 Hi, I'm Kirstie Allison Ampe, Chair of the Arlington School Committee, and I call this meeting the Regular School Committee meeting of Thursday, September 7th, at 6.30 to order. We begin normally with public participation. However, I'm informed there's been no one who has signed up for that. Oh, and I also wanted to welcome Ms. Ford Walker, or Dr. Ford Walker, who is joining us for the first time publicly on the big table. But we appreciate everything she's done since we actually hired her even before she was working here. So, welcome. Thank you. And I also want to acknowledge Ms. Keys, who is our AEA representative, and our student representatives will be joining us at her next meeting. So, we begin with the opening day report and summer activities, Dr. Holman. Let me get some slides pulled up in one moment, and then Dr. Ford Walker will jump in. Hold on, that's not the screen you want. Okay. We've had an excellent launch to the school year, if a little bit steamy this week. And we're going to open up with what we were working on in curriculum work, and then I'll close us out with some of the stuff we did to launch the school year. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. As Dr. Holman mentioned, we had a very exciting summer. There was a lot of learning, a lot of adult learning that took place, and a lot of fun. Each department really engaged teachers, staff, and leaders in a number of different experiences. And so I'll walk you through what some of those included this past summer. Our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging department had 18K to 12 teachers participate in a four-day virtual training. And this has really led in partnership with DESI and the ideas workshops that they offer. And they particularly focused on the anti-racist school practices to support the success of all students' course. In our English language arts department, we had a number of teachers that really prioritized looking at curriculum maps, also prioritized looking at curriculum. And in our ninth grade staff, they really looked at heterogeneous grouping in the initiative and took some time to think through what changes and implementations needed to be made with curriculum units and planning. And they developed essential questions, as well as norms for that particular initiative. Also, our middle school teachers examined titles, as well as looked at a number of different curricula to determine changes that needed to be made. And also, we had a number of teachers that participated in LEXIA training. And LEXIA is an ELA offering that is really targeted to meet the needs of students who are performing at all grade levels. In our ELA department, we had some work that was done around looking at curriculum units, making sure that they were aligned with DESI models and also making sure that there were certain state and federal documents that were completed and updated, including parent notification forms, program exit letters, et cetera. In our history and social studies department, a number of teachers participated in looking at curricula again and revamping it and making sure that there were strong connections to our new ELA curriculum, Expeditionary Learning. And they really spent some time making sure that there were intentional opportunities for students to connect both content areas. And also, at Audison, there was work done around specifically AI and modern world. And there were some updates made to the curriculum in that area. And our health and wellness department, particularly at grades four and grades six through nine, there was some work done around updating lessons, particularly around the human growth and development units. And those will be shared at a later date, the specific adjustments that were made. In addition to that, there was also a number of staff members that participated in a experience that was centered around updating PE or physical education as well as our FACTS curricula. In our library digital learning department, staff also worked on really identifying the Massachusetts digital literacy computer science standards within lessons and making sure that there was a strong link to those particular standards. And in addition to that, they also worked on making more intentional connections to the national library standards as well. In our math and computer science department, there are six through 12th grade teachers worked on orienting new staff to curriculum and the pacing guides. I mean, as you all know, there was a change in leadership at that department. Our new director, Octavia Bronner, did some work with our former director, Matt Coleman, to make sure that there were, that there was alignment made to some of the practices that had started last year already, particularly around grading for equity and making sure that some of those conversations continued into this new year, although there was a new leader. Also, there was intentional work to make sure that there were some content areas that did not necessarily get lost in the transition between leaders and what I mean by that is some conversations around making sure that some of the initiatives that Mr. Coleman was in the middle of leading didn't necessarily falter with the new leadership. In addition to that, there was some specific work done around the cyber security curriculum and also some intentional work around pacing guides. In our nursing department, there were a number of nurses that attended a great deal of training. Some of the training was connected to ensuring that topics such as emergency preparedness and medication administration were given due attention, but also there were a number of participants that, excuse me, a number of staff that participated in learning about the new SNAP Health Portal that is going to be piloted at