 I remember when in the 90s, I managed food sessions at the Monastery Mass, and when I got in, we had all this yellow mustard, and I got in a couple cases of golden mustard. Because I thought to myself, it was a desecration of the hot sauce to not have, you know, a good spicy brown mustard on it. The number of people who wrote saying that the most important change they'd seen that year was that they had golden mustard. They had a proper mustard dorata. It was absolutely astonishing to me. Yes. Or forgot to come. He's just supposed to come. Yeah. All right, so Steve is not here. We do on the other hand actually have quorum. I'll call, I'll at least get around. Well, let me call us to order, then you can, right? I just want to make sure she... I mean, I'm happy to do... I can just at least call her, so she... Yeah, you can start calling her. But she's not part of the quorum. I'm just going to leave this... Actually, aren't we supposed to always, like, announce some sort of remote participation policy? Yeah, luckily you're a regional chair because it's... you basically have to say that in town of Amherst. Yeah, you're citing references to MGL and stuff, region, it's just... you have to announce it. Awesome. Well, I used to work for a state agency that also where you had, like, there was some written thing you had to read out. We're one packet short. Are we really? It's very sad. Can I get one of Steve's? Sure, yeah. I think you can. I'll get another one if I can go ahead and have one. Okay, so you're... We don't sign these during the meeting, can we just let you decide to later? Uh, I don't know. I always consider it to be rude because it's almost an indication. Easy, you're not really paying attention to what you're signing, or you're not paying attention to what I'm talking about. I just want to... I just want to make sure the connection works. All right? I'm going to put you on speaker. I don't think I ever remember sitting next to you. I'm hearing something just... I've been. No. All right, thanks. Are we good? We are. Okay, so seeing the presence of a quorum, I'll call to order this meeting of the Amherst Pellow Regional School Committee at 6.31 p.m. The meeting is being taped for broadcast by Amherst Media, which we appreciate deeply. And also, we have a member of the committee participating remotely. We do have a quorum present physically. And Allison, are you there? I am. I'm having a hard time hearing you, Eric. Well, the microphone is being now oriented more towards me and the rest of us. Can you hear me now? Yes. Cool. Awesome. Since it's not executive session, I don't think we have any other boilerplate around that, except for to make note of the fact that due to the remote participation, all of our votes will be conducted by roll call vote. I think that's it. So... Does someone say something? So the first order of business will be approval of the minutes of October 16th, 2018. Are there people who had a chance to look at the minutes or not and entertain a motion to approve the minutes? Is there one? No, I moved to approve the minutes of October 16th, 2018. Is there a second? Second. Moved by Demling, seconded by Castinson. Are there any edits? Seeing none, all those in favor of approving the minutes of October 16th, 2018, signify by raising your hand. There are four ayes, any nays, any abstentions. Our donators abstains, the motion carries. Oh, sorry. Oh, my God. Yeah, sorry. Screwing up my own rules. Mr. Manino. Manino, aye. Demling, aye. We're donators abstain. Nakajima, aye. Castinson, aye. Donald? McDonald's, aye. Thank you. The motion carries five to nothing to one. Thank you. Next order of business is announcements and public comments. Any announcements from the committee? Allison? Nope. Okay. So we are open for public comments. If you have a public comment, please come forward and address the microphone. State your name. You'll have three minutes to speak. And I will even get my, all everyone's thinking about coming up, coming up. I'm going to close public comment period. Subcommittee updates. LPAC representative, I assume is that it means we need to find one. Yes. Would you like me to find one? Do you want to remind people of what LPAC is? Yeah, and I think, I think in the packet Debbie shared some information about the research. Yep. There it is. Right after the notes. I apologize. Debbie had it right in order. Of course, I'm looking the wrong way. So last year in November, the Look Act was passed. We've talked about it more at the elementary, Amherst Elementary Committee in relation to English language learners. But one of the, another of the positive attributes of the Look Act was that it creates, it requires districts who are a certain size. And between our districts, we fit that size. And we're going to do it because it's the right thing to do even if we didn't sort of technically we could get around it. Which is to create an LPAC, which is an English learners parent advisory council and is modeled after CPAC, which people are more familiar with here. We had our first meetings last Thursday. It was one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Pretty good attendance, particularly in the afternoon. And the idea is to get, increase our participation and input from parents guardians about the English language learner program. So Ms. Richardson, who many of you have met, who is our English language learner coordinator, facilitated that. There were many English ELL teachers and staff present as well. So just getting started, but it would be great if there was a committee member who was willing to step forward to be representative. I think much like CPAC, the plan is to have meetings roughly every month. And again, the goal is to increase participation and input and feedback that we receive from the parents of English language learners in our districts. Wonderful. Any other further questions about that? Is this similar to CPAC in that there's one for both districts? It's like shared. For all three districts, yeah, absolutely. And I think similar to CPAC too, I know Ms. Richardson met with the CPAC president about just the structures that have been successful in CPAC and trying to emulate them. Any further questions? Would take a volunteer now or we'll take a volunteer later? Ms. McDonald, do you have any questions? No, if nobody else is stepping up, I'd volunteer. Then we welcome it. Thank you very much. And I'll make sure that you're connected with Ms. Richardson about future meetings and the agenda from the first one. Excellent. Great. Thank you very much. So do we have any other subcommittee reports like from budget and finance, for example? Just a quick announcement for the committee that the flowered folders that are in front of you have actually been prepared by one of our school equity task force members, a couple, actually, of school equity task force members. You'll recognize a couple of the materials that are in here. One is the second page here, which is stapled together. It's actually the newsletter that Dr. Morris had shared with all of us, I believe, last week or maybe the week prior. And it came from the students here at the high school that have been working on the storage justice program. These are the sort of student leaders. So if you haven't had a chance to read the email, it's been printed out for you. And I highly recommend it because it shows some of the enthusiasm and excitement for new students. The other thing you'll see here is a letter from former principal Mark Jackson regarding his experience with the Restorative Justice Program. As we know, he was presiding over the initial meetings that took place when the program was started. He has worked with the SCTF for over a year, has had a couple meetings with the SCTF and has reported back to the SCTF on the progress of the program. And so he includes some of his thoughts in here that we thought you might want to see. And then finally is the one of the pages of a report that was shared with the committee also a couple of weeks ago regarding just some of the disparity in discipline and in education, particularly among black and Latino students. And so wanted to highlight this because there's a lot of really important information that came through in this report. And of course it's work that we have been talking about and thinking about and the SCTF in particular has been very concerned with. And so we thought it was a good idea to highlight this as well. So I just want to thank two of our members of the SCTF that are here with us tonight, Alisa Malnick and Mary Lou Farrow, who's also been working with this group for quite some time. But in any case, just wanted to highlight this and make sure people get a chance to read it. Great. Thank you. Pleasure. We held a meeting at 5 o'clock, reviewed three documents. A draft of the trust agreement for OPEB benefits. A draft of the designer selection procedures. And we talked a lot about fees. And we took no votes. Okay. Okay. Great. Let's see. Where are we now? Any other subcommittees that want to report? Robert, any updates on their meetings? Yes. Just one question. I'm also sitting on the board currently for the collaborative for educational services. And I think it's more of a process question. So they will routinely share the director's report and some of the other materials. I don't know if the committee would like me to go ahead and forward that directly to the committee or if we should go to the chair and serve them first. What's your preferred method for sharing things like that? I guess what we typically do, it seems like a lot of things run through depth. Yeah. I'm sorry, I was typing. Yes. It can come through me. Okay. And I'm happy to get it out to you. Great. Thank you. Okay. Any other subcommittee updates? Seeing none, we'll move on. Superintendent's update. Sure. Do we have a separate piece of paper for this? This is actually in the packet. Okay. So the upside of getting in the packet is, it previewed it. The downside is, of course, there's things that aren't in the packet that I then realized. Right. So I'm going to orally share them. But it's on the page right after the Look Act page, I believe. Yeah. You mean it's in order again? It is. Thanks to Ms. Freshmoreland. And so, this month, earlier this month, we partnered with, a group we've partnered with before Pear, which is political asylum immigration representation. They're based out of Boston, but there are some folks who are parents, guardians of the district and other interested people who are connected to Western Massachusetts. And in this space, we offered a New York rights workshop for our high school students. We did that a couple of years ago, you may remember, but, you know, things with high schools is the kids change, right? So we didn't necessarily take the students who saw it two years ago, but also some of the content had changed. In fact, I think it changed three times in the month. They sent us the content of the slide deck a month before. And I think there were three iterations based on changes that were going on, particularly in the federal government. So I want to thank Dr. Guevara, who is a private contact, Dr. Gramacchi, who's here tonight, Interim Principal Gramacchi, and I was able to attend part of it as well. And I was really impressed with the engagement of students. Their questions ranged from technical to political to what's the future of our country going to be, to, yeah, I think I'll leave it there as a confidentiality of their comments. But what was new this time, in addition to a slightly different set of information, was that the week after, students were able to end their families if they wanted to come in and meet individually, because this is a group setting. The first one, there was probably, I think, 20, 30 students present. So they were able to meet individually with representatives from PAIR to talk about their individual situation and context and get individual feedback and advice. So it was a nice thing that we were able to offer our students. And, you know, I think without getting into exactly the content of the dialogue, it was one of the more poignant things to see someone like me who was born in this country have a lot of privilege that comes along with that and getting to witness students who don't have that privilege be able to interact with the larger context, which I read about, care deeply about, but don't personally experience in that way. One of the both poignant, scary, and I don't know, it was an experience that sticks with me, certainly. So I'm glad we were able to offer that for our students and their families. The LPAC event I just mentioned a bit of. So last week, we had the first meetings. We did one in the morning and one in the evening, or late afternoon, based on feedback that we could try to access families when they were available. Mr. Richardson facilitated the meetings. Again, the afternoon one happened to be a lot better attended than the morning, but there was a lot of interest in being more involved in school. We had translators present and staff present because there's a range of languages that families speak, but highly successful start to a new venture for us. Cross-country updates, so just the girls and boys teams won the Western Mass Championships and individually. We had two students win the individual titles and for those who don't know cross-country, that's the same event. So the team runs and then the individuals are running as well. So the teams won and the first finisher for both the boys and girls for Western Mass was from our school. Also at the middle school level, the boys and girls won team trophies at the Western Mass cross-country meet, and also we had the boys and girls champions at the middle school level as well, which was neat. Strategic planning, so on October 31, which is Halloween, we had over 35 stakeholders which included middle school, high school students, faculty, community members, and parents' guardians engaged in the first meeting of strategic planning team. We set a context, we set goals for the work, we created norms, and we participated in envisioning what we'd want our school to look like in three to five years, and those 38 people I think it was, are now crowdsourcing getting more feedback from their communities. So when the group comes back together on January 9, lots of work has happened about not just relying on 38 people, but actually getting their constituent groups to come and participate in getting that feedback as well. We had a college access retreat, this is all the way back on Indigenous People's Day. So we had students, a staff from the family center work with UMass students from a certain sorority, particularly for students who their hope is to be the first in their family to go and attend and graduate from college. So they don't necessarily always have the family background support for that process because they're the first to go through it. So we provided some additional support on that day and the feedback we got from students was highly successful and supported them into thinking that this whole thing called college applications was more doable and readily available to them. We'll hear more about this in December with a more detailed update, but we've had the math consultant from Looney Math Consulting VR 6 to 12 math program. They've been in classrooms, they've talked to staff, they've been here twice, they also had two parent guardian opportunities for feedback, as well as surveys that went to staff, students and all parents and guardians at those grade levels. Mr. Sheen will be at the next meeting and he'll give a much more thorough detailed review of that, but just wanted to keep the folks up because there were public events. I want to make sure you're in the loop. Last month we had the opening of Mountaintop Pistro at Summit Academy which was a really nice event as you know Summit Academy moved and they now have a commercial grade kitchen setup and they always had a kitchen program but now they have commercial grade equipment. So it was a really nice event, like they were in the room including Dr. Bramaki and some others here. We're present for it. I also want to say today was Summit Academies, they have an annual tradition of a community Thanksgiving so that was I think actually lots of people who you'll hear from in a little bit all were there as well as I was and it was just wonderful tremendous amount of food but the big thing is how many families came in and just the community atmosphere it builds and the band played which was great as well. Our students last month attended the MSAN conference in Boston which was really nice for not to have to travel as much easier for our students. This was a treat to drive an hour and a half and we're hoping that they can come and get on the agenda for December. This was a tough night originally they were going to come but families were heading out of town for the holiday and I just shared some links about the pre-readings you get a sense of what they did before they were there as well as a video that they shared with us from the conference. As we'll talk about later the Department of Education the Massachusetts Department of Education is seeking public input in the expansion of Pioneer Valley Chinese Emerging Charter School in Hadley. It would increase their maximum enrollment to 952 students anyone can offer input on whatever however they feel about this to the Commissioner of the Board of Education at either CharterSchools one word at toe.mass.edu honor before Monday December 3 which is coming up soon two more quick ones one you'll hear about this a little bit but November 6 was Election Day which for us was a professional development day we're able to offer high quality professional development to all of our staff on the topics of equity and social justice I think it was shared with all of you the different workshops that were offered and you'll hear a little bit more in a bit. And lastly thanks shout out to Jody wherever he is in Amherst Media so we've increased our window into ARPS episode load and they've worked with us swimmingly on that and so the recent one which just came out yesterday was by parent request which was great and it's the first one we've had a parent email and say I really want to hear about this and it was about our English Language Learner Program so we had Sue Abdo who is the ELL teacher Department Head of the High School and Terry Geffert who is the ELL teacher at Crocker Farm so we had sort of the K-12 continuum of ELL services and our next episode will be on the high school and getting an update on the high school so Dr. Gramacchi and Mr. Sadiq and the assistant principal will be joining me to update the community on all things high school related sorry that was a mouthful but it's been a while since we met so it's been actually since October 16th that's right so just a question for the superintendent I'm wondering if there are any plans for the committee to hear more about the math program at the high school math curriculum I understand there's been a couple questions raised recently and so I'm just wondering if there might be some room of coming agenda to hear more yeah we were planning to have Mr. Sheen talk about that in the broader context of their math review as well so I think we can do both at the next meeting at the December meeting I had a similar question so hopefully the scope of that is both the future planning and also variations if any would be done this year based on whatever feedback you're getting and observations you're having thank you for pointing out the email and the deadline for the charter school expansion proposal just if you happen not to be here in two or three hours from now and you're in the audience for another item school committee could definitely use the help in spreading the word about the importance of this this is over a half million dollars a year at the regional level it's one and a half million Amherst level and the school is essentially doubling proposing to essentially double in size so spreading the word about that however you feel about it is appreciated and just a quick question I had about the strategic planning it seems like kind of a long period between the very first meeting and the next one it's like over two months is there thoughts about what happens in the interim in order to keep progress going on that very large important project sure some of this was by design that you want to give people time to gather feedback from their constituent groups so if we offered people three weeks then we know that not everyone would get as much feedback as we're hoping that they get and the other is just that trying to schedule that many people in the month of December when there's multiple holidays going on created a log jam so we made the decision to have a longer period and also extend the amount of time that people have to get feedback from their neighbors, friends and the larger group but you're right intentional that way you're right to say it was a long period of time so we haven't we haven't met since middle of October and toward the end of October there were some extraordinarily challenging incidents nationally particularly in Pittsburgh and I didn't know if you had anything to offer the regional committee I think you talked about this in the commerce committee but you didn't at the regional we haven't met and I didn't know if you wanted anything to share with people so after the tragedy in Pittsburgh a group of high school students engaged their administration