 Welcome everybody to the meeting of the Arlington School Committee. We are not the selectmen. We are potentially engaging in our last exercise of municipal interference. We can make any dead-end streets we want one way. And if we don't like the person, we can make the street one way inbound. We can award alcohol licenses to anyone we want. We can have some fun here. But this is our last opportunity because Superintendent Bode, I think you have some good news for us on the vertically challenged front. I think the elevator is going to be ready for the next meeting. Right now we're scheduled to have it inspected on Tuesday. Do we have an antique inspector coming in? We have a new piston. It's only partially antique. We obviously need an inspector who's used to dealing with antique equipment. It'll be good to get back home. We want to thank the selectmen for making their space available to us. It's been fun. First order of business for tonight will be public participation, Linda Hansen. Good evening again. My name is Linda Hansen. I'm the president of the Arlington Education Association. And I'm just here to give a quick update on the park MCAS question that was reviewed at the last school committee meeting. At that time, there had been a very short turnaround time between the time we found out about the commissioner's recommendation and the board voted until the time you all met and wanted, you know, we're looking for some feedback. In the last couple weeks, we've had a little bit more time to regroup and spend a little more time just kind of weighing the factors, including the recommendation of the administration that if to go park, but very specifically to allow school choice on online or paper and pencil if we go park, and to just test the test and not think about it as this big preparation to see how well we can do. So I asked building reps that we have in each building to pull their third, fourth and fifth grade teachers together and the same thing at the oddison and to conduct a conversation about the pros and cons, including the recommendation and to invite their admin, their building administrator to the meeting as well so that they could really wrestle with the issues themselves. These are the people that are in the classrooms. They're administering the test. They're watching students take the test. They are the most closely connected to this whole enterprise. And so of the seven elementary schools, the results came back to came back strongly in favor of MCAS. And the reasoning was the stress related to well, keyboarding, even though we know that's that's a choice. The time nature of the park test, the comfort level for teachers and the less stress for students that was felt if they if we could continue with MCAS. One school, the return was kind of mixed. MCAS, the concern was about the time test, time nature of park and just going to a different test at this time of year just not enough time to really get ready for anything new. The other four elementary schools came down on the side of park. Most of them with a paper and pencil option. Fifth grade teachers were more inclined to be interested in trying out online. I think just because more comfort level with the technology. But here teachers, the reasoning that teachers gave for park was the interest in seeing having exposure to test, test items that may be incorporated into MCAS. Useful data about how our current programs and literacy and math prepare kids for the layered deep questions presented on the test opportunity, try out a new test format in a full harmless environment. You're off from high stakes testing. That was big on people's list as well. Although there were some concerns around what it would mean for special education students and for ELL students. So concerns both for the students and for the work that would it be involved in teachers to transition to make the necessary changes to IEP plans and that kind of thing. At the Odyssey, they had a pretty split. It was kind of 50-50 split. But nobody wanted park paper and pencil at the Odyssey. Math teachers were more inclined to want park than anyone else. I think there is a difference between the math system and the ELA system. The majority of those who wanted park online wanted to see it as a test of the computer network. Strong feeling though on the MCAS folks side that we don't need one more new thing. And concern about the stress for students taking an unfamiliar test that they didn't feel like would necessarily help them. So again, that was kind of 50-50 split at the Odyssey. One final thing I just wanted to mention is that I participate in monthly ELA director meetings, coordinators, literacy coaches as part of our EDCO consortium. And so I did ask people to go around and just say what did you do last year? How did it go? What is your district planning on doing next year? And of the eight districts there, five of them did park last year. Bedford, Watertown, Concord, Newton and Belmont. And so they will do park again this year. Their experience was mixed. But I will say the lessons of those districts was if you're going to do park, do it as a no prep test. Just do it to test the test. It was very stressful for the districts that tried to prepare the students and teachers for it. And two districts, Lexington and Winchester, did MCAS before and will likely do MCAS again. Lincoln did MCAS last year and they're not sure that at least the ELA person was not sure which direction they were going for this year. So I did just want to share those updates and insights and do really appreciate the extra time that you all decided to take to allow more time to kind of think about this question here from different stakeholders and people involved. But I do think the teachers have taken this very seriously and really feel like they are part of this conversation and would like to remain part of the conversation. So I thank you for your interest in your time and listening to them. And I don't have copies this evening, but I can leave a set with Karen and she can make copies for everyone. Thank you. Excellent. Rebecca Steinitz. I'm Rebecca Steinitz. I'm a parent of a ninth grader and a educator in Massachusetts. And this is the last time you're going to see me. I have a commitment next week. So I don't like to repeat myself. And you know my position. I think park is a problematic test for many reasons. I believe desi is pushing districts to switch to park in a blatant attempt to make the parkification of MCAS 2.0 inevitable. And while I'm as certain as many of you that the department's intention is to create a park in MCAS clothing, I'm not convinced they will succeed. Thus, I'm opposed to shifting to park in 2016. That said, I want to talk about what I'm hearing from you all, including Linda just now, which is two main rationales for switching to park, the whole harmless provision and technology. And my question is, what do these rationales have to do with students and learning? Accountability matters. I work at a school that has gone from the ninth to the 24th percentile over the last four years. And I was so happy I cried when we went from level three to level one in 2014. But Arlington is a different story. Our district goals for 2015-16 say nothing about PPI or SGP. Yes, we are a level two district, but so are Newton, Brookline, and Lexington. As achievement in the Commonwealth rises, these designations have less and less to do with educational quality and more to do with impossible metrics. You can't grow too much when you're at the top. Arlington's accountability problems are administrative and subgroup issues, which matter and continue to be admirably addressed, but do not threaten the district in any meaningful way. Looking ahead, if Arlington students take park, they will perform relatively speaking exactly as they perform on MCAS. That is, scores are going to decline with park, they've declined all over the country, but the park standings will just look just like the MCAS standings, teach to the test charters at the top, followed by wealthy districts all the way down to our poorest districts, and Arlington will stay more or less where it is because as we know, income is the number one correlation with standardized test results. As for individual student performance, released park items can be used to gather data. And let's not forget that 2017 will also be held harmless for whatever form of test MCAS 2.0 actually takes. In short, I'm not seeing a compelling need to be held harmless in 2016. And more importantly, I'm not seeing how being held harmless matters for authentic student learning. As for technology, and I'm really surprised I ended up talking a lot more about accountability than I'm going to talk about technology because I've heard a lot about technology. I'm not worried about how students will handle computerized tests. They are the new generation. They are non plus by computers. We're the ones who worry. Concerns about bandwidth and devices are more compelling. Absolutely. But still, those are issues for adults. Are we really going to give children a test they don't need to take? That is test the test to see if our technology works as an educator my mind boggles. In short, I've heard little in official discussions or private conversations to convince me that taking park will benefit Arlington students. And I hope you will take this factor into consideration as you make your important decision. Thank you. Thank you very much. We go on to the next agenda item. MCAS accountability. Dr. Cheson with some good, wonderful news. We have very few slides tonight. And that's usually a good thing. And in this case, it really is. I'll wait to the slides come up. As the audience may or may not know, accountability was delayed this year for a number of reasons. One of which is that there were a number of reports that already automatically come with MCAS that the Department of Education wanted to have available for move to the right because you don't want to turn it off. The arrows, I think. Make sure that all the reports were ready. There was also a crosswalk between the two tests that had to be done to be able to come up with accountability ratings. Do you want me to just go or do you want to wait for the slides? What would you like to do, Mr. Chairman? Continue talking. Okay. So just to remind everybody that accountability in Massachusetts is based on the progress and performance index, the PPI. There are two PPI's. One is an annual PPI. And the other one is accumulative PPI, which is a weighted average. So we take this year's PPI, we multiply it by four. We take last year's multiply it by three, the previous year's by two, and then one by the fourth year out. We do that to wait the most current year's performance. We look at two PPI's. One is for all students and one is for high need students. The PPI is also made up of three different components. One is the CPI, which is about achievement. Now we're closing the achievement gap. One is SGP, which is about growth. And then at the high school level, we look at dropout rate and graduation rates. Bonus points are given for cutting down the number of students in the warning category. And bonus points are given for increasing the number of students in the advanced category. There we go. We can go right to the second, the third slide. If you want to just go one more. I got it. I did it. Okay. So the overall accountability ratings, you'll see the ones for 2014 and the ones for 2015. One of the, the asterisk in Bishop just explain is that under the calculations for last year, Bishop did not have enough high need students for there to be a PPI calculated for that. The regulations were changed for this year and they now do have enough high need students to have the PPI calculated. So for now for every school in the district, we're looking at having two PPI's, one for all students and one for high need students at each school. We're pleased to share that Audison has moved from level two status to level one, level one status. They were very close to, as you can see, the high needs PPI last year was 74. So they were sort of on the cusp of being a level one school last year and they have completed that transformation. And then the other thing that is notable of this slide is that Bishop Elementary School. Again, as I said last year did not have a high needs PPI to compare to this year because they've changed the number of students that are required for that group to be counted now does have a high needs PPI and that was 71 this year, the cumulative PPI. And so therefore, they became a level two school because of that. Moving to the next slide, just to look at the level two schools and their broad area of need. At Bishop, in English Language Arts, when it says not meeting the gap goals, it means looking at the performance of students who are at the percentage of students who are proficient advanced and the students who are below that and closing that gap. They did not meet the goal for the last school year in English Language Arts and math. Well, one of the things that we're doing is increasing our data review in LA and math and really having an impact on instruction from that review of that data. We're also focusing our PD and this is across all grades, but we're focusing also in the specifically in the level two schools. Our PD for grades three through five in math focus on assisting high grade students and they will also retaining their math practice guides, which are people that come in and work with students that are below just below the standard. Hardy is also a level two school again in ELA and math. They're both have the same issue, which is not closing that achievement gap. We have added Hardy is a title one school. So we've added a title one tutor in math and English Language Arts. And again, the PD there is focusing in grades three through five on assisting high need students in Pierce. The same issues exist with closing that that gap. We've added a tight. They're also a title one school. So we've added a title one tutor in math and ELA and we'll be focusing the PD for grades three through five in the same way. Thompson actually has no needs in terms of ELA. They got all their ELA points this year, but they're still working on their math. It is also a title one school. So we've added title one tutor in math at that school and we'll be focusing the PD at the same. It Stratten will still need to work on meeting the gap goals in ELA. They're just below the gap goals and math. They almost made it. They have also upped their data reviews, which are informing instruction. They are focusing on their math coaching work and they are retaining their math practice guides. So other assistance plans. We have set up a district wide elementary curriculum council to share best practices and area of concern. We have representatives from every grade and we've be meeting four or five times this year. It's a joint committee that involves administration curriculum leaders as well as teachers. In addition, we're going to be deepening the coaching model this year and we're going to be working on increasing our consistency in coaching and having we're working with thanks to an application that was filed on behalf of Arlington by myself and lead Hanson. We have been accepted into a professional learning network at the state that focuses on coaching and programs like our lab model. So we'll be working with other districts who have similar programs to kind of learn from what they're doing and they'll learn from what we're doing. We've sent our coaches to a training last week with Mr. Knight who is from the University of Kansas who is the considered to be the utmost expert in coaching to really try to keep raising the proficiency of our coaches. And when we review the budget requests for 2016-2017, you're going to see that we're going to focus on materials. They're going to allow access to the curriculum for all students that are even more aligned with the common core than the materials that we have now. Budget requests for professional development and support set it on centered on better meeting the needs of all the high-need students. Questions from the committee? Dr. Seuss. A quick question about the numbers, PPI numbers here. Are they cumulative? These are the cumulative ones. So 2014 are cumulative and 2015 numbers are cumulative? Yes, that's correct. That's correct. Is it the raw scores then or not raw but whatever the yearly scores? The annual scores available? Yes. Desi website. Yes, they're on the Desi website. They were released yesterday at 2 o'clock. Mr. Heiner. These combined with those that took the part? Yes. That's one of the reasons it took so long to get accountability out. Did they give you any, did they give the districts any metric of how they interconnected these two tests that are supposedly not connectable, have no relationship whatsoever? I'm trying to understand. I understand your question. I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm thinking. Is it an excuse not to give us the MCAS stuff? Well, they had to compare there. You're always being compared every district across the state. So in order to do that, they develops across work. I understand that part, but that usually meant that the public would get it by November or October November. Right. The schools would have got it a little earlier. Right. Usually late September. I want to keep my emotional aspect out of it. They said because some parts of the state were doing park and some parts were doing MCAS. That's correct. And your answer to, their answer to you and your answer to me a minute ago was this is a reflection of the two tests. Yes. And it boggles me. I'm not a statistician. I am an educator, but because they said one is measuring one metric and one is measuring another metric and the two metrics aren't the same, how they meet in the same. And I'm not trying to put you on the side. No, no, no. I understand. I think Mr. Schlicken might want to answer. Yeah. I mean, I am a statistician and I do play with these. And an educator. The thing is, is the state, one of the things, one of the reasons why I took some time to release the accountability data is one because the park data was later coming back and they had to do all the metrics in terms of setting cut scores and trying to figure out what the park data means vis-a-vis Massachusetts. There was a lot of work being done to statistically equate the roughly half the schools in the state who were park versus the other half that were MCAS. Looking through the data, and obviously I've only been able to look at data from all the schools in the state for, since Tuesday, there are quite a few schools, maybe 60, 70 even, even more, I haven't gotten an account that were held harmless on the accountability. Some might have moved anyway, just by the trend of the district. In comparing us to, and I'm looking more at Lowell than Arlington in this case, because that's what I've paid to do, in looking at Lowell schools, vis-a-vis comparable districts to Lowell that were park districts, we're not seeing a lot of variance between the two. I think that they've done a reasonably good job of equating it. There are differences. The fourth grade MCAS is statistically a harder test on ELA. Eighth grade is a little easier, so depending on the grade level, there might be some squishiness in a couple of accountability numbers. But then again, the accountability numbers in the percentile, underlying percentile scores that are driving all of this are also weighted over a four-year period, so that schools traditionally don't move a lot in any one given year. How do I feel about the numbers that we're getting? I think they're pretty good. Mr. Hayner. I just want to make a statement. If they're able to meld them and put them together, my question to the state is, why the rush? I would say that what you're doing is you're looking at the performance against your peers, and so if you're in the certain percentile, because one of the other things is the percentile ranking, so if you look at an accountability report, it has a bar across, and it will tell you where you stand. Are you performing better than 91% of the schools? So they're saying you performed here, so you're better than 91%. I understand it. It's only statistics. It's not against the same standards. This is where we all, everyone looks at. Right. I don't want to believe it. Thank you. Thank you. Well, just to the point that that's not where everyone looks at. I mean, this is just sort of the accountability thing that people who are looking at schools in bulk might be looking. I think that educators were looking this from a very different perspective, in that as I'm looking at test scores coming in, I'm looking at the schools, the classrooms, to look for trends, to look for strengths, to look for places where our curriculum is not aligned, and the better the test is aligned to what you're trying to do, the better the data is going to be in terms of being able to use within the school district to improve instruction, which is really the goal of the test more than providing realtors with selling points for individual neighborhoods. Mr. Thielman. Thank you. So two questions, two comment and question. First, it was a sizable jump by the Stratton School in High Needs PPI. So congratulations to the team there. Was that, so was there a best practice there that should, that can be carried throughout the rest of the district, or do they look at best practices in the rest of the district and utilize it? I think we're sharing best practices across the district. I think that, especially how we've designed professional development over the last couple of years, although it doesn't come cheap, it's starting to have a good effect. The other thing is that cumulative PPI is based on annual PPI. And annual PPI is very volatile. If you look at a school's annual PPI from year to year, there's a lot of this going on, which is why they do a weighted average. So, you know, part of that is from last year, but part of it is that the 35 was a weighted average and included some bad years from the previous year. So, it's hard to tell exactly what, you know, from just looking at the numbers, it's hard to tell exactly what the impact is. Got it. And the second point I want to make is I think we need to congratulate the, Tim is here, the Odessa Middle School on achieving level one status. That's an extraordinary achievement. So, congratulations to Tim and the teachers and the whole team there. That wasn't easy. There's a lot of hard work and you did a great job. So, congrats. I think one of the important things to note is that there are a number of interventions that we've begun at Odesson that we're starting to reap benefits from, that we're talking about looking at can we, even though high school is level one, we still want to continue to improve in our high need students and that we're looking at the interventions that we're doing at the middle school and can we make those same interventions at the high school in terms of some subjects and also look at, you know, what does that mean for the elementary schools as well. Good. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Mr. Thielman beat me to the punch. I was happy to see that the scores are improving in most schools or at least holding steady and especially the strat and made a big bump. But it was awesome to see the scores for Odesson and see it rise to level one. And then the other question is, so we don't have growth scores yet, right? SGPs. Yes. We actually, I actually presented on those, I believe at the last meeting, I presented, the last time I presented MCAS, when I presented all of the MCAS reports at the SGPs were in there. By school, I thought we got it by school. Yes, by school and by grade. By subgroups. Do I get that? I presented on that. Okay, I'm sorry. But if you need it again, just let me know and I'll send it to you. No, I'll look for it. Okay. They all break down in the accountability as well because the growth is half of the ELA and math calculations and you do get bonus points for improving your growth, for high growth. Anyone else questions or comments on the, on this report? Hearing none, thank you very much. Thank you. Next, we took a vote in executive session at our last meeting, which we need to repeat here an open session, Mr. Thielman. For article two of the agreement between superintendent Fote and the school committee moved that the school committee notifies the superintendent that we desire to continue her employment beyond June 30, 2016 and enter into negotiations with her on a contract extension. So motion by Mr. Thielman, second by Ms. Starks. Mr. Heiner. Question. Are we going to put any term on it on this motion? No. This is just purely a motion to declare that we desire to continue her employment and to begin negotiations. Anything else beyond that would be subject to preparing for negotiations on the part of the committee and would be done in executive session. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. When we vote, may we make a statement? You may. Thank you. Are we ready for, oh, you can make a statement now if you like. I'll wait for the vote. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Okay. I see a 6 to 1 vote. Abstain. Mr. Pierce abstains. You can vote this. I can vote? Even though, okay. Yeah. Yes. It's a 6 to 1 vote with Mr. Heiner voting in the negative. Mr. Heiner would like to make a statement. I came on to the committee almost five years ago with the intent to bring back the public confidence in the school system. I've been fortunate to work in with a group of people, including the superintendent. I've always been collegial and hardworking. Many things have changed for the positive, but my confidence in the superintendent is laggy. That's why I voted in the negative. I intended to read more, but I beg the indulgence of the committee. I'm going to be leaving right now at an accident on the way here, and I am in pain right now. I'm going to survive. I'm fine, but I'm hurt from real bad right now. I'm going to pass this on to the secretary and get copies. Thank you. Thank you very much. Feel better, be well, take care of yourself. Next item of business will be fiscal 17 budgetary needs of Ottison Middle School and Arlington High Principles. We'd like to invite the administrative staff of both the Ottison and the high school to come forward, please. Before we begin, I do want to convey to the principals before us that the school committee extends our sincere congratulations to your staff and for your hard work, you are both principals of level one secondary schools, which is a significant achievement, especially considering the size of the Ottison, the bigger the school, the harder it is to hit level one status, so that we want to recognize the good news very formally. And I'm sure that as we talk budget, every member of the committee is going to want to go and repeat this congratulations and thanks to you for your service to the children of Arlington. So the forum is yours. Thank you very much. I'm going to go first. So because of the support of the school committee and the assistant superintendent, parents and staff, we've been able to improve every year. So this is my seventh year coming before the school committee to ask you to support us in the needs that we have in our growing school and the needs that we have in our diverse population that's continuing to come into our school and the Arlington school system. And each year that we've asked you for supplies, staffing, whatever it might be that we asked you for, you've done your very best to provide us with those. And because of that, we've worked very, very hard in order to utilize those to the best of our abilities. And this year, being named a level one school shows that everything you give us we use and we make the best of it. We have our population, we're graduating 338 students, we're bringing in roughly 420 students. So we're at max capacity now. We're able to, after working with the superintendent, the assistant superintendent and the assistant principals and department chairs, we will be able to maintain the building this year, but we do need additional staffing and we do need additional supplies because it's gonna affect every aspect of the building. It's gonna affect paper usage. Textbooks, walkers, supervision for staff supervising students in the library is gonna become an issue because we're gonna have more students in the library. We're gonna have more students in classes. We have a higher needs population coming in just percentage wise. The more students come in, the more high needs students are gonna come in. We have a larger population of school refusal, hospitalizations, social and emotional needs that we need to address and in order to address those so that we can, and a common theme in the school committee as well has been everybody needs to progress and that's the reason why we made level one, not just our high needs population, but all of our population and in order to maintain that and use the data that we get from our classroom and that the teachers get from that classroom in order to be able to differentiate and do what they need to do in order to bring the type of instruction that they need to do in the classroom, we need to maintain the level of class size that we have now. And this is with minimum staff. It would be wonderful if we could have four clusters in sixth grade, four in seventh and four in eighth because that really would be the optimal cluster size. We haven't been able to do that. To this point we've had, last year we were able to add a fourth, two years ago we were able to add a fourth cluster to six which really helps with the transition from fifth to sixth. We want that small personalized instruction. We went to a house system. We developed the advisory in order to help this with the growth of that, that means advisories are gonna be bigger, the houses are gonna be bigger and if we don't have additional staff in order to break that down and make it smaller, we're not gonna be able to do that. So as far as the cluster, additional cluster teachers, we really need 2.0 FTEs for an eighth grade, potentially eighth grade half cluster. We have, in order to keep the current seventh grade that's going into eighth grade class sizes at the same level as they had in sixth and seventh, we're gonna need that addition for eighth. So as I said, right now our seventh grade class is 383, our current sixth grade class is 411 and we're expecting roughly 420 in next year. So to maintain, just to maintain what we have, we would need that. In order to balance out our specials, we need staffing in our special classes. We were able to balance this year better and a few years ago you'd see a class of eight and a class of 30, a class of 12 and a class of 35. That was due to the fact that we didn't have the proper staffing across the board and would enable us to balance the classes out but because you were able to give us more staffing for the specials last year, we were able to better balance it out. So this year it was much better but with the growing, again, growing enrollment, I know that's a hackneyed phrase now, we've been saying it for years but still it's there coming to us. So in an attempt to keep PE classes in the 30s because right now the average, the amount of PE classes that are above 25 is 50%. So 50% of all PE classes are above 25 and when I say above 25, I mean above 25. So class sizes have become challenging and it's difficult to manage locker room coverage. It's become a safety issue with the current staffing. As of right now, we have PE teachers that are covering the locker room during their planning periods because they know that in order to keep the kids safe, they need to do this. They haven't complained but I've recognized them. We're doing whatever we can now. So we really ask for a 0.6 PE in order to continue to balance the specials, we need 0.2 family and consumer science. We currently have 2.4 fax teachers and this would provide two extra sections in fax for the next year. This would bring the fax department to closer of the same FTEs with other exploratory departments which would allow us- Consumer science? We have 2.4- Yeah, I just wanna make sure that everybody understands what- Family and consumer science, yeah. Sorry, I apologize, I'm just so used to saying. Excuse me? Would you say 0.2 FTEs? We would need another 0.2 FTEs which would provide another class each day. So, which would help balance out the classes. Right now it really would be helpful to have another school nurse. I know that this is a lot to ask but to ensure an appropriate student coverage ratio the district needs to add an additional school nurse at the middle school. Without this position the district will fall below recommended state and federal school nurse staffing and student levels. We would need 0.8 FTE in world language. The middle school's increased enrollment has created a need for additional class sections in the world language areas. So, we look to add an additional 0.8 Spanish and French teacher. Catherine Ritz has worked really, really hard to build the foreign language department. From the time that I've started till now it has grown immensely and we would hate to see anything affect that. We would need 0.4 digital media computer science. So, the increased enrollment has created a need for additional class sections in the digital media computer science area. Therefore, we are requesting additional 0.4 FTE for this need because we're trying to grow that. We have a really strong sixth grade media computer science program right now. We would like to grow that to eighth grade and then eventually seventh grade as well so that they have it going up so then they can feed into math program into high school. So, it's really, he's pushing me to do all this. I'm trying to keep up with him. And we also need a 0.5 social worker in the wake, again, of the increased anxiety felt by students and in response to the rise of school refusal and hospitalizations. We're requesting an additional 0.5 social worker. The guidance counselor social worker case load is currently 300, roughly around 300. And if we do not add this 0.5 position, next year's numbers will be over 300 which is above the contractual limit. Other things, as I said, with the addition of the students and needing staffing for those students, Matt and I were talking earlier. So if for every certain amount of students you need an FTE in order to take care of them, you also need supplies and other things in the building. So we would need additional lockers for the girls and boys bathroom. I was down there a couple of weeks ago looking at the lockers. They seem to be over 50 years old. Most of them you can't even use. They're in disrepair to the point where I'm afraid somebody's gonna get hurt. In the student hallways, we may require an additional 40 lockers for students to use for their books, personal property. Desks, again, with the increase in enrollment, we have 50 students coming in. We need 50 desks for them, 50 chairs for them, cafeteria tables. We're at the point now where we're most likely going to have to go to a fourth lunch, not next year, but the year after, we're gonna have to go to a fourth lunch. We're at max capacity as far as we can fit 410 students in the cafeteria tightly. That's if we're counting on 10 or 20 kids potentially being absent, not counting on, we don't want anybody to be absent. But if 10 kids are absent out of 410 in a classroom, then everybody fits in the calf. If everybody shows up, it's a tight squeeze. We need as far as chairs for when we have visitors come in and we do presentations for the kids and we have authors come in. We don't have anywhere for the students to sit. They can't all fit in the bleachers. And I don't like to see my students sitting on the floor for an hour and a half. They're wonderful and they're excellent and they do it. But we really need folding chairs for assemblies. So 50 more folding chairs for assemblies before, and then when we have the night assemblies, we have 50 more sets of folks coming in to see their kids. So we're gonna need them for that. We also need social studies textbooks, pilot of science textbooks, Latin textbooks, visual art needs. So these are real needs that we have in order to continue to present the same type of education that we want for all the students at Audison that I think we've been doing very well for the last seven plus years. And we want to continue to get better. Our goal every year is to be the best middle school in the state, the best high school in the state, the best elementary schools in the state. We've clearly been supported by you in the past and we ask you for your continued support. And thank you for giving me the time in order to be here. If you have any questions, I'd be glad to ask you. Let's go for middle school questions or comments. Thank you. Thank you and congratulations. Thank you. On the level one status, that is excellent, excellent. Thanks. If you had to rank in a top three order, the top three, have you given thought about that and also have you put together a sort of budget monetary note as to how much these items would cost or perhaps that's more our job or Ms. Johnson's job? We do have Ms. Johnson put together a spreadsheet for us for a meeting that we recently had and I gave her all the figures that I had and then she reported back the accuracy to those. That was a little bit under. So I'm asking for a sizable amount of money. I don't know if you want me to give you that figure right now. Say the number, go ahead. 430,000 would be roughly the number that I would be asking for. That includes the teachers? That includes the teachers. And if you ask me for a rating, I would say that the additional cluster teachers, I must have them. I mean, I hate to say must, I'm not here to demand, but the social worker is going to be an imperative need and then it's really hard to rate the rest of them because I feel that they're all equal in merit. Right. Just as a point of clarification, you are saying that every dollar of that 430,000 is to maintain the current level of services in light of the increased number of students you're getting. That's correct. There's no fat on this at all. There's no fat at the middle school. We have no fat. So, Mr. Pierce. Yeah, on that, the .5 social worker, would there also need to be an additional guidance to because don't they have a load requirement? It's the same. So, in my plan years ago was to move social workers in because of the needs of the students. Because we have so many social emotional needs at that grade level, school refusals and hospitalizations. I had a doctor call me from, was it Mass General last year? And he said, you know, I want to talk to the principal. So I said, hey, how are you a doctor? And he said, great. I noticed that you've had six hospitalizations. They said, really, yeah. No, we've had 36 hospitalizations this year. So that's really something that needs to be addressed. And, you know, that's really the reason why I want social workers in the building to help us deal with that. They can deal more with the issues that students are, you know, looking at when they're in middle school. Thank you so. Dr. Allison Ampe. I'm just trying to clarify. So for the cluster expansion, you need how many FTEs? So the model that we're looking at right now, and it may change, but what we're looking at right now when I was talking to Dr. Bodie and my assistant principals, we had a meeting a few weeks back, was looking at a half cluster, which is different than a split cluster. So a split cluster would say take three classes of one grade and two of another. A half cluster would mean you'd have two teachers that would dual certified, which I think that I talked to Mr. Slickman about last year at this time about what that would look like. And you'd have to get somebody that was really strongly qualified in both areas. And that's one of the things that we're looking at right now because you really can't do a split six, seven and a split seven, eight. So what we could potentially do is add two teachers to sixth grade and do a split seven, eight. But that's just, so we're just looking at it right now and we're trying to decide what the best model would be. So in our paper it's listed as two but it's made up of 0.5 math, 0.5 social studies, 0.5 English, 0.5 science. I think that was an earlier thought, but right now we're really thinking of a half cluster. For one for either sixth or eight at this point. Thank you. Sure. Mr. Thielman. I just want to try to get, so it's $430,000 increase. How many FTEs, what's the total FTEs? Four and a half, right? Four and a half, that's no. Yeah, four and a half FTEs. Four and a half FTEs. That includes the 5.5 plus the plus. What's that? 5.5 plus the plus. 5.5, okay, okay, 5.5 and that's. He guessed a little late on the number. I was a little light on the number. 460, 78. I get nervous when I'm asked to say numbers because I don't know if I'm supposed to say them. I didn't get permission to say numbers tonight. 467, 8,000. I started asking those questions. I was like going into my tank. You had time to prepare. 5.5 FTEs. We like numbers and we live with them. So I just, and the highest priority is classroom teachers. Classroom teachers, social worker, and then everything else I hold. Classroom teacher is, how many classroom teachers? That would be two. Two. Plus the teachers and then the 0.5 social worker. 0.5 social worker. Obviously we want to give you it all. I appreciate that and you've always tried to do that. Yeah, I just wanted to get that. In the language, what do you say? Point eight language. Point eight, yeah. That would be a split French, Spanish. Okay, so. Congrat, and by the way, I want to congratulate you personally on the achievement of the level one. That's quite an achievement. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Let me just ask one question for you. When the audition opened in 1998, we converted it from a two grade school to a three grade school, six, seven, eight. There were 966 students in your school. You had 1107 in October 1114. What was the October one count for 15? Do you know? 1136. 1136 and climbing. If we get the additional teachers and the additional staff, where are we going to put them? Well, for this year, we can make it, excuse me, for the upcoming year, we can still make it work. If I have to move some teachers, I've already talked to some of the department chairs on how we move teachers. We wouldn't need to divide any of the rooms at this particular point. However, the following year, in conversation with the superintendent and the assistant principals and department chairs and the high school principal and elementary school principals, we would need to think about, would we need modules? What would that look like? Who would we put out there? We know where they would go, roughly, and then 10 years down the line, would we be able to maintain that or would we need to open, I know that there's been public conversation about this, so hopefully I can say this freely, that there was talk of opening the Gibbs again. That was a conversation that had been discussed because, is it really a good idea? I mean, I'd like to speak to everybody about this and hear your philosophy behind it, is it a good idea to have 1,500 middle school students in one school, and are you gonna be able to break that school up in a way to keep the integrity of all three grades and make it feel as small of a learning community as you can, because that's really what we've been trying to do. I mean, by starting the house system, which has been hugely successful, and having grade level meetings to deal with grade level issues, and that's been hugely successful and adding in the advisory, we've been able to maintain that, but when you get up to 13, 14, 1500 students, is that gonna be something that you're gonna be able to do? And I mean, I have my theories on that and my ideas on that, and I would love to hear others' ideas on that as well. All right, Mr. Thielman. You know, one question for you. So a bunch of us are, all of us are wrestling with space and enrollment issues, and so there have been a lot of different ideas thrown out and you're not ready to answer, so you don't have to, maybe you can think about it. One idea is, and this is not next year, but it's at some point in the future, to separate the sixth grade to have a seventh and eighth grade. Another idea is to separate the eighth grade and put it with a high school. Those are ideas, not proposals, and not for FY17. So I'm just wondering if you could give us, if you could give some thought to what's best educationally and let us know at some point. Well, in my experience and talking to other principals in middle schools that made it split, a friend of mine was a teacher in a middle school. I was a teacher at the time and his middle school split, because it grew to be too large and they moved sixth, seventh, and eighth. So then they had to decide who to move, what teachers do we move, what students do we move, what specialists do we move? And it was really messy. And the teachers in one school said, why do we have to stay here? Why don't we get to the new school? Why do we have to stay in this old school? Is there something wrong with us? And then the teachers in the new school said, why do we have to leave our friends? Why do we have to leave where we were comfortable? So there was a lot of morale issues and it was really tough for the parents and it was really difficult for the students. So in the experiences that I've had, because I've been involved in a situation where we had to move an eighth grade class, I'm not saying that we move the eighth grade, but potentially you could move a sixth grade class to the Gibbs State, and this is a conversation that I've had. Again, just thinking out loud, not saying that this is something that we would definitely do, but just thinking of moving a class. So now you have that transition to another school. And I know that the argument would be, so now there's another transition that students need to make. Now they need to transition into the Odyssey per se. But having them have an experience that's all their own in a situation where you can deal with all the transition factors of going from fifth to sixth and all the needs of the sixth grade students and having a school that's just designed for those needs. And that's really what we're attempting to do now at the Odyssey and with the house system and having the clusters anyway does that. But now this is a whole situation that's geared just toward them. There's no distractions from anything else. And at that point, I think that they would be stronger and more ready for another transition if they had a whole year just for themselves. And this is done, I've seen this done in other districts, again it's a fifth sixth. So you do one through four, five, six, and then seven, eight. And that's still another transition. And students are resilient and I think that they would be ready for that additional transition. So that's something that I thought about. Moving the eighth to the high school, I've seen that before in another district that I've been in that didn't work out as well. I don't know. But I really think that moving a grade, so now you have, you know specifically which teachers you're gonna move. You know specifically which specialists you'd need to move. There would be difficulties, but I think there would be fewer difficulties in that type of a move than if you moved six, seven, and eight. Thank you. Sure. Well, we have here one last question. Sure. We're looking at park MCAS. Sure. Do you want me to be completely selfish? Go ahead. Okay, so I mean as an administrator, I'm looking at park. Again, there are gonna be infrastructure problems. There were problems when we first brought in MCAS. There were things about MCAS that people didn't like. It took years for people to grow used to MCAS. So there's always gonna be trepidation. There's gonna be fear. We've done a lot of work with the Common Core. We've done a tremendous amount of work in all the schools toward the Common Core. When you talk to the department chairs who are really the experts in this, when you talk to the department chairs, they really feel that all the work that they've done has led them to a point