 Seeing a presence of a quorum, I'll call this meeting of the Amherst Polynesian School Committed Order. We are currently being taped for future broadcast by Amherst Media, and we're going to – our first order of business is going to go into the Executive Session. If we do so successfully, then we'll be gone for a little bit and then back a little bit after that, because we will enter back into meeting after the conclusion of the Executive Session. So I move, and according to the National General Law, Chapter 38, Purpose 3, discuss strategy with respect to litigation, Hustine v. Amherst Polynesian School Committee, and I do so because as Chair, I find that an open meeting may have detrimental effects on the litigation position of the committee, and we do have plans to return to open session – the conclusion of the Executive Session. Is there a second? Second. It's been moved and seconded by Ms. McDonald. This requires a roll call vote, so I will start on this end of the table. Cassin's an aye. Or Donna's aye. McDonald's aye. Nakajima aye. Spitzer aye. Demley aye. Menino aye. Okay. We're voted to go into Executive Session. Oh, so we'll have an aye. Okay. It is unanimous. We are in Executive Session. Thank you. I know. Okay. So we're going to call to order again, or recall to order an open session. This meeting of the Amherst Pellum Regional School Committee, it is now around seven minutes of something like that. And the first order of business approval of minutes of April 9th, 2019. I don't know if people have a chance to take a look at them, hopefully, if they have any corrections that they would make to these minutes. Mr. Domen. Just one on its item G. That's towards the end there. Six G advocacy. Six G advocacy. Sentence Mr. Demley suggests the committee advocating against the governor's proposed change to the baseline formula for funding charter schools. I recall I was talking about charter reimbursements. You are. So schools to reimbursements. Okay. Do we have that? Yes. Awesome. The other, I'll entertain a motion to approve. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Move by Ardonia, seconded by McDonough. Any further edits, changes, discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor? Please signify by raising your hand. And motion carries unanimously. Which is now eight to nothing. And the next item of business is announcements and public comment. Are there announcements on the committee? Seeing none. We'll go to public comment. There isn't presently, for the purposes of those watching later, there isn't anyone in the audience. Anyone else in the audience? So seeing no public comments, we'll close public comments, and we'll move on to subcommittee updates. Are there any subcommittee updates? I know we're doing a policy, a couple policy items later, but that's for Demley. Just very brief on CPAC. I'm reading this Friday, 9 to 1030 at Summit Academy. I mentioned this before last time, but for anyone watching this on tape, if you have interest in supporting the school's special ed services, we're looking for new board members, and that could be a very micro volunteer opportunity. So if your kid has been done right by special ed services in our schools, then it comes to you, or not, if you just want to support special ed services, come to CPAC and see what we're all about. Okay. If somebody wants to fight city hall, come on in. Absolutely. So it's a great group and great organization. Did she get a chance to put it in your superintendents we left it? The part about recruiting new CPAC members, so I was waiting for language I think I was going to receive. Oh, from the CPAC? I thought, yeah, was I going to get that too? I feel awkward talking about this in public, but I thought you were going to get that on. Well, I guess I was pushing it because I thought it was a good idea to get it to do that. Oh, I agree. I almost touched my face. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Any other subcommittee updates? Seeing none, we will move forward to the superintendents update. Is there something? I did not, I apologize, I did not get a written one. That's okay. But I will do, it's relatively brief. A number of the things I would typically share tonight are actually in the bottom part of the agenda, so I'll be brief. So this afternoon I taped the next episode of Window of the Arps, it featured Anastasia Morton who is student leadership specialist, the family center and high school student who I've known since he was in kindergarten or first grade at Crocker Farms. So it was really nice, but really the focus was around student leadership in high school and particularly for those who may not be, who may need additional support and that leadership doesn't have to be, yeah, I've got all my grades and all these other things together and I do leadership on top of that, it's really about how all students have opportunities to participate in leadership and broadening that base. So they were great, it'll be a really good episode and that'll be out probably within a week. So thank you to Amherst Media for that work, Jody was off building another meeting, otherwise I would have seen him twice today. So principal search update just will have, by the end of the week we'll have announced the person who has been selected to be the principal of the high school. So by Thursday we'll have that out, but certainly if not Thursday then definitely by Friday. I know lots of people are anxiously awaiting that result, the completion of that search. Last Saturday. So just a quick question, if you could just remind the committee, there were two or three interviews, right, and do you have a sense of how many people attended those interviews? Sure, so there were, yeah, I'm sorry, there was three finalist interviews and it was hard because we did them one, which we've done before for these kind of roles, one night after another just because three people can't, people can't stay that long to see all three people. But the attendance was pretty strong, it wasn't the same every night, but it ranged between 20 and 40, the different nights, 20 low, 40 is the high. And we got, Miss Cunningham and I have read every single piece of feedback and that was, you know, there was also student feedback, came from sessions that each candidate had rotated through the lunches at the high school, got to meet students as well as a faculty, an opportunity for faculty to meet each candidate right after school. So we got plenty of feedback, which was great. Okay, thank you. Yeah, sorry about that. We had Leverett Town meeting on Saturday, which we appreciate the support of the Leverett community that went very quickly, I think it was the quickest, smoothest we've had in less, less five years or so, and broad support for the solution for the assessment methodology as well as the total budget amount. So, Miss Kanzinski, thank you again in absence for her presence, she did not run and they had an election, they do it at the town meeting in Leverett, so they had an election but they'll reorganize their elementary committee with the regional rep designated, I spoke to the chair of their elementary committee and she said, you know, they'll get on it at their next meeting, so we'll have a full complement soon before we lose other people, I suppose. Next Monday, which is the sixth, just two events, one is that the morning, albeit at RIAC, it's the last RIAC meeting of the year, Racial and Balance Advisory Committee, and our charge is to write a formal report to the commissioner, that's like technically our charge through the formation of the group, just talking about how we feel there's been a lot of action on the eastern part of the state about METCO, so that's grabbing a lot of our attention right now and potential changes to the METCO program and how we feel about that, so that'll be, I know, part of that, but we'll also talk about broader equity issues as well. That afternoon, the sixth, that Monday at the middle school auditorium will be the CPAC Starrs event, so the Starrs event, this is third, fourth year, I'm looking at Mr. Demling. I think it's, yeah, third or fourth, I don't know. I think it's four. Okay. And CPAC, basically the way it works is that anyone in the community, students, faculty, families can acknowledge someone and suggest someone who's made a huge difference in the life of either individual or collective group of students with special needs. So last week, I know Dr. Brady traveled all around the schools with presenting the awards and surprising staff members in front of their students, which was great. Mr. Demling is one of the MCs again, I believe, and he does a wonderful job, but it really is a special event. We don't have enough events in general where we acknowledge the great work of not just staff, I mean, primarily staff, but also fellow students as well as community members. So everyone's welcome. So four o'clock, middle school, library upstairs, and we hope to see some of you there. I think that's, given the other items on the agenda, that's my update for tonight. Okay. So I guess with the chair's update, I would just say that there, it's, we, as you may recall, in the four-time meeting, we had a broad agreement from the four towns to have a two-year regional assessment agreement. And I just think the committee should be apprised that it hasn't taken more than a couple of months for there to continue to be rumblings in various places around what the, what people in the town, what feedback people in the town are going to be giving their select boards and finance committees and town meetings around the regional assessments. And so based on everything I think I've heard and that the superintendent's heard and the minus directors heard, it looks like things are going to still move forward in all the towns with affirmative votes. And we have still have support, you know, as was agreed from the select boards and finance committees. But if you hear something, actually what I would say is this, if you hear something from a neighbor or a friend or something pops up in the Gazette or online about funding for our schools and what the budget's going to look like and all that, all the people who are at the four town meetings are still working together collaboratively and hard to try to make sure that we see through the agreement we made. People recognize this is a really difficult thing to do in that it impacts the bottom line of all of our towns, you know, very significantly. So nobody likes property tax increases, nobody likes tight budgets. And it's why we have the advocacy item, among other reasons later in the discussion because there's a real problem we have with school funding in general. So my, you know, my thought is that if you're, if you're a resident out there and you're listening, I really feel deeply that our committee and the other committees we've worked with get the idea that we're under a lot of fiscal strain and take seriously what we're asking taxpayers to contribute for our schools. And but it's, but it's hard. But as I said, everyone's hanging together right now to fulfill the commitment that was made at the four town meetings. And we'll see how it goes. But I think it's a preview. Honestly, what, what I said to all, to all, to not all of you, some of you, after the meeting at the regional four town meeting, I said, what, you know, this is just going to come back up again by next December, January. We'd love it to your agreement, but I just don't buy it. I don't believe that's going to happen. And this is sort of, to me a reminder of the fact that it, that whatever, you know, Sean and Dr. Mr. Mangano and Dr. Morris can think of and whatever we can do together to sort of continue an affirmative conversation with the other towns, it's probably a good idea to do just so that we can maintain the good feeling that we're starting to develop with a little bit about how we can all hang together in support of our schools. But it could be a rough ride. I don't know if you had anything you wanted to add. I think, I think you captured. Okay. I'll just continue to update the committee after each town meeting about how it went. And if there's a unforeseen development, we may have to get back together to talk about it. Right. Okay. Cool. So speaking of this, we're staying on financial issues. And is this a mistake that you're actually on early in the agenda instead of for the sun's out? It's bizarre. It's like I'm usually dark back. Now, what's the sun in our budget? Yeah, it's in good shape right now. So this is the quarter three budget report for the region. After nine months, the Amherst Pellum Regional School District budget is projected to finish under budget due to savings in tuitions and health insurances. There haven't been a tremendous number of changes since the last quarter report, but I'll point those out as we go through. So payroll is tracking over budget by 103,000 due to the following. The middle school principal model, as we discussed last time, was more costly than anticipated because we went from a self insured trust fund to Maya, the support we used to get for business office staff and HR staff from the health insurance trust fund that went away. That's the second bullet point. So that was a $27,000 cost. Additional ELL support, 0.55 FTE totaling $42,000. So that was hired. I think that was in response to some of our life needs at the high school and middle school level. That one's a new one since last time. Special Education is a group in terms of, in the payroll section, is $176,000 over due to the following. So this is sort of a subgroup of payroll. We have some unfilled positions which are promoting savings, $141,000. Those positions are instructional coach, a BCBA position and a physical therapist position. The instructional coach, we just, we changed the model, and if you remember that's actually a position we caught in next year's budget. The BCBA and physical therapists were positions that we weren't able to fill early on, so we contracted those out this year. We have a new, this is new from last time, a new part-time adjustment counselor at the high school, $37,000, and that's in line with an ad to the next year's budget. So it's started early, and then it's in next year's budget as well. At the elementary level, we heard about this. We shifted the IDA grant around this year. Instead of funding salaries, we're funding tuitions. So a shift of approximately $230,000 of employee salaries that were on the IDA grant have come back to payroll. So payroll's over budget, but it's sort of not really over budget because we moved this $230,000 off of the grant, and then shifted that down to the special ed tuition section. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. And then also, we have three additional pair educators at Summit Academy for a total of $50,000. And then the last payroll item, staff turnover, savings about $170,000 with the staff turnover savings and some other adjustments that have happened this year. We've had a number of sort of high level positions that have just turned over and shuffled. Most noteworthy is the high school principal, facility director, high school assistant principal positions, and the dean positions. And then we've had a number of leave absences that have been filled to temporary staff as well. So that's the payroll section. Going to expense accounts. So special education is tracking under budget due in large part to a couple of things. So the first one is our special education costs for our district tuition actually rose this year, even though it's a little contradictory because it's under budget. They actually rose this year and we believe we are eligible for what's called extraordinary relief aid. So it's a part of circuit breaker where if your costs rise, I believe it's 125% from the year before you get this additional one time reimbursement. So that additional one time reimbursement has been calculated and it's factored in here. You just used the phrase, we believe we're eligible. When will you find out if we are? So we've submitted everything shows that we're eligible. Now we're just waiting to see if it depends on what other claims are out in the state. We believe we're going to get something. If we get the full amount depends on what other districts have for claims on that. Then in addition, so those funds, if we get the full amount, it's about $140,000. We did get that once before about three or four years ago. And then as noted in the payroll section, $230,000 of expenses have been shifted out of the tuition section onto the IDA grant. So we had the payroll came off the IDA grant went into payroll and then these tuitions came out of the general fund and went on to the grant. Again, the reason we did that was it frees up more of the grant when we don't have to pay payroll from it because we don't have to earmark the retirement portion. So overall expenditures have exceeded the original budget, but due to the extraordinary relief aid and this grant adjustment, it appears under budget. Enrollments in charter schools, vocational schools and other public schools are much lower than expected. Shown in the charts below, this is mostly the same from last time. So we're under 12 charter school students from what we budgeted. We had 93 in FY 18. We projected 107 when we did sort of the cascade of students going up a grade level and then estimating what seventh grade would look like and basically we stayed pretty flat actually with FY 18. One of the bigger surprises is if you look from eighth grade and FY 19 to what we projected for ninth grade and FY 19 to what actually happened in ninth grade, we're about four students less. So there's definitely this movement back to the high school from eighth grade to ninth grade when kids, when charter school students go to that ninth grade level. And we've seen that a couple of years in our row now. So we're somehow trying to quantify that and factor that into our projections. Vocational enrollment, we saw another large drop. So we had 40.65 students in FY 18. We budgeted 39 in FY 19 and we actually only have 31 and a half. Again, we saw a much lower ninth grade enrollment and then we saw some other grade levels. Some students come back to us or leave the vocational school altogether. And then lastly to complete the trifecta, school choice also came in lower. We had 24 students in FY 18. We rolled that over for FY 19, stayed flat and our actual number as of Q2 was 18 students. So that came in six students under budget. So there was one little, you'll see this in the budget transfer section. There is a little bit of additional savings in the tuition section, which is called other programs. The charter tuition rate came down a little bit from what it was in Q2. It's a preliminary rate in Q2. They give us an actual rate for the Q3 report. And so that tuition rate came down a little bit. So there's a little bit more savings there. Can I ask a dumb question? I should already know the answer to this and I don't, so I'm just going to ask it. As embarrassing as that is to say. So we have, if you anticipate a certain amount of whether it's choice, vocational or charter, so it could be any of them, enrollment, and then we come under that enrollment amount and we have money, excess money than we thought we'd have available. Because we're a regional district and not, I know in an individual town, that money would likely roll back into the general fund of the town into the year. Are we able to bank some of that money? Yes. And I'm asking that question because I kind of wouldn't want to be, I mean, I understand you're going to figure out how to figure out what the enrollments are going to look like in the future. But one of the challenges would be if you get it wrong, like if you say to yourself, you know, this is definitely a secular trend and we're going to keep this thing going. And then all of a sudden it doesn't for whatever reason, beyond anyone's imagination, then like you're out of a lot of money. On the other hand, if you do continue a sort of a conservative estimate of projections and assuming it's not radical, right? Because you wouldn't want to be overcharging the town for a lot of money. But if there was a little bit of a delta and you were able to bank it and then spend it forward, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So this like other accounts, any savings here, if it's not used for other other uses during the year, we're going to our END account at the end of the year. How do we budget the I mean, I knew we're, I guess the reason I'm asking this question, I knew we're also conservative about how we budget use of the END fund. Right. Yeah. So we'll talk about this a little bit. For FY 20, the use of the END fund, we ticked up a little bit because we knew we had these additional savings. Some of that's a one time thing that's going to come back down. But yeah, when we, so when we determine what we're going to use for the following year, END to support the budget, part of that's based on how this year looks and what we're going to put back into END. So yeah, these savings do get banked into our END fund. We're capped on that. So it's not like it's not like we can bank that and it can just grow and definitely we have to stay below the 5% for END. So we have to use basically anything we think we're going to be close to that 5% we have to use it. Interesting. It's going to be an END fund of stabilization account? Not exactly. It's a it's it's sort of like a town's free cash. But regional school districts are only allowed to have 5% of their operating budget and capital budget combined. So for us, it's somewhere in the 1.6 million dollar range is the the max we can have. And anything above that, if you had a surplus that exceeded that amount has to go back to the towns. Okay, so utilities are tracking under budget by $65,000 due to savings and heating costs. The surplus may grow as we anticipate further savings in our electric bill the spring from net metering credits. So we think we're going to have additional savings. This is the first time we're seeing what the net metering credits look like in the spring. So for the winter, the net meter credits kind of go away because you're not generating much electricity from the solar from the solar panels. So our net meter credits sort of flat lined. And now we're going to see what they look like as the as the months get warmer and April, May, June come around. So we think that number is going to grow a little bit as we go forward. Risk and benefits are tracking significantly under budget due to changes in health insurance enrollment patterns. The suspension of the health insurance surcharge and lower liability insurance rates and lower unemployment costs. So pretty much everything's trending well there. So you can see the snapshot below of health insurance enrollment. So we have 249 plans last October. We budgeted 251 for FY 19. And we dropped about 20 plans from what we budgeted. And in addition to dropping those plans, we shifted pretty significantly from PPOS to HMOs, which are less expensive. And all that's been factored into next year's budgeting, which is why next year's budget was in good shape. The surcharge going away six months into the year equates to about $200,000 of additional savings. So we have that sort of surcharge piece, which is roughly 10 and 20% of what we're talking about. We thought it could last up to two years and it went away after six months. So that's some additional savings. We also lowered our liability insurance because we did a competitive quote process. We did it in conjunction with the town. But we got a lower quote from our existing vendor, the one that we've had up until this year, and they got a lower quote from somebody else. So we actually have a different insurance provider right now than the town, which is sort of a pain at times because before we could call the same person, no matter what happened at any of the schools and now we call different people, depending on what school it's happening at. But it's worth it, I think, for the price. And then unemployment insurance costs are tracking $45,000 lower than expected, which is a little surprising because we did have a large number of cuts last year. So you would have expected the employment costs to potentially be at least average, but they're quite a bit less. And maybe that's the sign that the economy is doing well. But those costs are coming in less as well. So at this point in the year, the district is on track with expected savings, intuitions, and health insurances. And as the year progresses, more information will become available and projections will be adjusted accordingly. And then the next, so that's the expense side of the picture. On the next side, the next page is the revenue side of picture, which is always much more, much closer in terms of budgeted and actual. So you can see what we budgeted for revenue sources, our actuals, we're coming in about 0.08% higher than actuals. So we're right on track. Chapter 70 came in a little bit higher. Charter tuition came in lower, and that's the offset. So if our charter enrollment comes in lower, our expenses are lower, but then we get less revenue as well because the tuition reimbursement is lower. Our regional transportation aid came in higher because there was an effort last year after the budget was done to push that up. Our Medicare Part D is sort of a volatile year-to-year that came in a little bit higher. And then other miscellaneous revenue came in higher. That's always sort of, we don't budget for it because it's not a defined source every year, but we usually get something. So overall, revenues are on track. Any questions on the Q3 budget report? And the transfers are on the next page. So there's not quite as many transfers for the region because you actually approved sort of the big bulk of them during the Q2 presentation. So these are just some of the things that have sort of changed since that time. So there's some things that are just sort of projection adjustments, risk and benefits, that we're projecting a little bit higher costs there. Utilities, we're increasing. So there's overall savings in utilities, but after the second quarter adjustments, I think we assume too much savings. So this is adjusting that down a little bit by putting some money back in there and trying to figure out how to do that. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and adjusting that down a little bit by putting some money back in there until we see what the net metering credits look like. Student services, we have an increase in homeless and foster transportation. Same thing as the elementary level. It's really hard one to project year to year. We might have to have another conversation about that sometime because it's definitely growing costs in our budget. And there are some talks at the state level to provide additional funding for it, but it's just a hard one to budget for. Transportation, just a little projection about the cost, the region share of the accessibility audit, putting that into the facility department's lines. Payroll, 29,945 increase. So we've had a number of positions, particularly Custodial, that have been unfilled all year for a variety of reasons. And so we've had temporary staff basically working and they get paid out of the contract section. So it's a different section of the budget. English language education, our translation costs are up a little bit for contracted, contracting out translations. And regular education, we've bought some new risers and staging for the theater department. They had some old stuff that was not as needed to be replaced, essentially. So between these risers and staging and the auditorium seats, the theater department did pretty well this year. And then so those are the increases in the budget and then the decreases, control accounts. So many of those things were funded by what basically was in the reserve accounts, 118,000 going down. And then I mentioned earlier the charter tuition rate went down a little bit. So other programs were decreasing by 26,391. And so those increases and decreases offset and that's the proposed Q3 transfers. Just a comment, I think, more for the chair and for Dr. Morris. There was mention made about the student services and the increase in the homeless and foster student transportation. I actually would like to bring a little bit more at a future meeting about this program in our schools. I think we've heard from a recent meeting with legislators that a lot of communities might be concerned with the substantial increase that we're seeing as there are fewer foster families that are available to foster students and therefore the area of transportation has become a lot greater, meaning that there's now focus transportation related costs. So I think it would be worthwhile to have this conversation now before things we don't know what the trend will actually be but just to better understand the program that we currently have and how we might be able to help students that are in these situations. You mean like both homeless and foster? Both. Just very briefly we'll talk about this at the end, but homelessness was on the May 28th agenda and we could certainly, I think for what you said makes good sense of including that. Thank you. Any further questions on these? Just one question related, excuse me I'm getting over it cold. One question related to the extraordinary expense. So I just, I guess my question is just so I understand it fully. So it's great that we're getting these funds this year but I'm assuming that you said they're one time and it sounds like is the expense going to continue on next year and I'm assuming we've budgeted for the increased expense for next year and we're not assuming and we won't get an extraordinary relief next year unless we have new costs. So yeah, it's truly a one time sort of nice to have kind of thing but it is, we're not counting on it for next year's budget and those costs are now again that's not to say we might not have new placements that are concerned for next year but the ones that generated the extraordinary relief are factored in. One more. Just on the current FY 19 revenues the homeless transportation is going back to that it's blank is that but Yeah, so I have to look at last year, sometimes So what was that, because of your size an increase of about what was it, 25,000 I'm just curious about it might have got rolled into it might have got rolled into the regional transportation