 Good evening. I'm calling to order the meeting of the Allenton School Committee on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021. I am Bill Hain of the Chair. For me to confirm that members and persons anticipated on the agenda, our President can hand me. When I call your name, please respond. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Good evening. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Dr. Ampey. Thank you, time. Yes. Thank you. Dr. Holman. Yes. Dr. McNeil. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Mr. Cardin, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Thanks. Okay, thank you. Mr. Mason. Here. Yes. Mr. Spiegel. Here. And the AEA representative, Ms. Ferranti. I'm here. Thank you. Other people will be introduced by Dr. Holman as they come along. Tonight's meeting of the Allington School Committee is being conducted remotely consistent with an act signed into law on June 16th, 2021 that extends certain COVID-19 measures adopted during the state of emergency in the Allington Health Department. The act includes an extension until April 1st, 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. The Governor's order, which is referenced with agenda materials on the town's website for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Before we begin, permit me to offer a few notes. First, this meeting is being conducted via Zoom, is being recorded and is also being simultaneously broadcast on ACMI. Persons wishing to join the meeting by Zoom may find information on how to do so on the town's website. Persons participating by Zoom are reminded that they may be visible to others and that if they wish to participate, you are asked to provide your full name in the interest of developing a record for the meeting. All participants are advised that people may be listening who do not provide comment and those persons are not required to identify themselves. Both Zoom participants and persons watching on ACMI can follow the posted agenda materials also found on the town's website including the Novus agenda platform. And finally, each vote tonight will be taken by roll call vote. Let me just check. Okay, I would like to make one correction to the agenda. It's an error that I did not provide the school's committee secretary with it. Down the reasons to go into executive session, the first one, the reason the word litigation was not appropriate. It should be for negotiations purposes only. No one has signed up for public comment. So we will go to the first item on the agenda. New hire, Dr. Holman. Okay, this is going to be challenging because we have a lot of new administrators joining us tonight who I would like to have introduced themselves very quickly to the committee so that you can meet all of them. They are fantastic. Part of why we have so many new administrators this year is because we have now full-time assistant principals in all of our schools. So they're all here to introduce themselves and say a quick hello. Some of them have been with the district in the past and are now in new roles. Some of them are new to the district and have just joined us. Some of them as early as last week. So we're very happy that they are all here. And what I think I will do is do my best to call on each of them. And then if I get through the list folks and I missed anybody, please raise your hand so that I can call on you and just tell us your name, your new position or how your position has shifted if it shifted in the district and what your location is. And why don't we get started with Nicole? Hi, Nicole Schwartz. I am the new assistant principal at the Brackett School and this is my 17th year in Arlington. I moved from a classroom teacher to an assistant principal this year. Olivia. Hi, my name's Olivia Goodrich. I'm the assistant principal for Pierce Elementary School. Reena. Hi, my name's Reena Mello. I am the middle school special education coordinator working at both Gibbs and Audison Middle School. Rochelle. Hi everyone, my name is Rochelle Smith. I've been with Arlington for three years now and in a new role as the director of MECCO. Yeah, and so I do K through 12, three elementary, the middle school and the high school. Rashmi. Hello everyone. I'm Rashmi Pimprakara. I'm the director for digital learning and it is an honor to be with all of you. Thank you. Stephanie. Good evening everyone. I've been in Arlington for 13 years. I was the special ed coordinator for Gibbs and Audison and now I am the assistant principal at Gibbs. Luisa. Hello everyone, my name is Luisa Popkin. I just started on September 15th and I am a special education coordinator for Brackett, Dahlin and Hardy. Nice to meet you. Samantha. Good evening. This is my fifth year at Dahlin as the assistant principal. I had been part-time and this is my first year as a full-time assistant principal. Good to see you all. Peggy. Good evening. I'm Peggy Setsulis. I'm the full-time assistant principal at the Hardy Elementary. I've been with Arlington for 15 years and previously I was doing part-time assistant principal at the Hardy and special education team chair. So I'm very happy to be full-time assistant principal. Christina. Good evening. My name is Christina Chevalier. I'm the new assistant principal at Thompson Elementary. I've been in the district for 13 years and I'm transitioning from being a social worker to the assistant principal. Margaret. Good evening, everyone. My name is Margaret Kudle-Thomas. I am transitioning from being the Meckle director for the last eight years into the role of director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the district. Doreen. Hi, good evening, everyone. My name is Doreen Crow and I'm the new director of nursing. Okay. Did I miss anybody? Okay, we have two others who were able to join us tonight. Eva Liner is the new assistant principal at Bishop. She was there last year, but now she gets to be full-time, which she's very much enjoying. And Patricia Shepherd wasn't able to make it tonight either, but she's the new CIO for the town and she has jumped right in with both feet and we're really enjoying having her as well. Thank you, all of you. It has been great getting to know all of these spectacular leaders over the last several weeks and I welcome you to welcome them. Thank you all. Welcome to Allington. It's a great school system in spite of the chair. Moving on to summer school report, Dr. McNeil. Thank you. But before I get into my report, I was just asking Dr. Holman, are the participants or the visitors, do they have to stay or can they go? We are so glad that you joined us and you do not need to stay for the rest of the meeting. So if you need to get going, we are happy that you were here and we hope you have a great evening. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Dr. McNeil for bringing that up. I should have asked as well. Dr. McNeil, when you're ready for the summer program. Yes. So can I share my screen? Liz Stiggins, I'm not sure I can make him a co-host. I'm trying, but it's not working. I already, I made him, he should be able to share. Can you share now, Rod? Checking, let me check. Yes, I can. Okay, can everybody see my screen? Yeah. Yes. Okay, great. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to give an overview of our FY21 summer programming. I'm happy to say that despite some of the challenges that we had in the spring with, you know, trying to find staff to come and work in each one of the programs, we were able to fully staff the program and meet the needs of our students. So I just want to, as you see in each one of the slides, I've listed the teachers who participated and provided instruction for our students. And I just want to make sure that I give them all the praise and accolades that I can, because after such a very difficult year, I'm just so happy that they dedicated themselves to working with our students over the summer and providing that opportunity to, you know, provide credit recovery and also to give students support who needed it. So I'm not going to go into all the details of the program, but I'm just, as I can go through the slides, hear the particulars for our K through five, title one extended summer learning program. We serviced the content areas of reading and math. In reading, we serve as students in grades K through three and in math kindergarten through fifth grade. And you can see that we had a mixture of being in person and remote, which worked out great. Previous to, in planning stages of the program, the coordinators sent out a survey to parents asking them which type of learning program that they would like to be a part of. And we based our decision on having a hybrid version on those responses. So we were able to offer in person and remote. And as you can see, the in-person was 60 minutes, each session was 60 minutes and the remote was 40 minutes. And so they were in small groups of three to four students and they received targeted instruction and phonics and phonemic awareness for reading. And then this is the reading team. And again, I just can't say enough about those staff members who availed themselves to work in the program. So moving on to the math, we had, and you can see the attendance that we had, the people, the students that were actually participated in the program. For math, we had 48 students in person and 35 students remote. And I'll go back and show you. And for literacy, we had 47 students participated in an in-person program and 39 remote. So we also offered programs for our English language learners. We had two programs. We had our cell program and the description of the first program is here. And you'll see it's for all ELL newcomers entering grades one through five and serve schools from across the district. And this program was virtual. And we had 16 students across all grade levels. And you'll see the time and the dates when they met. And then we have some examples there. And I know I have to work on the links for those examples. So I will continue to work on those so you have access to those examples. Then there was a second summer program that serviced students in grades one through 12 that met in person at Odyssey Middle School. We had 10 students across all grade levels. And again, you can see when those, the date and times, when those sessions met. And then another link, I think that I have to also provide you with access to that link. Moving on, we had our middle school programs. We had a sixth through eighth grade summer math program. And again, you had 26 students. You'll see the instructional team and they focused on the big themes for each one of the grade levels. And you can see how it was broken up between sixth, seventh and eighth grade. And you'll see the schedule. And then we also had a summer literacy program that focused on reading clubs or book clubs. And again, you'll see where the date and times when those sessions met and the enrollment and our format for instruction. We also at the high school, we had MOOCs and we had Play-Doh for credit recovery. You'll see some of the, sorry, courses for the, I'm sorry, I'm moving too fast, for the MOOCs program right here, the number of students that participated and the teachers that ran those MOOCs. And then you had the Play-Doh, which was credit recovery. And I'm happy to say that the majority of the students that enrolled were able to successfully recover their credits. And you'll see the different courses that were offered for those students and wish those students that they went to focus on to recover those credits. And then we had our ESI program here, the particulars for that program, the different sites and a number of students that participated and the dates and the times. So I will stop sharing to take any questions regarding our summer programs. Any questions or comments? Yes, Ms. Eckstin. I think Bill called Mr. Heiner called my name even though he was muted. I was just wondering if you, both Dr. McNeil and Ms. Elmer could share if you shared any survey, feedbacks to both staff and to families about the programming and then how that information might be used for planning in the future. I know last April and May is the ESI was getting planned. We talked a little bit about that. So I just wanna make sure that that feedback loop is continuing. Sure, do you want me to go ahead, Dr. McNeil? Sure, go ahead. Sure, so we did send a survey at the end of the programming this summer. As you saw at the different levels, we had over 200 students participating in our ESI program. We did only have about 30 respondents to the survey. And the majority of those were at the elementary level. And with the exception of four families who felt communication was not sufficient, overwhelmingly folks responded positively to the communication that they received this summer and noted improvement. Probably not surprisingly, the largest complaint about the program, particularly at Pierce was if folks were aware that this summer there was also DPW work that took place around the Pierce school where they closed down virtually all the roads to the Pierce school. And so I think that's something that Michael, Mr. Mason and I will work with. We put in permits for the building back in February. I'm not really sure if the town communicates around the use of the buildings during the summer. So I think that's something certainly to think about as we go forward, because the road construction did persist through most of the summer programming at the Pierce school. I think it's important for folks to know that we've used the Pierce for several years, mainly because of its air conditioning. So again, when we put in the permits in February, we don't have a sense if this is gonna be a relatively cool and rainy summer, you know, we're using the building because we use with over 120 students at the Pierce, we use all floors of the building. So that limits, you know, they use the Thompson for the programs that Dr. McNeil was talking about, but they only use the lower floors for that. They don't have air conditioning on the top floors. So I think the point around communication, one was managing expectations of families, you know, that ESY is not the same as the school year and also setting some base minimums for the staff going forward around communication that they, you know, do need to send out because what became clear from the limited responses that we got that some people were very pleased and some people weren't. So that indicates that individuals may have been doing it, but I think going forward, we need to set some base expectations around minimal communication that staff need to make, you know, weekly to families, I would say it was our takeaway from that. Ms. Abdel-Nor is the coordinator. She and I met to review the feedback. She's meeting with the coordinators and I in one of our upcoming meetings to talk a little bit more as we plan, as we start to plan for next year. Your question around last spring, around notification for schedules, we did set a goal of having those out to families by the end of June. Dr. McNeil has noted, you continue to note that hiring was an extreme difficulty for the staff that we had hired. We were able to get schedules out. For the staff that we were hiring up until, in some cases, after the program started, you know, obviously those schedules weren't completed. So there were some delays in that as well. You know, we'll look to December again to make sure that we're posting and trying to get as many folks committed as early as possible with the hopes that some of this shortage of workers will start to resolve itself as the year progresses. But that was certainly a challenge for us in a way that it hadn't been in previous years, just finding staff to work for the program. Dr. Rampe. Thank you. I had a couple of quick questions. First, about the high school summer programming in person one. I was wondering if there's ever been any thought towards offering these courses for kids who got Ds. I understand they didn't technically fail, but they're also not really set up well for the next year. And it seems like if we could get them better prepared, then I'm concerned that a D doesn't necessarily make it so you're gonna be able to succeed the next year, even though you passed. So what I'm gathering from your question is whether or not we can have like a summer school where students could, because I hear what you're saying and so I'm just trying to clarify. So the purpose for the credit recovery is so those students could recover their credits. So if they get a D, they still get their credits, but you're asking if we can have more of a summer programming like we have at the elementary where students can get reinforcement and support in various subjects. Yes. I guess I don't know what the technical names are for what I'm asking. I'm just saying, it looks like there weren't very many students who were involved in the credit recovery. And if we've got people in there, it just feels like maybe there's room to have some more kids getting educated at the same time and improving their next year. Right, so what I can do is I can take that question and I can speak with Dr. Janger and his admin team to talk about a program that would fit that criteria. Okay. Thank you. And then I have one other question. Just looking at the extended school year numbers, I wondered so for the pre-school, there were 25 students for the elementary kids, there were 120 for Gibbs and Audison age, there were 70 and then for high school, there were only 12. And I'm just wondering why so many fewer kids for extended school in the high school? So to go back to our