Bishop and Gibbs this year. Also, in addition to that, we had a number of new hires in our nursing department. In our performing arts department, two teachers participated in a national project titled Musician of the Month. In this particular program, it's about making sure that music education is embraced and that there is a deeper dive into understanding different composers, performers and ensembles and also different music styles that exist. In science, there was a great deal of work also done to make sure that there were deeper connections made to our new ELA curriculum, Expeditionary Learning, and also there was a lot of work that took place within that department to make sure that topics of diversity, equity and inclusion were embedded in the experiences of students. Also, there were more opportunities for teachers to engage in group work with one another and also group work in making sure that group work was reflected in the learning experiences of students. In our social emotional learning department, we had a number of staff, and Dr. Harmon will share this hopefully when she talks about opening day, but we had a number of staff comment on some of the opportunities that they experienced with social emotional learning as a result of our two leaders in this particular department as a result of them doing some intentional work with staff over the course of opening day and new teacher orientation to really experience what social emotional learning could look like in the classroom. And so this was as a result of their work over the summer to really be intentional about embedding social emotional learning and the learning experience for students. They also updated some counseling and SEL curriculum, particularly at Gibbs, and also there was a small elementary team that did some planning around department time using prioritizing anti-racism. Our social education department participated in a number of trainings. I won't review every single training there, but there were 38 participants that were able to take advantage of a number of different experiences. Allison, would you like to add to that? Thank you. I know we switched this year to safety care for our crisis intervention and de-escalation training, which is required by the state. So we had previously been doing therapeutic crisis intervention, but through this we were able to train in-district trainers. In the past we had two trainers. We now have 16s that were able to offer more training across the district and minimize disruption to schools as far as scheduling and having people out of the building and get more people in the training. So the folks who did that this summer will be leading trainings this school year. The first session begins next week. And then you've asked in the past about Orton-Gillingham, we have another cohort who took the coursework over the summer and then this year will be doing their practicum over the course of the school year. And then these were some other offerings that folks participated in. Thank you. In our visual arts department there was also some intentional work done around updating curriculum and updating some learning experiences. Specifically there are five new courses that were being worked on over the summer, filmmaking, animation, mural painting and set design, mental smithing and jewelry making. So we're super excited about the addition of those courses. And also in our K-8 grades teachers worked on transitioning from the traditional approach to teaching and learning to the teaching for artistic behaviors curricula. And this is a live link that you can click on to learn a little bit more about what that particular approach is. In our world languages department the theme of looking at curricula continued and updating it continued. And there was the creation of a new thematic unit in grade eight that really prioritized looking at authentic resources. And teachers also researched authentic resources and developed learning sequences for existing thematic units. And just shifting a little bit to our newest departments, we did want to provide update around some of the work that took place in those particular departments. So Matt Coleman our former director of mathematics who's now the director of data research and accountability did a lot of work this summer to review systems currently in place within Arlington public schools and also to identify different areas of growth around data collection, data analysis and also tying systems together that are currently in place and making sure that we are using them most effectively. So some of his work included attending a power school university training as you know power schools a huge platform within the district that is I would say the center of a lot that takes place around student data development management and housing data. Also he met with different leaders throughout the district to gain a sense of some of their needs at the school based level around data collection but also around how to improve processes. He also did a preliminary look at school data as well as district data and started to identify different areas that we will continue to look at and review in order to make progress. And also he did a lot of work around preparing the school leaders and schools for the new year in terms of data and creating data folders and really making data more of a conversation. Also our new family engagement and communications director did a lot of work over the summer to connect with families to transition the work of engagement to more of a central location but also to really strengthen and identify areas where engagement could be strengthened in the district. And so she is in the process of continuing to meet with people throughout the district to gain a sense of what the needs are and