 Hi, I'm Kirstie Allison Ampe. I'm chair of the Arlington School Committee and I call this meeting of the regular school committee on Thursday, November 16th, 2023 to order. We are here in the new wing of the high school, which Dr. Hommel mentioned in a couple minutes. And before we do that, I want to note the passing of the very successful passing of the override last week, for which we thank both the voters and the taxpayers of Arlington. It was resoundingly positive with a 61.4 percent yes and favor and given that the commitments of the override included significant increases in funding to the schools to both fund our strategic plan and to one of the components of which is increasing compensation for educators. We are both very thankful and just impressed that the town was so understanding of both our needs and appreciative of our efforts. So I want to say thank you for that and then we had another big milestone last week the day after. So I'll actually start by commenting for just a second on the override. We're really looking forward to implementing the strategic plan that we've worked so hard on and these dollars let us do that. We're really grateful for the show of faith in the tireless work that our educators put in every single day for Arlington's children and we're we just want to thank the work of the volunteers and elected officials who made this possible because now we get to go do the fun stuff and we get to do the fun stuff in beautiful new buildings and the educational plan for the new Arlington High School really wouldn't be possible without the override dollars because the strategic plan is very aligned to making sure that we can do more deeper learning in facilities that allow for interdisciplinary work and allow for a lot of collaboration among adults. We are sitting in a brand new school committee room. Central office has been steadfastly focused on moving for the past several weeks and we've managed to do so successfully in the middle of a school year along with all of our high school students doing the same. So it is a beautiful new building we're really looking forward to welcoming members of the community to do tours later on this winter and spring and it's we had conferences in the building almost immediately upon opening it up and it was wonderful to see parents coming in to talk with their teachers. Our staff our students watching them walk in for the first time was just such a treat because they were related to be in such a bright welcoming new space. So we're grateful so much to the taxpayers of Arlington for continuing to prioritize the needs of our students and to allow us to move forward with some of the innovative and exciting work that we're doing. So there is no public comment so I can't so you may have the people who are here and maybe some of you on zoom had seen that this is all kind of jury rigged and we were we're still a work in progress here. There will be changes over time we'll be talking about it later in the facilities report. But in the meantime I can't move my mic any closer. So if I if you can't hear me someone needs a wave OK they say I'm fine but I know sometimes that's a problem. So there is no public comment. We do have an AHS AHS representative who I see on zoom Graham Minnick. Do you want to give us a report. OK. Thank you. Next we have the Pierce improvement plan. What do you want to introduce. Yes. While our Pierce team is coming up and getting settled we're going to have you all over here and we're going to hope to have your slides up here. We're working on that. I just want to say Pierce saw some absolutely spectacular outcomes for students this year. They really have been doing a lot of hard work over the last several years to improve instruction interventions build out an instructional leadership team. And I really always enjoy heading over to Pierce and seeing bright pink flingos everywhere. So I'm looking forward to hearing what they've been up to and what they're planning for this year. Are we good to go. No. No. All right. Well maybe we'll have slides otherwise I'm sure you'll be able to follow along with an exceptionally well executed presentation. No pressure. So I'll hand it off to you all. I am driving the slides. Can you see them. OK. I at least need my screen to be working. Yeah. Twist it a little bit. It's not working. Yeah. I think it can be here. That's great. But if not this works fine too. All right. Take it away. Yeah. I think so that the audience at home can see. That's what. Thank you school committee for having us in this evening. We are very excited to share a plan with you. But before we do we'll introduce ourselves and then we'll dive right in. Thank you for having me. I'm Andrew Mottie. I'm the proud principal. Hi everybody. I'm Julia McEwen. I'm the assistant principal at Pierce. Hi everyone. Steph McKenna math coach at Pierce. Hi everybody. I'm Beth Ladoo the literacy coach at Pierce. So briefly this evening we'll give you some data overviews. We'll talk briefly about some of the wins that we see in the last school year. We'll talk about some of the challenges we we face as a school. We'll share our school goals with you and some of the ways that we plan to achieve them and some of the resources that we feel may be helpful and as always look forward to your questions this evening. All right. So we are the Pierce school. We are very excited to be here. We have 336 students. We have about 50 staff members. We are proud and fortunate to be part of the Metco program and we have a wonderful learning community in our of students in our language based learning program. We currently have 17 sections in the school and we like I said before are very excited to present to you more this evening. So the data that we wanted to share with you this evening is around our absenteeism our achievement and growth specifically in ELA and math as shown in the spring MCAS our dibbles data and then our panorama data around climate and culture. All right. So the first thing we want to bring to your attention this evening is our data on chronic absenteeism. This is an area where we made some gains as a school. We reduced the we're able to overall reduce the number of students that were chronically absent and we made some pretty significant gains in our high needs subcategories as well as students that fall in the low income categories subcategory. We see some positive signals within this data. It's trending the way we want it to and we're seeing some some positivity. Some of the things we did last year that I think were impactful were partnering with families regularly communicating with families meeting with families and understanding some of the needs and barriers to getting to school. And I look forward to keeping some of those in place this year and expanding the ways that we're supporting our families. But I also want to be up front that it still remains alarming to me that one in five students that are in a low income category are still chronically absent. And I'll talk a bit more about that as we get into some of the academic achievement data. But that is a main area of focus this year. I'm going to talk to you guys about the achievement and growth data for the ELA component. So as you can see as Andrew said with his last slide we've seen upward trends in every category between 2022 and 2023. But probably the most exciting is our largest growth was in the high need subcategory. And you can see that in the last two indicators. That's where we made tons of growth something we're really proud of. But what's not shown in this chart which is very exciting are a couple of very specific grade level examples. So in our third grade 77 percent of our students were meeting or exceeding state standards which meant our third grade students were ranked in the 96th percentile in the state which is amazing. Our fifth graders last year had an overall SGP or student growth percentile of 57 which is a really strong indicator of years to come especially our fourth graders now moving up to fit a couple of things that we're trying new or sort of adding on this year that's going to keep contributing to this upward trend is we have stretched out the grade bands of using the Dibble screener in the past we've only done K to three and this year we're doing K to five. And the Dibble screener measures phonemic awareness phonics fluency vocabulary and reading comprehension and it's given between two to three times a year. And what we're doing with this data is actually pretty incredible. We're meeting as teams after these benchmarks we're analyzing the data we're noticing trends and we're having it really inform our teaching and whether it's extension work or intervention work. We're also incorporating a stronger language arts program and it's all based on the science of reading. And lastly we just have amazingly talented ELA educators and that's why we have such high expectations and such high achievement. So similar to the ELA data we saw overall gains across the board that we're really encouraging this year in mathematics according to the MCAS. But most exciting I think is are the gains that we can see there made by some students in our more vulnerable categories. You can see there. Some things that you can't see at looking at the data are fifth grade and third grade and S.G.P. of 73 which is incredibly difficult to do. And something I'd like to point out is the work of K to two that leads to some of these data points that we get to see in MCAS later on. Our K to two teams have been working year after year helping to improve our fluency screeners which it's so nice to have a common data set at K to two that we can then work. We can use setting them up for three to five and those fluency screeners now extend integrates three and four as well. So we have more data we can use in our ACE meetings among teachers. Thank you. I'm just gonna say one more thing about math. And before I do though I want to double down on a statement that both Beth and Steph shared which is that we have an outstanding staff and a really hard working staff and we are aligned K to five. And so some of this the wins we're seeing tonight are in the upper grades in terms of the data but they are a reflection of all of our educators and I'm very proud of what they what they do. One of the concerns that you're not seeing on this graph in math though is around some of our racial subgroup category categories. And there's some a couple things that stand out as areas that we will continue to focus on one of them being that only one in 12 students that are Black met or exceeded expectations in mathematics and that is deeply problematic and that is something that our team remains focused on on improving and committing to over the years. Additionally, seven of 18 students that identify as Hispanic or Latino met or exceeded expectations and mathematics which is also below where we would like to be in terms of supporting and addressing the needs of all of our students. Thank you. So as you know, we only test the science and cast doesn't exist for grades three and four but it does for grade five and as you can see here, we did quite well and we scored in the 90th percentile for the state which we're very proud of but one of the things again that the data doesn't show is the qualitative information that we have around science at Pierce which is that this is one of our students across the board K to five favorite subjects. We know this from talking to them from listening to them in the hallways from having informal conversations with them but also through the empathy interviews that were done towards the end of last school year where consistently across the board what's your favorite subject science what's your favorite subject science. We have the classroom capacity for kids to be engaged in hands-on experiences with science and it I think that it is really showing up at this fifth grade MCAS level so that's another point that we're quite proud of and are going to be continuing to promote. All right I'll speak briefly about some of the trend some of the trend areas we see so from 2022 to 2023 we saw a small gain with our non-high needs groups and an increase in students that are considered high needs. However, we