 Good evening. Today is the 28th of January for those watching on video tape on a date other than a Thursday. This is the Arlington School Commission. And we have to start with some sad news. Unfortunately, Roland Chappett, who we all know is Raleigh, probably one of the most dedicated volunteers of this town, passed away over the weekend. He was the husband of Janet Sullivan, a loving father of Philip Chappett and wife Lucille of Wuburn, Susan Robinson and husband Spencer of Arlington. Thomas Chappett and wife Christina of Lexington and Anne Raleigh and the husband of John of Brockton and John Chappett and wife Melissa Smithfield of Rhode Island survived by 10 grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. Roland was a Korean War Army veteran. He served on Arlington Town Meeting for over 44 years. A member of the Redevelopment Board, Conservation Commission, Friends of Robbins Farm, the Dowling Museum, Tourist Council. He worked on the Brackett School Council. He was on our redistricting and that's just a partial list. He was on committees we haven't even invented yet. He was just an amazing force for this town. Funeral tomorrow, 10 a.m. at St. Eulalia's in Winchester. Relatives and friends invited. So a moment of silence for Raleigh. And we have, next is public participation. Public participation is limited to three minutes. We listen while you talk. We do not respond in public participation. We may elect to go and bring your item up by a referral subcommittee later. But we won't discuss anything or act upon it tonight unless it's on our agenda. The first one is Juliette Moore. Good evening. My name is Juliette Moore. I have three children at Thompson. I wanted to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for your recommendation to place modulars at Thompson and for your recommendation to support permanent construction. I'm here tonight to ask that you continue to aggressively push forward to seek funding for permanent construction at Thompson Elementary. I know that you all know that the modulars placed at Thompson are just a mandate, giving the students a one-year reprieve from the loss of our art room and large class sizes. I've sat in on various task force meetings and subcommittee meetings and I know that you all have the very same concerns that the parents of Thompson have about the short-term nature of the solution. Having been to the enrollment task force meetings, it's clear that many on the task force want to wait to see how Arlington's actual numbers compare with the McKibbin projections. And given that Thompson is already over McKibbin's projections at 435, I urge you to please continue to advocate for the students of Thompson and the students across town to recommend funding of a design phase for Thompson's permanent addition to avoid additional costs spent on temporary fixes. We know it's critical for funding approval to occur in April to avoid large class sizes in 2017 and 2018 and to alleviate the ongoing core space shortage that we have. Thanks very much. Thank you. Timor Yantar? Hi, I'm Timor Yantar, Thompson parent, Precinct 7, 15-year resident. I'd like to comment on middle school overcrowding and I have four points to make in three minutes, so I'm going to speak quickly. First, fast, cheap and good. In project management there's a maxim, if you want it done fast, cheap and good, you can't have all three, you have to pick two. And so if you want it fast and cheap, it won't be good and so forth. And that's what I think we're up against here right now. It's striking a balance among faster, cheaper and better solutions. So second, what do I mean by fast? I don't mean hasty, I mean not wasting time, I mean narrowing down the options for middle school overcrowding by eliminating the ones that are just not feasible, securing the funding for these studies, doing the studies and coming to a decision as soon as we can because the longer that we take, the greater the risk of two things. One, that certain options are no longer options because we took too long. For example, if renovating the Gibbs is taking off the table because a feasibility study can't be done by June, which is when the town needs to notify leaseholders about renewal or not. And second, there's a greater risk that whatever suboptimal educational conditions are out there for our kids and that they'll be unnecessarily prolonged. Now as for cheap, what do I mean by cheap? None of the options before us are cheap. You don't really know how much they'll cost. Last week, the facility subcommittee kept putting in a placeholder of about $30 million for each of the options. I know it's been refined a bit since then, but how rigorous are the estimates? So I'd like to see a study done as soon as possible to get some real numbers for both capital costs and operating costs. Taking the Gibbs example again, for innovation costs I've seen numbers of 30 million, 25 million, and the HMFH study that's had 14 to 20 million. So from low to high we're talking from 14 million to 30 million, that's too wide a range. And we need to get that range narrowed down. As for operating costs, for example, what's the difference in cost between running a larger audison or running a smaller audison plus a new Gibbs? Teachers are the teachers, no change there. Having two schools costs more because of incremental staff. On the other hand, they're savings as well because you don't have to have to bus students from East Arlington to Audison. Again, we need to have hard numbers here. And why? Because the town authorities are very careful about spending the public's money and will only do so when all the homework has been done to compare the cost of the options. And finally, fourth, what do I mean by good? Again, fast, cheap, and good. Good, this may be hard to define, but I think we all know it when we see it. We want a quality educational experience for our students that prepares them well and that the town can be proud of. That's all I have. Thank you so much for your time and your attention. Thank you. Mary Cummings. She's the first. Well, Linda Hansen there. You signed it in that order. So Linda Hansen. Good evening. My name is Linda Hansen. I'm the president of the Arlington Education Association. And I want to start out by congratulating Dr. Bodie and everyone else who worked on the application for the state funding for the high school on successfully attaining entrance into the next level of MSPA funding. It's incredibly exciting and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it later this evening. The issue of state funding for our school building, though, is actually leads me to a topic I want to spend a few minutes talking about this evening. Like a lot of people, I've been thinking about the congruence of all of the costs of maintaining quality education in Arlington for the buildings, the personnel, the programs, and the curriculum materials. Like all of you, I have and will continue to participate in the many important meetings to attempt to come to a consensus to find the best way forward within the financial limitations we face. While we've been extremely focused most recently on working with funding decisions constrained by our local resources, the more time I've spent looking closely at the issues before us, the more I am convinced that increasing funding at the state level by raising more revenue is the only thing that will really get us where we need to be. I know you're thinking along the same lines and it was great to see our local representatives at the last school committee meeting. They're all strong advocates for our school. But it's pretty clear that without strong and impassioned advocacy, we will continue to have to rely on regressive local property taxes to fund our schools. I want to personally commit to expending time energy in the upcoming months to help the parents that are so committed to educational excellence in our schools understand that in order to have smaller class sizes, neighborhood schools, differentiated curriculum, high achievement, and exciting learning experiences for our students, we will need to become more vocal and effective advocates for state funding. We will need to mobilize parents, community members, and town officials both inside Arlington and more importantly across the state. We have opportunities to do this before us now. The failure to capitalize on these initiatives and the failure to redirect some of the local energy to state level solutions will leave us all with less than we would like to see. We need to engage our friends and neighbors and our respective organizations around the concrete initiatives that we have before us. I'm going to name just three, charter school funding. Nothing new there but Arlington is currently losing $100,000 to charter schools. This total reflects the amount of Chapter 78 that will be diverted from the school district to one or more charter schools minus the total amount of state reimbursement the district is estimated to receive. This is for eight students who live in Arlington and attend a charter school. It may be a small number compared to what we need but it represents about one and a half teachers. We need to support the senate's efforts to revisit and revise how charter schools divert money from local school districts. Clearly more urban communities are suffering even more than Arlington. Our neighbors to the north and east stand to lose much more. Medford is slated to lose $4 million and Somerville $7 million to charters in FY16. Lowell $14.7 million. Is that my timer? Can I have one minute of yours? Yes. The foundation budget. If new formulas are used from the foundation budget Arlington would stand to gain $3.6 million and that would be about $1.5 billion. Local reps have talked about phasing in that idea but without active vocal and organized support we risk the report ending up on a shelf. The fair share millionaires tax the 4% search charge to income over $1 million would generate about $1.5 billion annually. I recently spent two hours talking to a neighbor about kind of the history of what's going on with the schools and local funding and she said we really need to look at state money and mention the millionaires fair share tax and she said what's that? So I just feel like we need to draw those connections for people. And also I just want to encourage us all to activate ourselves but most importantly our respective communities across the state MASS, MASC, MMA, MTA we all need to work together on this. Thank you. Now to race. Arlington resident and speech and language pathologist at the Thompson School. And at our recent Martin Luther King event Tito Jackson, Boston City Councilor and an extraordinary activist for justice and education. I know many of you were there and we saw him get two big rounds of applause and at least one standing ovation when he asked us to help to keep the cap on charter schools and he talked about the damage it's been doing in places like New Orleans but we're just focusing tonight on the cost of it to us in our schools. Charters are approved by appointed not elected State Board of Education members regardless of the desires or resources of the districts that might be sending students and money to them. Charter schools are not held accountable to the local elected officials including school committees for how to spend our tax dollars or treat our children. Charter supporters are now investing about $18 million to either get our legislators to pass the Governor's bill to raise the cap or convince voters to pass the ballot question that would raise the cap. I think we're all in agreement that we want to keep that cap on. We're concerned about the fact that most people know very little about charter schools or the impact they can have on our schools here in Arlington and we want to work together to bring that to people's attention. I've given each of you a button made by my own hands that says public funds for public schools and we're asking that you or a surrogate wear those buttons just doing errands just to the grocery store and we're just looking to get it out there so people can see something so that when we call them or invite them to an information meeting they'll have some idea that oh this is the kind of thing that it's like the yard signs. I've seen that yard sign this is a little bit familiar so we want to push them out now to make them familiar and then we want to have some community information meetings to help the community to understand what charter schools are because they think they only impact Boston and other urban areas so we've got to work together and work hard. Can you imagine if we cut out the option of charter schools then we would give the millionaires and billionaires a chance to prove that they really care about educating our kids and they could take some of their $18 million and give it to us instead of putting it in lobbying for charter schools. Just think of that. That's right on the button. Lisa Newmark. Hi my name is Lisa Newmark and I have two children at Thompson. I've been following the enrollment challenges issues and have been intending the meetings and I just wanted to request that going forward there's a more of a significant review and acknowledgement of what the evidence and research might say about the options that are on the table so that we understand what the trade-offs might be as the options are being evaluated. So for example there's a tremendous amount of research about the impact of large schools and the potentially negative impacts. The impacts on increasing the number of school to school transitions and a general consensus that children perform worse when there's a greater number of transitions and I haven't really heard that being part of the framework of evaluation as we're going as everyone's considering the feasibility of the options and I'm seeing that other communities are dealing with the same issues so there are these opportunities to learn from what others have done and particularly the impact on students learning and social development and so going forward I'd like to hear more of that. Thank you. Peter Jackson was mentioned and at