 Order the Amherst Pellum Regional School Committee meeting of May 22nd, 2012. Thank you everybody for coming and thank you Amherst Media for bringing this to people at home. First agenda review. One thing I'd like to add to the agenda is during the superintendent's update is we have a consultant here to explain to us the move of the retired teacher's health insurance from the Group Insurance Commissioner, GIC, back to the local health care trust fund. So he'll briefly explain what that is to us and answer any questions. Any other comments on the agenda? Yes? No, I just have a comment. I mean I'm not... Okay, next is approval of minutes of May 8th, 2012. Any corrections to those? Michael? One quick one. In 1B, I think Kiff has got the wrong gender attached to his name. Here it is. Any other corrections? Okay, I'll take a motion to approve the minutes. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Any discussion? All those in favor? Opposed? Abstentions? Okay, great. Moving on to announce some public comment. Anyone having public comment to make and come forward with a microphone, state your name, please keep your comments to around two minutes, and we don't allow comments about any specific school employees, so I'll try to refrain from that. If I only use one, can I donate another minute to someone else? I'm Joe. Oh, okay. 30 seconds. Hi, my name is Dave Noonan, 32 Tangerwood Rogue, and this is a question concerning the late stop. I'd like to know what type of real studies you folks have done to see what type of impact you will have on parents' employment by forcing them to stay an hour, 45 minutes later in the home before they can go to work. I know there was some type of study done amongst people who I don't know what the term is, receiving some type of stipend or something for schools, but the vast majority of people to my knowledge, and the vast majority I think, no one ever questioned me, no one to my knowledge has any scientific study about whether or not people are going to have to somehow give something back to their employer or lose something by way of wages or benefits because they have to stay X number of minutes longer in the house to see their kids out. And I would ask you that I really don't think you should be voting on something like that unless you know, especially in these days and times where dollars are real important to people and if you're going to affect their ability to make dollars, you need to know that simultaneously. I know all the studies about how it may help kids. You have a concomitant obligation to make sure the benefit you render for the kids is not offset by the harm that you render to the parents. And that's all. Any other comments? My name's Kelly and I have been a bit of a school time stalker. I followed around a few of the different forums and have participated, not participated and listened to your discussions. I have many minutes. I won't use David's to talk about this, but I am very, very concerned as a district about what these decisions have with regard to impact on the families in our community. I think that at our last meeting, Mr. Chavaz talked about what is the impact on elementary schools. And the concern I had is that we have this change that will affect parts of the schools that haven't had identified problems. So I'm a terrible public speaker. I'm going to get that. I'm a great heckler. So the issue is, for me, the cost benefit and to determine that, we have to identify what the problem is. And I think that what we've identified in this community is what the solution is before identifying what the problem is. So the question for me has been, what is it that we're trying to solve? Who are we trying to benefit? What is the issue that we're trying to cure for the students and which students? And I don't know that we've really talked about that. We've talked about depression. We've talked about mental health. We've talked about sleep cycles. We've talked about lots of issues. And then the secondary problems of this change. But what is it that we're trying to improve? And I would like to have some real discussion around that. With regard to elementary students, I think we're causing a problem personally. I think we're adding to their day. We're increasing the cost for the middle class with regard to increasing time for after-school care. I think that kids will be in care at the beginning or ending of the day for longer periods of time. I think that some of the research that we've tried to find are not going to go in order because I've been persevering on this and chewing on my issues. So I'm going to just float them out. With regard to the other studies, they talk about districts that don't have bus schedules that are attached. And I think this committee has to really consider that the hour and 15 minutes actually makes sense only physically. It's not really ideal. And so do we want to have a non-ideal solution for the questionable problem? I think that everybody would agree that an hour and 15 minutes is actually a long change, not the ideal change for the secondary school. Pushing the exit of school to 3.30 in the afternoon or 3.25 really shifts everything late buses will be leaving school after 5 o'clock that our sports schedules will end up being later in the evening. There is a protective factor that I think has been well established around families spending dinner times together, evenings together, going to bed at similar hours, having similar schedules. That can't be supported with a start time change. And I know my minutes are up. The other concern I really have is about sports. We have a huge participation of sports in this district. Between 42 and 50% I think Mr. Farrell can tell us. Per trimester of our secondary students participate in sports with a very high eligibility criteria for GPA in two of the three trimesters if you only participate in one sport. It's a really significant safety net. And what I'd like to know is what percentage of the demographic that we're trying to hit participate in sports at that rate and how many semesters there are trimesters so that we actually know who are we making this huge change for? Are we hitting that mark? And is this what we want to have the cost benefit to weigh out on? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Hi. My name is Nat Woodruff and I'm a teacher at the high school as well as the Nordic coach. And I'm just here to kind of give my perspective on how I think that the delayed start to school is going to take away some opportunities from our kids. I think taking away an hour at the end of the day is an hour of opportunity that these kids have. And I don't think that there will be added opportunities at the beginning of the day that will be the equivalent to what's lost. Our sport in particular is one that practices during the winter time and we rely on a just a little window of daylight that we have at currently when school ends until the sun goes down. So we have an hour and with this change in start time we're really looking at losing all of our sun. I think that Rich Ferrell gave you guys a really good summary of how this is going to affect sports teams. Ours is one that I'll just say that it could go away without being able to practice after school. We won't have a team. I mean we won't be able to train the kids and it wouldn't be fair to just put them in on Saturday if we're not training them during the week. And before school because we practice offsite it's going to be very difficult. So this could be one of those things that goes away and I imagine that there's other things out there that will suffer similarly to our sport. Yep, so that's my perspective. Thank you. Any other comments? I'm Kevin Landau, 17 Gulf Road in Pelham. I would like just to add a little bit more of a comment about the sports concern. My concern is that if we go ahead and make our time change and other schools don't it's just going to be one huge chaotic scheduling debacle for scheduling games and having our school system unilaterally making a change without other school systems following seems like it would just add to the confusion. Okay. Any other comments? Hi, my name is Lena Quackenbush. I'm a junior currently at the high school and I know my coach already came up and was talking about how the later start times will affect the ski team. But some of my fellow teammates and I are here and we wanted to really say how much the ski team has meant to us and the fact that it's only been here for four years and this year they've already had to put a cap on it because so many kids want it to be on it. It seems like it would be a major shame if we lost it by having start times later. And also when I was planning on coming here to talk I was asking some of my teammates what do they feel about it and they were saying after going out and practicing for two hard hours or more a day you're already tired when you get home at eight o'clock and so then do homework. You want to go to bed as soon as you can. So these pushing back start times would actually just make us have less like exercise and therefore would maybe harm us even more than the benefit of later start times. Thank you. Any other comments? Any comments from the school committee members? Do you have one Catherine? No. All right. Moving on to superintendent. I'm sorry. I thought you might want to come in here. No, I do have an announcement. But the regional school district planning committee is having a public forum on Thursday night at 7 o'clock at the Amherst Media Studios at which time Stephen Hemen who is part of the regional... Thank you. It's been a long day. We'll be there to answer Amherst specific questions and questions that came up at our first public forum and so I really encourage people to come and get some of their questions answered at that time and inform the committee about things that they want us to carry forward. Thanks. I'm sorry, I have another comment. I asked a question expecting that I would get a response. Is this not the forum where I get the response? Yes, sorry, I should have mentioned but we don't respond to public comments. However, when we get to that item on the agenda we'll certainly keep what you said in mind and talk about it at that time. Any other comments? Was the date again? Sorry, the date. This Thursday. What time is it? 7 o'clock at the Amherst Media Studios. Moving on to superintendent's update. Okay, so given that we have a very large agenda and we have Ken with us tonight to talk about the potential of having our retired teachers move from the GIC back to the town's health insurance plan it would be helpful if I just gave you these to read and people can look on our website for the updates. There's lots of great updates in here and I would love to speak to them but I know time is limited. So I'd love to introduce Ken Lombardi who's here and again from EBS Foreign. I set that correctly. Thank you. And Ken advises the town and in this case the schools related to our health matters, health insurance matters. And Kathy Mazer is here as well and the Kay's Logar just walked in as well. So perfect timing, Kay. So if Ken, I think you'd like to share some information with us allow us to ask some questions and this is just kind of the first information sharing around this topic. So Ken, you can use the microphone. You could sit if you prefer and just take it off of there. Whatever's comfortable for you. But if I just stand here. Perfect. Yeah, thank you. Good evening. Thank you, Maria, for explaining all this information. So I believe you folks have received a package of information about what the subject is all about. Obviously it's a sensitive issue because it deals with retiree health insurance but I think what we're trying to explain is that for a chance we have an opportunity to actually improve benefits for the retirees and lower costs. We've been studying this issue for quite some time and we've reached that pinnacle of the will where this does make sense to follow through with the process. So to kind of frame this to make it simple to understand there's 288 teachers that are retired from the school district whose health insurance is provided through the state group insurance commission which is the largest health insurance purchasing group here in Massachusetts. Municipalities can also offer retiree health insurance and they typically do that by themselves on a direct basis. And the health care trust fund does cover town retirees as well at this point in time. What we've uncovered is that with the rising costs of health insurance through the group insurance commission and the frequent changes in health insurance plans that our local health care plan options through the health care trust fund, Amherst Pelham and the school district that's part of that actually does show that retirees on average will save premium and increase their benefits. So to frame this there's 288 folks that are in question. So when you meet to review this in the public forum those folks have been invited to attend the hearing and hear information. I'm aware that Kathy and Kay, folks that are managing this have provided those retirees with frequently asked questions and lots of information. None of it's going to make any sense to retirees and it's likely that during this session we'll be able to hopefully explain what we're trying to accomplish. To further analyze this, out of the 288 I have to split it into really two groups of retirees and the reason for that is because mass law treats retirees that are 65 and older differently than early retirees and retirees that aren't entitled to Medicare. There's 162 out of the 288 that are Medicare entitled. So what that means is when they turned 65 they went to Social Security and they applied to Medicare and they were provided with hospital services and medical services at a premium. That was a requirement by the state in order to continue health insurance. All of these 162 retirees that have Medicare will see a premium reduction and a benefits improvement. So I'm confident and I'm pleased to be able to report that for a change we'll have a group of retirees after they get done yelling and screaming at us will likely see that yeah this is a pretty good deal and more importantly there is no loss of provider network coverage. So that's very critical to understand and the reason for that is because all of the health plans, state provided, local provided require that the employee, the retiree excuse me, has Medicare as primary and then therefore they use a provider that accepts Medicare. So there's no difference in the protocols, the processes, the utilization, it's all entirely the same. Plan names will be different and we'll understand that and folks will think we're taking their health insurance but we're replacing it with a plan that is actually better in benefits and low in premium. So that's a win-win. So we're pleased to be able to explain that to that part of the membership. The other remaining 160 or so folks out of the 288 actually 106 excuse me, they fall into a number of categories. Under the state GIC, retiree teachers have limited plan options and there's actually a whole mess of plan options for the GIC but for some quirky reason the GIC permits the retiree teachers only allows them to enroll in a handful of plans and some of these are very expensive. We do have locally plan options that are similar. Some are either the same costs are slightly higher but all of the plans that we're going to be switching these folks to have much improved benefits. So the cost benefit lies with the member and obviously they'll enjoy at the end of the year after they're out of pocket expenses will enjoy lower overall costs. Some of these folks will now have more plan options and they may actually have lower premiums as well as improved benefits. A little bit of a complicated issue because we are changing of course the health care plans but again the same issue with these non-medicare retirees. They'll be using providers that they have access to today. There's no restrictions. There's actually some more expansive coverage. Service areas aren't required. We have some local HMOs that have actually have more robust networks. They may actually find their providers in these networks. So we generally think we have one size fits all and everyone should benefit from this. I've been involved with this process in other communities and I don't have to tell you that clearly this is a with the age population and their likelihood to not really understand all this. We have a focused effort in trying to work with these folks if one on one if we have to to try and make sure that this transition is smooth. Another important detail is when your active employees retire there'll be continuity into benefit plans because right now when they do retire we disrupt the whole process and we make them change their current plan arrangements and now they have to go into other plans as well. Then the biggest issue here is obviously the net savings to the district is less premium through this mechanism than through the cherry seed allocation from the GIC premium payments. We can control our plan designs where we don't have that control for the GIC. All of the members will see improved benefits and I think this is the age category that likely will experience the better benefit. Our younger active employees don't have the same claims cost but these members have frequent use. Specifically the prescription drug benefit is vastly improved and of all the benefits used that's where the membership spends most of their dollars. It's not that easy as just saying yeah we're going to do it and it rules out as I said I've been involved in the process. It's a little bit of hand-to-hand combat but at the end of the day very confident that the members will see that there's a lot of value in this recommendation. Before we go to questions too so this information Ken needs to share with us now. The process is Kathy and Kay have shared information with all the retirees with the question and answer more than willing to sit individually with people because it is a complicated process to walk through. This would require then a public forum which I believe we have June 13th where we will need to have school committee members as well as from and select boards from the town of Pelham and the town