have a lot of work to do to continue to close the gap. We also know that chronic absenteeism continues to impact our families that are in the high needs category specifically in low income categories at the highest rate so part of our working theory is that if we can continue to have high quality instruction and curriculum and we can get our students to school more frequently over the years we will continue to close this gap and as we go to the next slide in math you're going to see something very similar and our theory remains true we need to get kids to school as much as we possibly can and then surround them with rich cognitive academic tasks and add in layers of support around interventions tutoring and increase access to after-school programming in order to close this gap. This one's me as well. All right so this is the kind of this is our Dibbles data and briefly what I see in this data is that last year as compared to the district our students exited kindergarten a little bit behind on benchmark as compared to some of the other district schools and as we move through first grade we start to close that gap and have more students at or above grade level. By second grade we are about on par and also have a higher percentage of students reading on grade 11 by the time we get to third grade the vast majority of our students are reading at or above grade level and our students that are in the well below category are are are still there and there are less students in that category and so this is something we see as trending in the right direction and that anytime there is a student though that is below or well below there is still work to do. All right so we're switching gears here a little bit and talking about climate and culture so last year we really focused on our instructional plan about targeting students in sense of belonging and making sure that the their school level experience was full of joy that it was positive and we made a number of adjustments within the school to commit to all of our students. Additionally we focused on rigorous expectations in the classroom and high level interesting engaging cognitive tasks and what we saw in those two areas that we really focused on are two of the largest gains and in school safety we we saw a small gain as well as teacher and student relationships and we saw school climate go down a touch and that is something we'll be looking into more this year. And lastly with student climate and culture these are specific questions that were asked within the sense of belonging category and one of them that stands out to me is when you feel like giving up how likely is it your teacher will ask you to keep trying and this is something that we talked about in some of our professional work last year. It's really supporting our students you know asking how we can continue to support them and this is also something that our non-classroom teachers are doing too to try to forge and build relationships across our school and that's bearing out in the data. All right and then we have one slide this evening and this is what our staff told us. I'm going to go back to my notes here because I have quite a bit of positive things to say. So as you can see that we saw some pretty significant increases in our staff's sense of belonging and our staff's sense of well-being to increase by 17 points for a full staff I think speaks volumes about the professional staff that we have and their willingness to go the extra mile for one another. From my perspective I think that we used our professional time meaningfully. We committed to outings together outside of the school. We focused on integrating teams and grade levels to create more connections across the school and we we created some flexibility and I credit our coaches in creating some peer-to-peer walkthroughs that allowed us to get into one another's classes and learn from one another and I'm very proud of the work that we've done over the last year on this. We asked the staff what they felt like contributed to this and there's a lot of things. One being the additions of the new playground so thank you to folks on this committee and thank you to the folks across town that have made our outdoor facilities better. There's a shout out to well-crafted class schedules with wind blocks or what I need blocks. The establishment of the Flamingo community school norms, a rebranding of our mascot, a commitment to free breakfast and lunch, an expansion of before and after school programming, a deep collaboration across all departments and grade levels was noted as was strong teacher hires in the past three years. And lastly there are other things that happen in our school that are more informal like book clubs and spirit weeks and as I mentioned briefly peer-to-peer learning which can be as informal as asking a colleague to be able to come in and watch them teach or vice versa and just sharing something you learned from them. So I'm really proud of this and that's what I've got for you. I'll pass back to Julia. Before we move on to the next slide one thing as a newcomer to Pierce that just listening again to some of the things that our staff shared that make them that are reasons for those strong numbers in a sense of belonging in a sense of well-being you might be thinking you know how does us having free breakfast and lunch for all kids it's not really a staff thing but one of the things that you hear up and down the hallways of Pierce is how proud our staff are of things like that for our students and how much their sense of belonging and sense of pride and joy around the school is really centered on the experience of students and so coming in to Pierce this year that that just I mean it jumps right up at you and it's something that I think is also very commendable about our staff is that their own sense of belonging and well-being is intricately tied to that of the students and the experience that the students are having in our school every day. So based on this information and the work that we're doing there's a lot of words on here for in terms of our goals and I know that we're all good readers and close readers so I'm going to depend on you for that but what I really wanted to pull out is the things that we're focusing on this year are really closing the achievement gap between the non-high needs and high need students specifically in literacy and making use of high leverage instructional practices to do that so that we can continue to see that gap close and close and close as students move throughout the grades at Pierce. We also want to continue to focus on student engagement again through the use of high leverage instructional practices like the ones that we are seeing in our new EL curriculum that's in its pilot phase this year but really thinking about what student engagement looks like what we want to see students doing when they're walk when we walk into a classroom what teachers are asking students to do and really using that as our measure for what student engagement looks like and that's a constant conversation on our instructional leadership team as well. We also want to continue to improve that sense of belonging for all students and really dive into which students which subcategories are maybe not showing such high numbers of feeling of a feeling of belonging of a sense of belonging and similarly for our for our families really wanting to increase that sense of belonging for every single family that is connected to Pierce. All right so some of the things we're committing to this year using our professional time wisely using our ACE time our building times to really focus on literacy instruction improving access to interventions and learning with one another. We're committing to closing that gap that I spoke earlier about about chronic absenteeism and making sure we can get students to school and there are a variety of measures of ways that we're trying to do that this year and we are going to continue to refine our peer observations that have been in place for two years and to really focus them on the student level experience around engagement and high level tasks in the classroom and some of the resources that we feel could be helpful. It's always nice to have more folks that are trained as reading specialists. This is an area that is pretty nuanced and specialized and reading is a very difficult thing for some students to learn so I am very impressed with the new tier one resource and I also understand that we will continue to need to support students that reading is challenging for and really want to make sure we're doing the best that we can for that for them. Supporting some of our newcomer families particularly our MLL families that are new to Arlington in some cases new to the United States and making sure that they have what they need both at the school level but also outside of the school is something that we are committed to and something that requires resources both at the school level and town level and lastly just better connections to town resources. Before I say more about that I'll say that I feel very fortunate to work here and also to live here and we have a lot of resources and some really dedicated folks around different departments and just making sure we're connecting so we can get students into athletics, food making connections across town and really making sure that all of our children can experience all that there is to have in Arlington. That's what we have for you this evening. Great thank you very much. Do you want to add anything or should I go straight to questions? Only that I'm an exceptionally proud superintendent this evening and this group has done an amazing work at Pierce. Any questions? Mr. Thinwin. Thank you that was a great report. I'm curious you talked about resources needed for students born outside of the United States and what are you talking like what's the need? Well some of the need is making sure that I mean there's a lot. I mean making sure that anywhere from transportation, getting to school school functions, getting access to healthcare providers, getting linked up with community resources that are available. In some cases we know that they they in some case we know that those are being connected to and in other cases we wonder if they are or not or not and so liaising more with the town more with folks to be able to get every family what they need. Good okay thanks for that's nice of you to recognize that. Your subgroup analysis said that the scores for ELA and math grade three of five, I think you have you've had growth in high need students and you've actually closed the achievement gap so and you know in every school's done a good job too of working on that on that but you seem to have had a lot of success and I'm wondering I guess it's a question for the district to what extent is your experience, your practice, how you're doing things being shared with the rest of the district or is it relevant at all? I guess it's a question for Liz. I'm writing your question down. So the goal is definitely to share the successful practices that lead to outcomes like this, the district as a whole. First we have to define with the Pierce team what it is that happened that led like that results like that and so a lot of what we want to do this year is pay some really close attention in those places where we see a gap closing to what it is that led to that gap closure because one of the things that we know coming out of the pandemic is that we've had a series of different baselines set over the last several years and I think this year we finally have the ability to compare apples to apples and so the question now is okay we can compare apples from last year to apples from this year what actually led to healthier apples this year and and what do we need to do to make sure that the entire orchard is growing that way I'm sorry I just really ran away with this metaphor. I don't like them apples Liz. But whatever the Pierce team is using to make sure their orchard is thriving we want to make sure that we're perpetuating that practice so it's hard it's not easy and I mean I would actually ask you to put that question back to the team a little bit to say what are some of those