the Martin Luther King event we received a resolution from the legislature that I read aloud at the King event but the resolved statement is that Massachusetts General Court hereby commends the Arlington MECCO program for 50 years of excellence and further extends its sincere best wishes for continued success and be it further resolved that a copy of these resolutions be transmitted forthwith by the clerk of the senate to the Arlington MECCO program and so we are in receipt of this resolution. Arlington is one of the original MECCO towns we were one of the towns that made it happen and this was a tremendous source of pride for us on the Martin Luther King night as well as an expression of gratitude from counselor Jackson from Boston so I'll pass around the resolution so you can read it as we proceed on to the next item on the agenda which is AHS Seal of Biliteracy. To introduce this evening our director of ELL which is Carla Brzeze and our director of world language Catherine Britz who have both been here before and they're here tonight to talk about a certificate program that they will be collaborating on going forward. Good evening everyone thank you so much for having us so we wanted to share with you an initiative that really spans the world language world and the ELL world to award recognition to students for developing proficiency in two languages English obviously and a second language. I want to just give you a little background about this movement because it's really a national movement the seal of biliteracy and then Carla is going to go into some specifics of how we've developed the seal that we'd like to pilot this year with our students at the high school. So this movement started in California in 2011 the state passed an official designation for a state seal of biliteracy. It's now spread to 14 states that have official state seals including New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Texas, New Mexico, Indiana and so on and then there are three states that currently have legislation pending to establish an official state seal including Massachusetts. So we're hopeful that this will become an official state seal this year and in case you're curious the legislation is called the act to establish a state seal of biliteracy. So I've been collaborating with some of the teacher organizations that I work with in a seal working group to develop state guidelines for the seal and there's a number of districts throughout Massachusetts that are piloting the seal a few piloted last year an increasing number are piloting this year for example Melrose, Andover and many more. Framingham, Holliston, and Boston is also piloting a seal. So Carla and I have been working on this along with one of the guidance counselors, Carolyn Lichter, and one of the Spanish teachers in my department, Cristian Toro, to come up with guidelines. So I'll pass it over to you. Good evening everybody, I'm Carla I'm actually really excited that this initiative is coming to Arlington because it is actually validating languages and literacy so I was really excited when Catherine reached out to me if I knew anything about this. I'm also a member of the Matzol Professional Directors Association and they're jumping on board as well with modern language and foreign language. So how we came up with our working group on the seal of biliteracy is that we'd like to award three different awards for biliteracy, a silver seal, a gold seal, and a platinum seal and we have certain requirements and criteria for students to achieve these different levels in seals. The silver seal we're looking at foreign language students that receive an intermediate or mid proficiency in English in their partner language and for ELL students we're looking for an access state score of a level four or higher and for the gold seal we're looking at intermediate high which is for foreign language and then for ELL we're looking at a 4.5 on their state testing for English and then in the platinum seal we're looking at advanced low proficiency in English in their partner language and then for ELL learners we're looking for a level 5. We have kind of collaborated using the guidelines from the state but as well in our mini piloting group committee our criteria for English proficiency we're looking at the MCAS scores for high school students for a 240 or above and we're using the access scores for ELL learners to get that proficiency and then one of the following is also required for students to demonstrate a seal of biliteracy. The proficiency demonstrated on a standardized assessment the apple, the actual assessment of performance toward proficiency in languages it's available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and in English. The cost is $20 or the stamp standard based measurement of proficiency in Chinese, Arabic, French, Hebrew, Japanese, German and Italian. The cost is $22 or the ACFL Latin interpretive reading assessment which is a cost of $10. We're still figuring out how actually the ELL directors are trying to figure out if we can use some Title III funding for students that have hardship measures and can't pay the fees for these assessments and for either the assessment or a portfolio demonstration and students would have to bring together three to five benchmark pieces of classwork or projects demonstrating the following in the students' second language for English for the ELL students and then for the foreign language students the proficiency in the language that they're targeting. I don't know if there's any other questions. Yeah another point I just wanted to stress is that this designation really emphasizes proficiency. It's not a seat time certification so we really feel like that's an important piece to emphasize that we can honor ELL students who bring a really rich background and proficiency in their home language that is honored in the school and students of foreign language who've developed a high level proficiency in the language that they've been studying at school. We're planning on piloting it, rolling this out to students this year for our current junior class and then the following fall awarding students. We have these lovely medals that we would give students for graduation and I have a little present for everyone and I won't hold you to this. This is a little bumper sticker. I won't make you put it on your car but in case you would like it I support the state seal of biliteracy. And just really briefly and then I'd love if you have any questions for us Carla and I are collaborating a lot this year. We're also working on thanks to the guidance of Dr. Bodie, a global competency program at the high school. So that's really under works we have just a draft guideline but that's also an initiative. That's in a number of local districts. It started in Needham High School and it's kind of an academic program where there's certain courses that you want to see the students have take. You want to see some foreign language proficiency and then they also have to do a global engagement research project. We hope that it would also include a travel component so we'd love to come back when that's really flushed out and present it to the school committee as well. So if you have any questions we're happy to address them. Thank you and I definitely support this program from what I've seen on the website and what you've given us. It seems like such a great added benefit for our students who are going on to college. Perhaps they could put that in their applications that they were awarded such a designation. The question is really sort of in the future for our district what you think about starting with proficiency and students with languages earlier than middle school and how we can get there. Music to her ears. How can we get there? Yes, well I would defer to Dr. Bodie and Dr. Chesna. I am 100% in support of that initiative. I know we both are. I would be too if we could start even in preschool. Because I'd love to see these students get awards in fifth grade. We started with a high school one but there is a middle school CL as well but we decided to start in the high school. So let us know what we can do. Thank you very much. I have two grandchildren in the Spanish immersion program in Maine. How many other towns are doing what you're doing? Is this a growing? I don't need to know the exact amount. It's a growing thing throughout the state. Yeah, it's growing throughout the state. Does it have any, I don't mean to be materialistic about it, but succeeding on this, does this goes on the permanent record going forward to college and stuff like that? Does it have any effect or is the program still just too new? We had, so in some states they actually put a sticker like a certification on the actual transcript or have it written on the transcript. With Carolyn Lickter representing the guidance department, we decided in our initial year most schools are, they have digital applications so a sticker wouldn't make that much of a difference. And we decided let's wait and make sure this program is successful before we start looking at ways to get it actually printed on the transcript through power schools. So we decided to wait on that one, but possibly. Is there enough evidence to make a determination how receiving schools are responding to it at universities? That information quite yet. Yeah. Thank you. But I'm confident, I mean, assuming that this gets passed in the legislature and becomes an official state seal, I think we'll see it grow increasingly in more and more schools. Thank you. I don't know why you're doing seals. We don't have a harbor. Can we do river waters? No, this is a wonderful thing and to add that recognition in for students who achieve biliteracy, I think it's a wonderful thing. We have such a diverse population and so many languages being spoken in our schools and in our town and in my home, I'm an illiterate in my own home. I can't read more than half the books, but that's okay. You're not going to fix that for me. But I wish you well and please come back if there's anything else we can do for you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Next item would be today's students, tomorrow's teachers with an update. Mr. Spiegel. Okay, thank you. So as you know, for the past several years Arlington participated in today's students, tomorrow's teachers or TSTT program. The mission of the program is to recruit, mentor, and train culturally diverse and economically challenged students from high school through college and place them as effective teachers and committed leaders in the schools and communities. It's a pipeline program to start students in school thinking about careers in education and follow them through college and hopefully return to teach in your school district. It's part of our effort to recruit more teachers of color into our classrooms. It's a career development model that does increase culturally diverse educators in schools. It's a program that's been going on in New York State and for more than 20 years it was founded in Westchester County in 1994 and in the 2011-12 school year it was expanded into the greater Boston area with four school districts Arlington and over Brooklyn and Lexington. At the end of the 2014-15 school year those four school districts had their first cohort of seniors graduate and there was an event in June at Lesley University where our students were awarded and were recognized for graduating. At the end of the last school year there were some changes among the member districts here. Lexington had decided prior to the end of the school year that they were going to withdraw and not continue in the program past the end of the last school year and over the summer and over reach the same conclusion. They withdrew from the program. So that left Brooklyn and Arlington which was really impossible for the organization nationally to fund a program manager to run the program here in our area and because of that uncertainty and not having the stability of the program we didn't recruit a new cohort of students and neither did Brookline. So we have one student who was remaining from last year who was now a senior and Brookline had a few students who remained and so we've been trying to figure out what we're going to do going forward for the students who will remain in the program and in the future if we're going to continue. On Tuesday Dr. Bodie and I had a conference call with Dr. Betty Perkins who is the founder and executive director of TSTT and her husband they are interested in resuming a cohort in a region here next year. They've been reaching out to districts nearby like Waltham and Medford and some others about joining and they're hopeful that they and other districts nearby will join. A lot of this is dependent on the district's budget process like us, everyone's in budget season and trying to figure out what makes it into the budget. This program does cost the district $3,000 per student per year so depending on how many students we have that's how much we pay and the whole of the program and the way it works in a lot of the, in Westchester County where it was started and where there's several school districts that are very involved in it, they have a cohort in every class in the high school so you could have a school with 20 to 25 students and you're paying $3,000 each. Some of those schools have sponsors, they have corporate sponsors in New York that are paying for some of that which we have not had here. So we're looking at if these other districts do join and we can develop a cohort of 40 to 50 students in our general region which would probably take five to eight school districts to do. Then we, Dr. Bodie and I talked to Dr. Perkins that we would continue, we'd come back into the program, try to recruit students for next year who would be underclassmen, freshmen, maybe sophomores at the high school here and start again as you know we're involved in the mass partnership for diversity in education, we're a member district. Regina Keynes who is the director of that organization has been very vocal in her support of TSTT and has spoken to the member districts of