raised I don't know if he wanted to say something. James swan, can you, can you let him come in as a panelist please. Any attendees. Who is our host right now. James. Yes, I'm here. Yep, you're on we can hear you we can see you thank you. James swan 35 Windsor street. I attended the curriculum and accountability subcommittee meeting on Monday. I support the goal of getting as many students as possible to engage in deep honors level work regardless of racial or ethnic heritage English proficiency level or economic background. This is admirable and achievable. I really appreciated the care and the questions asked by the school committee members during this meeting. We're also, I also found the presentation from a PS and their expert collaborator on heterogeneous classes, those that makes honors and non honor students disappointing. The description of outcomes for the experiment with freshman heterogeneous classes during the last remote school year, and the subsequent discussion was not up to the standard I would expect. For example, one common worry for parents is that heterogeneous classes will lower the educational standards of high school. APS does not do differentiate instruction well at any level in my opinion. This concern was answered by a teacher comment quote, we have kids who are good at math class, but are not good at math and quote. The implication is that there's something wrong with the kids that only a major change the instructional model can fix. Thus, we'll send our children to Arlington Public Schools 180 days a year for 13 years. This teacher's assessment, which APS emphasized is the kids are not good at math. The responsibility lay squarely at the feet of the educators, not the kids. They reflect the values inculcated by their teachers who have exclusive control of the classroom. Answering this concern from parents by claiming that our students are not already well served by APS does not give me confidence in the process going forward. Parents deserve a clear plan for how any future heterogeneous classes are going to work. It should anticipate and answer many questions, including on what model of differentiated instruction will this program be based? Which other districts in Massachusetts have implemented it? How did they know this approach was better? How will we know the same? How can we trust the district to assess this honestly? APS only now tells us that learners in their honors classes are quote, not good at math. The standard for discussion of this major change and the planning and evidence to support it needs to be much higher than it is right now. I think that APS can expect parents will show them respect by reading their plans carefully and critically and by providing constructive feedback. APS officials should show parents and the representatives on the school committee respect to and come properly prepared for these future conversations. APS should also share publicly all the survey data collected on the freshman experiment last year. I've had other parents reach out to me privately wanting to discuss this issue, but afraid of being cast into social disgrace for being perceived as not on board with what has been declared an equity initiative. I think that's wrong. No one should be afraid to speak their mind for fear of social retribution. A good plan from APS should be able to be discussed openly and its merits should be evident. I also think this problem has not helped when what is considered equitable in this situation is left ill-defined. The district needs to take the lead in setting a definite standard for what they think constitutes fairness. That standard is not clear now, and this ambiguity can be deployed unproductively. For example, the district presentation noted that participation rates and honors grew for all racial demographics during the remote year. Growing honors should be counted as a success, but the rates of growth were not the same across all demographics. In fact, the fraction of black students making up the honors cohort shrank by about 15%. This is a growing disparity in representation and can be perceived as a moral failure. Also, grades of high school were up overall last year. This was true of students working for honors credit in heterogeneous classes. However, grades were flat among students for working for regular credit in the same classes. These students underperformed compared to their peers. This should be concerning, and perhaps more so because black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students are overrepresented among this group. By one measure, these students were not as well served by the experiment with heterogeneous classes. More to the point, these kinds of statistical analysis should not be undertaken lightly and then imbued with moral power. It's not enough to simply state that the new model is more equitable than the previous one. In fact, that shuts down discussion and limits the scope of feedback. Our community must decide together what fairness looks like, or better yet, what values we want to see reflected in the level and style of instruction provided to all our students. I think the clear goals and standards of assessment and real openness on the part of the district to parental feedback are a necessary part of doing that well. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Swan. Would somebody please admit Miss Culverhouse. She's bail set. Okay. Miss Culverhouse we have you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for hearing me tonight. My name is Lynette Culverhouse I live at 24 Draper Avenue. I'm a town meeting member and a retired teacher and school administrator. I have a statement at the last meeting in hopes of hearing a response from you, but not one of you responded. I refuse to believe that this is because you don't care about this issue. A black student at one of our schools was given a suspension for something he didn't do. I know this boy. He is a gentle kind soul who only wants to be accepted and to feel safe. This is no longer the case for him. He is being maligned by both adults and students. It appears the word of a white student was believed while the word of my friend son was not. But if this child were white with the outcome be the same. If he were the son of a town leader would it have been handled in the same way. Here are some of my questions. Our school leaders realize that a suspension goes on a child's permanent record and that for black boys this is the start of a school to prison pipeline. Arlington is a largely white town with mostly white leadership and a Eurocentric culture. It is therefore understandable that our white leaders may not understand the challenges and struggles that black families have to face every day living in a white culture. It is not understandable, however, that our leaders are not informing themselves or showing a willingness to listen to believe and value the voices of our black residents. I'm asking you to change this. The data reveals that black students in Arlington receive suspensions at a greater rate the rate than white students. How are we addressing this. Why were the parents informed at 515pm on a Friday that a hearing would be held at 915am on the following Monday, whether they could show up for it or not. This is so insensitive to a family's work situation. Why was the report that was read at the hearing not provided to the parents in spite of several requests for it. Why was only one other person allowed into the meeting with the parents. Is this legal. Is this a facilitated conversation between the two boys to help them resolve this disagreement. How can we expect our children to be problem solvers or resolve conflicts if we aren't modeling it for them. When will we move from a punitive approach to a restorative approach. Why were only other students interviewed about this incident and not the supervising adults or the school nurse. Why was each student's story differed. So how was the assumption made that the black student was guilty. There was no evidence. The principal himself admitted. There was no mal intent and that the stories were not consistent, but he gave him a punitive suspension anyway. Why what for this was not explicit. Why was there no consequence for the other child involved he was doing something that was against school policy. I know it's hard to look at but this is what institutional racism looks like. I'm asking the school committee to please address this. The family deserves an apology and the suspension needs to come off his record. It would not have happened to a white student, in particular a privileged white student. I would like the committee to know that I'm a friend of the family. I'm not naming names because I don't want their reputation further tarnished by parents and children who make assumptions and gossip. I'm doing this of my own accord. No one has asked me to do it and doing it because I'm trying to walk the walk when it comes to equity and undoing systemic racism. Please take this in that spirit. Thank you. Thank you. Questioning. I'm asking why this was allowed to continue because of the concern of identifying the student, not for any other reason. I felt that I don't understand. So that's all. I'm not speaking to the topic. I just want to make it clear that it is the school committee's position not to enter into a dialogue at this time. We do listen to the people that speak at this time and if there is a concern by a member they will bring it to the administration offline. This is not an agenda item. Ms. Dre had indicated that she wanted to speak but I don't see her listed right now as an attendee. I don't see her either. So, okay, I'm going to move on at this time. Right now we have Ellington student representatives of the school committee. Dr. Homan, I did not have anyone indicated as a student rep so we'll pass on that one. Okay. We have jazz education conference proposal. Dr. Homan. Ms. Diggins is the staff member from our, actually, I do see that Dr. Janger is here so I can let him begin but I think we also had a staff member from Ellington High School who was going to attend and be here. Oh, he's here. Okay. All right, I'm going to actually hand this request off to them it's a proposal that they have sent to me and we wanted to make sure that the committee was aware of it and had a chance to ask any questions so go ahead Dr. So, Mr. Dagestino can speak more to the actual program. This is, we had an opportunity, which we have had before because of our wonderful programs to participate at a conference in Texas. And that does involve students traveling out of state, and overnight which according to our school committee policy, you are required to approve. So, other than giving a massive shout out to our instrumental music program, and Mr. Dagestino I'm going to turn it over to him so he can tell you about the program and the planning. Your microphone is not on. So about it. Is it on now? Yes. Good evening everyone. Thanks for having me here. Thank you so much. So I'm going to try to be brief. I send the proposal via email. Basically, the Honest Orchestra was accepted to participate at this jazz conference and it's an international conference where all these international jazz musicians come from all over the world. And it was really hard to pass. And of course, because of the code restrictions, unfortunately, the, this, this festival can allow only five students to participate in our orchestra. It is fortunate. And as I described in our, in our proposal, we are going to have a course after your approval, if you can approve, of course, we're going to need to do auditions to have five students to participate. As always, like we have done in the past 19 years, when we have traveled in Europe and in the United States, we are going to do fundraisers to help the people that they might not be able to afford this trip. And then Papa, which is the parents association, the performing arts, as agreed to help in case this trip can can happen. And as I have also attached to the email I sent to the school committee. The COVID guidelines that the this conference follows, and they're very, very strict, of course, that they, in other words, we're going to follow the high school guidelines, the, the flights guidelines and of course the, the, the COVID guidelines written by the conference. Yes, like Dr. Jagger said that this is an incredible incredible musician music opportunity. And of course I'm here to propose it to you and I hope you can approve this, this trip. And thank you. Yes. Mr. Thielman, I move approval of this trip and I congratulate Mr. DiAgostino on his excellent teaching and leadership that got us this far we wouldn't we wouldn't have this opportunity we're not for him. Is there a second to that motion. Okay. Thank you. Any further discussion by members of the committee. Seeing none, I'll take a roll call. I'm sorry, Dr. Ampe. I'm sorry. I think it's a wonderful opportunity, but I'm concerned that the, it does not require vaccination. I think that a negative COVID test before can be enough. And I'm concerned. I see that Dr. Janger has his hands up if he's speaking to this. Dr. Janger. So as a rostered extracurricular, the participating students would be required by us to be vaccinated. They're not required by the conference. Okay. I guess, in my opinion, Texas has not been doing COVID well. I am reluctant, given everything to send our students even vaccinated into that situation, especially since they are not requiring all the students who participate. I understand ours will be vaccinated, but the other ones are not. So I'm going to vote against it. I'm sorry. I'm a small sport. I think it sounds great. If it was here, that'd be great. Just to clarify, the conference requires vaccination and testing. It's in the document I sent to Ms. Diggins. Is it in the updated one? I'm sorry, I didn't. There are two documents, one my proposal and the other one from the conference. The conference requires a vaccination and or testing. From everyone who walks into this conference, which is going to be a great, great. And I'm saying testing is not enough. They need vaccination. And, and it wasn't, I'm saying if the updated. It doesn't, it's or so I don't think negative test is enough. I understand. There anyone else that would just speak to this. Hey, on the motion for the trip. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlegman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. No. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Ms. Xen. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. And I vote yes. It passes. Six to one. Thank you. And hopefully you'll take a lot of pictures and bring them back to us and share them with us when you get back. Thank you again for seeing me and for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. Moving on. In vision, Arlington, Mr. Lover. Good evening, Mr. Heiner. Are you able to hear me okay? I can hear you clear as a belt. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to speak. So how much time do I have realistically on the agenda? Mr. Heiner. One minute. No. I can do it in whatever you give me. Well, we have a tight schedule, but we want to see the program. We're looking forward to it. All right. Great. And Ms. Diggins, do we have the slides available or should I project them? We have the slides, but I think you should project them. I have you for sharing the screen. Okay. Very good. I'll bring them up. Give me just one second. Are you able to see the screen, Mr. Heiner? Yes, I can. Okay. Thank you. So I'll move quickly. Good evening, everyone. Scott Lever with Envision Arlington. I'm serving as the interim co-chair of Envision Arlington. I'm also the superintendent's representative or one of two of the superintendent's representatives on the committee. And I want to talk to you tonight about the town survey, the annual town survey, which many of you may have participated in, in this year or in previous years. The town survey is something that's performed annually. It's been performed annually since 1992 by Envision Arlington in collaboration with the town's planning department and many of the other town departments, including the school committee and the superintendent's office. Last year I worked with the school committee and then superintendent Bode to develop a number of questions that were included on the survey. And I'll tell you a little bit about that data tonight. Just a little bit about the survey as I get started. So the survey this year and each year it changes based on some of the topical things happening in town. In the year 2021, we covered a number of things, including looking at resilience and wellness in the face of COVID-19. Diversity, equity and inclusion, education issues and senior issues, as well as communication of town services. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the overall findings. A detailed report will be available by December of this year. And I'll also talk to you a little bit about some of the findings in the education section tonight. So a little bit about the survey. The survey was administered between January and March of this year. It's administered online via a web survey link. Essentially a survey monkey survey that's used for it. And notice of the survey is shared each January with tax bills that are, that are sent to all residents of the town. In past years, we've encouraged only one member of a household to respond to the survey. We've changed the format a little bit. And in the last two years, we've encouraged multiple members of a household to submit. This year we received approximately 3,735 responses. Some of those were incomplete and weren't included in the analysis. That number is down a bit from previous years. And that we've attributed to in part COVID. So. I want to go into some of the findings, which I think the committee will find. Relative and permanent around wellness, as well as some of the findings that we have with regard to education or at least the data at this point. So in the survey, we asked a number of questions about the wellness of residents with regard to their physical mental health. And their financial wellbeing in the face of COVID. So the timing of this is actually really important. The survey was administered between January and March of this year. January was really the peak for Massachusetts in terms of infections. So this was done really at the height of one of the major surges of COVID. We asked a range of questions, including questions about physical health. Mental health and economic health and wellbeing. We found that 86% of respondents reported their overall physical health was either excellent or good. 87 reported that their financial health was either excellent or good. While only 66% of residents or respondents really reported their mental health with was either excellent or good. So the mental health number was significantly lower than the physical or the financial health number. Now we don't have any benchmarks. We haven't asked this question previously. So it's hard to compare that, but it did stand out to us as being a relatively low number in comparison. A couple of other things. We asked about access to medical care. Again, this was at the height of one of the major surges in the pandemic. We asked survey respondents if their access to medical care has been more difficult than usual. We found in the responses that 45% of those who responded said their access to routine medical care was made more difficult. That was a pretty significant finding for us. We also asked a number of questions about finances. We found, again, between January and February, January and March of last year, which was about a year into the pandemic, fully a third of respondents in our survey in Arlington, reported that they had been negatively impacted by the pandemic financially. That's a third of respondents. And again, we asked about employment. We found that a quarter of respondents reported, actually, sorry, more than 30% of respondents reported fear of losing their job. And we found that, again, at that point in the pandemic, about 12% of respondents had filed for unemployment in the self-reported data. So again, really interesting and impactful findings about the impacts that residents were feeling from the pandemic as of earlier this year. So we want to shift and talk in a bit more detail about some of the education questions, which many of you contributed to. So thank you for that. So again, we met about a year ago and we identified a number of questions to include in this survey. And I'll move forward in the slides. The questions included, how, if at all, are you connected to Arlington Public Schools? How has COVID-19 affected your need in use of childcare? How many hours per week, if any, are adults in your household supporting remote education for K-12? Have any of your APS students made use of any of the mental health services in 2020? And thinking ahead for this school year, which of these services, and we listed a number, do you expect might be used by one or more APS students in your household? So I'll touch on the data. And the data is part of the minutes of the meeting. On the first question, how, how, if at all are you connected? Again, we had approximately 3,700 total responses. Fewer, fewer were used in the analysis. So that number is going to move around depending upon who responded to what question. So you'll see that the total number of responses varies a bit. But we did have a 91 students report data in our survey, 91 students. And we opened the survey for folks 16 and older. So those would be high school students who responded. These numbers allow us to do some additional drilling into the data to look at some of the findings by these different segments. That work hasn't been done. It's something that we can do together with the data going forward. And we also looked at a couple of other groups. We identified people as either current parents or future parents of a student in the system. So how has COVID-19 affected your need and use of childcare? We found that 20% of the total response or 46 of the people for whom this was relevant had to change the work schedule. And this was as of January to March of last year. Fully 9% or 21% of those responding as this is applicable to them said that they had difficulty finding childcare. And many more had to pay additional funds for childcare. How many hours a week are you using to support remote education for K-12? We found that fully, you know, 16% of those responding yes, they had students doing remote education were spending less than five hours. And it ranges, again, up to 6% of respondents said they were spending 20 hours or more to support remote learning. Then with regard to the use of mental health services, we found that 7% of those responding to this said that they were relying on guidance counselors and teachers. And then the other large group was, of course, other psychotherapy or clinical resources outside of the school. So again, this one was interesting because obviously the frontline guidance counselors and teachers are bearing a lot of the burden of this. What do people expect to be using in terms of services going forward? Again, there's a range of answers here. Enrichment programming came across pretty high. Sports. And again, this this data is available to you into the committee. So I'll pause. If there are any questions, I'm happy to ask Mr. Hanner as time allows. Happy to answer. Okay. If you could guess. Stop the sharing. I would be able to see my screen a little bit better. Yep. You bet. Thank you. Any of the members have any questions? Or seeing clarifications of comments they would like to make this time. I don't see anybody. Thank you. I think you gave a great report. We've had the numbers. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. I just want to say I've had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lever not too long ago, and we've started working on some collaboration linked to the potential for some strategic planning down the road. And I know this is work that he and members of the Envision Arlington team have historically been part of with the school department and it's, I'm looking forward to collaborating further with him. As we look forward to what is to come. So thank you. Good to see you. Mr. Lever. Yeah, good to see you. Thank you. Looking forward to it as well. And I just want to put a plug in that the survey will be, of course, starting again soon for 2022. And we'll be looking to re-engage the school committee. Around questions for that. For the next iteration. So looking forward to that. Thank you very much for your time and efforts. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. The Gibbs school improvement plan. Madam PM Maxwell, please. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Am I allowed to share my screen. Am I on. To share. Miss. Miss. Yes. Everybody can share their screen. Okay. Okay. Good. Good evening, everyone. Once again, thank you for having us. I am madam PR Maxwell, the principal at the Gibbs school. And with me tonight is. I am Stephanie granted the assistant principal at the Gibbs school. And we're going to give you a very brief presentation. Of our set plan. So tonight we're going to give you a quick overview of the Gibbs school. We're going to touch upon our wins. Some of our challenges in the priorities we have for the 2021 to 2022 school year. We'll discuss some of the key initiatives, action steps. Some of the resources to support our success. And then there'll be times for some questions and answers. Thank you. And I apologize in advance. It wasn't expected that the. Entrant. It was not going to work at school and I am at home and I do have roommates. So we're going to try to keep it down, but I apologize. I apologize if you hear any noises that's not school noise. So we are the Gibbs school. Our core values are centered around the social emotional learning. We have three keywords that we drive everything we do by, which are that our students, staff, community members are understanding unified and unstoppable. And so we look to always put in the students at the center of the community. And we look at what we do to take into their social emotional need into account to help them feel belong. So they can participate in their learning. We have quite a few humans that support us in this work from day to day. We have 76 of them, including our classroom teachers, the teacher assistants, school counselors, social workers, our nurse Dalton, who's a star on a day to day basis every day. We have our men office staff, the custodians, the cafeteria staff, everyone truly cooperate and coordinate every day, collaborates to support the core values that we use to teach our children. We also have additional trailblazers at large to support us. We have after school program. Yes. We also have a building that many of our students participate in. And of course we are supported by our curriculum directors, the school council members, the go PTO, the leadership team members, our amazing superintendent, her cabinet members, school committee, and of course our fearless parents. All of these people support us directly or indirectly to drive instruction and create the best environment for our students at the Gibbs school. And in spite of many adjustment, we had to make last school year. We felt that we had an unstoppable year based on all the support of our former superintendent, Dr. Bode, we truly felt that the year went at best as could with all the restriction of COVID. So this is Gibbs in a nutshell and we're going to continue to improve on what we do, centering our children around social emotional learning to really support their learning. So now we want to talk a little bit about our wins from this school year, starting this school year. We ended last school year holding several virtual conversation with our students at the elementary school, at all the seven elementary school. We also held a virtual presentation for our parents to kind of make a quick connection, let them know we were thinking of their students and we would spend the summer planning for the students. So we felt that it was a huge win having a total of 441 students in total participating in all the activities we put together with Gibbs staff through the Allington community education to really prepare to guide out students before they enter the school for the 2021-2022 school year. The assistant principal and I and the coordinator of the special ed department and other support staff to facilitate conversation for the students. They came, their parent came, we had 14 