number we'll check that and I'll have to look at where our costs were last year but overall it's really small right now so they used to fund 100% of your homeless transportation costs that got cut down to about 30% of your homeless transportation costs so I'll double check that and if I need to put a number there I'll update it and send it out to you. Just curious about how to fake those. Yeah usually so whatever we submit on last year's under your report for homeless transportation we'd get that this year as a reimbursement. I mean I think I'm funny about this you always have to find an appropriate way to talk about how we're providing services and support for students and engaging with families so that you know you have a dollars and cents conversation but you're not treating people as dollars and cents but the reason I'm saying that only though is I still think getting a good for the committee to get a good picture of all of this on the 28th would still be a really good idea and we're going to trust you guys to figure out how to talk about it that reflects the compassion, concern, support and caring that we would want to show as a committee. Makes sense? You don't know where the students are coming from how can there be transportation costs for homeless students? Yeah so Homelessness is a status it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have shelter so when students are in that status we transport them from where they are. Does that answer your question? And the way it works technically is that homeless transportation in particular it's always a cost share between two districts so it's a cost share between the district where the student goes to school and the district where the shelter is located so whenever we get those bills we pay 50% essentially of the cost. Great. Anything further? I'd also entertain there's on the front page of the agenda there's a motion if one of us is prepared to make it under FY19 budget transfers Mr. Della? I move to approve the budget transfers between cost centers as presented by Mr. Mangano. Is there a second? Second. There is a third. I have a motion. Carries unanimously to nothing. Thank you. Oh, don't go too far. MSBA update on accelerated roof repair program arms roof my understanding is we are literally providing an update and not requesting any action by the committee at this point, right? That is correct. The key point is there may be a future action as anticipated but not today. So what we'd like to share just very briefly is an update we received about the accelerated repair program just for context if you may remember it was voted by this body a $3 million assessment to replace the middle school roof there was an additional motion that was passed around exploring solar as part of that process and so we received some information that Mr. Mangano will share from MSBA that we wanted to share with you and I think as we go through the next couple we may want to come back and have more in-depth conversation but this was something that was just we were made aware of at the end of last week and so we want to share where we are and continue the conversation throughout the spring. Yeah, so we actually heard this information from our friends at Shoootsbury as they were having a visit from MSBA on their roof project that the threshold for the age of your roof in order to be eligible for the accelerated repair program was increased from 20 years to 27 years and our roof, the age of our roof is about 25 years. So we haven't been given official notice that our proposal has been declined or deferred or whatever but we're expecting that after hearing that information and I did contact MSBA to confirm that that was the case and they confirmed that it was increased to 27 years. So that means we're unlikely to receive funding for the roof for this coming cycle and so the future discussion would be around do we push forward with the roof replacement project without the MSBA funds or do we try to wait a year and resubmit and in the meantime again do more patching to the roof we can complete the study about what additional cost there would be to strengthen the roof to support solar we can try to do some of those pieces in the interim while we wait to resubmit for the MSBA program and the MSBA program so let's assume the roof did come out to 3 million when it's all said and done the MSBA program would probably cover 250 and 60% of that in that ballpark. So you say we're roughly in year 25 of the roof? Yes. If we vote it next year is it anticipated that we wouldn't receive the award until we were in the year 27 of the roof? So do we accept it or do we really have to wait two years? So they started back it so if we flip back a year they had increased the threshold last year from 20 years to 25 years of age and they only accepted I think projects that were over 25 years last year and then to start this year they brought it back down to 20 at least for the original submission and then based on how many submissions they get they determine how far up they have to increase it so I anticipate next year they'll start back at 20 and then based on the volume of requests they'll have to increase it to something whether it's the 27 or maybe 25 or maybe they have to go to 30 I don't know it's hard to know when the responses was that the line item that funds the accelerator repair program was kept flat from the prior year so they didn't receive any additional funding to be able to clear out the backlog. So they don't mean like they changed the permanent program? No, no, no it's more a matter of they're making annual judgment calls and so the reason you don't want to apply next year is the judgment call might be 26 years and all of a sudden we're perfect. Any further questions? Sorry I'll just add the last year they bumped it to 25 years because there were 63 school districts that applied and they bumped it to 27 this year because they were 83 so I can only imagine that next year it'll be even more than that and Sheetsbury was a 24 and a half last year when they bumped it up to 25 and then we go now we're 25 and they bumped it to 27. That's kind of nice though because that means they've given you a year of breathing space for you to have little reason to have you know if they've gone to 26 next year it'll be all set and they'll be like oh darling now they've gone to 27 and one of the things we can bring back to the group is an assessment by the facility director and his team of how is it what can we wait essentially? I think that's what we really need and I think the other thing we really need is we need to understand what's the fiscal impact on the towns of eating though I'm just saying if you want to make an intelligible decision you got to understand like you know saving half over half the cost sounds like a lot of money so we have athletic fields and other stuff to fix too Thank you. Any questions? No other further questions? We move forward Oh and thank you very much. Thank you. You're done right? Thanks Sean. Yeah good night I'm still somewhat bright out. Superintendent Evaluation Tool discussion. Should I get the answer? Sure So I'm currently a member of the subcommittee on the superintendent evaluation committee so as planned Debbie Wismoreland was kind enough to put together what's going to be going out to everybody electronically for the evaluation of the superintendent this year we're presenting it today so people can have a chance to review it and provide any feedback if there's anything that needs to be changed or if you have any questions but the hope was I think that we approve it and then at the next meeting we'll have artifacts just confirming that presented by the superintendent and then we'll be using this tool in several weeks to do the evaluation. Would you like to get feedback on tonight and then formally approve it next time or do you want to? I think that makes sense to unless people feel comfortable so you'd accept the motion but I think we have time to wait and give people more time to review it Do you want to walk people through or does someone want to I mean so the Jesse sets out the different elements and we set the goals and then this is the tool that sort of connects those elements to the goals and I think one of the things to just point out here is the scale and again this is set by Jesse so I think where some of us in our evaluations feel like proficient it's not doing that great but here the proficient is actually quite a high standard to meet so I just want to remind people of that especially the public because I think sometimes in these types of evaluations you really need to look at how they define each scale define this scale This is a little different than last year in terms of how you score and things like that I don't believe so The only difference is in the exemplary where in prior years it always had you if you chose exemplary it was saying that Dr. Morris was able to like be the top dog in the entire state where now it really speaks just to the district where exemplary sometimes was actually hard to choose not because of Dr. Morris but because of what exemplary stated so it's much better this time Interesting. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think the state adjusted language and it's similar on the other educators not just the superintendent rubric but also on the teacher rubric, principal rubric that was based on, they went through a rewrite of all of those rubrics RIAC actually was a part of that and still has a gripe about one of them but not the part that Mr. Sullivan is raising so they did revisions five years later based on feedback It's so interesting because everyone I've ever talked to who's done this who's filled out an evaluation takes it super seriously but I have to admit what Mr. Sullivan was just talking about that standard of there's a marble statue being carved presently at the Harvard School of Education or something it reads as a very high standard not that you can't meet and match it but it's interesting to see it altered in a way that makes an exemplary sound extraordinary as opposed to unbelievably superhuman is somebody going to answer you? Yeah, I guess I was just looking at the definition it didn't jump out of me as much I guess as it did for Mr. Sullivan because it does still say proficient could serve as a model for practice regionally or statewide but I guess maybe it's the word regionally or statewide that is the difference that was yeah because the statewide is still there it is still this like paragon but it doesn't sound like before to me it really said a model for the entire state like you were the supreme telling you marble statue you bought it down just a shade that's right more like aluminum cast or something which is the key thing of the cycle anyway anything further? I'll ask when we're filling it out I usually put proficient what are we to do in terms of deciding through proficient and exemplary I mean I guess I don't know the difference one thumbs up or two thumbs well I think that's a really hard question because I think one of the challenges is what context you use to be able to decide the standard I think to me actually it's very interesting to me anyways last couple of years the description in there about able to model practice was an interesting bit of language because I hate to do this in front of you I'm not going to say anything specific but it's obviously about you is that there were some things where I could see Dr. Morris sort of working through something and I thought he did a good job and I thought it was even an excellent job but when I thought about how he was presenting what he was doing that I say this is like so rigorously thought through and structured and the way in which he did it is sort of all not could be a future model or is going on the path for being a model but it's just really good and then there are other things that we did I think it was reflected on the thing I submitted last year there are other things where I could literally look at how Dr. Morris organized things and say my god it already is literally a model for how other districts could execute this thing that's kind of easy right just thinking then through that structure but I think that's I think the standard you bring into it yourself like I don't know if we grade them proficient we're still giving them high marks correct I'm not going to put Dr. Morris in the spot on this I don't see any reason why a professional in this context couldn't go through a couple of years of getting all proficient marks and no major demerits and not be proud of the work that they were doing and feel like they were making excellent professional advancement as a superintendent and an individual I mean I think the challenge actually in fact I think when you look at the definitions one of the challenges you have and this is something that Espitzer was bringing up at the very beginning and I think it's a really important point which should bring up at the beginning is that if let's take an argument that Dr. Morris is doing on something you might feel the urge to give an exemplary because you think it's expressing enthusiasm as opposed to a strict adherence to the language that's on here and ideally there are other areas where there are boxes where you can provide written comments where if you thought for example I'm not trying to put you on the spot I'm just saying as an example if you looked at something and you thought Dr. Morris was really a solid superintendent he proficient but you were enthusiastic about something he did there's a place you can put that in and make a comment of the way you handle X, Y, and Z I thought was really, really terrific and by the way it also doesn't prevent you because we did this last year of writing in your proficient in an area and then writing in the comments but by the way as I'm looking forward the next year there's this, this, and this where I feel like that could be a clarification I sort of remember last year that if you gave them a exemplary rating we had to put a narrative in a box as to why we an exemplary rating is that the case you share anything but proficient is required to you have to give a response as to why but it doesn't prevent you from making a comment that's proficient you have to make an explanation if you do the others but if it's proficient you can still make a comment about your reasoning or thinking and obviously this is where I'm sure you remember from last year that pile of artifacts is like really, really dense and there are links and everything and if you I'm sure everyone did but I'm just saying if you take the time there's like gobs and gobs of stuff to look through and to reason through and make your own judgment it was probably exhausting this topic are there comments that people want to make or Edison that also wants? Since this is the fifth time for me that I just want to remind the committee and also the public that we chose what to grade the superintendent on in the fall and we have to stick to what's on here there's no freelancing and we're not looking at anything but what is on the evaluation which corresponds also I mean I should say if you do your job it corresponds to what submitted the artifacts meaning literally there's a correspondence