root causes we've had the conversations but use of like some of the things that actually they mentioned the staff appreciated we would identify as huge contributors to the success purposeful use of time listening to what educators think they need when it comes to that professional use of time so that they have time to collaboratively plan with one another ensuring that we are consistent in our message around what we think rigorous instruction is these are things these are examples of things that I know Pierce has worked on and our practices we're working right now to spread across the entire administrative team. The superintendent directed me to ask you if there's any other root causes so there anything else that she didn't add. There are and I think one of the things that would be helpful is expanding tutoring I mean we have done some really intensive purposeful tutoring before school after school we've used money effectively we've used our own teachers to pay them to come in before and after school and we've really deployed most that two year first and second grade and concentrated some of the support in those grades I would like to see that expanded both across the town and at Pierce so I think that's a concrete thing that could be done that has a really high leverage. Good all right thank you this is a good way to the kind you're right here you're right this is good dialogue thank you. More question. Mr. Schlickman. Okay I mean I'm intrigued by this and I'd love to go into a lot more depth than I can now but before I go there I want to hit the aesthetic piece I love the green and pink on your bar charts. I'm very appreciative of somebody who goes and adjust these charts to make them tell a story. My critique is that I heard many times in this presentation this is really wonderful but it's not in the slide if it's really wonderful put it on the slide okay because this is this is really a permanent record you've done a really great job. I've got I'll ask you the question that probably won't ask others because I think you really have this well thought out are there any content areas types of literature types of mathematics types of questions you know creating discourse things that are underlying that you picked up on from your data that's not apparent to us that you've latched on to and you're acting upon. Yeah team let me take this word you would you like to start? So Paul I think it's a great question I think one of the things that we've really focused on for the past two years is around student discourse which and really thinking through not just turning and talking and talking about what's going on but really developing high-level questions and and turning more of the to use an ed term heavy lifting on students right and working on that through our coaches and I feel we're talking for Steph and Beth but but really helping teachers develop those and giving more license to students to be able to have those questions back and forth rather than going through back through the teacher all the time so it's kind of a granular move but we're doing it across the school and have been for a while and it just puts more ownership on the students to do the bulk of the learning and thinking. Yeah I think that a focus on discourse is usually something that's behind this type of growth and these times of growth types of growth numbers with kids because if they can communicate their knowledge that then you go and throw them through these tests and they're they're going to do well and it's going to reflect what they actually know. Go ahead go for it. So something that I've been thinking a lot about lately is sort of the inner systems within grade levels and what we do with our data how we look at it and over the last six years that I've been here I've noticed every year teams being willing and eager to dive deeper and to have conversations gen ed special ed everyone at the table about what we're going to do about what we see and that translates into what they choose to include in that discourse when they're once they're in class at a tier one level and also what happens in our intervention groups. The other question is is because I'm listening to you talk about your newcomers and English learners and you raise such a beautiful point from as an urban educators working that population that's probably one of the most important things we can be doing so my question I guess is bouncing over to this side of the room. I sense the need of maybe additional social work support or something to some sort of a district support for these immigrant newcomers and second language learners. Do we have any grant money or anything floating around this year that can support a little additional services for these kids? We do have the there's the homeless grant that we do we do have funds for that's allocation about initial allocation about thousand dollars per student and we have about nine students that are eligible for those services so we can get reimbursed for those costs and then there'll be additional funds that'll be released to the district based on the per day enrollment amount from Desi. Needless to say Mr. Slickman thousand dollars per student is not a social worker make but I think one of the things that I'll commend the Pierce team for thinking through is what resources would help our multilingual learners this year right now and so we've actually added an after-budget additional SSP to Pierce that's posted at the moment that's specifically intended to both help with some of the liaising work if we're able to hire a bilingual educator and with some of the inclusion-based MLL learning support that those students might need. Yeah thanks that just feels so important to me thank you. Ms. Morgan. So I wanted to ask about the absenteeism which obviously there's been huge improvements and I guess this is sort of a qualitative like how close do you feel like you're getting to the floor right because there's going to be a floor right event like we're not it would be great if we got to zero percent chronically absent students but we're not going to get there right so do you have any sense of you know with your general population that looks like it's hovering right around 10-ish you got some movement this year you're obviously whatever you're doing is working I'm just curious if you have a sense of like how low you'll be able to drive that. Well I tend to be an optimist on on some of these so I would say there's a long ways to go I would like to see overall at five percent or under and single digits in every subcategory. Okay good that's helpful because it seems like what you're doing is driving that down pretty significantly so it's helpful to hear from the people who are actually doing that work to get a sense of where we're headed. I think one thing that's important for us to keep in mind as we do it is how obviously we can see trends amongst you know kids and families or kids who are chronically absent families who have chronically absent children but one of the things that I feel very proud about in terms of meeting with families around this is that every single family has a different story about it and I don't say that to sound hokey I say that because it can really present some challenges for structurally what we do whether it's you know a family who doesn't speak the same languages that I speak and how do I actually meet with them and that is a relatively surmountable hurdle but I think that when we talk about wanting to get this to single digits and under five percent really keeping that in mind that every single family may need a custom made intervention after we do the well of course we meet with them of course we communicate of course we advocate and then what comes after that really does get down to that individual level. Great great and then just the other pieces you know we are obviously very focused on ELA and I know nobody's losing sight of the math I know you're not but it and it the the goals are fantastic and the the work is amazing and the gaps are closing in math so I'm not like worried it's just you know as somebody who works in higher ed with non-traditional students without foundational math skills it's still really important yay math so we just want to make sure we're we're still talking about it I'm I'm sure you are there's no way there's no way that you're not talking about it and getting these kind of outcomes but I do think we sometimes have to to say it so and we have to get creative too so I obviously have seen our implementing teams work really hard this year on EL and it becomes absorbing but those are some of the teams who are still reaching out to me and asking you know what can I do about this I have several teachers in the building who are interested in trying some of the building thinking classroom strategies and working in-house on that because they aren't able to go to the pd that we're offering around it so we still have a lot of excitement around math good and I'm sure that will continue that's awesome yay math yay math dr homing wanted I just want to add on to what this team was saying about the chronic absenteeism efforts and the every single family has their own story and how many resources it then takes if there's a single family in a situation where access to after school is the thing that's going to make sure that they are able to be at school stay at school and not have consistent absenteeism or if access to a before school program is the thing then this is why we put resources in the strategic plan towards things like that because each time we try to resolve one of those challenges for students it's going to take a resource that's going to take financial investment and the strategic plans goals are aimed at that and I know that I can count on the peers team to be one of the first that will call us up and say hey are there scholarships for a family for whom this is going to make a really big difference pretty sure we had that phone call today so like but it takes resources and that's the point I want to make is that like the resources we've committed for each and every one of these families there's usually a resource whether that's a human one and the time that they're going to put in to making that phone call and doing that communication or a scholarship or an additional reading specialist are one of those and those are critical to the efforts that result in results like these oh i'm sorry miss giddelson you are thank you um i i think this is i think i'm no the answer to this question but to follow on to the discussion about the absenteeism i know andrew that this has been a huge focus of yours and it's really exciting to see on paper what it's accomplished um and this follows on a little bit to what dr homan said like you've done really well you've done a lot what is it is it that you just and not just is it primarily that you want to be able to do more of the same of what has been successful or are there specific things you can tell us that you would like to try that you haven't been able to try because they haven't those resources have been heard again or aren't available and um and i'd just like to hear about that as we move forward or i think i mostly understand your question i think one of the things that improves chronic absenteeism is direct outreach and whether that's from me miss mcqueen social worker calling directly meeting directly whether it's at the school or at a home or anywhere else matters and that takes time and it takes kind of a tenaciousness that i think um you know it requires that people like at the schools to do it but of course an additional resource that is helpful are community members potentially liaisons in the community that that that know folks um because the more that we can amplify how important is to be at school when you're not seriously ill we know it will lead to better outcome so miss gillison i'm not sure i'm answering your your question directly here but more connections to folks in the town and and i think um just a willingness um to meet folks where they are um is something that goes a long way and um you know there's a lot that i need to learn right like i i i study up a lot on chronic absenteeism and we have not met our goal so i'm proud of