of Amherst thank you to come and hear questions and concerns from the retirees because ultimately the school committee will have to vote as to whether to make this move or not. So we need to be really informed and we need to be able to help people walk through the process so that we have full consideration before a vote comes to us. So I just wanted to make sure that you kind of understood the process. Marie's point is that you three boards are the respective insurance authorities for purchasing health insurance. Thank you. Okay. I want to thank you and Kathy for putting all of this together. I thought that the material that you sent out was very informative but I do have two concerns. One is I have a feeling that retired people next to knowing their grandchildren are trying to keep up as much as possible with health care and several of your comments concerned me and I would hope that during the forum you would not speak down to people who attend this forum. They may actually know more about the health system than you do because it's so close to them much more so than when you're 25. That's one point. Second point is a number of these people are going to be quite old and I'm wondering if any effort has been made to provide transportation for the meeting on the 13th? We have not made an effort at this point. It's a good suggestion and we can reach out and see if that would be helpful to some people. It is being televised live this forum so we'll go to people's homes who live in the area. We're also providing some assistive devices for people who may have some challenges that would help their ability to fully participate in the forum. Full participation to meetings being there so I would just like to see you make an extra effort. Understood. Thank you. Any other quick questions? Lawrence? I don't know if this is the forum to do this but just a couple of questions. So the plan that retirees or the plans that retirees are being encouraged to move into has there been stability in the previews? Quite honestly over the last two or three years we've had hardly any rate adjustments or hand-off plan design changes actually and our plans are very competitive in fact they're lower cost than the group insurance commission plans at this point. That leads to another question when they make the move is there stability for a year? The reason I ask that is because as everyone knows who's been following the discussions about moving municipal employees into well into the GIC and other plans the folks at Pittsfield when they made the move into the GIC were all of a sudden shocked to find out in mid-cycle that they had a hike in co-pays and other costs and I'm just curious. One of our biggest concerns is there's front-end deductibles on some of the benefit plans that the retirees are paying and we don't have those in the health care trust fund. The team that manages the trust fund, we meet routinely to study trends and look at options and provide counsel if you will to the group of employees, the insurance advisory committee to look at options and fortunately that organization has made some proactive changes very strict as far as setting premium rate structures and that has all benefited to a healthy health care trust fund we're taking some advantage of now. You know the problem with the GIC is that it only shows up once a year and you have no access to managing that capability. It works great for communities whose premium costs are skyrocketing and they can take advantage of HMO plans but we have a geographic variation that's suitable here not necessarily made up of our eastern communities that are dominating the GIC so it doesn't make logical sense to continue so that's why I said I think the timing seems to be appropriate but in our rate I suggest for quite some time that we would need to take any corrective action on premium costs. Thank you. Since we're going to be talking about this and having to vote on it, if it's okay I'd like to wrap this up. This is really just a quick this is what's going on and we'll be talking about it a lot later. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. So at this point I think I'd be happy to move on unless anyone has questions about the update just so that we are conscious of time because I know there's a few discussions we want to have tonight. Great. Okay so moving on to UMass partnership update. Great. So I am very pleased tonight to have Dr. Rebecca Woodland here from UMass who began UMass partnership with our school system also Sarah Wittcombe and Laura Baldiviasso is here and Shannon Berry who is a doctoral student with us and Sarah I should say Dr. Wittcombe and Dr. Baldiviasso are also professors at UMass. So I'm sure they can explain a little bit of who they are and how they're connected to our work but I'm thrilled to have Rebecca here to give you kind of an update on the work that we've been have been undertaking for about a year and a half now. So do folks have a copy of the slides? Can we get those out and do we have it somewhere? Okay technology which I can't help but I love it the man of the fact pointer I love that. Great. Okay well thank you Superintendent Garrick for that introduction and it's really great to be here and I want to thank the school committee for the opportunity to come and give an update on the really incredible work that the district has been doing in partnership with the school of education at UMass I also really want to have the opportunity to thank the members of the district instructional leadership team which is made up of all the principals and assistant principals, directors and the superintendent and some of whom are here tonight that I'm looking at. I just want to really thank them because the partnership really rests on the work of the folks from the district and the folks at UMass and so that district instructional leadership team is incredible. That said a lot of the work has involved going into schools and conducting instruction around so I want to thank the teachers tonight who have had their classrooms visited and have participated in elements of the partnership and for the students who have put up with these strangers running around in the hallways and last but not least I do want to just thank my colleagues because even though I will be doing most of the direct talking in this presentation this is absolutely a group team effort and again that is Dr. Laura Valdivia from teacher education curriculum studies and Dr. Sarah Woodcomb from the department of student development and Shannon Berry from the department of student development so thanks. And I will also say that yes it was 18 months ago that superintendent Garrick and I got together to talk about how we might really launch a partnership a meaningful partnership and I'll just say that I'm invested in this not just from an area of expertise because I am a professor of education a leadership and have a long history of working in schools and with schools and in higher ed but also I have two children in the system so I want to say I have two kids in high school so I'm invested on multiple levels so you should have a copy of the slides and there it is and it's up on the screen and so I'd like to just start with and I don't have the clicker do I magically wave at this wonderful man at the back or okay I'll magically wave at Deb, thank you great alright so we'd just like to start with and I will go as quickly as I possibly can an overview of the work from the summer 2010 to the present would you like the committee to hold probing questions until the end and then just ask if there are clarifying questions that you really just need what the heck are you talking about you can ask her in the middle but otherwise let's hold the probing until yes so although as quickly as I can but if there's something that you're like what is that acronym or what is that please just ask and then we'll save yeah the probing question to the end that would be great so great so the overall goal when we were thinking about how do we put this partnership together what would be its core purpose it had to do with building district capacity for teacher collaboration and continuous instructional improvement the core of the work of a school district student learning through instruction and then the capacity for collaboration to improve instruction so you can just click through these Deb they can all go at the same time but so here are some of the key things that we have done first and foremost we formed the district construction leadership team which did not exist which now meets twice a month for two hours and sometimes more and as a result of the work of the district instructional leadership team forming school instructional leadership team so the systems through which we can do this work we have implemented instructional rounds at a numerous number of schools and more to come before the end of the school year we have integrated other initiatives going on in the district that come from the school of education I just want to say right off the bat that a lot of this work of the partnership building came about because what we found is that and you have found and we have experienced that in the Amherst regional public schools there were professors and people from the school of education that were doing things but they weren't talking to each other so one of the things we really tried to do was take some of the major important core work of the district and say who are those people let's get them together and let's have them overlap their language a bit and see how we can weave it together and what's the common storyline so positive behavior interventions and support and English language learner teacher support all relating to issues of equity around instruction and building systems for collaboration to do those things we've really integrated into the partnership in terms of evaluation work we launched in the fall of 2010 a district wide survey on collaboration and effects of instruction on practice and we're doing it again currently right now we have 299 responses to the survey right now we've also engaged in something called social network analysis which is a mathematical method for really empirically examining collaboration which can be this fuzzy thing that many of us have our own definitions for but really trying to nail it down and we've also hosted a summit a partnership summit in district which had about 40 people people not just from the school of ed but from all over UMass civic center for civic and community engagement and others from the school of ed across the school system to really identify where to go next and also and I want to emphasize this this may seem small but for the first time ever the school of education at UMass pulled money across departments to create a position inside the school of ed just for the school district a research liaison position because another thing that was happening in the school district is that we individually as faculty members we're getting calls from individual and some of you included saying hey do you have any information on late start times? Do you have any information on is there a research brief on and it was very one to one and we said you know what let's have a point of contact where Amherst regional schools could go to this liaison through a process and we could have a point of contact for that work so that's been Megan Shulda who's a doctoral student and teacher education and curriculum studies who's been that point of contact and Rhonda Cohen worked on a process connections get made so that's sort of an overview there's much more but those are some highlights okay so as I said at the beginning this is about building district capacity for teacher collaboration and instructional improvement I just want to get right to what would those variables be if we're trying to build district capacity what are those aspects of district capacity that we want to study and mess with and improve and see what we can do about them and there are there are five that we're working with founded in research and there's some citations there for you I should also say that obviously we're packing this into a 30 minute period but if at any point any aspect of this you want more information on or you want to have a smaller meeting about it we're all happy to do that at any time so these are the variables that we think about when in terms of whether it's about straight instructional improvement whether it's about ELL teachers teachers that work with English language learners whether it's about positive behavior interventions and support all around this need for collaboration adults working with other adults figure out what to do and how to do it so we would consider this who's working with home why are they together for what purpose to what end how often do they meet how much time do they actually have to meet and do that work at what level of quality are those teams working because we all know teams can come together but what happens there is sometimes up for grabs we want to know what's the quality there and then lastly so you have many many teams let's say the capacity of the district for the innovation of the knowledge to spread or go to scale so if we learn something really good about instruction somewhere how do we make it go across classrooms and across schools so those are our five variables that we're working with and okay don't hit the net yeah good that's good so what we want to do is we have some pictures of that have we've generated through social network analysis to show you the current capacity for teacher collaboration in the district and we have three examples and I want to thank Mark Jackson in my case and others for and Nick Yap, he's not here but for all the administrators in the district who for a while now have been responding to our requests for information about who's working with whom when for how long for what purpose so that we could feed it into an empirical process called social network analysis so we want to show you the results of the capacity on those variables so here is the high school and now it's hard to see you don't have to know all of it yet but there is a picture of the high school and Shannon do you want to explain what those parts of that are so this is kind of a cool picture but what is it it's just kind of some lines oh sorry I have a soft voice can you hear me right now okay so all of this data was taken from the principals and just do the stand-ups so all of this information was taken from the principals and we asked them to identify what teams exist and then what people exist on those teams and I put it into a nice statistical software and come out with these nice pictures we also asked how often do they meet and what do they meet about so the size of those octagons indicate how often they meet and this particular school the high school that team up there which is child study meets the most often whereas the rest which our department meet the least often the triangles or squares indicate whether it's teacher or non-teacher and then the color of the nodes identify what they discuss so the blue would indicate non-instruction, non-student learning and then green would be instruction, teacher instruction, student learning things like that so thank you and so I want to say that we also, as she said we asked the administrators for that information however we also did the websites and looked at the org charts and I can't work a microphone can you still hear me great so we also did off the websites and the org charts and also have verified through the teacher collaboration survey this information we've revassed every teacher in the district what teams are you on so we're very interested in the formal networks that exist in the district so notice that this kind of picture and now we've gone to the middle school notice that this kind of picture shows us four of the five variables about this district's capacity for collaboration it shows us who's working with whom it shows us basically for what purpose and again blue is non-direct instruction, student learning classroom green is closest to the classroom and instruction so it gives us at least that level it gives us some information about how often how much time they have together and you're looking at the middle school's picture and if you just look at that picture can you flip back to the high school for a minute you just look at that middle school you can tell the first was the high school very departmentalized you can see the departments and in the middle school you can see the teaming going on so at first blush you can see that the capacity against those variables for collaboration is stronger at the middle school currently than at the high school of course there's other things we need to find out other things to note about these pictures is you can tell who the bridges are or where the bridging groups are or where the bridging people are which are resources and if you go one slide further this is an example of the elementary this is Wildwood's current map and you can see that there's isolate outlier teams without formal connections to the rest of the collaborative network so there's work to be done but I just want to say this, this is currently when we did this originally there were many more isolates many more outliers more blue less green there was work right away to reconfigure we immediately formed a district leadership team and school instructional leadership teams to get the focus on instruction okay, thank you okay, so why would we be focused on so much on collaboration and perhaps it goes without saying but I think it's important that just to put out the Amherst school system, regional school systems theory of action about collaboration which is that sustained job embedded discipline collaboration is the primary engine for ongoing and targeted improvements and instruction will occur so we know that the greatest can you go back Deb? that's alright we know that the greatest influence that a district controls over student learning is the quality of instruction and we know that what improves instruction are instructors together examining student work and their practice in relation to what it's doing for student learning and collaboration and instruction will lead to access participation and achievement for all students so it's