teachers in total that support the 12 days a guide for the Gibbs students under the leadership of Mrs. Kelly O'Keefe, one of the veteran teachers at the Gibbs school. And currently we had 76 parents who came for conversation about the last 18 months and some of their feelings, what they had learned. We had three key section we talked about was what did they want us to consider to amplify? What are some practices they felt based on the last 18 months we should sunset and what should we create? What innovation based on what they learned alongside their children with the school system, what can we do differently based on our experiences with COVID. And last but not least, currently more than 50% of our staff are participating and engaging with our students in AMP and program after school daily, simply to really help tackle all the different challenges that were caused by COVID and how can we get back to learning and creating a normal as possible environment for the students. Mrs. Griner, I can't see you so I don't know if you want to add anything at the stage. No, I'm good so far. Keep going. Thank you. And we wanted to share some pictures of celebration and conversation we had with our students. These were some of the students who came over the summer in the month of August more precisely to connect before school started. So they had a chance to do a similar activity than what we did with their parents and also with the teachers when the teachers returned to school. So we were asking the same questions of all of our constituencies to get a sense of how to really set up for this school year and to learn from what the last 18 months had taught us most everyone. So these are the 12 bases. You can see how they work from hello from coming. We created some mindful jar to give them to settle their spirits so they can really learn how to re-center themselves because most children even pre-COVID would get agitated coming to school. So we know many of them were remote. So we wanted to make sure we did some activity to get them familiar with some of us with the leadership of the school with many of the teachers. So the school will not be so strange to them when they arrive on last September 9th. These are pictures of some of their parents who also came. These pictures were taking in our media centers where some of the parents collaborated with myself, Mrs. Griner and Miss Mello who is the new special coordinator at the Gibbs School. These are and they were extremely engaging. And last but not least we have some, these pictures are actually from about three years ago where we did some activities with some of our trailblazers at the school showing you how we are collaborating with the students pausing to give them voice in different situations that are happening in the school so they can be included in some of the decisions that we are making that's really affecting them. So ultimately we want to really collaborate with our students and work with them on finding environment we want for every student. This is some of their pictures from this school year about three weeks ago. See how excited they are to be at Gibbs. And I think we also have some pictures of our staff and professional. These are some staff meeting conversation. We had similar conversation about professional development and collaborating, prepping to the school year. So these are some of the wins we wanted to share with you to show what's going on at the school. What's the pictures? So they were unified from the start and we're going to be collaborative and be understanding from hello and continue to do that throughout the school year. So now with the challenges, we have looked at some of the data from the school from also all into public school. We focus on the last from 2017 to 2021, although this data is representing performance of sixth graders by their subgroups. So we have African-American in blue, black students in red, Hispanic and yellow, green is multi-race and then orange is white. So we are looking at the performance of students from year to year. You notice that even when everyone were not progressing, we can see there was some movement going down, but the African, the black students in particular have truly declined. If you look at 2017, they went even lower from 460 to 460. They went up a little bit in 2019 and they went down again in 2021. We did not have an MCAS taking in 2020. This is for math. Math is even a more dire situation. Looking at the number again, we are looking at the number of students who were not progressing. Their performance is a lot less. 2019, it looks like was a year where there was growth being made by all in all the different group and we understand that if there wasn't a COVID-19 in 2020, perhaps that friend would have continued to go up, but in 2021, again, the black students seems to have not done as well as they are counterpart. That data is identical across the district. From third grade, fourth grade, fifth all the way to 12th grade. Consistently, black students have underperformed their multi-race peers, Asian peers and white peers. We are looking at the school and I think also the district is looking at that through some of its plan. We met with our school council and looking at how the SIP is created. We want to look at when storming around why. Why is it that across the district we are not looking at the community, we are not looking at the community like their peers are performing. We view a video which I'm not going to play tonight for the community but you have access to it that really set us to address some situation and some challenges that people tend to be uncomfortable to discuss when we are talking about a great school. Our school is a great school. We have a lot of tools and we have many of the resources we are creating the atmosphere yet some of the students still are not performing. Some of the questions the school council members pose after we view the videos and looking at the SIP and this whole looking at trauma and form lens is something our support staff are looking at. Can we view students differently not just because of COVID but because of the systematic way some black children are treated in society or how their parents are treated in society. It's not something we can ignore when we are talking about this. It's not always about that they don't know how to do the work but are they ready and open and have the capacity to take in what is being talked to them because they have so many other things competing in their mind about learning. Can we truly work on the concept of belonging for all students to feel welcome in our classroom? Does every child feel welcome in our classroom? Give schools truly centered using responsive classroom. We use the MTSS framework. We have a lot of resources that center around the question of our children feeling that they belong in our classroom. We also ask does every African American or black child have access to everything we stated above like the other students in the classrooms? Last but not least, how can we petition to explore the cultural biases in the MCAS itself? And also the topic that started conversation at the Gibbs School last year about the fact that how we grade and why do we grade? What are some of the systematic ways of perhaps not putting minority students on equal footage that we use through our system of grading and something that can often be quite subjective on the way that we do it. These are some of the interesting conversations we've had with our school council so far on the first draft of the Gibbs SIP. So I'm really looking forward to continue to work with them for us to address the elephants in the room when we are having this conversation. Do not be afraid to be vulnerable to really say the things that often people are not saying in the room. I think one of the goals in those three objectives we have in the SIP is if our school is finding where it is or has many of the elements of what makes a good school, why aren't all students and specifically African-American black students' academic performance not comparable to that of their peers? That's a question we're going to go back to today. So the three key initiatives in the SIP for Gibbs School is to create a school environment that truly fosters belonging through compassionate interaction, students to students, staff to students, staff to staff, parent to staff and staff to parents. The second initiative is to expand each staff's capacity in the area of literacy and then the last one is to develop a yearly plan to equitably teach, support our students and build all adults capacity in our school slash district. The resources we will need to support a successful implementation of the SIP is consultant to coordinate with the district director of DEI to help facilitate professional development for Gibbs staff. We would like district or school initiative to support staff in taking the ideas course. It's a course that the district has made available for teachers or anyone who works in our district. We would like to see we create the possibility giving teachers time and identify the time where we can make it more appealing for teachers to want to take the course. I've taken the course. It's quite intensive. It's a lot of reading so we can see sometimes staff may have a life after work and it's very difficult to take the course when we have not identified when is an ideal time for them to take the course. We also want to take the course. We also want to talk about the education program for students from elementary school. We do have some programming at Gibbs school but they are not in alignment with what currently exists in our elementary school so we will be working on making this more of alignment from Gibbs from elementary school to Gibbs and then Gibbs to teachers to teachers collaboration. Teachers and administrators collaboration. So we can really talk about this initiative. It's wonderful to have big initiative but if we don't have the time specifically allocated for these collaboration to take place it makes it difficult for us to implement. We also will definitely look at what budget adjustment to fund some of the stated initiative. I didn't talk too fast but this is how for you to take it. Thank you for listening and I'm going to let Mrs. Garner take all your questions. Thank you. Thank you. Any of the members have any questions or comments they would like to state or share? Mr. Carden. I'll let Jane go first for change. All right. Ms. Morgan. I guess let me. The MCAS data isn't in the presentation that we got or the one that's in Novus so if we could get an updated copy of that that would be great. The thing that I guess I wanted to ask you and Ms. Greiner about is that while certainly and I am not looking at the data now because I don't have it but you know we continue to see that in the future. I don't know if that's a good idea. I don't have a lot of groups of students but what is sort of remarkable to me is that the large jump in achievement at the Gibbs for sixth graders that we saw the first year the Gibbs opened has continued into 2021. Right. So if you look at those scores over time that we saw the first year we saw the Gibbs building down Mass App. And then we see a pretty market across the board again I'm not looking at it but a pretty market improvement in 2019 then no data for 2020 obviously and then a drop in 2021 but it's it's you know it's commensurate. Again my suspicion is it's commensurate to what we saw across the district so you know when the Gibbs opened and the decision was made to open an all sixth grade school you know something happened with student achievement when that happened with that group right those sixth graders are doing better at the Gibbs in an all sixth grade environment than they were historically and I guess I hope that you and your team can dig into that a little bit because I suspect that there are some lessons to be learned from that and with what you're doing that hopefully could be applied to improving achievement for all students so I guess I'm curious if that's something that you've talked about I appreciate it's a little wonky because we don't have those 2021 that you know that 2021 data but this is the first time that we've seen like it wasn't just an anomaly right that this year wasn't just an anomalous jump in achievement for students so I'm just curious if that's something that you guys have talked about I do agree that our students if you look at the Gibbs data itself they are doing well there there is some substantial growth but the idea is that across the district there's so our teachers probably have to do much heavy lifting than that subgroup of students to get them up to par and when you're looking at the end if you dissect the data and look at the subgroup themselves as the school we're doing well but then when you zoom into the individual students it turns that some of the students who are not doing as well happen to be those African-American or black students so that can easily get lost in the shuffle if we're looking at as the school how are we progressing so we are making growth we wanted to be substantial growth for all students so these results would include equally our African-American students so that's the thing we have to look at why are they not performing equally as their peers especially if they are of our district all along I mean of course that's what we want but I guess what I'm saying is that I also don't want to lose the fact that something happened in 2019 for achievement for across each subgroup and all students something happened that we didn't have any data for in 2020 and it was replicated by and large in 2021 and it just that there may be something to learn within whatever happened when those kids came to an all sixth grade building yes not all students we certainly don't have parity across subgroups not even close and that's what we want to do but I just am hoping that we can take some lessons from where there has been where we did see some improvement and hopefully use that to continue to drive future success so that's it and I think you're trying to give us a compliment I will graciously take it the staff does work very hard they are committed they are engaged with the students and so if we just looking on the surface I think they are doing everything