the trend but um we're in no way made it yet absentee conversation here um i think something that you are not saying that i'm going to sort of say for you is i think that another piece of this is the relationships that you have clearly built with these families um because as we talk about resources you know in my head i'm like well we could have some position where their job is to go to these people's homes or call them but i don't think families are going to respond to just anybody they're responding because you are their child's teacher their child's assistant principal their child's social worker um and so i think that you all should take a lot of credit also for the relationships that you are building with these families that they trust you to get them the resources that they need to get their kids to school so thank you thank you miss exton okay everyone has asked my questions so i'm just going to make a comment sorry i'm getting um so i had some of those chronically absent children because of illness but because of various lingering things and i'm just throwing that out there to suggest that as you talk to families if you work with them to find out what it is that they need in terms of support for health for the student in the school even if they're only at school for like half a day um i know it might have been possible for my child to have attended more we still probably be chronically absent but there's definitely and i'm thinking especially with covid going on rsv and you know it just feels like there's more illness out there that's causing more significant issues and if you happen to have one of those lucky children um that's something that hasn't been mentioned and and i think should be being thought about so um i think that's everything thank you very much this great presentation thank you thank you for having us we enjoyed hearing from you okay and next we have bracket introduce all right while they get settled we did print copies for folks who are sticking around of the bracket over there awesome so you can follow along even though you can't see on our flash screen behind me um the slides so i just want to say the bracket team has a brand new fully brand new administrative team this year so welcome dr vise mr amaral um this is our new principal and assistant principal of bracket elementary school they have really hit the ground running and getting started uh bracket is in phenomenal shape we've heard wonderful things about their leadership at the school so far you know they've been working hard on systems and structures and routines and getting to know everybody and doing entry plans all as they start the school year so i'm sure they'll have wonderful things to share with us about what they're up to and looking forward to this year it's all yours right so first of all i really want to first express our um gratitude for our bracket community which has really embraced us our students our faculty our staff our families have really um opened their arms to us and that has made a huge difference in the way that we've been able to begin this school year and so i want to begin this presentation first by thanking them um again i'm dr gretchen vise i'm the principal at bracket and with me is i'm michael van der leen the assistant principal of bracket i said the wrong last name i'm sorry recently married recently and we also have members of our school community here with us our coaches our our special ed coordinator um and our school council also um sense their regards so thank you all for coming um so our purpose um for this presentation was to really accompany the school improvement plan that was given to you and really highlight our major wins and opportunities for improvement we want to provide you with the narrative around our first few months our first 45 days with our students and as such we've organized our presentation into three major categories thinking about our joy our growth and then how we are thinking about moving forward and thinking about belonging and we'll start with joy because it's been an absolute joy getting to know the bracket school community um and we've been able to celebrate some many wins as we implement our entry plan i joined dr vise this summer as we considered our interviews as we um along with the strategic priorities of the district and it was clear communication and feeling safe and supported were very important to our school community we spent time connecting with families with staff uh and and faculty and our community partners as we built up our relationships with them we hosted meetups and some informal events such as popsicles with the principal back in august it was a wonderful turnout a great way to meet families and and make that first connection with them and it was a great launch to our back to school week we worked with families around chronic absenteeism and iep support by meeting and creating plans for these students and these families prior to the start of the school year our focus was it continues to be ensuring that all of our students have access to an empowering educational experience as at bracket these connections and conversations they really formed the web of support that we have and we were able to kind of refine our existing operational systems of the building some of those refinements were adjustments to our arrival and our attendance procedures with the goal of having all students in the building ready to learn by eight a.m to help with this we've established a safety patrol with our fifth grade students um as they accompany their our learners into the building there's a picture there on the bottom right of that slide and it's been a wonderful moment for them to serve as their role models for their younger learners and more importantly to create that deeper connection contribution and collaboration to our school community to foster that sense of belonging for them and so it's been a joy watching our students really thrive in that way we've refined some logistical and operational systems such as our evacuation and safety procedures and protocols we've developed scheduling that supports the implementation of el we've clarified our communications through weekly family newsletters regular updates to our website as well as our own internal communications and thinking back to our opening day with our faculty it was a day that was full of some full of excitement and joy as we did a lot of foundational work to co-create the path ahead for bracket we extended this work by engaging our families and student council and in the picture that you see here is one of our core activities we did where we sourced input from our stakeholders for words that describe the future of bracket our hopes our desires how we want to be described how we want our students to be described and ultimately what our goals are for bracket together and through an iterative process we'll continue to engage stakeholders and this will form our school-wide expectations to work in concert with our district initiatives of multi-tiered systems of support we revitalized our ace meetings our student study team process as well to enhance the way all of our focal groups equitably experience the strategic priorities of the district and their time at bracket and through our joyful work with the bracket community we used all of this as a stepping stone to dive in deep to the to our data and form our school improvement plan which dr. vice will share with you now so it's important for us that joy leads to growth so that we're using a strengths-based approach to address our needs and michael and i are still meeting with different constituencies and really listening and learning from them as we use our beliefs about education and their dreams for the community to build what we want for bracket as far as our school improvement plan we began by identifying growth areas and looking at the data for our 425 students and 70 plus faculty and staff we have some really good wins and foundations to stand on we made substantial progress towards our state goals especially true in mathematics where we reached or exceeded 2023 targets for all students and most of our subgroups in math last year at bracket the bracket community focused on expecting high engagement in math discussions and we think that some of those pieces have definitely influenced that that success was echoed in our panorama data that looked specifically where our students were responding about the the fact that their teachers had rigorous expectations for them and that was seen as the biggest increase in our panorama data in the spring chronic absenteeism overall improved and though michael said it's still a priority for us and we were still making individual plans with students at the beginning of the year at the same time while we're seeing some trends towards improvement in our literacy data through our dibbles our overall there was a slight increase in our English language arts data but many of those categories did not go up especially the gap between our high needs and our non-high needs but when we started to look at our corresponding panorama data which you can see here when we looked at some of those subgroups within that high needs category our students with disabilities and our students without disabilities really the the gap in that was something that we wanted to prioritize especially within our English language arts so this was a a sub a focal group that we really identified which corresponds with the districts initiatives as that being a focal group there were some relative weaknesses and cultural awareness and action despite work on this in the previous year both on in the faculty panorama results as well as in our student results so this gave us the sort of the the meat which which we were going to build our school improvement plan and we wanted to develop a plan that was aligned to the district plan clear intentionally demonstrated connection between the goals because as we're two new administrators really thinking about how can we work and meet many of these goals at the same time thinking about those action steps so we wanted these to intertwine and the way that we did that was by thinking about three guiding questions as we developed this and so we looked at how do we inspire all of our learners how do we use data to focus our initiatives and how do we build connections for everyone and so those echo through all of our strategic plan goals dr vise do you want to tell them what this thing is oh yeah i'll so we'll we'll tell and then come we can we can look back so you want to go yeah so our um so this is the four goals for our school improvement plan our academic first academic goal really centers on english language arts and that gap between students with disabilities and students without disabilities our second academic goal fosters conditions for deeper learning and integrating the el high leverage practices across all the disciplines um our culture and climate goal and our strategic family engagement goal are both identifying needs for growth and belonging specifically thinking about including more voice student voice family voice and making sure that there's open communication path within those within those groups and with each of those we're also thinking about that that subgroup of students with disabilities and families with students with disabilities in those um and so for our first question was how do we inspire all learners and for that we wanted to build on the on the protocols that we used in last year's math discussions and think about how could we again use protocols as we implement the el curriculum really intensively in first and third grades and through the high leverage practices across the school so the pictures that we have here are actually the magnificent things that the first graders created in their first in their first unit for el so this first unit had the first graders think about what is a problem within their classroom that they want to solve so some of the things that are featured on this slide to the left is a talking stick they said that way everybody's voice could be heard at the meeting there's a lost and found that has different categories different boxes for different sized things