 As a preliminary matter, this is the November 12 2020 meeting of the Arlington School Committee. This meeting is being conducted remotely with Governor Baker as executive order of March 12 2020 due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth through the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in order to mitigate the transmission of the virus. I have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public meetings, gatherings and as such the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely the order which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded. I know that the public can follow along with the deliberations the meeting ensuring public access does not ensure public participation. This meeting will feature public comment for this meeting the Arlington School Committee is convening by zoom is posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and some attendees are participating by video conference accordingly please be aware that others may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. The broadcast may be captured by the recording all of the materials for this meeting except any executive session materials are available on the novice agenda dashboard we recommend members of the public follow the agenda as posted unless I note otherwise. I will introduce each speaker on the agenda after they conclude I will go down the list of members all vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote. So let's do attendance and make sure everybody can hear me. So members of the committee. Ms. Exton. Yeah. Mr. Cardin. Not yet. Dr. Allison ampy. Yep. Mr. Thielman. Here. Mr. shipment. Good evening. Mr. Heiner. Hello. Hi and Dr. Bodie. Dr. McNeil. Here. Ms. Elmer. Here. Mr. Spiegel. Here. Ms. Mason. Here. And so tonight. I hope I didn't miss anybody I'm looking really quickly and just joined us. Excellent. Welcome Mr. Cardin. Tonight. And I think she's here. She's here. She's here. Here she is. We have a new student rep to the school committee. Her name is Megan. Carmody. She is a sophomore at Arlington high school. And I'm just going to give her a minute just to say hi to all of you before we move on. Hi, I'm Megan. Like you said, I'm a sophomore at Arlington high school. And I'm really excited to be here. Welcome. Hi, I'm C. Good to be here. Thank you. And the A tonight. They're newly elected vice vice president or vice chair. Ms. Sif. For Ronte. Hi. My name, C. For Ronte, it's. Good to be here. Thank you. And. Okay. We have Mr. Cardin. So we have four. So the first item on the agenda is public comment. that each speaker is limited to three minutes and that as a matter of policy the committee doesn't respond to public comment but sometimes things that come up in public comment can either be directed to a subcommittee or you know could be brought up later in the meeting. So the first person for public comment is Ms. Andrea Canty. Hi it's Andrea Canty. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Hello all and thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening. I had the pleasure of being included in a recent meeting with Dr. Janger about plans for the second semester at the high school. I appreciated the opportunity to provide feedback during and after the meeting and while I understand the full report is not due until tomorrow I wanted to share my thoughts with the school committee this evening. At the recent meeting Dr. Janger shared two options that are under consideration for the second semester. I appreciate the hard work that was put into creating these hybrid choices though I am leftist heartened that our children at most will only receive 160 minutes per week of in-person learning. My concern is this does little to help with isolation and loneliness nor does it do enough to combat the Zoom fatigue that many of our children are experiencing. Charlie Baker is asking all schools to return to classrooms full time and while I realize that the high school is not ready for a full-time in-person experience I do believe that the community of Arlington is creative and thoughtful enough to meet a difficult challenge and do better by our high schoolers. It is one of the reasons I love Arlington so much. On a final note I have two seniors currently at AHS so many of the AHS seniors feel forgotten with little to no acknowledgement of their losses. In addition to not being able to see their friends at school they have lost their junior prom, group celebrations at football games, final homecoming and countless other important milestones that many of us adults remember fondly and mark our high school years. After meeting with Dr. Janger I proposed a committee with parents working with high school administration to come up with solutions to get the seniors together throughout the remainder of the school year. As an example Newton South recently held an outdoor drive-in movie night for just their seniors. If there is already such a committee I ask that they begin to plan events to happen now rather than wait until the spring and if a group does not already exist I ask the school committee support my recommendation for a creation of a parent administration group for senior specific activities affected immediately. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. The next person is Ann Sokazensky. Miss Sokazensky. Hello can you hear me? Yes thank you. Great thank you so much for the chance to speak tonight. I'm the parent of a senior and I took part in one of the recent focus groups to discuss spring plans at the high school. I'm here tonight to add a parent perspective and draw attention to concerns about how all remote school is going and concerns about what we're hearing regarding plans for this spring. For the fall semester Dr. Janger shared that attendance is at 99 percent. Reverse field trips are creating in-person options and there's a comparable incidence of mental health issues now compared to pre-covid. The 99 percent attendance rate is really commendable because it's a testament to the hard work of APS in making sure that all students have access to resources to connect to the all remote model. But we also have to recognize that attendance only measures how many students are checking in at the beginning of classes. It doesn't measure the percentage of students who are able to engage really effectively with the online teaching. As for the reverse field trips my own student has had access to only one of those in the past seven weeks since school started. The incidence of mental health issues is a key metric. It's not clear how this is being measured in Arlington but national measures indicate that the reduced access to in-person school during COVID has had a dramatic effect on teenagers mental health and their loneliness and it seems likely that if Arlington is not seeing this we're probably not looking in the right ways. The spring semester plans that we saw at the focus group included a four cohort model that brings students into school only one morning per week. That was the best scenario presented. The other two plans were only a small step above the current reverse field trip model and may only include in-person options for core subjects at the high school. It's really important to note that most seniors take very few core subjects in the second half of senior year so those latter plans might give seniors little or no access to in-person options. As Andrea noted seniors stand to lose the most in the current situation. Many of us parents heard at the curriculum night that if we can just get through this incredibly difficult period we'll have a beautiful new building to occupy. The class of 2021 will never set foot in that new building and many of them feel forgotten by the town at this time. This is such a critical time for them not only academically but also because they're processing and planning for the end of their secondary education and all of those little small informal discussions they usually have at school with other students and teachers are fundamental in helping them through this key life transition. The most important thing I want to say tonight is this whether or not there's a viable in-person option for all students next semester. I ask that the administration and school committee make plans that prioritize giving seniors tangible in-person experiences. Here are just a few things AHS could plan for the spring. Create in-person advisory for seniors on Wednesdays. Give upperclassmen some access to the visual and performing arts spaces. Facilitate socially distanced in-person study groups or peer support groups and include electives in any hybrid plan that moves forward. Please know that many parents are willing to work collaboratively to make these plans a reality. Thank you so much. Thank you. The next person is Mr. Thomas Davison. Hi Mr. Davison can you hear us? Yes can you hear oh there we go. Hi sorry I had a mute. So hi my name is Tom Davison. I'm a father with a freshman and a senior here on to high school and I want to say the two previous speakers Ann and Andrea this isn't a planned senior slam on you but I'm also here to talk about about seniors. I think that just speaks to how many of us who have seniors that are thinking the same way. First I want to say thank you to the school administration and the school committee members for all the work you're doing. I understand these are very difficult circumstances and I'm here tonight to speak to ask that you make a plan to bring back at least the senior class the spring semester at AHS. It's great that we've shown in our elementary and middle schools that we can safely hold classes in those buildings and I understand requiring the high school that the ventilation issues led to us being fully remote this fall. I was encouraged in the October school committee meeting when Dr. Chang reported that there were I believe he said 30 classrooms that had breaking ventilation that the prognosis was good that ventilation could be prepared in more classrooms and then in addition that the red and blue gyms old hall the pit the auditorium and the cafeteria I believe he said were all usable spaces. We all want to bring back all the students into the building and I understand there are challenges to do to doing that. None of us know what the COVID-19 situation will be in the spring but looking ahead one I really want to hear what Dr. Janger's upcoming report will be on the high school facilities and the possible options for the spring but all that said with the spaces that we do have I think in the climate that Dr. Janger said last school committee meeting that if the school committee were to ask to bring back the senior class that facilities were there to make that happen I ask that you make that plan that you put that plan in place to bring back at least the full senior class for the spring. I'm not throwing my freshman son under the bus you know the rest of the underclassmen under the bus but I will agree with what the two previous speakers said and it's the first time I've heard their comments but I do believe emotionally and socially it matters more for our seniors to bring them back into the school. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Ms. Diane Gardner. Hi my name is Diane Gardner. I'm a Wellington high school parent and I thank you for the chance to speak tonight. I would like to read the petition the following petitions signed by 244 Arlington community members including parents and students requesting that the Arlington public schools present the school committee with one or more workable hybrid models for a safe return to in-person learning. Please note that this petition circulated before Dr. Janger's focus groups over the last week. I do have a list of signatures as well as comments that I can submit if desired. The petition reads, Dear Dr. Janger, Dr. Bodie and members of the Arlington school committee, the undersigned Arlington families urge you in the strongest possible terms to do whatever is necessary to provide safe in-person learning options beyond the burdensome band-aid solution of reverse field trips for Arlington students in grades 9 through 12 for second semester. We understand that the constraints imposed by COVID-19 have required a balancing of interests, prioritization of needs and acceptance of less than ideal arrangements for the school year. And we believe that the needs and interests of Arlington high school students have not been prioritized appropriately. The district's current approach disregards the clear priority that the community put on in-person learning. Based on family input, the school committee approved a hybrid learning plan for the district. This is because school is not only about instruction, it is also important to see friends to be together with other students in the learning environment and to feel part of a community. Not creating a feasible hybrid learning plan for grades 9 through 12 is inequitable. Most students in the district have been afforded a hybrid option. Families of current AHS students have accepted that there would be disruption due to the new building construction. But it is grossly unfair not to make the efforts and improvements necessary to use current facilities for a hybrid model merely because of the future demolition. This prioritizes other interests over those of current students and we feel our community is better than that. Most importantly, an all remote academic year is unhealthy for many of our children. It's bad for teens to be isolated at home every day for months on end. The mental health of our students is suffering and an option for in-person learning would help. Families at all grade levels should be able to choose either all remote or hybrid based on what they believe is best for their students and family's needs. It is up to the school committee, not APS administrators, to balance needs and interests and decide on the best school, high school approach given constraints. To do this, they need options. We believe that some form of hybrid is achievable. While I plan to bring students into the building part-time may impact instructional time, it would elevate students' mental health and social and emotional needs. It may not be what the administration recommends and that of course should be considered. But a workable hybrid model or hybrid options should be developed so that the Arlington community through its elected representatives can have the choice. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Gardner. If you could send the petition and signatures to our recording secretary at Kay Fitzgerald or you can email me and I can get it to her, that would be great. Thank you. Okay. Sure thing. Thank you. Okay. So the first agenda item, we have two. So the first agenda item is an update on the superintendent search process. When we last met, we approved the recommendation from the superintendent search screening committee of two finalists and they have been scheduled to come virtually to Arlington for much of next week. So on Tuesday and Wednesday, they will meet with principals, assistant principals, students, curriculum leaders, teachers, and then there will be a community meeting in the evening for parents, guardians, members of the community who are able to join. And Tuesday and Wednesday will be one for each candidate. They will sort of mirror each other. And then on Thursday and Friday evening, the school committee will have an opportunity to interview each candidate one on each night in one of our meetings, which is also, of course, open to the public. I've worked with our search consultant as well as our administrative assistant, Ms. Fitzgerald, to get these set up. We're pretty close, making sure that we have the right Zoom meetings to accommodate all of the teachers and staff who want to attend. That's critical, obviously, as well as the evening. I am going to moderate the community session in the evening with Ms. Exton. She volunteered for both evenings. Ms. Juliana Keys, who is the president of the AEA, will moderate the session with the teachers. And we have two Arlington High School students who will moderate, respectively, each one of the student sessions. So it's going to be a busy week. There's a lot going on. So from the committee, I wanted to, oh, and the other update is that it was suggested that we, or that I evaluate whether there was interest in providing an opportunity for members for town of Arlington employees and members of town boards like the Finance Committee, the Capital Planning Committee, the Human Rights Commission have an opportunity to meet the candidates and provide their feedback as well. So I think that is going to be scheduled on the Monday of the subsequent week and likely in shorter sessions back to back so that we can fit that in. It's extraordinarily challenging to do all of this with town meeting concurrently running. That takes a lot of us out from eight until 11 Mondays and Wednesdays. And for those of us who attended the dress rehearsal earlier this week, I think it became very clear that town meeting could take a little while to dispense of its agenda. So it's uncertain when it will end and we have Thanksgiving. So but I think we're in good shape in terms of the nuts and bolts of getting this scheduled and sorted out so that there were a couple of things. I'm happy to take feedback obviously from the committee about that. The two things that I was looking for feedback for is in Novus. There is a sample feedback form that we would provide. I need to let Mr. Kuchar know if we're comfortable with that so that that can be done. I need to let him know that tomorrow so that it can be put together tomorrow. So if there is feedback on the survey, I'd like to get that from people tonight. And the other thing that I think we need to discuss because this is our only chance to do so is how people want to structure next Thursday and Friday. I'll be honest as chair, I'm fairly agnostic about how we do it. I'm happy to run the interviews in whatever way members feel comfortable. But I would like to have a sense of how we're going to structure that just so that I know and we all know what we're going into because it's not obviously going to be our typical agenda meeting. So can we do, is there any comments on the feedback form first? So the intent of the form would be to provide one link for each candidate to all, to everybody. And with the hopes that people would self-identify as a teacher or staff or community member, parent, what have you. And then they would answer questions about both candidates and then the committee would have that feedback. So any feedback on that first? Mr. Hayner. Just a question on procedure. When the feedback is given, I assume Mr. Kuchner's group will put it together and compile it and present it to us, the committee. Correct. And will we have that prior to our meeting with the candidate? So will that follow for us to be to digest that plus our meeting to make our decision? Right. So the issue is, I think that in order to accommodate, in order to provide as many people with the opportunity to get a sense of the candidates, we need to keep the feedback open because some people, so there will be faculty members, for example, who are unable to attend the afternoon sessions that we've set up for teachers and staff for whatever reason, but they may be able to attend and watch either the community meeting on Wednesday night or they may choose to watch our interviews with the candidates on Thursday and Friday and provide their feedback there. So I can't tell you, because we have to really keep it open through when town boards meet on Monday the 23rd. So no, we won't have that before we interview them. So they'll be doing this, we will be doing our interviewing, compiling all this material, we will get a chance to digest all this together, and then we will do our own deliberation. Does that sound right on a timeline? Yeah. So right now what we have on the schedule is we have a meeting for all of us to meet on the 24th, which is the subsequent Tuesday. But as we said, whenever we last met three weeks ago, two weeks ago, I don't know, last year, we sort of put that meeting on the books, but I see that as more of a sort of pulse taking of where we're at at that time, how are we feeling? What are we doing? Do we have what we need? Because we can't, as we all know, we cannot meet in any other forum than this one. So by having that meeting on the books, it allows us to at least come here on Zoom and make sure that we're having a conversation just like this. I personally don't expect it to be a hugely deliberative meeting because I don't think we're going to have all the stuff that we need. But, you know, I think we, I like having it on the books especially because I think we could still be in town meeting. So that way we can at least see where we're at. Thank you. Dr. Allison Ampe. It's a Tuesday meeting. Why do you think we won't have everything we need at that point? Because I think the earliest we'll be able to schedule town employees, finance committee, capital planning, etc., is going to be on the Monday from some period of time before town meeting likely starts. So we will not have their feedback. We'll obviously know what, you know, I would expect that we will have feedback from all of the Arlington Public Schools people who are slated for Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, right? I think we'll have feedback from teachers and students and administration. And then we'll, you know, we'll know what we think after our, after our interviews on Thursday and Friday. I guess I was hoping for faster turnaround than it sounds like what you were hoping for. So that's all. Well, I will tell you as somebody who has spent the better part of this last week trying to schedule all of these pieces one right after another, I would love to have faster turnaround as well, but there are literally not enough hours in the day to make this happen because of town meeting, meeting concurrently. We Monday night and Wednesday night are totally out later in the evening. And so, you know, I think that we'll have the vast majority of the feedback in, you know, Friday night and over that weekend. So I was, I was, this was by no means a criticism or anything implied by you. I think you have done an amazing job and that we all owe you tremendous and, and Ms. Fitzgerald to tremendous accommodation for, for doing this. I meant that it seemed like it's just gathering the town stuff from the day and that our consultant could isn't in town meeting and could get it together. So we would have that last bit of feedback so that we would not be waiting on stuff. But I think it's reasonable to expect that we will have the feedback from, you know, anybody on the town side that chooses that elects to provide it after their 1123 meeting by the morning of the 24th. That's my intention. So, you know, I think we were, we were shooting for, I think we put up for 630 on the 24th. So, you know, for those who have, who are able to sift through that, I mean, my intention is to provide the committee with, you know, as much in whatever form it is easily accessible to people so that they can see, you know, all of it, right? I mean, it's going to be given the format of the survey, it's largely narrative. I mean, it's entirely narrative, right? So it's going to be a question and I don't know how much people are going to write or share. So, yeah, I think it's, I think we will have the bulk of it by the end of, you know, by the end of Friday for to review over the weekend and then whatever comes in after Monday's session will be able to look at or some people may be able to look at before Tuesday night. Mr. Thielman? Ms. Morgan, thank you. So just to summarize, we're still holding the 24th for a meeting at the regular time, 632 whenever. Are we going to be conducting any regular business after the interview on the 19th? After the interview on the 19th, no. So our next regular business meeting where we can respond to the high school report and all that stuff will be not until December 10th? So I think that was one of the things that I had on my list to talk about with everybody tonight. I think that we could choose to, and again, I'm trying to, you know, we've, there have been members who have said, well, I don't, you know, I don't want to do anything but blank, right? Which is fine. So we could elect on the 24th, which is a, I mean, it's a special school committee meeting, but it is, you know, it's, it could, there's no reason that we can't take up both, you know, issues related to the high school, as well as a temperature check, you know, planning for where we're at in the superintendent process. I don't have a problem with that, obviously. And I'm happy to do that. I just want, you know, I want buy in from everybody that that's what we want to do. I would be comfortable with that, but I can't speak to the rest of the group. So that's where I, I don't know. That's where I would, I would be comfortable. I would just, it's going to be a long time to go from a report we receive on the 13th on the high school, a CIA meeting next Wednesday, I guess it is to December 10th, which is basically a month from today. So I would just propose that I'm comfortable with the 24th. I cannot speak for everybody in the committee. And I certainly agree that the superintendent selection is highly, is a big deal. I'm not, I'm not minimizing that anyway. Thank you. Ms. Exton, you had your hand up earlier, or was it Mr. Cardin? You guys are both wearing the same color tonight. So I'm obviously a very color oriented person. Was it you, Ms. Exton? Or was it you, Mr. Cardin? I think we both had our hands up. Okay. So Ms. Exton, go ahead. Sorry. Have we, were you able to get any more information about being able to do something in person safely and publicly? And is that something that we would discuss on the 24th, if we felt like it was something we still needed to do? I guess I'm just wondering where, where we are. So where we punted after three weeks ago, we sort of punted to tonight to figure out do we, you know, we can meet in person, we can, like we can use the school committee room as long as it's only the seven of us and the candidate. And I provide various charts and graphs and maps to the director of health and human services, as is appropriate. So that's absolutely something we can do. It's not been scheduled, obviously. So I, you know, we can make a decision tonight, if that's what people want to do. I mean, it's, this is kind of what we're here to decide to do, right? I mean, I would like to meet them in person. I'm, you know, I'm agnostic as to how we do that. I'm happy to schedule it. I know that when we met last time, Mr. Thielman said, and others seem to agree that, you know, obviously conducting the interviews would be easier over Zoom, just because we wouldn't need to be, you know, we wouldn't need, we wouldn't have masks on and we would be, you know, in this sort of forum that we're actually all have become a little used to. But so, yeah, I mean, if this is what people want to do, I guess I just need to know what I should set up. I mean, at this point, realistically, it's not going to be until after Thanksgiving. I don't think I don't see any way that we would be able to do it between now and then, realistically. Yeah, and I agree with Mr. Thielman from the previous meeting too, that I think the interview in this forum is much better. But I, you know, you know, this is someone that hopefully is going to be a part of Arlington for longer than COVID. And so, you know, I feel like as much for them to be able to come and see our arms in and for us to meet this person in real life as much as it's feasible. Maybe it's something that after the interviews and the community meetings, we meet on the 20, that Tuesday and feel like it's necessary or not necessary. But I just want to make sure it's something that we're still talking about. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. So I was going to just ask about the work that MESC is doing with the feedback form. The goal is not really to produce a report like the focus group report where they kind of digested things. Is that, I mean, because I think we all are going to go through it in granular detail anyway. So I don't want to wait for them to sort of sift through it because we're going to do that on our own. My expectation is that they're going to provide us access to de facto the raw data, which is the narrative feedback by candidate by question. So no, I'm not, I'm not expecting anything written from them and I don't see why we can't have access to it as it comes in. I just need to, you know, I need to confirm that with them. But yeah, no, I don't think there's going to be any compiling really needed. I think they can just provide us access to it. We're, I mean, I think we're generally interested in the broad demographic categories and then the narrative feedback given who is providing it. That's that's been the sense that I got the last time that we met. So I think we're my other comment is that it would have a slight preference to sort of sort out a more firm schedule than just sort of having this temperature check idea for the 24th. I mean, based on the schedule and not being able to meet them in person before that, you know, maybe it's just another meeting to plan for the rest of the process. I don't know, or maybe Paul has some ideas. I'm just a little bit queasy with with the uncertainty. Agreed, me too. So that's that's why we're here. I would like to I would like to have clear direction at the end of this conversation. And I'm happy to implement as as people wish we could we could certainly meet in person with candidates on the 24th, the evening of the 24th, if that's, you know, if that's where we want to go. Mr. Schliffman, I prefer queasy, actually. After the two interviews, we'll have something of a sense of how much thought and research we want to do. We may want to do site visits based on what we've seen. We might not. We might be really interested in one candidate more than another. We might not. I think that we need to be open for whatever evidence we collect over the next week in terms of watching the community response and responses to our interviews. So it could go in one of many directions. I would not be available to do in person on the 24th anyway. So I think that once we figure out what we want to do, we can use the 24th to deliberate and make a decision as to how much more research and depth do we want to do. Do we want to meet with both candidates? Do we want to do a virtual site visit for both candidates? So we would be reacting to next week's interviews and feedback. That's why there, this needs to be an open book rather than a locked in schedule. Mr. Hayner. Apologize at the outset by adding more to the table, but I would go along with Mr. Thielman. I don't want to wait until December to deal with the report that's coming out. And I don't want to speak for the other five members, but I would like to possibly find some time on the 24th to deal with it, to look at that and discuss that as well. So I don't know if you want to discuss that now or in a different sort of a different agenda item. But I mean, it's all going to be sort of wrapped in. I mean, I think if we have, you know, it sounds like in person on the 24th isn't an option for Mr. Schickman. So that's off, which is fine. So that leaves Ms. Eksten and others. I share her request of, you know, planning for in person would be a post Thanksgiving thing at this point, given where we're at. So, yeah, I mean, I'm still, you know, I think we're still the other thing that we need to deal with as part of this agenda item is how we want to format our interviews for next week. So I'm not sure what people's thoughts are about that. So let's, so we're going to meet on the 24th. I mean, we can, you know, we can have two agenda items. One is the HS report, and the other one is, you know, continued discussions around the superintendent search. You know, I don't know, I don't know where we will realistically, I find it very hard to project where we're going to be by, you know, 10 days from now. I guess that's where I'm struggling. Um, so Mr. Cardin, if you were looking for something more structured, which I appreciate. No, no, no, that's, that's fine. I take Mr. Schiffman's comments, and that's fine. I understand where he's coming from, and I, that's okay with me. On the high school, though, I wanted to just note that I don't anticipate CIA be completing its work by the 24th for sure. I mean, the committee can always discuss the matter, but certainly the idea that, I mean, it could certainly be a point of discussion and a time if Dr. Janger is available to ask questions. I don't even know if he's available then. But I anticipate CIA doing a couple of weeks of work before having a report come to the committee at a decision point. Mr. Damon, I just clarify. Thank you, Mr. Cardin. The report is coming to us from Dr. Janger on the 13th. You have a, you're scheduling a CIA meeting on the 19th. Do I have that correct? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's the 18th, but yes. Okay. The 18th. Wednesday, the 18th. Thank you. He's, the principal, be at that meeting with the committee. And, okay, we, we, and you, you, you in the committee may want to do more research and more evaluation before making a recommendation of the full committee and won't be ready until probably December 10th to make a recommendation. Is that what you're projecting? I'm not sure because I don't know what's in Dr. Janger's report besides the, the few comments we had earlier to this evening. But yeah, I mean, I do think it's going to, particularly with Thanksgiving, that sounds realistic. We can, you know, certainly try to push earlier, but I think it's going to take until December 10th to get all the information we need. So I guess I have the question that I put to you, Mr. Cardin, is, is it helpful or a hindrance to you in the work your subcommittee is doing to meet, to, to talk about the high school on the 24th? I think it partly depends on what the report says tomorrow. So I think, you know, it's definitely worth having a conversation. I mean, maybe the options are not sufficient, maybe the information is not sufficient. That's certainly something that CIA will look at, but if the full committee, you know, wants to make that determination as well, that that would be something to discuss. So I guess can I suggest a way out of our, out of our conundrum would be, you know, we're, we only need to post the agenda 48 hours in advance, right? So if CIA meets on Wednesday, I guess what I would ask you, Mr. Cardin, is for you and your subcommittee to make a recommendation as to whether or not the full committee take up the high school, we're going to keep our 1124 meeting regardless. We need to come in and see where we're at with the superintendent search. So I am happy to add the high school to that agenda. If it is helpful to the work your subcommittee is doing, and we'll continue to move you forward and potentially provide you with more time to meet that is already structured. If not, then we will just take up the, you know, where we're at with the superintendent. Does that seem reasonable, Mr. Theoman? Yeah, let me just suggest this. The subcommittees were formed many years ago to do the kind of due diligence that Mr. Cardin is suggesting. At the same time, this is a report that is of interest to the whole school committee. So what I would suggest is on the 24th, we have an agenda item and Mr. Dr. Janger comes to the meeting to answer questions from all members of the school committee. Mr. Cardin as the chair of the curriculum instruction assessment subcommittee can say in that meeting, I'd like to hold off on making any motion at this time until the subcommittee can do further research. But that meeting on the 24th gives the full school committee the opportunity to interview the superintendent, the principal and asking questions and all of us should be afforded that opportunity. Whether we can attend the full curriculum meeting or not. So I would put that on the agenda. I would inform Dr. Janger that he's to be there on the 24th at the time we specify and we have a discussion about it. Dr. Allison Ampe? I was going to suggest it be put on the agenda on the 24th no matter what, just in case we had, it would provide us the opportunity to ask questions if needed. I'm not, I think the CIA could be seen as a committee of the whole and I'm not sure that we have to have the school committee provide the opportunity, I think CIA could provide the opportunity if necessary. But I think it should be on our agenda on the 24th just in case there's any turning points decisions that we need to make. Mr. Kevin? Yes, that's true. Dr. Curse with Dr. Allison Ampe said, but it's not always possible for everybody to make the subcommittee. And so that's just not how it works. It's a matter of, it's a matter of importance for the entire school committee. It's ultimately a decision the entire school committee has to make. So he can come to the meeting on the 24th. And I'd like him there. Yep, I will, I will follow up. So where we're at right now, we seem to have some agreement around the survey. We have some agreement or most agreement, mostly agreement around what we're going to do on the 24th. And so next, the last thing we need to do as part of this item is figure out what we're going to do next Thursday and Friday. We're working backwards. So we're now at the most like so, so there have been a couple of suggested formats for how to run these interviews. I believe it was Mr. Schliffman presented a format where each member was afforded 10 minutes to have a conversation. I believe Mr. Thielman suggested at least two rounds so that there was another opportunity to do follow up at the end. You know, I, I, there's been suggestions to go, we could go in alphabetical order, we can go in our normal order. I'm fine with whatever we do. But I do want there to be general buy in for how this is going to work. We need to do it the same way on Thursday as we do it on Friday. So I want to make sure that we're all as comfortable as we can be going into Thursday so that we can replicate it on Friday. So I think because, so the initial suggestion was, you know, 10, 10 minutes per person. And then a follow up of five minutes. Is that, was that what you, is that where we were at the last time? So let's start with that as a baseline and then comment from there. Mr. Heiner. I support what you just presented. The order you, I'll leave it to you to put there. The ones you like, you can send them first and go from there. Well, I think I would do it in the order that we always do things in. I would maybe, I would maybe shuffle it up for the last, for the five minutes. I think it's, I think being first and last are the harder places to be, frankly. So, but I will, I'll come up with something and make sure that everybody knows well in advance so that they can prepare. So if we do 10 minutes, 10, 70, five, 35, that gives us almost two hours, right? It'll be two hours. Thoughts. And then the idea would be that, that members would come up with their own, you know, their own questions. I don't know if there's a way for us to share those with each other in advance. Probably not really. So I suppose those of us, let's assume that for the first, let's assume for both rounds, we'll go in our regular, the regular order that we go in. So Ms. Extin, you're going to get first crack. The advantage is that nobody will ask your question before you get to. And then those of us at the end may be making some edits and adjustments if we want to touch on something different. Does that seem reasonable to everybody? And then we'll go back with a five minute. So, so Ms. Extin will ask her questions and then she will be able to watch or Mr. Cardin, because they're both early, they should, they will be able to watch all of the responses to the rest of us as we ask our insightful probing questions. And then they will, they will have five minutes, you know, we'll come back and people will have five minutes to ask any follow up questions. Mr. Cardin. So just as far as the order I was going to volunteer, having served on the search committee and seen, you know, the candidates and also had a chance to submit questions, I'm happy to go later in the process. And I don't know if that's true of my other fellow members, but it may make sense for those who have not had a chance to ask a question to go earlier. I kind of like that. That changes things up a little bit. So that would be Extin, Theoman, Hayner, Morgan, Cardin, Dr. Allison Ampe, and Mr. Schlickman. Yes. That seems great. I like things that are a little different. Dr. Allison Ampe. For the search committee, we were able to have the consultant compile a list of questions. I'm wondering if I can ask Mr. Schlickman through the chair if that's possible. I mean, I think we can ask him to do whatever we want. I think it's, I think we certainly could ask, you know, if people want to be locked in to what they're going to ask about, I think that's the downside. Mr. Schlickman. I don't want to be locked in because I think that was one of the handicaps of the first round interview is we're all sort of locked into our question. The goal here is to be more conversational. However, I don't know if this full committee has gotten the, there's a list of about 150 questions that are typical for superintendent interviews. And I don't know if the full committee has gotten that. The search screening committee got a look at the typical questions so that we could have that as a reference. And people can just sort of use that as a starting point for thinking about what kind of questions they might want to ask. I mean, I certainly would want to get into a conversation about things like public governance, budgeting, relations with town meeting, you know, a lot of the things that in my mind that we didn't see in the first round, but I think the more informal and relaxed it is in terms of the conversation, we're going to learn more than the rigid style that we had previously. And you saw the questions that we asked at the last session. So, so you know that that's ground that has been covered. Mr. Schluckman, could you provide to us through Karen the list of, you know, that like sort of exhaustive lifts of many questions? It's possible we've been sent it before, but I can't put my hands on it right now. So I would be grateful if you could get us that. Yeah, okay. If I don't do it tonight or tomorrow, send me a reminder or now do it because my screens are all locked up. All right. Mr. Thielman. Yeah, I'm not in favor of sending, I'm trying to coordinate the questions. I think I've watched the videos and the questions were fine. I think if you prepare for an interview like this, you should, I'm going to zero in, I can't tell what everyone's going to do, but I'm going to zero in on where I have doubts about each of the candidates and those are going to be the sources of my questions. And so I think everyone, and I think to kind of reveal that, I think people should, that's one way to approach it. That's how I might approach it if I were guiding so many on this. All right. So we're clear on the format. We're clear broadly on the plan for the 24th. If you have questions, let me know. I see your hand, Mr. Schluckman. And I will make sure that we have the meeting set up on the 23rd for the town governance side and we'll go from there. All right. Mr. Schluckman. One other thing, I'm assuming that both candidates by virtue of their resume has presented MCAS scores to their respective school committees in the form of a PowerPoint. And if we could ask the candidates to provide that. I will put that out to Mr. Kutcher and see what he can do. All right. Mr. Heiner. Just a reminder, this is a long process for these people to go through and sit through. I would suggest that we have some sort of break for all the members, especially some of the senior members, me, to take a break in the middle of this at different times. Just so we can all breathe. That sounds like a good idea. If I forget, Mr. Heiner, I know you'll remind me. I'll be doing this. That's great. So you can hold up a picture of a toilet. All right. Anything else on this item? Seeing none. So the next one is the evaluation process for Superintendent Bode from 2019-2020. I put in Novus what I am suggesting we use to complete her evaluation. It is the three first pages of the traditional form that we have used. It's significantly truncated. It only provides one spot where it asks for us to provide narrative feedback. And then instead of doing the various like sub, what I can't remember what they're called, but the sub pieces, we would do an assessment on professional practice, student learning. We didn't actually have a district improvement goal. So that I would remove and then we would we would evaluate her on the four standards, provide an overall summative performance, and then write whatever narrative comments we so choose chose to do. So this is instead of using the seven or eight page evaluation that required narrative comments on many pages. I thought this was an efficient way for us to do this at this point. I'd like to finish it this calendar year before we leave for the winter vacation. Dr. Bode would provide us with a with her self evaluation, which would be in narrative format. Those of us who have done this before are familiar with that. And then we would do our evaluation and wrap that up for the November the December 17 committee meeting. So on on the form is there any is there any are there any questions or concerns about using this version of the form. Ms. Ecksten. Thank you. Since this is this process is new for me and I came on to the committee sort of at the end of the last school year. Does Dr. Bode provide evidence towards these or is it sort of like the evidence is gathered over the course of the school committee meetings? How is that? So it's a great question. It was the next thing I was going to bring up. So typically, we do do a large scale gathering of evidence. There's a lot of documentation, hundreds, thousands maybe of pages of documentation that are updated into Novus that we use to produce the evaluations. I was going to suggest, given what else we have going on and where we're at in this evaluation process that we significantly reduce, if not almost entirely eliminate that the process of collecting that evidence just in that it's extremely time consuming for both Dr. Bode and her administrative secretary and ours, given what else we have going on right now. But I didn't, you know, I wasn't sure where the committee was at with that. I can absolutely understand why it would be difficult to do this evaluation without having a lot of that. So I guess that's sort of the question, right? It's that balance between what do we need to fulfill this requirement of our policy and what do we realistically want? What do we really, absolutely need in order to be able to do this? So are there any other, those of us who have done this before, can anybody speak to what you feel like you would need to wrap this up, Mr. Thielman? The answer is excellent. Yes, you said Ms. Ekston, we usually get a lot more evidence, but this is a different year slash you have a contract. I mean, I think my suggestion would be people feel they need more information. Maybe they could send their questions to Dr. Bode by a date certain and then get that information. So some of the intent of the district goals, presentations, and the PowerPoint that Dr. McNeil put together, and we heard from some curriculum leaders three weeks ago, some of the intent of that is that, obviously Dr. Bode's her performance on the standards is sort of tied to district goals, right? And she has two specific goals, right? The professional practice goal, which is around the high school, and the transition and phasing plans. Of course, when we wrote this, we didn't understand even remotely the full extent to which she would be expected to come up with transitional and phasing plans for all students, as well as the student learning goal around benchmark reading. I do think that we, for the student learning goal, I do think that we've heard a fair amount we did hear from Ms. Perry a few weeks ago. So I personally feel like I'm sort of in a place where I could evaluate on the professional practice and the student learning goals fairly effectively. But I guess I would agree, other than doing a huge data collection effort that some of us may not be in a position to fully sift through, I would be inclined to go with Mr. Thielman's recommendation that if there are members who need help with the four standards that they reach out to Dr. Bodie. If that's, are you comfortable with that, Dr. Bodie? Yes, I'm very comfortable with that. Thank you. Okay. Mr. Schlickman. Yeah, and for Ms. Eksten, new members who were on a committee less than a year, often recused themselves from part or all of the evaluation. So do what you feel is right and do what you, how you want to communicate and don't worry about it. Mr. Cardin and then Mr. Heiner. Sorry. So yeah, I was just going to suggest that somebody also send around the full form because those four standards that we need to rate on are more flushed out in the rest of the form. We don't need to fill out the rest of the form, but there are a lot of subcategories for each of those standards. So it's helpful to understand what those, what's meant by management and operations. If you look at the full form. Agreed. Agreed. So yes, that's super doable. Dr. Bodie, do you think that you will be able to provide, if we're, I'm creating a sort of end of 2020, like deadline artificially, just it's in my own mind, I'd like to get this done. So that would put us at the meeting on December 17. Is there a reasonable time between now and giving us some time to fill out this form that you could get us yourself evaluation? Yes, I believe I can probably do that by the Thanksgiving break or right after it. Okay. I mean, I don't know that we even need it that soon, but yeah, great. December 1st. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Great. So the plan will be that Karen will get you guys, will get us the forms. We'll have those. Dr. Bodie will give us her narrative. If there are questions around the standards that people need clarification on, they should follow up with Dr. Bodie. We will plan to fill out the first three pages of our regular CBIE summative evaluation report. Great. All right. Mr. Heiner, sorry. Just going back to the format. Once we've got all this information, we're all satisfied. We've done our writing and everything. Are we turning a copy of this into you for you to put a a compilation together and do the reporting? And in the past, we've done, I'll be honest with you, I don't remember ever doing it the same way twice when we do the report. Last year, if I'll ask the members to correct me, the chair did a summative or a compilation. And then we, those of us that wanted to did an added piece. Is that how you intend on doing it? Or is that up for discussion? That is also up for discussion. If people would like to discuss it. I mean, I was, I figured, I think we need to produce one. I'm not sure what we're obligated to do by policy. I know we need to produce one sort of constant. The state requires one compilation of the together. And that's why the chair did the compilation. We got a chance to see it. If we had any question about it, we could respond back to the chair. I will plan to do that. And then anybody who would like to read their narrative comments of any length and plan, excuse me to do so on the 17th, but I remind people that you need to read what you have written on the, you need to read what you actually put on the eval. You can't go, you can't go rogue on the 17th. Thank you. Okay. Are we done with this? I'm done. Great. Okay. So the next item is the approval of the traffic supervisors and cafeteria food service MOAs. Mr. Spiegel. So we've these MOAs were reached through negotiations with the local 680 who represents the traffic and food service regarding specifically focused on the Wednesdays when many of the, the traffic supervisors are not working this year. And not as many food service are, although there are some opportunities for food service to work on Wednesday. So that's basically what some of the changes that happened this year for those agreements, those MOAs. Did you have questions about them? Questions. Mr. Heiner. I am number three on the MOA for the cafeteria. It talks about the right to file unemployment. Yeah. I misunderstand that. I thought they, that was an issue. So, you know, I think they, they can file, they can try. I don't know necessarily if they're only losing less than 25% of their weekly income if they would qualify. I guess my question is, it's in one MOA, it's not in the other MOA. And that was the major thing for the both MOAs was the Wednesday issue. Yeah. So, shouldn't there be some consistency in the two MOAs? That's all I'm looking at. Okay. I don't know. I mean, they, to look at that again. I have no problems supporting this. I mean, when we were in, in discussion, and then it came back to us that they may not be eligible because of the minimal amount of hours or whatever it was. I'm just looking, is there anything that would allow one to have it on our, the other one? No, I don't think, we don't control whether they can get unemployment. It really is a determination of the department of unemployment. So I would recommend, and I'm not trying to stifle any more discussion, just for the purposes of discussion, I would recommend approval with bringing both MOAs into consistency. That's all, similar language. Ms. Eckstin. I'm not, so I'm looking at the traffic supervisors and maybe I'm not reading it accurately, but does it number six on that one say the same thing? The school committee will notify them of that. Yes. Yes. I apologize. You're right. I didn't turn the page over. Okay. Thank you. They are consistent. Okay. Younger rise prevail. All right. Any more comment on this? So I'm looking for a motion. Mr. Schickman. I move that we approve the MOAs and authorize the chair of the committee to sign it on our behalf. Second. All right. Any more discussion? Seeing none. Ms. Eckstin. Yes. Oh, see, now I have the wrong list for what we're doing on our interviews. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schickman. Yes. Mr. Hayner. Yes. And I am also yes. Mr. Spiegel, we don't need to approve them. Do we need to approve them separately? No. We can just do them both in one motion. Well, Mr. Schickman, I guess would be the question. If he made the motion, we're probably good, right? I think so. I've seen no reason why we can't approve both at once. Okay. Great. All right. So the next item is the district 2019-2020 goal progress from Dr. McNeil and curriculum leaders. Dr. McNeil through, actually, I think he emailed us directly about questions from the committee about the presentation and the slides. So our curriculum leaders are here. So Dr. McNeil, I will let you introduce this. I know that I was derelict in my responsibility to provide my questions in advance. I could not make the timeline work for some other things that I have going on. So I apologize for not sending them in, but hopefully we can still work through this. So Dr. McNeil, would you like to let us know where we're at with this and how we're wrapping this up? Yes. Thank you very much. So I have all the curriculum leaders and directors who did not present at the last school committee meeting. At the last school committee meeting, we presented on the ELA and math goals and computer science for the secondary. So we have a number of slides. So the email that was sent was sent by Karen, Ms. Karen Fitzgerald, to everyone to see if you had any questions. And instead of going through a full presentation, the curriculum leaders and directors are here to answer any questions you might have about the goals. I can, once again, I could give a short overview of how the goals have been structured in the slide deck. And then we can go from there. So I will take the direction from you, Ms. Morgan. So I guess I looked to the rest of the committee. Do you, would you like a short update of where, of those goals or do people have questions that they're ready to ask? Why don't you give us a little introduction, Dr. McNeil, just so that we're all, we've hit a lot of topics tonight. So this is, I'm really, thank you. So once again, we are here to talk about the progress that we made on our 1920 curriculum and instruction district goals. So the goals that are in this slide deck pertain to goals 1.1, 1.2, and 2.1. 1.1 are the goals that we've written around student achievement, you know, and delivering the curriculum. And 1.1, there's 1.1 right there. So it's, now I won't read it to you, but again, it's like designing the curriculum to meet the needs of the students and doing it from the perspective of our vision of student as learner, which is one of the documents, guiding documents that we utilize in order to identify specific skills that we're going to address in the curriculum and making sure that our lessons are aligned with those skills. And then all of the, I will just show it a sample. If you look at the, if you look at each one of the goals, you'll see that they're written in a certain format where you have the goal, you have the rationale for the goal, and then you have the action steps that were utilized in order to, in order to fulfill the goal. And then there's a progress statement that is, was provided by each curriculum leader. So I have, and I put the goals in alphabetical order. We can start with digital literacy. Dr. Susan Bisson, the director of digital literacy is here. And we can start here if you want to just go through them one by one, read the goals. You've had, you know, I don't know how much you've had time to read the goals over the last couple of weeks, but this is the same slide that we presented during our last meeting. So we could go alphabetical order, go through 1.1, and then, you know, each one of the directors, curriculum leaders, can answer questions about the goals. Great. I don't think we need to read them, because I've read them. So I assume I think others probably have to, and we're, you know, generally familiar with them. So should we do, I guess I look to the committee, it's now hard for me to see everybody. I can stop sharing. Yeah, it's helpful to have both. This is when I really miss being in the room, because then we could look at each other's faces and have that up on the screen, which would be great. So should we, so we have tonight we have digital literacy and so questions from the committee on the district goals related to digital literacy. Mr. Gilman. So I want to commend the leadership, district leadership on the whole presentation and all the work on the goals for the year. So I just want to say that at the beginning. Could the director of digital literacy just speak briefly. I'm really curious about the digital citizenship lessons and maybe talk a little bit about that. And have we started to see an improvement in digital citizenship as a result of the lessons that took place last year? I guess it was most, well, I guess it was in the high school as well. But I mean, is there any way to measure an improvement in digital citizenship as a result of the work that we've done this year? I know there's been, there were more lessons, but is there any measure, is there any way to measure progress? Currently, no real concrete way. We do have at the high school students completing some sort of exit ticket. They are receiving digital citizenship curriculum through advisory. So the activities that they do with their teachers are fairly targeted. We're using the common sense media curriculum, adapting that somewhat. So we do have responses from students about what the activity that they've done. In the elementary grades, our digital citizenship has really been focused, at least last year, because as you may recall, digital citizenship began as a pilot in 2018. And then we were rolling it out. Our plans for each consecutive year sort of build on what we're doing now. So last year in grades four and five, students were receiving digital literacy, sorry, digital citizenship curriculum and activities as part of a special program along with Keyboarding Without Tears. Middle school is slightly different. That children are receiving some digital citizenship education, but it's not as formalized. And we would have sort of continued that this year had it not been for the pandemic and needing to switch our attention, at least for the moment. Thank you. Thank you. Others on digital literacy? Okay, great. Seeing none. So the next one, Dr. McNeil. Yeah, I want to acknowledge the fact that the English learner education, we do have a goal for that. However, the director of ELL was not able to make it tonight, so I can have her come back at another time in order to present on her goal. So we're going next to the history social studies, which is for Mr. Denny Conklin is here, the director of history and social studies. Dr. McNeil, do you want to just refresh us for a minute and take us to that? Sure. You don't mind? Thank you so much. I will do that right now. So I'll just give everybody a chance to read the goal real quick, or Mr. Conklin can just talk through, give an overview. So Mr. Conklin. Yeah, hi everyone. The goal last year for history and social studies was for grades six through 11. It's actually year two of a two-year goal around students' research skills and ability to write about their research. So we were able to, and I believe it is in the next slide, we were able as a department to determine the essential research skills and then assign them to each grade so that we have a very specific focus in each grade six through 11 on the research skills that we want students to achieve mastery in. So there's much more vertical and horizontal alignment in the way that we're completing research skills. So I'm happy to answer any questions people have. Great. Thank you so much. Questions for a quiet bunch tonight. Mr. Thielman. One quick question. Mr. Conklin, I'm assuming that you're, you didn't get a chance because of COVID quite understandable to finish the research rubric in the Common Lessons Plans on research. You're picking that work up now? So we're not picking that work up now. I think that's going to be a task that we do towards the end of the spring semester and possibly over the summer. We've retooled our goals this year to be around using the online learning platforms. One of the things that we are going to be doing is looking at how we can fuse the research skills into students' use of those online learning platforms. But we had to put a pause on the rubrics and the lessons. Okay. Thank you. Now I will echo Mr. Conklin. It was something that we discussed as a department and we decided that, you know, because of all the online tools we've purchased this summer and because we've had to do some modifications of the curriculum in order to make sure we're focusing on those essential standards due to the change in the format of instruction. That's been our focus for this year. So some of the goals have, we've paused on them in order to focus on providing a, you know, a robust and challenging curriculum for our students for this year. Thank you. Mr. Heiner. To the students getting an opportunity to publish their research and share it with each other? That varies by teacher by teacher. I know at the high school level, one of the things that is important in our research projects at the high school level is having students present their research in a different form. They are required to pick an audience. They're required to pick a means of how they want to communicate their research to that specific audience. So for some students that's been podcasts, some have done social media campaigns. Some have written letters to government officials at various levels. I had a couple of students that made some websites. Some students published some blogs or submitted some articles they wrote about their topics to some freelance writing websites. So it's been varied ways that they've been sharing their work. Do we archive this and have it available for future students to use as a resource? We