and then eventually me and wanted to get together to have a meeting to talk about how they were experiencing the tragedy and how it was influencing their time both at school and beyond and so the students reached out to Dr. Mackey and then she reached out to me I was in touch with the students and we asked the students if they wanted anyone else to be present and so given my background and faith they encouraged me that I'd be welcome to be there as well as I reached out to the local rabbi from the Jewish community of Amherst and so he was able to attend I want to thank him again and particularly for someone who's called on for many many things especially in the time of tragedy and so he made time to come over for an hour and a half on a Friday afternoon as he was getting ready for Shabbat and spent time and so there was students they're in high school they had some people could stay for a long time some people came in late but I would say all told over 30 students came not all of them Jewish some were allies to talk about their experiences but it was incredibly moving to hear the students talk about not just their experiences with Pittsburgh but their experience being Jewish living in western Massachusetts and I think the other thing that was so compelling was so many students who were not Jewish came in and either made connections to what the Jewish community was feeling and how they felt in whatever way they want to share or just one they thought it was important just to be a listener and just to be a supportive listener the emotions were quite raw but I think very productive in giving students space it was completely student organized so the Rabbi myself some staff were there we were there as participants but two students who were organizers facilitated the entire meeting themselves and I think that was also telling so it was something that I think students needed they voiced that I checked in well after the meeting there were many of them still there checked in on how they were feeling there was an opportunity, a safe space to talk about how they were feeling how they were experiencing Amherst Pittsburgh living in this country they really didn't have not all of them had a mechanism to do that necessarily in this healthier way with their peers so I want to thank Dr. Gramacchi for creating the space and providing support for those students and thank the students for taking on such leadership in the meeting there are too many examples of this obviously these days in our society who the targets are obviously in this case is a grotesque act of anti-Semitism but one of the things that struck me was at the time being when you were talking to me about it and we were talking to the committee was that there was kind of similar to some of the mass school shootings last spring remember if you listen to some of the high school students it felt very immediate that was similar in this case that it felt very very immediate very personal in the sense of insecurity felt very real and very personal I don't know if there's any anything that would be followed up on after that or is it the first scene that would be followed up on I mean I'm just about that particular incident but in general yeah I think so you know we offered the student at the end one thing so we had to be me and not me so I wanted to be a full participant and so that meant putting my superintendent hat somewhere else and then I also had to put it back on at the end to make sure that our students got what they needed whatever that was and so when I came back and looped back around there was about five or six students and I said you know what is it that you need and there is a student support group or student affinity group around Judaism and there's kind of this we're going to have to see how this plays out and what supports we need but I think the big thing that they got was that there was a support of administration a support of staff there were six or seven faculty members were there just to make sure students felt like you know they needed it was a Friday afternoon at the end of a hard week so I think at the time being they expressed they got what they needed and then they're not professional their organization or affinity group they're not going to Dr. Gramacchi or others if there was continued sort of ongoing support at a larger level I think it does point to our need to be continually focused on issues of difference and how everyone feels included or not feels included in all sorts of scenarios both you know locally but I will say that a lot of the conversation didn't revolve around high school it revolved around what it meant living in Amherst, Lebrich, Sheetsbury, or Pellum living in western Massachusetts and I think that's true not just for this it's true for lots of groups in our schools that we focus as we should so much on the school day but when you let students speak they talk a lot about the experience that aren't Monday through Friday 7.45 to 2.15 so that was the other takeaway for me was just how does this weave into larger community dialogues around what does it mean to be a multicultural community sorry I could go on for well we didn't have a chance to talk about it it was really valuable to particularly at the regional level Ms. McDonald do you have anything at all you want to ask or say go to the report? No, thank you okay anything else on the committee? okay seeing none chairs report so one of the things that coming out of one of our last meetings where we did have a discussion actually literally the last meeting kind of it's weird I'm on the cycle where our regional committee meets like every other week and so it's like we've had a really big gap between meetings so we had that great discussion with the school equity task force about not just the top line goals that the school committee adopted last year but underneath it a series of more concrete recommendations I think when you look at the superintendent goals for the year some of them are actually reflected in there now but one of the questions I have and I'm throwing this out as a planning practical question going forward is there are and we had those presentations last year we know that there's work that's ongoing and has been ongoing and we've collected a lot of these same goals but it just strikes me that as we're looking toward the budget season and as we're looking toward refining the strategic planning process that the question of how do we optimally include, engage, align and operationalize that what was presented and that becomes a really critical question and so I'm throwing this out now because what I would like to do is maybe at the December meeting have some kind of more in depth conversation and I'm obviously looking at the superintendent because and actually it's coming in too because if it doesn't come from you then it's not going to be worthwhile, right? What are we looking at here in terms of the next year and the deliverables if you look in your draft goals for example the strategic planning process and sort of delivering upon that process is one of the goals speaking kind of just for myself but not really because we did adopt as a committee the five goals as a top line thing it's hard for me to imagine getting to May or June and not having those goals in some ways reflected and operationalized with the strategic planning process or granular understanding of how that happens and where it goes is I think really important and so I don't want to have a perfunctory conversation or one that feels like a sort of fly by night one I'd rather it to be actually more organized and more thoughtful particularly when you're looking at the next six months and you're thinking of time points where the SCTF either through its engagement with the strategic planning process or in some other venue our committee or whatever or when we're looking at the budget there are going to be different time points in which we could clearly engage in a way that's both useful developmentally in terms of overall process but also very practically does it affect the budget and if it does how where we can then have a really sort of more granular conversation but that also feels productive and it feels like it's leading to something if I can just add to that I think I've spoken with the chair before with the superintendent about the importance of continuity of our goals and finding a way for us to track our progress and make sure that we are continuing to move forward and so once we adopt a set of goals that we understand this is something that we've adopted we've all agreed on is important and so how do we then ensure for ourselves that we're actually making progress on this in some of the ways that we've talked about data collection things like that require I think our committee focus because in order to make sure that it's actually going forward and that we're funding it appropriately and that we're finding the resources and all that I'm interested in thinking through what that means as we start these conversations around budget and everything so if we can have that kind of a conversation you know just to build off the chair's report you know for the next couple of meetings it would be really really helpful that's a real yeah I think just one thing and I don't want to skip ahead on the agenda so I'm going to be cautious about that since some of the goals that SETF proposed do have budgetary implications and one of the things we're doing tonight is offering feedback for the administration on what to come back with a more detailed budget information about it seems like there might be a happy marriage especially thinking about the December meeting of linking budget guidance that you offer us to come back with and there's some information in there and some information that wasn't in the SETF goals that Ms. Cunningham and I spoke about well you know some of these things while budget implications so we can get to that when we get to it but I just think there might be just a really natural way to start that conversation in December I think there is but I mean I just not to put a point on it to me I want to look at the next six or seven months or whatever it is because I think if we don't look at it in that frame then it feels it could feel episodic right like there's a certain and also I'd rather we're never going to have enough money and so I also would rather have a conversation and in fact who knows maybe we'll I hate to say this on microphone on the camera who knows maybe we'll end up in a world in which we're doing cuts again I hope not but we just don't know that right now and so I also don't want to have a conversation about budget priorities ads or whatever you want to do where we talk about it where it seems sort of like two rifle shot it seems too narrow and focused without looking at the big picture because one of the things I've said before I know so this last year is that one of the challenges of this conversation is if one thinks narrowly about budget in the given fiscal year then the obvious answer is there's never enough money right and so then you say to yourself well we can't make progress on this goal because we don't have the money so do we commit ourselves to the goal because we don't have the money right and that sort of circular thing is endless right and the reality is it's not just endless endless it's like totally endless right we know that ten years from now whatever committee is sitting here they will also not have enough money and this is sort of like it can't be a world in which we're thinking without resource constraint what do we want to do in the next three to five years it's reality based exercise right it's got to be taking into account our constraints and maybe we're never going to have enough people in IT and data to do the kind of analysis we want I don't know if we're not then we've got to figure out how do we satisfy this getting where we need to go in a reality based exercise and so anyways my point is that look ahead for the next seven months and where are we going with all this and how does this fit into the conversation and how does it fit into budget and other decisions seems to me to be part of the right way to do it because then we can more fully integrate part of what I'm trying to do and I sort of I think we're all trying to do this but this is something I really care about doing so I'm going to use the first person singular part of what I'm trying to do for the next seven months that feel like they're balkanized or in some ways you know it's this thing over here right I mean we're doing planning for the whole district for a three to five year period like whatever we want to do with math this has got to be integral though right and I mean that literally like if we need to make changes with math that's literally going to be integral so whatever the planning is we do for the regional district we're just organizing the way that feels seamless and feels measurable and also is reality based meaning we don't have enough money we never have enough money so how do we make progress anyway Ms. McDonald I'm going to keep doing that every once in a while by the way just because otherwise you'll yell thank you I appreciate that I agree with what you were just describing okay thank you okay so let's move on the first item of business is restorative practices you want to introduce so unfortunately though our restorative practices facilitator for the district is not able to be here this evening but I really appreciate Dwayne Chambl who is our out of school time coordinator and works through the family center like a supporter of restorative practices is willing to comment his experiences being in circles and the implications for him so a fair statement Dwayne okay so I think you want to come up to the microphone very quickly you can come on up I just want to make a note for the committee if I can so we had talked about having the head of the restorative practices program here but she is a way for a medical leave I believe so the idea is that she and a group of students will actually be coming in January hopefully we can get her on the agenda and make a presentation to the committee the students who actually were in charge of writing that news letter to help share their experiences and their stories around having this incredibly important program from their perspective just having you know and having us learn more about it so thank you so I just have some prepare remarks that I'm going to read just to keep all of my thoughts in line but hello to everybody that knows me and everybody that don't my name is Dwayne and I'm the out of school time coordinator for the Amherst Pellow Regional School District and I thank you all for having me here tonight I'm here today to talk about my personal experiences with the healing circles conducted by DW McRaven here in the Amherst Regional High School if you want to know I'm sorry I want you to know that what I'm about to share are my personal thoughts and feelings and do not reflect any influence from any outside source I was invited to speak before you by DW and the SETF and I feel honored to have been asked to share my perspective the three main points that I want to touch upon while sharing my experience with you today are feelings, connections and the idea that that kid, those students they are all our children see these points are the foundation on which I believe we are building a new structure of love based on common bonds and mutual respect when I first arrived in this district three years ago I was admonished by my mentor and all incidents with students and their families like they were my child and my family this wisdom has been at the core of every interaction I've had ranging from a happy good morning greeting at the Before School Care Program down to having a difficult conversation with a parent about an incident on an after school care bus with their child in each and every case knowing that I care for this child connecting with their parents to ensure that they know they are not alone and feeling love, compassion empathy and care have shown me that the power of love and our mutual human bond for wanting the very best for our children is at the core of who we all are these values I feel are essential to a healthy and happy community and these values I have seen, felt and experienced participating in the two healing circles by D.W. McCraven now, there are a few core feelings that I experienced while in the healing circles that I want to share with you all today those feelings are anticipation there was sadness there was isolation there was fear there was depression there was loneliness there was empathy there was love there was hope there was a lot of smiling and then a lot of laughter you see these and many other feelings that are not listed are alive in the hearts and minds and bodies of our children each and every day we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow but we can prepare today's field by nurturing tomorrow's soil to safeguard a fertile terrain for the seeds of destiny to be sown now I know that was just a mouthful but I want to explain what these seeds of destiny that I speak about are these are seeds of love these are seeds of belonging these are seeds of caring these are seeds of you are enough just the way you are these are seeds of this too shall pass they're seeds of I'm going to love you no matter what these seeds will surely with the right cultivation produce a beautiful harvest of loving and pathetic and socially responsible young adults so at this point I wanted to just speak about my experience with DW and who she is and how she conducts herself so I feel like I could list many points to add to her credentials I really feel that especially in this profession that more than credentials that a person's character is the core of what we should be looking for so I just thought about her and I said these are the things that came to my mind about who DW is and when you meet her you'll feel this as well the thoughts were commitment undying commitment to the students it was compassion it was expertise it was purpose-driven it was unflinching it was dedication it's passionate passion generational healing and a visionary a pioneer and to close I just feel when I think about restorative justice and what that means to me that means a proper alignment to something that's natural something that flows and I feel that the restorative justice and what we're doing here is our part and our piece of realigning our community because I feel that we as humanity, we as people we've lost the connections we lost the genuine feelings that we have for each other and the thing that I feel that will bring us all together is that we all want a better future for our children so if we come together on that point with this restorative justice and seeing all of the kids that are in these circles as our kids because our kids have to deal with it they come home with the stories and we're all in this together so I just feel that continuing to do this practice is going to be our part to make this world a better place thank you well in that context I wanted to say that this is almost like a preview of coming attractions when do we have that meeting with BW this last summer or spring the SCTF I mean I think it was at the end of the spring or maybe even like early spring I think Miss Cunningham you might have been there maybe at some point in the beginning he was in spring it's been a while and I think just to kind of wrap that up I want to say thank you Mr. Shambl for saying what you just said I think we've talked a lot here on the committee about the value of this program and why we wanted to bring it to the district and to hear somebody articulate that in that way is incredibly powerful and moving but I do think having sat with Miss McCraven and having sat with even Principal Jackson but hearing almost the transformative experience that the folks who have been working in this this program for a long time describe is an incredible asset to our district right and it's something that you see the value in it especially when we talk about Pittsburgh when we talk about so many of these other you know terribly terrible impactful events that have taken place understanding that there is a program like this that can actually help shore students up and also educators and staff because it's not just about the students it's also about the other people that are experiencing it with them and again you'll see the letter from Principal Jackson hearing him talk about it from somebody who had never experienced that before to someone who had gone through you know sat through a circle and talked with Miss McCraven and talked to some of the students and going through that learning process was so incredibly important and transformative and you understand this is why we're doing what we're doing right this is why we're investing in resources and money into a program like this because it actually pays dividends in so many different ways that we don't necessarily understand even now right but I think that you know having an opportunity to hear directly from the people who have both led that program and participated in the way that they have and hearing from the students is just going to be incredibly powerful for the committee yeah I completely agree my recollection of the meeting we had last spring I guess it was how incredibly powerful the work is and also how hard it was to get your head around what it actually was without having a sort of a deeper