 kind of modifying the curriculum and making sure that there's levels of understanding in that curriculum for the teacher so that they can implement it well. They'll work for students or work with students at times if it's kind of a flexible grouping a mixed up math where they're not only supporting the teachers but they're also supporting other students that might need extensions. They may need a little bit of remediation. It gives us a little bit more flexibility in meeting the needs of all of our students. So it has been nice so far. We're all looking for it to expand. I am kind of an egg and I'd always love it to grow a little bit more but it's going well so far. So I'll keep it short. I just love for them to actually describe a typical day. Just maybe something that they do. I hear it a lot but just for you guys. So a typical day I'll give you today for example. I started out with flexible grouping. I meet once a week with second graders in flexible groups. So the three teachers and I can take all the second graders and split them up into four groups rather than just three. So now you have a much smaller class to deal with. The teachers are always saying oh it's so nice to only have 15 kids in a class. You can do a lot more with 15 than you can with 20, 25. And then I usually meet with teachers during planning. And right now some teachers are working on a fraction unit and they know their kids struggled with fractions last year and so this year we're working on what other things we can add to the curriculum to really reinforce the concepts. I go in to some classrooms in the afternoon and watch what's happening in the classroom when the teachers are teaching and the kids are learning and are the kids really getting it? Are they missing things? Are there things that need to be added that they're not getting? So it's kind of doing some formative assessment sort of in that case, so that's a typical day. Just add on, one thing that Kirsten's also great with is the technology. A lot of our formative assessments are now being put onto the iPads. So students are actually able to do some of this work in a much more streamlined fashion. Our ability to collect some of the data has been much simpler. It's nice to be able to have that, sorry. So I would say that my day sounds very similar to Kirsten's day. We've been focusing primarily on third, fourth and fifth this year just because we can split in two schools. We obviously can't get to every classroom. A lot of them have math at the same time. And so one of our big focuses with the third, fourth and fifth grade has been thinking about problem solving and how do you write about problem solving and communicate about it and how do you find good, meaty problems that are worth spending the time solving and talking about. And so on a typical day, I usually end up modeling one or two lessons around that and meeting with teachers. Last week we're looking at some of the student responses and talking about how we would score them and just trying to calibrate our own thinking as a team about what that would look like. And then having that same conversation with the students, giving them some samples of other students' work. Being at two schools, one advantage is that I could bring work from the other school so it would be totally anonymous and give them a chance to just see, well how would you score this? Oh well this person didn't really explain this very well and then give them their own work back and give them a chance to say, oh I guess I didn't explain that very well either. Well now I have an idea about how I could do that better. I think another big focus is helping teachers to think about how to make what their kids are learning more concrete. So how to bring in manipulatives and different materials to model their thinking so that it's not the way that we all learned math where we've memorized a lot of procedures but actually trying to understand what it is that they're doing. Coaches in general just do awesome work. I'm so proud and so happy to really have that opportunity to work with them and I really can't thank you guys enough for giving us that kind of support. And what's also too is Stephanie's in the back here in support of the coaches. I mean I think for a lot of the principals in talking with them they have really, really appreciated the fact that there is someone there on a more consistent basis. Not one offs but just someone who's there at least twice a week who's working with the teachers working with students, it has been really great. So I'd love to have any questions from any of you or from all of you. When you set up the flexible groups, how do you determine the groups? We've been using in the lower grades in particular the AMC assessments. We have assessments that we give periodically throughout the year based on different skills that we're working the kids towards. So the teachers are already giving those assessments so then we base the groups off of that. With each assessment, do you regroup? Yes. Thank you. Ms. Hyde? It's fabulous to hear what you're doing. Some of the faces are familiar. I know first hand I'm at least work with the DESC and so that's very exciting. I'm wondering, we know a constant challenge for elementary is that our elementary teachers tend to have a much higher level of expertise in English language arts than they do in mathematics. Based on the intensity of the math coaching at this time, are there any clear directions in terms of needed professional development, needed support materials so that we can help our staff be just as strong in mathematics at that level? Yeah, really the ultimate priority for me when I think about an instructional coach is really to support that teacher for both content knowledge as well as their instructional skill set. For us this year, that first half of the year, just in terms of how it flows in my mind, was really us just getting in the doors, building that trust, building that relationship. The second half of the year has really been us trying to hammer it away at some of the work that we have to do and set the tone for next year. One of the topics that came up at our last meeting was the fact that when we do focus on our PD next year, we really wanna focus on the teachers doing mathematics. We really wanna kinda start to challenge the perception of what and how and all the connections that we have in the mathematics so they start to rethink how they teach it. We all do mathematics the way we were taught it. We all believe mathematics is always the way in which we taught it. So if we're expecting our teachers to teach differently or to kind of embrace other habits or skill sets, we actually have to start to put the teachers in a position to believe that that's a good thing. So a lot of our PD next year really will be focused on working with mathematics. We are also working on a couple of other kind of support projects, one with Harvard in terms of looking at the quality of instruction that we have and a large component of that is actually analyzing mathematics and analyzing how we teach the mathematics. So it is a huge area of importance for us and we hope to be able to support all the teachers. So the project that we're working on, organizing right now, a researcher from town who works for Harvard, Heather Hill, she's done some great work with Debra Ball. Kinda made a semi-joke, but Debra Ball is, she's like the V's D's. Like in terms of mathematics education, it doesn't get any better and Heather Hill is phenomenal too. So their research was all about the mathematical knowledge for teaching which is essentially one of the skill sets that you need both mathematically and instructionally that will really support higher achievement, deeper understanding, good quality instruction. So through their actual research, they started to realize that kind of an offshoot was that all the teachers that they were working with to do their coding for their research actually started to change their own habits of instruction. So what they've done is actually turned us into a PD program. So we're gonna be working with Harvard next year, third through eighth grade. We're gonna start to advertise and get this out to all the teachers. It really is a great opportunity. You know, it's one of those things also that I'm really, it's great to know that there are such committed people in the school. A lot of the principals, Heather Hill has actually offered to do a subsection and a lot of the principals have actually volunteered. They want to be part of it as well as our coaches. So we have an opportunity to really kind of next year put good quality instruction at the forefront, try to kind of reset what we use as a vocabulary, reset what we use as our mind frame, and reset what we think about and what we look for when we see the quality instruction. It is a great opportunity. Dr. Ellis-Namon. I was just wondering if you could share some of the feedback that you're hearing from teachers as you've gone through the year with the math coaches, because I think this must be new and different for them. I think in the beginning, they didn't really know why we were there. And they were kind of like, yeah, we know what we're doing. But I think as the year has gone on and we've built a relationship, I think teachers have become more comfortable with us, which I think is obvious. And they're really, really happy, I think to have this resource. I think it's changed the way that some teachers teach already, being able to just bounce ideas off somebody else. I think some teachers sometimes have questions about the math and are afraid to ask it. And so I think being one person, rather than being in a room for professional development, they're much more comfortable coming to me and saying, can you just explain to me what's going on here? So I've had a very positive experience. I would agree. And some of the concrete examples are that, we've been working on this problem-solving framework and I walked into a fourth grade classroom that I hadn't been planning to visit just to ask the teacher a question and all the kids were doing another one of these problems with the teacher. So she had kind of taken what we had done and was going with it. And another teacher came up and said, could you just come and observe my lesson and give me some feedback? So they're coming to us now and seeking us out. I agree that at the beginning there was kind of this, why is someone else in my room observing me? Now it's much more, they have me scheduled when I'm at each of the schools. We need you in our, they wanna make sure, especially since I'm split between two and a lot of them have four teachers at a grade level. So I can see each of them twice a month. So they have me scheduled to make sure that I can get to all their classrooms on a regular basis. Thank you. Probably didn't help that we rolled this out at the same time as a new evaluation system, which pretty much also caused a lot of stress at the beginning. So, yeah, it's not perfect. Our AEA rep, Ms. Linda Hanson's with us tonight. Yeah, I just wanna jump in on that particular response because I was at a Bishop building meeting maybe six or eight weeks ago and they were going through grade by grade to just say what's going on in your grade and how are things going. And every single grade mentioned Kirsten's role and how much she's supporting and helping them at the grade level. Nobody told them to do that. It was just kind of spontaneous, but once one grade started off, every single grade kind of was talking about how much they appreciate the support that they've gotten from her. Thank you. That is something that teachers are hungry for. When we look at a lot of the elementary goals, three, four and five, that needed to be written for the new evaluation system, it's amazing how many of them focused and centered on mathematics. This is something that, I mean, it's a need. There's a desire for it right now. What is the math curriculum? Is there, do you guys have a specific, like do you follow CMP or, I don't know. So yeah, in the elementary school, the back of what we use right now is TURC. Yeah, grades. K is a little more of a hybrid right now. You know, there's other things happening in K. One and two uses not the newest version, but the older version, but it's been modified to meet the needs of what we're doing. And then three, four and five actually uses a much more updated version that we're working with modifying to really make sure it, you know, no curriculum is perfect. It needs to also meet the kids we're teaching. So what we're doing right now, and this is what's great for having a team, is we can really differentiate, modify, and start to tailor something that can meet a broader group of kids, as opposed to once that curriculum, turn the page, do the next lesson. Well, two things I want to add. One is that we also use AMC pretty heavily in K. One and two, that's a big focus of our work. And the other thing I just wanted to add, which I realize I didn't mention a typical day, but is a big part, is thinking about how to enrich and provide opportunities for students who are looking for more of a challenge, which I think is another big part of our work and part of really supplementing our core curriculum, is we have a large number of kids who are looking for challenges, and sometimes those aren't the kids that you originally thought would be the ones. So it's pretty exciting to see. Mr. Schlickman and then Dr. Allison Epic. Yeah, I was gonna mention the implementation of this program at the same year you're doing the valuation. Could have been difficult. I mean, the notion of having a support stream and an accountability stream and being two separate entities. Has that sort of taken on so that people understand what the design is? From my experience, yes. I mean, I think it helps that they see that we're teachers too, we get observed too, and are going through the same process that they are. We matched our goals with some of the teachers, so all the fourth grade teachers I work with have the same goal that I have. And so they know that I'm as accountable as they are, so they feel like, I think they actually feel like I'm sharing some of their stress with them. And they also will come and say, this is my goal, I need help with this. Can you help me with working on this? I have place value as a goal, but I don't really know what to do with that. During, I think one of the actually evaluation