that they know how to do correctly and this is why we need to find the right professional development for them we need to look deeper into the whole concept of what is true inclusion look like what is what are some areas of equity so for example if we look at how we're grading students even how we notice if we say a child is disruptive is the child truly disruptive or the child's behavior is not something you are accustomed to so I think we are on the right track at the school in regard to how do we embrace what we say putting the student at the center creating that growth mindset framework for everyone to use whether you are an adult or a child and then yes we can do better but definitely this school being all sixth grade create the right atmosphere for the children to learn without many destruction they may have had if they are with their seven and eight great peers I would agree to that and give kudos to what the staff is doing. Mr. Cardin. Thank you. I was going to make the same point this is the first time we've seen that data shown that way and I don't know when we have to rule out that there wasn't also improvement at Audison in a similar fashion in 2019 I don't think there was but that would be interesting but if not if it was limited to Gibbs and then I think somebody owes me a call to congratulate her for the job she and the team did in setting up that school so it is something hopefully a good win for us so Madame Pierre Maxwell I understand you eliminated project block this year and your new schedule isn't on the website so I'm not quite sure what that looks like now but are the teachers now teaching five periods a day or are they still just teaching four plus some other assignments. They're teaching five years a day. Okay. The other thing facing you is 500 students coming in next year based on our fifth grade size over 500 students so hopefully you're thinking it sounds like that change will help handle that level of students with the five clusters. We think so. We're hoping. Great. I'm happy very happy to see the the special education focus as the screener knows I have a personal personal history there so that's that's long overdue and you know it's sort of something that we may have had a lot of success in launching the school but something that just wasn't quite settled well so I'm glad you're taking a look at that. In the plan though it has four or five years in it for the for each activity. So it wasn't clear to me whether you're setting up a new process that you're going to use every year for the next few years or if this is sort of a one time let's look at how we're doing it to bring it into alignment with what's above and below us. Is that what you're trying to do? Well we know that we can't just have all this happening by next school year so first we want to process to looking at the logistic of the data who's coming what are they receiving to make sure that we are intentionally planning for the students and not just assume when they to gives will figure it out and then if this then we will be looking at space and at the capacity of the current staff at the school to service the incoming class we're also going to be looking at the schedule doing the schedule where we are scheduling first with special children who have those high needs and then populate the schedule around them versus the other way around. So it's a process that may take a few years and as far as the budget is concerned we understand every year going to have it on flavor because we don't know how many students coming from year to year so that's a process that once we establish it that needs to continue it from year to year and we hope that we can also start the process not somewhere in the spring but somewhere at the end of the fall so we can be well prepared for example if we need to post in position if we need to tweak the programming at a district level to properly staff give school that we can do this ahead of time so we still playing with the years but I foresee that once it's established it will be year in year out to make sure that we are utilizing the data that's coming in whether it's the facilities perspective or academic or materials for the program the kids will need et cetera so that's what we're hoping to do. Great thanks. I'm chair of the curriculum instruction subcommittee basically short name so I do hope you have sort of gone through this process this year in the spring you'll come to us and give us an overview of how that went and what you've learned from that that would be great. Thank you. A lot of what I want to say has already been said the only thing I want to do is say that just to let people recall that several years ago we had long conversations about the sixth grade school and it was a good idea and you know and I met on behalf of Maxwell made great points about areas where things are going great and areas where the staff and faculty recognize there has to be improvements and I think that's great leadership on her part and staff's part but I do want to say at a high level things are working really well it's a good model it's very popular in our town and kudos to the staff administrative leadership for making the school where it is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you madam. One thing I wanted to ask about or at least bring to your attention so I understand the focus on black students and the focus on students with disabilities is not available with those at all but the other group which is having significantly lower scores and growth factors growth percentiles are economically disadvantaged students and I'm concerned that there's nothing that's been discussed that as best I can tell that especially if part of the reason these kids are not achieving as well is perhaps things outside of the classroom you know it's lack of resources at home lack of extracurriculars maybe poor study conditions and stuff and so I just there's a lot of kids in that group too and I hope that they can be looked at and that their needs can be addressed and they can get some help with that. So thank you. Thank you and we will definitely do that. Thank you. Mr. Slickman. Thank you very much Mr. Chair. Thank you to the Gibbs staff for the school improvement plan. I commend you because this is the most difficult improvement plan to write because it's only in one grade school and so that if you're doing a cohort analysis it's very easy to go and do an analysis on the students you had last year and apply that universally to the population that said I did go through the district data broken down by subgroup and that last year's fifth grade and sixth grade showed similar patterns so I think you're on target of where you're going your focus is aligned with the data good form for school improvement plan would be to have the data in the plan laid out for folks to observe but that's okay you've come to the right conclusion but my suggestion is for next year as you're writing your school improvement plan and I would expect you're probably going to be looking at some of the same things that you're looking at right now is to be using this year's fifth grade as a benchmark from which you're drawing your action plan and your desired outcomes for that group because you've got a whole different population coming in but because of the similarities between last year's fifth grade I don't know how deep you went into last year's data for the fifth grade but your conclusions and your action plan does align to what I think are important things for the school to focus on so thank you very much Thank you Madam PM Maxwell please first thank you and please pass on to the rest of your staff the gratitude of the committee for all the work that they've done and continue to do Thank you so much I will do so Thank you Audison school improvement plan, Mr. Merringer your microphone is still off we should be all set and hopefully I've shared my screen there so Madame thank you very much it's always good to follow you to begin with the school improvement plan here at the Audison I did want to thank a couple of people that I think have done just a fantastic job so Julia McEwen is here with me today and she is the assistant principal for seventh grade, Rachelle Rubino could not be here today unfortunately she is an adjunct professor at Salem State and she is teaching administrators who want to get through kind of their pals process so we are going to, I did want to say to thanks to them very much I am having a little problem hold on with my screen here just for a sec so if you can just bear with me for just a sec there we go we have three goals here at the school improvement plan for the Audison I just wanted to say the first one is about a bridge program that we are launching so this is a program that is transitional for students coming back from illness whether it be physical or whether it be hospitalization for social emotional and also for students who are having trouble getting to school with school refusal the second school improvement goal I would like to talk about tonight is looking at creating an advisory program at the middle school and the adoption of ruler as a social emotional curriculum and then the last school improvement goal I would like to talk about is whether we get rid of tracking at seventh grade so right now most of our students are in math 7a and I am glad to let you know that Matt Coleman is also with us tonight to ask any specific questions that might be in and around math so to start off with the first school improvement goal that is creating a bridge program and launching it so when I first started here three years ago at the Audison we had a good amount of kids who were missing substantial amounts of school so to be in Massachusetts considered chronically absent you need to miss 18 days which is 10% of the school year and for the last three years we have been above 8% so when you figure that out it is about one out of every 12.5 students are missing 18 or more days so we tried to look at why do we have one out of 12 students missing so much time and what we have found is for many of our students or enough students that we needed to help they were missing it because of social emotional reasons coming back from physical ailments such as concussions and because they were school phobic so we tried to design a bridge program and what the bridge program is is a program that helps students coming back from missing time to hopefully get help both emotionally and academically until they're ready to be full-time students again so this year we have an academic coordinator that's working with students who are coming back from extended absences and we've also linked a social worker with that program as well we have something like this at the high school shortstop in harbor and we're really trying to make sure that we're meeting the needs of some of these kids who are struggling we're also looking to have a bridge program not only because of students missing but we're also looking to the future and we're worried about increasing numbers of kids who are in anxiety or depression and a lot of times what happens with many of these students is that they're referred to special education and really what they need I think is a bridge program a lot of times to get them back on their feet so just to run you through just a real quick history that first year we kind of identified the problem that we needed to have kids transition back during the second year we partnered with the bridge for resilient youth which is out of Brookline to design the program we made sure we were hiring the teacher and having an accident entrance criteria but then unfortunately COVID hit and we were delayed from implementation for one year and so we've started the program this year we feel like it's a program that unfortunately a lot of kids are going to take use because when you look at kids missing school and you look at kids who are suffering from depression or anxiety over the last 10 years you are seeing an uptick in kids who are suffering and COVID has just made it worse so I think if you look at the data we're seeing trends of depression anxiety a lot with the girls who are in kind of 13 or 14 year olds the good news with that is it seems like from the data most girls are suffering from depression or anxiety but they're more likely to ask for help for boys the numbers seem less but they're more reluctant to get into therapy so this year we have kids in our bridge program we are tracking monthly attendance we are making sure that we're collecting all sorts of data so far I think we're off to a good launch of the program and I'm hoping that it really is going to help some kids coming back from illnesses because what we saw kind of before this time you know would refuse to go to school might have a concussion might be hospitalized and the difficult thing is the more time they missed it got increasingly difficult to come back and get a full academic load so we're hoping this bridge program will really help some of the kids transition back get on their feet get some services they need and get back to school so that is really our first school improvement goal is to make sure the bridge program is running effectively to help students who need it our second school improvement goal is to look at something called ruler which is the social emotional curriculum both Julia, myself and Rachelle have taken the course and we feel like education is changing in that we're really trying to meet not only the academic goals but we're trying to meet the social emotional needs of our students as well and we're looking for a curriculum that will help and we're looking for a place to put it and as many of you know there's an advisory program in school there is not one at the autism and I think we have to talk about what an advisory program what would be the goals of it and why we have to have an advisory program and we are going to have an advisory committee that is going to be with teachers because I really need their input and buy in on what it looks like so that's an advisory program that did start a few years ago it was not successful feedback that I've received it was before I was here teachers didn't think it was kind of well run and they weren't invested in the end for the kids feedback it wasn't seen as super successful so