 Hi. Welcome to this regular school committee meeting of January 25th, 2024. We don't have any public comment or AHS representatives, so we can start, and we also welcome Ms. Keyes, who is our AEO representative. So we can actually start writing with the vote to approve application for rebate for electric bus, which is being presented by Ms. Talia Fox from the town, and she's on Zoom, so we need to be able to see Zoom people. Okay, she knows she's being promoted, so she knows she's being promoted on Zoom. Okay, Ms. Fox, can you hear us? Your microphone is muted, at least from this side. Ms. Fox, can you unmute her? Nope, there she is. Okay, there we go. I can hear you. Can you hear us? You can't hear us, Talia? Hear us, Talia. Okay, got it. Okay. She can hear us now. Hello, can you hear us now? Okay, okay, so we are, since you missed, we are ready to vote to approve the application for the rebate for electric bus. If you could just tell us real quickly what it's about. I'm still disagreeing, basically acknowledging that the school committee has appointed the application, the number of buses, and the fuel type of buses, as well as the number of buses. And I'm planning to apply for funds to support one electric bus. We were facing Eagle Bus in the school suite. The school would own a bus. I'm not applying to apply for funding for charging infrastructure, because we closed our tuition directorhood, oh great, I can see you on it. Where are we so good? The directorhood will be an additional bus, so we'll see you at all the projects at Odyssey, but where do you exist over there? The maximum funding amount was $200,000 for the rebate. And we have $150,000 for our 25 capital budget to replace the diesel bus. This amount would not be sufficient for an electric vehicle, which is why we're seeking additional funds. Given the towns and schools that you've met there, it's crucial that I think that we're doing different things. So when are we going to use the fossil fuels and then my school should be working with that so we can get those opportunities? So it does feel important to mention that the likelihood of us securing this rebate is quite small. We are not a prioritized community because we don't meet certain environmental justice criteria that the federal government is using to allocate funds. And I'll do my best to seek additional funding sources so that we aren't forced to purchase a diesel bus in the new fiscal year. So with all that said, I just ask for your blessing for this application. I'm happy to answer any quick questions, but I don't think there's a ton of time right now and I'm happy to come back to the committee and have a lengthier discussion about some of the climate initiatives that we have going on and I do plan to come back in the coming weeks. So thanks. Great. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions? Okay. Can someone make a motion? So moved. Second. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Yes. Okay. That's great. So we'll sign it and I think Liz Diggins will have it after this. So thank you very much. Thank you. Have a great night. Oh, now you sound great. Okay. So next we have the Hardy Improvement Plan. You want to say anything first? That's all right. While they get set up, I just want to say a few quick words. First of all, a big thank you to Dr. Connolly, who's a new principal in the Arlington Public Schools and stepped in as interim principal at Hardy during a late transition of their principal last year. I want to thank Dr. Connolly for all the work you've done to support the Hardy community this year, especially. Notable is the work that our special educators in the SLCC program have done with some new staff and the support that the community has really gotten from your leadership. Dr. Connolly told us recently she won't be applying to the permanent position and while we're sad to say goodbye, we're very grateful for her leadership and also for the leadership of Ms. Tazsoulis, who has been the assistant principal there for quite a while. I'm excited for them to share some of the great work they have going on at Hardy this year and I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Connolly. Great, thanks very much. Dr. Holm, first of all, Dr. Holm, I thank you as well for your support and everyone here at the table support in my role here. It's been an incredible opportunity in my professional journey. I've learned a tremendous amount. It's been really nice being back into schools with students, so I've really enjoyed the opportunity. I'd also like to take the time to thank the educators at the Hardy School, who it's just been tremendous to work with them. Consummate professionals and really have students at the center and as Dr. Holm spoke, the SLC programs at the school have really done well. So I want to thank Allison for her support in our continued efforts to improve those programs and all opportunities for all students. So to everyone at the Hardy School and families, but most in particular the students who have just really warmed my heart tremendously to be, as I said, back in schools and every day being with students. So it's been a tremendous opportunity. So tonight I just want to talk about the Hardy numbers, our priorities, areas, and then answer any questions that you may have for us. So the Hardy School, our initial vision from 1925 was hand-heart-mind for the common good and the Hardy community sort of took that on as an initiative last year and is really solidified at this year, working with the students and the families and came up with Safe Kind and Responsible, which is really reflective of the work that we do in our goals, in our positive behavior programs. So those are really the goals that we work with the students on. Last year we had 383 students and 49 staff. We're up a couple of students and a couple of staff this year. And the staff increases due to some of our special education needs. The race and ethnicity of Hardy School has remained relatively steady. We have seen a drop in our African-American Black population. This is just two years ago, it was 3.2, in part that is due to Boston resident students working closely with the MECO director to see if we can't get those numbers up, as we'll have just one student that resides in Boston at the Hardy School next year. And we want to certainly at least supply some sort of a cohort for them. The strategic goals were in your packets and they're here. Some will be familiar. I also want to thank my principal colleagues at this time, as I'm doing this, as they've been an incredible team to me, as I've done this work, not this work here, but just being here in Arlington. It's a really great group of administrators that I've had the privilege of collaborating with. So now we're going to talk about MCAS and all that what's in your report, but not on the slides or the MCAS numbers for mathematics. I just want to talk about those as an aggregate. The data indicate that the Hardy School has met and in some areas exceeded the state determination goals in both achievement and growth. While this is something we take pride in, our instructional leadership team and I hold responsibility to further disaggregate this data, identify students performing below expectations, notably students that are in a high need category. My team and I are responsible for exploring those factors that have contributed to and continue to contribute to considerably lower achievement score for these children compared to the classmates, and focus our efforts on closing those gaps through differentiated instructions, interventions, and responsive teaching processing. While 36 percent of our test takers did not meet grade level expectations, which is certainly a concerning number, 74 percent did. We must balance our concern for meeting the needs of our high need students and mathematics while ensuring that implement rigorous and relevant content. I'm going to move to ELA, which is on these slides. And again, as an aggregate data, the Hardy School has met and in some areas have exceeded state determination goals both in achievement and in growth. While this is a positive reflection on the dedicated staff and students of our community, it is my instructional responsibility and that of our instructional leadership team to further disaggregate this data. That said, the data indicate that our high need students earned two of the possible achievement points and six of the possible growth points. And so therefore, it's a continued area of worry and concern and focus for us. I think another thing that the ILT this year has really been able to do, along with some of the changes that we've made with our weekly meetings, with our ACE meetings, is that we've, every meeting, it's an expectation of the team to bring the student data to the meetings and we're looking at that student data and then making recommendations for interventions. We're following the interventions on a weekly basis. Certainly we have six to eight week cycles, but on a weekly basis we're talking about what those might look like and how we can make sure that we're doing targeted research-based interventions for all of our students. Part of that too is also we're looking to shift our ownership of learning from teacher to the student, which is one of the EL initiatives. And some of these areas that we've really looked at across our whole school is learning targets as EL refers to them. We would know the more familiar as learning objectives and total participation techniques. It's sort of a new language that goes along with EL. And those are things that will also be familiar to you. Those are things like turn and talk, a thumb meter, true-falls, hold-ups, using white boards to see, check for understanding, but you're doing it with the whole class at the same time so that then you can get immediate feedback to alter your instruction that's happening. The existing literacy gaps between the high needs and non-high needs students continue to be addressed, as I said, through consistent implementation in part by the EL curriculum and by providing targeted, evaluative and non-evaluative instructional feedback for our teachers, and as well as, as I said, the targeted interventions and the support of our curriculum coaches. So our next data we're looking at up here is our data on our SEL. We believe that improving belonging for all students is defined and understood as a person supported by as adults, respected by the students and having a general feeling of belonging. So we, along with the district, have taken this initiative on full force, one of the significant things that we did was in the beginning of the year, right in the first couple of days of school, Peggy and I put together a whole document and presentation and we had teachers and custodians and anyone that any of the educators in our building sign up to be a partner with a student. Some people, not many, but some people chose as many as three and the job of that person was to make a further connection with that student, whether they're on their way to lunch, they stop in the cafeteria, say hello to them, whether they say in the hall, they make a concerted effort to reach out to that student, which I think that has made a big deal. People took this and were very excited about the opportunity, you know, teachers that had particular students couldn't wait into it to make those connections and every student in the school has somebody or even two people that are connected to them. And what we'll do is in a couple of months we will do an event in which those folks will be at the work with those folks outside of the content areas. In addition, we brought back all school meetings, so we have a monthly all school meetings in which the fifth grade leaders of our school sort of run the meeting, they read a book that has to do with belonging. We do a birthday pencil handout and a big yell for happy birthday. The Hardy Husky sometimes makes a surprise visit and we do a whisper Hardy Chair that has become beloved and they can't wait to do the whisper, give me an H, Hardy Chair. But I think that it's really a credit to the faculty that we went up 12 percentage points in our most recent panorama data on the sense of belonging for our students and it's just a concerted effort by the all the employees of the Hardy School that have made this possible. Strategic family engagement goal, improve the belonging for all families. I think one of the things that I certainly recognized in my career over the last more days as we went to the collective COVID is that we were slow to get folks back in, both for folks wanting to volunteer and just even feeling some trepidation around allowing folks to come in. So I think that we started this before I came but this year we've brought back a number of community events. We've done the harvest fest, we've had a trunk retreat, we've had picnics, we've had a craft day, we were going to have a movie night but it conflicts with basketball so we're going to put that off a little bit. But we there's been a number of things that we've worked in collaboration with the PTO who've also been amazingly supportive of our teachers in the community to bring back that whole idea of the elementary school is such a part of the ethos of the neighborhoods and having neighborhoods schools lends itself to that. And one of the things that we've seen is a much more significant outpouring even in the last short order of folks wanting to come in and volunteer and be in the library and be readers and even come and say we'll make copies for you. So it's been really great and I think that the community has now beginning to feel we have big event on Tuesday morning for our kindergartners. They're making they're doing a they're all doing presentations and they're doing a gallery walk with families so if you're not doing anything at nine o'clock on Tuesday morning you can come on by and see some of the EL work actually in progress and part of that is them presenting their work and they're quite articulate and it's and it's pretty wonderful. In addition we're in the process of getting again gathering nominations for a school council. We've not had a school council in a little bit. The PTO is helping me with this. We do have a number of folks that are interested and we're hoping to hold nominations probably right after February break just we're just gonna we're in the process of working on it. One of the things that I've done as well as I've increased my meeting time with the PTO so aside from just the monthly meeting I'm holding two additional meetings in the mornings right when school starts because I just felt like it was important to get their voices. They're so generous with their time and their resources that I felt like it was really important for me as I onboarded certainly but I would I would also suggest that it's been beneficial to the school to have those more frequent meetings. Then our areas of focus so attendance belonging transitions attendance continues to be an area of concern for the hearty school. I think that as I you know we're working with the school nurse working with we had eight students leave yesterday with fevers. Nobody tested positive for COVID and so it's just one of those things but I also think that at the elementary level I think that there's a little bit more of a sense that