meetings I had with both of these guys, I think I expressed the fact that probably the best thing I did last year was hiring who I hired. I mean, the team we put together this year, I really couldn't have been happier. They are professionals in every sense of it, and they understand what it means to really support the teachers. Yeah, hiring matters. And just one question aside, got anything special planned for tomorrow? For Pi Day? Yeah, there's a couple things going on. Hardy has had a whole week long thing, and I'll let Kirsten talk about that. At the high school, we have a breakfast starting at 7.45, and it lasts for exactly, I mean, as exact as we can get for 100 Pi divided by two minutes. So just make sure you're within that interval, if you can. At down, I think, all of the week, but you had a math night last week. At Ottison, I want to say each of the teachers are doing something special for themselves. But I'll be honest, I go where the food is, so I'll probably be at the high school. And I think at 1.59, and Kirsten will say more about it. At Hardy, they're gonna be consuming regulation, she couldn't. She might be eating some district approved circular food. Rice cakes. But Kirsten should tell you more about this week. That's been math week over at the Hardy. So really, I think Kristin, DeFrancisco and the school council were there, planned most of it, but Monday morning was math morning, and the parents got to come in. Kristin, Matt, and I spoke to them for a little bit about the curriculum and what we're doing in math, and then they got to go to their child's classroom and do math with their children, and do play some of the games that they're playing right now, get to see how they are multiplying, how are they dividing. I think the parents learned a lot, and it seemed like everybody really enjoyed it. On Wednesday, I wasn't there because I'm only there on Mondays and Fridays, but on Wednesday, they had speakers come in from the community and talk about how they use math in their everyday life, and then tomorrow it's an all day extravaganza over there. K1, kindergarten and first grade are doing a QR code scavenger hunt for math around the building in the morning. The second and third grade are flying paper airplanes and then measuring the distance and graphing it, and then the fourth and fifth grade are creating their own unit of measurement after there's a little story about the SMOOT across the MASSF bridge, and then creating their own unit of measurement and then creating posters after they measure things with that, so it's gonna be a fun day. Can I just add that I know that Ms. DeFrancisco had 140 clipboards for the parent math morning, and she ran out of clipboards, so they had at least 140 parents. The gym was packed, it was standing remotely, it was phenomenal. I understand you started out with a math problem, I saw the math problem, the cookie problem? Yes. I don't know if you can remember the top of your head, but I think some people think that mathematics is all about multiplying, working with fractions, and that's certainly important, but there's also the whole idea of mathematical thinking, and from what I understand from the principle, there was a lot of startled faces when you presented this problem to them, we'll work out. People weren't very happy. They didn't throw anything. They didn't throw anything. Was it too difficult a problem? Is that what? No, it just required a little bit of thinking. It was, I'll try to remember it. There were 20 cookies. The first one had nothing on it. Every second one had icing on it. Every third one had a cherry on it, and every fourth one had a chocolate chip on it. So the question was which one has, or which ones have everything, and which ones have nothing? Bless you. That's cool. I mean, can we wrench you out for our homework sessions with our children? I was having such time this week with my fourth grader. Oh my goodness, writing math sentences? I didn't do that, so it was amazing, and the whole tape thing, and I guess my question is how can we as parents educate ourselves a little bit more on these new formalities and methodologies, and the follow-up question I have of that was the worksheet that I was looking at. I think, I want to say it said New York State on the top left, and I wanted to find out why New York is coming into, as a Red Sox fan, I wanted to find out why we're using New York. Well, as a Yankee fan. There you go, that's fine. That's now. Sorry about that. Yeah, so I'll start with the New York Engage, and this is so, I always think it's so interesting. If you talk to any teacher in New York right now, I grew up in New York, so I have a lot of teacher friends. It's like riots about the Common Core State Standards. They feel as though it's being really, really pushed on them, they don't really care for the changes, but the aside is some of the curriculum work they've done with the New York Engage is actually pretty phenomenal. It's much better than a lot of things that we've seen. So in terms of using that as a resource and a supplement, they actually have pretty good quality, really good quality stuff. So that's been something that we've tapped into as a resource, just because we do have to make modifications to what we're doing. Even though we have something as a backbone, you wanna make modifications. In terms of supporting the parents, that is something I would say across the US that's really tough right now, because of the fact that, and I think Dr. Boyd had just said it really well. We really always taught procedural mathematics. We really always taught kind of mechanisms for if you see a kind of problem, you work on it. And the reality is in terms of transfer of knowledge, in terms of growing, that kind of frame is a little antiquated. We really have to do, was do more work in terms of creating reasoners in terms of mathematical thinkers. Kids who can take more of that conceptual understanding and use that as the underpinnings to the procedural knowledge. And a lot of the times when you do see things with the tape and you do see things that might seem a little bit out there, really it's trying to create a physical construct of some of the concepts that we're trying to get to. So I'll give you one quick example. If I gave you two plus three equals five, just as a sentence, all of you guys can draw me a picture, you can tell me a story, you can give me four or five different ways in which you can rationalize why that sentence is true. It would make sense. Draw me a number line and show things. But then if I gave you the problem one half divided by two thirds equals three fourths. My feeling is that most of you guys would tell me the process why that works. You wouldn't tell me the reason why it works. And to me that's the core of what is starting to change. Now, I mean, all you guys are gonna, I would imagine just, I don't wanna put words in everyone's mouth. I used several licensed math in that. I know. I agree, but so. It's still a trash. Do you know the answer? Yes. Good. Do it, Sam. That's good. Well, I could draw it. You could draw it. Yeah. You would draw it. I would approach it from an area perspective. That's awesome. That's awesome. So in terms of starting to develop that deeper understanding, that's kind of what we're going for. Because we don't want this to be just a simple process that at some point is forgotten, is close to confused with another process. So if all we're doing is decision procedures, then the addition of fractions at some point will be confused with solving a proportion. And then all of a sudden you've created these things that kids can't decipher and discern the symbolism because it really wasn't embedded in anything substantial. And that's dangerous. That's real dangerous. My only concern is the tradition of chronological age with certain concepts, multiplication, eight years old or something like that. Not all eight year olds can understand the associative property of two times three is the same as three times two. And part of this is developmental. Is this taken into consideration? Yeah. The one thing I really do like about the new standards is I think there actually is a little bit more of an attention paid to that. I might be in the minority in saying that, but, and I say this from experience also. I've seen a high school student be given the problem X plus Y equals 12 and X minus Y equals one. Well, let me actually make it X plus Y equals 13. X minus Y is one. And high school students might struggle with that. But I have seen, because I've given like second graders, triangle plus square equals 13. Triangle minus square equals one. Can you reason where triangle and square have to be? So it's tough because I know that that is embedded in a lot of the kids and somewhere along the way we stop valuing that reasoning based approach. We stop valuing that looking at it as a puzzle, creating that puzzle as a disposition and starts to create something where it's process, product oriented. And you really need to know that one way to get there. That's, I do think the kids can cognitively do what we ask. It depends on how we frame it. It depends on how we kind of underpin those ideas and build from it. Matt, as we talk about helping parents, can we talk about explain everything and how we're gonna try to use that? So we are going one to one in Thompson definitely. One of the nice byproducts of that is that their video is now being created. Like there's a large library of what teachers are doing in terms of lessons and terms out there. So one of the plans and one of the things that we'd like to do is to start to put these on a website and start to attach these. It takes a while because it takes a while to create all this digital content, but we're making it so we wanna package it as something that's gonna be helpful for the community. So to use, consume and to watch. Just so we can start to, in my opinion, convey really what happens in the classroom. At the Hardy Day on Monday, it was awesome because part of it was parents got to go in the classroom. With this, parents are gonna be able to get inside the classroom in a sense much more often. Much, much more often. Which we do like, which I think is gonna be helpful and beneficial. Well it seems like we're just about at our time. I really, really appreciate you both coming. All three of you guys coming here tonight to help explain it to a guy who went into law to avoid all this. But you know, when we met at the AEF fundraiser, I think it was in the fall, Matt, and you'd mentioned that you wanted to come present to the school committee. I'm just so grateful that you guys could come tonight and do this for us and happy pi day tomorrow. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you so much. And Matt, I grew up in New York. Yep. I'm a Red Sox. Yeah, nobody's perfect. Nice. It's a fan from New York. Really? Yeah, I grew up hating the Yankees by nature. I grew up a Metz fan. So when I got here, I'm unbelievable. A Metz fan is happy. A Metz fan, a Metz fan. I know, seriously. I'm a Dodgers fan. I Dodgers, yeah. A Metz fan is happy when the Metz went in the Yankees. So I move here in a good days when the Red Sox went in the Yankees. It's almost the same. It's like you're kind of. You create a math problem around there. Most Yankee fans still view that Metz is an expansion team. Thank you, again. Thanks. OK, moving on. We are at 7.50. We're both to approve Dr. Whitby. So you got a motion. Can we have a motion for Mr. Heiner? Move to approve the hiring of Allison Elmer as our new special education director conditioned on the signing of the contract. Any discussion on that, Dr. Bodie? Committee members? Do we have the updated? It was for this contract. It's an additional motion, so. Any further discussion on that? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? 6-0. Get to calendar? Let's go to calendar. To the calendar. We are waiting for this. No, already? All ready. Yes. We will have the final calendar for all of next year, which includes early release date conferences. We will bring that to you for what we made. It's not the first. It's not the first meeting, certainly, but the second. In case there's any changes that need to be made, we would have time to make them. Any possibility for eight dollars have just way too early? Well, we can certainly think about it, but we're working with teachers right now. In fact, this afternoon, we had a meeting. We're trying to get out of hospital a bit more about how to do conferences at the different levels. As you may be aware, we did a parent survey, and we've done teacher surveys on conferences. And their level of satisfaction with it. And I would say across the board, parents, for the most part, are very satisfied. But there are ways that we think that we could improve this. And so I think it depends on how fast we can do that. When I talk with the group today, I did tell them we were aiming for a May vote. Because I think people want to be able to put this on the calendar and know where it's going to be. And if you recall, just a few years ago on the calendar, we would say to be determined for conferences. And that just not helped. So we want to have this locked down for the end of the year. But at the same time, there are things that we can vote on. And it would be very helpful for people planning next year. And that's what this particular draft is. And let me talk about the highlights of this draft. First of all, in August, again this year, we're going to have teachers begin before Labor Day. And they will be coming on the 27th and 28th. And then we'll have Friday off and we'll have Labor Day. So as we did last year, the first day for all students, well, except for kindergarten, for all students will be that Tuesday after Labor Day, which is September 2nd. This is very early this year, which is great. As far as kindergarten goes, we will not be beginning kindergarten until the following Monday. During those days, that first week, there will be screening sessions and visits to the school and all kindergarten parents will be given that information. But in terms of kindergarten, first day, it will be the eighth. Now, I don't want to put caveats in this already, but should there be some reason we didn't have school one of those days that first week of school, we probably would have to slide that because we're basing meeting the four days for the screening. All right, so we haven't put. I don't