so that little things wouldn't get lost at the bottom of the box and in the front is stuffy land which houses stuffies when they come to school which for first graders is a really big problem that their stuffies aren't just stuffed in their locker so they took that and then the first graders crafted paragraphs with focal statements and supporting details and when asked about these details the first graders talked about how they couldn't just list attributes but they had to explain why in those details so their ability to write and expand upon what they're writing is really increasing how do we use data to inform decision making as a school we're really working to expand our qualitative data collection and use both qualitative and quantitative data in our really intentionally in our in our teaching so on this slide you can see an evidence from a conversation at an ace meeting in which teachers broke down this sort of composite dibble scores right so your dibbles and you're looking at that early literacy screener and so they broke those down into different the different components and put each child in a class on a different post-it note and that way they could move those around and think about different flexible grouping possibilities in tier one and tier two instruction so that they could think about what are the different ways that they could really target that instruction and they map this on a visual of the MTSS or multi-tiered system of support process to really think about how tier one and tier two instruction work together and this thing really allowed us to have an amazing dynamic discussion in that ace meeting where and think about how we could double dip into that so kids are getting not just one access to that curriculum but again getting it multiple times and so finally how do we build connections for everyone we really wanted to build on the amazing work that has been done with our rainbow alliance and our belonging club that's beginning and the model of the student council that was begun last year to bring more student voice into what we're thinking about and another way we did was during our joint time together on november 1st was really that that time together was really integral to getting all the voices our teachers our paraprofessionals our specialists all together to focus on our students with disabilities specifically thinking about how they their feelings of belonging could be thought about throughout the school we first started with conversations about thinking about our own relationship with disability and then how that influenced us in our teaching and then we broke into different teams and talked about our students individually thinking about who are their friends who is an adult within the school that they feel connected to and if we couldn't name that for students what did we need to do specifically for those individual students to make them feel connected to the bracket community we'll continue this work with empathy interviews in the spring with our students uh with our families of students with disabilities and are having support from the district in that so this brings us to sort of thinking about where we're thinking up for the future um it's important to michael and i that our vision includes creating space and time for student agency student voice a plan for collaboration that's explicit and actionable and thinking about how we're going to include teachers and by that i'm including all grown-ups who are in our building as they are all teachers to our students in way different ways and how they can see themselves as leaders of their professional growth and in making school-wide decisions and we both want to thank you for having us engage in this really important work in arlington we feel really honored and proud to be here thank you um anyone have any questions mr cardin thank you um so miss exton has asked for a presentation later in the year about the student success teams ssgs but i did notice that you talk about redevelopment of the ssgt process to support mtss what exactly does that look like how are you changing the process sure um one of the things that we really did is we really wanted to make sure that um we were utilizing all of our all of our teachers and educators to the best ability as far as that their resource time with time as well as their expertise one of the big changes we did with our ssgt process is we've changed who we bring into the meeting for example if there's like a student that they were concerned about who has a need for ot and maybe reading support we're going to bring those two we're going to bring our reading coach in we're going to bring our ot person in as well as the general educator as opposed to a grade i think before we have a team that was represented from one just general ed teacher of every grade level other thing that we do is we do a pre-study we do a collaborative document where a lot of the educators and the whole team comes together where we do kind of an analysis we all weigh in so when we come to that meeting we do a 30 minute protocol that's very focused that's very uh intervention based about what we can do as part of our tier one support to really enhance what students are getting in the gen ed curriculum built upon our district accommodation plans great thank you mr schlitzman love the presentation um the fact that both of you are new to the district and come from different places i'm glad to have somebody with an art and music background coming in in a leadership position that's always that's always a blessing for a school because the first thing you said was joy and i can sense that you're trying to bring that in absolutely um tell me about i mean i want to know about your entry plan basically how it feels to come into this new environment because you know fish don't know about the water but you're this is a highly successful school and you're highly successful educators in different venues you're really good and that's why you're here tell me about how it feels to come into bracket and what you're seeing and what surprised you um so i think i feel really lucky in a lot of ways as we came into bracket um the conversations that i had at the beginning especially with our coaches have been really open and honest and people have been willing to um take risks with us and tell us how they really feel about things which has been really helpful um i think i was a little worried at the beginning that everybody would say oh it's everything is great everything is great and um and what yet we've found is people are starting to bring things to us to say like hey we want to collaborate on this problem we see that you're really interested in working with us on this and um and at points we're like wow there's everybody's bringing things to us and and yet that really feels like we're starting to build some trust with this community it's it's a amazing community there are incredible teachers the families are so dedicated to their students and to making bracket just a really lovely place and so um i'm glad that they're also able to think about how they want to grow because i think that's been really helpful for sure uh to echo dr vise to you know um hearing from our staff and faculty as they have been bringing concerns to us too what i really love about that is that it demonstrates their faith and their trust in us and that's an incredible honor to have um and not only that they're they they take risks along with us and they allow us to do that they allow us to go along with this ride and say hey let's try it out which is awesome to be a part of it creates this really infectious energy throughout the building um and what's been great especially for me too is that bracket has just been an incredibly welcoming community um uh from the moment that you walk into into those doors staff are asking you who just just about you as a person not necessarily just about the the upper professional side and one of the things i said in my my interview is that i'm really looking for the opportunity to make sure that uh we can humanize one one one another um and that has been a huge huge blessing as part of i as part of it you caused quite a commotion over yeah i'm too much joy it's just a lot of excitement a lot of joy and the whole thing is uh nuts i'm excited for you i'm excited for the bracket community welcome to arlington and uh you can do like a coca-cola commercial yeah you know it's it's good for you yeah i didn't turn it off yeah i looked it this way okay well mr schlickman is working on that anyone else have any other questions welcome and we have a bag of rice okay um i was gonna ask so since he's busy i'll ask the question he usually asks which is we're coming into budget season what do you need from us yeah i mean i think you know i'm also an arlington resident and so i was really excited about the override um i think you know compensation is definitely a thing that we all have to be thinking about um especially for um our paraprofessionals and the way that we can support them they are really um outstanding educators as well at bracket and i think a fair company really good compensation for them is helpful um i think that um we're also thinking about um our facilities and and excited that our playground is is part of this new um spring plan um but also thinking about how are we thinking about our our schools as learning environments and seeing what we've learned as far as the learning environments from the high school to think about how we could think about the spaces um at at the other schools and at bracket to have communal spaces for learning and and thinking about those those pieces as well and so those are things that we're we're thinking about um just in general i think next year i would have a just um maybe a little bit more detailed list for you as we've we've gotten through a year um but those are things on our mind may i follow up please dr vice so when you talk about the spaces in the building you're talking about like a recon like a make them like this building not necessarily but thinking about like outdoor space how do we how do we think about that as far as like outdoor classrooms or bringing kids together and nice and how can we can we do that you know i think when we see the safety patrol we see the fifth graders and the first graders and second graders and the relationship they're building how can we build those things within a school that's comprised of a lot of little boxes right and so thinking about that is something that i think is important to us how's your your staffing for custodians and to keep the building clean they've been doing a really good job yeah i'm sure they're doing a good job i'm not saying enough but do you have enough um we have someone in the morning and someone that comes later and that is such a diplomatic answer you got that's really good mr carne so we were doing so well line go ahead i think i'm done so for a while bracket before you were there but bracket was so crowded that every single space was being used as a classroom that could possibly be used to the classroom including the science room so i i know that the pressure is sort of off now the number section this is down are you reusing that space are you reclaiming it well how are you using some of those spaces um so we had we went we did have one classroom that came that went we went down a classroom says we actually used that space and put back in a teacher space where teachers could be together and collaborate and work together and and that was seen with with a lot of excitement from our faculty our pto actually came in and decorated the entire space for them so they could felt like a homey space where they could feel like they could be together and have conversations it also gives us another meeting space so that we can have larger group meetings as well so um so we moved the people who are in that space into a slightly larger space um and and then allowed the teachers to use that as collaboration space great thank you anything else dr homo i just want to say it's been wonderful to have the two of you join the team doing great work i can't wait to see what's next thank you very much do you want to make an apple i sorry i don't have an