MPDE to try to get some interest in TSTT through those districts and perhaps some of those districts will come on board. It's a little uncertain right now I think we do need to have, get other districts on board. Brookline is also in a little bit of a transition right now because they're going through a superintendent search. They have a new human resources director so the people who were involved in the program in Brookline when it was created there are not there anymore other than the teachers who have still been involved. So that's really where we are. We're sort of in a lull this year with the program and mostly because of the uncertainty of the program here in our district, in our region we weren't able to gain new districts until last year. Boston was talking about starting but that kind of fell through. Worcester had their own thing going and I don't think that's going to continue in the same way anymore after this year. So it's a little bit, it's been a tougher for this program to get interaction in Massachusetts and so we're sort of beholden to what other districts we can get involved because we do need other towns, other school districts in our general area to be involved for us, to be involved for it to be worthwhile to engage a program manager who's going to work with the districts in really running an effective program here. I don't know if Kathy has anything to say. Great summary. Mr. Heiner? First off I don't know if you remember but I was fortunate enough to represent us at that graduation program at Leslie last year and it was seeing the young students it was phenomenal. I value this program. A couple of questions for you. That $3,000 how much of that goes to the national? So we send it to the national. So the $3,000 goes to the national. What they do with the money is they pay a regional program manager, they create curriculum, they obviously have overhead at their national office which is in White Plains, New York. So it's part of the organizational expenses. Second question. They don't have a copyright. I mean what would it take for us to consider doing it on our own? I think correct me if I'm wrong. The biggest part is money second having that director do the organization part. Could you prioritize is it money first or would you say? I think it's money. $12,000 for a student that comes in the freshman year through the whole program. I think it's money and time. So each school district also has a teacher mentor and we have had a teacher mentor here, Melanie Constantakis who's a social studies teacher here at the high school who's done a great job as a teacher mentor for our students here at the high school. The teacher mentor gets a stipend actually directly from TSTT program. It's not through our contract it's through the TSTT program and so they get a little stipend to work with the students but it's not enough to make it and they don't have time or capacity. We'd have to sort of create a part time position to allow them to do that in Arlington and release them from some of the teaching duties so there would be an expense to that to make it worthwhile. I didn't know if we could start our own just a thought a smaller consortium of several towns. From what I've heard because I've been active in this the dissatisfaction is the support of the major chapter because we had, correct me if I'm wrong, did we ever have a full time director? We never had a full time director in our region because we didn't have enough students to support it. Right and we had several directors going in and out of this. Over the course of the four years we had three or four directors. So there's a factor of consistency and stuff like that. I'm not trying to add more work or stuff like that but to me the program is worth it. If we can make it survive, if we have to possibly be creative, it's easy for me to say this and how to go through but that's part of it and so just throwing that out there. I'm not sure the caught. I mean I think it would require a part time position to run the program effectively. We've never investigated and I'm not putting any blame on this on anyone. Never investigated corporate responses in the area have we? We have not. That would be the role of the director but the issue of having other districts and having a director is that there are programs that they attend and so it's organizing these educational programs. There's certainly things they do in district but that would be I think that would not be really realistic in terms of what we could possibly reach out to. It would need this outside organization and we support them and I will certainly talk with any superintendents that they have interest in this program but I think without TSTT organizing all the programmatic pieces of this, we just simply don't have the personnel to do that. I just got the feeling that the support because we did not have a full time director was there all the time. I spoke to several two of the part timers and they would be getting information late. Some of the program students had already committed to something else. It was very frustrating. The concept of the program was phenomenal and there was a degree of frustration. That's where I'm coming from. That's all. I've heard that too and I think one of the other issues that can be the program is demanding it's a rigorous curriculum that the TSTT they have their curriculum that they set up. They have a lot of expectations for the students to do. Internships and tutoring and things like that. When you have students like we do in Arlington and a lot of the other districts do too who are involved in athletics and clubs and part time jobs and whatever it's very difficult to fit it all in. As you know our students are extended in this high school and many high schools in Massachusetts and have a lot going on and it's another thing that is very useful and helpful but it's just hard to get it all in. If I may just one more. The benefit of one of the students that finished the program in the next four years at Leslie was going to cost that student something like $2,500 a year including books, tuition and room and board. Scholarships through Barnes & Noble the main program has a lot of connections and stuff so extremely beneficial for these young people. They earned it. They earned every bit of it but I was just astounded that these people were gaining. The one other thing that is a challenge for the students. One of the things that the program does is it has college partnerships and so as you were saying the students can get at least 50% off tuition primarily or 50% scholarship for the colleges that are partners with TSTT. The only local college that was really a partner was Leslie University and that's been a recent development. I think they've talked to other colleges around here to try to add them. The limitation of the colleges. There's more in the New York area and some other in Westchester County and other upstate New York but not as if that would increase that would help too and a lot of our students there's other sources that they're getting college funding from. Dr. Seuss. I'm very sad to hear this and I just have to say that it's just kind of like such a fabulous program and I hope that things work out. Thank you. Anything else? Nope. Vote for approval second read of the 2016-2017 Arlington Public Schools calendar. Dr. Bode. We have a calendar before us. You have a calendar before you. Essentially this calendar identifies what the start date is of the school year. Major vacations. Major holidays. Of course the early release time we have on Tuesdays for elementary. So pretty much all of the essential information is in this calendar. What it does not have right now is perhaps your approval on what the dates are for the school committee because we just put them in based on the policy which sometimes given other conflicts those dates get changed around a bit. And also we don't have parent conferences on here at any of the levels or if there are early release days at the secondary level. We will be able to have that information by the end of this school year which we did last year and so we'll do an updated calendar at that time. I think parents are very would like very much to know what the key times are for next year. And our hope is that we're going to be able to do that for say the next two years after that. I know the committee relations committee, subcommittee and the AEA are going to do a joint survey just to get a sense from parents of some issues around the start time and maybe some other things that they're going to talk about. Because I would I think it would be helpful parents before the end of this school year to know the opening school date for 2017 and 2018 if we can do that. Obviously there will be incomplete calendars but it's getting the key times in there. Mr. Heiner. I would ask the superintendent to ask all the principles and stuff that's going on in the low auditorium right now. Not be scheduled for Thursday night unless it's an absolute emergency. There are too many programs I think that would be it's very important for members of the school committee to have a presence. A lot of them have fallen on Thursday night. Tonight is one that I truly wanted to go to. I asked if it was going to be videotaped but it's not the same thing. So I would ask going forward. I mean there was some talk of changing that I think the I don't know which is easy for us to change our night or for programs not to be scheduled on the night that we're meeting. That's what I'd ask you to do going forward please. Well I certainly will and I sometimes it has to do with when the speaker can come. There's a lot of other factors involved and also when we've had some actual school events whether they be parent conferences. The preference is clearly to have it more toward the end of the week because when teachers have a long day of teaching and are out in the evening it's better when it's toward the end of the week rather than the beginning of the week. So those are some issues that have always been. Maybe the conversation needs to go forward changing our night. I don't know. We've already referred that to policies and procedures but seeing that we meet twice a month I don't see it's going to happen in this county. But going forward with the discussion. The problem with the conference is that we have very few options for school community meetings in December and very few Thursdays and so to the extent that we can schedule around the committee meetings which is helpful then to get them on the calendar we'll certainly try to do that. Thank you. Mr. Thielman. So I'm going to move approval of the calendar with the understanding that it's going to be amended with filled in filled in rather filled in but this gives parents the start date and the end date for the year. Second. Second by Ms. Starks. Dr. Allison Ampe. I don't have anything on the current calendar but I'm very glad to hear that we're talking about getting the next calendars set earlier because we've been talking about doing that for years and we really need to do it. It passes people up. Any other discussion on the motion? Dr. Seuss. Just to clarify so we still have the option in the future calendars, not this year of course, of changing the date if we go to changing the date of the school committee meeting. We can even change it this year. Our policy allows us to set them on, our policy allows us to choose the Thursdays that they will beyond and if we want to amend our policy to remove either 6.30 or Thursday we may do that and that is before the policies and procedures committee right now. That's separate from this. We'll approve this as is and we don't commit to ourselves. We're not committing anything other than the start and the end. And the early releases and stuff. Yeah the early releases are set too but that could change. Okay. If you change the PD calendar for professional development. We're going to try to keep those in place. Right. Well next year the professional that absolutely has to be on the day of the presidential election. Yeah. There's an agreement we have with the clerk's office that when we have major elections that would be our PD day because it's just it works out better because there's so many people that are coming to the schools. I think the calendar will be filled in with more information after we approve it. Okay. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Opposed. That's the unanimous vote. Thank you. Next will be fiscal 17 budget. What are Arlington public schools priorities? Superintendent. You were when we first began this discussion of the budget you've heard from principals and we've certainly had a number of meetings with administrators saying what are the essential things that we need for our school district to provide the services that this community has expected of our schools. And we shared with you a list that totaled about $3.8 million. Of that we were able to see that in terms of our past formula for going forward that we would probably have $500,000 that we could put toward that amount bringing it down to roughly 3.3. Since then we've been given the number by the town manager and in fact this evening we do need a vote on that number going forward so that is one thing that will happen and I believe that we have the motion and the number for that. I have the number. Yeah. Okay. But we can get to that in a minute. But we have spent some time over the last couple of weeks since we were given that number and what we would take of that list and what we would say would be from our point of view from administrators point of view and teachers point of view I would also say that we would put forward to come to the dollar amount which basically comes to about $1.5 million. Of that 1.5 million 500 of that is the money that we would have from the formula for town appropriation. 