a real issue of equity as well it's about instruction that increases every student's access to the curriculum and learning, participation in it and their achievement and outcomes great, so what does that mean a discipline cycle of collaboration we could all say that we think we know what that means and so we've done a lot of work the team and over the past instruction leadership team trying to figure that out so just in a nutshell to say that discipline job embedded teacher collaboration would involve some level of dialogue with one another where there's agendas we know what we're talking about why we're talking about there aren't hibernators, there aren't dominators protocols are used, there are structures and so forth, decisions actually get made about what to keep doing with our teaching stop doing with our teaching and change what we're doing with our teaching is not created equal, we know this we have to use collaboration to figure out what we're going to sift out and then take action on it go do the keep starts and change out there, all of us interdependently and then evaluate the effects of our the quality of the actions we took and the effects of our actions and then continue to engage in dialogue thank you Deb okay so we wanted to give you an opportunity to get a flavor of a teacher team engaging in that cycle of inquiry in one targeted way and one targeted way that exists is called error analysis and that's where some project some assignment, something's happened for the students the student work has come back and there are errors mistakes, there are responses given or things are created that the teacher was expecting something different some other level of achievement on and so there's some error and so it's to analyze the error and that's what goes on in these teams I just want to direct your attention these are the five questions that a team would use in their dialogue if they're thinking about a process they would use if they're doing error analysis but there's many reasons to meet one of them is error analysis and that is a teacher saying why might the students have been thinking what have they been thinking to make this error so in other words the team generates the hypothesis about what would make this error occur how can we find out which is true a lot of the work in teacher teams I don't think I can emphasize this enough I say this a lot in different districts and in here that a lot of the time in teacher teaming a lot of time is spent diagnosing or finding solutions to the wrong problem and so we need ways to get to the right problem, the actual problem so that then we can generate the instructional solutions to it and so that's number two really three is what different teaching strategies could we use to fix or undo whatever led to the error and help them move their skills so what can we do differently, instructionally for how are each of us going to plan and manage it so that we can reteach it each of us so that we can reteach it or restructure so that you take those kids I'll take those kids so it can get done and then how can the team help is there a way to share and exchange knowledge skills to benefit both students and colleagues so we would like to show you a clip of a team doing this this is an English language arts team and there was an essay type of open-ended response assignment given and this teacher is bringing it to the table the website that Deb is going to is the research for better teaching website, they have a ton of excellent videos and resources for teachers and administrators on how to do this work and we're going to the six minute mark that's Jonathan Sepp, there you go we have five of the students right here the first question asks why doesn't Mrs. Llewela Bates Washington Jones say that she didn't smash people's pocket books when she was younger and wanted things she could not get and we consider this to be the easiest of the three questions the correct answer is she did things when she was younger that she was not proud of two of the students got that right and the other ones some of the responses that they chose one of them said she wanted the boy to feel really bad about what he did and we asked the students to provide evidence for their answers so we could see what they were thinking, what they chose the things that they chose the student wrote because she did not want him to think she was just going to let him go, she wanted to scare him a little so I think he was just kind of going on his own everything you know kind of you know my story as a whole and this student wrote it happened then she'd say it so he circled she saw the boy crown so even if she didn't say that she didn't snatch people's pocket books because she saw the boy crown so that made some sense in the reading because it does say something about how the boy did the crown so I think you know he was distracted by that he just saw the word crown and saw the word crown in the story and thought that that was the correct answer so yeah I'm just kind of curious as to why the students struggled on the first one so much the first question also thinking about ways that I can help this student you know really focus in on the things he should be focusing on yeah I'd be interested to know or to see how he would do if you read him the story and then have him answer it maybe it's not so much that he doesn't understand it it's just that he doesn't know how to read it I mean I find that with a lot of kids you know like the coders I should say and then there's also the vice person who's younger and wanted things she could not that that's a complicated question just hearing you read it why doesn't she say she didn't you know it seems like the kids the wrong responses instead of like almost like an immature student may have I can imagine them answering just what they thought in that from the passage like not like based on what the passage said I don't know I don't know how early we did this but I mean freshmen I don't know that they had experienced anything in search I'm assuming they didn't I know that like in the sophomore year they've been here but I think that this whole process is just so different for them well I think analyzing closely what they chose for their evidence would be one thing as well as talking to them and could you be as straightforward as almost giving them a question here's your answer did you answer it this way because the double negatives you didn't understand it or like you just say is this why are my assumptions correct right almost like a multiple choice question maybe just to help it I mean this is a short story and it is very short but maybe for a student it's not very short so like for example this question I think was so it came in like whatever came up in 72 if you took this question and embedded it just after the paragraph and then maybe took it to this question number two and embedded it what that would have been at the end of this story and then this well this one would be a little bit more difficult because this one there are um support for that all throughout this story I was talking on every page so maybe that one would be a little bit more difficult but that one would be the most challenging to make something like I think in search question after average page just to get them to the process like this is where you need to this is where you need to do this one which is another couple of stories at the end it's great isn't it I saw a lot of people nodding their heads when the suggestion was made that maybe the question was confusing that there were double negatives in it I think just the opportunity for teachers to put the work out the student results the actual assignment out together at the same time enables feedback to come from a variety of different directions and in fact all of those could have been true issues, problems could have been the double negatives for some students it could have been that they didn't know how to read it for others and it could have been that they were using their gut reaction and they would be able to craft responses and it Deb could you go back one slide so just to illustrate again that team was engaged in a process of dialogue using a protocol of error analysis by the end of that meeting they made decisions of what they were going to do in class to figure out the right hypothesis and how they would reteach how the reteaching was going to happen then they would need to take action and go do it and see what happens and evaluate it and bring it back to the table often with teaming a lot of us in teams is we do engage in dialogue and we may make decisions but we often don't get through the public action and try it out and bring it back to the dialogue that's one of the key components of the cycle of inquiry and will be a major focus for next year in this district and through the partnership alright so if we go ahead alright so so far in this update in the presentation of the partnership the focus has been heavily on that first part of that theory of action which is sustained discipline job embedded teacher collaboration leads to instructional improvement now I just want to present a little bit the hard work the incredible work that the district instructional leadership team has been doing to get some shared sense of fundamental instructional practices you know we might take it for granted to say well we all know what best construction is but if we have a hundred people teaching we have a hundred different responses to what might be most fundamental in medicine there is a checklist a tool go one day and others have developed checklists for this is what happens before surgery or this is what happens in medicine and it reduces mortality and increases makes it easier for patients to recover in education we struggle often people say we're a profession without a shared practice you know what are our core fundamental practices and it is highly unusual for a district to take on the task of saying we're going to identify our fundamental instructional practices and I just really want to commend the district for taking on that really the district are human beings the human beings taking on the really hard work of figuring that out so because it has resulted in this goal that was established last year to say for this year by June all members of the district instructional leadership team will hold a shared understanding of this district's fundamental instructional practices and you might ask well what would make something fundamental fundamental would be we'd expect to see it 99% of the time with 99% of the students in 99% of the classrooms and it would be those practices that teachers would be spending their time examining and improving and ensuring that it's happening and we would be providing resources and professional development in order to do that so they would they were saying by the go back one slide by the end of June which is coming up that the district would have a shared understanding of fundamental instructional practices articulated to their faculty and it facilitated the development of a strong culture well we bit off more we can chew with the last little bite there like yeah we're going to start our culture by the end of the year but we are getting closer because now the next slide this is a document that was adopted in 1925 I can tell you the work that goes into having 23 educators say that they believe in 8 fundamental instructional practices with the same terms okay it is a big deal and it's really impressive and I've had many a district call me up and say can we get a copy of that you know we'd like to adopt that and I'll say no you work to construct it and I'll say it's fundamental so just to say there are eight over here eight bins of fundamental instructional practices with brief descriptions and attributes what will impact its quality and how it's connected to student learning and this is very key those eight are high leverage if you mess with the quality of questioning in the classroom you affect the other ones overall they're high leverage they lead to the others but to be clear about is the direct instruction that too much of it actually can bring down the other ones but it's definitely a fundamental practice that we want to be good at when we are doing it one thing to notice about this framework is that you don't see a bunch of citations and capital letters and acronyms because there is no consensus in the field of education about fundamental structural practices there isn't any if it's going to exist it's going to exist in district because the district's leadership team and faculty has said these are they there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and research and tool kits and bins that will tell you what they are and there's a lot of overlap between them they did that work to figure out what it was and here it is alright last slide so some highlights just to reiterate and future directions one thing we want to stress is that there really has been an integration of innovations and initiatives say from the school of ed side and the district side between initiatives and between people we are all much more speak in the same language with one another and can represent the interests of you know I can walk out and represent the school district on some major reform initiatives because I'm intimately involved and so can I and the reverse is also true we've had district level instructional rounds which is difficult to pull off but it's happened at Crocker Farm and it's upcoming at Fort River and this past year the middle school has really taken on and adopted in a very systematic meaningful way the introduction of instructional rounds housed at the middle school they've adopted a FIPS framework this coming year we really want to get into you know those variables we talked about about district capacity for collaboration the one variable that we don't really know a lot about yet is the fourth one which is what's happening in the teams what is the quality of those cycles of inquiry that means cycles of inquiry in our ELL teacher teams, quality of inquiry in our PBIS teams, quality of inquiry in our department grade level content teams and so forth and then we do want to just make sure that everything we're doing is continuing to strengthen the U.S. Army SOE and our partnership in other domains a lot has been written on school university partnerships and they're difficult to do because of the complex cultures going on and bureaucracies but there are basically four ways that schools and universities partner they partner around they partner around K-12 student learning a shared mission around K-12 student learning they partner around pre-service teacher education they partner around professional development and they partner around shared inquiry in our work thus far we've really been in the bin of professional development and a little bit on shared inquiry so there are places to really continue to think about how might we weave in those other big bins that we really both care about like pre-service teacher education and how to do that and all that with four minutes okay thanks very much for that so questions keeping in mind we're supposed to start the next item in five minutes which isn't going to happen just keep getting no questions Catherine well first I want to thank you and thank all of you this is an unbelievable amount of work in 18 months given that you started with none of these teams none of this in place and really providing it sounds like if I understand it correctly the structure or the holding of improved instruction and improved learning across the district and that's incredibly exciting I think so thank you all of you and I do have one question and maybe so I'm so curious about how does one measure the quality of inquiry within the groups I mean how will you look at that and how does it get evaluated or measured well I love that question because that's we all want to know and we want to collaborate with one another and we want to do well so what does it look like and what does it feel like so that one visual of the cycle of inquiry has some phrases on it and we actually have about three different metrics and rubrics that teachers can self-assess that administrators can use in observations for that very purpose to give it the quality of inquiry and it's also the purpose of the district-wide survey that's out right now which asks every teacher to identify the core team closest to instruction and comment on a Likert scale about the quality of dialogue and vision-making action and evaluation and we did it in 2010 and we're doing it now so we have a baseline, we're moving forward and we have data on that and that will be for the administrators and the teams to use it's not meant in any way to be punitive or gotcha the idea is what's happening let's figure it out and now let's build capacity do you need protocols for dialogue do you need examples of how teams work together and analyze student work do you need student data to look at what do you need to make that happen I have never encountered resistance from teachers in any way, shape or form for this work in fact I know one item on the survey right now and we have 299 responses to it it's 96% of teachers either agreeing or strongly agreeing with that theory of action about collaboration so it's not the will it's the means and the capacity and you know some of these capacity issues that's one aspect of the team but we have to get them time to meet together we have to get the right people at the table so there are those issues too that go with quality thank you yes so you showed in the slides one example of an elementary school but are you looking all across the board including Pelham has Lisa DeJarle can attest to the amount of information that you have got well and in this some point very much my like to pick your brains on the idea of two way immersion in regard to ELL can I just say that I'm so excited about this whole process and that it's supportive to teachers it opens up classroom doors and it empowers them and respects them to work together to collaborate and it makes it intrinsic for them because then it's helping their students and helping their learning and they're not alone in what they're doing so thank you it's very impressive and thank you I guess since I'm not an educator but I'm