orchard analogy for you i think i think i spent it it's done pick another fruit oranges aren't you nice aren't you nice there you go well thank you very much for coming okay we have worms next have a great night goodbye okay get some sleep so next we have the buffer zone report by dr homen all right um i have included in your materials all of the enrollment data for this week in this agenda item so the enrollments are not in my superintendents update as they usually are it's all included here including a snapshot of october 1 data from october 1 last year to october 1 this year in the typical format of the enrollment report so i just want to go over quickly a purpose an overview reminder of what the buffer zones exactly are i'm going to share a little bit about the buffer zone assignments for this year comparison with last year a grade level breakdown and a few trends go over a class size overview an open enrollment overview and a vague over uh or not a vague but like a brief overview of open enrollment trends i put the trends together so i don't have buffer zone trends and open enrollment trends separated in this presentation as i did last year so just as a reminder for the public and for the committee our buffer zones are addresses on or near certain elementary school district boundaries there are buffer zones between each one of our elementary schools and the goal of this report is to give you an overview of the implementation of the policy and its effectiveness in maintaining balanced class sizes and how the policy is working towards improving balanced class sizes and its effectiveness in doing so so here are our here's our breakdown of buffer zone assignments for this school year 23 24 the vast majority of families were able to get their first choice of buffer zone assignment some families received their second choice of buffer zone assignment for the most part those who received a second choice for those who registered later on and we already had some constraints with regards to class sizes by the time they were registering and so if they were registering in a place where we had a hot spot or a section that really just couldn't take another student then they would be placed in the buffer zone that was their second choice wherever there were siblings the family received the first choice to make sure that we were keeping siblings together as is articulated in the policy and we had a total of 120 buffer zones buffer zone registrations this school year that's down 10 from the previous school year you'll notice that bracket had compared to last year fewer buffer zone students that Stratton was right on par with where it's been and then there's the comparison for all of the other schools for you to review happy to answer questions about any of those there's a grade level breakdown for all of the different schools the number of students who were assigned to that school's buffer zone for each grade level of course a lot more of them at the kindergarten level than at any of the other levels but we had a lot of third graders enter in buffer zones incidentally this year i also want to give a class size overview in comparison so on this chart it's going to show the average class size october 1 of 2023 and the average class size on october 1 of 2022 last year when i provided the snapshot it was not based on october 1 data it was based on data taken at some point in october this is actually the october 1 calculation of class average class size in the snapshot so if you see class size highlighted in blue across 23 to 22 then that means there's been a decrease in the average class size from last year to this year of more than two students if it's yellow that indicates an increase in the average class size of more than two students from last year to this year and if it is not shaded in any way then it's in change of equal to or less than two students so one of the things that you'll notice is that in second grade we've had a decrease in class size for the most part in first grade we've had an increase in class size for the most part and in fourth grade we've had a few schools where the class size has gone up from last year to this year some of that has to do with sort of bumper groups of students moving into new grade levels for open enrollment there's an overview here if you recall last year we're sort of getting our trend data in line with open enrollment until last year i grouped 2021 from the time i had entered the district through 2023 into one report so this includes that column all the way on the right as well as the open enrollment placements for this past school year so actually no for this school year so these are open enrollments for 23-24 school year in the table so we've had a number at bracket who are open enrolled at bracket you'll see there there's five and then from 21 to 23 we had eight students who were open enrolled at bracket and then as we move through the years i'll be able to show a little bit more of sort of a trajectory if we have schools that have more open enrollments in other schools and we can take a look at why that might be for the most part open enrollment was so that families whose personal circumstances changed at some point during their students elementary experience could maintain connection with their child's school community if they had a few more years left some open enrollment approvals more recently have been due to extenuating circumstances for students whose current placement is no longer meeting their needs so we've had a few situations where we've approved an open enrollment for those reasons those are the last two bullets on this on this slide back up to the top of the slide there were fewer kindergarten enrollments in 2024 2023 24 for this school year and fewer buffer zone assignments overall we have been trying to swing last year if you recall we were trying to swing away from the stratton district because of class size constraints and the fact that we had brought the kindergarten section sections down to three and incidentally we ended up with a very small kindergarten class at stratton that year not necessarily because of the swing away just because of how enrollment shook out this year we're trying to swing away from i was trying to swing away from to the Thompson district as much as we could because we had some anticipated space constraints there were 31 buffer submissions in a Thompson buffer zone only 11 of those students were assigned to Thompson luckily only one actually only got their second choice because the other students who were in a Thompson buffer zone selected the other school so it that worked out in terms of people's choices but we were able to shift a lot of students out of Thompson through the buffer zone process we're maintaining lower class sizes like I said in grade two that in FY 23 and we may look to reduce the number of sections as those students move into grade three depending on how those projections are looking for next year we're maintaining higher class sizes in grades one and four than we did last year in grade one that's due in part to we had a lot of unanticipated new enrollments late in the summer families who either had chosen to do kindergarten somewhere else and then come back to Arlington in grade one that is a trend that happens every year but we had more than anticipated this year and then in grade four the class size increase is pretty significantly less notable than in grade one if you look at those numbers the grade one increases more significant so I'm happy to speak to any of these trends or try to answer any questions that you might have about them we do have projections that mr mason has been working on as we think about budgeting for next year and we'll start putting projections together for that very soon great thank you very much any questions mr flickman okay one of the reasons why this report is sort of important to us is that it's a it helps us to evaluate our policy and whether or not the buffer zones are working and the one bit of information I think it's probably too difficult to do at such an early level but it would I would certainly appreciate going forward is to be able to take a look at each buffer zone and see where people within that zone are asking to go because maybe some buffer zones aren't really buffering that much and maybe some places we need to expand the buffer zone by a little bit we you know we we put this together in 2012 and I think we did a pretty good job of it but it's certainly something worth reviewing on a regular basis to see if the boundaries make sense this was a lot easier to do when we had the GIS system that had the map that actually gave us a visual and that has been down which made this year's report a little bit more manual of a process unfortunately but I can say that one of the trends we definitely see because all as as I'm approving buffer zones will often look up an address just to see where the family falls if there is a major road in between where they live and the school that there is their second choice that's a major factor in determining what their first choice or their second choice is by and large also this is harder for me to say for last year because we didn't have the maps up but one of the things we could see in the maps previous to that is what the original districted school was families select for the original districted school more times than not because the kids in that area they've made friends in their neighborhood and those kids are going to the originally districted school so that's it still is useful to be able to say where we have a hot spot I'm sorry but your assignment's going to be at this other school it has it has made certain hot spots not become so desperately crowded that we have to add a section so that has it's definitely mitigating that however the Thompson buffer zones are not super useful only because of the pond where it is and because it's not a very big spread into the Bishop buffer zone so if we were to make any adjustments and one of the things I wouldn't mind looking with Mr. Mason at soon is a map to determine whether or not it would make sense to expand the Thompson buffer zone towards Bishop that's the Bishop buffer zone towards Stratton to give a little more room there it's going to depend on what the trends are looking like for Thompson over the next few years because they really are out of space when we drew the maps originally the state came in and they said you'd better do this because we're funding your Thompson school and we don't believe you're going to fill it obviously we've added six classrooms since and we're still crowded so that the the the paradigm that we were trying to address in 2012 is a totally different circumstance that we're experienced here here in 2023 and I remember the way we drew the tail down Pleasant Street on the east side of Pleasant Street putting that in a Thompson buffer was really because we needed to draw more kids in and I don't know geographically how much sense that made and I bet you're not getting any kids going to Thompson from that neighborhood anyway now I live in a Thompson Bishop zone north of Mass Ave we also did struggle with the boundary of Hardy going across Mass Ave which was historical and the problem with Park Avenue versus Brackett and Down was also another problem that we had when we drawing the original lines so I can see places where we struggled 11 years ago making these maps and maybe it's time for us to sit around and and figure them out again and obviously the GIS down at this point it's this isn't the time to do it but at some point we should be able to get the data together and start thinking about tweaking these things. Thank you. I think and I think if we do that we want to take a look at the language in the policy again just to make sure that it's not that it's being obviously it's not being implemented inconsistently but the policy because of when it was written prioritizes the maintenance of these 2011 original school zones right as the sort of like primary and then parental request is actually per the policy is sort of like a secondary piece of it which maybe doesn't make as much sense now given that it's been you know 12 years since 2011 so I think they