where park is the next natural progression, the next natural step. If you talk to Matt Coleman, he'll tell you that there's seven different ways to answer questions correctly on a park test. Wow, I almost did that, I almost said park test. That is not true in MCAS, which allows the student to think differently than they would. As far as, again, selfishly, administratively, park test was far easier for us to give. There's I am in fits and starts during MCAS because I'm so afraid, one year I had to call Kathy and say, Kathy, we lost a test. And she said, well, you're gonna need to go to MCAS school. And then, and finally, I think I... That was what, that's what Desi used to do. That used to make you go to MCAS school. So, you know, so I would always be so terrified that I'm gonna, and every day we have to count everything and go through everything. And again, I know this is a selfish thing and you know, this is difficult for myself and my staff, but it really is something that is so cumbersome, that it takes, you know, the guidance staff away from, because I need to use guidance to help me count the test. I need to use guidance to help me implement the MCAS. So now, students are coming down to talk to guidance. They're not there. They're, you know, as much as they should be because they're helping with MCAS because something has to give. So this really is something that would be helpful to us. Again, I know that Laura's been really looking into what it's gonna take to be able to... And this is something that she's thought about quite often and talked to us about, what are we gonna do about technology? I think she has some answers, you know? So from my perspective, and you know, again, the real experts to talk to on this would be the department chairs, but I really feel that this is our next natural progression. And again, from a purely selfish standpoint, we would be able to maintain a level one status for at least two, if not three years. And I think that would be nice. I would like to be able to say that. So those are my thoughts. Thank you. Thank you so much. Anything else for the principal? Dr. Janger. Well first, everything he said until he started talking about clusters and specifics, he just changed it to high school. And I'm pretty much gonna say a lot of what Tim said. Also, we're talking a lot about congratulations in level one and level two. If we deserve any credit for being a level on high school, it's because of the work that's done by the middle school and by the elementary schools. And once folks get to us, we have such excellent students who are doing so well, but we're able to really focus on a very small number of them who are not being successful in order to really focus our energies. The other thing I think that's important, when one is level one, they have an opportunity to sort of talk about the broader picture of these sorts of ratings. Arlington High School is not only a level one school, but on lots of other ratings. We've rose up to 19th in the state. On MCAS scores, we were a gold medal school in US News, we were a top school in Newsweek. And none of this is because we've done a great job, it's because we have a great district. But the other thing to realize is that depending on how they write the algorithm next year and depending on how they fiddle the MCAS and the park next year, we have every reason to expect with the rising expectations of yearly progress and everything that we will as a result of some subgroup or another trip and be a level two school. And so I think it's really important for us rather than sort of looking at that final score at the end to use that motivation to look at how are we doing with those subgroups. So that's just, it's the thing you can only say when you've got level one. Every year I get level one, I assume I'll be level two next year. And it's important to say that to everybody. So that said, the things that we've been focusing, so first of all, the things that we've been focusing on in the high school, we've done a lot of work this year on social-emotional support on creating a stronger social-emotional environment instead of relationships with the school. We continue to work on implementing more effectively digital technology in order to make more engaging and effective instruction. And we've continued to do an awful lot about focusing on high-need students, looking at both social-emotional issues and learning issues, and making sure that we have the right settings and the right programs in place for all of those. I don't envy the decisions and choices that you and Kathy Bode have to make. The district has sort of an impossible combination of short funding, tight salaries, short staffing, enrollment that's going up, and ancient buildings that don't fit all of the students. So when I make this presentation about what it is we think we need, I say that understanding that there's going to be a lot of very tight decisions made by all of you. And so I welcome decisions and questions. I'm a little bit shy about asking for almost anything, knowing that the middle school is almost going to rival the high school in size relatively soon, even though they have only three levels of students. That said, I think I'm just going to go right into sort of the numbers and the explanations behind the numbers. So this year we've experienced, depending on how you count, in which version, an enrollment increase of 48 students over the last year. We expected an enrollment of about 24 students. Last year when we were looking and having the same conversation, we were looking for, and again the numbers will change, 3.6 students to get us up to equal. We didn't quite get those numbers. So we continued to be, as Tim has said, tight. We continued to have the large class sizes. We actually saw an uptick in the large classes and those sorts of challenges. We saw that. Clarification, you wanted 3.6 additional FTEs to manage the increased enrollment. To manage the increase in enrollment. And we got more enrollment than we expected and we didn't get all of those FTEs. We continue to be tight. We've seen a little bit of an uptick in large class sizes. So right now it's very difficult to say. When we look at our own version of the numbers, we expect about another 15 kids. So we're working in our own minds off the number 1280. There's lots of enrollment projections you've seen that doesn't match any of them. But yesterday I looked and we have 1,265 and there's lots of enrollment projections and that doesn't match any of them either. So those are the numbers that we're looking at when we make these requests. And we looked in terms of making these requests in the same way Tim did, had actual kids and actual seats going from English 9 to English 10 or going from French 1 to French 2. And the other thing that we're looking for as we go forward is attracting and keeping excellent staff. So a lot of the sort of fractional numbers that we look for in each of the core departments, the five academic departments allow us to create full-time positions by shuffling people around and post for people that we're expecting we're going to need. And so in some cases they take us right to where we need to be. In some cases they may give us an additional section. We can't hire people in fractional pieces. It also means that potentially we won't come to you for quite as many of the year after or potentially if they're off again by 15 we're not in quite as tight a situation as we are. So that said, right now the average student for teachers in the core content areas is still high between 20.5 and 20.8 depending on the department. The result of that is that we have class sizes 25 or over the level of 29% in science, 25% in math, 27% in history, 27% in math, 15% in English and 20% in world language. I have a hand and I'll give you all when I'm done. So you don't have to write all that down. In addition the elected classes are at their cap. So if you look at the art classes they're all pushing 23 to 25 of the fax classes. We try to cap them at 20 for safety almost every single one of them is at 22. And so the limits are size of the space, size of the facilities and the safety with which we can support them. We also foresee the following trends having a real impact on staff. We have the same issues that Tim has in terms of social emotional struggles with students. This is not something that is specific to Arlington or Arlington High School. Last week I went to an EDCO meeting. We spent two hours with all the local principals talking about the fact that this seems to be something which is challenging all of our students. Exactly why and exactly what we all have lots of theories and there are things that we're all working hard to do about it. We continue to have the issue of the chapter 222 and the new laws require us to educate students who come to us with felonies or really challenging backgrounds. So one of the things that happens in lots of ways frankly in the public schools nowadays is that enrollment is growing but not only is enrollment growing we are expected to and want to educate a whole portion of students who did not in the end necessarily get educated by us. And so those students are being educated by our Milbrook program, they're being educated in our summit program, they're being educated by us often in other sorts of programs where they're not even able to be in the building and all of those put a strain on the deans, they put a strain on the support staff, the social workers and the administration which takes that support away from our regular ed teachers. So a lot of the things that give them support with their large class sizes even though they may have the same staffing levels in those administrative levels and social work levels those folks are not able necessarily to pay attention sometimes even for kids our classroom teachers aren't seeing. So the other thing is we get stressed about these level one, level two things. And those are ever rising expectations and so I think it's really important for us to sort of keep the teachers focused on the kids in front of them. And it's something that we're always talking about it's like look at the I need student, look at the students who are not making progress, you know who those are, look at the students who are not passing, you know the MCASP but look at them because that is the student in front of you. Somebody was interviewed a couple of weeks ago by someone who was interviewing principals of schools that did well with their minority students and they asked us what we did and I said one we stand on the shoulders of giants and two we just manage by spreadsheets which is primarily lists of names because the names are a small enough list so we can know who they are and make connections to them. So what we're asking for, we're asking for in order to keep, to lower the class sizes in the content areas in order to allow us to attract good quality staff at full time positions and in order to meet the existing curriculum requirements student needs and frankly to address safety issues in places like facts and in science. We're asking for a point for teacher and math, teach math, pre-algebra and computer science, a point for teacher to do math high needs, to do co-teaching with our special education staff to improve our content area instruction with those high needs of populations. We're asking to do that co-teaching model, we're actually looking to do that in the other content areas as well but that's covered in the asks that they're asking for. So in English a point six to make a full time position in social studies a point eight that's actually listed in other things as point six but we meant point eight, it's a typo. Science, biology to teach sections of biology which are large in physics which are large point six and then in world language and if you need someone to explain it I'll point to Catherine to handle the pipeline and shuffle with people who are certified. One of the challenges both in science and in world language is that they're not really one department, they're multiple departments. If you're a physics teacher you can't necessarily teach biology, if you're a Spanish teacher you can't necessarily teach French but some people can. And so in world language a point two French section and a point two Spanish section. Those get shuffled in with other people. In addition it would be extremely helpful in terms of reducing stress and giving students opportunities for electives to add an additional 1.4 FTE which we're looking at right now is an additional section of the culinary and family and consumer science. This year we had 80 students request those classes who were not able to get them. They flow into other electives. And then our art department would like a point six position. They believe they can fill that in art again to add additional sections. Those would be dependent really on enrollment. In addition in that 1.4 FTE I would like to make a case for a point six industrial arts teacher to start to continue to expand and develop our maker space program. Right now we have that space teaching both woodworking classes and then uses an interdisciplinary space so that our STEAM program science, technology, engineering, arts, math can actually fabricate the things that they're designing and CAD classes and other things. That area is in use all day long every period of the day with Mr. Tussoni supervising doing things for physics classes and sculpture classes and engineering classes and other programs like that. We'd like to be able to offer classes in there. The challenge right now is we offer two sections of woodworking. If you offer, when you have those two sections that are working in the space it's largely shut down for classes. In addition we have people like Frank Tussoni and industrial arts teachers are hard to attract and so we'd like to start developing that programming and that population so that when we go to the new building we know really what that sort of multidisciplinary space is gonna look like and we have the staffing to really be able to develop it going forward. I like your optimism about the new building. That's... We're gonna get a new building. It'll be in my career. Yeah, good, good, good. And then this is here on my list but it's not there on many of the other lists and I'm saying it only because it's something which our staff has requested and our department heads have requested and we understand the realities of administration. There are a lot of things that put a lot of stress on our staff right now. We have large class sizes, we have increasing needs among students and we have the building which is a rough place to teach and especially the elevator broken lately. We could make them all a lot happier by reducing their class sizes by 10% but that would require us to hire 10 more teachers. The people that are the sergeants who do the care and feeding of the teachers and make them less stressed are the deans and so when... I was actually shocked last year when we had this whole conversation with the staff that two teachers were asking for administrators. Teachers never ask for administrators and so they asked again this year and the department heads asked again this year. So I know the challenges, I know where we are in terms of realities, in terms of budgets, but it's in there. I know it's not on the other list so I wanna just know I'm not talking out of turn there. I just put it in there to be respectful to people. So those are our main areas. The other things that I wanna just emphasize are in terms of social-emotional support. This year we rearranged our schedule to create a five-day schedule. The research and other things say that that alone is a stress reducer for kids, particularly kids with executive function and organizational issues. It's been really funny because I've gotten in the habit of saying hi today is December 1st. It's Monday and it's a B day and now every time I say it's Monday and it's Monday because it's a Monday schedule and so people know where it is they're supposed to go. I can actually now in the hall when a kid asks me what it is, say what day is it and tell them where they're supposed to go. In addition, that new schedule created the opportunity to have two spaces, the campus period, the X block and the activity period X block. The advisory activities are during the activity period X block. A group of teachers has been developing a coherent program of activities that are focused on creating connections and relationships between staff and students in the school, finding consistent communications around things like planning for school and activities and fostering a positive school climate. It's been a pretty remarkable success, particularly given frankly, about the most difficult year I've ever experienced for the beginning of a school year. So that group, we really wanna make sure that we continue the support and we need funding in order to keep them able to really develop the curriculum to reach out to folks. We've been working with Rachel Polliner who wrote the book as a consultant and she's done a fabulous job of really turning this work on advisory and they're frankly doing the same thing at the middle school when Catherine Ritz is leading the group there and working with her as well. As a tool for teaching our staff how to run and address those needs in lots of contexts. Because when you have a conversation about how to lead difficult conversations in advisory, that translates into class. When you have a conversation about how to, how students get to know one another in class, how to deal with difficult students who are oppositional in class activities. Those are all things that transfer into a stronger social and emotional environment across the world realm. In addition, when students get used to having adults in the school ask them how they're doing every day and knowing who they are, they're more likely to expect the school to do that as a matter of course. Digital technology is something and I appreciate the incredible amount of resources I gotta give the nod to Dr. Jessen for helping us with this. We've come a remarkably long way in two years. With the laptops last year and now the Chromebook pilots and the iPad pilots in the high school, you would not think that we were a school that was not a connected school two years ago. They're a freshman I know one of them who are largely paperless in their life in spite of the fact that we didn't think we'd gotten there yet. Because the teachers are using the Chromebooks and using the iPads so extensively. Where we've done the pilots in many of the departments. For example, in English, where we have three teachers sharing two carts, the entire English department sharing the two carts, they have an incredibly complicated system to make sure that the pilot groups are able to do it in their own classes because they're supposed to be connected. But then everybody else steals them every moment that they have. So I think it's really important to keep that level of staffing consistent. Much of that's gonna come through capital but there are things that we'll need from the school committee. So I also have to give them a nod to AEF in case anybody's here. Because two of those things also came from them. They're listed in my list. We need to make sure we invest in wireless and network capacity. They've done a lot of work but they're still recalcitrant and it's really important that they work all the time. The maker space is something that allows everybody to take that digital world and make it into a reality. We need something that is hitting my budget relatively hard and department budgets relatively hard is replacement parts and bulbs. When you buy everybody $30,000 with the projectors, it's great but every year we lose about six, $80 bulbs and we lose one or two projectors and we lose one or two computers. And those are not things that are represented in the other budgets. So that's something that really needs to come to the building. And then time and funding for ongoing professional development on this. Part of the reason we've been successful is we had a quarter of our staff participate in EdTech teacher a year ago. We have the staff doing the pilots right now. We have the teams that are working on this and that really makes it effective. And then last but not least, the building. We are hopeful that sometime in the next week we'll get a thumbs up or if not that a year from now we'll get a thumbs up. I'd be willing to put money on within the next year. Not so much on next week. But that means nonetheless that we're talking about breaking ground 2019 or 2020. Unless they're faster than I think they are. So we're gonna have thousands of students pass through the building in that time. And if we want to keep being able to give the kids the best experience they can and also having the teachers not struggling. I was told today the good news was the elevator's gonna be working within a few days and the bad news we're not gonna have heat in Fusco house for the next two days. That is the life we live on a regular basis. And it puts a real strain on teachers. It puts a real strain on administration. I would not need a new dean if you gave me a new building because Mr. McCarthy could spend his time not running around fixing things and coordinating with maintenance. I do wanna say while I'm at that, many, many people we appreciate. Maintenance, Carlos, Jeremy, Mark have been doing a wonderful job of working with us over the last two years. Things have gotten better. And Ruth Bennett has shown up and she is, I don't know if a breath of fresh air is exactly the thing, but she has a breath of something. She is fired up and she is moving forward on making things happen. And so that's really appreciated. We really hope we'll make progress on that. So I've written athletics here on the bottom of my thing as I did last year. It's just a moment to turn my head and say, Melissa, is there anything you wanted to say about athletics? Here you go. Come up. Should I move? The mic is critical. There are people who watch this on TV. All right. In the budget request this year, there is a $150,000 increase in budgeting, which isn't reflective of an increase in spending, but rather the last year and a half or so, Ms. Johnson has worked closely with me and we've collaborated to really assess the demands and needs of the athletic department. There are so many different intricacies of costs and costs that change over time that we felt it was important to really evaluate where we're at. So there are a couple of factors that go into that $150,000 and part of it is, as you've heard, is a theme, increase in growth. So our participation numbers have increased tremendously. I have registration numbers last fall. We were very excited when we cleared 400 registrants and this past fall we cleared 524. This last winter we were at 290 athletes registered and for 2015 we're at 391. Over the course of a year we service well over 1,200 athletes, different capacities and you're familiar with athletic schedules and demands. It's a year round, pretty much a year round, 60s a week, different programs and activities are running. With that, they require transportation, supervision, staffing, officials, and equipment to compete, which are really the fundamentals to keep our programs running. And that's what constitutes this $150,000 to meet really strong rise in the transportation costs. Relative costs increase over time of equipment. We have increased some coaching positions to maintain safety and supervision. And then just really outfit uniforms, just the things that we need to meet these numbers and service these student athletes. Okay, I'm a high school. Questions or comments? Mr. Pierce. Thank you for being here and sharing this with us. Same questions that I had for Mr. Rejair. You're top three if you had to pick. I was gonna try to remember what they were doing. And give us a number. The number I got, I started calculating when we were here. It's roughly 724,000. And how many FT's? I'm sorry. My count is a little different than his count. So my count is 4.8 FT's for a total of 683,000. 