 It is 6.30 p.m. Thursday, October 22nd. This is not the Board of Selection. This is the school committee. Although we do intend to award liquor licenses tonight. Oh, no, we're out. Just for the board. We're out of liquor licenses. Well, no, but the thing is they've got to get renewed and we have to obviously test their wares. I heard you were out. There are 15 full licenses out there and we have unlimited beer and wine. It's a beautiful thing. We are a wet town. The meeting is now open. We'd like to first start off with a moment of silence for finance committee member and husband of former school committee member and current clerk at the high school, Ken Simmons. So we'll have a moment of silence in his memory. We now go to public participation, Matt Dorson. Good evening. My name is Matt Dorson. I'm a parent. I have two kids at the Odyssey Middle School, Nate and Alex Dorson. And at the beginning of this school year, the school passed out seven-day MBTA bus passes to the kids that worked great, like a seven-day MBTA bus pass is supposed to work. The kids could just go and they get on the bus and the pass was valid and obviously this was a mistake that somebody made, but it brought to my attention that maybe this was a mistake that we should try to follow up on. And so the existing MBTA passes that students use if they're taking the T to school is a student Charlie card. It has a maximum value of $20, so the students get on the bus. They can add cash to it on the bus on board. If they lose the card, they've lost the card. You get another one and they put more money on it. The T also offers a pass called the seven-day student bus pass. Well, it's actually just a seven-day pass. And what that card is, is it's a prepaid card. For $26 a month, it lets you ride unlimited bus, subway, commuter rail, zones one and two, things like that. So the advantage of this card in my eyes is threefold. One is that in the long run for the school year, it's cheaper for the students. At $26 a month, they'd save about $28 a year on bus fare if they rode the bus back and forth 180 school days a year versus using the pass for 10 months. That doesn't count for the savings they get because they could use it on the weekends. It also doesn't get a count for the savings they get because a lot of students, like my own sons, go partway home from school on the bus. They go to an activity and then they carry on home. So we figured out last year my older son used about $350 with a bus fare. And this pass would cost $200, and it's in the sheet I passed out, but it cost $260 for the year with a seven-day pass. So savings could be almost $100 a student for people to get to use this pass. The other big advantage is I hear from a lot of the kids that when they get on the bus in the morning, because the passes they have can only have $20 on the maximum, the first day they get it, they can put a $20 bill on it. They can never do that again. So every other day when they get on the bus, if they think they're going to run out, they have to take a five or a 10 or a one or a pile of change. And the report is that this really slows the buses down in the morning. The kids are getting on. They're putting in their card. They're putting that little hit the white button, put in the card, put in the money, hit the white button, hit the card again. They're figuring this out and they do it, but it really slows the buses down to the point which some of the drivers apparently just won't take kids. My younger son reported yesterday they were outside the Autism to come home. A bus pulled up. It let two adults on and said, you kids stay there, and the woman drove away and left all the kids standing at the Autism school waiting for the next bus. Maybe this isn't related to adding money to their pass, but it's clearly something that happens. And then the third advantage, so that's the other advantage is that parents end up just scrambling around finding 10s and 5s and 1s in the house and sending their kids off with them. And sometimes that money actually makes it onto the pass that they're using. And sometimes they come home from their after school event and you're like, where did the ice cream come from? Well, I convinced the bus driver to let me on for free and I spent all the money on ice cream. So the nice part about this pass program at $26 a month is it would give them unlimited use of the bus. It's simpler to administrate from the family's perspective. Now, obviously from the school's perspective, they would have to collect the funds from the students and distribute that to the MBTA. The MBTA has set up a pretty comprehensive website where you can be a super user and you can upload a spreadsheet in the right format and kind of manage it in a bulk fashion. It's not like somebody sitting there tapping every little box on a website. So there is some administrative time involved, but it really isn't any, there's no additional cost for the program if it's passed through to the parents. And one other alternative that would help, the current sixth grade program involves, there's a reimbursement program for sixth graders. So if the sixth graders ride the bus to school, they can at the end of the year, well actually at the beginning of the year they can say they want to ride the MBTA and at the end of the year they'll get issued a check for $1.20 per day of attendance at school. So the school is kind of partially reimbursing the $1.60 a day. I don't know if that was a decision made a long time ago when the bus cost $0.60 and now it costs $0.80 a ride. So the sixth grade reimbursement is not even complete anymore. And this program, if it were implemented, would be very easy simply to purchase the passes for the sixth graders ahead of time. You hand them a pass, they never have to think about it. It's one less thing off the plate of the sixth grader getting on the bus in the morning. So I think it's a program that we should try to implement through the school. I don't know what it takes to do, but I'd love to see some traction on getting it implemented. Thank you. Thanks. Anyone else for public participation? Hearing none, we are now up to the buffer zone report. Jane Mike Remi. Yes, let me introduce Mike Remi, who is our new registrar and data specialist. And since we initiated buffer zones in the district a couple of years ago, we have a report every fall on the distribution of students in our buffer zones. And Mr. Remi is here tonight to give us an overview of the buffer zones. And we have, he's put together a PowerPoint. Thank you. Good evening. Just going over the 2015-16 buffer zone report and taking a quick look at the students where they were placed and how some of those distributions played out. At a glance we can see there were a total of 114 new students to the district who resided in a buffer zone. Of those 114, there were 38 who had siblings already enrolled in Arlington Public Schools. 