it's okay if someone leaves will it's okay if we take vacation a couple of days early it's okay if we if my student it's going to be okay they're in elementary school and so really I feel like it's an opportunity to educate families that you know when you miss 18 days it's a you know it's a tenth of your school year and it is really critical. I completely understand that it's you need the need to maybe go away a day earlier or you know you have family things that come up but really it's really important to be in school particularly you know just given our most recent history so we have letters going out we have communications going out from teachers we have meetings with families and so again I think it's just that opportunity for us to educate folks on how critical it is for to get their kids even even their littlest kids in and so with that again I just much appreciation for this last many months I still have five months so and I'm looking forward to it it's it's been great so just if you have any questions and Peggy and I are happy to answer anything you might have I just want to add a look Dr. Connolly didn't highlight this because it's new data and Mr. Coleman's going to talk a little bit more about our panorama results but on the spring panorama survey Hardy saw a 12-point jump in belonging and I would credit that directly to some of the initiatives that they've had going on and a 15-point jump in questions like what kind of support do you get from adults in your school which can look directly at some of those initiatives she's describing around connecting adults to students so that they have a trusted adult in the school so kudos to the work that you've done this year it's already showing some pretty strong results great anyone have any questions first Dr. Connolly thank you for sharing your talent and your experience and caring with us for a year in this interim assignment the community I'm sure appreciates that and I wish you well as you wander off where wherever you want to be and I hope for a lot of success thank you for the thoughtful presentation I'm curious that taking a look at the growth numbers grade four to grade five grade five is blowing the doors off the growth numbers great four isn't particularly over in math so do you have any sense of why so you know elementary schools are greatly impacted by cohorts and I think that this particular grade was also great more greatly impacted by COVID and so I think that we've had this when you look when we look at scores not just MCAS scores but other other points of data including our Divils reading scores over time this group has necessitated and secured significant amounts of intervention just due to their need and so that continues where it's certainly a focus of us right now one of the things that we're looking at is you know even as we prepare for MCAS and I mean that loosely but is helping students to become more familiar with the devices that they'll be assessed on right so mathematics is on a computer so we're having students start to work on the computer to do their mathematics and adapting the curriculum to be able to do that a little bit and working with our math coach so it's somehow sometimes cohorts and particularly in smaller elementary schools they have the you know personality of their own like each school in needs of their own and this has been a focus for this school for since these folks were in COVID and then beyond so it's I can't say that it's all of that I think I'd say that I can't point to COVID and that's the reason why because we have other groups as you said the fifth grade scores and the third grade scores wouldn't don't reflect that but we are certainly aware and are focusing much of our attention on that so I all I need to know thank you sure any more questions okay thank you very much we appreciate your presentation okay so next we have the bishop's school improvement plan all right while miss liner and miss spinny come up and figure out how to pull your slides up yeah let me know if you get stuck um miss liner and miss spinny have been the uh team at bishop for this school year and a good and a good portion of last school year if you'll recall miss liner stepped in his interim principal last school year about mid-year miss spinny came back to join us after being the ap at stratton for a little while um and I just want to point out some great work that's been done at bishop improving meeting structures conducting meaningful professional development and very purposefully planned professional development as part of their building meetings this school year miss liner was integral in the rollout of a pbis process at one choose the assistant principal there and I know that that's ongoing into the school year it's always a wonderful community to visit with a very vibrant and involved um parent community and I look forward to hearing what they have to share with us tonight what they've been up to thank you so much appreciate it and thank you all for um having us here tonight we appreciate being here um and we're looking forward to discussing the accomplishments and school priorities um I feel very fortunate to be the principal of the bishop's school and would like to introduce a few people who have joined me here tonight this is and spinning our assistant principal who you'll hear from in a moment um I also have maria motto here she is our literacy and our math coach and in the back Mary Perry who is our pto president um and is also one of our community members um on our pbis team so thank you for having us all here tonight so tonight we'll be highlighting some of bishop's data from last year um we will also be stating our school improvement goals discussing some of our important priorities for this year and looking ahead to bishop's future for the next few years um to start with bishop is a wonderful school with just under 400 students and over 60 staff members in a proud proud mechco school I started at bishop school as um Dr. Holman said um as the first assistant principal five years ago and last year I became the interim principal in November as far as initiating any new priorities last year that really wasn't my role as interim principal um my goals were to ensure that students and staff felt a sense of security um and that the previous principal's priorities were supported as I said many times I wanted to make sure that the ship kept sailing in the right direction and which sets us supportive and strong staff and caring community of families we did just that so to look at some of the data um this slide shows our student enrollment demographics while most of our demographic data percentages are just slightly smaller than the districts the bishop community has representation from many different countries with 15 percent of our students with their language uh first language not english um our ml population is nearly twice that of the districts last year we gained an additional ml teacher which has been pivotal in really supporting um our growing ml population over the summer we asked our families which you can see the picture in the middle we asked our families to tell us their countries of origin um and we made a display of the flags of all the countries that represent the many families that responded we have 67 flags displayed currently and we will continue to ask families each year to update our display as needed so the next slide goes into our mcast data um I'm very proud of the bishops um data I will say our mcast scores last year showed great growth and achievement our accountability ability rating was 96 percent which indicates that 91 percent of our students met or exceeded the standard in grades three to five um I attribute this excellent score to the high quality instruction about standing educators um each you know who are delivering instruction each day our coaching model these two um that support uh instructional practices in the classroom and um help to give teachers uh tools that they can use with children in the classroom we have quality paraprofessionals who support individual students every single day in the classrooms and a rigorous rti process that helps to find out and support the individual needs of students who may be struggling um and lastly and probably most importantly we have supportive families that work very closely with the schools so we're looking forward to see how our new el a curriculum will affect our el a scores particularly for our high needs population with the um you know upcoming rollout so um this class this slide it was interesting to be able to look at some cohort data um so this takes a closer look at our math mcast data and looks how fifth graders from last year did over the past three years so the scores um the scores themselves are grouped by grade level so by looking at the 2021 third grade data 2022 fourth grade data and then the 2023 fifth grade data you can look at the cohort of students to absorb how the gap between non-high needs and high needs students changed over three years so i'm very pleased to share with a very focused effort um that the gap decreased from 15 to 6 to 2 percent over the three years at bishops with that particular group of students um because of the pandemic we don't have other cohort data to look at but we will sort of continue to look at these type of trends um with particular groups of students in the coming years so now miss pinney is going to speak um about our school improvement goals the first goal will address the achievement gap and literacy between high needs and non-high needs students we're really excited but excited about implementing the new curriculum we found that the former curriculum left a little to be desired when it came to our students with high needs uh el is more inclusive and allows for more discussion among students which increases their deeper understanding uh not only are we implementing foundations and hegerty in the classroom but our tier one uh tier two and tier three instructors are giving students a double dose when appropriate which not only furthers their understanding but makes them feel more comfortable uh to participate in the classroom our next goal this next goal we will be focusing on increasing tier one instruction and student engagement by implementing el high level leverage instructional practices across the curriculum we have focused on this within our instructional leadership team our members are taking risks in implementing new protocols they are welcoming their peers to come in and observe lessons in their classroom which you know allows for opening themselves up to feedback and i have to say i've really been impressed with the bishop school we have new or newer teachers to bishop um that are excited about jumping in to something new and they're taking some risks but we also have many of our seasoned teachers diving into new protocols and promoting academic discourse not only in el a but in all the curricula areas which has been really impressive to see our third goal is focusing on culture and climate and we will be working to improve belonging for all students again through our instructional leadership team we are working with the director of the d e i b j margaret creedal thomas to learn how to appropriately and effectively conduct empathy interviews and hopes to gather more information about how to improve belonging for all students uh this last goal is all about improving belonging for all families we are taking more steps to reach out to families and about their child's academic progress and trying to establish stronger communication channels and this is why i will be talking more about this shortly all right um i'm sure those goals looked very familiar to you now that we've had many elementary schools come through we as mid stated we we've worked together on those and it was a very great process um so as far as academic and instructional priorities um as you've likely heard from my colleagues in the other elementary schools one of our priorities is continue to look closely at our early literacy data including dibble screener to identify students who need more intensive tier one and tier two supports we use time in our weekly meetings to discuss the most effective interventions leaning on our reading department and instructional literacy coach and then our classroom teachers and reading teachers do an outstanding job in the large group instruction and giving students exactly what they need to support their areas of growth um our displayed dibble dibble's data demonstrates the effectiveness of our literacy programming and decreasing the number of students who are below and well below the standard after kindergarten another priority connected to this um uh another can uh priority connected to this goal is to increase our protocols and academic discourse strategies um as teachers learn more tools they are getting more comfortable utilizing these high highly engaging practices and our c seeing important results in the student work for example last year at a summative meeting that i had with a teacher she mentioned that her students written essays were better than in previous years and asked her why she thought there was a change and she attributed um the growth uh the growth in her students to her growing use of discourse particularly around pre-writing and particularly with her high need students so when having more time to discuss their ideas and importantly hear other classmates ideas they were all better able to express their thoughts in writing so my hope is that when we fully implement the el curriculum um which is rich in discourse we will continue to see this level of improvement in written expression um so as far as a culture and climate priorities um in an effort to increase student belonging um particularly for those students in our focal groups coupled with the fact that there have been leadership changes over the past year um miss binney and i worked with margaret creedal thomas um and mogley olander the scl director to create a pd series around building trust building belonging and making connections with our work with students and families this three session pd is just the beginning of what i hope to be a multi-year uh series this is not the kind of work that's ever done so we will continue to collaboratively plan to build on our learning each year additionally as miss binney mentioned earlier i our ilt is getting empathy interview training to be able to skillfully conduct empathy interviews with selected students and families our hope is to analyze the data in a longitudinal study where we are asking the same students and families questions over a number of years um and we'll use this data in addition to other qualitative data like the panorama survey to better understand their experiences and make a port important adjustments to our programming as needed and lastly in this priority area um as dr homa mentioned we will continue our thriving pbis pbis system we have um clear school-wide behavioral expectations that teachers reinforce in their classroom and a very thriving acknowledgement system where students earn blue bishop bear tickets um for demonstrating one of our three core values respect responsibility or regard for others we have clear signage through the school and have different all school activity activities and challenges like earning a certain