dive and I remember at the time being thinking I wanted the school committee to go through a circle but if we if we don't which I still think would be a good idea if we don't we'll make that decision after January right because it has to be a group decision we'll do that yeah we might do it after the budget process right I think it's always a good idea I mean based on what I was hearing I think it's always a good idea but my point is though is that you need to hear about the actual work to sort of get it otherwise it sounds it sounds very impassioned and transformational but also it sounds slightly abstract until you really get into understanding what the work really is so I'm looking forward to that anything else for the committee seeing none thank you again HR this is a this is a really well described item HR department update I don't have anything to throw this to you superintendent like I'm not even going to do that unless you demand a step in I don't I thought you were going to introduce us sorry I'm getting different feedback from different sides of the table so actually I would like to do a brief introduction I was just teasing that's okay no I really do think kind of a couple things I want to say as an introduction one is I really want to thank the department for being here not just this Cunningham but the full department and I think that shows that teamwork that this group has I also think and related to the prior conversation and SCTF goals that's not a good screen on that one that one's fine I don't know how to solve that one so I'm not going to I think tonight and there's been updates since what's in your packet just with a little more refined data so what you'll see on this screen we'll have some of that so I do think it's also responsive to some topics conversation as it relates to staffing and percentages that the community has been asking for I'm pleased that we're not there but we're showing a lot of significant progress and I think finally it shows the range of topics and areas critical work of the district that one department is able to work on it's not just one aspect and even from the slide deck that's in the packet I think you got a sense of the wide range of tasks and responsibilities and critical responsibilities the department takes on so with that I'll pass it over to Miss Cunningham and her team well good evening everyone last year we started off a new HR department and our department consists of Damani Gordon our diversity equity specialist we have Sasha Figueroa who's my assistant and we have Jennifer Ortiz who is our HR administrator so when we started we created five goals for our department to fulfill for last year and this update will just let you know how we did with those goals so our HR department is really three people and my assistant so all the things that you're going to see was done by this miraculous team so in this brief overview we're going to talk about the great things we have a slide that congratulates our district and gives you more information as to the great things that we've been doing we'll also look at the goals that we have and then answer some of the SCTF questions as to staffing and how we progress towards our diversity equity goal we'll talk about the waivers and training and we'll touch a little bit on the futures program because Damani is integral with that program then we'll leave it open for questions so first we wanted to congratulate everyone on the hard work that they've been doing we've ranked the best place to teach in Massachusetts on niche.com we're also number nine of the best school districts in Massachusetts number 24 with the districts with the best teachers in Massachusetts so I think that's just showcases the hard work that everyone does from the administrators down to everyone to all of our staff and our faculty and making this one of the top 25 places in Massachusetts to work and do business then so our goals when we started last year we plan to hire quality diverse staff we plan to assist our administrators with the license and our educators with the licensing and waiver process with anything that they needed such as help with grievances or complaints or concerns amongst the staff we look towards training we help to advance our hope was to advance many of our staff members within our district to a higher level and to continue to build relationships and partnerships with our community so as far as retaining and hiring a diverse staff here are the statistics this chart just talks about each department and how we've done so in 2017-18 in each of these departments these were the total number including the hires of people of color that each department had so if you look at the business office for example there was one person and now we have two so going all the way across we see that there's been an increase in most departments right now the two departments where there was a decrease were still in the process of hiring additional staff for those two departments those numbers are the staff of color compared to the total so here is you can find this information on the desi website so if you look at the top boxes that's at the regional level and then the bottom boxes are at the Amherst level and the the numbers in the parentheses tell you what percentage of our staff, total staff are in the have chosen that demographic to call themself so if you look African American in 2016-17 we had 17 and in 2019 at the regional level we have 35 which is 12% 12.5% of our staff same thing for Amherst in 2016-17 we had 16 which was 5% and now in 2018-19 we're almost at 7% now this one was interesting because here what we did was we took the student demographic because I know SCTF has asked how do we compare to one of the goals they had for the superintendent was to have our staffing increase to reflect the number of students so if you look in 2016-17 African American at the regional level we had 6.7% now in 2018-19 teachers are at the teachers are the numbers in the parentheses so teachers are at 12.5 and our students are at 7.11 don't change it yet if you continue to look there's been an increase there's two categories where we really need to work to improve what we are working on it so when we look at the Asian and the multirace non-Hispanic categories those two are still very low what we are working to increase the number and our retention rates this is also on the desi website so in 2016 we retained our retention rates were 73% and in 2018 we are at 90.8% what is that the retention rate of staff of color but total retention rate we'll be talking a little bit of how we were assisting our administrators with the whole licensure process so our administrators and our educators and if we go to the next slide something that we incorporated that's different from years past is the evaluative tool that we use in the plan we inserted new fields where teachers can keep track of the licenses that they hold and the date that they expire whether it's initial professional license and each of those categories have their own they have different parameters around their expiration date but it also gives administrators an opportunity to go in and see which of their teachers hold what licensure and when those licenses will be expiring so that everyone can keep track of where they are licensure process and where they need to be moving towards so this is just a quick overview we've also included the public look up so that you can just administrators, teachers and so they can look themselves up but administrators can look up their teachers or if they're looking to hire someone and they want to see what licenses that person has to fulfill whatever needs they have in their buildings they can quickly go in and see if they're licensed in that area or not so one of the changes came as a result of the spring conversations that we had where there was a question as to what do we do for teachers to make sure that they know where they're at and for administrators how do we help them so this is permanently on my learning plan every administrator that goes into my learning plan to do the evaluation of the teacher this is the first screen they see every teacher who's going into input their goals this is the first screen that they see and they cannot go past the screen without responding to it what percentage of teachers and administrators do not hold licenses we're going to get to that so this is a comparison of last year to this school year and the amount of waivers that we've had to request as you see we've had to request less than half of the amount of waivers that we had to request this year before and 100% of our administrators are all licensed and some of the reasons are outlined here we don't even have to go out and request a waiver to begin with what we found this year were outstanding MTEL requirements so one of the hardest or one of the biggest barriers for people to be licensed is the MTEL is passing the MTEL and we've included here an example of one of our educators who's had who's tried four times to pass the MTEL and they finally passed it but it takes that amount of time and effort in order to be licensed so we've had to also wait for other districts, we can't provide them ourselves for incoming teachers so we have to wait for other districts to provide these endorsement letters to prove that they've passed certain requirements so that they can achieve licensure and we also have very unique slots and opportunities in our district where you have to have dual licensure so for instance you may already hold a license in a core subject area for math for instance but if you're working with a group of education students you also have to be licensed in special education, moderate disability so you may be licensed in one area but we need to help you get licensure in the other area so while you're achieving those goals and while you're checking off those requirements you need a year of to be on a waiver in order to advance into your license so those were the reasons that we found this year that we needed to request the waivers that we did and so one of the questions that may be going through your head is do you have an HR to help with this situation so with the Mtels we are offering Mtel prep courses for some of our teachers and you know through the Futures program we are able to have our courses offered for free many of our teachers are taking advantage of that so that the person here who we talked about who took the Mtel four times that individual actually went through the prep course and was able to pass the Mtel after alright next I want to talk about the trainings that we have had this year based on diversity, inclusion sensitivity and other practices these are the trainings that we've had hiring process and that's based on you know getting together a pool, a diverse pool of folks in order to strategize and get the right person and the right fit for our schools in our district implicit bias implicit slash affinity bias in hiring those three trainings were done during admin week right before we start school when all the administrators are there we also have licensure that we just talked about types of renewal and processes and we also had as superintendent talked about before the November 6 PD day recently we offered 22 different workshops there were options for our teachers and parents that wanted to be involved some of the trainings that we had just to give you an idea was getting to know restorative justice at ARHS and that was youth led by some of our students the N word in the classroom teaching racist language without harm creating gender inclusive classrooms and laying the groundwork for having difficult conversations about race so just a few of the trainings during the PD day that we had and there's also the UROC the undoing racism organizing collective all except four of our administrators attended that and the four that weren't there will be participating one coming up very soon in Hartford, Connecticut so the first three trainings that are on there those did take place earlier in the year but we're also cycling back in January to continue with these conversations and these trainings because we're coming again to another hiring season and we want to make sure that the administrators understand their own implicit bias in hiring and help to increase the likelihood of having a diverse staff our teachers understand license they started to hold licensure training during staff meetings some of our principals have asked to request of their own staff of their own faculty they've asked us to come in during staff meetings and they have a quick overview of what they need to do the different types of licensure when they expire, what PDPs are how many they need so that people are better prepared and well-versed in what they need to do as we're in school how did that go was there a lot of active learning on the part of folks who were trying to understand implicit or affinity bias in hiring you know what I mean I'm not looking for any scuttle bud but I'm just curious how that went I believe it was very eye-opening for a lot of our administrators to see just certain things such as jargon being something that they hold fast to when they're hiring and how a lot of our individuals of color may not use jargon but may say the same thing so it was very important for them to see their own bias in making sure that a candidate uses jargon before they hire them you want to ask? if you don't mind during the sessions during administrative week we get active feedback on and it's anonymous and the anonymous feedback we received from our team was that it supported everything Ms. Cunningham just said in terms of thinking differently about that process and what biases we all bring to that and coming back to it as Ms. Cunningham said as we enter this season makes sense but I do think it opened a lot of eyes because it was a simulation exercise it wasn't like an academic exercise that the team put on here's some images of our pvd that our communication specialist actually provided of the different sessions that we had some were held from the auditorium there were multiple individual classes but we actually sat through one of the sessions and it was very eye-opening how actually what struck me most was how receptive the teachers were it was a difficult topic the end work in the classroom without creating harm and they were just so receptive and open to learning and creating a safe space for their kids when they were teaching literature that can be very difficult for students of color to hear can I just ask a quick question who was actually teaching these classes these courses no just the microphone thank you Mike so some of the we actually had some of our own staff members teaching a few of the courses we had professors from Smith College we had another professor from I think the two professors were actually from Smith correct and then our own Springfield College and then like I said our own staff members teaching the courses which I thought was really nice to have our staff learn from their own from their colleagues yes that's right and just if I can ask just a follow-up question were these folks from Smith and others here in the staff were they people who have gotten degrees what's their level of expertise I guess on these issues so they teach these same subjects in their own classrooms in the universities in which they teach and they've also worked with some of our own staff members so I believe the professor from Smith and worked with one of our English teachers here at the high school so there was a relationship there and the staff that were here that were teaching it are they also how do they come up to their expertise I think they were vetted by our assistant superintendent and also by our curriculum coordinator Tim Sheehan about the subjects that they would be leading the sessions that they would be leading and what the material would be that they would be providing their staff members at local colleges and universities some of them are just experts in their field and their colleagues have recommended them to be the person to lead that discussion because they've been in their classrooms and have noted some of the things that they've done all of them have received at least an exemplary on their ratings and for their evaluations and such but like I said most of them are well known and they do a lot of presenting in other conferences so they've been recommended by their colleagues or their professors elsewhere yes and these are after our PD day we had we took a survey from everybody that was involved in attending and these are the responses that we had 158 responses and how satisfied you are with the PD day and what you've learned that day you know one's the lower end not as satisfied and five the top extremely satisfied and as you can see you know there was a lot of people were satisfied and definitely engaged and empowered by these trainings that we had so out of the 158 there were only about 3 that were not very satisfied and the reasons were that we were 10 minutes later we had anticipated so those were the that was the big reason we started a little late so we ended a little bit later how many staff were involved in total all of the staff so we have over right but not all attended so about 500 maybe one of the comments after the PD session was although I tend to dread the idea of PD prior districts our needs are so diverse I really enjoyed the day and I think it was well run and I learned something in each of the sessions I attended another comment said having students present was the best keynote possible so our keynote speech was done by about five or six students and here's the feedback and these are the next steps this is a question posed to staff what other resources do you need to implement what you've learned today and the responses were about time time to implement to work more with colleagues to gather in professional development communities and walkthroughs as we know the schedule is always so tight for the teachers and just more time to get those things together as we can implement those and the other what we learned about this was training and the next the next level so as a department we always talk about not having the one and done training and so we are looking to continue with the training but we're also looking to help the staff to use the information that they've learned because there would be no point in continuing the training if they're not using it and it's not trickling down to our students so we're working on trying to find ways to make sure that what they've learned is being used in the classroom another thing that we really focused on and one of our main goals is to advance our own staff so with the next slide we'll be able to go a little further into it we're looking to advance staff on every level so not just from peer educators to educators to teachers but we're also looking to advance our custodial staff and we've been able to advance two members of our custodial staff in two positions in roles of leadership where they're overseeing larger amounts of people they're overseeing larger square footage with our futures program which Demining is an integral part of we have three peer educators who are going through the program to then become teachers we have five teachers who have stepped into administrative roles and even on our food service level we're also looking to advance our own staff so we've had two general food service workers who come up into positions of cooks so this is something that we're looking at across as a district-wide goal of ours to advance our own staff so not always look outside but also look inward and see where we have talent within our own staff and move them forward another thing that we've been working towards is building our own relationships and partnerships in the community and these are the following collaborative endeavors that we've had so we have our Amherst Futures program where if peer educators hold at least a bachelor's we can move them forward into the Mount Holyoke program to the program, the Futures program where they can earn a master's through a Mount Holyoke and also become licensed educators we have our five colleges diverse teacher workforce where we're looking for a diverse teacher staff that represent our students we have been working with UMass we've been in hand in hand with them with their teacher prep program so accepting their students into our district so that they can do their prep programs and their internships we've been working with Smith College for professional development as we mentioned earlier which was during our PD day and the mass hire Franklin Hampton Career Center we've been doing with them our work with them has been centered around our custodial staff so moving them forward into journeyman positions where they can then enter into the maintenance field which opens up more opportunities for them in the district as well and even outside of the district what Jen has been working with UMass with is helping our teachers who would like to become administrators to move into a program like that and UMass is looking and hoping that we will partner with them and have some of our administrators teach those courses also as was mentioned the Futures program are for individuals who currently hold a bachelor's whereas we're working with UMass to work with those who do not currently have a bachelor's they go through possibly university without walls to get the bachelors and then move into the programs where they can