to the body of evidence you submit the instrument you've developed the goals that were set earlier and then that's the focus right you should help me briefly I appreciate the committee that all the work the subcommittee has done builds on the work of the previous subcommittee which has gotten us to a really excellent place in terms of having a tool we can all use I think it's really interesting this discussion that I don't think has a definitive answer about the evaluation tool can get so quantifiable and try and identify exactly what proficient and exemplary means but at the end of the day it's up to our personal interpretations of how to apply that and we have a lot of freedom to do that it's our evaluation it's a public facing document and I thought one of the more enlightening things of the evaluation process last year was seeing how different members approach that and how the sum was greater than the constituent parts so it's interesting how you can try and quantify it but at the end of the day there's this I wouldn't say like a special sauce about it but there is some sort of creativity personal approach to it by the way forgive me I don't know why I did this since we were asked a question around how to make these judgments I thought I'd offer an answer at least on my perspective but the reason I looked around the table is because reasonably speaking we could have eight different this per table eight different views on how to do that within the framework that we are given and that's obviously very appropriate and actually I should remind people of what you I think hopefully already remember is that we had also previously agreed that when the summary evaluation document is done at the end one of the things we're trying to do is even as we're following sort of the numerical sort of mean or how it reaches different grades numerically we talked about trying to make sure that we included a description of the range of responses and a sort of a coloration of some of the views that were submitted so that even though obviously Dr. Morris is able to read every single evaluation and I'm sure he does even the summary document is not intended to wash out the diversity of this group but is genuinely trying to pull it all together and encompass it which I think is a good thing even better we already agreed to do it so that's what we're going to do yes, let's cast and send and then Ms. Agnes. Thank you this is great and I feel like we're sort of now really hitting our stride in terms of setting the goals at a good time during the year early in the year I wonder if going forward the superintendent evaluation subcommittee could consider sort of as soon as the goals are set starting to compile this artifact so that during the periodic superintendent goal updates the committee could sort of think about those updates in terms of this language that they're going to be evaluating on later in the year so that's just very ingrained and familiar there should be a suggestion. Ms. Agnes. I think it's a great idea and I also just wanted to check in on the so looking at the hand up committee got for proposed agenda topics we have a superintendent evaluation artifacts presentation May 14th we haven't yet voted on this tool so are we then thinking that we would vote on that tool on this tool on that date in addition to receiving the artifacts I guess we could potentially do that but we could vote today or if people are one more time I think we could wait and I realize I may be speaking at a time. Well thankfully you are I'm not going to nod my head this direction sitting on that. I'm just looking back to the minutes of the last meeting and we had said that May 14th we'll share artifacts and vote on the evaluation instrument so that was the original plan and people are still thinking about it. I guess I'm saying I'm happy to vote on this tool tonight I feel like we've talked about it before and it's a great you guys have done a fantastic job putting it together I don't see any reason not to vote it and then that hopefully gives Ms. Westmoreland time I'm looking over in such a direction I'm so used to having Ms. Westmoreland over here give her time to upload the tool and fix any tweak it if necessary So under progress was the order you can't make a motion after you talk but I can recognize someone right now to make a motion Would you like to be recognized? I would like to be recognized I would like to move to approve the 2018-2019 end of cycle summative evaluation report tool as presented to the committee tonight. Is there a second? It's been moved by Ms. Adonis, second of this meeting I was in need for the discussion. Seeing none all those in favor signify aye It carries unanimously nothing By the way, going forward Ms. Spitzer is going to be chair of the subcommittee You know the creature! She'd be Ms. Westmoreland at all the hard work Policy JICFC student-to-student harassment third read possible vote there's a motion in the packet Is there any presentation around any changes or are there any other changes or are we sitting on this? I can speak to this and anybody else from the subcommittee if you want to jump in if I leave something out just to give a little bit of background we started this I think even before my 10 months a year ago and then it took us a long time to organize our policy subcommittee and so we've been looking at this the last time that we talked about this at the regional the full committee we had questions about other classes or a population that we've wanted to specifically call out or not call out in this particular policy and we had questions around that we've since gotten the legal written legal advice on this particular policy which is also included in the packet in which we as the subcommittee reviewed it our last meeting at the beginning of this of this month we opted to go with the attorney's recommendation on this we actually even so since the last reading the only change that we've really made is that we've reordered the list of classes so that it's identical to what the attorney was recommending just to make it easier for ourselves to track and make sure that we had everything that they were recommending and hadn't left anything out the only clarification that we made that is different than their recommendation is so I'll just read the classes on the basis of race, religion, color national origin in parentheses, ancestry, disability criminal record or sex, gender and this is the addition that we made which is including sexual orientation and gender identity and I don't know if folks had a chance to read the attorney's recommendation but to sum it up was the recommendation was for us to not to detail individuals or populations that are not actually legally protected classes of individuals because we'd be affording rights that aren't specific there is no precedent legally for how to address that particular harassment and the advice was that in many cases the behavior is and can be covered under some of our other policies including our anti-bullying policy and so the recommendation was to address the behaviors that we want to address through those other policies and not through this policy did that cover the conversation? yes can I just point out one thing because when we had the open discussion last time I believe at least I was one of the folks on the committee who raised the issue around national origin and we had specifically a question of whether or not that included undocumented students and I just want to point out that part of the reason I was comfortable with not calling out explicitly undocumented students was because we did get the attorneys that are states, you know, although an undocumented student would like to be able to claim protection based on national origin so that was why I felt comfortable not calling that out I just wanted to share that because I think others on the committee were also concerned about that class of students so are there questions or comments? Mr. Solomon? I'd just like to thank Ms. Cunningham she's the one that brought this forward to the policy subcommittee two September's ago now great so if there are not at the moment any additional questions or comments would we entertain a motion as is present on the agenda? who else would be recognized? I'll move to approve policy J-I-C-F-C student to student harassment as presented is there a second? moved and seconded any further discussion? I guess one question I have is Dr. Morris is there any sense on how this would be distributed to the students or students being aware of it or is there any way beyond this sort of the negative way and then oh wait there's a policy about it I'm just curious how what happens next to something like this? Sure, so what would happen in this particular instance is we look at the guidelines that previously existed for the policy make any necessary adjustments and it would be reflected in the student handbook which is a typical way policies around student harassment we don't send an email like hey don't do this now it's not that you're suggesting it I'm trying to make a light moment what happens is next year's handbook would have the changes reflected in it I remember some policies at UMass that were never known to the students how often does the student handbook distribute it? it's every year it's edited and updated it's distributed at the secondary level for students who are new to the school which is the bulk of them are 7th and 9th grade students in the fall other students get an electronic link on our website as well so we try to conserve paper when we can but we also feel like when students enter a school they should actually have a hard copy of it just a follow up question for the subcommittee the last line of that paragraph that we were referring to previously about status as homeless or undocumented it says that the rights afforded homeless and undocumented students could however be protected under policies addressing enrollment and I was just curious if the subcommittee I guess sort of cross referenced those existing policies or had a discussion around how to strengthen those because I still even though I feel that I can vote for this policy with the changes as recommended by the attorney I'm still a bit uncomfortable I guess that we're not calling out these statuses as we had discussed in our previous discussion I think they're critically important to come around to making sure that we are highlighting and strengthening if necessary or if we can existing policies as the attorney recommends that would make me feel better about that so I don't know if you did discuss it or if one could say will you look into it yeah well we didn't look into the policies coming out of this related to enrollment what we're finding is that when you start touching on policy it leads to potentially a whole bunch of other policies and I would just like to say that I shared your concern about calling out my document especially because at least Amherst we consider ourselves as a sanctuary town or city I'm not sure which one to use now but I would welcome the chance to do that in the policies of committee if others would be interested in it I think it's something for the larger committee to have a conversation about I think we'd want instruction from the larger committee that yes we want to call out these classes if it's undocumented or if it's another class because it does take it's a bit of taking a step outside of where there's precedent to do at least a substantial precedent to do with this anybody here who is also on the subcommittee feel free to add on but I think we kind of felt like the subcommittee didn't have the power or didn't feel like we had the authority to go ahead and decide yes we want to protect this class of folks and we're going to call it out so I think we'd want to make sure to have feedback from the broader committee before we made any big changes like that I will say we did look at because of that reference from the attorney and we talked about that and looked at the behaviors there we did not look or discuss the enrollment policy that doesn't specifically address harassment which is the topic of this particular policy as I recall but building on what Ms. Spitzer just said is one of the things that we have on our docket and I was wanted to lead into that was to go through our entire policy book and classify some it had been done I think a couple years ago sort of detailing all the policies that just listing them out and when they were last updated or looked at and sort of set our own our policy subcommittee policy handbook for how we wanted to approach these and how we make decisions about which ones we're going to be reviewing and revising because it's a massive massive undertaking and in theory it's something that we're supposed to be doing every year which is just impractical it's so I think Ms. Spitzer referred to it as a Pandora's box and it really is and it's hard to sort of line your way through it but we did look at to answer your specific question about the subcommittee policy which is referenced in this anti-harassment policy and we can talk about taking a look at the enrollment policy as well if that's what the full committee would like us to do just very briefly I haven't been to these policy subcommittee meetings so I'm commenting myself I'm not commenting at all for any connection to those subcommittee meetings but kind of the two cases I know relatively well both from California are sort of an undocumented status and there's kind of one really well known one and the second is that often bullying goes hand in hand in those situations so I think reviewing that even if it's just not to bring to the full committee but just to make sure and it seems like you already have done that because there's been ones where even it doesn't have to be that a student is I'd say this well it can be the perception or the intent of the harasser around national origin if in fact the student may not be from national origin that's different from the victim and the harasser may have the same national origin but if there's a perception of a difference that's enough to justify harassment claim which makes a lot of I mean as somebody who had my national origin questioned when I was young in the Amherst School District as an ex of minor bullying of course as a matter of fact some of the most obvious harassment that happens against people based on their ethnicity or race is based on that kind of ignorance the although the interesting thing about undocumented students which is interesting for the school committee and for the district is that from from our perspective we don't ask students about their documentation status and so there's an interesting element to which you have you have anti-bullying and you have concerns about people being harassed which is a different thing than the idea that the district would take an interest in determining whether I mean if you know what I'm getting at if you go down this rabbit hole all of a sudden you're trying to figure out whether you're going to charge someone based on documentation status well you'd have to verify it wouldn't you which I'm setting aside the question whether the committee looks at this I think you have to set your own agenda to