44 of those new students were kindergartners and the remaining 32 were grades one through five. And if you just take a look at the percentages here, we had 28 of those 44 new kindergartners were assigned to their preferred school. 24 of the 36 grades one through five were assigned to their preferred school, leaving us with a total overall of about 68.4% who were assigned to their preferred school. Special considerations were made for those who had siblings already enrolled. And you'll see that just a little later. Over here, we can see the distribution, how everything played out for those 114 students, which buffer zones they were in and which schools they were ultimately assigned to. As a brief visual, you can see just how populated each school was based on the charts and seeing exactly where kids from which buffer zones ended up and which schools ended up with the most kids based on those buffer zones. As a percentage, you see that same data and you can also see that there in the Stratton Bishop buffer zone, we do have one student who was assigned bracket. Similarly in the Bishop Stratton buffer zone, you had one child who was assigned to the Hardy School and that's based on the sibling preferences to keep family integrity intact and make sure those students were attending the same school as their students. And finally, the sibling placement chart shows you 100% across the line. All 38 students who had a sibling enrolled in an Arlington Public Elementary School was assigned to the same school as their sibling. So there you have it. The preferences just kind of go down the line and folks got about 68.4% of the schools they were preferred they were assigned to. Thank you. Ms. Starks. So you can actually, our overall is actually closer to 79% because I assume that everybody who had a sibling wanted to be in their school for siblings. So if you add the number of siblings that were placed at their schools where their siblings were, were actually 90 students out of 114, that's 79%. So it's actually, I think it's a better number, just saying. But I also, one of the things I want to thank you for the report and the numbers, but it's really hard for me to make any sense out of this unless I can see classrooms. So my question of course is, did it help? Did it help with the evening of the load of students in classrooms? I can't tell from this because I don't have with it the classroom lists. So for me, while these are great numbers, I'm really interested in now seeing how it played out and what the class load sizes look like. Let me respond to that. That's correct. The answer to your first question, did it help class size? The answer is yes, because the decision was based entirely on class sizes. So if the average class size at one school, say, was 22 and the other was 24, that the decision would be to go to the 22. We will get you a chart that is similar to ones you've seen in the past. But it means now going back to all the schools and seeing what their distribution is. One of the things that happens, as you know, that even in the first month of school, there's still a lot of movement of new students in and actually withdrawals as well. So what may have started out, and I think this is true, in fact, I know it's true in all of the elementary schools. If they had hypothetically three sections of 66 kids, they were going to have 22 per class. That falls apart very quickly in the first month or so, and so we will get that for you. But you can have a pretty good idea of what it would look like just by the enrollment chart because three sections 66. In fact, Mr. Remy has, we could actually get them your, the one with the algorithm in it that shows what the average class sizes are. But what we'd like to do is to get the actual now by school. Right. Dr. Allison Ampe. I'm talking as close to my mic as I can reach. I just wanted to point out that our policy JC on buffer zones in the reporting requests, the report will include but not be limited to a description of buffer zone use, open enrollment and their effectiveness. It should answer questions like, are the desired results being achieved? And if so, is this attributable to the buffer zone and open enrollment policy or other factors? Is class size equity improving? Are imbalances smaller? What buffers are being activated by how much and what's the flow between districts? That bit, that last sentence we've gotten, but the other ones, like Ms. Starks, I would like to know. And I don't know that we've actually seen that in the past and I would really like to see that this year. Well, as I said, the very fact that you can look across a grade at the different schools and just see how much more tightly they are equal than they have been in the past is really part of it. But I think what Ms. Starks is asking for is the chart that we used to, we still can generate, that shows now how is the breakout at Straton in grade three? What are the three class sizes? And it's really looking to see whether across the district we've minimized the spikes. I understand, I guess perhaps I don't want, I would like to see that too, but I'd also like to know if we hadn't activated the buffer zones, if we had not activated the buffer zones, what would the class sizes be? Right. You know, what difference has it made? Right. Because we are, we've put into place a system that inconveniences people. We