more an organizational person the question is you're talking about culture and it's really about sustainability so that this is not initiative it's driven by personalities and the personalities go away so I just want you to speak a little bit about what it's going to take from the district level to sort of build that culture so that when we had different superintendents and we had different professors and the culture that it's going forward so first of all it goes down well first and foremost bricks and mortar don't collaborate with people do so it is first and foremost about people and their relationships and you need champions for the work because partnership work is not easy in any case so there has to be more more people it has to spread it can't be a Rebecca thing a Maria thing and us thing there has to be more people involved and it's about why do we exist why are we here what are we trying to accomplish and it's not always about the money because collaboration is supposed to exist in some ways so when you have dwindling resources you come together in your shared mission and not everybody has to do the same we don't have to repeat so many redundancies so it's coming together to figure out how our missions overlap and picking those most important things apart of our mission and say okay well how can we do them together but that we need a system and structure to do that and so Maria has done a lot of work to create venues and forums like the five college partnership meeting that goes on we now are hosting meetings inside the school that about the partnership with the school system and bringing it to the table we meet regularly so we need more connections that are ongoing in this space I just wanted to mention that I've come to believe that inconsistency is maybe one of the biggest problems that we have from class to class school to school I'm guessing this helps that a lot by getting people talking together to hear how everybody does things do you find that that's helping already or do you think it will help? well I'll just say I couldn't agree with you more it's really important that we identify what brings about learning and make sure every kid gets it that's at the heart of this work and one way to do that is what we just saw in this video is you put a few teachers together and go hey by the way that's a really confusing question so we get shared understandings of things and then it's also equally important that that team like that team we saw in the video is now somehow connected to another team so that the learnings and lessons from that don't stay just with that team like Laura is doing Dr. Valdaviezo is doing a lot of work with the ELL teachers we're learning a lot there so if we want to address for those kids and in relation to certain curriculum that we're implementing we want those lessons to scale through the network so absolutely it is supposed to address that no more questions thanks very much thank you moving on to later start time discussion so I think there may be four parts of this conversation one is to hear from the superintendent and administrators what their latest thinking is what their recommendation is still the same the other is we're getting more information tonight about other aspects of this the third thing is to hear from each other how we're thinking about it and the fourth thing is to vote if we feel like we're ready to vote if we don't feel like we're ready to vote we shouldn't vote so why don't we start with heat of the extra information or your latest thinking I just like to frame it a little bit I really appreciate that more questions have been coming from the committee and I'm sure from the community as well through the committee for us to think about and respond to so I did share some information with you from my reaching out to other superintendents in the area I know Rich has some substantial information that he'd like to share tonight with the committee around athletics some of the specific questions of what is this potentially going to look like in the afternoons and also what sports will be submitted by a later start given if we are at this moment at a 9 o'clock start time so he has some very specific information I did send out to all of you recognizing that this information came really late so I recognize you may or may not be willing and ready to really address and vote tonight and I understood that I also asked Debbie to craft a motion for consideration whenever you're in that position whether that's tonight within the next few weeks that really talks about what you would be authorizing for me to be able to move forward for 2013-2014 also with a very clear understanding because I felt it was important to put into the motion that if Amherst, Leverett, Pellum or Shootsbury school committees do not approve this earlier the later start time and really for them it would be the earlier start time for elementary schools we would have to bring that back in front of the regional committee for reconsideration so and I also put in if there were other unforeseen financial or educational obstacles that might come up in that 16 month period that this committee would I would be bringing that back to you I know some of our conversations have been around that that issue so again we want to acknowledge that we are a unique configuration because there is not one single governance structure not one single entity we have multiple towns to consider and we have to be sensitive to the fact that we are interconnected in many ways in particular around our transportation so if one school chooses not to we are back having this conversation again and I think we need to put that up front so I think it might be helpful to I think a lot of the questions last time if the committee is comfortable going in this direction was around athletics so I wanted to be able to to have Rich come up when you're ready to do so Michael it's part of the hand out did you get that one Michael? it's on the last page of the hand out yeah it was just yes and then I sent also by email I think so again really late in the game to send more information but again I'm trying to be responsive to the things that keep coming up so that if people don't feel rushed they feel like they're able to really be thoughtful around this issue so Oda Kakei to hear from Rich first and I have some handouts from Rich sure that'd be great whatever you're comfortable with Rich of course our principals as well so I want to first of all thank Rich because we sent him back with a few tasks which was to speak to the other athletic directors in the area and gather some information and he also spent a lot of time analyzing different seasons and when the sun is coming up and when the sun is setting and the effect on athletics so I think this is probably lots and lots of information I'm sorry of course I do you can have mine I'm going to share one second Mike's going to Mike's going to help me some clicking from over there I can share with Debbie it's fine yes I apologize for this coming in as late as it did I was collecting data from athletic directors all week last week so what I'd like to talk about is outlined on this first slide so the impacts in regards to practices games any financial impacts and then a little bit about the input I gathered directly from other athletic directors in the Pioneer Valley interathletic conference ok Mike so this is what a practice day would look like for athletes so with school beginning at 9am ending at 3.35 with our after school help session students would get out of that at 4.15 and then be ready to go for practice at 4.30 and I based this on basically a length of practice no longer than 2 hours because I think that's a reasonable amount of time to get done with what we need to get done in a practice ok so using that basically what I went through is I looked at September 1st, 15th, October 1st 15th and the 30th and then looked at a 4.30 start time when the sun sets and then how much time you would actually have for practice on those dates so you see at the beginning of September plenty of time by the end of October we're down to a little over an hour and a quarter until sunset so that means that to our practices no problem until about early October and then they're starting to get reduced to about an hour and 15 minutes by the end of the fall and so I did the same thing with the winter and obviously the winter time we've got less of an impact because most of our sports are indoors but we do have a couple of sports that are outdoors so you see that there's not a significant amount of time for outdoor practices starting at 4.30 in the afternoon so I looked at the morning as well just to look and see what that was like starting if we started to practice at 6.30 a.m and went to 8 a.m the sports that this is for are off-site so Nordic skiing generally practicing at Cherry Hill so they would need time to get back get ready and get to school by 9 so I considered 8 o'clock sort of an end time for that practice and then looking at when the sun rises and how much time again so maybe an hour at the beginning and towards the end so then I went into a couple of details about how practices practice times would impact specific sports so right now the girls and boys basketball program share the high school and the middle school gym very complicated schedule that goes on we also share with LSSC but the big thing is that at the high school basically practices are run starting at 3 p.m. and ending at 9 p.m. every day so if we bump this up by the 75 minutes some of our practices would be getting out after 10 o'clock if we continue with the current structure of after school practices for basketball Nordic skiing like I said before they wouldn't be able to practice in the morning or afternoon so really at this point we don't really have a feasible plan for how Nordic would continue with the proposed schedule change and we have about 40 athletes participating in Nordic this past season so ice hockey as I mentioned before the traditional practice time for ice hockey has been 3 to 4 p.m. at or rank for probably 30 plus years since then things have kind of moved in around it in terms of a women's team in Amherst college and youth hockey and things like that so right now it doesn't fit in with the schedule or for us to change they might have some flexibility that would allow for that the other option would be is to move over to UMass but it would potentially triple our ice time costs if we were to go with that option Alpine skiing they do dry land training 3 days a week Monday Wednesday Friday that wouldn't be impacted at all because it's mostly indoor at the middle school in one of the side gyms they get on the mountain one day a week for practice and that's on Tuesdays and if we did this without any sort of early release they would have an hour and 15 minutes of less of practice each week because the ski mountain closes at a certain time in terms of I kind of folded in a little bit of competition for Alpine here in terms of their races their races are on Thursdays and they start at 5pm athletes get there they help set up the course and then walk the course they actually have to be there you know about an hour before practice so we'd need probably an early release for those days for them to compete because that's all the PVIC ski teams compete at the same time so we wouldn't be able to change those times yep can you say 45 minutes early is that 45 minutes earlier than than what? than 335 so in the spring this is what our practice sure and how many students are on the Alpine skiing team? 10 this year actually no ended up being 8 this year I'll get the hockey one second oh 16 this year in hockey next year we're looking at about 20 so spring as you can see spring practice times start end of March there's not really any issue with spring practice times there's plenty of time for us to practice in the spring after school with this schedule so you can right by that one so now I looked at actual game days and the biggest adjustments have to do with away games so in this case scenario students wouldn't have to necessarily stay for away games for that after school period because right now we released them before that time so currently our buses are able to leave at about 245 for away games so in this case if we had a bus leave students get out at 335 they leave at 4 arrival times between 445 and 5 if you get traffic in there obviously that can change things a little bit as well so looking at that 15 minute warm up time the earliest start time we're looking at is about 515 for away contests so these are just some travel kind of average travel times I talked with Peter Kraus in transportation and just got his kind of idea about travel times to most of the places we compete against so the longest trips are down obviously to Springfield and south of Springfield upwards of 50 to 60 minutes so in terms of the length of events for sort of the light dependent sports we've got cross country about 2 hours with the races and the walkthroughs that they do have the courses beforehand soccer games timed at about an hour and a half field hockey games same thing and then golf generally about 3 hours for golf matches so again I went through and put in if you had a start time 515, sunset how much time you would actually have to get these away games in so you see again you have enough until about the you know halfway through September where it starts to get to be close in terms of being able to fit games in good so I broke down also the number of games for each sport after September 15th so you get an idea of what that looks like most of the sports in the fall play between 16 or involved in between 16 and 18 contests so this is how many after the 15th so the things that are most impacted in the fall field hockey home varsity games were able to start at 415 not a problem JV games wouldn't be able to finish starting about mid September one of the reasons with that is that in field hockey and the same thing goes for girls across they have to play the varsity first and then the JV second because there are not enough officials to do side by side field hockey or girls lacrosse games so you usually get the same officials refing a JV and a varsity game and a lot of times it's also the availability of field space so basically for away games it wouldn't be possible to fit in JV games starting at 515 which it would be very challenging to run a JV program where you couldn't have you know away games starting at 515 potentially you could do JV games on other days but then we're getting into increased transportation costs at that point so we'd have to look at that golf the MIA similar to alpine skiing golf mandates at 3pm start for their matches because they're about 3 hours long we could potentially push it to until about mid-September some schools have said that weekend matches are a possibility depending on depending on their home course so potentially athletes would need releases of maybe an hour I can't tell you exactly how many times a season because I don't know exactly how many schools we'd be able to get to play on a weekend but it would be probably I would guess in the range of 5 cross-country meets we'd be able to start them between 4 and 430 at home and finish before dark not a lot of warm up if you're starting at 4 o'clock for a cross-country meet 430 would be you know ideal 515 start times for way meets are not feasible especially in some of our sites like Springfield where forest parks only available to a certain point chick would be the same thing their sites are only open to a certain point in the day so they have about 3 meets after September 15th so we do an early release potentially for those 3 meets for cross-country soccer varsity and jv home games no problem we'd be able to start at 415 and get both of them in because they can play side by side varsity and jv away games could start at 515 until mid-September and we'd start to run into a little bit of issue with getting those done by sunset so potentially an early release of half an hour to maybe an hour for those games so in the wintertime I didn't do anything in terms of event impact on events because Nordic meets are actually mostly on the weekends so Nordic practices would be impacted Nordic meets would not so I didn't put anything in here in terms of the winter so I skipped right over to spring in terms of event duration so baseball on time, softball on time lacrosse is like soccer hour and a half tennis untimed, outdoor track and field usually between 2 and 3 hours for track and field meet so again you can see in this case at the beginning of the season it will be a little challenging to get those in after about the 15th of April we'd be able to get most things in so you can see again I broke down how many events occur before April 15th for each of the sports home and away and so baseball on softball untimed 515 starts for away games would work most of the time we've actually done several 5 to 515 starts this spring for our away games so we could utilize transportation to save some money so I know that that does work but it was about April 15th when we were able to do that so potentially a couple of early release times for those events that were before the 15th of April and of course there's some baseball games that end up just going on and on but that happens every year either way so there are always games that have to get stopped due to darkness sometimes girls lacrosse as I said earlier same situation as field hockey so it would be hard to continue on with a junior varsity program without substantial changes because of the limit of field space and the officials track and field meets they can start at home for the entire season there are three away track meets during the season that would potentially need an early release of half an hour an hour and then so the next piece is the financial impact so this spring as I just mentioned we were able to save approximately $6,000 in transportation cost by utilizing our district busing rather than our private contractor a five star so that was what I was saying I took about 40 events this spring and move them to five o'clock starts so we could utilize our district transportation leaving at $345 so next year projecting that we could save between $10,000 and $15,000 again that's a projection