figure out what's on your plate and we have to get down I think it's certainly reasonable to look at some of these things but what it pulls me back to wondering is if before the end of the year because we could do this out of sequence we could do one meeting on homelessness and foster students and I don't want to freight this too much but the aspect of that conversation is actually about the socialization and the culture of students who may be either may be transient or may be undergoing very significant personal experiences that make it hard for them to focus on school make it hard for them to develop friends and to be feeling welcome and fitting into the environment that we have in our schools and so figuring out what we can learn about that aside from the policies how the kids do make and are they are there challenges that we are facing in fact around kids feeling ostracized or unwelcome it's one thing because you might feel anxious it's another thing if someone else is making you feel anxious and it would be interesting to know without getting into the details of the individuals it would be interesting knowing what the actual experience is and then the second thing is because we've actually annually been in an interest in what's going on with the immigration debate what's going on with families in our community what's going on with students in our schools and how we support them it might be a welcome time at some point before the end of the year to understand what have we done this past year how's it going, what's the experience are there changes or not are there changes in the experience that are occurring in our school where some perceived bias based incidents actually have occurred they occurred it would be interesting knowing what's actually happening and how are we addressing it and then a year ago one of the discussions we had is you sort of told the committee hey here's what we're doing this summer both to support families directly during the summer but also in preparation for the fall I think it would be awesome to hear that same question answered going into this summer makes sense are there anything else on this no we did no we didn't vote you want it you moved over I know I'm just looking around all those in favor of approving policy JICFC as presented please signify carries 8 to nothing unanimous okay policy JIC student rights and responsibilities meeting and discussion will not be going on tonight and this one I think definitely I'll tee it up but welcome because I know you had some conversations on this one as well so this was on our list of very old policies that we wanted to review again versus current recommended policies or similar policies this one was last looked at in 1983 so what we are proposing the edit that you have here is actually the MASC templated policy for students' rights and responsibilities so we and this is where we really went down the rabbit's hole of looking at all of our other policies many of these other rights and responsibilities that are outlined here we have other policies that cover this particular concept or activity or idea so we wanted to trim this down to one, eliminate that overlap of concepts that we didn't have to reduce the potential for conflicting statements in our interim policy handbook and really clean it up and tighten it up as we brought this forward into the 21st century so do you want to this looks really different from what was there, this was an old policy I think it was from the 1980s looks like 80, yeah, 80 degree so I briefly met with Dr. Morrison at that time I think we felt like so this policy tracks a little more closely much more closely the MASC template for example I think sometimes and Dr. Morris felt this way too if rights are more generally enumerated it's more protecting of them because when they're too specifically enumerated there could be a perception that if it's not enumerated that it's not a right and so since so many of these are addressed and other policies I do feel that this is a cleaner way of protecting the core rights of students if you were to summarize the major change you made to the document what would that change be? so we went through what was enumerated I would say the lion's share of those enumerated rights were encompassed by the new rights that you see enumerated here once through five so I don't think there was anything that was particularly removed exactly but they're just more broadly encompassed in these new bullets Dr. Morris so I think much like the earlier discussion with this one much more so than actually the first policy I should suggest would require a major rewrite to the guidelines that the district staff write in response to policies this is just very bluntly and the existing policy looks much more like a guideline and procedure than it does a policy so we would have some work to do about how to capture the kind of spirit of what is the text that's being lost into more operational language I'm not weighing in on good bad but just I think this substantially rewrite would require a substantial rewrite of guidelines so to follow that forward the introduction to this topic was that some of the elements most of the elements in here where they are more specific are referenced in other policies that have already been created but does that mean because this particularly is like a currently before this is voted a really detailed description of rights and responsibilities the existing sort of student guide cuts and pastes a lot of this and includes it as a framework and as an operational matter if we move to this more general statement of rights you would have to go through a more detailed process of enumerating the functionality of some of these elements in ways that might mimic the current language that's exactly correct just to care of my question sorry alright any other questions so is the I guess the committee I guess people on the committee know how to find that committee so if something burns awesome so what you can do is if something pops into your head after this meeting don't write it to all of us write it to Ms. McDonald and she our next subcommittee meeting is on Monday May 6th whatever that that's Monday so ideally before Monday I'm just saying so we're not because we have to move on no one seems to have anything to say but if you come up with something you know what they do with it cool 815 strategic planning update item 7G it'll be us right now early so I think it'll be brief because really this is just segwaying to the next meeting whether it be a much more substantial discussion and presentation I wanted to share and publicly thank all the members of the strategic planning team they spent over 30 hours working on this and I think just wanted to summarize some of the work and then to preview what's to come two weeks from now so it was all members of the strategic planning team contributed to receiving robust community feedback so there was electronic tools that went out and in addition to those tools they went to their micro communities and gathered feedback and brought it back some of that was paper and pencil some of that was just sharing the link so we got substantial feedback from the larger community about what they envisioned for the regional schools moving forward we participated in a multi-stage back to the future protocol to think about what the district wants to be then backtracking to where we are and telling the story of how we got from where we are now to where that place is and that sounds simple, it's incredibly complex to do that with a group of 30-35 people including students, community members, parents, guardians staff and administrators but it was a really robust activity to do because you have to sort of think big and then you talk about where you are now and everyone has different current realities it's not to say that everyone experiences exactly the same and that emerged as a major theme and thank goodness we have the young people because they were outstanding so I want to put a special acknowledgement to them we took those two pieces of feedback both the substantial probably eight hours of time doing that involved in that protocol the many hundred responses that we got from our tool, our electronic tool put those together and tried to figure out what are root causes of some of the challenges what are root causes that are the delta between where we are now and where we want to be in the future we did a SWOT analysis along the way which is about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and really where we are now as we have kind of the document you'll see two weeks from now has three major items so one is strategic objectives and those are a coherent group of overarching goals and levers for improvement so that's kind of like at the 30,000 foot level and that's what in this process we'll use objectives the second is our initiatives so if you have objectives you need ways to get to those objectives and the last is outcomes so how would we know if we were getting there and what we'll bring next time what I'll bring next time is a flow chart of those three items and how you have the objectives, the initiatives and the outcomes I want to be clear that the outcomes at this point are not in the smart format of goals really what the strategic planning team collectively decided is we'd like, they wanted me to bring that some of them may come two weeks from tonight just to hear like an outlet some of them ask if they could speak during a couple of comments which I assume they're members of the public and really have a discussion and then eventually an endorsement of those outcomes and then we would take the next step which is writing them into a smart format that could be kind of layered within a multi-year process but the group collectively felt like before we did that work we really wanted the school committee's endorsement because it didn't feel like wrong sequence to do that level of detailed work without the school committee being on board so we'll get that in the packet next time so people have at least a few days between when the packet goes out and the next school committee meeting to share that with you so that you can review it and ask any questions of me or bring questions to the meeting but that's sort of where we are so we'd like to present that next time and then have an endorsement or a vote and then we'll do that last phase of work of kind of itemizing the initiatives and the outcomes over a kind of three to five year period When do you think that would, what's the plan or window for when that activity would occur? The more specific smart goals Yeah, so we feel like we could have that done by the fall for sure if not sooner. Some of it depends a little on availability of people once we get to June it's a little harder to get the broad representation that we've had One more question So then, if we're I don't want to presuppose the next meeting but assuming to think of argument that the committee is excited about the different greater objectives that are set how would you view the interplay between the committee trying to work with you on superintendent goals as soon as the end of June and the desire to align those goals with these more specific smart goals? Yeah, I think that's very doable. I do think while not in a smart format I think it's pretty clear what the intent of the outcomes, the initiatives and the objectives are I think we can have that conversation next meeting but I do think it's really just laying out what might be the artifacts of the markers along the way but the outcomes themselves I think the group work collectively incredibly hard on making sure they're clear that we took out jargon, we tried to make them very accessible so everyone can know what we're talking about is more just how would you layer them out over the course of the next few years because not everything's going to be done in year one I think that's the kind of work that we need to do I would just say give that some thought as you're preparing for the next meeting because I think when we get to doing the goals for next year it'd be unsatisfying speaking my personal opinion it might be sure it'd be more than me it'd be unsatisfying if all of our goals were process goals I'm going to do a great job working on year one goals and I'll show you that by next year I'm making that stupidly up my point is that's an unsatisfying goal there's probably some of that stuff around completing process oriented outcomes and deliverables but then presumably some other goals would be more substantive like we've all agreed we want to go to the moon in five years what do we need to do, we need to by design a Saturn rocket in year one and so I'd rather move in that direction in terms of if that makes any sense sorry Mr. Edelman, please so I'm excited to see the results of the work I'm curious thinking about some of the issues that our chair was talking about earlier with the assessment method and some of the issues that we'll talk about soon with advocacy so what degree do you think the strategy sort of discussion and evolution of these long-term ideas has been affected by a potentially more resource constrained environment than what we've operated in because what I'm thinking is in future years or decades there's an order of magnitude or more decrease in funding to public education that seriously alters what can be practically achieved as opposed to academically wished for so just any general comments on that how that's gone in the discussion it's a real challenge I think you hit the nail on the head it's something that I've often had to be the unpopular person in the room to talk about that I actually wrote and I think you'll see this in the final draft a statement at the beginning that kind of speaks to at a broad level some of the fiscal challenges that we may anticipate moving forward I mean to be very blunt it was a frustration for members of the group who have really strong feelings and thoughts about how to improve our district and even if some of them are relatively resource neutral we may not be in a resource neutral environment and so it's I would say of great concern to the people who are involved in that group and as much as I can try to explain bureaucratic processes around regional assessment methodologies for our powerful 12 and 13 year olds and 16 year olds in the group they're thinking about their experience and how the good parts they want to keep and what they want to see different for the future for not just themselves but their younger literal and figurative siblings that are coming so it is in the document it is something that was a topic of discussion very frequently I think I should probably leave it there but that could keep going so this is obviously going to be on the agenda and we'll be getting into it much more deeply so if there's any other questions or comments we'll move on I think just one of the things to note I'm sorry that I wish I'd said is that these processes are interesting because you start at this meta level where you have hundreds of pieces of feedback and pages and pages of notes and then you feel overwhelmed this is like every student planning process I've ever been in and then you know the challenge is whittling it down to a finite