previous presentation that extended school year is for students who are likely to exhibit substantial regression in already required skills. So similar to the way we see students requiring an IAP's decline as we get up through the older grades, we also see that fewer of them are going to have significant regression due to a break in services. That's been consistent over the years and I would say generally across school districts, you'll see much smaller numbers as you approach the high school. Okay, thank you. Ms. Morgan. My question is around the EL programming, which I know that we shared in the spring how disappointed some of us were that it was only offered to students remotely, especially for English language learners. I just wanted some assurance that all efforts would be made or that not even efforts that this is programming that will be returning to in-person instruction in the summer of 2022. Yes, but I also want to emphasize we did offer a in-person program as well over summer at Audison. So we had a remote and we had in-person, but yes, I hear you about the, for the CEL program, we will do everything in our power to create a program that is in-person. Because I mean, basically based upon what the state has, you know, and the way that the state has directed us to have in-person learning, I would imagine that that won't even be an opportunity based upon what the state has on state guidance. Good, thank you. Mr. Garden. Thank you. So one, two things. One is just to note that as we look at our hiring issues and we're also negotiating a new contract, it might be an opportunity to consider adding positions like other districts have that require somewhere work. So that's something just to note and think about as an administrative team and also, you know, check with your colleagues about how that works in other districts. And then secondly, we've had this model, this ESY model of 12 hours a week for six weeks for some time and other districts have the same, other districts have very different models. So I just think at some point we should take an opportunity to look at that model to see whether it really is the most effective in retaining and preventing learning loss over the summer because I'm not sure if we really thought about it just sort of always been that way. So just two suggestions, thank you. Is there anyone else with regard to the summer program? Mr. Schleckman. Thank you. Just a reflective question if Dr. McNeil or anyone would like to say in retrospect after looking at this year's program, what might you be thinking about asking us for in terms of resources or support for next year? I will have to reflect on that. I think we had all the resources that we needed in order to have all the programs. Again, I will have to think about that. What are those resources that will help promote and continue the program that we have? And I will say this, we were able to extend the Title I program outside of the grants that we normally receive because of the ESR funds. So if we're going to continue to have programs that are expanded beyond our initial cohort of students and open it up to schools that are not necessarily receiving Title I funds, that may be an area where we would have to invest some of our financial resources so that we can make sure that we are able to staff for a larger cohort of students other than those students who are receiving Title I support throughout the year. So just off the top of my head, that could be one of the areas where we would have to invest some of our financial resources. And I see Dr. Holman, sorry, you had your hand raised so I will yield to her at this point. The only other thing I could think of is if we were to expand some level of programming to general education students at the high school as Dr. Al Snampy suggested that would require some resources for us to implement. Right, so we worked exactly. That's a great, another area, yes. Dr. McNeil, please, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to get a sense of if there was something that you had an aha moment during the school year that you might be able to help people. Dr. McNeil, please pass on our appreciation for all the work you and the staff have done during the summer and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Moving on to revised handbooks, you've all had an opportunity to look through them. I defer back to Dr. McNeil again on the handbooks. So yes, we're bringing the handbooks to the school committee so that we could get you to vote on their approval so that we can post them onto our website. There were some changes that we needed to make based upon our tiered focus monitoring review and we have made those changes and so I think we're aligned with what the state regulations so we're bringing them to you for your approval. What I have on the agenda is first read. Is this something that we treat as first and second read? I do believe I did get some feedback during the week and I addressed that feedback with the principle of Gibbs and Addison regarding the dress code that was brought forth by Ms. Morgan. So I will yield to her to see whether or not what we've done is acceptable and any other comments or questions that you have about the handbooks, I will do my best to answer them. I appreciate that. I just wanted to clarify the procedure. Mr. Thielman, were you gonna respond to that on the idea of the first or second read? Honestly, we've done both over the years. Okay. So it usually takes two meetings to get this done. I appreciate the need for the administration. No, we both approved it in the first time we've seen them and we've also insisted on two reads. It sort of depends on the purpose of the committee. The purpose of the committee. Thank you. Ms. Morgan, do you wanna respond? Dr. McNeil and Dr. Holman responded very expeditiously to my concerns about the dress code and they have been addressed. Thank you. That's funny. Okay, sorry. Is there anyone else that would like to comment at this time? Mr. Keiden. Thanks. So there appears to be a change in the high school handbook about the absence limit from six to seven. Is that because of COVID or? And I'm still a little uncomfortable with a hard limit that requires a doctor's note in this environment. So I'm okay with the official policy, but I would ask that the administration give some consideration to allowing parents to test, attest, that their kid is really sick and doesn't have to go to a doctor to get a note. Dr. Holman, we could just- Sorry. So was that increased to seven because of COVID or what was going on there? It's my understanding that that was due to the circumstances and is to be revisited in future years and that the high school is being flexible in its administration of attendance policies. Great, thank you. Thank you. Dr. Ampey. Thank you. This is really minor, but as long as we're discussing them, also I appreciate that Ms. Morgan brought up the dress code. I also had concerns and I like how the high school writes it. My other comment was on page nine of the Gibbs manual, it's under homework. At the end it says parents guardians, if your child reports not having any assigned homework, they should perform one hour of reading. I don't have any problems with them reading. I think that's great, but can we phrase it in a more inviting way? Because what if, okay, I don't know that kids ever look at this, but it just, it makes it sound like work and we don't want kids to have reading seen as work. We want them to enjoy reading. You know, can you have the read for, you know, find a favorite book and have the reader or something anyway? That's my only comment there. Thank you. I did write that down. So I will speak with principal Pierre Maxwell about that comment. Is there anyone else at this time? I will entertain a motion to approve first read of the elementary Gibbs, Audison and Ellington High School student handbooks. Don't move. Is there a second? Mr. Schlipman, you got to turn it on first. Okay, second. Thank you, roll call vote. Ms. Eckston. All right, I would have a question. So we're approving the first, we're approving the first read as in it's going to come back with. Yes. Yes. Wait a minute. There seems to be another question. Ms. Muckerman, another question. There we go. I'm sorry. Not you. Go ahead, Jeff. I'm questioning whether we need to do this. I think we just do first read. We don't, we just say it's a first read. The administration takes down all the things we've raised and then we do it. We do an approval in two weeks. But I mean, I defer to the wisdom of the group. As anyone in the group have any issues with what Mr. Thielman just wrote. We are now going to take a vote. We're not voting tonight. We are voting. Mr. Hainor, I don't think we should vote. I think that's what I reckon. I think we do take a vote when it's for a second reading. That's the point I wanted to make. I have six months to get this meeting done right. This is not one of them. You're doing a great job. It's a lot of them. Thank you, Jeff. Are we ready to go beyond the handbooks at this time? Rick, superintendent's goals. Dr. Holman. You should be seeing my screen, yes? I haven't. Okay. So tonight I am going to share some goal setting work that I've been doing over the past several weeks with all of you and sort of the process that I've used to come to the goals that I'll be sharing with you tonight. I'm going to start with a few words about self-assessment and the process that I used to conduct a self-assessment, which you would have received a separate memo as part of your materials for this evening. I then want to identify the focus indicators part of the process of the superintendent's evaluation is that superintendent through the self-assessment identifies focus indicators or areas where the committee will focus both their feedback and their ratings for the year. These are a draft version of focus indicators. The committee is welcome to weigh in with other ones that they think might be more important or things that they may wish for me to really focus on that are linked to those. And then I'll talk about three district improvement goals, a professional practice goal, and open it up for discussion and feedback. So to begin with, I think it's really important and I like to model the practice of reflective leadership, reflective practice. And so I want to share a few of the things that I think are skills that I bring to the work of the superintendency, things that I hope to build upon and continue to improve upon, as well as a few challenges that I think are going to be inherent to the work of the school year. To begin with, I started by going through the indicator list in the superintendent's rubric to identify the strengths that I think I bring, one of which is commitment to timely and transparent communication, something I think is critical to leadership through particularly challenging times like the ones that we are in. I believe that I bring a desire to plan inclusively with the community and to seek out diverse voices to inform the work of the school district, as well as experience in both operational and instructional roles in my previous districts. I think that we also face some big challenges and those challenges are not going to stop at the school systems doors, they're gonna be challenges for me as the leader of the system. I think that, as we move back to a focus on instruction, we're also still grappling with the realities of pandemic education and that balance is going to be a challenge. We really want to be proactive this year and I really want to focus on what's going on instructionally in classrooms and at the same time, we are interrupted routinely and that is going to be a reality likely throughout the year and something that I will be challenged by and that our leaders will be challenged by and finding that balance will be important. I also think that it will be a challenge for me to ensure that the activities of my entry plan and really getting to know the community deeply and making sure that that continues throughout the fall and the busy start of the school year while also doing the work of the superintendency could present its own challenges. So I'm really trying to commit to doing as much stepping back and listening as I can while also making sure that we move the work of the district forward. And then it is always a challenge in my leadership and something I'm striving to do to seek out and welcome in voices that might have been traditionally marginalized. And I think that there are certain things we can do to enhance that work. And I hope that you see evidence of that not only in my goals tonight, but also in some of the planning that we're doing around the expenditure of S or $3. So these are the focus indicators that I sent you the committee, a self-assessment relative to earlier. I identified these by thinking both about where I bring strength to the work as well as where I think we're going to face and I'm going to face some challenges this year. Areas where I think I really need to focus my attention are around the work of planning and goal setting for the district, strategic planning for the district as well as making sure all of our families feel supported and informed about what's going on. I'm really going to need to pay very close attention to the budget process this year and the fiscal systems at work in the district and make sure that I'm planning for a budget that's really going to help boost our recovery efforts and help me gain a really good understanding and a strong understanding of how we build the budget in Arlington and how the budget has been built in previous years. And I also think it'll be important for us to maintain a focus on our policies and practices and building consensus across the community. So those are just a few of the focus indicators I identified. In order to figure out what my goals would be, I asked myself what is it that the district needs right now and based on my entry plan work, I wanted to base what I set goals around for myself and my own practice around what I thought the immediate leadership needs of the people I lead are, of the students are, of the families and community members that I've spoken with might be. So I identified three district needs that led to three different district improvement goals and they're listed here. The needs themselves, I'm going to sort of walk through some data that informed what made that need sort of crop up in my attention to the top of the list. And then I will talk about the goal that that comes out of, okay? So for the next three or several slides, I'm going to talk about the need, the data that informed that, like where I'm getting that from and then what the goal is that leads to. I want to note that just because I'm saying that this is a need doesn't mean that strengths don't already exist in that area. In fact, I've joined a very strong organization and I'm very grateful to join a very strong organization with a strong foundation. And there's a lot of work that's already been done in each of these areas. And I think that I identify these as needs not because there's not work already happening there, but because accelerating this work and addressing some of the areas where this work has encountered challenges is going to really help the organization become a strong organization that's meeting the needs of students and families. So I'm going to start with building a collaborative and equity focused leadership culture. So some of the things that have informed this, this particular need is listening to and hearing staff sentiments in listening sessions that a coordinated approach to data informed equity work is needed across the district that we've talked a lot about using equity or using data to inform some of the equity work happening in the district, but there's not a sort of a organized approach to what data cycles look like that the pandemic really disrupted momentum that was happening in that area. When you look at academic data, and I'm willing to show this both here and when we talk about the S or three goals, there is consistent improvement across the district that's really exciting. And it's evident that we're making a lot of great progress for students. The pandemic slowed some of that progress, but it did not mean that we took a huge hit. We'll talk about academic data next time we meet, but there are still consistent and persistent equity gaps and opportunity gaps and achievement gaps for certain subgroups of students. And the fact that those equity gaps persist and that we have closed them for some subgroups of students indicates that we have strengths in areas that we can build upon and that we have other areas that really need our attention because those equity gaps have been persistent over multiple years. And that's what that graph there is showing. That's an analysis and I switched it today to include 2021 because they just released those results to the state, but I'm including an analysis of district-wide average-scaled scores from 2017 to 2021, which shows the progress that we have made in mathematics. You can sort of see the leveling off that happens as a result of the pandemic there and demonstrates the equity gap, particularly for our students of color. However, for our Hispanic students, we've begun to close that gap, which is exciting. So what I believe this demonstrates is that by working together and by really focusing on also what staff need in order to build their capacity with some of the equity work that we're doing and some of the data work that we're doing, a focus on building a collaborative and