250 of that would be from our revolving accounts and then the remaining amount of money is part of the change in the formula for next year that goes to the 35% of per pupil for enrollment growth and that differential between our current formula which is 25% and 35% 10% over the last three years. So essentially it's in the neighborhood of about 950,000. So we have given you what we think are the priorities for that. Ms. Johnson has been working on preparing the budget documents for use and that has to go to the printer tomorrow so you have it next week. But this is the opportunity now and over the next couple of meetings to have some discussion about those to see if there are different priorities that you might have as a committee. So that's what's one of the beginning discussions. What will come from this meeting however will not be reflected in any documents that have to go out tomorrow pretty much because that's all has to do with already pretty much there to go to the printer. We did get some very unexpected and good news today however. I was at the mid-year conference with superintendents this morning and Commissioner Chester announced that something that none of us knew about that the governor was proposing a way to encourage more districts to have a full-time kindergarten without fees and has proposed that districts that have that would be given $350 per student that would be used supplementary we could not supplant anything working pretty much like how Title I works so it would be supplementary and if that does happen we would be very close about $30,000 shy of what it would take to have full-time teaching assistance in the kindergarten. So we won't know that until the budgets finally passed but I heard about it and we immediately Julie Dunn immediately called the Department of Education we were the first district to call to find out is this really true and apparently so. It's a different kindergarten grant extension than what we previously had so it's an entirely different initiative which is supplanting the old version. So that was a piece of good news and the other is that we would have a little bit more in the way of Chapter 70 not a lot and I believe that you think that that would come to about $1,000. I heard about $120,000 thrown around I would hope that we'll use it to fund reserve positions. No, you don't. This is all very new information since that was put into your Novus Box. I would just say that the Chapter 70 increase was haltry and I think the first thing I did when I saw those numbers is I called the Governor's Office to complain and then called the Rep and the Senators to complain as well. It sort of puts us in a peculiar position in that we do have two reps and a Senator who are very solid behind us but one of the really important things to have up on Beacon Hill is their ability to hold a stack of phone messages of outrage from their constituents over this Chapter 70 change and the Foundation Budget Review Commission talked about how underfunded the Foundation Budget was and so now we have a Governor who inflates it at negative .022% so he's cutting the Foundation Budget rather than increasing it so that it's leaving us with about a 1.5% increase in our Chapter 70 or actually it's a 1% increase in Chapter 78 with a 1.5% increase in students and it's totally unjustifiable and I think that anyone within the sound of this voice our Union friends, our parents needs to make three phone calls tomorrow. One to the Governor's Office and one to their Rep. Senator either Mr. Garbley or Mr. Rogers and fill their phone messages with complaints about the disinvestment because what's going on here and I'm sorry I shouldn't be talking like this but it's egregious that the State has the ability to raise revenues but they've taken it off the table and they've taken away our ability to raise any kind of revenues locally. Massachusetts municipalities are the most restricted municipalities in the nation in terms of their ability to raise revenue locally so all the state is doing with this budget or all the Governor's because the legislature hasn't adopted it is proposing to pass the problem on to local school districts and that's irresponsible to go and balance your budget and turn the problem over to somebody else and I think it's egregious Mr. Hayner why are we voting tonight and what is it exactly we're voting that you're asking us to vote on the number that the town has given gave us last week appropriations yes at a later date can we raise it after we vote can we raise it is this this vote tonight does it lock us into that number it's accepting the number I have a concern about that because in the budget meeting we had yesterday the idea was the initial budget is your budget we're formulating our budget it sounds like we're adopting the budget or we're going to have to take cuts within it and be restrained by the top money and I'm a little bit nervous what happens if we don't accept it tonight I'm not saying we're not going to accept it what happens if we don't accept it tonight anything this isn't the mandatory acceptance of the budget that we have a certain date that we have to accept the budget prior to town meeting I'm just concerned that this puts restraints on the committee to increase if we if we come to a consensus to increase I'm not saying that we're going to I'm just nervous about that well this is the number that emerged from long range planning in terms of what would seem to be a reasonable number going forward I think that putting this in context I think everyone acknowledges that we are going to be going to the voters for debt exclusion overrides on a number of projects which I will talk about tonight the high school and we are also looking down the road at an operating override the town has been done an excellent job in being able to take the past override and have it extend many years and part of that ability was actually through the employees of the town agreeing to go into GIC plus some additional monies that came through the budget process of the state but that is not going to go on indefinitely but when they're looking at the money that we would use for operating budgets up through the next three years or whatever number of years they want to do it with the eye toward what is a reasonable operating override I understand that and I appreciate all the work that's been done by you Miss Johnson and the long range planning committee and everything but in the budget process we're going through we're doing outreach right now to each of the schools and stuff and part of that is to ask parents in different groups to communicate with us their needs and their priorities by voting this tonight my concern is those meetings are fairly hollow other than if a group of parents say we would like you to increase this or we would like you to support this it means we then or you have to cut something out if we make that a priority and not that it would be 100% funded but it makes it to me just an act of futility in my mind that's all I'm saying can I at least proceed really just saying procedurally you asked me what this would mean the only way that that number that bottom line number would change would be if the finance committee recommended a different number to town meeting or the committee went to town meeting and asked for more money yeah so I think that we're not voting the buckets we're just voting the number like we always do every January we have to vote to accept the final number this is the final number this is a lot earlier than we normally do so this is not the end of January can we not Mr. Thielen I think we have to vote to accept the number tonight and I'm trying to understand do you want to talk about the cuts or should we make a motion to get the number I think that done first we can have a motion before us to vote the number but the discussion can go into the impact of it so that our debate on whether or not to approve that motion to accept the number that's been offered to us can be informed by the discussion and I'll put the motion on the table it'll be a second then I'll ask questions I'll second it okay so I move what's the number we accept the number is the total 50 you're going to read it you might as well have it so I move that the school committee accepts the following allocation from the town for our budget fiscal year 17 57 million $1,333 by Mr. Hayner and Mr. Thielman continue followed by the chair of the budget subcommittee go ahead Mr. Thielman so I just I went through the list of the cuts and the document is titled color coded so I'm looking at FY17 color coded ask cuts for 17 okay so I see under Audison teachers SLCB teaching assistance so what's the plan for SLC given these cuts at the Audison we would not be increasing staff and so how many SLC classrooms so the model at the middle school is a little bit different from the model at the elementary school so it's not a completely sub separate where it's a classroom all day students go there throughout the day a special education teacher too so what would be what's the impact going to be on that change and from what we asked if there are program referrals obviously the class size during those periods will increase the social work will have a larger caseload all the collateral work that you do around these students who have social motion needs working outside the virus will increase on two individuals that we currently have under the elementary cuts and that's Stratton Hardy Bishop Stratton Hardy Bishop teachers and one was an ELL, two were ELL teachers and one was a reading specialist what's the, could someone just describe the impact of that we would have a larger number of students that have to be serviced by the ELL teachers one of the things that we are looking at particularly at Hardy is whether if we have other elementary teachers that are hired and the same thing at Thompson to see if we can obtain dual certified teachers so that those students, you know, that would help us with managing the caseload in terms of the ELL in terms of the reading specialist we do currently have a situation where we have to prioritize the students that receive reading services we are currently not able to service all the students that we might like to have reading services and this will increase that to some degree. Thank you. Audison, World Language, Spanish, French, 1.8 FTE that means that, is that means larger class sizes offering, what's the trade off? Certainly larger class sizes but, you know, Dr. Bodie has a policy at the high school regarding the minimum number of students that are necessary for to be in a course in order to run it. This is middle school I understand I was going to just say that we're going to probably have to use the same kind of guidelines similar guidelines at the middle school. I will add one more thing, one of the constraints we've had with world language at the middle school this year is the size of the classrooms they've been in and we're probably going which constraints a number of students so class sizes will rise but it's also going to mean that some classes are going to have to move to other rooms and have more traveling for world language teachers. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. And the one thing I did want to point out is I think I got this right the science kits that's saved. We're going to do the materials are all the same. We're going to take that out of revolving money so that's a one time expense. Okay. And out of the revolving reserve fund. Right now we're planning to take 250,000. Okay. So the one, so that's a good thing in some respects and another thing, in another respect it's a little dangerous because then we get we get used to that. That's a concern. There are certainly expenses that come up that are unexpected. The elevator is a good example of that. Because there's certain things that we're going to have to fund. One could argue is so what is the right percentage to have in keeping your revolving accounts with the budget, this size the number of students we have and frankly I think we're we're fine. With the numbers we have right now to have no reserves is not good prudent management of a school district this size. It's just not. And so having something in the order of 2% I think is a reasonable number. Okay. Thank you. That's all my questions. Okay. Dr. Allison Ampe. Okay. So I'm sorry I wasn't here last time and behind on meetings and I'm still playing catch up and also I'm not 100% but I'm doing my best. First, when we have voted before on this what we have phrased it as at least in the recent past is we acknowledge the number that we were given. Knowledge. So I'll take the friendly members instead of accept acknowledge. Yes. Because certainly it sits better with us. So the second thing is we did have a we had a meeting yesterday with the budget subcommittee. One of the things that we brought up was whether we we had heard about the town's funding and the numbers that were coming down and so one of the obvious questions is do as Mr. Hayner was saying do we just accept it or do we keep coming back and what I found was that the budget subcommittee itself was very divided and I didn't feel that we could come to a resolution so we don't bring forward anything in terms of a specific recommendation either accept or not. I felt it was better just to have us all make our own statements about what we thought. I'll wait and get back to what my thinking is on this. So the that's really what it calms down to is whether we acknowledge and accept the number or whether we try and push forward. There really isn't much precedent for us pushing forward. In fact there wasn't really precedent for us pushing what we did. So it's hard to say how will it fit into budgets and things you know clearly budgets are still flexible. I mean things are being decided until town meeting but there are so many other balls in the air also and we were having to look and think about all of these things at the same time and pick what is the best option for all of them and it gets very complicated. I appreciate that you were eliciting the feedback on what the meaning is of not having these things as we communicate out to parents where we will bring some of this information to them to speak to Mr. Heiner's point about what's the point in going and talking to parents. Part of what we're doing budgeting is always a zero sum game. It's figuring out what parts within