become teachers last year we had some lists of our other HR tasks this is just highlighting the work that continues in our department one of the greater pieces of work that we have is trying to resolve staff complaints last year alone we had 43 investigations and complaints that just come through and assisting investigations that come through our office we a lot of our time has dealt with trying to resolve concerns that our staff members have so that we can have a happy group of teachers and staff members in front of our teaching our students right and helping our students Assistant Superintendent Cunningham leads the second year teachers meetings and they've been focusing on social justice we've initiated four contracts with our administrators our teachers are peer educators clerical staff maintenance custodial and food services we transitioned over 660 staff members to our new health insurance plan over the last spring and summer not including our retirees and as always our ongoing work with recruiting diverse staff in a variety of roles whether it's teaching, peer educators custodial employment verification, work with comma we facilitate and participate in conferences we're called upon for those as well furthering our partnerships and our program development so that we can help our staff grow licensure support for educators the hiring and onboarding of staff collecting and disaggregating various data so a lot of times we're called upon to provide information to administrators on what's going on in their schools how many teachers do I have licensed in this area versus that one leadership work and membership support groups the enrollment working groups which we've been able to do district wide also for our students so before that was it was pretty much segregated for school they were doing their own collection of query information it's become a centralized system now where all student interns come through volunteers, interns, observations they all come in through a central office and then we help along with the universities we help position them in the different schools thank you Sasha our hiring process, our communication social media and the other list of things that we do daily in our office so our goals for next year the goals that you saw we just reported on for last year we've decided okay, we're doing okay with that but what we need to continue to do is to continue to hire and retain a qualified diverse staff we saw the two areas where we were way behind that we know that we would like to go out and network and increase participation rates and hiring rates for those two groups we're working with the Alana cabinet to review data and create action plans for different things so they've asked for some information on our special ed groups and also on our teacher retention rates we're looking to create some programs so we find that in HR we're doing so much with the adults in hiring that we don't often get a chance to see the effects of our hires so we'd like to start going into the classrooms more I know there's only four of us but we'd like to get into the classrooms and see how great a hire we have done and then create some of the programs that are needed for our students for social justice we're also looking to increase the use of restorative justice and restorative practices in the district so I know that we mentioned previously how DW is working with the students but we'd like to start using restorative practices with the adults in our district and we're going to continue with our trainings any questions Ms. Kamling so thank you for this very comprehensive presentation I would just reflect a little bit of the congratulations that you gave at the beginning back to the HR department this small agile effective team I don't think you get to be the number one place to teach without doing something right when it comes to HR so given the size and complexity of our organization the fact that you have three to four people doing all that is pretty amazing so I think you should feel pretty good about that so a couple of short questions mostly on the diverse staff and demographic charts if we could get the updated version of that it's a good one okay great and actually you could send I don't know if you have the PowerPoint version as opposed to just the PDF version so that we could copy and paste the data one thing opportunity I was thinking of and I don't know how far back this data goes we'd start at 2016-2017 but I think without too much of an effort we should be able to do some sort of simple just standard chart of trend like a line chart that shows the percentages for staff and compared to students and then every year when this question comes up it could just be a matter of updating the source data and then we're always looking at the same format right we have to tweak it depending on what we're looking at but I see the seeds of what could be a standard version of that I'm sort of harkening back to the data trends subcommittee whether we folded that in but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of for that that kind of effort so yeah so thank you for that Fran congratulations Paige do we advertise this, do we tell people about this do we put it on our website are we the only group who sees this I know teachers and administrators were told and they were excited about it a lot of the general community needs do we tell them so we have put it on our social media networks and other things like that as well and I think I do think we get strong candidates for positions because it is we are seen as a good place to work and teach so if you look at you know for many years for five years, six years I worked with the first year teachers and our first year teachers are generally first year teachers to Amherst a very small minority are truly first year teachers and when we ask people why they left whatever the district is is because we do have reputation of being an excellent place a good employer and I think this is the data back up what we have done and what we have seen over the last couple of years it is just that a number of times we have had these presentations which contain good news and we hear about it but I am just wondering what mechanisms are used to let the general public know about it perhaps we can do some reflection on those letters and things like that that might be able to highlight those things it is a really good piece of feedback Ms. McDonnell, do you have any questions or comments? I was muted. No, I don't Okay Ms. Irena So I also just want to say thank you I worked I think with most of you and I know for fact how hard working you are so thank you for that that actually brings me though to a question because it strikes me it is incredibly important to see I think I forget how you phrased Ms. Cunningham but the connection point between the hires and what is actually happening in the classroom and so I am wondering if instead of having the HR staff be the ones to actually go into the classrooms if maybe we might think about the ways that the district can incorporate or fold in this work into other departments right so for example the curriculum director thinking about those AP classes is this something that maybe is shared with the curriculum department per se which I think is like two people also or something but just ways of incorporating a little bit more of other elements or departments or staff in central office that can shoulder some of this burden and help disseminate it a little bit more and I think of that serving a couple of different purposes one is it helps to carry out the work that you are doing even more broadly and help involve more people that could probably bring different perspectives but could also benefit from seeing those connection points and I know you all work very closely anyway in central office but just thinking about formalizing that like how does that work but then also I think practically speaking you know I worry a lot about burnout and worry about a small already overtaxed staff to be carrying on even more things as important as they are it feels like for sustainability it's even more important perhaps to think about how you bring in more people into that kind of work so that it's a little more spread out take that for what you will I think it strikes me talking about that you know how we can help short burden but I have just one more question and this was sorry back to my notes so this is the form around licensure and I think I have raised this at an earlier time when we were talking about licensure in the spring very intensely and I was wondering at that time and I'm still wondering if there is a concurrent process that exists so that it's almost passive when you have information on a website that people have to go to that says a public lookup of your current valid license can be found here I think that's valuable because it's information but the person actually has to know enough to go to that form initially to look that up so I guess I'm wondering if any thought has been put in or any protocols have been put in place to proactively inform staff or at least to just say hey reminder you know we've got your license on file for this amount of time you know our records are indicating that you're going to be you know due for a license renewal or whatever just so that we are ahead of that ball right on a regular basis so there are two things that occurs one desi sends them an email to let them know and two we also in addition to all the things that we say we do we audit all staffs license and we send out a reminder to them and the union and their principals to let them know that they're either coming close to being due or are overdue and like I said with this they are going on proactively every year and when the principal is alerted that there may be something that is coming due soon the principal also reaches out to the staff one thing I wanted to touch on too was when I talked about us going into the classroom it's just to see the fruits of the work that we've done so we're here and we're hiring but we never get a chance to really go into the classrooms and I'd like us to be able to go into the classrooms and just enjoy it and see what the results are for our new hires I think that's actually a good practice in the same way that also some of the ways you're thinking about taking feedback from professional development I mean staff, colleagues the point is getting that feedback then thinking about how do you build next I mean one of the things I talked about before how essentially the programming you're doing now is going to be either reinforced like a mid-year hiring affinity and bias and sort of look back and then looking at this year's programming and saying what do we do next year and how do we build on it what feedback do you have? I think all those things that kind of break down silos and move it away from being I hate to put it this way because I know you're not doing this but rather than a pro-forma exercise where you're sort of saying we've done this work, isn't that great? But I mean as much as you're going to celebrate going to the classroom you're also going to get really sort of enriched feedback from that and experience that's going to inform and improve the work you do next I'm sure that's great. So you're done? Yeah, so kind of building on this I'm looking at our next item which is budget guidance and I think I know the answer to this question but I'd love to hear from you directly we're going to talk about marketing communications and social media and all this good news that's happening and wanting to express that to the community and our potential students down the line do you feel like your staff has enough time yet do you feel like you have enough resources to do all that you want to be doing? So if I say no will we a lot more funds? I don't even know That's okay. So I'm connecting this question back to actually something Mr. Dona said if that's okay which was about just the number of people we have doing and the number of tasks there are to do so if that's okay Mr. Demling I want to attack it from that point of view so I do think and it's not just an exercise I mean we do talk a lot about work-life balance and that's true for this department it's true for other departments at Central Office and I think it gets challenging when the number of tasks are increasing and the number of folks we have working at Central Office have significantly decreased in the last five years and so I think there is a challenge in that and you know unfortunately we've had Mr. Nakajima's point earlier when we're making budget decisions and we've tried our best to keep it as far away from students as possible I think the challenge is that what these folks do is they're the critical support for the people working directly with students and that balance is sometimes a challenge when we're faced with 1.2 million budget cuts is what's the right balance on that and the reform we cut some other significant number and I think sometimes that gets lost in the budget discussion by myself included right that we try to think about you know what's the number of students in that class and that's critically important but what these folks do it's not just a list of things or a bullet list it's that they're actively supporting the work of the educators and staff that we have in the district and if you know Mr. Sheehan's here next month and he's talking about curriculum you'll see that that work is critically and I'm not taking attention off this department that work is critically important for supporting teachers make next steps and how we're relating and supporting students in the acquisition of content and so to directly answer your question the answer is no so if you remember one of the earlier budget documents from last year we created through some reorganization at Central Office we had a communication position that ended up not making it through when we got to the end of the budget and the idea many districts have this in Massachusetts and one of the challenges is when it's an add-on to someone's job the job gets done and I think Ms. Figueroa does an excellent job with that and the challenge is there's many many other tasks that also have to get done that often are more time sensitive than communication it's not that I'm looking at Mr. Donis who does this for a living and want to be sensitive that I think communication is critical but it's also sometimes when there's a query check that comes in and someone needs to be in the next day and we want to make sure they're safe to be with kids that's a hard calculus to manage I don't believe we're funding communication at the way in which in a perfect not even a perfect world the way we'd want to do it and I appreciate Ms. Figueroa's work on top of the other things she's doing and Ms. Westmoreland as well who does a tremendous amount of clean the Friday update which is in my opinion an aspect of communication but when I talked to other districts and Ms. Figueroa and I a couple years ago were able to talk to another district somewhere in the eastern part of the state I think who had someone whose role was to do this the responsiveness the ability to think more proactively instead of like get really good stuff up quickly and make it look really nice but not have like a defined longer term strategy there is a difference there so I want to be honest in answering your question that for me the answer is no so what I want to do is I want to make sure that if Ms. McDonald's Castinson himself doesn't have anything that they have an opportunity to do so so otherwise we're going to move on obviously my oh man every time a licensure comes up I just start sitting here and I start to fidget I don't bounce out of my chair and my face turns red and my stomach just churns and I get butterflies and I just at a district level understand how we were able to hire teachers that aren't licensed because having gone through the licensure program I have an ELR account and no it's pounding into your head that your initial license is good for five years then you have to get your master's or if you don't already have it and then you work then you're the professional license and I just at the principal level and I just don't understand how we haven't been on top of that before I can start if you like yeah sure so I think a couple of things one is that some of these were inherited issues but not all of them were so I want to talk about some particular scenarios and I don't want it to be so identifiable to a particular staff member right that's why I didn't want to right and Ms. Ortiz referred to it earlier so sometimes there are situations where we have roles where we literally did not get one applicant who has all the license for them often times that's related to special education so what we do we hire who we think is the best person they may not have the multiple licenses they need for that role and this team supports them to receive all the licenses they need so that at the end of this year they'll be fully licensed we also have situations where different mtels come up so depending if you're grandfathered in or not there are scenarios that were raised earlier or on mtels become a larger aspect or a larger part of the work we have I'm just trying to think about confidentiality so we also have new licenses the state comes out with so we have had teachers who are fully licensed and the state has now decided well there's a there's a computer science license and now someone who's been teaching under the current license without any issues now is required to get a new license and by the way the regs come out just before someone's supposed to actually get them and how does actually one actually go through that process to get it so when we talk about the reduction numbers of waivers some of that's because either people got their licenses or they're not they're no longer employed with us and we have examples of that as well and I want to be sensitive to that factor but some of it's the structure that when we apply for waivers it's because we don't have a licensed candidate for that role they're few and far between we think about the number of staff members the number of waivers that was applied for was six and some of those are actually resolved or they won't need to be on waivers because they've been able to have been successful getting a license but that is more typically our situation they're more typically involved in special education or related fields and they need multiple licenses where we get lots of licensed candidates but they don't have all the licenses they need for that particular role so that'd be in a nutshell the nice thing about this bed though is there's no MTEL it's just the class work there are MTELs that they would have to take there's no MTEL for the oh okay Ms. Kaston or Ms. McDonald if you don't have them just want to give you to make sure you had a chance thank you very much for this that's all I have to add thank you Ms. McDonald likewise thank you it's a comprehensive very helpful presentation thank you I had my appreciation to it a lot of things I think one of the things that I think building off of Mr. Sullivan's question is that what I was hearing you describe I thought and I think was of what your approach is around ensuring that all the hiring entities are in the understands what their obligations are and what their responses are also by my assumption had been that because you were focusing on circumstances under which you either had a deficiency in licenses held for people you were able to hire and get in or also I assumed in some cases and I could be wrong about this that you were that this was in some way also connected to the developmental process of trying to improve hiring ladders within or is that not the case in this case it may not be for this year so most of it is what you initially said we look at people who are the best candidate and if they have the one license then we work with them to get the second some of it was that we were still working with a couple of the candidates that we inherited and are still just working through that so the one thing I meant to mention it's a slightly non sequitur but not totally to Mr. Sullivan's comment is the other thing that gets us into waiver world is we have high quality candidates who apply from out of state so we are one of the unique states that is not part of and this isn't a political statement just the truth we're not part of what's called the praxis so most states in the United States take the same licensure exam and states can set their own passing mark we have decided and I've got something in my work on RIAC the racial and balance advisory committee we've advocated with the commissioner the new commissioner seems more amenable to having this conversation we advocated with the old former commissioner around it that it's a huge disadvantage for us when we get out of state candidates applying from Massachusetts because there's almost no way for them to get licensed until they get here because we're not part of this national so if we were in Connecticut and Ms. Cunningham could tell you more details about Connecticut but you know you have a praxis score from the score of meet the cutoff for Connecticut great than the licensure process is much smoother and so for us we do get a significant number of diverse candidates from out of state and they are licensed teachers they have worked to do to become licensed in Massachusetts because we are unique in our licensing examination scheme it