number of things that the district can actually take on and I think what's worth noting is it's not going to be a 30 page document that we present it's actually the work was taking all that feedback all that work and actually saying no we need to focus on a set like five or six outcomes that we need to work on and so I just think what I'll have to do next time but I want to preview with the community is to share with the public that an incredible amount of work went into what we'll look from a text amount of text not a tremendous amount of text now the pages and pages which you'll see in the artifacts that I'll present of presentations and workflows and all that went into it but I want to compliment the group because one of the most challenging things to do is to focus on a finite number of things as complex organization as we have but you know the group and I collectively were a little concerned about how that will be perceived that people wouldn't spend so much time in what you end up with and this is from a very diverse group of individuals by diverse I'm talking in broad and specific terms that doesn't look like a 608 page facilities report that we got so I just promised them that I would preface even preview that with the committee and the community that the challenge has been actually so many good ideas and then what can an organization actually take on and be successful and there was a strong commitment in the group of not just trying to do everything but actually doing a finite number of things really well to move the district forward Is that ours? Just that final comment that you made about success I just want to I guess make sure that the presentation that we're going to be hearing has a significant portion dedicated to evaluation right and how we know we're going to be successful in working on undertaking because I think that you know one of the most exciting things about this undertaking to do a strategic planning process for the district is that we can get to a place where as a community we can agree on what it feels like to move our district forward I'm calling that a win but you know I think that part of the challenge is knowing when we've actually gotten to a place where we've made the progress that we want to make and so that we don't end up repeating a lot of the same things and not just this district but I think a lot of districts make and a lot of communities make in putting together a strategic plan are so focused on what's different from other work that's been done before and end up introducing something that's completely new you know that maybe doesn't necessarily meet the same kinds of goals that the community had set for itself previously and it just becomes very challenging to try to you know move like you said a really complex organization forward in such a way so I just want to make sure that we're paying attention to structure to balance to consistency across you know the work that's been done previously by the district and that there's a valuation measure being put in place to make sure that we can self correct if necessary you know and that we're not just putting something together for the sake of putting it together not that I would assume that about you know but I think you know what I mean I mention this enough times before absolutely great thank you so the next item is going to be advocacy Mr. Donies do you want to introduce the document Mr. Demling email this thing so I can read it yeah well it was a joint effort I think this is based on the last conversation that we had with the regional school committee around advocacy at the statewide level work that Mr. Demling has been doing and that I've been doing for the past couple of years engaging legislators and engaging statewide policy makers around you know a series of issues that are extremely important affecting both our budgets but also just you know kind of our vision for education in the future moving forward and so we have undertaken already a lot of different meetings with local elected representatives as well statewide representatives and have been participating in many different things including asking the town council to sign on to the promise act to pass a resolution not to long go around the promise act but there's still a lot more that could be done I think the challenge for this committee and I've talked with Mr. Demling about this is in coming up with a plan that feels doable that doesn't feel like we're overreaching and that still allows us to you know help have a say along with the other communities you know and we don't speak for myself in this regard I don't necessarily see our place as reading you know statewide campaign to change the powers that be or change the way things are I think there's a lot of other great organizations and individuals who are doing that kind of work but I do see us as being leaders and I think there's a lot of what we could be doing there so hopefully this plan helps us get to that point but I don't know if there's anything else Mr. Demling that you want to add to that I think that's perfectly well said I think you articulated exactly the bottomless thing that the more you engage in it the more there is to engage in and you know if you let yourself go you could be doing this 24-7 and leaving your job and family behind which we are not in a position to do so right so and yet we don't want all of our action to be completely globalized into just our own town and so how do you do something local that's appropriate at our school committee level collaborate with our colleagues potentially statewide picking our spots where we're leveraging opportunities so Ms. Cassinson, Ms. Ordonia and I were able to go to a legislative session that our Senator Joe Carverford and our representative, Mini Dome arranged a couple weeks ago Dr. Morris was there the superintendent gathering prior to the school committee and it was really interesting I really wish that every person member, select board member who advocates about assessment method could have been there because it was really interesting to hear perspectives from different regional school districts and other smaller districts talking about the unfund mandates the problems inherent with regional agreements and collaborating on budgets and so Senator Lewis and Representative Pysh, the co-chair of the Joint Committee of Education you know got to hear that and I thought it was interesting that there was certainly a theme of urgency but it was almost desperation on the point of some districts you've talked about in the coming years this is going to be difficult for our districts for other districts that are already there and it's really difficult and so on the one hand there's a lot of support for the Promise Act that we've endorsed and yet acknowledging that those unfunded mandates have to be taken care of as well so it's really pretty powerful experience I think so I was hinting earlier in the chairs report I think it may be difficult for our collective district now but my real point is that if there's not more done about it I think there's going to be a profound political backlash that's going to be it's going to be a beast that's hard for folks to handle in Boston because there are this is the weird thing about this conversation I'm glad I like the plan and I think the only thing I'd like to figure out is what we talked about item number four on the town council is you know I'd love to understand better what like the Mass Municipal Association is doing in particular because I still think this is a state and local fiscal issue that's masquerading is a school funding issue and I'm not sure to be clever about that there is a real problem with school funding but the reality is since most towns and most cities will always try to fund their schools as best they can they just don't have enough money but the point is they're going to shift as much resources they can into the schools that they possibly can which means they're then always starving other accounts or raising annual levy as much as they can so the reason why I keep saying this is going to be a major political backlash at some point is actually not because of the schools we already know our schools need more funding it's going to be because all the it's like my analysis of question two it's because all the town meeting members and select board members and finance committee members and town councilors and city councilors and mayors are going to lose their minds and start hitting this on a property tax state and local tax issue so to that point so I can share this link with the committee the Mass Municipal Association wrote an excellent letter that summarized exactly what you're talking about at least it's submitted to the Joint Ways and Means Committee but it talked about their recommendations for the budget and they really called out about the whole harmless districts, about the charter school formula about the charter funding about the unrestricted government aid and really put the context of public education into municipal funding and exactly what you're talking about how it shifts the burden to municipal it's a system that's designed to create income inequality so if the schools don't have the income then your schools suffer as a result so yes, I can send that link out that'd be great, that'd be wonderful so let's go through this item by item do you think that our committee or members of our committee should go to Boston or go to Springfield or split the difference and go to both do you have an opinion? because there's more than one of us but one is we could be in both places I think that the one Springfield is designed specifically for community members and other folks who are interested in these issues that are here in western Massachusetts so that they don't have to go to Boston I think that the choice is ultimately of course up to the individuals who want to go Boston is far Boston at five o'clock can be a little difficult too so just on that point I know I spoke this morning actually with the president of the APA Jean Fay and I know she is you all will receive an invitation for her because I know a number of teachers from our district will be attending the Springfield rally if that makes a difference for any of you I think that should actually if our community is in Springfield I'm not sure I'd be facetious I know we're closer to Springfield I'm just saying if our neighbors and colleagues are going to be rallying in Springfield and that gives a good reason to go to Springfield it's not a facetious point at all I think it's a strategic decision to make sure that western from Massachusetts is represented for the reasons that Mr. Denley mentioned that meeting that we had with legislators there were a lot of communities from western Massachusetts who are very passionate around the impact that these funding choices are having on their communities and so going to Springfield is a perfect way to represent that great for my benefit and the benefit of anybody watching at home is this the type of event that students or children would be welcome at yes, this is your answer correct so item number two submit op-ed or letter to Boston Globe and Daily Hymnshire Gazette and it sounds to me like which is great this is particularly focusing on some of the areas that we have need that would get lost in the discussion forgive me for saying this but lost in the discussion of the Promise Act I think to Mr. Demling's many points earlier absolutely however possibly we can capture the sentiment and the vibe in that room into words I think is what we would try to do I think we have kind of an opportunity in that last year some regional school districts really got the grassroots effort out of the transportation so we have made a number of contacts with school committees and other advocacy individuals across the state from regional schools and we know a bunch locally so this is potentially something we could maybe get multiple sign-ons on to if we weren't too formal about it maybe it's kind of up to the committee we all sort of know the general position but we need this commission recommended by the auditor Suzanne Bump a year and a half ago sort of laid out the Bible the study of all the issues it wouldn't be too hard I don't think to get some individuals and to have a letter that would sort of represent here are all the districts across the state who feel left behind who feel like we're not part of this discussion and have that kind of be the angle the hook but I just one thought any other thoughts I think it sounds good I think to me finding a way to do number two then to distill that in a way that connects the number four on this list makes enormous sense because logically whatever is written in two could also be sent as a bullet in four to the other groups as well as just an encouragement to go I mean I think we could say Boston or Springfield but I think we should just help people try to go to Springfield and most of us are going to go to Springfield so that again we can get some sort of en masse thing you look like you're gesturing with your pen just actively following along alright so do you do you want to work with me on a letter sure do you want to we'll talk later we'll talk tomorrow well just very quickly we suggested a deadline of May 13th but obviously it doesn't give us too long it's just a couple weeks but it's perfect timing for just having budget processes going through so hoping that that just means we have to work quickly yeah that makes sense no I mean we can connect tomorrow awesome alright I don't think we need to vote this by the way I think it's a good thing and we're agreeing to do some things since we've been on it's head it's all a good thing cool yes can we run by item three a little bit sure so on the back of that page it's kind of a summary of the chart and mitigation right yeah just to kind of couch what I've been trying to do with this this is one of those problems and Mr. Daniels we've talked about before how do you scope this so you don't become a statewide campaign chairman a particular issue right so this is kind of a summary of the proposed chart and mitigation change when we talked about this before this was just an idea on the governor's budget it sits past the house budget it's become more of a reality it's a living breathing dragon it might eat us all at the legislative meeting Senator Lewis he said he was surprised that it got into the house budget and so budget process tactically where we are is that the senate ways and means is now the process of crafting its budget it will then propose its budget with the senate it will then propose amendments and so we have this kind of brief window where these 40 senators or so have an opportunity to provide their input to the senate ways and means committee and so there's a lot of information about this particular issue with Senator Cumberford who's been extremely supportive about raising awareness not only did she part of the team setting up that meeting she forwarded this general information on to Senator Lewis to make sure that they got that so she's been great I think kind of the next sort of action step would be twofold one would be just sort of sharing this information with her so this is specific the top part of