think the snows continue to go down. I hope not. I hope not. I will get to snow later. So when we look at September, here we of course always put the school committee reasterics, the school committee meetings. Again, the second and fourth Thursdays of the month and that's throughout the entire calendar. If you look at the 25th of September, we have Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur this year is on a Saturday. So we have that labeled there as a no school day. When we move into October, we have of course Columbus Day, which is going to be the 13th of October. Going into November, our professional day, our all day professional day, no students in school is going to be election day, which is November 4th. We do that for security reasons when we have big elections. So basically every two years we'll be having a professional day then. As in past years, we go up to the Thanksgiving holidays and this year Thanksgiving is fairly late. It's the 27th of November. When we move into December, where we've had some discussion, because this year when we look at where the Christmas falls, which is the 25th, we will be in school the 22nd and the 23rd. And there was actually a fair amount of discussion, both with teachers, to the AEA, and also with administrators. And after some discussion, even though there was some thought initially proposing the two weeks, because when we had the two weeks issue just by a fluke, it was terrific. On the other hand, we thought in the best interest of students that this arrangement would be better. As we move forward, we'll be coming back to school on the 5th of January. And then there's one more holiday, which is Martin Luther King in January. And then basically the February and the April break are as they always are, the third full week of the month. And so the February break will begin, well it's the week of the 16th of February. And that's marked vacation. In March, we do not have anything, any holidays, that's always the month that is a long month from that point of view. And then in April we have again the fourth full month. And if you notice that the first week is actually starts on a Wednesday, but that doesn't count. That's something that always gets confusing to people. It's the third full week of a month. And then as we move onward here, Memorial Day is on the 25th of May. And then as you now jump down to June, you'll see that our last day of school is the 17th of June. And that'd be wonderful. Don't plan on it. Thank you so much. Sorry about that. That's a reality. So, this is important for parents to understand. We are obliged by regulation to put five snow days on our calendar. And for teachers, they know that they shouldn't be really scheduling anything because we could go that long. And the same thing goes with respect to camps really. And everybody crosses their fingers, I know, and probably schedules camps that last week of June with the hope that that will work out. And I hope that it works out. Because beyond those five days, we really have a cushion of three days before we hit to the next fiscal year. Hopefully that would never be the case. And hopefully it won't be the case this year either. We're doing well. So these are the major holidays and start dates that I think the parents want to know. Mr. Hanner. Not related to the parents and the children, but I'd like to just bring to the notice of the committee, five of these months only have one school committee scheduled. So perhaps we may want to look at the calendar a little bit different for next year. There's five whole months that only have one school. Not this many. I understand. Special ones. And move them over. That's a good suggestion, Ms. Darks. I was wondering how conference, if we have several half days for conferences, how does that affect the day count? The days for conferences wouldn't affect the day count. Okay. And we never have a full day off for conferences. Well, then it would affect the day count. Okay. And it would push us out a day in June. Okay. Ms. Hanner. I just wanted to point out to the committee members, Aid, Al-Fatir and Al-Adha both occur in July, both in 2014 and 2015. So just there's no conflict with their counters just because we have had parents come before us in the past and ask about that. Ma'am, one other comment. In our contract for teachers, we have 183 days. So we do have to be mindful of those days as well when we're thinking about this. Well, we already have, they already have 182, right? Cause they have those two that are already there. 183. Great. Cause they have professional days. Oh, and the professional days, 183, right. So can we possibly get a motion on the table? So moved. What are we motioning to adopt the calendar, the draft calendar for the Arlington Public Schools 2014 to 2015? So far. The start and end days as an end days. I will second it for discussion. Okay. Discussion? Ask the superintendent just for clarification. We're basically approving the start and end days and the, I assume the curriculum days and the parent conference days. You said you're going to be bringing us a final draft and that will be the final vote on the calendar at that time. I just wanted to clarify that. There's two other things that we want to put in the calendar. Conference days and early release days for professional development. Thank you. Any other discussion on this? Just for clarification, I think Mr. Hanermas spoke. So we are not approving conference days. They're not on this calendar. Okay. No. But we are approving the no school days. Yes. So anything that we add will only be half days. Yes. Possibly. Unless we do a full day conference day. Yes we can. We just push it out a day. Oh, the teachers have to read it. Actually, we have to put it as a full-rated day. Okay. We're all the same. We have to start thinking about it. We don't have enough days for parents to come in. Well, we're actually really thinking some creative ideas on this and we'll come back to you on that. I'm not sure if you may have missed one of the no school days that's listed on the calendar, the Good Friday, did you mention? It's here. No, it's there. Did you mention it? I didn't say it. Okay, I know it's there, but yeah. It's on the third of April. Okay. Thank you. Do you have a question on this vote? Okay. All those in favor of approval of this draft school calendar for next year, say aye. Aye. All those against? Okay, that carries six, zero. This will be made available now with the parents and community members. We'll put it up on the website right away. Dr. Allison Amper has a question. Can I, well, I just wanted to bring up something that I've heard from at least one parent about the half days, the early release days for professional development, that this year because of the scheduling, tending to take place on Tuesday or whatever day it is, their child has missed probably two or three months of the special that they have that falls on that day. And I think we have brought this up in the past and we were told there was gonna be some shifting of schedules and things, and it doesn't sound at least at this school it's happened, but if there's a way of making them bounce around or do, this is, it's a concern to this parent that the child's missing this many of their specials. And if there's a way to make that not happen going forward, I think I would like to hear about that. I believe that there was some work at each school in terms of how that was going to not happen. So maybe later on you could tell me which school and I can take a look at that. There was actually a lot of discussion. The elementary principals, they found this exact issue and there were a number of ways of solution and people tried to find the way that it was gonna be, at least to disrupt it. I don't know, did you wanna say anything about? Well, we switch off. Shy. Is this principal, Stephanie Zerchukov, principal of Bracket School? The way we can have the schedule is we'll alternate. We have alternating one early release, group A will have the specials and the next early release, group B will have the specials. So there are a couple of grades that always get them because they fit right in the middle of the day, but that's how we've been working on it. And there's also thought we could shorten them, but we talked to the specialists and our specialists wanted the whole period once a month to miss rather than missing twice a month. Okay, thank you. That was the feedback we had from specialists that they did, that was one of the first plans, in fact, was to shorten up the day, like they do at the high school and the middle school if shortened periods, but that wasn't their preference. Okay. Great. Moving on then, we are at monthly financial reports. Ms. Johnson. As you know from your packets, special ed costs have not gone down, but in fact have gone up. And when I did the analysis this month, I was very concerned and in my letter to you, I targeted some areas where I had observed that costs were rising and so I went to the special ed department and I'd like to take a moment to thank the tremendous cooperation and hard work the special ed department did to try to educate me on some of the causes behind what's going on. The good news is that we have reserved sufficient to cover this overage for this year. The not so good news is that many of these things are trends that we need to be concerned about as we go forward. They represent some seismic shifts in some of the things that special ed is dealing with. One of the things that we're seeing is that in 2008, ultra low birth weight babies below three pounds began surviving in much higher numbers and these children have a very high incidence of disabilities of various kinds, particularly in vision and hearing and they're now hitting kindergarten age and now that those babies are surviving more routinely, that's not going to end. And so our expectation is that while vision and hearing services have escalated this year, that that's not likely to reverse itself into the future. So one of the things that we're looking into is the possibility of hiring an in-district person with the vision specialties that we're now currently contracting out for. Thinking that that might be more cost effective if we can hire someone on staff, perhaps sharing them with another district, perhaps having them to ourselves if the workflow warrants and of course contingent on finding somebody with the right specialties to do this. But outsourcing these kind of specialty services when you have a student or two is cost effective but when you start reaching volumes, it becomes cost ineffective and that's what's crossing over with vision services right now. So that wasn't anticipated but it is something that's not a blip that this is going to be forward moving. In terms of the out-of-district tuition, we looked at the new out-of-district placements for this year and close to 50% of them are directly related to hospitalizations of students and their return from hospitalizations and the implications of that. And so there's more work we have to do with this. Again, it used to be something that was relatively rare and is now an escalating problem and it's not just in Arlington, this is statewide, this is nationwide. And we need to be thinking about ways to contend with this and we discussed a great number of things but I think the most important thing to do is to be looking at this from a budgetary perspective to expect that we're going to see some pressure in this area. Transportation obviously goes hand-in-hand with out-of-district placements. The more you place out of district, the more you have to transport them. And ABA services are also related, as you've heard many times, general anxiety, stress, social-emotional behavioral issues are believed to be on the rise generally and ABA services are one of the ways that we can specifically approach providing support to these students and their families to hopefully keep them in school, keep them functioning in school, enable their access to the curriculum which is the point. So it was on the one hand very dismaying, on the other hand very enlightening to speak to all of the special ed administrators and to hear their thoughts on these subjects and to really try to think about what we can do going forward. As I say, we have reserves sufficient this year, that's why we built up those reserves because generally speaking, special ed does run in cycles, it's raining or it dries out and it's really raining this year and hopefully it will dry out a bit next year. But it's important to be aware that we need to be thinking about budgeting and long-term strategies for these areas that are emerging. And hopefully, as the new special ed director comes on board, we can be looking at things that seem to be less pressing and perhaps those areas where we can pull back since we have to extend in different areas. I mean, it's always a movable feast. I'm very grateful we have the reserves to contend with the share. President? One of the areas that we are gonna give a lot of thought to is that we have a number of students coming back from hospitalizations is looking at a program in the high school. They tend to primarily be at the secondary level, though they're not exclusively so, I believe. And that is actually one of the programs that Ms. Elmer began at Reading High School for Therapeutic Program. And so that is something that we're looking at very carefully as to how we would do that next year and we'll come back to you should we make some progress along those lines. But we also realized to some extent there's a little bit of a zero of something going on here because we already have a proposed budget and we're gonna have to think about other ways that we might be able to potentially fund another position so we need to do that. As far as vision services, we already are spending the money. It's in contracted services. And so it'd be a really just sort of a shifting of that, of those kind of, of those monies. But again, we don't know whether we'd be able to find someone with that level of expertise. But on the other hand, we haven't started to look here. Mr. Hinner. I defer to the superintendent on this. Is it appropriate at this time to discuss the legal costs and things? It's associated with the subject, I would think so. Okay. The, I'd like to bring to the committee's attention, from the documents that I've received from Stoma Channel LaMilla, we have exceeded our retainer $60,000 