number of tickets in a category like regard in order to earn uh all school pajama day or having a teacher march madness bracket to acknowledge the participation of our excellent staff one piece of panorama data that's kind of small on that slide um in the area of school climate was how positive or negative is the energy in your school and we had an increase in that last year and i believe one of the reasons we made gains in the area is because we had a full-year experience of pbis last year for the first time so the last priority is family engagement and uh bishop bishop has rich traditions and family events that are a huge part of what what makes bishop a special school and i've hugely appreciated the collaboration and supportive spirit of our pto in the past and even more recently as i transitioned to be principal um increasing participation in the many events like the bishop play bear fair science night in the cultural fest is one of the important tasks that we have ahead we're also looking to add more family engagement activities like the principal's meet and greets that miss binnie and i have started this year and a math event for families that's currently being planned additionally since the pandemic there really has not been a concerted effort to address chronic absenteeism so this year miss binnie and i in collaboration with classroom teachers are in greater communication with families around excessive absences and are committed to raising awareness and working with families to move forward with this work i will also collaborate with my principal and assistant principal colleagues to learn more about effective mechanisms that they've used to increase attendance so the last slide is around just bishops future so um there are few things i wanted to highlight from this but uh some of the areas we plan to build upon in the next few years um we're looking to increase our social work in the building to be more in line with the other elementary schools so that we can provide tier one and tier two supports for children um we want to continue our equity pd work with our staff um we need to focus greatly on the ways we can support staff and the el implementation through ace meetings and other pd time um looking to add new technology like audio systems in the classroom to bring up our technology to be in par with newer schools newer than bishop um or new more newly renovated than bishop and also to have more interdisciplinary and innovative experiences for children by increasing our gardening program so i appreciate your attention and um listening to our presentation and if you have any questions we're happy to talk about bishop more great thank you very much does anyone have any questions mr carden uh thanks and uh sort of relates to the to hearty as well thank you for for ramping up community engagement and involvement of families how are how are people reacting to that are you getting good attendance at these events yes um some of the events are brand new and so it's hard to gauge whether or not so as i i said um miss binnie and i have had principal meet and greets we never had that before when i was an assistant principal so it's hard to gauge but i will say they've been consistently attended by different families so it's not that the same people are coming every time so that's been positive and some of the new events that we have are upcoming so i'll be able to report more on that later great thank you yeah yeah i mean you've got the same fourth fifth grade thing working too i'm wondering if there's something systemic about our curriculum or something going on around the district uh or is this just sort of a quirk that the two the two of you guys are encountering the same little growth number i i'm going to chime in on his question because i was going to ask the same thing and actually i wonder if it's because of covet because of the age that's what i was going to address so the students who so we're talking about the students who were in fourth grade last year right so our current fifth graders were in first second grade some of the real foundational times particularly for literacy and i think um we can all agree that covet was unprecedented we didn't always have all the you know proper supports in place um in that sort of remote and hybrid setting so i would attribute a lot of that i think my colleague had had mentioned that as well um yeah i don't i i any any one of my team can chime in on any any other thoughts around a discrepancy i mean it's just sort of interesting in but with with the knowledge that every kid who was a fifth grader last year was in the same cohort and ran through the same thing so yeah you know i and i want to underline that i'm not concerned uh because you're you're hitting a 96 percentile score which means you're you're knocking the score the scores out of the park and to have high achieving high growth kids like bishop obviously does is a wonderful thing uh that said you come in here doing wonderful things i want to extract that and spread around the district right so the other thing that i just thought of um prior to you speaking was that that uh that our current fifth grade group is a large class so our school has three sections per grade that grade has four and i believe that that large trend is across the district in our fifth grade good luck to give us when they all come next year um and so i do think there's also there's a little bit of numbers in that too that we have more in that cohort and at the end of your report you were talking about all these needs for professional development you're working very hard on professional development and i admire you and your staff are wanting to go in that direction do you have enough time to you know have enough ability i don't want to see you guys get buried in all the enthusiasm and just sort of burn out either i think that there's always the balance right so there's a lot of things that need to get done particularly with a new curriculum being rolled out as well to the full school next year so it's going to be about balancing all those priorities and keeping in really great communication with our coaches and our teachers to make sure that what we're doing is matching what they're needing and making adjustments as needed uh but some of the equity work is just work that we have to continue to do so we have to prioritize in some way you're speaking well for your school in the district thanks for your presentation thank you mr. thanks very much for both presentations both schools talked about attendance and uh i'm just wondering when you uh talk to individual students and their families about attendance issues without getting into a specific case what are you kind of what are you hearing from them it's it there's so many different reasons for excessive absences there's medical issues there's um traveling as i said we have a number of families who are international and you know if you travel to india you're not going for a long weekend right you're going to be gone for a few weeks and so between you know every situation is a that unique and i think that part of our work this year is to have those conversations and start gaining that understanding of okay what's going on with all our families and then we can start really catering the needs it truly at elementary level it's it's it's a fan absenteeism is a family thing right kids kids get driven to school or they walk to school with their families so we don't really speak with kids about absenteeism as much as with parents okay thank you any more questions okay i'm going to circle back to the current fifth graders and this isn't so much for you but rather more for the district that just the little bits of data that we've been seeing just tonight suggest that those kids are still behind or at least certainly the high needs kids in that cohort are behind and i'm just hoping that as we go as they all go to gibbs that we're ready for them and we need to continue closing those gaps because that's concerning no matter what the source is you know we we have to be working towards um getting them up to speed the same speed that everyone else is going so thank you very much i appreciate your thank you thank you so next we have the ahs program of study uh dr jenger want me to change mr mccarthy yeah can you hit escape the program of studies is on this computer if you wanted to pull it up do you want me to open it um you can leave it right there leave it yeah is that it yeah that's it but leave it that way that's it if you need to scroll through it you can you don't need to it's fine okay thank you thank you all thank you how's everyone doing tonight good well it's that time of year again program of studies time um we saw i saw dr tinger here earlier is he gone now i can hear you so as you can see we have the program of studies here i believe it was sent out to everyone um quick structural piece just before we get into any of the updates for this next year um the opening page if you notice at the bottom of the opening page says updates specific to 2024 and 2025 um that lists all of our new courses course changes and so that is helpful as a link i believe that was all shared with everyone and that's what i'm going to be working from right now also the table of contents this is for anyone who is listening the everything here is bookmarked and linked so that's really going to be your homepage when you're trying to explore different departments and different course materials and policies so i'm going to run through the updates and new courses uh if there are questions i'm obviously open to them uh policy and general information updates so the first one you'll see there is a department name change so originally uh our english learner education department uh will be changing their name to the multi language learner education and that is obviously to foster the fact that many of our students are learning multiple languages or have already mastered several languages uh to match that change we will be taking several of the courses which are currently listed as we do one we do two and we'll be changing their numbers and their titles that's included in the chart below and i'll point that out as we get there grade scale update so the grade scale this is not a change to the way we're to the title of the grades but the original wording in our grade scale was along lines of exceeds standard proficient work fair work poor work and failure talking as a team including teachers uh we've decided that exceed standard meet standard partially meet standard minimally meet standard and does not meet standard uh is more in line with our curriculum and how we are promoting our students just to be clear that language was in the rest of the description the next section what we are removing is the design thinking certificate and global competency certificate you might remember we introduced these several years back as a way to bring in different pieces to our curriculum in our school for our students to access most of the materials that are in these certificates have been rolled into the courses at this stage so design thinking certificate with the expansion of the makerspace metalworking design and fabrication most of what they asked for in that are folded into the courses themselves now same with global competency certificate as we've worked those materials our original goal was to offer that and work those materials into the curriculum and we've now done that the last one is one that we're very excited about and this is a change to a course but latin five um as you may remember there are three levels there's ap latin latin five honors and latin five curriculum a uh we are now going to be partnering with umass boston and much the same way we've done with suricuse in the past and we still have those programs with suricuse as well we call those super we'll be partnering with umass boston and students that complete latin five uh and pay the nominal fee will actually have a umass boston transcript that states that they finished latin five uh so we'll get credit through allington high school and they will get credit through umass boston we're very excited about that change and that connection with umass any questions on the policy or general information any questions i don't see any do you want to tackle new courses you're doing great i'll keep rolling um honestly i just want to say don't really pull this all together so i'm really perfectly happy to be able to run through all of it so um new courses so the new courses that we have most of them are just advancing the curriculum we've already offered uh filmmaking architecture animation you'll remember last year we revamped the visual arts department to take advantage of the new space this is just taking those students that have finished part one and part two and opening up part three so they can continue their work um design engineering and fabrication we're really looking forward to this course where we are going to be doing uh virtual designs and a change to this will be actually bringing them to the makerspace and designing and building the items whether that's in wood metal plastic with the 3d printers um and we're hoping that we'll continue to grow this is starts at a level one it does offer a level two right now and our hope is that in much the same way we do with the other art departments classes they'll continue to grow as far as the other courses most of them actually previously existed we are just finding new ways to uh as we did them this year you'll notice courses like play building and directing and advanced scene study and improvisation are all courses we offered this year as we taught through them we decided that there are ways to meld these courses together they actually fit well in terms of the curriculum and so our goal there is to bring these courses together and really you know play directing uh play building and directing are two courses that meld well and really build on the same skill set much the same way with improvisation and scene study there are several courses that are going to be put on the uh reactivated most of those focus around science and our computer science department and again anything we do rotate through these courses on a yearly basis so as we reactivate astronomy we'll be deactivating weather and climate um we'll be reactivating artificial intelligence which if any of you have walked through the building you've seen the drone flying around we have a student who is building an ai for a drone it's a lot of fun a little scary at times um and so though that that rotation will continue on there are several courses we're retiring most of those you'll see are actually just being enveloped by other courses so we're not cutting back on anything we're just finding new ways to have students access that material and that is that miss anything very short process our goal uh next steps is obviously hear any questions go through the process uh our goal is to open up the course selection in february and then we'll have an idea of which courses will run and which courses will not run in march and obviously that influences our staffing as well and just because I feel need to justify sitting here I mean the philosophy by which we sort of create these new courses right there's new opportunities created by the new building there's