we came up with something called aspire which is a 10 minute break which I think it allows students and teachers enjoy it's after the first two periods it allows kids to catch their breath get a snack get announcements get reorganized go to the locker I think if when you ask kids and staff they really like it but it is only 10 minutes long and I think there are some things in advisory that we could do that needs to be a little bit longer we really need to discuss what that is one of the things that I think is difficult with advisory programs is sometimes they're almost too scripted and they seem too artificial and a little awkward for both staff and for students and what we really want to do out of an advisory program is have kids connect with adults in the building so that they feel comfortable and when I look at education going forward I think that the relationships that students have with staff is of paramount importance and you know I look at we had a cross-country team this year for the first time we had about 50 kids and for many of those kids they were excited to come to school because they had cross-country and I think kids are inspired to come to school if there are things that they really enjoy and if we can make those connections between adults so everyone has a trusted adult and wants to be in school I think that will be more successful and will help with attendance but also help with learning and academics and I think that's an area that we really need to look at and how we do that successfully and I think there's an advisory program that to me is too scripted or too artificial I wanted to make sure that both students and talk to students and talk to staff of really how they feel this can be successful and I do think that there are some things we can take from the ruler course that Rochelle, Julia and I all were attended this summer and there's some really good things that we could take out of that so kids could also talk about emotions and talk about how they're feeling because I do feel like more and more we're talking about social emotional learning and how kids are, how they're feeling how they can be connected to people and the last thing I just wanted to say in general is that if you have a teacher connect with a kid and inspire I think that is the most powerful thing education is changing for years if you wanted to know how to do something you would go to a teacher because the teacher was the keeper of knowledge so if I had to learn how to factor or if I wanted to know who in the 18th century was a czar or any of the different subjects the teacher was the person that I could go to to get wisdom and it could get information we're switching and I feel like education is now switching in that you can get content online I've watched my daughter who's in high school when she has a question she goes to YouTube she goes to Khan Academy you can get content but what I see from kids is when they really have that relationship then they can get inspired and excited about the content that's why social emotional learning getting an advisory making sure we have a bridge program is all important for kind of the future of education the last thing I wanted to talk about and I think we have to look at here is whether we should still track math at seventh grade and so the question to me is I want to investigate if it makes sense so when does it make sense to track students for math so we don't track kids for English we don't track kids for science we entrust in those teachers that they will differentiate the instructions to reach all kids math and Matt Coleman I will have him speak to this if he wants to math seven and math seven a are very similar in what they're teaching kids and so if it's a similar curriculum should we not track yet at seventh grade and that's the question so a lot of this came out of you know and madame talked about this earlier is looking at some of the statistics and it's really making you think so if you look at math seven and seven a seven a is the more advanced math we have two thirds of our kids are sixty percent depending on the year taking a higher level math class so we have forty to thirty three percent we're taking the math seven course if you look at our students who identify black or African-American it's flipped we have more is so for example in two thousand twenty two thousand twenty one sixty percent of our kids took the higher level math class nineteen percent of the African-American or black population took the higher math class forty percent of our students overall we're in math seven eighty one percent of black or African-American and the same holds true this year so it's it's a relationship so the question I would ask is why is that we need to investigate and I think there was a question early on what about economically disadvantaged students yes we need to look at that the question is is a course at math in seventh grade doesn't make sense to have students to be in there and differentiate if we believe in in you know a growth mindset where every kid can do it and if we can differentiate and we can give them the tools to be successful does it make sense not to track in seventh grade and there are other school systems that are not tracking yet at math in seventh grade if you want to look at Wellesley or Weston there are other high performing districts that don't that don't track at that level yet and so if you are tracking at seventh grade or kids internalizing I'm not in the upper math class I'm not a good mathematician and should I should I be not looking at myself to take upper level math courses as I go along because clearly I'm not in the upper math class I know this is something that people are looking at and it is something we want to investigate so some of the things that we're going to do this year is to look at the curriculum mapping for sixth seventh and eighth grade we're not trying to lower standards we're not we're trying to make sure the same amount of math is being taught we'd have to create some time so the teachers could differentiate the instructions we need to get parent involvement and get parent feedback we need to get the feedback obviously from school committee we need to make sure that we're looking at conducting walks looking at how we use math support and whether we want to pilot something so this is to us this is a true investigation of look we've seen something does it make sense to investigate and so that is the third goal is to really look at this so with that I'll be more than happy to take any questions any members of the committee Mr. Slickman thank you again this is a thoughtful plan but I do have some questions and an overall comment towards the end first of all on the school improvement portion of the bridge can you talk to us about what you would view as a measurable outcome or a hopeful achievement that you dated that you'd be able to show us at the end of the year if you're successful my overall hope is that the data would show is that we can have kids that come back from either hospitalization or a school refusal and that they could transition quickly back into full academic load so for right now if one of our students is hospitalized they've missed maybe two weeks can we in two or three weeks they come back into the program can they ramp up and can they go back into classes full time and be successful one of the things that we've seen sometimes is when kids are school avoidant or whether they're hospitalized a lot of times the absences just increase and increase throughout the year and what we're looking for hopefully successfully is we can look at students who have missed time and then hopefully we get them up and running in three to four weeks where they're taking more of an academic load and once they've been in bridge hopefully then they have a successful year overall we're looking to try to keep the numbers lower than 8% but we also want to make sure that kids can continue to be at a higher rate of 8% rate under 8% and the reason we picked that goal is that we've been over 8% for the last three years and we're worried now with kids coming back from or we're still in a pandemic but coming back and also with the increase we're seeing an increase of 8% but we also want to make sure that kids can come back because I think what's happened in the past is kids have come back in and then they've missed more time and they've come back in and they've missed more time what we're hoping to do is provide structure so once they come back to school hopefully they can get the academic and emotional support they need and be successful students and that's what I think is really important and this is all very important the one thing I'd say is that for us as a committee because we don't have access to student level data the MKS data is pretty obvious published by the state so that for us to look at a school improvement plan and desired outcomes and to evaluate it and join with you in a partnership we're going to need to as the year concludes come up with some way to measure the effectiveness and or things that you envision improving going along second question is how does the ruler program align to Gibbs in the high school so right now the as the Gibbs has responsive classroom but it is something that Sarah bird wanted us all to kind of take into find out so right now we're kind of piloting the program with the with the teachers and then we're going to come back and try to pilot it but right now it does not it's a it's a program that's standalone and we're kind of the first group that's in it I think one of the criticism we've had over all the district is that there there has not been a continuity and consistency across levels in terms of the way we're approaching both student conduct and social emotional and with the changes at sixth grade and its seventh grade and at ninth grade I think that we need to be finding a way to align things so that kids are more consistent in terms of I'd like to see going into next year as part of your evaluation of this goal how you're looking towards alignment with your adjacent schools the third one in terms of tracking math into seventh grade and I guess it's more of a Matt Coleman question answer comment is that the research literature shows and student performance all over the place the early tracking in mathematics kids who end up not in the honors track or in lower tracks that immediately becomes a barrier to higher level mathematics when they get to high school so that we're making a decision for kids in sixth grade as we're scheduling them for seventh that locks them either into a path or out of a path to calculus and other higher level mathematics so I really see the need to break down those barriers I thought that the four by four block offered a passing lane for kids who got into that trap but I just sort of like to ask Mr Coleman how he views that particular element of giving kids the chance to get to the highest level of mathematics and not excluding them at sixth or seventh grade can I jump in before Matt because I have definitely learned Matt and I want to make sure that like I am a good student of yours the barriers of whether you're in seven or seven a does not mean that you cannot make the upper level math classes it does not put you necessarily on a track where you can't I think where I am thinking and Matt I will let you obviously answer as well is our kids internalizing because they are in that math Matt I believe you have like the track is that you can take all advanced courses just there's you've made it so if you're a math seven or math you are not all of a sudden tracked for a lower level math you can make that you can still do as well as anyone in math seven I think I'm looking for more of a internalizing you know it's a little bit like soccer when you everyone knows who's on the first team and the second team and you're on the fourth team you might not look at yourself as being that kind of player so Matt I think I have you know I'm looking at whether kids are internalizing that but still with the setup we have today you know every kid can end up at the same point it's just a different pathway am I correct with that Matt almost can I add on yeah really good so there's a lot of nuance to a lot of this stuff and I'll try to take it in buckets so I know I've spoken to all of you about my desire to try to make sure as many of our pathways are open to as many kids as possible and there have been shifts and I I think thinking about the end game I think it's a good way to think about it what I'm thinking about as students go through our whole entire system I am trying to think about what is the typical experience what do we expect all students to have as their experience what do we want to see them end up with so right now at the high school I would say we have we have multiple pathways we have an AP stats pathway and we've reconfigured what happens even in our standard level classes so a student math 6 math 7 math 8 algebra 2 can take AP stats their senior year so that availability of AP stats is still there which is important to me the work we've done with our CS program in the mandatory sixth grade in the seventh and eighth grade optional class which this year is 40% of our students are enrolled in one of those optional CS classes that's really open up the barriers to that CS pathway so we have freshmen who are in AP CS principles you know somewhere in honors which is great but we have some kids who are starting up that pathway or up the back the toughest enough to crack though is that Calc pathway because that one that is the determiner with that math 7 and math 7a and one of the things I worry about is although we have a lot of kids like right now as is 40% of our seniors are enrolled in at least one math AP class which I think is great the downside is not a lot of students even though these opportunities are available to them not a lot of students and I think this is to Mr. Merger's points bronze point there's this this something that's happening in our community where some students just don't internalize themselves as math students and they are not taking advantage of a lot of these opportunities and I'm worried that our systems are going to be sending signals to some students that some of our classes aren't for them so my interest of this