limit by $15,000 by the end of January. We still have five months more to go. I guess I would ask Ms. Johnson, will that be reporting out because according to our contract, once we exceed the $60,000, they'll be billing us on an hourly rate. And normally you don't put it on here because it's covered under the retainer. And I understand that. So I don't know how it's going to be reported to us. My understanding is that we put all the bills we pay onto this spreadsheet. Right. But normally under the retainer column, the only thing that shows up on this piece here is the $20,000 and the $20,000 because it's covered. But our contracts after $60,000, the contract with Stoma Channel LaMilla says we're paying at the hourly rate of $190. So I guess what I'd be asking for it instead of, it needs to be brought out in this column. Well, would it not be non-retainer legal fees at that point? I don't know. I mean, the logic of it to me would be that we pay the full retainer amount and then anything in excess of that is non-retainer fees. Well, they're providing us with a spreadsheet of retainer, non-retainer. And that's how I was able to break this down and see that additional $75,000. I think it's important. They're going to still give it to us. I guess I'm the only one right now that being aware of it. Well, I think your question goes to, this is a public document. Yes. So you want the public to be able to see those breakdowns as well. So maybe what we're getting from the law firm could be made public on the website. And my only other issue with them, and she had it, the spreadsheet is dealing with specific billable hours. They have other fees on it that are showing up on our warrant article. And I got real nervous because what I received on the sheet that said, I'm rounding the numbers up, $3,200. And the billing on the warrant article was $4,000. There was an additional fee that didn't show up on the other. That's not an issue here, but I guess it's important for everyone to see this difference and this breakdown. And they are providing us with a breakdown of retainer fees on a monthly basis, separate from that. And the issue of going over that, that retainer thing is something I think the committee has to look into itself because we still have five months to go on that. Dr. Halston, have they? I think to tag onto what Mr. Hanner said, I think it would be helpful to separate out, not just lump the stuff that we're being billed hourly that's in excess of retainer into other non-retainer fees. We need to keep these separate because we're going to come to a decision of whether to continue this contract in a few years. And we need to know how much we're going over and is it because the retainer stuff is going over or is it because the other, and it doesn't seem too hard to put in another column or something that's retainer excess. I'm sorry to be dim, but I'm not entirely understanding and rather than drag everybody through and what I understand could be a torturous discussion of ways and means. Could we have a subcommittee or something to sit down and figure out exactly how you want to see the spreadsheet? This spreadsheet actually precedes me, so I am happy to give you whatever you'd like to see. Fine. This legal spreadsheet? Yeah, it precedes me. Yeah, I just maintained it when I came here. Ms. Hyde. I would just ask where Stonem Chandler and Miller does a lot of our special education cases and therefore for somebody that might be more knowledgeable there might be a direct correlation between certain IEP challenges and how much it's costing the town that we make sure that that is never apparent in whatever goes out. So it's above the retainer, you don't want to say what it is. It's just a bottom number. Right, but the thing is, I mean the unfortunate piece is because they're just doing our special, for the most part just doing our special education, when these amounts go out, this is tied to the IEP process and I do not want to see this presented in a way that in any way, shape or form, could be perceived as reflecting negatively on children that are receiving those services or families that are advocating for their children. And I will not be around as many of you know to be part of this in the future, but I just want to put that out there right now as an area that I see could be opened. And it starts. I want to say that in my classroom in Lexington, I do, I have a, he's legally blind student. So I know that we have, and I have met with, we have two very good vision people who have met with our team. Because I guess he can see enough to do things, but he's legally blind. And that also our school has been outfitted with the speakers in a lot of the rooms. I know Thompson has that right. A lot of the teachers already use it there for the hearing impaired, but I know that at our middle school, we also have that. So if you're looking for expertise, I know that there is some in Lexington. Because, and although he's the first, I've heard that we already have one or two more next year. So I think that you're right. It's kind of, we're seeing a lot more of it. And you know, it is interesting. He does very well as an iPad that he carries around. He takes pictures of everything because then on the iPad he can get it to whatever size he wants so he can see it. So it's- One of the things that I didn't understand about this until I had the opportunity to learn more was that somebody who's totally blind, there's a set of adaptations. For people that have limited sight, maybe they see partially in the field or that everybody has a slightly different vision of disability and so the adaptations have to be different on a child by child basis. I had no idea. I mean, it's enormously complex. Your student has the ability with technology and perhaps technology in some places or how a room is arranged or how the teacher stands. And it's just enormously complex and challenging given that it's variable in terms of the disability. Right. There, Mr. Hanner? In no way do I mean to disparage anything that's previously been said. But we have a fiduciary responsibility. We have a contract with our legal firm and part of that was to, the idea is to have a retainer. And the idea of retainers to contain costs. We have exceeded that retainer by percentage already and we're not even just over the halfway. That's the part I'm concerned with. We all, Stoneman Chandler and Millet does a lot of us, does have special ed and that is a piece of it but they also do school law. And that's a big part of it, which would be covered under the retainer too. So the facts that would be presented on this sheet in no way identify one way or another. It's a bottom line number. And that's all I'm asking for is a reporting of a bottom line number. Ms. Hyme, real quick. I am in no way saying that we should not follow our fiduciary responsibility, but I'm saying that when we are posting something that can be interpreted if somebody knows the right facts, 2.2 specific child, perhaps the Arlington Public Schools website is not the best place for that to be posted. Perhaps there are confidential documents that a subcommittee would be looking at when making that determination that would not in any way shape or form mitigate somebody's right to privacy or adequate free public education. And I just want to be mindful of that. It's about the kids. Dr. Allison Epic? I'm on a different topic. Can you explain what ADA means when you're talking about ADA services? ABA? ABA, so I didn't even hear it right. Let me check my notes. Is there any disability? Well, I don't know that, but that's not what you were talking about. No, that's not ABA. Oh, it's ABA. Yeah, it is. Behavioral services? Yes, it's a specific type of behavioral services. It's a behavior analysis of person who is capable of looking at a student's behavior and helping to create a behavior plan for that student to help the teacher and the student in the classroom. Or at home. Yeah, or at home. Any other questions on this before we, Mr. Slickman? Yeah, I just want to say on the special ed legal budget, I also have to look upon this as an indicator in how well we're doing in terms of maintaining our relationships with our families. And if this number is going up, it indicates, I think it's sort of like a fever on one level. And that if our expenses are going up or getting extraordinary, we may be getting into too much of an adversarial posture as a district. And I hope that we are with a new special ed director coming in, we can start to mitigate that as well. Yeah, I just want to follow up on Mr. Slickman's comment. I, too, am concerned about how we are with our relationships with our parents and what affect, what cause and effect have you found from that question, not Ms. Johnson, but from speaking with the special ed board members? And what, if there is some cause and effect, what can we do about studying what is happening in our district? A professional industry has grown up where parents pay people to get better and more expensive services for their children. And so that if you just want to look at it as relationships between the school and the parent, the role of the advocate can't be ignored in all of this. And so I think the contention that rising out of district costs reflect poorer relationships with the parents is not accurate. I think that, as with anything in SPED, it depends on a case-by-case basis, and also depends on the advocate they may or may not hire and how that advocate may or may not conduct themselves. There's a lot of factors that's extremely complex. And we're at our time for this item, so I don't want to cut any other members off. But is there a possibility that we can revisit this issue at a future meeting? Because the amount that we're over what was projected is significant. It is. But also our special education costs are significantly over what we projected. We're about 1.2 million now. It's significant, and I, Diane, explained quite well where the places are, that there was no way to necessarily predict some of this. And as you recall, then there's a strong correlation between increasing special education costs and legal costs, because sometimes cases can be very complex. And I certainly don't want to, at this table, discuss any of those, or even allude to any of them. But if you recall the charts that we have done on historicals in special education, the one thing that you can say is that there is no pattern. It's just like this. And all you can do is look at long-term trends in terms of what the cost will be, and try to protect yourself when you have a particularly high year, which we do. We have a stabilization account. Unfortunately, we're probably going to have to use that money this year to be able to fund these increases. But some of these are just not predictable. And in fact, I remember our first thing talking about stabilization accounts, Diane was saying that she would like to see a one million dollar, we remember that, and we were talking about that, and we would have probably liked to have it. And I certainly would be like to have it in this particular timeframe. But this is something that is the way it is in special education, because you don't know what problems are going to present to themselves in any given year. Our long-term trend is that if you look over a 10 year period it's going to limit somewhere over 7%. 7% is a reasonable number that I would say though that we probably are over that number. And what happens is that differential is made up in the operating budget. But that's really about the best you can do in a given, you know, as you're going forward. And that's what we're doing, and the plan with the town is to do exactly that. Mr. Hanna, could we please have a report without specificity of legal costs under special ed, out-of-district programs, bottom line numbers, not individual, and the additional costs we've had just in this fiscal year. Just to look at that, please. Okay, but in the absence of case-by-case information it doesn't tell you a lot. I mean, I'm happy to give that to you. And that's the difficulty in doing analysis in this area. It is so case dependent and so difficult to discuss. I mean, right now we're at about $7 million to give or take, I'm sorry, $7 million to give or take in out-of-district tuition. That's where we stand. And I say give and take because we have kids possibly going into 45-day placements and possibly returning and so it is constantly influx. Then the follow-up question, once I got those figures I'd ask, how much of this is a result of litigation? As a result of litigation? Yes. Out-of-district. So precipitated by litigation on the part of the parents? Litigation, I don't think we're gonna litigate to pay for some of the water district. So the answer to that would be, yeah. I can't think of, and I reviewed all of the cases, I can't think of a single case that was precipitated by litigation. I mean, there are cases of students in need and then disagreement arises around the best treatment for the need, but it doesn't start with litigation. But have we been, just like those two figures if I could please. Sure. Thank you. And perhaps I just wanna put out there that because of the spike, because of this very, very large spike this year, that we consider an outside group to come in and study what might be going on here, to give us some aid in terms of how we roll out what we can do in district and what we have to do out of district. It is something to think about, but I think we have a pretty clear understanding of what's going on. It's just it's not so easy to fix it. And I don't think a consultant can fix the problems that we can't fix. Our hands are tied in many ways by the state law and by what's ethical, by what's possible. So we know where the problems are. There's just not a lot we can do about it. And so the best thing we can do is plan for that, is to make sure that we budget appropriately to make sure that in better years when things break our way instead of not our way that we build up our reserves again, that we be as prudent as possible and we'd be as proactive as possible. That we strengthen our intervention models, that we make sure that we get the kids that are struggling early and often and help them do better. But at the extreme end of this spectrum, at the extremely expensive end of this spectrum, we have very ill children. And more ill children live longer, more fragile children come to school than ever