did it for a reason, but it's nice to show that it's working. And I understand what you're saying that you can kind of look across and say, well, it doesn't look as bad, but that's not the same as saying, okay, if we hadn't done this, this year the classes over at Straton would have had 26 and the ones over at Bishop would have had 24. And instead, they're 25 and 25. Well, that's something that we can look at as we're doing the data for next year to build that in, that's not, we haven't kept track of that other than going back and make going back through all the decisions that were made, which it would be, you know, we probably should keep track of that as we go along and we can do that. Mr. Hayner, are you saying you're going to do it for the numbers we've got now or for next year? I said going forward. Well, I'm just thinking we know who does not belong in that district in the move. You have that information of who is technically out of a district if we didn't have a buffer zone. Well, we have, but we can subtract it. I mean, it's not hard to go back and say, okay, if we didn't do this, there would have been six more here. I guess what I'm saying is what I heard from Dr. Ampe is that this is part of the report. For us, they have to do it. No, no, I'm agreeing with you. Oh, okay. I think that they should be able to back the numbers up for this year. Right, I agree. Thank you. All right, yeah, we can do that. We can do that. We can get you a follow-up report on that. Anyone else? My thoughts, look, I live in the buffer zone and I live in a multi-family building and I've talked to two parents. One's at the bishop and they're very happy. One's at the Thompson, they're very happy. So one of them ended up in the school that they wouldn't have under the old proposal, but both of them got their school that they chose. So whether they ended up at the school that they wanted versus where they would have landed under the old zone lines are really two different questions. And the parent satisfaction, if you're now in a buffer zone, which I think is a wonderful thing, the people in my building are happy to be in a buffer zone. Are people ending up where they want to be and are they happy? Then is it an effective policy doing what we want it to do in terms of evening out the distribution? And three, I mean, in terms of policy analysis, we set the policy on this and we established these buffer zone lines. The question that we would have going forward is, do we want to adjust the lines? Do we want to make the buffer zones bigger and where? And having a sense of how they're working within these constraints would give us the food for thought to say, you know, maybe we should expand some of these zones a couple of blocks or maybe we'll need to because the Thompson and Bishop, Thompson and Hardy are crowded and we need to encourage people to go to the further west. There are policy decisions that are facing us, especially in light of the crowding. So that's why the committee I think is curious is to more under the hood on the buffer zone reports. I mean, what we're seeing here is a report that's over, that basically is telling us, yeah, most of the parents are satisfied and yes, it's working because the enrollment is evening up. But there are going to be further layers to this conversation we're going to need to have in terms of expanding our policy around district with increasing enrollment. Anyone else? But thank you. Thank you for your work. Welcome to Arlington and I hope you have an enjoyable and long career with us. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is the MASC delegate assembly. We need to elect a delegate. Everybody's listening. Who's going? I'm going. I nominate you. Thank you. Second. Motion made by Ms. Stark, seconded by Mr. Thielman. Any debate on the issue or qualifications do you uh... If I can convince you to quote Paul Ryan, I don't want the job. Past president of the organization, that's all, you know. Move to close the nominations. Yeah, okay. Any further discussion on the silly motion hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? It beats going to the Democratic State Convention. It certainly does. By the way, there are resolutions on there. We sent them to you. At some point if you have opinions, please forward them. I think that the delegate assembly is before the next meeting so we won't be taking a formal vote but I think that the positions are pretty self-evident unless people start talking about this in a way that I don't expect. Superintendents report. Dr. Bode. I don't have very much this evening but for two things. One has to do with the memo I actually sent you last night that came out yesterday from the commissioner about his recommendation that he's going to make to the board. One of the things that did not really come out in the article was in the globe today or at least not as clear as maybe needs to be made is that just recently Park Inc. offered to states of giving them a range of ways that they could be part of the membership. So Dr. Chester is taking advantage of that new openness about the membership in it to propose this. Now one of the things that are not clear, there are a number of questions that have been asked and yet not answered. For example, how long would it take to develop a park-like test that is a Massachusetts test? And actually for people that are listening this evening there was a recommendation by the commissioner yesterday to the school board, the board of education that Massachusetts consider their own MCAS 2.0 test which is really going to be the next version of MCAS which is park-like. But what will happen in the spring is still up in the air and whether the board will take this option or not because another consideration is what is going to be the cost. Already the state has invested quite a bit of money in going forward with park. And then of course then what's the other issue? How does Massachusetts now relate to the bigger park consortium? And the question is on everybody's mind is what will happen in the spring 2016. So what the state board of education is planning is a public comment session on