could be looked at in we did we did do some work on this in budget right before covid the GIS gentleman came and we looked at houses and dots and there was like a lot there's a lot going on but I think it'd be really hard to do without GIS data so thank you. Do we get the GIS data from the town or did we have our own we got that there was a guy I know there was a guy platform that was coded with the information allowed you kind of look up any address and maintained all of the requests within it I believe we can still get some of the GIS data from the town but it's not linked up with our buffer zone data so we'd have to cross-reference it okay and I can I mean we can work with the IT team and see what would be possible so that we can take a look at some of those maps again. Okay I guess the one question that I have is these are what you've given us is helpful but I'm just wondering part of what the policy was asking is how much good do the buffer zones do what what would the class sizes be if we didn't have the buffer zones and this was in part to prove to the people who live in the buffer zones who are not happy about having buffer zones that we were actually making a difference and so that's something to be thinking about going forward I mean it looks from what you're saying in terms of the numbers it looks like yes it is making a difference it's just that is actually a question that honestly I'm not at this point part of the reason we headed in there was that when this when we did this redistricting people were not happy they were seriously not happy and so we needed to show them that we were getting something for their unhappiness I'm not sure people are as unhappy now so it's not as big a deal but if we're talking about changing the buffer zone we'd have to show the impact of the change well I think showing that buffer zones period help and then you know if we change the buffer zone it will help more I think it's important without the GIS platform it would be exceptionally difficult to do a comparison now against like what would it be had we never right right that's it may be that we can't do that until we have but if we redrew boundaries for the buffer zones or made them slightly larger it would be easy enough to say and here's the number of residences that would newly fall and the potential impact that could have on say Thompson enrollment that we could probably do with data we have available to us okay I think buffer zones helped us a lot when our enrollment was like skyrocketing and if we're going to see a contraction which I don't think is going to have the same kind of slope as our growth there's no reason to expect it's going to look like that but still in times of contraction buffer zones can also be helpful because they can their their cost savings right yeah so they they they're not um they still matter a lot they matter the least I think at times of like enrollment stability right but when you're on those movements they they do really um they can really help I mean and the other there's a lot of questions we could ask about buffer zones and so I think it would be you know a new subcommittee or something else to figure out what the questions are that we want to get to I mean one question I have is if everybody who applies in February is getting their first choice then you know do we really need it to create anxiety for those long-term residents right because that's the people who you know they've lived here their kids are playing on the playground of their neighborhood school but they may end up getting assigned to a different school because they happen to be in a buffer zone that's still the complaint that we hear right so if we're not using it that way if those kids are still going to their closest school that where they're playing on the playground then for me that's a question I'd like to interrogate do we really need to create that anxiety so I think that there's a variety of questions it's sort of a you know more than just is it effective that we can look at I would say that the the the moment in which I most appreciate the existence of the buffer zones is in July and August when we are in the situation where little fluctuations make a really big difference in terms of the resources we need to provide at any one school and we filled the sections in and we have a sense of what our staffing is it's pretty locked in and hiring additional staff at that point is going to be really hard and disruptive and expensive and so so were we to interrogate some of those questions making sure we have those mechanisms to balance when we have seven elementary schools and three to four to two sometimes sections at each grade level at each one that bit of flexibility that these give is very appreciated at that point in the enrollment process yeah I think the buffer zones have gotten into the culture the community and people have accepted them as sort of something that we do rather than it being a totally new thing in 2012 I spent more time and got more caffeine doing meetups with people who were concerned on buffer zones that year than I've probably done with coffee since then because it was like every weekend it's like two or three groups of parents who wanted to talk and talk about buffer zones and how we're going to do it and if the system is working so that it tends to be the people who are registering late and people who are new to town who are most at risk of being assigned across a line I think that that sort of takes the edge off of folks who are longtime residents and get in on the first week of registration and make sure that you know that they're in the queue for the school that they want so it sounds like it's working good great thank you very much okay so next we have the superintendent's evaluation this is something that we do every year as required by the state let me pull this up so what we have all done is filled out the form which is called end of cycle summative evaluation report we've each filled it out separately and everyone submitted their copies to me which I appreciate and then I as chair have completed a compilation this year I did a compilation which is just a the appending of everyone's comments I didn't try in and summarize or or condense what was written the other thing I've done is part of the evaluation is we have to check different like performance towards goals and so I've created a compilation of those this uh the summative evaluation is available now in novice it was not provided beforehand because we can't my understanding is we cannot because of open meeting law and so I'm going to go through what the results were just the number results I'm not going to read comments if anyone wanted to read their comments pull up what you wrote and I'll call on you but otherwise we'll just zip through the the number part so the first part of the evaluation talks about assess we're assessing the progress towards schools and oh and so I also want to say that this is to me not the evaluation system I would design if I was in charge I think it personally I think it does not create the best evaluation I think we're having conversations with Dr. Holman offline but this is what the state requires us to do we must do it in public session we can't talk about things beforehand together and so I'm you know this is all this pomp is because I'm required to do this by the state but I just want to make it clear that I personally would not design this system this way um so first we assess progress towards goals um professional practice school um which I'm going to find I'm going to find the sorry okay so the professional practice school um included aligning all priority areas of the strategic it was aligned with all priority areas of the strategic plan and included actions related included hiring a new deputy superintendent of teaching and learning who could drive the instructional practice over the district forward in alignment with the strategic plan continuing to develop the collaborative and capacity of the cabinet team towards participation in racial equity professional learning and participation in a deeper learning dozen continuing to develop relationships with families town colleagues and community members to share and reinforce the new APS mission and vision statements so for that uh members one member uh marked significant progress four marked met and two marked exceeded and as a group thing I chose met the student learning goal is um action it's aligned with priority one of the strategic plan ensuring equity and excellence actions related to this goal include continued instructional rounds and professional development for administrators expanding instructionally focused leadership teams at all schools focusing on student and staff sense of belonging for all schools development of strategic plan to model data analysis best practices to be used in development of school improvement plans and summer for professional learning for principles on developing excellent uh student school improvement plans so for this goal uh one member marked some progress one marked significant progress five marked met and I chose met as the overall um mark and then for the district improvement goals which I'm not going to read all of them because there's three of them and it will take a long time so this this summative evaluation is available for the public and novice so six members marked met and one marked exceeded and again the uh overall uh category was met step two is assessing performance on standards and standard one is instructional leadership and for that six members marked profession and one marked exemplary standard two is management and operations five marked proficient two marked exemplary standard three family and community engagement six members marked proficient one marked exemplary and standard four professional culture six members marked proficient one member marked exemplary and for all of those four standards I marked as a summative thing I mean as a compilation I marked as proficient so then the final most important part which is truly the only thing that we have to turn into the department of elementary and secondary education is the overall summative performance rating and for that seven marked the superintendent as proficient and therefore I marked our overall summative thing as proficient so I'm pleased to pronounce you proficient and there are many comments which I'm sure the members will be happy to go over they include both accommodations and a few suggestions for improvement over the next years but I think the superintendent did a really wonderful job in that she has created a website where she has different presentations which we've seen over the past years and how they're linked to the different goals and it made it really easy to go back and find things we didn't remember where we had discussed things is there anything else I should say about this no okay oh and I forgot does anyone want to read anything from there okay great and we are set can I just say thank you for the time you put into this as somebody who does more than a dozen of these I know how much time it takes and I really appreciate you taking the time to provide comments I have not read them yet but I will and I look forward to discussing if there are any questions or elaborations you have on them thank you okay thank you very much and so we have completed um I think does this need to be sent somewhere I think it needs to be sent to Dessing do we need to send I think we have to send the state submission yes it goes in the state submission it's electronic okay okay okay that's fine okay so moving on we have the superintendent update all right fantastic I have a short update just one slide for us today because we've been very focused on the move and so that's most of the update I we've moved into phase two Arlington High School and the central offices I want to say thank you to the Arlington High School Building Committee the Arlington School Committee all of you and the wider Arlington community for their patients as we have worked through the move this has been the most complex phase it was wonderful to have a number of elected officials and building committee members and school committee members on tours this