also to begin to work on updating district offerings such as the district website as well as creating a communication hub. She also launched the district's Instagram page to further the home to school connection and also onboarded to communication specialists which will help her with this work. And finally in our leadership development and onboarding department this was I would say a really busy summer for Kate who is the leader in this particular area and her work really involved onboarding new leaders as well as new teachers as well and also onboarding new central office staff and that included supporting the work of new principals by providing just one to one support also providing more technical support as well as needed and she also matched mentors with mentees and she supported that effort with our teachers. I'm going to transition to our new teacher orientation that took place last week and it was an exciting time where we were able to welcome approximately 70 new staff to Arlington public schools and this took place over the course of two days where they were able to learn a little bit more about the curriculum also learn a little bit more about systems and structures such as our evaluation and observation system they learned a little bit more about special education, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging and they also had an opportunity to meet with their union representatives and work with their mentors. I will say that we have a number of excited staff who are very happy to be here and they are looking forward to the work ahead of them. Welcome to our new teachers and I'll only add that we open by talking to them about our mission and our goals and our vision statement and the fact that growth, joy, belonging and empowerment live at the center of what we do here in Arlington and hope that that sets a really strong tone for their entry into the work. I'm going to talk a little bit about August leadership workshop and opening day and then we'll be done. At August leadership workshop we were really focused on getting a better definition working for ourselves about what deeper learning is and also digging in a little bit to some of the phrases, terms and eventually initiatives that sort of are the core of our strategic plan. So our objectives are right there. One of our key objectives was to complete a task together with the guidance of students. So we had a group of about ten students who taught everybody at August leadership workshop which included 53 teachers, 20 coaches, 51 administrators, how to dance and that was silly and fun and it was only about two hours of the time we spent at leadership workshop over two days but it was a very fun two hours and we learned from the students and so the whole point of that exercise was we place the students in the position of being teacher, we place ourselves in the position of student and as a result of that a lot of vulnerabilities surfaced that come along with being a student that allowed us to then talk about what that experience is like. We were in leveled groups, we got to decide what our level of comfort was with this task and so if you didn't have as high of a level of comfort you entered later in the flash mob and we got to talk too about what the implications of that were for things like leveled grouping because then we got to experience leveled grouping and for some that was a different experience than it was for others. So we got into a lot of really rich conversations surrounding that learning task but we also did a lot of very serious work. We looked at data sources in order to help schools start to think about what kinds of practices they wanted to perpetuate in their work this year. As Dr. Ford Walker mentioned, Mr. Coleman had done a lot of intensive work over the summer to make data really easy to access and analyze for our leaders in accordance with what some of the data was in our strategic plan that we said we wanted to track as outcomes and so they got to do some early work thinking about what their school improvement plans would have in them, what kinds of things they needed to focus on, took a look at where some of their greatest gaps lived and then started the beginning work of getting a school improvement plan together until then continue into their ILTs. It's always wonderful to have the teachers there for these discussions because they can be there in front of their colleagues with their principals and administrators sort of sharing the message that they take away from these days and as they start their ILT, their instructional leadership team meetings. So that went pretty well. We managed to pull it off. We did have a flash mob to launch the year at opening day and then we had some really powerful panels at opening day. We had a panel with the new cabinet team. We have two new members and three members who came off of that team and so we wanted to introduce the group to everybody so we had everybody submit whatever questions they wanted to ask us and we pulled them out of not a hat but a little box from food services and so we didn't know what we were getting. It was a little scary but we answered a few questions and introduced ourselves and then we had the students who had done that work with us at Leadership Workshop do a student panel for the staff and talk about what they had learned about learning and what they had learned about belonging and growth while they were teaching us and it was really fun to hear their reflections on the work of teaching and very inspirational to a lot of our teachers and it went really well. So that was opening day and we've had a hot but smooth launch and I'll talk about that in a little bit when we do the superintendent's report but we're really excited to start this school year and really encouraged by the tone and effort and perseverance that we've seen our educators put in over the summer. And off we go. Take any questions. Great. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions? Mr. Shulkman. I'm sort of curious that I'm seeing the new arts courses at the high school. I'm wondering how much of an influence having a new facility and being able to have a place to do this is in terms of expanding and developing our curriculum. I know it's impactful. I mean they couldn't offer some of these courses if they didn't have the resources they have in the rooms that are in the art new art wing but I'd have to ask Leo. I'm really thrilled to see it appears to be a product of the hard work we did to get the building improved because it looked like things we weren't able to do in the past and I think that's really an important story to be telling. The investment we're making in this building is paying off and improved teaching and learning. I think the collaboration, the sort of co-collaboration between departments in that department to offer some of these classes is really exciting because it highlights the nature of the importance of interdisciplinary work if you're going to do deeper learning work and we can't do that kind of interdisciplinary work if we don't have facilities and resources like the ones we have at New High School. The design layout too is specifically meant to foster that as well. Mr. Philman. Thank you. Dr. Ford-Walker welcome. Thank you. My question is thank you for this report on all of the professional development. Do you, I mean you inherited some of this I imagine. Are you starting to think about how all of this work in professional development connects with changes in student performance or changes in student life? That's a great question because there was a lot of professional development that took place over the summer, which is great, which is wonderful. I think the question now is how impactful is it going to be on student learning and also student experiences. And so I would say that I'm definitely in a place now where I'm entering the space of really looking at what's the impact. Also there was a financial implication to some of these experiences as well. And so looking to see if there are ways to make sure that we're getting the skills that we possibly can in order to enrich the experiences of students but also in order to make sure that we're being fiscally responsible too. So I'm in that process of looking at that. That's a big question. Great. Thank you. That's a good answer. Thank you. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. So I see that grading for equity is mentioned in a couple of places and we've heard about that before. I'll mention it later during future agenda items, but I think it would be good to have a deeper dive on sort of what work you're doing, what work you're finding meaningful, what you're focusing on. There are so many different aspects of that. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Nexton. Thank you for this report. I just wanted to highlight my appreciation for the paraprofessional guidebook that came up quite a bit in some negotiations and I think that providing that and having that professional expectation also helps them to feel very supported and a member of the community. So I appreciate the work that went into that. I will also, we didn't have this in here, but name that we had for the first time some professional development specific to paraprofessionals on opening day and professional development specific to administrative assistance on opening day. That's never happened before. And so that really helps people feel a sense of belonging when they're seeing, they see themselves on an agenda and it's been nice to have the capacity to offer those supports. That's great. Thank you. And we're also considering how do we continue to expand those offerings as well. And so we're looking at options for, so our whole district professional development days that happened throughout the year. I think there's six of them. We're looking at how can we make sure that some of those offerings are also specific to paraprofessionals as well. Anyone else? Okay, I had one comment. So first I appreciate, well actually two comments. One on the health when you said the SNAP, there's like a SNAP thing here, for the nursing they talked about using the SNAP health portal. Is this different from the mass SNAP health nutrition benefits? I mean it's just a coincidence and names. That's what the platform's called, SNAP. Right, but it has no relation. Okay, I was just wondering. Because it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that they could be the same, but okay. And then the second is I could tell there were a bunch of links in the document. They don't work for us. And I'm assuming they won't work for the public. And I think this is partly a Novus thing. And what I'm wondering is if it would be possible to just capture all the links so that they could just be cut and pasted if you want to go, you know, at the very end of the document for each, you see what I'm saying, that you know, it have for each section you just put down what the links were so that if it doesn't come through and whatever you're looking at, at least you can see what they are and cut and paste them into your browser. Absolutely. Thank you for letting me know that. Oh no, it's not you. This is a continued problem. I think it's a tech thing that we just haven't worked out. So thank you. Okay. Okay, anything more on this? No. Okay. Thank you very much. So next we have policy updates. Mr. Schluckman. Thank you. We gave a brief report at the special meeting in August. So none of this is unexpected. First of all, within the group of policy updates, we have four policies before the committee for first reading. However, one of them file AC is merely the correction of a typographical error in the policy. So there was a blank line where we were supposed to fill in our links in public schools. So just making that edit is not a substantive change in policy, so I'm going to move to suspend the rules and advance file AC as amended to second reading. Second. Okay. Vote. Is there? She gets to call that. Yeah. I've been absent too often. Does anyone have any comments about this? No, we're concerned. Okay, so we can just have a regular vote because none of us are remote. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. That passes 7-0-0. And now that we've suspended the rules, we're now on second reading for AC, I move approval. Okay. Second. I mean, any discussion? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. That also passes unanimously. Okay. If you recall, we were working on ACA, which was in terms of safe and supporting school environment. And at the request of the policies committee, we forward the proposed policy to Doug Heim, who is looking to the courts. There's a case right now, Foot v. Ludlow, that was decided in favor of the district that is under appeal will be heard sometime this month. And he'd like to see what happens there before he recommends policy amendments. So that's sitting on the side until that happens. File ACA-E, what we're looking to do here is place the desi guidelines into the policy manual. This is just sort of a transparency tool so that it's clear for anybody looking in the policy manual where some of these decisions concerning safe and supportive school environment are coming from. Because all the things that we've been doing have either been grounded in federal law, state law, state regulation, or MIAA. The second policy up for review is JGE, I just lost it, JGE, co-curricular and extracurricular activities. We are adding the requirements for athletic participation from the MIAA. We must do this in order to participate with MIAA so in terms of clarity we're putting the language about participation according to gender identity into the policy. The third policy then before us is a revision of the nutrition and wellness policy and the health department has been working to bring our current policy to align with federal free lunch standards and state nutrition policies. And that will be back up for second reading at the next meeting. So that is the first read for those three policies. Okay. Does anyone have any comments or questions about any of these policies at this time? Just on the wellness policy some of the edits aren't showing up on track changes. Like there are definitely things that were changed in here that aren't in this red lined copy that's in Novus. So. Does the policy read correctly or is it? It looks, I mean it reads, yeah, it reads fine. So I think it's good, I think just we want it, it's important that people know that there are additional changes that were made from the first, from what we have currently to what we would adopt that aren't like redlined in that. Yeah, we were working on multiple documents so it's entirely possible that things aren't read that are actually changes. So we'll try to go and fix that and get that to the committee. Well, and just update it in Novus so if anyone's looking for it in the next couple of days they can find the updated, the corrected version. Okay, any other comments or questions? So also on the wellness policy, and I don't even know if anyone actually knows the answer to this. The classroom celebrations will be food free. It was my understanding that that was the intention and practice for a while and so just to understand that this is codifying that. Yes. Okay, so my follow up question is that was my understanding that that was the intended practice. It feels like it is not universal so just as this policy is approved presumably at our next meeting that there's a way to share that out with staff in fact I'm afraid that there's been enough. Bring it on or communicate this list right now. Okay, anything else? Okay. Then we go to the next agenda item which is policy related as well. Oh, yes. Okay, so the next one is a motion to... Oops. Sorry, I didn't see that they had written all this stuff out. Yeah. Okay, where's the... Oh, there it is. Okay, so Mr. Schlickman. Okay, in going through the policy first of all we found Dr. McNeil in there and we found a couple of references to assistant superintendents and we knew that we wanted Dr. Ford Walker to be in that one spot and there were places where assistant superintendents should now be deputy superintendents but even more critical is that we only have three more meetings after this in this building unless the high school building project committee tells us otherwise we're moving over to Milberg Drive so our address will no longer be 869 Massachusetts Avenue we'll have a Milberg Drive address and rather than having the policy committee and the school committee vote to edit all the policies that list our address that this motion would allow the administration to do this administratively so I move that the Arlington School Committee authorizes the superintendent make administrative changes to policies containing the title assistant superintendent and any policy containing the street address of central office. Second. Any further discussion? Thank you for doing this. Yes. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Nope. So that passes unanimously. And that completes policy. Okay. So moving on we have a discussion of the timing of the superintendent evaluation materials so I didn't realize I was driving this but the reason that this was brought for you brought before you is that my understanding is CBI or CBI requires us it details all the time all the timeline for when the superintendent evaluation process occurs and the first thing that happens is that the superintendent's supposed to have materials ready for us at the next school committee meeting and we wondered if it would be possible to move that to sometime in October because of when accountability and data are available. And yeah it's based on when the accountability data is available then the superintendent would do a presentation on these materials the second meeting in October. So I wanted to find out how people feel about this and Okay. I think I'm wondering it just occurs to me as you say this is if we should sort of amend this policy if I have words in there like generally or something maybe the policy procedure subcommittee because you can't really predict when data will be available. Yeah it's it we certainly can do that right now was a little I'm not I'm sorry I'm not doing it right. Which one has all the data? Well that's what so that was the other thing I was going to say the reason I'm being very hedgy about all the timelines and everything is that the CBI that is in our online policy manual is not the correct version. Oh well there you go. And I hadn't had a chance to work out where the correct version is and then make sure it gets uploaded. When did we change it? We did change it. At least in 2018 that's what I was finding in my notes but I wanted to reference but so this isn't what's not in there right now is that accurate? No it's not accurate at all. Mr. Cardin. But we did change it because when Paul and I and I know it was a bill was that our member were advised by MASC on providing the policy we adopted the standard MASC policy because they said they recommended that any details about the process being negotiated with the superintendent in their contract. We took out all the details. Okay I thought we just I forgot that. So that would be the stock MASC policy should be prepared? So do whatever you want. Yes it is. We can do whatever we want. Okay. Have at it. Have a good time. Keep us posted. Let us know. Okay. Okay. Just what policy? CBI? Yeah. Yeah. You remember that Paul? I do remember that discussion. That may have been. I sort of remember this now but I do wonder as not even a new chair that it's helpful to have some guidelines and I wonder if we want to have like CBI not E but I don't know. I would be appropriate. No we already have CBI. Oh we have an E. Yeah we have an E. So it can't be E. Anyway CBI are whatever that hasn't yeah we should. I don't I anyway so I'm confused by this because it ends up leaving it totally open and there's nothing to refer to and that makes me nervous about continuity from year to year and being fair and equitable from year to year. So I'm kind of wondering I do now remember us talking and deciding this but I'm not. What does it say in her contract? Nothing. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't be negotiated with you all. Yeah. That you will evaluate me. Yeah so okay. I don't know do we want to throw this to policy. I mean I can figure things out with with the superintendent this year but I am concerned about this in practice and I'm raising this concern to you and I'm asking do we want to kick it the policy do you want me to come up with something what do you want to do? Mr. Phil. I think you can kick it the policy and you can kind of send a suggestion to us based on your experience. Okay. I will pull the MASC policy on CBI which assuming that's what we adopted and just as a pro forma thing maybe bring it back at the next meeting so it is voted in place in the book and then we can go from there. I think it is. I think it is. I think it's accurate. I just didn't know. This is accurate. CBI is accurate. Okay. The chair is saying it would be helpful for future chairs to have a timeline in some place. Or at least a suggestion of a procedure so that a timeline in a procedure remains. I think it's something the subcommittee can look at. Yes. Because Mr. Cardin. Yeah I mean it doesn't matter that much but the intent was that it would be written down it just wouldn't be in the policy it would be an indendum to our contract. It doesn't matter where it's written down I don't think that much it's a little bit more flexible when you're changing superintendents to you know they may come in with a different idea of when the evaluation should be and then it would have to go to policy if that person insisted on that. So I don't care. Yeah. I'm thinking. That was the recommendation from MSC. I'm thinking that it could be a suggested timeline just so there's something to do and then it could be picked up and adopted into the superintendents contract or changed but just as a suggested timeline. Ms. Eckstein did you have a question? Well I just was thinking about when Dr. Holman started and some of that we did have a conversation about when we were going to do this and it might look different based on and then we sort of have gone back to I think the timing that you have been doing previously. So I guess the open end in this I see is unclear but I also think that we should have some flexibility to work with the superintendents. Okay. So it sounds like it's getting kicked to policy. Listen to suggestions. We've stayed with the old policy but maybe we had some sort of outline or something as an addendum and I will work out the process with the superintendent and I think that's it. Okay. Great. Okay. Next, superintendents report. All right. Considering we just did our opening report and it's the opening of school there will be a little bit of redundancy here and a little bit of additional information that didn't make it into your deck but I will make sure it gets uploaded into Novus. So first of all welcome back to school everybody and back to school committee meetings. As I