sometimes takes time and we do need to apply for waivers and our commitment has been well we can't offer reciprocity with other states we're not also going to eliminate our way one of the critical ways that we do diversify our staff as long as they someone has a license for another state we'll work with them to pass the MTEL but most candidates don't have the license they need from Massachusetts at the time of hire because of our unique status I just want to add to what Dr. Morris said and say that sometimes our candidates have a license at maybe the elementary level and they are hired at the secondary level or they have a license at the middle school level and they are moving up to the high school level and just need a moment to apply for the license at the next level and so we would request a waiver to make sure that we are all licensed how does the licensed out of state teacher get a license do they have to take a test yes right so as in most states they already have taken the test they would need in Massachusetts we have our own unique teacher licensure test that no matter if their license have taught somewhere for 25 years got a perfect score on the practice they have to take the MTEL because they are moving to Massachusetts that could be a barrier at a state level it is a barrier and a local level but that's why RIAC feels so strongly about this they feel like it's a critical barrier to diversifying the teacher force in Massachusetts I was only going to add that even I when I came here from Connecticut I had to take the test here in Connecticut even though I was teaching for almost 20 years in Connecticut thank you so much and also I think the extended discussion at the end is helpful just given all the conversation we had last year one of the things I appreciate about it is just that through your answers I think both what you and your team as well as Superintendent are evidencing is that you're I'm not saying you weren't paying close attention to that but I'm saying you're showing great effort it's being on top of the subject now which is obviously something I think people should take comfort in and pride in the work you're doing thank you thank you and be safe by the way do we have any black ice out there or anything be careful when you're driving home I think it's been really wet out and I understand it's colder so actually I was at one point wondering whether you're going to be here or whether it was okay I'm just budget guidance can we take a five minute recess I'm going to actually Ms. McDonald is that okay with you yes that's fine Cassinston is that okay with you okay with me is that okay with you it's okay with you loud Peter yes yes yes we're going to do that so I'll introduce this slowly so budget guidance sure so I can do a quick I think I shared this electronically with the committee that our process around budget guidance is typically that at the November meeting the school committee talks about and hopefully votes a few discrete items for us to come back with a December meeting to provide more context and more information about in the budget process I want to thank Mr. Mangano who shared electronically it's in the packet just some key indicator reports it really captures uses the same format that the town of Amherst does in their financial presentations and makes it more specific to the schools with you know trends and some details and some financials at the bottom of the 12 slides that he shared so we're really open to feedback from the committee generally we like to say two to four areas because if we go much above that those of you who remember the lengthy meeting last December some of the feedback the end was that was great and we want to not do probably as many areas because everything was great but it went very late and some of the feedback I recall was it just got a little overwhelming the content the amount of information so it was like a forced slog each individual item was fascinating but the cumulative impact was like being bludgeoned with a hammer call my polite way of putting it it was a tough year and just to recap or refresh people who weren't part of the committee last year so this process that presentation and then calling out some of these programs for sort of a deeper dive was the product of like a subgroup that sort of looked into the budget guidance process I think Mr. Ardonias and Mr. Manino and somebody else Mr. Nakajime looked at this process and developed sort of this approach to try to make it more meaningful so we don't have to go over the slides as more just to update what you saw last year and if you have any questions we're happy to answer them and I'll take notes so looking at these slides I'm not sure if the input I have to provide is exactly what you're looking for but I'll just give it anyway and then you can tell me whether you can shelve it for something else so I was thinking not necessarily in terms of like technical budget line items from some content areas like I think last year one of them was the sports offerings so I was thinking kind of along okay good so I'm not off the rails so the two things I was interested in seeing is the first is our performing arts and I think of this for a couple of reasons one is so related to what we were sort of talking about earlier with communications you know we obviously spend a lot of time talking about PVCS CICS charter school because they're trying to expand at the region we actually spend quite a bit more on PVPA students so local charter school that focuses on performing arts and I just happen to be lucky to have three kids go to the schools each of whom have had different experiences different aspects of the arts from 7 through 12 and just been constantly amazed at the breadth of offering the quality of our faculty and the way it integrates with students with special needs in the classroom and how there's certain key events that bring everything together so the sort of roll up I would want to see from that from a budget perspective and this might involve like maybe the performing arts director or the creative arts director about you know what's sort of the state of the offerings for you know it would include like a list of like what we offer but also you know when you sort of look for the next three to five years and the health of the program what is it that is going to be key to support that so this could be you know middle school electives this could be equipment it could be staffing concerns those sorts of aspects just a quick follow up I think that's a good one and one of the things I hear a lot is sort of the facility needs you know the auditorium seats we've all sat in those those are not great for performances things that we've done recently but I know there's more to do with lighting that I've heard from Mr. Becktold so I think we probably want to fold like the facility needs aspect of that into it as well yeah so so that would be good I'd also want to give maybe Mr. Becktold the opportunity to speak a little more broadly about because I know like sometimes the middle school what's offered there can change depending on schedule constraints and that's because that is one of the key grades at which parents and students make the choice to continue on it's interesting and I think about this in a budget perspective too because that ROI that cost-benefit analysis that you know it's 18k a year for one kid and if you're say you're a communications physician if you retain one kid in seventh grade that's potentially 18k times six years right so that's one the other one is the sort of health and wellness theme that we've been talking about recently this is sort of directly related to your superintendent draft goal in number six and it's it's kind of coming from a place that I don't have a great sense of what our health curriculum looks like right now and where it's delivered and this might vary whether you're talking middle school or high school it might be advisory it might be a quote-unquote health class it might be part of some other class and it could take a number of forms like when I grew up health class was taught by the teacher and it was a just say no to drugs and you know and abstain from sex that was what it was obviously we have a much different and broader area of concern and our community you know we have more progressive values you know we have student leaders presenting on LGBTQ inclusion the Sega club kids that went to New Jersey you know we've talked about technology and how it's rapidly evolved and become part of our students lives how do they manage that interruption the recreational drugs you know we have legal now across the river you know and so what does that mean in terms of the philosophy and approach of how we educate kids about recreational drugs to not stigmatize it and yet not encourage it how do we approach that and there's some really interesting things there that may require budget investment you know Canada has recently legalized and I was looking into some of the things and they spent a lot of time coming into develop a modern curriculum of how do you talk to teens about drugs in a way that's not a binary you know this is good or this is bad thing and you know there's other things in terms of emotional health some of the issues we were talking about earlier even late start times is something about the whole child you know what affects the whole system so again that general question of what are we doing now what would you like to do right so this is maybe both superintendent and also a teacher kind of question and what if any impact would there be to the budget not necessarily as much of a quantitative return on investment as the charter school you know loss is but obviously a huge personal return on it so this is what I'd like to do I think I'd like to go down the committee and just get people's thoughts I could either start on the end of the people who were not on the committee last year to go through this process why don't I do that and obviously if you have any questions about this process you can ask those too at the beginning excuse me I was actually going to ask if I could go later on because mostly because of my lack of familiarity with this process hearing Mr. Demling's comments that was helpful to sort of understand what are we trying to ask for and look for here because I look at these key indicators which I love these charts and these reports but there are things that are sort of beyond the control of of ours it's more sort of understanding what are the influences and things coming in so I'd rather if you could come back to me after other folks have started no trouble at all and actually it's kind of a funny thing we almost could have said at the beginning that the charts are actually unrelated to the question at hand because I think I know that sounds dumb because they're in there and you'd think they'd be connected but in fact I think I'm getting this right and if I don't have it right Ms. Adronis can change it to something that is right that the genesis of this was that we tend to start looking at the budget process in December and January as a bunch of numbers and trends on a page and it tended to be divorced from unintentionally divorced from the question of how does this exercise budgeting interrelate to the core mission goals that we have as a district whether they are things like you know counseling and support and services or whether it's part of our curriculum and programming academically and and we wanted to find a way in which we could have a more informed process to really dig into how our budget priorities are impacting the classroom and also since there's a sort of irritating part of budgeting where we never have enough money and then we're thinking about oh should we add 5,000 or should we cut 5,000 and then the question A we don't have enough money anyway and then B, well what does that even relate to right like what are the impacts we're trying to shoot for in terms of the classroom and what do we do now compared to what's happening now and so this was at least our attempt to try to improve that dialogue by picking substantive programmatic areas and they could be directly academic in the classroom but they don't have to be they could be something else where as a program area and the budget whatever you think did I get that right? basically yeah cool it's just Mr. Monino now we're going to move the other direction and take on you sorry oh sorry we don't have one slight addendum not to be accepted but just so I think the only thing I'd add is that the slides that Mr. Mongano presented are likely not connected to what's cited here but I don't want to preclude people from saying I really want to dig in on health insurance right I see that chart and it's a huge part of our budget and we got an update last year I'm not promoting that idea but I also don't want to preclude committee members from saying what's on these charts on these things so that's my two cents it's obviously your decision but I could imagine and in other committees frankly some of the feedback has been we want to dig in on this thing it's not how the region has typically done it but I don't think it'd be inappropriate for us to ask us to come back with you. I think the challenges I mean if you look at all the slides I mean the challenges chapter 70 trends regional transportation stuff I would be a waste of time to talk about it even in my personal opinion I guess I'm offering my opinion even on like vocational and charter there are other venues at our own meetings in which we talk about what those trends look like and what other things we should be doing that could positively impact those enrollment trends I think health insurance and payroll are probably more uniquely suited to discussions on the board but even there we just concluded negotiations on contracts and so I'm not sure that on the wage trends there's as much that we can do functionally in that area so I mean I think it's not funny about it but I mean even healthcare since we spent a lot of time talking about healthcare last spring and my god there's only so much we can do there too I don't make it sound like I'm arguing with you I don't mean to me that's totally out to lunch in my comments no I didn't mean to hurt you to feel that way it's not what I'm trying to do I'm not personally hurt but you have given Mr. Manino a little extra time to think about his answer because we talked about it earlier tonight sport what is the expenditure on sports and clubs we mentioned that majority students play at least one sport and club what is the expenditure on sport above and beyond the fees reimbursed and I don't think this is part of the budget process but I raised the question what good is sports and somebody said well it's educational it's empowering it's self esteem it's all kinds of other stuff could that be addressed so that was one that we actually did last year so when you're talking about it some of these maybe we could just re-send out those presentations from last year because I think there are a couple of good presentations on clubs and athletics oh I mean it's the idea of academics versus sport or performing arts I mean they're all kinds of intangible outputs the output is in the class taught or it's more taken I just thought that and because I've never participated in a sport which is obvious I always looked down a little far I like it to be discussed but it's already covered we covered it so yeah I just I wanted to I guess state for what it's worth I mean looking at these charts were actually really helpful just to understand the trends and for me that was what was happening with the transportation reimbursement in particular in chapter 7 day we have taken I think a more active role in advocating on behalf of the schools right with our local state elected leaders and that's actually was heartening for a little while and then things took a turn for the worse right Mr. Demling and I sat through several meetings with our local state elected reps so I think that beyond as Mr. Nakajima says are stating the obvious and marking those trends there's not a lot that I would say about that it's just really disappointing and I think for us it's not a budget guidance question so much as where can the committee lend some pressure and some expertise moving forward continuing to advocate right and maybe tapping the community a little more than we already have to take action on some of these things and put some pressure hopefully where they are I think it also will help that we have new leaders in our government both at our local level but also at our state level who hopefully have been hearing enough about this who ran on platforms that were connected directly to the importance of understanding chapter 70 funding and regional transportation in particular but also just with things like charter schools and all of that they bring that awareness to Boston in this upcoming legislative year and hopefully by next year we start to see some changes in that anyway I'll get off the soapbox for that I think that in terms of budget guidance a lot of the questions that keep coming up that I think that we continue to grapple with as a committee have been particularly around issues related to diversity and related to equity I think it's great to hear the report from Ms. Cunningham tonight and from the superintendent articulating our path forward and also stating we frankly could use some help that's what I'm hearing too is that there's some room there for improvement and for growth so if we can look at the ways of helping to fund those things and for all the reasons that I stated before I think these are values that our community holds and I think for most of us we are sort of in the same bandwidth in terms of understanding why these things are important but it's also practically speaking about supporting our students and supporting our educators and helping them be better students and better educators and better administrators so ultimately for me practically speaking it's about that, it's about giving them the skills and the mindset that they need to feel successful and to actually do a good job when they are here in school and to hopefully increase all the things that we want to see from literacy rates to graduation rates to success in future careers whether they go to college or otherwise so I think all those things are important for us to continue and reflect in our budget and I'm interested in doing that I think the sort of justice program I think is incredibly important and we're seeing some this is sort of the blossoming of something that I'm hopeful can actually make us kind of stand out from the rest in terms of what we can offer our students and our community this is extremely difficult times that we're going through in our country and we're seeing a lot of students expressing this frustration hurt and difficulty dealing with a lot of the issues that are coming whether it's gender sexuality concerns whether it's race and ethnicity immigration status all of those things and they have a real impact on their learning and also just in their success as students and as community members so I want to see us doing better with that I think we have already taken a position of saying we want to do better so what does that actually look like in this upcoming year I think that's incredibly important I do think that thinking a little bit more also about some of our core subjects I raised a question before about math and it's great to hear that we're going to be hearing more about that I know that there's been some concerns raised by the community around some of our health classes and what's being taught there I think any opportunities that we can take to continue to support all students through AP placements through just better sex education different health concerns and issues that we should take those opportunities to do that I think in terms of budget guidance that's basically where I am right now I also understand that we are potentially in uncharted waters because we don't understand what our care costs are going to look like next year we've tried to stabilize that we've done a pretty good job of it but it's still kind of a murky place I do think it's important for us to stay on top of that and to continue to understand what's happening there and to get more or frequent reports as we've been doing just to hear what's happening but I do think as far as the superintendent or our finance director can articulate a path forward on these other things while still keeping this general environment in mind that would be helpful the utilities I don't need it blown out again but I'm just curious is that solar farm online in South Deerfields now cool that took a little while and the other question how are we doing on the natural gas in what respect when we switch from oil and natural gas we're still going to see some savings from yeah so at the high school and middle school natural gas we actually are in the process of locking into a contract which the rates are good lower than what we were projecting so that's been promising oil prices did come down but they started to creep up a little bit again so I think for the region both schools being on natural gas has been a good thing if you look at it compared to our heating costs before we switched over thank you anything you want to hear about jumping on the curriculum bus when we cut those two healthy programs last year and had to cut staff also you kept under your breath mentioning that you hoped it wasn't that