what the changes and then this is specific to our senate district to Senator Cumberford's district to sort of show her what that impact is and to just kind of formally or informally ask her please express your opposition to the senate ways and means committee and help us work with your colleagues if it gets into the budget to support amendments and what not the second part that I thought would be manageable is that it was a bit of a spreadsheet lift to try and extract this list of of districts with school districts in the senate district to make a very long story short because there's multiple towns potentially within school district multiple senators within a town cross-referencing and all but now that I sort of have that mechanism working I can sort of generate this senate district specific list for any of the 40 senate districts so short of quitting my job and just being a full time chairman of this idea I thought one thing I could do is to just generate this for the cities and towns that are the school districts that are most affected and send it to them and say here's what it looks like for Springfield and Springfield senate district we're asking our senators to oppose it ways and means if this is something that you want to advocate on this is something you can do so I could reach out informally to school committees and let them sort of go at it as they wish relative to what was being said here what MASC is doing on this yeah so I reached out to MASC I'll say this about MASC I really like their current leadership some of their top level leadership is very new and they obviously have a very full with the promise and cherish act and all that they don't yet have a really effective infrastructure for allowing school committees to communicate with each other in an effective way for advocacy and so I've reached out to their advocacy coordinators and they've suggested a listserv which is not really that active I mean we'll try it but they basically aren't offering really effective coordinating tools so I thought a middle ground effort I could engage in is to reach out to school committees individually and say here's the information for your senate district if you want to do something on this that's your question, what's I forget which senator put forward the bill that Mayor Narcovitz went to the Beacon Hill and lobbied on behalf and would change charter funding that was a MASC municipal association backed this is to change the charter school formula right there must have been a senator who was a lead senator I don't remember who the senator was I'm going to get out and give this to them no, I'm serious because to me the best way to kill this is to say because in a weird way, the more I've been thinking about this in a really weird way the argument that the governor and Pizer have is in a really weird way almost not illogical because basically what they're saying by changing the formula is you know we're never really going to fully fund this right so why don't we just effectively for all intents and purposes eliminated except for the hardest cases for one year basically and they're like in the weirdest way that actually almost makes sense I mean we're going to stop promise that it's something we're never going to do but so to me the best argument against it is to say if we think at least on the senate side that you're going to have this big debate around rethinking charter funding generally then why would you miss with a single component of it in advance of that broader discussion if that makes any sense to you it does so I think maybe this is just the cynical person in me but I really don't think there's much attention at all on changing the charter school formula right now kudos to mayor and aquas for going out there and testifying an MMA for pushing the issue that's great I don't think it's really anybody it's such a hot button political football they'd really have to be like a push to urgency for it well that'd be sort of the question for the senator is this getting any traction but I'm just saying it's sort of the best argument for doing it because otherwise I mean there's two ways of looking at it one way of looking at it is this is a lot of money another way of looking at it is 50,000 bucks 80,000 bucks there it's not that much money I think what you're suggesting is a very easy thing to do and I think we can do it and should do it and just to reach out and then I think just the earlier question about what the MASC is doing around this so they have their annual MASC day on the hill next to Tuesday I believe it is that's tomorrow so it's May 1st not May that's what it is tomorrow I'm thinking about the conversation we had last week anyway obviously we're not going so I don't know if Mr. Dumlin decided to go it's a big ask to take a day and go to Boston for this for limited gain I think quite honestly but I think that sharing this kind of information with a lot of the senators the way that Mr. Dumlin articulated before makes a lot of sense and it's a low hanging fruit that we've talked about before so that's one of the reasons for this advocacy plan we said supporting the work of MASC and others in raising awareness if we can do things like that and just send along information or send along emails it seems like a pretty easy ask to do now your hand is definitely up it is definitely up so just to answer your question about the MMA's Charter School Finance Fellows representatives Capral and Brodoer who are the people who put that we're going to move on so again stay with keeping it brief so we'll start with the larger 6-12 or in this case 7-12 work which is actually K-12 work frankly which is to the team has been revising the mathematics vision and core values statement that went out to the community last week in the Friday update to gather feedback from other community members on that so I know we're receiving some feedback on that but we hope to finalize that document that will be pun intended but truly core in terms of decision making to come to make sure any process fits within that vision we've still been using the moderate to late draft of that document as the high school has been working with parent guardian reps there's been meetings after school which was the 22nd and 23rd of last week to develop criteria for the textbook review and the same group met last Friday and then half a day yesterday which actually set it on part of to work on the process for textbook review selection and hear presentations for different vendors came in and did their spills so there's a ranking mechanism right now for that group meetings are planned for coming days to engage other stakeholders so next Monday May 6th at 5 o'clock there's a lot going on next Monday at the high school library right here and then Tuesday May 7th at 8 30 in the morning in the high school cafeteria or open sessions for anyone in the community would like to come in offer feedback those will be facilitated by Susan Looney who did the report and her organization is continuing to work with us but there are lots of opportunities for feedback along the way as well as our typical ways where we'll share out and make publicly available one of the challenges we're fighting this time is there's even traditional looking textbooks are moving to electronic resources like the sharing out is we're finding we're actually having to adjust that I mean many of the ones we're looking at are not traditional textbooks and that's the forecasting that will go in that direction so sort of the public review process is looking a little different than it has in the past but we're working on that but those will be two sessions for people in the community interested to participate and we hope to come back the reason this one's brief is we hope to come back particularly on the 28th so it looks like I've got that wrong in setting up meeting agendas with kind of more specifics of where we feel like we're landing as it relates to high school math curricula we've been using as a primary sorting mechanism the ed reports website which is run by third party vendors it's not a they don't receive money from any of the textbook publishers you heard about at a previous meeting that any program that we review has to have high rating on that it's not aligned to standards we're not looking at it and the other piece is one that incorporates balance between the practice standards which are some of the critical thinking problem solving skills and also the computational fluency that students need to be successful so all those things are in the mix and we have great representation from the department obviously but also parents and I want to thank parents and particularly Nancy Stewart who's the outgoing CPAC president for one last hurrah of spending days upon days looking at math curricula which is great to have her lens within there there are special educators in the room as well but I really appreciate Nancy's point of view and want to thank her at the middle school level we've had multiple meetings now looking at I think Mr. Sheehan talked about this last time open up resources which is a online textbook it's not an online it's not like Khan Academy or something that is like it's a traditional textbook that's delivered online for schools that have one-to-one computers we've had two sessions we have another one actually tomorrow that I'll be attending part of as much as I can we were also joined by the curriculum coordinator from Union 28 the math coach from North Hampton because they were also looking at this product Mr. Sheehan's contacted and had a long conversation yesterday with Brookline Public Schools who have been implementing for two years this curriculum which not the same demographics but at least similar demographics and so that process is also pushing ahead in a slightly different way than the high school and I think our goal you know we could do a quick update in the 14th the more I think about it that more of me being superintendent update than a full agenda item but on the 28th we'll certainly want to spend some time with where we are and where we're landing and how we're thinking about not just the curriculum but the professional development, the training and the plan for implementation which is at least as if not more important than the specific choice in my opinion Are there questions with the superintendent? Yes Question of some attention so I'm going to try to keep it brief but I guess I've been thinking a lot about the fact that we might be moving towards this online textbook and what that means in terms of screen time for our kids and things like that so I'm just curious if any other curriculums are currently delivered in this way or would math be the only one where it would be? So there's no other curriculums that are delivered in this way I think it is the case for a lot of students while they're given options most students will use Chromebooks to complete their writing that's a little different than what we're talking about I think the one caveat I want to say for the if we go in this direction is they do sell student workbooks they're relatively inexpensive to go along with it so you're not as beholden to looking at a screen and that's an active conversation that I know some of the teachers have raised as well so I think more to come I'll find out more about that tomorrow I think the other piece that I think is highly relevant is it's a textbook that again is a balanced textbook so it's not a if students are looking too much at their screen time it's not a it's not a it's not a it's not a it's not a it's not a it's not a it's not a if students are looking too much at their screen that means they're not actually doing the math right so that the activities that come from that are not well I do I look at the screen and I do numbers one through ten on the in the workbook it's actually much more a program consistent with what we heard earlier that is is actively focused on problem solving where students are working collaboratively to solve problems so it's not the case that even if we did just use the online curriculum that we're going to screen for 45 minutes at a time that would mean that we're not implementing the curriculum as it's written there are further questions for today just a comment about something that I read recently and I think it's related to your question about if other communities have been contacted it sounds like you guys have been doing your due diligence but you know there's been research that's come out not too long ago about the different ways that people learn and how learning from textbooks is actually very different from learning from computers or screens so I just would hope that the district is looking into that a little more seriously because I think that in recent years communities around the country have been literally sold these software programs and these tools for e-learning that are proving to not be as effective as they were sold right so it is I think just a big question mark there for knowing what we know now versus what we knew a few even like three years ago about the brain and how it's how we learn especially for young students it's worth pursuing and understanding properly could I try to clarify not to belabor the point so I think at the high school some of the tools that the committee is looking at have more e-learning features or functions the 608 curriculum that we're looking at is truly a textbook that's delivered electronically instead of where I think the e-learning suite where there's applets and you know that's actually not the focus and I guess the slight or the comment I would like to make is whether it's in paper form or textbook or electronic form for thinking about a textbook we wouldn't want our students looking at that resource the majority or the bulk of their math class anyway right so I think there are like some of the there's a big New York Times article I want to say was last week that talked about truly like e-learning tools and what's being considered at the for the middle school is intentionally not that at the high school there are some curriculums that are have more elements of that and that actually has been an active discussion of that committee. It's interesting I think that would be a there's sort of two conversations is splitting in two different directions that are complementary but I think are distinct I mean one is looking at like in other words you've been having professionally with your colleagues a conversation about the use of online tools and the benefits and more negative aspects of that how to integrate it appropriately it'd be great to surface that conversation at the school committee at some point because I think people are reading the same article. People are seeing articles like that but they're also just they're concerned about you know the bright shiny electronic object being seen as delivering educational value and I think a lot of people are skeptical of it but it's also just interesting to think well how are you guys thinking how about you and your team thinking about it as professionals in the subject. The second which distinct but complementary topic is literally thinking about and actually I remember Mr. Demling brought this up I think a year ago of thinking about or