have exemplars that we've saved from year to year and that's really beneficial. Not only just for us to have but also to show students that they have something to aim for. Thank you. Great. Anybody else? Great. All right. Next one, Dr. McNeil. Yes. So the next one will be, like I said, we're going in alphabetical order. So we're going to move to our performing arts and we have Mr. William Papascesis here to talk about that if he could give an overview of the performing arts goal. Sure. So the past couple of years we've been implementing a new methodology. It's called conversational sulfage and there are two pieces to this program. The first is immersion which happens in the primary grades K to 1, K through 2, and then there's conversational sulfage which focuses on literacy skills and that's in the old grades 3 through 5. And we found that grade 2 is kind of a transition year between the immersion and then the focus on music literacy skills and so that's where we spent our time this year and in addition to that we're also implementing a new arts curriculum framework which came out this year. This was an implementation year. So we're looking at the frameworks and we were looking at this transition year and determining what oral skills, oral and literacy skills would be working on in addition to composition and improvisation because that's also one of the goals and the standards in the framework. So we developed a curriculum outline for identified essential standards, content, and we started working on some on some common assessments that we'd be using in second grade and that's pretty much where we left off before before the school closure. We haven't continued this project this year because our focus has been on on developing our you know our remote learning curriculum and implementing our online tools that we're using. So that's been our focus this year so that we can provide students with a robust music curriculum remotely. Questions? I'll say one thing I just. Please do. Yeah. Mr. Prophecies, thanks so much. I do want to we're talking about the goals but I do want to commend your team on onboarding some new talent throughout the district at the elementary level and other places. So they're an amazing group of teachers. Yes, an amazing group of teachers. I witnessed it and they were talented because of your leadership. So thank you. Thank you. Ms. Exton. I also just want to thank you and all of your team for the work. I know that teaching music remotely is incredibly challenging and the restrictions that have particularly been put on playing instruments and singing has really limited things and I know that you know everyone in your department has worked really hard to make that work for students. So I appreciate that. Thank you. I'll convey the message to them. Okay. So we'll move moving right along. We're up to science and we have with us today. I will share my screen on science. We have the director of our K-12 science department. Sam Hoyle is here along with our K-5 science coach, Ms. Sarah Huber. So either Sam or Sarah, you can give an overview of the science. Good evening. It's really nice to see you all. This presentation will be very similar to the last one I made. I think the last time I spoke to you is right before our shutdown where I gave you kind of where we're at peak. But essentially we had three goals, one at each of our levels. At the kindergarten level, we were really trying to incorporate more of the science practices and in order to do that, a lab manual was created for tools of the mind. And so teachers got that last year and we started to implement more of the science lessons into the tools of the mind curriculum. And then in grades one through five, it was decided that we would have a common assessment. So when I joined the team, I was given a common assessment. We put that out to teachers and the feedback was through the piloting that it was a little much. And so Sarah and I really kind of sat down together with teachers and really kind of tried to talk about what is the goal of the common assessment. And we decided that the goal was to measure our curriculum against the state standards. So we are hoping probably either late in the spring or over the summer to finish creating a new common assessment that will be solely guided by the standards and our curriculum and create a common rubric that the entire district would be graded on and then hopefully have that attached to report card or progress report report cards at the elementary level to give it a more robust standing there. In grades six through eight, our goal was to start implementing the new curriculum that was purchased for the district, which was iScience. We're working on that. It's a continuation of progress. And this will be part of our goal moving forward again because it's an online platform really trying to get students and teachers using that curriculum. And then finally, grades nine through 12, it was piloting project-based learning activities. Many of our courses were planning on kind of saving the project-based learning until the spring semester and that's really where we kind of got cut off. So there were some teachers who were able to make this project happen. The AP BIO team did a project about race and the biology of race which is really good. I put it up as part of the examples for you to look at. And there are a couple of oceanography and more of our elective courses had an opportunity to do and work with the PBL versus our more core academic courses. But that is still something that we're hoping to do more of over the next couple years. So any questions? Mr. Cardin? Thanks. So on the common assessments, it looks like they implemented one each grade or how many were actually out in the field and utilized less before we shut down? That's a really hard question to answer. Every grade had done at least one. Some grades had done two. I don't think any of them did three. But everybody had been given at least one. And what we found really was that these assessments were taking multiple days and that was we felt was too much for kids. Like I said, when I came in, we were handed the assessment and we said, here you go, live long and prosper. And so we kind of went with it and then we decided working with teachers that it wasn't going to work that way. And we really needed to revamp it to make it more student-friendly. But also to make it reflect the goal of what we thought the common assessment should be, which is, are we teaching the state standards? So we made it a lot more standards-based. And we also made it reflective in some ways of MCAS. So it's a series of multiple-choice questions, but there's also open-response questions. So it also gets students into the practice of getting ready for those high-stakes tests that we have to take. Right. So these revised assessments that you've now developed, those have not been used yet? No, we have teachers have them at this point. We decided to kind of hold off on them for this year and not make them mandatory. We have asked teachers if they would be willing to pilot them for us. A couple of teachers have said yes. So we're really hoping that they'll actually do that and then we can kind of sit down at the end of the year or over the summer to say, were they working? Did they not? And what common rubric can we create in order to then assess these equally across the district? Great. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anybody else for science? Great. Back to you, Dr. McNeil. So next up, we have Visual Arts and Mr. David Ardido, who is our K5 art director, and he can go ahead now and speak and give you an overview. Hi, everybody. Good to see you. I think the main story for us is teaching for artistic behavior, affectionately known as TAB. I think some of you know that we received the significant Arlington Education Foundation Development and Expansion Grant to investigate TAB last year, and we made tremendous progress before March. Unfortunately, March kind of shut it down, but teachers were involved in so many things to learn about TAB, which is a revolutionary, really, art educational philosophy that is changing the way teachers all across the country are delivering art instruction to students. So we had teachers visiting art teachers in other districts, attending webinars on TAB, doing TAB workshops with the national experts who actually visited us in person last year on a number of occasions. Anyway, that work unfortunately was shut down, but we did make tremendous progress. So our goal this year is to re-establish that and continue that work. We've gotten agreement with AEF and these TAB experts to continue that work, so we're excited about that. I just want to say why TAB. I know you're thinking, you know, why TAB? Why is teaching for artistic behavior so important to us? It's because it aligns with our district's emphasis on social and emotional learning, because it empowers students as independent thinkers and art makers, and because it increases choice in materials and themes for students. And they can make art about what concerns them and interests them the most, social issues, their emotional challenges, the joys they feel, the joy they feel about things in their own lives, and the sadness, and so much more. So we're very committed to this. We're going to continue this work this year, and we're excited about it. Questions? Questions. I think we're all looking forward to coming back at some point to be able to see all of the artwork that gets shared by your team in our space at the high school and elsewhere, but it has been impressive. I've certainly seen a number of, you know, there's a lot of work to get their art out into the public and to share it, which I think is really important right now. I want to also commend Mr. Ardido because there have been lots of examples. I don't know if you remember that he presented last spring on a project that was done for kids that were at home, and we were, he presented the various art pieces that were impact, you know, he presented the art pieces and what was created based upon the way that students were feeling about their current situation, the pandemic and being at home, and it was all the way from kindergarten up to high school, and it was just very dynamic. And so that's evidence right there of the impact that this new way of, well, not new, but this inventive, you know, new cutting edge way of addressing art instruction and the impact that it's had on our students. Let me just add that I am really proud of the job the art teachers are doing delivering our instruction now to both remotely and in the hybrid situation to art students. They are, you know, going above and beyond to make sure kids are getting good solid art experiences both at home and in school. They've been, they've been using something, thanks to Susan Bison for this, they've been using Padlet, which is an app that they can use to upload student work and students can upload their own work to view and to comment on and they can share that. In fact, I'd love to share some of those Padlets with you. It's like a gallery of student art for every course, for every grade level, and it's a great way to not only archive student work, but to get students talking to each other about work. And they also put together, I don't know, hundreds of art kits so that students would have the materials that they need at home in order to participate in the remote art lessons that are being provided by our teachers. Thank you. Thank you. And Mr. Ardido, if you could, if you're able to share those Padlets through Ms. Fitzgerald, that would be great. She would be the best person and she can get that out to the rest of us. Really nice to see. So thank you very much. Anybody else? All right, back to you, Dr. McNeil. Yes, next we have on health and wellness. So we have Ms. Bouvier, who's the director of our K-12 health and wellness program. And she is here. Cindy, you could just give an overview. Sure. Hi, everyone. So last year, the wellness teachers met with kindergarten through third graders 10 times for each quarter. So they met with a quarter of the students, first term, second term, third term, fourth term. And what they did is they chose five of the units from the Great Body Shop, the health curriculum, and they decided to do two lessons on each of the units that they chose. And they were able to do that first quarter, second quarter, and almost into third quarter, but then we would stop because of COVID. And so these are the lessons that they did. The safety, the symptoms of the body, nutrition, wellness, community health and safety, mental and emotional health and physical fitness. And it went great. It went great. The, as you know, physical fitness teachers, physical education teachers, are really about keeping kids physically active. But they did really buy into this, you know, teaching health, keeping them seated in the classroom as much as they could during this time. And the students, the feedback that they got from students, they loved it. The students loved it. They loved learning about themselves. So they were physically active in physical education classes. This was in addition to, unfortunately, that is not happening this year. Hopefully it will happen again next year. And I will say that those lessons, if I'm correct, Miss Bouffier, were made possible because of the way that we had the newly structured elementary schedule where we had the ace block times. That is absolutely correct. We had 10 additional classes per physical education class. So if you had physical education, twice a week, you had 10 extra lessons per year. And that's how they got those. And thanks to you, we have the staffing for this and the schedule fit right into it. Unfortunately, the schedule this year is not quite the same. But hopefully next year it will be. So I just wanted to add that as one of the other, and our primary goal was to give teachers and building administrators an opportunity to look at data on a weekly basis by grade level teams. But this was one of those ancillary benefits from that schedule and how it impacted the curriculum, the wellness curriculum, the health and wellness curriculum. It really did. And the students loved it and the staff loved it. So hopefully we'll get back to that. Great questions. I've lost Mr. Scho, there he is. I lost you for a minute. Mr. Schiffman, you just moved to my left. Great. Thank you so much. Yes. So next up we have World Language and we have Don Carney here. And World Language, you see it's for grades 6 through 12, because that's where we offer World Language and Ms. Carney, can you give an overview? Absolutely. Thank you very much for having us tonight. We started, very fortunately, the department received a generous AEF grant to help us with our curriculum revisions. And we had two days last year with a national consultant to help us develop thematic units across grades 6 through 12. And concurrent with our work in developing thematic units, we were working on immediately putting into practice effective instructional strategies. So our overarching goal last year for the whole department was to increase the student use of target language during instruction. Teachers have been working for years before my arrival here in Erlington. So before three years ago, they had already been working to increase their percentage of target language use to 90% or more. And we're following the national standards to do that also for students. So that was our overarching goal for last year, for everybody, all languages, all grade levels, with the slight exception of Latin because there's not as much spoken language in Latin. Teachers had four PLC meetings before we left, before the coronavirus interrupted school in March. That's where the bulk of teacher work happened because it gave them an opportunity to discuss by grade level and within and among languages of the high school, particularly teachers don't work only by language at the high school, they don't group themselves that way for their PLC time. That's where teachers really have the time to discuss the strategies that they've applied, how