new areas of interest expressed by students and then sometimes we're looking to sort of serve or bring in populations of students and then sometimes for taking courses and sort of reconfiguring them to more accurately reflect what it is they're doing so for example bringing in new students which wasn't mentioned for example is the pet band drum one right because we had a lot of students who are historically um musicians right and they come up through the system but there are kids who would like to learn to play a drum or might play other things and so starting to create that opportunity both to bring music into the community and bring another group of students into performing arts we just do one example of that's it any questions comments this is all very thoughtful and you know having sat through this for a bunch of years that I can see the logical progression what you're doing it makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you're taking advantage of building the one thing I want to just sort of ask for a little more depth is the grade scale updates because I think this is magnificent I really really admire you and like the change in wording in conjunction with that can you describe how teachers are rethinking their grading and how they're describing grading requirements to students because it would see there it seems there's a mind-shifting going on here so we have been working for a while right if you go actually to the program studies and look at the whole description of the grades um the rest of the language right has been focusing on trying to have grades be more around three sort of core areas of standards content knowledge complex reasoning skills and work habits and by work habits we need scholarly behaviors there's a lot of ways people talk about that um and so there's a lot of conversation about trying to make sure that your grades are aligning with those things one of the things that we took out a long time ago was a lot of qualitative things um but to keep um sort of consistent with how people used to be thinking about it there was still this idea of good fair and poor right and the more people have been talking about that the more that never comes up it's not really the way we're characterizing it it's not fair work it's students have a method standard right which is the same kind of thinking when you say it was in the act when a student hasn't met the standard it's not poor work it's just not yet right and that's really the way we want things people to be thinking about it and that's the conversation we're always having so to go one step further in depth I know that when when I taught high school which was sometime in the last century um there was always this tendency of giving a bunch of grades averaging it up and using that to do the sort for the grade so that an 82 would be a b-minus maybe depending on the school so that if you're talking about a standard that uh if a child in or student doesn't encounter the standard when an assessment is made earlier in the year but then later on demonstrates meeting that standard do we go back and adjust how we're grading the student or does a earlier non-standard grade sort of holding the mix somehow you understand what I'm saying no I do understand I mean so what you were talking about I mean sort of philosophically is sort of full of standards based approach it's sort of spiraling forward and we'll come back there are various different ways to do that teacher practices right now are not idiosyncratic to the teachers but they vary in terms of grading grade-alike classes right so I have a research biology is more aligned there are some folks who are doing very full-fledged versions of a standard base there are others who are doing more of what you call standard reference so you are making sure that you're referencing that the assignments are assessing those standards that you're not simply saying I gave you a hundred pieces of equivalent work and then you did 80 of them you gotta be minus right instead it's like if you're supposed to know how to speak I've given you an opportunity to demonstrate that you know how to do speeches if you're supposed to write this sort of an essay I've given you an opportunity to demonstrate that you're doing it at this level and an opportunity to make things up so you'll see in a lot of classes in a lot of math classes there's a pretty standard test retakes and corrections to make sure because the other thing that used to happen in math the way you were talking before was I take the test I don't get the grade and I'm done I never learned that thing I move on to the next thing and I don't get it and the thing is that we want to make sure the students learn it so they take the test if they don't master the content there's a retake there's an opportunity to make sure that the students master the content so I think that's a lot of what you're talking about. Exactly it's exactly what I'm thinking about is that if you do end up playing nicely with parallel transversals say where you didn't get it when the first time around but you become an absolute master of it by the time you're done with the geometry course that will be reflected in in your in your grade and your assessment yes okay. Other questions comments I'd like to hear more about the pep band I know you mentioned it briefly but it was not adequate for me I would like to hear more. I mean the idea I'm fine with hearing the idea that's also fine. If we get students who are interested, this by the way has been a 10-year journey, we have we have made efforts at this in the past but having sort of really the opportunity right now in the staff to do it but the idea is that if we have students who are interested it would particularly focus on percussion and I'm now going to not sound like a musician here I do play all five chords on the guitar so I got that. The instruments are all listed in the program of studies. But the idea would be that it's focused mainly on percussion the idea would be to learn how to do that sort of creating you know an environment at games and other activities and programs and so as much as I love the symphony orchestra they don't do well in football games and so trying to have that spirit building both for students and not bringing music into the space is something we're excited about. Cool thank you. Okay any other questions I think we need a motion to approve. Move approval. Second. All in favor. Yes. Any opposed any abstentions. Okay so it's unanimous approval of the Erlington high school public program of studies so thank you very much. Thank you. Before I depart I just wanted to say one quick thing. I told class council I would talk about this the winter craft market January 26th five to seven at Allington high school we've got 10 10 to 15 different groups the student council organized this we have 10 to 10 to 15 different artists and stores in the town that are going to be coming in and so it'll be right in our cafeteria so if anyone's interested it's five to seven right in the cafeteria tomorrow. Great thank you very much. Okay next we have the panorama study results by Mr Coleman should be the tab immediately to the left should be the tab is up there. On the computer. Hi everyone thanks for having me back. So this presentation just over the the next bunch of slides here just to keep in mind one of the things that we're working to do for this particular time is really give a 30,000 foot view of a lot of the results for the fall administration of the survey overall success and I'll talk about some of those little aspects of it just a quick little agenda some of the bigger broader topics that we'll be talking about first just wanted to talk about panorama as a program what is it I'm not quite sure if we all have an understanding of where this survey tool has come about we'll talk about some survey insights and when we talk about those just again 30,000 foot view and there's going to be a lot of connections to the vision the mission and also the strategic plan we'll talk about the reasons why but we'll talk about those and then at the end we're going to talk about some of the action steps not everything and I'll discuss that throughout the presentation simply because of the fact that if this is connected to a lot of the strategic strategic plan and the school improvement plans a lot of this is also going to be for my particular role is supporting a lot of the buildings and making sure that they understand the implications of some of these data and understanding what could be gleaned from their school improvement plans and also other other things that we might find as areas of focus so general quick little overview I put a couple slides at the beginning an important aspect when thinking about data is ensuring that where we're surveying and where we're finding data that's actually connected to things and characteristics that we valued I don't want to be part of just giving surveys for the sake of being surveys so even the construction of the panorama survey for the multiple stakeholder groups has pretty clear connections so in the vision statement just bolded words and bolded phrases that are going to be a recurring theme and what we're going to be talking about this idea of sense of a belonging there are aspects of the survey in which we talk about this the idea of growth and joy there are aspects of the survey we'll talk about this this idea of empowerment and being engaged in your content areas in curriculum that's going to be part of what we'll talk about when I first started off in supporting this administration it was important to also find connections to the strategic plan and work with different directors to find areas where their work tied to the survey results these are three goals by no means do I want to say that these are the only goals that the panorama survey results could impact but these were three in which they were highly impactful to many of the directors and a lot of the school improvement plans and again I just took the time to bold some of the words just as we're reading through these are going to be recurring themes for what we'll try to look for inside of the survey results again today is going to be a 30 000 foot view not going to dig into any particular school but these are clear areas where when we're looking at the results and we're thinking about this story this narrative that's being told these are these characteristics and qualities in which we were able to see either growth or some areas of improvement that we can go forward with one aspect though just because I always feel like this part is important to clarify we do have the ability to sort in the panorama survey for different focal groups an important aspect of that strategic plan was the identification of certain focal groups where we may want to focus a little bit more for today we're not going to focus in on those but I just wanted to kind of talk about the fact that throughout my support throughout some of this session that we had had this past week with administrators this idea of digging into a lot of the specifics more of the questions and also for some of our groups of students in which we'd want to be a little bit more intentional that is part of what we've been working on not to say it again but today 30 000 foot view we'll get into a lot of the details but this is an important part in which this survey can play a pretty important role to better understand the experiences and the impacts our educational system has on certain student groups all right I'm going to pivot now just to talk about this survey and talk about one of the reasons why for folks like myself and some of the other administrators we see some value on this panorama is an education centered group I've appreciated the team that I've worked with that panorama you know I have an engineer that I work with directly I have other reps that really are supportive to the questions that I have like honestly they get back to me right away they're open to all the weird queries and questions that I might have they've really been good to work with they understand the education setting they know areas that they need to improve a lot of the times before I even bring them up and for myself it's been great to work with them in this first time that I've been helping to support the administration they do have a pretty extensive suite of resources within their tools it's been a pretty easy lift so far to get this off the ground a lot of learning but a good experience overall and working with them the fact that they are so broad is great just quickly bring up a quick little conversation I had with Dr. Janger this past week you know for him when he's thinking about these results sometimes it's hard for him to consider how these results compare to the elementary schools because the populations might be so different but the fact that some of these questions and some of these groups of questions are nationally normed against a lot of other schools gives him other ways in which he can compare how we're doing there's a lot of sortability and flexibility within the platform which I also appreciate this idea of just large numbers and other other samples that may have better representations to the different groups that we're thinking about as well so it's it's been easy to work with I feel pretty good about a lot of the aspects doesn't mean that we've perfected it but it's been pretty good to so far for this administration we have flexibilities in thinking about the types of questions that we ask either individual questions or in groups of questions right now the way we've set this up is in groups of questions so for families those are the seven eight my eyes are going a little bad right now seven different categories we actually ask all the categories that can be possibly asked for families we've done that intentionally right now we're still trying to get an understanding of a lot of different aspects across the board we ask these questions these groups of questions to our grades three through 12 students you'll see a little bit more but just to kind of add on this detail right now these questions are grouped by three through five similar questions and then six through 12 similar questions right now and this will will be an important part towards the end right now we ask questions of the students about the school and about the classroom so when you think about these these categories they're asking they're answering based on their experiences with the school asking answering based on the experience with the classroom we do have the ability to ask students about their experiences for themselves we don't ask those students about themselves questions yet and we are thinking about what that might mean and I'll talk a little about that towards the end for staff this is the wonkiest one for us over the past two to three years because we've shifted some of the groups of questions and you'll see this a little bit as well we panorama divided certain aspects of the grouping of the teachers and staff we asked the fewest set of questions for staff these questions are relevant to what we're looking at but because we have shifted so much over the past couple of years it's really hard for us to look at trend data just because what we're asking has has changed so you'll see in this presentation