because I haven't done we haven't done the fall and the winter yet so I haven't asked other athletic directors if they're amenable to those times but they were in the spring in many cases so these savings wouldn't continue with the 75 minute later start option in FY 14 and in addition to that we would actually have to use five star to transport our girls and boys basketball teams because their games start at $530 so they would actually need to leave before our district transportation could leave at $445 and that would be the same situation for some of our hockey games as well so we would have a loss of some of the savings that we were able to make for this spring and for next year and in addition a little bit with basketball and hockey alright so finally some of what I presented already includes what some of the athletic directors shared in a survey that I sent out so basically what I asked was would you be able to host games starting at 5pm or later in the following sports and I went through all the sports that we offer and then I asked a question of would there be positive or negative impacts with this switch that we would be making and I got results back from if you go to the next slide Mike I got results back from eight schools four on the slide four on the next and this is a little it's a little messy in this chart but I tried to take exactly what they put in terms of yes or no for the individual sports so I'm not going to go through all of the individual things in here I think what this does show is just the complexity of trying to arrange these schedules with the later start option so there were some schools that were very amenable to moving things around and there were some schools that said this would be very challenging for us such as the spring field schools where in some cases students would have to stay at the school for a 515 game because they don't have transportation back to the school later and so that would become a challenge for them to hold those students in their buildings for those two hours in terms of supervision so we had a mix there were some like I said there were amenable some that said it would be very challenging for them and so we saw, I heard from North Hampton Aguam the chickpea schools Westfield and then the spring field schools which are there are five high schools there you can switch to the next one Minnichog, Ludlow and Belcher Town are the schools that I heard back from and then the final thing I put up was just a couple of positive comments and a couple of not so positive comments coming from the athletic directors concerning more parents being able to attend it might actually free up some busing for some of the schools give them a little more flexibility with their busing similar to how it helped us this spring again the inconvenience for some of the city schools and students having to stick around after school and then some of the schools utilizing the public parks and recreation facilities it could be kind of challenging for them so that's a lot of the data that I gathered there's obviously a lot more I think that out there but this is what I was able to put together for this point in time which is great two short weeks thank you Rich questions Debbie so yeah Rich thank you so much for pulling all this together an enormous amount of work and I personally really appreciate it I have just a couple of questions the first is about indoor track which wasn't mentioned and I do know that they have 330 meets at least half their meets are 330 so I'm assuming that would also require early release yeah so that was one of the ones that that I didn't get onto here that I realized afterwards indoor track they have 6 meets 3 of them are at 345 3 of them are at 7 again it's all PVIAC so it's not they're not flexible in terms of those start times so there would be 3 potential early release days for the indoor track students so then my second question is just from Mark as principal instructional leader of the high school do you have any concerns about these students being released early for these events so I think one of the benefits of Rich drilling down like he did was to go literally sport by sport season by season practice by practice game by game and so the picture that emerges is he used the adjective of complex any number of times and that's the lead image that I have so I'm trying to live in attention right here which is what I hope we're all trying to do right that on one level we've established and we've asserted that later start time is more consistent with the wellness needs of adolescents and we're invested in making that happen and yet based on Rich's research there are some competing considerations that also have a fairly high significance as we assess what it is that we do for kids and so among those two that surface and Rich's analysis are we want them in class right and so the number of times that early release came up as the building principle it's concerning right so if it is the case that the later start time or later start proposal hinged on that degree of early release time my recommendation would be that we go back to the drawing board and we try to think about this in a different way not surrender the goal of finding a later start time but finding a way for it not to come at such a dramatic academic expense so the second thing though is it's worth noting is that I'm also concerned about participation opportunities right so I think we've had any number of conversations about the value that athletics provides in terms of a rounded secondary experience both middle school and high school particularly for girls I mean everybody's mindful of the ways in which that contributes to adolescent development and so the number of times when I looked at Rich's PowerPoint that JV sports younger kids their participation opportunities were compromised leaves me in the same place of really feeling that tension between having this priority and trying to manage and trying to manage some significant counter counterweights to it so I want to be clear about this none of what Rich has said has made me want to surrender that commitment right which is why it's defined as tension and at the same time what he has on earth are compelling and I don't think can be put in the category of those are things we will just work out down the road they're too compelling in and of themselves so God bless Rich for kind of laying this out but as I distill it those are the large themes that stand out for me but early release time I mean if I'm the e-period math teacher right like I'm on the war path it's very difficult for me to abide that and still have a coherent academic experience thanks just to get I'm specific I think on two things one to confirm in terms of the early release did I understand that it looked like for the periods where the sun was down and therefore you'd have to do early release there was no more than six for any particular one sport is that correct? Yes okay so there's lots of sports where it's happening but only if you're playing one sport it's only going to happen six times during the course of the trimester that's correct statement correct okay and then in terms of earlier during public comment there was a percentage in terms of the student body that participates in sports 42 to whatever are you able to break it down by trimester? historically it's been very constant so we're in the mid 400 ranges and it doesn't vary by trimester and like over the years that has stayed relatively constant so it's about a third, around a third of the population every season around 36% I think yeah the reason I asked I'm just trying to get to the actual human beings that are being impacted so if you've got a third of the kids who are playing in the fall and they're playing in a sport where it's you know six early releases you know what those numbers actually are when you can put it all together it sounds like a huge thing I think drilling down even further and saying okay I wouldn't expect to do that work but I think looking at that way I appreciate the tension because the tension is there I think this is a useful conversation so here's where I went Michael to try to drill down even further so if you took those six days there's 60 days in the trimester so that's 10% that's 10% of the entire class number of days that would be so kids who are sick kids of college visits could have dentist appointments so there are other more mundane routine things that would contribute to that but just for athletics it siphons off six right off the top and 10% right off the top so to put it in another context the absence limit is eight right if you hit eight in anyone trimester in anyone course you're at risk of losing credit so six bangs you right up close to that limit without dentist appointments and other garden variety things happen and can I ask don't many students like play lacrosse one semester hockey the next semester something the next semester so that those same students the ones who are physically active are the ones missing over and over again they're not just playing one yes we do have a substantial number of multi-sport athletes I can't give you the exact number thank you so much this is what I've been wanting since we started this task over a year ago that actually get down to some of the specifics and anyone who's been following this discussion knows I've been a strong supporter of the goal but use the word complex I would use the word daunting to describe this and it's really tipping the balance in my head because I support the goal of later start times for adolescent sleep schedules but I also strongly support athletics and participation in athletics in high school and right now I really find this daunting for the reasons of participation in athletics and the opportunity to do so at the times that would need to happen number one, number two, sports that may not be able to continue three JV programs that may not be able to continue and then related to sports for the athletic considerations that Mark was just talking about what did I say I meant to say academic thank you so yeah I'm finding it I would say daunting and certainly keeping the goal in mind but a reconsideration back to the drawing board is something that's very strong in my mind right now because of this because now that we have the specifics I wouldn't necessarily be so strongly supportive of going full speed ahead on this looking at all it would cost within the athletics and the academic related to the athletics scheduling so that's how I feel about it and then I have one simple question that I should probably know the answer to but I don't do we have lights anywhere in any of our field yes we have lights on alumni field which is the field inside of the track and then we have lights on community field which is our football baseball softball facility but we can't use both sets of lights at the same time the way that they're wired we can actually only use either the community field lights or the alumni lights or rewire I mean there is that possibility with a substantial cost but yes we do have lights on several fields other questions so I should probably ask the superintendent and Mark and Mike you know how are you feeling about this now I would still recommend the same thing and strongly I think that's the email being sent out at you know kind of seeing the level of detail that Rich provided late in the day we have not sat down together to talk about this so I guess that's why I brought it to you to say this is new information much more detailed we need to go back and we need to have some conversations because part of my conversations will be with Mark, Rich and Mike or what you know we have the information of what sports and I think we also have to have the information of you know where are we sitting in athletics now what's the potential effect on our budget gap at the moment in terms of athletics so there's a number of different I kind of want to weigh I don't want to say are we cutting anything now but I kind of do I want to say are we cutting things that may have an effect a year down the line based on our gap at the moment and I don't know athletics given that we have a 50 to $60,000 gap for next year does this have any effect for the following year and I don't know that question, that answer I would like to look at that and then I really do want to sit down with them and say I think we have some non-negotiables about early release from classrooms I think we're consistent on that point and then there's further questions that surround schedule and such that I'd rather take back with these guys to talk about it it doesn't diminish my commitment to I think this is a really important move if we can move the start time so that we can help students to have less issue with being sleep deprived so my position has not changed on that it's just a matter of teasing out what this really means and then putting it back in front of you and saying where are we going to fall on this Catherine yeah so I've been a pretty vocal supporter of starting adolescence later at school and for all the reasons that I've stated that I think as a school district our number one goal and purpose is to provide an environment that's best for kids to learn in learn academically although I also recognize the importance of sports athletics for students to help them learn other kinds of things and to keep them healthy and Mark you talked about the last time we discussed this about our move towards addressing the needs of the whole child and so I also find what you presented tonight Rich incredibly complex and I would like a chance to look at it more and ask some more questions and think about maybe some kinds of alternatives because I really don't want to lose the opportunity to provide students not every student but a majority of students a chance to achieve to their greatest ability and part of that is not coming to school tired and the research I think really is compelling about that and again I said this before I understand that this kind of change is incredibly hard and we have to take all the implications of it very seriously and which is why I appreciate this really sort of drilling down because it does allow us now to look at this information and see you know are there adjustments we can make to the start time are there adjustments we can make in terms of athletics and when it happens and how it's you know different days and etc. I mean now we really have an opportunity to do that and we really hope that we don't lose sort of the opportunity to have an impact on students achievement and in school so I just want to say that hello okay thanks a minute so just in response to the fix where we stand now so if I could write the game plan on how this conversation would have gone over the last year and a half I would have bet on tonight and this is the classic formula for as we look at changes and the things that get us to the end that we can't make the decision to make the change so I just want to be up front about that aspect of it the other things I want us to continue to think about is the forest and not just the trees on this we've had many conversations about this over the past year and a half two years and sports has been on the table the whole time and a whole variety of things have been on the table at the same time so a couple of things I want to say first focusing on what Rich talked about in terms of his presentation he set out the doomsday right if nothing else changed this is what would happen okay so what I heard is two JV teams would get cut because we can't find a second official okay I don't think we're going to do that so I think there's that path to look down the other path to look down is speaking as the middle school principal I've said from the beginning if the high school can't come along the middle school should change too put us on the elementary school bus runs there's a lot of things that we made decisions about along the pathway we've forgotten a little bit about all those decisions one decision that was made was we weren't going to have in kindergarteners be out waiting in the dark in the middle of December because that's the time of the year when that happens so do we balance that to academics to sports right so my concern like is does this just die on the backs of looking at the sports programming or do we continue to have that forced in view which has to be looking at that whole child and I have to say I'm compelled by the data I know there's some disagreeing about that the research to me is very clear I hear from a lot of people both sleep researchers and educational researchers it's not a debate on that piece we may want to leave that as a debate it's not a debate so speaking as the middle school principal I encourage the school committee to look at ways that the middle school will have a later start time because I watch my kids every morning no one hasn't spoken yet Lawrence I was actually planning on coming tonight and voting against this because I guess I'm one of those persons who I did I've done what I think is very in depth research over the last three weekends and I've looked at the referee journals and the academic research and I don't find it compelling so what I would love to hear is referee peer reviewed research articles that do show I'm open to it I just didn't come across it that's number one and then going forward a very big consideration for me all along asking questions about the survey is the impact that this would have on the families particularly the families of elementary but the families in the district we made an effort with that with the survey and I thanked the task force for doing that but as I've mentioned before I found the survey very flawed absent the demographic data and given the structure of the questions I was I hate to say it the data was it just didn't figure into my decision because I didn't find it useful so it would be great if going forward if we did have a scientific valid well crafted survey that measured the impact on families in the district because actually athletics has been important to me I have three daughters who have gone through our excellent program but I'm really concerned about the academic improvement really seeing for me measurable not subjective measurable data that shows real academic improvement