before. Medical technology has advanced to the point that children that would have died years ago are alive and expected to come to school. And we have to accommodate that. It is a changing world. Mr. Film? It would be good to see if our out-of-district trend mirrors the out-of-district trends of other districts. That would be a good data point. I think that's, I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure I can get that data. Yeah, I know, that was my foul plan, is I don't know how to get that because it's not something on the DESI website. Correct. But you have colleagues who are- Anecdotally, yes. You have colleagues who are CFOs who you network with and know, so it's possible to- Anecdotally, I would say yes, that we are all seeing the trend in hospitalizations, the trend in out-of-district placements are just a spike lately, that are really pressing people. And I believe Dr. Bodie has heard similar things from her colleagues at meetings, and Dr. Cheson as well. Well, if it's possible to call a few other districts and get that data, it wouldn't be a bad thing to do. I mean, there's no enough people to do anything called four or five districts and see what they're experiencing. The second thing in my own experience in budgeting is that whenever I've told a board that we can't predict certain costs and they go up and down, they said, well, then plan for up. That's kind of how my board has directed me over the years, which I never like, by the way. But I work for them and they're great people. So they are, and so they are great people. And so I don't know, so when you say things go down, it... But planning for up allows us, when it goes down, to replenish the reserves. Correct, yeah. And that's exactly what we try to do. So, yeah. I mean, we have planned for the up. I mean, we've adjusted this year's budget upward by $700,000 in out-of-district tuition. So going into 15, we have increased the budget to accommodate that. Yeah. So if things break the other way, kids come back in a district, programming shifts. Reserves. Back in the reserves, they go. Mr. Schluck. Yeah, we have a legal moral obligation to spend the money on the special needs children. And I understand that. I'm not going after that right now. It is what it is. The thing that I'm worried about is that we're spending money on attorney surrounding these issues. And that's the number I'd like to see come down. Now I'm willing to suspend this conversation. In fact, I think I need to suspend this conversation until after our new special ed director comes on board and take a look at this and come to us with some sort of a conversation. But I think that it's in our best interest to see if we can't reduce legal expenditures on the special ed side somehow because that doesn't go to kids. Dr. Allison. With these new revised higher numbers for how much we're going to go over budget this year. I understand we have reserves even with the higher number for this year. But does this imply that we need to change anything in this budget that we were going to talk about? I do not believe so. It will leave us much less well-reserved going into next year. But I do not believe we need to make adjustments to this budget. Please bear in mind that we still have, we are still carrying one year of circuit breaker and reserve. And so if God forbid next year we were to get slammed again, we would still have those circuit breaker funds to fall back on, leaving us in an extremely dire position for the following year, but it would at least buy us some time. And looking back over 10 years, we tend not to have two consecutive bad years. But past performance is no guarantee of future results. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for the update. And good segue I think into our next conversation, which is discussion on our FY15 budget. How would I like to begin to really look at this? We've outlined what the budget drivers are for next year, what the budget priorities are, which are with our goals and actually consistent with some of the needs we've just been talking about. So at this juncture, what we need to hear from you is that there's things that you would want to change, because this is the time that we would do it. The last time we had this discussion two weeks ago, we were looking at, we were talking about the reserve positions. We have five built into the budget and you were expressing a lot of concern about support for administrators. And I've had some conversations and I can say over the last two weeks, there's no one size doesn't fit all. Different administrators might say they would want different types of support. So you could reserve one of the positions for a variety of supports. On the other hand, should we need five positions when we get through this summer, we need five positions. And that's exactly what happened last year. So I would, I think that my advice would be that since it's sort of non-specific, non-person driven to hold off on it until we see where things are going in terms of enrollments. And there are things that we can put in place depending on what happens a little bit later. For example, there may be a principal who might want more administrative support that would not be doing any evaluations but would be doing support in terms of, for example, I'm doing MCATs this week. I mean, that is a very time intensive process and I think Liba can probably attest to how time intensive that is. But we're also at a period of time when we're doing formative assessments and other evaluations. And so all of these come together and that's actually one of the things we have to take a look at going into next year. But it may be that there'd be extra support for those types of administrative functions that would not be keeping a principal from being in classrooms. That type of support. How I'd like to handle this is to vote tonight the budget transfer buckets. As it were, section four, page two. Beginning with elementary total. That sounds to me like what we've historically done recently and may entertain a motion beginning with the elementary total of $13,012,833. Thank you. So moved. Any discussion on the amount for the elementary total for next year? I realize Dr. Bode just mentioned this but I was hoping to hear a more firmed up proposal for how we can support our administrators. I'm concerned we're going into a situation where we have several schools at our elementary level that have a lot of classrooms that they're going into the evaluation. They're having to implement it. I'm still new and I'm concerned whether they're going to have time. It sounds like we're going to have to wait but I was looking forward to hearing a proposal. As you said, there's different possibilities. Several principals have said that we'd be very helpful, for example, to have people who are in multiple buildings. For example, we have people who are in music. Or anyone that has multiple buildings to have some administrative support in that respect so that those evaluations would not be done by a building principal just to take a little bit off of the load in that respect. So that is one possibility that we would be looking at for next year. We would have to get down to figure out how many people, what type of team that is. But that's one possible proposal. Right. I meant that we don't have something that has a bottom line and we can just say, yes, we think that's how we should judge things. I think it's going to go the other direction. I think it's going to be that we're going to see where we stand financially and back into it that way. Rather than, as we do with all these other positions, we're going to hire that position and that money is allocated. I think at this juncture, it would be better to see where we stand and then fill in where we can and hopefully we'll be able to have a better idea of that sometime early summer. I don't... You can take the reserve position and say that one reserve position is going to be used for administrative support and it's going to take different forms. It's going to be allocated for support, as I said before, either for evaluations or for administrative support in the building. I don't hear a plan firm down as much as I would want to move money around. That's all. I don't have... Well, I'm confining it to what we've reserved for one reserve position was 55,000, not to exceed that and it would be tailored to the particular situations. It's firm in the sense that you could use that money, but I think that the principles are concerned about class size and they would rather wait and see where things fall out in terms of increased enrollment before we back into it. So at the end of the day, after we hire the people that we need and there's 20,000 that's there, then we'll tailor the support to that amount of money that's there. That's how we're thinking about it right now. Anything else on elementary total, Ms. Heim? I was just going to say, I think it's prudent based on what we just heard from Ms. Johnson about the needs of some of the students we're going to have coming into kindergarten and based on last year's enrollment information where we saw a surge at the end of the summer of kindergarteners that we did not know we're going to be enrolled, that we wouldn't necessarily want to commit into any positions at that elementary level until we have more of a history of where this town is going with both of those features. I just dovetailing on our math presentation a short while ago, I do want to note that there has been an increase to our math intervention at the elementary level of $70,000, which I think is what Mr. Coleman was saying was really needed to augment their work, which is the reserve positions, the five, they're within this bucket as of where we're at. Any other discussion on the elementary, Mr. Heiner? The different programs, the different curricular aspects, current programs and future programs, is that in this part of the budget? The elementary. This would be any of the elementary. So if you go back to the superintendent's budget message and you look to the spreadsheets, all the changes that are listed under elementary increases or decreases would be in this bucket. But I mean, maybe I didn't say it correctly. The programs that we currently have in place that require monetary... It's in there. It's in there. And any new programs that we're thinking about would be in this budget as well. Yes. Thank you. Well, then all those in favor of the elementary total for FY15 of $13,012,833, say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? Okay. 7-0. Moving on to secondary total. We have a motion on the secondary total of $13,251,044. So moved. Second. Discussion? Could I just... Mr. Heiner? The $40,000 restructuring for FY15. Mm-hmm. Could you just... System-wide floating clerk that has been vacant this year. Thank you. Mr. Schlickman, 25. I know somebody has any questions. To some extent, this is going to be driven, these increases by what students select. Mm-hmm. So while there is a proposal, which you've seen in terms of FTEs by department, Mm-hmm. That may change. Mm-hmm. Because it just depends on what students select as they do the... They register for the courses next year. But we feel pretty confident that this amount of money is going to cover the increases that we're seeing in the moment. Mr. Schlickman, will we have the course selections in hand that we can start making actual budget decisions or scheduled decisions? Well, the program studies is out and you've approved it. I would say sometime in April, maybe, because I know that the department chairs in particular are very anxious to be able to, you know, advertise that they had a position. But on the other hand, to do it right now is premature and she goes through the process. You need to see when we section, you need a particular course and how that all plays out in the department. So the positions that we know are due to retirements or maybe not subject just sensitively to enrollment. As soon as we can, we're going to post them. But anything that's a function of student choice is going to hold off until we get that completed, which would be later this spring. So for the public, we're seeing additions to our secondary, as I see here in tab 5 of $250,500 at the Audison and $320,600, $260 at the High School in terms of additions for next year. It doesn't add up to the nine, but sure. You may be looking at the subtotal of just the town appropriation portion without the revolving. There's an increase of $909,000. Sorry. So a change of $909,653. Any other discussion on secondary? All those in favor of the $13,251,044 in secondary total, say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? 7-0. Moving on to special education total. Like a motion on the special education total, please. I mean $17,692,385. So move. Second. Discussion? Does this reflect the additional cost we've just been talking about this year? Yes, it does. If you look at the difference between the FY14 budget and the FY level service budget. Okay. That picks up teacher contract increases and the additional out-of-district tuition. Thank you. Anything else? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? 7-0. Curriculum and instruction total. We have a motion on that of $1,429,534. So moved. Second. Discussion? Mr. Hanner. Why are we reducing this by $30,000? I think it has to do with the shifting of curriculum materials from the math department budget where we were rolling out two grades worth of middle school math curriculum to the assistant superintendents budget to be a more generalized curriculum budget for the entire district. So if I understand what you're saying, we're not actually reducing the curriculum budget. Just shifting it from one line to another. And why did we do that? We moved a buck because we put a lot of money last year into math to roll out curriculum specifically at the math, but we don't roll out the curriculum year after year. Thank you. So the funds are going back to the assistant superintendent. Thank you. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? Seven zero. Administration total, $2,714,413. We have a motion on administration total, please. So moved. Second. Discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? Seven zero. Other total? Facilities, IT, transportation, totaling $5,824,844. May I have a motion on the other total? So moved. Second. Discussion? Mr. Hinner? Does this include our elevator? Elevator. All of the issues that go with it. Elevator? That's building maintenance. That's budget maintenance for various mechanical systems. Thank you. Any further questions? The stairs build. I'm afraid to go in the elevator with my weight. Does this also include the need for additional transportation that you were discussing with us earlier? Yes it does. Any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? Seven zero. I'd like a vote. I guess we don't vote the grants. Vote on the total, revolving in town appropriation total of $53,925,053. May I have a motion on that? So moved. Second. Discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those against? Abstentions? Seven zero. So on March 17th, we will go before Mr. Fanning and your fellow members and present this to all of you. 745 Monday. St. Patrick's Day. We're green. Okay. Moving on. Right on time. Superintendent's report. Dr. Pote. Thank you. Just giving you a preparation. Can't wait for snow. I mean not. Your report on snow. About your time. Fortunately we did not have to have a snow day today. That was good. Most of we had to have a delay. So I had given people, people being a staff and parents, the heads up that that might be a possibility. But I have to commend the custodians that are a day custodians. They came in at five this morning. They were out there making sure everything was solved as best as possible. BPW did a terrific job last night. They started at midnight. By the time I was talking to them around four, three to four or five, they had already done almost two rounds. So they did a terrific job to make sure that the streets and the school entrances were in okay shape. Now, was it still slippery? Yes. Here it is. And on the other hand, we're living in New England. So to some extent we have to adjust to that, which I know people are very tired of adjusting to. But soon, maybe, set by Solve is another storm coming in next week. No. It's all rain. So we may be getting to the point where we're out of it, but I don't want to say that because I might jinx it. At the moment, we still remain just the first, the first Monday of the last week. And hopefully it doesn't go beyond that. And I said to parents last night, and it bears saying again this evening that, you know, these decisions are made very early with the best information. Many, many conversations. People that are on the ground outside the schools and our DPW, and you make the best decision, but sometimes parents might look out and say, I just don't think I can drive or I don't think it's safe for my child to walk. And those are decisions that parents need to make. And certainly if they call the school and they say this is the reason, it's an excused absence. It's still an absence. It's just that it's an excused absence. So hopefully I won't have to say that again for six or one months, but we'll see. One thing on yesterday, if I may, Dr. Bodie, if it weren't for Kiersey and your Facebook post, I wouldn't have known that there was a possibility for a delay this morning. For some reason, some folks, some parents didn't receive the email message from you that apparently went out about this morning possibly being a delay. I'm wondering what might have been a breakdown in that email communication. Well, I think the first thing I would have you do is go into your parent portal and check your contact information because when we send out an alert, when we send out an email, that information feeds the list that it sent out. So if for some reason it's, if you go in and you find out that it is in there and it's correct and you didn't get an email, then this is something that I would want, Leilani D'Agostino, who is our data person and also who oversees the alert now system to just take a look at. Dr. Allison. I'm not sure that all schools, the elementary schools have received information to get into the parent portal, at least not this year. I know we did not. Ms. Hyman. I would also just want to remind people because I'm often forget about it to check their jump mail folders as well and make sure that they have acknowledged that the Arlington Public Schools are a safe center. Yes, and anybody can, you just have to go on to the Arlington Public Schools website and on the right hand side, you can sign up to receive email from any school, all schools if you want. You can get all of it. Just to be safe. Just to be safe. Thank you. That's a very good idea. I mean, you can, anybody, you don't have to even have a child if you just want the information, you know. So you knew about the delay then? Yes, I did. I knew not to come to school this morning. You knew not to come to school. Okay. I didn't go. All right. The weather held off, well, not last night, that we were able to have the parent, present, the presentation for parents and community members at the high school last night. We had, I would say, about a hundred people there for the presentation and Roy Poles who you had, her presentation on the report gave a presentation last night and there were a lot of questions who went beyond the time. I sort of expected that might happen, but they were very good questions and I want to thank her. I think she did a terrific job on this report. Really laying out what some of the key issues are and that report is on our website. If you go on the district website, there on the right hand side, you'll see AHS facilities documents. Anytime we have relevant documents related to this, the condition of the building and what we're doing to plan for it will be posted there. And in fact, we've got to get the PowerPoint up there from yesterday. So we're going to put that up as well. I have very good news, though I'm sure you probably already know this, that when we presented on Monday evening, the Board of Selectmen voted 5-0 to support submission of the SOI, which is terrific. They have to do a formal vote on the 24th using the language that you voted on last week and we've sent that language over to them and they'll have the formal language to submit. So the motion that you passed last week should be fine. There were only two things you were considering. We might have to amend it. And one was the date and we had the 26th. That should be fine. And then the second issue was whether we could file under the first priority and as I think people, since people have been listening to the discussion, I want to have Diane talk a little bit about what she has heard from MSBA with regard to the first priority. I spoke to Diane Sullivan at the MSBA the next morning after our last meeting and she was very clear that priority one needs to be an imminent safe, imminent danger of health and safety from the building itself. That as best as falling in roofs, unsafe conditions. And you need a third party expert to certify that. So it's not enough for us to say the building's menace. You have to have a professional say that the building is menace. So that's a very limited use priority. I think that's something that's used when a couple years ago with the heavy snow packs and roofs went down in western Massachusetts. That's what they're looking for for a priority one. The Esther Brook School in Lexington came in under that because they found PCBs under the building itself that were migrating up into the classrooms and stuff. They were fortunate three years from start to finish because of the danger itself. And I'm grateful we have no such danger here. On this topic, one of the concerns I had from last meeting was that in addition to the SOI that we voted, the MSBA gets the minutes of our meeting of March 6th. So maybe we can... We're not meeting until... Is this getting submitted on the 26th? Well, we'd have to amend that vote tonight if it wasn't. Why amend it? You have it in the minutes. What I'm saying is... We don't have approved minutes is what I think he's saying. Does that have to be approved? Oh, the minutes have to be approved. Just say minutes. I think the minutes have to be approved. They do have to be approved. But does it go with the SOI at the same time? I think we submitted that after. We have to submit this... We have to certify by checking a box when we submit electronically. But then we have to provide the copies along with the signature page when we send the hard copy in. So we could vote them on the 27th, the minutes, and just send it. We're going to send the hard copy. We submit electronically and then we have a package that goes to them as well. So we don't submit the minutes electronically? No, I check a box on their forum saying that it's been voted by your government body. The form that you sign will go electronically as well, I think. No, the form is hard copy. We'll just send that hard copy. If we check a box that says we've done it and we're not doing it until the next day. We did vote it. We've already voted it. No, we haven't voted the minutes. What are you checking? Do you check a box to say that we've voted the minutes? No. You say that we've voted... I'm reading what you gave us. And it just says, for documentation of the vote of the school committee, minutes of the school committee meeting at which the vote was taken must be submitted with the original signature of the committee chairperson. It does not say approved minutes. Okay. I think we're good. Great. Any other discussion? Do we need to authorize you to sign anything or can you just do it? Do we need to vote to authorize you to sign on our behalf? No, I think that because we voted... I have that authority. We're good. There was a lot of interest last night, as you know, from other conversations you've had with people on tours. We are offering three tours in the next week for people who would like to see firsthand the high school. The first tour is this Saturday from 9 to 10.30. So you actually come at 9 because it's going to take us an hour and a half to do the tour. We have a registration link which has been on our website and in fact, the link didn't... We put the new link out to all parents. We've also put the link in the February newsletter. It wasn't initially in there working. So that's been done. So there are ways of doing that, but if all fails, you can always call my office or you could call the high school office just to let them know that you would like to come. So it's this Saturday from 9 to 10.30. And the reason we're having people RSVP is we want to know how many tour guides and how many groups we're going to have. So we're planning basically a loop of sorts and starting people at different points on the loop going the same direction. So we're not bumping into each other. But we're also having two additional tours next week, which will be on Tuesday and Thursday from 4 to 5.30. I guess we have forgotten that there was daylight savings time when we set those because our concern was we wanted to have it in daylight. If there is more interest, we'll plan another Saturday down the road in doing this because I think it's... The building speaks for itself. And I think it's good to get a visual and parents who come for conferences. You've seen different parts of it, but you probably haven't seen all the different places in the building or get a sense of... Well, probably have a sense of how big it is. That I'm sure you probably do. So those tours will be offered for people. And I think you'll find it very interesting to do the tour. I would suggest if you are going to do it, you wear good shoes. One of the... We have a couple of reports that actually Laura is going to give. Do you want to start with maybe doing this one here? Sure. All right. Anything to explain what this is? You received a copy of this by email. And this was the survey that we sent out in February in concert with the AEA regarding the teacher's responses to the new teacher evaluation plan. We wanted to start to gain feedback as we go into our... As you know, we have a cycle where we go back into negotiations to talk about whether there's any need to change anything with the plan. And we'll be beginning that shortly. So we wanted to gain some feedback from the teachers. Now we'll also repeat the survey at the end of the school year. Please report there was strong positive feedback regarding teachers feeling about being comfortable with the development of their goals. And we also had strong positive feedback about their experiences working with their goals and on their educator plans with their evaluators. The vast majority of teachers also reported that they found their post-observation meetings with their evaluators to be useful. There are two areas that we need to continue to work on and give teachers additional professional development. The first is on evidence and the collection of evidence and understanding what good evidence looks like. And we're going to continue to work on that. And frankly, it's going to be something that we're going to continue to work on next year because it's a very different concept for many teachers. And it's our hope to develop exemplar portfolio exemplar so the teachers can look at that for next year. And the same thing around goals. We'll be developing some exemplars of goals. In addition, the system that we use, baseline edge teachers feel that they need to gain more expertise into that. And we will be sending Susan Bisson, who is the person in the district that works with teachers on technology and also works with our academic databases. We'll be sending her out to schools to sort of do site visits and sort of be there to be one-on-one kind of help with people. Mr. Harris? How many teachers responded? 306. Out of how many? About 500. No online survey. 50% return rate is considered to be excellent. So we were very pleased with the responses that we got. I appreciate that this was the teachers. I kind of wonder what the evaluators' thoughts were of these different things. Do they feel that people understood how well they did goals and stuff? And I'm not trying to imply that the teachers aren't right. I'd like to know if everyone's on the same page or if there's some disconnect. We presented this data to all the evaluators right after we got it. So sometime in the month of February, very close to when we got it, we didn't get any feedback that people thought that they were, you know, not in line with what they thought. But there will be a separate survey that will be about from the evaluators in order to prepare for negotiations. Thank you. Mr. Harris? Regarding the evidence, and I noted that too, is it possible that the evaluators, not maliciously at all, are you asking for different approaches to it? No, I think what it is is that there's a complexity of how we tried to simplify the amount of evidence that we asked for people to get. And I think that actually, in some cases, it made it more complex. We were very specific about, you only need so many pieces, and some people were a little more zealous. And so if I look at my neighbor and she's got 25 pieces, and I think that I'm only supposed to have three pieces, I might start to get nervous. And so I think it's just going through the process. Just give them an update on that. We'll do a tool. Right. The review committee for the... Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, no. You have something on this? Yeah. Yeah, I wanted you. Okay. I thought we were like doing the eye contact thing. Okay. So I thought I was really actually impressed too by the results of the survey. I think it's closer to a 75% turnout of kind of unit A teachers anyway that were represented here. And I definitely agree with Dr. Cheson that the whole evidence collection was the biggest problem. And I think it's just the lack of exemplars. Teachers just really don't understand what people are looking for. So I think like you indicated after we have some good examples that we can put out there, people will feel more comfortable. And getting that evidence then, just the mechanics of getting it up on baseline edge was problematic as well. I personally think... I know Dr. Cheson and I and Dr. Bodie have had some conversations during the year about the goals setting. And I think actually people have a bit of a false comfort about how the goals process went. I think we're all still struggling a little bit with what those, especially the student learning goals, should look like across the state. I think it's still... There's been some confusion around that. So I think that's an area that we're going to need to work on more for next year. And then I think just in general too, it's the first year of this brand new system. So I think teachers are struggling somewhat. And I think evaluators are well, are as well. And what I hear, and this wasn't part of this survey, was just again kind of calibration among evaluators from department to department and school level to school level. And I think that's a process that's going to take a couple of years as well. So I think we just need to constantly be looking at what are we doing to work towards kind of calibration and uniform implementation of the system. Yeah, please. I totally agree. This is something we've been working on at the administrative level for a couple of years, really, is how to improve our calibration. It is but a focus of a lot of our professional development this year and we'll continue. It's not something that you're there. You're just in a constant state of getting better at it, which is exactly what the spirit of this new system is, is how do we continuously improve our practice. And so there's different parts of that. And I think we've off to a very good start. And I do again want to give a lot of credit to Samson and Dr. Chesson because they were a great partnership in laying out the groundwork last year. And I could tell you from our meetings with administrators, the thing that I hear over and over and over again is how much they love the conversations. The technical part of how do you schedule all the conversations and fit them in and is this the right time and then scrunch this week. All of that is part of it. But those are also the technical parts of it which we're going to work on. But the substantive parts, which is really what the heart of this is all about, is all very good. People feel very positive about the conversations that have been happening. I just want people to know that I know today we had a half day of professional development and it was all on the teacher evaluation system again. And I'm in Lexington. We're divided into two cohorts, those who went this year and those who won't start till next year. And I'm in cohort two. And we're still, so my part, I haven't taken part in this yet. And so we are still learning how to enter. It's still the same conversation. That's what's so funny is that we're still like, and how much evidence and where does it go? And I think that it's just because it wasn't asked for before. It used to be that they would come in for the full time and they would gather whatever stuff they needed while they were there. And so I think that this is just, it is more about implementation. It's not about whether you need it or not or whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's kind of how do we do this again? And so those questions are the same in my district as well. And so I just wanted to make sure people understood it's not, I don't think any of this is unique to Arlington. I think every district that's implementing this is seeing different levels of the same question. So. Mr. Schluckman? We had that same professional development yesterday in Lull where I have my teachers in and we were talking about evidence and uploading it into our system. And how do you use your evidence to find how it correlates to the rubric items and the proficiency for the areas that we're looking at? And what I did at one point was take a picture of my first grade team with their Fontis and Penelope's talking about kids and learning and interventions and just taking a picture, collaboration, lesson planning, differentiation. A lot of different rubric areas and different points on the rubric that that one piece of evidence pointed to and made a case on and you're able to just pull the language out of that. It's not easy to do. We're not used to doing this. Right. And, you know, we'll get it right. And I think the best thing that everybody understands is, you know, we recognize your professionalism where you recognize the good things that are going on in the classroom. We're doing this differently. It's going to be okay and we're going to get there. That's all right. We take the same attitude about it. One of the things that I think is a real plus of this new system is the exercise of actually writing your goals. We've been doing that as a district for a number of years. Because I think it helps focus and every teacher comes in with goals and probably every day people have lists and goals. But when you have sort of overarching goals for the year, it really does help you focus your PD, what you want, you know, how you're going to be, what you're doing is going to help you achieve that. And in fact, we, department heads in Arlington, we have, we read books together. Our latest book, which we just finished, had to do with the issues of goals and procrastination, how you really achieve your, what you want. And of course, one of the important things, and you see this in all of these kinds of books, is that writing your goals down is a really important first step. And so I think that it's something we're not used to, in the sense of the formality of it, but in terms of what the payoff is going to be down the road, I think it's going to be quite significant. But we will get there. And I think we're taking at the right pace, the right priorities, the right attitude in the district. Excellent. I have more. Please. Pardon me. Did you want me to do two? Oh yeah, please. Yes. So the review committee for the tools of the mine curriculum met last Monday to hear the concerns of the petitioners and those who supported their position. And then on Thursday, the same committee met to hear the position of the teachers who mentor all the kindergarten teachers and those who support the position of the use of those materials. The committee met subsequent to the meet, both meetings to review everything that they've heard. Becca Steinitz, who met earlier tonight, a parent and community member on the team, drafted a report with feedback from me. This report was just completed today. We'll be sending out this report tomorrow to all the members of the committee to ensure that we're all in agreement, that that's what we heard and that our recommendations that we wanted to make based on what we heard were in agreement on those. And then any feedback that we would get back from the committee if we misheard something or misstated something, will be incorporated by mid next week and then the report will be given to Dr. Bode for her consideration. So that's where we stand. Any questions on that process? All right. I just wanted to give a quick update. We are moving forward with Stratton as well. We talked about the high school earlier. But we do have a building committee and we are meeting monthly. We met yesterday. And three members, we break down into subcommittees for different purposes during the month. And last month, a subcommittee actually compared all the square footage of the different schools just to see how Stratton compared in terms of parity. That is the question before us. How are we going to... What improvements do we need to make at Stratton so that there's parity? And of course, how do you define parity? So one way to look at it is in terms of spaces. And what came out of that, and we're going to do digging more and the next step is to actually get an OPM and an owner's project manager before we actually are able to get an architect to do the design. But in broad strokes, the facilities committee can see this report and more depth. But in terms of classrooms, something we all know is that the classrooms are greater than any other classrooms in town. But some of the other spaces, such as the library, the kitchen area, which is really a galley kitchen, the nurses in the medical area are smaller than other facilities, other schools. So that really sort of helps us focus on really what are the things that we need to do there. In addition, of course, just to the infrastructure, the windows, the heat and the other part of the building, part of the roof and so forth. So this is moving along. The goal is that we will have a recommendation in terms of cost to the capital committee for their consideration in the fall. Actually, we'll have a proposal, well, a recommendation however late August and then now that we find over the fall. Mr. Harris. Would the intent to be part of the town budget or the budget for the following year? Well, how that gets financed is going to be a lot of discussion in capital. I can't comment on it quite yet. I mean, the intent is to, I thought the capital planning committee is already committed to support the issue of parity. Absolutely. They're the ones who define the charge. What that amount of money will be, what the timetable will be, and all of that will be worked out. But right now, they want to know what is it going to take for parity and how much is it going to cost? I'm wondering when I think about parity and thinking about Stratton and some of, you know, like the Thompson, part of what I see are more the finishes, the new, you know, the bright new shiny tile and the windows and the walls. And I'm wondering how that's being taken into account when you're looking at parity. That's certainly the first thing people talk about when they talk about parity. And so that is definitely, that definitely would be part of going forward what the cost would be. You know, this clearly needs paint. But we've heard a lot about paint, the molding, and that's all come up, the paneling many times. But that won't happen. The idea is to also update that as well. But the parity issue is like, what are the really important things? That's what you really have, the big rocks. That's what you have to get in place first. And the other part of it is that we want to be creative so that we don't have to change the footprint of the building because as soon as you do that, you're then getting into a lot of money. So there's some very creative ideas. We just now probably need, we're really getting very close to the point where we need to have an architect, but we have to go through a process. And Diane may want to talk a little bit about this so you're aware. We will be working on going out to bid to get an owner's project manager. We, under Massachusetts procurement law, you have to have an owner's project manager on the case. Before you hire the architect in a project that you expect to exceed $1.5 million, and based on the on-site insight report of the mechanical systems, still needing to be upgraded at the Straton, we will well exceed the $1.5 million threshold. So rather than doing partial work now and then having to re-bid everything later down the road, if we do the bidding for the OPM and then bidding for the architect, then we can just roll through from the project, hopefully from a feasibility like spot all the way to a construction spot without having to go back out to bid. What's the source of funding for this? The capital budget. Thank you. As someone on the Straton Building Committee, I want to know that I think that the best part was that the other thing we talked about was that there's basically three main categories of things that we're looking for. One is systems and things that absolutely need to be done, like the heating and that kind of stuff. The other one was, as you say, decor and technology. That was like a second bucket. So these were like three big buckets that we're looking at. And the third one is kind of parity in size and space internally. And so I think that those were kind of what we were, that's kind of the way that the group is looking at this. So kind of looking at, okay, if we look at each of those buckets, what would we do decor and technology-wise that would bring it up to parity? What would we do, you know, as far as a kitchen and a library and that kind of thing? And then what are the absolute, like if you look at the insight report, like what systems actually we absolutely have to do, you know, heating or whatever. And so I think that it might help people to know that those are kind of the three big buckets that they're looking at. And then kind of what the committee's trying to do is try to flush out kind of what those things mean for moving it forward. So that's very helpful. Yeah, I think that that. Why is decor and technology grouped together? I don't know. It was just one big bucket. Because I think that they're actually fairly small pieces. So you put them together in one bucket. I mean, I don't think cost-wise they, I think they make a huge impact, but I don't think cost-wise they're comparatively to building expenses. I