Monday, November 16th. This is going to go from 4 to 7 p.m. at Malden High School. And then the following day, Tuesday the 17th is when the board will be taking a vote. Mr. Hanger. Dr. Cheson, my only concern with park, a large percentage of the state is not capable of taking the electronic part of this test. It will still be a manual. The issue that we've had this year with the numbers and the delay in the MCAS results because some parts, the numbers changed, the baseline changed. That would continue if this takes place until the rest of the state gets up to speed. And as far as I know, and I'll stand corrected, there's been no big movement from the state to take broadband and the infrastructure that the eastern part of the state has west. And until that happens, I mean, I'm not saying we stop, but we may have to relook at our numbers as they come in. We won't be looking at statewide testing numbers. The other question I have, and does anyone know where the, there were three pieces of legislation going forward dealing with stopping all testing, delaying testing, where those pieces are right now? I don't know where the legislation is. As far as the other issue about the technology, it's true that not all districts have the technological capability of doing park online. If Massachusetts is going to require it being online down the road, then there's going to have to be an investment on the part of the state toward infrastructure and hardware. Let's be candid. The state makes a lot of mandates and we're recipients of those unfunded mandates. This will be massive. And my concern is that if they do that and they make that commitment, it's got to come out of some other part. So we, I support the testing concept. I support immediate feedback to get results so that we can, we're not having this big lag each year in catching up. But I think that we need to do it right. I think everyone feels that way too. What is going to be of interest happening in the spring is are we going to keep a two part system? Right now they're trying to figure out what the crosswalks are between MCAS and park. And Paul, Mr. Schlickman may have a better sense of it. I don't know if Dr. Cheson does too in terms of where we are with that. It probably won't come out until December. So I don't know if they're going to, it's just, I don't, I don't think anybody knows what they're going to decide. As far as Arlington goes, we would be prepared technologically to do it online. We would, if we go, if they ask everybody to do park in the spring, we will do park online in the spring, not park paper and pencil. That's great. Just to, I'm going to talk to the desi geeks tomorrow who really do the technical stuff behind it with all the waiting and stuff. But I wasn't meeting today where they were talking about it. And it seems like the direction that everybody is sort of preparing is to go to MCAS 2.0 and use park stuff as the foundation for going forward with our own state test. So how it's going to work? I don't know. The equating, you know, they were talking about how they were going to equate accountability and performance levels across the two instruments. And that's a mathematical exercise. I have no good thing to do that. But the one thing that I was squawking about today was the lack of timeliness in terms of the data. And they said that whatever we do, we are going to get back on track in terms of the timeliness. Oh, good. Mr. Heiner again. Do we know if they're making any modifications or adjustments or adaptations for, I'm assuming when and if this is, when this is in place, it'll be a graduation requirement just as MCAS has down the road. It took a long time to adjust for sped issues and adaptations in that. Do we know if that's going on right now or are they going to wait and work at all like they did with MCAS? It took almost like five or six years before that. Well, the law requires that a test be in place or the standards be in place and the tests be in place for X amount of time prior to becoming graduation requirements. So, but in terms of the sped adaptations, there's actually more adaptations that are available through the online park than are available through a paper and pencil test. The model that was given up at Audison, the person said there were no adaptations as of that point and I just took that. So, I take what you're saying and I'm glad to hear that. You can click on a word and get a definition, there are multiple things that are available. But the adaptation I'm talking about, if a child is a non-visual learner, they have a visual problem and I'm not just saying blind, they just can't process visually. Are there auditory, are there auditory people will be allowed? No, the test can be read aloud by the computer. It can be read aloud by the computer. Fine, okay, thank you. Dr. Elsa Namby. Two questions, one, have they spoken if they go towards using part of park and not the whole thing, will individual questions then be able to be released? I don't think they have any idea. Okay, it's new. No, just because that was, the third option is quite new. Yeah, no, I know, I've been reading about it. Second, even with the park option, the consortium has taken to heart to a certain extent the close nature. The thing I don't understand is as a consumer of the data, how do we make a decision if this is telling us the proper story, if we don't have data to match up with what's going on? The state has made a lot of progress in terms of both the accountability system and the testing, so that you can pull out sub-scores of the test and make some sense out of it and align it to standard space report cards and do work and gain information more than just that the kid was proficient or not. And the other thing is that if you look at the right constellation of scores, you can make some assumptions about what the next logical questions are to ask about what's going on with your curriculum, what's going on in a school, what's going on in the classroom. It's not gonna tell you, but it's gonna point you in a direction of what the next logical question is to ask. And if we look at this as an indicator, and not as