that zero sum what parts do we keep and what parts do we shrink and what parts do we grow and what we're trying to hear from the parents is our thinking in line with what their desires are. And so I don't feel that there is no reason to go talk to people if we've already accepted a bottom line number and just to clarify as we were having sort of side talk this is the usual actually the last meeting was the one that we normally acknowledge the number and it's always in what way in advance of our budgeting and part of that's because of the way the town does it with the long range plan and going forward I think in other situations it may be somewhat different. But I think it is important for us to continue going forward and collecting information from parents but also I had asked last for last meeting to gather school committees thoughts on what priorities were and I think that message got kind of garbled so we are still interested in hearing what you folks are thinking or what you're hearing from people so that we can go forward and look at what the decisions are and think about them in that light. Am I done? Ms. Starks is next. I had a bunch of questions my first question was I assume that the increase early childhood asked for two TAs and they're getting three I assume that's because they're not getting the teacher. And then initially in the I noticed that we only had one reserve teaching position but in this new one that's available tonight the color coded one we have two reserve teachers. I don't know how that changed. We have one unless you put in the you put the two in because of the chapter seven. I wondered where it came from. They had a meeting about this. We're feeling very uncomfortable at the number of reserve positions as you can well understand this last year we had eight. Yes. That's why I was concerned because we initially had asked for five then it was cut back to one but now I see it's back up to two which I feel a little bit more comfortable with but I just wondered where that came from in that. If I could it's two on top of the two that we've automatically allocated to Thompson to staff the two. Right. Right. So it's actually four ads. Well we also allocated one to Hardy. One of those two reserve ones. One of the two reserve ones. At least one. We have we're going to need one or possibly two teachers at Hardy next year. The second teacher will depend upon what happens with kindergarten enrollment. All right. So that's what those are for. Yes. But we put the two for P.E. For P.E. Yes. No. They asked for more P.E. The Odyssey. No the elementary school. The problem is the overcrowding elementary school P.E. classes. Okay. The other question I have is translation asked for 10,000 so you gave them 11,589. That was to hit the number exactly. In addition that's actually kind of low. It's way low anyway. Okay. I needed something to tie us out. Okay. And then I wondered you I'm excited that we're going to put another nurse at the Odyssey given the number of kids there. And I just I noticed that their original ask was for $68,600 but we're only giving them $54,000 but we're still keeping the FTE the same. Did we just find a cheaper nurse? That's exactly what happened. Director Franke told us that she could find somebody for that price so we lowered the amount. Of course I feel just like everyone else I have I'm sure that I mean it's heart wrenching the stuff that we can't do but I mean I understand that the decisions that had to be made I don't think that I could make them any differently so I just wanted to make sure I understood what this done. Thanks. Thank you. Was one of the considerations the amount of X's in the four columns on the left if there were four X's that would get the funding before the more X's equals more dollars. Okay. One of the things that I'm concerned about with the Common Core is that the teacher's professional development in Common Core is getting not funded at all support for Common Core implementation. And we're also the elementary math coach and the reading is for example the elementary math coach is .2 instead of 1.6 if we're not going to have the teachers having that professional development and we're not going to have the coaches that we need and we're switching to a test that is all Common Core it just seems like something's going to not be right in that equation so I just want to know. Well I can have Dr. Chesson chime in on this too but I will say we've been doing a lot of work on Common Core. Professional development is an extremely important investment that we make in our teachers because that's how our students benefit. As we go forward with this we'll hope that they'll be able to offer more. The thing to remember about a budget is that it's a blueprint. It's not exact to the dollars because you can't do it until you go through and that's what you see in the actuals the year goes on. So we're hoping that as we actually hire and we live with some of this we'll be able to do that because we share your value. It is extremely important. And a lot of the curriculum development work and professional development occurs in the summer and so we're going to have to set a dollar number for this summer and have to live with whatever that's going to be. It might be certainly less than we've seen in the last few summers unfortunately. Do I have time for another? Go ahead. In terms of curriculum, hard paper and books and we were told we needed to update. Just as a sort of layperson I value bodies over books and I value old books to hiring a new body. What placement and what importance do you put in that priority in terms of can you get by with older materials so that you can get that extra math coach or that extra teacher? I think that at the middle school we've been doing that. We've been doing it for 20 years as you heard when they came to speak. I think it's time that we say we've gotten every dime out of this that we possibly could have. I think also at the elementary school we're asking teachers to teach common core in math and literacy in science and social studies without the appropriate materials. I mean we're already asking way too much of them but without the appropriate materials that's almost like breaking the horse's leg before it comes out of the starting blocks. I mean it just cannot, it can't happen. We need to have those materials so that teachers at least have a framework to follow when they are able to do it. Particularly in the compressed school day that we have there's just no way that without those materials they need a road map to see where they're going. So we really looked and only funded those that we absolutely needed and so those would be curriculum materials that are common core based at the elementary school and at the middle school we finally had to say you know if the countries have changed five times since we put out this textbook I really think that we and I know I'm being sarcastic and I apologize but I'm just trying to emphasize that things have changed in the last 20 years and we just really there's nothing with working with the companies to say it's like Lisa's description to Windows or Microsoft. Like everyone has to have a least number right? Like they can't borrow their cohort teachers. Well actually we set up classroom books now and we get digital copies for students to make use of at home so we do not buy a textbook for each student anymore we haven't done that in a really long time. The other issue is substituting curriculum materials or a person for the curriculum materials. We're going to be funding the curriculum materials out of revolving account money and I think it's not good budgeting to count on a position funded from the get go out of that. Certainly what has happened in past years is we've sometimes gone to the reserve and it's not really it's not we can call them reserve but they're revolving accounts that in some cases are not entirely earmarked that we've had to pick up a point two or something in those but that from at this point in the process to budget out for it's not part of the base then so I think for one time expenses this is a very appropriate use of that money. Thank you. Dr. Seuss. So I just have two questions in the statement so just a clarification about numbers the kindergarten new proposal by the governor and we recognize that the governor's budget is only a starting point and then actually budgets originate from the legislature it may look very different eventually but how does that number for the kindergarten program compare to the amount that we were previously getting I mean it looks like we have about 500 students at 175,000 does that seem right? It's pretty comparable to the kindergarten grant for this year. Right and so so we previously from that amount we were only funding a half time TA so we would be adding to our budget. Let's see what happened is that when we were deciding what would put into the base budget we could have said because the grant went away and this is actually how we've handled grants in the past when a grant has gone away then that those positions go away but we felt that very strongly felt that we you know not to have at least a half time TA so we didn't put it in the grant part we could have done it that way so now that we have done it this way if the money comes out in the grant program the way we've done it it's for it can't it can't supplant what you've already budgeted. Okay good so in some ways by making that decision early on we've created a situation where it could feels like extra. Yeah exactly. The other question I have about numbers is the chapter 70 increase so the 120,000 is less than the 170,000 that Adam was counting for in his budget so do we then not get that amount? We only get anything above 170,000. It's 126 I believe and I believe this is above that number but we don't know that for a fact yet. Is that so right? I thought we were well the increase I think it was below what Adam was expecting so we wouldn't get any that under the current proposal is that no the agreement was regardless of what the chapter 70 was we would get the funding so through the agreement if it was above but if the number came in above a certain number we would get that right but 120 below 170 that's what I'm wondering about is the 120 already is there somehow the increase 120 is on top of it or is it below it and so we don't get that money under the governor's proposal. Can I read what he wrote in his budget? Go right ahead. In addition to this significant increase this budget recommendation further proposes that any increase in chapter 78 above what is currently estimated which is 126,000 be provided to the school department so we only get that number because we just there was just sort of a comment about the 120 being something we could put into reserves and it sounds like if we get it we don't have it. It's not in the budget. Yeah but it sounds like even if suppose today the governor's budget best passed then according to the agreement that according to what Adam's proposal is we don't get any extra money. Correct. Okay that's what I thought so we can't put anything in reserves because we don't get anything extra necessarily. We don't get any extra money yet so it's not any part of the budget. Even in the budget it's not. It's not in here. Okay. So that was the question. So and then I just have a statement and I'm sorry to take up your time but just to point out how constrained we are year after year our per pupil spending is less than the state's average. Our pupil spending is less than the talents to which we compare ourselves to is not Lexington and not Newton. I mean we're way below that. We're talking about much lower than places like Belmont and other places I have a list over here but we are number eight in terms of you know if you list the towns one to twelve we're number eight. So we are constantly constrained this year is no different. The town is also constrained and I feel for the needle to which Adam has to thread the thread or whatever. Threading the needle is a very very difficult thing. I think that we as a town need to have a conversation about what we want our town to look like and what we want our tax base to look like. Nobody likes taxes but we need to figure out what kind of services we want to provide to our citizens and what that's going to look like in terms of the tax base. I hope that in the context of the enrollment discussions and the possible debt exclusion and the possible operating override that that conversation happens and that we really go to the voters and ask them what do you want. Thank you Mr. Heiner. I'm deeply concerned about the cuts on the special education especially at Audison and the high school. When the presentation was done by the high school directors they emphasized the need for these positions for high needs in math science and English to maintain that level one school. That's the spot the high need students where the one and two even the lower ones that's really where we get hit. The high school seems to get hit real hard in this whole budget. Maybe their asks and their dreams were higher than everyone else. I'm an elementary teacher and I value everything. I am deeply concerned about the special education and I would ask everybody bottom line if things we vote a number. You folks take that number and there's possibilities you're going to make changes and stuff throughout the year for the needs. I pride myself in saying I'm a member of a school committee which is a level one high school. All the programs at the high school make it a pristine high school. The building doesn't make it. It's quite obvious that we're producing phenomenal graduates in spite of the facility. Thank you. My comments are just two very brief ones. I'm very concerned about the cuts to ELL positions. ELL parents are not the ones that come out here in squawk. They just need advocates and we should be their advocates. I also note that where we do not have level one schools our shortfall is for high need students and to be cutting funding for positions to address the needs of high need students I have tremendous difficulty with. The other thing I would note is a town meeting member since 1992 or something like that and somebody who's been involved in the town side as well as the school side since this last override I've noticed absolutely no erosion of services or angst about cuts in any other town area but we're being put through this and I think there's something critically wrong with that picture. I think one of the things that we did when we went for this override is we said we would hold our property taxes and our spending to certain levels but we'd also provide maintaining the level of services that we were providing back when the override was voted and with the increase in enrollment we're not able to keep up with that and we're not increasing the mileage of town roads, we're not increasing the number of homes on sewers appreciably but we're having a significant annual increase in students which are yielding higher class sizes and reductions of services and I've got a problem with that. I mean if we're one town and we have to absorb cuts as a town they shouldn't all be on our side of the street and that's where I stand. So I guess it's time to take a vote and I'll do that as a roll call. Mr. Heiner. No. Mr. Pierce. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Ms. Starks. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Dr. Seuss. Yes. The chair votes no. It's a 5 to 2 vote. Dr. Allison Ampey. Can I ask one more question about the color code budget? Yeah, quickly. Yeah. What's the athletics money for? If I may, the athletics department was somewhat tumultuous before Melissa Dougalucky took over and we needed some time to figure out exactly what she needed to run it. This 125 basically funds what she has been spending so it's not an increase to her budget, it's simply budgeting what she's been spending anyway. You know when you see the budget you'll see that it's predominantly in the areas of transportation, which you've shot up tremendously the new transportation contract for athletics is very expensive and ice time. I mean those are the two big things that we're getting hit on. As you see, her whole ask was her having based on a couple years of experience what she needed to optimize the athletics budget and build and maintain the programs that she thinks the district really needs and so that was the whole $246,000 ask. But the 125 I feel is essential because the money's going out the door already. So we just need to be honest with ourselves about it. Thank you. Now for the good news Dr. Bode MSBA board decision regarding Arlington High. Yes, it's absolutely a wonderful decision. Yesterday I attended the board meeting and the Mass School Building Authority Board into the eligibility period 26 communities. Arlington High School was one of the communities and we actually a board member is a 1989 graduate so he did make the comment. Still looks the same. He was very happy to see that Arlington High School was on the list. So what is happening and I think adds a little bit of the confusion about this is that the commencement of the eligibility period is going to be staggered and they've never had such a big cohort coming in for different projects. So this is a way to I think just space out the process because I put into your into Novus you have a schedule that you can see what are the deliverables during the eligibility period and there are very defined timelines for that. For example you have the initial compliance certification with 30 days to get that done. That one's not particularly a tough one but going down the list for example the educational profile questionnaire that actually is a very important document in fact is probably one of the most important documents of this entire list because they emphasize yesterday that your programmatic educational vision is what should dictate the building and they take that very seriously and they really want to see what you're thinking about it and what it's not even just the high school we're going to have to be talking about the entire district. And I remember doing this with Thompson and it took us a while to do it because you have to be very clear because then later you line up your building in terms of what the design is to that educational vision. So you have 90 days to complete that and they can then there's also a whole enrollment piece in this first and that actually is going to be an issue. There's also another piece a part of that enrollment which doesn't show up there is that there are actually components of that and people have asked me well when would we discuss whether the 8th grade would be part of a project later on. That's when you introduce the concept of a new configuration. There's a lot to all of what has to happen in this period of time. As you go through this process if those members are on the school committee at the time we went through Thompson there are a number of board votes as you go through this. So we'll have a feasibility vote and then you have other votes going forward. In fact when you saw the agenda yesterday and I can actually give you a copy of it like you can see all the different votes they did. Some people are going to feasibility. Some people are getting repairs. There was just a lot of different stages that people were in. Arlington I will make it very clear Arlington has been invited into the eligibility. We are going forward with this project. Now while we're not commencing right at the moment that doesn't mean that there's not work that we can do and it does not mean that we cannot go forward at springtime meeting and look at allocation of money for feasibility study which is part of this first module. I want to point out that if you drive around and look at all the cars in the license plates once upon a time every registration expired at the end of the year and you'd have to get a new plate in January 1st and that became onerous for the registry of motor vehicles because they'd be swamped at the end of the year. Now that all the passenger plates are staggered over 10 months based on the last digit of the plate so they can stagger all the re-registrations. Essentially the state's doing the same thing on these building projects. They have a limited staff and they've got to stagger these out over the course of the year. Instead of having a one on our license plate we'll probably have a five that we get voted in on May so we're in the queue to get voted. It's just which last digit of the license plate we end up with so the fact that Belmont got a one on their license plate and we may get a five is not a big deal we'll have the same process and it'll give us a couple of extra months to beat the deadline on doing the first module Mr. Hayner. Without opening a major can of worms when you do the enrollment you have to include the 150 plus or 120 plus students that are at Minuteman in case tomorrow they decide to come back here. That's a very good question and that is something that will be part of all of that. Yes, that's a very good question. Thank you. Mr. Thielman. The 207-day period that starts to run the day you commence so for example Belmont there were eight projects yesterday that were voted to commence their eligibility period and it actually starts two weeks after the vote so they will commence and then they have to complete everything. Now that's the outside of when you have to complete it you can complete that module the day after. Well you could technically. So I just want to clarify that they have not voted to commence for us. We have not voted to commence yet. But we're commencing. We are commencing. There are certainly things I'm going to be thinking about and I think that it's laid out here what you have to do so there's a lot of things that you can think about. You cannot give deliverables until two weeks after you commence. Okay and could you just when would you think so the next an action are we going to take any actions at this year's town meeting? Are we going to have any authorization? I certainly hope so. Dr. Allison Ampe. We can start working on these things without getting in trouble with MSBA if it's before we've commenced. We're not going to be submitting anything. They're not going to review them with us. Whatever we do is just more or less our preparatory work. For each one of these you can be working with your project manager. We will get assigned a coordinator and a manager that there's a back and forth. I saw that with Thompson. Mr. Thielman saw that with Thompson as well. But you don't even begin those discussions about any of this until you commence. I'm sorry go ahead. So we're not actually, I mean we'll do some sort of groundwork stuff but we're not actually starting to work on the module things until after we commence. It's pre-commence. We can do our homework but we can't submit it. No but that's not what she's saying. She's not actually doing it. It's essentially I know what the educational questionnaire is going to be like and it's certainly going to be thinking about it but once we commence that has to be submitted within 90 days. Right. I understand that. They also have rules about what you can't be doing before until you've entered the feasibility study or something. You can't decide on what your school looks like. We're not doing that. I know, I know. I'm just saying I don't know where all those rules are. No and in fact when we went with Thompson we had certainly came in with our preferred option which was a new school but we also had to come in with two other options and that is part of what happens during the feasibility part of the plan. Because you're working at that point because after this and you have to put your team together which means you have to advertise for an owner's project manager and then of course a designer which is your architect. So you have to get your team in place. You don't even begin the feasibility study until you have your team in place. No I understand. A lot of people probably don't understand what the process is. Dr. Seuss. So I have more questions about the feasibility study. So we get the money essentially at town meeting in April. We can't commence gathering the team and doing a feasibility study until it commends until two weeks afterwards. What would be the time period that we could get are the possible options sort of in front of MSBA, in front of people in the town. What is the range of time are we talking end of the summer. Okay. We're talking mid fall. We're talking end of the winter. Just sort of a general range of what kind of time period we're looking at. Maybe you could help me. What do you mean options? Well so I understand the feasibility study doesn't come up with three options that then is presented to MSBA and they weigh heavily on which one they're going to find. I mean they choose which one they're going to find. What timing if we sort of worked our butts off, everything fell into place perfectly. What kind of timing would we be looking at to get those options before MSBA for them to vote on? Get the options. Oh that part can take a while. Okay. In fact that was what took us the longest with Thompson. The Thompson project roughly speaking from beginning to having a dedication was about four years. Right. But what about the time where we're like okay this is the option we're choosing we haven't done any dramatic drawings of it. That's going to be that will take months to do and yes there will be components where we reach out to there'll be a lot of community input into that. There will be a building committee that has formed under the very strict roles that must be played in that and then once you don't really go out until you get your designer and your own project manager. Okay so just a general thing like winter of 2016. I don't think we would be going spring into that. To actually delivering our three options until the sometime in the school year 1718. Okay. Easily. Okay. Mr. Thielman. So when the school building committee is selected that committee it's an open meeting. The options because they impact the town are discussed, impact the entire town budget are discussed by the capital planning committee or the select men, the school committee, the finance committee. We made presentations for the Thompson to all those groups. They were all public meetings and there were meetings with parents. So there's a lot of meetings that take place with a lot of input and there's a lot of back and forth. And there's a lot of people that you know gravitate to one option or another and push for that option. I spent no one. But I think 1718 is realistic. Mr. Pierce. There are eight modules correct in the process for the MSBA for us to go through eight. In fact you can go on the website and there are, I have it here, there are definitely eight different modules that you go through. Each one takes the same amount of time or the same level of work, correct? So assuming that you can do some of the preparatory work in-house before the commencement period begins, does that shorten the project outcome for us at all if? Possibly. But another one could be unexpectedly take more time. For example Thompson, it took us more time because remember that debate that was going on in different groups in town about whether we could use the field and have that whole process took a long time. So you might save some time on one but you might end up having more. And this is going to be a very complex project, very. So the one thing that there was a meeting after well, after the board meeting we were sort of towards simultaneous to the end of it, the towns that were invited to the eligibility period. And you know, the really caution, it's not to really talk about how long it would take at this stage but you certainly can use your experience with an elementary school which was for, you know, at that time 380 students brand new and how long it took us. And then you can look at what it would take for a high school. So you know, you're looking at, it's certainly not going to be a four-year process. Five years might be a very you know, very accelerated process. Go ahead, dovetail on that. I mean, since this is the year that they've accepted the most 26 districts or whatever is