don't think they're a huge portion. And so we were trying to get our heads around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just, you know. Roof windows, boilers, floors. Big costs. That's going to be the big stuff. Yeah. You know, electrical service, rehabbing the kitchen. I mean, that's the big bucks. If you need to move walls around or renovate up into space, I mean, those will be costs for sure. But you don't want to, you have to be thoughtful about this. You want to make sure that what you're, you know, the plan is really going to solve the issue. Thank you. Thank you, Cindy. That was terrific. And thank you for serving on this. It's a great committee. Probably going to have to belong hall. All right. More of these are very quick things that I want you to be aware of. In athletics, we've had a lot of notables in the last couple of weeks. And one of them is congratulations to the AHS five ponders basketball cheerleading team. Because when they traveled to Western Mass this last weekend, the entry into the MSSAA cheerleading contest that came forth in the state. And also our boys hockey team this year went into the quarter finals of the division and we haven't gone that far in a while. And they played a terrific game and very proud of them and proud of their sportsmanship despite their disappointments. It was terrific. We also had, speaking of hockey, I'm not sure when it's going to happen but we had a student in high school who, the story of how we donated the stem cells to his father. CVS was here the other day doing some filming on that for the morning show. So that story probably will be there. I don't know when. They didn't say. Another point of congratulations is to our middle school students who participated this year in the National History Day competition. Last year they did fantastic. Remember we had a team that went to Nationals? Well this year they had the regionals April and four, six of the teams that went into the region. So 16 teams from different middle schools this are going to the state. And of the others four, and some of these topics that they are talking about in their presentation they present to a panel are very, very thoughtful and in some cases controversial topics and they have to submit a bibliography that has a lot of primary sources. And I know that a parent posted and we're trying to find where that posting was the other day really just how impressive these students were at the competition. But to give you an idea one group that I think is going on to states had a topic of consumers versus animals the debate over animal rights and cosmetic testing. Then another topic that did go on to states is children during the industrial revolution the government recognizes the need for child labor laws so exploring that topic. They also had civilizing savages do we have the right to change a culture? We do not understand. Another topic was the Vietnam draft the effects of a forced responsibility is on the perception of rights. So these are pretty weighty topics that our middle school students did an excellent job on. We're a lot too proud of them. We wish them well in states which I think is happening in a couple of weeks but we may have more success in that area too. Congratulations to our middle school students also for their performance for guys and dolls. It was a very lively production and I was impressed on these students that came out for the show not only to be in the show but actually to watch it as well. And at the high school the next musical is going to be the first weekend in April and that is probably here about that at the next meeting as well. That's an oldie. Another thing you just need to be aware of not that this is open I don't believe to well actually it's an open meeting Secretary Malone called us several weeks ago to see if we would be willing to host the school safety and security task force meeting. They tried to move it in different places and so we are and that will be held at Thompson on Tuesday April 8th from 5 to 7. I believe that they're expecting spectators as well. I'm sending it out so that the committee has their sort of a U shaped a conference area but I believe that they're also going to have seats if anybody wanted to attend. You're most welcome to do that. The um I was you know it's Friday and I also the February newsletter I want to thank my team that helped with this Betty Botos and Julie Don and Claudia Bertola because this particular one is very long but you can't help but see all the different things that are going on and be very proud of our students and our teachers and all the great things that are going on and one of the things that that I was very happy about is all the community service projects that our students participate in that level of awareness that they see a need and that they follow through and do some really wonderful things. One of which is you know we have the city and we've been gathering books and pencils and Spanish books I should say and pencils and any kind of school supplies that might be helpful for the school down there and we just sent off 500 pounds and the students did this More than one stamp More than one stamp Yes, they did that more than one stamp We'll just double check this anything else here Moving on Consent agenda All items listed with an asset considered to be routine will be enacted by one motion There will be no separate discussion of those items unless a member of the committee requests which event the item will be considered in its normal sequence Approval of warrant 14126 dated February 27, 2014 in the amount of $490,209.32 Approval of draft and it's none Any other motion? Second All those in favor? Say aye Aye All those against? Subcommittee and liaison reports Policies and procedures The old man or Mr. Schlickman Whoever would like So we're going to move the second reading to eliminate policy BEDHA escalating issues and GBK staff complaints and grievances I guess we'll do So I move that we eliminate BEDHA Second Any discussion? All those in favor say aye Aye All those against? No, I move that we eliminate GBK Second Any discussion? Aye Good job All those in favor say aye Aye All those against? Ask We meet on the 18th at 7 o'clock Rebecca Bryant is coming So I'm conscious of this fee issue So I'm not sure where we Do you want to make it a short meeting? Yeah Okay, good Okay What are you going to discuss with Ms. Bryant? Policies Policies Last for that one I'm sorry If she comes to my meeting We'll talk about budget Yeah Policies Yeah man, I don't know what's the agenda You can set the agenda You can set the agenda There's an agenda I just don't have it with me There's about ten policies on the list Which is researching Well over the retainer apparently Okay That's gracious One of those interesting oddities We discussed in the last meeting Was the consent agenda Why do we have to read all that Consent agenda language If we only have one item on the Consent agenda I also have a plan to eliminate The secretary's report But we'll reveal that Oh In public The public reading I have a public reading Sorry It's all right It won't be my job You can have it back No I don't No that's enough It's great to see you here tonight Good to be here How was the concert It was great Strengths Strengths I stayed for the first part And then the memo Not to leave But parents are leaving So I just Left You have a duty to attend to Thank you This is dark It's budget All right We're going to start with The second reading of A file to policy KF-E Which is the fee structure For rental of school Building space I move that We accept the change Which adds group four And moves the date For applications So that when we Set the rates to march From May Second Just a question Call those in favor say aye Aye Call those against Abstain Abstain All right And as Kathy reported We have on Monday At 7.30 we will go to Fincom That's in the selectman's room And talk to them More about our budget We had the Budget Revenue Task Force On Monday And at that They gave out a very good One pager Which I have And I can make more copies Of the people want Although it has my notes On it On to As to how the town Figured out How to give the schools More money And we discussed that I thought it was Very well received I was fairly glad About that And so that is In the long range plan now Which has us Without deficit Until 2019 So all of that Seems good What else did I Want to say I have it written down And I believe Although I haven't read it yet I think the Metco thing That Charlie and I wrote Made it in the paper To make it in this week Yes, I haven't read it Okay, so I sent it to everybody I wanted everybody to know That it was working on that And the only other thing I have is a question Which has nothing to do With budget Except the advocate request So the advocate sent us mail They want us all To answer these questions On the high school And I wanted to know If one of us To respond Do you want I just want to Apply all and deliberate You can read the answers I don't know if Well, no, I didn't know If we wanted to respond As a committee I mean, he's looking For individual responses Well, he doesn't say Well, it went to everybody Right And it says You can be quoted Uh-huh But I just I think we're all On the same page But I think it would be detrimental If one of us Said something that might be Slightly off the reservation Or something I don't know how we'd do it Give it to a subcommittee or what I don't know how quickly he wants it But just to sign Some willing person That wants to do it for us Well, anybody could reply If they wanted to But if we could feel That we want to have a unified voice We could just direct The chair to reply Right, that's what I didn't know if we wanted To individually reply I wouldn't mind Ms. Heim Dr. Austin That's in a motion Do you want to say something Before the motion? Yeah, let me So I would say The advantage of having all of us Respond individually is We have the potential For getting more inches of space And given that we're concerned About ramping up the visibility And the awareness of the high School and the need For rebuilding I think that's a good thing But the question I have For Dr. Bodie is Is there any way Us talking about it in public Impacts the SOI In a bad way No, I would say the contrary One of the things the MSBA Really wants to know Is that the community And particularly at this stage It's really the leaders In the community are very much In favor of moving forward There's always an education Process that goes on We've already begun that And I imagine it will In fact, I'm confident it will Continue doing that Because people have to There's a price tag that's Going to happen if we were To be able to be invited in And then as we move along To the point where we're Actually going to build this Make the changes in the building So no, I think that the more That people talk about this The better it is The SOI is a document That we're refining And people are making suggestions And we're going to The goal would be to make sure It's done by next Friday Because I'd like the board To select them to have it But they're a vote on the Actual language But we're planning to Submit it on the 26th So that is a document That we will certainly Also put on the website Once we get the final document People can see it The more we can educate People about this building The better. So if I might say To our fellow committee members I would think if we just Phrase things like to me The most important thing is What? You know, instead of Speaking for the committee You're close to speaking For yourself. But I think the more That we can stir things up. I just wanted to make sure Before we, you know, I didn't want to deliberate Over email. I just wanted to make sure We brought it up. So everybody will Individually respond. Cool, thanks. That's it. Community relations. Curriculum Instruction Assessment and Accountability. Nothing to report. Facilities. Nothing at this time. Okay, I'd like to Entertain a motion to vote An organizational meeting On Thursday, April 10th At 6.15 p.m. Second. Second. Discussion? All those in favor say Aye. Aye. All right. Ready? I have an organizational Meeting. She's going to abstain. Sure. So it does not impact me So I do not feel a proper Voting force. You're not going to Come and wish us well? Of course she is. The majority of our Lentenians do And watch you from the couch. Secretary's report. He starts. All right. Seeing as it might Be one of our last. Oh. You're going to miss it. You're going to miss it? Just telling. All right. Correspondents for the Committee since our last Meeting. We received the following Correspondents commissioners Weekly update dated February 28th, 2014 forwarded by Dr. Bode Email about the Prioritization of our Paperless needs in an Update on how the Process is going. Email of the article in The Globe about the AHS hockey goalie. Mike Schiller. Email from parent Lonnie Savitas. I'm sure that's not How you pronounce it. I'm sorry. In support of the Tools of the mind Curriculum. Invitation to see The OMS Production of guys and Dolls on Thursday, March 6th and Friday, March 7th. Email from Dr. Bode about AHS Reports and renovations and parent meetings and times for tours. Presentation handouts from the March 3rd parent presentation on the Tools of the Mind Curriculum from Kathleen Coughlin and Mike Vardybedian. Email from Kate Leary, a Hardy parent who supports the Tools of the Mind Curriculum. Invitation to the AEF Trivia B on Sunday, March 23rd from 3 to 5 p.m. Dr. Bode's February superintendent's newsletter and an Email request from Arlington Advocate for school committee members to answer some Questions about the High School Rebuild. Any further Discussions? Seeing none, Executive session I'd like to have a Motion to enter Executive session to conduct strategy Sessions in Preparation for Negotiations with Union and or Non-Union personnel or contract Negotiations with Union and or Non-Union which and held in an Open Meeting may Have a detrimental Effect on the Bargaining or Litigation and Position of the Public Body and the Chairs of Declares and to Discuss the Special Education Director's Contract for Ms. Allison Elmer. So move. Second. Girl call. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Unmuse me. Evidence LOL. Nice one. Professor Chief�� no further business motion to adjourn second any discussion all those in favor against great we are adjourned 27