1100. It's up in some and down in others in some. Right, so if you take out athletics, I calculated off of the spreadsheet, so we can go around. But if you take out athletics, it's about 370,000. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. And that's for the entire ask. You asked for priorities. So I mean, it's hard not to ask for folks to fix the building and keep fixing the building, right? We need doors fixed and bathrooms repaired. So I don't know if that counts as one of my priorities. My first priority is certainly staff. And within the staff, particularly the 3.2, to allow us to hire full-time staff in the content areas. That is our main ask, really. The second's, you know, some of the other things like the advisory money is pretty short money. And then this, other than continuing advisory would be huge, but that's short money. And then technology, continuing technology, but that's not necessarily here. That's capital. Thank you. So I thank you, Seth, for three I gave you four. Great. And Dr. Seuss. I had the opportunity to look at your school improvement plan and I was very impressed by the level of detail and aspiration and it was just a very impressive document. And the question I was going to ask, which I think you've already answered, is how you felt the five-day schedule was going. But it sounded like you feel like this is something you want to continue. Yeah, I mean, it's gone remarkably. Survey at the end of the year, but... It has gone remarkably well. We're going to do a survey actually in January. But the union did a survey, which was more about staff stress. And people came out neutral on the schedule and neutral on advisory, which to me is a win. Given that it has been, I mean, this year has been very fun every week. We had the late start. We had more interruptions to the schedule than a usual fall. That is very noticeable with an advisory schedule. A lot of things hit that schedule, which would have made it, if it was going to go wrong, it had every reason to go wrong this fall and people have been fine with it. It's not something we're considering changing at this point. Anyone else? Thank you very much. Okay, I'll make a couple comments. Dr. Vody. I also want to add my congratulations. But I think that one of the things that you've heard tonight, which I think is a very important thing that I want to point out, is that certainly we're very focused on providing rigor and helping all of our students to struggle. But we look at it very holistically. There's a lot of thought around social emotional health, health classes themselves so that students can make good choices. So I think that one of the things that I think is to be complimented in both the middle school and the high school, is that they really have a very broad view of what education is. And in athletics, certainly the work that Melissa has done in captain's council and leadership training really has an effect with the whole high school, but it will have a profound effect on the work that they do and how they move forward. And actually to that, since she's here, I highlighted the newsletter, but she is receiving the statewide Ted Damko Award, which is quite an honor in the MIAA. This will be awarded in March. They choose one athletic director in the state and she was nominated and went through a vetting committee and the award was given to her. So I wanna congratulate her and it's quite an honor for her as well as it is for the school. Thank you. The work is very good. Also, some people had to leave, but I think it would be great to have people that are here tonight introduce themselves because they are very much part of the team that makes this all work so well. And so maybe we could just go around and start with you, Larry. Larry Weathers, science director of K-12. People will not be able to hear this, so. Oh, let me introduce them then, okay. All right, Larry Weathers, who is our science director K-12. Diane Johnson, you know Linda Hansen and of course, Allison Elmer. Our director of world languages is Catherine Ritz. Stand up, please. You've heard her name mentioned a few times tonight with respect to the advisory at the middle school and our new director of social studies, K-12, Denny Conklin, who will come before you at some point this year and talk a little bit about social studies. I can't see who's back there. Trish Bellarossi. Oh, Trish, yes. Trish Bellarossi, who is our lead teacher in family and consumer science and has both worked at the middle school and the high school. And we had three of our assistant principals from the middle school here tonight, Maureen Murphy, Jack Flood, and Wendy Salvatore. So they're all very much part of a team working together. And I think that one thing I can say is how proud I am of them. It's quite a great group of people, and I include all of our elementary principals as well, who work very well together very collegially to make the best decisions we can for the district and our children. So thank you all. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is a park or MCAS decision. It's the intent of the chair to ask for a vote on this at the next meeting, which will give the elementary principals as well an opportunity to have a say before us before we actually make the vote. But at this point, seeing that we have already started the discussion, and this isn't the final discussion, we have obviously one bit of new information before us is the status of the oddison. And I know the people have been thinking about this, so I'm just going to open it up to members of the committee who might have questions at this point that they'd like to have answered tonight so that it could potentially inform their decision for next Thursday. So does anyone have a question or a point to make at this point? Dr. Seuss. I'm just in case the status of the oddison, what are your friends? Excuse me? Oh, the level one status, and because of the hold on list provision, there'd be certainly an advantage for them to move testing to the one where they would be held harmless. Mr. Pierce. A couple questions. I don't know if you know the answers, but I've heard from some folks that the MCAS questions were getting to be more geared towards the common core. Is that not true? The last, at the last meeting, and I'm sorry you weren't here, and I'll send you a copy of the presentation if you don't have it. I did a presentation on park, and while there has been some movement in MCAS, I showed two math questions, one that was from MCAS and one that was parked. There's a distinct difference for the very fact that the park question has more than one right answer, and the MCAS question only has one. But also that the level of reading and what you need to do with nonfiction readings is quite different from park MCAS. So while there's some slight movement, the test is just not designed to be the same kind of test. Why would the state say, I mean I can presume why, we're gonna hold you harmless if you try this new test that we'd like you to try, but we're not gonna hold your scores harmless if you continue with MCAS. Because one is a new experience and you have a test that you have not experienced and it would not. But every test is a new experience. Unusually, yeah, but the type of test it is is quite different. And there are gonna be two sets of English, two sets of math tested, right? Which part? Just as, yes, there's a point. Instead of just one with that test. The testing window is just one, it's just one testing window, yes, that's correct. So last year and the year before, there were two testing windows, one was performance space assessment and the other one was for the regular end of year assessment and then this year it's been changed and there's, thank you, and there's only one window. One window of testing. So, and the, while, and the minutes of testing are a little bit more, when we look at how much time students will spend in the testing environment, it's either about the same or a little bit less actually because of the, you know, students are creatures of habit and if we give them unlimited time, some of them take unlimited time and some for a very good reason and some because there's no reason to go any faster. So, the districts that I've talked to, time was not an issue for their students. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. For my colleagues who are thinking they want to vote to maintain MCAS, can you explain what the pluses are to the district and also kind of holistically will it push the state to doing a different test or something? I'd just like to hear what the rationale is, any of you. Or if you just feel like arguing, being contrary is argument. Who are you answering? I see you're asking. Anyone who might want to take that position? Of anyone who would like to advocate for staying on MCAS and argue that position, why it would be a good thing if the argument is something that Dr. Allison Ampe is expressed of interest in hearing. My two points are one that it's a test we already know and as a teacher having to do something new for yet another year is just another new thing. I mean, I've administered MCAS and aware of how it is and done all that. The other thing is I kind of feel like, I know that Mr. Thielman said that he felt like MCAS was a test that didn't count, but I feel like well if they're not holding us accountable, Park is the test that doesn't count and I don't really want to have kids take a test that we're not even gonna pay attention to. So why take a test at all? Can we just not test at all for a year? That would be better, right? So I don't know. I'm still, and there's still Mitchell Chester, Mitchell Chester, Mitchell Chester. So he comes up all the time and you know. I just want to build on that. I mean, I think my reservation last year, of course I didn't have the opportunity to take such a vote with you guys, but I would have voted for MCAS and why I'm leaning towards staying with the MCAS this year is precisely because there are no perceivable differences to me between folks and students taking a test that has already been something they're used to taking and the computerized version that we're gonna just go computer testing eventually so we might as well do it now. We like getting the results that we got tonight about our accountability and about our student growth and I'm not sure that that's gonna translate well next year if we go to this test that doesn't have any of that because it's not gonna be meaningful and it's not gonna be instructive either because the teachers that are already teaching the subjects are giving students district-determined measures. We've talked about them a lot here. There are internal tests within our district that test student learning and achievement and while it's not the entire district, I think it gives a lot of information to teachers about how well the students are doing in particular subject areas. So we're already gaining a lot from testing as it is. Another test that is totally new to me, it doesn't make any sense to do it, but. Dr. Seuss. Actually, I'm in the fence so but I can tell you the, what would switch me towards MCAS and I'm on the fence and I have all these reasons for a part as well is the thought that there's a chance that the part MCAS 2.0 is not going to be timed and so then we would be putting our kids through a time test for one year and then potentially not for the year afterwards and similar worry that I actually think MCAS 2.0 is going to be a better quality test because it's going to be more thoughtful and incorporating different things. So I suspect parts is going to be slightly less good of a test. So then again, why put the students through one year of a test is not quite the right kind of test that we want. So those are my, but then I have reasons on the other side. I'm really on the fence. Thank you. Mr. Pierce. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Kiersey, a vote for MCAS isn't a vote to be a contrarian. I think that a vote for MCAS is a vote to, in some ways I think send a message to the state and what they are doing on their website, they still don't have us listed as taking the MCAS last year. So the numbers are skewered to show that oh, more districts took park last year than MCAS. And what Cindy was saying about Mitchell Chester's involvement with the park coalition and its ownership and benefits there too, I think it is in part to send a message to the state that there's state control that matters to Massachusetts and there's local control that really matters to us too. And we're not just going to roll over because you say, oh, we're going to be held harmless for a year or two. And we don't have to go to paper until 2019. So that's an important factor for me. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Oh, I was just thinking. Okay. Mr. Thielman. You know, the only thing that I want to just point out that people, we have a week to reflect on this and we'll take a vote is that, I don't know if it's a majority or it's a split opinion or it's a majority. I don't really know what the numbers are. There's a number of administrators, principals who would like to administer the park. The principal of the oddison is in favor of the park and his leadership team is in favor of the park because they want to see how they're doing on the common core. So I just think that we have to hear that, listen to that. I like the, you know, the school committee takes a vote on whether to do park or MCAS, the district decides how to administer it. That's your job, not ours. And so it's good to know that there's some flexibility in the administration. Some, I think I'm hearing that some schools may be able to do it by paper because the faculty and the administrative leadership wants to do it that way. And some schools may be doing it electronically because the faculty and administrative leadership wants to do it that way. So in a sense, even though we're not, you know, it's a state test and we have to take a vote on a state test, there's a considerable amount of, at least for now, for a year or two, there's a considerable amount of local control over how we administer it. And there's a desire by local leadership to see how we're doing against the park standards. So I think we got to take that into account when we make the vote. I think we got to listen to the leadership. And I'm eager to hear what the principles like are all eight coming, the middle school is kind of. I think the planning on it. He already made his opinion pretty clear. But I mean, I'm really interested next week, when I realize people come in and they do research before and they make up their minds of how they're gonna vote and I've done that a lot too. But I hope that we have a good dialogue with the principles and I really want to hear what they're thinking and why they're thinking it next week. And can I just add, I think it's really important to listen to what the teacher said. I understand that it's not every teacher that's saying it, but it's certainly a much larger number than last year. And the principles and the administration really took a lot of time with Ms. Hansen's help to get input from teachers. And I would like you to also take that into consideration what the teachers feel. And I know it must be really hard to be in your position, but I would like to just echo what Mr. Thielman says. If you would please listen to the administrators, if you would please listen to what the teachers are saying and that you would give that as much, forget us, but the other administrators and really give that as much weight as possible. I know also just for the chair, I hope we get enough time, I know you do always to give us enough time, but I want to just make sure there's enough time in the agenda so we have a good dialogue with these folks. Yeah, yeah, we will take the time we need to talk about this. Good, that's all. Thank you very much. I also have to state that from my position, two things. One of the most persuasive argument may have been very subtle, but is hugely persuasive. It's that the whole process and the personnel required to administer paper MCAS at the Odyssey is substantial. And I think that the principal understated it, that he's accounting for 1135 test booklets, 1135 answer sheets, a corresponding number of teacher manuals and other pieces of paper that are shipped back to New Hampshire. And each and every one is counted and has to be accounted for. And one missing document at some place creates havoc. And that to manage this paper flow is hugely disruptive to his staff. And that happens twice. That happens in the end of March beginning of April for ELA. It happens again in May for mathematics. So that you've got two very disruptive testing windows. And the discussion that he put forth is that people who service kids for the most part and are diverted to accounting for administering MCAS would be able to be working with kids during those extended periods rather than being hung up and testing in Ministrivia. Mitchell Chester was not my friend and I'm certainly not going to go and vote for something because he wants it, but I don't think that it's particularly a wise move to vote against something that's in the best interest of the district because you wanna send a message to Mitchell Chester. I can do that effectively through other means. And I think we all can. If we wanted to have a vote of no confidence in the commissioner, we could do that effectively and send that off. And I think that would be a far more effective way to send that message than to do that through the testing decision. No question in my mind that the MCAS is obsolete. It was crafted a long time ago. Several components of the test are not statistically relevant. For example, the long comp really doesn't differentiate much of anything. So we're wasting a lot of time doing that. There's some talk about eliminating that in the 2016 administration. I don't know if they do, they should. They haven't made it. They haven't made the decision, but I know that there's been that chatter coming about. Paper and pencil obsolete, multiple choice, lots of statistical error. Moving towards a computerized test is a better instrument just by definition. Moving out of paper and pencil, moving to something that's more authentic and aligned to the common core is an advantage because that's how we're teaching. I think that we're going to get data back from either instrument. We can't abandon testing. We have to choose one or the other. Schools that have gotten park data have gotten a rich set of data that's going to help them with teaching and learning in their district, just as skilled people who are looking at MCAS data can tease stuff out. The fact is, is we are moving towards a hybrid in which there are park-like questions that are going to be administered by the state. Pearson will not be the entity that we'll be dealing with. It will be a separate state contract and so the Pearson issue and having the consortium define what we're doing is being removed from the process and it will give everybody the experience of taking a look at the data that aligns to the new test. Yeah, we're going to be held harmless but the data will still be out there and published just as it is now. I don't really see an advantage of staying put on MCAS. Is park perfect? No. And if we were going to park paper universally, I don't think that I'd really see a compelling argument to make such a move right now but I think the sooner we move to a computer-based assessment tool, the better it is for the district, certainly the better it is for the middle school. They clearly have told us in the past two meetings that they'd much prefer to go to the park computer-based test. It would make it a lot easier to run that school. Through the spring and I view that as a very, very compelling argument. Well, one point I want to make. Yeah, Mr. Thielman. I want to make, thank you. Is the policy makers make decisions based on all sorts of different biases. Well, how our kids feel about a test, how we feel professionally about a test, how we felt when we were kids about a test, what different constituents say. So that's how we make decisions and that's the way it works. But the one thing I would just watch people to think about is this is the easy part of education, a bunch of policy makers sitting in a room, taking a vote, you walk out and people have to do the work in the schools and that's the hard part. And the majority of the administrators, not all of them, seem to be saying that the hard work of getting teachers and students to work and act differently could be or would be or likely would be helped by the park test. That's what I heard in the survey. They feel that that test will help them change the way people teach and the way students learn. And we gotta kind of step away from our biases, unblend ourselves from our biases and just listen to that next week. That's what I would just say. Just listen to that. Because that's what I'm really, that's what I'm asking. Do you believe that this tool is gonna help you, help teachers to improve their practice? Not that they're not doing it anyway. And is it gonna help you to help students learn better and differently in a way aligned with the new standards? That's the question I'm gonna ask and we'll see how they answer it. Mr. Pierce. And I would just say that that voice that you're hearing, the people who are so strongly saying that park is going to be the test that's gonna improve student learning and achievement, those same voices will say on the other hand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with a different audience in front of them, with a different question or asking the same question a different way. They're here in front of Dr. Cheson and Dr. Bodie. They're here as agents of the school district. We are not expecting of them to take such a contrary view in front of their bosses and in front of the public. But in private conversations, you might hear a different answer to those same questions. Well, and I'm not saying that anyone is being disingenuous. I'm saying that there's an equal part concern, an equal part relevancy of the MCAS that I think you guys are just saying, oh, it's antiquated, it's the Titanic, it's a sinking ship and we can't do anything about it. No, we can do something about it. We can, we've been continuing to learn from it and just tonight talk about it. It's not irrelevant. So I would just say that the same folks that you're talking with, the same folks that they've talked to the school committee last week are the same folks that will say, on the other hand, you know, blah, blah, blah. So. Well, I mean, okay, I don't know how to measure that. But I would just say that, well, we'll see. I mean, we'll see if all eight principals are saying the same thing or if they're saying different things. And that'll be a way to test that. Test your position, right? Because if we have eight people up there and five. But this isn't the best environment for them to say their full mind. This isn't the best environment for that. And you have to take, I think, personal anecdotes or personal conversations, personal emails into account, not just the bodies in this room for two hours, three hours on a school committee night. And that's the edict and that's what they want. I think there's a lot more variants and a lot more gray here than outside of this chamber. I think that Ms. Hansen, and I'm going to ask her to come back and make a final comment because she is our AEA rep and normally has a seat at the table. But I've never known Ms. Hansen to do anything else, but give us a straight position as to what she sees is happening out there. And I never heard a principal come here and forcefully make a statement in favor of something they don't really believe in. And I don't think that the superintendent would put them in that position where she would expect them to tow a parting line when we're trying to ask questions and obtain facts and opinions. I expect our school leaders to follow the directive of the committee once we make a decision that we are entitled to make. But at this point, we have not made a decision. We are soliciting opinions. And I think that the folks who have come before us have been forthright in their opinions and I expect that to