you thought it could be worse the following year which is I never wanted to ask you what that meant so I stayed away from that question I didn't want to hear the answer but now I think it's time to hear if we're going to have to do the same thing again so I think we'll talk about this in the next agenda item a little more specifically if that's okay with your testimony so of course Mr. Demling's interested in hearing about wellness I like the arts thing too but and what I would love I guess the truth is I would be happy for you to present that in whatever manner your staff your team would naturally present it what I mean by that is to me my assumption is if you're impacting the entire student body then that conversation your methodology could go anywhere from actual counseling and support for people who need it straight through more academic settings in which you're engaging a broad population in which you may not have any particular 20 kids in a room you don't have any reason to know any of them have any issues but you're still wanting to engage them in the principles of wellness in whatever modality you're doing it so my point is I'm opening it up to the question of how would you present that conversation or how you're attacking it I guess my assumption is that there's more than one way to do it actually more than one way you need to do it in order to be effective the other thing I would like to hear about is if this year we're doing a strategic plan that means next year we're going to be implementing it and so I don't know what resources we need or that we think we have or what our perspective is on being able to support the implementation of that plan and so to me that could mean a number of things that could mean looking at materials and professional development days and how they're allocated it could actually mean things like communications if you've got a plan not only do people need to know about it but also you still need to have the interactivity of that's an ongoing process and then it seems like speaking of defunct or maybe defunct or not defunct subcommittees we endlessly seem to have had conversations around data and identifying data sources and managing them and analyzing them and making them transparent I say I introduce that topic in sort of a vague way because I could understand if you would say well we don't have money to appropriately resource these areas what's the guidance you give me Eric you're saying you want to put a lot of money into it and then that would sound stupid and maybe even more stupid when we get to the next item on the agenda and so I'm not trying to say it and that bound it away I'm just saying if you're going to bother developing a strategic plan then we have to think about how we're going to implement it and that almost certainly either has it has resource implications under any circumstance meaning if there's no net increase anywhere then someone's still going to have to be doing work that's allocated towards some aspect of implementation or it means a budget add or a shift and so getting an understanding of that thinking would be useful and then I want to drill down specifically into the question of where we think there might be resource needs and then I specifically do have a question around data and part of it is just because again if we don't think we can do a budget add and it's just not realistic to do then we need to answer for ourselves the question of well how are we thinking of being able to develop monitor and analyze the data and publicly share data over time that's going to be instrumental in creating both consensus as well as momentum around those plans and by the way I don't have any answers this is the great thing about asking this question is I can just ask the questions and you guys can provide the answers and you know I'll try not to peanut gallery it okay alright when I came in I was going to ask about athletics but we don't need to ask about that and I thought about that specifically because of all the capital improvements that we're wanting to do I think performing arts would also be a great area as would wellness which brings I do think that for me one of the most important things is tying the budget guidance to the goals because that's what you know we've that is our our vision for the district and so those things are really so there's certain right with regard to the restorative justice and a lot of this I mean I think I have questions about what what parts of the budget would play into that so maybe a little more information the wellness goal that's been brought because that is a goal I know we mentioned at our last meeting particularly regarding the new landscape of recreational marijuana that's coming into Amherst of what the school committee the district could do to just be a more active part in that and helping in that process in that conversation so I think that fits into the wellness goal and budget guidance my last this is more of a question I mean I this is budget guidance I don't know if we do sort of budget look back because I mean looking through these you know there are trends charter school tuition is going down choice tuition is going down that's a percentage I don't know if that means that we're spending more and those things are sort of staying level or if they're actually we're spending less but if we are what have we done to to increase that retention rate and can we sort of look at it from a critical way to see keep up the good work I'm going to do next Can I ask you a question brother can you actually it might be helpful to the committee where does this meeting fit within the budget process near the beginning meeting in a couple weeks what are we doing so this is probably the first time we've officially talked about the budget guidance so there's sort of a three pronged approach that the subgroup came up last time so there was the indicators which you have there's this meeting which either next month or the month after will have the groups come and report back to you and then the third part was actually what you mentioned was cast and sent about the goals and tying the current budget support the goals that the superintendents lay out so this is near the beginning I think we're sort of on trackish one of the things I think we're still sort of feeling out the Amherst budget process this year with the switch over it does have an impact on the region I think things are going to move pretty much the same way as they have in the past but we're still going to have to feel out that new process with the town council as opposed to a town meeting or I don't know if that's still going to be the process but I think we're on track in terms of the budget process you'll see initial sort of projections of numbers at the four town meeting on December 8 so that'll be sort of your first glance at what the rough gap would look like for next year so we're on track the reason I want to the reason I was going to say the reason I wanted you to say what you just said is that based on what you just said and absent that information this would look woefully inadequate to begin a conversation around our budget what our trends are, what our look back is and all that kind of stuff and even though I think we're I'm sure we're fine in terms of where we are in a schedule I think last year we did this probably a couple weeks earlier yeah I think we started I think we tried to start in October last year but you know given the flow the reason I'm just saying that is that if we were having this conversation two or three weeks ago the sort of preliminary nature of the conversation would feel more natural coming up on like we kind of see December in sight it starts feeling more like hey we're moving towards making decisions at some point it'll get much more granular much faster and a lot more information so just three comments one is just the raw numbers in the bottom of these charts as well so you know the percentage is the red line but the raw numbers are included I think the second thing again I think we talked about this a bit more last year and two years ago around some of the trends we did a survey about for charter choice and private school families and one of the things that I noted at the time and is still true now is that there are these key touchstone moments in the district and I was surprised because I've been in the district a while how many people commented on challenging moments in the district and just how that made them think about other choices more favorably and so I do think you know this is going to be a weird thing to say but I do think the committee has had a large role in promoting a healthy working relationship with the community and I do think there's a place of having that stability and forward movement that has made an impact on some of the areas that you cited and I think we saw evidence because I saw the raw data before it got scrubbed of some of the I didn't like when and you know people's names were used so that wasn't released publicly so I do think there's a lot of reasons why but it's my belief that the data showed that that's one of them I think the last thing I want to say is a number of people have mentioned well it's been you know concerns about talking about potential but ads in what may or may not be a challenging budget here and I actually think there's more reason to actually talk about them you know we added the restorative practices position in a bad budget here we added Chinese last year in a terrible budget here so I do I mean it was a small amount of Chinese but we did do that so I don't you know just I did I appreciate the sense of concern about where a budget sits and you know fiscal conservative approach about that at the same time I think before we get real numbers before your 4-10 meeting and even after the first one I think if there's a thing the committee feels urgency about for the district I don't I don't know and it sounds weird but I just don't want people to have to feel apologetic about saying I think there may be a need here and you know we can work on it not saying we can deliver on it there's a lot of variables but it also helps us when we talk to our constituents and you know when me for it's mostly staff and some parents but you in your different roles to say these are the types of things that we're fighting for you know that we feel like our community needs and not being the kind of deficit mentality of cuts so for what it's worth I just I noticed a couple people very respectfully saying that and there's no critique of it it's actually just I'd rather actually have that stuff on the table so when we have those conversations it's out there instead of you know withholding. I think at least for myself the reason I mentioned it a couple times is that since all of our meetings are kind of public dialogues I didn't really feel like having a conversation in which a very reasonable public critique would be you spend a half an hour talking about multi-hundred-thousand-dollar ads in an environment in which there's no sense of where the money's coming from and it is otherwise it seems utterly divorced from reality and so I prefer to talk more about tasks we need to get like on the strategic planning stuff if we don't have an answer to how we're thinking about implementing it and monitoring how we're implementing it and doing that that's a bad answer whether there's a budget out or not and so you know rather same thing with wellness and legal marijuana and stuff right? Ms. McDonald we're cashing up to you I'm always coughing as soon as I start talking so I would endorse the and sort of add my voice to some of the areas that others have mentioned including the arts. I haven't seen this in the past so I would love to just repurposing something from the past I'd love to see that and wellness so I'll just add my voice to those and I did have one quick clarifying question on the the budget indicators and then another question I don't know if it's appropriate for what we're talking about now but my clarifying question is benefits and there's a comment that that increased 17 to 18 is health insurance cost can I, does that mean that the next page that that health insurance cost spending is actually a subset of that first chart? Please also in 18 beyond just the health insurance cost so I would be curious and this kind of leads into my next question be curious to understand sort of what's driving the rest of those increases beyond the health insurance because it looks like it's still about three or four hundred thousand in my doing the math in my head but my and my question is some of the things is I intrigued and curious about the conversation Mr. Nakajima brought up about data because it does come up repeatedly and then it kind of links also with somewhat into communication and strategic planning but is important and if it's one bullet point on the gazillion things that our fabulous HR department is doing to what extent and being absolutely new to this I apologize but to what extent short term are used and leveraged for some of these these kinds of non-curricular non sort of completely ongoing administrative leadership positions such as analysis or even bringing in some of the you know website maintenance and you know just communications maintenance if you will so those are I don't know to what extent those fold into that wages and benefits but understanding the full time versus temporary contracting consultant and to what extent we use and leverage this sort of one-off opportunity to get work done basically that we can't really envision bringing up full time position for so I can start if you are you want to start yeah I think on the wages piece I'll I can bring back more information next time I mean some of that's just the regular all staff get every year but there's probably a little bit more information to go with that and then on the contracted piece so that's not obviously included in the wages piece trying to think if we have any types of contracts I know we have done one like that in the past I'm thinking the you Chicago thing we did a few years ago but I don't think we have any currently so we do contract with the collaborative who do support us at the website development and they do you know some of the setup and the core kind of technical features but I think yeah I agree with Mr. I don't think we have thought of contracting out and some of it when it gets the data and student data that gets really sort of complicated with student rights and privacy and you can sign that disclosure but we tend to be quite sensitive about what we do with student data because there's no way to crunch without having some identifiable piece unless we put up protocols that end up being more costing that like you know for consultant to do the work it tends to be quite costly certainly something we can come back to for future dialogue and conversation if the committee would like great thanks we're going to move on we have a busy agenda we have a lot more to do yeah so should we use sort of our judgment and pick somehow roll these together to bring back to you yes okay so if we don't get to all of them that's okay I mean there's themes of what we've heard we may not be able to get to all of them sort of in that one type of meeting but we'll do our best to address as many as we can okay I'll have to make a question what next what do you plan to bring back to us for this for all these concerns that have been mentioned performing arts wellness so for performing arts we'll have Mr. Becktold who runs the performing arts program come and speak to you about what he does all the offerings the challenges that he faces sort of from a supply facility standpoint and then address your questions you'll have deeper questions that you'll want to go into when you hear that presentation so it'll give you a better understanding of the performing arts program so when you see what it costs and if there's an ad or if you want to add funds you'll have a better context for hearing that great oh why sit down you're not sitting down regional assessment December 8th Saturday morning upstairs in the library the middle school and we're hoping everyone can attend and they're critical for those of you I'm just going to say it out loud for those people who may not have been at four town meetings there are opportunities for those in the past but in the past it's been select board finance committee school committee to come together to hear about the financial condition of the schools about that you're going forward talk about assessment methodology and financial overview and outlook and so they've been critical meetings around the four towns coming together to align the needs of each town and trying to figure out how to fund the regional school district both operational and capital budgets in this particular year and I'll start and jump in but I think what we're planning to present is multiple budget scenarios so just going back to last year you might remember that we the agreement between the four towns was to have 20% of the statutory method rolled in so that happened last year there was not agreement between the four towns on what was to happen this year some towns assumed that would go up to 40% it was a five year roll in going to statutory other towns openly stated that they did not agree with that approach we've gotten budget guidance from two of the communities given us a 2.5% increase as budget guidance and Leverett has given 1.5% as budget guidance and as you all know that there's a relational formula so those two things don't necessarily mean that 1.5% in one town doesn't mean 2.5% in another town because they're in relation I mean they both can't be true most of the time 100% of the time I went to a Leverett finance committee meeting so we got the guidance from them they are in another tough sort of financial year so they were toxic going to two they said on 1.5% because they do have some significant financial hurdles that they have to deal with this year another wrinkle this year that may I welcome your input on in terms of designing the presentation it's going to be a little bit of a different dynamic because we're going to have 13 town counselors some of which this is going to be brand new for this was sort of we had the same select board members for a long time they're very well versed in this now we're going to have 13 counselors some of which have experience some of which this is going to be brand new so designing that presentation or trying to bring up the speed sort of on that will be I'm open to your suggestions on what we should think about for that but yeah we're going to design that presentation to show multiple options the 20% the 40% what if we hit Amherst guidance what if we hit Leverett guidance and we'll be open to feedback from the towns if there's other things they want to consider do you expect to get guidance from Schuetsbury and Pellum before then Pellum doesn't give formal guidance to us specifically but they sort of have a running guidance of 2.5% sort of just sort of what they want to sustain within to be sustainable long term yeah Schuetsbury has not issued us formal guidance the last few years I have called their town administrator just to check in see how things are going but we haven't received formal guidance from them for a few years I just want to put perhaps a finer point that one of the critiques in the past has been the presentations have been hinged or the models have been shown always assume that Amherst guidance the town of Amherst guidance dictates the other three in reality doesn't work that way but since they give formal guidance we've done that and we're trying to be responsive to that feedback by showing multiple scenarios with the towns we have formal guidance from and what it would do to all four towns so that it's going to be a longer presentation with more models but we think it's responsive to make sure that we're being fair to all the communities that's a stupid question I don't really care what would happen if you built a budget that included a 2.5% increase from Pellum, a 2.5% increase from Amherst a 1.5% increase from Leverett and whatever the heck that would mean what would that look like presumably that's not actually mathematically impossible to calculate right, it's not mathematically impossible I don't know if it's a long term thing so you have to, in your regional agreement you have to have some sort of method so as a one year solution something like that's possible you'd have to think about how to write the amendment to the regional agreement but that's not impossible that for a few years they had equal increases every year to all four towns but long term the regional agreement needs some sort of method but I don't even care if it's equal what I'm saying is Pellum and Amherst all say 2.5% and Leverett for whatever peculiarity of their financial circumstances say 1.5% I mean let me rephrase what I'm saying one of your slides should show that and the reason I'm saying this I'm going to be very blunt after this couple of years now and certainly last year I don't know what that would show but for the sake of argument if 2.5% increases in three towns and 1.5% increase in the other town man we didn't have to cut our budget we could actually meet our needs without going through some ghastly experience this coming year it's important to ground ourselves in showing that that basically the rest of the argument on what the formula is if all the towns are agreeing if they did that they would be willing