I'm a pretty light on the info and staff that's not to mean that the info wasn't good it's just that from a 30,000 foot view it's been a little bit more of a challenge for us to get really clear takeaways from the school level and each of the buildings they will you know it's going to give them a little bit more information but we just we're in the position right now for staff we just had a lot more variability in the way in which we structured it our intention though is to keep for the sake of trend and the sake of thinking about growth our intention is to keep as much of this consistent for our spring administration with tweaks that are easy tweaks that are not going to impact what our overall results are with the idea that hopefully in future administrations we can get a little bit more of a consistent view of this all right I'm just going to put all three up we always have wins so to speak you know there's a lot of good information to take away from the survey but the one aspect that I was pretty psyched about is this was by far and away our most successful year if the metric was participation and I really have to thank a lot of folks for this Wes and the communication team the principals just the ability to get this survey out there just this ability to make sure it was available for all so many people did great work overall out of the 11,000 people students family members and staff that we surveyed we had 62 percent respond which was probably about 15 percentage points higher than at any point ever which was absolutely great I think Dr. Holman said maybe 66 percent next time we'll see if we can do that yeah we'll see so it's been great from that point of view it makes me feel a lot more comfortable with the results knowing the fact that it's just a higher volume there were some years where you know and this is more towards the beginning where we may have only had like 52 people respond to certain category and now it's on the scale of like hey 800 people responded in that so it just makes us feel a little bit more comfortable and confident that we're getting a better canvas of of how people feel all right so this is one of the views you probably saw little pieces of these types of reports cut up and in different school improvement plans and presentations I think we saw some of this today this is just the trend for those different categories for our grade three three five students and where they were this doesn't give you the overall trend it's just the prior administration which for students was last spring spring 23 and yeah this is how we did I'm going to talk more detail in those a little bit even though some look like they went down there are some went up there are different areas where based on the overall trend they're more interesting than others here's a snapshot of how great six through 12 did one I do want to point out here though and we'll talk about this in more detail is that for six through 12 students the sense of sense of belonging I know that's been a recurring theme and it was brought up a little bit in another snapshot for a school nice area of growth there family school relations we'll talk about these results I just wanted to point out one aspect on the on the right for the buckets on learning behavior in school safety these were two core buckets when looked at in totality other questions we could look at if it's offered that's the national benchmarking so you can see you know learning behaviors fantastic we went up one but overall compared to other districts nationally we are still I think the way it said was 11th percentile school safety same thing we're not only getting our internal metrics it went down to but even with those scores were around the 50th percentile of all schools so these reports are are fantastic just to get a quick little sense but you know warrants a lot more digging in one last one nope no that was last one I alluded to it a little while ago what we did this past Monday for two hours and I'm grateful the time for Dr. Ford Walker to give up on an admin meeting we were able to get a bunch of curriculum directors and a bunch of principles and what we did was our first initial really deep dive into it which really talked about how to navigate the the survey platform how to think about these reports and it you know we were able to support them with different protocols where the hope is they're going to take these types of processes back to the ILTs consider and reflect upon the school improvement plans use this as a benchmark right now relative to or in respect to their goals that they've been created and think about minor tweaks or little things that would have to shift for the remainder of the year to maybe see a little bit more of a positive impact that we're looking for so what I'm going to do now to pivot is kind of just tell a story of of the things that I noticed things that you know I don't want to say seem contradictory at time but just kind of talk through some of that those that high level data in a quick little story so here were different things we have been focusing on the sense of belonging and it's improving it's improving across the board I've been very happy to see that student failure perception though of cultural awareness and action is declining which at first to me was a little anti-intuitive that belonging is increasing in a great way but a certain aspect of where we might be focusing our work didn't show growth the teacher-student relationships at 6 through 12 is improving and meaning really steady the perception of the school climate for students has been improving but for family members the perception of the school climate has been declining and that's been a little bit anti-intuitive it's one of those things where it's showing a little bit that students are feeling more positive about their experiences than families might be feeling about their students experiences students perception of rigorous expectations remain steady in some areas that's going up and I'll talk about this but not to bury the lead the area of discourse was an area of growth for a lot of places and improved here but the family members perceptions of the learning behaviors remain below expectations that was that category where nationally we're around 11 percent that's 0 to 19 percent so although we're showing improvement there still might be from the parents point of view areas of growth and improvement and finally this this one you know I I don't want to say that this is a main core reason but and I know a lot of the schools are are talking about it the idea that the family members perception of the school-based communication might be changing a little bit and it's uh it has a little bit of a decline so thinking about like what's happening in some of these areas and thinking about where we might be able to improve so let's take into some of the data one thing I did for each of these slides if you look at the bottom there are questions I didn't want to include all the questions that are asked but I included questions that seem to be pretty relevant to the impact on this data so the sense of belonging how well do people in your school understand you as a person how much do you matter to others how connected do you feel it's great to see that this is improving and it's improving pretty consistently for our grade six through twelve students that's a fairly good increase I've was psyched to see that for a cultural awareness and action this is a chunking of all three even the family members included although we are seeing that nice improvement we have an area right now with the cultural awareness and some of the conversations that we could have here where I think we probably could have some areas of growth talking about speaking out against racism little pockets and little the PD that Margaret is working on for bishop it's those things are great it's it's awesome that those are already in place and those are moving forward in order to keep these conversations going this is for six through twelve thinking about the cultural awareness and action a lot of these questions center on conversations on race how often are they having in the how often are they occurring in within schools teachers student relationships though are improving teachers being respectful towards you teachers are excited to have you again in the future that interpersonal relationship making sure you have a trusted adult we're seeing a lot of signs of improvement here this was that question on school climate so we have this weird nuance where essentially students are feeling really good about their connections with the adults we see here the perceptions of overall social learning in the school for the students is improving but the parental pressure the community perception of it right now is showing a little bit of a dip I did want to note though that it's still higher than the other two groups in terms of the favorable rating but it's this weird nuance right now where it almost seems like there's a disconnect with how students feel about their school experience and how others might be perceiving it this kind of added on to that in terms of the rigorous expectations these two categories are really high relative to a lot of other samples the area that was the biggest growth was the explain the answers the discourse portions of it this is shown really really steady growth with high overall scores the past few years and this is pretty much the trend right now for 6 through 12 and again this one seems like a really nice connection overall because we have I know you've probably heard a lot of school improvement plans that are talking about the concept of discourse talking about the concept of ensuring that students have voice and it's great to see that is being represented here this is the learning behaviors so although this is something that nationally is below these were two core questions that were of interest how often does your child read for fun and how motivated is your child to learn the topics covered in class so I included this one because we are seeing growth but it does feel like there's still a little bit of a disconnect these these are the national scores for that learning behavior so this one puts us near the 10th percentile so again we're seeing growth in those areas that that belief of of how school is for our students and our children but we definitely have some areas of growth this one was a surprise you know I spent a lot of time with this this is the family school communication specifically just to kind of iron out this one this is representative much more about how an individual school is working with their community so right now across the board for us as a district where we're looking at a 30 000 foot view it is decreasing a little bit it's gone down definitely an area in which we're going to dig into and try to understand I know there's a lot of connections to school improved plans which is which is great and hopefully some of this can be cleaned up a little bit but this was this was one little area I do want to note on this one that the area where we saw the biggest drop the question we saw the biggest drop on was how clear we've been about COVID related safety measures and protocols which we don't really communicate about anymore so it's possible that with the removal of that question in that category it's a point that this could see a nice little uptick again yep yeah so right now just in terms of how we're moving for the next step and these are the type of things I appreciate what Dr. I'm saying that we've got to dig into this you know we're at the point right now where we have a pretty good sense of the overall data this is just a big view right now there's going to be resources put towards the principles to make sure that we're unpacking this at that school level what does this mean for them for some of these schools even though you see the downward trend they're increasing by spades like this isn't representative of how everyone's doing it's just that bigger view ensuring that we're using this information as almost a benchmarking for for our school improved lands using the feedback from the administration this is one of the things that I have been working on I'm already gearing up for the spring administration so for me and I'm glad I didn't do this but I almost wanted to send out a survey to ask how the survey went but that didn't seem like a good move so I've been trying to get as much information about how the survey experience was for different stakeholder groups little modifications ensuring we don't miss out on any teachers for silly things it's just wonky technical things and we've been trying to do a lot of behind the scenes work just to ensure that we're honoring everyone and this includes also some question modifications I think I was explaining what that comment yeah the I want to explain this in detail I'm I can't believe I can't believe I'm old that there are teachers who work with us who were born after the year 2000 so we definitely missed like a little area for demographic information for some of our staff that's entirely on me I'm old we've already fixed it we already fixed it for last time so I apologize for that so that that one's that change is already made I described a little while ago we we do a lot of surveys we we do in my short time in this role it's amazing to me how much information that different departments in different groups collect data like we have a ton of stuff and being able to put this all together in a good coherent place is part of a challenge so the director of SEL has expressed interest in thinking about shifting some of the SEL surveys to be housed within panorama remember at the beginning I talked about the idea of the student facing information so right now what we're trying to do in our analysis of the overall structure of the service system is to understand how we might be able to do that if it's worth it to do that and what it would mean so right now we're we're doing that and that that focus is going to be on the student there are some bits of information and some things that we'd like to know a little bit more in detail and panorama gives us that ability so just optimizing it as a platform is is where we would be and the last little thing is you know for me and this is the part of the work I like is just working with all the other departments you know having a chance to sit down with west's department and think about what this might mean having a chance to sit down with Margaret's department thinking about what this means those are going to be the the the little bits of work that will will tackle over the next few months with that said that kind of concludes my 30 000 foot overview and I would love any questions I'll do the best I can to answer them yes Morgan great thank you so much um so I guess I'm going to go back to so my sort of overall feedback is I think that this was super helpful um and I'm just one of seven and like one of like I don't know how many people are in this room 15 I in the future when we get this I kind of probably need to go to like 15 000 feet okay for me like this this was fine um and uh I think that like the the the changes in you know the reported changes in each category is helpful and because we sampled such a huge proportion of the population even these onesie twosie