a holy grail, it's not a bad instrument, and I think that the accountability system that we've gotten into right now has more or less gets it right on a lot of levels. So that there's been a lot of progress from when this first came about 15 years ago, and how can I evaluate Park against that when there's no data? I can't match data to schools, to accountability, to, it just, I want the data to make a decision. Right now, it looks like the state board is going to make a decision without that layer of data that we have. So don't ask me if I like Park or not, I haven't seen the data. Who else? Mr., Dr. Seuss. Well, I just wanted to say that I'm very excited about this. I was jumping for joy when I heard this, because potentially it has the opportunity to get all the things we like about Park, the fact that it's on a computer, that you can get the data back quicker, ideally. But we don't lose control, and I love it. Dr. Alcinae. If we do, if they do decide to go to Park, I'm concerned about the reports that statewide there were more problems with people doing the online part of the math exam, I mean the math exam online, as opposed to paper and pencil, and can we, before we make a final decision about online or paper, look at what was happening and make sure that that's been addressed in whatever test we will be taking? I'm not sure I know the answer to that question, but I can tell you that Nadine Solomon, who's one of our most experienced math coaches, actually said that the students that she worked with that took the test on paper had more difficulty than the students that, in terms of how to code the answer, than the students who took the test online. So that was not our experience, but I wish I knew the answer to that. Yeah, it was pretty much across this, I mean, maybe not here, but I was just, that's concerning to me, to have students taking the test that people have had a good chunk of problems with. Absolutely, and that's why I asked the people that were in the trenches that worked with the students while they took the test. We're kind of a geeky town, we do our stuff online. Anyone else on that topic, Superintendent, continue? The only other thing is that the town manager and I have been talking about moving forward with the task force that is going to study the different options that are before us as a town very soon. The expectation is to have a committee formed and meeting in the first week of November. I think today we're going to have a facilities report of the meeting, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say that that is happening. The intent is to have a subcommittee of the budget task force in order to just have efficiency of moving forward, but what people need to understand is that these are going to be open meetings and there will always be a public comment portion of the meeting so that there will be an opportunity for a lot of input as we move forward with it. But in order to get this moving quickly in the kind of timeframe that's needed, it really needed to be a committee that sort of existed already that we could take a subgroup from. So I expect that probably within the next week the committee will be formed and a meeting will be set. Mr. Heiner, do we need to make a motion to authorize the superintendent to be our representative? No, I think my intention of talking to the superintendent is that the facilities committee would be our representative in a task force. And if that's not sort of where things are going, I think we need to go further on that. Well, I think that both the town manager and I would like to be on that committee and there would be representation from the school committee and it could be up to the chair to do the appointment or there could be a motion tonight as to who would be selected for that committee. It's the chair's intent to appoint the facilities committee members to the task force if each members of the committee concur. Yes. So there are three members of the subcommittee. Motion by Mr. Heiner, second by Mr. Pierce. Any discussion? Yeah, I just have a question. Would that make the committee too large? Do we need to get sort of representation all across town? Do we need all three people on the facilities or should we have one? I think that, you know, it's really huge school issue. And I think that the reason why we have a facility subcommittee is to go and do this. So I want my three members there. Okay. Yeah. Plus the superintendent. Plus the superintendent. Yeah. Yeah. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all in favor of the motion say aye. Opposed? That's unanimous. Mr. Heiner. Just like that, if you finished, I just want to ask you a question. When I talk to Margaret a couple of times, she has a Metco pass program set up. I don't know if it's similar to what the general was talking about tonight. So I just thought I'd just pass that on to you. She gets the passes for her students and stuff like that. Right. So you already were. Well, she gets passes for the students that do not elect to take the bus. Right. We have, we have buses. Right. There are students that, we don't, we want them. I was talking to the mechanics of the program. Oh, the mechanics of it. She sets it up because I started one day and she was arguing with MBTA because the passes weren't working for all of her students one day. This was a very confusing start to the year with respect to MBTA passes. And I was over at the middle school when they were dealing with having to have all the passes come back for whatever reason, it was not clearly set up on MBTA. So we'll take a look at this. I think at this point, the passes may be in place, but I don't know that for a fact. Dr. Seuss. Oh, I was just curious. Do you know what the administrative hurdle is to adopting those kind of classes? And how, what would involve on our end administratively? Well, I'd have to look into it a little bit more. I think what happened was exactly as this gentleman had said, is that the passes that were distributed at Odesson were the type where you had to add money onto it, but then subsequently learned that there was another type of pass that was not like that. So the passes had to be exchanged. No, I'm saying, we've known about this kind of pass for a while, but there was a feeling that it was a lot of trouble to administrate it. I'm just wondering what is the administrative sort of barrier? I'd like to table this discussion until folks have a chance to research it because our policy is not to discuss things that are brought forth in public participation because I think that everybody's entitled to do their homework before we get into a conversation. Anything else on the superintendent's report? No, that's it. Thank you. Okay. 