to pay those increases then I'd like to see what that looks like on paper to understand whether that would be enough to meet our needs it might not, it might actually mean with all the other increases we have it might still put us slightly under water or might be treading water I don't know what it would show you guys would do the analysis but I would love to have that starting point because I understand the idea that adopting different formulas has flowed in implications from one town to another but there's really been two parallel exercises we've been going through in the last couple of years one has been what formula it feels or is fair and should we adopt philosophically the other one is how do we pay for our school budget and those two have interwoven in a way that I think is very unhealthy is that we can contemplate in circumstances that we need to cut our budget but in fact if you pop back for a second from a broader perspective and say wait a minute what's everyone said they're willing to pay oh well the willingness to pay actually would meet our needs well then why the hell are we cutting our budget right I mean there's sort of an unreality to that exercise and I understand why it's not exactly unreal there is a statute around this there's a lot of guidance but I'm just saying one of those slides should show that and by the way if it shows we're under water anyway then that should even be more bracing that when we're looking at these different formulas I'll stop there is there a dunny's in Mr. Dunway sure but I don't mind so you know I think having through I think maybe three of these meetings so from the past few years it's become really apparent that I think we have very different perspectives on this process and how this process should be run and even I think at the end of the day I think everyone that's in that room is you know more or less on the same page in saying we want to make sure that our schools are well funded and the best that we can for our kids that said I also think that there's so many different competing perspectives and interests that we end up sort of talking at each other and my experience has been that we've actually just come up with these sort of stop gap solutions to you know just stop the water from flowing through the dam you know too quickly right let's just you know try to mitigate to the best of our ability some of the financial realities of these you know different towns these different communities and that doesn't get us at a long term process it doesn't help us you know have you know beneficial conversations I guess in the long term because we're constantly saying okay well you know we'll negotiating during the process and I think that that can be healthy but it also makes it a lot harder for the district to be able to plan in the long term because you never know what's going to happen we're always back in this conversation of like okay well now we have to go to this you know four town meeting and hope for the best right and you know and do our best to negotiate and so you know I think in laying out the framework what I'm most interested in hearing is a you know a kind of a almost like a review to refocus everybody like you know can we at least agree that we want to work towards making sure that our schools are the absolute best schools that they can be and that we are committed to the mission and the values of our school district and start from there right like it's almost like you know bringing everybody back to what's important and saying let's have that conversation first I don't want to dwell on it because I'm not a Pollyanna you know kind of person like I don't think it's worthwhile to delve too deeply into something like that but I do think it might help hopefully some of the psychology of the people that are in the room like just thinking about you know the reason why we're having this conversation is because we're actually trying to benefit the health long-term financial health and stability of our school district which we all happen to be invested in literally so can we think about you know presenting that first and then think about how do we come to a conversation about you know what does it take to actually get there right like you know let's have a frank conversation about what's involved in all of this and do we feel like you know I don't I haven't gotten a sense since last year that there's been any movement in feeling from the different communities about you know yes we are willing to pay a little bit more or we're willing to you know we've sort of aside from what you just described with Leveret I haven't heard anything else from any of the other communities right you know obviously here in Amherst is different so you know is there an opportunity for us to have a conversation that feels a little bit more collaborative as opposed to just people getting pitted against each other or feeling that way anyway right like you know we're going to pay more but we're not doing that next year because we paid so much this year you know just feels like it's not contributing at all to the long-term health of that so I think it just I think we need to think a little bit about framing and the other thing I wanted to say is that it was actually from my perspective helpful to have the school committee play a prominent role in the meeting last year years prior the tenor of the conversation was actually very different it felt a lot more like there was a little bit more tension animosity about having the school committee kind of at the front of the room having chair there playing a central role in managing the conversation seemed to feel and I don't know if Dr. Morris and Mr. Ongano agree but it felt to me anyway like it was really important to do that and I think I think that's right and I think that conversation probably should take place before we show people numbers we really want people to have that conversation without having that sort of filter first because once we show them options and they see that it's sort of lost I agree and just to the point of school committee involvement absolutely and I think a line that Mr. Ongano and I try to stay clear of is that the schools and I'm glad you mentioned last year because it felt better last year but at times we've spoken and we felt like we've gotten pushed into conversations and we have to be careful not to be we're not representatives of any town we're representatives of the region so we're actively looking for school committee members to play large roles not just in the Mr. Ongano did a great job last year in terms of facilitation but even when we go into small groups because we're interested in the health of the district we're not we can't be advocates of well this method goes and just maybe taking a step back for people who have been through it so the school committee recommends a method and a budget and that's what goes to the four towns whether it passes or fails as opposed to a town budget which is slightly different in how it functions where it's just sort of a dollar amount gets voted and goes to the town this one both the assessment methodology and the budget numbers go to the towns for a vote so we are actively looking for firm involvement from committee members both at the front end which we can I think simulate last year and I think that was successful but also in the small groups because you're the collective body that's going to end up voting on these and we look to you to advocate and help towns come to that conclusion and I think the feedback is good on the framing and we can certainly do that as well in terms of the front end of the meeting so to make this our current meeting I'm going to go to Mr. Demling but then after him I want to just go around the table and get people's feedback or input on this or questions, it could be anything so that we could move through the side of the productive yeah so just comment on a couple of ideas that are brought up in terms of what might make this more most efficient it's a really interesting dynamic I didn't think about it that deeply until Mr. Demling brought this idea up that we're trying to do two things at the same time one is get through the crisis or what always feels like a crisis of the current budget year my gosh we need everybody to agree on something please and then by the skin of our teeth getting out and yay we did it and then having to do the whole thing over again so I'm not wanting to spend so much time on just getting agreement in one year without paying any attention to a long term solution and yet I feel it's a bit of a paradox because I feel like until we settle the one year like the current budget year there is that natural defensiveness I mean if Leverett is coming and saying one and a half percent and we're firm on that and we actually have a hard budget year I can't see an unclenching of that concern that's right in front of them in order to talk more broadly about you know what they value in schools and what the three to five year priority is so I was really intrigued by Mr. Nakajima's idea of why not just show the guidance that every town has come with and say this is this is a model and who knows maybe politically it won't fly but it would at least show that we're honoring and respecting where towns have said that they're coming from right because there's so much I mean I've only been involved in this process for two years but there's so much bad blood in some respects in history here that the level of mistrust is pretty high coming in and there's so many people at these meetings that are still for real open back and forth understanding dialogue changing of minds it's pretty low in that context so I kind of feel like starting from a position where we're not attacking each other we're saying okay you've said one and a half percent you've said two and a half percent you've said this is what it looks like if we were ever able to get to a point where that budget looked manageable we could then take care of that it's off the mind and then we can start thinking about long term and are we going to go to 40% statutory and whatnot I just feel like that second conversation is so hard to have when there's so much protection over an individual budget and in terms of process I do agree that I like to and Mr. Nakjima you and Ms. Kosenski you're at the front of the table and directing that I thought that was a good thing and also I think the variable this year the new variable Town Council coming in maybe presents an opportunity to even clarify that process because you kind of have the built in excuse of here's up to 13 people that are completely new to the process so it makes sense that you would say well what are we doing here we're the regional school committee and we recommend a method and a budget and so we're here to get your feedback on that so you sort of lay out for the newbies what the expectations are and that sort of implies to the rest of the group of what we are actually doing and so this is how we're going to proceed we're going to do item A and then item B and Mr. McDonough is going to present this information and then we'll so that might be an opportunity to improve that process and I think by the way for 11 out of 13 of those Town Councilors they are actually literally going to be new to at least the last couple of years of four town meetings so I think there's a huge huge huge majority who are like in that position which means you know we're going to move around the table I'll wait for the political forces to play themselves out in terms of what each town is willing to pay I don't anticipate a long term solution ever unless we move to the all statutory method which I guess would be a long term solution it's a political process which is all I have nothing to add to this I've been to some four town meetings before last year so I yeah so I think having the school committee taking a bigger role sounds great and it's been helpful for me to be on this side of the table since I've never been yeah just attended but haven't been a part of the process is it fun? it's fine it's not fun because welcome to this side of the table I appreciate the perspective though from all of you who've spoken so thank you that's why I'm just saying Mr. McDonough do you have anything to add? the only thing I'd add again I don't know if I said it right earlier or said what I was thinking earlier is and actually I think it'd be helpful I don't know if you could but if you could do an analysis of what the budget would look like and share it with this committee in advance of the four town meeting I'd kind of actually appreciate it because I don't honestly like in your head do you have a sense whether that gets us anywhere close to what our budget needs are going to be I think that will be a advantageous method for the region for one year my concern is that it's not tied to no no no I'm just saying you think you could work out that math and show it to the committee? absolutely but I just want to finish that one point that might actually be a decent status quo budget in terms of the numbers for the next year when you say we try to apply a logic the more you sort of have a method that is not based on a logic the farther you have to go to get back to something so that's just the one sort of pitfall to keep in mind that if we just say we increase everybody you know x percent the next year you say no we're going to tie it to enrollment that means somebody's going to probably have a bigger period to go through I understand that but I guess part of why I really want A to see the numbers so we know what it looks like and then B to potentially have that as part of the conversation we're having with the four towns is in my personal view we're in a really unhealthy place with this conversation where it is conceivable that we might actually and again that's why I want to see the math because it's conceivable that all four towns might be willing to pay what we need to to maintain our budget but we'll choose not to and we'll force us to make cuts because we can't agree on a formula on a page that would get us in their minds to fairly pay what they've already said they're willing to pay and it may sound a little silly but what I'm backing that away from is the idea I would argue that one of the principles I would like to follow is that we're not going to butcher our budget or cut it for basically no good reason and I'm sorry to put it that way if I'm not going to say this at the four town meeting I know this is on camera but if I said at the four town meeting people would yell at me and say it's not for no good reason it's actually for excellent principles and here are all the principles so that's probably too extreme on my part so if I doubt it back a little what I would argue is maintaining a stable budget environment that's predictable and is able to retain staff and retain a level of quality services that we think we need for the best interest of our district is in fact in a really important value along with having predictability and fairness around whatever methodology we're assessing towns and even though I know at the end of the conversation we had with the four towns there was near unanimity, not unanimity but near unanimity that that was really important and that towns were committing themselves to say we want to make sure that the resources are there I almost want to front load that on the conversation and say look based on what you've all said you're willing to pay it would get us to this budget and change the obligation to figure out a long-term solution but it is an equal and important principle and I would argue more important principle to say that if there's no reason to do harm like massive increases in our health care expenditures or whatever why are we? there should be a do no harm principle around creating continuity in our budget if you have a huge recession and your revenues are falling off a cliff and a state aid is being dramatically cut which could happen it's happened before, it could certainly happen again then you're making decisions that you simply can't avoid and have to make because there's no way the town which is also under direct towns that can ever make up the shortfall on budget and so you're forced to make budgetary decisions that are really gruesome but also absolutely necessary because the money is not going to come from anywhere in an environment in which you're not faced with a certain circumstance then there should be a prudential principle that the towns follow or in trying to come to an agreement that doesn't unduly harm the operating budget while also finding a pathway and I think the conversation I don't want to feel like I'm lecturing anyone throwing that out but it makes absolutely no sense to start from a framework of abstract principle and abstract ratios and say where we want to end up on these abstract ratios and in fact some of them we're going to do could do undoubtedly significant harm to our operating budget and again if you start with the budget guidances that'll tell you up front where are we actually in terms of the ability of the towns to pay now how do we get there in terms of what the ratios should look like so I know that was long but the reality is we don't need another working group because another working group is not going to succeed and so if that's not going to succeed then what's really the goal of the school committee in my opinion the goal of the school committee is to ensure we have the resources we need to be able to support the budget knowing the fiscal picture of the towns what gets us there let's figure that out two very brief comments thank you all for the conversation because this is the kind of feedback we were looking for what kind of presentation how to model it, how to frame it the reason we put it on the agenda for today is we haven't always had meetings to talk about four town meeting before it happens this was really helpful and I think to one of the points you made Mr. Nakajima I think we are trying to position ourselves by providing information to the four towns in very clear and as I described earlier perhaps in more iterations to be more fair and share more information with the towns and I think that's the conversation needs to happen from it it's truly an I wonder statement whether the committee, because I heard a couple of people in my opinion imply and then one explicitly would it make sense to have a school committee meeting half an hour before the four town meeting so that you all will be well versed and be able to see not just see the information but ask questions beforehand I'm just conscious that seeing the slides might look different than having a discussion and it's not something we need to make a decision on tonight but certainly something that we could arrange and it wouldn't be atypical other committees sometimes have meetings before this and you know I just think for someone getting a lot of slides because this will be a lot of pretty detailed slides on different assessment formulas I don't know if a conversation might be helpful directly beforehand for what it's worth I think that's actually a really important thing to have happen I think it's a Saturday morning and so it's difficult because people have families and they're working all week all the time this is kind of what we do here like this is you know this meeting not to you know put to find a point on it but it is incredibly important for the long term financial health and stability of the district and so I think having you know the committee I think as close to a full committee there as possible if not the full committee would be really amazing and then I think also on top of that full committee in advance so that it's fresh in our minds we're coming out of that conversation I would support that just a couple points on the town council variable the more I think of it with these at least 11 people completely new and this is a complicated topic even being in it for a year you should probably reach out to them so that they can discuss what they want to do about it like you're either going to need to present to them at their first meeting or they're going to have to have another town council meeting before that because they get migrated on a Sunday and then we meet Saturday that week they'll have to meet and therefore they'll have to talk about meeting on that Monday or you'll have to reach out to them and say hey I'm here for you this is really complicated you know this isn't the kind of meeting where you can just and just be there as a resource for them because I would hate to be a town councilor who is all wanting to do the right thing and get thrown into that not knowing that importance of everything that we just discussed okay, yeah we can do that that helpful? just yes when and where is this meeting it's at the middle school library it's on December 8th and it's at what time? 9 o'clock 8.20 AM same location or you can find a room off of the side yeah, I think we'd like to do that yeah, so why don't you submit to the middle school yeah, absolutely nearby RFQ for feasibility planning at high school and middle school so we did a request for qualifications process for a designer to do the quasi feasibility study with more of like a building use study of the high school and the middle school with some different grade configurations so we posted that on September 26th we received over 20 applications we had a ton of interest more than we've ever seen for this type of design project we only received three actual applications for