they've been effective, when they haven't been effective, what have they done. This is absolutely the work that we're this is the essential work of world languages is having whatever the target languages be the language of communication for everything that is happening 90% of the time or more. Clearly, this does not happen in grade six where students meet only every other day for half of the school year. But as soon as we start in grade seven, where students have language every day, there's a very intentional scaffolding process to bring students there. And by the end of seventh grade, we can get students close to that. It is much more challenging to do this remotely. When we left school last year, physical school and switched to online learning, we made a again a very intentional effort to stay connected with students to create space where they felt comfortable and safe to participate as much as possible. And because we know that we refer to it as the effective filter in world languages that when students are not comfortable, they will not take the risk to speak the language that is new to them. There's so much that goes as you have all experienced, I'm sure professionally, but also in this meeting, there's so much communication that happens without words, body language, reading the room, learning and gleaming from each other. So that has been our biggest challenge is to hold students accountable to create that same accountability for using the target language. However, it doesn't mean it's not happening. I just actually sent emails today to all three building principles to just share the positives that I have seen in all of the world language classes that I have been able to observe all of the teachers. And there's a lot of work going while there, but that is certainly where we are most significantly impacted by closure, remote learning. Questions? Hi, Dr. Allison Ampe. I appreciate you're giving the background on this. I'm wondering when you think you will be able to get the new thematic units finished up and running? That's a great question. It's a harder question to answer simply. The simple version is that we will have level one units running next year. We have five different languages at the high school, one of which is Latin. So those are not happening at the same, because it's not a modern language. It's a completely different approach. But we just don't have the same number of teachers that are available to work on these projects outside of Spanish, where we have the highest percentage of enrollment. We have the highest number of teachers. So our work is just a little bit slower, because we do have to have, while we're able to work as a whole team across languages, to have a language agnostic curriculum, meaning that everybody in level one will be learning the same themes. We do need to have the language-specific teachers to cultivate the resources and then develop the language-specific activities that we need. But we will have, we have draft assessments for four units. So we will almost surely be rolling out, if not all of new curriculum in level one next year, at least three-quarters of it. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions? All right. Go ahead, Dr. Michiel. So before I move on to goal objective 1.2, I just wanted to point out that if you were able to see that there's a theme for the goals that we created for 1920, and it was focusing on tier one instruction. So whether or not it's looking at assessments, looking at the format of instruction, or looking how to align curriculum with the new standards, and look at the various skills that students need to work on, that was a common theme for our goals for 1920. Common theme for our goals for 2021 is student engagement and being able to adjust a curriculum to fit a hybrid or remote learning environment. So I just want to point that out that we have various themes that are going on here, and that may not necessarily may not align together perfectly from last year to this year. And then so we're going to go on to goal objective 1.2, which focuses on integrating SEL and cultural literacy into our instruction. And we have Ms. Sarah Byrd, who is our director of K-12 School Counseling and Social Emotional Learning here, to talk about that goal. And I will share my screen. Sure. I don't want to leave out that preschool though. Pre-K-12. Pre-K-12, right. That is cool. That was not in me, folks. So yeah. Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thank you. So similar to last year, everybody else here, we were rolling. And then March, we sort of did a little inverse, but you'll notice something kind of interesting about what we did in March. So we spent our time last year getting our boots on the ground and doing a really intense audit. In Arlington, we have a lot of raw materials in the classrooms and in the hands of all of our expert educators. And I wanted to really find out what it was. So we use some walkthrough tools from CASEL, and that's the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning, specifically looking at how are our schools and our classrooms actually manifesting the safe and supportive learning environments. So we use this walkthrough tool in all of our buildings. And you'll see in the linked report there that we were able to walk through all of our buildings in the elementary schools except for we got partially through Dallin, and then we didn't get to Pierce. So we were able to get through. If you want to, Rod, you can totally click on that link. If you want to, it's totally up to you. But it gives you some of the visuals, gives you a chance to take a look at what we were able to see in those spaces. Yeah. I don't know if I can hold on. Let me see. Make sure I can see. Yeah. Okay. It's also just a nice visual change of pace for folks. I know you've been looking at the same blue screen for a while. So we said we were going to map it. And we did map the entire preschool as well. So we were able to map all of the preschool classrooms in Hardy, as well as the ones at the high school. And you can keep scrolling down to Rod, if you want to. Nice little bar graph for folks to get a chance to take a look at it. There we go. So we were all the way up to about 60 classrooms. And you'll notice that D was for Dallin. And then Pierce, we were going to get to in May. And so we paused right about there. So we did a really nice job getting through mostly all of our schools. And we have individual item analysis on all of the classrooms in particular, as well as the grade levels. And we were able to map the preschool, the K, the first and the second grade. What we did with all of that data then is we sat down with principals and classroom teachers using their ace block time or their leadership team time. And we shared the data. We also used our early release time at the elementary level and shared images that we were able to snap through just taking pictures across the district to show classroom teachers what these positive climate artifacts look like district wide. And so it was really great kind of a way to take learning walks virtually across the district using these walkthrough tools as an opportunity. And principals were able to bring some of these data points and cross reference them with the vocal climate data, build it into their school improvement plans. And then some others were able to take them and use them in their team student achievement goals and cross reference them with moments where we saw student voice was perhaps a little low. And so we were able to take the student voice measures from the walkthrough tools, the student voice measures from the vocal climate survey, and then use that to inform an educator student achievement goal. So thanks, Rad. That's great for the slide there. So come March, we had all these great things in place and we were rolling and we paused. I mean, you can see all the wonderful PD that we also had when you take a look at this. And we have a lot of opportunities for staff to do learning but there really wasn't and still isn't a cohesive tier one universal SEL curriculum in place. We have responsive classroom as a climate setting morning meeting routine in place. But this was a really good opportunity for us to audit it and see how it was taking hold in the climate of all of our buildings. So once we took a look at that, and then we closed schools, the grids actually gave us a really interesting moment to start to consistently offer every single classroom and every single teacher the opportunity to have access to the same resources, at least digitally and virtually. And so we started to push out the same content through the grids district wide. So it was a lot of work, and it was kind of an odd silver lining moment, but that's what happened post closure. So you may or may not recall, there was a how to start your day section of the grid and then an SEL section of your grid, which we had never really had before and the how to start your day had a lot of great opportunities to embed within morning meeting. In addition to your morning meeting structure, the morning messages and so on. And then SEL curriculum that was pulled from a number of evidence based curricula that's either been in place in a couple of our buildings, but was being provided for free because of COVID. And so it was a really interesting opportunity to pilot that across the board and see what teachers liked, what they didn't like, and get their feedback from it and move from there. So it was an unofficial kind of opportune pilot, and that's what we were able to do last year. Questions? Mr. Cardin. Thank you. And I'm not sure when we last had a SEL presentation, but we maybe do for a separate one coming up in the next few months. So when you say the curriculum was mapped, what does that look like? Is it like standards were, you know, what we do in the first month was mapped to a certain standard? Or what does that actually physically look like? Yeah, so we were mapping the existence of a curriculum used to fidelity. Is there a specific time scheduled in the week, the day, the month? How much time is it evidence based? Who delivers it? Is it aligned with state standards? And then taking a look at across the grade level, is there 100% fidelity across the grade level with the same adherence to that schedule, curriculum, and so on? Is it consistent building-wide? Is it consistent district-wide? And you will find themes in Arlington where you will have either a grade level that's completely in sync or a building that has themes, but we do not have complete adherence grade-wide, building-wide, or district-wide to a single evidence-based curriculum across the board. And our responsive classroom trends are very strong, but they are not 100% fidelity. That was one thing that we saw, that we wanted to improve upon. And that's part of what informed our PD time as well this fall. And that's why we spent a lot of time dedicated to the social-emotional training for the skills for all of our staff and also spending a lot of time going through what does morning meeting look like? How do we make sure staff who've maybe never been formally trained in morning meeting have a baseline training in what morning meeting looks like, especially if it's done virtually or remotely? So we're always, it does require an ongoing investment financially as well. And so how do we find a way to continue that, to invest in that, and especially when we have this fractured staffing structure? How do we make sure that even the students who are with staff on their at-home days have staff that are familiar with and comfortable and understand the core tenets of responsive classroom? So we've been working to try to keep up with our continual change in the structure. So to be honest, we haven't even gone much further in depth to do a curriculum audit. This is just the very basic landscape analysis of what is in place, what's actually reaching kids, and let's start there. Great, yeah. I do think it might be worth getting a little bit more granular about what you found with us at some point in time. And because that will inform going forward where we need resources and how we can implement what you're envisioning. So maybe some more information at some point. Go ahead. Sorry, was somebody else speaking? Nope. Okay, can you still hear me? Okay. Yes. The district capacity assessment, was that like a written document or was that more of an exercise that you went through? The district capacity assessment is an online fidelity tool that comes out of the national IRN. Now I have to remember NERN. So Implementation Science Research Network. So it takes a look at what is the district's actual capacity to implement this kind of work. And what we found from our numbers in our first year of doing the assessment is that we have work to do system-wide in order for our schools and our teachers to actually be able to implement the work. And that we can purchase all we want, but there are some other drivers of change and implementation science that we also need to improve on in order to expect any change in the SEL implementation to shift. We did not get a chance to do it because we need to have an outside facilitator do it. We need to have our leadership team together and understandably our leadership team was managing COVID. So we are hopefully going to have an opportunity in the future, but we haven't had a chance to do it yet. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Other questions? Great. Dr. McNeil? Yeah. So that I don't know if you want me to keep going because we can get into the professional development, which is goal 2.0. We definitely can keep speaking about the professional development that was provided for staff. And a lot of it is connected to goals 1.1 in order to make sure that we were addressing the tier one goals and for instruction. We needed to make sure that we had a very organized and aligned professional development plan that supported what we were trying to do within the classroom. One of those goals is also we focused on cultural literacy. And I presented last year on the November 3rd day and the fact that we had identified eight hours that all staff would participate in eight hours of cultural literacy training. And we were able to address that goal. So I don't know if you want me to go further or I think we should see if there are questions from the community. Yeah, I can take questions about it. I know that you've always done a good job, Dr. McNeil, of keeping us up to date about what opportunities have been provided to teachers and what's been run through the district and what we did do. And I guess this is really going to be part of the 2020-2021 PDE, but we talked a lot about the PDE that was done over the summer as well, which I think was really helpful. So questions on that for Dr. McNeil or anybody else? Okay. All right. Great. All right. So that concludes our presentation. Again, the rest of the information is in the slide deck. So if you have questions after this meeting, feel free to send me those questions and I will provide the responses. So I would like to just thank all of our curriculum leaders and directors and coaches who this is a group effort. This is a very collaborative effort. We have a lot of discussions about alignment, standards, and how we build the curriculum. And also we talk about the assessments that will provide us the information to let us know how we're progressing and how students are receiving the lessons that we've designed. So it's a very talented group of individuals who are very knowledgeable. And you can see at the end of the slide the whole department. So this is a group effort. And I just want to applaud everybody on our team that does such a great job with the work that they do. And also we couldn't do any of this work without the classroom teachers. So it really is a group effort from all the way from administrators all the way to our very talented teachers and support staff and TAs and paraprofessionals. This is a group effort. So I just want to make sure that I acknowledge that. Thank you, Dr. McNeil. Thank you for putting this together