is really trying to make sure that I'm understanding like all those little mechanisms that could be kind of considered what are the implications of those mechanisms like I know on that list we're talking about math support I think we're at the point right now we might be able to kind of retrofit and change math support so maybe that we can actually start to shift around some of our other support programs to not just keep that standard level to make sure that we could actually promote to really encourage students to take that chance and jump up at that seven a level and seventh grade so for me when I'm thinking about this it's really kind of opening up that final little nut that little nugget at the end of the time for a broader audience that we have right now so that's that's kind of my motivation in all of this and that's why I'm curious about it I've painted around the edges and kind of moved around pathways as much as I can and I do think this is the next thing that I think is really good for us to consider you know and to to to understand what the outcomes could be for the broader population of our students. Okay very much thank you chairman. Any other Ms. Morgan. So I have a question about the advisory but I'll stick with the math just because we're kind of on that on that trajectory so Matt are you are you saying so are there any kids who take math seven not math seven A but take math seven who go on to take algebra one as eighth graders do we close to algebra one for students taking math seven because what you just said was that what we do when we when we level them in seventh grade as we close off calculus right and I know that the path to calculus goes through algebra one and eighth grade there's no way you can't get there if you don't take algebra one and eighth grade right there are ways around that too. Okay. But I mean but but most students who go on to take calculus take algebra one in eighth grade. All right so so but but how do you get students out of math seven into algebra one in eighth grade. Yes. So there are multiple ways we've tried to and this kind of goes with I would say the bigger push over the you know this is the start of my 10th year and this has been something we're trying to massage. So our tracking isn't hard and fast but there's a lot of places to move. So we do have some of our students in math seven who will do really really well that will open up algebra one. We do have students who essentially in usually then for those students in 10th grade where some of the electives in the high school might open up go opt to double up on geometry and algebra two and take that math classes are elected those classes don't overlap so much as we do that and then the other thing that we do Our state standards, a lot of the way in which are, the new math standards across the country are written, has Algebra II as that capstone. So those are the ones I hold most dear. 100% of our students graduate our schools through Algebra II. There's no one who doesn't. And even at this point, what's great is, even through high school, our Algebra II classes are all standard level inclusion classes. So I'm saying that they're graduating with that. We're giving a really good, robust education to pretty much all kids throughout too, which is really a testament to our teachers. But, and this is the caveat, but I think we can do a better job of getting, oh, sorry, sorry, I forgot this part. We have kids, sometimes we'll take precasts during the summertime if they wanna jump into that cal. So we can offer that as well. But as a caveat, those little things are few and far between, and they really are for those very motivated students within those groups. And I still feel as though what I see in the data, and I'd be happy to kind of talk more about it if I can give it a little more time. What I see in the data is we're still not sending the message to all of our students in a lot of different subcategories. I think it kind of is pretty broad to a lot of our students that some of our math classes isn't for them. And that's what I worry about. So I guess what I would say is, like I appreciate that this is being presented as an investigation. And I hope that part of that investigation is looking at, so my hypothesis as you begin to investigate would be that those students who take math seven, who go on to algebra one at the oddison, are the ones that I'm very intrigued by, right? I'm very interested in those are the kids. And I would hypothesize that those kids, the reason they choose to go to algebra one instead of math eight is because of the relationship they have with their seventh grade math teacher. And that they build a relationship with that teacher during that class, during that year, where for some reason they are then committed to going into algebra one. Because I suspect some of them, it's a little bit of a sell, right? That you got to get them to say, yeah, yeah, I'll take algebra one instead of carrying on with math eight. So I hope that, I think it's important that we're leveling, that regardless of what happens with the math seven leveling, I think it's really important to look at this because it does seem like a place where if we don't need to level, let's not, right? If we don't need to level to get our objectives, let's not because it becomes a barrier to students. But I do want to understand what happens for those kids who decide to go from math seven into algebra one, what that's about, why they feel confident enough to do so. And is there anything, is there anything? So I will say, I talked to a parent of a seventh grader a few weeks ago and she said about her daughter that she was really enjoying math seven this year because finally all of those other kids got out of the class who always answered the questions first and were always like jumping out of their seats and were flashing their perfect test scores around, which they do because they're kids, right? And she was now, you know, toward the top of her, you felt like she was like one of the better students in her math seven class. And so it had really increased her confidence. And I said to the mom, I was like, you know, like the material's not all that different, right? Like it's not that different. But there was a perception for this particular child that that was a good experience. So anyway, as part of the investigation, I'm sure those are all things that you're going to be looking at. So my other question for Mr. Merringer. So the idea of advisory, I guess my concern about it is that ultimately to do advisory, I presume you want really small groupings, right? So you're deploying all of your educators in the building to take a small group of kids. And so I will say our experience this year, I have two seventh graders, they're having a great year. They happen to be an advisory class because it's all alphabetical with somebody who they really don't ever see again for the whole day. Really nice man, I think. I don't know him at all because they eat snack with him and it seems great. But I guess my concern is that we only have so many minutes in the day and if we're taking time in advisory and the purpose is to build relationships with adults, there are going to be kids who have an advisory period that's sort of, it's been created, right? To work in the schedule and to have a person who's an educator who's leading it and it's not gonna be somebody that they ever see again during their school day. And I guess I just don't understand the value of that if we're trying to help adults build relationships with kids. So I don't know if you can share your thoughts about that but it doesn't totally make sense to me. So one of the things we're looking for advisory would be to put some social emotional learning in that time but you could also have parts of advisory that would be interest-based. So for example, if you wanted to have teachers teach what they're passionate about and what kids are passionate about, you could also some places have advisory where you go not necessarily with who you're assigned to but for that block of time, you might go 20, 25 minutes with something that you're really interested in. One of the things we've talked about internally is about affinity groups. Is that a time period where you could have an affinity group? If you had a 25, 20 minute block and I don't know what it would look like, how could you meet the goal and there might be different creative ways of getting there? So some of it might be, yeah, student A always goes to Matt Coleman's class but there might also be some time where we say for the next three weeks, we're gonna be offering different interest groups and instead of your son going to Matt Coleman's class, they're going to Mr. Heynner's class because he's doing something on history and wow, they think that's fabulous to go to and that will be exciting and your kid's always been a history buff and all of a sudden they're excited about something like that. So we're trying to look at some real creative out of the box thinking of what that would look like and we do wanna keep things small but I think that's a valid criticism of what is the assignment of kids and who they're with and how do you maybe mix them up with some of the teachers after a while because one of the criticisms of advisory is that is it artificial that you're meeting together as a group and you're trying to connect with that adult? Like maybe there are times in which we need to switch those things. So I just feel like when I look at the overall idea of advisory and connecting with kids, are there different things that we can do? And I wanna get the feedback from the teachers because we had it here, it wasn't seen as successful. Why wasn't it successful? What places are it successful with and go from there? But I agree, what can we do creatively so that we can meet some of our overall goals and have it be an exciting time in which kids are really like excited about learning and connecting with people. Yeah, I mean, I think it, I'm sure that you guys will do some thoughtful work around this. It just seems like a lot of that, there are only so many minutes in the day, right? And we've gotta give them, we've gotta give, my kids like their snack. Could they snack and learn about history for Mr. Haynor concurrently? Sure. But yeah, it does seem like, but I appreciate that part of the SIP is not necessarily saying like, we're gonna implement X, Y, or Z and that this is a, that I think that it's helpful to normalize improvement as investigation, right? Because it is, like part of improving is looking into things and turning over stones and looking to see what's underneath them and it's okay to be like, oh, okay, maybe not that one, right? And I think that that's really important. So I appreciate that. If I try to implement top down advisory, it will not work, period. It won't work at all. Like I need to hear from the teachers who are in the classroom and the students of what they need and what we're trying to provide them with is hopefully a time in which they're making connections with their classmates, they're making connections with teachers, they can discuss maybe difficult conversations, they can hopefully, it's a real enrichment and inspiring time and that's what we're really looking to do. But if I just tell you exactly what it is, it's not gonna fly. Like it needs to be, there's a reason why a couple of years ago advisory was at the Odyssey and it didn't seem to work. So for me to just say, oh, we're gonna try it again because Brian thinks it's a good idea. It's not gonna work. Like I need people to be excited about it, both students and staff, or it's just a neat thing for me to go to school committee and be like, oh, we've got this really neat thing. But if there's no buy-in, what are we doing? So that's one of the things we're trying to do to see if it can be successful. I mean, it's like the same thing with math. Like I have questions, let's see if we can investigate an answer. Thank you. Ms. Hexton. Thank you. Some of my comments are repetitive, so I'll try to skip over those, but I appreciate the thoughtfulness around adding social-emotional learning programming to the Odyssey and that's been something that's been missing and we've heard that, I've heard that from parents. But I do share Mr. Schlickman's concerns about the many sort of SEL programs that are out there. Second step, responsive classroom, ruler, collaborative problem solving at the high school. And I hope that there is a plan to make something more cohesive or smooth, sort of vertically aligning that. And I share some of Ms. Morgan's questions about the size of the advisory group. So that feedback was helpful. But one of the things that it made me think about is the Panorama Survey and some of your comments to Mr. Marender around students having an adult in the building that they trust. I forget the exact phrasing of the question. It's like, is there an adult in the building that you trust? So I'm wondering if you have considered that the data from that question previously and is that something that you'll use going forward? I realize you'd have to decide you're going to implement advisory, but I hope, I agree with you that every student needs to have an adult in the building that they have a relationship with. And it's not always going to be a teacher of one of their core classes. And so having advisory can offer that opportunity for them to form a relationship with a different staff member in the building, but just thinking about how you're going to decide whether or not that's happening or the advisory program is effective, whether it's implementing rule or doing something different. Yeah, I mean, if you look right now, you can honestly say like, you have advisory at Gibbs, you have the high school, you don't have it at the Audison. Social, emotional, what is the Audison doing? And I think that's, we need to take a look at that and we need to find out what's best for kids. And when we look at, and that's what we need to, we don't just need to say, oh, this is a great program, we'll just throw it in and we say we're going to do it. Like it has to work for kids. And when you look at some of the data in the survey we have, I want to say it's about a quarter of our kids said that they didn't really have like a relationship and a trusted adult. And to me, that's too high. And so I'm hoping that in middle school right now, when you can go into school, you feel like there's someone that if you had something, you could go to that person, you could trust that person. And for many of that kids, that's happening and they like going to school, but for other kids, we need to make sure that's happening. And so we're trying to investigate because I really do think education is changing. Like we are seeing kids with increasing, social, emotional problems. We are seeing a switch to more technology. And as the needs of our students change, we need to react. Like I don't think a school system is static. And we just say like, gee, when I was in school, this is how we did it. It's not, things have changed. And I think we need to look at how we best meet the needs of our students. And we need to get our students involved. We need to get our teachers involved in what that's gonna look like. Thank you. And I'll just add, I appreciate the emphasis that you're putting on getting teacher input into that programming. Thank you, Mr. Heiner. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. A couple of quick questions. First, the bridge program. So do, does either the academic coordinator or the clinical coordinator work to help align the homework loads or get rid of, do they, are they involved in communicating with the teachers and managing expectations? And all of this happens at shortstop and harbor in the high school. Yes. So that is their role. Their role is to make sure as the student comes back, they're checking in with the teachers, finding out what is the most important thing to do because what we're trying to do is get that kid, that student back into the regular academics and get into a routine. So the academic coordinator is talking to the family of that particular student and is also talking to the teachers and trying to figure out how best to happen. And so we're worried about the child transitioning and what we're trying to do is have someone who's the adult being the conduit between the family, the student and the staff to make sure they're as successful as possible. And that really is the role. So at bridge in one time, we're looking anywhere from six to eight students, we're looking to have on that caseload. And the idea is that it's transitional, not that it's a year long process where they're in. But yes, the idea is the academic coordinator is talking with the staff to find out what is most important to get them back in the class full-time. Okay, I think it's been a program which has been very successful at the high school and very useful. And I can see a need for it at the middle school. I think the readout, one of the readouts that Mr. Schwickman was looking for could just be what percentage, what percentage of the time have students been in school? And we only have historical data now but you can compare it with that. And that's a useful metric just to begin with. Then my other question was just to offer an alternative view about the differences among the SEL programs. Kids respond differently at different ages and it may be that one program is better for younger kids or older. And also sometimes these programs put things in, they phrase it differently. And so one kid may pick something up in one where they don't in another. So I don't think it's totally unreasonable to have a mixture of programs across the district. It would be nice to get, and this isn't for you. I'm looking at you, Mr. Berger, but it's not you. It'd be nice to have a sense of what the programs are at all the different levels and what the strengths and downfalls are of each one and why we do which one where. But that's something that would be later. And again, it's not something that you should be doing to be more as further or someone else in the administration. So that's all, thank you very much. Mr. Codden. Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Merringer for a very ambitious SIP. So this is our first time looking at the SIPs for each school. And I think part of what's taking us along tonight is you've got a lot of big ideas in here that we haven't really been exposed to before. And so suddenly seeing them in the SIP, we all have strong thoughts on some of the proposals. And so some of these probably need to come back for more discussion either at a subcommittee or the full committee or during the budget process. So I have lots of thoughts on lots of these, but I'll try to keep my stuff brief. So the bridge program looked like that started in September, 2021 this year. So is that already underway? Yes, it is. Yeah. So we already started the bridge program. So this is great. That's great. I didn't see that discussed in the budget discussion last year though. So were we able to fund these positions elsewhere from somewhere else or? So we funded, so going back pre-COVID which seems like a lifetime ago, we had a teacher here who fulfilled a lot of different roles. One of her roles was that she gave some extra help to kids. One of her roles was that she did in school suspension. Another role that she did was that she made sure kids were catching up when they went, came back from extended absence. She retired. So we repurposed her position to be in the bridge academic coordinator. We were also given a social worker this year as an extra position to help with a lot of kids transitioning back. And when we took the social workers position, we said, not only would that person be working with a caseload, but they would also support that person in the bridge program because a lot of those kids need counseling. So one was pre-COVID repurposing a position we already had and one was adding a general ed social worker. So for years, the only social workers we had were you needed to have an IEP. Otherwise you were going to your school counselor and we thought that there were many kids who would, and when we talked in school committee, thank you for funding the position. We felt that there's needed to be a general ed social worker. And so that was a lot given to us. And we said some of that would be helping out and giving counseling to the kids who were coming back from hospitalization, but might not be on an IEP and have services. Great, thank you. And then on SEL, I mean, I do recall Ms. Bird saying she was working on a SEL map for the district. So I don't know what happened to that, but I think that would help put all of this in context and put our minds more at ease if we could get her to come. We've got a pretty booked agenda through the new year, but in the new year, we get her to come and update us on the work that she's been doing. I think that would help put ruler into context because I know she's a big supporter of that. And then with the math restructuring, in partly you've got so much going on. I do think doing all of this this year to run a pilot next year in this area is I think it's too much too fast. So I definitely support exploring this idea, investigating it, but I do think once you make a decision that this is the direction you want to go in, you're going to need a lot more time to rebuild the curriculum. I mean, math support just changed from to transition to algebra last year. So we're going to change it again in next fall. You know, I would think we would want to go a little bit more cautiously with this. It, you know, I'm not saying I'm against it. I do think there's a lot of data here that shows that we're unnecessarily tracking in the seventh grade, but I do want to make sure that when we make the shift, we do it right. And we make sure that the teachers are able to differentiate correctly. And this kids that need support with keeping up with the curriculum are getting the support, keeping up with that actual curriculum somehow. And then maybe it's not math support. Maybe it's TAs in the class, I don't know. But I do think we need more time to build a program that will work for everyone. And then I'm, you know, we still still have the skip math program, the skip sixth grade math program that I think you introduced, Mr. Coleman, if I'm correct. And I just, we need to understand the impacts on that as well, right? So if we're eliminating the chance for kids who want to go faster in the seventh grade, are we going to be forcing more kids to try to get into the skip math program? There's just a lot of questions that I think we need to investigate before we go forward with this. So that's all for me. Thank you again. Yeah, and I think you bring up some good points because what we don't want to do is rush anything because I think we want to be thoughtful and we want to make sure that we're having these conversations with all the stakeholders. And yes, I agree, it's ambitious. I don't know if we'll get, you know, it's a goal. You know, we're hoping to make sure we're doing the action steps and move on, but it might not be, you know, something that we get to. And, you know, we understand that, but we're going to try. And then I think the conversation will be whether we're ready or not. And if that's what the investigation turns out. So, you know, I think we're pretty realistic right now in looking at it and wondering what we need to do and can we do it? And it might, you know, I'm hoping we can, but I share some of the same kind of thoughts of we need to look at a lot of things. But, you know, I think it's something worth investigating. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, I'm going to be brief because a lot of good materials been covered. You know, first of all, Mr. Marriage, I think that the three objectives you have are right on and the things that the school should be addressing this year. So I applaud that. And I think the conversation that you and Mr. Coleman and the rest of the district, or best of the math teachers and you want to have is actually a good thing to have. And I actually think, I mean, I heard Mr. Coleman saying in the subcommittee meeting the other night that you know, the day that this is the, you know, that it might be better to begin to get rid of leveling in or have heterogeneous classes in the seventh grade or earlier. And so I would think this might be the grade level to begin what was talked about at the curriculum meeting the other night regarding heterogeneous classes. So this might be the level to begin at. So I'm glad you're doing it. What Mr. Cardin said is probably good advice. And I think you're considering it anyway. You don't want to rush it and you might do it well. So that's the only point I want to make. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Marriage, thank you. And thank you all, all your staff for the work they've done and continued to do. Thank you so much. Have a good evening. Okay, superintendent's report, Dr. Holman. Okay, you should be able to see my screen. Yes. Yes. All right. Good evening members of the school committee. And thank you. And thank you to our school administrators who took the time to be here and share their school improvement plans. Middle school night was a lot of fun. And it was great to hear what they're working on. And the two of you also can get going at any point if you would like to be dismissed and have a good evening. I know you have a busy day tomorrow. Actually, not two of you. There's a lot of you there. So thank you all for joining and thank you to Mr. Coleman for joining as well. I want to give a brief update as it regards our COVID-19 situation and numbers in Arlington and in APS. We have had four cases so far this week in Arlington public schools. So we're continuing to have a low case numbers across the schools. We are working to make sure that the dashboard is updated regularly. I thank families for their patience because it usually takes me or takes us until the weekends to get some of the pool testing data up. But we do try to keep the case counts up to date as possible throughout the week. Arlington's average daily case rate was posted earlier today and it's stable compared to last week. So it looks like overall, both in the schools and in town cases are stable. I don't anticipate a change in Middlesex County's status this week. And as I mentioned last time we met, that is tied to the town's consideration of dropping a town-wide mask mandate. Additionally, the commissioner issued a revised deadline for the dropping of the mask requirement to January 15th. I critically want to make sure I note and did not note in what went out to families that there is still a waiver process if a school has a case rate above 80% or a vaccination rate above 80% then school districts may apply for the waiver. We are not in a situation where we can consider that right now because we are still under the town-wide mask mandate that is linked to Middlesex County's case rates. However, we could begin to consider a revision if we ended up in a situation where we fell down into low or moderate categories. That said, we're considering a lot of different factors including the fact that our youngest students can't be vaccinated, many of them have older siblings. The fact that the upcoming holiday season is on its way here as well as flu season and all of these things would play a role in conversations that we would have with the Department of Health and with our nursing team in considering any sort of application for a waiver ahead of the January 15th potential date. So that's just an update on COVID-19. I also wanted to update the committee on the work being done towards my entry plan just as a quick snapshot of what I've been up to. I'm holding some fall family and staff listening sessions. Those are set to begin next week and they have some focal themes attached to them that are coming out of the listening sessions that I held earlier this summer. These will be themed around diversity, equity and inclusion. The staff forum I'm actually holding with our director of diversity, equity and inclusion as part of her entry plan. So we're just gonna hold a joint staff listening session. Also some themes around partnering with families and community, how we allocate resources as we start thinking about budget season and the roll out of our budget process. I would love to hear from staff and families about how we should allocate resources, about how we support staff and one of the listening sessions for staff is about