this from JCJ Architects, Steffi and Bradley Architects and SMMMA a committee comprised of myself Ms. Castinson and Mr. Cody who's our facility quasi coordinator right now reviewed all the applications, the technical applications we reviewed those, evaluated them since we only had three we invited them all and for interviews we ranked them based on their interview responses and so the total rankings based on both the technical piece and the interview piece was JCJ and the score Steffi and Bradley was just a smidge lower than JCJ and then SMMMA was a little bit less than those two so the process for the committee is to select one and approve that hopefully tonight you can technically select any firm from the list but if you select somebody other than the first firm you have to have a written justification for why you selected that firm and I'm happy to answer any questions and Ms. Castinson can as well Ms. Castinson, do you have anything you wanted to add? No, I summed it up I mean this was actually really enjoyed being a part of those interviews it was fun you know just to see different visions of what firms can do and it was difficult because the two top contenders were very close and they both interviewed really really well and what set those two apart for me was their local expertise so one firm has worked in the district before and had a lot of experience in this particular area of like school consolidation or reconfigurations the other firm maybe hadn't done quite as much work with public schools in this department but had someone who locally who lived here so both firms had really the resources of global architecture firms so they were was a tough decision and I spoke to a reference who actually has worked with both firms and had nothing but good things to say about both firms and their their work Are there questions from the committee? Questions or comments from the committee? Yes I was just going to say that JCJ Architects was the firm that was working with the district around the last elementary school building project Sorry, I missed what? Around which project? The last elementary school building project So you were saying it's a matter of state law that if we pick someone other than the first one we have to provide a justification for why? I'll entertain a motion I move to accept the RFQ from JCJ Architects for the recommendation of the review committee So I move to second it. Any further discussion? Now would be your opportunity to provide a rationale for not choosing the first recommended vendor Silence is golden roll call vote Mr. Manino Benino aye Demling aye Kajima aye Kaston's aye McDonald's aye Thank you With two not present obviously and I must among those who happen to be here which should be obvious Is that it for you Mr. Magana? Have a good evening Thank you Superintendent Goals item F I just want to thank also Ms. Kaston for sitting in on that design committee I appreciate your time So in terms of goals So the differences from the prior version based on the feedback one is sustained dispelled correctly on number two so that's a minor difference but the more content specific differences are number five and six so you'll see that it says for the consideration of grade level spans for secondary school buildings that was based on feedback from the last meeting and number six was drawn out much more with some sample items that were related to wellness the original goal was much much briefer and didn't spell out some potential what was intended to mean wellness was intended to mean in that goal so those were the three changes that were made based on the feedback from the October regional school committee meeting Are there questions from the committee? Ms. McDonald Anyone? None's for me I don't have to be I'm just asking. Do I have a motion? I move to approve the superintendent goals for this school year Is there a second? Second. It's been moved and seconded Any further discussion? Seeing none, roll a call but you know, I need no I Don't like I. Or don't as I So will then I Kaston's an I McDonald's I It passes unanimously by those who are present We got this under the wire so we can do your mid review At least one up out of three years so it's okay April That's right exactly PVCICS expansion letter Funny, the title always baffles me It's like the non the opposition to expansion letter because it always seems to I guess it's good to write in the positive rather than the negative Mr. Numling Okay, so this is going to be a bit of duplication for all y'all at the image level but for the region If you were here on the region last year the structure of this letter is quite similar to our final letter from last year it begins with so many of our objection reasons goes over a little bit of the history which is highlighted a little more clearly here given that we have a new commissioner and we want to emphasize the fact that there's been consistent position on this issue from the past board and commissioners and then it goes into quite a lot of detail about the demographic shortfalls again using Desi's own data and a bit of response to the school's response as to why these aren't problems and then a sort of a deep dive summary into one of the more egregious demographics if you're following this along at home and you can't see the paper we're looking at this we were talking about chronic and severe under enrollment of low income students with disabilities Hispanic students, high need students and that the special ed disparity is really quite dramatic so that's sort of called out here as well as some references to some advocacy that some PVCICS parents had done a couple of years ago in regards to providing a welcoming and supporting environment for special ed students and families Mr. Nemle I mean just to provide further context for those watching at home I mean I know you said this at the school committee meeting that a particular reason for calling us out apart from the fact that it's egregious and doesn't match up with desired goals for our public schools is that in their application they used to mention last time that they particularly called out that they were a magnet or achievement school for integration desegregate you know the quote is in the proposal to Desi as to why they should expand so allow students to attend desegregated integrated public schools as the school has proven to be an engine of integration in Hampshire county so it's directly pertinent to their current application that in fact the numbers belie kind of radically the veracity of that statement and then the last page just to finish the summary there's a section about the finance formula which is short because desi does not have control of it and we sort of are making the assumption that that is not an argument that resonates with the board of commissioner but it is something that obviously matters to us and so we include it there and then the sort of history and annotations at the end comments or questions on the committee is there any I just want to say thank you again to this together I think it's a fabulous letter and I really don't have any concerns or you know edits or anything like that I think the only thing that I would point out is that we heard from both Springfield and Holyoke school committee members that this school has appeared to be targeting their districts and communities in particular and probably to try and help you know sort of change the perception of of their school and they have been advertising that they are the engine of integration so this is these are statements that they are making repeatedly in public despite the data showing up otherwise my only other the only question I have is I guess I'm not familiar with representative like Natalie blaze I don't know who that is I'm sorry so she is the newly elected representative who took part in Coulick's so she represents so at the region she will rock and roll absolutely I should make a note both because we bring up Natalie blaze as I was getting the contact information for the new representatives she specifically calls out fully funding regional transportation on her campaign website so if we are worried about you know our new representatives understanding what our priorities are she is fantastic you don't know her? she is really a wonderful person I mean they all are they all seem to be working together maybe representative Coulick are there other questions or comments otherwise I would entertain a motion yep I will move to approve our letter opposing the expansion of the PVC ICS is there a second? moved and second any additional comments beautifully written thank you it is very well written I'll just add my thank you also to Mr. Demling for this great letter the second one great and the regional committee you know and on that note I think we are going to start with you this time as McDonnell okay McDonnell's aye Kasim's an aye Nakajima aye okay carries unanimously can go forth and have great impact hopefully H 2019 2020 school year calendar last year we decided based on feedback to try to have the school committee approve the following year school calendar before the end of the calendar year based just as families staff members really appreciated having the earlier notice typically was more in the springtime which for some families was complicated and so our process that we instituted two years ago was that Mr. Smollin does a great job setting up initial draft we get feedback from our superintendent planning council which is district directors from our principals and then we meet with the Amherst Palom Association leadership they then offer feedback and we come up with an agreement to share with faculty contractually the APA takes a vote and they have to affirmatively vote if we're going to have a pre-labor day start we've had that for at least 15 years do you say at least 15 years but we have to offer a pre and post labor day start option to the APA we had that meeting last week last Thursday I think with the APA leadership they've now presented these options to the faculty they will get us the responses well before the December regional school committee meeting but it's an opportunity for you to review ask any questions there's really only one substantive change from last year to this year is or from this year to next year however you want to think about it is that if you remember we had a very hot start of the school year and our first day of school was a half day and there was a universal feeling that it was a wonderful way to start the school year that having an earlier release allowed for the community building and welcoming feel people had struggled to make that last for 6 hours or 7 hours right then you sort of delve into content and so people didn't love the 98 degree heat and 98% humidity of the day but they did really appreciate how it felt and we used to have an early release as the first day of school all the way back this was a request that I got we received lots of feedback why did you remind us of that 98 degree day because it's 38 raining I'll take my 98 but so that's the only kind of substantive change otherwise everything is slight date variations but everything else is pretty identical to the current school year both on the pre and post Labor Day start can you remind the committee why we don't align any of our breaks with the five colleges so the question comes up every couple years why don't we have a March break instead of a February and April break which is particularly in New England this is pretty typical but outside New England most school districts have one break in the spring and it happens in March and so this is not a I agree or don't agree statement but the chair and I spoke and there's actually a school committee policy that dictates that February break and April break each spring each winter and spring so when that conversation comes to me my short answer is the school committee has a policy we can't do that I have a longer answer if anyone's interested I'm not sure 938 it's I think it's worth mentioning a slightly longer answer now also which is the majority, vast majority vast majority of staff majority I'll just say it majority majority majority majority staff doesn't live in our district and so if they have kids their kids aren't going to the school district which means even though there's hue and cry that's perfectly reasonable by the way perfectly reasonable hue and cry from people who work at EMS or Amherst College or something where they'd say I really wish you could align the breaks with our breaks so that if I want to take my kids I don't have to take them out of school and we can wait spring break which totally makes sense perfectly reasonable it turns out there's a countervailing voice from a lot of the staff who actually work in the district whose lives would be disrupted if their kids breaks totally didn't line up with when their break was and vice versa so they'd have daycare needs or custodial needs sometime when they can't take off and then they would have an opportunity to go away at a time in which their kids can't and they'd have to pull them out of school and so it's one of those things that I think for a lot of us as school committee members we get a lot of feedback from our constituents which is totally understandable and reasonable about isn't it obvious you do it this way and it turns out once you dig a little deeper there are actually arguments to not do it but also feel reasonable in their own way which makes a comp or irrespective of school committee policy after 44 years living in town I had a good explanation for that thank you I actually have a question and I apologize for adding to this late the late meeting time but Germanino longstanding question that I've always had but one question I do have is the is our end date so when we are ending in that last week of June I just really really questioned the amount of learning that's actually happening in the last five to ten days at school when we've added five policy driven and so it's not something that can impact for 1920 but I just would love to ask the question and maybe it's not for tonight maybe it's for another time to understand what how did we end up in the situation if that's just perception from my parent in the school district hearing my kids talk about basically the last week and a half and movies and not really doing a lot of learning in school is there ways that we can think through the calendar in ways to pepper those extra snow days in other parts of the calendar year so that they're actually impactful learning days as opposed to movies and popcorn so I think I'm not 100% sure when you say pepper I think you're trying to get a better sense of what that means whether it's eliminating one day of a vacation day so taking away one day in February or one day in April it sounds like policy driven we have to have a vacation is it mandated in the policy that it's five days if it is then obviously the answer is no we can't do anything about it without changing policy but it just seems to me when we have the snow days we tack them on at the end of the school year in June doesn't it sound like there's opportunity to move up the start of the school year a few days to counter it so that some of those snow days are taken up at the front of the school year and some are at the end of the school year if needed I just consistently see nothing happening in those extra five days that get added at the end of the school calendar year so one is I'm concerned to hear about popcorn in movies because that's not my experience so I think we could certainly bring that up either at school committee level or we could certainly connect as you feel better individually about that because that is not I'm not saying that's not your child's experience or other children's experience it hasn't been in schools I've worked at I think there is a lightning of load and some realization that the end of the school year happens my perception of that I have some family who live in the southern state where the school year ends on Memorial Day they have the same thing that happens at the end of May there's something about days 176 to 180 that no matter what day of the week or what day of the month or what month it is that there's a natural crescendo down whatever that is yeah thank you yeah to that happens I don't think popcorn in movies is the answer and again we could follow up offline I also think when we have one day weeks our attendance is pretty terrible so one of the things you'll notice I didn't point it out specifically is if you look at the December break on either calendar we're choosing not to have to school on Monday December 23rd and then have the break starting on the 24th and that's when our experience is frankly even this week which was a two day week we've seen a decline in attendance right and so we certainly could add a day to those weeks I just wonder about what our attendance from teacher attendance will be staff attendance I should say what our student attendance will be and how much learning will actually happen in those days given that our experience has been when we have one day weeks they generally are there's not a tremendous amount of learning that happens on that day so that's my moment in answer yeah and so that would hold true also for that June 22nd date if we need to go to that it would right absolutely yeah and hopefully we won't because we just and I'm not a believer in snow Mr. Sullivan knows I've been talking to his department 445 last three school days but but you know sometimes we do and sometimes we don't and then we get into a blizzard bag conversation which is another topic for another day if the group wanted to go in and I'm not a fan but at all but you know that's the way some school districts deal with when you get over a certain number of snow days so that you don't have these one-off kind of days but I'm not a proponent of that so I just wanted to say as a child of two educators that the favorite vacation was very special to us because we went to the family we'd go skiing and that was something that I would never ever want to give up so process wise this is for our review and the APA votes at first and then we voted so they vote so in order for me to bring forward a pre-labor day schedule for your consideration an actual vote the APA has to vote to support a pre-labor day start first so contractually they have that right now again many many years in a row they will have a strong hunch based on my conversation with the leadership that that trend will continue and then we bring it forward for a vote in December so they're not necessarily voting and they're sort of a voting on a schedule but they're really voting that they support a pre-labor day start because contractually we need that before I can bring a formal recommendation to you. So I just have a question about April so looking at these weird blocks of time that show up sometimes right one of the things that I see community members responding to sometimes negatively is when you have these weird weeks like the week of April 6 where you have April 8 which is an early release day and then April 10 is you know a day off right you know trying to find child care staggering work and all that stuff and it's not an official holiday week right and then two weeks later you actually have spring break is really challenging so I'm wondering if there's any way to move up you know and maybe not but if they're you know if you thought about maybe moving that half day to April 1st moving that back a week you would have two consecutive half days weeks but you know I guess it's sort of a wing and I'm not sure you know what kind of thought process into this like in this particular pattern. Yeah so I can speak to that actually we have thought about that and the state has not yet released their MCAS schedule but they typically have at the high school level there are days where MCAS have to occur like it's not like a window it's like the test and it typically is the week that spans March and April so we're avoiding that week for an early release because 10th graders are likely to have MCAS that day and if kids if students leave early I mean they could stay but that causes all sorts of unfair pressure on students so that's the reason for that I'm aware of that sort of awkward wrinkle but that's where we are so I guess the question is would it be possible to move that half day to the following week though the week of the 13th you know and have it be the 15th or something again just trying to think if there's a way to provide some relief to you know parents who are trying to find alternate you know I don't know but it seems like looking at the calendar that's the only time where you really have this really awkward otherwise it's a great calendar yeah that's good feedback we can take that back this will be on the next agenda thank you to the APA for making their vote process fit with the school committee process absolutely and I love the fact they're voting it answers the question of is this going to cause a fruit it's like Carolina gifts we have a sheet of paper with gifts on them anyone who's inclined to be vocal right now they can read it as a motion I move to approve the following gifts from fellow elementary PTO PTO Inc. number 1495 for national development breakfast 11618 in the amount of $100 and from hardnet to support donation of clothing to family center total amount estimate 250 for a grand total of $100 is there a second second Mr. Manino I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I