happen again next week. Ms. Hansen, would you come forward again? Be happy to. You've heard the discussion. You've heard the middle school principal. You've heard everything else that's happened tonight. You made a statement in public participation. Would you like to comment further? I think it's a difficult decision and I think both decisions honestly are equally problematic and equally potentially useful. I think we're kind of making a decision within a really closed environment here. And I think some of the bigger questions, Mr. Pierce said if you really wanna hold harmless, we should vote for no test at all. That's part of a conversation that's going on out there. So I think the fact is as a district, we have to make a choice between two imperfect things here. A year and a half ago, I was very much pro, stick with MCAS. I think the whole park thing was very problematic for all of the reasons that people have talked about. Losing state control over it, sending it to this multi-state consortium. It's a new test no matter what it has problems. It's gonna need a couple of years to smooth itself out just like the MCAS did. I completely believe that. Meanwhile, we have a four-year trajectory that we're headed towards in 2019. I think a lot will happen between now and then and I honestly hope that this is only scratching the surface of our school committee and our administration and our teacher's interest in the kind of state testing we want, the amount of state testing we want, the amount of standardized testing we want, how much time we want it to take, whether it's timed or not. So I really hope this is just the beginning of the conversation. So I started out this second round personally thinking we should just stick with the MCAS. Honestly, when you weigh all of the factors back and forth, I come out really mixed myself. So I've kind of taken the stand through this, these last couple of weeks, that I have more theoretical interests in one and philosophical interests in one test over the other but where I've come down is that I feel like this is a perfect example of a educational policy decision where I think teachers should have a significant say in it and just the conversations that they're having with each other and having with their administrators about testing are, you know, to me, that's really what the interesting thing about what's happening right now. In the end, the kids are gonna have to take a test. Eight-year-olds are gonna have to take a test. They're gonna have to sit for five days, five mornings. Some of them are gonna be stressed out. Some of them are gonna be crying. It's the educational world we live in right now. If that's not something that we like to think about, we should think about changing that. But, you know, honestly, if they're gonna sit for MCAS or if they're gonna sit for PARC this year, me personally, I feel like it's six or one half a dozen of the other. I do think a good case can be made for both. And I think some of the reasons that you've all stated, some of the things you've heard from the administrators, some of the things you've heard from the teachers in our district and from ELA directors and coaches and coordinators in other districts, they're all valid. And it's kind of like, where do you come down? Where do you come down with your own values about testing? Where do you come down with kind of what you wanna put kids through? So again, I really feel like the attitude we have going into this is really important. Mr. Pierce, you talked about, while we're having this test, what we're all excited about, hold harmless. Mr. Thielman, you talked about the parents on the playground talking about, wow, two years of no accountability. That sounds pretty good. But at the same time, you were talking about how much interest people had on the stats and figures and becoming level one. Dr. Chesson kind of said, these PPI's are really volatile. You're from year, be careful what you wish for. Like, yep, congratulations this year, but you don't know where you're gonna be next year. So I feel like to me, the more important question is how much stock we're putting in these numbers in the first place, what kind of value we're ascribing them. I think accountability is important. I think every single teacher in Arlington would say, we wanna be accountable. You would be surprised, 18 years now, many of our teachers have never taught in an era where there wasn't a standardized test to kind of hang your hat on. They wanna know how well their kids are doing. They really grab that information when they get it and they look through it and they wanna know and they wanna compare. And when I sit down and do data analysis and instruction meetings with them, they say to me, who does this really well in the district? I wanna know what they're doing. They're not, you know, they're competitive in a good way. And they say if somebody knows how to do this better, like tell me, like I wanna talk to them, what are they doing? So, you know, I just feel like you asked me, you know, to get it back up here. So, I have the opportunity to talk. You know, I would encourage you to read through the comments of the teachers again with the new information because, again, I ask them not just what but why. What were the factors that you thought were important to you? And I think teachers talked about their comfort and their discomfort with something new, their comfort with what they knew. But a lot of them talked about stress on kids. But there are different kinds of stress, you know, with a new test, there are different kinds of stress with a long composition, which can take all day. So, you know, I really, I think it's important that you think about why you're deciding whatever you're deciding. And I think it's important that you validate teachers' opinions who took the time to really think about this and discuss it, not just with themselves amongst themselves, but also with their administrator. We want schools that do that, that think school cultures and climates that where people are really, their opinions matter, they're taken seriously. So, I guess that's my two cents for now. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. May I ask a question? Don't go all the way, Linda. May I direct the questions for the chair? Please do. I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this and it's difficult, so you'll have to work with me. How well do you think, if we try and send a message that we don't want people to fret about this test, if we switch to park, especially if we went electronic, how well do you think that message will come, will be received? You know, will they just say, well, they're saying that, but you know, really they want the good results and so. So, I think that's a really good question and I think you would have to say it on day one and if that's a reason why you're choosing, for instance, to go with park, it should be fully stated when people vote it and I think it needs to be, you should, you know, set up appointments with the reporters of the advocate and whatever, you know, kind of other media outlets. I think the administration has to be very clear with teachers and principals from day one. I think you have to look at your district goals for the next two years and think about how they reflect or don't reflect to focus on those numbers and that test. I mean, I think it's something that you would have to communicate and message over and over again. But I think it's possible, you know, again, talking to other districts that did that, it seems like the message, they were able to get that message across, that it really was a very low stakes trial. Could you tell me other districts that did that? I mean, offline. And I'm actually giving you copies of my notes that have it in there, but we could talk about, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Seuss. Actually, I wanted to ask a general question of Dr. Cheshon and you presented this last time, but just to remind everyone, how many days, how many hours each test, you know, sort of, just to get a picture of what it looks like. For park or for both tests? I guess for both, for both. The MCAS test has two sessions, one session that's in March, which is two, two testing windows. One testing window that is in March that has two sessions of 60 minutes each, and then has a session of math in the Maytime frame. In park, there's one window and the minutes, for me to give you this too verbally is not gonna be helpful, because there's just too many numbers here. Just to say that there's one window for park, there are two windows for MCAS. If we add up the minutes, they're slightly over, but one of the reasons the minutes are slightly over is because they add time onto the park testing session so that kids who need extra time can take that extra time. So how many mornings, I guess, or how many days, physical days? I know that there are time tests in their zone. Yeah, I'm not sure. It grades through, it's different every grade, because one grade has this one. It's in the presentation that was given the last time. No, I do remember, I just wanted to, I do remember. Dr. Chesson, could you resend that presentation to everybody? I will, yes, I will, I'll send it to Karen and Karen will send it out to you, it'd be great. Thank you. And I actually, we have more detailed information about what a schedule would look like if we did it online, what a schedule would look like if we did it on paper. I will send that out. I knew you were voting next week, so it was my intention to send that out, you know, so that you would have it for next week. So will you have that? Yeah, but you just get it like before the Thursday. No, no, no, you'll get it tomorrow. I have it, I just held it back so that you would have it in a timely fashion and it wouldn't disappear as things do in my email. Dr. Allison Ampe. I know this is ironic given I just said we're not gonna care about the test, but I did look through your other presentation and we didn't get SGPs for the high needs. Oh, all right, I can send that out too, yes. Yeah, thank you. If you need it before I can send it out to you, it's available on the Department of Education website. It's something I know, it's just, it's something I think we should be keeping an eye on in the setting that we're looking at the test. If we have a test we're not worried about, then we won't. Sure, I'll send that out too. All right. Ms. Hansen. Can I just say one thing related to what Dr. Allison Ampe was just saying? So less than 50% of the districts took MCAS last year, I think that number will diminish again this year. So maybe, I don't know, maybe 25% of the state will take the MCAS, who knows. The way that they're making the equivalence between the MCAS and the PARC is they're using something called the equi-percentile, maybe Ms. Starks can explain it, I don't know, but you know they're basically just taking the results of one test and the results of another and like plugging them in like this. And there's a chart you can see on the DESI website that shows how to do it. Honestly, I think it's kind of problematic in terms of, you know, kind of shifting from one complete test to a totally different test. That will take a couple of years to shake out too. So I think even just the fact that you're now starting to compare, you know, normally there are like 70,000 kids at one grade level that take the test. This year there were like 35,000, so you're already comparing yourselves against, you know, and it's gonna even go down further. So I don't think honestly that that comparison, comparability to stay with MCAS personally is not something that I think is, I just think everything's gonna be up in the air for the next couple of years. So to me, I think because the numbers are shrinking so much and changing so much in new tests comparing to an old test, different groups of kids taking them, I just wanna say that seems problematic to me. We were fortunate this year in that it split 50-50 and that demographically the park schools and the MCAS schools tended to look alike so that there wasn't a real difference between the two groups. So it wasn't a major issue equating, but the reliability and validity of the MCAS data next year if we go to 25% of the districts taking it, you lose the compared to watt and that's really the important part of the equation. Right, that was kind of my point. And to be held accountable for a test that's only being taken by 25% of the population becomes even more statistically problematic and you can have results that don't make statistical sense because of the diminishing numbers of students taking that exam. So I think you could have other reasons. There are other valid reasons. I'm not sure that's one though. Yeah, Dr. Seuss. I have another question. Potentially for Dr. Seuss and the president for Ms. Elmer, I know that there's a potential in the future on the computer-based test to make accommodations more easily. I was wondering what about the status of the paper-based test? Are there concerns there for kids who need accommodations? They're the same accommodations that have always been available, but with the exception of for the park, there was two that are kind of significant with the untimed portion which the MCAS was untimed for all students. And then Ms. Hansen mentioned that earlier that there would need to be some accommodations to IEPs, student IEPs, but not for this year because there's a blanket waiver for people who would be switching over. And then there's a few things from graphic organizers and whatnot that people are used to. It's a standard accommodation on the MCAS. It's not an available accommodation on the park. However, should they eventually go to that MCAS 2.0? It will be. The assumption is that they're doing that so we can get some of those accommodations that we're used to having. So if we went to park next year, would there be any problem because they would not have a tool that kids are used to dealing with or? The graphic organizer is actually an actual copy of one, but really it's best practice is to teach a student to create their own graphic organizer. That helps them. So I mean that wouldn't prevent them from doing that. You know, you have to submit the graphic organizer that you would use anyway for the MCAS. So I don't foresee the lack of a graphic organizer as a particularly problematic one. I think the untimed piece is something that, you know, people are concerned about. Right, right, okay, great, thanks. Anything else? Hearing none, we are committed to talking about this as much as we need to and we'll be back at it next week. Monthly financials, Ms. Johnson. Good evening. With the exception of the elevator, which we all hope will be ready next week, and that it's costing more than we last projected, as you saw in my letter. Hopefully not as much as we've encumbered, but significantly more. It's been a very expensive project. We're pretty much where we were. Any questions to the Chief Financial Officer? Hearing none, that was the easiest one you've ever had to deliver. Have we, I also uploaded the larger file from some of the presentations you heard tonight. Do you have any questions on that that I can answer? You were about to get away. Dr. Seuss, I'm trying to be helpful. Yeah, just actually this question about the Dean at the High School, I know that you had mentioned that there was another position that was maybe playing the role of? The Director of Guidance position. The Director of Guidance position, and that, so on Mr. Janger's request, he would like both, is that right? It seems so. Okay, so I'll clarify that, okay, thanks. Anything else? Hearing none, thank you very much. Oh, good, Dr. Allison Ampe. I'm not sure if this is for the superintendent or for Ms. Johnson. Will we get a list from the High School? Well, actually, Dr. Janger said he was gonna hand us out something, but oh, you've got it. There is a narrative point-by-point that was completed today, but we didn't bring it forward because we couldn't get it out two days ago. We just finished it today, but it will number every ask, and it will have a narrative backup for each ask, obviously. Okay, and it'll be from, it'll be the asks that they gave us this interview. It'll be the original asks. Right, that's what, okay, thank you. Can we send those out tomorrow? Well, tomorrow we have an administrative team meeting, and we're going to go over all of them and see if there's anything that they would wanna add. Right now, that's very- Add. Quite a dense document. It's 12 pages long, the narrative with, you know. And we wanted to write it this year, and I have to give Julie Dunn a huge shout out for all the work she's done on it under a very short timeframe. We really wanted them to be stand-alone documents because one of the critiques I've heard that's hard for me to get in my head all the time, I'm very comfortable, I'm more comfortable running down a spreadsheet than running down a narrative, but that's not true for many people. And so we wanted to make the narrative a very much a stand-alone document. So if you're going back and forth, you'll see a lot of redundancies, but for those who prefer to see it only in narration, they can read the whole thing and get the whole story. So that's a big change, but it's an enormous amount of work, and Ms. Dunn needs a lot of credit for all the work she did on that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your attendance report. All right. One of these we've had already. One thing I actually wanted to bring up because it was in the Globe on Sunday, and it was an article, I believe it was actually on the front page, talking about asbestos and some concerns in some districts that they or some schools that asbestos is not abated in the best practice manner. And what I wanted to say tonight, that that is not the case in the early to public schools. When we have identified, we have any kind of renovation that requires movement of an encapsulated tile or piping or whatever, that we have strong suspicions of having asbestos. We go through the best practice methodology for doing that. And whenever possible, try not to do it when we have students in the building. And I would ask Ms. Johnson, because she's usually the person who is, the person who oversees this, if you want to add any more comments about that, because we've had things happen over the last few years, and certainly have done our very best to make sure that it's done the right way. In the capital budget, we've carried $5,000 a year for asbestos abatement every year since I've been here and into the future of the plan. In general, asbestos tile where not broken poses no health risk. The real problem with asbestos is when it's broken and becomes friable, or for people that are working with it, putting it in, taking it out, developing it. So we keep that $5,000 there. So if in one of the few remaining places we find a broken tile, we can hire the abatement and get it done right away. And we're very careful about that. We have been chipping away at it, pun intended, to get most of it out of the district. With the renovations, you know, that there's two pieces, I don't want to bore you to death, but in any event, we're staying on top of it. The high school is really the last big reservoir of such tile. Not surprisingly given its age. Let's knock it down. Let's fill a new one. Yeah, fill a new high school, let's solve all our problems. Continue to. I don't really have too much more. It's hard to believe that we are on the edge of winter season as we've lived through this week, but we are. And I will be sending out a notice to parents, but just reminding them that while we put a lot of time into it, and I have to talk about we, that's DPW, the early morning phone calls and a lot of conversation across districts. A lot of thought goes into it, but sometimes weather can change after the decision is made, and parents have to use their best judgment. I think in general, I would say that snow levels of three to four inches, and I say this as a general statement, are probably not going to require a snow day. Now, that could be changed, depending on already how much snow is on the ground or how I see it. It's just a lot of other things that could impact that. But in general, I think that we have right now a very, our end date for the school year is June 29th. Now, for each snow day, we have to put five snow days on the calendar. We can back that up. Now, am I going to make a decision that's going to in any way be considered poor judgment in terms of what the conditions are? The safety is the most important thing, but sometimes, and I can even think of an instance last year where there was a surprise. Things happened that the weathermen hadn't even talked about it for in the morning. So, that will happen. So, just keep in mind that it's time to get the galoshes spot and put by the door and we try to have students be in school. Certainly, one of the most important things in education is being there. But if a parent really feels that they can't get out of the driveway, there's some reason why they can't. It will be an excused absence. But at the same time, it's something that we take very seriously and I'm confident the parents do too, the wanting their children to be there. We really touched on a few things, but the one thing I did want to mention, there are a lot of activities that go on in the school system. There's a concert at the high school in Monterey. We've had a concert at Otis and there are all of those which parents note. And I would say to people who are listening tonight, one of the things we have updated on our website is our calendar. So, you can actually go into the calendar by day and see what all the different activities are going on. But one I wanted to point out because we're in the holiday season and the AHS is going to have the Christmas Carol next week. And so, if you're looking for an activity with your children, I would highly suggest it. So, it's going to be on at 730 on December 18th and on 730 on the 19th. But on the 19th, there is going to be an 11 a.m. performance. And this is actually a very unique one. It's, they're going to make it sensitive to children with autism disorder. And so, that might be something that parents might want to consider because often some productions may be too loud or whatever that might be that might make it difficult. So, anyway, we have that happening at the high school next week and I would encourage people to buy some tickets. Mr. Pierce. I'd love to add my son who's a sixth grader is performing in that as Tiny Tim. I saw the tail end of it today. They were rehearsing in Old Hall because I guess there was something else happening in the auditorium. But if you bring a canned good or non-perishable food item, you can get $2 off your ticket admission. So instead of 10 bucks, it'll be $8 for a ticket. And there'll be four performances. Excellent. Looks good. You'll be at all four, right? Oh yeah. It's a camera. Yes. Thank you. By the way, the November newsletter went out today. So, there's a lot of great things going on right now. Consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests. In which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of warrant number 16077, November 19th. Warrant amount $760,431.79. An approval of draft minutes November 12th and November 19th. Mr. Pierce. I'll pull those. We will pull the minutes. So basically the consent agenda is one item again. The warrant all in favor. Aye. Opposed? That is unanimous. On the approval of the minutes of November 12th and 19th all in favor. Aye. Move to approve. Aye. Opposed? With Mr. Pierce abstaining. Subcommittee in liaison reports policies and procedures. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We had a good meeting on December 7th. We discussed two, well three items of merit. The BEDB file, which was our file concerning the, come on, reminding. Someone. Agenda format preparation and dissemination. It was such an entertaining meeting in the morning that I somehow forgot that BEDB file. Poor Frank. We discussed whether or not we were going to actually come back to you with revisions or in the alternative ask to see if we could just trial practice with Ms. Fitzgerald's great help and approval. A system where we can get documents into the system by Friday. So we had the weekend to review them and look at them rather than having everything do by Tuesday. We'd like to try that as a school committee and see if that works over the next three to four months. And if that does indeed work for us and work for Mr. Fitzgerald and everyone else who has to load this stuff in, we could revise the policy accordingly. Can we under the context, obviously we would be, I don't think it would be a policy violation to put things in early. No. But the policy item of not opening the documentation to the public until the time of the meeting, if we were to do that early, would that be a problem? Not at all. I think that would be in line with us getting this stuff earlier too because there's nothing in our obligations to even give our materials to the public. It's just the agenda that needs to be posted. So the fact that we give the materials and make them available for the public here or even electronically is in exceeding what is our obligation under the law. In terms of people have a right to access it but we're making it easier. Making it easier, correct, yeah. But I think that it's something that we should be doing. I think there's a selectment of actually, it's sort of embarrassing, the selectment of doing better than we are at this. They're getting it out early. You can see the backup documentation a couple of days in advance and actually make a decision whether you wanna go and complain to the selectment about something they're about to do before they actually do it. It's kinda cool. So I guess what we're saying here is with the consent of the committee, we will take the proposed changes and implement them as a trial to see how they work out and that if things are working, we will adjust the policy to conform to our new reality. Precisely. Okay. The other things we discussed at our meeting had to do with our kindergarten admissions and age. We seemingly talk about this every year because it is something that comes up every year with our cutoff date of age five at kindergarten age six by September 1st and 1st grade. I think it's the consensus of the subcommittee to leave the policy as is for a lot of reasons and the one suggestion and change that I'll be making and having the subcommittee look over and then ultimately bring before all of you is some sort of preamble statement at the very top of the policy explaining how and where we've looked at resources and looked at other districts and how we've arrived at that sharp cutoff date and why it's important for this district to have it. Sort of a historical background if you will but brief to put the top. And then we talked to MCAS and PARC because that might ultimately be a policy decision for us and we talked about the pros and cons like we did today of those two tests. So we're gonna meet on January 11th at 8.15 in the morning hopefully in our regular room and not in the guidance room we'll be upstairs hopefully we'll see. And that's all we have to report. The electronic signatures are on the summary. Where are we on that? We're not quite resolved on that yet. We seem to think that there is permission for us to be able to do that from looking at the MASC listserv but that's all the research that I've done on that specific issue. Has the MASC provided a sample policy that would permit that? Possibly. Perhaps we should ask them for revised policy that would incorporate the electronic signatures. Absolutely. Okay. Dr. Bode. Well, since the policy subcommittee meeting I've talked to our controller and he wasn't sure. So he's looking into it as well. It's not something that he's had experience with previously and so nobody's. Yeah, nobody's had experience with us. Yeah. Sold a house and all of the documents were signed electronically. It's pretty wild. I did that on my phone. You get to pick your own font, you make your own signature and then it's all directed only at you and only you can sign it and then that's your signature. My husband had to get his own. So it was interesting. Cool. And we saw on the MASC that some districts had moved to that. And just to be clear it's the warrants that we sign here in person every time. This thing. Yeah. And then we have to chase people forward. In the summer, right, right. You would allow us when we're not together to get the signature. What about other things that need to be signed? For example, you have to sign payroll. I don't. Mr. Hainer signs. I don't know. We don't know. The policy we were brought down was electronic signatures for account payable warrants. So that was the one thing was mentioned. I mean, if there are other things we can do electronically that would be a benefit. Okay. That'll be on the agenda on the 11th. Okay. Cool. Budget. Budget also had a good meeting on December 7th in the afternoon. And we are again bringing forward the Pierce Field fee for your perusal and I hope approval. The committee had moved at the previous meeting to present the revised Pierce Field fees schedule for the school committee to approve on a trial basis for about the next six months, except we didn't have the documentation. You have the documentation today. We haven't got any updates on that since then. Dr. Allison Ampe then, are you making any motion? I am. Go ahead. For the school committee to approve the revised Pierce Field fee schedule as presented by the administration. Move by Dr. Allison Ampe. And on a trial basis for six months. Dr. Seuss. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? That's the unanimous vote. Where were you yesterday at 5.30? You can tell. I want to say that the Arlington Cable ACMI ACMI when not dropping anvils on road runners and delivering packages to coyotes, they run a really nice cable operation. I'm getting kicked from under the table by the guy from ACMI. They hate it when you call them ACMI, but they had a show last night that was focused on budget and numbers and our esteemed chair of the budget subcommittee joined me in this and she did a wonderful job. She has such a command of details. In fact, it's a blessing to have her on the committee. Facilities, Cindy Starks. So we have met, facilities have met on the 7th. We have also had two meetings now of the enrollment task force. I'm sure I can get this. It will be nice to be back. So one of the things, a lot of interesting information I think has come out of the enrollment task force and we have had a lot of deliverables. And so I just, I put together kind of a quick PowerPoint which you guys have. Some of this was given to the enrollment task force as well. Let's see, how do I make it? Did I just hit enter? Oh, good. So we started by explaining to them what the needs were. I think that most of you already know this. This is just kind of breaks it down. I have a slide for the needs of the elementary school. We're looking to need about 17 to 20 elementary classrooms over the next five years in the oddison. Come on. Oh, I skipped one. How do I go back? Huh? Oh, okay. Middle school. Also, over the next five years, we're looking at needing another 20 classrooms at the middle school. And again, this just outlines kind of how we get to those numbers, 14 regular, 16 specialists. In addition, once you have all those new classrooms, we need more gym space, more lunchroom space, more administrative space. So it's more than just the classrooms. And of course, at the high school, they don't want to leave it out. We need to rebuild the high school. We know we're all waiting for that 21st date. So hopefully, here we go, right? And just, I put that on there, that the MSBA will be involved in this and to stay at the top of the list for the high school. Obviously, we always need to say this, but any other renovations are all in our dime because we can't ask MSBA for money as long as we're waiting on the high school. So there are four big questions that we feel like in order to help make our decision and move our decisions forward, that we feel like we need to have answered. And it's, these are questions that we need to kind of talk about tonight and come up with what we think. But we also, on January 7th, have the forum that Community Relations is gonna put on and it will be co-sponsored by the School Enrollment Task Force. They voted that last night to help get input on these big questions from the town and voters as well. So the first one is elementary neighborhood schools. How important are they? What is the definition of a neighborhood? Like for example, could neighborhood be Hardy and Thompson, are they a neighborhood together? So kind of trying to put our heads around what that means to people and also what is it possible to just redistrict to put students where the classrooms are. We have classrooms, we don't have enough, we still don't have enough, but we do have some and a lot of, they've been a lot of wild and crazy ideas thrown out of the School Enrollment Task Force. I think that that has frustrated some people. They're like, I can't believe you're talking about that. And other people, I just feel like we're just putting everything we can out on the table no matter how crazy. But one possibility is do a massive redistricting and move kids where the classrooms are and save some money for a while. I don't really know how much this helps and for how long I don't think that we have enough classrooms to really make a difference in the short term, but all of these things kind of need to be thought about. The second big question that we need to ask is what size we want our middle school to be. As you heard, you know, when Mr. Rajiri, sorry, got up and spoke today, we are now, we are the seventh largest in the state. We are starting to catch up to our high school and we have to decide, are we gonna make it big and own it and just teach the stuff out of it? Or are we gonna break it up somehow? That's kind of a really big question that we need to answer. And we should probably have that discussion here. A lot of people at the School Enrollment Task Force are really interested in what are the important pedagogy input from the school committee about these questions. I mean, you know, it's an interesting meeting. We have Al and Al Tosti and Charlie Foskitt are there kind of from finance and, you know, capital planning. And so they talk numbers at us and we talk, you know, practices back at them and then the poor select men are trying to figure out like what they're supposed to be doing. And it's kind of interesting meeting. It's great to have all those minds there together because, you know, we have to have these discussions just like that. And then also, if we do break up the middle school or if we try to do something about the middle school, what grade level should we keep together? Do we wanna have just one, you know, we have to kind of have some discussion around what we think about that. The third big question is class size and teacher load. I'm trying to redefine it from class size to teacher load because we all know that not all students are equal. They have, their age is important, their needs are important, whether that be financial needs or academic needs, whether they're ELL, whether they have special needs. We need to define what we think is educationally sound. We have to think about what we can afford, how do we define it? And we just need to know what people wanna do. I've been trying really hard. I've been playing with a formula that tries to get to something where we can define what we think is an acceptable teacher load. And I'm working with Sanson on that actually more this week so hopefully we'll have something that we can bring forward. And then the second part of that is not just what is teacher load that is acceptable but what are we gonna do when we exceed that? Cause it's gonna happen even in our best case, right? Even if we were to do all this building, if the town continues to grow, we'll be in this position at some point again and I just wanna make sure that we always say, okay, we can say that 30 kids in a classroom we're gonna add a teacher and then we're never gonna let it get to 40 or something like that. But there's definitely could be different steps to mitigate what we think is acceptable teacher load. And obviously there is some point when that actually has to be another classroom but we need to kind of define those. And the last big question that we wanted to get answered and they wanted our input on also is town impact. We know it's gonna cost money. We have to build something. We have to do something about the enrollment issues. And I think that one of the things that we are all aware of is that we wanna build somewhere. Well, where can we do that? Where's the smallest impact on the other priorities the town has? Whether it's arts or other programs or whatever, we do wanna make sure that we keep all of that in mind. I'm not really sure how accurate this is. This is mine and I have a cold and I've been home for two days. So I had a lot of time to prepare the presentation but my head, I'm sorry, I am on cold medicine so I am not necessarily all here. But I was trying to figure out for people where the stressors are and when they happen. I mean, we've been talking a lot about Thompson because Thompson is the first one that's gonna hit but you can see and I believe that closely on its heels in the next year, we have Audison and Hardy and Bishop that are also right at the edge. And I was trying to figure out and I need probably, Dr. Bodie, you should look at this and kind of see. You know, I kind of rolled in Audison classrooms. I don't know if there's like a huge need at one year to have like all 20 classrooms but I kind of assumed that it would be a rolling in. So over three years you kind of see them get up to that. And that's what in a lot of the schools, right? You need a couple the first year, then you need a couple more, then you need a couple more. So just trying to, I would really like to better explain to people what is happening and where it's going on. Yeah. When you did that, are you taking like for Bishop where it needs zero to two? Is that including like using the repurposing classrooms which are only the classrooms that they listed on that sheet. Okay, so it's only classroom, classroom. It's not the specials. You're not taking. Unless there was a special classroom listed as a potential use. Okay, like the computer rooms. Yeah, like one room, this computer room at Bishop, just the computer room. Yeah. So I assumed no internal monkeying with rooms, right? So it was just from the list that Dr. Bodie gave us of available rooms. Okay. So that's kind of where the tipping points happen when I think so, you know, as we get there. I also wanted to look at it another way. If you think about it, what we really need is we have these five elementary schools that are under a lot of stress for their enrollment and what they all really need is to have 24 classrooms, right? They need four for six grades and so I just mentally do the math. That's also 20 classrooms. So no matter how I look at it, it's 20 elementary classrooms. Thompson needs six, Bishop needs six, Hardy needs three, Dallin needs three, and Bracket needs two, at least, right? There are also, there's other spaces that we need. Some of them are gonna need additional gym, lunch, after-school space, special space, and again, we still have an additional 20 classrooms at the oddison that we need to do as well. So I just was trying to look at it from a couple of different ways to help people get their heads around like why is this happening? And obviously those are the five schools there, Pierce and Stratton are the two that are not. I'm also trying to boil it down. I feel like for a lot of people on the enrollment task force, we're so stuck in the weeds. We know what's going on, that it's hard for them to kind of, so I wanted to try to say, in my mind, there's really only two educationally feasible ways that we do this. One, we add to the five elementary schools and we add to the oddison, right? We do that. Or we can take the fifth graders out of the elementary schools, which alleviates the strain on the elementary schools, and we pair up five, six, or some combination of five, six, and seven, eight, and I'm not married however to do that. You could make a five, six, seven, and then move the eighth to the high school, but you can either relieve the strain from the elementary schools by removing a grade, and I think that there's probably more acceptance of doing that at a higher grade than doing it at a lower grade. I mean, you can take kindergarten out, but I think that that's harder. So really, I think that if we can get it to a choice, a high level choice that we wanna make, I think we need to have a high level vision of where we want it to go and then move back through what that means we need to do for all the short-term stress that we're seeing at places like Thompson and the next year and the oddison and the other places. So I'm trying to think about, because I feel like there's so many possibilities out there that people can't even get their heads around it. So I think that we can try to put them in these kind of bigger buckets first and make what I say is kind of a vision statement for the schools. And then once we've chosen the vision, we can choose then what the steps are to mitigate it and move in that direction. So if we remove the fifth grade from the elementary schools and do something like a five, six and a seven, eight, obviously one of those two can stay at oddison, but then we need to obviously build another school. So you're either kind of mucking with six schools or building a new school. And I think that that wasn't clear to a lot of people. A lot of people saw that there were costs for Thompson and costs for this and costs for that, but I think that one thing that we really need to do is put it all together and try to give people different buckets of costs to choose from. So a couple of timeline requirements in order to build permanently anywhere by the 17, 18 school year, we have to go to town meeting this January with the ask because we have to have the money and it takes that amount of time. However, modulars can be in place with a year's notice. So we have a little bit more time if the solution for any of this is modulars, which for some short term might be anyway because it's harder to get to the long term. And then this, I just put down all the dates that I knew so far that we were trying to work through. We are right now on December 10. We have December 14th, the community relations meeting, more facilities, another school committee. Are we, can we keep it on the 18th? We did, so he's set. So he is coming at 430 on the 18th of December. I assume it'll be at the high school. To give us his new numbers, because as we know the numbers are short from what he gave us, a lot of people are asking, and I feel like now that we've lived with those numbers for a while and people are throwing them back at us, I have a lot of questions. So I'm really excited that he's coming again. So we're gonna get a new update on that. We can ask him all of our questions. We know the 21st, hopefully, we hear about whether or not the high school is. And then the next meeting of the school enrollment task force is on the 22nd of December. January, we have the parent forum, a full school committee meeting, and then that town meeting is kind of where we're headed. So that's the big strain right now on trying to deal with all of this, is that we have to get to that with the right ask. You don't wanna miss that timeframe. So these are kind of the questions that we need to answer or that we need to be thinking about. We need to come up with complete solution costs and plans for people. They're asking us to try to put that together. We need decision timelines for whatever options we wanna put out there. We really, obviously, someone needs to refine my stress table because I'm not really sure I just did it. And then tonight, I feel like what we really need is we need to have some high-level recommendations from the school committee on how we wanna move this forward and what we can take back to the school enrollment task force. They've been asking us a lot about pedagogy and about what we think is educationally sound. And because, like I said, some of the ideas are crazy and that's okay because it makes you think about some other ideas. But I feel like we really, we haven't been able to talk about any of this. So I haven't been able to talk about this. We've had facilities meetings where we've had some discussions, but until we have something that the whole committee agrees that we wanna move on. I don't wanna take it to the school enrollment task force. It should come from all of us, not just. So that is kind of all of my thinking and trying to put it all kind of together and explain it. So I just wanted to make sure everybody had seen that. I did not, at the school enrollment task force, we did not talk about kind of this is my take on it. And I would like to have that discussion with you guys before I take it to the school enrollment task force about kind of, I feel like if we could just make some decision and head in some direction. I feel like that's really hard, but I feel like that's what we need to do. It's hard too, because like I said, the McKibben numbers, the people on the numbers side of the table say to us, but in five years, the enrollment shrinks back down again. So why should we invest? And I'm like, but it shrinks back down to where we are now or a little bit higher. It's not like it's gonna go away. And a lot of people who have been coming to these meetings don't believe that. I'm still not sure I believe it. So that's one big question I have for Dr. McKibben is really after five years, you see it really starting to retract and where are you getting that? Like, if we don't have, we can't be for his numbers for the growth and not be for his numbers for the shrink. So we either have to buy in or not buy in. And so I'm having a hard time because they're having a hard time then saying, well, if it's temporary, let's find temporary solutions and all kinds of crazy ideas. Minuteman's got a whole bunch of space. Let's bust into Minuteman. That was a joke. I'm serious. I mean, they're like looking for space everywhere and they're kind of thinking about putting kids everywhere. And I just feel like we have to kind of get our hands around what we think we really wanna do and then try to see if we can work that. Let's let your colleagues talk to you. Dr. Allison Ampe. Thank you for sending this to us during the day. So after you did, I went through it and spent time looking on the map of Arlington and where's there's lots. And what I'm wondering is the Pierce Field, Pierce Practice Field, doesn't look that different in size than the area that the Gibbs is on. And I'm wondering, could we create a high school slash upper middle school campus, call it part of the high school, build a seven, eight classroom on the Pierce Practice Field. Maybe there can be some sharing of facilities, possibly gymnasium, parking, things like that. Maybe get some reimbursement from MSBA for doing it. We save the Gibbs and all their programs. And so we put five, six, we do a five, six at Audison. We have seven, eight at the high school and then they move on to the regular high school. It would take the stress off of all the elementary school. I mean, you would have to phase in and there might be some years where you need to do a module or something, but it would take stress off of all of the elementary schools. You could adjust what's remaining by redistricting. It would offer the chance maybe to do some different educational stuff with our fifth graders. Like we could start a foreign language early, a year earlier, or maybe we could do a sampler so that then when they go into sixth grade, they have knowledge and can pick their foreign language. And it would be, by having them all together, we'd have efficiencies of scale and that the class sizes would be able to be more even. Whereas if you do two separate middle schools, you're gonna have more inefficiency with teachers and it's gonna be harder to keep, you're either gonna have to hire a lot more teachers or you're gonna have different class sizes. Anyway, I just thought it had a lot of pluses and I'm wondering, do we have any idea if it would sail with MSBA? I mean, as part of, I mean, we told them already that we're interested in doing the eighth grade and could we just throw in another grade and, you know, wrap it all together? I think that's a question that can certainly be discussed assuming where we are with them this year. You would be putting in another roughly 1,000 students, 900 to 1,000. There is no parking to share. Right, and we mean, I'd build a garage, yeah. You have to do something, maybe underground. And those kinds of things MSBA would not fund. Right, right. Well, funding a garage versus funding a school for some of the eighth graders on our own. I'd rather fund the garage and maybe get the town to set up a parking authority and we could share it with people who need to park for other reasons in the town. I mean, this is a fascinating little idea if we can get into play. Right, now the only problem, of course, is the timing. Yeah. Because the high school's gonna take a while. But I don't know if we could build on the Piercefield earlier. I mean, there was a really good, Al Hilts, is that his name? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who also drew up basically adding, kind of making it a campus and taking over the crusher lot, which is the trees behind the Odyssey, which is a pretty good size of all those five acres of land there, and kind of making it into a middle school campus. So build a seven, eight or a five, six. And they're still on the same campus, but they're separate schools. Right. That's another place to build it. It is wooded and it's currently on the map as protected. I just don't know what level of protection that means right now, but yeah. And that, again, it saves the Gibbs. If we can do that, I mean, again, this one is completely without the MSBA because it's on our own land, but it's also within our own timing, right? If we can move on it, we can move on it and do that. So I mean, that is, I think of all of the recommendations that is my, I think what I feel like if I envision what we need to do in order to help save these elementary schools, because I don't think that the pressure is gonna go away very soon. And I don't think that enrollment is gonna drop the way he thinks it is. And so I'm worried that if we build on to the five elementary schools that in another 10 years, we're gonna have to build on again. If we don't start thinking about how to do this differently and kind of alleviate some things. So I like the five, six, seven, eight idea. I just don't know where we necessarily put one. Dr. Seuss. So when that plan has been mentioned in the past, there's always this question of, we just don't know if the high school, in the high school proposals, could support that many grades. Is there any way to do a study sooner? I mean, I know that certainly if we get to the feasibility stage, we have to study the space much more deeply and find out details like that. But would there be any way to answer that question? Because if it's not feasible, well, we say, I mean, we still can leave potentially the audicent proposal up, but then we have to take it off the table. But if it is feasible, then we have to seriously consider it, I think. So it would be great to really know that. Right, it'd be great to know cost aside, and we're gonna have to pay for something. The great to know, is that at all feasible given the physical space? Is there any way that we could do that? I mean, is it? I don't know how many acres it is. Right. Acreage would make it be an important piece of it. Right now, audicent's acreage is about seven. You wouldn't, it's hard to believe that it's seven, but it's just the way it's configured. The high school is about seven point eight. We're talking about every buildable space or just the space you're having at right now? The whole, I think the, I'd have to go back and look at the map, but I think it's all of what the high school, the fields, everything. Okay. So on this, on the 2016, the high school is seven point seven four. Okay. The high school field. I don't know what that means. 8.53. So that's just the footprint of the high school building part. So I don't know what that means. I mean, I don't know. Well, that's the whole plot of land that the high school's on. I think for the town, it would be great to have this combined thing because I think we could get some benefits. Certainly we could do things like introduce athletics into the middle school easier because of the fields and stuff nearby. They could share some of the resources. Oh, a terrarium space could be shared or something, you know. But if it's not feasible, it's not feasible. So that's why it'd be just great to know is it a genuine possibility. Well, that's why I have a feasibility study with MSBA. You're saying we can't do that until we get feasible. We wouldn't be able to know that in the next couple of weeks at all. Right. We'll turn that, or maybe the next couple of months before the town meeting vote. The real time, the regular town meeting. Right. Well, the question is that if the state goes and says, yeah, you're going to the next level, what kind of conversations can we have with them? Right, right. Or with architects, frankly, we entertain. There's a different question of whether they're gonna pay for it, but then there's this basic question, is it all possible? Right, is there room on the lot? Well, the thing is we put an SOI in to the high school. In that SOI, we identified the enrollment issues at Otteson. And one of the things we put in was the possibility of the eighth grade perhaps being combined in some way of the high school. We did not put in anything about a seventh, eighth grade separate school. Right. That would be in the same campus. But that's not, that's not, I mean, that's a question about who's gonna pay for it. But the question I think is, is it physically possible? Again, if the answer is no, then we don't think about it anymore. Well, that's a question that we would probably have to hire an architect to take a look at. It might even be possible to have one of the members of the task force who is an architect to take a look at that as well. So just to the broad question, is it possible? Yeah, and there will be a lot of issues with the seventh grade in that field, another building in that field because of access. Drop off. I think we just need to know this. I think we can't, I think sort of speculating that. I think that we can take a look at that. We can certainly take a look at that. There's probably more of a chance that if it was, had some adjacency to the high school, that that might be a conversation you could have with MSBA. I can't even predict what they would say. Clearly if you went to a field that was not adjacent, it would be a separate project altogether. Yeah, where's your. So in the feasibility study, we have what's nine months to do a feasibility study? We have to go through the first phase of it, which you can shorten up. It's about a nine month phase, nine months. Remember we had to do a lot of different things to prepare in terms of committee and getting the money for the feasibility study. So there's a lot of conversations and administrative pieces, but then you get the money for the feasibility study and that's when you start really looking at what is the preferred. Is that you? And we could get that in January? So now we just have to mirror the displays. For that money in January, we have to wait till April. If we were approved. Well, the warrant article for January is broad enough that the answer could be yes. The feasibility study that we would do in the MSBA process, we have the flexibility if we want, right? It's our money that we're spending on the feasibility study to look at the needs at seven, eight, nine through 12, we could do that. So we're not. I think you could look at that, whether that would, they would agree with it. I don't know. Another piece of this too is that one of the things that MSBA does is they sort of have broad estimates as to what a project will be. So they have a certain amount of money and I think for this particular cycle, they had about $540 million. So not that they have an exact dollar amount, but they're doing approximations in terms of the cost of a project. So they are inviting people into the grant process based on rough ideas of what, and so that's another factor that, again, I can't even predict what they would say. But we're gonna have to spend town money on something anyway, so then the question is, what do we spend money on? I think that that's really key is trying to come up with, if we add the five schools and the Odyssey, is that the same as building a new building? And if not, well, that's one decision point, right? But if it's the same, then it's still like that's what, I think that's the hard part is there's so many decisions that it's become such a snowball, you know. How much would it cost to add a performing art center or an art center to the high school if we were funding that as the town? That's what we're talking about. And we took the gifts. I mean, you know, there's so many moving parts because I think that there's such a commitment on this committee to do the right thing not only for the kids, but for the rest of the community. So. I just want to. It's difficult, Mr. Thielman. Thanks. As I understand it, our decision in January is really that what the task force was asking us last night was whether or not we're going to make a proposal regarding the Thompson. So that is something we have to zero in as a committee. That's what they want to know. Are you gonna? And I think that decision is, are we gonna add on permanently or would we rather build a different school? Because if we're gonna add on to Thompson, at that point I think you may as well add on to all of them. Right, so well, yeah. That's another tipping point. That's another thing that we have to decide. And you can also slow the decision down too. While we could make that decision, clearly Thompson needs classrooms, but you can do temporary least modulars for a period of time. Right, we're heading in one direction and we can kind of, you know. You can have more time on the decision. Right. That's possible. And if that's what people decide, I think for all of us, one of the lynch pins and all of us in the decision models is what's gonna happen with the high school. Right. And once we know that, that really is going to make some big differences in what we can do. Yeah, yeah. One other thing that I want to say is that when we said that the Odyssey is the seventh largest middle school. Last year, I don't know what it is this year. Last year, we don't have the numbers for this year. But last year, the largest was in Marlboro and they had 1325. And they've got a declining enrollment. So it's not gonna take much for us to get from seventh largest to largest. Right. And if the largest now is around 1300, 1500 isn't beyond contemplation to think about having 1500 adolescents in one building. Just on itself, with a big site, lots of cafeterias and gyms and stuff is one thing. But to pack them into that site even with added classrooms, eh, no. Right. Which is why I think you can, if you looked at the, so an architect drew up an idea which is that you build kind of another building and then walkways up to it from the Odyssey that we have to up to the Crusher lot, which is literally right behind Odyssey right behind where the parking lot is, is another idea, because it breaks it up but keeps it together like having a seven, eight on the high school campus, right? Now you have the campus and he even went as far as to like, there's a street that runs up there and that could lead right to a new parking lot and a new facility. And so, I mean, it's an interesting idea. You know? Or you can add permanent modulars onto the middle school. You can have a base of six classrooms and go up three levels. Right. You could get 18. I'm not sure 18 will do it even at its, if you get to maximum capacity. And you're overtaxing the rest of the building. Right, you still need more gyms. That building was built for 900 kids. Right. It would be totally overtaxing it. Dr. Allison Ampe. Can I show you this since we spent all the time? I think, I'd love to see this. Okay, so these are screenshots from Google Maps. They're both at the same resolution. So this one, this map is by the high school and I'm at an angle so it's kind of hard to do this. So this is the Pierce practice field here. Yeah. And then there's DPW, the DPW parking lot there and there's the high school over here. This side is the gyms. And the gyms parking lot. And I'm just, visually, they're not that different. So it just, from a very high level view, it looks. Right, well, they are, yeah. I mean, unfortunately, the gyms is not on, is it on, I don't think it's on this map that Adam gave us. Oh, it's not, okay. Does anyone have any questions or can I ask them? No, but I just gotta say I'm intrigued by your idea. Right. No, and I think that's, I mean, I think that, if we don't end up adding on to five elementary schools in the Odyssey, we have to build somewhere and then the question is where? Do we build on the gyms? Do we build on Crusher? Do we build on Pierce Field? Do we build in the middle of Monotomy Rocks Park? Do we build, I mean, there's a whole bunch of, we were trying to build in the cemetery. A few holes over at the Winchester Country Club. Right, right, right, so. The challenge, we don't have a lot of empty land. Right. And the large parcels that there are around, like Miraq's car dealership, I think that they're quite attached to. So, land acquisition costs, if we wanted to go after something, would be very high too, and that just, we're done. You know, one point to feel, if they consider was that Kathy passed out this memo, which everyone, I think everyone got, which was renovating the gibbs for a school is $14 to $20 million. And when you do that $14 to $20 million renovation, you get a school that can house a grade, sixth graders, fifth graders, whatever we decide to do, whatever we conclude is best, educationally. But then you displace all those tenants. And so you've spent $14 to $20 million building a facility for our students. You've displaced these tenants, and if we want to help them as a community, we gotta help, we either gotta help them find a home outside of Arlington or help them find a home inside of Arlington. And if it's inside of Arlington, that could cost us some money too, especially with the Arlington Center for the Arts. So it's not, it may not be the best financial solution. Yeah, there are a lot of moving parts here. So, a couple of questions that I need to answer. Okay, that's what I was going to get you. Ms. Stark, so let's put forth the questions we need to answer. I think that one of the big questions that we can answer is how big do we really think we want the middle school to be? I mean, we heard from the middle school principal, even he is kind of hesitant that it get much larger. But in our vision, do we want it to get much bigger or would we rather have, and I like the way he said, if you break it up, because the other possibility is you take 500 middle school students, I don't know what that is, maybe it's one cluster of each and you move them over to the Gibbs, but like he said, who gets to go, who gets to stay, that gets really hard. I would rather have a small middle school as hard as that might be than put one grade somewhere. I just don't feel like putting one grade somewhere is a good idea. I don't know why, but I just, I don't feel like that's a great idea. Well, let me just say that I think that's, that bears a lot of discussion and thought and reflection. I don't know if we can just make a kind of a visceral, I don't want one grade in one place. I just don't think that's a good way to make a decision. We have, Needham has had. She's not making a decision, I'm putting out there what I think. Needham has had a lot of success with its sixth grade, and I know some people that have worked in that district and they like it. Would they like to have grades together? They probably might, but they seem to like the sixth grade there in Needham, and it seems to have good results. The principal of the middle school tonight talked about some value to the sixth grade. So I'm not wedded to one idea or another. I want to study it more, and I think it's, I want to see a lot of research and reflection on that point. Dr. Seuss. So, you know, when I talk to parents, they are generally against the idea of putting a single grade for a very reflective reason. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea educationally, but I think if it is a good idea educationally, we need to hear from teachers, we need to hear from educators. We need to sort of have a conversation with the community about why that's a good idea, if it is. Because what I'm hearing from parents is they don't like it. Just instinctively, reflexively, they hate it. So I think if we were building a school district from scratch with these numbers, we probably would create two middle schools. But I think that given where we are now, I understand that that might be a more difficult thing to pry apart a middle school and create two schools. So I think for those, if we take over the Gibbs, if we decide to do that to alleviate the overcrowding at Otteson or somewhere else, I guess, I just want to have a conversation with educators and find out more what their thoughts, and at all levels, not just the sixth graders, but I want to hear from elementary school educators and everything just to sort of have a conversation about the benefits and disadvantages of doing something like that. Can I, I want to make one more point if I may. One of the things I've heard a few times is this worry that if we take the fifth grade out of the elementary school, that we're going to result in some schools being too empty as a population declines. And I think the population will eventually level off. I mean, you know, I have a lot of friends right now who are living in East Arlington, who no longer have kids in the elementary school, right? And we're not moving. So that sort of happens where people have kids, they pass through one school and then they move on. But I think it's important to realize that right now we're not dealing with an ideal situation in terms of the facilities that we have. You know, people don't realize that the 11 extra classrooms that we have this year, those aren't really empty, right? Right. I mean, so that there aren't computer labs in schools. There aren't, I mean, maybe there shouldn't be, but there aren't, right? There aren't after-school programs, dedicated schools, rooms for after-school programs. There aren't, you know, wiggle rooms or, you know, other things that people want, right? So I'm not that worried about the idea of a school having three sort of extra classrooms, right? You know, if we take out fifth grade. I think, and population declines a little, I think we can probably do something with those classrooms that would be really good educationally. So, you know, I know that we have to worry about costs and I think that's a really big consideration and I don't wanna build unnecessarily, right? I don't wanna overbuild. To your point, to your point, the down one opened in 2006 with 348 students last year at 456. Hardy, when it was renovated in 2001, opened with 270. It now, it had 392 in 2014. Bishop, when renovated and reopened in 2000, had 371, 2014 at 415. Brackett opened in 1999 with 263 students. In 2014, they had 497. When Stratton, Stratton was last renovated in 1963, but they had 306 students in 2006. They now have 408. Pierce opened in 2003 with 228. They are now have 267. And Thompson opened in 2013 with 358. One year later, 392. Okay. Right, right. So, we're stressed now. We're not at a stress, you know, we don't have much stress or hanging around right now. So, the idea that maybe some schools will be a slightly better situation than they are now is not talking about a bunch of empty classrooms sitting there doing nothing. Maybe we can get them back to where they were designed to be. Right, right, right, exactly. So, you're trying to get a sense of the committee so you can go back. So, I'm gonna ask you to push on the, let's go quickly around on the size of the middle school. And I will say, I don't want 1,500 adolescents in one school. Middle school size, Dr. Allison Ampe. I don't think it should be bigger than it is now. I don't think there's enough, the core doesn't support it. And there's just not a way of enlarging it. So, no, we need to find some other solution. Mr. Seelman. So, I would, you know, I want a smaller middle school. You know, I think that goes without saying. What that actually means, I would wanna see a plan that talked about ratios of administrators, counselors, social workers, support staff, nurses, to students in any configuration. So, whether it's a five, six, a six, seven, whether it's just six grade by themselves, I think these questions need to be answered. So, theory, yeah, general, high level answer, smaller school, absolutely. But I think it's about really looking at it in a much more granular way than we have. That's why I raised that question before. You know, I need to know how many adults there are gonna be to support each of the kids in the school. I mean, how many social workers, how many counselors, how many nurses, how many case workers, how many teachers, how easy is it gonna be to offer different services, different language services? I mean, that's a, so there's a lot of thinking that needs to go into it. And if we come out with that, you know, what we can't, we can actually offer more services to kids and more support in a bigger school, I gotta be open to changing my mind when that data comes here. I can't be kind of wedded to one. Right, right. Dr. Seuss, I'm just trying to do a lightning grant so we're not here a little bit longer. Dr. Seuss. So I think if you designed a school from scratch for 1400 kids, it might be, there might be things that you can get out of that. I think that that particular school, you cannot add that many students with the common spaces and the way it's structured so that you can't separate upgrades and stuff. I think that to create something that we'd want to have would require so much money that we just can't do it. Mr. Pierce. I don't get this, please. You're collecting information, go ahead. I like the idea of students not changing schools a lot. I don't much get the towns that have four or five school changes in the kids K through 12 life. I think that there's a reason, now look, I'm not an educator, I'm a lawyer, so I don't know the pedagogy or whatever you're looking to find out, but I do know that there are liability issues when I see the students rushing in the Odyssey Middle School after a class of bell rings and it's like a herd, it is a herd and it's galloping and if there are any extra students in that hallway, I can't imagine what it would look like. So part of me thinks that elementary should be K through five and that kids experience should be that and secondary should be six through 12 and there should be two schools. I mean, I don't know how realistic that would be but the student would only have to change once. That's just a fantasy, I guess, but as to the middle school and its size, it should be smaller than it is now and ideally it should be with two grades, not three. Ms. Starks, to summarize. So I teach in a middle school of 824 students, which at times seems really big and sometimes seems really small, but we also are growing and my school will undergo renovations to add a three-story addition on next year. So we are headed towards getting bigger. I have a feeling they're about to build it for nine to 950. So I know it's possible, but I feel like definitely 1100 just seems like, I don't know, there's something about when you cross that thousand line that's like the size of a high school, like that just, I don't know what that is, but I just feel like as a teacher, I like knowing that I know a third of the sixth graders right now and that every kid in that school has someone who knows them well, which is the whole idea behind middle school and I just don't think you get two certain numbers and that just doesn't, it isn't true anymore. It's really hard for the administrators to know them all and it's important that they know them all too and as a teacher, I know my kids, but I certainly don't know all the kids. And so I feel like the ideal size is somewhere in that eight to 900, give or take a little bit of a high school. I really like the idea of doing a five, six, seven, eight. I even like doing it as a campus in the same place. So it's not even really a transition. I mean, it's a different building, but it's a similar place. So if it's seven, eight on the high school or seven, eight on the oddison, having it be in one place because they are a similar age and they have similar needs. I too, if we were to add it at the oddison, I do wanna make sure that we have all of the facilities and all of the things that they need. We're gonna need two of everything. So it is an additional school, but I also can see that being, I like it being with another school. Whether it's at the high school or on the Pierce field or at the oddison, I much prefer that than putting them out at the Gibbs, I guess, because I still like having them together. It makes it more of a campus feel. One thing that's a lot of this. The next question you need is, because it's 9.45 and I know that we're gonna be moving the 10 o'clock rule. So the next question needed answered was in terms of the neighborhood schools. Neighborhood schools. Neighborhood schools. As the task force wants our thoughts on that. So let's go and do the lightning round again on neighborhood schools, Dr. Allison Ampe. I think that Arlington Fields are very important. Could you say anything in here? I think Arlington Fields, they're very important. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that literally hundreds, maybe thousands of families moved to the town with that promise. And it's part of the culture of the town. And we have to explore. One of the things we figured out years ago on the school committee, and then we haven't really addressed it a long time, but it was that one of the realities of the neighborhood schools is that there were inevitably unequal class sizes across the district. That was just sort of what we had to accept. And so I think that's, I've always been comfortable with that. And the other thing, as I wanted to say, I never knew the name of that lot was the Crusher Lot until this whole thing. It's the Crusher Lot. Yeah, this has been a great education. It's just a piece of work. It's like a place where you take the old cars. I know, exactly. I don't know, it must be somebody's name. Dr. Seuss. Yeah, I don't have anything to add. I think that the town is committed to it. I have many, many pleasurable fond memories of walking my daughter to school and enjoy that and would not have been as fun if I had to drive her someplace, but I don't have anything else to add. What? I think the town is very much committed to that. I think getting rid of that, it doesn't seem like it's going to achieve that much, frankly. I'm not gonna get that much out of it. Any possible savings and efficiency would be at the expense of huge costs and angst over the neighborhood schools. I think that it's a no starter. Mr. Pierce. Yeah, I think buffer zones were for us the third rail and that it started to fray that idea a little bit and that's why we got a lot of outcry and it was very valid because as a parent, two small kids, I share the same memories that Dr. Seuss has and all of us have of knowing the crossing guard and frankly, I think that the Thompson-Harty area is a neighborhood in and of itself. I agree with that. I think that the two schools share similarity in size and geography. We are a small town anyway. It's nice to think that the students all play together in town leagues and they get to know each other eventually when they're middle school students. But there is something nice about the neighborhood streets and joining up at the neighborhood schools field. So I wouldn't want to disturb that. Ms. Starks. I never got the chance to walk my kids to school. I live in the Bishop busing district. So I put my kids on the bus but I did walk them to the bus stop. It is different and it's interesting because we've just been finishing up the Thompson video and one of the things the parents said was there was a lot of angst around busing those kids off in three different directions at first. And then it's funny because then it goes on. It says, yeah, you know what? They were much better at it than we were. It turns out it wasn't a big deal. And it was funny. It's true. But I do agree that I think the neighborhood schools are something that define Arlington. It's one of those small town things that people like about this town. I think that they like that it's a town. They like that we have these small schools and yet they're more expensive and it's a different way of running things but that seems to be what people like. So I would tend to agree on that. Anything else on your question was that we need to bring back? We have to talk about the Thompson, I think, right? Because that's the immediate. Is there a class size question, Juana? Class size. Well, there were four questions. Which is how needs, that's the Gibbs conversation. That's the Gibbs conversation. It's kind of where we weigh on that. So I think we need to hear what people say about that. Yeah. And I think the other one is class size. It's just a, which is kind of theoretical but we should at least see what people think before you look back at the committee. Right. Okay, class size I think worth the squeal point. We can't get any bigger. Right. Well, like I said, I'm trying to work on a formula that talks about teacher load and trying to define what we think is an acceptable teacher load and that would take into account, it would have multipliers for age and it's very different for an elementary school teacher who teaches all four subjects. So they have four subjects but only 24 kids but they also have really little kids and then you have to add in the special needs and ELL and are they high, whatever. So I'm trying really hard to kind of come up with something but I feel like that there's, I mean there's just a certain amount of size too, right? I mean our classrooms can't hold 40 kids but I also realize that if I had a class of 30, if I had help in that class, I could do that. So that's the other thing that I struggle with is that, yeah I think that there should be some limits but all I feel like is there should be a limit and then if you go above that, here are the steps that we're gonna take to mitigate it at every level and if it ever reaches here, that's a new classroom. Like it can't, you know, and that's what I would like to try to get my head around and see if people have numbers that they associate with those. Well, I don't think we're gonna get to that decision tonight. No, no, no. But what is it? I do wanna. Because it's at 9.51 now. So what, is there anything else you need to know tonight from this committee in order to move forward? Go ahead. So ask the question specifically and we'll go around to another lightning round. No, I need to answer. Okay, Dr. Allison Ampe. You need to be paying attention to what the design constraints were for the classes that were already built because that's a hard limit and there's different sizes and some of them are smaller than you would think. So that's just, you can't just assume you can go to 30 and everything. Right, exactly, exactly. All right, I think that the ask on the Gibbs is, I don't know what the ask on the Gibbs is. Well, what do you think the ask on the Gibbs is? Okay, everybody gets a comment on the Gibbs. Which is the element? Yeah, I mean, I don't see it. I think if we were right now, based on what I know right now, okay, if we were to take that building over, we'd have to put somewhere between $14 and $20 million of improvements into that building. We would displace tenants who were serving the town and I feel an obligation as a member of the town meeting, as a parent, as if somebody uses a lot of the facility or my kids use programming there to try to help those tenants find other space, which is gonna cost the town money as well. So for me, I just don't see it as a viable option. We were asked last night to see if we could use some classrooms in that building for a temporary period of time. I don't think, I don't think that's possible, but Dr. Bodie has to kinda do some research on that. So that's where I'm at. Right. Dr. Allison Ampey. I would much prefer not to have to use it. I would, I wanna hear what our other options are though before I totally roll it out. I agreed either way we're gonna be paying more costs, but I just, I wanna know what the options are before I say no totally. But I like the Pierce practice feel better. Yeah. Dr. Seuss. Well, I am at the Gibbs almost every day. In fact, my son was opening night of a play there tonight. One flew over the Cougar's Nest. That's amazing. Yeah, it's a really tough, tough play. It's a much beloved place for me. What I have been saying to people all along is there's a lot of passion around the arts. Rightly so, this town is committed to the arts and it should be, it is possible to potentially find another place for the arts and it's potentially easier, well, everything's hard, to find another place for the arts than to find a new school building. That doesn't help the other tenants of Gibbs who are also incredibly valuable members of our community but who we're just hearing less about from, right? What I hear from mostly is the arts community and then my response is I think this town is committed to arts and I think because of that commitment they will put up money to find a place for the arts if needed because the town is so committed but it doesn't solve the other problems. We have this adult daycare program that I haven't heard people talk about. There's just less excited people about it but it also serves our community. It's an incredibly valuable program and then we have preschool program and you don't need a bunch of things there so it's a difficult thing. Mr. Pierce. Well, it's hard to follow that because she was just talking about a show with kids in it and asking if I wanna disrupt that, make it a school. No, I really don't and I don't think it's viable because it's older, it would cost a lot of money as Mr. Thielman suggests and I love the idea of having some type of campus arrangement whether it's for younger kids or high school age kids. When we were in town hall, I said what is the viability of just building a new building and that's frankly where I stand on this. I'd like to see instead of big apartments and condos going up in Arlington, I'd like to see viable performing arts spaces or viable schools going up because those are the things that we really need as a town here. That's where I stand. I really want that to be a school of last resort for us. Right. I look at it as being all tied to the high school thing and I wanna see the possibilities of doing a performing arts center at the high school because we have such a great theater department, such a great music department and such awful space for them. We've gotta do that better and we can probably come up with some sort of arrangement like Barnstable or Chelmsford has done to have a performing arts component. If we're doing that to add town money into the high school project to build an arts center in there is well to meet that need that would be shared space between the high school and you'd integrate programs. And if we did that, okay, we'd move ACA over into the art center, the town art center attached to the high school and we'd be able to use Gibbs as a school without all the disruption that we'd have. I mean, the thing is, is that everybody went into the Gibbs knowing that it's a school in reserve and we were renting it at below market rates because it was a school in reserve and there might come a time where we'd need it and that time is there. I mean, that's a reality. So it to me comes back to what is the town willing to pay for? Are they willing to pay for a premium on a school project in order to keep the services and amenities in the Gibbs or to provide them a new home somewhere else in the town? I think the town would wanna do that. I think it's that kind of town. How we do it, I don't know. So I'm not really locked into any one solution but I must say that Dr. Allison Ampey's thoughts of building seven, eight on the high school site and seeing if we can wrap it into the SBA gets us a little more reimbursement money and might be the most cost effective wonderful thing we could do. So I think it's important just to when we talk at the next meeting that the committee hasn't really reached the decision. So I think we need to be clear about that. No vote, no decision. Right, right. But you've got a sense of the wide sense. But on the neighborhood schools, we're all in on that. There's a lot of clarity. Right, that's clear. And I think it's fairly clear that we all think the middle school is too big in the way it is and we'd like to see it small. Too large as it is, yeah. Okay, it is 9.59. I'm looking for a motion to do what? To extend, which we have to move. To move the 10 o'clock rule until 10.30. Motion by Dr. Seuss. Second by Mr. Pierce. All in favor, opposed. That's unanimous. So facilities, are we now done with? Mr. Chairman. Yeah, Dr. Elson-Ampie. Can I bring up another thing because we've talked about it and I don't want parents to freak out. Just that, can we hear from the administration about the, what is it like if we move the fifth grade students to, you know, a five, six school or to the oddison and just educationally as it sounds, socially and emotionally as it sounds, because I know it's something that some parents are going, I think parents feel less strongly about it because we didn't have an uproar about having the strut and fifth graders at the middle school. Fourth graders, yes. But fifth graders, no, they're cool with it. And I'm not saying that everyone will feel that way, but just that we need to be acknowledged. This is something that's going to bother some people and we should know at least what our thinking is and whether we feel it's worth the trade-off, so. Okay. District, count, oh, okay. There's one last thing, which is we need input on this because we are being asked to make a recommendation on the Thompson. And so, you know, we're gonna meet next week, we can talk about it some more. But we've got a, you know, I don't know, I mean, Kathy, we got to make, they're asking us for some recommendation on the Thompson, task forces for the January town meeting. Well, the recommendation doesn't need to be made the next meeting. There is time in early January. But this is possible, we may not know the answer to the high school when we meet on the 22nd. It's possible. But I think this committee, we need to know what we need to be thinking about as a committee so we can have a conversation about, maybe it's too late tonight. If you, well, given what you've been just talking about, if you decide that you wanna hold out and take a look at that possibility of a seven, eight, for that matter, five, six, then you do not want to build permanently onto Thompson. Yeah. But you do wanna have modulars to relieve the stress and it would make sense, particularly in this case, to do the modulars next year. However, it's more complicated than that. You're talking. I'd like to see the numbers, how much it would cost to build permanently to install. I sent it to you. Okay. It's in this report. Oh, okay. And I put some caveats on it. This is just industry numbers. This isn't, it's really just a magnitude of comparison. They could be off somewhat. They're estimates at this point. But in rough numbers, permanent modulars cost twice as much as temporary. Maybe not quite as much, because there is a rental fee with them every month. Yeah, it depends on how much. But there is. The installation's always the issue with modulars. And the other piece that's different is the planning time to get permanent is roughly twice as long. Okay. We can take that up again next time. Yeah. So I think next week we need to, next Thursday night, we need to have time on the agenda to just talk about this question, because they're asking us what do you want to do? Yeah, yeah, right. You know, so I want you to add, I know that the Thompson community is having some sort of gathering of parents to talk about issues. And I'd love to hear from them specifically about common core spaces. So that's a big worry, I think. Common core? Common spaces, right. They're doing the common coral. Sorry. Common spaces is a big worry. And so I know one suggestion is to take one of those classrooms and use it as an auxiliary gym, because that's maybe, you know, gym is just too small to, and you can't double up gyms. I mean, they, in one case, this was just one example, they doubled up the gym and they couldn't do anything and they did a rock, paper, scissors thing. That is just not a good thing to do, right? I mean, we need kids to move around, run around. So we need more gym space. So I'd love to hear from the community some suggestions about common space issues and I don't wanna overlook those issues. I think that if we build classrooms and we ignore the need to potentially expand the common spaces, we're gonna be kicking ourselves. So we wanna sort of have a clear idea of what our future needs are in that direction. Okay. District Accountability, Cork Instruction Assessment, Mr. Thielman. We met this evening at 5.30 p.m. and we talked about different pieces of information we should have for the four categories of the superintendent evaluation. I don't know where those notes are, but I mean, basically we're gonna meet again in January. We're gonna ask for time on the agenda of the school committee in February and we're gonna come before you with recommendations on evidence that the superintendent should start pairing now on the four standards, Instructional Leadership Management and Operations, Family, Community Engagement, Professional Culture, as well as two goals that we chose, closing the achievement gap and then developing a space plan and then a practice goal for the superintendent and a other goal. All right, yeah. Student achievement. Student achievement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So we'll have something for you and we're working on it and we'll have a good process for the evaluation. Okay. Community relations. So our next meeting is on 12.14 where we're going to talk about the our January Visioning Meeting and that I have a question for the committee. New information last night, the task force agreed to co-sponsor the January Visioning Meeting, which is January 7th. We want to know if this should be a community relations meeting or it should be a school committee. I mean, should it be, should it? Should the school committee? I want to take a vote on whether we should be a official school committee meeting co-sponsored by the Enrollment Task Force. And actually, frankly, potentially there might be other co-sponsors, but this is where we stand right now. Should it be a sponsor of the event or should it be our meeting? I think you're asking for us to be a co-sponsor of the event. We are a co-sponsor of the event, I guess. So right now, I mean, it's sort of coming out the community relations subcommittee. Do we not want to do that and just say this is a school committee meeting that is then co-sponsored by the Enrollment Task Force? Okay, so. That's the motion on the table. Is that specific enough? Well, you know, I just want to ask. So I think this particular meeting is about school visioning should be chaired by someone from the school committee. Yeah, so you were the chair. So it's not a co-sponsor. I wouldn't. No, I don't want to sponsor that's what I was saying. It should be a school committee. So really the question is, right now it's. Is it a subcommittee meeting? Is a subcommittee sort of sponsored thing or is it a school committee sponsored thing? I think it sounds better. And by the way, I think that we should all be involved in this so we're going to talk details on Monday. Who specifically should do what and we're all going to go to you for asks pretty soon. To get involved. Just as a warning. Because we really have to come out of that. We have to come out of that with. With the answer to those four questions, but not just a pie in the sky. Well, we have to come out with some community thoughts and feelings about things. I'm sure we're going to come out of the answers. No, not necessarily answers. We need to. We need to solicit opinion at this meeting. And we need to educate the community. It's partially educational. It's partially soliciting feedback. So you're looking for something that's almost like the one we did in September? I'm looking, no, actually. Somebody tell you a little bit of details. Actually, for the next school committee meeting, we should have a draft agenda. We have a draft agenda now, but we need to work on it more. Stacey Smith of Consensus Building Institute, who is a hardy parent, who's worked at the town on numerous occasions, has volunteered her services. So she is going to meet with us on Monday and we're going to talk details. But basically the idea is this. Two parts or three parts. First part presentations, answering logistical questions. Second part, small group discussions at the table about broad visions. And the third part, specific areas, talking about particular issues. So there might be a sort of area here about neighborhood schools, thoughts, feelings, concerns. Something else about grade distribution. Eighth grade to the high school, whatever, thoughts, feelings, concerns. And so that we are both broad and general and specific about these things. So I think it should be a school committee meeting. Okay, so that's the question. But I do want to give you guys all more details and that we'll definitely be ready for the next meeting. So then when we get the details, we can decide how we want to do it. But yeah, it sounds like a school committee event. I think it's going to go with all seven of us. Yeah, yeah. So okay, so we should take a vote on that. Next time when we see the agenda. Okay, okay, that's fine. The reason I should write it for you tonight is I thought when we start advertising it, I could advertise it as such. It's a school committee event and how we structure and organize it doesn't much matter. So we can advertise it now that it's a school committee. As a school committee event. That's actually the question I wanted to give you. Any objections to advertising this event as a school committee event? Seeing none, go for it. Okay, great. Okay, that's what I wanted. Let's see, executive session minutes. We've done that warrant committee. People have been paid school enrollment task force. We've talked about that up down sideways. We need a vote to approve the memorandum of agreement between the Arlington School Committee and the Arlington Education Association, Unit A, health insurance premium deductions for employees who receive 21 paychecks per year. So moved. Moved by Mr. Thielman, second by Mr. Pierce. Any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor. Hi. All opposed. The chair will sign the document. We have now reached the point of executive session. I don't have the official legal language in front of me. But we're going into executive session for the purposes of, I'm trying to do this from memory and it's after 10 o'clock. Purposes of negotiations. For purposes of negotiating and preparing for negotiations which have held in public might be detrimental to the district. We will not return to public session after the meeting. Motion by Mr. Thielman, second by Mr. Pierce. Roll call, Dr. Allison Ampe. Mr. Thielman. Aye. Dr. Seuss. Aye. Ms. Starks. Aye. Mr. Pierce, the chair votes aye. We are in executive session. Thank you for everybody for watching this wonderful little TV show tonight.