professional development and teacher leadership as well. I'm also getting started on student focus groups. These are scheduled at all levels and I can't wait for these. They're going to be a lot of fun so that I can talk to the students themselves about what they love about school, about what they love about their teachers, what they love about their classes and also what they would like to see change in their school experience. School visits are underway. I had the pleasure of visiting several schools this week and seeing classes with principal and talking about instruction and fall family, student and staff surveys are currently in development. And I will attach any questions about my leadership to those Panorama Falls surveys. I do want to name for the community and the committee that we do continue to have hiring challenges along with everybody else in the Commonwealth, every other school district and honestly a lot of other industries as well are suffering from hiring challenges and shortages. We have currently 41 open positions posted which I say publicly to just let everybody know that we're actively hiring for multiple positions at all levels of experience and please share. If you know anybody who is looking for employment we would love to have you join the APS community especially if you really enjoy working with little kids. So please do share, please let people know. We are working to recruit as best we can and getting creative as best we can also acknowledging that we're not the only ones who are having this particular challenge and that this is a neighbor, this is a mirrored challenge in our communities nearby. A couple of quick good news items as well to share that we will be providing grab and go lunches on all school days including those early release days when we maybe previously had not served lunches. We're able to do this because all lunches and breakfasts are free to all students and I also wanted to remind the community that we are serving breakfast at all of our schools this year, it starts at 7.45 the elementary schools and a little bit later at our schools that started at 8.30 and the students are welcome to get some breakfast if they would like to upon arriving at school. It is a slight adjustment to provide the grab and go lunches from the school committee voted calendar. We've made the adjustment on the Google calendar and we're glad that we can go ahead and provide some lunches for students as they leave. We will revisit whether or not this is possible as we develop plans for next school year. And I also wanted to share that we're preparing for COVID-19 vaccination clinics throughout the district. Those are going to take place in November and we will have dates locked in as well as locations as soon as the approval for vaccines for ages five through 11 comes through. We'll send information to families as soon as those vaccines are approved so that they can go ahead and sign up for these. The health department's emphasis is really being heavily placed on preparing for COVID-19 vaccines. We have held a couple of flu clinics but we're probably not going to hold a lot of those in the next month because we're ramping up to make sure that we're able to provide the COVID-19 vaccination clinics. We sent a survey out to families to get a sense of how many of them would take advantage of this and the response was overwhelming. It looks like a lot of families would go ahead and take their students to our clinic. So we want to make sure we have the capacity to do that. And that's it for my update for this week. I will happily take any questions that the committee has. Do you want to the committee have anything? I just noticed that Amy has joined us, a student representative and I would invite her if you have anything to share with us tonight other than saying hello. I don't think I have much to report besides that most fall seasons are coming to an end here. So hopefully me and Megan will be able to show up to more of these meetings consistently. I know it's tough. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it. To be with a bunch of olders. Mr. Mason, financial report please. Good evening, school committee members. This evening in Novus was the included was the period three financial reports, the period three financial reports are reports for a month ending September 30th or date ending September 30th. We pulled all the financial reports out of that date. Included in the packet is the reports for the grants, the revolving and the school committee appropriation, which we call the general fund. We also have included in the report, which is different is I separated out the COVID-19 related grants. There were some additional grants that we were funded through the American rescue act. And we also included grant funding for the, which was recently accepted or one of them was recently accepted. And then there's some pending for the electric bus. We were recently awarded for the, from the EPA, additional $326,000 to cover that electric bus project. So overall, I'll start with the general fund, the general fund or the school committee appropriated dollars. We are currently reflecting a access balance projected of around $1 million. This $1 million is mainly driven between two elements. We have budgeted a little bit more out of district students than what we currently have. My understanding is we're around 70 out of district students. That's lowered from 86 that we had last year and we were budgeted, I believe, around the 80 number. And then the other thing is what Dr. Holman recently stated in our previous, her superintendent report, which is we are still trying to hire. And so there's cost savings reflected because those positions are not encumbered as of yet. And there will be cost savings as when we do fill those positions, there will be the half of the year that those positions were not paid out. So that's what drives that access. Go moving on to the grants report. All the funding and many of some of the grants just recently got set up for this fiscal period. We are still in the process of setting up some grants such as like SR3, which we've presented to this committee many times or several times. And what's different this month is that I put asterisks next to the grants that need your approval to or acceptance per master law. So if that motion could be made to accept the grants with those asterisks, so that would be the consolidated health services affiliated grant, the integrated learning to academic learning grant, the EPA grant for the electric school bus, the Fund 252 ARP IDEA, which is tied to the COVID-19 related funds and also the ARP IDEA for early childhood. The spending plans and how we have them budgeted are also in this report. And then last but not least is the revolving fund report, which once again, we're spending as planned and there's nothing major to report. So overall, we're in a good financial position. I will now open up to any questions if there are any. Dr. Ampe. I move acceptance of the grants that were named by Mr. Mason earlier. For a second. Second. Is there any further discussion regarding the acceptance of the grants as presented by Mr. Mason? Roll call vote. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Ms. Ekston. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. And I vote yes, unanimous acceptance. Are there any questions or comments on the rest of Mr. Mason's report this time? Thank you, Mr. Mason. Mr. Schlickman, M-A-S-C Delegate Assembly. Delegate Assembly is next week. I have asked the resolutions that will be before the Delegate Assembly to be posted in Novus for your perusal and we'll happily listen to any comments either now or going forward as this is a discussion among members of an association and it's not a direct school committee item. And Mr. Schlickman indicated that if members, you can attend on a hybrid basis if you're not going down. Am I correct, Mr. Schlickman? Yes. You can register and attend sessions on a hybrid basis. I'm gonna be helping M-A-S-C with the technology on this somehow, I think. Does anybody have any questions or comments that I'd like to give to Mr. Schlickman at this time regarding the M-A-S-C Assembly meeting? Thank you for being our representative, Mr. Schlickman. Appreciate it. Moving on to the consent agenda, all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests. In which event the event, the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Warrant number 22093 by 809,607 dollars and 27 cents dated 26,2021. Minutes from regular school committee meeting on September 23rd, 2021. Minutes from regular school committee meeting on October 14th, 2021. I'll entertain a motion of acceptance of those three. So moved. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Thank you. Roll call vote, Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Ms. Eckston. Yes. And I vote yes, unanimous. Subcommittee and liaison reports, budget. We met today. We had discussion about additional positions which will be presented by the superintendent at a later meeting and also about thoughts for the upcoming long-range plan meeting. And now I'm going to have to go because I need to drive. I'll be listening in, but I'm going to be driving. So Jane or Lynn, if you could chime in, if I forgot anything. Be safe. Ms. Morgan and Mr. Cardin, do you have anything to add? Okay. Which others find community relations, Ms. Eckston. Yeah. We met on Monday with the directors from the after-school programs, both in APS buildings and within the community. We heard about enrollment and wait lists and a need for more space and challenges with getting staffing. And then we had a conversation about policy KFD, which relates to surplus space and after-school programming. And so we will, it sounded like the consensus from the subcommittee was that we wanted to have a full committee discussion about the changes as opposed to sending it to policy. Is that Ms. Lynn and Mr. Cardin? No, I mean, I thought the issue is eliminating some of the data that's required by that policy mainly the financial data. So I guess the consensus on the committee was to delete it. We don't really need that financial data about these programs. But if anybody disagrees, then we should have the discussion. Yeah. Might I suggest you pass that on to the policy committee and then they can hash it out with the rest of us. Okay, that's fine. Suggestion. And I also just want to point out, it was also about consolidating the dates of the superintendent's report. And then the other piece is there will be a school committee chat on Saturday, November 13th at 11 a.m. Anyone is welcome, but it is especially we are inviting families of students in special education or on 504 plans. Interpretation will be available. And there was an email sent out by Ms. Tiggins and I will have her send another one before the deadline of November 5th to sign up if one needs interpreters. Mr. Thielman and I are gonna be the school committee representative. That's right. Thank you. And Ms. Exxon, Jeff said she'd come and help us. That's a good idea. Good strategy. Mr. Schleckman. Did Ms. Exxon say there were two policies she wants us to look at? It's one policy. K F D. J F A. K. J F A. Okay, thank you. K, K, as in Kite. J F K. K F V. K F V. D, like donut. A F D. That's not an email Liz. I will, I will. Yeah, okay. Sir plus space, Mr. Schleckman. Sir plus space. The one we use to decide to evaluate the use of the upper school programs. Yeah, I just want to make sure there was just that one and there wasn't the second one in there because it sounded like there was more to talk about. Y'all said Liz? Yes, I will email you, Mr. Schleckman. C I A A. Mr. Guy. Thanks. So we met on Monday. All but one of us were there but update us update for the community. We heard a brief update on the deeper learning dozen which is going as planned. We heard about plans for a non residential science week this year in light of the pandemic and the closure of the Alton Jones camp. Science department head, Dr. Sam Hoyo is working on plans for more likely Memorial Day week that will involve experiential learning for our fifth graders centered on Margaret Sheds in the community ending with a game with game or games of predator and prey. There's interest in the subcommittee on further exploring the longer term future of science week and I expect we'll discuss that more upcoming in the next year in the new year. We also heard about further work being done on the issue of heterogeneous grouping at the high school. They've hired a consultant to work with them on this and presented some initial data regarding the 2020 21 experience. There'll be a series of community forums before any possible ideas for a pilot are developed and brought back for review. Committee members raised a variety of questions and concerns and we have an open offer to have an additional meetings on this if desired by the administrative team. That's it, thanks. Thank you. Facilities, Mr. Thielman. No report. Policies and procedure, Mr. Schlichman. We'll be scheduling your meeting as soon as I get an email from Liz Eksten. Thank you. I like the High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. We meet next Tuesday, November 2nd and at that meeting we'll get an update from the design team on the progress of the project. Anyone have a liaison reports at this time? Announcements. I would just like to remind the committee you received an email from Ms. Diggins with a request for me to look at as subcommittee chairs that survey for the remote participation committee. They're looking for data going forward. This time I will entertain a motion for executive session to vote to meet an executive session pursuant to Massachusetts General Law 30A, Section 21A for the purpose to discuss strategy with respect to litigation, specifically litigation associated with the solution of EDCO litigation associated with dismissal of an employee because an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the litigation positions of the committee. As far as I know, and I'll stand corrected, we will not be coming back to open session. So is there a motion? Don't move. Is there a second? Mr. Schlichman. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Dr. Rampey. Yes. And I vote yes, unanimous. So we will now enter executive session.