equity-focused leadership culture is going to be very important. So that leads me to my first district improvement goal, which is to work with school and district leaders to model and develop data-informed practices that are focused on addressing the learning impacts of the pandemic and helping us build a common understanding of what we mean when we talk about equity work in Arlington. And there are a few key actions that I intend to work on as part of this goal. One is revising the meeting structure of administrative meetings to include time for administrators to learn together and to view instruction. Those two things were not part of meeting structures that happened for administrators in the past. And I believe they are an important piece of helping us build a common language around equity work, build a common language around what we expect to see in classrooms and build some consistency across buildings related to what we see in classrooms. Part of that is developing a plan for leadership learning in Arlington, which is part of my entry plan work and will be presented as part of my entry plan report. The development of school improvement plans and the leadership of that work with the principals is a key action step for that as well as the allocation of resources to make sure that we are engaging all of our stakeholders in equity conversations. We'll also be a part of that and that's embedded in some of what we'll talk about with us or three later as well. I have evidence and outcomes for each of these goals. I'm not going to dwell on those. I'm happy to take the committee's feedback on those when we have our discussion at the end. So for the second area of need, that was improving and streamlining transparency, family engagement and communication. When we look at our families' feedback on the Panorama surveys from last school year, we notice that less than half of our families felt as though the school or their child's school were valuing their opinions quite a bit or a tremendous amount. When I talked to families in listening sessions, I heard several families talk about wanting to have a feedback loop, wanting to know that if they ask about something or if they inquire about something, how long they can expect before they hear back or what the feedback loop will be, how do I know if my feedback has been taken seriously and then implemented or turned into something? I also, we also heard from families that they want to see innovative practice. They want to see new programs available for their children. And we also don't have the response rates that we would like to have both on our Panorama surveys from the fall and the spring, as well as on some other surveys such as the ESY survey that you saw. And so I would love to improve families' response rates on things like that and engagement with some of our feedback loops and mechanisms, both through making those things more accessible and through making sure that families understand when something is really important and we really want their engagement with it. So my goal tied to that need is to work inclusively to build a comprehensive understanding of the culture of the district through my entry work and to expand the inclusiveness and improve the transparency and accountability for all stakeholders by setting a multi-year strategic path forward for the district. So there are some key actions associated with this one as well. One is to complete my entry plan activities and present a findings report in January. Another is to expand access to district and school information by enhancing our communication systems. We've started working on some of that through our engagement with families and our sharing of our recovery plan process and also to later on this spring, convene a team of stakeholders to engage in some inclusive and data-informed strategic planning with the entire community and make sure that we have as many voices as part of that strategic planning work and goal-setting work as we can, including members of the school committee. So the third area of need that I identified for goal-setting purposes was to make sure that we ensure a safe and supportive pandemic return and recovery. And I looked at a lot of data over several years in order to inform this goal, one of which are the longitudinal data that tell us that chronic absenteeism has actually been on the rise in Arlington, particularly among our youngest students who are high needs or might come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. And you can see that disaggregated for you on the graph that's on the screen. We don't have attendance data yet for last year because the state is still sort of teasing apart what that looks like. It was kind of a messy year for attendance data, but we do have from 2017 to 2019. And with everyone coming back to school, it's really important that we get kids back to school. This is a really important part of our work this year. And it's also really important that we do that safely and we need to acknowledge that we're still schooling through a pandemic, a reality that has really shown itself this week. It's been a challenging week for us. And so that led to district improvement goal three, which was to ensure a safe and supportive return to full-time in-person instruction and make sure that we implement the operation systems and resources necessary to make sure our kids get to school and that their learning is not disrupted. So like I mentioned, we've already encountered challenges in this area just this week. We are going to be consistently revising and tuning our protocols and procedures and making sure that we have the systems in place needed to identify COVID-19 in our schools and respond quickly. We're going to continue to implement and develop policies and procedures as needed to respond to the ever-changing circumstances of the pandemic this year. It's going to require a lot of our attention and we'll continue to work on ensuring that we have well-maintained fully staffed programs that provide equitable access to programming. And then the final one doesn't have as much data surrounding it, but it is important to the work that I do this year, which is to participate in the new superintendent's induction program as well as other learning opportunities in order to develop skills and strategy development, data analysis, and instructional leadership and to make sure that I'm sharing those skills with the leadership team. So I'm participating in the new superintendent's induction program and also looking into participation in the deeper learning dozen that I shared with the committee last time we met. I will be meeting with my coach at least every other week and integrating her feedback into my practice and also completing all the assignments and tasks that come with those hours of professional learning for new superintendents. So with all of those goals shared with you, I'm open to the committee's questions and feedback and I will stop sharing the screen. We'd like to ask the first question. Everyone happy with what? Okay, Dr. and not that Mr. Keiden is not happy. Mr. Keiden. No, I am happy. I thank the superintendent for doing all this work at a very busy time during the year. Actually, my main concern is actually that there's maybe too much in here given what we've seen this week. So I would just ask that, you know, as we go through the next month, you know, if you're, if you're continuing to be drawn in too many different directions that we think about pairing this back a little bit and focusing on a couple of key areas. Thank you. Is there anyone else at this time? Ms. Morgan. Yeah, I agree with Mr. Cardin. Obviously I deferred to Dr. Holman with what she feels that she can do and certainly don't want to kneecap you in any way. But we want you to, I want you to stay and to be here and to keep doing this work for us long-term. So I just wanna make sure that, you know, whatever we're all agreeing to is sustainable because that's really, really important to me. So. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. I just wanted to echo what Mr. Cardin and Ms. Morgan said. I think we need to be thinking long-term and avoiding burnout and in doing too much, I'd rather we do less and do it well. But I think your assessment and your efforts are great. It's just, we also have a pandemic. So that's all. Mr. Schlichman. Yeah, it's very difficult coming in as a new person into an organization and coming up with a set of goals that are the foundation of any kind of evaluation or assessment, a really good set of goals is something that we're going to look on and view as making significant progress because if we achieve all the goals then the goals were too low. This is ambitious. This is impressive. Things are going to fall by the white side by definition because as you understand this week with all the wacky things that have happened and this is only Thursday that there are many distractions to this but being focused on these areas and sort of having this hanging up on the wall as things that you're pushing towards, we can take a look at this again towards the end of the year when we know each other better and can all have an understanding of each other and our relationship with the superintendent and the superintendent's understanding of the district and how things work so that the next year's set of goals are sort of over five and on this. This is really impressive because I think that over a few short months as somebody coming into the district she's really got her pulse on a lot of things that we were looking at very seriously over the past several years. Sir Thielman. Yeah, I just want to praise the superintendent. I think this is great. I think Dr. Holman, you picked up a lot of important things. I think I fully support this and you have my full support to achieve all these goals and I think anything this committee can do to help you achieve the goals, you just let us know like what can we do to support you to achieve these goals? Do we need an approval, Mr. Hayner? Is that the formal thing we're doing or just what are we supposed to do? Dr. Holman stated at the beginning that she was looking for feedback. She's got some just now verbally. I will defer to the board. I move receipt. I second the receipt of the goals and I second. Do an informal roll call. Ms. Eckston. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Dr. Rampe. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. And I informally say yes as well. Dr. Holman, you've got the input back from us. You've got our support and we'll continue. And I would just like to say you're doing well on that communication part just this week alone, keeping us informed with every little thing that happened. And they weren't little things, they were big things. Thank you for all your efforts and all the town's people that supported you in getting things up and running and continue to go. So moving on. Answer three spending plan. Mr. Mason, Ms. Dr. Holman and Ms. Dunn, option B. Oh, I'll take this one. I'll also say thank you all. My coach told me to have three goals and I had four. So she agrees with me and I will take that and keep that into account. So I am going to share my screen again, give me a minute. And I'm gonna present these slides and then I'm going to lean on members of my team who have been a really integral part of this work to comment on them. I've also been in contact with Julie Keys about several of the initiatives that we're going to talk about tonight. And I'm not sure if she wants to jump in or if she's had an opportunity to talk to Ms. Keys. It's certainly been a crazy week, but if she wants to provide input on these, I certainly would love to hear that as well. So just a quick recap and reminder for the committee in the community about the overview and purpose of these funds. The American Rescue Plan was enacted on March 11th, 2021 and SR3 is the education portion of the American Rescue Plan. APS has been allocated $1,133,653 as a part of this initiative, the federal government. We have done a lot of community outreach over the last several weeks and done it quickly to inform our planning for this. We had the pandemic recovery plan process was part of the requirement for the SR3 funds. So we did that over the course of the summer in order to prepare for the start of the school year. We've done listening sessions and the entry plan process that I just described which has informed some of this. And I've shared a lot of that data with the team as well to help inform it. We shared out a descriptive flyer and surveyed the community over the past week or so and gotten some input from the Budget Subcommittee School you all last time we met. And just this week, the Special Education Parent Advisory Council on our plans for these funds. Here's a recap of our timeline for this work. The items in green were completed before the last school committee meeting on September 9th and activities in blue have been completed over the past two weeks and we still need to get the plan in under the deadline. So we're here to get feedback from all of you. This, as far as I understand does not require school committee approval it requires input, but we're happy to have the committee's approval of our plans. These plans are very flexible. We have the ability to issue amendments if we need to as we move through the years. What we're offering tonight is a very initial draft of what we intend to prioritize as we move forward in using these very much appreciated funds to tolerate our pandemic recovery. I wanna share how a survey participation looked. We had 842 staff and families weigh in on the SR3 survey that we sent out last week. Of those participants, 11.2% were families of English learners. 74% were families and caregivers overall of APS students while 23.3 were families of students with IEPs. I will note that for our families of English learners and families of students with IEPs that's very well representative of the number of families in the district that we have who have students that fit in one of those two categories. 24.9% of the respondents were staff members either administrators, staff members or teachers of APS and 85.5% of our respondents identify as white. A reminder that we presented three initiative options and those are listed here on this slide and initiative option B as a bit of a teaser is the one that the community was most interested in and I will talk a little bit about what that feedback looked like to support option B as well as some data to support option B. I'm gonna take the slides a little bit out of order from what you have in your packet committee members because I just wanna remind everybody of what we said initiative option B was when we met last time. Since then we have done some refinement based on the feedback that we've gotten from the community. So initiative option B, the initial objectives that we put forward for this one were that this would be about developing teacher's capacity for culturally responsive instruction that we would really hone in on teacher professional development both job embedded through coaching and separate professional development that we wanted to boost and really make sure we bolster and provide for every single teacher in the district. We wanna develop a comprehensive professional learning plan that would allow us to really audit the structures that we have for professional learning for teachers and think about whether we wanna make adjustments or revisions to those and develop like a real strategy to the learning that teachers are doing across the district. And that would really help us in the areas of ensuring that we have anti-racist and inclusive teaching practices across the district that are consistent as well as help us evaluate the extent to which professional learning feels really valuable to our educators and like they can operationalize it and use it in the classroom quickly. And then this one was also focused on improving our multi-tiered systems of instructional support and we had a list of things that we had ideas about what those relief funds could support. And I'll share with you what the community's feedback on these things were. So our survey responses are shown on the screen and you can see probably pretty clearly why option B is the preferred option for our community. We had an overwhelming favorite here with 66.2% of respondents listing this as high priority and 24.8% listing it as moderate priority. And I also want to share a little bit of the trends that we saw in there was on the survey, there was the options and it said, do you consider this low, moderate or high? And then there was also the option which few people took us up on but several put some feedback in that was open response and said, what else is there anything else you can think of or anything among the spending options here that you think is most important for us to prioritize these funds for? And so I tried to pull out some trends that sort of encapsulate what was in multiple of those open responses. And some of the trends that we saw in the feedback that we got was that folks are hoping we will focus on systemic and structural adjustments and ensuring that we have the accessibility and that basically people understand that these initiatives are important but they wanna make sure that everything we do is applicable to the learning environment directly applicable. So how is this relevant to what happens in the classroom? That was one of the bits of feedback that we got. We wanna make sure that we're gonna see how this work translates into instruction and my child's experience