maybe last fall thinking about the topic of the health and wellness of students and the impact of screen time of various forms on them and what are we doing how are we thinking about it how are we assessing it how are we bringing that thinking into our work and so this is a topic kind of for another day because I'm not you've already been saying what you're saying that you're not really trying to do that here but I think there would be a good reason for the committee to not really be satisfied with that at the end of the discussion. Absolutely. Particularly because it's I mean not to belabor it but I just mean there's there's got to be a development of a good amount of research trying to figure out what happens when you take a toddler or even a near infant and you introduce them in the world in which they're bombarded and engaged with electronic and other devices and then you push that through for 17 or 18 years how does it affect them developmentally what's you know what are the all that kind of stuff and hopefully there's a better body of like you know peer review scholarly clinical information on that but thinking of knowing how that's affecting what we're doing and more importantly tailor what we do in a way that's very humanistic and child centered in terms of their development is like massively important so I threw all that out I know the next person is Mr. Demling because he had to stand up earlier and then I'm going to sweep around the room so I won't go down the road of the theme but that is a very important topic when it comes on to our agenda I guess the thing I would just recommend is regardless of whether it's online or papyrus or whatever there seem to be a lot of excitement expressed from the people who will be making this decision about that online curriculum and so just in terms of doing your due diligence of the immediate flag that should go up there is that okay that means you need strong devil's advocate scrutiny of that particular option precisely because it's the one you're most excited about at the beginning therefore the one that you have the highest risk of having potential issues with is the one that everybody is like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right and so you always kind of want one sort of pessimistic snarky critical downer in the room who's saying well this is why this has a problem and just to give it a more robust discussion but that's what I think I just want to sweep over No, no, no I just want to thank you and echo everything that you said looking at screen time is part of a wider inquiry about helping wellness in kids and just a particular note about this online textbook or whatever in terms of diverse learners it would seem to me that some kids would just not interface well with screens and computers so I would hope that there would be other options paper options or whatever to support people with different learning needs around that thank you yeah, I think it was just a response back I wasn't referring to younger students meaning elementary school students or even middle school students I think it's just brains being with HR in us understanding now that brains don't stop developing until the age of 25 that the less exposure you have to screens even just throughout that entire developmental period probably the better there's still unclear about it I think I've seen the research to see what I have but I think that yes, also to what Ms. Kessensen just said about understanding the impact along helping wellness and being able to track that would be really just important so that we are making room for students who may learn differently just a comment reference I'm sorry go ahead please the New York Times Wall Street Journal in the last two weeks had a big article about I think some of the academy where the entire curriculum was offered on screens and teachers just walked around the room guiding students it was devastating I mean especially the idea that certain kids got headaches they couldn't follow special ed students had a difficult time using screens it was a devastating article and some Kansas or Nebraska towns adopted wholesale because it was cheaper sort of building on that this discussion there's two very different topics here and I think you touched on it one is a textbook that happens to be digitized that is replacing so it's reading activity that is being done on a screen versus a book and then what are the accommodations that we might need to consider versus that article which is very different is my understanding which is actually it's an e-learning in a digital learning environment that is very different than an online curriculum and I think choosing the language when we get to that to help not just ourselves here but people that are not as close to it to understand the differences between what you're what we're looking at this online curriculum which is not the same thing as that some of the Academy sound learning and also then when we're thinking about screen time too screen time that is devoted to reading and it's different from replacing activity that would have been sitting still and reading something in a book versus sitting still and reading something on your Chromebook is very different than sitting for hours on end and doing all of your learning and not having the interpersonal connection with your teachers and paras so I think language is important and I don't know the answer to that but I think when we come to that to that presentation and the future discussion that will be very important you know one thing that makes sense to me I think that's a great way of summing up and adding to the conversation we're having that it'd be interesting not just to talk about what the curriculum is you're going to pick but talk about what the student experience is going to look like both in the classroom and working in team settings as well as working with static material you know what I mean like in other words when you're presenting next time talking about literally talk about the curriculum you're choosing obviously but then talk about literally because also a lot of this reminds me of the commentary getting from the public and through all the emails and other conversations we had yes they were about the curriculum but kind of know they weren't they're really about here's what my child has experienced or what I'm hearing they're experiencing when they're at home alone in the room when they're in the classroom when they're out working with fellow students it's all of those things and so hearing from you so what's the update in terms of how are those experiences changing and what is it going to be would be really interesting and valuable for the public as much as anything because I agree with that comment that ultimately we need to help expand people's awareness of use this as a forum to expand public's awareness of what changes are going to expect so probably shouldn't respond but I'll do it for a quick second which is I'm not going to do a defensive screens because I empathize with many things people are saying but from an accessibility point of view based on language based on special needs there are huge advantages to thinking about curriculums that can be delivered in ways where there can be quick translation immediately no matter what student's home language is where there may be tactile functions that work well for specific students where spelling may be an issue for some students and has having some augmentative strategies I just want to balance the equation I don't disagree with what I heard tonight but I do think we have students that are accessing the curriculum that frankly couldn't if some technology that comes with screens wasn't available that 20 years ago didn't access the curriculum so I'm very empathetic to the point of view but based on what I see on a day-to-day basis when I'm in schools I also just want to balance that there are technologies that are making learning accessible for students that weren't before so we have to figure out that balance but I felt urgency to at least suggest that there are opportunities that digital technology offers that opens up learning that wasn't previously available that I see literally on a daily basis if the committee disagrees then what they should do is we should all throw away our smartphones or tablets because we're walking out the door here because none of us think that there's any great value that we've received from enabling everyone here I have a set of encyclopedias on my bookshelf I'm just I'm just saying I think it's a good it's a good rejoinder that obviously the internet age the development of apps and portable devices and tablets have been extraordinarily beneficial on multiple dimensions but let's move on could I just finish my statement because I wasn't quick I thought you were done no I just the challenge we face collectively is how do we harness those technologies to use them effectively to benefit students and not use them because it's convenient or easy or inexpensive to replace things that we're actually don't need replacing and I think that therein lies a challenge of how to harness technology for its use and it may look ability to differentiate sometimes gets lost it's like well we're in a one-to-one district we're in a Chromebook that doesn't mean the same way so that's the conversation I'd like to have is what's the appropriate way that technology enhances the learning experience of students and that's not to replace everything we're doing with technology but I think that's in my head how I frame what I see technology being used well and where I see technology being used in a way where students are looking at screens too often not actually for a learning there's no learning benefit to it and so for me that's I guess where I'd like to frame out a conversation let's move on I mean also part of the reason is because I think I was reminded earlier we're bleeding on a school committee planning pretty badly in that topic so I'm wanting to move on for that if anyone wants to bring up another comment bring it up onto that item so accept gifts Ms. Kastensen do you have a motion sure there's a handout oh thanks here we go I would like to move to accept the following gifts we have donor project Brad number 68596 to support teacher champion award Patricia Taylor's school based nutrition program of Patricia's choosing in the amount of $1,000 from Amherst academy number 1590 to support Amherst regional high school 2019 Amherst academy excellence scholarship in the amount of $1,000 from anonymous number 613715810 to support Amherst regional high school at the principal's discretion in the amount of $22.76 and from various donors to support the high school softball program in memory of Donald Jebavik I hope I'm not mispronouncing it I'm sorry in the amount of $255 total $2,277.76 and then that's all we're doing for the next meeting we're going to do this one too I get it and then finally from project bread number 68625 to support 2019 healthy school breakfast grant in the amount of $8,000 is there a second second move by Ms. Cassinson second by Ms. McDonald that Patricia Taylor is a special educator at the high school and this award came from project bread was in honor of her work making sure that our students are eating well and the nutrition is a key part of learning so I just want to acknowledge Ms. Taylor's work at our high school any further discussion any questions seeing none all those in favor of the motion is read carries unanimously 8 to nothing on to school committee planning we have another handout that I've proposed 2019 let's run around through them sure so superintendent evaluation artifacts later time start time discussion that has been on the docket for a while we'll present my thoughts on that school policy on food service collections we'd like to update how that policy is going so that was a policy that was passed previously and we want to update with some data and perhaps some discussion and even though it's a policy we're not suggesting a change in the policy we think it would be better to bring to the full committee if that's agreeable strategic planning presentation and discussion we've approved clerical and media award recipients math update I think actually as I mentioned orally I'd like to move it back to the 28th 28th we'll have the seal of biliteracy with the look act there is a formal process that we're undertaking to identify a seal of biliteracy which would be something that would be part of the graduation not for this year but we need to actually eventually have it approved at school committee to implement for next year so this would not be asking for a vote but just giving update of where we are vaping prevention substance abuse another one that's been on the docket for a while homelessness and foster care not just the transportation but more generally as well as the finances discipline data so Ms. Cunningham will go back we'll come back and offer an update on her previous discussion with as she said she would have some more data in it because we're further along in the school year I think we can think about where this is separate agenda item it may just be a superintendent update item but just at that point the first meeting for the grade 6 through 8 studies will have occurred so just update on the progress and thanks for Ms. McDonald for volunteering to be part of that strategic planning you know we'll gather feedback on the 14 possible vote on what's being presented and then we'll have the math update great so are there other I mean these meetings are obviously kind of full as they look if there are other items that we've talked about that we haven't put on I mean at this point part of what we're going to have to do too is look at what we do remainder of this year and then also what we it doesn't fit that we might say maybe we should we have to put it in the hopper and say is this something we want to address at some point in the next year and I think you know honestly Dr. Morris at some point later this spring I think it could be in alignment with talking about superintendent goals for next year even an initial conversation about that thought I think it would be worth thinking about what topics and how we would talk about topics of the coming year because there might even be planning or work that you and your team have in the summer that might inform discussion next year but also it has to align with the planning and trying to get those things in alignment would be a good thing to talk about anything further for this item anyone the only other thing I was going to middle school roof I don't think there's any rush from that Mr. Mangano I think bringing it back in June and talk through because it's it'd be bonded anyway so it's not like it's urgent from our perspective to rush that conversation we also don't have official work from MSBA so we would like to come back to that before the summer but unless the committee feels urgency we'd like to hold that for a June meeting we'll seeing nothing else Ms. Cassinson do you have a motion? Your last motion? I'll move to adjourn is there a second? I moved in second all those in favor it carries unanimously Ms. Cassinson's motion carries Congratulations Ms. Cassinson Did we thank Ms. Cassinson?