that situates us in the research as well as a scientific study of how it will impact the families in the community anyone else who hasn't spoken yet I just wanted to say that we have to recognize that as a region we're a large region and that there are students who are reading at 6.25 for the bus in the morning and that's really really early and I don't know how that can contribute to the well-being even if it was you know when I ask people at Amherst they like they don't mind the start time but they don't read for the bus until 7.15 so it's really very different when you're out there in the cold in the dark and I was also wondering how we're going to measure if this is a real change on our students like how we're going to make sure that it really works and if we are going to do something like a later start change where we're taking an hour away from the day for the students I know where you mentioned today on the radio about looking at the whole picture of our children and talking about homework as well and how they have such an overloaded amount already and then that's something that we really need to consider and it's a way to help lessen the impact of this but still the sports is really compelling so right now and I know some people might really disagree with this but I know myself and there are a lot of high schoolers that have come forward and said we are pretty much totally against the 9 o'clock change I mean yeah so it's really important but for me and sports again are very important and I know people are really invested in it and passionate about it but for me I think that the way it is now kids are getting a really kind of I don't know full academic experience because you can take college classes you know if we push the start time you wouldn't be able to take college classes and because you know the sports if kids would have to get out early I know for me like as a teacher if I was a teacher I would hate that for kids to leave and personally I don't like leaving class early because I feel like I miss stuff and I just know and I forwarded an email to Maria from a freshman who wrote a petition up and that went to these guys too but just for your information a freshman emailed me and had a petition that he'd written up saying all these people who are signing it are against the later start time I think all these controversies that we're talking about like sports with families it seems to be working the way it is and I don't know just personally I really don't want to change and my mailbox is really exploded this week and one of the things I think I've stated all my views I'm not going to state them again nothing that I've heard, read seen has changed my opinion but one thing has dramatically come home to me given the emails that I've received from proponents and opponents and that is how deeply intrusive this issue is into the lives of families it touches every single aspect of family life and I can't support this for a variety of reasons but whatever we do I would certainly hope that we consider that we're a public school and families send their children to us having an expectation that we will respect and honor the public and I think families make up that and whatever we do I hope higher than sports higher than anything else we respect the integrity of the lives and rhythms of families and I think this change as proposed really threatens that and undermines that a lot of talk has been given about costs in terms of dollars and cents perfectly valid but I'm not sure we found a way to measure other costs that are granted not so easy to measure out whether it's in terms of increased child care whether it's in terms of lost wages whether it's in terms of lost jobs because some people simply do not have the flexibility that others do to say to their boss I'm coming in at nine instead of eight sure you are look for another job that's the world out there today I'm going to show you people that will take your job so I just think we better be very, very careful before we intrude on the very essence of what makes a community what it is a community and that's families I just want to make sure we hit items that were brought up at comment time one was about data on parents and their jobs whether that would be here Mr. O'Brien addressed that very safely and I urge you to follow this to see anybody Debbie go ahead I do support the idea of trying to find a later start time for the middle school and high school students so it's not that I am completely against change and just can't bring myself to that point I am perfectly prepared though tonight to vote against a nine o'clock start time I think the problems and pitfalls with it very much outweigh the potential benefits I think it would be good for us to look at those schools that people keep throwing out there as success stories which I did and I looked at all of them that I saw mentioned Holyoke starts at 815 Sharon starts at 805 Swampskut 810 Beverly 815 then outside of Massachusetts we have Palo Alto 815 Wilton Connecticut was 820 Washington West in Connecticut but they started at 745 so I don't see how that's late and then the other one was Minneapolis which has sort of a diverse range of high schools that seem very specialized the ones that push their rigorous curriculum and programs started at 755 the other started at 830 there's not a single one that starts at 9 o'clock so I think that's telling and I think it's important to recognize that it may be a very good idea and we may want to work toward it but 9 o'clock is not I don't believe 9 o'clock is an appropriate time yeah I agree with what you said 9 is very kind of extreme and well first of all going back to what Kip was saying that families are really concerned that it will affect families but I also think it's important to hear what the students are saying I feel like this discussion isn't based enough on the students and so many students have come forward and said don't change it the way that it is it's working and I haven't heard any come up and say yeah 9 o'clock and that's a big for me that's a big effect and also as Debbie was saying personally like I'm not afraid of change per se but I think that at this point if you look at a rational decision-making model like the benefits outweigh the cons for keeping it the way it is and that's just the more rational choice I think so a few things just for the committee since I'm new to the committee I've been thinking about this for about four years we talked about it at Chutesbury when Northampton first started thinking about it a bunch of years ago so so you don't think I've just started thinking about it and thinking about this meeting the two things that are compelling for me that haven't changed I'm in support of it I mean clearly there's complexity but I find the research compelling and just but the two things one is that we're mandated to look at the whole you know so all the kids are the vast majority and so by definition kids who are doing other subs they're subsets so they're less than the whole and so for me I'm thinking about if we're going to create I think either Catherine or Mark said it last time creating the right environment for the best learning and that's for all the kids and so for me that's where I start and everything else is very valid and there's individual family and student concerns but they're all subsets and so it breaks out for me in that regard the other thing I was thinking about more recently is that in terms of choice and it's not to belittle that people are embracing things and expansive things but if the school says this is when school starts everyone has to show up it's legally mandated you can't otherwise you're truant and so but everything else is a choice whether you're doing a public school athletic activity a private athletic activity an after school component all of those are choice but the thing that we would make a decision upon are legally required and people have to show up when we say they have to show up and that I think is an important framework just to retain the two other things I just wanted to mention I mean it's sort of when Kip was talking about losing jobs I think it's also important to recognize there will be people and families and students who benefit by a change whatever the change is is that I remember when I used to have to wait for the school bus and then run to work and if it came earlier it would have been easier for me so things flip everyone's situation is different and there's a gazillion different variations on the theme so we shouldn't as Mike said sort of assume this is just the worst case scenario other sides will benefit from it and lastly just sort of as a solution going forward because this is the other big conversation we're having is that if the four towns figure out some kind of regionalization as opposed to something else there is regionalization money and one of the challenges with the bus schedule is that right now with Union 26 you know they're separate districts and so you don't get reimbursed from the state if we create a region then we have regionalization money so there's a little bit more so we can look at different times it addresses some of the issues clearly there's logistics to figure out but if anyone wants to think about how you address the big issue of learning and stuff they're married because we get more resources and we have more flexibility in some version of regionalization that's it I haven't actually said anything about this so far I was planning on voting yesterday if we had a vote but I think Rob said it best for me is that like him I was for this but this really seems daunting I would love it if it was 8.30 and not 9 but we've been down that road and don't feel yet that we can do that so that's really where I'm at I guess I just wanted to follow up and say that I continue to agree with Michael that I find the research compelling I don't think you're going to find better research or design better research for that and I also don't think that the biological research can be argued with in the hormonal studies so I still in favor of looking for solutions however I think Debbie had some very good points about the actual start times of the districts and I couldn't help but wonder in places like Minneapolis, St. Paul which has been held up or Ann Arbor which has been held up as areas have done this I've got to believe that they have A, more lights than we do for athletics and B, probably busing not tethered to the elementary school busing I'd be so interested to find out if they have a whole bunch of lighted fields and can design their busing to go when they want it to go and not constrain to the limitations that we have Exactly That has been the confounding factor that we started talking about with considering a later start time was do we push everyone back a half an hour but then we have little children home without parents because they have to, again it's the flip side but recognizing even that amount of shift would be beneficial to the secondary students so it is a matter of finances around to stay connected if we're going to stay connected with our tears as they are right now they have to be in sync however I appreciate that Michael stated the regionalization conversation you rather than me because I really feel like that's one of the factors I've been considering because Amherst, Pelham, Leverett and Shootsbury right now do not benefit from regional transportation reimbursement which is a substantial amount of money if we had a region we would so thank you for raising that I saw Lawrence's hand Oh no I was just going to say that one of the studies that claimed the most recent one that a supporter of this sent that made the comparison with the Air Force Academy if they had looked a little bit closer the times in the Air Force Academy were 7.30 and 7.50 so again this this is what I've found coming across the research is that 8 o'clock there seems to be the time at which it's sort of the flip point or something and I've again to second what Debbie said it's situating ourselves when you say later start well later than what where are we starting where does the where does the research take us and I think I probably said this originally if I could you know wipe this slate clean and have the perfect start time 8.30 but again our circumstance I just wanted to point out the process in the school committee the later start time group actually did not recommend the flip as their first option they talked about the half an hour shift in time it was the school committee back in I think this fall or some point losing my dates on this I've been doing this a while is that the school committee said we want you to look into what the effects are to have this switch go to 9 o'clock because looking at the research the determination was that that's what gives you the maximum benefit so just playing that back to the school committee so that's what happened but the group that originally worked on it remember Josh Goldstein saying many many times there's no way it's going to be accepted with a dramatic shift around the flip and move which is or just the flip and so he always talked about it should be the half hour shift so that's what I'm talking about when you step back and look at the forest is that there's many things that we made decisions about going down pathways I don't think we should get stuck on this one decision we need to continue to look at the wider picture so do you have the input you need to actually so my suggestion is we're going to go back and have some conversations and then I will recommend to the committee and talk to Rick as a chair whether we're bringing this back in two weeks or if we're bringing this back in a later date again I am committed to exploring all options to make a later shift however I've heard clearly from the committee questions and with the new information from Rich I think we have more exploring to do so I'm happy to take the information back Mike just two piece of information maybe if you can look at I mean it seems like it's untenable but maybe it's already there from the early stuff I appreciate Mike's comments if everyone wanted a 30 what that would be just nice to have the number because I think that informs future conversations if that's supposed to be the ideal and then I think just the other thing for the committee I guess I'm supposed to lean forward into the mic for the committee is in terms of the timing my sense was that this conversation and vote was so that we can give students and families a year of adjustment we can figure out the details so if we put it off for a few months we're looking at a year and a half or we'd be willing to look at it for the same start time but have an eight month transition time so that's something for us to be thinking about I think between now and then and I would encourage if it's doable to keep the same start time I think wasn't it $500,000 for the busing if we did all the busing at the same time if everyone went to school at 830 wasn't that that was the estimate by Ron I'd want to go back and do it so that was the estimate that was the estimate by Ron but the with the new regional contract that will come up for round busing or actually regional in all four towns contract we would need to look closer for those numbers so and then just one more thing that hasn't really been brought up is that looking at the whole I keep talking about this and it's kind of an honest but it's a big part is the college classes because you're talking about a full learning experience and that is not just school that is extracurriculars and other worldly experiences and like the big thing about the whole values and beliefs core beliefs community and the opportunities of the colleges and like I don't know that's a huge part for me and I'll bring that information back to Zoe we'll talk and we'll look at what time that is and looking at the different start times but I will make sure that's not lost so like Zoe I'm going to sound like a broken record but I personally think when this comes back to the committee it should have the details and when I say the details I'm not talking about whose golf is going to play in October versus I just mean the information that people really need to make the decision and I think that's really important because otherwise we just talk around the issues and we just don't have all the... and to Michael's point I don't think it's bad if it takes a little bit longer and you don't come back until the fall I don't think that would shrink the implementation time or expand the implementation time at all but I really as a school committee this is a really big decision and to me initially it felt a little bit like you were asking us to vote on a bottom line budget without giving us any of the details that's how it felt to me and we would never do that and so in that same regard we would never vote on a nine o'clock I don't think a nine o'clock start time without knowing what it entailed can I just ask one thing in the community I know a lot of times when people don't like something they'll speak up but if they're interested they don't say anything so if the things are going okay or so whatever your opinion is please let the school committee know and the superintendent so that we can make an important decision okay why don't we wrap this up move on thanks thanks very much for all your work thank you guys okay so moving on to athletic sponsorship more fun a double hitter so there's a memo in your package dated May 18th from the policy subcommittee to the regional school committee it asks some questions in this motion kip do you want to address anything on this or yeah this is not unlike the class size matter we've talked about this in the policy subcommittee on several occasions and I guess we felt we sort of hit a brick wall because we really didn't have a sense of what the parameters were going to be that we should be writing within and so we brought this back with three questions that we felt were integral and fundamental to the issue of advertising and sponsorship and wanted the committee to have a conversation about that in the same way that we'd like the committee to have a conversation about class size I think that would help us make much better use of our time I think we could come up with something sooner rather than later if