past week to see the results of so much hard work in many many hours spent making sure that we could have such a wonderful facility so we've been very focused on that as we've experienced tonight we've of course got some kinks to work out there is a punch list that we're working through to make sure that all of our outlets are working all of our technology is working all of our lights are working all of our heat is working but despite you know all of the you know pains that come along with a big move it's gone very smoothly and a huge thanks to the moving companies to consigliar construction company our architects and Skanska our folks who have the owners project managers who have been very responsive to all of the concerns that have come up and there have been a number of things for them to respond to over the last couple weeks so we're very grateful we are seeking community members right now for our APS strategic plan working groups we put the call out earlier this week for folks to join these working groups we're looking for community members staff members from all roles across the system we have students who have signed up we have more than 40 applicants who have asked if they could be members of a working group and they've indicated their first and second choices on working groups so we're looking forward to inviting many of those applicants into the working groups starting in january the meetings for these if you're interested in them and are watching in our public audience the meetings for these will be on thursday evenings once a month from 3 30 to 5 30 this is a compensated opportunity thank you to the Arlington education foundation for making that possible and our students will be who participate in this will be compensated with community service hours as well so we're looking forward to expanding those and getting that work started i want to say congratulations to the cast and crew of the Arlington high school fall play which was put on not last weekend but the weekend before that their production of marion or the true tale of robin hood the teen edition was spectacular by all counts and went smashingly well we had because we have a new theater director who or manager who maintains the theater space itself and has been doing work directly with the students this was an entirely student produced play meaning that our students were the ones behind the scenes doing the set work doing the light work they've been taught how to run the theater by our theater manager so it's been great to have that resource and be teaching the students not just about being the actors on the stage but also about doing all the background work as well budget development is underway mr mason and i have begun work on this we have requests from department heads do tomorrow and we look forward to updating you in december on what those requests include and like i noted earlier your enrollments are included in the buffer zone report and i'm happy to take any questions anyone okay no questions uh next we have the consent agenda all items listed within excuse me listed within asterisks are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence warrant number two four zero nine three dated ten thirty one twenty three nine hundred and thirty five thousand seven hundred and seventy two dollars and twenty eight cents warrant number two four one one four dated eleven seven um twenty three two thousand two hundred fifty two thousand eight hundred and eighty five dollars and sixty six cents and school committee draft minutes of october twenty six twenty twenty three second okay all in favor all right it's good old son oh yeah we have to do oh okay so miss good old son you have to say yes you're muted or are you muted or are you're muted okay mr cardin hi mr morgan yes mr felon yes the next mr schlickman yes and i also vote yes so that's a unanimous vote okay next we have subcommittee and liaison reports budget uh budget met monday um we did it mostly remote because of the new space um uh not many new updates on the f y 24 budget um dr homin just updated the status of the f y 25 budget the schedule finally is in novice i think under this agenda item so everybody has the budget calendar now um we also did an executive session um to prepare for negotiations and we'll start having executive sessions here as we enter into negotiations with first unit d and community relations uh we met yesterday in a interesting hybrid format in the superintendent's new office we reviewed the school committee chat schedule and format for this year where administrators are going to be joining and we decided we would continue with that and we will do our eye will do a better job communicating that out with the direct communications and family engagement um to ensure that the community is aware that they are happening as administration will be present um and then we had a conversation about um a collaborative task force between um some members of various commissions the human rights commission the rainbow commission the disability commission um and members of the aps community to continue to support the district's mission around diversity equity inclusion and belonging and when i have more information about what that will look like and what we as a committee need to do to support that i will let you all know okay thank you uh curriculum instruction assessment accountability nothing to report okay uh facilities so we met on uh november 2nd um we received a report from mr mason uh that had uh an inventory of all buses in the district which we had never received before it was very helpful we received an ahs custodial staffing analysis that compared um our the maintenance the maintenance staff and the custodial staff we have in the high school to um a national standard called the association of physical plan administrators and so we're below the standard we received the aps recreation uh playground and recreation report so it was very helpful so we saw which playgrounds are owned by the yeah owned by the the district and which ones are owned by the town we also you know one of the things this whole thing got kicked off because we wanted a report of which schools can be air conditioned and mr mason uh said that we need engineers to kind of do that analysis and we'll get that later in the sometime after the new year um we talked about the accelerated repair program and whether that could be helpful in roof repairs that are for for buildings that are 25 years or older and then finally we had a conversation about a potential statement of interest for the addison middle school and i think the group's conclusion was that we will we requested the superintendent um look into using uh an educational consulting firm to figure out um that the educational challenges of that building what does what doesn't work educationally and why that all online we're gonna yeah we're gonna go we're gonna look into what vendors we can use to do yeah yeah so there's a process to get that done and that is pretty much all we talked about um mr cardin brought something to my attention that we have to talk about the the strategic plan contains facilities elements um now that it's funded they should start looking at yeah okay that's it okay policy number court high school building committee dr homing gave it the building's open um and we're very excited uh that the old building has been cleaned out pretty much and it's gonna start to be a process of starting to is it cleaned out or not yet it's being abated it's being abated so it's clean it's cleaned out of stuff so it's very exciting and if you walk around the building um remember that that hands the hands that's now up what else is up from the old building is there something else that's going to go up soon i would need mr mccarthy here but we didn't miss mccarthy but anyway there's some nice there's some nice memories of the old building that are in this new building but the fosco entrance has been taken down and is in storage and they're figuring out does it match what they thought it would look like or you know the sizing and thickness and stuff and we found a time mr mccarthy found a time capsule capsule from 1981 so when the 1981 edition was done uh there was a time capsule done and so that's going to be opened at some point in time i don't know we're going to coordinate that it was supposed to be open in 2001 well it's a little bit yeah so we who knows what's what's survived well it's you know that's right well yeah so anyway okay so the other thing uh to talk about for the um new high school is just our room and mr thielman and i have had discussions we do not remember specific discussions of the furniture or the layout of the working environment here and uh i think what i propose is i'd like to talk to dr homen uh i think we want to involve discussions with acmi but we need to be thinking about what's the most useful arrangement of this room where it can serve appropriately for school committee but can do as much other things as possible i mean we can tell just from the wires underneath that right now this you know this kind of layout is very hardwired i don't know if this is the only way of doing mics and stuff if it is then that dick takes some stuff in the meantime we're gonna work if you have suggestions for how you think this would be you know i've already tweaked it a bit but we have other ideas yeah that's we talked about that um so we'll get a curtain for now um so it's more desk like but um that i think we should live with this space for a little while before we make decisions but dr homen and i can can think about it yeah there's a there's a form that goes to everybody uh in the in the building that you can complete with comments or feedback right but this is this is this is ours we need bigger i mean we need bigger picture than just their form to think about really how this this space serves us best i mean by us i don't mean just us but but serves this school system the best so you're encouraged okay we can talk afterwards but you can sign attachments with that form too it doesn't have to use you can send a memo and other things okay i have a very not important question but are these bulletin boards like are we going to get the art back yes we'll put yes we will have art like the kids yeah okay we have more space we'll be decorating this room needs not a priority but i think we're in wall space so great okay um latest on reports announcements um it was good to see uh dr homen make a presentation at the ma s e ma s s joint conference it was an excellent presentation related to diversity efforts and i would invite her to discuss it a little more than than i will but the other thing that happened there is the ma sc had their delegate assembly and our resolution it was the first one to be considered resolution one full stable funding for metco and it was approved as presented on a vote of 92 to 3 with no abstentions good congratulations thank you um just to join on that i also was able to attend ma sc conference for the first time and because of that i got a little ribbon which i don't know if everyone can see but it says first time attendee so i'm special um but it was it is actually a really good use of your time and i didn't get to see dr homen because i got confused where the rooms were but i actually ended up in a uh talk about special education and the new forms and and the rollout things and so that was also really useful and interesting um and there were lots more things that we learned so uh next is so that was announcements feature agenda items i'm starting by saying we are now going to be adding executive session in terms of bargaining to every agenda from now until we say we stop um because i forgot to add it to this one so we do not have an executive session uh to discuss things but we will make sure that there are those added to our future agendas does anyone else have any future agenda items no okay um then at this point uh we i have can i have a motion to adjourn so move second all in favor roll call roll call you're right miss gogelsen okay yes great mr cardin yes mr morgan yes mr thelman yes miss exton yes mr chlickman yes and i also vote yes and that's an unanimous and we are adjourned so thank you everyone