percentage deltas are like statistically significant I mean they are right like but like one and two I like you can't I don't get super excited like I'm kind of like okay meet um yeah you know four five six sure like that that gets my interest um so I guess that but and I don't know how you do that because I'm not interested I'm I don't want to be in the business of comparing schools or comparing elementary to middle to high because I think that that's an enterprise I don't really know how you get to 15 000 feet so good luck um I can't I don't I don't like but for me what's I'm I'm interested in more of those sort of nuances um and I think the work that you're doing we saw it in the conversations that we had with um the principles earlier right because they were saying oh we're doing x y and z and we're seeing this result so that may be where I get to my 15 000 feet it may not be in something like that can I just to respond to that I agree with you 100 the goal the reason why I kept on saying about the 30 000 foot is this wasn't about making any inferences or judgments about any particular school at the moment you know it's it really is at this point me making sure that they understand the impact for their school improvement plans um to help with that you know it's I could probably sit here for way too long I think we were shared also were some of these reports inside of the system I believe yeah and these will allow you to go into a lot more detail in that I was trying to find that balance between just giving us that overview talking about where what our next big core steps would be where we were in this process of using this data some takeaways I will say this I was leading the questions I chose for each of the categories those were like the sixes I wasn't choosing ones that were like ones or zeros I was trying to give questions that either were in the positive or the negative that were impactful for that category just so all of you can kind of kind of that here's a 30 000 foot but he is a little linkling of of why that may have changed yeah so that was my my splitting the difference which is is great and we're I mean we're gonna I assume we're gonna have a vote on Dr. Homan's goals later I assume we're going to approve them um but they speak a lot to some of the the information that's going to be in here um so I uh the the staff participation seemed low to me at 61 percent like what are we taking a percentage of like is this of every human who gets a paycheck from it like or like are we give anyway um I don't necessarily didn't answer to that but like um I hope we're giving them time to do it um and that we're able to um because 61 it seems low to me um if if we got 49 percent of of families to do it I so that seems like there's an opportunity there um what else did I have oh yeah and then the COVID protocols questions probably probably um I I found I was like whoa when I took it I was like yikes so um maybe we want to rethink those and then I shared with panorama that those need to come out of those categories because they're in the category we can't take the question out without messing up the categorical right calculation so what Dr. Homan's alluding to is some of these questions come in a bulk like if you talk about school safety you get all the school safety so these are the the areas that when I'm working with them thinking about the cost benefit like do you ask all of these for the sake that like 75 within that category are really good um and how do you get rid of it sometimes you do have flexibilities to change things but what you might lose is the nationally normed part of it because they're using some of the questions against each other so you it's just how you want to structure it so those are the conversations that I'll be having and trying to understand like what what are the questions we really want to ask and what are the questions that we want to ask to ensure that we have that nationally normed data and all that other information great and my last question is just around the experience of and I I recognize my experience is sort of unique I have a lot of children I have four of them and my understanding is that I should fill this out four times which I filled it out zero times because I just like I kind of couldn't get I sort of thought I should do it and then I couldn't get past like well which of which is my favorite child so I'm gonna fill this out for right like it was kind of like that right and then it's so and I don't know that there's any way to fix that it's but it's tricky it's so we talked about that um I you know in working on this first administration I received a lot of parent feedback some parents really wanted that ability to ask or answer for multiple students or children because they felt as though their kids were different and had very different experiences yeah some were annoyed that they had to fill it out that many times so I intentionally didn't say just because I was more curious what people would do I think we probably have to draw a line in the sand and say this is what we're gonna do for my first time through it I didn't want to say do this because I was curious I was curious there was a little bit of experimentation from my point of view because I want to understand like what is that feedback from the families I do think though we're always going to have families who will want to respond multiple times agreed I and I think the other group I is just the group that's confused like I got like confused yep and then I was like that's I've hit my well but is it I mean no no not really I mean I because I got an email from like multiple administrators being like this is your so like but it is it's one of those things where like the activation barrier just like tips a little bit and then you kind of are like panic and then just don't do it don't do it um but I mean we have so and the the 49% 46% I can't remember 49% is that like that's the number of fan like that calculation how pray tell did we for that one I use the number of kids against the number of responses so 3100 or whatever 40 whatever already students were in the overall versus the number of responses that we got back so but so it's probably a much higher percentage of families it could be oh it's definitely representative of much more than half of our families actually did more than I did right did something right like took some like more than half of our families interacted with the survey in some way yes great can I can I take 30 more seconds to just say this we do have also options when we set up the staff survey when we set up the student survey we auto populate everything and then send them an individualized survey so that is tailored to them for families we just create a link and they respond so there's no one-to-one correspondence in working with panorama you always get a higher response rate from families when it is guaranteed anonymous for that family one because there's no record it's it's just a blink you're just filling it out so they based on their experiences we can set it up where we do the parent and it's sent directly to them to their email and that is their individual link but there's a really big drop off with participation because of that fact so you've got to kind of find that in between so for yeah I don't know if that makes sense but I mean we use peak on at my work and we all think that like HR is spying on us and like they promise us backwards and forwards they're like no no this is totally anonymous and we're like ah yeah right um and then we don't fill it out but and like I actually do believe it is probably like anonymous right but that there is that like that I just want to be very clear we do not have data that's right that matches responses to human beings we do not get that data we do not want that data yeah yeah but we do roster the kids and the teachers we don't roster the families and and just even to clarify this even though it's set up with the direct link for teachers and students there is no way to link the responses in the platform they actually intentionally do that but you can see the teachers who respond and who don't you can't see what their responses are you can never see that okay thank you so this is a follow-up because I I got questions from people about you know how many am I supposed to fill out you said you were curious did you look like if it's all that anonymized could we what did you learn anything what I learned is um I don't think I'm going to satisfy everybody so I'll draw a line that that's what I learned and that's learning so like you know we may have to draw a line on the sand and say one per household uh and then we'll work through supporting those families who may want to do it more than once or we might just say fill it out for as many times as you want and work through that okay I'm just yeah no it's we could also roster and send well that was my other question is like can you give people like yeah can you some of us don't care if like we might be findable some of us care a lot I I don't know like if there's it just to maximize it yeah we can look into that thank you for this um I have to try to reach my notes so well I was going to say as another anecdote I have two children at the same school so I filled it out once because I felt like other than the individual student experience the communication I felt like was global so when there are different schools I might feel differently about two different responses but anyway um so similar to miss Morgan and not being a statistician my question is how do you what of these changes are statistically significant and which is not so I think it was like rigorous expectations was that the one that had a big drop off versus these ones that went up by one or two like how how can you say oh look we're doing better in this when it's like an extra person answered the question yeah oh this is also perception data this is all how we feel about it so even working with the principals and the directors the other day we talked about the latter of inference and you know thinking about notice and wonderings and thinking about these takeaways and not having your biases come through and finding an answer right away and really exploring and looking for other sources of data you know it's that triangulation that ability to to to lean into the inquiry as opposed to lean into the judgment I know this is in 100 answering your question but it really is a shift in the mindset it really is thinking about this in more of a proactive kind of journey sort of way as opposed to this summative this is how we did and that's what I've been trying to do in working with all of those folks is how do we use this data to inform what we're doing so for some of the principles it's already sparked some other questions for some of them you know there was one particular principal who was like sites because their data clearly showed their their strategic plan one of their goals it was directly related to a set of questions and it was a lot of positive growth so really thinking about that as a metric that's showing at least a perception or some some context that they're they're showing growth and then leaning into some others where we're like oh it may have been a dip but what could be the cause for what those dips were and not like saying it was definitely this but it could have been this it could have been this all right so what what could be a next possible action step does it mean we read a goal or does it mean we tweak the goal or change the benchmark uh that's the that's that habit that i'm hoping to instill on folks so it sounds like it's sort of easier maybe to to do this at a school level which it is and that's yeah the committee is is sort of too specific um we want the overview we want the general overview but really we should be looking at this at that school level um and then one other just one other piece to this um around sort of the the context and the belonging and the cultural awareness and action and all in the school climate sort of we're doing we're working on this and improving this in the sort of intention that when students feel a sense of belonging and they have a positive school climate and teachers are happy to be at work students are going to achieve at a higher right that's where we're going with this and so I guess another piece of this story that I would be interested in in hearing in the future is how does this match with you know what we're seeing very like lined up somehow I don't know how you do this with with our achievement data like is are we are these things connected I think the power of this survey lives in the longitudinal analysis we've focused a lot in our reporting and Mr. Coleman focused a lot tonight on belonging and rigorous expectations because we see those as mapping against achievement data when we see steady improvement even if it's one percent every year every time we've administered since 2021 but that's steady in belonging and that's improving and we see a similar trend in rigorous expectations and that's improving and then we have an awesome accountability year like we did this year then our theory of actions working out right we're seeing that over time as we focus on specific areas do specific things at specific schools where it is a little easier to trace we did this and it did that but system-wide that longitudinal trend is very encouraging on particular areas where we've really been focusing our attention what this survey is useful for and why it's in my goals is highlighting areas where we might be seeing a dip we might be seeing a decline the cultural awareness in action is a really interesting shift in how students are perceiving their experiences in school and how families are as well and it's coming at a cultural time when it's there there are things we can potentially think about and consider as contributors and contributing factors that may be beyond our locus of control or influence or but that are part of how we interact and engage with families every single day so we need to think about new ways to do that and so that becomes a goal for the next year in a focus area but we keep our laser focus on belonging expectations and keeping those high because we think those two things together help like if a student tells high expectations they know we believe they can achieve and that helps them feel a sense of belonging and connection to their teachers and that helps them achieve and those three things together are having the impact that we wanted to have yep so we need some some image that puts all that together cool we'll work on that we have to get Leo for that i i'm not artistically inclined okay uh i've got a bunch of stuff here too first of all in pushing for belonging you're talking about being able to tweak certain aspects of what's going on with uh panorama i've got 120 families here whose language wasn't listed can we fix that they um yes so do you want the quick answer to that yeah based on the questions that you choose internally for panorama they only offer that's another one the way it's uh it's it's a if you i'm going to make this up if i choose this set of questions on school climate and internally they've only translated for seven languages every time you choose a new thing it changes the language that you offered so we had pushed on them to