in the classroom. There was a strong desire for us to build consistency and coherence across the system, including a common language around what we mean when we talk about anti-racism and equity work. There was several requests in the feedback to broadly define diversity as being more than just about anti-racism also being about gender identity also being about LGBTQIA ability, other intersectional identities. There was, hold on, sorry. There were requests for us to prioritize mental health and social emotional learning as well. I think folks didn't feel like that was as well represented as they might have liked for it to be. A lot of questions about providing staffing for mental health and social emotional supports and then a lot of notes about making sure that teachers are empowered to do the work and that they are honored as experts and that we build that internal capacity that we don't just hire a consultant externally to come in, do something and then walk away, but to come in and do something that's going to help us be better as a system. There were a lot of requests specifically for staff and I want to just clarify that using these grant funds on staffing can be really challenging because it means that we need to build that staffing into the operating budget. And if there are staff and it's down the road, right? So that's something that impacts a budget cycle that's three years out. And so we were trying to be very judicious about any additional staff that we wanted to add to the budget plan for this, in part because we knew that that would come down the road and we also knew that this is only $1.1 million. And so to add staff members actually adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the budget and eats up chunks of this allocation pretty quickly, which doesn't enable us to use it for some of the other things that are on this list of priorities. So I just wanted to clarify that for the community. I do think there are a lot of data that support Option B and one of the committee's bits of feedback when we talked about this a couple of weeks ago was just a little bit more information about what data support these different options. And so I want to present a few data points that we think are really sort of boosting Option B as an important set of initiatives for us to pursue. This heat map from the fall 2020 Panorama Student Survey for students in grades six through 12 highlights some of the differences in experience for our students who identify as Black or African-American compared to the school experiences of our students who identify in other racial categories. So across the top, what you'll see are the different categories on which we survey students. Those categories are focused on students' feelings about school and schoolwork, the school's ability to build cultural awareness among students and students' engagement and relationships with their peers. The gray percentages across the top, so these percentages right here across the top, they represent the percent of students who responded what Panorama calls favorably to that category of questions. And the pluses and deltas reflect the percentage difference from overall for each identity category of students. So B represents Black, A, W represents that students identify as Asian and white and Black and white. And I think one of the things you'll notice is that the students who identify from various racial categories, including our Asian students or Asian and white students really identify as having some challenges compared to their peers when it comes to their experiences in school in grades six through 12. Obviously those are experiences that grow over time for students who have been with us since elementary school. And so that's a gap in student experience that option B is designed to really hone in and help us work on as educators. I'm also sharing some early warning outcomes data to support option B. The early warning indicator system is something that's developed by the state. Early warning indicator models indicate based on past trends what each individual student's potential risk level is for falling behind academically in school. These risk levels combine a bunch of different measures that have been shown statistically to impact students' academic achievement. And it allows educators to see what the risk levels might be for each student and that can help inform intervention. So as this graph shows, more of our students of color are considered moderate or high risk compared to their white peers, indicating that there might be some additional needs that might be initial supports that might need to be put in place as well as we may need to do a lot of reflection on instructional practice that is going to meet the needs of our students of color. I shifted this slide slightly from what you got in your materials because I wanted to include 2021 data and I also wanted to include data that I referenced in the bullet points around students with IEPs. Like I noted in my previous presentation, we have seen significant gains for all subgroups in ELA and math over multiple years district-wide. Dr. McNeil, I'm not gonna steal his thunder here. He's gonna talk about outcomes next time we meet, but this is just a little bit of a preview of some of that. We have been closing the achievement gap, like I noted for students who identify as Hispanic, but not for our students who identify as black or African-American. And we have a persistent achievement gap in that area compared to those students white peers. We also have improvement for students on IEPs in both ELA and math, and at the same time, a widening gap in that achievement. So you can have improvement across subgroups and you can also have a gap that is widening. And so that's worth interrogating and taking a look at where and for what subgroups we have gaps that are academic achievement gaps that might be getting bigger. And what can we do to address those so that they begin to close? One last academic outcome to support option B is looking at the percentage of students who have IEPs. Our black and African-American students and our students who identify as Hispanic or Latino are much more likely to have an IEP in Arlington. That is disproportionality that we have not been cited for, but it's something that we need to keep an eye on. Disproportionality that we have been cited for and have a subgroup working on directly are the percent of students with IEPs in substantially separate settings. And there is a significantly higher percentage of students who are African-American or black who are in substantially separate settings. And notably that's a very small number of students, but it is a disproportional enough number of students that it is something that we definitely need to address. And these initiatives as part of option B are specifically designed to help us interrogate the processes that we have in place that result in students having an IEP being placed in academic interventions because those things can be just as tied to what students are doing academically as they are tied to perceptions of student ability in the classroom and some of the work we do as educators to plan for instruction. So the team has come up with four core initiatives that have informed the spending plan that we've developed and shared with the committee tonight relative to S or three. The first one is a comprehensive equity audit and strategy development around that. One thing that we really wanna make sure we also do this year is support the brand new office of diversity, equity and inclusion. I believe Ms. Thomas is still here with us tonight. And part of that is completing an equity and SEL curriculum audit that we started in 2019. I know that the committee has heard about this audit. It was not completely done in that it certainly took a deep dive into curriculum and took a look at SEL. And it did not take a look at some of the other systems and structures in place in the district. It did the individual, Dr. Dina Simmons is an excellent scholar in the area of anti-racism and equity didn't have a chance to go into classrooms because right around the time that would have started happening the pandemic hit. And so completion of this audit and really doing a comprehensive equity audit of the system would help us gain a fuller picture of the state of things after the pandemic in the system. This initiative would also support the addition of a DEI specialist, somebody with an instructional lens to really drive some of the DEI work of the district and build the capacity of educators to do some professional development linked to equity and anti-racism work that would begin in year two. It would expand our access to ideas courses. Ideas is an organization that provides graduate level courses in anti-racist educational practice we've partnered with them for several years and the impact of the work we've done with them can be seen in some of the academic data I just shared. And we would like to develop and support school-based teacher facilitators and leaders for some of our DEI efforts. The second initiative here is to expand teacher leadership capacity system-wide. This would mean that we would expand our ability to have teachers lead their professional development. We would expand teacher leadership roles in the district and make sure that teachers are compensated for that leadership work, which will expand distributive leadership in the district. And it would also provide support for school-based equity and instructional leadership teams that have some consistency of expectations around them and some consistent sort of mechanisms to make sure that those instructional leadership teams are driving the academic work happening in each of our buildings. This would also, we've also allocated some funds to support student engagement, mental health and to further our school culture work. This includes continued partnership with Interface Referral Service and we've had that partnership over the past year. We've been sharing that with other town departments and it comes at a cost, but it is a service that allows us to refer families to mental health services, therapists as necessary. And it's been an excellent service to have as we've moved through the pandemic, it's something we want to continue. It would also allow us to continue our Panorama School Climate and SEL community surveys, something that we've used as part of our planning and that I know you'll see additional information from from the schools when they present their school improvement plans. It would also allow us to expand teacher leadership and professional learning in equity, trauma and form instruction and social emotional learning which we believe are all very interconnected. And then finally, this option B would allow us to really take a look at our coaching models. We've expanded coaching very quickly in the district and what we've discovered as a result of that quick expansion is that we don't have a more consistent model in place. In some cases, coaches are building based. In other cases, coaches are district level. And it's really important to have a clear model for what you mean when you talk about instructional coaching because this is job embedded professional learning. And it's important that we really articulate what that coaching program is, where its gaps are and where additional resources may be needed and build some consistency particularly across our building based coaches. So this would support a 1.0 literacy coach which would get us to having enough coaches to have one in each building, both in literacy and in mathematics. And it would also allow us to complete a coaching program audit that has already started and make sure we can do some really clear role definition around the program development for our coaching program and get some clarity around what our district level coaches do and how that's different from the work of a school-based coach. On the final slide, I have a preliminary spending plan. I say preliminary because again, we can always issue amendments to this grant. We can move things around if we find that we need to or that we can't hire for a position right away, which is very possible these days. We have projected out through multiple years what the cost of each of these buckets would be. And they're highlighted in different colors on this screen. And you also have a more detailed plan in your materials. And when it comes to questions, I'm probably going to defer quite a bit to the team that helped us come up with some of this, but I'm happy to field any questions that the committee has at this time. I'll stop sharing. Thank you, Dr. Holman. Is anyone on the committee that would like Mr. Schlickman? This is very thoughtful and there are a couple of really important points you're drawing out there. The one thing I just want to note going in the future is that 84.5% of the respondents to the survey were white, whereas our student population is a sneeze under 70% white. And because equity is one of the focuses, that's sort of going to be an interesting number to watch to see if we can't get better engagement with the community beyond the folks who are accustomed to filling out surveys for Arlington. And I'm glad to see that we're working on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And hopefully that'll move that number as well. Anyone else at this time? Mr. Cardin? Yes, thank you, Dr. Holman and the team for putting this together. It looks like a excellent plan and I love the data supporting it. Just a quick question on the coaching model audit. We hadn't heard about that before. Is that something that we're doing internally or are we using an external resource? What does that look like? Dr. McMill. Thank you for that question. So last year, because, and let me just say the motivation for doing this is we have expanded our instructional coaching program by adding on a couple of, and this is again, credit to the school committee for supporting our desire to do this and approving the budgets and the finances that we need to do this. So I just wanted to start off by saying that. But looking at the different content areas, and we've had a SEL coach, social and emotional learning coach. We've added two social studies coaches. We've added a science coach. And as Dr. Holman alluded to in our comments, we're building out our literacy instructional coaching program. And all these coaches are at the K through five level. And while we're doing this, I thought it was a perfect time for us after getting feedback from principals and our curriculum leaders to take a pause, not take a pause, but to, for us to focus on creating a shared vision. Cause everybody has different ideas of how the coaches should be utilized. And they're not so far off, but for us to move forward, I wanted to take that information and provide an opportunity for us to work together in order to build out that shared vision. And so in doing so, we have contracted a consultant team that has come in and at this point, we have just completed our phase one of the program. And we, so we've collected information through focus groups and surveys from teachers, administrators, coaches, admins, administrators. And so we're taking all that and they've created a report that they've shared with me and I've shared it out to principals and administrators and coaches. And Dr. Holman and I both met with the consultant team this past week. And we talked about next steps. And the next step is to put together a design team so that we can look at how coaches can be utilized based upon feedback from that, from the surveys and the focus groups and to continue to cultivate that shared vision. It's maybe coming up with a menu of different services that the coaches could provide for teachers. So the goal for this is to create a shared vision and also hopefully to foster that relationship that has to exist between coaches and teachers in order for it to be a productive partnership. And I just wanna say this is work that Dr. McNeil started in partnership with Dr. Modi before I began. And I've been extremely impressed with the consultants that we have helping us with this. They've been very thorough in doing focus groups with different stakeholder groups. And these are experts in the field of instructional coaching. They really know their stuff. They have been extremely pleasant to work with both for our administrative team and for myself and Dr. McNeil. And we would love to keep working with them to do the additional steps that are involved which is why that's included in the proposal. Great, thank you. Thomas Cardin, I just wanna make sure I answered your question. Yes, yes you did. Thank you, I appreciate that. And I look forward to hearing more about it as the work progresses. Thank you. Sure thing. Thank you. Dr. Ampe, did you have a question? Yes, thank you. So I think this is great. I think you've done a wonderful job pulling together the data and explaining it and putting it into a cohesive program. The one thing that just stuck in my mind is I know we have, at least in the past, we've had a robust mentorship program for new teachers using the existing teachers. And I just, I'm trying to figure out where it would fit. It feels like it should be in there. Some, I mean, not, it just, it feels like it should be touched on or something. And, but I can't say how. I mean, I just had the idea now. So I haven't had much time to think about it. But anyway, I'm throwing that out there that whether any aspects of the mentorship program should be, should receive some of the information from this or whether