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. Mr. I'd like to pull the two trips please for discussion. Okay. The two trips. Anything else people want? Yeah. 10-8. 10-8. So this would be the approval of the job description administrative assistant to the principal and data. No, no, no. 10-8 agenda. Yeah, so he's just listing what's now on. And we are voting the approval of warrant warrant number 16054 dated 10-8 2015 for total warrant amount of $531,749 and 3 cents. All in favor. Aye. Opposed. Now the draft minutes. Motion to approve the draft minutes by Ms. Stark, second by Mr. Thielman. All in favor. Aye. Opposed. Abstain. Yes. It's a 6-0-1 vote. Mr. Pierce, abstaining. The trips, Mr. Heiner. I'm just curious. These trips in the description we got had nothing to deal with academics at all. And I assume they're not looking at what these folks are going to be doing. Why are we sponsoring it if it's not an academic thing and it's during non-school time? These trips are for international students. And the committee looked at the fee structure a year ago. And one of the things that we included going forward was money for enrichment and trips. Now some of this trip is going to be paid for not completely out of that amount of money. But one of the things that we have thought that was important for international students if they wanted to do this was to have a chance to see different parts of our country. And it's really just an opportunity for them. It's not tied to the academics of the high school. But they are paying tuition to come to our high school. Then I guess from my perspective in getting this I would have liked to have had a statement to that effect that it prefers back to our increase in this for enrichment and let us know the enrichment. I'm not looking for granular description but just a statement of that because all it looked like was a trip, these are the dates and this is what we are going to do. And I couldn't see the connection to education. You've answered that and responded. Just a little statement to that in the future. Thank you. Motion to approve the AHS foreign exchange program trips to New York City and San Francisco, Los Angeles by Ms. Stark, second by Dr. Seuss. All in favor? Opposed? unanimous vote. I was looking at the agenda saying it looked kind of thin and the real heart and soul what we are doing tonight is in the subcommittee in liaison reports and that's I think how it really should be. We're doing good work out there. So let's start with policies and procedures, Mr. Pierce. Thank you, Mr. Chair. On September 25th, we met last as a subcommittee and we discussed policies that were put forward at first read last time. I wasn't here at that October 8th meeting but I understand that there was a comment made regarding the flag policy to take out the budgeting of money and just make them available. I'd be happy to offer that as an amendment to the policy read at first read. Can I have a second? Second. So the motion is to bring that to a second read with the amended language. Yes. Any discussion? Just to clarify, so what we did was we deleted provided its annual but it was just read shall provide that a flag is an appropriate issue for each school. Looks good. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? So that's made a past second read. Anything else, Mr. Pierce? On the cigarette policy, we added as a subcommittee of the e-cigarettes that was presented so well by the students to us last year. So I would like to make a motion that that be adopted as a small addition to that policy. Okay. For a second read motion by Mr. Pierce, second by Dr. Seuss. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? And you have the charge from our last meeting. I do. We'll be setting up a policies meeting to go over that agenda dissemination of materials. Okay. I'll be sending out a deal. Thank you. Any else on policies and procedures? Not at this time. Hearing none, we go to budget, Dr. Allison Ampe. Budget met yesterday. We thank Dr. Bodie for attending the meeting as well as other staff members. We discussed the draft budget calendar, which you have in front of you. It looks like this. This is just the annual calendar, which we do to talk about when we're going to look at different parts, different information that's necessary for preparing our budget. I've amended it as discussed by, as discussed yesterday. And I'm putting, this is sort of a first read and then we'll approve it next time. If anyone has any comments in between now and then, if they could get them to me. Another thing that we did was discuss, how do we want to solicit input from the public on our budget process? And that's still an ongoing discussion. We'll make a decision at our next meeting. We're thinking of doing perhaps some visits to schools and talking to parents there. But we haven't finalized that. So if anyone has ideas, both in terms of how and also what sort of input would be helpful to you as we do the budget. If you could send comments to me, I'll put them forward at our next subcommittee meeting, which will be on November 3rd, if I remember correctly. The, what else did we talk about? I'm blanking. Sorry, he doesn't know what I talked about. We had an extended discussion for the next agenda, but that's not relevant. No, that's not relevant. Okay. Well, it was mainly budget. I mean, mainly budget calendar and doing the input. I guess one of the things, what we want to do in future years as well. So, sort of how we're going to approach community outreach this year and then in future