keep offering more they just didn't have it their response was well if you take out these we can get it up to 15 languages so it was one of those where you know based on what you ask that's there their promises that they're always translating and always offering in more languages uh that one for this administration was less out of our control than i would have liked i i agree with you 100 percent can we get that that that's a question directly question 11 what language do you mostly speak at home yeah even if we can't translate it because i i know that we've got folks who are malt who speak a different language at home who are fluent enough in english to respond to the survey but to not get to be able to represent them in the here is certainly really counter to our i agree i agree and i think we're missing our biggest two languages in this district that's my guess i mean you got 120 families here four percent of the total um on the plus one thing um plus one you know it could be 49.4 to 49.6 which by rounding goes from a 49 to a 50 and it's really not significant um what i you know what i what i'm interested in most to tell you the truth what i'm looking at the data is in the order of magnitude of changes okay here's our plus seven here's our minus six and obviously the ones who are out there are of interest the ones that really didn't change unless we're really going and trying to move that particular number aren't as interesting as the ones that change the other thing that i really really need is the benchmark because without knowing what that national norm is it's just a number floating in there is the 49 compared to 25 nationally and we're that 49 percent is is really high we're doing well compared to the rest of the world or is the rest of the world at 80 and anytime i see that number i need that anchor um uh and so then my last follow-up question because you know miss morgan is really good statisticians pushed a lot of good questions and she also asked are we giving time and i think that's sort of the question if for the staff surveys that if we have employees that we're contracting time for uh and we say hey guys we're going to give you an extra half hour off go do whatever you want but you have to have the survey done uh that's sort of the way we did it in lull when i worked there and we got you know huge numbers on the staff are we doing something like that or can we do something like that we did that we did that so then it should be our expectation that we get a higher number staff well yes and yes this is all staff and we don't right we have been focusing on making sure teaching staff fill out the survey uh so it's possible that some of those who did not or some of our operational staff who qualify as staff in the survey not as teachers the other thing to note is that teachers who go to multiple schools or are assigned to multiple schools show up at all of those schools in the stats and so it's it's not 62 percent it's higher than that in terms of staff who took the survey because if i'm at Gibbs and oddison i'm going to take the survey Gibbs or oddison i'm not we're not going to ask staff to take it at every single school they hit especially if they are at multiple so that's it's a slightly deflated number because of that can we get that is there some sort of way we can sort of figure out that number to get it accurate because if these guys are really going out and doing it and it's some sort of quirk in the way of going about asking the question i'd like to recognize the fact that the teachers are really taking it seriously and giving us a good set of answers i lost my microphone we had 418 there's about 500 ish unit a members maybe a little bit over that so that gives you uh some idea um time was given on the november 1st professional day to do this um we had a cohort of elementary teachers who were doing el training all of that day so they may not have gotten to it um and for the non teaching staff um remember we have paraprofessionals who don't have computers can we send a better message of yeah we we care about you and this really is important because we want to make the way i sent reminders out for this in my weekly updates as well to members the comment i heard most from people was i've been doing that for years and they've never listened to anything i've said on it so why am i going to keep wasting my time doing it i think people have put a lot into their narrative comments which are never included in any of the reporting out that comes from it and what they're seeing is i keep telling people about concerns and issues and problems and nobody's listening so i was telling people this time like just felt the numbers i don't even care if you write anything just felt the numbers um so okay it's interesting thanks so for um just in terms of the timeline this year i think we did it a little later we were able to get it for the november 1st it was uh later on in different staff meetings i think for this year i think it was um one of the things that we've tried to do for the narrative is it was a little yeah i think it was a little later that was on me i didn't get it done in time what do we do on november 1st it was now oh it's ethics training that's where yeah so um and this is also true for the communication ones and this this one also is kind of the goal and the intentionality of trying to set up the survey for the parents a lot of the questions were centered the narrative questions were centered on the idea of communication the numerical values pretty much represent that i believe i have to look back at the core set of questions um the area that was important for staff this year just connected to the the strategic plan centered on professional development and supports there i had a question also about cultural awareness but that was also centered on pd um we could definitely share out those narratives but it was more a lot of those comments were more centered on that for this year just because that was that connection to the strategic and the strategic plan one other one other quick question i'm not going to say quick question i hate when people do that another panorama specific question so that if you have multiple children like uh mrs morgan and is there any way for the panorama survey to sort of do you have another child in the district if so we go back to question like is there some way to do that in a recursive way question yeah i'm sure that that's something it's uh vexing every district that's using it because if we then go and say oh if you have four children just pick one then what's going to happen is that people are going to to go for the child they have something to say about which is going to skew the numbers either high or low depending on how they feel about that particular child's experience i haven't asked them about the that type of question or that type of setup so first thank you for coming we love to hear data and and this position has worked out great from my perspective because we're getting good presentations on data we've got somebody who can aggregate the data and we can actually do something with it and and not just let it sit on the shelf so that's a great improvement thank you um i i agree with miss morgan a little bit that i mean you you did present some other trend data and we're sort of relying on you to pick out the things that you think are most interesting but maybe a little bit more context a little bit more of those um those trend items or or um you know for example like school climate is discussed at in each of the surveys but to look at that date to compare like the different levels you got to flip the pages you know and it's just hard to to sort of see what's going on there so a little bit more um data would be would be great um uh and then my question was about um the uh what was I going to ask about oh so Dr. Holman mentioned the great improvement in belonging at um at at the hearty and and I guess are there other pops or declines that you saw or is that for later analysis or it could be for later um um I fancy myself good with numbers I don't think I don't think I can remember I say this in honesty like uh knowing I went through each of the schools individually went through the districts I I don't recall each of them like I wasn't even trying to but to answer your question yeah I mean time to include but yeah there were a lot of those and like I kind of mentioned what was important to me was putting folks in a position to start to think about this data as benchmarking for a lot of their goals you know uh Mr. Slickman you were talking about kind of prioritizing them the way I kind of worked with them and prioritizing them was more or less all right this is what you intended to do these were your goals what does that information tell you relative to that even if it's a zero or plus minus or whatever and the second part was have you learned anything else besides that I think it was alluded to you by Dr. Holman like what might be good precursors to future goals or changes to goals so I was using a little more of that as the way in which we uh have a lens on this information I just I want intentionality I want there to be all right this is what we're trying to do and here's ways in which we can measure what that might be great thank you can I just respond real quick yeah to both to Mr. Carter's point to Mr. Coleman's point and to Ms. Keys's point we've done more with this mid-year administration than we have at the mid-year administration ever and and that includes getting leaders into the room to look at the data within a month of it coming back working on some reporting out to staff so that we can say here's what you said here's what we're doing and putting it together with some other information that we have about what schools are doing what I'm hearing from staff when I visit schools so I I think you know yes this has been a big capacity builder having Mr. Coleman's role in place and having him in it and we're really trying to get better about taking it in and then getting it back out to people to say here's what we heard here's what we're going to do with it right now here's what we are still working on we're not quite sure exactly what we're going to do with it yet but you're going to keep hearing about it because we've heard that feedback that you know we do this we don't quite know what the district does with it after we do it so we're trying to get quicker on the turnaround okay now I get a chance I actually I'm not going to everyone's asked lots of good questions I just had two kind of questions one for the learning behaviors one I just wonder if that's at all affected because we've been trying to decrease or eliminate homework at the elementary school levels and so I know the kids are maybe supposed to be reading but that the homework was kind of what the parent saw in terms of learning learning behaviors right and if they're not doing it they don't have anything to really talk about and and so that's one question and you could anyway you can figure things out then the other thing is when you're doing comparing to the national norms I just like to have a better understanding of what what the national you know what is the national norm and and just you know I look on the website and they have names but it doesn't tell me that all the schools in that district are doing it or or just some sense of you know it's just this blob I don't have any idea you know all I know is a blob with some names of school districts in it I don't know are all the schools in that district represented are do they do all the questions you know anything like that so those are those are kind of my questions and then in terms of the language ones did I understand correctly that if they if you want to ask a question in that is not offered in a translated language that then you can't if it's one question that isn't offered in say Korean then you can't offer any of the questions in Korean if you want to ask that question is that what I was explained to me so when we were just have them skip that question so at least we get no I'm serious yeah I could ask we we don't get you know so we get some data and we understand what the data is versus getting nothing from people who speak Korean they're just to talk through the way in which it works it's like all right let's build your survey you want this you want this and they've got the little the little pocket with languages and then you complete it and then it is based on your completed survey this survey can be now be delivered in these languages so I couldn't tell you which ones were the tipping point or which ones changed it it's just that when we built the survey and we said this is what we want it came back that that survey is only available here we went back and asked can you have it in some more they looked at it I think there was a modification changed and then it increased the languages by one so it wasn't a huge thing but it was by no means you know I think it was in the what all said and done I think the number seven keep is in my mind I think it may have only been available in like seven languages it would have been better if it was available in a lot more I think we've talked Mr. Coleman so thank you very much quarterly we enjoy our data and discussing thanks for having me everybody okay so moving on we have a second read and vote for possible approval of the school year 24 25 and 25 26 and 26 27 calendars and dr. Holman you want to uh so adjustments um adjustments as I understand it on the calendars are pretty minor we made sure that there were six all district early releases I think we adjusted the date on one of them miss diggins can you remind me if there were any other adjustments to these yep okay yeah there was a we adjusted some conferences yep so they weren't the week of um holiday break yep okay so my understanding had been that we wanted to get feedback before we approve before labor day start on in the 26 27 calendar yes and so we haven't gotten that feedback correct correct so are we only looking to approve the first two yes so we have final for the first two in your materials and just the same file for 26 27 but it doesn't say final on it because we were anticipating you would vote those first two okay so so does someone okay first well does someone want to make a motion to approve the 24 25 and 25 26 calendars and so moved second and second um and does anyone have any comments or questions about these okay so none all in favor aye aye sorry set it my head okay any abstentions okay so that passes unanimously if quietly um and next we have the superintendent's goals I did I only made a few changes in response to some feedback that I received from one of you at the last meeting to include a little bit um more clarity about categories that come from the student survey so that people understand where that's those are coming from so I was explicit about um being looking closely at the learning behaviors and student needs categories on the family surveys and some of the outcomes areas um but for the most part these are similar to what you had seen last time okay um does someone want to make a motion to approve the superintendent's goals so moved second um are there any further comments or questions about them seeing none all in favor aye aye any opposed any abstentions okay so that's