there any thought or concern about them over extending as a state agency in terms of will the funds be there when our license plate 5 comes up? They're doing it March, May, and July. No, they're very careful about this and that is one they don't, they sort of, well they don't know the exact number clearly because you go through this process but at the same time they are very careful about not overextending and they've figured this in. And then as you go through the different modules you're going to get down to the module where you're going to have your project scope and budget. And so at that point they know where you are on the budget and that money is encumbered. Their contribution is encumbered. Now one of the things that does get confusing for people as they go through this is that you know even though you get your base rate and we'll probably get that some time in the first part that could actually change because when you actually go to the building and you start going through all the different parts some of it may not be eligible for reimbursement. For example, in this building I am, well I don't want to say emphatically but I think it would be very unlikely that we would not get any reimbursement for any town offices, for example. If you were another high school that wanted to put a turf field in the back, there's no reimbursement on that. A swimming pool. Because it's not deemed educational? Well it's not that it's not educational. There are certain things that they will not reimburse you on. So in other words, if you decide to go ahead with that even though it's not reimbursable then the percentage that they're paying out of the project can change. Right. I just don't want there to be any sort of, for lack of a better word squeeze in terms of districts that have come before us and then by the time they get to us they'll be less willing to partner in the kind of school that we want for Arlington. If we say we want it for this amount of students they'll say well we can't give it to you for this amount of students. We can't give you a percent partnership for that amount. We have to limit you to, I don't want that to happen to us. They're very well managed that way. I wouldn't be concerned about that. Okay. They're pretty consistent in terms of the way they deal with people. One of the reasons why we're there is that back in the old program, if you just think of Newton North when they just loaded up everything you could possibly want in a wish list and got a 60-some odd percent reimbursement as a matter of right by the way it was done. There's a series of standards of the things that they will pay for they will pay for this amount of square footage for this number of students and these kind of things but not those amenities. So if we wanted amenities into the building that would be outside the reimbursement we have to do it 100% town funding. And you have to be careful with that too which is experience that Concord had recently and I won't go into it tonight but there's a fine line between paying for an amenity and whether it goes beyond what the partnership agreement is anyway. Early childhood is that something they reimburse? I did hear from another superintendent yesterday that yes they did reimburse in their school. Okay. Indeed this is good news. We now go to superintendent report and we had a special town meeting on Monday didn't we? We certainly did and it was very special. It was actually the top of my list. I saw it on the list here. It's easy when I've got cue cards. It actually I was I couldn't have been more pleased the town meeting. I want to express my gratitude on behalf of all of our schools to town meeting members and to the community for supporting Stratton and Thompson the way they did that evening. It really was I think it showed a great show of support and I do know from talking with one of our representatives that that's actually something that MSBA does take note of too because that is a show of support for the buildings in the school district so that was absolutely terrific and so we're moving forward with the Stratton project and moving forward with funding to modulars at Thompson Elementary next year. Just terrific as well. I also before we end the conversation on the high school I do want to also say thank you to everybody that participated Diane in particular and working on the statement of interest. I think that we did a very good job and certainly the second time we did it we did even a better job and the school spoke for itself when they came for a senior study. It's clear we need that but there still was a lot of collaboration on doing a good job on the SLI and so I want to acknowledge that and thank everybody. Alright okay so we'll come back to the professional learning network because I'll have Dr. Chaston talk about that but you had mentioned the Martin Luther King event and we did get a declaration this year the Martin Luther King birthday celebration committee wanted to acknowledge and commemorate the 50 years METCO has been in our district and sometimes you know when you take a birthday and you hear the new number and you go how did that happen especially the big ones and 50 was quite a significant number and Arlington stands out in that as soon as the program opened up Arlington was right there, seven communities, it's grown since then so we are one of the originals and so in honoring this event this milestone the Martin Luther King committee honored three people who have been very important to that one of which is Dr. Jean McGuire who is an icon, she has been the executive director I believe since 1973 and she has been an amazing force for METCO expanding METCO, helping get METCO funding for our districts and she was honored that night and attended we also acknowledged Steve Pereira who worked in Arlington for 32 years as the METCO director and he was there that night as well and Steve as you know remained very active in many ways both in Arlington and in the district as well as outside and one of his activities in the district was being AAA president for a number of years and then we also honored our current director of METCO which is Margaret Cretel Thomas and it was terrific to have them all three of them there that night we also which I thought was a particular treat was having some of our graduates come back and recent and even graduates that graduated some years ago and before the event I had a chance to talk to one of the women who is now a kindergarten teacher and has been for quite a while in Boston she just I tried to talk her into coming here but she's very happy and has very fond memories of her years here and so the event went really well and Pearl Morrison again this year she does so well as the moderator there was a quote in some of the literature that was there that night but there's a quote that someone found from Martin Luther King which I read I read that night and I've read it since then I just I thought I want to share I would like to share it with everybody because I think it is in the world that we're in today it really resonates the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy who speaks truth over many years so it was a great event and I think Eileen Chin should be very proud of the fact that they do this every year and there had to be 250 people there easily it was a great event did you want to talk about the learning network I think we've talked about this a little bit with the committee but we are part of a professional learning network we were selected to participate that that's taking a look at teacher leadership and lab site models similar to what we have the group of folks including Miss Hansen myself Tammy McBride another one of our literacy specialists Matt Coleman who is our math director Carolyn Shediak who is one of our math coaches and that Dingman who is the principal of our school on visited Wakefield and heard from their staff about what they're doing in terms of coaching and lab site models and we presented to them so we will have a long term relationship with them throughout this year where we will visit each other's districts and Arlington actually will be hosting a meeting at EDCO because as you know we have slight issues with parking during the day in Arlington so we'll be at EDCO but we'll be hosting the March meeting of the PLN which involves eight districts across Massachusetts that are focusing on teacher leadership so it was a great opportunity for us they have a beautiful new middle school that we got to see so it was kind of interesting for us to see what a new school looks like at another district but also for us to hear what they're challenged with and what we're challenged with and to get ideas from one another and we'll be continuing to do that throughout the year A couple more things ACMI would like to do is planning on doing a series of segments honoring Black History Month which you know is in February and one of the program editors in fact who Ms. Stark worked with, Sarah Power-Fonkel is actually the person behind this event and what they want to interview people about is what does Black History Month mean to you and that is the only question they're going to ask in the interview and Tom Manager, Adam Chapelein has set aside space and time in the Lions hearing room which is on the second floor and inviting all of you, if you can fit in time to come for a short interview about this, I'll send you these in an email but I also want to say publicly because the public is invited to come and the times are this coming Monday, February 1st from 10 to 1 granted that will limit people who are working but then on February 3rd, that's just Wednesday it's from 1 to 3 p.m. and then on Thursday, February 11th from 3 to 7 p.m. and I will send that out to all parents as well and staff, our students, I'm hoping that we will take have some students go over and participate in this as well so it's just one question, what does Black History Month mean to you? I want to just talk a little bit about the February 24th, we're going to have a forum for elementary parents on the Common Core and the Park Assessment. On February 24th it's been scheduled at Thompson Elementary and I'm going to let Dr. Chestins give a couple more details about it. So it will be from 7 to 9, it is for elementary parents, we will also be having a meeting sponsored by OPEC and we're waiting to get the date for that for grades 6, 7 and 8 parents so this will be a meeting for elementary parents particularly all are welcome but it's particularly for parents who have students in grades 3, 4 and 5. There will be also a separate meeting for Bishop parents because as we've discussed Bishop is going to be doing the test using computer based testing and so we'll be having, I'll be attending the Bishop PTO along with Ms. Hansen, Ms. McBride and Mr. Coleman to talk about the testing environment that will be specific to Bishop but all are welcome to either or both presentations and we'll be talking about the schedule and how we'll be preparing students but you know really how we're just test driving it and really want students to feel comfortable but not pressured and that's exactly how we want our staff to feel as well. 24th is at Thompson. We'll send that reminder out to you and to all parents as well, multiple reminders as we talked about. The last thing is kindergarten registration that is going to be occurring in March. Parents are going to be getting letters. Well in fact all the letters are going to I think leave here on the 9th of February because the registration will begin in early March. We've a little bit later about a week later than we were last year because we've invested in some new software and been working to make sure that that is up and running and we'll be launching it but all of that will be happening very soon. We already are getting calls and have been actually for the last few weeks about when kindergarten registration is and so we're going to put all those dates on the website. They've just been finalized. That's it. Okay. We now go to the consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence. Approval of minutes, regular school committee minutes from September 24th, 2015, December 10th, 2015 and January 14th, 2016. Approval of warrants, number 16100 dated January 7th, 2016 in the amount of $655,561 and 25 cents. Approval of warrant, 16104 dated January 14th, 2016. Total warrant amount $218,775 and 25 cents. Moved by second by Ms. Starks. All in favor. Need to pull January 14th, please. Pulling January 14th. Anything else that needs to be pulled? Okay. All in favor. Was I here on the 10th? Or is that the one I missed? You. Missed one in December. You were there. You missed the next one. I missed the next one. Okay. Don't pull that one. Okay. So we have. Just the 14th then. Okay. So all in favor. Aye. Opposed. Now we will move the minutes of January 14th. Motion by Mr. Thielman. Second by Ms. Starks. All in favor. Aye. Opposed. Abstain. Aye. Okay. One abstention. Six in favor. That gets us through there. Now we go to the subcommittee and liaison reports and announcements. We start with policies and procedures Mr. Pierce. Thank you, Mr. Chair. We'll be meeting on Monday, February 1st at 8am or 5pm. 5pm here. We're going to go over school committee meeting dates and times for the coming year as well as a couple other issues. Okay. Facilities, Ms. Starks. Budget first. Oh, budget first. I'm sorry. You've heard most of what we talked about with budget. We had a meeting yesterday. In addition we talked about how the budget will be presented and work towards getting you the color coded list that you saw today. And we'll be meeting again in the future but we haven't sent the date yet. Okay. Now we go to facilities Ms. Starks. Facilities met last Thursday to start the discussion on the middle school enrollment issues. And to that end you have in novice a document called handling enrollment challenges at Ottison, which is a only partially filled in table. But I thought before we spent much more time filling in the table it would be best to have all of your eyes on it. So our goal is to have this document filled in