years. Right. That's all. So that's it for now. Okay. Next on the list would be facilities. All right. We met on Monday. We met also not only facilities subcommittee, but with Adam chapter lane as well, the town manager and Diane and Dr. Brody. And there were lots of members of the public there as well. I do want to mention. We talked a lot about kind of things overall that need to be, you know, decisions that need to be made. We talked a lot about, you know, debt exclusions. We talked about kind of big picture things. And the more we talked, the more we realized that really the first step had to be the creation of this task force. So all we did was name it, which is the, it is now called the school enrollment task force. And that Adam and Dr. Bode as she reported would, you know, get the group together and try before the first or second week of November to actually have a meeting. Just that there's so many moving parts. It's like such a chess game now that it really does require, you know, kind of a broader scope. And I also reiterated to the members of the public that were there that it was that we had, at our last meeting, decided that we were kind of breaking this process into two. One where facilities was going to kind of focus on the timelines and decisions and dates and that kind of thing. And that community relations would deal with trying to get as much input and as many ideas as possible. And so I just wanted to make sure, because there were a lot of people there who wanted to talk about that, but that really wasn't the point of the meeting. So we didn't really do a lot of that. So as Dr. Bode reported, our next thing about facilities will really be around that. Although I did have a question. Do we have an update on the hardy? I keep asking. A hardy playground. Do you know if we have an update on that? I know that we... That's right, Dan. I believe the contractor has been selected. I don't know what the timeline for beginning will be, but the intent is to get this done soon. Okay. Certainly while we still have good weather. Right. If I may follow up. Mr. Heiner, the same question I had the last time. That webbing is still broken on the playground and the benches, the end of the pieces of benches are still exposed and dangerous. That's it. Any update on Stratton? Oh yeah, how did that go? We had a meeting with the parents. Didn't we report that the last time? Anything? I'm just asking. I know that there's an advisory committee that has been, started actually last year, and the membership has expanded this year. I just received a list of concerns from staff in terms of things we need to think about, which is exactly what we want to have happen because we want to get that list together. I mean, there's so many issues that when you really now have the major pieces in place, how are we going to handle recess? Where are we going to have people be able to have preparation time if we have to have art and music in the classroom? So there are a lot of issues that have to be worked out and they're getting, they're being brought up and so, and I'm sure even as the year goes on, we're going to think of other ones as we go along. But that's why it's been, it's terrific that we have this year to plan because that's exactly what we need to do. And so the faculty is certainly helping in that process and asking some very good questions and brought up some important concerns that we're addressing with them. Anything else for the facility subcommittee? I did send out, I don't know if anyone was able to view it, but you couldn't see it? No, I think we had to request permission from you. I can never get permission. Oh, really? Oh, I have no idea. I never got any notification. But all right, I should show it to you guys. I don't know how to do that. I didn't get the email that said to grant you permission, but I had just spent the whole day on Friday in these modulars at Lexington High School. And I was taking my PD, and I did during my PD, I was like so excited because I took an iPad class to learn how to use the app. And then I used the app and I made the thing. I was so proud of myself. But anyway, so I have a little short thing, but also I'm sure that I can talk to them and if we want to go through the ones at Lexington High School, they are not permanent in any way. There's been no exterior work like they were explaining. And you can just see really clearly how, they really are beautiful. I'm sorry you couldn't do that. So I will figure out a way to grant you guys permission so you can at least see my short little clip. But I put together just like a little clip of all these pictures that I took because I was in those modulars all day on that Friday. Dr. Allison Ampe. When we're done with facilities, can we go back to budget? Sure. She forgot some. I'm done. Are we done with facilities? I'm done. We're backing up the budget. Okay. I remember the thing that I forgot to say before. We had been requested by Ms. Starks to find out what the status of kindergarten teaching aid assignments were. And the administration provided a chart which shows that every kindergarten class and the K-1 has a 0.5 aid. And they're there all during the morning. They don't swap back and forth. And we were also asked for enrollment numbers. We have the same chart which we've seen before. My calculations show that classes range from a low of probably 19 to a high of probably 24. I'm having to do my own math. We don't have the exact numbers. But there's not too many in the 23-24 range. It's mostly in the 21-22-ish range. So I'll put these numbers will be put into our minutes. Okay. I just wanted to report that stuff out. Thank you. District accountability, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Mr. Thielman. No report. But if people want to email me the thoughts on the evidence that you want for the next round of evaluations or any comments or concerns you might have about the way the evidence was compiled this time so we can plan for next year. That'd be great. Okay. Mr. Thielman. Mr. Heiner. I attended the EDCO meeting yesterday. It was all on superintendent evaluations. And I'd be happy