mentioned we had a wonderful opening day got to hear from some students and think about deeper learning and what that means for our work together this year. I want to say welcome to all of our new staff and any new families who have joined Arlington in the past couple of months since we were last here and welcome to our school committee meetings. Dr. Boardwalker, it's great to have you here. We're really excited this year at the start of the school year about our new APS we are open for breakfast at all of our schools at 7.30 at the elementary level 8 o'clock at the secondary level in order to make sure that this is well staffed and well programmed so that we can have some games and do some activities with everybody. We've got some incentivized pay for the programming leads and a lot of our teaching assistants have taken this up because it gives them a little bit extra in the paycheck each week and as I said we are open a half hour before school starts at all schools and we are asking only that families make sure that their students take breakfast because that's part of how we subsidize the program. If students get breakfast we get some of a reimbursement from the state for that so the only rule about Breakfast Club is that you come, you are happy and you eat breakfast and then you go to class with a full stomach. We're really enjoying this we had a lot of excitement about it from families and we had over 300 students signed up before the first day of school so it's going well. I'm going to give a few updates. Dr. Ford Walker actually already updated you on a few of these things so I'll go quickly just about work that's been going on in our new department of communications and family engagement. It's been really great to have a little added capacity in this area. We are working on systems for establishing monthly family newsletters and making sure all of the information that needs to be in there gets in there from all the different departments. It's been hard over the past few years to make sure we've got everything in there to remember some of those things. We're continuing the weekly leader logs to the administration just with a little bit more collaboration around what needs to be in there. That's a weekly communication that I send to all of the administrators in the district. I've been doing that since I arrived but it's been sometimes hard to remember to get all of the things in there so that's where we share any new procedures with administrators, any new expectations that are coming down the pike any updates or like hey this is on the horizon and we sort of give a layout of the week of any district meetings that they need to attend. And we're working on approximately monthly newsletters to staff using some of those same systems. As I said, we held some first ever training with administrative assistance so that we make sure we have a welcoming environment for families to walk into and make sure they know how all of our systems and information systems are working and how to use them to share information out. They'll be getting some training on how to also update their websites, their school websites making sure those websites have any information families need on them. We've hired a new engagement specialist this is a new term for the registrar role so we just changed the title of the registrar to engagement specialist so welcome to Makaya Healy she's going to be our new engagement specialist and thank you to Wes Pierre for getting this department off the ground and going and getting a lot of really great work done so far. Enrollments are in your materials and I wanted to speak a little bit to the heat this week. As everybody knows we had six schools who went home early today because of extreme heat conditions. That was definitely the right decision for today. Conditions climbed up to 93 to 98 degrees in several classrooms in those schools where we had sent students home. We only sent students home in schools that do not have air conditioning in a majority of the classrooms in the school. We've been doing frequent spot checks of heat in significantly impacted areas starting on Tuesday. We deployed a whole bunch of thermometers to our administrators who were moving around the buildings with them taking spot checks of heat and sending data over to the central office throughout the last couple of days. We've been rotating students in classes to cooled spaces where we can for a break from the heat. A lot of our offices and libraries are air conditioned or are central spaces like cafeterias or lobbies even are air conditioned and we've been using them trying to get people a little bit of a break so it's they're not there for a sustained period in the really hot space. We were over 90 degrees by 10 a.m. in lots of our schools today, especially on some of those top floors. A lot of our rooms even with air conditioning were at the 80 degree mark or 85 degree mark AC was having trouble keeping up and we did hit 98 on the third floor of Thompson like I said. So for tonight we have a plan. Our plan for tomorrow is to be in for the full day. We're going to have a full day plan to make sure that happens. We've done a few things tonight that we couldn't do earlier in the week because the overnight temperatures were so high that it really wouldn't have done anything. We are placing fans in front of our windows. Our custodial crews are going through rooms tonight are placing a fan in front of the window to pull the cooler outside air into the room so that we have more outside air circulating through the building. We also typically have our ventilation systems off overnight. We're also going to be able to help save some energy. Tonight they're going to run all night long. That will pull more outside air that's supposed to get down to 70 