it can be a tool for approaching this work. That's all. Partly because I think in the past and certainly with what you're saying about hiring problems, bringing our newest teachers up to speed is one of the biggest things we can do to help our students. And so it feels like if we can energize that with this work, that would be really helpful. That's all. Thank you. Dr. Holman and Dr. McNeil, you want to respond to that? I'm actually wondering if any other, Dr. McNeil or any other members of my team are interested in responding to that. I just want to clarify. So do you mean like add on to the current mentoring program that we, that we already have in place and figure out a way to provide more support for first year teacher or pre-professional teachers? Is that, is that what you're asking? Just the work that you're doing here, whether any of that should be, whether the mentor, the already existing mentorship program should be incorporating some of these types of things. I'll think about it more and continue an email if I can explain it better, but it just feels like we have something already in place and we should make sure that the program that we have is supporting these new and different things that you're trying to do. And I don't see any connection right now. And I'm suggesting maybe there should be a connection. I think we absolutely agree and we also see that connection and have some ideas for how to make sure that this is targeting some of our teachers who were just coming into the district and that's part of the expansion of the ideas courses but we didn't spell it out quite as articulately as maybe we could have. Thank you. Ms. Morgan. I just wanted to share. I'm excited to see the, looking at the coaching model and really diving into how that's working as part of my team at work. We have built and discarded two coaching models in three years. So I have a deep level of appreciation for how challenging this work is and instructional coaching is really, really tricky and it's very hard to take exceptional teachers and have them become coaches and have that be really effective and especially as there's no evaluative component which I think is really, really important to coaching but this is an area that we've invested in heavily and I think it has been, it's certainly money well spent but I see this as sort of making sure that we're deriving the most benefit for our students from the coaches that we have in place and understanding how best to deploy and leverage them because it is really challenging to think about building based versus district level versus, and we have all of the same challenges in my work just with different flavors and it's really hard. So I'm glad that a consultant has been secured. I'm glad that it can be part of this SR expenditures because I think we may get more, there'll be more readout to the community about it which I think is really important. So thank you so much for including that and I'm excited to find out what we learn. This next one. Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation and all of the details and the data it's been really helpful and it's been really helpful to hear how the community has responded and who responded. I'm really excited about the coaching piece. I professionally have really benefited from it and it's nice to hear that there's gonna be some sort of looking at it as a program and how to best utilize it. One of the things that I've been thinking about as I was looking at this is, again, thinking about how we're headed into negotiations. I want us to be able to hang on to the teachers that we are coaching because I think that, you know, part of that model is building on what they have learned with their coach year after year. And so, and not having the coach having to start over with new teachers every year. So I hope we as a committee can keep that in mind as well as we are working on our negotiations and supporting our teachers and helping them to stay here in Arlington. So thank you. Dr. Holman. I will just chime in that retention has been a big part of the conversations that we've had surrounding the work that we wanna do with some of these extra dollars. And building teacher leadership is something that we understand as a retention strategy. So we agree. Dr. Holman, did I understand you that as it does not require a vote from the school committee? That is my understanding. Julie, is that accurate? Ms. Dunn. That's my understanding as well. If there are no... Seth. I just wanted to add that the AEA supports option B and we like the idea of the teacher led professional development around the equity issues. Thank you. Move receipt. Is there a second? Okay. Second. Roll call. Mr. Shorkman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. And I vote yes also and receipt of this. Thank you for all your work. It's been everyone. Dr. McNeil, Mr. Mason, Dr. Holman, Ms. Dunn. Thank you all. It's a tremendous amount of work. We can see it. Thank you so much. Okay. Moving on. Monthly financial report. Mr. Mason. Good evening. I'm sure that everyone has received and reviewed the monthly financial reports for the period two that was sent as a memo. And I will touch upon it from a high level view. And I do want to thank those that sent comments prior, or inquiries prior to the meeting, just so I can touch upon some of those items. So there's these reports, there's nothing changed in terms of the format. What I will note is that I am providing your report sooner than we've done in the last few years. So some of the variances you might see on the report are largely due to it being earlier in the year from providing like a more fine-tuned numbers. So, and I'll explain that further as I get into the report. And I will, if you do see a need for me to put, present the memo on the screen, I can present it on the screen. Do any of the members read that at this time? I don't think so. Thank you, Mr. Mason. Awesome. So what I will note and explain for those that are watching and just to recap, there are normally three reports included in the monthly financial packet. There are two provided that is the general fund report, which is the town appropriation, which is funds from the local community and the state, which is really driven by the town's funding formula for the schools in the town of Arlington. And then there's the revolving accounts report, which reports on select revolving accounts that the school committee approves in the school committee budget every year. You'll see that the report is affixed with columns with the approved appropriation. That was the approved school committee budget and transfers, which are include a carryover balance of any encumbrances from the prior year, plus any transfers made in between the different types of expenses, which is considered the object descriptions or object codes, a revised budget, which is the net between the original appropriation and the transfer columns. As well as a year-to-date expended or actual, which is the posted expenditures as of August 31st, 2021. The encumbrances are the same thing. They're only the accounts payable or non-salary encumbrances as of August 31st, 2021. Non-salaries were not included in this report. And the projected expenditures is a projection that use salary expenditure data on the September 10th salary run and assumes departments will spend all of their non-salary budgets by the end of the year. So the total posted expenditures as of August 31st is $3,449,588, which is about 4.24% of the current budget. One thing to note is that there are expenditures that are not shown because they are tied to the prior fiscal year and those were encumbered and rolled over. And this year, the payroll cycle went a little later because of the schedule of payments from the prior fiscal year. Total non-salary encumbrances are $9.5 million. And once again, salaries are not encumbered. So all of the salaries are in the projected expenditure columns. So what I would touch upon is that there are some large variances that a school committee member did bring to my attention, which I was aware of, but I thought it would be a good idea to discuss to the full school committee, which is tied around the teacher salaries, teaching aid salaries. You'll also see that the maintenance salaries do also have some large discrepancy. And then I'll touch upon the special education out of district tuition law. The teacher and teaching salaries. So since the hiring process, there's a timing delay of when we hire someone to when the payroll team is able to enter the data into the financial system. So when looking in August, the August data does not include a lot of the teachers or any teacher salary actually posted at the time because teaching hasn't started. So the first salary payout is in September 10th. However, not all new hires are paid in that first payroll cycle. So some of those are not included in the projection. Known vacancies at the time was included as an estimated amount, not an actual precise amount. So we might be understated in those categories. Just to give you an idea, the HR and payroll process about 118 new hires in September or that had a start date of September in the financial system. In 24 of those 118 that were entered into the financial system were not included in the projection because they were not paid in the September 10th payroll run. So those numbers will be more fine tuned in the next projection as well as there were 25 vacancies. My understanding that there are still teaching positions that are still opening, open such as a special education, so much special education positions, specialist positions, data coach. I'm sure that Mr. Spiegel will talk about that in a featured report, that's not this evening, as well as teaching assistant positions have been very challenging to fill. There's been some trade positions that we've been having difficulty to fill since last year in the facility department due to the bargaining and the pay of certain units of the facilities department. So I know that the town has been looking at figuring out how to bargain for those positions. In terms of the tuition, the out of district tuition, there's an entry that needs to be made for the circuit breaker. So you'll see in the revolving account, this is to completion, there's an amount that projects outwards. That entry has not been made or the conferences have not been moved over. And in terms of entry, meaning journal entry of expenses. And so what I did, also what I noticed was that, looking back, I haven't provided a report this early. So it probably is my mistake to provide you such a report this early that might have questions that come up as such until we get more fine tuned numbers. The last time we received a report about August data was back in fiscal 2015 or 16. So just maybe if next time I'll prevent any confusion, maybe not to provide a projected expenditures column in an early report and just provide the clear data and wait for more clear projections to provide to you. Revolving accounts is the same and the grant reports due to the cycle of grants, many of the grants are from the prior year. They were not set up in August. So we will have that in the next report. I will now open up the questions school committee. This is Shlickman. Thank you. I must admit I'm a little confused here. This is a fiscal 22 report, but I'm really puzzled how we're getting fiscal 21 money into that transfers column. Can you explain that to me? Because I'm thinking that fiscal 21 should be in a different set of different spreadsheet and I should only be looking at fiscal 22 unless of course we're dealing with grants that do extend. So I can, let me try to explain it in a way that most people can understand it. So in order for more transparency, what I did last year, I started to, I made a slight adjustment in a report which I did explain previously and we included prior year and conferences. So you'll see in the column, the encumbrance column, right now there's about $9 million of encumbrances. So last year in the final period, we had about $1.2 million worth of encumbrances that we were saying we were going to spend. So in the system, it carries it over as a budget amount because it carries a fiscal 21 budget into the 22 budget amounts to cover those expenditures. So when you see the net spending, it includes the $1.2 million of expenditures that are possibly prior from last year. Not all of it has been spent. Sometimes when we close out an encumbrance, those funds should go back to the town. And depending on how the comptroller handles it, when we do a piano invoice or a liquidation. So that's what the reflection is. So the budget has to carry over from fiscal 21 if we're going to reflect the 21 carryover expenditures in the report. So it's just for greater transparency. So what we're saying is we encumbered 1.2 for a million in that transfer column. Correct. And those are fiscal 21 encumbrances. Yes, they are fiscal 21 encumbrances, correct. That we encumber towards the end of the year. So let's say for example, I'm a vendor and I don't get the bill in until July 15th and we end up paying it in August, it might end up on that list as an encumbrance and that would disappear. Correct. So I think just in terms of my thinking in terms of understanding what's going on, I would prefer to have this separated out into a fiscal 21 and a fiscal 22 document and not bring in the fiscal 21 encumbrances into 22 because by law, we're really forced to separate that out and things that were not spent on a fiscal 21 expenditure that was encumbered for payment because the vendors late really isn't our money and our obliged to drop it back into free cash. You understand what I'm saying? No, I absolutely do understand what you're saying. Part of the reason why we did that, we included it in the past was because there was an issue with carrying over payroll encumbrances. So when we started payroll encumbrances, the financial system that we use does not carry it, does not do a good job at the close of year. And so in order, it was creating a lot of work to produce the report, to separate those payroll encumbrances. And so we therefore started to include it as well, it made more sense. It becomes a wash at the end of the day because the town will take the money and the expenditures will show up as in the expended call. But this is just greater information that you did not receive previously in just trying to clearly spell it out, but we can separate it out for you or try to have the report separated out essentially. Yeah, because what we're doing right now is we're monitoring our fiscal 22 budget. We need to know if we have a problem for fiscal 22, fiscal 21's in our rear view mirror, so to speak. Correct. In total financial picture as a school committee member, I would say that if you were monitoring encumbrances or monitoring the overall budget picture, you would want a better understanding of how much funds we end up returning back to the town, right? So the $1.2 million doesn't reflect something we've returned to the town yet, correct? That number will eventually reduce if I do return money to the town because an encumbrance that doesn't get spent. So apparently $1.2 million is either still encumbered or it's gonna be expended in there. And it's still under the school committee's responsibility, but we just haven't put it out there to you. But if you suggest- So basically everything in that column, that $1.248 million is either going to go to pay a bill from fiscal 21 or the town's gonna come along and take it away. If we let it go, correct. Okay. Is there anyone else? It is actually, if I correct you, it's more than fiscal 21. So facilities department may carry things over for multiple years and that's sitting there. So just for clarification. Dr. Ampe. Thank you. Mr. Mason, I know you spoke about the tuition to other schools and I just wanted to be clear. You said that there was some journal entry that hadn't been made yet. Does this mean that we're not $1.1 million below what we've budgeted or, okay. So it's just that the money is coming, that other money is coming from another product that's not shown here. Correct. So yeah, so that would be cleared up in the next report. Okay, great. Thank you. Ms. Morgan, did you have a question or has that been answered? My question was the same as Dr. Allison Ampe's question about- Great minds think alike. Thank you. I think this is something that we're watching really closely right now, right? Because it's been a budget area where that hasn't had as much attention over the last couple of cycles. And so what is it? Friendly number 83201 is a lot of eyes on it right now. So thank you, Mr. Mason. Looking forward to the next report. Are we ready to go on to these motions? I will entertain a motion to approve the use of the following federal and state grants according to approved FY22 budget per Massachusetts general law chapter 44, section 53A. SS2 in the amount of $514,420. Title I in the amount of $137,822. Title IIA in the amount of $64,244. Title IVA in the amount of $10,843. Metco in the amount of $541,139. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Any further discussion on this motion? Yes, Dr. Ampe. I just want to point out that for this motion and the other two which will follow, we did discuss these at budget subcommittee and we approved of them. However, we weren't, there were some changes to the, there were going to be some changes to the language. So we didn't pass our own motion to present these to the full school committee, but we did discuss and agree with them. So. Thank you. Anything else? Roll call, roll, Dr. Ampe. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thaleman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Codden. Yes. Ms. Ekston. Yes. And I vote yes. I would like to take a motion to accept and approve the use of the following state grants per Massachusetts general law chapter 44, section 53A. AC Act, now school bus electrification grant in the amount of $174,000. So moved. There's second. Any further discussion on this motion? Roll call, roll. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thaleman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Codden. Yes. Ms. Ekston. Yes. And I vote yes. I will entertain a motion to accept and approve the use of the following privately funded grants per Massachusetts general law chapter 44, section 53A. Sims Memorial Fund grant in the amount of $20,755 and the Sanborn Foundation grant in the amount of $25,000. So moved. So moved. There's second. Thank you. Any further discussion on this motion? Roll call, vote. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Thaleman. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. I mean, Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Codden. Yes. Ms. Ekston. Yes. Mr. Hainer, am I, I vote yes. As far as I know, that's it for the finances. Anything else, Mr. Mason? No, nothing else for this evening. Thank you. Okay, moving on. Support of Learning Center SLCD, PS elementary school, Ms. Elmer. Aye. I have Principal Andrew Omadi with me as well, because as you just mentioned, the program is located over at the Pierce. And the program is new this year, but as you'll recall, we've had Dr. Orkin, Melissa Orkin here in the past to share with you the work that we as a special ed department have been doing around specifically identifying subtyping dyslexia and working through our assessment battery as well as intervention and progress monitoring around that. And Dr. Orkin has also begun to work with General Ed as an outgrowth of that work that she's done with the special ed department. And so all of that kind of has gone into the development of this in district program that is located over at the Pierce. And for the shorthand, we call them the SLCs, as you said, Supported Learning Center. And while D seemed to follow ABC, which we have for the other elementary programs that have been around for a long time, you can use it to remember dyslexia or dysgraphia, but that was not essentially the intention in calling it that. And so the program, as I mentioned, is a design for students with specific learning disabilities in the area of reading or writing or specific language impairments. And so that is gonna manifest itself in a severe language-based learning deficit. The medical term, as I just mentioned, is dyslexia for the reading disorder and dysgraphia for the writing disorder. And this program, as I really building off the work that we've done with Dr. Orkin, where the team is working to identify and explicitly teach those underlying linguistic skills that are critical to reading and writing. And we're doing that through a multi-century sequential structured approach that targets those deficits that are foundational to reading and what we know about the science of reading, which are accuracy, retrieval, and oral language comprehension. And then what's really key for these students is that in addition to that targeted reading and writing intervention, is that we are providing that language-based instruction across the other academic content areas throughout the day to develop and support those literacy skills and their support of accessing the general ed curriculum. So in looking at what type of student is going to fit the profile for this program or is at least the student that we're going to be considering as our special ed teams convene is looking at students who have a specific learning disability. And that is characterized by an average or above average cognitive skills with an otherwise unexplained inability or struggling to learn to read and or write. So I think it's important to recognize that, students who may have an intellectual disability may also struggle to read and write, but at the core of what is an SLD or specific learning disability is that those cognitive skills are otherwise intact and this unexplained ability to either progress with reading and writing is the hallmark of that profile. And so we are looking specifically at students who have failed to make progress towards those goals in less restrictive interventions. So that they've been receiving reading supports and that they're not making the expected progress that they have been able to or have not been able to access the general ed curriculum without with the less intensive interventions and that they really do need a more restrictive intervention if we can manage their educational needs and allow them to make effective progress in a less restrictive environment with less restrictive interventions than we are going to. So this is really about an individual student's ability to make progress towards their individual IEP goals. So just to break that down a little bit further about what that student may look like, I had already said a little bit about what that cognitive profile is going to look like, you know, other hallmarks of a language-based learning disability to include memory deficits. We know in the past when we've showed you that profile that we're working on developing with our assessment battery, looking at working memory and retrieval, the impact of low processing speed or any auditory discrimination or speech perception deficits. Another thing we know that students with specific language impairments, so that's either receptive or expressive, so what you receive or what you output may, this may be impacted with a language-based learning disability. But again, that listening comprehension piece is typically average or above average. That's kind of the hallmark is that they can understand it when it's not in that written format. And so again, we're looking at some of those academic indicators as well and putting that all together through the assessment tools, the students' performance in the general ad setting as well as their previous interventions is how we're making those determinations at the team level. And what is specific to this program, because I think we use the term language-based instruction without really clearly defining what that is, so that it's both multi-sensory, that it's explicit, that it's both sequential and cumulative, so it's building over time and that it's structured. And so when you start to put all that together, you can see why even the students in general education, if they really need their core content to be delivered in this format, then that's what the student we're looking at who's going to need a more restrictive setting in this language-based program. This program is staffed currently with a special education teacher, a speech and language pathologist who actually came out of the MGH literacy program, so also has her background as a reading specialist, paraprofessional and then any other related service providers that a student may have in their IEP, so that's the full battery of our staffing support, whether that's OT, PT, social work, any of those, as well as the general educator as a part of this team, because several of these students will still spend time in general education. They've been assigned to a general education classroom for homeroom as well as for specials and then individually, depending on what their profiling needs are, they may be included for math, they may be included for other times during the day and that's really an individual consideration for each student. And then we're going to continue to work with Dr. Orkin. She's been consulting through the program development process and then we'll have ongoing consultation each month with Dr. Orkin and our program staff. The program, as we mentioned, is located over at the Pierce Elementary School. Currently, we have students in grades three and four. We are looking next year as those current students, you know, age up that we would include grade five. Any sub-separate classroom specifically has the regulations limit that to 12 students. We don't anticipate the program growing that rapidly from the current five students that we have, but that's regulatory where that isn't that 12-1-1 is 12 students to a teacher and a pair of professionals, just how the regulations define that staffing. And really we wanted to give you an opportunity to ask any questions that you may have, so I will stop sharing. Anyone that would like to ask any questions or clarifications at this time? Mr. Carden. Thank you and thanks for the presentation. So I think you answered one of my questions, but I was surprised that there wasn't a reading specialist listed as part of the staff. So does this program require reading specialists? We just happen to get lucky that the SLP was both or how is that supposed to be staffed? So it's specific to the student's IEP, so some students have their reading intervention delivered by a specialist teacher or a reading specialist and really, again, based on the work that we've done with Dr. Orgen in developing that profile and looking at what the intervention is required is really how the team determines who the provider is. Most of our reading specialists deliver Wilson. So if a student requires Wilson, then often it'll be a reading specialist, but if they require a different intervention, one of that's lively letters, lips, seeing stars, one of those other interventions and it may often be a special educator who's delivering that. The special, we were specifically looking for a speech and language pathologist who also has that dual reading specialist licensure. And as I mentioned, Ms. Frost, who we've hired did come out of that program. And so at the completion of this year, when she's been in the state and working in, she came from California previously. And when she's been here for the year, she'll then have the reading specialist licensure in Massachusetts as well. Great, thank you. And then just two other comments quickly. For Mr. Amati, I do hope that you're consulting with the principals at Dow and in Brackett and Stratton about having a SLC program at your school because there's a lot of work that needs to be done to integrate those students into the school. A lot of issues about where do they go at the beginning of the day? Do they go to their home room? Do they go to their SLC room to build community there? Where do they get the backpack notices? Just little things like that, that can trip up the whole environment. So I just recommend that you talk to your other principals and make sure you're working on that. And then secondly, I mentioned this offline to Dr. Holman, but we would like to be informed about development of programs like this. Not sure what happened, but by guns, but in the future, I mean, it's our responsibility to make sure the district has programs. So when you identify a need and you wanna start building a program, please let us know as soon as possible. And the CPAC also has a statutory role in advising the district building programs. So that didn't happen here, but let's make sure it happens in the future. Thank you. Anyone else at this time? Dr. Amati. Thank you. I was just wondering how did we help children who are now in this program before we had this program? What happened with them? Sure, so as I mentioned earlier about looking at less restrictive interventions, less restrictive settings, less intensive interventions, these students who have been receiving earlier services, whether it was through a push in and then perhaps a pull out. So each student has kind of taken a different pathway to this program, but in individually considering their needs, there becomes a termination that they need to have the majority. Again, if you look at what a sub-separate program is, it's greater than 60% of the time outside of the general ed setting. So that's as that progression happens. I mean, ideally as we continue to work in the general ed with our introduction of the Hegody Phenemic Awareness at the kindergarten level, the earlier adoption of foundations earlier in the year, the expansion of foundations to third grade, I truly think that we'll see fewer students requiring IEPs in general for reading services in general, and then ideally even fewer that will need this level of restriction because at the end of the day, you saw in the earlier indicators, having an IEP is a risk factor. It's one of those early warning indicator risk factors it's more time spent on a general end leads to lower outcomes, whether that's graduation on time going on to college and career. So these are decisions that we have to make very thoughtfully, very seriously before we decide to remove a child largely from general education. Okay, I guess I'm assuming we must have had students like this, I mean, had exactly the same problems in the past and what did, what did we do? I mean, were they out of, were they placed out of district or I think again, we give intensive reading supports, reading and writing supports across the day. There are some students who have been placed in out of district placements. I think our elementary special educators have worked really hard and they've worked really deeply engaging in this work over the last four years. So I think that we have more and more students who are able to stay in that general ed or inclusion environment. And for students, we continue to try to, if it's to beef up the services and pull out to provide more services in the classroom through pushing as they age up to the middle and high school, we have our co-taught model which offers support across all of those content areas. So I think we've addressed it in a number of ways. Yeah, I guess I was just trying to get at is this bringing any students back or is it keeping any students from having to go out of district in part? Yeah, so that's what I was trying to get at with that. Yeah, so our requirement is once we identify that a student has, we developed the IAP, then we have to discuss the placement for that. If we don't have the placement for what we've identified, we have to create or locate. And so in this instance, as we have created it because we've identified that these students have this in. Okay, thank you. Ms. Morgan. Thank you and thank you for the presentation. I was also surprised in the spring when I learned of this program because it was posted on our website. So I was surprised that it didn't come up during the budget process, but I know that it will be considered this year, which I think is great. I hope that the district continues to do outreach through CPAC and any other means necessary so that parents also know that this program exists. I heard from more than five, fewer than 10 who were very surprised to see that it was being built. And all universally very pleased that the district is taking this on. So I think that that's great. And I still don't understand why we don't talk to people about this stuff. But anyway, I think the question that I had was around the sort of the facilities needs of the SLC just to make sure I'm glad that Mr. Amadi is here. I've been really impressed by what we've heard from you in the short time that you've been, well, it's not that short anymore, I guess that you've been in Arlington, but I'm really glad that the school that you're leading is taking this program in. And I think that's great. It sounds like we have third and fourth graders. We're going to add a fifth grade or next year we would incorporate the fifth grade. What are the classroom space needs for this program and what are the plans for adding any of the earlier grades? So the classroom space that we have identified is essentially what would be a half classroom. It looks like at some point at time it probably was something. And then it's been subdivided. So it's about a half classroom size. So we currently have five students. As I mentioned, under the regulations we could go up to 12. So that space would reasonably fit eight to 10 students. As I was saying earlier, we need to make sure that we have we have a least restrictive environment mandate as well in special education. So that we have considered less intensive, less restrictive interventions prior to removing a student. So I don't have any current plans to go down to the K one and two level. As I mentioned, that's when students are learning to read. And we are continuing to do work in the general ed. We're doing screeners that are going to identify students earlier so that they can intervene sooner. And so we do not have any immediate plans to be looking at K one and two, looking at those existing students who are three in grades three and four. And then obviously next year those fourth graders become fifth graders, et cetera. Great, thank you. And I guess my other question for you Ms. Elmer and Mr. Amadi was can you, because this is a program and I appreciate that we move students in and sometimes out of SLC programs during their elementary school career. I'm just curious about, so I assume that some of the five students who have come into the SLCD were not at Pierce previously. And so they've resulted in a change of school. And I know that that's something that we take very seriously. Ms. Elmer, I know that you came to us with an exceptionally well thought out plan of how to move the SLC from bracket to Hardy, right? And that's something that's been ongoing planning for many, many years. And I'm just curious, I don't obviously want any