that was the process because I personally and I think other members of the subcommittee really don't have a clue as to what the sense of the committee is and that's really essential for bringing something back to the draft form so that's why these two questions were proposed so why don't we zip through these three questions and see what we think just to interject I appreciate the three questions I think there's sort of a higher level question that maybe we lost when you say you'd have a clue about where the committee is I think I was struck last time by my statement and then your statement that you were open to pretty much everything and I was more constrictive in that regard so I think the fundamental question is about advertising the district which is not included in these because once you get the sense of how much we let in or not let in then you can start figuring out where you want to go in terms of where it can be and how much and how you regulate it well that's number one I think that's the intent of number one well this is talking about advertising banners and website which is a subset of the larger concept by banners I think they don't mean website banners I think they mean physical banners well I would how about we interpret number one to just mean advertising period I don't want to waste the committee's time on that kind of nitpicking what we need to know is what are your feelings about advertising no matter where it is we need to know that we don't expect it to give us the specifics and the details the guidelines and regulations can be worked out by Maria but we need some sense let's answer that question once and for all does it take us anywhere else globally that would be very helpful so consistent with what I think I'm hearing I am for right now a baby step not trying to fashion a global policy around how we sell rooms how we sell auditoria how we put a brand or a name in order to generate money I'm not interested in a global policy I'm interested right now in a baby step I can see the web I can see the website as a baby step maybe something physically on in the gymnasium or out on the on the play field but again limited tasteful but I'm not so much interested in the policy committee crafting a global policy of how we sell the public space of our public schools I'll go next I'm pretty much for anything I don't want as much money as I can get I trust the superintendent I'm not putting up something that's this lousy and so that's where I am anybody else I think it's important to point out that isn't there a policy right now that says no advertising correct in place right so there's going to have to be a policy change we can't do anything without changing that policy I'm not sure that's correct well even if it is the motion tonight could overrule that I suppose I thought there would I thought we went over that initially in the first part of this discussion I don't think it's on it's list yeah I don't think it's on it's list you'd be able to parse it anybody else wait I saw okay I'm sorry I think we need to whether or not we sell the policy I mean I definitely am in favor of signage specifically in athletic areas athletic events I think that's a good idea that a lot of other places do I have no problem with that as I said last week I don't necessarily think it should be the job of the administration of the school committee to start to decide which businesses are okay and which aren't I think it'd be a good idea to represent local businesses businesses but not specifically local only businesses of course you would think people who want to advertise here would be businesses that have a local presence be they chains or mama pop shops so I'm in favor of that I forgot what my second point was sorry I agree with Shabazz as far as taking small steps and things like the website you can walk away from it and you can when you're not on the site you're not constantly being bombarded with the images whatever they are and I agree I know where it will be tasteful but we need to set up policies that are in place to support the district if you God forbid ever leave hopefully you don't but we need to set up the students to be safe so I wouldn't want to bombard them yeah I I agree that you know with the idea of signage around athletics and athletic areas and the website but I wouldn't just state of the website because I'm not sure that it would actually bring in enough money to sort of meet the goal of what we're trying to do here we're trying to raise money you know I'm probably Rick I would stop at painting the roof of the middle school but I do think I do think that some local business or locally represented businesses with some banners and signage as we saw examples of makes sense and we you know it's clear our athletics could use the money I also agree I think it's I think we should have a policy that allows the advertising in the gym or the track at athletic events and the website and I think we should move forward with it I like the idea of baby steps actually I still have some sound now and I think supporting athletics I think that's where it started from you know supporting athletics and that seems to be a well established American norm of you know advertising and banners the two things I would guess contribute to the conversation that hasn't been said I actually would not do the website and for me it's about captive audiences so we're expecting parents and students to come to the website to get information and if we're expecting them to come and especially you know around the portal you know anything around that that's students have to go for that stuff and we're asking parents to check on their schedule so there's a captivity issue that I you know is different than an athletic event for me so I would be less but I think the other thing is just maybe it wasn't the draft ones consistent with sort of the wellness policy and healthy living generally you know that there's and you quickly have a slippery slope of who's good and who's bad but I think we do have a wellness policy everyone's required to do it so you know non violent non you know drugs non alcohol I mean there's some things you're not allowed to do legally but I think that vibe and sort of figuring out where the place you can stop but there's a resonance and a consistency that I think we should try to stick to the website's going to have ads on it whether or not we put them there so either the site that provides the service will have the ad or we can pay for the ad ourselves correct so the whole art correct yes currently we're using a program called yeah we're using a program called LeagueMinder okay so it's a specifically for athletics if you go to the high school website and you click on athletic schedules and brings you to digital sports dot com so I guess just clarifying that that for for a vendor hosted site that we can't control that but for the one that we own which is the high school or the middle school site it's or the old metrics a different one no can I further clarify that sure if you want to say something from that site that they go to the what's it called digital sports has ads on it that if we want to pay for space on there we can have our own ads or they will put ads there oh yeah no I got that okay I'm just saying that the one that we run the rps one is separate we we can't control theirs we can control ours just one small point too is it's for those people out there who would like to not be a captive audience to website ads it's pretty easy to block them on your browser yeah so so how about this how about we write the policy and we give it to you we write a draft I'm dead serious we write a draft we've been thinking about this for a while right and just to step outside that for a second so you know the I don't want advertising I'm looking for underwriters right I have the NPR model everyone NPR had no advertising it was like this kind of this bastion of purity unsullied by commercialism NPR has advertising for everybody right but it's but it's quiet it's not garish it's not screaming it's quiet I'm looking for and and they call it you know what's that woman's name call me and I'll help you become an underwriter of it right what she's telling you is you have to don't scream don't do anything grack garish come in low then you qualify as an NPR underwriter I'm looking for underwriters if you want to if you want to do shocking pink tout yourself as extreme I'm not interested low NPR is kind of model that's what I'm interested in right so what I'm also feeling is I get I get keep the position you're in trying to really parse these issues I mean I would think that'd be a very difficult thing to write so we're closer right now to kind of stepping out and actually doing it how about we put together a set of set of parameters that seems to approximate that kind of underwriting vision and we give it to you because my bottom line is we get $50,000 to make up right and so I'm really feeling the urgency to turn the athletic director loose and I want to earn your trust that we can do this in an understated way that's consistent with the values of the community that's consistent with the values of the school district I don't want to trifle with that because if I trifle with that I lose your trust and you'll back me out of this so I want to put something on paper that says this is how we'll operate these are the kinds of things we'll solicit this is the way we'll solicit this is how it's going to look in the end so maybe you don't have to have another subcommittee meeting for a while next Wednesday so question number two in the motion kind of address both of those things the only difference is the motion doesn't have the part about coming back and getting those guidelines approved at the school committee I don't have any problems with that at all it takes a lot of pressure off of us and you folks are closer to it we were hoping that we could wrap this up before the end of the year which I still think is possible our next meeting is May 30 can you have something to us by May 30 I'll talk to the other I'll talk to the other because it'll be spare it'll be no more than one page sorry the motion yes and that's I'm trying to encourage that a set of very spare bullets put on one page so I'm here in baby steps I'm here in tasteful and I'm also here in money so there's some urgency to get going I have a suggestion for they do the guidelines come to us at the next school committee meeting run it by us we hopefully say okay but with the idea that that's kind of temporary for now then the policy subcommittee can go and look at it and come up with policies later on okay just one quick additional item I'm wondering I love the idea of underwriter because it kind of removes what I think has some negative connotations that advertising sponsorship underwriter sort of implies something quite different a little bit less threatening it's possible to incorporate that concept into whatever you write that would be helpful for us is there anything that precludes us from just passing this motion now to authorize it and then still having Mark come back with draft policy guidelines for the policy committee no I don't think that's your question can we change advertising to underwriting so so I just read it earlier today so according to guidelines established by the superintendent her does meet so the implication is that we're the designee that's up to her I'm going to delegate that responsibility I'm not sure where he is but to the I would move the motion second okay any discussion on the motion well just to clarify I appreciate what Mark's saying I think it makes sense if what we're talking about is specifically around the athletic program it seemed like we sort of morphed let me write it but it being just focused on athletics so I support that in that regard I would also say that somewhere in the future we do have to grapple with this because it's huge and my two second political thing is that we're here because we're part of a larger context which is you know we have less tax money because people are paying less taxes which in the end stars public entities like us which means we have to say where do we go to the private sector it's going to get worse and we have to address it sooner or later because the pressure will continue okay so there's a motion any more discussion on the motion Debby do can I ask a question is it possible to add or underwriting underwriting like to authorize the athletic director to accept the advertising and underwriting for the athletics program or is that just semantics well you'd have to do it it's okay any more discussion on the motion okay we'll come to a vote all those in favor opposed abstaining I think it was unanimous thank you thank you I'm going to get the Kip and Roy approve yes talk about it Kip friend's always there friend will outlast all of us go fellas so I guess I'll move to approve the following gifts people's bank check people's bank donation for the ultimate intervitational $500 Friends of Amherst Recreation donation for weight room $1,500 Norman and Eva Brown met Sir Brown Holocaust Remembrance Scholarship $500 Pell and After School General Scholarship for $2012 $500 that was Pell and After School program and Charter Insurance LLC General Scholarship for $2011 $1,000 Washington Post Company matching gift high school choral program support $500 for total $4,500 I move that we accept these gifts second Any discussion? All those in favor? Opposed? Next Policies It's a policy ABD drug free and alcohol free workplace in school work workplace in schools We have to accept Is there a second? Second Any discussion on that policy? My first read I believe In the third paragraph talk to our employees and it seems like we want to incorporate the concept of volunteers, official volunteers that are on site I have a point of order question Do we motion on first read? We can postpone the motion I think is the wording to the next meeting but let's finish discussion I guess discussion in the motion is the same thing as discussing the policy so you can keep any other discussion on that policy I don't even know if we have to move to postpone because theoretically we can't pass this anyway even if it's moved because it's the first read We're not voting at all We usually don't motion a first read even though this was just motioned and seconded and I think even if we wanted to vote it wouldn't be allowed by school committee policy because it is a first read Motion is out of order correct Do you want to add the word volunteers? Not so much add the word but add the concept which should get incorporated because if someone is volunteering on behalf of the district whether it's tutoring or whatever they are under a purview in their course they're not an employee but they're equally important Okay, so I have a follow-up if I'm not mistaken Kip this was the language, the bold language is what was added by our legal counsel So should we have to bring that back? I'll ask Catherine And does visitor and corporate volunteer as sort of another employee contractor or visitor That may work right there I think so I'll check to make sure it's specific enough Visitor also sometimes includes like benders and things that are on set But that might be sort of a check on that I'm actually thinking about the we're putting the responsibility of the employees to do the reporting and I'm saying volunteers so if you're tutoring a kid and you see something Yes, I see So that's where we still need to Okay, any other discussion? Does the input clear? Just withdraw the motion Well, I just ruled it out Okay, so we're good We have the power to do that Awesome Okay So moving on to class size policy Is this the first thing? This is It's not interested The previous policy cause created more conversation than I thought it would I suspect that this one will have a great deal of conversation This is not a policy It is just an exploration of some concepts that we think should be dealt with by this group and it's complicated by the fact that this has ramifications not just for the region but for Amherst Elementary Pellum We need some guides not only on wording but on the direction that we should go given three different entities Do we need three different policies? What's your pleasure? Debbie So just based on my experience with Pellum when I looked through the one that immediately caught my eye was Hull's policy which is really I think what operationally Maria does at least at the elementary level I'm not so sure about the secondary schools but I like having something in there about the superintendent working with the principals to determine optimal class size Me too I like that lead-in Reflecting on shootsberries I like andovers for a couple of reasons in that I consistently am underwhelmed by MASC's policies and I would think you're quite deficient This starts out with a statement of philosophy which I think is helpful why do we care about class sizes I think that's helpful I think having some specific ranges was helpful and I think the only other stuff that I would add in terms of the one that you put forth is in the second paragraph it talks about developing guidelines and it seems like what we're looking for on an annual basis is some projections guidelines should have a lasting power of some sort more than just an annual so you're tweaking the projections is something but the guidelines should be more long-standing and be explicit like I think one of the other ones talked about that we're tying it in part to budget information so there's two reporting in that the superintendent does ones in the spring which should inform the budget discussion and then there's one that's in the fall which is really informational and it's helpful to point out so just being more explicit about that If I understand it correctly I think we're conscious of that and we're looking for a range as a guideline to avoid the possibility of every time the budget has to be cut or what have in particular you have to rewrite the policy I think there's a reluctance to go to specific numbers anyway but that's what we were thinking about I was just saying like the guideline this year is not 18 to 23 and the guideline next year is 19 to 24 that doesn't work So I think a policy is the guide practice and whenever there are exigencies that require a