for us and for guiding us through it over a couple of evenings. So okay. All right. The next item on the agenda is the FY22 budget calendar first read. So I believe that that is in novice. Dr. Allison Ambe, did you want to speak to that? Just that it's a calendar like you've seen every year where we're putting up the schedule of when we're going to be talking about the budget and the requests from principals. We'll be hearing them in December. Dates have been updated for this year. We've heard from FinCom that they're running on their normal schedule because I felt that that was a potential question, but apparently they're running as normal. So everything works out pretty much okay. We can have, there was some question whether we needed to have this approved this week. There is no reason. This is just a schedule. So it can be in draft. It works just as well. And then we'll just formally approve it at our next meeting whenever. But it gives you an outline of when things will be happening. That's all. Great. Questions or comments for Dr. Allison Ambe? Okay. Superintendent's report. Dr. Bode. Thank you. There are two items that are actually highlighted in the agenda. But before we go to those, I want to touch on a couple of other things. One of our speakers this evening spoke about Governor Baker's request that school districts go full in person. One of the things that is the foundation of why we are in Arlington and either a hybrid program or the remote is that we decided as a community that we wanted to have desks six feet apart. I've had that discussion again this week with our Department of Health and Human Services and representatives from the Board of Health and they concur that this is their position as well. We have been very successful up to this today that we've had zero transmissions within our schools. And as a testament to how well our staff, our students are abiding by all of our protocols. And we know that that's the case because of contact tracing. So at this juncture, my strong recommendation is that we maintain the six foot distancing of desks, which means that there is a limitation to the number of students that can be in our schools at any one time. This may be something the committee would like to take up and discuss it at a greater length of some time, but I did want to since we're meeting tonight acknowledge the governor's proclamation last week and what is underlying the reason why we have the programming that we have. The second thing is testing. We continue to offer testing, free testing to our staff. And I gave you a summary of our testing up to date, but I want to also let you know that the results this week was that we tested 255 teachers and staff and we had no positives, all were negative, which was terrific. Next week, we are moving the testing from Monday to Friday because the following Monday, our teaching staff for the most part will be remote, actually pretty much everyone will be remote. And so we're moving into Friday, 1120, and all that information will be communicated to staff. So I have one thing to talk about, but let's go into the reports and you would ask for a report and hiring and Mr. Spiegel is prepared to do that. Thank you. So since our last school committee meeting, we've onboarded eight new paraprofessionals at different schools, teaching assistants, instructional support personnel, and including in the remote academy. And two new people, sort of one additional position, sort of a special education reading teacher position at Stratton. And then we are actually, we have a resignation that we're replacing school counselor at someone who was just hired this year is already leaving. So we're replacing that person with a new person in a couple weeks. So 10 new staff, we're still again, we have postings up for building subs and paraprofessionals. I know there's been a lot of interest in hiring more people to support our buildings and our teachers in the hybrid program and the remote program. So we're still actively searching. It's been challenging still, but we are continuing to post and try to find some different positions and see how if we can continue adding people. And that's where we are. Great. Dr. Bodie, can we take questions? I see one from Mr. Hainer. Can we take questions on what you've presented so far and then go into the second bit. Is that all right? Absolutely. Great. Mr. Hainer. Thank you. Mr. Spiegel, are we anywhere near going back to the 230 regular part on the hybrid? Are we still having the program and at 130 at the elementary level? My understanding is it's still, it's, sorry, 145. Yeah, I think that's still, I mean, there's a lot of, I think it's more than, I mean, obviously we do need to add some more staff still for some schools are still short, a few teaching assistants or building subs to be able to support that. There may be other considerations as well that would need to take place before we could go to 230. So we're not quite there yet in every school. Thank you. So my question parallels Mr. Hainers. I think it would be helpful. I received more than one email a week, couple emails a week about 230. I think it would be helpful for the committee to understand what, what the, where we're trying to get to. I know when the principals were here, gosh, five or six weeks ago, they had said that they were going to meet the subsequent week and sort of figure out where they were at and what they're sort of, you know, where their tipping point was. So I hope that there's, there's something, but I, I think, I think it's time to let the community know clearly what, where that tipping point is and, and how we're making progress towards achieving it. So I assume that it's not sort of a moving target. Is that something that, I mean, I don't know, Mr. Spiegel, is it, if it's from you or if it's from Dr. Bodie to the elementary principals, but you know, I think it's, I think it's time to know what percent progress are we making towards keeping kids in school until 230? We're making progress. You asked what the mesh for kids. Ideally, what we would like, and we've been saying this for actually some time, is a at minimum one paraprofessional teaching assistant per grade. Now, this is in addition to the teaching assistants we have in the kindergarten, in addition to our special education teaching assistants and addition to the building sub. So we are not there at every school. In fact, I think maybe we only are at that at one school at this time. So we continue to remain active in trying to seek more people. And so I say this publicly, if you know anyone who is interested in being a teaching assistant, we would be very interested in speaking with you. Great. I think it would just be helpful to understand, do you need, so if you're there, maybe at one school, so you need at least six, because there's seven schools. Does it six? Is it 12? Is it 16? Is it 60? I don't know. So I think it would be, you know, I don't know how, like, if we're not going to go to 230 until we have all of those people, which if that's the decision, that's the decision. It just would be helpful to know how close we are to that. I can't tell you right now exactly how close we are to that. But that's what we would need. The reason why we're at 145 is that we cannot provide our teaching staff, both with lunch and with a prep period, which is contractual obligation with the support staff that we currently have. That's the issue. So we are able right now to be able to do lunch, but not a prep period. And in the past, how this worked when we were pre-COVID is that we would have our specials intermingle through the day, and a teacher would have lunch and their prep at a time when either students were at lunch or they were having a special. That's how it works in elementary schools. And when you take that out of the ability to have specials out, then therein lies what the challenge is. So we need to have someone that can be in classrooms when a teacher is going to have a prep period. Right. And I understand that. I absolutely want teachers to have their prep period. I understand that's our obligation, but it's also the right thing to do very much. I'm not questioning that. I'm not looking to end run around it. I just want to know how many people we still need. Do we need fewer people than we needed on September 15th? Are we halfway there? Are we a quarter of the way there? Are we ever going to get there? Are we just going to tell people we're never going to get there and we're never going to do 230? I'm ready for more data, I guess. Yeah. I can get you that information for the next time we meet, but I will tell you that everybody would like to be able to go to that to 230. That is the goal. In fact, we've just discussed this week among the elementary principals, and they all would like to get there. And they're very active in trying to hire people. It's just a challenge. Mr. Thielman. Thank you, Ms. Morgan. I'm going to go back to the initial comment Dr. Buddy made about the six foot rule. Part of the problem, right, Governor Baker issued his statement. Part of the problem is that on the DESI website, and in DESI guidance, it's vague, or it's contradictory when it comes to the three foot versus six foot rule. The language is something to the effect of. It is advisable to have six feet, but you can have three feet. And so that causes the problem at the local level because local authorities are going to look at that guidance and use it. And it's probably best to be conservative. I probably would be conservative if I were in the shoes of our public health department. My question for you is in the meetings with the superintendents, is there ever any conversations or requests to DESI to be more specific on that rule? I mean, there is research out there that can be examined by the state of Massachusetts. It's not something we can, I think for those of us to opine on that data at the local level is almost, it's probably not helpful because we're not experts. We're just reading news reports and summaries of studies, which a lot of us have read. I read, but I mean, I guess, I guess, is there any, in the superintendent's meeting, is there any request for more specific guidance on the distance between DESI from DESI, which would help the conversation at the local level? Well, DESI, I don't know if they really changed their position in saying that somewhere they would be acceptable to have three feet. The CDC still recommends six feet. And I was in a call this morning with a number of superintendents in this area, and they also are abiding by the six-feet distance. The thing is, we've had a lot of success in having zero transmission, and do we want, what are tests for the success? Is it because we definitely have hand washing as a practice in the schools? Is it we're wearing masks? Is it six-foot distancing? Is it the limited contact we have? It's a package, and the question is, do you take one thing out and will that change? And we don't know. It could. It might not either. So I guess that's a question that we have to wrestle with. And of course, right now, at a time when we have increasing COVID in the state, there's a reluctance to take that chance. Yeah, I totally get that. I'm not disagreeing with it all. I'm just saying, are the superintendents asking for more definitive guidance based on science? Because there is science out there that suggests that wearing a mask, keeping adults six feet away from students, and allowing students to be closer together, still is sufficient to mitigate risk. There's science out there, but it's not for us at the local level to make that judgment. It's really for people at the CDC, at the state level. And I'm wondering if the superintendents are asking Desi for better guidance, more concrete guidance based on science. That's all. We have not put a formal proposal into Desi. Okay. Thank you. Nor have we heard anything from Desi along the lines of what you just said. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Heiner, and then Dr. Allison Ampey. First off, I want to commend you and the rest of this town for keeping us safe. I'd rather err on the side of caution than take any risks. That being said, we had a couple of parents in the open forum at the beginning talking about seniors. Are you looking and Dr. Janga looking at all to provide some opportunities for the seniors for the spring? I don't know what the plans are for senior activities, but what I can tell you is that I don't want to get ahead of what Dr. Janga is going to present to all of you, but he is going to present hybrid options. And that's why he's had these focus groups to present various options to people just to see where people are on them. You know, the high school, even though we, and by the way, I want to commend the facility department and Jim Feeney, the high school has been able to rectify a lot of the ventilation and knock on wood at last, because that is an issue that they fix it, then it breaks again. And we have a number of bigger areas where we can have bigger classes be in the same room, but then again, the problem is we have 60 distance and you have say a science class of 22, 24 kids, but the classroom only holds 12, you know, what do you do? Can you have two kids separated and continue with science rooms with one teacher? So they're exploring these issues. And the high school is not exempt from the restrictions we have everywhere else, and the classrooms are only so big. But I think he's doing a nice job on looking at the options and you'll see his report very soon. I think it's important for the parents to know that we're not just making arbitrary decisions, you're making an effort to go forward. And the primary concern, and I applaud you and the entire staff, is the health and welfare of our students and our faculty. So thank you again. Well, thank you, because that is really our number one. Isn't that the most important thing we do is to keep our staff and our students safe? I mean, that is not that education is not important for sure, but that is even more important. Dr. Alice Campy, and then Mr. Cardin. Okay, I was just going to point out that when you reduce the, if you go from say six feet to three feet, it's not just that you're putting the students close to each other, you're also putting however many more kids into the box of error that is in there and therefore increasing whatever potential viral passage there is. Now hopefully the ventilation is taking care of that and stuff, but I agreed that it would be really nice if we were getting better science and better interpretation of the science and better guidance based on the interpretation of the science from above. I hope someday that will happen. That's all. Mr. Cardin. Thanks. Yeah, two points. One is that the very limited, unfortunately very limited, but the very limited data everywhere is that transmission in schools, not just in Arlington, but everywhere is quite low. So that's good news, if that continues and is verified. But I also think we need to look at what happens when the vaccine, which we got favorable news on this week, becomes available, possibly for teachers as early as February or March. So if we have teachers vaccinated by the end of February, what are we going to do? Are we going to change anything? We need to start having those discussions in the new year about if the favorable news continues about any changes we might be able to accommodate once our teachers are vaccinated. So I just wanted to put that out there while we're discussing it. Thank you. My understanding is that teachers probably are in the third tier. That would be a very... That's not correct, Dr. Rowdy. Oh, well, that's what our Department of Health and Human Services has said. It's most likely in the third. I mean, if we could get it by February, it would be fabulous. I don't know. I just don't know where we're going to be and when it's going to be available to the public. I ask that very question. When will teachers be able to have this shot? And I think people are just speculating right now, but if we could have it this spring, that could be significantly a change. So we also have to be very careful that we don't create a situation where there's any transmission of students of student either. In fact, we have another incident of a COVID case in our district today at Pierce Elementary. So I mean, this is the kind of thing that we're going to be seeing increasingly so that has implications for classrooms or for staffing. I don't see that changing for some time. All right. Any more questions on this or comments? Then also wanted to hear about enrollment and Michael Mason is going to give that report. Good evening. Earlier, I sent all members the current enrollment report and projection with the memo. This report was also shared with the budget subcommittee earlier this week in the meeting. As you may know, the enrollment is a variable that is used to calculate how education is funded across the Commonwealth through the Chapter 70 funding formula. So in locally, we have that agreed funding formula with the Long Range Planning Committee, the School Committee, as well as the Town Administration to fund all of the public schools. So the current enrollment numbers that are in the report are not yet certified, but they're probably not likely to change as much at this point. But desi is in that process of certifying once their reconciliation process is complete. The enrollment numbers are pulled from two different reports, which is the district enrollment by grade and special education enrollment for out-of-district placement. Last year's enrollment for October, October 1, enrollment numbers was a little bit over 6,000. It was 6,128 students. And compared to where we're at this year at 5,849 students of enrollment, we're down to 279 students. And part of our normal projection when we provide our enrollment figures, we do a five-year projection as well. And included last year was a projection that we would have been at a higher number. And we're actually down 429 students from that enrollment, with most of the the variances from the projection between grades preschool to third grade. So we also looking at it, the overall between, we had about over 900 students leave the district, but of the 900, 342 of those was 966 students, to be exact. 