specifics, but do we feel like that the sort of integration, Mr. Amadi of the students into Pierce has been sort of largely successful? Are there any like, are there any takeaways from, I'm sure you've watched that process very, very closely. Are there any takeaways from just seeing that happen over the last couple of weeks? Yeah, thank you, Ms. Morgan for the question. I mean, from my perspective, well, first of all, I should say I'm thrilled that we have new students here at Pierce and feel fortunate to be able to host a program like this. Coming from a, can you hear me okay? Sorry, I haven't spoken all night. Yes. All right. You know, I'm thrilled anytime we get an opportunity to serve new students, specifically those with a particular need. And I'm thrilled that they're here. From my perspective, our students have been integrated well both into the SLCD classroom and as well as into the general education classroom setting where they are having their morning meetings and their community meetings and our meeting folks across the grade level that coincide with their age. They are also having their meals and their snacks and their recess and their special specialist classes across the day. And from what I see, I stopped into those classes frequently. Our students making connections across classrooms. I see students that appear happy. And I see teachers that are working collaboratively to get to know one another, the shared curriculum. And of course, the curriculum that is kind of exclusive to this program. And I hope that I'm giving you an accurate description of what the child and family perspective is. That is what I see. And I'm very proud of the kids and faculty working with those students. Great, thank you so much. I'm not at all surprised, but it's always nice to just hear it again. So thank you for all of your work and please extend our appreciation to your faculty and the team. And I think this is a really important program for Arlington and I'm really proud that we have it. Thank you, Ms. Elmer, for your work getting this off the ground. And I hope that we continue to celebrate having these opportunities for our students with our district and our community. I think it's important that taxpayers understand that these are the kind of programs that we have vetted and have built and that are really important to help our kids be successful. So thank you very much for the presentation. Ms. Hexton, did you go right ahead? I'll echo all of the things that others have shared. My question actually goes in the other direction. I'm curious, I guess I wanna make sure that we're also being thoughtful about what's happening two years from now when the fifth graders are going to sixth grade. And if this program still needs to exist, then making sure that we're planning for what that's gonna look like at the Gibbs. Cause I know that bringing together of the entire town in sixth grade, making sure we have that programming for that one grade level for all of the needs that students have. Was that a question or an observation? It's a comment. I wanna make sure that that is something that's on everybody's radar. I appreciate that you're thinking about next year, but I wanna make sure we're thinking even further down the road. So thank you. I think that's important to be reinforced to the community so that there's no anxiety or apprehension going forward. And I saw the superintendent shaking her head in a positive way at the same this going forward. Is there anyone else at this time on this issue? Thank you again, Ms. Elman and the entire staff. Mr. Amari, please pass that on to your people as well. Thank you. Moving on to license practical nurse job description for approval, Mr. Spiegel. Yes, so this is a need that has been recognized this year that we have some students in the district with some needs that our nurses can do, but our nurses are pretty stretched in their buildings. And we could use some help for our registered nurses, our school nurses who do so many different things in the building. And so we have identified a need to hire a licensed practical nurse to help out, particularly in one of the buildings. And that person can specifically manage and work with some students who have some needs around feeding and some other specialized needs and also assist the school nurse in other duties. So I think it's just been a need that's been recognized. And we think that adding a licensed practical nurse is a less expensive option than hiring other school nurses. We are looking still for school nurses in a couple buildings and resource nurses who can substitute in the district as needed. So that's just another thing to put out there to the community that we still do have that need for registered nurses, but this job is a new job for us as a specific licensed practical nurse. But the purpose of discussion and going forward, I would like to take a motion to approve this job description. So moved. Is there a second? Second. Okay. I just like to ask this question. You had an hourly rate down there. My concern would be that if this, you've suggested specific needs in the system right now that this person doesn't be deferred from that to fill out the spots as well. That's a concern. You see this being a specific amount of hours per week with specific jobs or Doug, will it fluctuate? Well, it's an hourly rate because that's our director of nursing has in her recent, in her research and my research, that's sort of the rate that we see for this position in Massachusetts. We do see it as a full-time job comparable to the other positions in the district that would work the school day. And yeah. Thank you. Anyone else have any questions on this? Ms. Morgan. I think that this is really important and I am really concerned about our nursing staffing right now. I talk to some of our nurses regularly, very regularly and I'm really concerned about what we are asking them to do and just their capacity to do it. They're miracle workers and have thrown themselves into the breach and are taking on both the pool testing and the test and stay, which is just, it's a lot of work and it is constantly changing and the kids coming in and out of test and stay and pool testing changes every day. So I think that whatever we can do to support them and make sure that we have as many people who can help them and who are skilled in those areas is just critically important right now. So I think we should approve this job description and find all of the people to do it as many as we possibly can. Yeah. I will agree that our nursing, our school nurses in this district have been incredible the past year and before that even, I mean, of course, but especially the past year with all that they've had to do and every district is in need of nurses. So we're not unique in that that we've heard a little bit about staffing challenges. Again, we're not unique in having staffing challenges but we have these challenges, we are trying to address them and we are trying to add more nurses who can work in the district in different capacities. Absolutely. Does this follow up? I'm sorry. You need to ask, because this is really, really important and I do worry about making sure that we can retain these folks who have been with us for some, a long time and some a short time but I'm really worried about what they're needing to do right now and that we just don't have enough people and I appreciate absolutely, Mr. Speedle, that it's not a lack of will but anything that we can do to get them some support I think is really critically necessary. I didn't realize, I mean, I realized it but it's become so clear in the last couple of weeks just how much we're asking for them to do and we're asking them to negotiate with a new provider who has been challenging at many turns and so I'm definitely worried about our nursing team. So thank you so much for bringing this to us. I really appreciate it. Anyone else? Does time take a roll call? Sorry, Dr. Ampey. Sorry, I just, I'm just double checking. We can do this, yes. We're not required to just hire registered nurses, I mean by law. So we're required to have our school nurses have to be registered nurses by statute. We have a school nurse in every building. This would be specifically to, they would not replace a school nurse. We are not hiring LPNs to replace school nurses who have to be registered nurses. This is an addition. Okay. And the law allows for that. I'm, my internet isn't great. Okay, great. Thank you. Well said. Roll call vote. Mr. Schlickwin. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Eckston. Yes. And I vote yes. And then this vote. Superintendent's report, Dr. Harmon. Okay. I have a few quick updates for everybody. First, some good news. We received a donation from National Grid of Sanitizing Wipes for our schools, a full pallet of them. And we're grateful for that donation. They weren't able to use them in their offices. And so we're able to distribute them across our schools for our teachers to use in classrooms and for us to have available. So thank you from National Grid. I also have a few updates relative to reopening. First of all, we are in light of the situation that we encountered at the Hardy this week, still doing a lot of ventilation protocol and procedural checks. We are doing additional human checks of rooftop units. So instead of just looking at a computer system to see if a unit is on or relying upon someone to report the concern about a ventilation system, we're having our maintenance team walk the rooftops to ensure that our ventilation systems are working routinely every few days. And as well as doing technical checks of system schedules, making sure that all of those are fully operational. The Hardy Elementary, as everyone here knows, and as we've notified families, had evidence of potential school-based spread. We did report as part of what we sent out to families the other day that there are 10 total cases at the Hardy Elementary School as of yesterday. I do think it's important to emphasize that not all of those cases are connected to one another. Some of them are isolated. Some of those cases are connected to the evidence of spread. I can't really get into a lot of detail related to that because it runs the risk of potentially identifying people if we get into too much detail. But I do want to note that not all of those cases are connected to one another. We did have a situation today that resulted in the dismissal of Arlington High School at about one o'clock, I believe, due to a power failure. We had rain falling in the area and from what I understand, an area of the neighborhood surrounding AHS, as well as a couple of neighborhoods in Winchester were impacted by a blown transformer. And when the power goes out, the ventilation does too. So we had students out of the building extremely quickly. I want to thank the teachers at Arlington High School because without power, we also don't have Wi-Fi. Without power, we also don't have email. Without power, we also don't have an intercom system. So our administration worked exceptionally quickly to make a decision about what we were going to do. We got in touch with Eversource as fast as we could, got a projection, realized that the power wasn't going to come on for at least another hour and that we were not able to keep students in the building under those circumstances. And so Mr. McCarthy was taking the lead and he led a very swift evacuation of Arlington High School and we dismissed the students and they cheered in the courtyard when we informed them that it was time to go home. So we don't want to dismiss school in the middle of the day, but when we have a power outage and given some of our challenges around ventilation and what we know about how COVID spreads, we absolutely had no choice today. And so that happened and we also are still doing our pool testing. We were able to do pool testing this week. We received all of our supplies on Friday and we are also working on getting some additional support, human support from CIC Health, which is our vendor and provider of pool testing. We're in the process of securing that and building out a schedule for that, but we'll have a five additional hands on deck and those people are helping us to have pool testing move around the high school. That's one role that we have them doing so that we don't have all the students going into one space to do pool testing, which is problematic and also discourage students from doing pool testing because they had to go down to the nurse's office in order to do it. It was kind of out of the way for some kids. So we actually have pool testing on carts at the high school to make sure that we're increasing participation and access to that. In addition to that, we'll be deploying some of our help from CIC out to the schools to assist with pool testing and we're also centralizing the registration process which reduces the amount of paperwork for our nurses. Basically, they have to take in all of the tubes and then they have to go through a registration process to register the tubes with CIC before they get sent out by the courier. So we're centralizing that registration process so that nurses can get the testing done and then go on and move on with their day and not spend all day. We're dealing with some of the backend work that happens after that. We may have CIC help also with some of the swabbing at different schools, different schools feel like they need different levels of support with pool testing. We obviously, as we're doing pool testing with so many more students at one time in a single week this year, that additional support is very appreciated and we're glad that we have it. And I also wanted to update the community that we do have the COVID-19 dashboard up and running and I am working to make sure that we are updating case counts as often as possible. We can guarantee that these are updated once a week and we're trying to update more often when we see additional new case counts coming in. I've gotten some questions or families about how frequently we would update the dashboard or questions about discrepancies between what they heard and what's on the dashboard. We'll guarantee that it will be updated by the end of the day on Friday, every single week. The pool testing results will not be updated until that time and they will only be updated once a week. So the new pool testing numbers will be up next week. Case counts, we will try to keep updated more frequently but we guarantee that they'll be updated once a week. And as far as enrollment, you have a new enrollment report and your materials for tonight. Our net changed from 2020 to 2021 and that's at least in part due to the way that withdrawals are processed over the course of the summer. Essentially what happens as I understand it is that withdrawals are entered into the system with a withdrawal date that happens before the start of school and then at the start of school those are processed at the district level in the system which means that some of the numbers I was looking at for your enrollment report weren't reflecting withdrawals that were coming in over the summer and or we had students who were enrolled but didn't show up and so the withdrawal didn't process until they weren't present for the first day of school and we followed up with the family. So we did have a drop in the enrollment projected increase for this year down to 130 additional students compared to October 1, 2020. We anticipate that that will remain relatively stable as we move towards the October one reporting day for the state. And I'm happy to take any questions from the committee. Anyone have any questions for the superintendent at this time? Thank you, Dr. Holman and congratulations for surviving a week. And it's only September. It's only Thursday. Moving on. The school has not failed to disappoint. It's been a great first full week. I asked Dr. Holman if she would still take the job if she knew then what she knows now. She hesitated just for one second. She said yes. That's good news. And not getting any response from any members of the committee, I will entertain a motion to appoint the chair for the remote participation study committee. Oh, moved. Is there a second? I believe seconded. Boy, this is the most important motion that I've ever seen this committee go for. Roll call vote. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Absolutely, yes. Mr. Schlickman. Oh, yeah. Mr. Thielman. Yes, and thank you. Dr. I mean, Ms. Exit. Yes, and thank you. Mr. Cardin. Yes, thanks. Reluctantly, I will say yes to. Okay. Discussion Belmont School Committee Letter. Vaccine requirement to attend school. Mr. Schlickman. Belmont sent us this letter regarding vaccines. Let me pull up the letter on my screen here. Essentially what Belmont's looking to do is tell the state a couple of things. First of all, first of all, let's understand the baseline is that there are many vaccinations that are required to attend school. And in fact, the state regulates vaccinations required to attend summer camps. We now have an approved COVID vaccine for our older students. And vaccines for COVID are expanding out with reports from the Pfizer folks that hopefully will be able to vaccinate our younger children. The thing is, is the DPH has the authority to add the COVID vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines. Belmont said that we think that they should do it. And if the DPH continues to refuse to do this, to refuse to add the COVID vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines, that the state should allow districts to go and add a COVID requirement. This really is essential. We're taking a look at the situation now is that COVID is a consistent problem that we are dealing with. And the only way for us to get completely out of this mess is to vaccinate as many people as possible. And it seems reasonable to support Belmont and send a similar letter to our representatives and our Senator affirming the points of the Belmont model. So I move that the Arlington School Committee joins the Belmont School Committee in urging the Commonwealth of Massachusetts through the Department of Public Health or through legislative action to add an immunization requirement for COVID-19 to the existing list of the required vaccines. The Arlington School Committee directs the Secretary to communicate to Senator Freeman, Representative Garbley and Representative Rogers that we sign on to Belmont's letter and similarly thank them for their continued work on behalf of the children of Arlington. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion? Mr. Card. Thank you. During this pandemic I've said that I'm not a medical expert and therefore I think it's best to follow our established health authorities, such as the CDC, the State Department of Public Health, our local Department of Public Health and when relevant outside organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics. I'm not aware of any of these organizations calling for a school-based mandate for this vaccine which is only approved for those over age 16. So I'm not in position to lobby for this mandate and I'm not gonna vote for this motion. Thank you. Or anyone else? Seeing none, call for roll call vote. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. No. Mr. Haynard votes yes. Inanimous. Excuse me, 6-1. I apologize. Moving on, 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 which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Warrant number 22042, August 31st, 2021, 847,269.56. Warrant number 22052, September 14th, 2021, $300,725.45. School committee minutes, August 24th, 2021, school committee meeting minutes, September 9th, 2021. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Second. Roll call vote. Dr. Ampey. Yes. Ms. Brogan. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Ms. Axton. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. And I vote yes. Policy EBC supplemental, first read, Mr. Schlickman. Thank you. The policies and procedures subcommittee met last Friday. We drafted a proposed amendment to file EBC supplemental general interim policy and COVID related issues. Since then, we asked the superintendent if the policy we proposed is something that could be achieved and if the language was appropriate for aligning to any procedures or protocols. And subsequently with consultation with council, the superintendent has proposed this specific language which is different than the first policy amendment we put forward to. So the file I'm directing you to for first read that I'm offering for the first read is the one in novice mark revised version of file EBC supplemental general interim policy and COVID related issues. So this is the version that's before us for first read. Second read will be scheduled for a vote at the next meeting. Is there anyone has any questions, a discussion at this time? Mr. Carden. Okay. So as I just noted, I would prefer that we follow our health authorities. And again, I don't have, I haven't heard of any health authority saying that we should require vaccination for extracurriculars. If there is a need from the superintendent and her policy advisors to adopt a vaccination requirement for chorus or for something that's higher risk then I'm certainly open to hearing that. But I believe that as written, it's too broad and I can't support it right now. Also, we've deferred, previously deferred to the superintendent on things such as masking and not enshrined those policies in our policies. And unless there's a request from the superintendent that she needs an official policy for some reason, I don't think we should change what we've been doing throughout this pandemic. With regard to the visitor's policy, I think the superintendent's policy is very rational and seems to be working fine for now. So again, it's any reason to upset that. Thank you. Ms. Eksten. Yeah, I guess I'm looking for clarification on when it says students who are age eligible, are we talking about students who are 16 and up where this vaccine is fully approved by the FDA or are we considering currently students who are 12 and up where the vaccine is only approved under emergency use authorization? That is, I assume that is a question to either the Mr. Schlickman or to anyone else. Yeah, the policy subcommittee, I guess. I'd like to pass that on to the superintendent who's research with council. So I have not talked to council about that particular question. I have some level of reservation around requiring a vaccination that is not FDA approved. So my preference would be that we begin by doing this for students who are age eligible for the FDA approved vaccination. We have mapped it out at the request of the policy subcommittee for the Odyssey as well when we looked at extracurriculars. And in doing so and mapping out which extracurriculars we would consider rostered extracurricular activity considered a few things. First of all, the conditions of the performance venue, whether or not it would be indoors with large crowds the relative risk of the activity, whether or not that activity integrated travel, whether or not exposure to groups outside the district or outside the school day was involved in the extracurricular activity. And we excluded activities required for participation in the curriculum. So for example, if you're part of orchestra and you do a concert that's at the school, we excluded the activity of participating in the concert that's at the school because it's part of the curriculum. In some cases at the high schools, I understand it part of the final because the activities we've included in rostered extracurriculars are limited to those activities that could be considered higher risk. I am more open to the committee considering approving this only for those extracurriculars, including for those students who are not eligible for the FDA approved vaccine. I'm open to it. I have my reservations about it, mostly because I understand as a parent some of the reservations a parent may have for giving their child a vaccine that's not federally approved. However, these are also optional activities. Students do not need to take part in these activities and they are potentially higher risk. And so that's where my reservation ends. And I think that if it is the wish of the committee to consider this for all students who are age-eligible for any vaccine, I would understand and support that move as well. Yeah, so I guess right now I also have reservations about supporting this for I guess 12 to 16 year olds. I am willing to support requiring a vaccination for 16 and up. And I think that I think the pool testing requirements that are here, I would support that for all students. Regardless of age, obviously. But that's where I am right now with this policy. Is there anyone else this time? Mr. Thielman. Yeah, I mean, I just would, if the policies and procedures subcommittee through the chair or some members, I'm just like I could just sort of explain the overall motivation for these policies. You know, kind of, I mean, I guess I'm trying to understand generally what we're trying to achieve here with all these policies. Like what's the goal? Well, essentially what happened is that, first of all, Lexington came to us and forwarded us their policy revisions. I think the reaction is a couple of things that have been mentioned previously. One is that as the superintendent stated, we are obligated to educate children within the course of the day. However, participation in athletics and extracurriculars is not a mandate. Participation in athletics increases a risk for COVID spread just by nature of the activity. Athletes can get up to four times the normal respiration rate than somebody sitting in the classroom. And that as we can see, MIAA has many different standards for eligibility that are imposed. So we do have clearly have the right to bring our community forward and say, you know what, if you're gonna be participating in an athletic or extracurricular, particularly those that are going to require less than six feet of social distancing, we should be protecting the students in this manner. So this is the thinking behind moving forward on this. Now, we did not specifically address the question of whether we are going, would extend this requirement for vaccination to anyone who's eligible to receive the vaccine or eligible to receive the vaccine based on full FDA authorization. And if it was the will of the full committee, because we're only three subcommittee members, the will of the full committee should come to play in terms of our determination here. But I think it's reasonable for us to be doing all we can to protect our students and limiting their exposure to the COVID virus. And then policy EBC, supplemental general interim policy and COVID related issues that this whole big, I mean, it requires the superintendent to notify the school committee of various actions Yeah, this was a big, big, big honking policy we passed last August in 2020. Right, okay. All right, I guess I'm clear. I just thank you. And so I'm very happy to listen to thoughts of the other committee members regarding whether we want to add language, specifying emergency use full FDA approval or leaving it to the regulatory authority and superintendent. Dr. Ampey. So this is going to be really policy subcommittee my rationale for, for as if, can you folks hear me? Yes, just speak a little slowly. So first I'm hoping to the idea of changing the requirement to the FDA approved vaccine. But my rationale for feeling if we should go forward with requiring a vaccine for athletics is big picture. What we're trying to do is keep as many students in school as possible since we've already seen the consequences of what it's like when they can't go to school. And athletics are a higher risk exposure that are not something that we are required to provide. It's reasonable to place students to be vaccinated to participate. And we're lucky our Indian high school has a very high percentage of students who are already vaccinated. But they're also in contact with the other teams from other towns, which may not have as high vaccination. So what I'm hoping we would do by pursuing this is make our bubble tighter. Keep less even asymptomatic COVID for getting into our schools to other students and keep more kids in school all the time. So that's my rationale for that. Thank you. Ms. Morgan. In thinking about how to move forward with this, it started with high school athletics and then we've evolved in expanding it to other groups. I guess I come at this from the perspective we know that vaccination is protective and ultimately parents need to make their own decision for their own kids, right? Whether or not they're gonna choose vaccination, but ultimately we have an obligation to protect our staff who are coaches and leaders of these activities. We have an obligation to protect the other athletes or participants in the activity. And we also want these activities to be available to students. So we don't wanna see spread on sports teams or within musicals because that will be devastating. My daughter is on the high school swim team and there were a lot of us crammed into the Arlington Boys and Girls Club last night and spectators were masked, but you can't swim in a mask. And so these are kids who are choosing to compete for their school and to participate in an activity. And where in that situation, masking just isn't a possibility and they have four practices a week and a meet every week. And I think we need to do what we can to ensure that the kids that are participating in some of these higher risk activities are vaccinated. Obviously with medical, I assume like there have to be medical exemptions within this and exemptions for sincerely held religious belief in the same way that we've handled it with our staff. But I do feel as though we bargained an agreement with our teachers and our administrators to ensure that they be vaccinated to come to work. So I feel like the least we can do is to have an agreement with our extracurricular participants that they be vaccinated to participate in those extracurricular activities. I see this as something in good faith to our staff and our teachers and our coaches. Many of our teachers are our coaches. They're all the same people. And so I think that this is something that we can do. And so we should. So I would feel more comfortable if we started with full FDA authorization for those. So it's a smaller subset of the population. I have deep, deep faith in Dr. Homan's ability to implement this, but I think that it's a lift to reconcile all of these teams and their vaccination status. And it's going to take some follow-up. So I would like to see it done 16 and up and look at those first and then move forward from there with the recommendation from the superintendent. So those are my, that's how I feel about it. Thank you. For anyone else? So where are we, Mr. Schlickman? We're on first read. I will resubmit this for second read adding the language of full FDA approval because that seems to be where the committee wants it to be and present this for second read at the next meeting. Thank you. Are we on? Subcommittee and liaison announcements, budget committee. Dr. Rampe, why don't we hold you until last? Because we're, you're coming in a little bit jumbled, okay? Okay. Community relations, this accident. Thank you. Community relations subcommittee is hosting us. Full committee chat this Saturday, September 25th at 11 a.m. Ms. Morgan and I will be there. Everyone is invited, but it is especially for families and caregivers of students in grades six through 12. And the zoom link can be found on the APS calendar on the APS website. Thank you. Curriculum Instruction Assessment and Accountability. Mr. Carden. New report, thanks. Okay, facilities, Mr. Filman. Thank you, Mr. Hinner. The subcommittee met on Wednesday, this the 15th of September. We received a report on playgrounds and agreed on a pro act that there needs to be a proactive plan of improvements, capital plan for the playgrounds that we, the early public school zones, APS zones and we asked for a report from the district from Mr. Mason and Dr. Pullman on which properties we own, which playgrounds are owned by the school district, which are owned by the town. The other thing we did was Mr. Mason gave us a report on the plan this year to contract with on site, inside or another firm that meets his criteria to do an analysis of the Addison Middle School, a structural, a physical plant analysis of the Addison Middle School to see if we should be beginning a dialogue with the Massachusetts School of Building Authority about submitting a statement of interest to the state for the middle school. It's a long process as Mr. Mason, Dr. Allison, and others reminded all of us in the meeting last week, a long, long process, but this is the way you started. This is how we started the high school eight years ago or so, something like that. We started with an on site, inside report. We started with a Niasque accreditation report followed by an on site, inside report. That led to the filing and the statement of interest. And so we're hoping to begin that same process right now. And that was it. Passes and procedures, Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, we did meet last Friday. We talked about the COVID policy plus we made brief mention for a future meeting on implementing the town requirement of a land acknowledgement statement. I did a quick poll of members of the subcommittee and the feeling was that we should be thinking about doing that at our organizational meeting at our first meeting in September, and also at graduation. Recognizing the fact that that would be the required times meeting the land acknowledgement in the chair could read it at other times that his or her discretion. Thank you. Allington High School Building Committee, Mr. Thielman. Yeah, the committee, well, the committee didn't meet last week. We meet again on the first Tuesday in October. Dr. Ampe, can you budget committee? Can you hear us? Yeah. We're going to meet on Monday at 1030 on Zoom. Great. Thank you. Are there any liaison reports at this time? Any announcements by any of the members or anyone else? Okay. I will entertain a motion to go into executive session to me for the purpose to discuss strategy with respect to litigation, specifically negotiations associated with the dissolution of EDCO and litigation associated with the dismissal of an employee because an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on litigation positions of the committee to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and non-union in which it held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which it held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. We will not be coming back to a regular session. We will adjourn from the executive session. Roll call vote. Ms. Morgan. Who moved that? I'm sorry. Thank you. I've not seen the motion. Someone moved it. Second. Is there a second? Second. Somebody, I'm gonna get this right. Ms. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Carden. Yes. Ms. Eckston. Yes. Dr. Ampe. Yes. Mr. Schleckman. Yes. And I vote yes. Motion carries.