that the policy is not feasible that comes before the committee in a waiver we can look at a waiver without necessarily having to rewrite the policy but in circumstances where there is not an exigency I think you need to have numbers and not numbers like this Andover for first grade going up to 27 Okay, so we specifically have this conversation at the Amherst School Committee it was before the election so it was before the new members came on and we specifically decided that we did not want to have in the policy at the elementary school level guideline numbers written into the policy for the various reasons so we discussed at the time that there should be more flexible up to the superintendent we talked about having ranges and we thought that that would be useful and for that reason I do prefer the guideline language in the draft policy that KIP has given us here much more so than the Andover example policy because it does speak to guidelines and it says that those would be reported to the school committee now if that instruction of the Amherst School Committee were to change or if we wanted to revisit the discussion with new members present then I would think that we would need separate policies because I don't think it makes sense to have a regional board pick absolute numbers for elementary and secondary school so can I just clarify? I wasn't advocating Andover for specific numbers I think the idea of a range makes sense so you build in flexibility I just like the beginning of the Andover because it's a statement of vision and purpose of why we actually care I'm totally fine with the range and I think if you nail down a number you're never going to hit that number just to clarify when you say range you mean a range of numbers from this number to that number? it seemed like there were some that were saying like 18 to 22 the thing that KIPP put forth didn't have anything and so I just like how do you hang your head on that? well we don't and I mean the Amherst School Committee when we discussed this decided that we didn't want even a range of numbers put into a policy because that range could change on a year to year basis and we thought it was made more sense to have that range discussed with the school committee and presented by the superintendent to the school committee but not be the policy and I when we when we looked at this topic you know I did a fair amount of research of looking at different school districts and what they had and there's very few policies policies that are actually in place there's some guidelines which are not policies but you know kind of ranges of people's what people are comfortable with and we did provide a synopsis of research around optimal class sizes for the elementary level and we did consults with legal as well and it was very clear that the school committee should not put parameters because it is ultimately the superintendent's decision around class size within an understanding of you know expectations of the community therefore the school committee so it was not to go too specific but again I think some connected to budget was the only place that they really said if you have to increase the budget because of a class size decision then it would come back in front of the committee so I think it was a distinction which I'd be happy to bring back in front of this committee and we can look at again if that's helpful. So my two cents is I actually like the policy I agree with the rod that I like the policy as it's written here in draft it's very broad but what I would love to see is more specific on when the superintendent brings the numbers to us what does that look like so I'd like to see like a five year history of what the numbers have been in that report and I'd like to see that for the state average and for some districts that we want to compare to because too often I think in a lot of reports we get a snapshot and we don't get what the history has been and we sometimes don't get the comparison to other districts Catherine and Debbie. Yeah I agree that I like the guidelines in this in the policy subcommittees and one of the reasons one of the most important reasons we decided in the Amherst elementary school committee not to I mean I was against having a policy period. I thought that given our charge as in terms of the budget that it was potentially limiting I mean you don't write a policy if you intend to change it but I would certainly be supportive of a policy that was that gave the superintendent and the building administrators the flexibility they needed to with the understanding which I trust that they all have of what is best for what are the best class sizes for kids to learn and that if it requires going above a number that the superintendent and principals feel is too high or there's a budget issue then it comes to the school committee. So again since we're writing this policy for all of the three districts back to Pellum I completely understand why in Amherst you might want all of that information but from the Pellum perspective it's just not necessary that you know we have done it. It's so small and so specific to the class and the kids in the class and the teachers that we don't need that much information. So again I think Pellum we can kind of work around some of this but I would be reluctant if it was written in such a way that I felt like it was kind of placing an undue burden on the superintendent around what was necessary for Pellum. I wish I had thought that the outset of Catherine's point about not having a policy at all that's maybe where we should have started and maybe that's where we should go because I don't know we talked about having a contents to a policy but maybe the bottom line is we don't want to have one because that would you know make it difficult for you to make a decision related to budget. I don't know but that's a very, very good point I'm sorry I didn't bring it up earlier. So for a little bit of the history that I know because for example one I don't know any history where we were talking about a policy on class sizes for secondary. For me I always thought the discussion was around elementary. So that's number one. Number two a lot of it came up around the discussion of choice and the presentation that was given around different kinds of enrollments what the pattern has been looking like we had very compelling presentation from members of the community with data driven research economics of education review, Journal of Education so on and so forth that really showed from the community there is interest particularly in light of when they're seeing documents being circulated saying that our target population our target number class size guidelines for budgetary purposes, target number for kindergarten first grade, second grade is 22 people were concerned because that's out of line with what the research is showing is what is optimal at that size and that's our target size we're offline from what the data already shows. Now in truth we're not at 22 and as the superintendent presented this was sort of some unfortunate you know words that were put here that didn't really reflect like a hard and fast target that she works with as superintendent to make all of our kindergarten classes and all of our first grade classes and all of our second grade classes 22 students so that was a context for why we came at this discussion and I think it is important that somehow we are saying clearly for our schools that that is not the case and that we have some sort of optimal number range or whatever we're putting in place that shows clear language that this is what we strive to do I think is important for the community. I think especially when we choose whether to be choice or not choice as a district be it Pellum or as Amherst chooses or at the regional level that we want to be careful not to pack the classes as full like she was saying you want to make sure keep agreeing with you tonight to make sure that we're not just shoving in as many kids as we can in a room and that because when it's school choice it just leaves you that opportunity like oh we could get a little more money and we don't want to lose educational benefits for the kids by just stuffing more kids in. For the reason that Chabaz mentioned and we've been talking about those numbers for two years since I've been on the committee I mean that's why this all came up is we wanted to get rid for that reason I support having a policy but I support having a policy that requires a superintendent to come up with the guidelines and then report them back to the school committee but doesn't include the guidelines as specific numbers in the policy. I honestly care about that more for elementary although I can see why middle school might be something you'd want to talk about with team numbers as well. My main focus is elementary less so for the high school middle I can go either way. I would agree with what Rob just said and I'm just wondering the conversation that being less attached to the numbers I think in retrospect we always talk about the difference between a policy and the guidelines of the procedures and so the procedures you're going to develop and that might have the numbers. I think it's essential and it gets to what Chabaz is talking about I'll agree with you too. The policy is about the values it's the guiding part. So if it comes to the point where you're suggesting 30 kids in a class and we're saying that's not what we're about this is what we're trying to do it's optimal it's prioritizing educational quality whatever it is but that's the policy and then the specifics I think getting to what Rick talked about is that we need some procedural that's very clear about how you report back when you report back so that we have the information to ascertain what's appropriate. I wanted to clarify for Chabaz Chabaz I agree when we discussed those numbers one of the first things we said was the use of the word target was incorrect. I think we understood that to be a ceiling and certainly not our target not our target number so I just wanted to clarify that. I'm not against a policy but I just want to be very careful not to lock the superintendent and ourselves into a situation where we're going to have budget issues because of our policy serious budget issues and I also wanted to again clarify school choice that I don't think anybody here understands school choice to be a way to pack classrooms and make money for the district I think one of the advantages of school choice in fact for class size is that if we have a class that we feel that the superintendent feels and the principal feels is too large school choice actually allows us to make smaller classes so but I just I just want to make sure that that's out there so I probably would prefer guidelines but I would certainly be happy to vote down the road for a general philosophical policy or sort of guiding principle so I I think if you go for a general philosophy and we start with elementary policy I would be happy to write guidelines that are more specific with ranges so numbers for the different levels based on the research that we reviewed which Shavas mentioned a few of the different research studies that we took a look at and then also talk about where in the process are projections you know where are you bringing October 1 your actuals where when are you actually updating projections for the following year to the committee so I'd be happy to include that in guidelines I just want to can you send I see some of these copy and P maybe some of those papers that you sent out I'd be happy to thanks thank you I hope so it's helpful thank you Maria you did mention something a few minutes ago about you could make available something I'm used to what that was it won't just come by it had to do with numbers and I was wondering if you could supply them to the subcommittee I mean I did create a document and a recommendation that I sent out to Amherst which I'd be happy to thank you I just want to say thank you to Kip and everyone else on the policy subcommittee you guys you really have done so much work time out in the past year really it's been huge and I just want to say I really appreciate it the person who really deserves the credit is Elaine she has been just outstanding and I honestly I can't speak for Lauren she has been just a God sent to us and if you're out there Elaine she just was fantastic I can't say enough about how much she's contributed don't mention that he can't take the credit we'll pass on our thanks to her which brings up a point however the next meeting we reorganize and right now it's Laurence, myself and Debbie and I think I know we could use a third person right now but if you can give it some thought we organize we need to make that decision I think it would be very helpful to have a third body preferably I don't know we already have someone from Amherst we have someone from Lever that does an excellent job representing central office I'm not sure where we need a person from but I think it would be helpful to have a third person and our timeline is we just have to wait for Pelham to reorganize correct which is in the beginning of and so by the 12th we will be set to reorganize here by your next regional meeting excellent thank you we're not the last we're not the first thing ever so are we done on policy? yes so the next meeting we do reorganize keep thinking about budget suck committee whether they own suck committee if we have the moment also at the next meeting we'll have an equity update we may or may not have discipline update probably not another meeting we're also going to have a secondary math update so that will be on there and I put down retreat prep we'll just talk about the agenda for the retreat how can we do those better what's the role of school committee versus the superintendent that discussion how can we come up with a report card to know if we're doing better or not related to that last thing there used to be something called the how are we dealing committee on this committee back in 2009-2010 and actually did some work on that and other ones that came up with these comparison districts that we should compare ourselves to or they thought we should and they also came up with some criteria for creating a report card I mean it wasn't, didn't get super specific but it was a list of things so I'll forward that to you before the next meeting and do some thinking about what should we be measuring maybe before the next meeting we could have a little bit of discussion about that before the retreat and also maybe want to think about reestablishing a committee like that I don't know to maybe well we can't decide on the goals until the retreat but if we were to decide to have a committee to help with that or to help with how are we doing maybe we'll decide to do that but I guess we won't decide to do that until the retreat so that's not really for the next meeting anything on the calendar you'd like to see added or just confirming the times of the retreat the retreats is six to nine and then remember that for those six is a school committee training we don't ask isn't that mandatory for all new members or all people who haven't been oriented yeah but you don't have to go to this one there's other ones is it only for regional members or if there are new Pella members who aren't on the region for anybody okay so we need that to be stored Debbie I'm going to send out an email to all the Pella members which is everyone but me so we also can I also see the other date we have to think about is the meeting with the select board to hear about the retiree questions which would be on the when was that June 16 June 13 thank you so we'll have to send something out about that and Debbie had one just reminder for people I just want to put on your radar on June 18th we'll have our retiree years of service awards for staff and faculty and you're not required to come but you're certainly invited it's a really nice night it'll be at 7 p.m. on the 8th where the middle school cafeteria did we talk about high school graduation no that's what I was just going to do too the A is high school graduation which typically all school cleaning members regional members are sitting up on the stage so the 8th and I don't know what time and I should know what time so we get there's a time we have to be there ahead of time we go into this green room blue room whatever they call the background and then we sit up on the stage and it's a beautiful thing so all the members because we're graduating our seniors will be inviting you to join us and then I get to say wonderful words of wisdom so what time should we be there I will send out a specific no a specific yeah I can't even like and we will also say where you need to go what time if you haven't and we will need confirmation if you get that confirm if you're coming all about the seating and making sure everybody's in order if you haven't done it it's really a blast it's like makes being on a school committee worth it your face first smiling at the end of it it's really wonderful so we haven't yet reorganized in Pellum and that's going to happen the day before I mean I think I know how it's going to go would you like me to say that I just want to make sure that the person gets the invitation the appropriate he will get the invitation so I don't know if she'll say anything that's fine this is I've been very open this is my last meeting so we want to formally thank Debbie because she will be stepping down from the regional I just want to be respectful Debbie so you know I want to thank Debbie personally for the time and energy you put into the regional school committee and I feel and have felt 100% supported by you through this process and your voice in terms of asking really wonderful hard questions and working collaboratively with us has been a gift so I want to thank you and I'm glad I get to keep working with you Pellum yeah thanks and I'm glad I get to continue to work collaboratively with you because this past year has been a great committee a great experience I want to thank you too it's been just a pleasure working with you and like in the budget subcommittee she just knows the numbers better than any of us it's just fantastic you've been great thank you we'll miss you yeah thank you Debbie okay I guess a little do germ okay