342 of those were the graduates of the senior class last year. So really that we want to look at the 624 students and to figure out which students are going to actually come back to the district. And so, you know, in the report explains that currently, and we use the power school system to track all of our student data. And it explains, currently we have about 140 students that transferred out of the district to a private school. So there's possibly a portion of those students that might return. And that will try to figure that out. And that percentage of students that may return will be important to determine how we may fund education in the district going forward. Also, 245 of the students in the report moved out of Arlington, to either weather to a different town, different state or even out of the country. And about 80 of the students are currently have been approved to be homeschooled. And in that data, since the data is not centralized, is entered by each school, we're still investigating about 127 students that left the district that we're not 100% sure about. But looking at all these figures, we're going to have to figure out that percentage of students that we believe that's going to come back because we're going to still have to serve all those students at some point. We're also going to start, we have to look at the birth rates of the younger students to see how many students that, you know, we have a low kindergarten enrollment. So we need to make sure to see if there are students that didn't enroll this year or the families that didn't enroll their students this year. You know, are they going to come to Arlington Public Schools next year? Or at some point in the future, when they feel comfortable sending their children back to the district. But all of this analysis would be complicated because there's a lot of variables, you know, whether families have sent students to private schools and if they're intending to return those kids back or whether, you know, even look at the birth rates, whether some of those families have already migrated out of Arlington or not. But our next steps is to finalize and figure out, you know, what that percentage of students will be returning and to try to provide this information, obviously, to this committee, to long-range planning, as well as to town management to work on an agreement on how to move forward and make sure that we can be able to fund the district, maybe hopefully with a way if it's level funded or what not, like a hold harmless mechanism, not level funded. I'm not saying hold harmless in the sense that, you know, the students that we lost this year, we should not consider as part of that calculus going forward. I think that's, I don't have anything else to say beyond that, but the report explains more. If you have any questions, I'll feel free to ask now. Mr. Heiner. My concern is we lose this amount of students. It has an effect on our state reimbursement. Even if these people come back, we lose it for a full year because we're not going to get credit bottomance of the following October. Do we know, this is a unique year, there's no question about it. This sounds like it's something that may be happening in other districts as well. Is there any thought of communicating this with the state? When you talk about holding us harmless, the town can't hold, I can't see the town making up for what the state usually gives us. I mean, it's going to be a rough year no matter what. So, I mean, is there any thought of other communities dealing with a similar problem and going to the state and say, hey, at least give us the money we had last year? If I might jump in here, the answer is yes. The Massachusetts Association of School for Intendance did a statewide survey and this is exactly what's happening in other districts to a more or less degree. We're also going to be contacting state legislators with the proposal to hold harmless for the year. I mean, for Arlington, that still have some kind of negative effect in that we've been increasing enrollment each year and so that would not be taken into account. But yes, now that hasn't happened yet, but it's being presented. Thank you. Mr. Schiffman. Thank you. I mean, that's an important point in that our Chapter 78 has been increasing because the enrollment increases have driven our minimum net school spending above the caps of the required local contribution so that we've been getting a bump and aid. And if we don't have the bump and enrollment, we're going to get hit particularly hard for next year's Chapter 70 money. My question really is that if we have students that we would have normally expected to join us this year for kindergarten, who were held back by families who decided they'd like the way to year and have a more normal kindergarten experience for their child, do we have any way to counter estimate that number? Go ahead. In the sense of the only estimate would be based on trying to find the birth rate data and that doesn't necessarily won't give us an accurate count. The students that were enrolled, if you look at the report, there's about 18 students that was enrolled this year, they were all kindergarten grade level that was then removed and it's pretty clear in the data that those families do intend to send their students back next year. But for the students that may have not enrolled and are not reflected in our system, the only information that we can really use is is understanding the birth rate data that's and that will give us an idea of how many students would have possibly been part of this incoming kindergarten class and then try to come up with the understanding of what we would do a projection or a best estimate of how many students would actually come back without being able to contact those families directly. I would expect there to be a bubble coming in next year's kindergarten, it probably would be worthwhile for us to go through the town census and send a mailing out to people in what would have been our kindergarten cohort this year who didn't show up to do some sort of a survey or a poll or to get data on those kids to see where they're going to be so we know what we're planning for budgetarily because we might end up with significantly more kindergarten seats needed next year than we do for this year as well. I would concur with you Mr. Schluckman that Mr. Mason is very modest but I have to say our projections have been pretty close to the number in the last few years and if we were to compare how many students we have in kindergarten compared to our projection we're looking somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 possibly as high as 50 students that did not choose to start this year. It will be corroborated by the work that Mr. Mason is going to do and looking at birth dates but you're right you know we know we have at least 18 to 20 students that had registered them with through but I'm expecting a bump next year and that could be problematic in terms of staffing and classrooms so we had this happen a couple of years ago if you remember we really we made a big jump and it was actually up to like 580 and I had talked to Jerry McKibbin about this after and he said what he hadn't figured out was that there were another kids that were going to just be held out of year so it's very possible. Thank you. All right anything else? The last thing I wanted to mention was that the Department of Education set out a survey last week to districts to get information about structured learning time and it was a survey in which you had to say how many hours there was or in both remote academy and the hybrid how many hours there were with in-person instruction, synchronous instruction, asynchronous instruction, how much time was devoted to non-instructional time which included hand-washing and mass breaks, lunch, etc. It was a fairly significant time involving survey because one question could have 50 cells that you had to fill out in this regard. So we submitted the data as did all the other districts. There's going to be analysis. I have yet to get our data back to proof it because one of the things that happens in the surveys you couldn't see your data entered in the cell. If it required two digits you're going to see one digit. So it's very hard to proof it. It took me a lot of time to do that but I just want to let you know that that did happen. I think one of the goals was to see if districts were meeting the number of recommended hours of structured learning time which at the secondary level is 5.5 hours out of six and a half in our case. I can say that we do. We look at that very carefully. At the elementary level it is five hours per day. We do on four of them but on Wednesday we're an hour off of that but that's been true for a number of years. We have an early release date. I just want to let you know that that was something that the state requested. I don't know when they're going to give a report on it. But I have heard nothing further since last weekend. That's a conclusion in my report. Great. Thank you, Dr. Bodie. Any other questions on the last bit? Okay. Consent agenda. All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which case, in which event the item will be considered its normal sequence. Vote approval of warrant warrant number two one zero nine one dated ten twenty seven twenty twenty total amount six hundred and twenty eight thousand six hundred and seven dollars and ninety five cents. Vote approval of minutes July 30th 2020. So move. Second. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlipman. Yes. Mr. Hainer. Yes. And I am yes. Subcommittee liaison reports and announcements budget. Dr. Allison Ampe. We met this past week and we hashed out the budget calendar and started talking about how to get feedback and stuff. That's all. Community relations. Mr. Hainer. We had our first school committee chat. I think you muted yourself. Mr. Mr. Hainer. We can't hear you. I apologize. No worries. You've got it. Just start over again. We want to go through that whole thing again. Anyway, we had our first school committee chat. It went I thought extremely well. Eight different parents came in and signed on. The most part they talked individually. There was one or two minor discussions. I did a summary report to the committee and I'd be happy to answer any questions with regard to that if you choose. Our next chat is scheduled for this Saturday at 11 o'clock and the follow-up one will be on December 5th at 11 o'clock. Great. Mr. Cardin, CIA. So we are meeting on Wednesday at five o'clock to go over the report from the high school principal and also to exam we have time to start looking at the draft goals for 2021. Facilities. Mr. Thielman. I mean, Dr. Brody mentioned earlier that we've got lots of good news from the high school. The team has made a lot of progress. We don't have a meeting scheduled. And I realize we have not spent any time this year on the other buildings other than a report from Mr. Feeney early on. So we'll take a look at that. Policy. Mr. Schlickman. A no report. Superintendent search process. Mr. Schlickman. You know where we're at. High school building committee. Mr. Thielman. The high school building committee meets on the 17th. We will be voting on what's called the guaranteed maximum price on December 3rd. We'll get reports on the 17th on bids. And everyone got the notice that due to Governor Baker's order, which wasn't quite directly impacting what we were doing, but we decided not to have tours. And we decided not to have the ceremony on the front of the high school, the first steel ceremony. We'll have a small group in the building committee there on the 23rd to witness the first steel and hopefully record it for posterity and for ACMI, I guess. And we'll try to do another ceremony for the public later in the year when conditions change. But I will say the building project is moving forward and it's it's moving at a good pace and there's a lot of good news to that we'll get more details on next week. Thank you. We discussed the first steel ceremony. Mr. Thielman will have a crucial role. He will be filmed. It will be broadcast. It's going to be in retrospect because ACMI is going to have to put it together, but there will be stuff there to watch and it will be exciting. Super. It will be exciting. It will be exciting. I shouldn't be downplayed. It will be very exciting. And it is very exciting, by the way. It gives us all hope. You're an exciting person, Jeff. All right. Liaison reports. Announcements. Mr. Heiner. Brewery Club of Allington placed 158 flags up at the water tower on the top of Park Ave, recognizing heroes throughout the entire community. This function is thanks to Mr. Lundstrom and the workplace program and the students. They have been a key factor in this every year. They will be flags because of the weather. We'll stay up through 11 up. They'll be taken down at 11 o'clock next Monday. So if you get a chance, take a walk up there and walk through the flags. Get to see all the different heroes throughout the town of Allington. Thank you. Great. Future agenda items. Seeing none. Executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or nonunion personnel or contract negotiations with union or nonunion in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect to conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation in which if held in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect. Collective bargaining may also be conducted. So what do we think? We need to vote to go into executive session. I so moved. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear. Great. And we are going to adjourn from executive session. And I'll second that. Thank you. The adjournment part or the executive session part? All the executive session. Okay. You're usually a fan of adjournment too. Ms. Exton. Yes. Mr. Cardin. Yes. Dr. Allison Ampe. Yes. Mr. Thielman. Yes. Mr. Schlickman. Yes. Mr. Heiner. Yes. And I am also yes.