to share. And the basically timelines and suggestions like that, I ended up, we were the only ones that did, we were one of two that had done surveys. And I felt really proud of us, the asking how we did it and stuff and they were connecting. And the, I'll share that stuff with you. Yeah, great. Thanks, Bill. Okay. Community relations, Dr. Seuss. Yeah, we have a meeting coming up on the second and we have quite a lot to do. So we're just going to probably touch on everything briefly. I'm going to give a first read of a summary of the survey that we did last year. I will, we're going to be discussing the website and dashboard, sort of where we're at. I'm dedicated to looking at a bunch of examples out there and seeing if there's anything that looks good. And then the final thing is sort of our next steps for involving the public and communicating with the public about our enrollment challenges. And one of the things I'm doing and I will present there and it will go up is collecting all the ideas that people have given me by email and person in the, in the, these public meetings. And I have about 14 ideas so far. And if anybody has ideas, send them over and I'll add them to the list and I'll, you know, I have a sort of a brief notes about them, but really no, no serious commentary, just list of ideas and a couple of notes. Yeah. Is there been any kind of public like outreach to get those from people? Like we should, I feel like we should put out a, hey, you got a great idea. I've only, I've done outreach to my networks, but of course my network is only part of the town. I would encourage the public to, that's watching us to reach out to their networks and to all of us to reach out to our networks. I just wonder if we can put something up on the website. Yeah, more official than that. Even if it was just like, you know, we're thinking about enrollment. Do you have ideas and then maybe they could just shoot those emails to us or something? I don't know, but I mean, we need to kind of a more, like a public drop box. Don't shoot the poor little email. Say they didn't do anything wrong. Yeah, Dr. Bode. You didn't announce what time that meeting was. Oh, I'm sorry. I believe it's at five. I do have it at five. Five? Yes. Sorry. I'm the second. And I assume that we will still be downstairs in the high school at that point. Yeah. Not upstairs. The reason why we are in the selectments chambers tonight is because the elevator in Arlington High, which hasn't been working since August, still isn't working because we have to go get some antique part from somewhere and have a curator install it. It's a national historic elevator. Plus we have to buy more duct tape. So we may be here again for the next meeting. And this just illustrates how bad a facility we have over down the street. What again? And how much we need to do some major renovations and improvements in our high school facility. And I hope that somewhere the state gods of funding are feeling our pain. Interesting. That's it. Executive session minutes review subcommittee and warrant committee, Mr. Heiner. The chair has done his job. The other members, as far as I know, have not. So that's my report. It's the same report for three times. I'm not going to mention who they are, the second and third, fourth person for me, but they won't make it public. But we don't have an elevator, so, you know. You're right. I will bring those down for you. Or any third floor. Third floor. Yeah. Okay. Subcommittee and liaison reports and announcements. Any announcements going around? Let's... Mr. Heiner. I attended the EDCO meeting, as I said before. It was well attended by... It's a roundtable for school committee members. And it's really an exciting thing. We talked... Initially, the topic was superintendent evaluations, but we got into other things. The next one... I will send a copy of the agendas. Although I'm the representative from the committee, any member that wants to come is welcome to come. They're informal, but very, very informative. So I'll send the agenda for the year of the next several meetings and let you people know. Thank you. Any other announcements, comments, complaints? So this Friday, we have two great fundraisers. If you don't have anything to do this Friday night, one is here at town hall is the AYCC Gala. So you can get dressed up and have a drink. And or ABGC is also having a fundraiser. They are trying to get enough money for a timing system for their pool. And I am trying desperately to see where exactly that is. But they have a troop of comedians for a comedy night. I think it's not the Elks thing, but it's at one of those. And that is also happening this Friday. So... This should be a good venue for comedy. Yeah. Stand right up there. So, but both of those are on their websites, either ABGC or AYCC. So people... Are only for boys and girls club and are only for youth CC... CC. Counseling Center. Counseling Center. Okay. ETC. Knights of Columbus. Knights of Columbus. The comedy nights of the nights. Any other announcements or stuff to go forward? We are going to executive session tonight? Yes. Okay. So the... Mr. Thielman, would you read the executive session motion? To conduct strategy, sessions in preparation for negotiations between union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations in union and or non-union if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which if held in open meeting may have a detrimental effect, collective bargaining may also be conducted. That is the motion by Mr. Thielman, seconded by Dr. Allison Ampey. And just now for the benefit of everybody on television who will get a test pattern, don't stare and watch, go find something else on another channel. We will not be coming back out of executive session. Roll call. Mr. Heiner. Hi. Pierce. Hi. Starks. Yes. Okay. I'm so out of sorts here because everybody's in the wrong order. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, it's me. I'm on cold weather. Dr. Seuss, Mr. Thielman, Dr. Allison Ampey. The chair votes in the affirmative. It's the unanimous 7-0 vote. We are in executive session. Thank you for being with us.