to the best of our ability with at least estimates of timing and costs, et cetera for the school enrollment task force meeting that's happening on February 23rd, which is the week after February break. Facilities is meeting on the 9th of February before that to try to make sure that we can actually fill it all in. So at the Thursday meeting we kind of created this table and the information that's in that document and then asked superintendent to go off and try to fill in as much of it as she could and then we're going to come back on the 9th. Review that, look at it and then hopefully have it ready for the 23rd. But I was hoping that while you guys had a chance to look at it you could give me some feedback on what you think and what kinds of changes or other items should be on there. Can I make one suggestion to add, which is including, I don't know what you called the model but where teachers don't have a homeroom, there's a staff room that they share and then the classrooms are able to be utilized more. I know that won't fix everything forever and I know it's not necessarily a popular option with teachers but it might help during the first crunch time for a little while. Any other comments or remarks regarding this report? Mr. Thielman. There was a comment by parent, by Timor, I forgot your last name. Yantar. Ten night. The subcommittee meets on the 9th, February 9th and so what you had to say tonight about speeding things along or taking as quickly as possible, that's going to be taken up at the meeting on the 9th at 5 p.m. here. I would point out that subcommittee meetings are far less formal and we invite the public to carry on a conversation with us at that point. Just to, and Dr. Bode, one of the things we will need for the meeting on the 9th is information on some of the things we've been talking about. So any cost information, operating cost information, and operating cost comparison between using a new school, creating additional space at the Addison using the Gibbs, so all that stuff. The more information we have on the 9th, the faster we can move the process along. District accountability, curriculum instruction assessment, Mr. Thielman. Okay, so we are, our subcommittee is tasked with coming up with the evidence Dr. Bode has to present to the school committee for her evaluation. The policy requires that by March 31st of 2016, or March 31st every year, Dr. Bode has to give an interim report on for her evaluation on where she is at or the district is at and she is at on the goals that have been selected, the standard goals and as well as the goals that have been selected. So if you open up your document you'll see what the committee has come up with, the subcommittee has come up with for first read is the following pieces of evidence. So evidence for each standard. Standard one instructional leadership is a vision statement or another document describing instructional leadership in the Arlington public schools. Two, the teacher leadership curriculum within the APS professional development plan, and then three park scores correlated with prior MCAS results showing academic performance outcomes of Arlington students K-12 including subgroups. One of the reasons why we pick three measures is because, correct me if I'm wrong, in a teacher evaluation generally you give three measures per standard. Three pieces of evidence. Management and operations, budget presentation of the school committee finance committee and town meeting, reports, materials, minutes of the school enrollment task force, SC members observations of the superintendent in public meetings and evidence of her attendance at public meetings. Standard three family and community engagement is the newsletter, the newsletters that the superintendent sends out each month. List of events of the past year designed to engage the public in school issues, so Dr. Bode's assistant, administrative assistant put together a calendar of the park meeting and other meetings that take place. Results of a survey of parents and community members of APS issues if conducted by the community relations subcommittee. And then standard four we came up with one professional culture which was an annual staff survey results the survey to be drafted by the curriculum instruction and assessment and accountability subcommittee in April and distributed staff in May. And then evidence for two practice goals, one four is the park reports which is the same information as above and then the other evidence goal that Dr. Bode chose develop a plan to address space needs and the evidence required is the McKibben report a plan to respond to the report and communication received or sent to the MSBA regarding the AHS rebuild. So that's what we came up with. This is a first read. Can you tell me where that is? You said it was in Novus. It's in Novus. Under community relations. It's in the reports down there. It's down here. Reference material superintendent evaluation. So Mr. Heiner. Just a quick logistic thing. What Mr. Thelma mentioned at the beginning on the 31st that's the 5th Thursday of the month. So I just suggest for Dr. Bode the 24th of March would be the only meeting prior to that would be having this year. The policy request by the 31st. The meeting is on. We have 5 Thursdays then. But it doesn't have to show up on a meeting. That's all. Thank you. Community relations, Dr. Seuss. Do you want me to present the survey? If anyone has any suggestions or changes that you would like to hear about, maybe you can send Karen your thoughts that can go to the subcommittee. And if we collect a lot of stuff then we'll meet again. If not, we'll presume this is okay. We'll have a second reading in two weeks. Dr. Seuss. Do you want me to present the survey as well as the other stuff? It's within your domain. Go for it. So we had a meeting tonight and I'll go backwards. It was a discussion about sending a survey to parents and educators and staff about calendar issues. Every year we worry about various calendar decisions. Should we start before Labor Day, after Labor Day? Various other questions. And it's a very complicated issue, but it would be great to get a sense of everyone's opinion. Perhaps when we do this survey there's no consensus. It's like 25, 25, 25. But perhaps there is and it would be great to know. So that's our goal. Ms. Hansen and I are meeting next week to try to craft something to go out at the same time to both teachers and parents to ask these basic questions. The thing we took up middle is just a discussion about what we're going to do for the Common Core Slash Park presentation. Some discussion about how to solicit questions from parents before, during, and potentially after the presentation. And then some discussion we had once talked about potentially merging that discussion with a big picture discussion about testing and Common Core and we decided that was too complicated to do in that one meeting and we'd have to pull those things apart. The first thing that we took up was the issue of district lines or buffer zones. This was something that we talked about referring to the Community Relations Committee last time we met. And the sense of the Community Relations Committee is that it is a valuable thing to do to talk about especially expanding buffer zones with the caveat that we would be operating under the assumption that we would do something similar to last time. Existing kids would be grandfathered and siblings would be able to stay in the same school as their siblings. The idea was that this would not do any drastic solutions but it might help us in certain cases when, for example, we might be able to get away with seven grades in an area rather than eight if we expand the buffer zones. If we do this and there is unclear when we're going to start the process but if we do indeed start the process, we thought that it should take at least a year or something around that time to get community input to really flesh things out. So actually what I wanted to get from the committee tonight, this is the subcommittee's sort of sense, but from the rest of the committee, what are your feelings about that kind of process, beginning that kind of process with those assumptions? Yeah. April you get this. I think it's very important you said it's very limited, it's going to take some time. I think again I just want to emphasize to the community that this is not going to be an immediate solution to the enrollment issue. Thank you. Anything else? My one comment is I got an email from a precinct nine resident who wrote to me as a town meeting member saying, what are you doing trying to move me over to the Stratton school? It's a wait a minute. No, no, no. We're not going and making radical changes. We're going to do this. Take a look at things and if we expand the buffer zones if you're in the bishop, you're going to stay in the bishop. But it's just the first level of conversation which we're really charged with talking about whether we come up with any kind of changes that make sense or solve a problem is another story. And we're not going to start making changes if they don't solve a problem. Anything else, Dr. Seuss? Yes. So I felt I should finally report out the survey results that we've been batting around for a long time. It was never time critical so we kept pushing it on the agenda. But over a year ago we did a survey of parents primarily around communication. We received 1,366 results, about 35% of families within our district. I actually think that's a pretty good number. When you do surveys it's not bad. There's a two page survey summary on Novus if anybody wants to look at it. But I'll just talk about the highlights. Parents are very proud of their schools. They feel their children are proud of their schools, that they have excellent schools. They feel that we have great teachers and that the parents and the community is engaged and that kids are happy and self-reliant. They're generally happy with communication. So those are the really good highlights. Areas of challenge, things that we have to work on and I have to stress that things that were unique in respect in a district. Homework, some parents felt that homework was too much, especially at the middle school level. Anxiety, this we know is a national problem that we've seen rates of anxiety increase and social and emotional issues sort of become more center stage. And Arlington is not alone in that. Some parents wanted more challenging curriculum, more ability to be involved and some issues about discipline. But the question that I actually wanted to answer when I suggested two years ago to do this survey is my fantasy question, so I wanted to report on that. I wanted to know if we were given a windfall amount, what would your priorities be as parents? My parents had the opportunity to choose three priorities. So these are my top three choices. Most parents unsurprisingly chose that they would like to add more classroom teachers so as to alleviate overcrowding and not to make classrooms smaller. 27% of parents chose this as one of their top three choices. Second and third most popular elementary school parents were split between adding foreign language to the elementary school and making the school day longer. And we had a limited number of options. Parents might have other priorities, but those are the ones they wanted of our options. Middle school parents wanted math coaches, increases in technology, and a longer school day. High school parents wanted math coaches, increases in technology. And this was interesting. Fourth choice among high school parents only was eliminating sports and music fees. So this was important to 11% of the parents we surveyed. They chose this as one of their top three options. But it was the fourth most common. So it was something interesting to know because I know many parents are passionate about that sports and music fees are too high. We all certainly feel they're too high. But just to know where does this fall in our priorities? Because as Dr. Allison Ampe mentioned, budget to some extent is a zero sum game. And when you add to one, you have to take from something else. So that's it. I mean, some open response. People talk about the utterly dispiriting facilities of the high school. Well, thankfully we are on the road to changing that. You know, class sizes, stuff about crowded facilities. Stuff like that. So the survey results are on Novus available to the public and the summaries as well. Thank you. Executive session minute review subcommittee Mr. Heiner. I have spoken to town council. He's willing to go through it. I'm working with Fitzgerald to make a copy. I'll secure it and hang, carry it and share with him and hopefully he can fit us in and we'll be, yeah, I'll have a report with those that we can release, those that we can't release sometime probably in April. Thank you Warren committee. We all got paid. We didn't get paid. You didn't get paid? No. I got paid. I got my nothing. Not on my signature. They all get paid. We're all going to get a 10% raise next year. Thanks to the governor. School enrollment task force. I think you've heard that. Yeah. Okay. That brings us to the conclusion of our public agenda. We're about to do executive sessions so the motion will be to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or nonunion personnel or contract negotiations with union and or nonunion in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect and to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining and litigation in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect, collective bargaining may also be conducted. Among the list of things would be AEA unit C administrative assistant contract update and negotiations for nonunion personnel. To do this executive session motion by Mr. Thielman second by Mr. Pierce roll call Mr. Heiner. Aye. Mr. Pierce. Aye. Dr. Allison Ampey. Yes. Ms. Starks. Mr. Thielman's yes. Dr. Seuss. Yes. The chair votes in the affirmative. It is 7 to nothing. We are in executive session. We're not returning. We will not be in advice. It will not be returning. Nice to meet you, Mr. Dr. Yontar. Hope we see you again.