unanimous thank you actually I shouldn't be well it's unanimous yeah okay sorry I didn't I can't see her from here generally she had stepped up um okay so next we have the superintendent's update okay hold on oh can you um Ms. Dickens Ms. Morgan is actually on zoom as an attendee no she was she was gonna have to go out I remember this but here she's does she not want to be promoted now I just promoted her then we have to go back and re-vote as a roll call here she's come here she's come okay yeah I didn't see when she she should be in the panelist side yeah there she is there we go right okay so that's Morgan can we hear you yes I can hear you okay I didn't realize you were on zoom did you hear we just took two votes one was on the calendars and the other was on both okay okay thank you okay update all right so I have several for today um first of all I want to thank all the volunteers and Amy Spear who is chair of the Arlington High School building committees committee for communications um we had ahs tours last Saturday on the 20th and even though it was unbelievably cold outside we had 2000 people come and most of them even ventured outside to check out the preschool um and we're very excited about how beautiful it is and some of them even ventured into our offices to see the school committee room so we're really excited to welcome all of those community members including lots of future students at the high school into our tours um everybody thought the space was just absolutely beautiful very impressive work um by all of our teams that have contributed to the opening of phase two and it was a great success um we are very pleased to have started a morning um oms bus run I don't think it started yet actually I think it starts next week but we have many families who are interested in this it runs from east Arlington to Odyssey middle school in the mornings only to alleviate some of the pressure on the MBTA uh routes that have resulted in some students having trouble getting to school timing is good given the weather what it is at this time of year um and we're looking into what we can do to meet some of the demand because we did have some pretty high demand for this bus we ran a lottery um randomly to determine who would have access to it and we're looking into the capacity of the run or whether we can do to uh ahs Nordic skiing um update really quickly they are having a wonderful season there's a picture of them in action there at the bottom of your screen this is again um just as a reminder the first year that this team has been up and running and we've gotten some updates that they're having a wonderful season and are grateful for the school committee support of this new team um and that we were able to get it in place a working quick working groups update we have 10 to 15 members per working group again these are the strategic plan working groups um they are led by members of our cabinet team and administration um as facilitators but they're sort of facilitator members they work alongside members of the working group to implement small actions tied to the strategic plan in order to influence and inform um actions that will come later and that will inform budget priorities for FY26 they're meeting two hours per month they're conducting inquiry and action research cycles aligned to the initiatives um there's a full member list that is in your materials and that I will also be publishing to the community in the February 1 newsletters to uh staff and to families we've had some members who in retrospect haven't been able to join we've been adding new members in um so there's a little bit of fluctuation happening but we're really pleased to have added um all of our members and had two meetings of the full groups in January to get a good head start APS has been awarded um this is great news out of this week we were awarded a mass-saved climate leader at the state house um thank you to school committee members who were able to attend Mr. Thielman Mr. Schlickman and Dr. Allison Ampey were there to accept the award with me we're really pleased about this because it's been a lot of effort by building committees both for the Gibbs School and Arlington High School as well as efforts that we've undertaken with the town to increase electric um capacity and buses in town so it's really an honor to be recognized alongside other municipalities and companies across the state as a climate leader and we want to say a public thank you also to Talia who was with us earlier for the work that she's done spearheading some of our sustainability work in town. The LGBTQIA plus task force had a meeting this week on creative in creating inclusive learning environments I want to say thank you to our panelists um AC a fourth grade teacher at Brackett Renee a Pierce elementary school library and Justin a high school English teacher and Jasper an AHS junior we're all panelists at this event last night sharing their perspectives and answering questions with the 20 or so community members who attended the forum in person at the high school also these past couple of weeks we celebrated Martin Luther King birth Martin Luther King's birthday um the OMS eighth grade choir came on their day off that evening to um sing a song that's inspired by Amanda Gorman's poem that she recited at an inauguration and the AHS honors orchestra ensemble also performed works by an african-american composer and artist the MLK birthday celebration was fantastic I don't know why it's in my update twice but I thought it was worth mentioning twice clearly um kindergarten registration is going to launch our launch goal is February 1st that is a launch goal it may not be February 1st we're working out the final details on that date we have a brand new registration team um new staff running this effort so it's their first time we want to make sure that we have everything really ironed out and perfect in the forms before we launch them we will be making sure that we message this um a lot to all of our families so that they can let anybody who they know has a kindergartener coming in know that kindergarten has launched we'll put it on the website um we'll put it in our newsletters and we will be sending a snail mail to all of the families that we know have an incoming kindergartener as well um there will be extended welcome center service hours through the month of February and we're looking to do visits at school sites too to make it easier for families to get to us if they need help with k registration or filling out any of that paperwork and your enrollments are in your materials I'll happily take any questions any questions I went to the LGBTQIA forum last night and Dr. Ford Walker also was there uh she uh offered welcoming remarks and this this was a spectacular event this was really well done by uh staff members and a student who were open and honest about their experiences with us and uh uh we're personally revealing in their experiences both in life and in the Arlington public schools and it was well worth uh coming uh coming out to to see um and I think that the folks who participated in that need to be commended any other questions comments okay uh next we have update okay we now need to take a vote to acknowledge the town appropriation amount for the fiscal year of 2025 um can I can someone make the motion that this is what we have to do every year to satisfy whatever I know Michael's not here I was just checking and it's it's off by a few thousand from who was in the last version of the long-range plan that I have I checked it and came up actually let's make sure this is the number that I thought we had I had checked it okay if you've checked it then fine maybe this came from the deputy town manager directly this week yeah it was the the number of students was different okay and so that made and I checked that it worked out okay okay so um does someone want to make a motion to acknowledge I move that we acknowledge the town appropriation listed second okay any other comments or questions as always this is the first step of the work knowledge and the number and I'm not worried that we might be off by a couple thousand because oftentimes something will happen that will that will adjust that recognizing the fact that we see this as a floor not a ceiling okay anything else um okay so this will be a voice vote uh we we need roll call I'm sorry that's what I meant roll call that's what yes it's Morgan okay Ms. Goodelson yes Mr. Cardin yes Mr. Thielman yes next yes Mr. Schluckman yes and I also vote yes so that's unanimous next we have the consent agenda all items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion there will be no separate discussion of this item of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item may be considered in its normal sequence warrant number two four one eight one dated one twenty three twenty four for seven hundred and eighty two thousand seven hundred and twenty one dollars and seventy two cents Arlington school committee minutes of January 11th 2024 so moved second all in favor and this is a roll call vote Ms. Morgan yes Ms. Goodelson yes Mr. Cardin yes Mr. Thielman yes Ms. Xen yes Mr. Schluckman yes and I also vote yes now we have subcommittee and liaison reports budget we are meeting on Wednesday at nine o'clock to go over FY 25 budget okay committee regulations nothing to report okay we sent you a couple names for we need we didn't it should have happened and it did not okay I will send them later we we approved them being sent to you last time so okay curriculum instruction accountability Ms. Morgan okay facilities no report policy and procedure we had an extensive meeting yesterday I will I will have a whole bunch of stuff for first read next meeting a lot of that is either some technical revisions to gender neutralize some of our policies the other is some technical changes to bring policies up to current standards from MASC plus a couple more major policies so I will circulate a draft copy of the minutes and the and the policies the committee as soon as I get the minutes done okay Arlington high school building committee workers on schedule and Dr. Holman talked about the great opening day we had great tours we had on Saturday and many thanks to all of the volunteers who helped out especially there's a great group of students that were really helpful yeah that's I know that there's been people to who want to us to have another one like every month or something and I just wanted to point out that that event took a spear probably a week of man hour beforehand to plan plus a number of days in advance of that plus the time that the principles put into it and the administration plus all the volunteer time so it's not something that we can just go and it's we're not just opening the doors of the school and saying here come on in we're opening it but in a way that we can keep the building safe protected and in good shape and to do that requires a lot more effort than than I think people are aware of so yes I echo the thanks for the volunteers but also oh and we are we'll have a tour a video tour of the new part of the high school up on the website very soon and I know we've got the draft one coming through the communication subcommittee so if you miss the tour you can look for that and you can see some of the spaces here in explanation yeah one thing I kind of if you if any the public's interested to for updates you can just go to Arlington High School AHS building.org and there's a blog there's videos there's plenty of information to get updated on the project liaison reports yep on Monday January 29th the Arlington Education Foundation will be hosting its annual innovation showcase at Punjab Dr. Ford Walker will be the guest speaker live music small plates cash bar a suggested donation of $50 and you can register in advance at the EF website or you can stop by on Monday at Punjab and I hope committee members will come it's a really lovely evening any other ways I'm reports okay I'm going to report on one the I attended with Dr. Holman a it's a video conference for the influence 100 run by the Center for Strategic Initiatives which is a program that two of our employees are going through miss pierre and madam here yes and so each quarter they have both the enrollees and also the superintendent and a school committee member is it a chair or is it a school committee member a school committee member yeah attend the the conference and so there's people from Bedford and where else Groton and a whole bunch of different towns and so we attended this just a couple weeks ago and I just want to say it's really it's really an interesting thing they're talking about how to what they're trying to do is help improve the number of people of color in positions of authority in districts but also improve the experiences that the students and other staff were having and they're trying to teach the the enrollees how to help make that happen and also influence I think the superintendent and the school committee members and so I've attended just like the second or third I don't remember I can't remember either yeah anyway so and it's just it's a really interesting program I'm glibber participating in it and I wish there was something more with it that we could share out to the full school committee I think not to put them on the spot miss pierce listening in that we could potentially have them share a little bit about the experience at some point surprise but it is a program designed to increase the representation of people of color in the superintendency specifically and so it is a superintendent building professional development opportunity but it's also as members of a cohort they have the opportunity to do action research to influence the district itself in its equity and racial equity efforts in particular so it's a wonderful program that I've been part of this is a now in my second district it's supporting cohort members and it's it's had an impact a lot of people who have gone through the program have become assistant superintendents or superintendents or district leaders in other systems and are increasing the diversity of senior leadership in districts across the state so I don't think we want to put miss pier on the spot this time we don't have to right now yeah we don't have to right now but I think yes it'd be nice to put that on the agenda and at some point in the future so um okay that was my raise on report any announcements okay future agenda items seeing none um we are now going to go into executive session do we need to exit it no okay so we will be exiting um from executive session we're going into conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or non-union personnel or contract negotiations with union and or non-union in which you've held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or good occasion in which you've held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect collective bargaining may also be conducted and this is regarding the arlington education unit a negotiations discussions so can I have a motion to go into executive session so move second okay um and this is a voice vote uh miss morgan yes miss gettleson yes mr cardin yes mr fielman yes the zekstern mr schlickman yes and I also vote yes so we are now going into executive session and we will not be returning