degrees overnight into the building and it should be fully, we should be able to do full air exchanges with that running throughout the coolest part of the night which should cool off some of those indoor spaces and we've also opened the dampers up on those systems where we're able to do so. Some of the decision making factors as we were thinking about heat and time in the first week of school is deeply unfortunate and we really didn't like, I don't take decisions like that lightly at all. But we were thinking about the amount of extended time students would spend in extreme heat. The number of visits we had had to the nurse due to heat related illness earlier in the week and we had had several visits from staff and students, nurses experiencing some heat related exhaustion or illness. Temperature readings that we were taking like I said throughout the day and also some it's not safe to send a student home to an empty house in extreme heat especially if that house doesn't have air conditioning so safety looks lots of different ways we have to think about all those different versions of safety when we're making decisions like this. So like I said the plan for tomorrow is a full day of school. We're hopeful that with it getting down to 70 degrees overnight tonight that we'll be in good shape to open up and we are sorry for the inconvenience cost for everybody and for the discomfort that everybody has felt this week it was not the best way to start the year but it's been okay and the kids are upbeat and smiling and having fun even if they're moving a little slower. Happy to take any questions. Any questions? Okay. Yeah, no I think it was good to make the call and let families know. I think the thing that was the hardest for them was being informed that it might happen and then they were just like I don't know what to do and so I think it was good to just make a decision do the call and I think families were happy but I didn't hear lots and lots of grumbling. Okay, what do we have next? Consent agenda. Okay, this is long. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of this committee so requests in which case the item will be considered as normal sequence. Warrant number 23304 624 184 dollars and 99 cents dated 6 27 23. Warrant number 233 12 494 945 and 19 cents 6 dated 6 30 23. Warrant number 2400 9 163 092 dollars and 96 cents dated 7 25 23. Warrant number 24 026 207 dollars 500 and 222 127 thousand 506 dollars and 14 cents dated 8 23. Warrant number 24 026 525,191 dollars and 80 cents dated 8 22 23. Warrant number 24 052 260,758 dollars and 72 cents dated 9 6 23. School committee minutes of June 15 23. School committee special meeting minutes of August 18 23 and school committee special meeting minutes of August 30 23. All for approval. Well, that was the longest agenda we've had in place in time. I move approval. Second. Okay, there is no discussion. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, so that passes unanimously. Now we have subcommittee and liaison reports. Budget, Mr. Cardin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I have reposted the draft school committee chat, which I had presented in the spring. And then as I was looking at the schedule that we had created Saturday, September 23rd is town day. And I know that a lot of school committee members have other obligations on that day. And so I I had proposed in here that I'm also happy to try to reschedule that first for a different weekend, but I just wanted to point it out since it is in two weeks. Opinions. Okay. Anyone have any comments or anything? Cancel it. Okay. Yeah. Oh, no, I was definitely going to not have it that date. I guess it's reschedule versus just not have it at all. Not have it at all. Okay. Thank you. I think it could be rescheduled, but it's also letting people know that just because it has a focus topic doesn't mean you can't talk about the thing somewhere else. So even though if we cancel it, just make sure people understand they could ask questions about that topic somewhere else. Yes. I'll check in with Ms. Diggins and Dr. Homan too just because we had worked on having an administrator there, so rescheduling to make sure that somebody's available. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Curriculum, accountability. We're meeting next week on Wednesday at 2.30. Okay. Facilities. Mr. Thelman. I'm going to go through the operations and I are trying to find a date. You got to get back to me with some dates. And so once we have some options that fit our mutual schedules, then I'm going to reach out of the subcommittee to meet and we're going to talk about the district submission to the capital planning committee. Okay. Policy. We've already discussed. We've already talked. Okay. Building committee. We met and as I said last week, we're going to have a turnover of phase two is October 30th. There'll be a more formal communication placed on the website and the superintendent will get something out too next week, but it's October 30th, everything, but the mononomy preschool will be done. Okay. Lay is on reports. Announcements and feature agenda items. Mr. Yes. So I request that at some point we hear a presentation on the district's exploration of grading for equity. Sorry, I have to read it down. Keith, do you have anything? No. Back in the swing of things. Yeah. If we could arrange to meet some of our new folks in leadership positions live and in person for us at some point in the near future. So we know who they are. They know who we are. Anything else? No. We do not have a executive session. So do I have a motion to adjourn? We have a second. Second. Okay. A lot of practice. Well, you just like hanging out here. Okay. All in favor. Yes. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay. We are adjourned.